Signature Kill (21 page)
Authors: David Levien
Behr stood there staring.
“And you did. You got something going. You opened the chute. So now ride this fucker. Wait until we get back the match on those hairs, then chase down whatever it is you got.”
All Behr could do was nod.
The lead pipe hitting the man’s skull felt like the truth …
He is in bed, Margaret snoring softly beside him, thinking about it as if recalling a dream. Following the photographer off and on since the meeting only served to build his fury. All he could think of, driving behind Quinn, were those shoddy, garish photos.
That first night would’ve been the easiest. Quinn had split off from his friends, left the bar, drove home, parked two blocks from his loft building, and strolled casually home through the night. But he hadn’t been prepared. He’d had nothing with him. He’d had no plan in place.
Over the next few days, Quinn stopped by the police station several times. He worked there after all. And a crime scene—a carjacking that turned into a fatal motor vehicle accident—that he went to shoot was thick with cops. He didn’t know where else Quinn had gone, since he’d had to go to the office himself. But today, after work, once it was dark, he’d found Quinn leaving the station, perhaps for home. His senses lit up. By now he knew when the moment was coming. He
made
the moment come.
Quinn had pulled over at a dry cleaner not far from his place. The length of pipe felt heavy and good in his hand as he waited. The little strip mall housing the cleaner might have cameras. But Quinn might also find a parking spot right in front of his building when he got home and be inside in an instant, so he had to act. It was a calculated risk. It always was. It all was.
Quinn came out of the shop with his clothes on hangers inside a
plastic bag and moved around to the trunk. The car slid like a nosing shark and thumped into Quinn’s legs, hurling the photographer into the rear of his own car and then to the ground. If anybody witnessed it, it would surely look like an accident. He was out of his car, and glancing around, no passerby to be seen in the darkness, by the time Quinn was struggling for his feet, uttering sounds of protestation and pain.
The pipe cut the night. Quinn’s skull absorbed the energy of the dense metal rod. If there was a noise from the first blow, he wasn’t aware of it, only a sigh escaping from Quinn as he buckled back to the ground. He delivered one more blow for good measure. This time the skull yielded and he almost couldn’t stop himself. He might’ve struck a few more times before moving on, because he sensed the arm that held the pipe moving up and down as if detached from his body.
Then it was up and into his trunk with Quinn’s unconscious form—the hardest part. But it was no more heavy or ungainly than three slabs of quarter-inch gypsum drywall, or sheet metal, or two-by-fours, or feed sacks or hay bales, things he’d lifted and carried all his life through his youth and even college. Back then he’d tried to work himself into exhaustion, in order to not do what he’d been called to do. Small animals were just a silly distraction by then, but he hadn’t yet been ready to become all he eventually would. There had been some uncomfortable moments, with girls he’d dated, that had ended in tears, but he’d always managed to talk his way out, to apologize, and to dive back into the work. It was almost as if it all had prepared him for Quinn.
He knew the spot out by the tracks. He had it all picked out. Not as private as his workshop, but this piece of garbage didn’t deserve to be brought there. He belonged outside like refuse.
The tank was waiting, just where he’d hid it. The flint sparked like a friendly greeting, and then the oxy mix howled in the darkness while he adjusted the flame.
Quinn’s body writhed as his first hand dropped off like rotten fruit, and then the second. He imagined the gouts of blood soaking into the ground in the darkness that would soon carry the hack to his death.
But then the cough of a diesel engine and backing beeps of a
dump truck reached him. Some kind of crew was gearing up to work and he had to go.
The hands went into a bag, and it and the tank went into his trunk. His gloves went in on top of it all and he slipped away. He’d done it again, just what he’d had to.
His bed feels soft and warm around him. This was not like his other projects, but all the same he is ready to sleep the black, formless sleep of
afterward
. Quinn has taken his last picture, and by now, his last breath. Sleep comes and pulls him down.
Behr paced around in the street in front of the crime lab, sucking on a vile, ice-cold cup of gas station coffee and waiting for the results of the DNA test. Finally, after hours that felt like days, the door swung open and Breslau stepped out.
“You do know you can come inside,” he offered.
“I needed the air,” Behr said.
“I can see that. They only ran a rapid screen. Showed that the high probability is it’s
not
hair belonging to the Gibbons girl,” Breslau said.
“Okay. Who?”
“Unknown. For now. Only that they’re white-female. It’ll take some time to run the full test and cross it against the database.”
“You’ll let me know as soon as you get the full results?”
“Sure,” Breslau said.
“Anything else?”
“Django’s wife got a call from their dry cleaner. An Asian guy—”
“Just like the old commercial.”
“Which one is that?”
“Never mind. What’d he say?”
“That Quinn picked up some clothes last night right before closing, and the owner found them in the street outside, the ticket still on them.”
“That’s where Quinn got grabbed,” Behr said.
“We’re thinking the same,” Breslau said.
“Did the owner see anything? Anything caught on camera?” Behr asked.
“Don’t think so. But I’ve got some guys down there checking it out.”
“Can I head over?”
“Go for it,” Breslau said and gave him the address.
Behr drove too fast and hoped too much on his way to the dry cleaner. He saw an unmarked car in front when he arrived and a pair of detectives was inside the store talking to the owner, a slender man in his sixties.
“My name is Behr,” he announced when he entered.
“Breslau called about you. I’m Kelty,” a tall bald-headed detective said and then pointed to his partner. “He’s Sanchez.”
They were in the process of fingerprinting the dry cleaner, who said nothing.
“What do you have?” Behr asked.
“These are Quinn’s things,” Sanchez said, indicating hangers bearing clothes covered by a plastic bag. “We’re hoping to get a fingerprint, so we’re printing Mr. Kim to exclude him since he handled the bag.”
“I saw it in the street and brought it back inside,” Mr. Kim said, speaking for the first time, his English unaccented. “I didn’t know anything bad happened, I just thought he dropped it.”
“Don’t worry about it, sir,” Kelty said. “You likely didn’t destroy any evidence. If there are prints on there besides yours and Quinn’s, we’ll find them.” The detectives bagged the bag. “Same with Quinn’s car. It was found out front and it’s been transported to the lab to be run for DNA.”
“Cross any results you get with known murderers,” Behr said, thinking of Prilo.
“Thanks,” Sanchez mocked. “How would we have thought of that?”
“Anything show up on the security cam?” Behr asked, ignoring the jab.
“Come with me,” Kelty said. “Okay, Mr. Kim?” Kim nodded, and then Kelty, Behr, and Sanchez moved around the counter toward the back. They passed between rows of hanging clothing on rotating racks and reached a small cramped office. There they reviewed security footage on Mr. Kim’s desktop computer.
The image was from a four-millimeter lens that provided a seventy-degree viewing angle stretching about thirty-five feet before it fell off into darkness. The face of a housewife registered clearly as she entered with her arms full of clothing at close to 9:00
P.M.
the night before. Kelty fast-forwarded through her departure and some dead time and slowed down when Quinn appeared. He showed up empty-handed and left moments later carrying his dry cleaning. That was not something Quinn would be able to do perhaps ever again, Behr considered. Quinn left the spill of light and the range of the lens, and if anybody was in the darkness waiting for him, he was not visible in the footage. Before long the store’s lights went out, and Mr. Kim came into frame, locking up.
“Nothing,” Behr said.
“Breslau said you’d want to see for yourself,” Sanchez volunteered.
“So no blood on the dry-cleaning bag?” Behr asked.
“None visible,” Kelty said. “It’ll be screened for DNA. We’ll keep you in the loop.”
“Thanks,” Behr said and left.
Walking toward his car, Behr passed the spot on the street where Quinn’s car had been parked and the attack had presumably begun. Another few millimeters’ length on the security camera lens, and the whole thing would’ve been viewable in Technicolor. But capturing goings-on in the street wasn’t why Mr. Kim had the camera, and the “subject” had gotten away with it again. Behr climbed into his car and his phone rang. It was Breslau calling with the next level of results from the lab. Behr couldn’t believe what he was hearing. But before he acted on it, he realized what he had to do next: warn Susan.
He called her right away, but got her voice mail.
“It’s me,” he said. “It’s important. I need to talk to you. Don’t go to work and Trev shouldn’t be in day care. Grab him up, keep him with you, and go somewhere safe. Get in touch ASAP.”
He started dialing his next call as soon as he hung up.
“Holy fuck,” Mistretta said. They were sitting in his kitchen. She’d come over right after he’d reached her. She wore a long-sleeve T-shirt and sweatpants and was clutching a mug of coffee in both hands. Behr had just told her about Quinn, how he was in the coma, his condition otherwise unchanged. He’d also just given her the results of the preliminary DNA tests that Breslau had called in to him.
“So two of the hairs were from the Crawley girl,” Mistretta said, trying to process what she’d just heard.
“Yeah, Danielle Crawley,” Behr said.
“And the other …”
“One strand, broken, three and a half inches long, blond female.”
“Oh boy,” Mistretta said, “did it belong to your girl?”
“Kendra Gibbons? No. No match. Unknown white female.”
“Oh boy,” Mistretta said again, because she knew what it meant. “The blond female’s hair doesn’t match any past victims, so there’s a better than decent chance that there’s a new, yet-to-be-discovered vic.”
“Yeah,” Behr said. He found it interesting that she hadn’t said anything, besides the initial expletive, about Quinn and his hands.
“So what am I answering for you right now?”
“Well, my big question is the contamination. If someone grabbed Quinn up, put Quinn in his vehicle, or took him back to his home or wherever he carries out his kills, then why did victims’ hair come up, but none of the subject’s? And how come none of his DNA has presented at all? And on a related note: Why the hell was Prilo in that church basement? Can he have something to do with this?”
“A few things come to mind. Door number one: our guy is extremely careful. And lucky. Quinn’s clothes and person were analyzed,
not the sub’s trunk, so it’s an incomplete sampling at best. Door number two: it was only Prilo’s morbid curiosity that had him in that church basement. Besides, how does a man working with one good arm do that to Quinn?”
“He helps someone else. Advises him, is what I’m thinking,” Behr said.
“But …” she began, then tapered off.
“But,” he echoed.
“But that’s all investigative, not psychological, so it’s not why you got me here,” she said.
Behr did his best not to let an awkward silence grow. He watched as the realization dawned on her.
“Oh, shit, this isn’t about information, this is about warning me,” she said. “You think since our guy took Quinn, now I could be in trouble too.”
Behr nodded slightly.
“You have anywhere you can go?” he asked.
“Not really,” she said. “Nowhere I want to, anyway.”
“Well …” Behr said.
“I should probably be all right, right? I mean, he hasn’t gone for any non-blondes.”
“He hadn’t gone for any photographers either,” Behr said. It sounded stark and pitiless in the quiet of the kitchen, and he wished he hadn’t put it that way.
“What should I do?” she asked, the fear fully upon her. There was something deeply wrong about seeing a spitfire like Mistretta cowed. But she wasn’t a superhero, and she’d left New York to get away from this kind of ugliness.
“I’m about to get on Prilo like a tick on a hound’s ass to find out what he knows, because I believe it’s something. After what happened to Quinn, I’m gonna make sure he or any of his associates don’t come after you or anyone else,” Behr said.
“And what if it is door number two?” she asked, sounding small and young. “What if it has nothing to do with Prilo, and whoever else got baited into that basement is lashing out? Then you’ll be sitting on the wrong guy.”
“You need to be vigilant, aware of your surroundings when you go out alone, especially at night. Make sure to set your alarm. Maybe get some motion lights outside.” Behr felt as stilted and useless as Sergeant Odoms.
“Fuck that community meeting crap,” Mistretta said.
“Look,” Behr said, “even if he
saw
you, I don’t see how it’s possible he even knows who you are. Quinn’s name was all over his photos. He’s a known figure with the police department. But you were just another person in the room. Your name was never mentioned. And if the guy started tracking Quinn after the meeting and found out where he lived and all that, then there was no way he could’ve tracked you too.”
Or me, for that matter
, Behr almost said aloud.
Or Susan or Trevor
.
He’d been wrong a few times in his life, though.
“Can I stay here?” she asked meekly.
“I don’t want to kick you out, but that’s not really gonna work,” Behr said.