John Lutz - Pulse

The elevator in Dr. Moore’s building was warm and slow and seemed to stop at every other floor before Quinn got out of the stifling little car. A woman in the elevator had been wearing too much perfume, and he was still trying to fight the urge to sneeze.

When Quinn entered the doctor’s office, he found himself in a small anteroom with cream-colored walls and beige furniture. There was a rounded walnut desk with a computer, a printer, and phone on it. He heard nothing but the faint rushing sound of traffic in the street below.

He called hello.

A few seconds later, a door to what he assumed was a larger office opened. A distraught-looking young woman with frizzy dark hair pulled back to make her round face seem even rounder, peered out at him through dark-framed glasses. “Help you?”

Quinn thought she looked like the one who needed help. Maybe with her midterm exams.

He flashed his identification and explained who he was and why he was there.

The young woman, who said her name was Cleo, looked confused and started gnawing her lower lip with large white teeth. “I’m not sure if I should even talk to you about one of Dr. Moore’s patients, much less let you see the case file.”

Quinn gave her a smile that surprised her with its kindness. “What were you to the deceased, dear?”

“I was Dr. Moore’s part-time assistant and receptionist,” Cleo said.

“Did you ever meet Linda Brooks?”

“A few times. When she came in for appointments.”

“Do you know why she was being treated? Her… issue?”

“Not exactly. And like I said, I’m not sure I should be discussing-”

“You don’t doubt my identity, do you, dear?”

“Of course not. I’ve seen you in the papers, on TV news. But don’t you need a warrant or something?”

“I can get one, if you want to go on record as being uncooperative.”

“Oh, I don’t mean to be uncooperative. I just don’t know what the patient’s rights are, even though…”

“The patient is dead,” Quinn finished for her. “I suspect that if Linda Brooks could somehow communicate with us, she’d want you to let the people investigating her and Dr. Moore’s deaths examine her file.”

“Probably,” Cleo conceded.

“While you’re making up your mind,” Quinn said, “can you tell me why Linda Brooks was being treated?”

Cleo fought with her indecision for several seconds, then said, “I guess. She was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic.”

“Meaning?” He wanted to keep Cleo talking.

“She suspected people of being out to get her. And she had hallucinations. Heard voices.” Cleo looked around helplessly. “I don’t know the details. Dr. Moore didn’t talk much to me about her patients.”

“Still, you learned things.”

“I learned things,” Cleo agreed.

“Had Linda Brooks been getting better?”

“There was no getting better for her. She had to learn to adjust to being… disturbed.”

“Was she disturbed about anything in particular lately?”

Cleo held on to the back of the desk chair and looked away from Quinn. Then back at him. “She thought someone was following her. A man. She’d thought that before.”

“Was he someone she knew?”

“No, but he’d follow her, and sometimes when she’d get home, she’d know he’d been in her apartment.”

“How?”

“That I don’t know. You’d have to consult the file.”

Neither of them spoke for what seemed a long time. Quinn knew when to hold his silence. He made a bet with himself.

“The files are in those brown cabinets behind the doctor’s desk,” Cleo said.

Quinn smiled slightly but said nothing.

Cleo stood straighter. “I’m going down and around the block for a coffee. Do you mind keeping an eye on things while I’m gone?”

“You can trust me,” Quinn said.

Cleo had been clutching a key chain. She laid it on the desk. Without looking at Quinn, she hurried from the office and closed the door behind her, leaving him alone with the ghost of Dr. Moore.

It was easy enough to find the key that unlocked all the drawers of the file cabinet, and it was easy enough to find the file on Linda Brooks.

Quinn had been hoping for some DVDs or cassettes, recordings of the doctor’s sessions with Linda. Instead he found copious notes. Pages of them. Apparently Linda had talked, and Dr. Moore listened as a psychoanalyst should, and made notes.

The printer near the computer out in the anteroom was one of those multifunctional ones that also scanned, faxed, and copied. Quinn was glad to see it held plenty of paper.

It took him a few minutes to get onto it; then he got to work making copies of Dr. Moore’s notes.

He hoped Cleo would take her time over her coffee.

An hour later, at his desk at Q amp;A’s headquarters, Quinn began to read.

There wasn’t much more to learn about Linda Brooks. She did hallucinate. She did hear voices. As Quinn read, he could empathize with the agony the young woman had been enduring, the loneliness. And he got a sense of the courage she must have had in order to adjust as well as she had and build some kind of life despite her persistent illness. He found himself liking this woman he’d let be tortured and murdered.

Jesus! Don’t do that to yourself!

There wasn’t much in life Quinn hated more than self-pity and its destructiveness. It was an emotion Linda Brooks seemed to have for the most part avoided. She’d been a fighter.

And a fatalist.

That was what this killer knew about his victims-they were fatalists. At a certain point something would break in them and they would give themselves to him. That was the moment the monster in him lived for, the moment they were completely his.

Fedderman came into the office, swiping his forearm across his forehead. He was carrying his suit coat draped over his shoulder and he looked beat. In his right hand was a small brown paper sack.

He nodded a hello to Quinn as he crossed from the door to Quinn’s desk. Then he opened the bag and spilled out a dozen or so small plastic tubular objects on the desk top. They looked like cigarette lighters and for an instant Quinn’s hand moved toward his shirt pocket where he used to carry his cigars, when he’d smoked them more frequently.

“What are those?” he asked.

“Thumb drives. Or flash drives. I dunno; I can’t keep up with tech talk.”

Quinn stared up at him.

“You plug them into a USB port in your computer and they hold all kinds of information. Like a disk drive, only they’re not.”

“What the hell’s a USB port?”

“You gotta be kidding.” Fedderman pointed to a tiny port on the tower of Quinn’s computer.

“Oh, yeah,” Quinn said. “I use those all the time.” He pushed the plastic cylinders around with his finger. “So where’d you get them?”

“Dr. Grace Moore’s apartment. They’re videos of the doctor’s sessions with some of her patients.”

“Including Linda Brooks?”

“Yeah. I watched her latest session on the doctor’s computer before I came here. She said she was being followed by someone who looked like Frank Sinatra.”

“Ring-a-ding-ding,” Quinn said.

“The doctor was going with Linda to her apartment to prove to her nobody was following her or waiting for her there.”

“This was the day of the murder?”

“ ’Fraid so.”

Quinn bowed his head and let out a long breath.

“Things get on tracks,” Fedderman said, “and it’s like there’s no way to stop the train wreck.” He didn’t tell Quinn he was actually thinking about Penny and him, where they might be heading.

“Anybody else know you took these thumb drives?”

Fedderman shook his head. “Just the two of us. There are little squares of tape on the bottoms of them, listing the patient’s names. You’d be surprised by some of those names.”