Night kills

37

Quinn decided that sex with Linda Chavesky was better each time. He knew it had to do with trust. They'd both entered the country of lovers cautiously, knowing now there was no turning back. But they were learning and were more at ease with each other every time.

Of course, there were adjustments for each of them to make. Right now, lying next to Linda in his bed, watching the dying light around the blinds indicate the sun was about to set, Quinn would have enjoyed smoking a cigar. He could imagine himself doing that with Linda propped up beside him smoking an after-sex cigarette. But he knew it was only a mental image and would never become reality. Hell, for all he knew, smoking a cigar in bed might have become illegal in New York when he wasn't paying attention.

It hadn't been that long ago when Pearl had lain there beside him in postcoital languor, but it seemed to have happened in another world. It wasn't so much time as it was events that turned life's pages.

Quinn did still think of Pearl as more than simply a colleague who happened to be his former lover. When Pearl had found out about Linda, he'd read something in her eyes. Suddenly, with their romantic relationship supplanted by another for him, a part of her wanted him back. But only a part of her.

Maybe it was always that way with ex-lovers, even after tempestuous relationships. A reflexive thing. The heart refusing to surrender completely a piece of its past. He did love Linda, but he wondered in an abstract way if a part of him wanted Pearl back.

"What are you thinking?" Linda asked.

"That the Yankees should trade for pitching."

"I thought maybe about the latest Torso Murder victim."

Images of corrupt flesh, exposed bone, dried blood, and fecal matter cascaded through Quinn's mind. He went quietly mad for a few seconds.

"I've learned to push that kind of stuff aside," he said.

"Are you happy?"

"About the Yankees?"

She laughed and poked a rigid forefinger between his ribs. It hurt quite a bit.

She nestled deeper in the bed, lying on her side next to him so she could look him in the eye over the arc of her pillow. "Nift is keeping a few things back about the latest torso victim," she said. "He's obviously decided to delay as long as possible before sending the postmortem information along to Renz."

"Then he's probably already sent it to somebody else."

"He has. To Deputy Chief Wes Nobbler."

Quinn knew Nobbler. He was deceptively ambitious and rumored to be bent. As with many such bureaucratic climbers, there was a cult of junior officers who'd hitched their wagons to his star. Nobbler wasn't someone to be taken lightly. "You sure?"

"Yes, but I couldn't prove it."

She fell silent but for the faint sound of her breathing.

Quinn waited, knowing when not to press. That trust thing. Linda had already stuck her neck way out for him. Would she stick it out even further?

He felt her shift position again next to him on the bed, rustling the mussed sheets and causing the box springs to ping and the mattress to give. She might be stirring with her reluctance to say anything more. She was risking her career for Quinn.

"She wasn't dead when the broomstick stake was inserted," she said.

The images came again, like disjointed snapshots. Push them aside. Stop the slide show.

"And it wasn't the same as the last stake," Linda added. "It was like the other, earlier ones, furniture oil and all."

"Was the stake the cause of death?"

"No. She was alive for quite a while after it was inserted."

God! "Did the bullets match?"

"Uh-huh. No doubt they were fired from the same gun used on all the other victims. A twenty-two caliber. Two shots to the heart, but the heart had already stopped."

"The matching broomstick stake, along with the bullets, pretty much leaves out a copycat killer," Quinn said. "But then why the variation with the victim before last, who was penetrated with a different kind of stake?"

"Anal penetration," Linda said.

"I can understand that," Quinn said. "Had to be, because the victim was a man."

"No," Linda said. "I mean with this last victim, the woman, there was anal penetration."

Quinn was surprised. Another deviation from the usual M.O. But with the usual kind of sharpened broomstick stake. And the usual gun.

And what about the latest victim? The latest chunk of meat lying cold and unidentified in the morgue. Meat that had once been a woman. If Quinn and his team had immediately gone storming after E-Bliss.org, even without the necessary proof to convict, might she still be alive?

Quinn doubted it.

Or convinced himself that he doubted it. If Jill Clark's story was accurate all the way down the line, the machinery leading to the last victim's death had been in place for weeks or longer.

He lay on his back with his fingers laced behind his head staring at the ceiling and trying to make sense of these latest developments. Psychotic killers stricken by compulsion didn't follow the kind of interior script exhibited by the Torso Murderer in any way other than with strict repetition. But in this case there were anomalies. Not a lot of them, but they were significant. The question was, what did they mean?

Almost certainly this latest victim was slain by the same killer, and if accumulating evidence pointed the same way, E-Bliss.org was behind all the murders. Pearl's theory that the sexual mutilations were acts of misdirection, to dupe the police into searching for a standard compulsive psychosexual serial killer, continued to prove out. Pearl and her canny insights.

On the other hand, the latest victims had been alive when the stakes penetrated them. They'd suffered long and terribly. The killer had committed acts of ritualistic sadism, exactly like those of a psychotic driven by compulsion. Not like the work of an E-Bliss.org employee, a stone-cold killer simply attending to business, grisly business though it might be.

Quinn had an idea where this latest development might be leading them.

He wished again he could smoke a cigar.

"Two killers acting as a team?" Linda asked.

"That would be my guess," Quinn said.

And that's all it is-a guess.

"I promise you we'll know for sure soon," he added.

Linda leaned over and kissed him on the lips.

"You're the detective."