John Lutz - Serial

Quinn instructed Pearl to fill in both detectives while he went downstairs to the lobby to talk with Dianne Cross.

He was on the elevator when his memory lit up. TS. He checked the tattered list he kept folded in his wallet and found that he was right. Those were the initials of Tom Stopp, the man who’d been released on DNA evidence after serving a prison term because of Tanya Moody’s inaccurate identification.

Quinn wondered if Tom Stopp had an alibi for the time of Tanya Moody’s death.

Can it really be as simple as this? The victim scrawls her murderer’s initials with her own blood?

There would be ways to find out soon enough. They would find Stopp and lean on him hard. The truth would be in how he’d react, in what could be read in his eyes. Soon they would know if the awkwardly scrawled blood letters took their form coincidentally, or meant nothing at all.

Tom Stopp had an alibi, all right. Early the evening of Tanya Moody’s murder, he’d been rushed to the hospital after suffering a heart attack. Surgery had been performed. He was still confined to bed.

“The elephant sat on my chest,” he said, when Quinn visited him in his room at the Truman Rehabilitation Center. He grinned up from his bed. “That’s what we heart attack survivors say.”

“Have they found the problem?” Quinn asked.

Stopp nodded. “A weak left ventricle. They tried to fix it with drugs, but that didn’t work, so they put in a little thingy that’ll give it a jolt of electricity if it stops beating regular. That’s what I think they said, anyway. I was still kinda groggy with whatever they gave me to put me out.”

“I was you, I’d find out for sure,” Quinn said.

“Believe me, I will.” He stared up at Quinn. “You’re here about Tanya Moody.”

“How’d you know?”

“I watch a lot of news.” His gaze flicked to a small television supported by a cocked steel elbow in a corner near the ceiling. “The world’s going all to hell.”

“Nothing new there,” Quinn said.

Stopp raised an arm with an IV tube attached to it. “Listen, aside from having a perfect alibi, I’d never do harm to that woman. What happened to her, I mean the rape, was shitty, but I never had anything to do with it. Shook up like she was, she made a wrong identification. I don’t hold it against her.”

“You must a little,” Quinn said.

“That’s what I’d be telling you if I was guilty of killing her, trying to act the honest innocent. But the way I see it, serving time on a bad rap is just another example of the way my life’s been screwed up and plagued by bad luck from the beginning, when I was a breech-birth baby.”

“There are lives like that,” Quinn agreed.

“It’s almost enough to make you believe in astrology.”

“Well, your stars were aligned right for this one. Your life was being saved around the same time Tanya Moody was losing hers.”

“Her turn, I guess,” Stopp said. He seemed to get no satisfaction from the observation.

Quinn nodded good-bye and moved toward the door. He turned. “By the way, is Stopp your real name?”

Stopp seemed puzzled. “Whaddya mean?”

“I mean, is it short for something?”

“Craps, losing lottery numbers, second-best poker hands, horses that stumble coming out of the gate.”

“Really, what’s your full family name?”

“Lance Thomas Stopp. That’s it.”

“No kidding. Lance has got some pizzazz. Your mom shoulda gone with that one.”

“I dunno. For whatever reason, my mom and dad called me Tom, even when I was in diapers. The wrong name from the beginning. Maybe that’s why my life’s been all screwed up.”

“That kind of thing can happen,” Quinn said.

He wondered if Stopp had any brothers, and if so, what were their first initials.

“You got any siblings?” he asked Stopp.

“A brother Marvin out in California, and a sister Terri, is all. They don’t talk to me anymore. Maybe because I owe them more money than I can ever repay.”

Quinn asked himself if there could be so much self-pity in the room that it might be contagious. It was certainly suffocating.

“Take care of yourself,” he said, and left before the walls closed in on him.

“It’s way too late for that,” Stopp said behind him as the door closed.

The phone call scared the hell out of Sanderson the second he recognized the voice. The call came in over his cell phone while he was walking along Central Park West. Unknown Number, it said on his phone’s ID panel. And when he heard the voice he understood why.

“I don’t like it when plans go wrong,” the Skinner said.

Sanderson had stopped walking and stood leaning against a building in a shallow alcove where he had something like privacy. “What are you talking about? Tan-The job got done. It’s all over the news.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“I gave you your ticket stub, like we agreed.”

“That’s not necessarily enough. We also agreed on a patsy. You guaranteed me that Stopp wouldn’t have an alibi, that he’d be by himself home in bed.”

Sanderson was confused. He’d tracked Stopp. Knew his habits and routine. “Wasn’t he?”

“No. I checked. I always check. When the woman we’re talking about was losing her final battle, Stopp was almost losing his. He had a heart attack and was taken to the hospital in an ambulance. Lots of people that wear white outfits will testify he was nowhere near the apartment when the woman died.”

“Heart attack? You serious?”

“Serious as… well, you know.”

Sanderson’s confusion was fast becoming anger. His fear was moderated by the fact that the Skinner was far away, on the other end of a phone connection.

Or is he far away?

Sanderson’s gaze darted this way and that. Unknown Number. Any of the many buildings around him might contain a public phone. And there were cheap, disposable bubble-packed phones that didn’t provide caller ID. “Listen, I couldn’t know about a heart attack. I mean, that was something out of my control.”

The laugh on the other end of the connection chilled Sanderson’s blood. “Everything is out of your control. You’re like the hunter who tracked a tiger to its lair and found out his gun wasn’t loaded.”

“Listen-”

But the Skinner had broken the connection.

Tiger… Lair…

Sanderson stood with his mind whirling. The hunter analogy had scared the hell out of him. This was terrible. Stopp had been intended as an insurance policy, a patsy held in reserve, a prime suspect with a motive to kill Tanya Moody, and no alibi. Between that and the Skinner’s ball-game ticket stub printed with the time and date of Tanya’s murder, the Skinner would have had a tight alibi. But instead of alibi insurance, what Stopp had provided was a heart attack.

That Sanderson could be blamed for not knowing about it ahead of time was vastly unfair. How could anyone have predicted a coronary event? Or was he supposed to have had a backup plan? Some way to maintain control of the situation?

Well, maybe…

Was the Skinner right? Did Sanderson have any control at all?

Of anything?

Sanderson couldn’t stop looking around, searching with worried eyes. It had been a long time since he’d been so unnerved. He almost dropped his cell phone trying to slide it back in his pocket. It took a few minutes before his hands stopped trembling.

The Skinner walked away from the lobby pay phone in the Clarington Hotel. Across the street and down two blocks, he entered another hotel and went to the bar, where he ordered a Dewar’s on the rocks with a splash of water and sat by himself three stools away from two men and a woman. They were watching an old black-and-white Honeymooners rerun on the TV over the bar. Jackie Gleason was bouncing around in his bus driver’s uniform. Art Carney, as Norton the sewer worker, was patiently trying to calm him, but Gleason was fuming and out of control.