Through The Grinder

confessed.

Todd nodded. “I figured that out.”

“So don’t you want to know why I really came here?”

“Not really…I like the suspense. Now, can I call you a car? No taxis come near here, but I have a car service I use regularly.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I have a…car waiting at the end of the alley.”

“Well, it was pleasant meeting you, Clare. Drop by again — maybe next time you can critique my art — that gets me really angry.”

I shot him a look, and he raised his hands in mock surrender.

“Just kidding…”

After escorting me to the door, Todd said good-night with an admonishment to be careful in this neighborhood.

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “My, uh…driver…once fought his way out of a Calcutta hellhole.”

“Cool.”

I walked down the dark cobblestones. At the far end of the alley, Matteo stepped out of the shadows.

“I was about three minutes away from calling Quinn on my cell,” he said, suppressing a shiver. “So, how did it go?”

“Todd is another dead end — pardon the pun. But I did learn one important fact…”

“What’s that?”

“You can’t judge a novel by its dust jacket.”

Matteo gave me a sour look. “That isn’t very helpful.”

“No, it isn’t,” I replied, thinking about how charming and erudite, educated, and intelligent Seth Martin Todd really was, despite being a double-murderer — and, unfortunately, how much he reminded me of Bruce Bowman.

The Genius could see the girl was pleased to be around him. Sharing a cozy table at her mother’s coffeehouse, sipping cappuccinos, chatting easily. How nice. How very, very nice…

Yes, Joy, you have a pretty name and a pretty face. But it’s your youth, your silly, bubbly youth that’s the biggest attraction.

That ridiculous yellow parka of yours is clearly history now. I can see you love the new shearling that’s taken its place. Charming how you don’t want to take it off, even as you sit here at a table by the fire, enjoying your cappuccino.

But you don’t really deserve that coat…because you are clearly too young to carry it off. And, my dear Joy, the truth is, you are just too carefree…and careless…and you don’t understand when you take teasing too far, how your laughter cuts me in two.

Neither do you understand that I, the Genius, am the one with the power, not you.

You will learn it quickly enough, though, my dear Joy…and soon…because I’m just about ready to teach you…

Twenty

“But nobody questions your morals,

And nobody asks for the rent,

There’s no one to pry, if we’re tight, you and I,

Or demand how our evenings are spent….”

Somewhere under the East River, Matt turned to me and recited those lines from “Life Among the Artists,” a nearly century-old ditty written by journalist and radical John Reed, who’d lived for a time in New York.

“And?” I asked when he was done. “What are you getting at?”

“This town is the perfect place for people like Toddie the painter boy back there, people who want to escape their pasts. In New York, people may see you, but they don’t know you. And they might even know you, but they don’t really know you.”

“Matt?”

“You’re out of leads, Clare — ”

“No, I’m not — ”

“Listen to me. You admitted that Seth Todd was as charming as Bowman. He’s probably sensitive and sweet, too, when he’s not in a murderous rage. You may think you know Bowman, but he may turn out to be exactly like Todd. That may be the real reason Bruce moved to New York City, to escape other ‘accidents’ in his past. Certainly, your meeting with Todd should at least make you stop and consider it.”

I shook my head.

“Consider it, Clare. I think you have to begin to acknowledge the possibility that Quinn was right.”

I slumped back against the cold, orange plastic subway seat and wrapped my shearling tighter around me, trying to feel the warmth of Bruce again.

As we rumbled out from under the river and toward the first underground stop in Manhattan, we passed a slower train on a parallel track. The people appeared like ghosts in the darkness, their heads and torsos surreally floating by in the frame of the other train’s windows. I thought of Valerie then. How her body had been mutilated on one section of these miles and miles of subway tracks, and despite the shearling, a shiver ran through me.

“Clare, come on. When you walked out of Todd’s studio, you bluntly admitted to me that he surprised you. That you never would have guessed he was a murderer — ”

“But I only just met Seth Todd. I haven’t spent time getting to know him. I haven’t snuck around his place and read his e-mails, and — ”

“ — you haven’t slept with him.”

Matt’s raised voice drew some glances in the subway car. Two Hispanic teenage boys snickered then looked away. An old Filipino woman narrowed her eyes at us, then shook her head and went back to reading her paper.

“Let’s table this discussion,” I whispered, then slumped back in the hard, plastic seat and once again closed my eyes — trying to close out Matt’s words with them. Instead of considering Bruce’s guilt, I wanted to consider the facts.

Fact: Bruce was innocent. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a fact yet to Quinn or Matt but it was to me. I knew it. I just had to prove it.

Once again, I thought about Valerie Lathem. But not the dead Valerie. The live one. The Valerie that had been dating Bruce for a short time.

Bruce had met Valerie through her job at a travel agency — and that simple fact was probably all Detective Quinn wanted to focus on right now.

Obviously, the detective had begun eyeing Bruce as a suspect when the evidence at Inga’s crime scene had turned up a note signed with a B. So it made perfect sense for Quinn to stop asking questions about Valerie’s love life once he discovered Bruce’s basic connection to her.

But Bruce had revealed to me that it was Valerie who’d turned him on to the SinglesNYC site, which meant she had been using the same on-line dating service as Inga Berg. Maybe Quinn knew this already, or maybe he didn’t. To me, however, it seemed like a significant connection to pursue.

Okay, I admit that Quinn wasn’t wrong to focus on Bruce Bowman, the one man connecting Valerie and Inga (and Sahara, too, for that matter), but the detective wasn’t convinced of Bruce’s innocence, and I was. So there had to be another man connected to some or all of them.

If Valerie and Inga were killed by the same guy, chances were good that the guy who killed them probably met them both through that on-line dating site. All Matt and I really had to do was cross-check the site names. Whichever guy showed up on the dating lists for both of these women had to be a viable suspect.