things while I’m gone?”
“You can trust me,” Quinn said.
Cleo had been clutching a key chain. She laid it on the desk. Without looking at Quinn, she hurried from the office and closed the door behind her, leaving him alone with the ghost of Dr. Moore.
It was easy enough to find the key that unlocked all the drawers of the file cabinet, and it was easy enough to find the file on Linda Brooks.
Quinn had been hoping for some DVDs or cassettes, recordings of the doctor’s sessions with Linda. Instead he found copious notes. Pages of them. Apparently Linda had talked, and Dr. Moore listened as a psychoanalyst should, and made notes.
The printer near the computer out in the anteroom was one of those multifunctional ones that also scanned, faxed, and copied. Quinn was glad to see it held plenty of paper.
It took him a few minutes to get onto it; then he got to work making copies of Dr. Moore’s notes.
He hoped Cleo would take her time over her coffee.
An hour later, at his desk at Q amp;A’s headquarters, Quinn began to read.
There wasn’t much more to learn about Linda Brooks. She did hallucinate. She did hear voices. As Quinn read, he could empathize with the agony the young woman had been enduring, the loneliness. And he got a sense of the courage she must have had in order to adjust as well as she had and build some kind of life despite her persistent illness. He found himself liking this woman he’d let be tortured and murdered.
Jesus! Don’t do that to yourself!
There wasn’t much in life Quinn hated more than self-pity and its destructiveness. It was an emotion Linda Brooks seemed to have for the most part avoided. She’d been a fighter.
And a fatalist.
That was what this killer knew about his victims-they were fatalists. At a certain point something would break in them and they would give themselves to him. That was the moment the monster in him lived for, the moment they were completely his.
Fedderman came into the office, swiping his forearm across his forehead. He was carrying his suit coat draped over his shoulder and he looked beat. In his right hand was a small brown paper sack.
He nodded a hello to Quinn as he crossed from the door to Quinn’s desk. Then he opened the bag and spilled out a dozen or so small plastic tubular objects on the desk top. They looked like cigarette lighters and for an instant Quinn’s hand moved toward his shirt pocket where he used to carry his cigars, when he’d smoked them more frequently.
“What are those?” he asked.
“Thumb drives. Or flash drives. I dunno; I can’t keep up with tech talk.”
Quinn stared up at him.
“You plug them into a USB port in your computer and they hold all kinds of information. Like a disk drive, only they’re not.”
“What the hell’s a USB port?”
“You gotta be kidding.” Fedderman pointed to a tiny port on the tower of Quinn’s computer.
“Oh, yeah,” Quinn said. “I use those all the time.” He pushed the plastic cylinders around with his finger. “So where’d you get them?”
“Dr. Grace Moore’s apartment. They’re videos of the doctor’s sessions with some of her patients.”
“Including Linda Brooks?”
“Yeah. I watched her latest session on the doctor’s computer before I came here. She said she was being followed by someone who looked like Frank Sinatra.”
“Ring-a-ding-ding,” Quinn said.
“The doctor was going with Linda to her apartment to prove to her nobody was following her or waiting for her there.”
“This was the day of the murder?”
“ ’Fraid so.”
Quinn bowed his head and let out a long breath.
“Things get on tracks,” Fedderman said, “and it’s like there’s no way to stop the train wreck.” He didn’t tell Quinn he was actually thinking about Penny and him, where they might be heading.
“Anybody else know you took these thumb drives?”
Fedderman shook his head. “Just the two of us. There are little squares of tape on the bottoms of them, listing the patient’s names. You’d be surprised by some of those names.”
“I’ll make a copy of Linda Brooks’s, and we won’t watch the others. Then you better wipe them and put them back where you found them.”
“You don’t think we should hand them over to Renz?”
“Are you kidding?” Quinn asked.
“Actually,” Fedderman said, “I am.”
That night at the Hamaker Hotel near Times Square, Harley Renz leaned over and kissed Olivia good-bye. She was sleeping deeply, snoring lightly, and didn’t notice.
Renz walked lightly even though he was sure he couldn’t wake Olivia with a gunshot. She’d taken something, and he hadn’t asked what. After dressing carefully, he used a washcloth from the bathroom to wipe the glass he’d used to drink Jack Daniel’s; then he slipped the bottle into his briefcase that was propped on a chair. He was sure he hadn’t touched anything in the bathroom or the rest of the hotel suite that would leave a legible print. He was always careful to touch almost nothing but Olivia, but especially so since his conversation with Jim Tennyson.
Nothing must go wrong. Women, one of Renz’s favorite perks of his office, had brought down more than one hardworking police commissioner. The trouble he went to when he saw Olivia was a precaution, Renz knew, but it allowed him to sleep better.
Or it had before his visit from Jim Tennyson. Weaver was a help in that regard, keeping tabs on Tennyson. But Tennyson was an undercover guy with street smarts. Renz knew he could slip Weaver when it suited him. He had to trust Tennyson, at least until he could get something on him. Mutual damaging information among thieves was almost as effective as honor.
The clock radio by the bed was set for six o’clock, and he knew that Olivia would get up and shower and be gone by seven. Renz stared at her in the dim light. It was hard to imagine something so beautiful being as deceitful as Tennyson had described.
But it wouldn’t be the first time Renz had seen it.
He slipped out of the hotel room and locked the door behind him, handling the knob with the dry washcloth, which he stuffed into his pocket as he strode toward the elevator.
No one had seen him exit, he was sure. He began to breathe easier.
Five minutes after Renz had left the room, someone else entered.
69
P enny wasn’t quite ready to tell Fedderman about the Shadow Guardians. She wondered if the time would ever be right.
“I saw yesterday how it is when your mind becomes your enemy,” Fedderman said.
He and Penny were in the apartment kitchen, drinking coffee and eating a Danish pastry they’d bought last night at the bakery down the street. Penny could do okay on this kind of breakfast. Sugar and caffeine. Fedderman figured he’d be jumpy as a cat until he got some lunch into him.
“Are we talking about insanity?” Penny asked.
“Yeah. Quinn and I listened to a recording of a young woman spilling her guts to her analyst. She was in so much pain I felt it along with her.”
“Feds the empathetic cop.”
