instrument, roaming the Internet as if he invented it, pausing now and then to adjust something with the mouse as if finetuning or changing chords. There was no hesitancy, no altering of his strange body rhythm. His mind seemed to be one with the incredibly fast computer, somewhere out there in the ether, where Pearl couldn’t follow.
An hour passed like a minute. There was a thump as Quinn rolled off the sofa. Pearl looked over at him, momentarily concerned. He seemed none the worse for his short drop, and was sleeping deeply and probably comfortably, on the floor. Pearl turned back to her work (rather, Lido’s work) that Quinn should have been doing. Last night he’d followed Lido too far into the bottle. Pearl knew it wasn’t the first time. This crazy plan of his had to stop.
But not yet, Pearl thought. Lido was drunk anyway, so why not make use of him?
There were two matches, both men, who’d been at hotels in New York at the times of most of the Skinner murders. Pearl watched spellbound as Lido used the Internet to learn everything about them. She knew that half the sites he visited were confidential. They were breaking the law as certainly as if they were burglarizing buildings.
Not the first time, Pearl thought.
Finally Lido sat back from his computer. One of the men was a seventy-two-year-old financial consultant who lived with his wife in Atlanta. He traveled constantly, visiting clients all over the country. The other man was a clothing designer whose Internet history made it clear that he was gay.
“The gay guy maybe, but not likely,” Lido said, sitting back in his chair and obviously disappointed. He appeared to be sobering up. Pearl, still haunted by strains of youthful Catholicism, absently crossed herself as she located a gin bottle and poured Lido a generous drink. Forgive me, for I know exactly what I do.
He tossed the gin down like water.
“Has there ever been a gay serial killer who murdered women?” he asked.
“Not to my knowledge.” Pearl poured herself a very small drink. “Not openly gay, anyway.”
Lido worked the computer some more. “Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“He’s not only gay, he’s married.”
“Well…”
“To another fella,” Lido said.
“Oh.”
“And when Verna Pound was killed he was in Paris.”
“Unless we have two killers, that leaves him out,” Pearl said. She took a sip of her drink.
Lido looked crestfallen, but only for a moment. Then he suddenly came back all the way alive. The gin kicking in. “How ’bout another drink?” he asked.
“Let’s work for a while, then I’ll pour you one,” Pearl said. Carrot and stick.
She felt terribly guilty to be using this guy. She felt no different from Quinn, who was over there sleeping on the carpet. She wanted to wring Quinn’s neck, but she also wanted to wring yet more tech miracles out of Jerry Lido.
“I’ve got an idea,” Pearl said. “Hotel reservations are one thing-if our killer even made reservations. They can be paid for in cash, or credit cards under different names. But if you travel alone and pay cash for an airline ticket, the authorities take note of you. And our killer wouldn’t take a chance and use anything but a valid credit card when it came to Homeland Security. Maybe we should get into credit card files, if you can.”
“Oh, I can,” Lido said. “But it’d be easier to check flights into New York carrying passengers traveling alone, and who paid cash or with credit or debit cards.”
Pearl knew he was right. “Only thing is,” she said, “you’re messing with Homeland Security, when you illegally hack into airline passenger information.”
“Oh, I often get into-”
“Don’t tell me, Jerry.”
“I’ll come and go without leaving any kind of electronic footprint,” Lido said confidently.
“Jerry-”
“Sometimes I do it just for sport,” he said, grinning. “LaGuardia, Newark, and Kennedy. I compare what all the passengers paid for their seats. Pearl, it’s fun. God help me, it’s fun!”
Pearl said, “You want another drink?”
It was past 2 A. M. when, with Lido’s help, Pearl managed to get Quinn downstairs and into a cab. Within an hour, Quinn was in bed in the brownstone, and Pearl was curled next to him. Both slept deeply when they weren’t dreaming.
In the morning, Pearl awoke to hear Quinn on the phone. He was doing what Pearl had heard him doing before-talking Jerry Lido out of suicide.
Pearl rolled onto her stomach and buried her face in her pillow, assailed again by guilt over having exploited Lido’s vulnerability.
Later she felt the bed sag with Quinn’s weight, and his big hand was gentle on her shoulder.
“Lido gonna be all right?” she asked, muffled by the pillow.
“I think so.”
“I still don’t feel right about what we’re doing. I feel…”
“Guilty?”
“Yeah.”
“Still the good Catholic girl,” Quinn said.
“Sometimes, anyway,” Pearl said.
She rolled onto her back and looked up at him.
“You’ve been crying,” he said, and bent down and kissed the tip of her nose.
“There have to be rules, Quinn. Call them laws. Call them commandments. Call them whatever you want. But even in this screwed-up world, there have to be rules.”
“There are,” he said. “They bend.”
Later that morning, when everyone other than Weaver was in the Q and A office, Fedderman stood up behind his desk and cleared his throat.
Every eye suddenly turned to him.
Every instinct told him he’d made a mistake.
He decided again that he and Penny would keep their engagement secret until after the Skinner investigation. Fedderman was sure he wasn’t doing anything unethical, but why borrow trouble when there was so much of it already in the world?
He cleared his throat again and walked over and topped off his coffee.
Everyone else went back to what they were doing. Only Pearl looked at him strangely, sensing that he’d been about to say something.
Pearl would.
68
The police hadn’t believed that Tom Stopp was trying to help Tanya Moody the night he was arrested. That he’d heard a commotion, gone to his door to investigate, and seen her come flying half nude out of the unoccupied apartment across the hall. She was struggling in a desperate dance to put on her clothes as she ran, somehow managing.
What had prompted him was blind instinct. She was obviously in trouble, running hard from something, and in need of help. He called after her, trying to get her to stop and explain what was happening. She’d glanced back at him, obviously terrified, running from him!
No! She had it wrong! He couldn’t let her think of him that way. He couldn’t!
He ran after her faster to help her, to explain to her.
They wouldn’t believe him. Not at the scene in front of his apartment building, and not at the precinct house where he was read his rights and interrogated.
