'Hmm. Some kind of lesbian thing, do you think?'
'That's the most likely explanation,' Victor said. He prided himself on understanding women and he'd thought about this situation. 'I'm sure Jill doesn't suspect it. Hell, maybe even Jewel doesn't realize it. You know how it works, Palmer. Latent sexual attraction neither woman wants to admit. I don't think it'd ever get to the point where they'd get it on together. The two of them might be shocked if they figured it out.'
'You might tell Jill about it. Suggest that this Jewel has intimate plans for her.'
'Not a good idea, Palmer. She probably wouldn't believe it, and we'd be risking turning both of them against me.'
Stone sighed, dug his heels into the office carpet, and maneuvered his wheeled swivel chair away from the gloom outside the window. 'Well, you're the expert on that part of the business.'
As he had often lately, Victor found himself thinking about what he could do with Jewel if he had her like Charlotte. How she'd struggle against the tape that bound and silenced her, how she'd try to scream, how her dark eyes would widen when she saw the stake, how she'd-
'We might simply have to make Jewel expendable,' Stone said, as if reading his thoughts. 'If she might swing both ways, maybe we should introduce her to Gloria.'
'No, not that,' Victor said. 'It'd be bad business. Anything that happens to Jewel might lead the police to Jill. Maybe even, later on, to the new Jill.'
Stone turned his swivel chair back toward the gray rain. The usually silent rotating mechanism squealed softly, maybe because of the humidity. 'I see the problem, but we're running out of time.'
'Don't worry,' Victor said. 'I'll think of something.
Palmer Stone smiled at his business partner's blurred reflection in the window.
'You always do, Victor. You have imagination.'
42
Renz was pacing his office grinning. Quinn wasn't sure he liked seeing the commissioner so pleased. It usually meant trouble. A steady drizzle from a leaden sky obviously wasn't the reason for Renz's good humor. The diffused light from the wet window, along with the pale glow of the desk lamp, gave Renz's sagging features a grayish cast. Now and then the long shadows from the raindrops crawling down the glass pane made him appear to be crying, his grin a grimace.
Quinn sat casually in one of the upholstered chairs near the desk and watched and waited.
'The media sure as hell bought into it,' Renz was saying. 'Every time you turn on the TV news, every time you pick up a newspaper, you see that shit-heel Coulter. He's on CNN, FOX News, everywhere.'
'He oughta be getting nervous,' Quinn said.
'It's bought us some time, just like you said.' Renz suddenly looking serious, stopped pacing, and turned to face Quinn. 'Now we've gotta make use of that time. What are our alternatives?'
So Renz is in his officious mood this gray morning.
Quinn knew how to deal with that. 'Alternatives are several,' he said. 'My belief is that our best bet is to continue with Pearl playing Jill Clark's new friend Jewel, maybe force E-Bliss's hand.'
'It's a damned dangerous game,' Renz said.
Quinn wondered whether Renz remembered that he, Renz, had approved the strategy. 'Everything about this case is dangerous.'
Renz crossed his arms and nodded, as if approving of Quinn's answer. Then he said, 'It could backfire. If either Pearl or Jill is killed.'
'Or both of them,' Quinn said.
'Christ! If that happened the media'd blame us for their deaths. They'd bury us. Don't doubt that for a moment.'
Quinn didn't. 'The way it works,' he reminded Renz, 'is it would be too dangerous for E-Bliss to kill both of them, and too dangerous to kill Jill with Pearl still around as Jewel. And it would be senseless to kill Jewel first, because it might draw suspicion if they later killed Jill.'
'Sounds complicated,' Renz said.
Quinn couldn't deny it. 'It's like bombers flying in formation so enemy fighters can't attack one without drawing fire from the others.'
Renz stood still and thought about that one. Quinn knew he watched hours and hours of old World War Two documentaries on the History Channel.
'I guess it makes sense, when you put it that way, but I still get the feeling we oughta move while we can nail some of these jokers.'
'We still don't have much in the way of hard evidence,' Quinn reminded him. 'No identifiable victims, no solid connections between E-Bliss and their clients who've been killed-mainly because we don't know the identities that have been stolen. Surely E-Bliss has washed their files of any hint that they did business with the murdered women. Madeline Scott's the only name we've got, but now she's disappeared.'
''She being the new Madeline Scott?'
Quinn nodded, wishing Renz would stop playing the executive cop.
'All that client information's gotta be in their computers,' Renz said. 'They're a high-tech outfit.'
'If everything incriminating hasn't been deleted yet, it will be at the first sign of trouble. And like you said, they're a high-tech outfit. They'd know how to actually destroy the evidence.'
'What if we busted in there fast and confiscated everything?'
'Even if we could get a warrant, which I doubt, the computers might be set up to delete on seizure. There are lots of possibilities for built-in safeguards: destruction of files if the wrong password is used or the wrong fingerprint ID, or if the location of the computer is changed, or if a code number has to be fed in every so many hours so the files won't automatically be destroyed, or Stone might be able to send a signal some way we haven't thought of.'
'Who knows what we'd find if we were successful, though,' Renz said, undeterred by mention of all the potential tech catastrophes.
'I'm more afraid of what we wouldn't find. If nothing incriminating turned up, they'd know we were after them and every piece of potential evidence and everyone involved with E-Bliss would disappear. Then we'd be left with Jill Clark's unlikely story that she heard from a woman now dead, some unidentifiable torsos, and suspects who are on the wind. Nothing times three.' Quinn said. Then he added, 'Jill's all we have that could turn into something solid. They're not suspicious yet. They'll make some kind of play, some kind of mistake. Jill and Pearl put us in position to take advantage of it.'
'You forgot to mention the new Madeline. She could be the key to this.'
'If we could find her,' Quinn said.
It had stopped raining by the time Pearl climbed out of the cab less than a block away from Madeline's apartment. This was the same unit the new Madeline had taken over after the death of the real Madeline Scott, and then recently abandoned.
Pearl watched the cab drive away down West Seventy-second Street, then stop near the next corner and pick up a man waving his half-closed umbrella like a signal flag. She stood for a moment getting her bearings and setting straight in her mind what she planned to do.
She decided to have the super let her into the vacant apartment. After looking it over, she'd talk to some of the neighbors. Since the new Madeline was gone from the building, she could identify herself as NYPD and maybe open some minds.
Quinn and Fedderman had gone over the place, as well as a CSU team, but Pearl knew it wouldn't hurt to look again. If nothing else, it might make this whole thing seem more real. The truth was, sometimes when she saw Jill and Tony Lake together, how devoted and seemingly enchanted Tony seemed, the horror that was behind it all was damned hard to accept.
But isn't that the way confidence artists work? Haven't I seen it over and over again?
It's real, all right, and doubting it can cost Jill Clark her life. Can cost me my life.
