John Lutz Bundle (136 page)

There were floodlights set up in the street and at each end of the passageway, so it was like day, only the glare was surrounded by darkness. Moths fluttered in and out of the brightness in warm night air so humid they might have been swimming.

“Same as the others,” Fedderman said. He’d been closer and reached the scene ahead of Quinn and Pearl.

They were standing near the dead body that had been found beside the Antonian Hotel. Julius Nift, from the medical examiner’s office, was over by his black city car parked among the NYPD radio cars, peeling off his latex gloves. The CSU techs were still gathering evidence in the blocked-off passageway. Nift glanced over at Quinn, smiled, and nodded.

Quinn nodded back, thinking,
Asshole.

He thought about going over and talking to Nift, but the arrogant little ME was already climbing into his car, pulling the door closed. Quinn figured it didn’t matter. As Fedderman had said, this one would be like the others. Cause of death: a small-caliber (which would later turn out to be a .25) bullet to the head. Nift might have a time-of-death estimate, but it would be only that—an estimate. Quinn could wait until tomorrow for the postmortem report.

He almost spat a foul taste and odor from the edges of his tongue, then remembered this was a crime scene and swallowed instead. He was pretty sure most of the stench was coming from the black plastic trash bags, but the dead man was contributing.

Quinn looked back down at him. The man was in his late forties or early fifties, dressed conservatively in neatly pressed Dockers and a blue checked shirt, wearing a black sport jacket that was twisted around his body because of the way he was lying. He actually didn’t look too bad except for the way his eyes had sunk back in his skull, and of course the hole in his forehead.

Fedderman had already searched the man’s pockets and found nothing other than a hotel key card. Galin had been the only victim who hadn’t had one of those on him. Galin, in fact, was the odd piece in this puzzle, linked by method and not much else.

“Looks like our killer shot this guy, then concealed the body back against the brick wall under the trash bags so it wouldn’t be found right away,” Fedderman said. “That guy”—he pointed toward a ragged, bearded man yammering and gesticulating wildly at a uniform from one of the radio cars—“happened to notice a human hand protruding from the trash while he was back here getting ready to sack out for a while with his bottle of wine. That sent him screaming out into the street, where he scared the shit out of people and snarled up traffic. An ex-cop from Denver dragged him back up on the sidewalk where he’d be safe and called us on his cell, saying there was a crazy man running wild and yelling about a dead body. Right on both counts.” Fedderman grinned at Pearl. “Why don’t you go over and get Riley’s statement?”

“Riley the crazy guy?” Pearl asked.

“He’s not the one with the uniform.”

“Why don’t you go?” Pearl said. “You’re more likely to connect with him.”

“I’ll do it,” Quinn said, to shut them up. This wasn’t the time or place for one of their pissant quarrels. He pointed to a gray door set in the brick wall. “Where’s that lead?”

“Into the hotel, I would imagine,” Fedderman said, making Quinn wonder if Fedderman was messing with him. But then, it hadn’t been the brightest of questions. “I tried it after I made sure the CSU people had dusted the knob for prints. It’s locked.”

“Lock automatically when it closes?”

“I don’t know,” Fedderman said. “Nobody’s been in there yet.”

“You go check out what’s on the other side of that door,” Quinn told Pearl. “Feds, let’s the two of us go over and see what Mr. Riley has to say.”

Pearl flashed a grin at Fedderman as she hurried away.

When Riley saw Quinn and Fedderman approach, he lost interest in the uniform. He was more than happy to confirm the story he’d told the first cops on the scene. Trouble was, he wouldn’t stop confirming it.

“Should have given Pearl the job,” Fedderman said, managing to get in a word that wasn’t Riley’s.

Quinn nodded.

“Pearl the lady with the big bazooms?” Riley asked, indicating big bazooms with both hands. His breath was terrible and might have been flammable.

“Let’s not talk about that,” Quinn said.

“Those, you mean,” Riley corrected.

“Those,” Quinn said, thinking if Fedderman laughed he was going to kick his ass all the way back into retirement.

“They’re genuine, all right,” Riley said.

Pearl was back within ten minutes, telling them the door led to a corridor and she’d found blood on the carpet. It looked like the dead man had been shot inside the hotel, then dragged outside and dumped behind the trash bags.

Riley’s bleary eyes widened in alarm. “Shot? Blood? Holy, bejesus, bejesus, bejesus! I been told it’s the End of Days. I been told.”

“The dead man would agree with whoever told you,” Pearl said, stepping to the side to avoid Riley’s breath. To Quinn she said: “I’ve got the bloodstain cordoned off and a uniform posted to protect it.”

Quinn nodded, not doubting that the blood would belong to the corpse lying next to the mound of stuffed trash bags.
This one is different. The other .25-Caliber Killer victims died where they were shot, or at least were never moved after death.

Not exactly a break in the case, but something about it suggested to Quinn that it was important.

“Holy bejesus!” Riley said again.

Pearl said, “What the hell are you looking at?”

“Let’s check inside,” Quinn said. “Thanks for your help, Mr. Riley.”

“The End of Days,” Riley said.

“That’s a good thing for you to be thinking about,” Quinn said.

“I don’t like that old jerk-off,” Pearl said, as they were walking toward the front of the hotel.

“He seemed to like you okay,” Fedderman said.

It didn’t take long to learn which door in the Antonian the key card unlocked. After Quinn checked at the desk in the lobby, they took the elevator to the third floor.

The room was furnished like thousands of others in New York, an armchair that reclined, desk and matching chair, bed flanked by nightstands with lamps, an entertainment hutch, most of it in matching dark maple.

On a collapsible luggage stand was a suitcase with three changes of clothing. There was no luggage tag on the suitcase. The clothes were expensive casual and included a pair of designer jeans. There were three baseball caps, three different colors, each from a different team.

“Fickle fan,” Pearl said.

Quinn looked in the tiny bathroom. There was a shaving kit and lineup of containers on the vanity. Also a coffee brewer that hadn’t been used. The soap hadn’t been unwrapped. No tissues, nothing, in the plastic-lined waste basket. The dead man hadn’t been a hotel guest long enough to leave any stamp of personality.

Quinn took a wary look at himself in the vanity mirror and went back into the main room.

“A wallet,” Fedderman said, standing at the open desk drawer. He thumbed through it. “We got us a Floyd Becker, SoHo address, fifty-one years old and will be forever.” He riffled the money like a skilled bank teller. “Three hundred even.”

“That’s not the name he used when he checked in with cash at the front desk,” Quinn said.

“ Jones,’ I’ll bet,” Fedderman said. “And he used his initial for his phony first name.”

“ Smith,’” Pearl said, “and no same initial.”

Quinn shook his head. “You’re both wrong. Answer’s ‘Bob Green.’”

“Shit!” Pearl said.

Fedderman chuckled nastily. “I was sure you said
‘Smith.’
”

There was something unusual about this one, Quinn thought, despite Becker’s lack of imagination in choosing a pseudonym. Something that deviated from the pattern in a meaningful way. Maybe it had to do with the body being dragged outside. Or maybe it was something else.

Terri Gaddis thought she’d found heaven. Her own Camelot, at least.

Richard Crane was the most gentle, skillful lover she’d ever experienced. She lay now in her bedroom, hungover and exhausted from the wine and sex, her head resting on Richard’s bare chest. She could hear, could feel, his regular, coursing heartbeat. It must, she thought, be in rhythm with her own.

The pungent scent of their bodies, of their coupling, was still in the room, and she wished it would never leave. The air conditioner was humming, gradually catching up with the heat the two of them had generated. Soon, Terri knew, the room would return to normal, and so would her life.

Or would it?

Surely Richard had felt the same intensity she had, known the same revelation.
Yes! Two people can be this gloriously happy!

He was the kind of man who would feel it. She knew that about him now. It was all she had to know.

Which reminded her that she didn’t know very much. He’d mentioned that he worked for a Wall Street firm, but he didn’t say which. Obviously he was successful, had money, or he couldn’t dress the way he did, with the tailored suit and expensive gold watch and cuff links. And he took care of himself, judging by his muscularity and—she smiled—his endurance. She absently ran a hand over her right breast, her erect nipple.

We could do this again. And again and again and again.

She shifted her body and reached over to the nightstand where her half-full glass of wine sat and managed to wrap two fingers around the slender glass stem. After downing the rest of the wine to sate her thirst, she settled down again, snuggling against Richard’s warm body. The last thing she remembered before falling asleep was his arm working its way beneath her neck and pulling her closer.

The room was cool when she awoke in the morning, and she was alone in the bed.

Terri sat up, looking around with something like alarm, and found herself the only one in the room.

“Richard…?”

“In here, darling.” He appeared in the doorway, buttoning his shirt that he hadn’t yet tucked in. “I was getting dressed in the living room so I wouldn’t wake you.” His dark hair was wet, uncombed but smoothed back with his fingers, so he must have already showered. Terri had never been so relieved to see anyone.

“I thought we might go out for breakfast,” he said. “Celebrate us.”

“I can think of other ways to do that,” Terri said.

He grinned. “It isn’t either-or.”

“Almost everything else is,” she said.

The handsome grin stayed. “No, there are some things that are predestined. Nothing we do can change them.”

“Are we predestined?”

“Most definitely.”

“Then I can accept predestination.” She climbed out of bed, unashamed of her nakedness in front of him. After what they’d done with each other…“I need to shower,” she said. She padded barefoot to him, kissed him lightly on the lips, then squeezed past him and made her way into the bathroom.

She’d got under a hot shower, soaped up, and tilted back her head to rinse shampoo from her hair when she noticed the large metal hook screwed into the bathroom ceiling.

Surely it hadn’t been there before.

Or had it? Maybe she simply hadn’t noticed it.

No, impossible. I would have noticed.

Obviously, Richard had put it there while she was asleep.

She felt a deep dread. Why had he done such a thing? What the hell was it about? Some kind of kinky sex? Water sports? S&M? If it was that kind of stuff, Terri wasn’t into it.

After last night and what had happened between them, was it going to turn into something dirty and violent? The thought of it made her stomach knot up with disappointment.

She shook her head. Dating in New York…

Then she felt a sudden flare of hope.
The super!
Jennison the building superintendent must have installed the hook yesterday, or even sometime over the past week, and she simply hadn’t noticed it. That was it. Had to be. She’d been looking at the dark side again, jumping to disastrous conclusions. Her Camelot was safe.

When she got out of the shower, she’d mention the hook to Richard. He might even know what it was for.

Renz loved this kind of thing, a setting where he was in control.

He had them all in his office, Quinn, Pearl, Fedderman, and the team of Sal Vitali and Harold Mishner.

The office was hot because of the way sunlight was pouring in between the blind slats. Quinn knew the blinds would remain open because the deluge of morning brilliance was at Renz’s back, putting his visitors at a disadvantage. Renz tended to play every card in his hand. Quinn also noticed the faint smell in the dust-mote-filled air: Renz had been secretly smoking cigars in his office again. If the mayor knew that, there’d soon be a new police commissioner.

Vitali and Mishner were reasonably friendly toward Quinn and his team, but Quinn could tell they didn’t like the single-killer theory any more than…well, anyone liked it, other than Renz. And Renz liked it because it was politically expedient.

Still, Quinn had to admit it was possible that one serial killer in the city had, for whatever reason, committed two series of murders in different ways in order to forge, or satisfy, two separate identities.

Strategically silhouetted at his desk, Renz held up a folder. “This is more info on the Twenty-five-Caliber Killer’s latest victim, Floyd Becker. He was wealthy from his construction company, Becker Synergies.”

“Never heard of it,” Quinn said.

“They aren’t big in New York,” the silhouette said. “They apparently built a lot of dams and such in South America. Anyway, he was well off, if not a Rockefeller.”

“Liked to hunt, I’ll bet,” Quinn said.

“You got that right.” If the silhouette was irritated by Quinn’s remark, it didn’t show it. “We still need to find out why he checked in at the Antonian under a phony name, and why he went out without carrying any identification.” The silhouette laid the file on the desk and made a show of idly leafing through it. “No surprise to any of us that death was caused by a single twenty-five-caliber slug fired by the same make firearm—one we can’t yet identify—but definitely not by the same gun.”

“Maybe some make of target pistol with a changeable barrel,” Vitali suggested.

“No,” the silhouette said, “we checked that out. The firing pin strikes are slightly different. And you and Mishkin need to be focusing more on the Vera Doaks and Hettie Davis murders.”

“If it’s the same killer—”

“Call it a logical division of labor,” said the silhouette. “Back to the facts: Becker was shot inside the hotel, in a corridor running the length of the building and with a door leading to the passageway outside. A spot of blood on the carpet tested out to be his. For some reason, after shooting Becker, the killer then dragged the body outside into the passageway and dumped it behind a pile of trash bags. The crime scene inside the hotel offered up little evidence other than the blood. The CSU team searched and vacuumed the surrounding carpet, came up with dirt and three human hairs. None of the hairs matches Becker’s. One or more of them might be from the head of the killer. We’ll know that when we nail the bastard.” The silhouette turned its head toward Quinn. Strongly backlighted as it was, its hair looked like a hopeless tangle of wire. “The hotel staff have anything for us?”

“No,” Quinn said. “We’ll talk to them again today.”

“Do that, and interview Becker’s wife. She’s been told about his murder, but was too shaken up to talk last night.”

Quinn nodded and pretended to write something in his notepad.

“You two,” said the silhouette to Vitali and Mishkin, “keep hard at the Slicer killings and report anything pertinent to Quinn. Have you got anything on the Vera Doaks murder?”

“She’s still dead,” Vitali said.

Here was a man, Quinn thought, without much of a future in the NYPD. But he was feeling a growing fondness for Vitali.

“If you’re contacted by any of the media,” said the silhouette, unfazed by sarcasm, “don’t talk to them. I mean that. Tell them zilch.”

“Even Cindy Sellers?” Fedderman asked.

The silhouette stared at him for a moment, trying to decide if this was more sarcasm. “Especially Sellers. I’ll be the one to decide what she does or doesn’t know, and when she knows it.”

“Or doesn’t,” Quinn heard Pearl say beneath her breath. He hoped this meeting would end before she decided to jump in with Vitali and Fedderman and gang up on Renz. She could be captive to pack mentality.

The silhouette stood up and walked out from behind the desk, passing into the light and becoming Renz. “That’s it for now,” he said. “I’ve gotta meet soon with one of the mayor’s aides. Keep the information flowing to me and to each other.”

The five detectives assured Renz that they would and he politely, but hurriedly, ushered them from his office.

Outside the building, in the glare of the already hot morning, Vitali put on a pair of fashionably tiny sunglasses and said, “Have you ever heard such bullshit?”

“Oh, sure,” Quinn said. “But call me if you do have something on our murderous multitasker.”

“I’ll let you know if we apprehend either of his personalities,” Vitali said.

He and Mishkin got into their unmarked, which was a later model than Quinn and his team had arrived in, and drove away. Mishkin smiled and gave them a slight wave through the passenger-side window.

“Vitali is obviously the wiseass of the two,” Pearl said.

“I know Mishkin,” Fedderman said. “He’s almost mute and might faint at the sight of blood, but don’t sell him short, even in a down market.”

Pearl said, “Is the trail leading us to Wall Street?”

“Drive me back to the office and my car,” Quinn said, “then Feds can take the unmarked and interview the hotel employees again. You and I, Pearl, will talk to Becker’s widow.”

Nerves were frayed, after the meeting with Renz. It was best to split these two up.

Quinn and Pearl’s conversation with Floyd Becker’s widow, a hefty, brunette with a bright pink face, yielded little of value other than to confirm that Becker was, like earlier .25-Caliber Killer victims, an avid hunter.

“He even has a lion,” the widow had said. “Or what’s left of one. It’s down in basement storage someplace. For years we used it as a rug, complete with the head.”

Pearl thought about that as she and Quinn drove through noontime Manhattan traffic toward the Antonian Hotel to join forces with Fedderman. She didn’t know people still used animal skins for rugs. Wouldn’t that prompt some kind of social outrage? It should, Pearl thought. In fact she felt quite vehement about it. She glanced down at her leather shoes, felt slightly foolish, then promptly righted herself and maintained her indignation. People needed shoes, damn it! They didn’t
need
rugs. Especially rugs with heads on them.

“Wanna stop for some lunch?” Quinn asked.

“No. Not hungry.”

Quinn glanced over at her as he drove. “You okay, Pearl?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?” she snapped.

“I dunno. You look…angry.”

“What I’d like to do,” she said “is catch this asshole we’re after and have him made into a rug, head and all.”

“We’re pretty much of the same mind on that,” Quinn told her.

“What’s a lion but a big cat?”

“It’s a big cat,” Quinn said, making a right on Broadway.

He drove silently for a while, thinking, with Pearl fuming beside him.

She was a puzzle he’d never solve. Was that why he couldn’t shake her from his dreams?