Slaughter - Lutz John - Страница 42

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“You don’t really want to. Besides, I have a contract.”

“Then fulfill it.”

“Okay.” Quinn adjusted his tie knot and shrugged into his suit coat. Best to look like a detective, if that was your game. “Let’s go,” he said.

“Where?”

“To look at some collapsed buildings.”

“They’re still digging out the dead and wounded over there,” Renz said.

“Maybe somebody will dig out a clue.”

“Already we’ve got twenty-seven dead and sixty injured. What a hellish mess.”

“Like a war zone,” Quinn said.

“I’m thinking more of the political side.”

Quinn held his silence. Renz apparently didn’t know that when you had dead and wounded, there was only one side.

As soon as they stepped outside, the heat hit them. They took Quinn’s old Lincoln, with the air conditioner on high, and Quinn drove toward the disaster area.

For a while it seemed they were in normal New York traffic. Then, three blocks away, they began to see police barricades and detours and No Parking signs. They parked the car and went ahead on foot.

The two uniforms handling traffic and trespass problems recognized both the commissioner and Quinn, letting Quinn duck under one of the NYPD sawhorses and holding the yellow crime scene tape up so the corpulent Renz could get under it.

When they reached the corner they looked at the blocks of damage. The desolation caused by the original bombs was more than bad enough, but the gas explosions spread fire and more gas explosions, and damage that encompassed what seemed like the entire neighborhood.

Three bulldozers were roaring and snorting, working among the debris with cautious, elephantine delicacy, and Quinn could hear another close by. Workers with picks and shovels were making their way toward rescue or removal of dead bodies. That only twenty-seven had died was, in Quinn’s mind, a surprisingly small number, considering the field of destruction they found themselves in. Certainly that number would grow.

“I know it’s early on,” he said to Renz, “but has anybody come forward as a witness?”

“Only to be on TV or in the papers. Your people learn anything that might be helpful?”

“Might. Yeah. But it’s a meager might.”

Renz said, “Maybe security cameras caught something.”

“If they didn’t cook in this weather,” Quinn said. “I’ve got Sal and Harold looking into that.”

“So you haven’t just been sitting on your ass.”

“Nope. Did I mention, I’ve got a contract?”

“Now I’d like for you to have a clue.”

After a depressing twenty minutes, during which everyone other than Renz moved wreckage to reveal more wreckage, one of the uniforms came over and told Quinn and Renz that the Gremlin had phoned in to the Minnie Miner show and claimed credit for the destruction of the buildings, as well as for the deaths. The call was, of course, brief and impossible to trace, but the voice tracks appeared to be the same. The Gremlin’s, in both instances.

Quinn said, “Seems like a clue, Harley.”

Renz, flushed and puffed up from the heat and pervasive smell, called for his limo to pick him up.

Now that he’d delivered his message, Renz had little use for Quinn. He didn’t so much as glance in Quinn’s direction as the gleaming black town car with NYPD plates glided away.

Only to reappear on the opposite side of the bomb blast area and fire damage. Maybe Renz had thought of something helpful. A clue.

Quinn watched Renz from half a block’s distance. Renz was out of his car and talking to a woman with a microphone. Another woman was frantically leaping around the limo with a small camera, finding good angles for shots of Renz.

Renz was helping her as much as possible. He removed his suit coat and rolled up his white shirtsleeves. He found a high spot in the debris so the photos would have a flattering upward angle. For some shots, he propped his fists on his hips and raised his chin. A portly Mussolini.

Quinn watched and waited for a while, but he never saw Renz actually touch anything.

That was Renz’s talent.

48

That evening, in his office, Renz was less circumspect in talking to Quinn. He knew there were no hidden video cameras or recorders here. And like a beast in his lair, he was most comfortable in familiar surroundings.

The conversation was so amiable that Renz gave Quinn one of his best cigars and fired up an identical one for himself. He confided to Quinn that the cigars were illegal and from some South or Central American country that Quinn had heard of only in a Woody Allen movie. Now they were partners in crime.

Quinn sat in a comfortable leather armchair, holding the cigar and a glass ashtray. The armchair faced Renz’s desk, behind which sat Renz. If the desk had been any bigger, Quinn thought, he might need to shout to be heard.

“Now that we’re off the record we can talk,” Renz said.

Quinn didn’t remember anything about being on or off the record, but he let it slide.

Renz tilted back his head as if about to administer eye drops. He made a perfect O with his lips and blew an imperfect smoke ring.

“Are we really getting any traction in finding this Gremlin bastard?” he asked. “Something or somebody we can toss to the media wolves?”

Quinn blew a perfect smoke ring. “Tell them we’re making progress.”

“They won’t believe me.”

“They won’t believe you no matter what you say, so why waste the truth on them?”

Renz chewed on his cigar but didn’t take smoke into his mouth. “This Gremlin guy would be easier for us to get a line on if he was a professional. But real experts in those fields always peg him as a talented amateur. New to his work, maybe, but he knew or learned enough about killing that he manages to make the hit and then get away unseen.” Renz produced a white handkerchief as big as a surrender flag and wiped his forehead and neck with it. Watching him made Quinn realize the office had gotten much warmer. It might have been the cigars, or the futility.

“For instance, he knew how to neutralize all those elevator safety brakes in the Blenheim Building,” Renz went on. “All those floors.” He tapped ashes from his cigar into an ashtray on his desk and made a face suggesting he was nauseated. “God! All that bone sticking through flesh. And the fires! The arson guy said it took some knowledge and some jerry-rigging to bring off what this guy has done. Imagine the planning, learning what those buildings are made of, when and how they were constructed—their materials and vulnerabilities. He must have made studies before he made plans.”

“You would think so,” Quinn said.

“He knew where the flammable wooden support beams and joists were,” Renz said. “How the fire would dance its way through the place. Which walls were load-bearing. Everything that’d cause the fire to feed on itself and turn buildings into ovens.”

“Fire seems to fascinate people who like gadgets.”

“Does it follow that people who like gadgets like to kill?”

Quinn thought about that. “People who like gadgets want to know about how the insides of things work. They can only gain that deeper understanding through careful observation and examination. Which is why our gremlin has a compulsion to disassemble things so he can study them. Even women.”

“So he thinks that by abduction and torture he can learn about women?” Renz looked skeptical.

“Only some things,” Quinn said. “Other things he’ll learn in other ways. We have to learn those things, too, if we’re going to find him.”

“It sounds reasonable when you say it,” Renz told Quinn. He snubbed out his cigar.

Quinn took that as a signal from Renz that their tete-a-tete was finished.

Quinn didn’t think so. Still seated, he said, “There is something you might toss to the circling news vultures, Harley. Tell them we’re studying closed-circuit security camera stills and videos of people at the Taggart Building fire. The people in the street, observing the flames. Images from before, during, and after the explosions and fire. We think we might be able to do a facial match with the killer and the artist’s rendering. Mix in a picture of Kray as a youth, and we may come up with some positive identification.”

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