John Lutz - In for the Kill

"I thought we were gonna have breakfast."

"No time now. You were almost an hour late."

Lauri bowed her head to gaze at a gray-and-white pigeon that had wandered close. "Yeah, I need to work on promptness."

Pearl smiled. "It'll come."

"What about the other?" Lauri asked. "Did you talk to Dad again about that?"

"He didn't seem warm to the idea of you tagging along with me while I'm working."

"How do you mean?"

"He said he'd shoot me." Pearl waited until Lauri looked up from the pigeon to her. "I think it's a bad idea, too, Lauri. This isn't a job like word processing or selling insurance. You can learn by watching, but you can also get hurt."

"I'm willing to take the chance."

"He isn't."

"And he's Dad, is that it?"

"Yeah. And he's my boss."

"I guess we both have to settle for that."

"Now you're learning."

But Pearl knew this was too easy. Lauri was, after all, Quinn's daughter, and Pearl knew a thing or two about Quinn.

"We can still meet now and then as friends," Lauri said. "Still talk."

"Wouldn't have it any other way," Pearl said.

Lauri stood up, shrugged, and smiled. "Then I guess that's the way it is. That's what life's about, settling for what you get."

"Part of what it's about," Pearl said. "Car's parked over there. Want a lift uptown?"

"No, I've gotta check in to work soon." Big smile. Made her look like Quinn. "Gotta be prompt."

"Atta girl," Pearl said. You are so full of bullshit, like your father.

When she reached the car, Pearl turned and saw Lauri walking in the opposite direction, away from her. Standing there with her hand on the sun-warmed car roof, she felt a sudden and unexpected fondness for Quinn's daughter, a protectiveness. Maybe even a stirring of something maternal.

Scary.

When Pearl arrived at the office, Quinn was seated behind his desk, wearing the drugstore reading glasses he used for fine print and looking at the postmortem results on Anna Bragg. They were those weird glasses that sat low on the nose and looked as if they'd been sawed in half lengthwise. Fedderman was across the room, pouring himself a cup of coffee.

"Want one?" he asked, glancing over at Pearl.

"Not this morning." Pearl's stomach felt oddly unsettled, maybe because of her probably futile conversation with Lauri and the unfamiliar maternal instinct it had provoked.

"Orange juice? I stopped and got a carton."

"Nothing, thanks." Leave me the hell alone.

"This is more of the same, almost down to the number of cuts the killer made," Quinn said dejectedly, tapping the report with a blunt forefinger. Pearl wouldn't have wanted to be tapped that hard.

"Cause of death?" she asked.

"Drowning. Like the others. He puts them in the bathtub, runs the water, then drowns them before carving them up."

"What about the tape residue?" Pearl asked. "Is that the same?"

"Yeah. Same kind of duct tape, sold everywhere. Same MO all the way. Taped tight as a Thanksgiving turkey, and with a rectangle of tape across the mouth. When they're dead and silent forever, he removes the tape, including the gag, before going to work with his blades and saw."

"Time of death?"

Quinn adjusted the narrow glasses on his nose and glanced down to make sure. "Says here between six and nine P.M."

Pearl thought that was about perfect. Unless Maize the waitress was lying, Jeb Jones had his alibi.

Jeb…

"Her colleagues at Courtney Publishing all seemed to like her."

"They always do, after they're dead," Pearl said.

"Yeah. She was an associate editor, working her way up. Her boss said she had potential. Nobody there noticed her acting scared lately, or different in any way. She'd dated a guy in sales a few times, but it didn't go anywhere and they stopped seeing each other. He's at some book convention in Frankfurt now."

"Ah, the Frankfurt alibi."

"I talked by phone to people who were with him at the time of Anna Bragg's death," Quinn said. "No possibility he flew here, killed her, then flew back."

Fedderman had walked over and was sitting behind his desk. He had coffee in one hand, a plastic cup of juice in the other. "You get anywhere with him?" he asked Pearl.

"Huh?"

"With that guy who dated Marilyn Nelson a few times."

"Oh. No, I didn't. And he's alibied up for the time Anna Bragg was killed."

"That pretty much clears him across the board," Quinn said. "Just like the other guys we connected with the dead women. They dated them, some of them had sex with them, but they've got alibis for one or more of the murders."

"Sex and the City," Fedderman said.

Pearl looked at him.

"I rent the videos and watch them," he explained. "That way I know what I'm missing."

"What we're all missing," Pearl said.

Quinn removed his goofy half-glasses and gave her a look she knew too well. Had he picked up something in her voice? Did he somehow know she was covering up exactly the kind of furtive sex she was lamenting not having?

Don't be a fool. He isn't a mind reader.

But she knew Quinn.

He could see through people and beyond. Sometimes, only for brief moments, she found herself feeling sorry for the people Quinn hunted.

She turned and walked toward the coffee brewer so he wouldn't be looking right at her, studying her. Damn him!

"I think I'll have some coffee after all." She needed to get everything out of her mind except the Job.

"You should have some of the orange juice instead," Quinn said. "It might cool you down."

Damn him!

The fax machine began humming and gurgling.

Though he was sitting down, Fedderman was closest. He stood up and wandered over to the machine, then loomed gazing down at it as if it were some puzzle he couldn't quite work out.

When it beeped and was silent, he picked up the two pages that had been faxed and carried them over to Quinn.

"Copies of Marilyn Nelson's charge account receipts," he said.

Quinn scanned them, and then put his glasses back on and looked at them more closely. The receipts were mostly for meals and clothes. Only one of them was for two meals, at the Pepper Tree restaurant. Quinn remembered seeing the Pepper Tree just a few blocks from Marilyn Nelson's apartment. The date on the receipt was less than two weeks before her murder. Had she been dining with her killer? Unlikely.

But maybe with someone who might be able to tell them more about Marilyn Nelson's last days.

With his huge blunt finger he pointed out the charge to Pearl. "Pay a visit to this restaurant. See if anyone recalls who the victim dined with on this date. Marilyn picked up the check, and she was a regular who usually ate alone, so somebody might remember."

Pearl thought it was a long shot, but it was something. If they were lucky, Marilyn Nelson had dined with a date that evening even though she'd picked up the check. Marilyn going Dutch out of desperation, maybe even with someone who knew her intimately. Pearl could picture it.

Death and the City.

Then she looked more closely at the name of the restaurant. The Pepper Tree. Jeb had told her he and Marilyn Nelson once dined there.

Pearl and Jeb had a date to go there.

It seemed to Pearl that nothing in her life was simple.

Harrison County, Florida, 1980

It was a moonless night and dark, or Sherman might have seen the danger. His time in the swamp had made him alert to such things. He'd learned hard lessons, such as how to shelter himself from the storms that blasted through the trees and raised the black water, how to find and eat things alive and dead that wouldn't make him sick, how to sleep fitfully and watchfully for what had become his natural and very real enemies.

How to survive.

Every sound in the swamp meant something to him now, as did the subtle scents on the breeze, or the irregular ripple of previously still water. He studied and learned to read these signs as he'd studied and learned from Sam's books and his long, lazy conversations with Sam. That knowledge was Sam's legacy. The swamp was Sherman's home now, dangerous, but less so than the home he had left.