“That’s what you get for being a pretty boy.”
“That’s what I get for letting you write those stupid mushy e-mails. You made her think I wanted to get naked right then and there.” Under normal circumstances, Quinn wouldn’t have minded maneuvering a woman out of her clothes. In fact, getting women naked ranked high on his list, but not with some of the women he’d met lately. The thought of seeing Lucy naked held some appeal, but not when every word would be recorded. And yeah, not when she might be psychotic.
“Quinn, you’re going to concentrate most of your attention on Lucy Rothschild and Maureen Dempsey until we can either clear or charge them.” Sergeant Mitchell pointed to the two photos in front of Quinn.
Quinn looked at the blown-up copies of the driver’s license photos and frowned. Maureen Dempsey, possibly the stupidest woman he’d ever known, and Lucy Rothschild, the woman who wrote about serial killers. He understood why Lucy made the list. She was smart, and if anyone would know how to kill someone and get away with it, it was someone who wrote about it for a living. “I think we can eliminate Maureen. She’s as dumb as a box of rocks.”
“Could be an act,” Kurt pointed out.
Quinn laughed and shook his head. “You heard what she said about those aliens. No one’s that good an actress.”
“She dated all three victims, and we can’t rule her out yet.” Sergeant Mitchell flipped open the top murder book to several different photos of all three victims. They all lay spread-eagle on their beds, as if they’d been posed that way, their noodles limp and pathetic, their mouths open and the dry cleaner’s bag sucked down their throats. “Maybe Kurt’s right. She could be acting, but after listening to the Rothschild tape, I think she’s the more promising. She sounds like she might be bragging. Like she knows how to kill three men and get away with it.”
Quinn flipped a few pages to pictures of sooty fingerprint dust smearing doorways, nightstands, and telephones.
“Maybe she got tired of just writing about murder,” Kurt added as Quinn flipped another page. Black powder covered three different bathroom sinks, toilets, and shower stalls.
“It’s possible she wants to act out what she writes,” Quinn conceded.
The technicians had lifted latent prints off the dry cleaner’s bags, but all of them matched prints of Westco workers. He flipped past various crime scene photos. Three dead men and no solid physical evidence that linked any one person to all three.
“I’d like to get a look at what she might be working on now.” Quinn glanced up at the sergeant. “Maybe we should just pull her in and ask her. All we have to do is catch her in a few lies.”
“Not yet. We can’t risk her lawyering up.” Sergeant Mitchell scratched the back of his neck. “Kurt,” he said and pointed a finger at the other detective. “Work on a couple more of those romantic e-mails from hardluvnman and send them to those two women.”
Quinn cringed. Kurt read romance novels and watched chick flicks, and he and the sergeant thought Kurt knew what sort of mushy shit women liked to hear. He’d been married for more than twenty years, so perhaps he did. “No more shit about how hot they look in their photos,” he warned. “Or that ‘looking for a soul mate’ crap.”
The sergeant chuckled. “Set up dates for a few cocktails this time. Get those women loose. When they e-mail back, let me know.” He turned to leave but said over his shoulder, “Oh, and we need to question the people at Westco again.”
“Kurt and I planned to do that this afternoon,” Quinn said as he watched the sergeant disappear.
An hour later, Kurt finished the “romantic” e-mail. “I just finished this,” he said and handed Quinn a copy. “Sergeant Mitchell thinks it looks good. Maybe my best work yet.”
Quinn glanced at what Kurt had written, and he felt his brain squeeze. “Jesus H. Macy.”
Dressed for work in flannel poodle-print pajamas, Lucy grabbed a mug of coffee and headed for the office. Her slippers made scuffing sounds on the tile floor as she walked from her kitchen and moved up the curved stairs. She sat at her L-shaped desk, kicked off her slippers, and propped her feet up on the side cluttered with research books. Late morning sunlight spilled across her red toenails, a stack of magazines, and a pair of Steelhead tickets she’d been given by the Writer’s League. She yawned until tears filled her eyes. After the strong coffee she’d drunk the night before, she’d come home and worked until 3:00 a.m., killing off a character she’d had to invent from past boyfriends. Using Quinn as a template hadn’t worked out. Not after he’d saved klondikemike’s life.
She raised the mug to her lips and leaned over the arm of her chair to turn on her computer. Not that it mattered really, but Quinn had caught her in a lie. She obviously wasn’t a nurse, and she was sure she’d never hear from him again. Which was fine. Yeah, he’d been very nice looking in that dark and intense sort of way that made a girl’s chest get tight and tingly, but it hadn’t been a real date. She would never seriously date any man who didn’t actively pursue her, and more important, she didn’t have the time to date anyone. She was on page two hundred of dead.com and had to write another two hundred pages in the next month and a half. A demanding deadline alone was enough to drive her to drink. She did not need the distraction of a man to add to the pressure.
While Lucy’s e-mail program downloaded her mail, she plugged Maroon 5 into her CD player. She grabbed the small gold-framed glasses out of the case on her desk and placed them on her face so she could see without putting her nose on the screen. The problem with getting older was that she’d inherited her mother’s nearsightedness.
Her twenty-pound orange tabby, Mr. Snookums, whom she’d also inherited, jumped up onto the desk and scattered papers and magazines.
Mr. Snookums had shown up at Lucy’s door five years earlier, a skinny stray that she’d nursed back to health and for whom she’d paid more than a thousand dollars in vet bills to save from certain death. Snookums repaid her by being temperamental, totally passive-aggressive, and developing a raging eating disorder. But at night, when she went to bed, he curled up beside her and purred his own brand of pure love and affection. A continuous rattling that Lucy found very comforting.
Mr. Snookums rubbed his face against her feet, then sat and curled his tail around to his front paws. He stared at her as if he could mesmerize her into adding Meow Mix to his bowl, but he was on a diet and Lucy could not be persuaded. Instead, she checked out a Betsey Johnson velvet coat at Nordstrom.com and the newest collection of handbags on the Kate Spade website. She didn’t know which was hotter, Betsey’s coat, Kate’s newest leather shopper, or Adam Levine.
As she and Adam sang about being in love and standing in the pouring rain, she opened her inbox. Up popped fifty-six pieces of spam, three e-mails from her friends, and a joke of the day from her mother. While she deleted the spam, two more e-mails appeared in her reader’s mail file. She thought about opening them but didn’t. Ninety-nine out of a hundred e-mails she received from readers were perfectly lovely, but she never knew when she would get that one incendiary e-mail capable of ruining her day. The one that questioned her research, comma placement, and her intelligence. Opening reader mail was as risky as going to her post office box. Sometimes there was great stuff in there, and sometimes there were letters from crazy people wanting money or warning her that she was going straight to hell. Which was one of the reasons Lucy only visited her PO box once a month or so.
Just as she was about to exit her e-mail program, something popped into the account she’d set up for responding to online men. Lucy straightened and lowered her feet to the floor. Mr. Snookums jumped in her lap like a twenty-pound bowling ball, and she reached around him to open the e-mail.