As soon as Renz had disappeared, Quinn lit a Cuban cigar.
18
“It’s better than having him shut down the investigation,” Quinn said, after returning to the Seventy-ninth Street office and telling Pearl and Fedderman about his conversation with Renz.
The air conditioner wasn’t very efficient, and the air was still and muggy and smelled, as it often did, of subversive cigar smoke.
Fedderman had his suit coat off and his tie knot loosened. The top button of his shirt was undone. Pearl had a shimmer of perspiration above her upper lip that somehow looked good on her.
Neither of Quinn’s two detectives was crazy about the idea that the NYPD had landed with both flat feet in the middle of their investigation.
“Did we plan for this development?” Pearl asked.
“Not exactly,” Quinn said. “We’ll have to improvise.”
“They do that in comedy clubs,” Fedderman said.
“We’ll try not to make it funny.”
“At least we’ll be working with Vitali and Mishkin again,” Fedderman said.
The NYPD homicide team of detectives Sal Vitali and Harold Mishkin had shared the load with Quinn, Pearl, and Fedderman in a previous serial killer case. The gravel-voiced, intense Vitali and the deceptively meek Mishkin were a crack team and meshed well with Quinn and his crew.
Pearl, who’d been working her computer, sat back and stretched her arms, clenching and unclenching her fists as if she were working little exercise balls. “It’d be nice, though, if we had a client.”
“We do,” Fedderman said. “We just can’t find her. Pearl keeps checking her computer, but Chrissie’s not on Face-book or YouTube or any of the other mass Internet connectors. There are some people there looking for dates, though, so Pearl’s not giving up.”
“I got a YouTube for you,” Pearl said.
“Wouldn’t doubt it.”
Pearl fumed. Fedderman liked that. Quinn didn’t, but he hesitated in acting as referee when Pearl and Fedderman went at each other. Their frequent bickering seemed to stimulate their little gray cells.
“Ease up,” was all he said, and not with much conviction.
Pearl swiveled slightly in her chair to look directly at him. “Did you mention to Cindy Sellers that we can’t seem to locate our client?”
“Slipped my mind.”
“Sure it did.” Pearl knew better than to believe that. Hardly anything slipped Quinn’s mind.
Having forgotten for now about Fedderman and his jibes, Pearl smiled. Quinn thought she was beautiful when she smiled while still flush with anger. It was amazing the way she could switch gears like that. Like speed-shifting a race car.
“She called here while you were talking to Renz,” Fedderman said.
“Sellers?”
“The same. Pearl took the call.”
“I can’t stand that woman,” Pearl said.
“That’s just because she has no taste, compassion, or ethics,” Fedderman said.
“I can stand you,” Pearl said. “Barely, sometimes, and in short doses, but I can stand you.”
Quinn was getting fed up with the verbal rock fight. What were they, in high school? But he knew it was because they were stymied in their investigation. Couldn’t even find their client. “What did Sellers want, Pearl?”
“The usual. Answers. I didn’t give her any.”
“What did you give her?”
“That high school yearbook photo. The one we found on the Internet when we realized Chrissie hadn’t included any in the clippings she gave us. Sellers wanted a photo of Tiffany to run with her City Beat story.”
“Did Sellers bitch because you gave her such an old photograph?” Fedderman asked.
“No. She’ll do what we did: scour the Internet and build her own file of photos.”
“She’s probably good at that,” Fedderman said. “It’s what reporters do nowadays. Not much legwork left in the job. Not like being a cop.”
“Hmph,” Pearl said, which irritated Fedderman. It was hard to know if she was agreeing or disagreeing.
She sat forward. “I went through the clippings Chrissie gave us again, to make doubly sure, and there were photos of all the victims except for the last. Then I went on the Internet again.” She wrestled her chair up closer to her desk and worked her computer. “There are some great shots.” She moved the mouse across its pad and clicked it. “Like this one. It’s from an old Daily News. Looks like a studio portrait when she was still a teenager. Tiffany sure was a terrific-looking kid.”
Quinn angled to his left so the glare from the window didn’t obscure the image on Pearl’s computer screen. He stepped closer.
The image was of a news item with the victim’s photo inset on the right. Tiffany’s name was printed beneath the black-and-white head shot of a pretty brunette with dark eyes and a glowing and somewhat naive smile. Young woman with a bright future, the caption should have read, rather than Latest Carver victim.
“Exactly the Carver victim type,” Pearl said. “Attractive, with dark hair and eyes, good cheekbones, generous mouth.”
You, Quinn thought, but didn’t say it.
“Tiffany fits right in. Our client does, too, but not exactly.”
“She can’t be Chrissie,” Fedderman said.
“So who is she?” Quinn asked. “And why’s she done a runner?”
“I might be able to answer your first question,” Pearl said. “As I recall, she never said she and Tiffany were identical twins. She is Chrissie Keller, Tiffany’s fraternal twin.”
“She sure let us assume they were identical twins,” Fedderman said. “I mean, with her story about wanting Quinn to think at first he was looking at one of the Carver’s victims. Shock persuasion.”
“Feds is right,” Quinn said. “She led us in that direction.”
“So she lied,” Pearl said. “My God, what a surprise!”
Quinn and Fedderman looked at each other.
In a corner of his mind, Fedderman had mulled over Pearl’s suggestion. “Pearl’s got a point,” he said. “They might be fraternal twins. But me, I’m not so sure.”
“Either way, she’s been dicking around with us,” Pearl said.
“Still is,” Fedderman said. “Playing a game.”
“We’ll give her game,” Pearl said.
The two detectives’ animosity was forgotten, lost in the fervor of the hunt. Quinn almost smiled. Cooking now…
“We need to find out why she lied,” Fedderman said.
Pearl nodded. “We need to find her.”
19
The Carver sat in his room in Midtown Manhattan and watched the long, angular shadow cast by the afternoon sun move as inexorably as fate across the wall of the building across the street.
He’d taken to sitting in the same comfortable imitation Herman Miller chair and studying the same view.
It wasn’t really much of a view—simply rows and rows of windows. In the way of countless rows of windows in New York, they overwhelmed