The rear exit was a way out of the building, supposedly secret, that almost everyone knew about. If the news was hot enough, media types would have someone posted to see if anyone of any consequence was sneaking out. Those with something to hide usually fabricated stories authenticated by friends or lovers. Or by the police, who didn’t like to be one-upped in the media.
If they didn’t remember that secrets known by more than one person were no longer secrets, people who should have heeded the old adage would often get tripped up. The relationships between the criminal world and cop world involved people knowing secrets about people with secrets.
People forgot that, even though it was no secret.
PART THREE
And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine
—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH,
“She Was a Phantom of Delight”
55
New York, the present
Quinn lay in bed listening to Pearl’s deep and regular breathing. They had enjoyed sex last night; he couldn’t imagine not enjoying it with Pearl.
She sighed and rolled onto her side. One of her ample breasts spilled halfway out of her unsnapped nightgown. The city, an hour before the dawn, lay beyond the brownstone’s bedroom window. Its sounds, made fainter and less definable by distance, seemed to ebb and flow with Pearl’s breathing.
Quinn’s own breathing did not seem as regular, almost as if he didn’t belong in this room, this city, with this woman. As if he didn’t deserve them. Some kind of celestial accident must have occurred, and, improbable as it seemed, here they were.
That was how lucky he felt some mornings.
Pearl let out a long breath and rolled further onto her side, almost resting on her stomach. Her head was turned toward him, and she sensed his attention, opened her eyes, and smiled.
He propped himself up on one elbow and rested his chin in his hand, still looking at her even though she seemed to have fallen back asleep.
He felt rising in him again a thought that was becoming stronger and more powerful.
He wanted a family.
A certain family.
Pearl, Jody, and himself.
They were already much like a family. They lived together and had become that close, that dependent on each other for the various things that kept a family together.
It wasn’t that family life was foreign to him. He’d had something like it with his former wife, May, and their daughter, Lauri. He still, in a less forceful way, loved them both—especially Lauri. But he knew he had never loved as he loved Pearl.
He reached over and ran a knuckle gently across her cheek, waking her halfway. Still only partly awake, she turned toward him.
Quinn whispered to her, “We should be married.”
A long several seconds passed before she answered. “Is there a law?”
“Probably none we haven’t broken,” he said.
“Then we can’t fail,” Pearl said.
He drew her to him. Kissed her.
“There is one thing,” she said.
“Like in all marriages,” he said.
“I think we should wait until this case is over.”
“Kind of a distraction,” he said.
“A distraction,” she said, “would be Renz watching us walk down the aisle while a murderer is still walking his streets.”
Quinn said, “There you have a point.”
56
New York, the present
Anyone watching the woman walk along First Avenue would have guessed her age at about seventy. Her walk was slow and indecisive, as if she had no destination. Which was probably true. Her back was slightly bowed, and her hair was dull and frizzled, too long in back and sticking out in clumps on the sides. Her complexion was pale and there were sores on the sides of her neck. From the way she thrust out her jaw and held her lips, it was obvious that she needed cosmetic dental work. She must have been in her thirties.
She kept her chin up as she walked, slowly looking to the right then the left, like a turtle gazing from a shell that was a tattered green coat. The coat, which she had stolen from a used clothing store, was already too warm, but it would keep the rain at bay at least for a while, until it became soaked through.
She was approaching the doorway of a closed beauty salon. A few months ago she’d been shooed away from that same doorway by the woman who ran the place and was the main beautician. Most likely because the woman had been too much of a smart-ass with her customers, the shop was now permanently closed, its windows soaped. The blank white show windows lined the entrance. They did a slight zigzag to a door that was now locked and featured a red-lettered CLOSED sign.
The woman moved back and out of sight in the doorway until she was out of the drizzle that would eventually soak her only coat. A low, fierce wind swished in, whirling a mini-tornado of trash out on the sidewalk. A loosely crumpled sheet of newspaper broke away from the other litter, skipped into the doorway, and wrapped itself around the woman’s leg.
She bent over, peeled away the paper, and tossed it aside.
The breeze picked it up, and the airborne newspaper page swirled around and again found the woman’s leg. She bent slowly, as if her back hurt, snatched the paper away from her ankle, and was about to crumple it into a tight ball when she noticed something and stopped.
She smoothed out the crumpled newspaper and read it.
On the front page was news about the so-called Gremlin, who was by now, if you believed all accounts, responsible for over a dozen victims. The captions beneath renderings of the Gremlin were pretty much like others. No one seemed to have gotten a clear look at him. The woman mostly used newspapers to line her clothes so she wouldn’t become chilled in the early morning hours. She didn’t read much, and sometimes wondered if she’d lost the knack.
Here was good reason to find out, and maybe sharpen her skills.
She studied the crinkled newspaper and laboriously read the tawdry, horrible accounts of the victim’s death, as theorized by the police.
But there was something else that caught her attention. For some reason the killer had taken the time and risk of disassembling the latest victim’s expensive and complex coffeemaker.
When the old young woman turned the newspaper page over, she saw the composite rendered image, as imagined by the police and media. She still couldn’t be positive, but the more she stared at the composite, the more she thought she knew him. Or had known him.
Something about his eyes.
Her memory suddenly gave up the man’s identity like a prize. My God! He was a childhood friend! More than a friend.
Years ago she had helped him throw a man out of a boxcar that was coupled to a moving train.
She and Jordan Kray had saved each other’s lives.
Their childhoods were far away from them now. Though the sketch in the newspaper wasn’t all that accurate, the artist had captured something of his subject. There was no doubt that it was Jordan. It was difficult to imagine him as a serial killer, though not so surprising to learn he was probably the prime suspect in a series of murders.
She recalled how Jordan liked to take things apart and put them back together—if he could. Things that were simply objects, and things that were alive.
A curious boy, Jasmine Farr thought. Her seamed face broke into a smile.
In those days they had both been curious.
Maybe they both still were.
The newspaper had been a door-opener. Jasmine had fallen low and fallen again and again, and she had contacts, if not friends, in low places.