by John Lutz
Pearl and Quinn stepped into the barn along with Avis. It was cooler in there, and surprisingly spacious and clean. Along one wall were wooden stalls, all of them empty. The bare dirt floor didn’t look as if it had been disturbed. There was a strong animal smell in the barn, but no animals. There was no straw in any of the stalls or on the barn floor.
“Why no animals?” Pearl asked Avis.
“Too much trouble. Not enough profit.”
Quinn and Pearl let Avis lead them out of the barn, keeping him ahead so they could see the shotgun.
“You gonna take me in?” Avis asked.
“That was never our intention,” Quinn said.
Avis went with them, still slightly ahead and off to the side, as they walked over to the Lincoln and stood in the glaring sun. It was a hot place, Avis’s farm, despite the shade trees. The breeze coming off the fields was warm and dry and carried the grit of dust.
“You comin’ back?” Avis asked.
“Might,” Quinn said. “And if I do and see that shotgun again, I’m gonna shove it up your ass sideways.”
Avis showed a flicker of surprise, but not the slightest fear. He watched them without expression as they got into the car.
As they drove away, Quinn saw in the outside mirror that Avis continued to watch, unmoving, the shotgun’s twin barrels still pointed at the ground.
“I really think he’d shoot somebody,” Pearl said, when they were back on the dirt road leading to the state highway.
“If he had the chance,” Quinn said, “and knew it wouldn’t get complicated afterward.”
“Not a knife man, though,” Pearl said. “Maybe with dead dogs, but not with live people.”
“That’s the way I figure him, too, but he’s hard to read.”
“He obviously loves his gun. Penis substitute, maybe. Your friend Zoe could tell you. Guns or knives, those are the usual toys for boys. They tend to settle on one or the other.”
“Usual isn’t always,” Quinn said tersely.
Pearl said, “Well, duh! ” and turned on the radio.
He studied the items laid out on the bed and began methodically packing them into the blue canvas bag. The steel hook and portable drill were heavy, but he didn’t want to take the risk of fastening the hook beforehand, as he had with Terri Gaddis. Terri had been of average intelligence at best, but Mitzi was sharp and observant. She might happen to look straight up while showering and see the hook set in her bathroom ceiling, or she might even notice its shadow and glance up at it out of curiosity.
She’d certainly be curious, like most intelligent people. She’d want to know what the hook was for and how it had gotten there. Or if it had always been there and she’d never noticed it.
He couldn’t risk her asking a visitor, or the building super. So the hook would be installed just before it was needed.
Soon Mitzi would understand it all, when she could do nothing about it.
He smiled. Mitzi was smart, all right. His smartest so far.
That made it all the better.
61
Quinn and Pearl got back to the city around five o’clock. Rush-hour traffic. Heat chimeras dancing in the lowering light. They were headed south on the Roosevelt Parkway on the West Side. The Lincoln’s overworked air conditioner, its blower motor’s bad bearing chattering, was fighting the summer heat to a draw.
“So Avis was pretty much a bust,” Pearl said.
“Alphabetically, he’s still first on the suspect list,” Quinn said.
“Are you actually trying to make me feel better?”
“Like always,” Quinn said, exiting the parkway. He had a dinner date with Zoe and didn’t want to get tangled up with Pearl this evening. “Feds has got the unmarked. We’re not far from your apartment. Why don’t I drop you off? Save a subway ride.”
“It’s a deal if we stop someplace for dinner. Nothing fancy.”
“I’ll pull up someplace, and you can get some takeout,” Quinn said.
Pearl said nothing for a couple of beats, watching the traffic, then: “We dealing with Zoe here?”
He laughed, understanding why she was so talented at her work. “We are,” he admitted. “She and I have a dinner date this evening.”
Pearl shook her head and smiled sadly. “A cop and a psychoanalyst. What must she think of you?”
“We have something in common. We both help people.”
“She helps people like you, Quinn.”
He held tight to the steering wheel and braked to avoid running up the back of a cab. “Like me?”
“Obsessive-compulsive personalities. Tunnel-visioned fanatics. Pathetic workaholics. Psychotic subterranean Rambos.”
“At least I don’t hear voices.”
“You hear Renz,” Pearl said. “There must be better choices.”
“Who do you hear, Pearl? Dr. Phil? Your mother, telling you to get married to a skin doctor, a mole might be killing you?”
“I hear you, Quinn.” Goddamn you!
They drove for a while in silence while Quinn negotiated heavy traffic on Broadway.
“If you listened to me,” Quinn said after a while, “you wouldn’t worry so much.”
Pearl stared straight ahead and said nothing. Said nothing, in fact, until Quinn pulled the Lincoln to the curb in front of her apartment building.
Still not looking at him, she said, “You ever get the feeling Zoe’s using you?”
“Using?”
“Observing. Studying. For God’s sake, Quinn, she’s a psychoanalyst on the make. And I don’t mean the sexual make. Not only, anyway.”
“We’re not going to talk about Zoe.”
“What, she might pick up vibes and get her feelings hurt?”
Pearl’s pique was gaining on her. His relationship with Zoe was obviously hurting her, and that wasn’t what he’d set out to do. “Pearl-”
“Someday you might be famous. Zoe’s gonna put you in the academic book she’s writing as a case study. You might be a whole chapter.”
“Pearl, I didn’t mean to insult you or hurt your-”
“I know the type. Screw and take notes, screw and take notes. Men are so damned unaware.”
Quinn placed his arms on the steering wheel, slumped forward, and rested his forehead on the backs of his hands.
He sat with the engine idling, realizing that he felt guilty. He’d upset Pearl, which wasn’t what he’d set out to do. He’d been defending himself-and Zoe-against Pearl’s unreasonable invective and innuendo.
He sat up straight and was about to remark that they’d gotten off on the wrong track in this conversation.
But Pearl was already out of the car, slamming the door and walking away.
He watched her stomp up the steps to her building entrance and push inside, not looking back at him. Pearl in a snit. What the hell was wrong with her, born with a burr up her ass and making everybody around her miserable? Now she was going to walk down to that deli on the corner and get heated-up garbage for supper. She’d feel sorry for herself and then go to bed early and pissed off. That was Pearl. He knew her. She’d be hard on herself and make herself miserable.
Her own fault.
Why should I care?
He realized he shouldn’t and drove away.
Screw and take notes. He had to laugh.
Quinn dropped back by the office to see what Fedderman had come up with in trying to find some correlation between the Slicer murders and the. 25-Caliber Killer victims. Fedderman had left a report of his day’s work, with and without Vitali and Mishkin, on Quinn’s desk.
After sitting down behind his desk, Quinn fired up a Cuban cigar and leaned back. No matter what he’d do to eliminate or disguise the tobacco scent, Pearl would notice it tomorrow morning and bring it to his attention. He wouldn’t tell her his conversation with her in the car was what made him want to smoke a cigar and relax, get his nervous system back together. That might give her some satisfaction. He blew smoke and smiled. Pearl.
Of course, Renz might be a political animal, but he wasn’t a bad detective, and he still had his cop’s instincts, even if they weren’t as honed as before he’d become commissioner. Then there was Helen. She didn’t think it was impossible that both impulses, both MOs, could exist in the same person, the same twisted and compartmentalized mind.
Don’t we all compartmentalize? Isn’t that what keeps us sane? Or makes us part of the majority insanity that passes for normal?
Quinn drew on his cigar, rolled the illegal smoke around in his mouth, then exhaled. He set the report aside.
By way of twisted minds…
He booted up his computer and keyed in Dr. Alfred Beeker’s Web site.
There was no mention of Beeker being a doctor there, and he didn’t appear, unless he was one of the men wearing leather masks. There was lots of S amp;M literature, some of it amateurish and full of bad grammar. Then there were the photographs. Women in various poses of restraint, some of them not poses. Leather restraints, chains, elaborately knotted ropes. The women were mostly in their twenties and thirties, but some appeared younger. Probably they weren’t younger. Beeker was smart enough not to have shots of minors on his Web site.
Quinn clicked from one photo spread to another, scanning the thumbnails.
And there was Zoe, just as Beeker had said.
The poses were mild, without leather, chains, or whips. More like the sort of thing you’d see in Playboy. A younger Zoe who looked amazingly like the fifties pinup Bettie Page, mostly because of her similar hairdo. Zoe in a bikini, making a perfect O with her lips and pretending to be shocked and afraid. Zoe with her breasts exposed, smiling seductively and hugging a pink sheet to her lower body. Zoe seated nude in a wicker rocking chair, pretending to knit. Zoe wearing nothing but high-heeled shoes and bending gracefully to touch her toes. Zoe, Zoe, Zoe…
Quinn realized he had an erection. That bastard Beeker. What if his patients knew about his kinky other self? Or maybe they did. Maybe because of his predilection for kinky sex he crossed the line with his patients. Maybe those were his patients in his photographs.
Maybe they’re his patients. Jesus!
Quinn’s cigar, propped in the ashtray, had gone out. He relit it and shut down the computer.
He sat smoking for a while, thinking as he stared into the haze of his exhalations, as if the smoke were made up of his musings and might reveal some meaning.
He wanted to see Zoe and knew that if he called her she could be talked into inviting him to her apartment. But he didn’t want Beeker to be a part of their relationship in any way. Better if he waited a while, until the photos he’d just seen had faded in his memory.
He could wait for a while to see Zoe again. Certainly until dinner.
Later on, he’d see Beeker.
62
As soon as Lavern carefully and quietly closed the door behind her, she heard her husband’s voice: “You’re late and you’re drunk.”
“I was with Bess.” The first person Lavern could think of who’d back her up. “We sat in the restaurant after dinner and talked, and time flew.”
“You were drinking.”
She knew there was no way he could know for sure if she was drunk, as she’d just come in and the living room light hadn’t even been turned on. She was facing absolute blackness and could only be a dark silhouette against the dim light of the hall. Hobbs was completely invisible in the dark. “We had wine for dinner, then a few drinks afterward. That’s all.”
She didn’t tell him she’d skipped dinner and drunk alone, and then with a man in a lounge far from the neighborhood where she might have been recognized and word might get back to Hobbs. Nothing had happened between her and the man (Victor something, she thought, but maybe not
…), and in fact both had been too drunk to do anything about it if they’d felt any real sexual attraction. They’d been asked to leave and objected mildly, then were actually hurried and pushed from the place by a burly bartender.
Victor (or whoever) had thrown a punch at the bartender that was so ineffective it had been ignored, and there they were out on the sidewalk, barely able to stand.
Lavern had leaned back against a streetlight, closed her eyes, and almost passed out. Or maybe she had briefly lost consciousness. When she opened her eyes, Victor was gone. A man who might have been Victor was crossing the street at the intersection half a block down.
Too far away for her to catch up with him. All that effort…
Well, the hell with Victor.
So Lavern had walked, too, in the opposite direction, weaving noticeably at first and attracting attention. People slowed when they saw her approaching and veered out of her path. They seemed to be ashamed of her, embarrassed for her.
Screw you! All of you!
A woman in a gray business suit gave her a disdainful glance. A teenage boy with baggy pants low on his pelvis kept a hold on his fly and grinned at her as he bopped past. Fellow clowns and rebels.
After a few blocks she began to sober up; she could feel it.
On the cab ride home she’d impressed the driver with her terse and logical conversation about everything from politics to professional basketball. Pretty damned good! She was sure she’d reached the point where it wouldn’t be obvious that she’d been drinking.
She’d been wrong. Hobbs must have smelled liquor on her breath, maybe on her clothes.
“Shut the goddamned door all the way and come in here,” he said.
She obeyed, and at the click of the door latch the lights winked on in the living room, temporarily blinding her.
She gasped. Hobbs was standing ten inches from her and had flipped the wall switch.
The punch came out of the blinding light, smashing into her left ear and sending her reeling against a table, overturning it.
Hobbs was on her so fast she didn’t have time to think about the pain. His initial punches were wild. Then his fist landed on her ribs, which were still perhaps cracked from her last beating. That pain jolted through her, and she was sitting on the carpet, unable to breathe. Hobbs rested a foot on her shoulder and shoved her down so she was lying on her side.
He stood glaring down at her with his fists propped on his hips. “Goddamn lush. You’re screwin’ around on me, too, aren’t you?”
“No! Never!”
“Boozin’ and screwin’ around!”
He kicked her hard in the upper thigh and she rolled over onto her stomach.
This is going to be bad. Worse than usual. I have to get through it. No choice. Have to…
“Into the bedroom,” he said, and began kicking her repeatedly, not hard now. He wanted her able to crawl, and in the right direction. Her bare left elbow bumped a table leg.
“You’re too drunk even to crawl straight,” he said in disgust.
And she was. Lavern had to admit he was right. Were it not for the persistent guiding probes of his shoe she wouldn’t have been headed for the hall and the bedroom door. The door seemed so distant now.
Has he somehow injured my sight?
He kicked harder, hurting the base of her spine, and she crawled faster, shredding her panty hose on the carpet and skinning her knees, scraping the heels of her hands on the rough fiber.
He had to help her into the bed. She flopped back onto the soft mattress, watching the rectangular white ceiling spin up and away, and wished she could keep falling, falling…
Hobbs began to undress her. She didn’t resist, but he lost his patience with buttons and snaps and started ripping off of her clothes.
It proved to be more difficult than he’d thought.
He gave up completely and stalked off into the hall. Steel clattered in the kitchen, and he returned to the bedroom holding a carving knife.
He began slicing not flesh, but material with the knife. So expertly did he use the knife on her resistant clothing that it made her afraid of what he’d be able to do with such expertise to her flesh.
Amazingly, considering his frenzy, the blade didn’t so much as touch her.
Lavern clenched her eyes tightly shut and sent herself somewhere else, somewhere where this was happening to someone else.
You can be two people if you must. You really can. One afraid and in pain, and the other drifting and unfeeling…
Right now, the choice of which to be was easy.
With the morning already heating up like hell, Hobbs left for work without disturbing her where she lay in bed pretending to be asleep, the thin sheet pulled up over her face as if it were a shroud.
Beneath the taut white linen, her eyes were open and afraid.
63
They’d begun to gather in the park before dawn, and now there were hundreds of them.
At eight o’clock, New York One estimated the crowd at a thousand. It sure looked like a thousand massed on a TV screen. Traffic on Central Park West had to be diverted when their numbers spilled out onto the street.
They carried identical neatly produced FREE BERTY signs, and some wore T-shirts bearing the same demand in large black letters.
The event was large enough to disrupt traffic patterns throughout Midtown Manhattan, and made Quinn late on his way to Alfred Beeker’s Park Avenue office. He wanted to get there by nine, before Beeker’s first patients began to arrive.
He wanted to be in a room alone with Beeker.
Quinn sat as patiently as he could, draping his right wrist over the Lincoln’s steering wheel, watching the brown UPS van ahead of him advance along the street ten feet at a time. His right foot moved automatically between accelerator and brake pedal, advancing the Lincoln along with the van. The car’s air conditioner was sucking in some of the van’s exhaust, so Quinn dropped the driver’s side window about six inches. Heat rolled in, along with more exhaust fumes. The metallic chattering emitted by the air conditioner was louder with the window down. Too loud.
