Urge to Kill (38 page)

“We’re not interested in dogs or anything related to them,” Pearl said.

Quinn tried a smile on Avis. “Anyway, I don’t even see any dogs around here.” Playing dumb.

Avis knew better than to aim the shotgun anywhere close to them, but he pointed it farther off to the side, raised it, and fired one of the barrels. The noise was deafening, and Quinn could swear he heard pellets rattle through the branches of the willow at the side of the house.

“Shit!” said Pearl, instinctively dropping into a crouch.

Quinn remained upright and calm. “We’re here as part of a murder investigation,” he said. “And you’re digging yourself a hole with that gun.”

“
Murder
investigation? ’Cause of
dogs?
”

“Forget the goddamned dogs,” Pearl said, straightening up, but not all the way. She seemed hyperalert. Her black eyes were fixed, unafraid and calculating, on Avis.

He seemed to see in her somebody maybe not so unlike himself. Somebody who might shoot him.

“Forget the dogs?” he said, showing her he was heeding her words.

“I’m a cat person,” Pearl said, her bleak and menacing glare still trained on Avis.

“Well, I never killed any kinda person, nor animal I was never gonna eat.”

Quinn swallowed a bad taste in his mouth and then very slowly removed a slip of paper from his shirt pocket. He read off a list of dates and times.

“I need to know where you were on those nights,” he said.

“I was here.”

“You remember all of them?”

“I don’t need to remember any of ’em. I’m always here. And no, I don’t have an alibi. I was alone. Didn’t plan on havin’ to prove I wasn’t someplace else.”

“You mind if we look in the barn?” Pearl asked.

“I do, but you will anyway sooner or later.”

Seemingly ignoring them altogether, he turned his back on them and strode to the barn. He drew a ring of keys from a pocket of his threadbare jeans and unlocked the padlock, then swung both creaking doors open wide.

Pearl and Quinn stepped into the barn along with Avis. It was cooler in there, and surprisingly spacious and clean. Along one wall were wooden stalls, all of them empty. The bare dirt floor didn’t look as if it had been disturbed. There was a strong animal smell in the barn, but no animals. There was no straw in any of the stalls or on the barn floor.

“Why no animals?” Pearl asked Avis.

“Too much trouble. Not enough profit.”

Quinn and Pearl let Avis lead them out of the barn, keeping him ahead so they could see the shotgun.

“You gonna take me in?” Avis asked.

“That was never our intention,” Quinn said.

Avis went with them, still slightly ahead and off to the side, as they walked over to the Lincoln and stood in the glaring sun. It was a hot place, Avis’s farm, despite the shade trees. The breeze coming off the fields was warm and dry and carried the grit of dust.

“You comin’ back?” Avis asked.

“Might,” Quinn said. “And if I do and see that shotgun again, I’m gonna shove it up your ass sideways.”

Avis showed a flicker of surprise, but not the slightest fear. He watched them without expression as they got into the car.

As they drove away, Quinn saw in the outside mirror that Avis continued to watch, unmoving, the shotgun’s twin barrels still pointed at the ground.

“I really think he’d shoot somebody,” Pearl said, when they were back on the dirt road leading to the state highway.

“If he had the chance,” Quinn said, “and knew it wouldn’t get complicated afterward.”

“Not a knife man, though,” Pearl said. “Maybe with dead dogs, but not with live people.”

“That’s the way I figure him, too, but he’s hard to read.”

“He obviously loves his gun. Penis substitute, maybe. Your friend Zoe could tell you. Guns or knives, those are the usual toys for boys. They tend to settle on one or the other.”

“Usual isn’t always,” Quinn said tersely.

Pearl said, “Well,
duh!
” and turned on the radio.

He studied the items laid out on the bed and began methodically packing them into the blue canvas bag. The steel hook and portable drill were heavy, but he didn’t want to take the risk of fastening the hook beforehand, as he had with Terri Gaddis. Terri had been of average intelligence at best, but Mitzi was sharp and observant. She might happen to look straight up while showering and see the hook set in her bathroom ceiling, or she might even notice its shadow and glance up at it out of curiosity.

She’d certainly be curious, like most intelligent people. She’d want to know what the hook was for and how it had gotten there. Or if it had always been there and she’d never noticed it.

He couldn’t risk her asking a visitor, or the building super. So the hook would be installed just before it was needed.

Soon Mitzi would understand it all, when she could do nothing about it.

He smiled. Mitzi was smart, all right. His smartest so far.

That made it all the better.

Quinn and Pearl got back to the city around five o’clock. Rush-hour traffic. Heat chimeras dancing in the lowering light. They were headed south on the Roosevelt Parkway on the West Side. The Lincoln’s overworked air conditioner, its blower motor’s bad bearing chattering, was fighting the summer heat to a draw.

“So Avis was pretty much a bust,” Pearl said.

“Alphabetically, he’s still first on the suspect list,” Quinn said.

“Are you actually trying to make me feel better?”

“Like always,” Quinn said, exiting the parkway. He had a dinner date with Zoe and didn’t want to get tangled up with Pearl this evening. “Feds has got the unmarked. We’re not far from your apartment. Why don’t I drop you off? Save a subway ride.”

“It’s a deal if we stop someplace for dinner. Nothing fancy.”

“I’ll pull up someplace, and you can get some takeout,” Quinn said.

Pearl said nothing for a couple of beats, watching the traffic, then: “We dealing with Zoe here?”

He laughed, understanding why she was so talented at her work. “We are,” he admitted. “She and I have a dinner date this evening.”

Pearl shook her head and smiled sadly. “A cop and a psychoanalyst. What must she think of you?”

“We have something in common. We both help people.”

“She helps people like you, Quinn.”

He held tight to the steering wheel and braked to avoid running up the back of a cab. “Like me?”

“Obsessive-compulsive personalities. Tunnel-visioned fanatics. Pathetic workaholics. Psychotic subterranean Rambos.”

“At least I don’t hear voices.”

“You hear Renz,” Pearl said. “There must be better choices.”

“Who do you hear, Pearl? Dr. Phil? Your mother, telling you to get married to a skin doctor, a mole might be killing you?”

“I hear
you,
Quinn.”
Goddamn you!

They drove for a while in silence while Quinn negotiated heavy traffic on Broadway.

“If you listened to me,” Quinn said after a while, “you wouldn’t worry so much.”

Pearl stared straight ahead and said nothing. Said nothing, in fact, until Quinn pulled the Lincoln to the curb in front of her apartment building.

Still not looking at him, she said, “You ever get the feeling Zoe’s using you?”

“Using?”

“Observing. Studying. For God’s sake, Quinn, she’s a psychoanalyst on the make. And I don’t mean the sexual make. Not only, anyway.”

“We’re not going to talk about Zoe.”

“What, she might pick up vibes and get her feelings hurt?”

Pearl’s pique was gaining on her. His relationship with Zoe was obviously hurting her, and that wasn’t what he’d set out to do. “Pearl—”

“Someday you might be famous. Zoe’s gonna put you in the academic book she’s writing as a case study. You might be a whole chapter.”

“Pearl, I didn’t mean to insult you or hurt your—”

“I know the type. Screw and take notes, screw and take notes. Men are so damned unaware.”

Quinn placed his arms on the steering wheel, slumped forward, and rested his forehead on the backs of his hands.

He sat with the engine idling, realizing that he felt guilty. He’d upset Pearl, which wasn’t what he’d set out to do. He’d been defending himself—and Zoe—against Pearl’s unreasonable invective and innuendo.

He sat up straight and was about to remark that they’d gotten off on the wrong track in this conversation.

But Pearl was already out of the car, slamming the door and walking away.

He watched her stomp up the steps to her building entrance and push inside, not looking back at him. Pearl in a snit. What the hell was wrong with her, born with a burr up her ass and making everybody around her miserable? Now she was going to walk down to that deli on the corner and get heated-up garbage for supper. She’d feel sorry for herself and then go to bed early and pissed off. That was Pearl. He knew her. She’d be hard on herself and make herself miserable.

Her own fault.

Why should I care?

He realized he shouldn’t and drove away.

Screw and take notes.
He had to laugh.

Quinn dropped back by the office to see what Fedderman had come up with in trying to find some correlation between the Slicer murders and the .25-Caliber Killer victims. Fedderman had left a report of his day’s work, with and without Vitali and Mishkin, on Quinn’s desk.

After sitting down behind his desk, Quinn fired up a Cuban cigar and leaned back. No matter what he’d do to eliminate or disguise the tobacco scent, Pearl would notice it tomorrow morning and bring it to his attention. He wouldn’t tell her his conversation with her in the car was what made him want to smoke a cigar and relax, get his nervous system back together. That might give her some satisfaction. He blew smoke and smiled.
Pearl.

Halfway through his cigar, Quinn finished reading Fedderman’s report. He wasn’t surprised to learn that Feds hadn’t found a thing connecting the murders. Neither had Vitali or Mishkin. Quinn knew these were three people good at their jobs. If they couldn’t see any parallel, maybe there wasn’t any. It seemed the more they looked for one, the further away they got from Renz’s very political reasoning that there was only one killer committing both series of murders.

Of course, Renz might be a political animal, but he wasn’t a bad detective, and he still had his cop’s instincts, even if they weren’t as honed as before he’d become commissioner. Then there was Helen. She didn’t think it was impossible that both impulses, both MOs, could exist in the same person, the same twisted and compartmentalized mind.

Don’t we all compartmentalize? Isn’t that what keeps us sane? Or makes us part of the majority insanity that passes for normal?

Quinn drew on his cigar, rolled the illegal smoke around in his mouth, then exhaled. He set the report aside.

By way of twisted minds…

He booted up his computer and keyed in Dr. Alfred Beeker’s Web site.

There was no mention of Beeker being a doctor there, and he didn’t appear, unless he was one of the men wearing leather masks. There was lots of S&M literature, some of it amateurish and full of bad grammar. Then there were the photographs. Women in various poses of restraint, some of them not poses. Leather restraints, chains, elaborately knotted ropes. The women were mostly in their twenties and thirties, but some appeared younger. Probably they weren’t younger. Beeker was smart enough not to have shots of minors on his Web site.

Quinn clicked from one photo spread to another, scanning the thumbnails.

And there was Zoe, just as Beeker had said.

The poses were mild, without leather, chains, or whips. More like the sort of thing you’d see in
Playboy.
A younger Zoe who looked amazingly like the fifties pinup Bettie Page, mostly because of her similar hairdo. Zoe in a bikini, making a perfect O with her lips and pretending to be shocked and afraid. Zoe with her breasts exposed, smiling seductively and hugging a pink sheet to her lower body. Zoe seated nude in a wicker rocking chair, pretending to knit. Zoe wearing nothing but high-heeled shoes and bending gracefully to touch her toes.
Zoe, Zoe, Zoe…

Quinn realized he had an erection. That bastard Beeker. What if his patients knew about his kinky other self? Or maybe they did. Maybe because of his predilection for kinky sex he crossed the line with his patients. Maybe those were his patients in his photographs.

Maybe they’re his patients. Jesus!

Quinn’s cigar, propped in the ashtray, had gone out. He relit it and shut down the computer.

He sat smoking for a while, thinking as he stared into the haze of his exhalations, as if the smoke were made up of his musings and might reveal some meaning.

He wanted to see Zoe and knew that if he called her she could be talked into inviting him to her apartment. But he didn’t want Beeker to be a part of their relationship in any way. Better if he waited a while, until the photos he’d just seen had faded in his memory.

He could wait for a while to see Zoe again. Certainly until dinner.

Later on, he’d see Beeker.

As soon as Lavern carefully and quietly closed the door behind her, she heard her husband’s voice: “You’re late and you’re drunk.”

“I was with Bess.” The first person Lavern could think of who’d back her up. “We sat in the restaurant after dinner and talked, and time flew.”

“You were drinking.”

She knew there was no way he could know for sure if she was drunk, as she’d just come in and the living room light hadn’t even been turned on. She was facing absolute blackness and could only be a dark silhouette against the dim light of the hall. Hobbs was completely invisible in the dark. “We had wine for dinner, then a few drinks afterward. That’s all.”

She didn’t tell him she’d skipped dinner and drunk alone, and then with a man in a lounge far from the neighborhood where she might have been recognized and word might get back to Hobbs. Nothing had happened between her and the man (
Victor something,
she thought,
but maybe not
…), and in fact both had been too drunk to do anything about it if they’d felt any real sexual attraction. They’d been asked to leave and objected mildly, then were actually hurried and pushed from the place by a burly bartender.