In for the Kill

61

Lauri hoped she'd pecked out the right phone number. She still felt woozy from last night. That would teach her not to drink too much. Or love too much. Three drinks. She remembered Joe telling her that had been her total. There was a lot of last night missing from her memory, but what she did remember she liked.

Joe…What a wonderful lover he was…wonderful everything!

Sitting on the edge of her bed, listening to Joe's phone ring and ring on the other end of the connection, another dizzy spell made her sway slightly. Was this what it was to be lovesick?

Three more rings.

She was about to hang up when he answered the phone.

"It's Lauri," she said. "Remember me?"

"Forever. I was hoping you'd call."

"How come you took so long to pick up?"

"I was in the shower. Slept late this morning. I was really tired. Can't figure out why."

She smiled. "Try harder and I bet you'll remember."

"You're right. It must have something to do with why I was hoping it was you on the phone. You sleep okay?"

"Deeper than I ever slept in my life."

"Any regrets?"

"God, no!" She sounded choked. She could see the taut material of her blouse over her breasts vibrating in time with her beating heart. "Now I'm sitting here thinking how much I miss you."

"What a sweet thing to say!" His voice broke with sincerity.

She was glad to know she wasn't the only one with a tight throat. "It's only been nine hours and twenty-six minutes."

"Way too long," he said. He always seemed to know exactly what to say. Unlike…someone else.

"We can do something about that," she told him.

He laughed softly. She saw in her mind's eye the promise in his brown eyes, the curve of his soft upper lip. She had his face memorized and wanted the image never to fade away. "Problem is," he said, "I have to take a flight out of town shortly on business. I'll be gone for a few days."

She swallowed her disappointment. Her alarm. Was he brushing her off? Lying? "I could go with you to the airport and see you off." Don't sound like such a fawning fool!

"Too late for that. I've already got a car coming." He was silent for a few beats while her heart plummeted. Then: "Lauri, I was thinking of something special for the evening of the day I get back."

"It can't be more special than our last evening together."

He laughed again. "This would be a different kind of special. Dinner at one of the best restaurants I know, the Longitude Room in the Meredith Hotel. It's not the Hungry U but I think you'll like it."

"Will I like afterward?"

"If I have anything to do with it."

"You'll have everything to do with it."

"Not another cab ride," he said. "You deserve better than that. I'll reserve a room. We can wake up together and order room service the next morning."

Her heart was on the rise now, soaring. She was determined to seem calm and sophisticated. "Sounds wonderful." That was good, not too eager. Very adult.

"I noticed you have a cell phone. Give me your number and I'll call you when I'm back in the city."

She did, in her newfound calm voice. Her emotions were still whirling, but not so fast. She had a handle on the situation now.

"Don't mention this to anyone," he said. "I don't want any trouble for you while I'm out of town."

"Trouble?"

"You might not have noticed, Lauri, but a certain someone is almost as hung up on you as I am."

"Wormy? I can't see him causing any real trouble. He's not much more than an annoyance."

"You might be surprised."

"Now you sound like my-"

"Who?"

"Nobody. If you think it's wise, I'll keep quiet about us. I'm not the blabbermouth type anyway."

"I know you're not. I'll call you soon as I get back, darling."

"I'll be waiting."

They hung up without him saying he loved her. That was okay. Darling would do for now. Lauri wasn't discouraged. She knew something about men. He'd get around to the L word. She'd see to that.

"He'll make you wait," Helen the profiler said. "He's tantalizing you. Stringing out the suspense."

"This isn't a mystery novel," Quinn said.

"He thinks it is. And he's the main character."

"Doesn't the main character usually get the girl?" Fedderman said.

"He's gotten the girl too many times already," Renz said. He was seated behind his desk, chewing on a dead cigar, maybe trying to get across to them that he obeyed regulations and never smoked when he was in his office, which was a crock. He carefully propped the cigar in a thick glass ashtray converted to a paper-clip container, as if the cigar were burning and he didn't want it to go out. "This is the morning of the fifth day for our Myrna-as-bait operation. Pretty soon I'll have to reassign some people so they can chase down criminals who aren't shadows."

"Smooth move," Pearl said. "It'll go over great in the media if Mom gets snuffed."

Quinn threw a glance her way. They'd all been thinking the same thing, but she had to say it.

"I don't intend to let that happen," Renz said, looking hard at Pearl, "and I don't appreciate the sarcasm."

Pearl said nothing.

"I'll take your silence as an apology," Renz said, after about a minute and a half of nothing but traffic sounds from outside.

Good as you're going to get, Quinn thought. He glanced over warningly at Fedderman, who looked about to swallow his tongue. Fedderman seemed to find nothing in life so funny as Pearl being Pearl.

Renz pressed on. "I came up with an idea. Thought I'd run it past you."

Helen the profiler, who'd been leaning with a bony hand on the window frame, straightened up her lanky body and paid closer attention.

"Let's hear it," Quinn said, shifting in his chair and trying to sound enthusiastic. He reminded himself that Renz was a good cop when he wasn't trying to think too hard. His shrewdness seemed to be confined to his political maneuvering.

"We need to get this psycho off the dime," Renz said. "Get him to bust a move. I think Helen would agree that psychologically he needs some kind of jolt."

"Sort of maybe," Helen said cautiously. She crossed her long arms, an impressive show of muscle and tendon.

"He's feeling the increasing pressure, you said," Renz told her. "Especially now with Mom in town."

"True," Helen said.

"So it might not take much to prompt him into action."

"True."

Quinn was thinking that so far he hadn't heard an idea, hoping Pearl wouldn't point that out. He glanced over at her and she favored him with a razor-thin smile. Mind reader.

"I think we need to use the media again," Renz said. "Just a short piece about Myrna still being in town, along with a photograph. It could be taken in an interrogation room, or maybe even in this office, and we say she's given a deposition, quote her as pleading with her wayward son to give himself up."

"Nothing new so far," Quinn said, getting impatient and also figuring he might beat Pearl to the punch. He could almost hear Pearl ticking.

"You'll be standing over Myrna," Renz said to Quinn. "Maybe with your hand on her shoulder, and you and she could be looking into each other's eyes. Drive our sicko killer wild."

"Hint at a romantic attachment?" Pearl asked.

Renz nodded. "You got it. Hint broadly."

Fedderman rubbed his chin thoughtfully, his white shirt cuff just beginning to come unbuttoned. "Myrna's still a good-looking woman," he said. "It'd be easy to believe an attachment."

"Maybe you should be it," Pearl said.

Fedderman looked aghast. "I'm hardly in her league."

"Such modesty, when it's convenient. Other times you're Brad Pitt."

"It's Quinn he hates," Helen said. "Quinn is his great nemesis, maybe even the lost father figure who deserted him. Our killer simultaneously hates and respects Quinn."

Many do, Pearl thought.

"So he's all the more likely to respond," Renz said.

"It's possible he'll respond with an oedipal rage," Helen said, "vented at his mother rather than Quinn. When it comes to people he loves, hates, and fears, all at the same time, Mom's at the top of the list. It's Mom he's repetitiously killing."

"Isn't this all getting way too complicated?" Pearl asked.

"Maybe not," Fedderman said. "We're dealing with a complicated psycho."

"It'll all seem simple when the cuffs are clicked on him," Renz said. He stuck the dead cigar back in his mouth.

"Or a bullet brings him down," Fedderman added.

"I di'n' hear 'at," Renz said around the cigar.

Quinn wasn't sure he liked this at all. Still, if it might work…

He glanced over at Helen, who was idly rocking back and forth simply by flexing her long muscles, looking more like a decathlon champion than a psychologist. He knew her background. She wasn't just Helen Iman, NYPD. She was Dr. Iman, Psy. D. The expert in the room.

She caught him looking at her, misreading him. Maybe.

"Have you ever secretly thought of sleeping with Myrna Kraft?" she asked him.

"If I were a spider."

Pearl was silent.

There was a mood in the office no one quite understood.

Renz removed the dead cigar from his mouth. "So whaddya think?" he asked the room in general.

"I think it's a brilliant idea," Helen said. "But be ready for whatever you wake up."