John Lutz - Mister X

Pearl, who'd been working her computer, sat back and stretched her arms, clenching and unclenching her fists as if she were working little exercise balls. "It'd be nice, though, if we had a client."

"We do," Fedderman said. "We just can't find her. Pearl keeps checking her computer, but Chrissie's not on Face-book or YouTube or any of the other mass Internet connectors. There are some people there looking for dates, though, so Pearl's not giving up."

"I got a YouTube for you," Pearl said.

"Wouldn't doubt it."

Pearl fumed. Fedderman liked that. Quinn didn't, but he hesitated in acting as referee when Pearl and Fedderman went at each other. Their frequent bickering seemed to stimulate their little gray cells.

"Ease up," was all he said, and not with much conviction.

Pearl swiveled slightly in her chair to look directly at him. "Did you mention to Cindy Sellers that we can't seem to locate our client?"

"Slipped my mind."

"Sure it did." Pearl knew better than to believe that. Hardly anything slipped Quinn's mind.

Having forgotten for now about Fedderman and his jibes, Pearl smiled. Quinn thought she was beautiful when she smiled while still flush with anger. It was amazing the way she could switch gears like that. Like speed-shifting a race car.

"She called here while you were talking to Renz," Fedderman said.

"Sellers?"

"The same. Pearl took the call."

"I can't stand that woman," Pearl said.

"That's just because she has no taste, compassion, or ethics," Fedderman said.

"I can stand you," Pearl said. "Barely, sometimes, and in short doses, but I can stand you."

Quinn was getting fed up with the verbal rock fight. What were they, in high school? But he knew it was because they were stymied in their investigation. Couldn't even find their client. "What did Sellers want, Pearl?"

"The usual. Answers. I didn't give her any."

"What did you give her?"

"That high school yearbook photo. The one we found on the Internet when we realized Chrissie hadn't included any in the clippings she gave us. Sellers wanted a photo of Tiffany to run with her City Beat story."

"Did Sellers bitch because you gave her such an old photograph?" Fedderman asked.

"No. She'll do what we did: scour the Internet and build her own file of photos."

"She's probably good at that," Fedderman said. "It's what reporters do nowadays. Not much legwork left in the job. Not like being a cop."

"Hmph," Pearl said, which irritated Fedderman. It was hard to know if she was agreeing or disagreeing.

She sat forward. "I went through the clippings Chrissie gave us again, to make doubly sure, and there were photos of all the victims except for the last. Then I went on the Internet again." She wrestled her chair up closer to her desk and worked her computer. "There are some great shots." She moved the mouse across its pad and clicked it. "Like this one. It's from an old Daily News. Looks like a studio portrait when she was still a teenager. Tiffany sure was a terrific-looking kid."

Quinn angled to his left so the glare from the window didn't obscure the image on Pearl's computer screen. He stepped closer.

The image was of a news item with the victim's photo inset on the right. Tiffany's name was printed beneath the black-and-white head shot of a pretty brunette with dark eyes and a glowing and somewhat naive smile. Young woman with a bright future, the caption should have read, rather than Latest Carver victim.

"Exactly the Carver victim type," Pearl said. "Attractive, with dark hair and eyes, good cheekbones, generous mouth."

You, Quinn thought, but didn't say it.

"Tiffany fits right in. Our client does, too, but not exactly."

"She can't be Chrissie," Fedderman said.

"So who is she?" Quinn asked. "And why's she done a runner?"

"I might be able to answer your first question," Pearl said. "As I recall, she never said she and Tiffany were identical twins. She is Chrissie Keller, Tiffany's fraternal twin."

"She sure let us assume they were identical twins," Fedderman said. "I mean, with her story about wanting Quinn to think at first he was looking at one of the Carver's victims. Shock persuasion."

"Feds is right," Quinn said. "She led us in that direction."

"So she lied," Pearl said. "My God, what a surprise!"

Quinn and Fedderman looked at each other.

In a corner of his mind, Fedderman had mulled over Pearl's suggestion. "Pearl's got a point," he said. "They might be fraternal twins. But me, I'm not so sure."

"Either way, she's been dicking around with us," Pearl said.

"Still is," Fedderman said. "Playing a game."

"We'll give her game," Pearl said.

The two detectives' animosity was forgotten, lost in the fervor of the hunt. Quinn almost smiled. Cooking now…

"We need to find out why she lied," Fedderman said.

Pearl nodded. "We need to find her."

The Carver sat in his room in Midtown Manhattan and watched the long, angular shadow cast by the afternoon sun move as inexorably as fate across the wall of the building across the street.

He'd taken to sitting in the same comfortable imitation Herman Miller chair and studying the same view.

It wasn't really much of a view-simply rows and rows of windows. In the way of countless rows of windows in New York, they overwhelmed the eye so that all of them seemed impersonal, at least from a distance.

The Carver used high-powered Bausch amp; Lomb binoculars to close that distance and get to know on a more personal basis the people in the offices across the street. The interesting people, that is. Not the simple working drones. They didn't provide much entertainment.

But the interesting people were something else. Of course, it took time and a lot of watching to locate the interesting ones; and the intriguing thing was, a few of the drones, after you watched them for a while, turned out to be interesting once you got to know and understand them.

There was the insurance guy who spent most of his time masturbating or tossing darts at a poster of Angelina Jolie. The woman office manager who, locked in her own office, drank to excess and was having a hot affair that involved bondage with one of her female underlings. More conventional romance was a regular feature on the other side of a windowpane where the building stair-stepped to rise another ten floors. There a middle-aged bald man-the Carver had never figured out what sort of position he held-had at least three sexual trysts per week with a long-legged blond woman who was quite spectacular and didn't seem to frequent that floor of the building except for services rendered to the man.

A high-priced prostitute?

No. She didn't have that look about her, and she didn't carry a purse or large bag. She seemed to work elsewhere in the building, though the Carver had never figured out where. She was definitely one of the interesting people.

Considering the size of the building, all of this didn't really seem an excessive amount of interesting activity. In fact, it was barely enough to keep the Carver occupied. Most of those whom he considered his unknowing "family" held some fascination, but less each day. They all seemed to be on treadmills of risk and relentlessness that would result in wearing out their luck. And like everything else, luck did eventually wear out.

The Carver knew when not to push his luck. When not to use it up unnecessarily. And that resulted in a knack for sensing exactly when to leave the party.

He had left the best party of his life at precisely the right time. He'd gotten away with murder. Five times. While the police were aimlessly dashing around and bouncing off bad ideas like blind mice. He was proud of that.

The experts were wrong, of course. Serial killers didn't necessarily finally fall victim to their compulsion. Sometimes it worked just as it was supposed to, exactly as they wanted it to work. They fed their compulsion, and they became sated.