Or something like love.
Jordan couldn’t get Margaret out of his mind. She was a mystery he had to explore. He pushed her away from his thoughts. There would be time for her. He would make time.
A mist closed in on him as he walked. Soon it became a light drizzle. He walked faster, then turned up his collar and broke into a jog. At the end of the block he turned left and climbed steps to the porch of a white-stone and brownstone building and went inside to a small foyer. A long, narrow stairwell ran to the second floor. Jordan climbed the stairs quickly, then stood before the single door at the top of the steps.
He waited for a count of fifty, then knocked on the door, as instructed. He didn’t look up at the camera mounted at a downward angle near the ceiling.
“Come in,” a woman’s voice said, almost bored.
He opened the door and stepped inside, aware of a scent of jasmine. The woman was sitting in a chair near the foot of a bed. Something had been done to extend the chair’s legs to make them longer. The chair resembled a throne. The tall, lean woman in black leather, seated calmly in the chair, brought to mind royalty and authority.
“Have you behaved yourself since we last met?” she asked.
“No, I have not.”
They both smiled.
“Go to my closet and open it,” she said. “Hanging on the back of the closet door is a whip. Bring it to me.”
Jordan obeyed.
14
Renz dropped by the Q&A office with what he described as new information. He drew a plain brown folder from his recently acquired calfskin attaché case, and plopped it on Quinn’s desk in front of Quinn.
“Lab come up with something new?” Quinn asked.
“In a way. Those five women who were among the dead in the Off the Road fire. Two of them were in bathtubs and weren’t killed by the flames.”
Quinn leaned back in his desk chair, listening to its familiar squeal, and holding a pen lightly level with the thumb and index fingers of both hands, as if taking a measurement. “What? Did they fill the tubs with water so they might submerge holding their breath and wait the fire out?” Quinn had seen this attempted, ten years ago, and recalled that it hadn’t worked. The victims who thought they might find enough time to submerge and let the fire rage over and past them had been boiled alive. He experienced a vivid memory with an image that still haunted him. One of the boiled, a woman, hanging halfway out of the bathtub, her hair reduced to white ash, her eye sockets hollowed by the flames.
“You thinking about that Clovis Hotel fire?” Renz asked Quinn, which jolted Quinn. That was exactly the fire that was occupying his mind. Renz, a younger, slightly slimmer Renz, had also been at the Clovis fire.
“I think about it from time to time,” Quinn said.
Renz emitted a low, guttural laugh. “Some of those victims, you could stick a fork in ’em and serve ’em at a fancy restaurant. Tell the diners it was gourmet fare. You ever heard of lamb amirstan?”
“No,” Quinn said, “and I don’t want to.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Renz said, leaning forward and sliding about a dozen sheets of paper out onto Quinn’s desk blotter. “Helen and a police sketch artist created this.”
Quinn looked at a detailed drawing of the suspect in the Off the Road and crosstown dry cleaners fires, keying off the scant eyewitness accounts. Staring back at Quinn from the sketch pad was a man, slender judging by his neck and shoulders, who was quite handsome until a certain something came through. His pinched features were faintly rodent-like. The effect was enhanced by an oversized, pointed right ear that jutted almost straight out from his head. It gave the man a kind of intense feral look, which lent his elfin features a sinister air. He seemed halfway between a leprechaun and a gargoyle. A small, blithe spirit of evil that tinkered and turned mishap into catastrophe. A gremlin.
“DNA samples are still being worked up, but so far blood taken out of the pipes beneath the tub drains provides no conclusive evidence that the Off the Road and Clovis Hotel fires were set by the same person.”
Quinn laid the photos and sketch on his desk.
He said, “Something’s wrong here.”
“I see it,” Renz said. “The drainpipes under the bathtubs were clogged with blood. Some of the bathtub victims weren’t burned to death or died from smoke inhalation. They were tortured to death while their blood ran down so thick it clogged the drains.”
“It looks like the killer did his routine on both hotels.” Quinn could imagine the women lying awkwardly in the bathtubs, losing blood and so losing the strength to resist. They probably knew they wouldn’t leave the bathtubs alive, but assumed they were going to drown.
When the killer was finished with what he’d come to do, he probably left in a way he’d planned, careful not to be caught in his own trap of flames and smoke. The victims would have been too weak to claw their way up and climb out of the tubs. They probably kept trying harder and harder as the water kept getting hotter and hotter. Each of their attempts to escape would have been more feeble than the previous ones. Then the smells of charring flesh, the hopeless screams. The boiling.
Then silence except for the crackling of the flames.
Quinn looked up from the material on his desk. On the other side of the desk, Renz sat staring at him.
Quinn got up and crossed the office to a cabinet, which he unlocked. He withdrew a bottle of Jameson’s and poured two fingers into a couple of on-the-rocks glasses. He didn’t add ice or water before carrying the two glasses back to his desk, setting one on the blotting pad, and handing the other glass to Renz.
Renz tossed down most of his drink in a series of gulps.
Quinn sipped his drink slowly, thinking things over.
15
“There was a similar mass murder in Florida about five years ago,” Helen the profiler said. She was standing in front of Quinn’s desk with her arms crossed, rocking back and forth on her heels. “Two women found dead in their bathtubs, after a fire in a hotel on Pompano Beach. They’d been tortured, then boiled to death. Fire was deliberate, most likely set by the same person who killed the women. Three other people—all men—were killed in the fire. Firebug was never caught.”
“The men were collateral damage?”
“Looks that way. Men often are.”
Quinn was thinking about that when Jerry Lido came in through the street door. The air stirred with a faint scent of gin. Lido’s stained white shirt was unbuttoned and hanging out over wrinkled pants. His eyes seemed focused, though, and he was walking straight. Fedderman, over by the coffeepot, and himself no fashion plate, looked at Lido and said, “You look like something the cat dragged in.”
“I fought the cat all the way,” Lido said.
Quinn said, “I need you to find out what you can about a hotel fire five years ago in Pompano.”
“Sandy Toes Hotel?”
Helen shifted her feet and stood up straighter. She and Quinn looked at each other.
Lido caught the subtle exchange and smiled. He placed a wrinkled yellow envelope on Quinn’s desk.
The charred debris in the Sandy Toes photos was surprising. The burn victims’ bodies were shriveled black horrors. Breasts had been removed from some of the women. Quinn recalled another case, long ago, involving an urban cannibal who dined on breasts.
He was almost relieved when he saw that here most of the breasts—what was left of them—were lying near the victims’ bodies.
None of the male victims of the Sandy Toes Hotel fire seemed to have been tortured, and only one of them, possibly coincidentally, was found burned to death in a bathtub.
They seemed to have simply been in the way.
Collateral damage.
The women, however, were a different story. What was left of them—including their severed breasts—that was too large to fit down a drain was lying in a jumble at the bottoms of the tubs.