Mister X

57

They were in the office at ten the next morning, Quinn, Pearl, Fedderman, and Erin Keller. Addie was still at the hospital, where she'd volunteered to wait for a plainclothes detective and a uniform who'd been assigned to guard Lisa Bolt. Lisa hadn't yet regained consciousness. Vitali and Mishkin were in the field, working the Lilly Branston case.

The air conditioner, already under assault by what was fast becoming a record heat wave, was making an underlying hammering sound as it hummed away. Indoors, condensation had appeared as a thin trail of rusty water trickling down the wall beneath the ancient unit. Nobody mentioned either the hammering sound or the stain on the wall. They didn't want to jinx the thing.

"That's her, all right," Erin said, looking at the photo on Lisa Bolt's Ohio driver's license. "Same woman as in the photograph you showed me earlier."

Quinn didn't doubt that it was, but he wanted Erin's official corroboration. He was building his case. Sooner or later, this mess was going be in court. He hoped.

"Are you sure you've never seen this woman before?" he asked Erin.

"She's a total stranger."

"And Chrissie never even mentioned her name?"

"Never."

"If you do remember anything-"

"I know," Erin interrupted. "I'll call you right away."

She left, probably to seek someplace cooler.

The door opened, and Addie came in. She was wearing the same clothes as last night. Except for what might be the slightest sign of bags beneath her eyes, she looked fresh and wide awake. Pearl knew that she, on the other hand, looked a premature sixty years old.

Everyone said hello or nodded good morning to Addie, and she smiled and returned their greetings. "Bolt is still out of it," she said, "but the doctors sound more optimistic."

She assured Quinn that Lisa was safely under guard, and then wandered over toward the coffee machine. She shot a sideways glance at Pearl with a slight smile. Co-conspirators, after baring their souls and ambitions last night. Members of the new sisterhood.

Pearl thought, Screw that.

When Addie had her coffee, she came back and sat on the edge of Fedderman's desk. Though her coffee mug had her initials on it, she still hadn't gotten a desk of her own. She didn't seem to mind. Not having a permanent workstation gave her the opportunity to flit around as she pleased.

"There's something I've been turning over in my mind," she said.

Quinn said, "Turn it toward us."

"When Lisa Bolt does come around and start to talk," Addie said, "I wouldn't expect too much. Whatever her reason for impersonating Chrissie Keller, she might not know it's an impersonation."

"Say what?" Fedderman said. He was seated behind his desk but had rolled his chair to the side so he had a three-quarter view of Addie.

Addie crossed her long legs. Always with the legs, thought Pearl, watching Fedderman's involuntary gaze shift to the roundness of Addie's derriere on his desk.

Got 'em comin' an' goin', girl.

"We all know about the amazing synchronism of twins," Addie said. "How sometimes they think or act almost as one person. If Lisa Bolt's impersonation of Chrissie is some kind of mental aberration, she might actually consider herself to be Chrissie-or the dead twin's counterpart."

"A third twin," Fedderman said.

"Mathematically impossible, but it captures the idea. We might have something like triplets on our hands."

"That sounds insane," Pearl said.

"Oh, it is," Addie said. "We also have a mother fixation here, demonstrated by the removal of the victims' nipples. The carved letter X, as if the victim is being negated out of existence and perhaps even memory. Not only that, if we have personality transfer, Lisa might do anything to maintain her delusion. If she thinks she really is the late Tiffany Keller's sibling, she might attempt to kill her mother, the one person who knows she's neither twin."

"Beyond insane," Pearl said. She didn't like it when investigations started straying into the occult. This world alone was hard enough to figure out.

"Maybe not," Quinn said. "Most of us here in this room have seen stranger things."

Pearl looked at Addie. "You must have done a lot of thinking in that waiting room."

"I'm sure we both did," Addie said.

"It's not a hypothesis we should work on yet," Quinn said. "It all depends on what Lisa Bolt has to say when she gains consciousness."

"If," Fedderman said.

The door swung open again, letting out more cool air to be devoured by the hot morning. Letting in Vitali and Mishkin. Both of them looked awake enough after their hard night. Mishkin nodded. His brown suit was pressed. His white shirt looked fresh and was neatly tucked into beltless pants held up by suspenders over his surprisingly flat stomach. Even his brushy mustache looked trimmer than usual.

Sal appeared rumpled but presentable. He winked at Fedderman. "Who'd have guessed you could outrun a gazelle?"

"State runner-up as a high school miler," Fedderman said.

"Long time ago, high school," Mishkin said.

"It comes back now and then," Fedderman said. "I even get the occasional pimple and want to do Mary Lou Minowski in the backseat."

"You knew Mary Lou too?" Sal said.

"Enough of this testosterone talk," Pearl said. "It's wearing."

Vitali walked over to where Quinn was seated and laid something that looked like a flattened lipstick on Quinn's desk.

"This is what?" Quinn asked.

"A flash drive, or memory stick," Vitali said. "The killer took Branston's notebook computer with him, but he overlooked this. It was down behind the cushion on the victim's desk chair."

"You plug it into a USB port on a computer," Pearl said, "and you can copy files to it. It's like a disk drive only smaller and without moving parts. Some of them have tons of memory."

Quinn brightened. "You mean Lilly Branston might have been backing up her computer with this thing?"

"Probably not automatically," Pearl said. "Flash drives are used more for storage than for systematic backup."

"An actual clue," Quinn said.

"The killer's first mistake," Fedderman said.

"Maybe," Addie said.

"Gimme," Pearl said.

Pearl worked at her desk with the flash drive until almost three o'clock, not even taking time for a proper lunch. She'd used a plastic fork to eat a takeout salad while exploring the world of Lilly Branston's deceptively tiny memory stick.

At first she'd been disappointed. Much of the little device's capacity was unused. What was there were mostly condo and co-op units listed with the Willman Group, sometimes entire residential buildings. The Willman Group's website was set up so a prospective buyer could take a virtual tour of the property, showing even the views out the windows. Pearl thought that if she was in the market for a million-dollar-plus apartment, she'd be in heaven-if she had a million dollars plus.

This wasn't heaven. She was a detective and would probably never see a million dollars that wasn't stolen.

Her spirits lifted when she opened a file titled "C and C." She soon learned the letters stood for Coffee and Conversation, and it was a matchmaking site for professionals and people with arcane interests, seeking companionship with people of the same ilk.

Not unusual in New York, where minutes moved faster than sixty seconds, and people didn't have time for the usual rituals of cultivating friends and lovers. The city had figured a faster way that suited its occupants.

C and C had a feature that distressed Pearl but must have had great appeal to its clients. Joiners posted their personal profile (photo optional) and ways to contact them-usually their e-mail addresses. There was no way for anyone else, including C and C itself, to track who had contacted whom. Clients made person-to-person contact without involving the company, which apparently made its money from advertising. Privacy was assured.

Pearl knew that the odds were good that Lilly had met her killer through C and C, but how to find him was a different matter.

She must have used screen grabs to transfer profiles to the flash drive. Lilly's e-mail history had disappeared with her computer. Her online service might have a record of it, but obtaining that was legally tricky. And there was always the possibility that she'd contacted another C and C client by phone. Maybe a public phone. Or maybe, as some of the C and C profiles suggested, anyone interested in the client could meet him or her at a certain place and time. And there was always the possibility that computers in Internet cafes were used to make initial contact. Those computers used the cafe's online service, ensuring anonymity in case extramarital lovers or pornographic sites were visited.

Pearl scrolled through the hundreds of "Male Seeking Female" C and C profiles. Who of these hopefuls might have interested Lilly Branston? Several were in sales, as she was. There were quite a few in real estate. There were CEOs, entrepreneurs, lobbyists, artists, scientists, inheritors of wealth, educators, Broadway producers, sports figures, government bureaucrats. No cops or private investigators.

Nothing here for Pearl. Too much here for Lilly. Quite probably Pearl had just seen the real or assumed name of the Carver. Perhaps even seen his photograph. But there was no way to single him out.

Or maybe there was. Maybe in the hands of a real expert belonging to the right generation, a computer might be able to narrow the search and hit pay dirt. The NYPD had such tech-nerd wizards.

Pearl decided to check with Quinn first. If he agreed, they could turn the matter over to Renz and his NYPD. Renz could make himself useful. Take credit for the idea. And at some point return the favor.

Pearl smiled. Thinking like Addie now. Men as stepping-stones.

Addie. Pearl thought it might behoove her, and maybe Quinn, to dig deeper into Addie's past.

The information after the attempt on Addie's life in Detroit was easy enough to find, and to verify. If her attacker hadn't broken off the assault, she surely would have been killed. Then, in truly heroic fashion, she'd come back from the brutality of the attack and earned her doctorate and become a criminologist.

There was plenty of press on her, and much of it generated by Addie. She'd become a relentless self-promoter and made herself into a local talking head on TV whenever crime was the subject.

Once Addie had almost lost her life and become truly focused, there'd been no stopping her.

It was Addie Price before the attempt on her life that interested Pearl.

There was no information on her before that date.

Nothing.

Pearl had a pretty good idea why.