While one investigator got to work snapping photographs from every angle, the other got busy with his bottles of latent print powder. Kurt left the room to question potential witnesses on the second floor of the motel, and Quinn tossed his gloves in the duffle and walked back outside. He shone the flashlight hooked to his belt into the garbage can at the bottom of the stairs. It was half full, and he knew there had to be a Dumpster somewhere on the property. Before the night was over, he was going to be in waders, ass deep in garbage. He walked into the office and was assailed with the smell of nicotine, fried chicken, and cherry sanitizer. Behind the pocked counter sat Dennis Karpowich, a man in his early sixties with thinning hair the color of Grecian Formula 16. He had bad teeth and a worse smoker’s hack. When Quinn showed him Mr. Patterson’s license, Dennis identified him as the man who’d paid for a four-hour stay in room thirty-six.
“Did you see anyone with him?”
“A woman.”
This was the first time anyone had placed a woman with any of the victims. “What did she look like?” Quinn asked as he wrote.
“I only saw her from behind as they was walking up the stairs. I remember because she didn’t strike me as one of the girls.”
“Girls? Do you mean hookers?” Dennis didn’t answer, and Quinn glanced up from his report. “I’m not a vice cop. I don’t care if you’re renting to whores or to guys who like donkeys. I’m just trying to find a woman who has a nasty habit of killing the men she dates.”
Dennis lit a generic cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “She didn’t look like one of the regular girls who stay here.”
“What made you think that?”
“ ’Cause she had on one of them long coats that looked like it cost a lot of money. Wool or something like that. The girls who come here don’t wear their good clothes to work.”
Quinn tried not to smile at that. Dennis made it sound as if the girls poured concrete or painted houses for a living. “Color of the coat?”
“Red.”
“How tall was she?”
“I’m not good at guessing stuff like that. I think she was about as tall as his shoulder.”
Quinn figured that made her around five-two. They would be able to determine better once the coroner measured the body. “Hair color?”
“She had on a hat. A turquoise hat.” He circled his head with his hands. “And it had one of those wide parts to it.”
“It had a wide brim?”
“Yeah, but it kind of flopped down, and it had what looked like a big peacock feather on one side.”
Quinn paused in his questioning to write that all down before he asked, “Did you hear her say anything?”
“No, but she was laughing.”
Quinn glanced up. “Laughing?”
“Yeah. Like he was saying something funny. You know. Like he told her a joke and she kinda hits his arm. Playful.”
Alaughing, playful serial killer. Now that was seriously twisted. “Did you see anything else?”
“I don’t think so.”
“If you remember anything, give me a call.” Quinn handed him a business card. “I’m sure I’ll be in touch with more questions.”
As Quinn left the office, a patrol officer informed him the couple in room thirty-five might have heard something. The deceased excluded, room thirty-six looked just like thirty-five. Aprostitute in a dingy white sweater sat on the bed, picking at her arms, her eyes vacant, drugged, bored. The man beside her looked up through a pair of thick glasses. His hair was slicked back and his arms were crossed over his thin chest.
“Can I smoke?” the woman asked.
“Go ahead.”
Quinn wrote down their names and the time they’d checked into the motel. The man stood up and started to pace. “I gotta get out of here. I was just going out for paper towels and dog food. My wife can’t know I had a date.”
Quinn looked at the guy and his choice of “dates” and didn’t feel a bit sorry for him. The slob’s wife should know what she lay down with every night. But that wasn’t Quinn’s job. Not these days. “You’ll leave when I’m convinced you’ve told me everything you heard or saw.”
“I told the other cops. I heard some banging like a bed hitting the wall, but I figured…someone was having wild sex.” He shrugged. “I didn’t see anything.”
“How about you?” Quinn asked the prostitute, who was now picking at her cuticles. Lovely.
“I didn’t see nothin’,” she said, moving her jaw like all addicts tended to do. “They was here before us.”
“How do you know?”
“I could hear ’em. Like he said.” She took a drag off her cigarette, then added, “Just some banging. But you hear that a lot around here.”
Quinn handed them both his card and told them to call if they remembered anything. As he left the room, the coroner arrived, and they entered the crime scene together. An investigator knelt in the doorway dusting the jamb with black powder. “There’s dozens of overlapping prints here,” he complained as Quinn slid past. “It’s going to take months to process these.”
Too bad they didn’t have months.
“Another poor bastard,” the coroner said as he and Quinn snapped on new pairs of gloves, “just trying to get laid.” The coroner estimated time and probable cause of death, and Quinn photographed the rope tied to the bedframe.
An hour after the coroner arrived at the scene, the body was released, and Quinn filled Kurt in on what the manager had seen. Admittedly, it wasn’t much, but it was more than they’d had before. He knew better than to get real excited about a woman in a turquoise hat and red coat. What Kurt told him next had him rethinking the direction of the case.
“There’s a lot of ladies with turquoise hats these days. It has something to do with that Peacock Society.”
Quinn took a measuring wheel from his duffle. “Peacock Society?” He looked over at Kurt. What the hell was a Peacock Society?
“Yeah. These days, all the older ladies are in that club where they wear big hats and bright colors.” Kurt placed an evidence flag on the carpet next to a black button. “I think they have meetings and stuff.”
“It’s on account of that book,” the investigator collecting prints at the door told them. “Some lady wrote a book about women wearing peacock feathers because they don’t need men.”
Quinn rolled the tape wheel across the small room and wrote down the measurement. “Did you read the book?” he asked the investigator.
“No, but I saw it at Walden’s in the mall,” the guy answered as he placed clear tape on the black prints, then transferred them to the lift card.
Quinn didn’t bother pointing out that seeing a book wasn’t quite the same as reading it. Instead, he took more measurements and drew a rough sketch of the room. Tomorrow he’d track down information on a Peacock Society. If there was such a club in town, he’d check it out.
“Why did Breathless kill in a motel this time?” Kurt wondered out loud as he looked for more evidence in the dirty carpet. “Why take the risk?”
“Probably because men are scared and aren’t taking women home,” Quinn speculated.
“Maybe she’s getting bolder.”
“They usually do.” Quinn glanced about the crime scene, then looked at his watch. He figured they might be done in time for breakfast.
Lucy poured herself a cup of coffee and pushed her wet hair behind her ears. She’d slept little the night before, tossing and turning and thinking about what had happened at Quinn’s house, until finally she’d gotten out of bed and decided to work. The upside was that she’d written ten pages. The downside was that she was tired this morning.
She’d finally fallen asleep around three, only to be back up again at eight. It could only mean one thing. One terrifying thing.
She was in love with Quinn. She didn’t know how it had happened. One second she’d been answering questions for the Women of Mystery, and then she’d looked up and seen him watching her. Wham, she’d felt it just like that, and there had been no turning back to the second before. No turning back her feelings to when she’d been confused about how she felt.