John Lutz - In for the Kill

Renz pressed on. "I came up with an idea. Thought I'd run it past you."

Helen the profiler, who'd been leaning with a bony hand on the window frame, straightened up her lanky body and paid closer attention.

"Let's hear it," Quinn said, shifting in his chair and trying to sound enthusiastic. He reminded himself that Renz was a good cop when he wasn't trying to think too hard. His shrewdness seemed to be confined to his political maneuvering.

"We need to get this psycho off the dime," Renz said. "Get him to bust a move. I think Helen would agree that psychologically he needs some kind of jolt."

"Sort of maybe," Helen said cautiously. She crossed her long arms, an impressive show of muscle and tendon.

"He's feeling the increasing pressure, you said," Renz told her. "Especially now with Mom in town."

"True," Helen said.

"So it might not take much to prompt him into action."

"True."

Quinn was thinking that so far he hadn't heard an idea, hoping Pearl wouldn't point that out. He glanced over at her and she favored him with a razor-thin smile. Mind reader.

"I think we need to use the media again," Renz said. "Just a short piece about Myrna still being in town, along with a photograph. It could be taken in an interrogation room, or maybe even in this office, and we say she's given a deposition, quote her as pleading with her wayward son to give himself up."

"Nothing new so far," Quinn said, getting impatient and also figuring he might beat Pearl to the punch. He could almost hear Pearl ticking.

"You'll be standing over Myrna," Renz said to Quinn. "Maybe with your hand on her shoulder, and you and she could be looking into each other's eyes. Drive our sicko killer wild."

"Hint at a romantic attachment?" Pearl asked.

Renz nodded. "You got it. Hint broadly."

Fedderman rubbed his chin thoughtfully, his white shirt cuff just beginning to come unbuttoned. "Myrna's still a good-looking woman," he said. "It'd be easy to believe an attachment."

"Maybe you should be it," Pearl said.

Fedderman looked aghast. "I'm hardly in her league."

"Such modesty, when it's convenient. Other times you're Brad Pitt."

"It's Quinn he hates," Helen said. "Quinn is his great nemesis, maybe even the lost father figure who deserted him. Our killer simultaneously hates and respects Quinn."

Many do, Pearl thought.

"So he's all the more likely to respond," Renz said.

"It's possible he'll respond with an oedipal rage," Helen said, "vented at his mother rather than Quinn. When it comes to people he loves, hates, and fears, all at the same time, Mom's at the top of the list. It's Mom he's repetitiously killing."

"Isn't this all getting way too complicated?" Pearl asked.

"Maybe not," Fedderman said. "We're dealing with a complicated psycho."

"It'll all seem simple when the cuffs are clicked on him," Renz said. He stuck the dead cigar back in his mouth.

"Or a bullet brings him down," Fedderman added.

"I di'n' hear 'at," Renz said around the cigar.

Quinn wasn't sure he liked this at all. Still, if it might work…

He glanced over at Helen, who was idly rocking back and forth simply by flexing her long muscles, looking more like a decathlon champion than a psychologist. He knew her background. She wasn't just Helen Iman, NYPD. She was Dr. Iman, Psy. D. The expert in the room.

She caught him looking at her, misreading him. Maybe.

"Have you ever secretly thought of sleeping with Myrna Kraft?" she asked him.

"If I were a spider."

Pearl was silent.

There was a mood in the office no one quite understood.

Renz removed the dead cigar from his mouth. "So whaddya think?" he asked the room in general.

"I think it's a brilliant idea," Helen said. "But be ready for whatever you wake up."

The sun cleansed, purified, burned away whatever festered and gave pain.

At least for a while.

The Butcher sat on a bench at the Seventy-second Street entrance to Central Park and tilted his face up to the warm sunshine. He'd dreamed again last night and had been in no mood for breakfast this morning. He was tired from lack of sleep, and there was a sour taste beneath his tongue that persisted no matter what he did.

Not that he couldn't shrug off his dreams when he was awake.

Not that he couldn't at all times differentiate dreams from reality.

Except during his dreams, of course.

He almost shivered with the chill he felt even in the warm sun.

After his morning shower, he'd taken a walk, thinking that might stir his appetite and then he'd stop somewhere and have at least orange juice and coffee. And of course he wanted to read the morning Post he'd picked up at a kiosk during his stroll to the park. He was always interested in what the media had to say about the killer who so baffled the police and intrigued the public. Even the grand gray lady, the Times, the paper of record, sometimes ran news items on the Butcher, and right on the front page, above the fold.

Sherman smiled up at the sun. He'd found fame, in an anonymous way. Had he always sought fame? Or had it only been after he'd begun to act on what he'd known, what he'd felt?

He cautioned himself that it could be dangerous, this hunger for publicity. It was a hunger that at times consumed its own compulsion. Sherman had read the literature on serial killers and knew as much about them as Quinn. Well, maybe not that much. Quinn had actually met serial killers, whereas Sherman merely…was one. His smile broadened and he almost laughed out loud, sharing the joke with the sun.

He was still tired and his legs felt heavy, but he was definitely feeling better. He'd sit here a while, read the paper, and enjoy the day in its full and early bloom. After glancing around the park and then out at the busy avenue, he drew his reading glasses from his shirt pocket, slipped them on and adjusted the frames at the bridge of his nose, and opened the paper in his lap.

Ah! Interesting.

He leaned over the paper, peering at the photograph on page two. Not merely interesting. Astounding! Mom and Quinn, in some kind of room, perhaps an office. Mom was seated at a table, a sheet of paper before her, and a pen in her hand. Quinn was standing close by, just behind her, his hand resting gently on her shoulder near the curve of her neck. She was staring not at the paper or camera but up into Quinn's eyes.

And the way he was looking at her!

How dare-

Sherman felt a cold, cold pressure just beneath his heart. He closed his eyes and waited until it went away before he looked again at the photo in the Post.

Now he smiled. Making himself arrange his facial muscles at first, but then the smile became genuine. Reason had supplanted emotion.

This photograph was obviously a trick. He laughed out loud, a kind of strangled giggle. Quinn! He didn't hate him, didn't want to kill Quinn. After all, he'd chosen Quinn. And Quinn hadn't let him down. Sherman laughed again, this time in admiration at the wiliness of his opponent. The old "Killer's Mother Signs Statement" trick, but with a twist. Wonderful! Audacious! Mom as bait while having an affair with the lead detective. All a lie, of course. Quinn had come up with something new, something innovative, that could be added to all the other misdirected claptrap written and spoken about serial killers and their mothers.

Misguided and unhappy professors in musty classrooms or lecture halls half full of bored students, TV chatterhead pop psychologists mouthing the tired phrases of others, spoon-feeding pap in sound bites to the millions, what did they know? Who were they to presume?

Well, let Quinn be smug for a while. Sherman knew better. Who was this asshole detective really? And how innovative was he? Did he think he'd invented flush toilets or the forward pass?