Slaughter - Lutz John - Страница 14

“No,” Quinn said, “and I don’t want to.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter,” Renz said, leaning forward and sliding about a dozen sheets of paper out onto Quinn’s desk blotter. “Helen and a police sketch artist created this.”

Quinn looked at a detailed drawing of the suspect in the Off the Road and crosstown dry cleaners fires, keying off the scant eyewitness accounts. Staring back at Quinn from the sketch pad was a man, slender judging by his neck and shoulders, who was quite handsome until a certain something came through. His pinched features were faintly rodent-like. The effect was enhanced by an oversized, pointed right ear that jutted almost straight out from his head. It gave the man a kind of intense feral look, which lent his elfin features a sinister air. He seemed halfway between a leprechaun and a gargoyle. A small, blithe spirit of evil that tinkered and turned mishap into catastrophe. A gremlin.

“DNA samples are still being worked up, but so far blood taken out of the pipes beneath the tub drains provides no conclusive evidence that the Off the Road and Clovis Hotel fires were set by the same person.”

Quinn laid the photos and sketch on his desk.

He said, “Something’s wrong here.”

“I see it,” Renz said. “The drainpipes under the bathtubs were clogged with blood. Some of the bathtub victims weren’t burned to death or died from smoke inhalation. They were tortured to death while their blood ran down so thick it clogged the drains.”

“It looks like the killer did his 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

“There 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.”

“The men were collateral damage?”

“Looks 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.”

“I 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.”

“Sandy 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.

“He made every second count,” Quinn said, leafing through the autopsy sheets, which were complete with photos.

“He 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 photos.

“Looks like he went from point to point, killing and dismembering the women, then starting or feeding the fires.”

“Those women didn’t run because they were terrified,” Pearl said. She looked angry, but calm.

Quinn, reading further, said, “And with their Achilles tendons sawed through, right above their heels, there was no way they could stand up, or even crawl, out of a bathtub. Then, when the fire reached a certain point, the killer quickly finished his butchery and moved on in search of more victims.”

“How did he find them?” Pearl asked. “Look in every bathtub?”

“Listening for screams or calls for help,” Harold said. “Bathtubs are where lots of people trapped by fire take refuge. They fill them with water, climb in, and hope for the best.”

“And have their pleas answered by a gremlin with knives and saws,” Pearl said. “Nightmare stuff.”

Helen studied the postmortem report. “A figure of authority heard their calls and appeared, probably a fireman in a slicker and helmet. That’s why they didn’t run. They thought a rescuer had arrived. One of the first things he did was saw through their Achilles tendons. Then they couldn’t stand up or climb out of the tub. He’d have had to waste a move disassembling them as they got weaker and weaker from loss of blood. He probably eviscerated them last and then unwound and stacked their intestines.”

“Think of it without the blood,” Harold said, “and he sure does neat work.”

“Neat enough to be a doctor or a med-school student doing extra homework,” Sal said.

“Like a project,” Harold said.

Nobody spoke for a moment, thinking that one over.

“Nift says no,” Quinn said. “Our killer doesn’t possess that level of efficiency.”

“And there’s no sign of him having used power tools,” Fedderman said.

“Our guy wouldn’t do that,” Helen said. “That would depersonalize it.”

“Power tools might be noisy, too,” Harold said, and made a buzzing sound with his mouth to demonstrate.

Sal gave him the look, cautioning Harold not to get on a roll.

“The killer in Florida might have used the surf to cover up the sounds,” Jerry Lido said with a sideways glance. He’d been working on his computer while the others talked.

“Drowned them out,” Harold said.

“And the murder in Florida had an element of cannibalism.”

“Dinner is surfed,” Harold said.

Sal came within an inch of telling him to shut up.

“Not the same as the murders we’re investigating,” Sal said with raspy moderation. “The killer six years ago wasn’t nearly as proficient with his instruments as our killer.”