John Lutz - Urge to Kill

He stood up, stretched, and then poured some of yesterday’s coffee into a white foam cup. Tasting the horrid stuff and making a face, he snatched up the Manders file from Fedderman’s desk, sat down at his own desk, and booted up his computer.

After a minute or so, and several acidic sips from the foam cup, he peered over the frames of his glasses at the glowing monitor. Where to look first but the Wall Street Journal?

Interesting. The price of Prudent Power had plunged as the market rose, losing a lot of value for its investors. But wasn’t that what a hedge fund was supposed to do, move the opposite way of the stock market? Quinn wasn’t sure. It might not be that simple, meaning the manager of Prudent Power might have made enemies by the thousands. It would take only one furious client crazy enough to kill him.

But would that same killer then have moved on to take more victims, people who, presumably, had nothing to do with his (her?) finances? And Quinn wondered, how many serial killers had there been who were wealthy enough to have holdings in hedge funds?

He phoned the police profiler, Helen Iman, and asked her that question.

“Maybe Jack the Ripper,” she said. “But we’ll never know for sure. That’s about it. Don’t bother barking up that tree, Quinn.”

He was holding the phone to his ear with his left hand while leafing through papers in the file.

“What’re you doing, Quinn?”

“Looking for another tree to bark up.”

“I’m pretty busy here,” Helen said.

“I’m leafing through witness statements as we talk,” he said. “Not that there were really any witnesses.”

“The usual friends and relatives talking about what a great guy the victim was, and how he had no enemies?”

“On target.”

“Read me who they are.”

Quinn found the statements list and began reading her the names of people either his team or the earlier investigators had interviewed.

“That last one,” Helen said, interrupting him. “Same last name as the victim.”

“Zoe Manders,” Quinn said. “Sister.”

“The name sounds familiar to me. She the one who’s the psychologist?”

“Says here she’s a psychoanalyst. Got an office over on Park Avenue.”

“La-di-da. Well, maybe that’s where I heard her name, some convention or other.”

“Manders himself was no pauper. Lived on East Fifty-sixth Street, near Sutton Place.”

“Prosperous siblings,” Helen said.

“Like you and I would be, if we were related and had money.”

“Talk to her again,” Helen said.

“Says here she and her brother only saw each other half a dozen times a year, mostly on holidays. Didn’t go to the same places or have the same friends. And sis is solid with alibi.”

“She might know something she doesn’t know she knows,” Helen said.

“That’s pretty goddamned cryptic.”

“How old is Dr. Manders?”

“Forty-six,” Quinn said, adjusting his reading glasses to peer more closely at the file.

“Victim was forty-three,” Helen said. “They probably grew up together and were close. She was his big sister, and now she’s a psychoanalyst. Most likely looked out for him when they were kids. She probably knows a lot about him.”

“And being a shrink, she’d know how to root through her childhood memories in productive fashion.”

“Exactly,” Helen said. “All you have to do is get her to think like a cop, and she might tell you something illuminating about little brother. Dr. Manders might be a hidden undeclared asset.”

Had Helen been reading the Wall Street Journal?

“One way to get to know something about the killer is to know his victims,” Quinn said.

“You got it, Quinn. Cherchez la shrink.”

“Always,” Quinn said.

Hettie’s almost constant muted screams were like insane musical accompaniment to her agony. While they were barely audible, she could hear them. Each one echoed in every dark corridor of her mind, each echo sharper and more painful than the last. Hettie had given up hope long ago.

What filled her mind now, along with the pain, was a question.

Why must it take so long to die?

Zoe Manders’s fashionable Park Avenue office address, just off Fifty-ninth Street, whispered success. Standing in the towering building’s glass and marble lobby, Quinn studied the directory and found that she was one of maybe a dozen doctors of one sort or another on the floors not occupied by corporations large and small. He walked over to where a uniformed security guard sat in a low chair behind a curved marble-topped counter and signed in. The marble was cold to the touch.

“Good to see you again, Captain.”

Quinn glanced again at the guard and recognized the grinning, puffy face of former NYPD detective Ben Byrd. Byrd had worked out of Manhattan South homicide and been in a bad car accident while on the way to a crime scene…what, five years ago?

“You’re looking good, Ben,” Quinn said, shaking hands. Quinn meant it. He’d heard about how seriously Byrd was injured, the endless rounds of operations.

Byrd added a shrug to his smile. “I don’t get around so well, but other than that there’s no pain. It’s pain that can wear you down, especially the back pain.”

Quinn caught a glint of polished steel behind the counter and noticed for the first time that Byrd was seated in a wheelchair.

“I don’t get up outta here by myself,” Byrd said, but the grin didn’t waver. “I can get around okay, though. Things turned out all right, considering.”

“Better than what almost happened.”

“That’s what I tell myself, Captain.” Byrd’s gaze dropped to the building log on the marble counter. “I see you know Dr. Manders.”

“Meeting her for the first time,” Quinn said.

“Police business, I guess.”

“Yeah. Thanks for assuming I’m not one of her patients.”

“It wouldn’t be an insult. I was one of ’em myself, after the accident.”

“She must know her job,” Quinn said, a bit awkwardly.

“I figured you were here ’cause of what happened to her brother. That Twenty-five-Caliber thing. How’s it going on that one?”

“Slowly,” Quinn said.

“So nothing’s changed.”

Quinn told him nothing had, then offered his hand again to shake.

Byrd, with a still-powerful grip, gave Quinn’s hand a squeeze and said, “Take it easy on Dr. Manders. She’s one of the good ones.”

“In the building, you mean?”

“One of the good ones anywhere,” Byrd said. “A class lady.”

“Thanks for telling me.” Quinn smiled. “She’s not a suspect, Ben. Class ladies don’t shoot people in the head.”

“Most of them don’t,” Byrd said.

Quinn found the neatly disguised elevators and rode one to the ninth floor. At the end of a long, carpeted corridor, beyond the door to a law firm, was a plain wooden door simply lettered DR. ZOE MANDERS.

The door opened to a small anteroom that was tastefully furnished in grays and greens, with a brown leather sofa and two matching chairs. There were a lot of potted plants that looked artificial, but when Quinn touched one of the leaves he found it was real.

There was no receptionist and no place for one to sit and greet people. No phone in sight. The doctor must have an answering service. Next to a door beyond one of the brown leather chairs was a small illuminated button. Quinn had called ahead for an appointment, so he went over to the button and pressed it. A buzzer sounded behind the closed door.

Within a few seconds Dr. Zoe Manders opened the door and smiled at Quinn. She was a slim woman who looked too young to be in her forties, slightly taller than average, with brown eyes and short brown hair. Her features were even and radiated more health than delicacy. Maybe it was her wide cheekbones and wonderful smile, or maybe it was the fact that she was a psychoanalyst, that reminded Quinn of Ingrid Bergman, who’d played a psychiatrist in a Hitchcock movie.