Slaughter - Lutz John (читать книги без txt) 📗

“Helen?”

Minnie was looking at her expectantly.

“Sorry,” Helen said. “We push the food away. We’ve had enough. We can eat no more. Finally, it is time to stop.”

The audience applauded at the pause, without a cue. They liked this woman. Minnie decided to let it roll.

“Usually one person can understand another only up to a certain point,” Helen said. “Going beyond that point is what I do. That is what I’ve done. It’s my job, and it’s my calling.

“The Gremlin,” she continued, “is not a good person. Not in any way heroic or iconic. He has a curious mind. That we know. And he is sick. He might be clever. He might be deadly. He might be three moves ahead of his pursuers. But he is also sick. He can’t stop his increasing use of the knife. He can’t stop torturing before killing. He can’t help reverse engineering every interesting device he comes upon. He can’t help this; he can’t resist that; he can’t reverse this; he can’t change that. He is not the skilled genius who always must know more. He is simply a simple man with a simple problem. The solution is also simple. He wants to be caught now. Finally. Even more than he wants to kill. He wants to be locked up for life or die by needle. But not just that. He wants to chose the time and place of his death. He wants to be an observer as well as a participant. He needs to stop. On the other hand, he needs to continue.

“He needs to know how death works.”

68

“I heard most of the conversation,” Pearl said, when Quinn and Weaver had broken their connection. They’d recorded most of the Helen/Minnie conversation on their cell phones.

Quinn laid his phone on a bookcase. Most of the best mystery writers’ books were there. Tricky folks, those. Had they influenced him? He hadn’t mentioned to Pearl that she would be the primary target in Quinn’s plan. The bait. She was the one in the killer’s sights, whatever the condition of Weaver. Had been his ultimate target almost from the time of his arrival in the city.

It was Helen’s opinion that Pearl was the most important piece on the killer’s imaginary game board, the queen that had to fall.

That Weaver ostensibly was the ideal bait also made her the ideal diversion.

Pearl was what the killer had to claim to complete the mad symmetry of his purpose in life. And in death.

“You don’t have to do it,” Quinn repeated to Pearl.

She smiled. “I want to do it. I want to stop this bastard just as much as you do.”

“Why?”

“You know why. The reasons that sound corny if you say them out loud.”

“The lady in the harbor?”

“I don’t want to get all metaphysical before I brush my teeth,” Pearl said.

Quinn poured a cup of coffee, then sat down at the kitchen table. He sipped as he stared out the window at a ledge of the building next door. A small pigeon kept landing there, which seemed to drive the other pigeons nuts, because they would flap around and coo and fly at the intruder. As Quinn watched the avian combat, it occurred to him that he had never before seen a tiny, half-grown pigeon. He wondered if for some reason there weren’t any, or if he simply hadn’t been looking. Were they the victims of hawks? He knew there were hawks in Manhattan. Their presence had been called to his attention, and he had seen them.

Quinn wondered what else in life he simply hadn’t noticed. He had so far seen a certain kind of life a great deal, but there was more, much more.

There had to be.

Quinn drove to Faith Recovery and parked the Lincoln on the street.

The amazing imaginary woman who’d been in a car accident and lost her memory was on his mind, haunting his thoughts. He almost believed it himself, that he and she were going to enter a maniac’s mind and destroy him. All or most of the plan had been hatched by Helen the profiler, in partnership with a former cop who’d learned psychology on the streets.

Their plan—their trap—should work, and perhaps it might even evolve into something that surely would work.

Quinn and Helen hadn’t simply been burning up calories when they jogged twice daily around the block. Helen moderated her pace, and with Quinn had memorized their surroundings, the layout of Faith Recovery Center’s reception area, the location of the elevators, the entrances and exits, including the ones only for staff, the fire escapes, numeric sequences of the rooms, radiology, cardiac, and operating areas.

The place was a large enough facility to have a park-like area behind it, as well as a small gift shop and cafeteria.

Quinn glanced at his watch and saw that it was almost seven p.m. Time to go to the room adjoining Weaver’s, through an open, wide door designed to admit gurneys and wheelchairs.

Weaver was good at her job. She actually appeared injured and drugged. She was convincing as a woman who’d died and come back. The power of suggestion.

Can you do that? Ethan Ellis wondered, putting down the Times. Actually return from the dead?

Not long ago he would never have asked himself that question. But maybe he should have. Now the bitter pill he could never swallow was the truth. There were no second chances. And even if there were, he knew in his heart he wouldn’t have taken the smarter and more honorable road.

He knew he had to pull himself together. His wife, Cynthia, and his son, Jeremy, would wonder where he was.

Ethan was in the lobby of the recently rebuilt AA AAL building, financed by oil money and the taxpayers. He was the creative genius who’d figured out the best way to add marble and stone and glass and at the same time make the building almost twice as tall as its original thirty stories. Already the building was sixty percent rented. Now he was to accept his second Golden Architectural Award.

It was a night for celebration.

But damping high spirits was the subtle but persistent rhythmic whack, whack, whack that pounded through his head.

Then came the images of what Manhattan could become.

The pain.

Ellis bowed his head and sobbed.

69

Minnie Miner’s voice thrummed with excitement when she called Quinn the next morning on his cell.

“It’s working, Quinn! I made sure the Helen Iman interview was the hottest thing online, and that got us a lot of the print media. Not to mention even more video. CNN and Fox News are still running it on their loops. On Twitter it’s—”

“Sounds good so far,” Quinn interrupted. “Odds are that one place or another, the Gremlin will see it, hear it, or read it.”

“According to Helen, he’s bound to come in contact with it because he’ll be looking for it hard. He’s hooked on his own infamy. He can’t stay away from watching and reading about himself, no matter how hard he tries. This is what the sicko has been working for. It’s what they all want. To become legends. Their life is a story, and what’s a story without a slam-bang ending?”

“Helen isn’t always right.”

“Yes, she is,” Minnie said. “She’s my hero.”

“Mine, too. If this continues to work.”

“Nobody said it would be easy.”

“That oughta tell us something,” Quinn said.

He turned off his cell phone alarm and went into the bathroom to take his shower.

Quinn was toweling off, and was going to wake up Pearl, when the landline phone rang. This ring was louder than the cell phone’s alarm, and should have been loud enough to wake Pearl. He imagined her fluffing her pillow and gradually rising from sleep. He managed a gruff “’Lo . . .” as he picked up the phone.

“Quinn. It’s Nancy Weaver. How come you aren’t in your office?”