“He could go into any of the series of clubs in that direction,” Jon said to Halladay, “or circle back this way without having to go out to the street. And he could exit on either side of the street. So I doubt calling for backup to cover exits would do any good.”
“Who would we call, anyway?” Halladay said, as he moved forward into the second club. “Let’s just find him.” But Jon grabbed his arm to slow him down.
“Be careful,” the younger detective said in his ear. “We know he’s killed in public, and if he has a gun he could just wait for us to turn a corner and open fire. Let’s keep our distance from each other so he couldn’t take us both out as easily, but not so far that we get separated.”
Halladay nodded, and they both stepped out onto a balcony similar to the one they had just been on in the Starlight club, with the main dance floor ahead of them and down on the ground level. The ceiling was not nearly as high as at the former club—in fact, it was just above them. But when they moved closer to the railing, staying about ten or fifteen feet apart from one another, they could see most of the club from there, so they both stood still for a while and scanned the crowd for the suspect.
This club was better lit than most, and after a few moments of checking out the clientele, Jon found out why. He had noticed that the couples talking or dancing with each other were almost all older men with much younger women, and the few exceptions were older women with much younger men. The people who were not paired up yet were all young and attractive, or older and not, seemingly without exception.
“What is this place?” Jon yelled across to Halladay, over the noise of the music and conversations. He had to yell loudly enough that some of the customers milling around them stopped what they were doing and gave him a nasty look.
“It’s a Sugar Daddy club,” Halladay shouted back. “Old farts with money come to get some young fud, and the young fud come to get the old farts’ money. Just another modern version of the oldest profession.”
Now they were really getting some looks, and the surrounding crowd started slowly parting from them. Apparently they didn’t like how the big Scotsman’s frank description cut through whatever mental spin the customers had used to justify what they were doing there. But the cops stopped talking, realizing that they were drawing attention to themselves and wasting precious time, and went back to scanning the crowd. There were a lot of men who were older, like Shinsky, but not very many as big, so it wasn’t long before they spotted him on the bottom level dance floor, moving toward the entrance to the next club over. This move on the perp’s part made sense, because Sweets was too wide open for him to hide effectively. It was also too well lit, because the clientele had to be able to see the merchandise.
The next establishment in the Row, into which Shinsky disappeared and the cops pursued him, was the exact opposite when it came to lighting, and that was even reflected in the name. It was a sex club called Dark Desires.
13
“In here we have to worry about a knife,” Jon said after they wove through the crowd at Sweets, flashed their badges at the entrance of the sex club, and saw how dark it was inside. “He could be hiding anywhere in here.”
He had noticed a bed near the entrance, which was only slightly partitioned off by three small temporary walls, and he could vaguely make out others like it in the darkness ahead.
The two cops proceeded farther into the club, spaced like they were before but with guns drawn now, and Jon noticed that there were a variety of places that couples could choose. In addition to the cubicles, there were doors to private rooms along the outside walls and mattresses lining the floor in between the doors. The rooms were obviously for those who preferred privacy, the mattresses for those with an exhibitionistic streak, and the cubicles for those somewhere in between.
There seemed to be only one other exit from the big room, in addition to the door they had entered. Even though it was on the far side, Jon could see that no one was entering or leaving it currently, because the stairwell going up behind it was more brightly lit. He could also make out direction signs pointing up the stairs that said, BAR, DANCE FLOOR, and EXIT.
Jon knew that Shinsky might possibly have run right for the stairs as soon as he’d come in, and disappeared up them before he and Halladay had gotten there. But the big killer could also have found a good place where he could hide, hoping that the cops would go straight through the room and allow him to escape by circling back. Or, as Jon had suggested to his partner, he could have found a good spot for an ambush and planned to take each of them out under the cover of darkness. So Jon kept his eye on the exit, but bore to the left behind one of the cubicles to spread out the search more. As he did, he started to notice the smell of sweat that was mixed in with that of the many scented candles that were burning at various places in the room, but not really doing the trick.
As he was passing a second cubicle closer to the left wall, two men suddenly stepped out of it, fully clothed and obviously finished with whatever they’d been were doing in there. This made Jon jump slightly, but the men were much more frightened themselves when they saw his gun. They instinctively raised their hands and then backed away from him toward the exit when he gestured that way with the weapon. There were two couples on an oversized mattress along the wall as he continued farther, and they were completely naked. But Jon didn’t find this stimulating in the least, first because he could only glance at them briefly and second because it only took that brief glance to see that they were not very attractive people. All four of them were seriously out of shape, to put it nicely.
Then Jon jumped again, and much more violently this time, because the overhead lights abruptly flashed on and illuminated the whole room. After waving his gun around during the initial startled screams and shouts, he saw Halladay at a bank of light switches near the exit, smiling from ear to ear. The noise died down when the big cop held up his badge and people throughout the room saw it and started to dress and file out, even though he’d never told them to do that. Jon noticed that the plague of unattractiveness wasn’t limited to the two couples he had seen on the mattress—it seemed that it was true of almost all the people there, except for a few, whom he surmised might have been prostitutes.
“Reminds me of the old saying about nude beaches,” Halladay yelled across the room at him, either reading his mind or thinking about the same thing. “Those who should don’t and those who shouldn’t, do. That’s why they keep these places so dark—nobody wants anyone to see their bodies.”
Some of the people filing out of the room between the two cops grunted and scowled at Halladay, and Jon was amazed at how accomplished the big Scot was at offending even total strangers.
After a minute or so of scanning the customers and checking any possible hiding places, which was much easier now that the room was awash in light, they concluded that Shinsky wasn’t there and pushed their way up the stairway to the next floor, which turned out to be the main one. They talked briefly with a woman in management who told them she had seen someone fitting Shinsky’s description linger in the lobby for a few minutes but then take off into the next club in the Row—presumably because there wasn’t a big enough crowd in this one in which to get lost. The killer made a big mistake, however, when he tried to hide in the next club.
It was called Continuum, and they entered onto a balcony like they had with the first two. But this one was different in that it stretched across parts of the whole top floor in a seemingly random pattern, leaving some large holes through which the bottom floor could be seen. Jon and Halladay took up positions at the railing in two different spots that they thought would afford the best combined view of both floors, and started panning them for Shinsky.