outside.
Pleasant, Lavern thought. The alcohol relaxed her almost immediately, maybe because of the heat outside and the fact that she’d skipped lunch. She felt safe in here, isolated, her cell phone turned off and in the car, Hobbs at work for most of the rest of the day. She took a bite of the celery stalk that had been in her drink, then set it aside on a napkin. The crunching sound of her chewing the celery seemed unusually loud. Maybe it even attracted the attention of the guy down the bar.
He lowered his drink to its coaster and glanced over at her and smiled. Wham! This was a handsome one. In his thirties, dark hair and eyes, killer smile, wearing light tan slacks and a black sport coat, a red and black tie against a white shirt. Everything about him looked expensive.
Lavern thought about Hobbs.
He’d kill me.
If he knew.
She decided it wouldn’t hurt anything if she flirted a little. Hobbs would never find out. Anyway, she’d be in enough trouble with Hobbs if he just knew she was here, drinking in the middle of the day. He didn’t like it when he didn’t know exactly where she was, and he especially wouldn’t like it if he knew she was in a bar. Lounge, rather.
If she flirted a little, talked with this dark-haired guy and listened to his patter, it would make her feel better. Make her feel she was desirable as something other than a punching bag. She felt a pang of shame. A pang of anger. She smiled back at the man down the bar.
What the hell? It isn’t like I’m gonna screw the guy.
What Hobbs would do if he discovered her in bed with another man was something her mind didn’t want to comprehend.
In a kind of graceful manner the guy down the bar swiveled around on his stool and stood up, holding his drink steady and level in his right hand. She saw that he was about average height and well built beneath the nice clothes.
She liked the way he moved. He advanced toward her with a liquid, muscular walk, as if he might be some kind of athlete, absently spinning bar stools with his left hand with each step…two, three, five stools. They made a soft, ratchety whirring sound as they spun.
The closer he got, the handsomer he became. Heavy-lidded eyes, the kind people sometimes called bedroom eyes, a sort of predatory but sexy cast to his lean features.
When he was about six feet from her the expression on his face changed. Lavern knew why. He’d noticed the bruises. The makeup could conceal them somewhat in the soft light, but not from a few feet away. The light in his brown eyes dimmed, and his smile lost its wattage. He knew what facial bruises probably meant: violence he wanted no part of. Lavern came with dangerous baggage, so why waste time talking her up? Lavern couldn’t blame him.
When he was almost alongside her he widened his smile, raised his glass to her in a silent salute, then set it on the bar on his way out the door, as if he’d been headed there all the time and not down the bar to talk to her.
Letting me down easy.
“Too bad,” a woman’s voice said, as the door swung closed behind him, cutting off the glare of outside light. “I thought he was interested in you.”
Lavern looked up and saw the woman who might be Melody behind the bar.
“I thought so, too,” Lavern said. She took a sip of her Bloody Mary, then met Melody’s eyes with her own. “Listen, you don’t think I-”
“That you’re in here working? Drinking a Bloody Mary and trolling for afternoon clients?” Melody shook her head, grinning. “Not hardly. But I do think our handsome friend was lookin’ for a lady. He had that way about him.”
“Yeah, he sure did.”
“Oh, well. He’ll never know what he missed.”
“Shame,” Lavern said.
But the woman who might have been Melody was already moving away behind the bar, returning to concentrate on what might have been her crossword puzzle. Lavern was left feeling, as she often did, that this was a world in which she couldn’t quite connect.
It was strange, she thought, the way people’s lives could almost but not quite intersect, the way drastic changes could almost but not quite happen. She wondered if there were lots of parallel worlds where almost everything was different from the way it was in this one because different choices had been made. Different worlds with different, happy Laverns.
Not likely.
Fate, destiny, whatever. The hell with it.
Probably Hobbs would have found out and killed us both.
“Shame,” Lavern said again, softly, to herself.
35
Probably to demonstrate to Quinn that he was a busy man, Renz wanted to meet him for a chat while on the way to an appointment. He’d said he had something to show Quinn.
They stood in the warmth of the sun at Rockefeller Center, beneath the colorful line of noisily whipping flags that were captives to the breezes flowing down the avenue. Now and then one of the flags would snap like the canvas of a sailboat suddenly billowing with air. Behind them, Renz’s gleaming black limo sat at the curb, its engine idling, the barely discernable form of the driver behind the tinted windows sitting and staring patiently straight ahead.
Renz had on an expensive-looking blue pin-striped suit. His maroon tie had somehow found its way out from beneath his three-button coat and was frolicking in the breeze like the flags above. Backhanding the tie aside, he handed Quinn a large brown envelope and said nothing.
Obviously this was what he wanted to show Quinn, who undid the envelope’s clasped flap and examined the contents.
They were crime scene and morgue photos of Vera Doaks.
“What’s this world of ours come to?” Quinn said sadly.
“It’s the same as ever,” Renz said. “Story of life. We live, we become garbage, and they put us in a hole or burn us to ash.”
“Somehow you live with that perspective,” Quinn said.
“It’s the only way I can live, being honest. You should try it, Quinn, instead of nurturing your weak spot.”
“Which is?”
“You’re a romantic. The world is shit. You fool yourself into thinking it isn’t and try to clean it up while I recognize it for what it is and happily wallow in it. That’s the difference between us.”
“I’ll stay a romantic,” Quinn said.
Quinn knew what the photos meant, and there was no way to romanticize it. The killer the press had tabbed the Slicer had taken another victim. There was another serial killer in the city.
“On the surface it looks like we’re dealing with two dangerous psychos,” Renz said.
“On the surface?”
Quinn looked at the last photo and slid all of them back in the envelope. Then he reminded Renz of the common thread that seemed to connect the. 25-Caliber Killer’s victims. All of them had been hunters.
“And the two Slicer victims,” Renz said, showing that he was a step ahead of Quinn, “were treated like game animals, gutted and strung up like meat put out to cure. Could be we got us one killer using two different MOs to throw us off the scent.”
“Serial killers don’t usually work that way,” Quinn reminded Renz. “They act out of compulsion, and usually
