Urge to Kill

51

Sal Vitali sat at his desk in the almost-deserted squad room. All was quiet, except for a printer industriously buzzing away somewhere and an occasional muffled shout from the holding cells upstairs. Most of the detectives were out in the field. Only Don Mackey, a dogged old cop nearing retirement, was at his desk over near the window, working the phone.

Sal’s partner, Mishkin, sat across from him. They’d cleared off most of the desktop, and on it, scattered over a pristine white sheet of printer paper, were the items the crime scene unit had vacuumed up from the Antonian Hotel corridor where Floyd Becker had been shot and killed before his body was dragged outside. There was lint, a bit of brown plastic that had come off the end of a shoelace (not Becker’s, and probably not his killer’s), lint, three human hairs, and more lint. None of the hairs was the victim’s, but that didn’t mean the killer’s hair was there. The hairs could have come from anyone passing along the corridor.

Sal had read somewhere that the average person lost approximately eighty individual hairs per day. On most people that hair grew back, but on Sal’s head, he wasn’t so sure. It seemed to him that he left at least eighty hairs in the drain every morning when he showered. But maybe that was because he had so much of the stuff to begin with. The other detectives in the precinct kidded him sometimes about his hair, called him Columbo. Sal bore up under it and pretended to be annoyed. Like he had a choice.

Quinn might not approve of him examining the vacuum bag items, believing the Slicer and his gutted dead women, not .25-Caliber Killer victims, were Sal and Mishkin’s bailiwick, but so what? This was supposed to be one case, with one psycho killer, so in Sal’s view it was one big bag of shit.

What Sal really wanted to do was break both cases, collar two killers, show the bastards in the puzzle palace they were overthinking this thing. Renz and Helen the profiler figured there was one killer with two distinctly different MOs, who killed women one way and men another. Sal didn’t see it as likely. They all must have fallen under the spell of Helen the profiler, who as far as Sal was concerned might be a female impersonator, with that lanky body, those long bony fingers, and that chin. Not a bad-looking one, though. Some of those transgenders could fool you.

“Nothing we might be able to use but the hair, Sal,” Mishkin said, squinting down at the sparse assortment on the desktop. “And not even that unless we get a match.”

“The little plastic doodad from the end of a shoelace,” Sal said.

“If that’s what it is,” Mishkin said.

“Lab says that’s what it is.”

“Then when we get a suspect, we look close at his shoelaces. Especially if they’re brown.”

“And his hair,” Sal said.

Mishkin sat back and wiped his hand down his face, then smoothed out his mustache as if it needed it. “That break-in at Quinn and his team’s office, Sal—you think it’s connected to any of this?”

“Doubt it,” Sal said. “Probably just some asshole looking for money to score some dope. Probably didn’t even know the place was a cop shop.”

“The guy did a neat job picking the lock.”

“Smart asshole. Or maybe somebody forgot to lock the door when they left, and the guy walked right in.”

“Happens,” Mishkin said.

Very carefully, using tweezers, Sal picked up each item from the vacuuming and placed it back in its plastic evidence bag.

“Happens,” he agreed, when he was finished.

“There were three hairs, right?” Mishkin said.

Sal looked at him. “Right.”

“Just wanted to make sure,” Mishkin said. “Wouldn’t want one of your many hairs to get in with them.”

Sal kept looking at him, wondering if he’d just been ragged, but Mishkin was wearing his usual bland and amiable expression.

“You want some coffee, Sal?”

“Sure.”

You never could tell with Mishkin.

The man who’d broken into the Seventy-ninth Street office and knocked out Quinn sat at an inside table in the Aces Up diner on Amsterdam, sipping cold green tea and watching people and traffic stream past outside. Twin parallel lines of concern were etched vertically above the bridge of his nose. He was still unhappy about how his plan to become the hunter rather than the hunted had turned out.

The break-in had been easy enough. He smiled at the thought of it. How ironic that the police would take over office space and not concern themselves with the quality of the lock on the door. That was exactly how bureaucracies worked. Or didn’t work. With a good set of picks in expert hands, the lock had yielded after only a few minutes.

The plan had been to enter and obtain information, then leave without any indication that he’d been there. He would then know what Quinn knew, and Quinn would be unaware of it. That might make the game somewhat less interesting, but definitely safer.

A waiter came and placed the tuna salad sandwich he’d ordered on the table before him, then topped off his iced tea.

He had been hungry, and as he replenished his body with food and energy, optimism gradually replaced his concern. Last night—or early this morning—might have gone a lot worse. The suddenness of Quinn’s entrance and discovery of an intruder had surprised both of them. And in the ensuing struggle to escape, he had injured Quinn, given him something to think about other than his hunt.

Quinn wasn’t a young man, but there was an obvious strength in him, and he knew how to fight, so it was lucky that he hadn’t had time to set himself for the intruder’s attack. The game might have ended right there. As it was, the break-in had been partially successful in that it might have thrown Quinn and his detectives off their game.

He took a sip of tea.

Yes, it could have been worse.

Now Quinn would walk with the added dimension of fear, the cold tingle up the spine that came with the realization that stalker might at any moment become stalked. The intruder smiled. He’d been in that position and knew how it felt. It seemed to turn the world upside down.

Not that it would keep Quinn subdued for long. He’d know how to handle fear. He was an old hand at his game, a seasoned hunter.

But now he was a hunter who would occasionally glance back over his shoulder.

What was that legendary baseball pitcher’s adage? Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.

One day Quinn might look back too late, and there would be what had been gaining on him, suddenly caught up.

Quinn was breathing heavily with the effort of keeping his weight off Zoe as he rolled from on top of her and onto his cool side of the bed. He blew out a breath toward the ceiling, then turned his head to the side to look across his pillow at her.

Zoe was still on her back, one of her bare legs gracefully bent at the knee. Her nude body was glistening with perspiration. She and Quinn were both sweating, but the ceiling fan was on and would soon cool their bodies. The fan made a barely discernable tick, tick, tick as the broad wicker blades rotated, as if to punctuate the room’s isolation from the outside world.

Zoe noticed he was staring at her, and looked back at him with a kind of dreamy expression in her half-closed eyes.

“You okay?” Quinn asked.

“Men ask that a lot.”

“How do you know?”

“My patients. I know a lot of secrets.”

Quinn stared up at the ceiling, thinking about his visit with Alfred Beeker.

Tick, tick, tick…

“I am,” Zoe said.

“Huh?”

“Okay. Better than okay.” She reached over and gently touched his arm. “What are you thinking?”

“Women ask that a lot,” Quinn said.

“Do men ever answer honestly?”

“Sometimes.”

“So answer honestly now.”

“I’m thinking I’m a little old for a nooner.”

She slapped his arm, laughing. “Bastard!”

He leaned over, kissed her forehead, then climbed out of the bed. “If I can figure out how to open your fancy refrigerator, I’m going to get a beer. You want anything?”

“Right now,” she said, “I don’t feel as if I need anything.”

Pretty sure that was a compliment, Quinn made his way into Zoe’s state-of-the-art kitchen. The one she admitted she seldom cooked in. Quinn was sure she was telling the truth there. The gleaming white appliances looked brand new, especially the double-oven stove, which resembled the instrument panel of a jet airliner.

The built-in refrigerator door had so much weight and heft it felt like a well-balanced vault door when he opened it. There wasn’t much in the fridge in the way of food—a small bowl of apples, something shadowy in the cheese compartment, an unopened carton of orange juice, six bottles of white wine, and half a dozen bottles of Heineken beer. Like the refrigerator of a supermodel, Quinn thought, though he didn’t know one supermodel. He withdrew one of the green Heineken bottles and closed the refrigerator door. He used a bottle opener he’d noticed in one of the drawers rather than risk that the cap wasn’t a twist-off, and then carried the bottle into the bedroom.

Zoe didn’t appear to have moved. The warmth and scent of their afternoon sex was still in the air, not yet dissipated by the slowly rotating ceiling fan above the acre-sized bed.

Quinn touched the cold bottle to Zoe’s damp forehead, and she smiled. He sat on the edge of the mattress, facing half away from her.

Before she got a chance to ask him what he was thinking, he said, “Why do you have so many damned pillows?” He was staring at the stacks of throw pillows from the bed that towered on the carpet.

“They’re for show,” she said.

“Ah. I know about that.” He took another sip of cold beer. “I visited your doctor friend this morning.”

Tick, tick, tick, went the fan.

Zoe was silent.

“He won’t bother you again,” Quinn said.

“He hadn’t bothered me lately,” Zoe said. “It was you he might have bothered.”

“Yeah, with his anger issues.”

“Do you think he was the one who broke into your office and assaulted you?”

“I still don’t know what to think.”

“So you talked to him mostly about me.”

“I had to, Zoe.”

“Because he might have attacked you, you were afraid for me.”

“Anger issues are anger issues,” Quinn said.

“Did you terrorize him?”

Quinn smiled. “I wouldn’t say that. Whatever Beeker’s faults, he doesn’t seem easy to terrorize.” He looked over at her. “You want a sip of beer?”

“No, thanks. Did you threaten him?”

“He threatened me. Us, actually. Said he had some very personal photographs of you and if we harassed him he’d post them on the Internet. He said you’d know where.”

“I believe he might,” Zoe said. “Those photos—”

“I don’t care about them, Zoe. He won’t post them.”

“You said he didn’t scare.”

“But he knows what will happen to him if he posts those kinds of photos of you, if he ever bothers you again. He didn’t have to be scared to understand.”

“How can you know that?”

“I was emphatic.”

He still didn’t look at her, but he heard the sheets rustle as she moved closer on the wide bed. He felt her kiss his bare side, play her tongue over him. It was only slightly warmer than his flesh.

Tick, tick, tick…

“What did he say when you brought up the subject of the office break-in?” she asked.

“I didn’t bring it up directly, but he doesn’t have an alibi for its time frame. Says he was home in bed alone.”

“Do you believe him?”

“I told him I didn’t believe anyone about everything.”

“Is that true?”

“It is except for you,” Quinn said, twisting his torso so he could look into her eyes. “You’re different.”