John Lutz - Urge to Kill

Letting me down easy.

“Too bad,” a woman’s voice said, as the door swung closed behind him, cutting off the glare of outside light. “I thought he was interested in you.”

Lavern looked up and saw the woman who might be Melody behind the bar.

“I thought so, too,” Lavern said. She took a sip of her Bloody Mary, then met Melody’s eyes with her own. “Listen, you don’t think I-”

“That you’re in here working? Drinking a Bloody Mary and trolling for afternoon clients?” Melody shook her head, grinning. “Not hardly. But I do think our handsome friend was lookin’ for a lady. He had that way about him.”

“Yeah, he sure did.”

“Oh, well. He’ll never know what he missed.”

“Shame,” Lavern said.

But the woman who might have been Melody was already moving away behind the bar, returning to concentrate on what might have been her crossword puzzle. Lavern was left feeling, as she often did, that this was a world in which she couldn’t quite connect.

It was strange, she thought, the way people’s lives could almost but not quite intersect, the way drastic changes could almost but not quite happen. She wondered if there were lots of parallel worlds where almost everything was different from the way it was in this one because different choices had been made. Different worlds with different, happy Laverns.

Not likely.

Fate, destiny, whatever. The hell with it.

Probably Hobbs would have found out and killed us both.

“Shame,” Lavern said again, softly, to herself.

Probably to demonstrate to Quinn that he was a busy man, Renz wanted to meet him for a chat while on the way to an appointment. He’d said he had something to show Quinn.

They stood in the warmth of the sun at Rockefeller Center, beneath the colorful line of noisily whipping flags that were captives to the breezes flowing down the avenue. Now and then one of the flags would snap like the canvas of a sailboat suddenly billowing with air. Behind them, Renz’s gleaming black limo sat at the curb, its engine idling, the barely discernable form of the driver behind the tinted windows sitting and staring patiently straight ahead.

Renz had on an expensive-looking blue pin-striped suit. His maroon tie had somehow found its way out from beneath his three-button coat and was frolicking in the breeze like the flags above. Backhanding the tie aside, he handed Quinn a large brown envelope and said nothing.

Obviously this was what he wanted to show Quinn, who undid the envelope’s clasped flap and examined the contents.

They were crime scene and morgue photos of Vera Doaks.

“What’s this world of ours come to?” Quinn said sadly.

“It’s the same as ever,” Renz said. “Story of life. We live, we become garbage, and they put us in a hole or burn us to ash.”

“Somehow you live with that perspective,” Quinn said.

“It’s the only way I can live, being honest. You should try it, Quinn, instead of nurturing your weak spot.”

“Which is?”

“You’re a romantic. The world is shit. You fool yourself into thinking it isn’t and try to clean it up while I recognize it for what it is and happily wallow in it. That’s the difference between us.”

“I’ll stay a romantic,” Quinn said.

Quinn knew what the photos meant, and there was no way to romanticize it. The killer the press had tabbed the Slicer had taken another victim. There was another serial killer in the city.

“On the surface it looks like we’re dealing with two dangerous psychos,” Renz said.

“On the surface?”

Quinn looked at the last photo and slid all of them back in the envelope. Then he reminded Renz of the common thread that seemed to connect the. 25-Caliber Killer’s victims. All of them had been hunters.

“And the two Slicer victims,” Renz said, showing that he was a step ahead of Quinn, “were treated like game animals, gutted and strung up like meat put out to cure. Could be we got us one killer using two different MOs to throw us off the scent.”

“Serial killers don’t usually work that way,” Quinn reminded Renz. “They act out of compulsion, and usually follow a ritual set in motion in childhood. These murders have all the earmarks of serial killer crimes, but it’s doubtful they were committed by the same person.”

“But possible.”

“Barely.”

Renz attempted to tuck his errant tie back beneath his buttoned coat, but it flapped right back out, reminding him it was an untidy world. “In this case,” he said, ignoring the tie, “we’re going to assume, publicly at least, that we have one serial killer using two different methods.”

“And what links the murders is the hunting motif.”

“Very good,” Renz said.

“Flimsy.”

“But convenient. Sal Vitali and Harold Mishkin will continue working on the Slicer murders, but under your direction.”

“They won’t like that.”

Renz shrugged and made another futile attempt to tame his tie.

“Have you talked to Helen Iman about this?” Quinn asked. He was interested in what Helen the profiler had to say about tying the two cases together.

“She agrees with you,” Renz said. “It’s not likely the Slicer and the Twenty-five-Caliber Killer is the same person. Their methods aren’t even similar. She thinks the hunting angle is thin, too.”

“Helen’s smart for a profiler,” Quinn said. “You should listen to her.”

“But like you she considered it possible, if not probable, that we’ve got one killer. When we began discussing odds, though, she started talking about a meteor striking us dead.”

Quinn fixed a stare on Renz. “You don’t think it’s one killer either, do you, Harley?”

“I think it’s politically expedient for it to be one killer. You might not like the necessity of handling these cases that way, but there are politics involved. That’s something you should have realized earlier in your career, Quinn. You might have become police commissioner instead of me.”

Quinn knew he was right. Still…

“Have you told all this to Vitali and Mishkin?” Quinn asked.

“An hour ago,” Renz said.

“I’ll bet they were overjoyed.”

“They huffed and puffed, like you. But they took it. Like you. None of us has any real choice in this matter.”

Quinn sighed and jammed his hands deep in his pockets so Renz wouldn’t see that they were clenched in fists. “All of this for political expedience.”

Renz smiled and stuffed his flapping tie inside his shirt between the top two buttons, where finally it remained trapped.

“All of this,” he said, “for that.”

Terri Gaddis wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t show up. Handsome guy like Richard, he could have just about any woman he wanted, when he wanted.

How great it must be to be a man, rooting around among the trinkets, choosing then putting back down, instead of being one of the trinkets.

She took a sip of her rum and Coke and tried not to keep looking at the Magic Lounge’s door. Now and then a wave of embarrassment and anger at herself would wash over her.

What am I doing here? Other than waiting to be stood up?

But she knew what she was doing. Trying to relieve the loneliness of working at Office Tech, then going home, sometimes stopping for drinks with one of the other women at the store, watching reality TV (Survivor. Boy, she could identify with that one), going to bed, getting up, and then climbing back on the treadmill. Day after numbing day.

Then all of a sudden there he was, tall enough and certainly dark and handsome, chatting her up among the printers and fax machines in aisle seven.

Lucky aisle seven.