man were holding out what looked like dead rabbits they’d shot. Everyone in the photo, other than the rabbits, was smiling.
“You a hunter?” Quinn asked.
“Sometimes. Why do you ask?”
Ignoring the question, Quinn walked to the door, opened it, and went back out into the anteroom. The idea was to let Beeker stew, but Beeker didn’t seem to be stewing.
“Is everything okay?” Beatrice asked. She must have heard Beeker’s chair bumping around. Or maybe it was Beeker’s head.
“Everything’s violets and roses, dear,” Quinn said, and smiled reassuringly at her on the way out.
But it wasn’t okay. Beeker hadn’t once seemed even slightly afraid during Quinn’s violent visit.
That worried Quinn.
51
Sal Vitali sat at his desk in the almost-deserted squad room. All was quiet, except for a printer industriously buzzing away somewhere and an occasional muffled shout from the holding cells upstairs. Most of the detectives were out in the field. Only Don Mackey, a dogged old cop nearing retirement, was at his desk over near the window, working the phone.
Sal’s partner, Mishkin, sat across from him. They’d cleared off most of the desktop, and on it, scattered over a pristine white sheet of printer paper, were the items the crime scene unit had vacuumed up from the Antonian Hotel corridor where Floyd Becker had been shot and killed before his body was dragged outside. There was lint, a bit of brown plastic that had come off the end of a shoelace (not Becker’s, and probably not his killer’s), lint, three human hairs, and more lint. None of the hairs was the victim’s, but that didn’t mean the killer’s hair was there. The hairs could have come from anyone passing along the corridor.
Sal had read somewhere that the average person lost approximately eighty individual hairs per day. On most people that hair grew back, but on Sal’s head, he wasn’t so sure. It seemed to him that he left at least eighty hairs in the drain every morning when he showered. But maybe that was because he had so much of the stuff to begin with. The other detectives in the precinct kidded him sometimes about his hair, called him Columbo. Sal bore up under it and pretended to be annoyed. Like he had a choice.
Quinn might not approve of him examining the vacuum bag items, believing the Slicer and his gutted dead women, not. 25-Caliber Killer victims, were Sal and Mishkin’s bailiwick, but so what? This was supposed to be one case, with one psycho killer, so in Sal’s view it was one big bag of shit.
What Sal really wanted to do was break both cases, collar two killers, show the bastards in the puzzle palace they were overthinking this thing. Renz and Helen the profiler figured there was one killer with two distinctly different MOs, who killed women one way and men another. Sal didn’t see it as likely. They all must have fallen under the spell of Helen the profiler, who as far as Sal was concerned might be a female impersonator, with that lanky body, those long bony fingers, and that chin. Not a bad-looking one, though. Some of those transgenders could fool you.
“Nothing we might be able to use but the hair, Sal,” Mishkin said, squinting down at the sparse assortment on the desktop. “And not even that unless we get a match.”
“The little plastic doodad from the end of a shoelace,” Sal said.
“If that’s what it is,” Mishkin said.
“Lab says that’s what it is.”
“Then when we get a suspect, we look close at his shoelaces. Especially if they’re brown.”
“And his hair,” Sal said.
Mishkin sat back and wiped his hand down his face, then smoothed out his mustache as if it needed it. “That break-in at Quinn and his team’s office, Sal-you think it’s connected to any of this?”
“Doubt it,” Sal said. “Probably just some asshole looking for money to score some dope. Probably didn’t even know the place was a cop shop.”
“The guy did a neat job picking the lock.”
“Smart asshole. Or maybe somebody forgot to lock the door when they left, and the guy walked right in.”
“Happens,” Mishkin said.
Very carefully, using tweezers, Sal picked up each item from the vacuuming and placed it back in its plastic evidence bag.
“Happens,” he agreed, when he was finished.
“There were three hairs, right?” Mishkin said.
Sal looked at him. “Right.”
“Just wanted to make sure,” Mishkin said. “Wouldn’t want one of your many hairs to get in with them.”
Sal kept looking at him, wondering if he’d just been ragged, but Mishkin was wearing his usual bland and amiable expression.
“You want some coffee, Sal?”
“Sure.”
You never could tell with Mishkin.
The man who’d broken into the Seventy-ninth Street office and knocked out Quinn sat at an inside table in the Aces Up diner on Amsterdam, sipping cold green tea and watching people and traffic stream past outside. Twin parallel lines of concern were etched vertically above the bridge of his nose. He was still unhappy about how his plan to become the hunter rather than the hunted had turned out.
The break-in had been easy enough. He smiled at the thought of it. How ironic that the police would take over office space and not concern themselves with the quality of the lock on the door. That was exactly how bureaucracies worked. Or didn’t work. With a good set of picks in expert hands, the lock had yielded after only a few minutes.
The plan had been to enter and obtain information, then leave without any indication that he’d been there. He would then know what Quinn knew, and Quinn would be unaware of it. That might make the game somewhat less interesting, but definitely safer.
A waiter came and placed the tuna salad sandwich he’d ordered on the table before him, then topped off his iced tea.
He had been hungry, and as he replenished his body with food and energy, optimism gradually replaced his concern. Last night-or early this morning-might have gone a lot worse. The suddenness of Quinn’s entrance and discovery of an intruder had surprised both of them. And in the ensuing struggle to escape, he had injured Quinn, given him something to think about other than his hunt.
Quinn wasn’t a young man, but there was an obvious strength in him, and he knew how to fight, so it was lucky that he hadn’t had time to set himself for the intruder’s attack. The game might have ended right there. As it was, the break-in had been partially successful in that it might have thrown Quinn and his detectives off their game.
He took a sip of tea.
Yes, it could have been worse.
Now Quinn would walk with the added dimension of fear, the cold tingle up the spine that came with the realization that stalker might at any moment become stalked. The intruder smiled. He’d been in that position and knew how it felt. It seemed to turn the world upside down.
Not that it would keep Quinn subdued for long. He’d know how to handle fear. He was an old hand at his game, a seasoned hunter.
But now he was a hunter who would occasionally glance back over his shoulder.
What was that legendary baseball pitcher’s adage? Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.
One day Quinn might look back too late, and there would be what had been gaining on him, suddenly caught up.
