Free Slaughter by John Lutz

routine on both hotels.” Quinn could imagine the women lying awkwardly in the bathtubs, losing blood and so losing the strength to resist. They probably knew they wouldn’t leave the bathtubs alive, but assumed they were going to drown.
    When the killer was finished with what he’d come to do, he probably left in a way he’d planned, careful not to be caught in his own trap of flames and smoke. The victims would have been too weak to claw their way up and climb out of the tubs. They probably kept trying harder and harder as the water kept getting hotter and hotter. Each of their attempts to escape would have been more feeble than the previous ones. Then the smells of charring flesh, the hopeless screams. The boiling.
    Then silence except for the crackling of the flames.
    Quinn looked up from the material on his desk. On the other side of the desk, Renz sat staring at him.
    Quinn got up and crossed the office to a cabinet, which he unlocked. He withdrew a bottle of Jameson’s and poured two fingers into a couple of on-the-rocks glasses. He didn’t add ice or water before carrying the two glasses back to his desk, setting one on the blotting pad, and handing the other glass to Renz.
    Renz tossed down most of his drink in a series of gulps.
    Quinn sipped his drink slowly, thinking things over.

15
    â€œT here was a similar mass murder in Florida about five years ago,” Helen the profiler said. She was standing in front of Quinn’s desk with her arms crossed, rocking back and forth on her heels. “Two women found dead in their bathtubs, after a fire in a hotel on Pompano Beach. They’d been tortured, then boiled to death. Fire was deliberate, most likely set by the same person who killed the women. Three other people—all men—were killed in the fire. Firebug was never caught.”
    â€œThe men were collateral damage?”
    â€œLooks that way. Men often are.”
    Quinn was thinking about that when Jerry Lido came in through the street door. The air stirred with a faint scent of gin. Lido’s stained white shirt was unbuttoned and hanging out over wrinkled pants. His eyes seemed focused, though, and he was walking straight. Fedderman, over by the coffeepot, and himself no fashion plate, looked at Lido and said, “You look like something the cat dragged in.”
    â€œI fought the cat all the way,” Lido said.
    Quinn said, “I need you to find out what you can about a hotel fire five years ago in Pompano.”
    â€œSandy Toes Hotel?”
    Helen shifted her feet and stood up straighter. She and Quinn looked at each other.
    Lido caught the subtle exchange and smiled. He placed a wrinkled yellow envelope on Quinn’s desk.
    The charred debris in the Sandy Toes photos was surprising. The burn victims’ bodies were shriveled black horrors. Breasts had been removed from some of the women. Quinn recalled another case, long ago, involving an urban cannibal who dined on breasts.
    He was almost relieved when he saw that here most of the breasts—what was left of them—were lying near the victims’ bodies.
    None of the male victims of the Sandy Toes Hotel fire seemed to have been tortured, and only one of them, possibly coincidentally, was found burned to death in a bathtub.
    They seemed to have simply been in the way.
    Collateral damage.
    The women, however, were a different story. What was left of them—including their severed breasts—that was too large to fit down a drain was lying in a jumble at the bottoms of the tubs.
    Preliminary autopsy reports on the women suggested they were killed and dismembered swiftly. The killer had known he had minimum time.
    â€œHe made every second count,” Quinn said, leafing through the autopsy sheets, which were complete with photos.
    â€œHe must have known he had a way out without being trapped by the flames or smoke,” Fedderman said as the detectives passed around the files with