who…'
It was late, and the bellhop, a middle-aged Asian man named Vam, was the only one on duty. Not that he had anything to do except listen to this red-faced cop tell bad jokes, after each of which Vam would laugh politely.
'…tip? I thought you said 'trip,'' Neeson said, and grinned hugely.
Vam laughed. 'Good. Very funny!'
He was a part-time student at NYU, going for a psychology degree. Neeson interested him in a way the blustery cop wouldn't have liked.
Across the street, in the dark doorway of a luggage shop, undercover officer Frank Weathers, part of the NYPD's Fugitive Apprehension Team, sat on a blanket in his ragged mismatched suit and raised a brown paper bag to his lips. The bag didn't contain a bottle, though; it concealed his two-way, which he could slip up an inch or so out of the bag. The reception wasn't good enough to carry on a real conversation, but he could report in to Quinn and let him know everything outside the front of the hotel looked okay. It was late enough that most of the activity in and out of the lobby had slacked off.
Weathers was tired. He'd been at his observation post for hours and wasn't due for replacement until 3:00 A.M. He bowed his head so his ear was near the mouth of the bag and he could hear Quinn's static-marred reply: '…'Kay.''
He heard a car engine and glanced to his right. There'd been no need to contact Quinn. Fedderman was approaching in his unmarked.
The car barely slowed as it passed Weathers' OP, and the two men exchanged looks and slight nods. Myrna Kraft was still safe in her bed.
In her bed, anyway.
Staying in character, just in case he might be under observation himself, Weathers pretended to take a long pull from the imaginary bottle in the bag.
The night was warm, there were roaches on the sidewalk, and Weathers was sweating profusely and itched under the ragged clothes.
He wished he could have a real drink.
65
'Maybe he isn't going to show,' Pearl said. She slid one of the earphones back a few inches so she could hear Quinn's reply. He was still at the window, where he spent almost all his time except for when he was pacing restlessly or using the bathroom. Pearl thought he must be feeling the same doubts that had crept into her mind.
Quinn turned away from the view outside to look at her. His face, never a thing of beauty in the conventional sense, was a series of rugged, worn planes that would have put Lincoln to shame on Mt. Rushmore. 'You think all of us are wrong?'
'All of us being us two, Feds, and Renz? That's not so many.'
'You forgot Helen,' Quinn said.
'Yeah. The profiler. I thought you distrusted those people.'
'She's got a pretty good track record,' Quinn said. He turned back to the windowsill and picked up the cup of coffee he'd made with the brewer that came with the room. He took a sip, regarding Pearl over the rim of the paper cup. When he lowered the cup and swallowed, it made a noise suggesting that his throat was dry. 'Remember Haychek?'
Pearl remembered, though it hadn't been her case. Three years ago, Brian Haychek had killed six women in New York and New Jersey. He also turned out to live in the same building as Helen Iman, had even served with her briefly on the co-op board. 'Helen had him wrong,' Pearl said.
'She had him right, far as the profile went. She just didn't know it was Haychek.'
'Her neighbor,' Pearl said. 'They knew each other. Helen should have figured it out.'
'That's why she didn't figure it,' Quinn said. 'You can be so close to somebody you don't see them.'
'That's awful metaphysical for'-Pearl glanced at the bedside clock-'well past midnight.'
'Not at all. It's like you're sitting alongside somebody and observing them from only a few inches away, then trying to identify them from a distance. From so close up, you haven't really seen the symmetry of them, and it can blind you as to who they really are.'
'Sounds good when you say it fast.'
'It happens all the time. Strangers walk up and shoot someone, or a guy on the next bar stool punches somebody out, and the witnesses can't pick the perpetrator they've been face-to-face with out of a lineup.'
Pearl smiled. 'You should have been a public defender, tried that in court.'
'I guess it is a little theoretical,' Quinn admitted.
'Well, what I meant simply and directly is that it's possible the killer is too smart for us again.'
'But our-'
'Shh!' Pearl slipped the loose headphone back on.
She kept her forefinger raised so Quinn would be silent, and she listened…listened…
The sound she heard might have been Allsworth, the veteran cop stationed in Myrna's room. But it was the bedroom that was bugged, and Allsworth was in the suite's outer room, on the other side of Myrna's closed door.
The mikes were sensitive and might simply have picked up Myrna stirring in her sleep, turning over in bed, bumping an arm against the headboard. But Pearl was familiar with those sounds. What she'd heard hadn't been any of them.
What she thought she'd heard.
Finally she began to breathe again. 'I thought I heard something, but it was nothing.'
'I heard it, too,' Quinn said. 'I think it was a vent or pipe rattling in the wall. What I was about to say is that our killer will show because of the woman in the room down the hall. This kind of compulsion doesn't have anything to do with IQ.'
'Get me some coffee,' Pearl said, 'and I'll agree with you.'
She watched Quinn cross the room, then adjusted her headphones and leaned again over the desk. It was difficult to concentrate, listening to nothing. Difficult just to stay awake.
Gifted criminals, she thought. There weren't many of them, but they could be hell.
66
Quietly…This had to be done so quietly.
He lay on his stomach in the duct and peered down through the vent cover into the dimly lighted bathroom. He could see an angled slope of white plastic shower curtain, falling away, a corner of a marble vanity top like the one in his own room, the pattern of the off-white tile floor.
Undoubtedly there would be someone standing close guard over Myrna, but they wouldn't be in the bedroom with her. They'd have the suite bugged, though, and the slightest irregular sound would bring them running. Almost certainly Quinn himself was somewhere nearby, controlling the surveillance, maybe in another room on the same floor, listening. Sherman hoped so.
Of course there was always the possibility that Mom's bedroom was unoccupied, that the bait wasn't actually in the trap.
No, that would be risky for them. He might somehow tumble to it and bolt without making a try for the prize. After everything that had happened, they wouldn't chance that. They were too smart.
He smiled and reassured himself. They were the way God made prey animals, just smart enough and no more.
