by John Lutz
“Maybe Coulter really was the Torso Murderer. Now and then we get lucky.”
“The cops down in Dixie are gonna start tracing his actions over the past few weeks, and when they try to square times and places with him being here in New York committing murders and dismembering the bodies, it isn’t going to work.”
“They won’t be very eager to backtrack on Coulter,” Quinn said, “considering he’s dead.” He reached across the table and touched the back of her hand. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”
“Sure it is. You only need to fool the media. Media wolves are relentless, Quinn, and the E-Bliss folks strike me as smart and have sure as hell known all along that Thomas Coulter wasn’t the Torso Murderer. Assuming we’ve got this figured right.”
“We do,” he said.
“And you think it’s gonna all hold up?”
“I didn’t exactly say that.”
“I love confidence in a man.”
Linda finished her iced water, then picked up her purse from the floor and stood up. She was wearing a brown pantsuit with a white blouse, low-heeled brown shoes, no jewelry other than a silver bracelet. All very demure and businesslike, yet somehow sexy as hell in a way he didn’t quite understand. She wasn’t his type, really, so how could this have happened? A month ago, Quinn wouldn’t have dreamed he could fall in love again. If that had happened, what other surprises might life throw at him?
“You’re going?”
“Back to the morgue,” she said. “Nift needs me.”
“So do I.”
She came around the table and rested a hand on his shoulder. “I hope you always feel that way. Sometimes I’m bad luck for men.”
“Not this time.”
“We have no control over that.” She realized that if Wes Nobbler knew Renz and Quinn had been aware of Nift hiding or delaying information, Nobbler also knew somebody must have ratted Nift out. Renz must have his own informer in the medical examiner’s office. It shouldn’t take Nobbler and his cronies long to figure out it might be Quinn’s lover.
Linda understood how it worked. Nobbler would need her on his side, and he’d squeeze hard. She’d be forced to choose between her career and Quinn.
“You’re trying to tell me something,” Quinn said.
She leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. Her lips were cool and dry.
“Telling you to be careful,” she said and moved toward the door.
“Because you love me?”
“Because I love you,” she said, and then left the apartment.
Quinn finished his orange-flavored chicken and started in on some of what was left of Linda’s white rice. It needed seasoning, but he decided not to bother.
He knew Linda was right about the Coulter story unraveling soon. That was pretty much all he knew about what she thought. She was a mystery.
Maybe that was the thing about her that made him hers.
Palmer Stone’s desk was clear, its surface polished. The cleaning woman hadn’t been in for a while; Stone was responsible for the strong scent of Lemon Pledge in his office. Everything, in fact, was gleamingly clean, squared away, and in its proper place. Business profits, Stone sometimes said, were often the result of appearances. Perception had a way of becoming reality. Sometimes there was opportunity in perception. Like now.
“While the law thinks the Torso Murderer is dead,” Stone said, “maybe we should get back to business.”
Victor appeared surprised. “But Gloria—”
“How is she?” Stone asked.
“The same. Now and then you can see her pupils moving under her closed eyelids, but that’s all that moves.” The muscles in his face tightened and his eyes became moist. “I tell you, Palmer, it tears your heart out.”
“I do sympathize,” Stone said. “I wish there were something I could do.”
“I know…. It’s so goddamned rough.”
“It is,” Stone said. “Nevertheless, we’ll have to tend to business without Gloria. She would approve of that, I’m sure.”
Victor looked over at him. “We talking about deleting Maria Sanchez?”
“No, we decided there was too much risk in deleting her. But we should be able to delete Jill Clark, despite the almost constant presence of her friend Jewel. If Jill disappears leaving a note saying she’s left New York, who’s there to question it?”
“Jewel.”
“Jewel will ask Tony Lake about it. He’ll be heartbroken, unable to understand why Jill left him.”
“I can play that role,” Victor said. “I have before. But Jewel’s no dumb bimbo.”
“I know, Victor. But I’m sure Jewel will buy into it, especially since she has no choice.”
“What about our special client?” Victor asked. “The one waiting to become Jill Clark?”
“We can’t leave a torso to be found as a signal that she can take over Jill’s identity and move in. That would let the police know Coulter wasn’t the Torso Murderer. We’ll simply alter procedure and talk to her, make it clear it will be the only contact—ever—between us. She can be Jill for a while somewhere else, and then move back to New York, if that’s where she wants to be.”
Victor ran his fingers lightly over a chin that Stone was glad to see cleanly shaven today. “I don’t know, Palmer. Jewel’s a persistent pain in the ass. She might not accept my story. She might go to the police.”
Stone made a dismissive motion with his manicured right hand. “If she does, so what? Jill decided to leave New York, like countless other young women who grew tired of the struggle. And there’s always the note.” Stone sat forward. “You can persuade Jill to write the good-bye note, can’t you?”
“Of course. She’s no problem. I can persuade her to do anything.” Victor began rubbing his chin harder, as if trying to sand it smooth. “Once I—”
“Never mind that.”
“Weak stomach?”
“My stomach doesn’t factor into it,” Stone said. “You’re tasked to do something, you do it, and I handle my end of the business. We decided early that, in everyone’s best interests, compartmentalization would be our business model.”
“Yeah, we did.” Victor thought he might have to remind Palmer of that in the near future.
“Listen, Victor, I know Jewel’s a hindrance, but Jill must be deleted because of her link to the old Madeline Scott. And don’t forget she’s gotten at least a glimpse of the new Madeline.”
Victor stopped with the chin rubbing. It had become so vigorous that it had left a red mark. “Okay, Palmer. It makes sense. You’re right, as usual.”
Just the kind of talk Stone wanted to hear. “It’s a business decision, Victor, pure and simple. It best serves our select client, and it best serves the company. Think of it that way, and it’s our only reasonable option. It’s important, of course, that Jill Clark never be found.”
“There’s a place in New Jersey.”
“I don’t want to know about it. That’s your department, and I trust you can manage it as well as you always have.”
Stone deliberately hadn’t mentioned Gloria again. Victor would be acting on his own.
“When do you want it done?” Victor asked.
“Soon,” Stone said.
“How?”
“That’s totally up to you.”
Victor smiled.
69
The old man behind the desk at the Tumble Onn Inn watched the Louisiana state patrol car pull into the lot with its lights out. That made four cars.
“What’re you waiting for?” he asked one of the troopers in the motel office.
There were two troopers in the office, making it feel half as big as it was. It seemed the only space to move around a little was behind the desk. That was where the old man, whose name was Ike, sat on a high stool that had a low but rigid bentwood back. He hauled his scrawny body up onto the stool now and then to ease his perpetually aching spine. It was better than standing and trying to make nice with the guests. Or with t
he cops. Ike had suffered in his life at the hands of the police and was wary of them.
Neither of the troopers bothered answering Ike. They were polite enough when they chose to speak. It was just that they didn’t seem to think of him as someone worth answering.
Ike had misplaced his glasses, which made the two troopers look almost exactly alike. Burly six-footers with dark, flat-topped military haircuts and aggressive chins. One of the troopers had on some kind of cologne or aftershave that made Ike feel like sneezing.
Ike persisted. “She’s just one woman alone, an’ she probably ain’t the one you’re lookin’ for anyways.”
“You called us,” one of the troopers reminded Ike.
“Well, I figured she wasn’t right somehow, the way she flew off the handle when I told her no.”
The other trooper smiled.
“Imagine a woman like that,” Ike said, “offerin’ to sell sex to an old guy like me. Hell, testosterwhatever’s just a memory to me. These days, the only part of me that ain’t stiff—”
“Don’t tell us,” the trooper who’d smiled said.
“You might not believe it to look at me, but I’m eighty-six years old. And she just up an’ bold as you please said she didn’t have the money to pay for her room these past two days, an’ would I take a—”
“We don’t need to know that part,” the same trooper said. “We only need to know if it’s the woman we’re looking for. The description you gave on the phone makes us suspect she is.”
“Lookin’ for her for what?” Ike asked, raising his thick gray eyebrows, making his cadaverous face seem even thinner. “You two guys want a—”
“Hey!” the other trooper said, raising a cautioning forefinger.
“I don’t understand you guys,” Ike said. “Hell, I just thought a patrol car’d swing by here and you’d take her in for vagrancy or tryin’ to peddle her ass. Who is she, Bonnie Parker?” He fixed his bleary eyes on them. “You two even know who Bonnie Parker was?”
“Owned a diner outside Slidell, if memory serves,” the trooper on the right said. “Big redheaded woman, loud voice.”
“Different Bonnie Parker,” Ike said, eyeing the trooper with contempt. “I guess you ain’t heard of Bonnie and Clyde.”
“We know a lot of Clydes,” the other trooper said.
“John Dillinger?”
“He had something to do with Enron, right?”
“Christ on a stick! You call yourselves law enforcement officers?”
The troopers were both grinning. Ike, knowing he’d been had, glared at them and shifted position on his stool. “They stayed here once, the real Bonnie and Clyde. Room number eighteen.”
Both troopers were staring dead eyed at him, not buying it.
One of them turned at the soft sound of gravel crunching out in the driveway. Another car arriving. This one had its lights off, too, but Ike could see it out the window and it wasn’t a state police car. It was a sheriff’s department car from nearby Pool County.
“That’s him,” one of the troopers said.
“Who?” Ike asked.
He didn’t think they were going to answer him. Then the nearest trooper said, “The only one of us here other’n you who’s seen Mary Smith.”
“An’ she offered me a—”
“Forget that part of it,” said the trooper farthest away.
The other trooper winked. “Excuse my partner. He’s kind of a prude. And we don’t think the woman really is Mary Smith.”
“Don’t make me no never mind,” Ike said. “That’s the name she signed in under. Said her husband’d be here the end of the week with some money, an’ she’d pay me cash when she checked out.”
“That before or after you got that offer of sex?”
“After. She went to cryin’ when I turned her down. Then she gave me the husband story.”
“And you believed her, even though she signed in as Mary Smith?”
“I pretended to. She’s a sweetie. An’ she seemed all frazzled an’ I felt sorry for her. Thought she might have some kinda mental or drug problem an’ she should be in the hands of the authorities. Anyways, I seen more Smiths sign in here than you can imagine.”
“I can imagine a lot of Smiths,” said the trooper farthest from the desk.
“Let’s go,” said his partner. To Ike: “Just sit tight here, old fella, and we’ll finish our business and you can go back to that girlie magazine you’ve been reading.”
Ike started. He’d thought he’d concealed Bizarre Desires under People on the table behind the desk. Now he saw that People had been knocked sideways and Bizarre Desires was plainly visible. He must have brushed up against the table.
“Hell, I got no idea where that came from. I used to read Playboy years ago.”
But the troopers were gone. It was amazing how quickly and quietly they’d moved, for such big men. They hadn’t let the screen door slam behind them. Ike hadn’t even heard the stretched-out spring squeal the way it usually did when the door opened and closed. They were here; they were gone.
Ike went back to his magazine, but he couldn’t read it or even focus on the photographs.
Too much going on outside.
70
Outside, the two troopers walked to a line of trees at the edge of the parking lot opposite the room where Mary Smith presumably lay sleeping. The room’s lights were out, anyway.
A knot of their fellow troopers was already there, along with Lieutenant Floyd Balamore from headquarters up the highway. A young, tan-uniformed guy who must be Simmons, the Pool County sheriff’s deputy, was standing beside the lieutenant.
Simmons shifted his weight and the moonlight touched his face, and all of a sudden he didn’t look so young.
“We’ve got the back covered in case there’s some way out we don’t know about,” Lieutenant Balamore said to Simmons. Balamore was African American, big, smart, and very ambitious. He had sparkling dark eyes and wore a tiny brush mustache that was always impeccably trimmed and made him look as if he’d just sucked a lemon and, hey, it’d tasted okay.
“We’re gonna advance in a semicircle,” Balamore said, “with weapons drawn, and two men are gonna knock on the door and identify themselves as police. One of them’s gonna be looking back at you, Deputy Simmons. When you’re positive this is the Aiken woman, you give us the nod.”
Simmons, who’d seen and talked with Cathy Lee Aiken back at the swamp shack and was 90 percent sure she was also “Mary Smith,” nodded.
“Like that,” Lieutenant Balamore said, “but not yet.” His smile was thin beneath the twitchy little mustache. A comedian too dry for those under his command, he felt unappreciated. Simmons, he figured, was as humorless as the rest of them.
Balamore turned to his somber troopers. “Let’s do this thing. And remember, the subject might be armed and dangerous.”
They spread out, just as he’d instructed, and slowly advanced across the dark parking lot toward the end room that presumably contained the woman registered as Mary Smith, and whose description matched that of the woman they sought, Cathy Lee Aiken. Armed and dangerous as a woman named Cathy Lee could be.
The two troopers at the motel room door stood well on either side of it, concerned that a fusillade of bullets might smash through it at any second. The one on the left leaned in, knocked three times, and loudly proclaimed he was police. The one on the left had his gun raised and held with both hands. His head was turned and he was looking at Simmons, who was off to the side of the door and about twenty feet away.
Having met Cathy Lee, Simmons didn’t think all these precautions were necessary, but he had his gun out so as not to be the only one not ready to blast away. There was enough firepower here to take on an armed battalion. Nobody even knew if Cathy Lee Aiken—assuming the woman in the motel room was Cathy Lee Aiken—actually had a gun.
The motel room door slowly opened, and the form of a woman in a white robe appeared. At first she stood motionless. Then she moved
forward, leaning out into the moonlight, and Simmons saw her face as well as her cleavage.
She was Cathy Lee, all right. He nodded in an exaggerated way, so there would be no mistake.
No sooner had he done that then Cathy Lee suddenly bolted straight out the door and past the two nearest troopers. She stopped ten feet beyond them and pulled a large revolver from beneath her robe, causing the robe to flap open and reveal her otherwise naked body. She began turning in a tight circle, taking in the entire scene with wide eyes while affording everyone an entire view of what was beneath the robe.
There was no contingency plan for this. The startled troopers who’d been at the door froze when they saw her. The troopers lined in the lot couldn’t fire for fear of hitting their comrades behind Cathy Lee. The troopers behind her couldn’t fire without risking hitting one of those standing out in the lot. And of course there was the fact that in every demonstrable way she was a woman, and that gave men with guns pause.
Cathy Lee raised the revolver with both hands and began squeezing the trigger. The big revolver roared again and again. One bullet slammed into a car parked fifty feet to her left. Three went twenty feet up and lodged in some tree limbs. One went away into the night over a bean field. The last struck the side of a tractor trailer driving past on the state highway, hauling tires north to Atlanta. The driver wasn’t even aware the trailer had taken a bullet, one that was now probably bouncing around inside a tire.
Cathy Lee pulled the empty gun’s trigger several more times, then sat down on the ground and began to cry.
71
Palmer Stone had showered and was shaving, preparing to leave for the office, when he noticed the news was on the small-screen TV in his bathroom. A beautiful and sincere blond anchorwoman was talking about a woman who’d been arrested in Louisiana, and was thought to be the confederate of the two men who’d been charged with murdering Tom Coulter and with possession and distribution of methamphetamine.
Because of Coulter’s fortunate death and the assumption that he’d been the Torso Murderer, Stone had been following the news reports on him with some interest. He’d read about the woman who’d been with the two men charged with murdering Coulter, and knew something about her. A woman like that knew how to take care of herself. Stone thought she’d gotten away clean. Well, not clean, but away.
