Kill Switch

by Neal Baer

  “There’s been another homicide,” Nick said. “We’ve gotta stop this guy Quimby and you know him better than any of us.” He then asked, almost pleaded with her to accompany him to the crime scene. Despite Curtin’s admonition to stay out of it—he’d told her yesterday that Quimby was a police problem now—Claire didn’t hesitate for a second.

  They drove the short distance from her apartment to Central Park in silence, Claire focusing on the reflection off the windshield of the red teardrop light atop the dashboard. She hadn’t been in a police car since the day Amy disappeared, and the novelty of it wore off the moment she spotted two attendants removing an empty gurney from the back of the medical examiner’s van.

  Lieutenant Wilkes was getting out of his beat-up unmarked Crown Vic as Nick pulled up beside him. Wilkes glared at Claire sitting in the passenger seat.

  “Who the hell is this?” Wilkes demanded as Nick got out of the car. Wilkes wore jeans and a sweatshirt, and his usually well-combed red hair stuck out like straw, giving Nick the impression that his boss came over right out of bed.

  “Quimby’s shrink,” Nick replied.

  “You brought a shrink to a crime scene?”

  Claire was out of the car by now and heard Wilkes’s comment. She decided to kill him with kindness. “Claire Waters,” she said, extending her hand. “I believe you know my boss, Paul Curtin.”

  Wilkes shook her hand while cutting her off at the knees. “Yeah, I know him,” began the lieutenant. “And when the sun comes up, I’m gonna tell him to have his own head examined, sending you here.”

  “He doesn’t know she’s here,” Nick told his boss. “I called her.”

  “We don’t need her,” Wilkes said, not caring that Claire was standing right in front of him. “We got enough problems, Nicky.”

  “What we’ve got, Boss, is three dead girls in two days,” Nick replied, his voice low but emphatic. He gestured to Claire. “We know it’s her patient who’s doing these murders. Maybe she can shed some light on what his next move might be. She can’t do any worse than we have.”

  Wilkes looked at him. The old Nick Lawler was back, the one who wouldn’t take no for an answer, the Nick who had closed more than a few murders that were stone whodunits and considered unsolvable. The lieutenant beckoned Nick and Claire to follow him.

  “I hope you can help us nail this lunatic,” Wilkes said, turning to Claire, “because I’m told he really went off the deep end this time. Are you squeamish, Doctor?”

  “We dissected cadavers in medical school,” Claire said. “I’ve seen death before.”

  “This isn’t just death,” Wilkes returned. “It’s murder. And believe me, there’s a big difference.”

  Claire was sure she could handle it. “I’m a forensic psychiatrist, Lieutenant,” she said. “If I can’t deal with violent death, I probably should find another line of work.”

  Wilkes didn’t have a chance to respond as reporters, gathered at the edge of the crime scene tape, fanned out to surround and pepper them with questions.

  “Do you have a name for the victim?”

  “Is this another blond girl?”

  “Are you thinking it’s the same guy who murdered Catherine Mills?”

  Claire knew enough to keep her mouth shut.

  Wilkes looked straight into the cameras. “Hey,” he said, “you see us standing out here.” Then he pointed to the crime scene. “That means we haven’t been in there yet. Give us a break, okay? You’ll get your story when we know what’s going on.”

  He gestured to the three officers standing guard, and they lifted the yellow tape, allowing them to pass through.

  The reservoir was directly in front of them, though the crime scene itself was several dozen yards away, hidden from view by leafy trees and thick shrubs. Storm clouds had gathered in the sky, blotting out the stars. Nick could smell the rain coming and knew he had to work fast before it washed the crime scene of any evidence.

  As they reached the jogging path along the water, Claire thought of the dozens of times she’d run this route. She could see the glow of the klieg lights illuminating the crime scene. As they got closer, she hoped the bravado she displayed to Lieutenant Wilkes was more than just talk.

  They rounded a corner. A Crime Scene Unit detective was shooting photos of the ground along the water. Claire noticed the grass had been flattened, the tips of each blade pointing away from the lake.

  She was in the lake. He dragged her out. Why?

  Her thoughts were interrupted as Assistant Medical Examiner Ross emerged from the bushes. “It’s him, all right,” he said, seeing Nick and Wilkes.

  “What’d he do, drown her this time?” Nick asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Ross replied, leading them to the body. “There’s no water in her airway. More like he murdered her first, took her for a romantic midnight swim, then dragged her up here. This dude’s crazy.”

  They reached the body, covered by a white sheet, which Ross now pulled back.

  Claire gasped in pure terror. Nick grabbed her so she wouldn’t fall. The victim was another young blond woman. Quimby had burned her eyes with lye as he had Catherine Mills and the victim from Coney Island, and he’d left his signature rope around her neck with the same Dutch marine bowline.

  But this victim was soaking wet.

  And her long hair was cut short. In clumps. By an amateur.

  “We find her hair?” Nick asked.

  “Crime Scene did,” Ross said. “About fifty yards away.”

  “Why cut it?” Wilkes asked.

  “Because of me,” Claire replied, still shaking. “He was killing me.”

  Wilkes shot Nick a hard glance. “What the hell’s she talking about?”

  “She’s right, Boss,” Nick said.

  “Clear waters,” Claire continued, her eyes never leaving the dead girl’s body. “Quimby calls me clear waters. That’s why he dragged her into the lake. That’s why he hacked off her hair just like I cut mine. He wanted me to know.”

  “Know what?” Wilkes asked.

  “That Quimby’s after Dr. Waters,” Nick said. “That she’s next.”

  “Or that this murder was my fault,” Claire barely uttered.

  Nick turned to Wilkes. “Can you cover me here?”

  “What, you taking another day off?” the lieutenant replied.

  “No. I’m taking Dr. Waters to her hospital.”

  Wilkes looked at Claire. She was still shaking. He actually felt bad for her.

  “Don’t worry, Doc,” he said to her. “We’re not gonna let this whacko get anywhere near you, okay?”

  All Claire could manage was a nod.

  “You did us a solid,” the lieutenant continued, meaning it. “I’m calling Paul Curtin to ask him to assign you to us. If you’re up to it.”

  “I have to be,” said Claire.

  An unusual early morning thunderstorm crackled as Curtin perused the crime scene photos from Central Park. He flipped through them and returned them to a manila envelope.

  “I can’t allow this,” he said to Nick and Claire.

  They were seated in Curtin’s office. Lieutenant Wilkes had wasted no time making good on his promise to call Curtin, phoning him from the crime scene just moments after Nick and Claire left. Curtin asked to see the photos, and Wilkes had dispatched a detective to print them out and bring them to Manhattan City.

  “I have to do this, Doctor,” Claire pleaded with Curtin. “He’s after me now.”

  Curtin wouldn’t budge. “That’s exactly why you shouldn’t be involved,” he said flatly.

  “But I have to find out—” she began.

  “Not by risking your own life you don’t,” Curtin retorted.

  “But what if this is my fault?” Claire asked.

  Curtin softened. “Nothing you did made this guy go out and kill these women. He was doing that before you met him.”

  “I cut my hair,” Claire responded. “And Quimby made this victim look lik
e me.”

  “Claire. Listen to me,” Curtin said, looking directly into her eyes. “There’s no way that what happened this morning was in any way your fault.”

  Nick decided to try to break the stalemate. “Dr. Curtin,” he began. “We would’ve banged our heads against the wall for days, if not weeks, wondering why this fruitcake dragged that girl into the water after he did her. It took Dr. Waters here about five seconds to nail it.”

  Curtin wasn’t giving in. “Under any other circumstances, Detective, I’d be thrilled to have one of my students working with you. But I’m not going to paint a big bull’s-eye on Dr. Waters’s back. She’s in my program, and her safety is my responsibility.”

  “Taking her off the case won’t stop Quimby,” Nick responded.

  “That’s right,” Curtin shot back, “and that’s why I’m asking you for a protective detail to guard Dr. Waters until Quimby’s locked up.”

  Nick stood. “My boss has already approved it,” he said. “She’ll have a detective with her both at home and here at the hospital.”

  Claire was tired of listening to these two men decide how she was going to live her life. “I’m sitting right here, guys, in case you care about what I think,” she said to them. “And whether you do or not, I don’t need protection.”

  “Well, Doctor,” Curtin said in that condescending tone Claire hated, “you don’t have a say in this. I’m not losing a fellow on my watch.”

  Claire knew he wasn’t changing his mind. She nodded her reluctant assent.

  “C’mon,” Nick said to her. “I’ll take you home.”

  Half an hour later, Nick’s police Impala pulled to the curb of a residential block on the Upper East Side. Completely across town from where Claire and Ian lived. The rain had stopped and the air was refreshed, rinsed of its city grime.

  “I thought you said you were taking me home,” Clare said to Nick.

  “I am,” Nick replied, shutting off the engine. “Your temporary home.”

  Through the windshield, Claire saw Ian, a duffel bag at his feet, standing on the sidewalk with an attractive woman she didn’t know.

  “City seized this place from a drug dealer back in the eighties,” Nick said. “We use it to keep witnesses under wraps. Sammy the Bull lived here while he was testifying against Gotti.”

  “And the woman with my boyfriend?” Claire asked.

  “Your protection,” Nick replied.

  Claire was about to open the door when Nick grabbed her hand. “Listen,” he said. “We’re not releasing any of the details of the Central Park murder to the media.”

  “So you’re telling me to keep my mouth shut with Ian,” Claire surmised.

  “All he knows is that you’re being protected as a potential witness,” Nick said. “I need you to keep it that way.”

  “You have my word, Commander,” Claire said facetiously.

  It made Nick grin. “C’mon, let me introduce you,” he said.

  They got out of the car. Claire ran right into Ian’s arms. “You okay?” he asked.

  “I will be,” Claire answered, not letting him go.

  “Dr. Claire Waters,” Nick said, “Detective Maggie Stolls.”

  Claire reached out her hand, still clutching Ian with the other. It made Detective Stolls chuckle as she shook it. “I’m your roommate for as long as this takes,” she said. Maggie had an open face that Claire immediately liked. She was tall and well toned, her dark brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, which Claire thought made her look like a professional tennis player she’d seen on television.

  “Maggie’ll be with you around the clock,” Nick said. “Including when you’re at the hospital.”

  Claire broke her embrace with Ian and looked at him. “You’re not staying?” she asked.

  Ian indicated the duffel bag. “I packed up some stuff for you,” he said, “but they want me to stay at our place.”

  “Then you better protect Ian,” Claire demanded.

  “We have undercover cops on your block twenty-four-seven in case Quimby shows,” Nick reassured her.

  “What about you?” Claire asked Nick. “Are you staying with me?”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a momentary look on Ian’s face.

  Is he jealous? Claire liked the idea that Ian loved her so much he could be jealous of another man she spent time with, even if it was only for work.

  A squawk from Nick’s walkie-talkie broke Claire’s thoughts. “Car seven-oh-two,” said the radio dispatcher, “ten-two, your command.”

  “Ten-four, Central,” Nick replied into the walkie. “Uh, they’re calling me back to the office,” Nick said to Claire, indicating the radio. “It’s against procedure for male officers to guard female protectees overnight. And Quimby’s my case, so the quicker I collar him, the quicker we can send you home to your life.”

  “C’mon,” Detective Stolls said to Claire, trying to break the tension. “Let me show you your temporary digs.”

  Claire looked after Nick as he headed for the car. “Please,” she called after him, “keep me posted.”

  “I will,” Nick said back, getting into the Impala, starting the engine, and pulling away.

  CHAPTER 12

  “The problem with tracking this guy is he’s all over the map,” Lieutenant Wilkes said from the front of the cramped squad room. It had been nearly eighteen hours since the body was found in Central Park, and the orders from One Police Plaza, the office of the police commissioner, couldn’t be clearer: Stop Todd Quimby at all costs.

  In front of Wilkes stood his detectives and twenty other casually dressed cops on loan for this evening’s stakeout duty. Behind him were two dry-erase boards and a blackboard, all “misappropriated” from various offices in the precinct. The blackboard on the left sported a large blown-up mug shot of Todd Quimby, his pertinent information written neatly in chalk around it. The center board displayed a map of the city; blue pins indicated every location that could be tied to Quimby, and red pins showed where each of his victims was found. And the board on the right held their photos, in life and in gruesome death. Folding chairs were jammed into every free space so that the detectives on loan had a place to sit and sort through all the leads—most of them useless—that were being phoned in.

  An hour earlier, Brooklyn South Homicide had finally come through with the identity of the body at Coney Island. Rose Grimaldi was twenty and had traveled to the amusement park that Saturday night from Long Branch, New Jersey, with a group of four friends. When asked later why they never reported her missing, her friends explained Rosie wasn’t feeling too well when she got off the Cyclone and said she was going home in the car she had driven up from the Jersey Shore. It wasn’t until Rose failed to show up for work early Monday morning that the local cops were called, and it took another day before they linked her to the brutal murder at Coney Island.

  Nick taped up the material on the Central Park victim, whose identity was only as difficult to find as it was for Assistant Medical Examiner Ross to roll her fingerprints and feed them into the Printrak. Wilkes now pointed to her photos.

  “Quimby’s latest kill is one Sharon Corbett, twenty-two, came to us from beautiful Flagstaff, Arizona, six months ago. Took her bite outta the Big Apple by running up an impressive string of fifteen collars—prostitution, loitering, blah blah blah. Her latest humping ground was the Eleventh Avenue stroll between Thirty-Ninth and Forty-Second streets.”

  “Anybody see her there last night?” asked Detective Potts.

  “Yeah,” said Nick. “The other whores”—which Nick, like all good New York cops, pronounced “hoo-ahs”—“on the track. But none of them saw her with Quimby.”

  “I thought this guy found his victims at carnivals,” said a young Anti-Crime cop, Logan, from the back of the room.

  “There’s the rub,” Wilkes replied, “since there ain’t no carnivals on Eleventh Avenue.”

  “Times Square at night looks like the mother of all carnivals, t
hough,” offered Savarese.

  “And Quimby’s last two victims have been women with short blond hair,” said Nick. “If he didn’t find what he was looking for on Forty-Second, makes sense he’d go hunting elsewhere.”

  Wilkes pointed to the board as he spoke. “Rose Grimaldi, Saturday night, Coney Island. Catherine Mills, Sunday morning, Times Square. And Sharon Corbett late last night in Central Park. This guy’s on a spree. He gave us three corpses in the last four days, and there’s no reason to think he’ll take a break tonight.”

  He turned to Nick. “Detective Lawler’s run lead on these cases, and he’s gonna take it from here.”

  Nick stepped up to the front of the room. “Quimby’s last two victims were hookers, so we’re sitting on every pross stroll in the five boroughs, every night, till he shows up and we nab him. We’ve got units deploying in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island. We’re gonna cover Manhattan North and South. Patrol will back us up with extra radio cars along the West Side—”

  “Lieutenant Wilkes,” came a voice from behind Nick. A uniformed sergeant, Ramirez, stood in the doorway.

  “Not now, Pablo,” Wilkes said to him.

  “It’s urgent,” said Sergeant Ramirez. The look on his face told Nick everything he needed to know. The rat bastard struck again.

  “Where?” Nick said before Wilkes could get any words out.

  “De Witt Clinton Park,” said Ramirez.

  “Everybody goes,” shouted Wilkes as the room full of cops emptied out.

  De Witt Clinton Park is a two-block-square oasis in the West 50s between 11th Avenue and the Hudson River. The eastern two-thirds of the park consist of three softball diamonds that, during warm weather, are lit up for night games. Tonight, though, the floodlights illuminated only the foulest of play.

  Nick could see her as soon as he stepped through the gate into the park. She was lying in the grass behind home plate on the largest of the three ball fields.