John Lutz - Darker Than Night

“You mean people who were disturbed to begin with and had motive and opportunity to kill Dr. Maxwell.”

“Among others. Just think of all the secrets passed in confidence in this quiet, restful room.” Renz grinned. “But we know there’s really no such thing as secrets in confidence.”

“They exist,” Quinn said, “but briefly.”

“Like true love.”

“I noticed a security camera in the lobby. Did it show anything?”

“You mean like a shot of the killer on his way in or out? No. It had recycled and was on its next loop by the time we knew it was there. Everybody coming or going on the tape was here well after the murders.”

“What about the doctor’s files?”

“They don’t appear to have been disturbed. It seems the killer entered the outer office, killed ‘Hard Luck Hannah’ the receptionist, and hid her body in the closet. Then he came in here and did the doctor.”

“Maybe a patient thought twice after revealing something during analysis and wanted to take it back.”

“Always that possibility, with a victim like this.”

“It wasn’t done on a whim,” Quinn said. “The only blood from the receptionist is in the closet. Looks like she was knocked out and stuffed in there before she got knifed.”

“That’s how I figure it. The killer just wanted her out of the way. Dr. Maxwell was the primary target.”

“Have you searched her files?”

“That’d be a touchy matter legally,” Renz said. “We’re working on a warrant right now.”

“Have you searched her files?” Quinn repeated in the same tone.

“Yeah. And found about what you’d expect. But there are some interesting names in there.”

“Potentially useful to a shameless climber like you,” Quinn said.

“They might prove useful to our side.”

He was right. Our side. Our team. It made Quinn wince.

“And aren’t you just the one to talk about shame?”

Quinn felt his anger rise but pushed it back. “You mentioned you had a lead.”

“Sort of a lead. The receptionist kept a patient schedule on a software program in her computer, but she was old-fashioned and distrustful of technology. Like us. So she also kept names and appointment times in a book. One of the names in the book is missing in the computer and file cabinet. A patient named David Blank.”

“So, you think Blank did the killings, then deleted his appointment from the computer calendar and removed his file, but he didn’t know about the book.”

“So I surmise. He was the last appointment the afternoon of the murder. The first appointment the next morning discovered the bodies and called the police. We’re pretty sure Blank had previous appointments, because the records show gaps in the doctor’s schedule. Several of them. Damned computers. Global search and delete. Handy for felons.”

“Bits and bytes have no moral compass.”

“If you say so. There’s a recorder over there on the desk. Some of the other patients said it was how Dr. Maxwell worked. She listened to her patients and recorded the sessions so she could review them later, then placed the tapes in the files. There’s no cassette in the recorder.”

“So, David Blank wanted to remove all evidence of his having been a patient.”

“Sure looks that way. And turns out he’s proving difficult to locate. The few David Blanks we can find have been eliminated as suspects, so all we have is a name. The David Blank in Hannah Best’s appointment book didn’t and doesn’t exist. Only he’s real, because he probably murdered these two women.”

Quinn walked over and stared down at the taped outline on the floor, trying to imagine a human being lying there. A woman Renz had called a babe, with friends, family, and a medical degree. Looks, brains, she’d had it all, but had was the operative word. Don’t get sentimental. Maybe she didn’t have a family. But even I have a family. Some remnants of a family. The soon-to-be Franzine family. “If Blank did the deed after taking pains to create a false identity, he planned to kill the doctor from the beginning of his visits.”

“Why would anybody do something like that?” Renz asked, sounding deeply perplexed. “Go to a shrink knowing you were setting up to kill her?”

“I have no idea,” Quinn said. “But then, I don’t think I need one. Like you said, this doesn’t fit the pattern.”

“Still, it’d be nice to solve it. Throw some meat to the media wolves and take some heat off you.”

And you. “I’ll point out one thing. There might have been someone else who deleted and removed files. Somebody more successful than David Blank at covering his tracks.”

Renz looked at him with a kind of growing anger. “A killer who might have been a patient we never heard of and never will?”

“It’s possible. Somebody who knew about or never made it into Hannah’s appointment book. Who wants you looking for David Blank instead of him.” Quinn motioned with an arm toward the file cabinets in the office, then toward the reception area on the other side of the wall. “How can we know what else might be missing?”

Renz ran a hand down his face, stretching the flesh beneath his eyes so he looked mournful. “Jesus H. Christ! Leave it to you to make everything complicated.”

“It’s what you get for leaving it to me, Harley. And almost everything is complicated, if you’re really trying to get at the truth.”

“I’m not interested in the truth, Quinn. I’m interested in evidence. That’s all that counts in court.”

Quinn thought Renz might have something there.

He thanked Renz for calling him to the scene, then filled him in on what Pearl and Fedderman were doing and left.

He didn’t try pointing out that evidence was supposed to lead to truth, no matter how it played in court. There were only so many links in Renz’s chains of logic.

Enough to reach where he wanted to go, but no further.

As Quinn closed the door on the bloodied office, he wondered if the law would ever catch up with David Blank.

But then, it wasn’t his concern.

Successful decorators were a flighty bunch, flitting all over the city as if in a panic, difficult to catch up to. They were late there, in the wrong place here, ahead of schedule there. Apparently, they could arrange anything but time.

Pearl finally located Victory Wallace at a crumbly red-brick building just off Christopher Street in the Village. It was obvious that the building was being refurbished. A tubular slide ran from a second-floor window down to a rusty Dumpster. The front shop window was covered with graffiti-marred plywood featuring BOOK ’EM ALL in large black letters. The first three letters looked somewhat suspicious, and Pearl could interpret the original message. Sometimes she shared the thought.

Two vans and a pickup truck overloaded with debris-rotted lumber, broken wallboard, splintered lathing, an old door-were parked near the entrance. The building’s front door was not only open but off its hinges. Pearl wondered if it was the door in the truck.

She heard hammering as she stepped inside. Daylight streamed narrowly in through the few unboarded windows, completely missing areas that were illuminated by flood-lights. A fine dust hung in the air. Plaster dust, Pearl assumed. A burly man in jeans and a sleeveless shirt was on a ladder, using a trowel to spread drywall mud over seams in newly applied wallboard. A skinny, shirtless teenage boy, his upper body covered with tattoos, was sanding dried applications of the putty-colored substance-the cause of so much dust. His dark hair had a film of gray over it, making him look prematurely aged. At the far end of the area, whose interior walls had been removed, a man in baggy overalls was using a circular saw on boards laid over a pair of sawhorses. To Pearl’s left, another workman was on a stepladder, wielding a red-handled hammer.