pink.
Merry had died four years ago, and he still carried the guilt of it in his chest. He figured he always would. A constant reminder to be human, and in a job where he saw the worst in people, it kept him from falling into the us- vs-them mental pit once again.
After he’d put on the suit and transferred to the Violent Crimes Division, he’d concentrated on getting pieces of himself back. Of straightening out his warped view of right and wrong. Good and evil. Black and white. He’d thought he’d succeeded. He’d started to think of maybe having a life outside of work. Of having a wife and a child and one of those kiddie backpacks. But Amanda had proved that some things just weren’t meant to happen. Not for Quinn. He was resigned to it and was okay.
He raised the beer to his mouth and flipped channels on the remote. Light flashed like a strobe as he took a long drink. Quinn loved working in the violent crimes unit. He got off on collecting random clues, chasing disparate leads, and gathering seemingly unrelated evidence. He loved piecing them together until they made a complete picture and gave the investigation direction. He loved taking violent criminals off the streets. But it wasn’t his whole life. He was able to keep perspective and distance. To leave it at the office-except this time. Breathless had to be stopped before she killed again.
Quinn had an inherent talent for stepping back and seeing the bigger picture, but this time there just wasn’t anything to see. There were few clues, truly disparate leads, and the unrelated evidence proved to be just that. Unrelated.
This case was keeping him up at night. The who and why of it spinning around in his head without anything ever falling into place. Whoever Breathless was, she was one smart female. And if there was one thing Quinn hated above all else, he hated to be outsmarted by criminals. Female or otherwise.
Which brought his thoughts around to Lucy Rothschild. He was a cop. Trained to read deception in a person’s body language-and especially the eyes. But several times during the date he’d caught himself staring at her mouth instead of her eyes. Checking out the curves of her body for reasons that had nothing to do with deception and everything to do with the way her breasts filled out her sweater. And in those moments of distraction, the overriding question in his head had been, what made a woman like Lucy date men online? He could understand why men dated online. Asking out women could be intimidating as hell for some guys. But all a woman had to do was stand around and look good. Smile once in a while to let a guy know she was interested. How hard could it be? Especially for a beautiful woman like Lucy.
There was something wrong with her. Had to be. Something hiding behind those big blue eyes. Something that might point to murder.
The only evidence linking Lucy to the Breathless case was her name on the Westco dry cleaner’s customer list, one e-mail sent to her from Charles Wilson, aka chuckles, and one known coffee date with the third victim, Lawrence Craig, aka luvstick. It wasn’t much, but then, the police didn’t have much to go on at this point in the investigation.
The detectives were methodically eliminating suspects, and they had a lot fewer than when they’d started. Yet each begged the same question: what kind of woman would agree to meet a man who called himself luvstick? The police were betting the same kind of woman who would agree to meet someone who called himself hardluvnman or hounddog.
Chapter 3
The next morning, Quinn watched his hands in the mirror above his dresser as he slid up the knot of his red- and-blue-striped tie. He lifted his freshly shaved chin and moved the knot back and forth until it fit perfectly within the closed collar of his blue dress shirt. He buttoned the points, then reached for his badge sitting on the dresser. He hooked it on his belt and shoved his pistol in the holster on his right hip. He clipped his extra ammo and cell phone on his left side and tucked a pair of handcuffs into his pants at the small of his back. A navy blue jacket lay on the foot of his bed, and he threaded his arms into the sleeves as he headed down the hallway to the kitchen. He fed Millie, made sure the dog door was unlocked, and drank the last of his coffee. On his way out the door, he grabbed his laptop and files. He jumped into his unmarked Crown Victoria and headed toward the office. As he drove across town, he checked his voice mail and jotted down notes on a pad of paper on the seat next to him. He phoned the district attorney’s office regarding a pending court case, and by the time he’d pulled into his parking space, he’d crossed off a number of things on his shit-to-do list.
He made his way to the briefing room set up specifically for the Breathless case and noticed that Lucy Rothschild had been moved up to number one on the marker board, right above Maureen Dempsey. He was the first to arrive, and he set his laptop and files next to the three murder books on the table in front of him.
“We’ve eliminated Karla Thompson completely,” Sergeant Vernon Mitchell said as he walked into the room. “We just confirmed that she was out of town when the second murder took place.” A pair of reading glasses was perched on the end of the sergeant’s nose, and his white crew cut was cropped so close to his head that he looked almost bald.
Quinn sat and opened one of the murder books. “There’s a relief,” he muttered. Karla Thompson aka sweetpea, the woman who’d smelled like a Marlborough cigarette and sounded like the Marlborough man, had grabbed his ass as they’d stood in line for coffee.
Kurt Weber sat next to Quinn and started to laugh. “I thought I was going to have to bust in and rescue you on that one,” he said, referring to Quinn’s coffee date with Karla a few nights ago.
“Yeah, it was funny as hell,” Quinn grumbled. There were women a guy didn’t mind grabbing his ass. Then there was Karla.
“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
