Serial (28 page)

By noon Quinn had pretty much given up on tracing the Skinner through the recorded purchase of a carpet-tucking knife. The search was further complicated when they learned that building supply stores sometimes sold such knives as part of a tool set.

The good piece of news was that Weaver was being released from the hospital. She wasn’t completely healed, but she was out of insurance and scheduled to become an outpatient. Aside from her mother in Pittsburgh, Weaver had a sister in Philadelphia who was a hospital administrator. Common sense and simple economics dictated that Weaver should spend the rest of her recuperation in Philadelphia.

Quinn picked up Weaver just before noon at the hospital and drove her by her apartment to pack, then to LaGuardia, where the good sister had reserved a seat on an American Airlines flight. He thought Weaver looked okay but still acted somewhat out of it. She kissed him on the mouth before she joined the security checkpoint line, and glanced back at him as she passed through the metal detector. Something about the glance suggested they would never see each other again.

All in all, her departure made Quinn feel like crap. Despite the hour, he used his cell phone to invite Jerry Lido to lunch. He knew what lunch was to Lido, and it was the kind of lunch Quinn felt like having today.

Quinn was supposed to meet Pearl for dinner before they went home to the brownstone. She sat alone at a diner table, sipping decaffeinated coffee that was catching up with her because she was on her third cup. Pearl figured three cups of decaf equaled about one cup of strong regular grind. Enough to keep her awake at night.

She knew Quinn had gone to lunch with Jerry Lido, and she knew what kind of lunch that could become.

Damn Quinn!

By the time she thought to check her cell phone, she felt as if she was swimming in coffee.

Uh-oh. Quinn had called and somehow she hadn’t heard the phone. He hadn’t left a voice message, but he’d called again and texted her. The text message mentioned his name, but after that made no sense whatsoever. Quinn hadn’t used his cell phone for that call. She knew it was because he barely knew how to send a text message. She saw that the call had been from Jerry Lido’s phone.

That explained a lot of things.

Pearl paid for the bottomless cup of coffee and went outside to hail a cab.

Pearl had to knock on Jerry Lido’s door for a long time. A woman with an odd brown hairdo that made her look like a spaniel opened a door across the hall and glared at Pearl. Pearl returned the glare. The woman shook her head and ducked back inside.

When Pearl looked back she saw that her knocking had been answered. The apartment door was open. Jerry Lido stood there wearing pants and the kind of sleeveless undershirt some people called a wife-beater. He was barefoot and smelled like gin. Behind him, across the living room, Quinn was snoring away on a sofa. He was dressed something like Lido but wearing a tangled tie. There was a Gilby’s bottle on a coffee table. Three more bottles on the floor. Pearl felt as if she’d disturbed two hibernating bears.

“I see you had a party today,” she said.

“More like a tête-à-tête,” Lido said, surprising Pearl with his vocabulary and elocution. Especially since he was obviously still drunk.

“Looks more like you two rolled down a hill.” She stepped inside and got another whiff of Lido’s breath. “Are you still drinking?”

Lido shrugged. “A little hair of the frog.”

“You mean dog. Frogs don’t have hair.”

“Nor do they bark.”

Pearl went across the room and stared down at Quinn. He looked as bad as Lido, but his chest was rising and falling regularly. At least he’d stopped snoring.

“We were working on the computer,” Lido said, as if in pathetic defense of his and Quinn’s conditions.

Pearl could have guessed that. Quinn had been doing his job of getting Lido to drink so he could get in touch with and apply his tech genius to the hunt for the Skinner. Pearl wondered if the afternoon had been productive. She winked at Lido. “So what’d you learn?”

He eagerly led her to a long table on which was a big desktop computer. A laptop was placed off to the side. There were two flat-screen monitors. One of them was blank. The other was showing that screen saver of what looked like PVC pipes that kept fitting together to form right angles unto eternity. That monitor came all the way to life when Lido sat down at the computer.

“We learned where carpet-tucking knives weren’t,” he said. “But when I was lying in bed, or on the floor, this evening, I thought of something else.”

“What was that?”

“The fusion of time and geography.”

“You’re still drunk,” Pearl said.

Lido gave the sheepish smile that made him look so human and pitiable. “A little, but not like him.” He pointed toward Quinn, who had shifted in his sleep and appeared about to fall off the sofa.

“We know the murders are committed on weekends,” Lido said. “Sometimes Mondays or Fridays. So what I figure is we can check New York hotel reservations around the times of the murders, maybe come up with the same name more than once.”

So simple
, Pearl thought. Like all products of brilliance. For the first time she saw and appreciated Lido’s real genius on the computer. She could see why Quinn preferred him drunk when he worked.

Lido took a deep breath, like a concert pianist preparing to play. And he did play the keyboard like a musical instrument, roaming the Internet as if he invented it, pausing now and then to adjust something with the mouse as if fine-tuning or changing chords. There was no hesitancy, no altering of his strange body rhythm. His mind seemed to be one with the incredibly fast computer, somewhere out there in the ether, where Pearl couldn’t follow.

An hour passed like a minute. There was a thump as Quinn rolled off the sofa. Pearl looked over at him, momentarily concerned. He seemed none the worse for his short drop, and was sleeping deeply and probably comfortably, on the floor. Pearl turned back to her work (rather, Lido’s work) that Quinn should have been doing. Last night he’d followed Lido too far into the bottle. Pearl knew it wasn’t the first time. This crazy plan of his had to stop.

But not yet
, Pearl thought. Lido was drunk anyway, so why not make use of him?

There were two matches, both men, who’d been at hotels in New York at the times of most of the Skinner murders. Pearl watched spellbound as Lido used the Internet to learn everything about them. She knew that half the sites he visited were confidential. They were breaking the law as certainly as if they were burglarizing buildings.

Not the first time
, Pearl thought.

Finally Lido sat back from his computer. One of the men was a seventy-two-year-old financial consultant who lived with his wife in Atlanta. He traveled constantly, visiting clients all over the country. The other man was a clothing designer whose Internet history made it clear that he was gay.

“The gay guy maybe, but not likely,” Lido said, sitting back in his chair and obviously disappointed. He appeared to be sobering up. Pearl, still haunted by strains of youthful Catholicism, absently crossed herself as she located a gin bottle and poured Lido a generous drink.
Forgive me, for I know exactly what I do.

He tossed the gin down like water.

“Has there ever been a gay serial killer who murdered women?” he asked.

“Not to my knowledge.” Pearl poured herself a very small drink. “Not openly gay, anyway.”

Lido worked the computer some more. “Uh-oh.”

“What?”

“He’s not only gay, he’s married.”

“Well …”

“To another fella,” Lido said.

“Oh.”

“And when Verna Pound was killed he was in Paris.”

“Unless we have two killers, that leaves him out,” Pearl said. She took a sip of her drink.

Lido looked crestfallen, but only for a moment. Then he suddenly came back all the way alive. The gin kicking in. “How ’bout another drink?” he asked.

“Let’s work for a while, then I’ll pour you one,” Pearl said.
Carrot and stick.

She felt terribly guilty to be using this guy. She felt no different from Quinn, who was over there sleeping on the carpet. She wanted to wring Quinn’s neck, but she also wanted to wring yet more tech miracles out of Jerry Lido.

“I’ve got an idea,” Pearl said. “Hotel reservations are one thing—if our killer even made reservations. They can be paid for in cash, or credit cards under different names. But if you travel alone and pay cash for an airline ticket, the authorities take note of you. And our killer wouldn’t take a chance and use anything but a valid credit card when it came to Homeland Security. Maybe we should get into credit card files, if you can.”

“Oh, I can,” Lido said. “But it’d be easier to check flights into New York carrying passengers traveling alone, and who paid cash or with credit or debit cards.”

Pearl knew he was right. “Only thing is,” she said, “you’re messing with Homeland Security, when you illegally hack into airline passenger information.”

“Oh, I often get into—”

“Don’t tell me, Jerry.”

“I’ll come and go without leaving any kind of electronic footprint,” Lido said confidently.

“Jerry—”

“Sometimes I do it just for sport,” he said, grinning. “LaGuardia, Newark, and Kennedy. I compare what all the passengers paid for their seats. Pearl, it’s fun. God help me, it’s fun!”

Pearl said, “You want another drink?”

It was past 2
A.M.
when, with Lido’s help, Pearl managed to get Quinn downstairs and into a cab. Within an hour, Quinn was in bed in the brownstone, and Pearl was curled next to him. Both slept deeply when they weren’t dreaming.

In the morning, Pearl awoke to hear Quinn on the phone. He was doing what Pearl had heard him doing before—talking Jerry Lido out of suicide.

Pearl rolled onto her stomach and buried her face in her pillow, assailed again by guilt over having exploited Lido’s vulnerability.

Later she felt the bed sag with Quinn’s weight, and his big hand was gentle on her shoulder.

“Lido gonna be all right?” she asked, muffled by the pillow.

“I think so.”

“I still don’t feel right about what we’re doing. I feel…”

“Guilty?”

“Yeah.”

“Still the good Catholic girl,” Quinn said.

“Sometimes, anyway,” Pearl said.

She rolled onto her back and looked up at him.

“You’ve been crying,” he said, and bent down and kissed the tip of her nose.

“There have to be rules, Quinn. Call them laws. Call them commandments. Call them whatever you want. But even in this screwed-up world, there have to be rules.”

“There are,” he said. “They bend.”

Later that morning, when everyone other than Weaver was in the Q and A office, Fedderman stood up behind his desk and cleared his throat.

Every eye suddenly turned to him.

Every instinct told him he’d made a mistake.

He decided again that he and Penny would keep their engagement secret until after the Skinner investigation. Fedderman was sure he wasn’t doing anything unethical, but why borrow trouble when there was so much of it already in the world?

He cleared his throat again and walked over and topped off his coffee.

Everyone else went back to what they were doing. Only Pearl looked at him strangely, sensing that he’d been about to say something.

Pearl would.

The police hadn’t believed that Tom Stopp was trying to help Tanya Moody the night he was arrested. That he’d heard a commotion, gone to his door to investigate, and seen her come flying half nude out of the unoccupied apartment across the hall. She was struggling in a desperate dance to put on her clothes as she ran, somehow managing.

What had prompted him was blind instinct. She was obviously in trouble, running hard from something, and in need of help. He called after her, trying to get her to stop and explain what was happening. She’d glanced back at him, obviously terrified, running from
him
!

No! She had it wrong! He couldn’t let her think of him that way.
He couldn’t!

He ran after her faster to help her, to explain to her.

They wouldn’t believe him. Not at the scene in front of his apartment building, and not at the precinct house where he was read his rights and interrogated.

After a while in police custody, he could hardly believe himself. They paid no attention when he told them he’d tried to get Tanya Moody to stop, so he could convince her he wasn’t whoever or whatever had frightened her. So he could help her.

Later, when she’d regained her composure and good sense, she told them her story. Her concept of the truth. It was too late for Stopp then. There was enough circumstantial evidence against him to convict him ten times over.

The man who’d actually raped Tanya Moody was long gone. And Tom Stopp sat for the next several months listening to what he’d done, where he’d been, when in fact he’d been home in bed.

The more the prosecution, and the jury, heard his story, the less they believed it, and, strangely enough, that affected Stopp. He began to feel guilty. Maybe, when enough people didn’t believe something, it could somehow become untrue. Who you were could seem little-by-little unreal, until finally you were someone else. Some person the system had created.

In prison they’d laughed at him. There had been times when he’d thought he was one of the guards, complete with uniform and authority. Laughter sometimes tilted to violence. He’d been badly beaten by other inmates when he’d tried to hurry them back to their cells.

If Stopp had experienced this problem before, being another person, he couldn’t remember it. But that was the problem; that was how he became someone else sometimes, by not remembering who he really was or had been. The other person, waiting for an opportunity, would then take over. The one named Tom Stopp would recall what had happened, faintly through a veil, but not for very long. At least, from what other people said, that was the way it happened.

The prison doctor suggested mental illness, perhaps schizophrenia with multiple personalities. He was a general practitioner and recommended that a psychiatrist see Stopp. The prison authorities decided Stopp was simply putting on an act to better his circumstances and make his way back to the streets sooner.

Stopp saw no mental health professional. He simply remained convict 1437645. And one night when he decided
he
was a psychiatrist, it elicited more laughter than concern.

Now he was out of prison, wandering around unemployed, existing on welfare checks and whatever his brother and sister, living in California, sent him from time to time. Money he was going to pay back someday. Still. Even after his years in prison.

Stopp would find a way to pay his debts, even if it meant becoming a criminal, as they’d branded him all those years, and stealing the money. He owed that and more to his brother Marv the screenwriter, and his sister Terri the beautician. Tom Stopp was a man who paid his debts. Maybe someday his brother could write one of his TV movies about that. Stopp reflected that his life would make an excellent film.

But he knew his determination to pay what he owed was will rather than probability. Six months ago he’d been diagnosed with congestive heart failure. Which wasn’t as bad as it sounded—but almost. Put simply, his heart couldn’t pump out as much blood as it took in. A minor surgical procedure had helped, but not enough. The doctors told him he might live for years, if he didn’t overexert himself, took medicine he couldn’t afford, and slipped a tiny nitroglycerin tablet beneath his tongue if and when his heart started to act up.

There wasn’t much danger of him overexerting himself, because in his circumstances, and with the lousy economy, he couldn’t find a job. His stress mostly came from regret. He didn’t blame the girl, Tanya. She’d been doped up and half mad with terror when he’d tried to catch up to her and been interrupted outside her cab by the cops. The bastard who’d actually raped her…well, Stopp could work up a hate for that guy, only he had no idea who he was.

So he kept his pills handy in his pocket and made it through his days. Time was misery and was killing him with exacting slowness. Years, the doctors had given him, if he was careful. Plodding along Canal Street, Stopp almost laughed, watching the vendors close the folding steel doors of their kiosks after selling tourists and phonies their knockoff brand merchandise. He was like one of those faux Rolex watches that looked good at a glance, but had a strict limit on how many ticks were in them before they quit running. He shook his head sadly. Reality was always in disguise.

Years …

Tom Stopp wasn’t so sure. Something bad was going to happen to him, and soon. He could feel it. Like that time in Sweden when he’d been fired from his job as watch repairman.

He went home to his crummy basement apartment, stretched out on his bed, and watched the roaches. Outside, the sun began losing its battle with the night. Dusk moved in like an occupying army. After a while the apartment got dark, and Stopp could no longer see the roaches.

He wished he had some booze. He couldn’t afford it, and he didn’t like to beg. He’d tried panhandling once and decided it was less soul-smearing to write his brother for another loan. He felt like jumping up out of bed and leaving the apartment, walking the dangerous city streets. No, not walking. Running hard enough to outrace his tortured self.

Yeah, he’d had a lot of luck the last time he’d impulsively run from an apartment.

There was nowhere for him to go, anyway. No one he had to see or who wanted to see him.

He reread yesterday’s newspaper, which he’d gotten out of a trash receptacle. Then he put the paper aside and lay quietly, outwardly calm, watching the shadows grow and listening to his heart.

Cannibalism.

Such rumors died hard.

The Skinner tossed his folded
Post
aside and sipped some more of his espresso. There was no doubt now that the rumors of cannibalism were started by Quinn, in an attempt to rattle him.

Quinn seemed to have rattled the women of New York even more. Before the cannibalism speculation, the Skinner could sense their uneasiness in dark or crowded places, in the subways or narrow streets, or chattering together as they strode in tandem along wide sidewalks. He walked among them and secretly enjoyed that rippling undercurrent of fear.

Now he saw in New York’s women a quieter, deeper fear. They were scared shitless, and all thanks to Quinn. The media of course, had cooperated, but surely even they didn’t truly make the leap from severed tongues to cannibalism. They pretended. That was fine with the Skinner. The whole world was pretense. Sometimes he thought he was the only real thing in it.

He glanced at his watch.

Tom Stopp was home sleeping, or perhaps in an alcoholic stupor. The Skinner had seen him negotiate the narrow steps to his pathetic apartment he shared with the roaches. Stopp wouldn’t reappear until late tomorrow morning. That was his routine. He was where he was supposed to be, a game piece in its place on the board. And a move was about to be made.

It was almost time to leave the restaurant and do something very real.

Something Quinn could read about in the papers.