"Did you bring the thirty-five thousand for Wedding Bells dot com?" asked Arlene when Kurtz came in the door.
It was late morning. Brubaker and Myers had followed him from the Royal Delaware Arms and were out there now—Brubaker in the unmarked car at the end of the alley, watching the back door, Myers on the street in front, watching the entrance to the abandoned video store upstairs.
"Not yet," Kurtz said. "Did you have Greg bring Alan's old Harley down this morning?"
Arlene nodded and gestured with her right hand. Cigarette smoke spiraled. "I'm more interested in finding a new office anyway. Do you have time today?"
"We'll see." Kurtz looked at the stack of files and empty Express Mail packages on his desk.
"I got them about an hour ago," said Arlene. "The Hansen file from the Frears murder in Chicago, the Atlanta thing that had exactly the same M.O., and the ones from Houston, Jacksonville, Albany, and Columbus, Ohio. The other four haven't arrived yet."
"You read them?"
"Looked through."
"Find anything?"
"Yes," said Arlene. She batted ashes. "I bet we're the only ones ever to look at all these family murders together. Or any two of them together, for that matter."
Kurtz shrugged. "Sure. The local cops all saw it as a local nut-case family murder—and they had the killer's corpse in the burned house. Each case open and shut. Why compare it to other cases they don't even know about?"
Arlene smiled. Kurtz hung up his coat, shifted the holstered.40 S&W on his waistband, and settled in to read.
Five minutes later he had it.
"The dentist," he said. Arlene nodded.
In each of the murder-suicides, identification of the killer's burned body was made through tattoos, jewelry, an old scar in the Atlanta case—but primarily through dental records. In three of the cases—the Chicago Frears/Hansen case, the Atlanta Murchison/Cable murders, and the Albany Whittaker/Sessions killings—the killer's dentist was from Cleveland.
"Howard K. Conway," said Kurtz.
Arlene's eyes were bright. "Did you see the dentists' signatures in the other cases?"
It was Kurtz's turn to nod. Different names. But all from Cleveland. And the handwriting was the same. "Maybe our Dr. Conway is just the dentist to psychopaths around the country. Probably was Ted Bundy's dentist."
"Uh-huh." Arlene stubbed her cigarette out and came over to Kurtz's desk. "What about the other I.D. factors? The tattoo in the Hansen killings? The scar in the Whittaker case?"
"My guess is that Hansen finds his replacement for the fire first—some street person or male hooker or something—kills him, stores the body, and then decorates himself accordingly. If they have a tattoo, he sports a fake one. Whatever. It's just a few months."
"Jesus."
"I'll need his current—" began Kurtz.
She handed him a three-by-five card with Dr. Howard K. Conway's business address on it. "I called this morning and tried to make an appointment, but Dr. Conway is semiretired and isn't accepting new patients. A younger man answered the phone and shooed me away. I found listings for Dr. Conway going back to the early fifties, so the guy must be ancient."
Kurtz was looking at the photographs of the murdered girls. "Why would Hansen leave Conway alive all these years?"
"I guess it's easier than getting a new dentist all the time. Plus, the dental records are probably all older than whatever identity Hansen—whatever his name is—is using at the time. It'd be weird, something even local cops would notice, if their killer only had dental records a few months old."
"And it's not weird that someone living in Houston or Albany or Atlanta goes to a Cleveland dentist?"
Arlene shrugged. "The nut cases all moved from Cleveland in the past year or two. No reason for local homicide cops to red-flag that."
"No."
"What are you going to do, Joe?" There was an edge to Arlene's voice that he had rarely heard when he had been a P.I.
He looked at her.
"Come here often?" said Kurtz.
Angelina Farino Ferrara just sighed. They were working in the weight room today, and the Boys were outside on the treadmills.
Kurtz and Arlene had chosen the video-store basement for their office because it was cheap and because it had several exits: back door to the alley, stairway door to the now-defunct video store upstairs, and side door to the condemned parking garage next door. The drug dealers who had owned the place when it was a real bookstore had liked all those exits. So did Kurtz. It had come in handy when he'd left half an hour ago.
Arlene's late husband's Harley had been parked on the dark lower level, just beyond the metal door. Greg had left a helmet on the handlebars and the keys in the ignition. Kurtz had straddled the machine, fired it up, and weaved his way up ramps and out of the basement of the empty parking garage, snaking by the permanent barricade on Market Street that kept cars out. Detective Brubaker presumably still had been on watch on the alley side, and Detective Myers on the street side, but no one was watching the Market Street garage exit. Taking care on the snowy and icy streets, reminding himself that he'd not been on a bike for fifteen years or more, Kurtz had ridden to the health club.
Now he was doing repetitions on the chest-press machine with two hundred pounds. He had done twenty-three reps when Angelina said, "You're showing off."
"Absolutely."
"You can stop now."
"Thank you." He lowered the bar and left it lowered. Angelina was doing curls with fifteen-pound weights. Her biceps were feminine but well-defined. No one was within earshot. "When do you have lunch with Gonzaga this week?"
"Tomorrow, Tuesday. Then again on Thursday. Did you bring my property?"
"No. Tell me the drill when you and the Boys go for lunch." There was a heavy bag and a speed bag in the room, and he put on gloves and began working on the heavy bag.
Angelina set down the dumbbells and went to a bench to do some pull-ups. "The car takes us to Grand Island—"
"Your car or Gonzaga's?"
"His."
"How many people other than the driver?"
"One. The Asian stone-killer called Mickey Kee. But the driver's carrying as well."
"What can, you tell me about Kee?"
"He's from South Korea. He was trained in their Special Forces—sort of Green Berets by way of SMERSH. I think he got a lot of on-the-job experience assassinating North Korean infiltrators, people the regime didn't like, that sort of thing. He's probably the most efficient killer in New York State right now."
"When you go to lunch, they pick you up at the Marina Tower?"
"Yeah."
"Frisk you there?"
"No. They take the Boys' guns at the guardhouse. Then they drive us the rest of the way. There's a metal-detector at the entrance to the main house—it's subtle, but it's there—and then I get frisked again by a woman in a private room off the foyer before being allowed into Emilio's presence. I guess they're afraid I'll go at him with a hat pin or something."
"A hat pin," repeated Kurtz. "You're older than you look."
Angelina ignored him. "The Boys sit on a couch in the foyer while the Gonzaga goons watch them. The Boys get their guns back when we drive out."
"Okay," said Kurtz. He concentrated on hitting the big bag for a few minutes. When he looked up, Angelina handed him a towel and a water bottle.
"You looked like you meant it with the bag," she said.
Kurtz drank and wiped the sweat from his eyes. "I'm going with you to Gonzaga's place tomorrow."
Angelina Farino Ferrara's lips went pale. "Tomorrow? You're going to try to kill Emilio tomorrow? With me along? You're fucking crazy."
Kurtz shook his head. "I just want to go along as one of your bodyguards."
"Uh-uh." She was shaking her head hard enough to cause sweat to fly. "They only allow two guys to come with me. Marco and Leo, that's been the drill."
"I know. I'll take the place of one of them."
Angelina looked over her shoulder to where the Boys were sitting watching television. "Which one?"
"I don't know. We'll decide later."
"They'll be suspicious, new guard."
"That's why I want to go tomorrow. So they'll know me on Thursday."
"I—" She stopped. "Do you have a plan?"
"Maybe."
"Does it involve bulldozers and earthmovers?"
"Probably not."
She rubbed her lower lip with her fist. "We need to talk about this. You should come out to the penthouse this evening."
"Tomorrow morning," Kurtz said. "I'll be out of town this evening."
"Where the hell is he going?" asked Detective Myers. He and Brubaker had spent a cold and boring and useless afternoon watching Joe Kurtz's car and office, and when the son of a bitch finally emerged and started driving his scratched-up Volvo, the bastard had taken the 190 out to 90-South and seemed headed for the toll booths and the Thruway to Erie, Pennsylvania.
"How the fuck should I know where he's going?" said Brubaker. "But if he leaves the fucking state, he's in violation of his parole and we've got him." Five minutes later, Brubaker said, "Shit."
Kurtz had exited onto Highway 219, the last turnoff before the I-90 West Thruway toll booths. It was snowing and getting dark.
"What's out here?" whined Myers as they followed Kurtz toward the town of Orchard Park. "The Farino Family used to have their headquarters out here, but they moved it to town after that nun sister showed up, didn't they?"
Brubaker shrugged, although, he knew exactly where the new Farino Family digs were at Marina Towers since he took his weekly payoff from Little Skag via Skag's lawyer, Albert Bell, near there every Tuesday. Brubaker knew that Myers suspected him of being on the Farino payroll but wasn't sure. If Myers was certain, he'd want in himself, and Brubaker didn't like sharing.
"Why don't we just roust Kurtz tonight?" said Myers. "I got the throwdown if he's not armed."
Brubaker shook his head. Kurtz had turned right near Chestnut Ridge Park, and it was hard to follow the Volvo in the gloom and snow along these two-lane roads amidst all the construction cones and commuter traffic. "We're out of our jurisdiction here," he said. "His lawyer could call it harassment if we get him out here."
"Fuck that. We got probable cause."
Brubaker shook his head again.
"Then let's just forget this shit," Myers said. "It's a fucking waste of time."
"Tell that to Jimmy Hathaway," Brubaker said, invoking the name of the cop killed under mysterious circumstances four months earlier. The only link to Kurtz, Brubaker knew, was Little Skag Farino's comment to him that Hathaway—who had been the Farinos' bitch for years—had tapped a phone call and followed Kurtz somewhere on the night of the detective's murder. Hathaway had been eager to earn a bounty on Joe Kurtz's head at the time.
"Fuck Jimmy Hathaway," said Myers. "I never liked the asshole."
Brubaker shot a glance at his partner. "Look, if Kurtz leaves the state, we've got him on parole violation."
Myers pointed two cars ahead of him. "Leave the state? The fucker's not even leaving the county. Look—he just turned back toward Hamburg."
Brubaker lit a cigarette. It was hard to follow Kurtz now that it was really dark.
"You want him," said Myers, "let's roust him tomorrow in the city. Use the throwdown. Beat the shit out of him and turn him over to County."
"Yeah," said Brubaker. "Yeah." He turned back to Highway 219 and the Thruway to Buffalo.