telephone.
“I’m sorry,” she said through a shallow breath. “I didn’t mean to do that yet.”
He chuckled and lightly bit the side of her neck. “You’ll make up for it.” The telephone stopped, only to start ringing again. “Shit!” he said. He lifted his head and looked at Lucy through the dark shadows of the hallway. “I’ll be right back.” He moved into the living room and picked up the cordless phone next to the couch. “Yeah?”
Lucy pulled up her panties and hose and pushed down her skirt. She retrieved her bra from the floor, then moved a few steps down the hall to watch Quinn pace the floor in the living room.
“Because I was busy.” The phone was cradled between his shoulder and the side of his face, and his hands were busy buttoning his pants. “What?” He stilled, and one hand came up to grasp the phone. “Are you fucking kidding me?” He turned to Lucy where she stood against the wall. “Tell me you’re kidding me.”
The look on his face was unfathomable.
Chapter 9
Flashes of red, white, and blue sliced through the darkness and cut across the office windows and door of a motel known to rent by the hour. Traffic on Chinden Boulevard sped past, not slowing a click, not even to rubberneck the latest crime scene. Not at this time of night in the part of town plagued with flophouses and drug- related crimes.
Quinn fastened his identification to his belt as he moved between police cruisers parked at every angle in the small lot. He held a clipboard under one arm and his duffle bag in his hand. He glanced up at the second floor of the motel, and a frown pulled at the corners of his mouth. The place was bound to be a nightmare of fingerprints, hairs, and body fluids.
“Is the night manager in the office?” he asked several patrol officers standing around in front of the building.
“Yeah. We got him in there cooling his heels until you want him.”
While the patrol cops filled him in on what they knew, Quinn took out a pen and glanced at his watch. He wrote down the time of his arrival, the address of the crime scene, and weather conditions.
“Write down the license plate numbers of all these vehicles and run ’em.” The victim’s car was probably in the lot and would need to be impounded. He ducked under the yellow crime scene tape and moved up the outside stairs. He walked past three sets of windows with their curtains drawn and continued toward the patrol officers standing outside the open door of room thirty-six.
“How many other rooms are in use?” he asked.
“It’s Saturday night. Just about every one.”
Someone had to have seen or heard something. “Make sure no one leaves,” he said and walked into the room. Kurt, Anita, and two patrol officers stood next to the bed covered with a brown floral spread and a naked dead guy. Yellow nylon rope was bound to the bed frame and tied to the flexi-cuffs around the victim’s wrists. A Westco garment bag had been placed over his head and secured around his neck with silver duct tape.
Quinn took a pair of latex gloves from the duffle and moved to the head of the bed. He snapped on the gloves and looked down into a pair of brown eyes staring up at him from within the clear bag sucked tight around his face. Quinn unclenched two of the man’s fingers, then watched them curl once more. He’d say death had occurred within the last two hours. Sometime after Lucy had arrived at his house carrying a chocolate torte.
“Have you identified the vic?” he asked Kurt.
“Not yet. Anita and I just got here.”
Quinn glanced up at the other detective, and Kurt’s gaze slid away. While Quinn had been getting Lucy naked, and Kurt had been watching and listening from across the street, the real perpetrator had been doing her work. They’d fucked up. Big time, but he couldn’t think about that now. Lucy clearly wasn’t Breathless, and he would deal with her later. Right now, he had work to do. He had to deal with the dead man staring up at him through the child safety warning on the polyethylene bag.
Two crime scene investigators arrived, and Quinn had one of them snap a picture of the beige Dockers lying on the floor at the foot of the bed. Then he knelt on one knee and pulled a wallet from the back pocket. He flipped the wallet open and looked at the driver’s license of Robert D. Patterson. A forty-six-year-old white male. Brown eyes and hair. Five feet nine and one hundred and eighty pounds. Quinn stayed down on one knee, studying the dirty carpet for clues. He looked under the bed, then stood and secured Mr. Patterson’s driver’s license to the clipboard. He checked the other pockets of the victim’s pants and a light nylon jacket also thrown on the dirty carpet. Besides the wallet, he found a set of keys and a folded motel receipt. He placed the items in a paper bag and marked it.
While one investigator got to work snapping photographs from every angle, the other got busy with his bottles of latent print powder. Kurt left the room to question potential witnesses on the second floor of the motel, and Quinn tossed his gloves in the duffle and walked back outside. He shone the flashlight hooked to his belt into the garbage can at the bottom of the stairs. It was half full, and he knew there had to be a Dumpster somewhere on the property. Before the night was over, he was going to be in waders, ass deep in garbage. He walked into the office and was assailed with the smell of nicotine, fried chicken, and cherry sanitizer. Behind the pocked counter sat Dennis Karpowich, a man in his early sixties with thinning hair the color of Grecian Formula 16. He had bad teeth and a worse smoker’s hack. When Quinn showed him Mr. Patterson’s license, Dennis identified him as the man who’d paid for a four-hour stay in room thirty-six.
“Did you see anyone with him?”
“A woman.”
This was the first time anyone had placed a woman with any of the victims. “What did she look like?” Quinn asked as he wrote.
“I only saw her from behind as they was walking up the stairs. I remember because she didn’t strike me as one of the girls.”
“Girls? Do you mean hookers?” Dennis didn’t answer, and Quinn glanced up from his report. “I’m not a vice cop. I don’t care if you’re renting to whores or to guys who like donkeys. I’m just trying to find a woman who has a nasty habit of killing the men she dates.”
Dennis lit a generic cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “She didn’t look like one of the regular girls who stay here.”
“What made you think that?”
“ ’Cause she had on one of them long coats that looked like it cost a lot of money. Wool or something like that. The girls who come here don’t wear their good clothes to work.”
Quinn tried not to smile at that. Dennis made it sound as if the girls poured concrete or painted houses for a living. “Color of the coat?”
“Red.”
“How tall was she?”
“I’m not good at guessing stuff like that. I think she was about as tall as his shoulder.”
Quinn figured that made her around five-two. They would be able to determine better once the coroner measured the body. “Hair color?”
“She had on a hat. A turquoise hat.” He circled his head with his hands. “And it had one of those wide parts to it.”
“It had a wide brim?”
“Yeah, but it kind of flopped down, and it had what looked like a big peacock feather on one side.”
Quinn paused in his questioning to write that all down before he asked, “Did you hear her say anything?”
“No, but she was laughing.”
Quinn glanced up. “Laughing?”
“Yeah. Like he was saying something funny. You know. Like he told her a joke and she kinda hits his arm. Playful.”
