New York, the present
Harley Renz had nicked himself with his razor this morning. Quinn was glad.
Plastered to Renz’s bulging pink jowls were two small tan adhesive squares that were supposed to be invisible and might have worked if Renz had been Hispanic. The nicks could have been what put him in a bad mood.
The office had a window that looked out on a potted tree. Its leaves were as still as an oil painting. Morning sun blasted golden glory through the tilted blinds and warmed Quinn’s bare forearm resting on the chair facing Renz’s desk.
Renz inhaled deeply before speaking, puffing out his jowls and looking for a moment like a bullfrog about to croak. “I’ve got enough to be pissed off about without you coming in here all worked up because Millie Graff’s rapist was questioned without you knowing about it.”
If Quinn was pissed off, he didn’t appear so. He seemed to choose those rare times when he displayed anger, so that in retrospect it was difficult to know if it had been real. That was one of the things about Quinn that infuriated Renz. This morning Quinn’s voice was flat and carefully modulated. The way it sounded, come to think of it, when he was pissed off.
“Exonerated alleged rapist,” Quinn corrected.
“Yeah, yeah. Who else might he have raped?”
Quinn shrugged. He didn’t want to get into that conversation with Renz. Harley wasn’t the only cop with the “everybody’s guilty of something” philosophy. Often it was used as a rationalization to bust someone’s skull.
“I feel as bad about Millie Graff’s shitty luck as you do,” Renz said.
Quinn knew that wasn’t true. “What about the other Skinner victims’ released alleged rapists?”
“I don’t feel bad about them.”
“You know what I mean.”
Renz drummed the fingertips of both hands briefly on his desk. He wanted this office visit to be over. “Weaver just finished interviewing them, too.”
Quinn sat forward. “ Nancy Weaver?”
“The same.” Renz blinked and swallowed. He obviously regretted mentioning Weaver’s name.
“Jesus, Harley! You think Weaver’s gonna keep these interviews away from the media? The way she sleeps around, she’s probably trading pillow talk with half the journalists in town.”
“Best you remember she’s Lieutenant Weaver now, an aide to the commissioner.”
“Harley-”
“She’s earned the position, Quinn. And not in the way you might think in your dirty mind.”
“ My dirty mind? You’re the one who’s gotten down and shamelessly rolled in shit in order to get ahead.”
“And don’t you forget it.”
“I grant you Weaver’s good at her job, and I don’t care about her sexual adventures. What I do care about is you sending her around to interfere in the investigation you gave me to run.”
Renz thought it might be a good time to pretend to be angry. “Listen, Quinn, I’m the goddamned police commissioner. If I want to monitor an investigation, I will.”
“As long as I know about it, Harley. If I’m gonna run an investigation, I want one hand to know what the other’s doing, and whether there’s a third hand.”
“That sounds reasonable, Quinn, but you gotta understand there are political ramifications here. I got everybody on my ass about this case. You might insist on doing everything your way, but this is happening on my watch, and if things go crappy and slippery, I take the fall.”
“I wouldn’t think political ramifications would matter, considering the nature of this killer.”
“Political ramifications always matter.”
“Would Millie and the others understand that?”
“You bet they would. To make a go of it in this city, you have to step on some toes, and you have to avoid the toes of the people you got no choice but to dance with.”
“No denying that,” Quinn said.
“I can tell you that Millie and those other women wouldn’t want me slapped down by some dimwitted, deal-making sleazeball with mayoral ambitions, just because of what happened to them.”
“You’re not a dimwit,” Quinn said.
Renz leaned forward, his elbows on the desk. “Listen, Quinn. Two of the released rapists-”
“Wrongly convicted men.”
“Okay. Two of them have solid alibis for the times of death of at least one of the Skinner victims, if not the victim they were wrongly convicted of raping. One of them is back in prison on a burglary rap. Another hanged himself last year in a barn in Iowa. Left a hearts-and-flowers note in his pocket. Claimed he couldn’t find work, couldn’t adjust to society after prison, and the woman he was seeing jilted him.”
“Poor bastard.”
“Friggin’ loser,” Renz said. “But that’s not what we’re talking about. If you read Weaver’s notes and listen to her interviews, it starts you to thinking that maybe this Socrates’s Cavern thing is nothing but a diversion. The killer wanting to off some victims safely before he nails his primary target.”
“We’re thinking that’s the game,” Quinn said. “He’s one of the convicted rapists who were freed on DNA evidence, and he wants his particular finger-pointer and the object of his revenge to be simply one of many Skinner victims.”
“So he’d be just another face in the crowd,” Renz said. “And one who’s already been wronged and would have a dumb-ass jury’s sympathy if he did happen to get marched into court.”
“Weaver tell you this?”
“Weaver tells me facts. I pass them on. You’re the lead detective. You draw the conclusions.”
“I think Weaver is right,” Quinn said. “It’s the same conclusion we reached. And the killer is intelligent. He knows that by now we’ve figured out the DNA prisoner-release connection between the victims. That won’t stop him. The Socrates’s Cavern thing was probably just a stalling tactic anyway. He’ll continue to kill until he’s accomplished what he set out to do. Each victim will have a singular likely killer. One of them will be the Skinner, but we might never be able to separate him from his fellow suspects. Not if he plays it smart.”
“I don’t like that kind of defeatist talk,” Renz said.
“You’re the one in love with facts, and the fact is, we’ve got a new starting point because we let ourselves be led down a dead-end path by the killer.”
“ You let yourself be led.”
“It’s on your watch, Harley.”
Renz pursed his lips and nodded several times, causing his jowls to quiver. One of the little adhesive patches rubbed on his white collar and dropped from his neck to reveal a nasty razor nick. Quinn hoped it stung.
Quinn sat silently, waiting for Renz’s reaction to this new direction in the investigation.
“Science,” Renz said at last. “Goddamned science has caused all this trouble.”
Quinn didn’t want to hear any more of Renz’s lies or rationalizations. He stood up and left.
Behind him he heard Renz say, “I got a new cell phone, and I don’t even know how the damned thing works!”
Join the club.