Still As Death (26 page)

“And was so guilty that she killed herself.”

“Yeah.” She grinned at him. “See.”

“I don’t know. It seems like it must have something to do with the museum, but I’m not there with you yet.”

She shrugged. “Speaking of the museum, I should get over there. I have an appointment.”

She took a five out of her pocket, but he waved her off. “You’re providing me with information after all,” he told her. “The least I can do is buy you a cup of cold coffee.”

“Thanks.” They both stood up and she hesitated for a minute, then said, “Walk me over?”

He nodded and they started walking, not saying anything at first. Finally, he couldn’t stand the not knowing anymore. “So, have you decided what you’re going to do, about going to London, I mean?”

She didn’t turn to look at him, but he felt her tense up. “No. I mean I haven’t decided yet.” There was a long silence. They’d reached the steps of the museum and only then did she turn to look at him. “What do you think I should do?”

There was something challenging in the way she said it, as though she was daring him to tell her what he really thought, but then she looked away and he wasn’t sure what she’d meant and he just said, “I just hope you’ll do what makes you happy.” Then he said good-bye and left her there, standing on the steps.

Oh, shit
, he said to himself as he walked away.
Timmy boy, you’re done for. You’re really done for
.

He walked around for almost an hour, trying to shake his feeling of melancholy, and he had just gotten into his car when the radio squawked. It wasn’t for him, so he turned on the FM and listened to
Bruce Springsteen singing about love. But as he pulled out of his parking spot, he heard “Hapner Museum” and he turned the music down and paid attention. They were calling up a lot of units and his first thought was that there had been another murder, but then he realized that they hadn’t called him up, so it couldn’t be that. He dialed headquarters on his cell phone and asked for Havrilek.

It was a couple minutes before he came on and Quinn pulled over and executed a U-turn so he could get back to the museum quickly if he needed to. “Good, Quinny,” Havrilek said when he came on. “Get over to the museum. They’re not sure what’s going on, but a call came in about a man threatening people with a gun. There are some staff members who are being held hostage inside and the guy’s pretty distraught. You know everyone down there, so see if you can help. We don’t know yet if it has anything to do with the murders, but I think it’s a distinct possibility.”

Quinn started for the museum, feeling his stomach fall. Sweeney was at the museum. Unless she’d changed her mind and gone home, she was one of the hostages. He’d been in enough hostage situations to know that these things were often resolved without violence, but when they went wrong, boy did they really go wrong.

There were swarms of cops out front and enough reporters to hold a presidential press conference. He flashed his ID and they let him into the lobby. It was packed full of uniform guys, which told him that the situation was under control for the moment. If the man, whoever he was, was about to go off, they would have cleared the area.

“What’s going on?” he whispered to one of the guys he knew from his days as a patrol officer. “Who’s the guy?”

“Kid. Student, we think. He’s up on the fourth floor with a woman named Ortiz and some of the other staff. The initial call said he had a gun, but we haven’t been able to verify that.”

“It’s not Trevor Ferigni is it?”

“Yeah, I think that’s the name. The security guard called it in.”

“Who else is up there with him?”

“They don’t know. He yelled down that he was going to hurt someone if we didn’t back off, so we backed off.” There was a kind of low hum in the room and Quinn scanned the uniforms, trying to figure out who was in charge.

“I gotta get up there,” he said. “I’ll see you.”

He didn’t know the officer running things from behind the guards’ desk, but he introduced himself and told the guy that he’d been investigating the murders and knew everyone. It wasn’t strictly true, of course; he didn’t know the kid. But if Sweeney was up there he was going to get up there any way he could.

“We’ve got officers on the fourth floor, talking to him. You go up, let him see you, see if he responds,” the officer said. “But don’t do anything unless I give the okay.”

Quinn made his way up the stairs, and before coming out on the fourth-floor landing, he stopped and took a deep breath. He needed to be calm. If this kid with a gun who may or may not have had something to do with the murders at the museum looked into his soul, Quinn wanted him to see nothing but calm. He forced himself to relax his shoulders, closed his eyes for a minute, and stepped out into the hallway.

It was very, very quiet and there were only three cops there, standing close to the staircase, just standing there, not doing anything. They must have been told he was coming up because they nodded to him and pointed to the opposite end of the hallway where a skinny boy with a shock of blond hair was standing against the balcony holding a gun. Jeanne Ortiz was sitting on the floor, and even from thirty feet away, Quinn could see that she was crying. Behind them, in the doorway of one of the galleries, Sweeney and Tad Moran and Harriet Tyler were standing very still. The look on Sweeney’s face—scared and watchful—nearly broke his heart.

Get out of there
, he thought, as if Sweeney could read his mind.
You’ve got cover, you can just duck behind the doorway and you’ll be safe
. But there was Jeanne Ortiz. He must have told them he’d hurt Jeanne if they moved.

They all looked up and saw him at the same moment. The boy gripped the gun more tightly and called out, “Stay back.” He had on a T-shirt and cutoff shorts and he was wearing hiking boots. Sweeney met Quinn’s eyes, and he saw something like relief there, just for a few seconds, until fear crept back in.

“Who are you?” The words were shouted, breathless.

“My name’s Tim. I’ve been spending a lot of time at the museum,” Quinn called out. “It’s okay, Trevor. Let’s just talk about whatever it is that’s making you so mad.” He tried to keep his voice even, not condescending, but nonconfrontational.

“Are you a cop?”

“I’m a detective. What’s going on here?”

There was a long silence, as though Trevor was deciding what to say. Finally he turned to Quinn and said, “It’s her,” pointing the gun at Jeanne.

Quinn wasn’t sure what he meant. Was he saying that Jeanne Ortiz had killed Olga and Willem Keane? He waited, watching the boy’s face in profile.

“She’s fucking with me,” Trevor said, more quietly this time. “She can’t just, just shut me out like that. I didn’t even want to do it.”

“Trevor,” Jeanne said, her hands together in front of her chest in a little prayer. “Can’t we just talk about this?”

But he wanted to talk to Quinn. “She got me to sleep with her and then she says we can’t see each other anymore and she can’t …” He was crying now. Quinn took a couple of steps toward him. “She can’t
do
that.” He turned to Jeanne Ortiz and said, “You can’t
do
that.”

Okay
, Quinn thought.
That’s what we’re dealing with here
. It was what he’d suspected, and he looked up to meet Sweeney’s eyes again.

“Trevor, just put that down and we’ll go talk about it,” Jeanne Ortiz said. “Please. Trevor.” In addition to the fear on her face, Quinn saw shame there too.

“What are you going to do, Jeanne?” he asked her, his voice louder, a little more agitated, in a way that made Quinn ease a hand
onto his holster. “Are you going to tell everyone that you got me drunk, that you got a student drunk and, and …” He was crying very hard now, the words barely intelligible beneath his sobs. “And
seduced
him and then wanted to kick him to the curb. Like he was, like he was nothing?” He was almost shouting now, and Quinn had the sense that this was where it was going to go one way or the other. He took a couple more steps forward, close enough now to see the dark circles under the arms of the kid’s T-shirt.

“Trevor, if you could just put that down, then we could talk about this. It sounds like you have good reason to be upset.”

“Yeah, I do. I really do.” He brandished the gun, and that was the instant that Quinn saw it, really saw it, saw the little piece of plastic along the seam on the barrel, and without really thinking about, he charged forward.

The kid was skinny, lighter than he’d looked, and Quinn had overestimated the amount of force he’d need. The kid hit the ground hard and Quinn heard the “ooof,” as the wind was knocked out of him.

“It’s a fake, it’s a fake,” he yelled out, so no one would shoot.

He checked to make sure Trevor Ferigni was breathing and then he called out for handcuffs. He turned and saw Jeanne Ortiz still sitting on the floor. She was really crying now and saying, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” over and over again.

It was Sweeney who came forward to make sure she was okay, leaning down and putting an arm around her and helping her up as she said it again and again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

“So she was boinking the kid?” Havrilek asked him back at headquarters.

“Yup. And she’d decided that she shouldn’t do it anymore. But the kid wasn’t willing to be dumped.”

Havrilek raised his eyebrows, his pale, Siberian husky eyes studying Quinn. “He in love with her?”

“I don’t think he knows what he is.” Quinn looked at the pictures on Havrilek’s desk. Havrilek had five beautiful daughters. “If he was a nineteen-year-old woman who had been sleeping with her professor and this happened, I think we’d be saying she was forced into it. Not physically, but psychologically. I don’t quite understand it. When she wanted to end it, he freaked out. I don’t know what he thought he was going to do with that toy gun.”

Quinn rubbed his eyes and sat down across from Havrilek’s desk. “I’ll tell you, for a minute there, I was sure we’d solved this thing. It was perfect. The kid was at the opening when Olga Levitch was killed and he was at the museum when Keane was killed too. But that kid didn’t know anything about the murders. He was there to make Jeanne Ortiz own up to their relationship. That seemed to have been his motivation to me, anyway. So we’re back at square one with the museum murders. Well, not square one exactly.” Quinn told Havrilek about Cyrus Hutchinson being at the museum at the time Keane was killed too.

“What does he say about it?”

“We haven’t found him yet. He and his wife aren’t at home, his office doesn’t have any idea where he is. I’m starting to think maybe we should get someone in New York to look for him.”

“But didn’t you tell me he’s an old man? He didn’t push Keane over that balcony.” Havrilek looked dubious.

“Maybe it was an accident. Maybe he didn’t have anything to do with it. But at the very least, he knows what Keane was doing in the last hours of his life. I want to talk to him.”

“Okay. I’ll make the call. We’ll see what we can do.” He narrowed his eyes at Quinn. “Anything else?”

Quinn hesitated. “Yeah, well, maybe.” He told Havrilek about Sweeney’s tip about the Japanese collector. “I told our contact at the FBI about it. I think he recognized the name, though he didn’t give anything away.” In fact, Kirschner had muttered something under his breath that sounded a lot like “fuck me.” “I’m waiting for him to get back to me.”

Havrilek picked up the phone. It was his way of getting you out of the office. But then he put it down again and looked up at Quinn.

“Hey, how about the Ramirez murder? I got reporters breathing down my neck about it.”

“We’d hit kind of a dead end, but Ellie’s got a good lead. She’s working on it now.”

“Good.” Havrilek watched him for a minute, his eyes narrowed. “How’s it going with her, anyway? You doing okay?”

Quinn shrugged, wondering if she’d said something. “Fine. She’s smart, if a bit green.”

Havrilek watched him some more. “She seem okay to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, does she seem okay to you?” He sounded mad.

“Yeah, she seems fine.”

Okay,” Havrilek said. “If you say so.”

Back in the homicide division offices, she was standing in front of his desk, clutching the phone book, a little embarrassed grin on her face. “I think I found something,” she said, the words coming very fast. “It took a while ’cause there are so many colleges in Boston and no one was answering their phone. But I just kept calling and anyway …” She looked down at the paper she was holding in her hands. “There’s a guy named Jason Fowler. He’s a chemistry major at the university. I got his address and number right here.” She looked up at him, and when he didn’t answer, she went on. “There’s another Jason at BU, but apparently he’s studying in France this semester, so I figure it’s gotta be this guy, right?”

For some reason, Quinn couldn’t give her the satisfaction of a smile. “Maybe, maybe not. We gotta go talk to him, though. We’ll take it nice and easy, just ask him where he was, check on his alibi. If he doesn’t have one, though, we’re taking him in.” This is what it was about, he reminded himself. This is why they did their job. So they could bring the bad guys in. “Good job, Ellie.”

They found the apartment and Quinn parked illegally in front of the six-story building. They climbed up to the third floor and Ellie
knocked on the green wooden door. She was excited, Quinn could tell, a little smile hovering below her nose, and he remembered the first time that one of his leads had led somewhere.

“He could be at class,” Quinn said when no one answered.

“It’s nine
A.M.
,” she said. “Aren’t college kids supposed to sleep until noon at least?”

“How should I know? I worked my way through college. I had to be at work slinging hash in the dining room at six
A.M.
most days.”

“Me too,” she said and grinned.

“Yeah? Where did you go?”

“University of Illinois.” That’s where that accent came from.

“Criminal justice?” She nodded. “Try that door again.”

After another couple knocks, the door opened and a bleary-eyed kid wearing boxers and a white undershirt blinked at them. “Hi,” he said. “Sorry about that. I was still asleep.”