Mister X (8 page)

Holifield, Ohio, 1992

Jerry Grantland, thirteen years old last week, lowered himself from his bedroom window onto the soft carpet of lawn. He glanced at the luminous green hands of his Timex watch. One o’clock a.m.

That was the time it usually happened.

If it was going to happen.

There were clouds, and the moon was only a sliver, like a glowing shaving from a larger carving. Jerry knew that once he made it across the dark stretch of lawn that was the shadow of the house, cast by the softly illuminated streetlight out near the curb, he’d be in almost total darkness. The rest would be easy. There was a wooden picket fence running the property line between his house and the Kellers’ side yard, but it was only four feet high. The nimble Jerry could be over it in seconds and on his way into the shadows of the overgrown honeysuckle bush.

The bush would conceal him until he made it past the rosebushes and into the yews, where he could squat unseen in the darkness outside the Keller twins’ bedroom window.

He knew where the twins, a year younger than he was, slept in their matching twin beds with their brass headboards. Tiffany’s bed was against the far wall, Chrissie’s nearer the window.

Jerry found his familiar, comfortable place to squat on his heels and peer beneath the partly drawn shade into the room.

Both girls appeared to be sleeping beneath thin white sheets that were pulled all the way up to their chins.

Jerry thought it unlikely that they were sleeping. Like him, they were probably waiting.

He watched as both girls stirred and stiffened. Tiffany sat straight up in bed and then lay down again. Both twins curled onto their sides, pretending to be asleep. The window was raised slightly to let in the night breeze, and Jerry thought he could hear the faint rustle of the sheets as the girls’ young bodies moved beneath them.

Jerry let his thoughts about the Keller twins roam free, as he often did. If the twins knew what they did—and what was done
to
them—in his imagination, they’d be appalled. But they wouldn’t be surprised. In some ways they were interchangeable. In others—

As he always did when it happened, Jerry drew in his breath.

The bedroom door had opened and closed silently.

The twins’ father, Mr. Keller—Ed Keller—was like a shadow in the room, but a shadow with substance.

Jerry swallowed and stayed as still as possible at the window. He’d been sure Mr. Keller would enter the twins’ room. Mr. Keller was some kind of salesman and was out of town a lot. Whatever he sold had something to do with cars, with Detroit; that’s what either twin would say when Jerry asked about their father.

Mr. Keller had been away on business most of the week, and this was his first night back. That was how Jerry knew he’d visit the twins’ room. After being out of town for a while on one his sales trips, he almost always paid the twins a visit.

The tall shadow that was Mr. Keller moved to Tiffany’s bed. Chrissie, in her own bed, turned away, drew her knees up almost to her chin, and held the wadded sheet tightly against her ears. She was facing the window, but Jerry was sure she couldn’t see him, the way her face was screwed into an ugly mask, her eyes clenched tightly shut.

Behind her, shadows began to move on the far wall. Holding his breath, Jerry leaned slightly forward.

Within minutes the rhythmic, writhing dance of light and darkness on the wall became more urgent, wilder. It was impossible to know what was shadow and what was Tiffany or her father.

He could hear a soft moaning through the window and couldn’t be sure if it was Tiffany or Chrissie.

The writhing and moaning continued in a madder and madder rhythm. Jerry was hard now, and he lowered his right hand and stroked himself. Within minutes he’d reached orgasm.

The movement of the distorted figures on the wall finally slowed, then stopped altogether.

The tall shadow that was Mr. Keller straightened up from Tiffany’s bed. It moved toward the window, but Jerry, secure in the knowledge that he was invisible in the darkness and shelter of the yews, stayed motionless and continued to watch.

Mr. Keller rested a hand briefly on Chrissie’s shoulder. He knew she’d been awake, been listening. Jerry thought that almost surely she hadn’t been the only one in the house who’d heard. The twin’s mother must have heard
something
of what happened over and over in the twins’ room.

She must know.

The world of adults. Jerry wasn’t sure if he’d ever understand it.

He watched as Mr. Keller crept to the bedroom door, opened it, and merged with the darkness beyond it, closing the door behind him.

Neither twin moved for a long time, and then Chrissie removed the wadded sheet from her ears and sat up in bed. She looked over at Tiffany, who lay facing away from her, pretending to be asleep.

Chrissie lay back and pretended to sleep herself.

Jerry backed away from the window and made for the dark patch in the lawn where he could cross unseen into his own yard. He would return to his bed, where he’d pretend he’d never left the house, that he was asleep like the twins.

Everyone pretending, as the night moved toward morning and another day.

New York, the present

“We need to get together off the record,” Harley Renz had said to Quinn over the phone. That was why Quinn was in Bryant Park, on Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue, next to the library.

Bryant was a pleasant green oasis surrounded by concrete in a busy part of town. Quinn sat on a bench not far from where a group of people were playing some kind of game where players tossed heavy balls underhanded and palm down, so reverse English would cut down the distance they rolled when they came to earth. Every once in a while about half the players would jump up and down and hug each other, but Quinn couldn’t see that much had been accomplished.

Harley had entered the park from Sixth Avenue and was trudging steadily in Quinn’s direction. His general sagginess made him appear a lot heavier than he was. Maybe because of his face, which was jowly and sad-eyed, with a fleshy mouth usually arced down at the corners. Gravity was not his friend. The expensive blue suit he had on might have helped if he’d bothered to button its coat. Now and then the breeze off the avenue whipped the coat sideways and revealed the thin leather strap of a shoulder holster.

He spotted Quinn and veered slightly to set his course more directly toward the bench, swinging his arms in his peculiar restricted way, as if he were carrying a heavy bucket in each hand.

When he was about ten feet from Quinn, he showed his bloodhound smile. Sunlight sparked off one of his canine teeth. “I thought you’d be smoking one of your Cuban cigars, Quinn.”

“Isn’t it illegal to smoke in a public park?”

“Damned if I know,” Renz said. He pulled a cellophane-wrapped cigar from his shirt pocket, unwrapped it, and stuffed the torn cellophane back into his pocket.

“Not to mention that Cuban cigars are illegal.”

“Not to mention.” Renz bit the end off the cigar and spat it off to the side, then fired up the cigar with a silver lighter. The tobacco burned unevenly and made a soft sizzling sound, the way cheap cigars often did.

“Somebody have a baby?” Quinn asked.

Renz exhaled and held the cigar off to the side, as if even he was put off by its odor. “If you’d tell me your source for the Cubans, I wouldn’t have to smoke these dog turds.” He sucked on the cigar again, rolled the smoke around in his mouth and then slowly released it. “’Course, I don’t know now if I can still trust you.”

“You never could,” Quinn said.

“But I thought so for some things, which is why I’m disappointed in you.” Renz clamped the cigar in his teeth and from a side pocket of his suit coat drew out a folded, crinkly
City Beat
and handed it to Quinn.

Quinn had seen the paper’s morning edition but pretended he hadn’t.
TWIN SEEKS KILLER OF OTHER SELF
,
proclaimed the headline. Quinn scanned the story of the resurrection of the Carver investigation and vengeance delayed. It was spirited prose.

He handed the paper back to Renz. “Cindy Sellers. Where does she get that stuff?”

Renz stared at him as if they were playing poker and Quinn might buckle under pressure and display a tell. “Somebody’s talking, is where she’s getting it.”

“Maybe,” Quinn said, unperturbed. “Or maybe she’s making it up.”

“Whatever her source, Sellers has decided to be a pain in the ass.”

“First Amendment,” Quinn said.

“Yeah, yeah.” Renz wadded the
City Beat
into a tight ball and arced it gracefully into a nearby trash receptacle. He sat down heavily on the opposite end of the bench, causing it to rock slightly on uneven ground. “Whatever her source, she’s gonna continue writing this crap,” he said.

“That’s like her. She can’t be trusted.”

Renz looked over at the people tossing the balls and giving them backward spin. “What the hell are they doing over there? Bocce ball? Is it goddamned bocce ball?”

“I don’t know,” Quinn said. “It’s something else in life that puzzles me.”

“But you’re the sort who figures things out. For instance, you must know that with Sellers writing and blabbing about the Carver investigation all over town, the rest of the media wolves are gonna be hunting in packs. My assistant tells me our phones are already lit up with calls from the papers and television news. I had to make sure I wasn’t followed here by media schmucks.”

Quinn nodded. “Yeah, Sellers has changed things. Heated them up.”

Renz puffed on his cigar, then glanced at the glowing tip with satisfaction. “That’s why I’m reactivating you and your team. Or, to be more specific, the NYPD is hiring Quinn and Associates Investigations to help work on the reactivated Carver case.”

Quinn was surprised, but he shouldn’t have been. Renz could always be counted on to come up with some kind of bold countermove. Usually one that furthered his career. “So the popular and daring police commissioner goes outside the NYPD again for the public good and safety.”

“You forgot
imaginative,
” Renz said.

“Imagine that.”

“Our arrangement has proved successful in the past. And when you weren’t on the Carver case, we weren’t able to close it. This time around, I’m hitching my wagon to a winner.” Again, Renz’s doglike smile. “I’ll get some NYPD shields to you so you and your team can come and go at crime scenes unmolested, maybe wrangle some free doughnuts.”

“Is there a possibility of discussing whether I agree to this?” Quinn asked.

“Not really, considering Cindy Sellers has shot our previous agreement all to hell. It isn’t worth much now that the media seem to be getting shovelfuls of information on this case. Matter of days before our more vocal members of the public—some of them political office holders—will be demanding that the case actually gets solved.”

“You’ve gone from trying to scare me off this case to hiring me to continue my investigation,” Quinn pointed out.

“That’s called being outmaneuvered.”

Quinn had nothing to say to that. After all, the investigation was not only going to continue, but at an accelerated rate. So who’d been outmaneuvered?

“You’ll be initiating the NYPD investigation and consolidating it with what you have so far,” Renz said. “I’m assigning a detective team to work with you. You’ll be lead detective, of course. And you’ll report to me.”

“Do I have a choice?” Quinn asked again.

“Stop asking me that. It’s annoying. You don’t want a choice. You got what you wanted.” Renz watched the people playing with the wooden balls for a while. “There was a lot of spin on that ball you tossed me the other day,” he said.

“Conversational ball, you mean?”

“Whatever.”

They both sat quietly observing the people playing the mysterious game with the balls.

“I think they’re trying to knock their opponents’ balls out of a circle,” Quinn said.

“The thing to remember,” Renz said around the smoldering cigar wedged in his jaw, “is that, like in most games, they take turns.”

Quinn had been warned. It didn’t much concern him.

Renz nodded knowingly and smiled his jowly smile, then stood up from the bench and sauntered toward Sixth Avenue.

Quinn sat watching him walk away. He knew that when it was Renz’s turn, the ambitious police commissioner would make the most of it. And he wasn’t above playing out of turn.

It must be liberating to be so blithely corrupt.

As soon as Renz had disappeared, Quinn lit a Cuban cigar.

“It’s better than having him shut down the investigation,” Quinn said, after returning to the Seventy-ninth Street office and telling Pearl and Fedderman about his conversation with Renz.

The air conditioner wasn’t very efficient, and the air was still and muggy and smelled, as it often did, of subversive cigar smoke.

Fedderman had his suit coat off and his tie knot loosened. The top button of his shirt was undone. Pearl had a shimmer of perspiration above her upper lip that somehow looked good on her.

Neither of Quinn’s two detectives was crazy about the idea that the NYPD had landed with both flat feet in the middle of their investigation.

“Did we plan for this development?” Pearl asked.

“Not exactly,” Quinn said. “We’ll have to improvise.”

“They do that in comedy clubs,” Fedderman said.

“We’ll try not to make it funny.”

“At least we’ll be working with Vitali and Mishkin again,” Fedderman said.

The NYPD homicide team of detectives Sal Vitali and Harold Mishkin had shared the load with Quinn, Pearl, and Fedderman in a previous serial killer case. The gravel-voiced, intense Vitali and the deceptively meek Mishkin were a crack team and meshed well with Quinn and his crew.

Pearl, who’d been working her computer, sat back and stretched her arms, clenching and unclenching her fists as if she were working little exercise balls. “It’d be nice, though, if we had a client.”

“We do,” Fedderman said. “We just can’t find her. Pearl keeps checking her computer, but Chrissie’s not on Face-book or YouTube or any of the other mass Internet connectors. There are some people there looking for dates, though, so Pearl’s not giving up.”

“I got a YouTube for you,” Pearl said.

“Wouldn’t doubt it.”

Pearl fumed. Fedderman liked that. Quinn didn’t, but he hesitated in acting as referee when Pearl and Fedderman went at each other. Their frequent bickering seemed to stimulate their little gray cells.

“Ease up,” was all he said, and not with much conviction.

Pearl swiveled slightly in her chair to look directly at him. “Did you mention to Cindy Sellers that we can’t seem to locate our client?”

“Slipped my mind.”

“Sure it did.” Pearl knew better than to believe that. Hardly anything slipped Quinn’s mind.

Having forgotten for now about Fedderman and his jibes, Pearl smiled. Quinn thought she was beautiful when she smiled while still flush with anger. It was amazing the way she could switch gears like that. Like speed-shifting a race car.

“She called here while you were talking to Renz,” Fedderman said.

“Sellers?”

“The same. Pearl took the call.”

“I can’t stand that woman,” Pearl said.

“That’s just because she has no taste, compassion, or ethics,” Fedderman said.

“I can stand you,” Pearl said. “Barely, sometimes, and in short doses, but I can stand you.”

Quinn was getting fed up with the verbal rock fight. What were they, in high school? But he knew it was because they were stymied in their investigation. Couldn’t even find their client. “What did Sellers want, Pearl?”

“The usual. Answers. I didn’t give her any.”

“What did you give her?”

“That high school yearbook photo. The one we found on the Internet when we realized Chrissie hadn’t included any in the clippings she gave us. Sellers wanted a photo of Tiffany to run with her
City Beat
story.”

“Did Sellers bitch because you gave her such an old photograph?” Fedderman asked.

“No. She’ll do what we did: scour the Internet and build her own file of photos.”

“She’s probably good at that,” Fedderman said. “It’s what reporters do nowadays. Not much legwork left in the job. Not like being a cop.”

“Hmph,” Pearl said, which irritated Fedderman. It was hard to know if she was agreeing or disagreeing.

She sat forward. “I went through the clippings Chrissie gave us again, to make doubly sure, and there were photos of all the victims except for the last. Then I went on the Internet again.” She wrestled her chair up closer to her desk and worked her computer. “There are some great shots.” She moved the mouse across its pad and clicked it. “Like this one. It’s from an old
Daily News
. Looks like a studio portrait when she was still a teenager. Tiffany sure was a terrific-looking kid.”

Quinn angled to his left so the glare from the window didn’t obscure the image on Pearl’s computer screen. He stepped closer.

The image was of a news item with the victim’s photo inset on the right. Tiffany’s name was printed beneath the black-and-white head shot of a pretty brunette with dark eyes and a glowing and somewhat naive smile.
Young woman with a bright future,
the caption should have read, rather than
Latest Carver victim.

“Exactly the Carver victim type,” Pearl said. “Attractive, with dark hair and eyes, good cheekbones, generous mouth.”

You
, Quinn thought, but didn’t say it.

“Tiffany fits right in. Our client does, too, but not exactly.”

“She can’t be Chrissie,” Fedderman said.

“So who is she?” Quinn asked. “And why’s she done a runner?”

“I might be able to answer your first question,” Pearl said. “As I recall, she never said she and Tiffany were
identical
twins. She
is
Chrissie Keller, Tiffany’s fraternal twin.”

“She sure let us assume they were identical twins,” Fedderman said. “I mean, with her story about wanting Quinn to think at first he was looking at one of the Carver’s victims. Shock persuasion.”

“Feds is right,” Quinn said. “She led us in that direction.”

“So she lied,” Pearl said. “My God, what a surprise!”

Quinn and Fedderman looked at each other.

In a corner of his mind, Fedderman had mulled over Pearl’s suggestion. “Pearl’s got a point,” he said. “They might be fraternal twins. But me, I’m not so sure.”

“Either way, she’s been dicking around with us,” Pearl said.

“Still is,” Fedderman said. “Playing a game.”

“We’ll give her game,” Pearl said.

The two detectives’ animosity was forgotten, lost in the fervor of the hunt. Quinn almost smiled.
Cooking now…

“We need to find out why she lied,” Fedderman said.

Pearl nodded. “We need to find
her.
”