John Lutz - Pulse

“If he can do that kind of thing to us,” Quinn said, “can we do it to him?” Like Quinn to go on the offensive.

“If we knew about him what he knows about us, yes,” Lido said. He stood up from his darkened computer screen.

“Where you going?” Pearl asked.

“Home, where I don’t have to work using this limited equipment.”

“I thought you installed new memory in our computers,” Quinn said.

Lido gave him a pitying look.

“Doesn’t Q and A have virus protection and firewalls and Chinese walls and all that stuff?” Helen asked.

Lido’s expression turned to one of contempt. Not for Helen, but for whoever had trespassed in his world and made his skills seem minor. “The hacker got in somehow, then deleted all possible links, so a trace, even by an expert like me, is impossible. Supposedly.” He snatched up a few items from his desk and then stalked out.

“His alcohol-tainted blood is up,” Helen said.

“I wouldn’t bet against him learning everything about this hacker,” Quinn said.

Helen went to the desk Lido had just vacated and perched on the edge. Quinn couldn’t help noticing her legs could use a shave. “Think about this,” she said. “The hacker might have been secretly browsing your computers for information for a long time.”

“He probably has been,” Quinn said. “But Lido inevitably caught up with him.”

Helen gave him her thinnest of smiles. “That’s one way of looking at it. Another is to figure that if the hacker had the skills to hack into your system without being noticed, then circumvent your high-tech security and learn what you were doing, wouldn’t he also have the skills to withdraw unnoticed?”

“Probably,” Quinn said. “But that would mean-”

Helen’s smile widened. “That the intruder wants you to know your computers have been hacked.”

At two minutes to midnight Lido called Quinn’s cell phone and woke him up. His words were slurred, and it took him a while to arrange his sentences with enough order for Quinn to understand that whatever precautions the mystery hacker had employed, they had worked. Lido gave Quinn a lot of tech talk he wouldn’t have understood even if Lido was sober and speaking clearly. The message was, there was no way to backtrack the hacker’s online footprints to the source.

Quinn lay awake in the dark for a long time after the phone call, wondering who would have the ability to outfox Lido on a computer.

Every possibility he came up with was a worry.

A fter an uneasy night of patchwork dreams, Quinn was eating a late breakfast with Pearl in the brownstone’s kitchen. Waffles and sausage patties, all pre-prepared, and the finished issue of toaster and microwave. Pearl’s idea of cooking. It didn’t smell bad, though. The faint haze suspended in the warm kitchen was pungent and conducive to the appetite. But it didn’t fool Quinn or Jody. They’d been tricked before.

Jody had already left, explaining that she wasn’t hungry and would stop on the way to her job at Enders and Coil for a bagel. Smart young woman, Quinn thought, not unlike her mother.

He wondered if, when he left the brownstone, he’d smell like waffles and sausage. And if so, for how long?

Quinn’s cell phone played a cavalry charge trumpet tune and he dug it out of his pocket to see who was calling. Nift at the morgue. Quinn swallowed what he suspected would be his last bite of sausage and pressed the talk button.

“Mornin’, Nift. Whaddya got?”

The annoying little M.E. didn’t bother saying hello. “You talking with your mouth full, Quinn?”

“None of your business.”

“I was you, I know what it would be full of,” Nift said. Quinn could somehow hear the nasty grin on the little bastard’s face.

“This a business call?” Quinn asked, with a hint of warning.

A hint was enough to scare Nift into a strictly business mode. “Linda Brooks died from a heart attack, no doubt caused by shock. Like the other victims when the killer played his games with them. By the time he got around to administering the coup de grace, she was already dead.”

“I hope that was a disappointment to him.”

“No doubt it was. But he worked clean as usual. No usable prints, no DNA traces. Not even indefinite ones like with Macy Collins.”

Quinn had never had much hope for the meager Collins sample that might have been mostly her own blood.

“There was a slight residue of condom lubricant in the vagina,” Nift said. “The murder weapon was probably the same knife. Also used to remove Linda’s substantial knockers. No sign of those, by the way.”

“What about Grace Moore?”

“Probably not enough of a rack to interest our killer. He’s definitely a breast man with high standards.”

“At least she wasn’t mutilated,” Quinn said. He looked across the table and saw Pearl watching him intensely, interested in his end of the conversation.

“My guess is her death was comparatively easy,” Nift said. “A quick choke to silence her, then a single, accurate stab wound to the heart. I think she was simply in the way. Unlucky in the extreme.”

“Torture wounds have any commonality with the other victims?”

“You saw them. They almost had to have been the result of the same knife, the same killer. And they resemble morgue photos of Daniel Danielle’s work so many years ago. He loves to carve.”

“Yet he left Grace Moore untouched in that regard.”

“She wasn’t in his plans,” Nift said. “I can understand that.”

My God, so can I, Quinn thought. What’s it doing to me, getting into the heads of these sickos? Hunter thinking like prey, a part of him living inside their skulls. The killer is doing that with his potential victims. It’s part of his game. But I’m not playing a game. Am I?

“Speaking of commonalities,” Nift said, “the panties on Linda Brooks were the same size and brand as the previous victim’s. We even found a pubic hair for analysis that confirms the fact they were hers. Also, elastic marks, the lay of the material, looks like he temporarily untied the victim’s legs and did the panty exchange postmortem, but before rigor mortis set in.”

Quinn couldn’t help imagining the killer maneuvering dead limbs into various positions to work off and on the panties. A complicated task, but it might be a chore he for some reason immensely enjoyed. One he was compelled to do as an exercise in total control. Quinn’s stomach did a loop.

Pearl was giving him her narrowed eye look. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“What?” Nift asked on the phone.

“Anything else we might deem important?” Quinn asked.

“No. Let me know if you happen to find the boobs. And say hello to Pearl.”

Quinn flipped the phone shut without replying.

“Nift?” Pearl asked.

“Yeah.”

“Want some more sausage?”

“ No.”

Jody stopped for a bagel at a Starbucks near Enders and Coil. She’d often had lunch with Sarah Benham, but this was their first breakfast. The two women had become even closer friends, though Sarah was still something of an enigma to Jody.

They were at a table near the back. Sarah had a cinnamon scone, Jody a toasted everything bagel with cream cheese and strawberry jam. Both had tall lattes. Jody couldn’t help thinking how much better this was than her mother’s toasted frozen waffles and microwaved sausages.

“So how’s your mom doing on the Daniel Danielle investigation?” Sarah asked, and took a cautious sip of her steaming latte.

The question caught Jody off guard. “I’m surprised you’re interested?”

“Why?”

“You never seemed interested before.”

“The killer’s apparently branching out,” Sarah said. “He killed two women this time, according to the news. I was just wondering what that might mean.”