carrying it. She knew it was against the law, but screw the Sullivan Act. When her life was at stake, the only law that mattered was survival. Tanya also had a tiny canister of mace in her purse, and she’d taken kickboxing lessons. But she knew the kind of uphill struggle the strongest of women might have with the weakest of men. The gun gave her comfort.
She didn’t think she had enough evidence to contact the police about the man who seemed to be too often near her. And she didn’t know how they’d find the man to talk to him, unless they assigned an undercover cop to tag along with her for days until she could point him out. Obviously they weren’t going to do that. And after costing Tom Stopp years of his life, Tanya didn’t like the idea of positively identifying anyone for any reason. The human eye was an unreliable partner to memory.
All Tanya could do was wonder if the man actually was following her.
And, if so, why?
And be ready.
PART 3
We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart.
I’ll make my Joy a secret thing,
My face shall wear a mask of care…
67
By noon Quinn had pretty much given up on tracing the Skinner through the recorded purchase of a carpet- tucking knife. The search was further complicated when they learned that building supply stores sometimes sold such knives as part of a tool set.
The good piece of news was that Weaver was being released from the hospital. She wasn’t completely healed, but she was out of insurance and scheduled to become an outpatient. Aside from her mother in Pittsburgh, Weaver had a sister in Philadelphia who was a hospital administrator. Common sense and simple economics dictated that Weaver should spend the rest of her recuperation in Philadelphia.
Quinn picked up Weaver just before noon at the hospital and drove her by her apartment to pack, then to LaGuardia, where the good sister had reserved a seat on an American Airlines flight. He thought Weaver looked okay but still acted somewhat out of it. She kissed him on the mouth before she joined the security checkpoint line, and glanced back at him as she passed through the metal detector. Something about the glance suggested they would never see each other again.
All in all, her departure made Quinn feel like crap. Despite the hour, he used his cell phone to invite Jerry Lido to lunch. He knew what lunch was to Lido, and it was the kind of lunch Quinn felt like having today.
Quinn was supposed to meet Pearl for dinner before they went home to the brownstone. She sat alone at a diner table, sipping decaffeinated coffee that was catching up with her because she was on her third cup. Pearl figured three cups of decaf equaled about one cup of strong regular grind. Enough to keep her awake at night.
She knew Quinn had gone to lunch with Jerry Lido, and she knew what kind of lunch that could become.
Damn Quinn!
By the time she thought to check her cell phone, she felt as if she was swimming in coffee.
Uh-oh. Quinn had called and somehow she hadn’t heard the phone. He hadn’t left a voice message, but he’d called again and texted her. The text message mentioned his name, but after that made no sense whatsoever. Quinn hadn’t used his cell phone for that call. She knew it was because he barely knew how to send a text message. She saw that the call had been from Jerry Lido’s phone.
That explained a lot of things.
Pearl paid for the bottomless cup of coffee and went outside to hail a cab.
Pearl had to knock on Jerry Lido’s door for a long time. A woman with an odd brown hairdo that made her look like a spaniel opened a door across the hall and glared at Pearl. Pearl returned the glare. The woman shook her head and ducked back inside.
When Pearl looked back she saw that her knocking had been answered. The apartment door was open. Jerry Lido stood there wearing pants and the kind of sleeveless undershirt some people called a wife-beater. He was barefoot and smelled like gin. Behind him, across the living room, Quinn was snoring away on a sofa. He was dressed something like Lido but wearing a tangled tie. There was a Gilby’s bottle on a coffee table. Three more bottles on the floor. Pearl felt as if she’d disturbed two hibernating bears.
“I see you had a party today,” she said.
“More like a tete-a-tete,” Lido said, surprising Pearl with his vocabulary and elocution. Especially since he was obviously still drunk.
“Looks more like you two rolled down a hill.” She stepped inside and got another whiff of Lido’s breath. “Are you still drinking?”
Lido shrugged. “A little hair of the frog.”
“You mean dog. Frogs don’t have hair.”
“Nor do they bark.”
Pearl went across the room and stared down at Quinn. He looked as bad as Lido, but his chest was rising and falling regularly. At least he’d stopped snoring.
“We were working on the computer,” Lido said, as if in pathetic defense of his and Quinn’s conditions.
Pearl could have guessed that. Quinn had been doing his job of getting Lido to drink so he could get in touch with and apply his tech genius to the hunt for the Skinner. Pearl wondered if the afternoon had been productive. She winked at Lido. “So what’d you learn?”
He eagerly led her to a long table on which was a big desktop computer. A laptop was placed off to the side. There were two flat-screen monitors. One of them was blank. The other was showing that screen saver of what looked like PVC pipes that kept fitting together to form right angles unto eternity. That monitor came all the way to life when Lido sat down at the computer.
“We learned where carpet-tucking knives weren’t,” he said. “But when I was lying in bed, or on the floor, this evening, I thought of something else.”
“What was that?”
“The fusion of time and geography.”
“You’re still drunk,” Pearl said.
Lido gave the sheepish smile that made him look so human and pitiable. “A little, but not like him.” He pointed toward Quinn, who had shifted in his sleep and appeared about to fall off the sofa.
“We know the murders are committed on weekends,” Lido said. “Sometimes Mondays or Fridays. So what I figure is we can check New York hotel reservations around the times of the murders, maybe come up with the same name more than once.”
So simple, Pearl thought. Like all products of brilliance. For the first time she saw and appreciated Lido’s real genius on the computer. She could see why Quinn preferred him drunk when he worked.
Lido took a deep breath, like a concert pianist preparing to play. And he did play the keyboard like a musical
