Mister X. John Lutz
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Название: Mister X
Автор: John Lutz
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Ужасы и Мистика
Серия: A Frank Quinn Novel
isbn: 9780786025954
isbn:
Would it all begin again then?
No! He was finished with those times, those deeds. Thoughts. That was all he had now, and all he wanted. He didn’t need Mary Bakehouse’s death to fuel old embers. He could think about her any time he wanted, any way he wanted.
Mary was why he followed the news. Mere curiosity.
But he knew better. He tracked the news because old memories had stirred, and what lay dormant in him all those years, since what he’d considered to be his last murder, had slowly awakened and was pacing in his breast, sharing his heartbeats. A demon roused from its dreams.
He found that frightening.
He found it exhilarating.
Pearl surfaced from her subway stop that evening and trudged through the humid dusk toward her apartment. The softened light gave the city a dreamlike quality, as if she were viewing it through a fine screen. What did they call it in theater? A scrim. This momentary surreal view of New York was beautiful, in its way. It painted a place where any dream might come true, as well as any nightmare.
The meeting with Vitali and Mishkin had left Pearl feeling vaguely dissatisfied, though she didn’t know why. The two NYPD detectives had listened carefully while Quinn filled them in on the investigation and then gave them copies of whatever paperwork there was, including the clipping files given to them by Chrissie Keller—if the woman had been Chrissie Keller. Vitali and Mishkin had turned copies of the murder books over to Quinn and Associates. Everyone had been polite and professional, and nothing had really changed except that there were two more warm bodies on the case, representing Harley Renz’s political ass-covering. Nobody knew any more after the meeting than before.
“At least,” Harold Mishkin had said from under his brushy, graying mustache, “we’re all getting paid. I mean, with the economy and all.”
“That’s something,” Quinn had said, exchanging glances with Sal Vitali, who was grinning.
“Harold always takes the practical view,” Vitali said.
Pearl couldn’t keep her mouth shut. “It isn’t practical to have a client we can’t find, while we’re investigating murders that happened over five years ago, committed by a killer who, for all we know, is dead or living in another city.”
“What?” Vitali growled in his gravel-pan voice. “You wanna quit?”
Pearl sighed. “Can’t.”
“The economy,” Mishkin said.
“Not the economy,” Pearl said.
Vitali winked at her and shrugged. “We soldier on.”
“Only practical thing to do,” Quinn said, standing up.
And the meeting was over.
He watched his detectives trail from the office. They looked eager but tired. They knew that most of the case, the hardest part, still lay ahead of them. Phase two of the investigation had begun. It was one of those forks in the road nobody would consider significant until they looked back at it while driving over a cliff.
PART II
From their folded mates they wander far,
Their ways seem harsh and wild:
They follow the beck of a baleful star,
Their paths are dream beguiled.
—RICHARD FRANCIS BURTON, “Black Sheep”
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