by John Lutz
Don went back to the box and drew from it a folded clear plastic drop cloth, like the one on the floor, only smaller. He unfolded it and draped it over the hood of the car.
He came back and stood in front of Charlotte, just out of kicking range, and looked at Dixie.
“Do we really want to do this?” he asked.
“Both of us do,” Charlotte heard Dixie say in a throaty voice. She could feel Dixie’s warm breath in her ear.
Don went again to the box and this time drew out what looked like a broomstick, only it was shorter, and pointed.
At first Charlotte didn’t realize what that meant. When she did, she was aware of a warm wetness flowing down her legs as terror took over every corner of her mind.
This isn’t happening. This is a dream. Please, God! It has to be a dream!
Maybe God had heard her, because she became oddly detached from what was happening. It was as if there were no place, no time, only fear so deeply rooted she couldn’t bear to accept its reality.
It was a mercy that she was in a trance as Don took her from Dixie and walked her as if she were a zombie to where the plastic sheet was draped over the hood. He shoved her onto the hood, lifting her slightly so her feet were off the floor.
She felt her legs being forced apart. She tried to put them together, but Don’s body was between them now, easing them ever farther apart. Charlotte saw Dixie on the other side of the hood watching her. Both of Dixie’s hands were on the hood and she didn’t have the sharpened broomstick.
Don must have it.
Don must have it!
The trance was broken.
Through unbelievable pain, the terror and panic rushed in.
Charlotte began to scream, over and over. Each scream filtered through the tape as a muted, soft hum. Almost like coos of intense pleasure. Dixie leaned closer over the warm hood, still watching with glittering black eyes, her face like stone.
Charlotte loved Dixie. She really did.
Then there was only the pain.
32
It took Jill Clark almost half an hour to tell Quinn everything. When she was finished, she wasn’t sure how she felt about what she’d done.
She still felt she’d had to do it, to talk to Quinn before her next date with Tony. But now she began to think again about what Madeline had told her and wondered if she really trusted Quinn. If she trusted anyone.
She hadn’t been disappointed in Quinn. His strength and calm were obvious and reassured her, drew her out. He seemed to understand and to forgive her for any naïveté or foolishness that had led her to this predicament. But was that the idea? Was it a trick? Was everything a trick?
The sense of being drained, of absolution, after telling her tale was fast disappearing. She’d opened herself to new problems. She was still suspicious of everyone.
You’re being paranoid. Like Madeline.
Dead Madeline, who’d had real enemies.
But she didn’t know for sure that Madeline was dead. Jill had only been sure enough to come here, to talk to Quinn.
Tony. Why didn’t I talk to him? Why didn’t I trust Tony?
It was as if her heart had known secretly what hadn’t yet found its place in her mind. Her heart hadn’t trusted Tony. Was her heart right?
It hadn’t been right yet.
She was still afraid.
Appraisal time.
Quinn had been reviewing his notes when Jill arrived. He’d left his reading glasses on so he’d seem less intimidating. Anything to make her conversational and keep her talking. And she’d told him plenty, the words tumbling out sometimes so close together they got tangled up.
He leaned back in his desk chair and peered over the rims of his glasses at this young woman who’d just unburdened herself to him. She seemed entirely rational but obviously distraught. She was wearing lightweight blue slacks, a white blouse with a coffee stain on it, very little makeup. Her blond hair was carelessly combed and slightly flattened on one side, as if she’d been lying down. Her eyes were red, but he couldn’t be sure if she’d been crying. She was perched on the very edge of the visitor’s chair in front of his desk, facing him. Quinn, after all his years as a detective and all those lies he’d been told, could almost unerringly know if someone was telling the truth. Jill Clark seemed too frightened to be lying.
“I know it’s hard to believe,” she said, mistaking his silence. “I didn’t believe it myself at first.”
“And you think the woman you saw in the elevator on Seventy-second Street has taken over the identity of the one you referred to as mad Madeline. Has moved into her apartment.”
His words were statements, not questions.
“Only Madeline wasn’t mad,” Jill said. “I’m sure of that now.”
Quinn peeled off his glasses, folded them, and slid them into his shirt pocket.
“It’s hard to believe,” Jill said again.
“It’s hard to believe we’re finding human torsos lying around the city, but we are.”
“Then you do believe me!”
He wasn’t ready to give her that yet. “I think you and I should take a ride in my car,” he said.
“To Madeline’s apartment?”
He smiled. “It’s a little premature for that, I’m afraid.”
She shuddered and her lower lip trembled. “I know where we’re going. I expected it.”
“You’ve given this some thought.”
“Of course I have.”
And you’ll give it more thought after today. Probably for the rest of your life.
Quinn scooted back his chair and stood up, then walked around the desk and placed his hand on Jill Clark’s shoulder. He could feel the fear and tension like electric current in her slender body. “You’re safe now, dear. You did the right thing coming here.”
She surprised him and placed her hand on his and squeezed. “I don’t think anyone’s really safe,” she said. “Not anymore.”
“Relatively safe,” Quinn amended. “And that’s about all we get in this cockeyed world.”
She managed a smile, but it wasn’t much.
“Ready to take that ride?” he asked.
She nodded and stood up from her chair as if she were an arthritic old woman. The mind was forcing the body where the body didn’t want to go. Quinn couldn’t blame her for being reluctant.
“We’ll make it as easy as possible for you,” he said. “Nothing’s as bad as the fear of it.”
Almost nothing.
He scribbled a note to Pearl and Fedderman explaining where he was going. Then he placed a hand gently on Jill Clark’s shoulder and steered her toward the door. He saw that the label on her blouse was sticking up out the back of her collar and deftly tucked it in. She glanced over at him and they exchanged smiles. He had to keep her moving, keep her from thinking too much.
They were on their way to the morgue.
Victor paced in his apartment, roaming through all the rooms, head bowed, his mind processing new experience, the new Victor.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. It was business. He’d started out so detached. The dismembering was useful as a public signal to the waiting client as well as a hindrance to victim identification. And most of all, it helped to divert the police by convincing them a psychosexual serial killer was operating instead of a unique and profitable business. If the dismemberment didn’t do it, surely the phallic broomstick stakes forced up through the vaginal and womb walls, or the rectum, would.
At first there was no emotional reaction to using the sharpened broomstick stakes. But soon he’d become fascinated by the homemade stakes and began taking great care in their selection and transformation in his skillful hands. The sharpening, sanding, and oiling became tremendously important to him. Somehow extremely personal. It made using the broomstick stakes easier.
It made doing business easier. That part of the business.
Then slowly, without him being aware of it, he began to enjoy more than the preparation
. He began to enjoy using the stakes.
That wasn’t like him. Not at all. He was Victor the businessman, not Victor the Impaler.
He glanced over at his bookshelves, at the Vlad the Impaler books. When he’d seen them in the biography section at Barnes & Noble he had to have them. That really was when he first suspected the presence of a demon in him, a sickness, and his uneasy suspicions were confirmed when he read more and more eagerly about the sadistic despot and warlord.
Good Christ! He and the long-dead Vlad had something in common.
They were kindred spirits.
Victor wasn’t pleased by this. He went into the kitchen and poured some Johnnie Walker Black into a water glass. The liquor felt hot going down; maybe it would jolt him out of his depression, his reluctance to accept what he’d done, what he was.
It was Gloria who’d suggested using the broomstick stakes. Maybe she was the one who’d infected him. And she was the one who’d suggested that Charlotte’s penetration be anal, like that of the man. Victor remembered what he’d immediately thought when she’d suggested that. It was the way Vlad had impaled his victims. He’d agreed to Gloria’s suggestion without argument, as if it was all business with him so it made no difference. But he knew by the smile in her hard, dark eyes that she was aware of this new side of him, or old side that had always been there as a secret even from himself. He and Gloria could have few secrets from each other.
Victor continued to pace. He simply couldn’t sit down and be still.
He knew why he couldn’t sit and be still, the real reason. What had happened wasn’t Vlad the Impaler’s fault, or Gloria’s. The decision had been his.
He’d make the same decision again.
He took another generous swallow of scotch, nailing down the admission that hadn’t come easily, and that somehow made him feel marginally better.
This time when his mind began replaying Charlotte’s squirming and soft screaming on the hood of the car, he didn’t immediately deflect his thoughts, the muted pleas for mercy and the violent images. He found his courage and welcomed them into his consciousness, into his new being.
Victor the Impaler.
Another swig of scotch.
I enjoy my work. Why shouldn’t I?
33
“Why are we going the wrong way up a one-way street?” Jill asked.
Quinn steered the big Lincoln to swerve around a bus stopped for passengers and smiled over at her. “The pesky press, dear. They want to know what’s going on all the time.”
Jill winced as the Lincoln’s right front fender barely missed the bus. “Isn’t that their job?”
“Sure is. Right now, it’s my job to see that they don’t know about you. Because if they know, the killer will know.” If he doesn’t already.
Quinn figured that if Jill’s story was accurate it was possible that the phony Madeline had related the elevator encounter to E-Bliss.org. Jill might already be in danger. A lot depended on whether the woman who’d been found dead in the subway tunnel was the woman in her story.
Of course, if Jill didn’t identify the woman in the morgue as the real Madeline, that was no guarantee the real Madeline was still alive. At any given time, there was more than one undiscovered corpse somewhere in New York.
Horns blasted as Quinn steered the Lincoln onto Second Avenue, headed the right direction now with the flow of traffic.
“I think we shook them,” he said.
“Driving with you is an adventure,” Jill told him. There was a curious elation in her voice, as if motion and risk had temporarily taken her mind off her more ominous troubles.
“Life’s an adventure, dear.”
“Sometimes a fatal one,” Jill said gloomily.
Back in her doomsday mood.
Maria Sanchez thought she might be going crazy. She had no money problems, but three years ago she’d made a mistake Jorge didn’t know about. She’d violated his strict rule of dealing drugs, not using them, and become a user. Now she was trying to quit.
She didn’t think of it quite that way. Maria regarded herself as being in the process of quitting. She still had part of the stash she’d brought with her when she’d flown in to LaGuardia. Smuggling it in had been easy enough; arrangements had been made. Even if anyone had found the drugs in her possession, it probably wouldn’t have proved a problem. Money had been laid down. People who counted knew who she was.
Who she wasn’t anymore.
She scratched at her bare arms, stood up from the sofa, and paced back and forth across the living room of the apartment that was feeling more and more like a prison cell. Over the past several months she’d shortened up on her daily lines of cocaine, cut her usage almost in half. It wasn’t as if she had any choice. Maria had always been the exception to the rule. What others were afraid or unable to do, she could accomplish. Her drug usage wouldn’t be any different. Other people got hooked for life—not Maria.
Cutting back had been difficult at times, was difficult now, but well within the scope of her will and physical ability to deny herself. Confidence was bred in her. She’d been sure she’d be able to quit entirely when the time came.
Now she was beginning to wonder.
So far, the trip to the morgue wasn’t as bad as Jill had imagined. She was told she didn’t have to view the actual body. They sat her down in a red plastic chair in an anteroom and would show her close-ups of the dead woman on a television monitor.
Quinn stood behind her and to the side with his hand resting gently on her shoulder. “There are worse things on cable television,” he said. “The medical channel.”
Jill didn’t know if there actually was a medical channel, but his words did lend her courage.
Still, she drew in her breath as the first image took form on the monitor.
Quinn said nothing, but tightened his grip almost imperceptibly on her shoulder.
“Madeline,” she said simply, her voice almost too soft to hear.
“You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
Jill turned her head to the side, away from the monitor. One photograph was enough. She knew it was Madeline and knew that was how she’d always remember Madeline. “Can we get out of here now?”
“Of course.” As Quinn removed his hand he patted her shoulder, letting her know she’d done well and he was still concerned about her, looking out for her. “Are you all right?”
Jill nodded as she stood up. “Fine.”
Outside in the warm sunlight, she felt slightly nauseous and swallowed. She felt better after drawing a few deep breaths through her mouth.
“Tummy okay?”
He must have known exactly how she felt. “It’s all right now. The most awful thing is the smell. It doesn’t want to go away.”
“Usually after a visit to the morgue, I smoke a cigar,” he said.
“Feel free.”
He drew a stubby, almost black cigar from his shirt pocket. Jill was surprised to see that it was half smoked. It wasn’t badly damaged where it had been snuffed out. The charred tobacco had been evened out and tamped with care.
“It’s Cuban,” Quinn explained, seeing her staring at the cigar. “They’re kind of precious.” He dug into a pants pocket for paper matches, then struck one and fired up the cigar. “Would you like one?”
“No, thank you. Aren’t Cuban cigars illegal?”
“No Cuban cigar has ever been convicted of anything,” Quinn said. He drew on the cigar, rolled the smoke around in his mouth, then exhaled. He grinned at her. “Want a puff?”
“No. Smelling the secondhand smoke instead of the inside of the morgue is enough for me.”
They walked on to where the Lincoln was illegally parked in a loading zone, an NYPD placard visible on its dash.
“For you,” Quinn said, “I’ll smoke in the car.”
There was no reason to avoid the press as they drove away from the morgue. But just in case, Quinn ran a red light to make sure they weren’t being followed.<
br />
“Still sure of the identification?” he asked when they were stopped in stalled traffic on First Avenue.
“It—she’s Madeline. The real one.”
Quinn unbuckled his safety belt so he could work his cell phone from his pocket and pecked out a number.
“Isn’t that illegal, too?” Jill asked. “Driving in New York City while using a cell phone?”
“Not if you’re also smoking a cigar,” Quinn said.
When Quinn was finished telling Fedderman he had a lunch date, he called to set up his own lunch with Renz.
Renz already had a luncheon appointment, but when Quinn told him what he wanted to talk to him about, Renz broke it. They were sitting now in Puccini’s, an Italian restaurant that played opera for background music, only a few blocks from where Quinn had hooked Jill up with Fedderman near a good fusion restaurant on Amsterdam. From this point on, Jill would need protection. She was in more danger than she knew.
When Quinn was finished telling Renz about his visit with Jill Clark, and their subsequent trip to the morgue, Renz sat silently staring at his rigatoni carbonara. He wasn’t listening to La Bohème.
“This Jill is having lunch right now with Fedderman?” he asked, to make sure, not looking up from his plate.
“Right up the street,” Quinn said.
“The woman pretending to be Madeline might have been suspicious of her. We’ve gotta protect her. Gotta keep her away from the media wolves.”
