Twist (18 page)

H
elen had taken to her occasional appearances on
Minnie Miner ASAP
. She had her hair done, wore girly clothes, and on television looked feminine and smaller than she was. Always she kept in mind that perhaps the most ardent of the show’s followers was the Lady Liberty Killer. That was the reason she had to be extremely careful. Serial killers often sought their own end in spectacular fashion. Even though they prized and needed anonymity, it was fame and recognition they craved. All the more so toward the end, when they knew the only escape from themselves was death.

And for this killer, a singular event might well mark in his mind the total futility of his quest.

“You’re saying,” Minnie Miner was telling Helen, “that the killer, murdering—in his mind—his mother over and over, was being driven mad because he couldn’t get at his own mother, because she was in prison?”

“Correct,” Helen said. “Alleged killer. He—”

“So for the Lady Liberty Killer, prison was a fortified castle keeping him out, wherein his mother lived sheltered and protected from him.”

“Exactly. He was frustrated because he had no way to get at the much despised woman who raised him,” Helen said, “so he killed substitutes instead. At least that’s one theory.”

“It certainly seems the most accurate one. It’s like a dark fairy tale that gets more and more menacing.”

“I’m not sure—” Helen began.

“I
am
sure this animal needs to be stopped.”

“Of course he does. But I—”

“It’s fascinating that an amazing event occurred that made things not better but worse for the murderer. His mother committed a crime and went to a place even more remote from him, where he could never reach her. That must have driven him mad.”

“He was already mad,” Helen reminded Minnie and the audience. “And we can’t be sure—”

“So now, his compulsion and sense of defeat and frustration all the stronger and more overwhelming, this killer still walks our streets. If he was irrational and random in his choice of victims before, he might be even more so now.”

“Count on it,” Helen said. “Though I wouldn’t say he chooses his victims entirely at random.”

“The killer has become more deranged, and much more dangerous.” Minnie said. “No woman in this city is safe.”

“You could say that,” Helen said.

“It certainly must send chills down every woman’s spine . . .” Minnie was saying. She gave a slight shiver.

Helen was listening to her just attentively enough to be able to answer without making a fool of herself.

Minnie was locked in now, holding her audience’s attention in one sweaty little palm. “The real target of his hate and fear—yes, fear—has escaped this grisly killer’s grasp by going where he can’t reach her even if he follows. Yes, I said
her
. His mother, if you can believe it! How desperate and cheated he must feel! How betrayed and useless, now that his reason to exist no longer
herself
exists. The proxies he chooses as his victims now will be mere shadows of a shade, not representatives of a live and malevolent being taunting and living safely behind stone walls and iron bars, where he couldn’t get at her no matter how hard he tried.”

Helen thought that maybe her theory was correct and Quinn had been right in asking her to go on TV and stir the pot. To increase the pressure on the killer to act to reduce the angst he must be suffering. Minnie Miner was certainly stirring.

“The thing he wanted to kill has herself denied him that satisfaction,” Minnie said. “Incredible!”

Helen nodded sagely. “All the cruelty and pain the monster visited upon him can no longer be avenged. It’s as if she removed herself from the board while the game was still in progress. It isn’t fair—at least in the alleged killer’s mind. It isn’t fair to cheat him out of despising her, blaming her, and eventually killing her.”

“Yes!” Minnie said. “I can imagine him feeling
exactly
that way!”

“What he might be thinking now,” Helen said, “is that somebody has to pay. His other victims, all of them, were only prelude.”

Minnie gave one of her mock shivers. “It’s creepy that you’re so
into
this killer’s mind.”

“My job,” Helen said.

She heard Minnie mention a commercial break and thank her for coming. Helen made nice. She was glad this television appearance was almost over. For a while, anyway, she’d be back in the real world. She wanted to get out of the studio and go home, where she could change into her sweats and joggers and kick off these high heels.

 

 

The killer was mesmerized by Helen’s concise and, for the most part, accurate analysis of his mental processes. At least in so much as he could determine them. She was by far the most interesting and intelligent guest he’d seen interviewed on
Minnie Miner ASAP
.

And she was close to his adversary, Quinn. Maybe even his lover. (
Alleged
lover. Why couldn’t the killer also let his imagination serve him?) The thoughts she voiced had to be much like the thoughts harbored by Quinn. Listening to Helen gave the killer rare insight into the mind of his pursuer. It confirmed what the killer had known all along: Quinn would never give up.

After the commercial break (in which a lot of beautiful people laughed heartily and allegedly drank the same brand of beer) Minnie Miner talked in glowing terms about Helen and alerted viewers that her very special guest was scheduled to be on again tomorrow.

The killer made a note of that.

The killer had his dream again.

The one he’d had every night since learning his mother died.

But the fairy tale had it backward. It was Rapunzel who was kept prisoner in the tower prison. And she let down her incredibly long hair so her lover could use it to scale the tower wall and propose marriage.

It hadn’t worked out well in the fairy tale, either. The lover climbed into the tower and encountered the witch.

There were several interpretations of the fairy tale, but in none of them did Rapunzel dangle by a hair noose from the tower with her eyes bulging, an evil smile on her face even with her distended tongue.

He awoke with a start.

Another dream within a dream
. . .

The killer poured his third cup of morning coffee and sat down on the sofa, watching the flat-screen TV mounted on the wall.

Minnie Miner ASAP
came on as scheduled. Minnie wore a lightweight gray suit with a fluffy white blouse and very high heels. She would be standing up when she introduced Helen and didn’t want to be dwarfed. A few fans had e-mailed that they hadn’t known Minnie was so small, not knowing that Helen was a goddamned jolly
un
green giant.

An enthusiastic Minnie announced that after the commercial, police profiler Helen Iman would be on to talk more about the Lady Liberty Killer.

The studio audience matched her enthusiasm with its applause.

But Minnie didn’t say
immediately
after the commercial.

The killer had to sit and sip his rapidly cooling coffee while a young actress talked about how her fourth trip to rehab had saved her life. (
For now
, the killer thought.) After the actress came a recently fired newscaster who was angry as a hornet about the direction of news in America and was going to write a book. Both the actress and the former anchorman vowed never to quit their personal crusades.

The killer thought these people were obsessive, and not very plausible.

Finally, after the angry anchorman and a blast of short commercials, Helen Iman was introduced. The killer paused in his sipping as he regarded her towering height and beanpole figure. Wrong color hair. Definitely not his type.
Lucky for her.

Helen had talked with Quinn about today’s interview, and they’d decided they didn’t want the killer to enjoy his publicity too much. He mustn’t mistake public fascination for public support.

“Do you or the police think it’s possible this killer has what we would consider a normal personal life?” Minnie asked, once she and Helen were settled into their chairs, Helen trying to figure out what was different, then realized her chair’s legs had been shortened.

“Is ‘normal’ code for sexual?” Helen asked.

Minnie grinned. Maybe Helen knew what ratings were made of. “More or less.”

“What we would consider a normal sex life isn’t likely,” Helen said, “unless he’s playing at a normal relationship with a woman. That would be in order to enhance the camouflage that these sick people need in order not to be noticeable for their madness.”

“Maybe the killer himself will call and set us straight,” Minnie said. “He’s called
ASAP
before. And I might add he’s not so crazy that he stayed on the line long enough for his call to be traced.” She winked. “For those of you who were wondering.”

The killer didn’t like the way this was going. Not that he was blaming Helen, whom he’d come to admire. Quinn the puppet master was the one to blame. He was the one making things happen. Telling his people what to do. The killer thought about Pearl. He’d enjoy telling
her
what to do. Then there were the other two—Jody and Carlie. They might serve a purpose.

Quinn wasn’t the only puppet master in this game.

The killer drummed his fingers on the sofa arm. Maybe he
would
call in to the show. He knew Minnie would let him talk, though he wasn’t sure she’d allow a three-way conversation. For that matter, something about Helen frightened him. He wasn’t sure he wanted to speak to the towering profiler directly. The words
sick
and
madness
bothered him. Did Helen think she was a medical doctor or a psychologist? She was a goddamned profiler, that’s all. Sure, she knew her job, but it was one step up from handwriting analysis.

“What I’d like to talk about today,” Helen said, “is the nature of the victims’ injuries.”

“Sounds lurid,” Minnie said, with obvious anticipation.

“It is, I’m afraid, but I think it might help your viewers to better understand the sort of individual we’re dealing with, and who’s still walking the streets of New York.”

Minnie smiled and leaned back in her chair. “We’re listening.”

In a calm and unemotional tone, Helen described the nature of the damage inflicted on the victims before and after their deaths. She spared no horrendous detail, and the matter-of-factness of her voice made the injuries seem all the more horrible. For the most part, Helen looked into the camera as she spoke. Now and then, she’d glance over at Minnie Miner.

Minnie was turning green.

“I know this is strong stuff,” Helen said to Minnie and to the audience, “but I’m not here to entertain. I’m here to inform, and to alarm. Because we should be alarmed. Not panicked, but alarmed. A monster who looks and acts as we do, who blends into his environment like a chameleon, is stalking some of the women of this city. And what I’ve just described is the result of only some of the earlier encounters. I’ve left out the most vivid and gruesome.”

“We can imagine,” Minnie said, swallowing. Her lipsticked mouth arced downward. She appeared ill.

The unexpected had happened. Her show had become real, and reality lived in her stomach.

Helen was glad to see Minnie make it through her polite thank-you to her guest, and then introduce the next commercial break. As the picture faded, viewers who looked quickly could see Minnie stand up, then double over with her arms crossed tightly against her abdomen. Some of her cast and crew hurried over and supported her so she wouldn’t fall.

Nobody was paying much attention to Helen.

The killer, ensconced before his flat-screen TV, noticed what was happening and wondered what all the fuss was about.

 

 

Quinn remembered there was a voice mail message on his cell phone, but he didn’t have time to listen to it before his desk phone jangled.

“You see Helen on TV this morning?” Renz asked, when Quinn had picked up.

“Sure,” Quinn said. It was only eleven o’clock, but already the offices of Q&A were heating up toward what weather forecasters promised would be record high temperature.

The air-conditioning units, set in the windows, were humming and banging away, fighting the good fight against the heat. Not losing quite yet, though Quinn was sure at least one of the units would ice up and stop operating before the sun went down and all that baking concrete outside would begin to cool.

“Helen about made me barf,” Renz said.

“That’s the plan. We don’t want the killer to get the idea the public sees him as some kind of underdog hero.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“In this city?”

“Well, yeah, I see what you mean. Also,” Renz said, “I didn’t hear the word
allegedly
on Minnie’s show.”

“You think a serial killer is going to sue for libel?” Quinn asked. He didn’t say there might be a remote possibility the killer was insane enough to attempt just that.

“Not if we got the right guy,” Renz said.

“We do,” Quinn assured him. “Otherwise he would have come forward all lawyered up to dispute the allegations. Anyway, we can’t lose either way.”

“My kind of odds,” Renz said. Then the tone of his voice changed to one of officiousness. “Reason I phoned is I called in some chits with the FBI and got the file on that old Missouri case where the infant was ripped out of its mother’s womb.”

“The FBI?”

“Yeah. As long as the kid was thought to be alive, the Bureau viewed the crime as a possible kidnapping. According to the file, they showed up right away to assist the locals while they told them what to do.”

Quinn understood. He remembered that Harlan Wilcoxen had mentioned the Bureau’s involvement.

“They did do a good job of finding more information on the dead woman and her baby,” Renz said.

“What kind of information?”

“The victim’s full name was Abigail Taylor. Her folks were farmers,” Renz continued. “Country girl through and through. Never got in any trouble to speak of. Made decent grades but dropped out of high school her senior year to take a job as a waitress in a spaghetti joint. Told her folks she was bored with school.”

“Sounds familiar,” Quinn said. “I wish you could tell me now that a movie producer stopped in at the restaurant where she worked, saw her, talked to her, and offered her a screen test. Stardom followed.”

“I can’t tell you that, but you’re sorta right. That’s how she met the father of the child that was taken from her. He came in and ate lunch, then came back for supper. The next day, he returned for breakfast and the waitress. They got involved, moved in together. She got pregnant.”

“Not a movie producer?”

“That’s where it went wrong. The father was an auto mechanic, worked at a repair shop and drove a tow truck.”

“Ambitious, anyway.”

“Not so’s you’d notice. Word was the pregnancy showed so soon after the wedding it was unlikely the mechanic could have been the father. He and Abigail fought some, maybe about that, according to the file. The FBI saw him as a suspect for a while.”

“What made them eliminate him?”

“He and another fella were talking on hubby’s landline phone at the time of the murder-kidnapping, about Hubby being too hungover to come into work to do a brake repair job.” Quinn listened to Renz breathe for a few seconds. A fat man, and getting fatter, his weight was starting to drag him down. Finally Renz said, “The daddy didn’t have anything to do with what happened, Quinn. Day after Abigail was found, he drove his car straight into a bridge abutment. There were no skid marks. The speedometer was broken in the impact, stuck at ninety-seven miles an hour. Witnesses said it sounded like a thunderclap.”

“Christ!”

“Kid finds out he’s lost his woman, his baby, all in the same day, and in the worst way. Next day he took his own life.”

Quinn thought for a while. “I suppose the FBI made sure later on about the father. I mean, with DNA testing and all.”

“They did. Got blood from the placenta at the time of the crime to test for type. Tested some of it later for a DNA match. The kid was the daddy, all right. It’ll all be in the file I’m sending over. Name’s right there, supported by modern science. ‘Father: William James Wilcoxen.’ ”

Quinn pressed the phone tighter to his ear. “Say again.”

“Supported by modern science.”

Quinn said, “Not that part.”