Serial (37 page)

Quinn sat in his usual booth in the Lotus Diner and absently sipped his third cup of coffee. He didn’t notice its bitterness. Nor was he paying attention to the pedestrians streaming past outside the window, hurrying to make the walk signal at the corner. His thoughts were elsewhere, in a place he wished they hadn’t gone but kept revisiting.

Harley Renz, and apparently everyone else involved, was satisfied with the result of the Skinner investigation, but the assumption that Link Evans was the Skinner kept jabbing like a needle into Quinn’s mind. It would wake him in the middle of the night, and he’d lie motionless and listen to Pearl’s breathing and let his mind work like an Internet search engine roaming the vastness of the ether. How could it come up with the right answers when he kept asking the wrong questions?

Something was wrong. He knew it but didn’t understand why.

Maybe it was because too much didn’t make sense to him.

The attempted murders of Beth Evans and Westerley must have been impromptu, and the Skinner never did anything impromptu.

It was difficult to believe Link had planned the murder of his wife, which he then planned to pin on Vincent Salas—or would have planned—if he really was the Skinner.

And where was the carpet-tucking knife the Skinner was going to use to remove Beth’s tongue? A careful planner like the Skinner wouldn’t have relied on a kitchen knife. It was probably ritualistically important to him to use a particular knife, his special knife that served no purpose other than to carve the flesh of his victims. The ritual knife was nowhere to be found in or around the Evans house.

Adding to Quinn’s doubts, Beth would have been the first Skinner victim to be shot to death.

The case might have been declared solved, but those were a lot of leftover pieces.

With Jerry Lido’s help, Quinn began to dig. It wasn’t that difficult, now that the Pandora’s box of Link Evans’s secret life was wide open. Lido used his legal and illegal skills to trace Evans’s movements during his New York visits. Everyone who moved about on this earth left a trail, and Lido was an expert at finding and following those trails, be they old or new, hot or cold, paper or electronic.

It was time-consuming, assiduous work, but when it finally brought results, things fell into place in a hurry.

Gas receipts, as well as restaurant and motel charges, turned up from an area of Long Island. One of the motel databases had the license number and make of the car Evans and a woman were driving when they checked in. It didn’t match the make or number of Link’s rental car; they must have used the woman’s car that night. A mistake that Lido, months later in a quiet room, pounced on like a famished predator.

A license-plate number was as good as a birth certificate to Lido. It rapidly opened door after door after door. The woman’s name was Julie Flack. She was forty-three years old, lived on Long Island, and was married to a circuit judge.

Then it got easier. She had a Facebook account.

There was her photograph. She was an attractive blond woman with a sly smile. She had a daughter by a previous marriage, liked to sail, shop, and dine out. Her favorite food was Indian. Her all-time favorite movie was
An Affair to Remember
. Her all-time favorite TV series was
Sex and the City
. She hated everything about
The Sopranos.

Hated
The Sopranos
?

Lido found that odd.

Within five minutes after his phone conversation with Lido, in which Quinn learned these facts, he made a phone call to Julie Flack.

Her area code indicated she was on a landline, so he identified himself.

“I was expecting the pool-maintenance man,” she said.

“He’ll still turn up,” Quinn assured her. “In the meantime, you have me.”

“Why?” There was a hint of suspicion, maybe alarm, in her voice.

Quinn decided to hit her with it immediately, while she was off balance. “We need to talk about the Skinner murders, and your relationship with Lincoln Evans.”

Silence.

“You
do
know him,” Quinn said.

“I’d rather not talk on the phone.” Nothing in her voice now. Little Miss Neutral.
Probably already thinking about lawyering up.

“I could drive out there,” Quinn said. “We could sit by the pool and chat.”

“I don’t think so. The pool-maintenance man will be here for quite a while, making repairs.”

“Fixing leaks?”
Too late for that.

“No, the filter’s causing problems. Letting in the darndest things. Some of them through the phone.”

“We could meet somewhere,” Quinn said.

“Fine. The bar at the Medford Hotel? Say six this evening?”

“That would work.”

“Please be on time.”

“What’s really wrong with your pool?” Quinn asked.

But Julie Flack had hung up.

Quinn sat back and smiled. She was a cool one, Julie Flack. Though she had to have been horrified by his call, she’d stayed calm, and in fact managed to stay on top of the conversation, as if
she’d
called
him
and casually imploded his life.

Quinn could hardly wait to meet her in person.

But it was Julie Flack who was late for their meeting at the Medford. It was already ten after six and she hadn’t appeared.

The hotel’s lounge wasn’t crowded. There were three men and two women at the bar. They looked like business travelers. Others were scattered about the place, alone or in small groups, at the tables or in the black leather upholstered booths.

Quinn had chosen a secluded booth where they could talk privately. He sat where he could see the door, and waited.

He’d made his way through half a martini, when a pudgy white-haired man in an obviously expensive blue suit swiveled on his stool at the bar and walked toward him. He wore a kindly smile and an elegant blue and gold tie. He carried his drink—scotch or bourbon on the rocks—carefully balanced in his left hand.

Quinn realized the man must have been studying him in the back bar mirror.

When he was standing next to Quinn, he extended his right hand. “I’m Morris Henshaw, Ms. Flack’s attorney. She sent me to meet you as her representative.”

Quinn wasn’t surprised, the wife of a circuit judge.

“For all practical purposes,” Henshaw said, “I’ll be Ms. Flack.”

Quinn shook the cool, dry hand and motioned for Henshaw to sit down. Henshaw scooted into the seat across from Quinn in the booth.

“How long have you been sleeping with a serial killer?” Quinn asked.

The kindly smile didn’t waver.

“You said you were Ms. Flack,” Quinn reminded him.

“You seem the sort of gentleman who’d buy a lady a drink,” Henshaw said.

Quinn laughed. “Okay, Mr. Henshaw. I’m assuming Ms. Flack isn’t here because she has something to hide.”

“Or she doesn’t want to be embarrassed. Or frightened.”

“Or arrested.”

“Do you have the authority to do that?” Henshaw asked. And of course, no attorney asks a question without knowing the answer.

“I have the means.”

“How would she know you’re who you claim to be? She has every right to suspect an attempt at blackmail, since you seem to be under the impression that she’s vulnerable.”

“Fair enough.” Quinn fished out his ID and showed it to Henshaw.

“Actually, I know who you are,” Henshaw said, barely glancing at it. “I’ve long admired your work.” He leaned forward over his drink. “Why don’t you state exactly what you want of my client, and perhaps we can help you.”

“I think your client is in deep trouble, Mr. Henshaw.”

Gray eyebrows rose curiously. “How so?”

“It seems she’s been involved in a love affair with a serial killer, who planned on using her as an alibi if he were to find himself in a tight spot.”

“This serial killer, if there was one, is dead?”

Quinn nodded.

“Then why should my client’s name be dragged through dirt? I can assure you she knew nothing of her hypothetical lover’s…extra-extramarital escapades. Her husband happens—”

“I know who he is. Circuit Judge Aaron Flack. Are you also
his
attorney?”

“I’m the family attorney,” Henshaw said, sipping his drink. He stopped smiling. His pale blue eyes bore into Quinn. “Is your motive for doing this political?”

“Not in the slightest,” Quinn said. “My motive is simple. I want to know the truth.”

Henshaw settled back farther in the booth, smiling and shaking his head. “Such an elusive thing.”

“In your business.”

“Oh, we usually manage to pin down one version of it or another.”

“I’m going for my version.”

“You would wreck a marriage and ruin a fine man and an honest judge in the process?”

“It would depend,” Quinn said.

“You talk like a man with a price.”

“I’m not.”

“So you’re an idealist.”

“Hell, I don’t know.”

“But you see yourself as a just and good man.”

“I try. And I do understand the delicacy of the situation.”

“Might I appeal to your reason?”

“Oh, probably not.”

“Is it useless to quote a number?”

“Useless.”

Henshaw finished his drink and placed the glass on the table. “Then there’s nothing I can do here.” He extracted some bills from a beige leather wallet and laid them on the table, enough to pay for the drinks and a more-than-liberal tip. His jovial smile was back. He extended his hand to Quinn. “It’s been a distinct pleasure, sir.”

“I’ll look out for your clients, Mr. Henshaw.”

“I will tell them, Detective Quinn, that they should be reassured.”

“Within reason,” Quinn said.

“Everything within reason,” Henshaw said. “Everything.”

Quinn recalled the victims he’d seen, the artful carving in human flesh, the torture wounds, the hope no longer hope, the futures no longer futures.

Not everything.

Quinn decided his wisest course of action would be to continue his investigation quietly, so there would be a minimum of interference.

Badgering Julie Flack would provoke plenty of interference. Morris Henshaw would see to that, especially if Renz or the media learned what Quinn was doing. Besides, Henshaw had left little doubt that he’d take the case to the wire to establish that his client was unaware of her purpose in Link Evans’s activities. It wouldn’t matter anyway, if Quinn was right and there was more to the Skinner murders than had been uncovered so far.

The next step, Quinn decided, should be what he or one of his detectives would have done if the debacle at the Evans house in Missouri hadn’t occurred. If the investigation hadn’t ended in gunfire. He decided to question the man who’d wrongly gone to prison for the Jane Nixon rape. Who had motive to try to kill her.

His name was Scott Trent, and he’d been living in New York since his release from prison a year ago. He was employed by something called Amalgamated Cartage, and had an apartment on the Lower East Side.

“He’s at work,” Trent’s neighbor said, when Quinn was knocking on the door to Trent’s walk-up apartment. It was on the second floor of an old brick building that was bare on one side where the adjoining structure had been torn down. There was a faded advertisement for Rheingold Beer on the exposed and discolored old bricks.

Quinn turned to see a woman at least in her eighties leaning out from the partly opened door of the adjoining apartment. She was wearing a gray robe dusted with crumbs, had long gray hair in a style better suited to the head of a twenty-year-old, and a face as wrinkled as dollar bills that had been in circulation too long.

“I’m Cranston,” she said, peering through narrowed eyes at Quinn. “
Mrs.
Cranston.”

“At work where?” Quinn asked.

“Could be drivin’. Could be preachin’.”

Quinn flashed his identification in its leather folder, letting her think NYPD. Her eyesight obviously wasn’t much good anyway.

“That a wallet?”

“Sort of.”

“You offerin’ me some kinda bribe?”

“Showing you my identification.”

“I don’t care a fig about your education.”

“Who I am.”

“I don’t give a flyin’ fig who or what you are,” Mrs. Cranston said.

“Be that as it may,” Quinn said. He looked for a hearing aid in either of Mrs. Cranston’s ears. Didn’t see one.

“No say or nay about it. I don’t much like Trent, and I don’t much like his friends. Wish to hell he’d quit rehearsin’ his sermons late at night, loud as if he had an audience of thousands. If I could afford it, I’d buy me a hearin’ aid just so’s I could turn it off and use it as a plug, so as not to hear all that rantin’ and ravin’ about goodness, and not takin’ into account an old woman’s sleep.”

“Hypocrisy,” Quinn said.

“Hippopotamus?”

“Where does he preach? Other than his apartment?”

“Street corners. Says he found religion in prison. Like somebody accidentally dropped it and he could use it. Found new ways to steal from good folks, too, I bet. All prison is anyways is a college for criminals.”

“Which street corners?”

“Who the hell cares?”

Quinn tried Trent’s apartment door and found it locked. Better not let himself in, with Mrs. Cranston keeping a constant if clouded eye on things.

“Do you think he’s working today?” he asked.

“Worming?”

“Working. At work. Working.”

“Who gives a fig?”

Quinn thanked Mrs. Cranston for her time and left the building. He was relieved to see that his car hadn’t been stolen or vandalized. He thought he saw Mrs. Cranston peeking out from behind a curtain as he set out for Amalgamated Cartage.

It was just off Eleventh Avenue, not far from the docks. A billboard-size, weathered sign proclaimed that the flat, almost windowless brick and cinder-block building it rested upon was Amalgamated Cartage. The blacktop lot was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire, but a wide gate was open. There was a line of overhead doors along a truck dock running the length of the building, broken only by a flight of wooden stairs leading to a gray-painted steel door that allowed access by foot.

Half a dozen truck trailers were backed into loading doors. Trucks were hooked up to two of them. The overhead doors where the trailers had truck cabs attached were raised, and Quinn could see in past the sides of the trailers. There was activity inside the building, men walking, orange forklifts moving back and forth, clanking over the steel bridges that allowed access to and from the trailers. The trailers dipped and rose as the lifts ran in and out, depositing or removing pallets of freight. A driver sat in one of the truck cabs, a dusty blue Peterbilt, engaged in some kind of paperwork attached to a clipboard. He seemed to be paying no attention to Quinn.

Quinn climbed the sturdy wooden stairs and found the door unlocked. He opened it and stepped through into a vast warehouse whose steel shelving seemed to contain mostly long rolls of something covered with brown paper.

The men involved in loading rolls into two of the trailers glanced over at Quinn but didn’t show much interest.

A hefty redheaded man in too-tight jeans and a black muscle shirt emerged from what looked like an unpainted plywood office and swaggered toward Quinn. He had a full-sleeve tattoo on his beefy right arm. In his right hand was a clipboard.

“Help you?” he asked, without a smile.

“You can if Scott Trent works here.”

“He does.”

Quinn showed his ID. It didn’t seem to impress the man.

“You the boss?” Quinn asked.

The man nodded.

“I need to talk with Trent, is all. Won’t take more than a few minutes.”

“His minutes belong to the company during working hours.”

Quinn moved closer to the man. “I’m working under the auspices of the NYPD, and I didn’t come here looking for a pissing contest, but I can win one.”

Something in his voice made the Amalgamated boss look closer at Quinn and then blink. He shrugged. “Okay. Makes me no difference. He’s out sitting in that truck cab, checking over his manifest. At least, he damned well better be.”

“I noticed him when I came in,” Quinn said. “Tell me about him.”

“Ain’t got the time.”

“Are you sure you can’t find the time?” Quinn asked, in a way that prompted the boss to think about it.

“Aw, screw it,” the boss said. “There’s not much to tell. Trent’s been working here about a year as an over-the-road trucker. He ain’t got much seniority so he takes the long runs, delivering on Thursdays or Fridays, and has weekends to himself before turnaround. That’s so the company doesn’t have to pay him overtime on weekends. So he has weekends off here in the city, where he lives. Listen, the man’s an ordained minister of some sort. The cops have already been here talking to him. He wouldn’t attack anybody. He’d pray for them instead.”

“Amen,” Quinn said, He nodded to the boss and moved toward the gray steel door.

“Don’t take up too much of his time.”

“Not to worry,” Quinn said. “I know it’s money.”

He walked the length of the trailer that was hooked up to the blue Peterbilt truck, then around to the driver’s side of the cab. He rapped on the metal door with his knuckles. A man about forty, wearing gray work pants and a black T-shirt like the boss’s, only with
AMALGAMATED
lettered in white on the chest, opened the door and looked down at him.

Quinn flashed his ID as he had with the boss. Trent gave it only a glance.

“Let’s have a talk,” Quinn said. “I cleared it with your boss.”

“I don’t have much time. Gotta be in Georgia tomorrow with this carpet pad.”

“Everybody here is in a rush,” Quinn said.

Trent set aside the clipboard he’d been holding, tucked a pencil in the T-shirt’s saggy pocket, and swung down from the cab.

Quinn saw that he was wearing brown Doc Martens boots. He was slim and muscular, slightly shorter than Quinn.

“This about Jane Nixon?” he asked.

Quinn said that it was.

“I already talked to a police detective,” Trent said. “They accepted my alibi.” He dug into his hip pocket for his wallet and handed Quinn a ticket stub for
God Is My Sales Manager
. The address on the stub was in Lower Manhattan.

“This is what?” Quinn asked.

“A motivational talk. I was there listening to it the night Jane was attacked,” he said, as if that settled the matter and now he could get back to work.

“Truck drivers do much selling?”

“No. That’s the problem. It’s why I’m thinking about getting into sales.”

“You know the name Lincoln Evans?” Quinn asked.

“Sure. It’s been all over the news.”

Quinn’s cell phone abruptly vibrated in his pocket. He drew it out to silence it, but when he glanced at it and saw Pearl’s name, he thought he’d better take the call. He excused himself and moved a few steps away, half turning his back for privacy but leaving enough angle so he could keep an eye on Trent.

“Whadya got, Pearl?”

“I did more checking on Jane Nixon’s exonerated rapist, like you told me,” Pearl said. “He’s been mixed up in some bad stuff, and used forged papers and different identities, buying and selling stolen goods. The name Scott Trent is an alias he was using at the time of his rape conviction, and he’s been using that name in New York since his release.”

“You don’t say,” Quinn said, trying to sound casual in case Trent was tuned in.

Quinn suddenly remembered Trent’s words:
“Gotta be in Georgia tomorrow with this carpet pad.”

“Quinn, he’s also Beth Evans’s former husband, Roy Brannigan.” Pearl gave Quinn a few seconds to absorb what she’d said. “He supposedly raped Jane Nixon not long after he left Beth in Missouri and found his way to New York.”

“And the DNA evidence that sprang him?”

“He was convicted on blood type and Nixon’s identification. Turns out it wasn’t his blood.”

“Then he really was innocent.”

“That time, anyway,” Pearl said. “Like a lot of those other guys who’ve been set free thanks to DNA.”

Quinn kept his voice low and told Pearl where he was. She’d know what to do.

“Be careful,” he heard her say, as he broke the connection.

Trent—or Brannigan—hadn’t moved while Quinn was talking, but there was something different about his stance, a subtle tenseness. How much had he overheard?

Quinn smiled and stuffed the phone back in his pocket. “I do have a few more questions about Jane Nixon,” he said, letting Trent think the conversation wasn’t about anything he had to fear. “The woman you were convicted of raping.”

“I was later exonerated. DNA don’t lie.”

“Far as we know.” Quinn worked his way closer.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Brannigan’s eyes were beginning to roam. Quinn knew the signs.

“Listen, Scott—”

Brannigan hit him hard in the stomach with his fist, and then slammed the clipboard into his head.

Quinn shook off the clipboard blow easily enough, but he sank to his knees trying to catch his breath. Brannigan was on the run, and he had a stride like a deer’s.

When Quinn was just beginning to suck in air, the steel door opened at the top of the steps and the big boss peered down at him.

“What the shit’s goin’ on here?” he asked.

Quinn tried to speak but only made a squeaking sound. He raised a forefinger for the boss to give him a few seconds.

The boss came halfway down the steps and leaned so he could get a better look at Quinn.

“The employees park in this lot?” Quinn managed to wheeze.

“No. They park in a lot out front.”

“That the only gate?” Quinn tried to motion with his head, but his head didn’t move.

“That’s it,” the boss said.

“Lock it,” Quinn said.

“Says who?”

“Me,” Quinn said, and drew his police special from its holster. “And when you’re finished, go back inside and lock that door.”

When the boss was headed toward the chain-link gate, Quinn worked his way to his feet. Holding the old revolver at the ready, he began moving cautiously along the line of trailers, now and then pausing to peek beneath them. He tasted blood trickling down from the clipboard cut on his forehead, but it was Roy Brannigan’s blood that he smelled.