"But you did like her."
"Of course! Unless she changed a lot, you'd have to turn over a lot of rocks to find somebody who didn't like Marilyn."
"Did she talk much about her job? The people she worked with?"
"Quite a bit about the job, but not about the people. I think she was pretty much on her own here in New York, except for the one other store over in Queens or someplace. And she hadn't been in town long enough to make any enemies."
"In this city you can be murdered for looking at somebody the wrong way," Pearl said.
"Yeah, but the way Marilyn was killed…" Ella took another sip of martini. "Jesus! That was so awful!" She stared across the table at Pearl. "You actually saw it, what that ghoul did to her. Doesn't that haunt you?"
"Forever," Pearl said, being honest to evoke honesty. Another Quinn technique.
"And it happened just a few blocks from here," Ella said, "in the everyday world."
"That's the horror of it," Pearl said. "Everything happens in the everyday world."
"But you're a cop, so you should be used to it."
"Well, I see more of it than most people. But no matter how much or how little any of us sees, it's still happening. What goes on behind all those walls and windows out there sometimes isn't what we imagine or would like it to be. But it happens every day."
Ella seemed to think about that most of the time while they ate their salads.
They'd both virtuously decided against dessert when Pearl noticed a change in Ella's eyes, a kind of double take, as she looked over Pearl's shoulder.
Pearl turned and saw Jeb Jones approaching the table.
He smiled and said hello to Pearl, then nodded at Ella.
"Spotted you when I walked in," he said to Pearl, resting a hand lightly on her shoulder. "I just wanted to let you know I was here."
He backed away. "You're working. I'll grab a table up near the front and we can talk when you're done."
"Haven't we met?" Ella said.
Jeb studied her. "I don't think so. I'm Jeb Jones."
"Ella Oaklie."
"Sorry, doesn't ring a bell." He gave her his incandescent grin. "But now we know each other." To Pearclass="underline" "Take your time."
Pearl said that she would and watched him cross the restaurant. Watched the way Ella was looking at him.
"I thought that was the same guy I saw with Marilyn about two weeks before she was killed." She frowned. "But now that I look at him, I suppose he's just the same type."
"You saw them where?"
"Outside her apartment."
Jeb had dated Marilyn Nelson a few times, but hadn't been inside her apartment except for the initial interview with Pearl.
"They were just coming out when I interrupted them," Ella said. "We talked a few minutes and I tried to leave, but Marilyn insisted I come up and have a drink with them. I figured that might be awkward so I refused. Then the guy insisted, said we were old friends and should catch up, but we didn't need him. Then he said his good-byes and left. He was very nice about it."
Pearl put down the fork she'd been toying with. "Did Marilyn introduce him?"
"Sure." She bit her lower lip. "I'm trying to remember his name. It wasn't Jeb Jones, I'm sure." She brightened. "Joe! That was it. Joe something. Joe Grant! So it couldn't be him." She glanced toward the front of the restaurant. "Your guy, I mean."
Pearl made a show of making a note of the name. "Very good," she said.
"Is he a suspect?"
"Not really. Marilyn Nelson was an attractive woman. I'm sure she had her admirers. Most of the Butcher's victims were attractive, so we've had to routinely eliminate the men who dated them recently. Did Marilyn and this Joe Grant seem close?"
"Not particularly. At least not in the way I think you mean."
"But you did think they were more than friends."
"Maybe. I can't be sure of that. It was just that your guy, Jeb, something about him reminded me of Joe, or I wouldn't even have thought of it." She looked at Pearl over the dessert menu they'd decided to spurn. "You and Jeb, you're close, right?"
Pearl smiled. "You're intuitive." Which was true, and probably meant she'd read the Marilyn Nelson-Joe Grant relationship correctly-nothing serious. Pearl decided not to tell Ella that Jeb had also dated Marilyn. Not so odd that there'd be a slight resemblance. Like many women, Marilyn had liked a certain type.
It struck Pearl that they might be approaching this from the wrong direction; the Butcher chose as his victims a certain type of woman, but he might also have been able to get next to them because he was their type.
Ella looked again toward the front of the restaurant, where Jeb was seated alone at a table with a glass of beer before him. "Now that I think about it, there really isn't that much of a resemblance. But when your Jeb walked in and I thought he was Joe, it sure gave me a start."
"Me, too," Pearl said.
Me, too.
39
Harrison County, Florida, 1980
"He doin' okay?" Cree asked over his shoulder, his hands skillfully playing the jumping, jerking steering wheel.
"He ain't sayin'," Boomer shouted back through the truck's knocked-out rear window.
The old Dodge pickup rattled over the swamp trail that eventually widened and joined Palmetto Road. Cree was alone in the cab, fighting with the sweat-slick steering wheel. Boomer sat in back in the truck's rusty steel bed with the boy and the dead gator. The mosquitoes didn't seem to mind that the truck was moving. They allowed for windage and maintained their assault on Boomer and the boy with the skill and persistence of fighter pilots.
Boomer slapped at a mosquito on his sweaty forearm and brushed another of the pesky insects off the boy's cheek.
Ahead of the truck the swamp was bathed in white light, not only from headlights but from a rack of spotlights on the roof. There were maneuverable spotlights on each front fender, too, aimed straight ahead. Cree and Boomer were poachers who froze their game at night with brilliant light that was followed by sudden death. The gators were wily in their dumb way and didn't always stay motionless like the other swamp creatures pinned in the brilliance, the occasional deer, possum, or bobcat-even a panther once. Cree had opened up on the big cat with his twelve-gauge, but the panther bolted into heavy foliage along the bank and disappeared into the night. If it had been a panther, like Cree swore. Boomer had acted as if he believed him, but…well, he didn't know what the hell they'd seen. The swamp was like that. It could trick a man, make him sure of himself and then surprise the hell out of him.
Like tonight.
An hour into the swamp, loaded for gator, they'd fired at a big one and it swam away and slipped under the water just as if it hadn't been shot. Could be they'd both missed, but it wasn't likely, and they used twelve-gauge shotguns with slugs in the casings instead of pellets. A lead slug that size was usually enough to stop anything it hit anywhere.
When they'd come across the other gator, the huge one that was now laid out in the back of the truck, neither one had seen the boy at first. Then Boomer had put a hand on Cree's shoulder to stop him from firing his shotgun. "Got somethin' in his mouth!"
"So?"
Boomer was squinting into the darkness where tree limbs shadowed the wash of the truck's lights. "Whatever it is ain't dead. It's still movin'."
Water stirred and Cree focused in and saw more clearly. "Deer, you think?"
"Deer, shit!" Boomer said. "Looks like a kid."
"Mother of Christ, you're right!" Cree had said, surprising Boomer a little, Cree not in Boomer's memory being particularly religious.
Both men waded deeper into the black water to get closer, holding their shotguns high. Boomer's breath was caught in his throat.
"Don't shoot yet," Cree said. "Gotta get closer so's we don't hit the kid."
The kid, a skinny boy about ten like Cree's nephew, apparently didn't see them. They caught a glimpse of his pale face, his staring eyes that seemed to hold life yet observe nothing. He was still alive. His limbs were still moving, other than the leg the gator had hold of, but they were waving almost lazily. Boomer thought it was like the kid didn't care he was caught in the jaws of something that wanted him for a meal. The boy was resisting his fate blindly, automatically, as if he'd already surrendered to what was happening and he'd turned off his mind to the horror.