Serial

89

Quinn decided his wisest course of action would be to continue his investigation quietly, so there would be a minimum of interference.

Badgering Julie Flack would provoke plenty of interference. Morris Henshaw would see to that, especially if Renz or the media learned what Quinn was doing. Besides, Henshaw had left little doubt that he’d take the case to the wire to establish that his client was unaware of her purpose in Link Evans’s activities. It wouldn’t matter anyway, if Quinn was right and there was more to the Skinner murders than had been uncovered so far.

The next step, Quinn decided, should be what he or one of his detectives would have done if the debacle at the Evans house in Missouri hadn’t occurred. If the investigation hadn’t ended in gunfire. He decided to question the man who’d wrongly gone to prison for the Jane Nixon rape. Who had motive to try to kill her.

His name was Scott Trent, and he’d been living in New York since his release from prison a year ago. He was employed by something called Amalgamated Cartage, and had an apartment on the Lower East Side.

“He’s at work,” Trent’s neighbor said, when Quinn was knocking on the door to Trent’s walk-up apartment. It was on the second floor of an old brick building that was bare on one side where the adjoining structure had been torn down. There was a faded advertisement for Rheingold Beer on the exposed and discolored old bricks.

Quinn turned to see a woman at least in her eighties leaning out from the partly opened door of the adjoining apartment. She was wearing a gray robe dusted with crumbs, had long gray hair in a style better suited to the head of a twenty-year-old, and a face as wrinkled as dollar bills that had been in circulation too long.

“I’m Cranston,” she said, peering through narrowed eyes at Quinn. “ Mrs. Cranston.”

“At work where?” Quinn asked.

“Could be drivin’. Could be preachin’.”

Quinn flashed his identification in its leather folder, letting her think NYPD. Her eyesight obviously wasn’t much good anyway.

“That a wallet?”

“Sort of.”

“You offerin’ me some kinda bribe?”

“Showing you my identification.”

“I don’t care a fig about your education.”

“Who I am.”

“I don’t give a flyin’ fig who or what you are,” Mrs. Cranston said.

“Be that as it may,” Quinn said. He looked for a hearing aid in either of Mrs. Cranston’s ears. Didn’t see one.

“No say or nay about it. I don’t much like Trent, and I don’t much like his friends. Wish to hell he’d quit rehearsin’ his sermons late at night, loud as if he had an audience of thousands. If I could afford it, I’d buy me a hearin’ aid just so’s I could turn it off and use it as a plug, so as not to hear all that rantin’ and ravin’ about goodness, and not takin’ into account an old woman’s sleep.”

“Hypocrisy,” Quinn said.

“Hippopotamus?”

“Where does he preach? Other than his apartment?”

“Street corners. Says he found religion in prison. Like somebody accidentally dropped it and he could use it. Found new ways to steal from good folks, too, I bet. All prison is anyways is a college for criminals.”

“Which street corners?”

“Who the hell cares?”

Quinn tried Trent’s apartment door and found it locked. Better not let himself in, with Mrs. Cranston keeping a constant if clouded eye on things.

“Do you think he’s working today?” he asked.

“Worming?”

“Working. At work. Working.”

“Who gives a fig?”

Quinn thanked Mrs. Cranston for her time and left the building. He was relieved to see that his car hadn’t been stolen or vandalized. He thought he saw Mrs. Cranston peeking out from behind a curtain as he set out for Amalgamated Cartage.

It was just off Eleventh Avenue, not far from the docks. A billboard-size, weathered sign proclaimed that the flat, almost windowless brick and cinder-block building it rested upon was Amalgamated Cartage. The blacktop lot was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence topped with razor wire, but a wide gate was open. There was a line of overhead doors along a truck dock running the length of the building, broken only by a flight of wooden stairs leading to a graypainted steel door that allowed access by foot.

Half a dozen truck trailers were backed into loading doors. Trucks were hooked up to two of them. The overhead doors where the trailers had truck cabs attached were raised, and Quinn could see in past the sides of the trailers. There was activity inside the building, men walking, orange forklifts moving back and forth, clanking over the steel bridges that allowed access to and from the trailers. The trailers dipped and rose as the lifts ran in and out, depositing or removing pallets of freight. A driver sat in one of the truck cabs, a dusty blue Peterbilt, engaged in some kind of paperwork attached to a clipboard. He seemed to be paying no attention to Quinn.

Quinn climbed the sturdy wooden stairs and found the door unlocked. He opened it and stepped through into a vast warehouse whose steel shelving seemed to contain mostly long rolls of something covered with brown paper.

The men involved in loading rolls into two of the trailers glanced over at Quinn but didn’t show much interest.

A hefty redheaded man in too-tight jeans and a black muscle shirt emerged from what looked like an unpainted plywood office and swaggered toward Quinn. He had a fullsleeve tattoo on his beefy right arm. In his right hand was a clipboard.

“Help you?” he asked, without a smile.

“You can if Scott Trent works here.”

“He does.”

Quinn showed his ID. It didn’t seem to impress the man.

“You the boss?” Quinn asked.

The man nodded.

“I need to talk with Trent, is all. Won’t take more than a few minutes.”

“His minutes belong to the company during working hours.”

Quinn moved closer to the man. “I’m working under the auspices of the NYPD, and I didn’t come here looking for a pissing contest, but I can win one.”

Something in his voice made the Amalgamated boss look closer at Quinn and then blink. He shrugged. “Okay. Makes me no difference. He’s out sitting in that truck cab, checking over his manifest. At least, he damned well better be.”

“I noticed him when I came in,” Quinn said. “Tell me about him.”

“Ain’t got the time.”

“Are you sure you can’t find the time?” Quinn asked, in a way that prompted the boss to think about it.

“Aw, screw it,” the boss said. “There’s not much to tell. Trent’s been working here about a year as an over-the-road trucker. He ain’t got much seniority so he takes the long runs, delivering on Thursdays or Fridays, and has weekends to himself before turnaround. That’s so the company doesn’t have to pay him overtime on weekends. So he has weekends off here in the city, where he lives. Listen, the man’s an ordained minister of some sort. The cops have already been here talking to him. He wouldn’t attack anybody. He’d pray for them instead.”

“Amen,” Quinn said, He nodded to the boss and moved toward the gray steel door.

“Don’t take up too much of his time.”

“Not to worry,” Quinn said. “I know it’s money.”

He walked the length of the trailer that was hooked up to the blue Peterbilt truck, then around to the driver’s side of the cab. He rapped on the metal door with his knuckles. A man about forty, wearing gray work pants and a black T-shirt like the boss’s, only with AMALGAMATED lettered in white on the chest, opened the door and looked down at him.

Quinn flashed his ID as he had with the boss. Trent gave it only a glance.

“Let’s have a talk,” Quinn said. “I cleared it with your boss.”

“I don’t have much time. Gotta be in Georgia tomorrow with this carpet pad.”

“Everybody here is in a rush,” Quinn said.

Trent set aside the clipboard he’d been holding, tucked a pencil in the T-shirt’s saggy pocket, and swung down from the cab.

Quinn saw that he was wearing brown Doc Martens boots. He was slim and muscular, slightly shorter than Quinn.

“This about Jane Nixon?” he asked.

Quinn said that it was.

“I already talked to a police detective,” Trent said. “They accepted my alibi.” He dug into his hip pocket for his wallet and handed Quinn a ticket stub for God Is My Sales Manager. The address on the stub was in Lower Manhattan.

“This is what?” Quinn asked.

“A motivational talk. I was there listening to it the night Jane was attacked,” he said, as if that settled the matter and now he could get back to work.

“Truck drivers do much selling?”

“No. That’s the problem. It’s why I’m thinking about getting into sales.”

“You know the name Lincoln Evans?” Quinn asked.

“Sure. It’s been all over the news.”

Quinn’s cell phone abruptly vibrated in his pocket. He drew it out to silence it, but when he glanced at it and saw Pearl’s name, he thought he’d better take the call. He excused himself and moved a few steps away, half turning his back for privacy but leaving enough angle so he could keep an eye on Trent.

“Whadya got, Pearl?”

“I did more checking on Jane Nixon’s exonerated rapist, like you told me,” Pearl said. “He’s been mixed up in some bad stuff, and used forged papers and different identities, buying and selling stolen goods. The name Scott Trent is an alias he was using at the time of his rape conviction, and he’s been using that name in New York since his release.”

“You don’t say,” Quinn said, trying to sound casual in case Trent was tuned in.

Quinn suddenly remembered Trent’s words: “Gotta be in Georgia tomorrow with this carpet pad.”

“Quinn, he’s also Beth Evans’s former husband, Roy Brannigan.” Pearl gave Quinn a few seconds to absorb what she’d said. “He supposedly raped Jane Nixon not long after he left Beth in Missouri and found his way to New York.”

“And the DNA evidence that sprang him?”

“He was convicted on blood type and Nixon’s identification. Turns out it wasn’t his blood.”

“Then he really was innocent.”

“That time, anyway,” Pearl said. “Like a lot of those other guys who’ve been set free thanks to DNA.”

Quinn kept his voice low and told Pearl where he was. She’d know what to do.

“Be careful,” he heard her say, as he broke the connection.

Trent-or Brannigan-hadn’t moved while Quinn was talking, but there was something different about his stance, a subtle tenseness. How much had he overheard?

Quinn smiled and stuffed the phone back in his pocket. “I do have a few more questions about Jane Nixon,” he said, letting Trent think the conversation wasn’t about anything he had to fear. “The woman you were convicted of raping.”

“I was later exonerated. DNA don’t lie.”

“Far as we know.” Quinn worked his way closer.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Brannigan’s eyes were beginning to roam. Quinn knew the signs.

“Listen, Scott-”

Brannigan hit him hard in the stomach with his fist, and then slammed the clipboard into his head.

Quinn shook off the clipboard blow easily enough, but he sank to his knees trying to catch his breath. Brannigan was on the run, and he had a stride like a deer’s.

When Quinn was just beginning to suck in air, the steel door opened at the top of the steps and the big boss peered down at him.

“What the shit’s goin’ on here?” he asked.

Quinn tried to speak but only made a squeaking sound. He raised a forefinger for the boss to give him a few seconds.

The boss came halfway down the steps and leaned so he could get a better look at Quinn.

“The employees park in this lot?” Quinn managed to wheeze.

“No. They park in a lot out front.”

“That the only gate?” Quinn tried to motion with his head, but his head didn’t move.

“That’s it,” the boss said.

“Lock it,” Quinn said.

“Says who?”

“Me,” Quinn said, and drew his police special from its holster. “And when you’re finished, go back inside and lock that door.”

When the boss was headed toward the chain-link gate, Quinn worked his way to his feet. Holding the old revolver at the ready, he began moving cautiously along the line of trailers, now and then pausing to peek beneath them. He tasted blood trickling down from the clipboard cut on his forehead, but it was Roy Brannigan’s blood that he smelled.