Some kind of telepathy, Quinn thought. May and Elliott lived all the way on the other side of the continent, and still May chose that night to call Quinn.
"How's Lauri doing?" she asked, after they'd traded hellos.
"Doing well," Quinn said. I hope. He hadn't gone to bed and was slumped on the sofa, worrying while watching four lawyers on a quarter-split TV screen argue over a murder that had happened in some other state, maybe Minnesota. The victim had been an attractive young woman. He'd muted the lawyers but hadn't been able to stop watching.
"New York hasn't corrupted her, has it?"
"I won't let that happen," Quinn said. "Besides, she's more grown-up than I imagined. She's smart."
"Not street-smart. You don't get that way here in the burbs of LA."
Quinn wondered if May read the papers. If you were a teenager, anyplace you were had the potential to make you wiser but sadder-or worse. His gaze wandered back to the attorneys jabbering silently on the muted TV. "I think she's taking care of herself pretty well. She's got a job."
"You're kidding. The Lauri I know couldn't hold down a job."
"She's held it down so far. She's a waitress at a restaurant down in the Village."
"Servers, they call them now, Quinn. And I'm not sure I like it that this place is in the Village."
A dapper gray-haired man who used to be the chief medical examiner in New York was on the screen now, holding up a chart with a skeleton printed on it and using his manicured forefinger as a pointer.
"The restaurant's Pakistani," Quinn said, watching the former ME point at the skeleton's pelvis. "At least it claims to be. The food seems kind of eclectic to me. Lots of barbecue."
"You've been there?"
"Damned right."
May laughed. "Good. That's comforting. She's still working there, so you must have thought the place was okay."
"It's a job," Quinn said. "A start."
"Can I talk to her?"
"She's not home right now."
"It's eleven-thirty, Quinn."
Damned Worm! "She's on a date."
May didn't say anything for a moment. Then: "Oh. It didn't take her long to get into circulation."
"She's a beautiful girl, May. Like you're a beautiful woman."
"Spare me the Irish bullshit. Who's she going out with? Another of the food servers?"
"A musician from the band that's playing at the restaurant. There's a bar there, too, with live music."
"Pakistani music?"
"For all I know," Quinn said, remembering the high-decibel onslaught of "Lost in Bonkers." "I've met the guy. He seems…safe."
"Is that what your cop's instincts tell you?"
They tell me what to tell you. "He's a scrawny young kid, looks like he's never had real sex. If you could see him, May, you wouldn't worry so much."
"What's his name?"
"Wormy."
"God! Is that a nickname?"
"I don't know. I think it's French and I might be pronouncing it wrong."
Quinn heard noises in the hall, then the key ratcheting in the lock.
The door opened and Lauri came in alone. A vague, S-shaped shadow behind her writhed and flitted away in the hall.
"She just got home," Quinn said, trying to sound reassuring. He mouthed to Lauri, You're late.
"Close, though," she whispered back.
Quinn studied her. Clothes not too mussed, lipstick unsmeared, pretty much the same Lauri who'd left with the human worm.
"She all right?" asked the voice from California.
"Fine, fine…" Quinn held the phone out toward Lauri. "It's your mother. She wants to talk to you."
Lauri seemed to think about that, then shrugged and walked over to where Quinn sat on the sofa. He handed her the phone, then stood up and diplomatically left the room.
In the kitchen, he opened a cold Budweiser and for a brief moment considered listening in on the extension, then thought he'd probably be caught at it.
Sitting at the table, sipping his beer, he couldn't make out the contents of the conversation in the next room, but it didn't take long, and Lauri's tone was curt.
After a few minutes of silence, she appeared in the kitchen doorway.
"Your mother still on the line?" Quinn asked.
"No. I guess she didn't have anything more to say to you." She smiled at him. "I'm going to bed. Unless you wanna chew me out first for being forty-five minutes late."
"You were close enough," Quinn said. "Besides, eleven-thirty wasn't a promise, it was just something Wormy mentioned." He took a sip of beer. "You like that guy?"
"Not nearly as much as he likes me."
Quinn tilted back the bottle for another sip. "You'd better get used to that kind of thing."
Lauri looked at him. "Fatherly wisdom, along with a compliment. I like that. Thanks." She waved languidly to him. "'Night."
"'Night," he said, not sure whether she was kidding.
He sat for a while absently peeling the label from the beer bottle, trying to sort through how he was feeling, not getting anywhere. Probably like a lot of fathers of teenage girls. Unknowing. Unsettled.
He decided he'd ask Pearl to talk with Lauri, to just sort of get acquainted. Maybe she could figure things out and enlighten him.
Then maybe Lauri could explain Pearl.
22
"It somehow makes the murder more intimate," Renz said.
He unmistakably winked at Pearl before he glanced around. It was the first time he'd been in the office space the city had rented for Quinn and his team, and he was obviously thrown by the idea of the place as an ersatz squad room. It looked more like the scene of a boiler room operation that had folded only minutes before the police arrived.
Zzzziiiiiiiiiii, went a drill at Nothing but the Tooth.
Renz winced.
"Murder itself is as intimate as it gets," Quinn said. "The fact that the killer displayed some of the victim's pubic hair after dismembering the body doesn't make it any worse."
"No," Pearl said, "Deputy Chief Renz is right. There's something especially intimate about that kind of thing that gets to people-especially women. But men, too, if they have any sensitivity." She was perched on the edge of her desk, where she could usually be found instead of in her chair.
Quinn gave her a dark look from behind his desk. Was she ticked off at him over something? And Renz was at least sensitive enough to know he was being played.
But Renz was smiling; Pearl was playing his game. "Officer Kasner has it figured right, Quinn. That's why the chief and the commissioner and everybody who ever so much as ran for office in New York is on my ass."
"Which is why you're here," Quinn said.
"Yep. Pass the potato. You and your team have gotta start showing some results, or the entire NYPD will be in so much deep shit with the pols it'll be traded for Boston's police department."
"Or Mayberry's," Fedderman said. Pearl figured he must have seen Renz's earlier wink.
Renz grinned. "I like that. Your team's at least got a sense of humor, Quinn. Like a lot of losers, they've learned to laugh at themselves."
"I was thinking the same thing," Quinn said.
Now Renz was laughing. They were all laughing. Oh, it was a jolly world.
Renz wiped his eyes. "I was told by the chief to come here and shake a knot in your tail. I'm going easy because I know how it is, how clean this bastard works, so there's nothing you can grasp that doesn't slide right outta your mind. All I'm saying is, remember who hired you. We're working together while you're working for me."
"And we are working," Pearl said, having lost track of who was doing the kidding.
"And hard," Fedderman added.
"Don't I know it?" Renz said. "This visit is just a political necessity." He studied Quinn. "So what ails you? Have a bad night?"