“I see you had a party today,” she said.
“More like a tete-a-tete,” Lido said, surprising Pearl with his vocabulary and elocution. Especially since he was obviously still drunk.
“Looks more like you two rolled down a hill.” She stepped inside and got another whiff of Lido’s breath. “Are you still drinking?”
Lido shrugged. “A little hair of the frog.”
“You mean dog. Frogs don’t have hair.”
“Nor do they bark.”
Pearl went across the room and stared down at Quinn. He looked as bad as Lido, but his chest was rising and falling regularly. At least he’d stopped snoring.
“We were working on the computer,” Lido said, as if in pathetic defense of his and Quinn’s conditions.
Pearl could have guessed that. Quinn had been doing his job of getting Lido to drink so he could get in touch with and apply his tech genius to the hunt for the Skinner. Pearl wondered if the afternoon had been productive. She winked at Lido. “So what’d you learn?”
He eagerly led her to a long table on which was a big desktop computer. A laptop was placed off to the side. There were two flat-screen monitors. One of them was blank. The other was showing that screen saver of what looked like PVC pipes that kept fitting together to form right angles unto eternity. That monitor came all the way to life when Lido sat down at the computer.
“We learned where carpet-tucking knives weren’t,” he said. “But when I was lying in bed, or on the floor, this evening, I thought of something else.”
“What was that?”
“The fusion of time and geography.”
“You’re still drunk,” Pearl said.
Lido gave the sheepish smile that made him look so human and pitiable. “A little, but not like him.” He pointed toward Quinn, who had shifted in his sleep and appeared about to fall off the sofa.
“We know the murders are committed on weekends,” Lido said. “Sometimes Mondays or Fridays. So what I figure is we can check New York hotel reservations around the times of the murders, maybe come up with the same name more than once.”
So simple, Pearl thought. Like all products of brilliance. For the first time she saw and appreciated Lido’s real genius on the computer. She could see why Quinn preferred him drunk when he worked.
Lido took a deep breath, like a concert pianist preparing to play. And he did play the keyboard like a musical instrument, roaming the Internet as if he invented it, pausing now and then to adjust something with the mouse as if finetuning or changing chords. There was no hesitancy, no altering of his strange body rhythm. His mind seemed to be one with the incredibly fast computer, somewhere out there in the ether, where Pearl couldn’t follow.
An hour passed like a minute. There was a thump as Quinn rolled off the sofa. Pearl looked over at him, momentarily concerned. He seemed none the worse for his short drop, and was sleeping deeply and probably comfortably, on the floor. Pearl turned back to her work (rather, Lido’s work) that Quinn should have been doing. Last night he’d followed Lido too far into the bottle. Pearl knew it wasn’t the first time. This crazy plan of his had to stop.
But not yet, Pearl thought. Lido was drunk anyway, so why not make use of him?
There were two matches, both men, who’d been at hotels in New York at the times of most of the Skinner murders. Pearl watched spellbound as Lido used the Internet to learn everything about them. She knew that half the sites he visited were confidential. They were breaking the law as certainly as if they were burglarizing buildings.
Not the first time, Pearl thought.
Finally Lido sat back from his computer. One of the men was a seventy-two-year-old financial consultant who lived with his wife in Atlanta. He traveled constantly, visiting clients all over the country. The other man was a clothing designer whose Internet history made it clear that he was gay.
“The gay guy maybe, but not likely,” Lido said, sitting back in his chair and obviously disappointed. He appeared to be sobering up. Pearl, still haunted by strains of youthful Catholicism, absently crossed herself as she located a gin bottle and poured Lido a generous drink. Forgive me, for I know exactly what I do.
He tossed the gin down like water.
“Has there ever been a gay serial killer who murdered women?” he asked.
“Not to my knowledge.” Pearl poured herself a very small drink. “Not openly gay, anyway.”
Lido worked the computer some more. “Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“He’s not only gay, he’s married.”
“Well…”
“To another fella,” Lido said.
“Oh.”
“And when Verna Pound was killed he was in Paris.”
“Unless we have two killers, that leaves him out,” Pearl said. She took a sip of her drink.
Lido looked crestfallen, but only for a moment. Then he suddenly came back all the way alive. The gin kicking in. “How ’bout another drink?” he asked.
“Let’s work for a while, then I’ll pour you one,” Pearl said. Carrot and stick.
She felt terribly guilty to be using this guy. She felt no different from Quinn, who was over there sleeping on the carpet. She wanted to wring Quinn’s neck, but she also wanted to wring yet more tech miracles out of Jerry Lido.
“I’ve got an idea,” Pearl said. “Hotel reservations are one thing-if our killer even made reservations. They can be paid for in cash, or credit cards under different names. But if you travel alone and pay cash for an airline ticket, the authorities take note of you. And our killer wouldn’t take a chance and use anything but a valid credit card when it came to Homeland Security. Maybe we should get into credit card files, if you can.”
“Oh, I can,” Lido said. “But it’d be easier to check flights into New York carrying passengers traveling alone, and who paid cash or with credit or debit cards.”
Pearl knew he was right. “Only thing is,” she said, “you’re messing with Homeland Security, when you illegally hack into airline passenger information.”
“Oh, I often get into-”
“Don’t tell me, Jerry.”
“I’ll come and go without leaving any kind of electronic footprint,” Lido said confidently.
“Jerry-”
“Sometimes I do it just for sport,” he said, grinning. “LaGuardia, Newark, and Kennedy. I compare what all the passengers paid for their seats. Pearl, it’s fun. God help me, it’s fun!”
Pearl said, “You want another drink?”
It was past 2 A. M. when, with Lido’s help, Pearl managed to get Quinn downstairs and into a cab. Within an hour, Quinn was in bed in the brownstone, and Pearl was curled next to him. Both slept deeply when they weren’t dreaming.
In the morning, Pearl awoke to hear Quinn on the phone. He was doing what Pearl had heard him doing before-talking Jerry Lido out of suicide.
Pearl rolled onto her stomach and buried her face in her pillow, assailed again by guilt over having exploited Lido’s vulnerability.
Later she felt the bed sag with Quinn’s weight, and his big hand was gentle on her shoulder.
“Lido gonna be all right?” she asked, muffled by the pillow.
“I think so.”
“I still don’t feel right about what we’re doing. I feel…”
“Guilty?”
“Yeah.”
“Still the good Catholic girl,” Quinn said.
“Sometimes, anyway,” Pearl said.
She rolled onto her back and looked up at him.
“You’ve been crying,” he said, and bent down and kissed the tip of her nose.
“There have to be rules, Quinn. Call them laws. Call them commandments. Call them whatever you want. But even in this screwed-up world, there have to be rules.”
“There are,” he said. “They bend.”