Free Mister X by John Lutz Page A

could bring herself to be honest, she’d admit that.
    Whether she lived or died depended entirely upon his whim. He remembered her complete loss of control, the warm urine escaping her body. They both recognized at that moment her fetid, trickling surrender.
    She belonged to him. She understood that in the very depths of her soul, in the dark recesses of her brain where the demons played.
    That was enough for now.
     
    It wouldn’t look like much in the morning Times or Post, if it even made the papers. And it wouldn’t be mentioned on TV news. After all, there was no tape. There’d been no chance for some techie geek with a phone camera to be standing nearby creating a video stream.
    Mary had been treated well by the police and the hospital staff. At the hospital she’d been given a thorough examination, and what they referred to as a rape kit had been used on her to confirm that she hadn’t been penetrated.
    After the ordeal at the hospital she had given a carefully detailed and recorded statement. Through it all she could sense a genuine concern, but also a workaday disinterest. Hers wasn’t the first story like this they’d heard. No one had actually told her that, but it showed.
    The incident would be merely another apartment break-in in New York. The intruder had been surprised by the occupant and frightened away. Nothing had been taken. No one had been seriously hurt. Mary’s encounter with a man who might have killed her would be barely worth a mention in the media. In the grand and sweeping maelstrom of the city, it wasn’t at all important.
    Except to Mary.
     
    Quinn sat up late at the desk in his den and let his thoughts roam. A cigar in a glass ashtray was playing up a thread of smoke that dissipated before it reached the ceiling. A half-drunk cup of coffee sat on a round cork coaster. The cup was Spode and a survivor of his time with his former wife, May, who was married now to a real estate attorney in California. Their daughter Lauri was in California, too, but in a different part of the state. Quinn figured May and Lauri seldom, if ever, saw each other, but he couldn’t be sure. Lauri had ditched her musician boyfriend Wormy, and as far as Quinn knew was concentrating on her studies at Muir College in the northern part of the state. When last he heard Lauri was studying journalism.
    He drew on the cigar, exhaled, and concentrated less on his personal life and more on the case. On the desk was a yellow legal pad, as yet unmarked. Quinn picked up a ballpoint pen and began to make notes as he went over the case in his mind. Sometimes seeing things in some kind of order, in print, made them clearer.
    Tiffany Keller had years ago been the last victim of the Carver.
    Her twin, Chrissie, won the Triple Monkey whatever slot-machine jackpot and found herself suddenly moderately wealthy. She decided to use the money to find her sister’s killer. Or, more accurately, to avenge her sister’s death.
    The NYPD had demonstrated no interest in reopening the case.
    Chrissie, after pretending to be Tiffany’s ghost to get Quinn’s attention, had finally admitted who she was and hired Quinn and Associates to find the Carver.
    After paying a handsome retainer, Chrissie had then disappeared.
    Chrissie had deleted any and all photographs of Tiffany from news items in the folder she’d left with Quinn.
    Photographs on the Internet revealed that Chrissie and Tiffany looked nothing alike.
    Renz had phoned and tried to warn Quinn off the case.
    Quinn jotted on the legal pad that Chrissie was not to be trusted. There was no need to write a reminder about Renz.
    Quinn placed his cigar back in the ashtray and leaned back in his desk chair to look over what he’d written on the legal pad.
    None of it aided him in any kind of understanding.
    Too early, he assured himself. But that didn’t alleviate the uneasy feeling deep in his stomach.
    He placed the legal pad in the shallow center drawer of the desk, then slid the