Helen was wearing some kind of kimono, brown leather sandals, and no makeup. Her ginger-colored hair was combed back and held by a tan elastic band. She looked younger than usual, like a lanky athlete who’d just come from a women’s college basketball game.
Quinn sipped his coffee from an old cracked mug lettered THIMK and glanced around. “Nice back here.”
“Private,” Helen said. He knew it was an invitation to talk in confidence.
“I have a feeling you know why I came,” Quinn said.
“Yeah, but you go first.”
“I know we were dealing with dual and possibly conflicting personalities in the same person, but now that we know more about Martin Hawk, I’m having a hard time buying into the notion that he did those women.”
“You think Pearl shot the wrong man?”
“Not exactly.” Quinn reached for words he couldn’t find. “I’m not sure what I think.”
Helen leaned back and crossed her long legs beneath the silk kimono. Her well-pedicured feet looked huge and reminded Quinn what a large woman she was.
She said, “Martin Hawk turned out to be an educated and sophisticated opponent who was obviously upset about the dearth of tradition and sportsmanship in society, depressed over what his life’s love and endeavor had become. You’re thinking that whatever duality he might have contained, it’s unlikely that a man like Hawk, obsessed with fairness and honor, the regimen of the hunt, would simply slaughter unsuspecting helpless victims.”
“You’ve been giving this some thought,” Quinn said.
Helen nodded. “As have you.”
“Have you spoken to Renz?”
Helen smiled sadly. “He wouldn’t want to listen. Wouldn’t believe me if he did listen. There’s a narrative fixed in his mind and in the media. It’s all working for him now, and he wouldn’t want to change it. And I have to say he’d have a point. What about the stuff they found in the bag in Hawk’s hotel room?”
“I don’t know about it. I thought maybe you might explain it.”
“I can’t,” Helen said. “It’s compelling evidence. It would have taken down the suspect in court if Pearl’s bullets had missed.”
“You and I both think there’s something more to this case. The only problem is, we don’t know what.”
“That’s where we stand,” Helen said.
“So what do we do?” Quinn asked.
“I’m not certain we’re correct. But if we are, at this point I’m not in any position to do anything.”
“You could risk your job and professional reputation by backing me up,” Quinn said.
He’d thought Helen would laugh or at least smile, but she didn’t. Instead she said, “Bring me something, and I’ll back you.”
Then she smiled. “If there is something.”
78
Quinn knew that if he went to his apartment or to the office there’d be media types there. The Manhattan paparazzi.
He drove the Lincoln to First Avenue and found a parking space near East Fifty-fifth Street. He got out of the car and fed the meter, then began walking south on the sunny, crowded sidewalk, cloaking himself in the anonymity of the city.
As he walked, he thought about the way the Slicer victims were killed. Displaying the victims was almost like a desecration of the hunt, and the hunt had been Martin Hawk’s quasi-religion. It seemed impossible, at least in Quinn’s mind, that the. 25-Caliber Killer and the Slicer were the same man.
Then who was the Slicer?
Alfred Beeker? Could he kill in such a grisly manner? Perhaps. His was a profession that delved into sadistic and tortured souls. Maybe some of what he’d encountered had rubbed off.
Or maybe limiting the suspects to men might be where things had gone wrong. It wasn’t only men who sometimes hated women. Plenty of women still had enough pent-up rage at their mothers or sisters to compel them to kill.
And what about Dwayne Avis, prime suspect alphabetically but not in any other way? Quinn realized with a jolt that identification with the prominent rental car agency had diverted his attention from the fact that avis was Latin for bird.
Apropos of nothing. But still…
On the other hand, Avis was unlikely. He was in his late fifties, in the outer range of age for serial killers.
Still, it was possible. While the psychologists might be right and it was a long leap from torturing and killing animals to torturing and killing women, maybe it worked in the other direction. The dogs might not have been first. They might have been used as some kind of stopgap between human victims. Grisly offerings to relieve the compulsion to kill.
Quinn had to do something, and he needed his computer and directories, the files on the women’s murders.
He got back into the car and drove toward the office on West Seventy-ninth Street. The hell with the media.
There were only about a dozen of them outside the office, perhaps because they thought the main narrative of the story they were simultaneously following and creating was over. Quinn brushed past them with relative ease, smiling and no-commenting every third step.
When he was inside, he ignored frantic, loud knocking and locked and chained the street door. This wasn’t a regular precinct house; there was no reason to keep it open when most of the neighborhood didn’t even know it existed.
He switched on the office lights and sat down at his desk, then booted up his computer. He ignored it while it was activating its underlying software, and instead turned his attention to his phone directories and the Dwayne Avis file.
There was plenty to be found on the arrest and conviction of Avis in Browne County in upstate New York for cruelty to animals.
It took Quinn about fifteen minutes to contact the Browne County Sheriff’s Office that had apprehended Avis. The officers who’d been involved in the case were no longer with the department, but the undersheriff (which Quinn figured was some kind of deputy) Quinn talked to had, like Quinn, a voluminous file on Dwayne Avis.
The undersheriff’s name was Tom Hazelhoff, and he held a dim view of Avis. “Guy’s quite an asshole,” Hazelhoff said, “but he don’t give us much trouble anymore. Keeps to himself, and the neighbors don’t call in about some poor dog yowling all night. Guy who’d do that to dogs…” Hazelhoff ’s voice trailed off in disgust.
“I hear you,” Quinn said. “I’m a dog man myself. Your files’d be more extensive than ours, since he was in your system and went to trial there. What I want to know about Dwayne Avis is whether that’s his real name. ”
“Hold on,” Hazelhoff said. “Lemme look.”
He was gone more than ten minutes. Quinn almost hung up.
Then his patience was rewarded. Hazelhoff came back on the line.
“It’s his real name, all right,” Hazelhoff said.
Quinn’s heart became a weight in his chest.
“He had it legally changed to Dwayne Avis twelve years ago when he came here from Missouri,” Hazelhoff continued, “from his Native American name, Wild Sky Hawk. It says here for reasons of convenience.”
That was when the building collapsed on Quinn. Or was it the truth and full understanding?
Dwayne Avis was Martin Hawk’s father.
It was the son who procured victims for his father, repaying old debts, or perhaps even out of twisted familial love or obligation. The son, Martin, had nothing to do with the actual slaughter. Martin Hawk had personally killed
