“It’s almost three a.m.,” she said. “Maybe we should try sleeping for a change.”
He threw back his head and finished his beer in a series of long gulps, then swiveled on the mattress and let his upper body flop back so he was lying beside her. Hettie worked herself down so she was eye to eye with him in the damp bed, lying on her side.
“You finish your water?” he asked.
“Most of it. Why, you want some?”
“No. Want some of my beer?”
“Nope. I’m fine.” She smiled. “Your beer’s empty anyway.”
“Tired?” he asked, looking over at her.
“Getting there,” she said, just before she dozed off.
Hettie dreamed, saw the dark, muscular form of Dan Martin moving about the bedroom, heard a soft, metallic clinking sound. She couldn’t imagine what was making that noise. Dim light then, shadows gliding like the wings of soaring birds.
Dan’s voice: “Tired?”
Concerned about me. So sweet.
“Are you sleeping, Hettie? Hettie?”
She decided not to answer. Why should she? It was her dream.
When Hettie awoke she realized immediately what she was smelling. Perfumed soap. Her brand.
Her brain had barely registered that when pain erupted in her ankles.
What…?
She was dumbfounded. Disoriented.
Full consciousness made its way through the thick layers of confusion, and with it came panic.
She fought the panic by concentrating on the pain, then by trying to accept the pain, to somehow push it aside.
Reason! Think!
How did I get here? Where?
It was almost completely dark.
Can’t see! Can’t move arms or legs!
She tried to call out. Call Dan’s name. Her lips and the tip of her tongue worked helplessly on a rough, sticky surface she recognized as the adhesive side of tape.
Can’t scream!
A headache she’d barely been aware of now struck her skull like an ax, and she realized she was dangling upside down. Her feet were tied together, bound to something, and her wrists were tied or taped to her thighs. She could move only her head, and that brought excruciating pain to her neck.
Her eyes were getting used to the dimness, and she made out folds of what looked like white plastic near her. The shower curtain! Nearby vertical tubular steel glinted dully to her left, and to her right. She recognized it and knew where she was-hanging upside down from her chinning bar that, along with its collapsible and portable supporting structure, had been moved from the exercise corner of her bedroom into the shower stall.
Dan! He did this! Must have planned it all along. Put something in my water bottle, something that made me sleep so he could do this. Oh, Jesus, I can pick them!
The pain in her head increased with the pressure of blood-swollen veins and began to pulse. She made another attempt to scream but could barely hear the muted hum that found its way through the tape.
Dear God, If I ever-
A scuffing, building rhythm came to her, moving closer.
Footsteps in the hall, near the open bathroom door.
The lights blinked on, blinding her.
21
Sometimes it made sense to go back to the beginning.
It occurred to Quinn that they’d carefully investigated the. 25-Caliber Killer murders that had happened on their watch, but the first two crimes, the murders of George Manders and Alan Weeks, had been given only slightly more than a cursory examination.
He decided to start with the first victim, George Manders.
Quinn and his team had studied the murder book on Manders, read the statements of neighbors, friends, and relatives, and looked into the life of Manders himself.
Manders seemed tailor-made to be an unlikely murder victim, a maddening conundrum for the police.
They’d found nothing in his life that might lead to his murder. But of course there must be something, because he had been murdered.
Quinn sat at Fedderman’s desk, where the light was brighter, and propped the rectangular half-frames of his reading glasses on the slightly crooked bridge of his nose. Patiently, and in a pedantic pose that didn’t suit him, he began to read.
The statements of people who knew Manders seemed to lead nowhere, and the revisited facts concerning his murder also yielded nothing new.
Manders had been a fairly successful hedge fund manager for a firm called Prudent Power, which specialized in shorting the market using exchange traded funds. Quinn could barely make himself read about that, so boring did it become. But he scanned it, learned something about puts and calls, then decided it probably had little to do with Manders’s murder except in larger and general ways whose understanding didn’t require an MBA from Harvard. He hoped.
He stood up, stretched, and then poured some of yesterday’s coffee into a white foam cup. Tasting the horrid stuff and making a face, he snatched up the Manders file from Fedderman’s desk, sat down at his own desk, and booted up his computer.
After a minute or so, and several acidic sips from the foam cup, he peered over the frames of his glasses at the glowing monitor. Where to look first but the Wall Street Journal?
Interesting. The price of Prudent Power had plunged as the market rose, losing a lot of value for its investors. But wasn’t that what a hedge fund was supposed to do, move the opposite way of the stock market? Quinn wasn’t sure. It might not be that simple, meaning the manager of Prudent Power might have made enemies by the thousands. It would take only one furious client crazy enough to kill him.
But would that same killer then have moved on to take more victims, people who, presumably, had nothing to do with his (her?) finances? And Quinn wondered, how many serial killers had there been who were wealthy enough to have holdings in hedge funds?
He phoned the police profiler, Helen Iman, and asked her that question.
“Maybe Jack the Ripper,” she said. “But we’ll never know for sure. That’s about it. Don’t bother barking up that tree, Quinn.”
He was holding the phone to his ear with his left hand while leafing through papers in the file.
“What’re you doing, Quinn?”
“Looking for another tree to bark up.”
“I’m pretty busy here,” Helen said.
“I’m leafing through witness statements as we talk,” he said. “Not that there were really any witnesses.”
“The usual friends and relatives talking about what a great guy the victim was, and how he had no enemies?”
“On target.”
“Read me who they are.”
Quinn found the statements list and began reading her the names of people either his team or the earlier
