Serial (21 page)

Weaver was wearing a cheap plastic raincoat, but it would have to do. It didn’t bother her that she had no umbrella to fend off the steady light rain falling from a dark evening sky. An umbrella would make her more noticeable.

Though the evening was still warm, the careless breeze blowing along the city’s stone canyons sometimes carried a chill. At least Weaver had found a temporarily dry spot, huddled deep in the doorway of an unoccupied building across the street from Jock Sanderson’s walk-up in a bleak brick structure that looked as if it should have been demolished decades ago.

Weaver had read Pearl’s notes and report. She was disgusted by Pearl’s account of her interview with Sanderson.

Jock Sanderson had every reason in the world to kill Judith Blaney. She’d even had a restraining order issued against him. Sure, he had a seemingly ironclad alibi for the time of Blaney’s death, but so what? It was obvious to Weaver that Pearl had been too easy on him.

It was easy to read between the lines. Instead of seeing a wino in a cheap-ass apartment, Pearl had seen an underdog in its pathetic lair. In Weaver’s judgment, this asshole had played Pearl like a piano, made her feel pity so he could little by little ease her over to his side.

And that’s how the interview had ended. With Pearl almost apologizing for disturbing this good citizen in his meager shelter from a heartless society.

Maybe Pearl was right in assuming Sanderson’s innocence so readily. But Weaver thought there was a chance she was wrong, and that he had killed Judith Blaney. Whether he was the Skinner was another question. He might have somehow found out about the severed tongues and used the Skinner as the basis for a copycat crime, made Blaney’s death simply look like another in the string of Skinner murders.

As terrified of Sanderson as Judith Blaney must have been, Weaver figured she deserved more than Pearl’s half-assed conversation with him, and then a perfunctory dismissal of him as a suspect.

Of course it was also true that Weaver saw this as an opportunity to show initiative and make her fellow officers—especially Pearl—seem incompetent. If she went out on her own, secretly, and nailed the Skinner, her career would be made. Renz would see to that.

Pearl had screwed up. There was opportunity here, and Weaver was going to seize it.

She straightened her posture and then stayed still as she saw a dark figure emerge from the apartment building. A man. Wearing a black or dark blue raincoat and a beret or beret-like dark cap. He stutter-stepped down from the apartment to the sidewalk in a quick, easy maneuver that suggested he was familiar with the wet concrete steps.

When he turned and passed beneath a streetlight, Weaver was sure the man was Jock Sanderson.

He picked up his pace, and Weaver had to hurry to keep up. She barely felt the rainwater finding its way beneath her coat collar and trickling down the back of her neck.

Sanderson went down the steps of a subway stop, used a MetroCard, and passed through the turnstiles. Weaver followed.

The platform was crowded, and a train was roaring and screeching in, still traveling fast as its cars winked past waiting passengers. Weaver knew it would slow down and stop in a hurry.

With a loud, protracted squeal, the train did just that. Its sliding doors opened, and passengers streamed out. Some of the people on the platform waited patiently out of the way, while others began easing in through the sides of the doors.

There was a lot of milling about. Weaver looked around and saw that Sanderson was boarding the car behind the one she was about to get on. She turned away as casually as she could and joined the knot of people waiting to board Sanderson’s car.

More passengers than usual streamed from that car, and there was a great deal of pushing and shoving. When Weaver finally fought her way to the door, the car was almost too crowded to get on. She boarded anyway, pressing into the mass of passengers standing and gripping support poles. Several people glared at her. One woman, hugging a cluster of shopping bags to her breast, blithely gave Weaver the finger.

Weaver didn’t mind. What bothered her was that she couldn’t see Sanderson. The train lurched forward, and the mass of pressed humanity shifted in unison. Weaver didn’t like all the bad breath, the body odors mixed with the smells of damp coats and wet hair. She wished to hell that Sander-son had taken a cab. She might be following in a second dry and warm cab. Like in books and movies.

The subway swayed and jiggled though a turn, causing a man to shift position and step on Weaver’s toe. Another man almost lost his footing, leaning against Weaver. He didn’t seem in a rush to straighten up. She decided he was the source of the bad breath.

The train stopped and took on even more passengers. Weaver watched the sliding doors as best she could and didn’t see Sanderson get off. To be sure he was still in the subway car, she leaned sideways and studied the platform through a window as the train pulled away.

There was no Sanderson among the teeming, hurrying riders who had just left the train.

The next stop was Forty-second Street, a busy one. Only a few passengers got off, but many more piled into the cars. Not Weaver’s car, though—it was already crowded to maximum. She watched several people begin to board and then change their minds and drift back and away.

So it went stop after stop. Slowly, the passengers leaving the car began to outnumber those getting on. Weaver caught a reassuring glimpse of Sanderson seated toward the rear of the car.

She lost him at the Thirty-fourth Street stop. He rose from his seat and pushed his way out of the car almost immediately when the doors opened. It took Weaver several seconds to struggle to the nearest door and ease her way out onto the platform.

There were simply too many people massed on the platform for her to keep sight of him. She walked toward the steps leading up to the street, thinking this was as good an exit as any.

There was no sign of Sanderson in the stairwell or on the street.

Weaver glanced again in every direction and then stood there, the cool drizzle on her face, and wondered what to do next.

Then she saw Sanderson across Thirty-fourth Street. He was walking into the breeze, holding an umbrella in front of him as a windbreak as well as protection from the slanting drizzle.

Sanderson had slowed down. Despite the rain, he didn’t seem to be in a rush. He strolled with seeming aimlessness, from time to time stopping to look into shop windows.

Weaver followed, pretending to look into those same windows.

They walked that way for blocks, with Weaver keeping her distance to avoid being noticed. She was good at tailing, and she was sure Sanderson didn’t know he was being followed. He wasn’t exactly being evasive, yet his behavior wasn’t quite normal. There was something about the way he was walking, slightly bent forward, with his umbrella always at precisely the same angle, concentrating intently on something ahead of him.

Sanderson was following someone with single-minded determination not to lose them. He was focused on his purpose as if his life depended on it. Or someone else’s life.

She understood it then. He was stalking someone.

Weaver moved up slightly and observed him more closely, her heartbeat quickening. Sanderson was stalking, all right. Not simply following, but stalking. Everything about his pace and attitude suggested it. Weaver strained to see through the darkness and relentless rain, but couldn’t make out anyone up ahead of Sanderson.

That didn’t mean there was no one there, considering the weather.

They had turned several corners. There were no shop windows now. The neighborhood was downscale. The block they were on featured a closed dry cleaner, a boarded-up restaurant, a political headquarters now for rent. The peeling poster of the smiling candidate in the window reminded Weaver that things weren’t always as hopeful as they seemed. He’d lost big in the last election.

There were only a few people on the street.

And then Weaver noticed that she was alone.

No. Not alone!

She heard a faint rustle and sensed movement behind her and to her left. She began to spin away. Only began. Something slammed into the base of her neck and she was on the wet pavement.

She looked up and saw a man in a dark coat, a balaclava concealing everything of his face but his eyes and mouth. He was holding some kind of club or cudgel in his right hand.

As Weaver scrambled to get up, he jabbed hard with the club beneath her ribs. Pain shot through her right side, but she didn’t go down. Instead she clawed at her attacker’s face. She missed his eyes but felt her fingernails gouge flesh.

Again he was on her with the club—maybe a nightstick!

Is this guy a cop?

Whatever he was swinging was plenty hard. He slammed it across the width of Weaver’s back, making a sound that sickened her. Down again, on her hands and knees, she tried to catch her breath. She caught pain instead.

Then greater pain exploded at the back of her head.

Everything became dim, as if streetlights were going out one by one.

She smelled something like ammonia and felt someone holding her hand. For a second she thought she was being rescued, pulled up away from the darkness that dragged at her. Then she realized what she felt was her assailant cleaning beneath her fingernails that had gouged him. He didn’t want his DNA scraped from beneath her nails in the morgue.

Oh, God! In the morgue!

As she dropped into a dark world, her last awareness was of the slushy patter of soles on wet concrete, the faint and rhythmic splash of rainwater. She’d heard the sound often and could recognize it. Someone running away.

Years ago a hospice worker had warned Weaver to be careful about what she said when her mother lay dying in a hospital bed. The sense of hearing was often the last thing to go.

Am I dying?

The Skinner sat at a table in the atrium of the Citigroup Building, sipping an egg cream. There were no actual eggs in egg creams, which was one of the things the Skinner liked about them. They were tricky and misleading. Possibly most people who drank them, especially out-of-towners, assumed they’d consumed an egg. He smiled grimly. There were a lot of misconceptions about what people ate in this town.

He sipped and savored. Yes, egg creams were misleading. They symbolized the misleading and mislabeled world people were supposed to live in. But he’d learned long ago there were as many worlds as there were people. Anyone who was smart enough soon figured out it was possible to create and live in a world of your own, and it was just as valid as the one projected by so-called reality. It was the individual world of the spirit and the mind. It wasn’t mystical at all, but simply another chosen reality. Not buying into the common delusion; that’s what it was all about. The real rules, the ancient, few ones, were the only rules that mattered. The only actual reality, deeply buried in the human psyche, as it was in that of every living being.

He sucked on the plastic straw and it made a gurgling sound that signified the end of the egg cream.

Best to stop thinking bullshit, he decided. Not the place or time for hypothesizing. Concentrate on creating Quinn’s reality, keeping the wily cop in a world controlled by the Skinner. Different worlds for different folks. If his and Quinn’s worlds met only now and then, and tangentially, everything would work out fine.

He wondered if the lady cop he’d beaten was dead. And if she was alive, had she learned her lesson? Would she be able to go back to her job and be part of the game? Had Quinn lost one of his pieces?

The Skinner had beaten her with a tire thumper, a club-like instrument used by truckers to whap the tires of eighteen-wheelers to make sure they were inflated. He’d bought it in the shop of a highway gas station and restaurant frequented by truck drivers (a sure sign of good food) after noticing how much it resembled an old-fashioned wooden nightstick. It was even weighted at the end like a nightstick and had a leather strap to wind around your wrist so you wouldn’t drop it. A crude weapon, but effective. Ask the lady cop.

He gathered his napkin, cup, and crumpled straw wrapper from the table and stood up to leave. Maybe he’d stop in at the bookstore in the building and buy something to read. A thriller of some sort. Escape literature.

As he made his way toward a trash receptacle, he noticed two men seated facing each other at one of the tiny tables, their heads bowed. Their brows were furrowed and their gazes fixed, as they concentrated on a chess board between them.

Lost in a world of their own.

Quinn loomed watchfully, like a rough-hewn and wingless angel, over Nancy Weaver’s hospital bed. His shoulders drooped and his massive hands dangled useless at his sides. Right now he felt useless. Helpless. Before him was a problem for surgeons’ hands and scalpels, not cops’ hands and guns.

Weaver was unconscious but coming out of it. As Quinn watched, her bruised face contorted in pain and her body twitched in a reflex action to change position, which she couldn’t do because she was belted to the bed faceup so she couldn’t put a strain on her injured back. She moaned and tried to but couldn’t quite open her eyes.

Quinn examined her IV bottles, then adjusted a plastic valve slightly. He waited a few minutes and then stepped out into the hall and hailed a passing nurse.

“I think she’s regained consciousness,” he said.

The nurse, a portly, middle-aged woman with puffy cheeks and diamond-bright blue eyes, gave him a suspicious look. Her plastic name tag identified her as Rose. “The patient in two-oh-five?”

“Right. Officer Nancy Weaver.”

“Ah, the policewoman.” Rose shuffled several clipboards she was carrying, found the proper one, and gazed at it. “Hmm…you’re sure she’s regaining consciousness?”

“She asked if she could talk to me,” Quinn said. “Mumbled it, but she asked.”

“And who might you be?”

Quinn showed her his ID.

Rose looked him in the eye. “You’re positive she’s conscious? She’s receiving a sedative along with her glucose. We’re trying to hydrate her. She has several serious injuries.”

Quinn moved nearer to Rose. “I’ve got to confide in you, dear, that it’s vitally important that she and I speak. Lives do depend on it.”

Rose had heard that one. She shook her head no. “We’ll get Officer Weaver well on her way to survival, then you can question her and catch whoever did that terrible thing to her.”

Quinn laid a huge hand on her shoulder with a feather touch. “No, no, dear, you don’t understand. Her interest and mine, and I hope yours, are to make sure she’s not soon joined by another patient with similar, or perhaps even worse, injuries at the hands of the animal that beat poor Nancy. There is a time-urgent aspect to this matter.”

Rose shook her head adamantly. “I can’t be responsible for—”

“But you will be, Rose. Responsible for another woman suffering as Officer Weaver now suffers. That is, if you don’t let her and I simply exchange a few words. Then she can rest all the better knowing she’s done her duty and we know who did this heinous thing to her. I beg you, Rose, to let her finish what she set out tonight to accomplish.”

Rose gave Quinn a long, hopeless sigh. He wasn’t sure if it meant surrender or exasperation. Rose was hard to read.

Quinn moved closer and lowered his voice even more. “Young as you are, my impression is you’ve been a nurse for some time. You must know your real responsibilities in gray areas such as this, dear. Vital gray areas. We all know there are rules that must in special times be circumvented to prevent tragedy.”

“You are so full of bullshit,” Rose said.

Quinn’s earnest smile was undaunted.

“You can be in the room with us,” Quinn said.

“You’re damned right I can,” Rose told him, and led the way.

As soon as they were in the room, Rose examined the IV bottles hooked up to the tube leading to Weaver’s arm.

Weaver’s eyes flickered open. “Quinn…?” she managed to groan from her bed.

He touched her lightly on the forehead. “Don’t try to talk, Nancy, unless I ask you something.”

“I’m in goddamned pain. The bastard hit me with something that looked like a nightstick.”

“Who was it, Nancy?”

“I was following Sanderson.”

“Jock Sanderson? Why?”

“I read Pearl’s notes from her interview with him. They didn’t look right. The guy got to her, gave her a load of crap instead of straight answers.”

Quinn had read the interview and didn’t see it that way. And not too many people got to Pearl. “You really think so?”

“Yeah. So I decided to tail Sanderson and see what there was to learn. I got the feeling
he
was tailing someone. Stalking her.”

“Her?”

“I’m guessing there,” Weaver admitted. She took a deep breath. “Damn, that hurts!”

“Sanderson did this to you?”

“Must have. I was tailing him one second, and the next he was pounding away on me with that club of his.”

“You saw his face?”

“No. It was dark and he was wearing a balaclava. I could just see his eyes and mouth.”

“So you couldn’t identify him for sure.”

“No. Guess not…”

Weaver’s voice was wavering. She was obviously getting weaker.

“We’re done here,” Rose said.

“No,” Weaver said. She tried to grasp Quinn’s arm but couldn’t move her own. “I scratched his face hard under the balaclava. I remember that for sure. I did damage. Then I smelled ammonia—”

“Ammonia…”

“That’s it,” Rose said, and reached for the valve on the IV tube.

“He cleaned under my fingernails,” Weaver said. “I could feel the scraping….”

Rose readjusted the plastic valve.

“He might be our Skinner,” Weaver said.

“Skinner?” Rose asked. “The animal who’s killing those women?”

Quinn nodded. “The very same.” He looked down at Weaver, whose eyes were closed again. “Nancy?”

Weaver’s breath evened out and her features relaxed.

“She’s resting,” Rose said, “as she should be. And if I ever find again that you’ve tampered with medical equipment in a patient’s room, I’ll sic the authorities on you like a pack of mad dogs. There’ll be no more asking me to break the law for you. And you a policeman yourself.”

“I—”

“Don’t bother to deny it, please. I’ve heard enough lies.” She sighed loudly again. It seemed to be her signature way of expressing herself. “Have you got a card, Quinn?”

He looked at her.

“A business card, man!” Another trailing sigh.

Quinn dug his wallet from his pocket and handed her one of his Q and A business cards.

Rose tucked it in a pocket of her nurse’s uniform. “When the patient comes around again and you can count on her actually making sense, I’ll straightaway give you a call.”

“Thanks, Rose. I’ll have someone standing guard on Weaver here at the hospital. If you notify him, it’ll be the same as notifying me.”

“I hope you catch the murdering psychopath,” Rose said.

“We will,” Quinn assured her. He moved toward the elevator, and Rose walked alongside him. At the elevator doors, they paused. Quinn smiled his surprisingly beatific smile and gave Rose’s elbow a gentle squeeze. “You did the right thing, dear.”

“I was told those very words once after extramarital sex. It was a lie then and it is now.”