She swiped the back of her hand across her nose, which had started to run. “I’m so goddamned confused…”
Quinn wasn’t confused. What he felt was rage toward the late Joseph Galin, dirty cop, almost certainly planning on keeping his ill-gotten gains and at some point leaving his wife.
“I’m sure your husband loved you,” he said, “whatever his faults.”
Pearl gave him a look, letting him know this was no way to talk to a suspect. That’s what June Galin had suddenly become, though Pearl had come to the same conclusion as Quinn: it was unlikely that June had known her husband Joe was a bent cop. The hiding place beneath the bottom shelf had been created mostly to keep her from finding that out.
June began sobbing in earnest now, and went to the red recliner and sat on its edge, her face buried in her hands.
Pearl and Fedderman both stared at Quinn, question marks in their eyes. Were they going to regard June Galin as a suspected coconspirator? Cuff her, read her her rights, and take her in?
Quinn, almost imperceptiblly, shook his head no.
Fedderman came over to stand near him, keeping his voice low. “If Galin was dirty, it could be his murder’s got nothing to do with the Twenty-five-Caliber Killer.”
“Maybe,” Quinn said, thinking the investigation was leaning in that direction. There was no shortage of motives when it came to who might have killed Galin.
Then he recalled that inside-out pocket in Galin’s suit coat. And there was something else…
“Hey!” a woman’s voice said.
Everyone turned to look at Nancy Weaver standing in the doorway. She was holding a six-foot-long oak board beneath her right arm, as if she might go surfing, but the surfboard was obviously a bookshelf. And she was grinning.
Quinn remembered the bookshelves in the living room, crowded with glass figurines and a pewter collection.
“There was one of those removable bottom shelves in the living room, too,” Weaver said. “Come see.”
The hiding place in the living room held more money and jewelry, along with an envelope containing three deposit box keys.
When the tally was completed the next day, it was determined that Joe Galin had hidden in his modest home two hundred thousand dollars in cash, as well as ninety thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry. The three deposit boxes had held another fifty thousand and a coin collection that hadn’t yet been appraised.
But what interested Quinn most was something found in the first hiding place they’d discovered. An empty yellow envelope that looked, by the way it was folded and impressed, as if it had once contained money.
Renz was telling Cindy Sellers over the phone whatever she wanted to know about the Hettie Davis murder. Sensational though it might be, it wasn’t what Vitali and Mishkin feared, the opening act of another serial killer in the city. Not yet, anyway.
“The thing about the flies,” Sellers said, obviously taking notes. “That’s great.”
“Yeah,” Renz said, and swallowed. Ice-hearted bitch.
“Any additional comment?” Sellers asked.
“Just that we’re working day and night and in between,” Renz said. “And the killer should know we’re getting closer with every breath he takes.”
“That’s good,” Sellers said. “You decide to give up police work and politics, you should be a writer.”
“Who’d believe any of it?” Renz said.
After the conversation, he hung up his desk phone, confident that Sellers wouldn’t speculate in her paper about yet another serial killer, this one focusing on women. The way Hettie Davis was killed must have taken a lot of hate, a lot of sickness, a lot of evil.
He pushed the intercom button and told his assistant out in the anteroom that he didn’t want to be disturbed, then got up from his desk chair and cracked the window a few inches. Then he sat back down in his chair and fired up a cigar. Not an illegal Cuban like the ones he knew Quinn was smoking, but a good cigar nonetheless. Smoking wasn’t permitted in the office or anywhere else in the building. Damned near nowhere in the city. But what was the point in being police commissioner if he couldn’t break the law?
He leaned back in his chair and smoked, thinking about Hettie Davis again. Her murder had shaken even two old pros like Vitali and Mishkin. It had to be hard stuff.
What was wrong with people out there in his city? Were they getting worse? Renz had seen plenty of all sorts of crime, most of it committed for the usual reasons: greed, passion, revenge, mental illness… But sometimes the reason was simply evil. Not often, but sometimes. Renz believed in evil, and he knew Quinn believed in it. They’d both seen it and would see it again.
Renz swiveled his chair so more of the cigar smoke would drift out the window. He didn’t want it to leave a telltale tobacco scent after he’d finished the cigar and sprayed the office with aerosol pine air freshener. He adjusted his position until he saw with satisfaction that the window was drawing well. Smoke seemed to be fleeing the office.
He rested his head against the chair’s high back and blew a perfect smoke ring that dissolved quickly and headed for the polluted outdoors. He thought some more about evil. It was difficult to define, and though you might deny it even to yourself, you could feel it when you were in its presence. It did something to your flesh and stirred something long dormant in the minds of those whose job it was to deal with it. Genuine evil, the real deal, stuck to people, and it scared the hell out of them. Ask Vitali and Mishkin. Ask anyone who’d been anywhere near that crime scene.
Renz tried and failed to blow another smoke ring. In his cynical, self-serving way, he prayed there wouldn’t be another Hettie Davis.
29
Black Lake, Missouri, 1985
The snow-painted woods were quiet after the reverberation of the rifle shot; then there was the crunching sound of boot soles breaking through the icy crust as Marty and his father made their way down the shallow grade toward the kill point.
They stood over the dead ten-point buck Marty had just shot. The action had quickened their blood, and despite the low temperature, neither of them felt the cold. Marty, in fact, was perspiring under his heavy coat.
“We draggin’ it back now?” he asked, his breath fogging out before his face as he looked up at his father.
His father smiled. “We ain’t got my deer yet.”
Marty returned the smile tenuously. “We gonna just let him lay here, pick him up later?”
“Can’t do that. We’ll tree-hang him, cut him so he bleeds out, then come back later and field dress him proper.”
“How we gonna do that?”
Marty’s father drew a coil of thin nylon rope from a coat pocket. “I’ll help you string him up; then I’ll show you what to do. Then you’ll do it.” He walked over to a tree about ten feet away and tossed one end of the rope over a thick branch about ten feet off the ground.
“I’m rememberin’ when me an’ my dad did this,” Marty’s father said.
“How old was you then?”
“ ’Bout your age. Like he was when his father before him showed him how it was.”
“Long time ago,” Marty said.
“Not so long. Grab on, son.”
Marty and his father clutched the deer by its antlers and dragged it over the snowy ground to the tree. It left a long red track of blood along the trail of their boot prints.
