Slaughter (23 page)

And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine

—W
ILLIAM
W
ORDSWORTH
,
     “She Was a Phantom of Delight”

Q
uinn lay in bed listening to Pearl's deep and regular breathing. They had enjoyed sex last night; he couldn't imagine not enjoying it with Pearl.

She sighed and rolled onto her side. One of her ample breasts spilled halfway out of her unsnapped nightgown. The city, an hour before the dawn, lay beyond the brownstone's bedroom window. Its sounds, made fainter and less definable by distance, seemed to ebb and flow with Pearl's breathing.

Quinn's own breathing did not seem as regular, almost as if he didn't belong in this room, this city, with this woman. As if he didn't deserve them. Some kind of celestial accident must have occurred, and, improbable as it seemed, here they were.

That was how lucky he felt some mornings.

Pearl let out a long breath and rolled further onto her side, almost resting on her stomach. Her head was turned toward him, and she sensed his attention, opened her eyes, and smiled.

He propped himself up on one elbow and rested his chin in his hand, still looking at her even though she seemed to have fallen back asleep.

He felt rising in him again a thought that was becoming stronger and more powerful.

He wanted a family.

A certain family.

Pearl, Jody, and himself.

They were already much like a family. They lived together and had become that close, that dependent on each other for the various things that kept a family together.

It wasn't that family life was foreign to him. He'd had something like it with his former wife, May, and their daughter, Lauri. He still, in a less forceful way, loved them both—especially Lauri. But he knew he had never loved as he loved Pearl.

He reached over and ran a knuckle gently across her cheek, waking her halfway. Still only partly awake, she turned toward him.

Quinn whispered to her, “We should be married.”

A long several seconds passed before she answered. “Is there a law?”

“Probably none we haven't broken,” he said.

“Then we can't fail,” Pearl said.

He drew her to him. Kissed her.

“There is one thing,” she said.

“Like in all marriages,” he said.

“I think we should wait until this case is over.”

“Kind of a distraction,” he said.

“A distraction,” she said, “would be Renz watching us walk down the aisle while a murderer is still walking his streets.”

Quinn said, “There you have a point.”

 

A
nyone watching the woman walk along First Avenue would have guessed her age at about seventy. Her walk was slow and indecisive, as if she had no destination. Which was probably true. Her back was slightly bowed, and her hair was dull and frizzled, too long in back and sticking out in clumps on the sides. Her complexion was pale and there were sores on the sides of her neck. From the way she thrust out her jaw and held her lips, it was obvious that she needed cosmetic dental work. She must have been in her thirties.

She kept her chin up as she walked, slowly looking to the right then the left, like a turtle gazing from a shell that was a tattered green coat. The coat, which she had stolen from a used clothing store, was already too warm, but it would keep the rain at bay at least for a while, until it became soaked through.

She was approaching the doorway of a closed beauty salon. A few months ago she'd been shooed away from that same doorway by the woman who ran the place and was the main beautician. Most likely because the woman had been too much of a smart-ass with her customers, the shop was now permanently closed, its windows soaped. The blank white show windows lined the entrance. They did a slight zigzag to a door that was now locked and featured a red-lettered
CLOSED
sign.

The woman moved back and out of sight in the doorway until she was out of the drizzle that would eventually soak her only coat. A low, fierce wind swished in, whirling a mini-tornado of trash out on the sidewalk. A loosely crumpled sheet of newspaper broke away from the other litter, skipped into the doorway, and wrapped itself around the woman's leg.

She bent over, peeled away the paper, and tossed it aside.

The breeze picked it up, and the airborne newspaper page swirled around and again found the woman's leg. She bent slowly, as if her back hurt, snatched the paper away from her ankle, and was about to crumple it into a tight ball when she noticed something and stopped.

She smoothed out the crumpled newspaper and read it.

On the front page was news about the so-called Gremlin, who was by now, if you believed all accounts, responsible for over a dozen victims. The captions beneath renderings of the Gremlin were pretty much like others. No one seemed to have gotten a clear look at him. The woman mostly used newspapers to line her clothes so she wouldn't become chilled in the early morning hours. She didn't read much, and sometimes wondered if she'd lost the knack.

Here was good reason to find out, and maybe sharpen her skills.

She studied the crinkled newspaper and laboriously read the tawdry, horrible accounts of the victim's death, as theorized by the police.

But there was something else that caught her attention. For some reason the killer had taken the time and risk of disassembling the latest victim's expensive and complex coffeemaker.

When the old young woman turned the newspaper page over, she saw the composite rendered image, as imagined by the police and media. She still couldn't be positive, but the more she stared at the composite, the more she thought she knew him. Or had known him.

Something about his eyes.

Her memory suddenly gave up the man's identity like a prize. My God! He was a childhood friend! More than a friend.

Years ago she had helped him throw a man out of a boxcar that was coupled to a moving train.

She and Jordan Kray had saved each other's lives.

 

 

Their childhoods were far away from them now. Though the sketch in the newspaper wasn't all that accurate, the artist had captured something of his subject. There was no doubt that it was Jordan. It was difficult to imagine him as a serial killer, though not so surprising to learn he was probably the prime suspect in a series of murders.

She recalled how Jordan liked to take things apart and put them back together—if he could. Things that were simply objects, and things that were alive.

A curious boy, Jasmine Farr thought. Her seamed face broke into a smile.

In those days they had both been curious.

Maybe they both still were.

 

 

The newspaper had been a door-opener. Jasmine had fallen low and fallen again and again, and she had contacts, if not friends, in low places.

It hadn't taken her long to learn who in New York she could contact if she knew the identity, and even the whereabouts, of the Gremlin. Maybe the Gremlin was back in St. Louis. That was where they'd departed the train, and near where they had left, sprawled alongside the dark tracks, the body of a railroad dick.

Surely the man had died. Jasmine could still remember how the knife had felt when she slid it into his side, the surprised and frightened cry that he couldn't suppress. Had she really heard the knife's sharp blade scrape a rib? That was how it was in her memory.

Whatever the reality, Jasmine and Jordan had known that after the man died, the sooner they got out of St. Louis, the safer they'd be.

The wisdom of that had been confirmed by the next day's
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
newspaper. Railroad detective Ellson Ponder had been stabbed to death and was found alongside a train car. Police theorized that Ponder had discovered his killer or killers hiding in what was thought to be was an empty boxcar. A struggle ensued. Ponder had tried to fight off his attackers, but he was beaten, stabbed, and apparently had then been left to die. Ponder had lived with his wife, Charlotte, and their ten-year-old son, Ivan, in the St. Louis suburbs.

 

 

While Jordan and Jasmine had known they'd be safer somewhere other than St. Louis, they'd also known the police had most likely tracked them as far as St. Louis. From the police's point of view, the two of them might still be in the city, made to lie low so they couldn't run. They were pinned down.

At least for a while.

Two people running from murder could attract a lot of attention in ways they couldn't guess at.

It was just a matter of time.

 

I
t was easier to find Jordan than she'd thought it would be. Jasmine knew where people who didn't want to be found might be located. The invisibles who took form only when worlds overlapped.

Past and present worlds overlapped here, as Jasmine and Jordan stood on opposite sides of Canal Street. While he was unaware of her presence, she studied him.

He seemed even smaller than she remembered. His light jacket was wrinkled, as were his brown slacks. There was no shine on his shoes, and he was wearing a shabby fedora that looked too large for his head. Jasmine noted his dark hair was tufted beneath his hat brim, and that he needed a shave. The stubble on his chin and along his jawline was also dark.

He raised both hands and held his palms pressed to his ears, as if a loud noise that no one else could hear was torturing him.

The traffic signal changed to walk and he dropped his arms, stepped down off the curb, and came toward her.

As they passed each other, their eyes met only briefly, but it was enough to make her breath catch in her throat.

He looked older (of course he did). And he was slightly bent forward as he walked. He was the shorter of the two, even with the fedora.

After five steps she turned around and followed him. That was when she noticed that something didn't ring true about him. It took her a while to figure it out. His forward bend was more a matter of posture than of age and hard luck. His clothes were those of a homeless person, but they didn't match his attitude.

She said something not usually heard in New York City: “You finish shuckin' that corn?”

Jordan took a few more steps, slowed, and turned around.

He looked at her, and a smile slowly formed. She wasn't surprised to find that she couldn't look away from him. She had already felt the attraction.

He said, “Jasmine?”

“'Fraid so.” She was trembling. Could he see that? Could he not?

He reached forward and touched her shoulder, as if assuring himself that she was real. She laid her hand on top of his.

They realized, at the same time, that the past had bound them, and now they shared the future.

“Come with me,” he said through a smile. “We'll have some coffee.”

She looked at him, then bowed her head and surveyed herself. “Will they let us in? I mean, we can't go someplace where I usually check the Dumpster for leftovers.”

The traffic signal had changed again. Now a horde of cars was moving toward them. He held her elbow and escorted her up on the curb and safety. She felt like a parody of royalty. “I don't know about this, Jordan.” Saying his name felt good.

“Don't worry about how we're dressed. I have money. I wear these clothes to walk around the city without drawing a lot of attention. It works if I stay in the right neighborhoods.”

“Clever,” she said. “You always were clever.”

They were walking now, him leading her slightly, toward the coffee shop.

“Had breakfast?” he asked.

She shook her head no, and was astonished when he drew a fat roll of bills from his jacket pocket. The top bill was a twenty.

“This'll fix that,” he said.

“Are you always in disguise?” she asked.

“Not all the time. But I've found it's the best way to take advantage of the city's gift of anonymity.”

“I can vouch for the invisibility,” Jasmine said. “Sometimes I think I could walk right in and rob a bank and nobody'd notice.”

“That would be a crime.”

They exchanged a secret smile.

Both were aware they were exploring the bond between them. It was powerful. Binding in a way that neither of them quite understood. After all, this was the man who had claimed her virginity. The man with whom she had murdered.

Jasmine found herself wondering, Is murder an aphrodisiac?

She remembered the Gremlin, and decided it wasn't time yet to bring up that subject.

“I always wondered,” he said, “why you left me in St. Louis with no explanation.”

“I was young, afraid, and I was going to go home. But then I didn't.”

After they'd gotten doughnuts and coffee, he said, “I've been thinking about going where I can be even more unnoticeable.”

Jasmine added cream to her coffee and sipped. She had been beautiful, in her way, and still was, even though time and events had worked their way with her. Hers was an indestructible kind of beauty. The crow's feet, the mottled complexion, the crazy hairdo that was all curls. It was as if wear could change her, but she was impervious to time.

“What city would we go to?” she asked.

“Where we'd be least likely to go. St. Louis.”