Mister X. John Lutz

the maid?”

      Pearl dead-eyed the desk clerk, which seemed to scare him.

      “Don’t mind at all,” he said. “Yous see our rooms, you’ll maybe wanna stay here sometime. But yous won’t find nuttin’—not the way our maids clean up after a guest.”

      “Still,” Quinn said with a smile, “you never know.”

      “I guess not,” the desk clerk said. “Yous might find lint or a hair or somethin’.”

      “You’d be surprised,” Quinn said.

      “No, I wouldn’t. I watch all those forensic crime-scene shows on TV, read mysteries about how crimes are solved.” He appeared thoughtful. “There a crime been committed here?”

      “We’re trying to find out,” Quinn said.

      Buddy accompanied them in the elevator and led them to 512, where he opened the door and then hung around as if expecting a tip. Habit, Quinn supposed.

      “The bathroom’s in there,” Buddy said, motioning toward a closed door. “There’s your television. There’s a refrigerator right there stocked with—”

      Quinn gave him a look that shut him up. Buddy grinned, shrugged, and left the room.

      Quinn and Pearl looked around. The room was neatly arranged; it had to be, since most of the furniture was fastened to the walls. The maid had indeed been thorough. The scent of Lemon Pledge still hung in the air, and there wasn’t the slightest trace of dust.

      Pearl checked the tiny bathroom and found it smelling of bleach and gleaming and spotless. Even the grout between the blue tiles looked clean. She wished she had a bathroom like it. Hers was about the same size but was comparatively cruddy.

      Quinn was impressed. “The maid emptied the waste-baskets, and it looks like she polished their insides,” he said.

      “Waste of time,” Pearl said.

      Quinn wasn’t sure if she meant the wastebasket polishing or the room search.

      They went over the room thoroughly, but not with much enthusiasm, deftly staying out of each other’s way because they’d done this dozens of times in dozens of rooms.

      The desk clerk was right: the maid’s thoroughness had neutered the room when it came to anything like a clue. There was nothing that might be of help. Not lint, not a hair. Nothing.

      “Chrissie’s away clean,” Pearl said. “She did a number on us.”

      Quinn knew she was right. But what kind of number?

      And why?

      Two blocks away from where Quinn and Fedderman stood, a man was standing staring in the window of a luggage shop.

      A trip to someplace interesting, where I’ve never been before. That’s what I should do, take a trip. Pack a bag and get out of this city, at least for a while. Someplace in Europe. Or the Caribbean, if I can find an island that—

      Air brakes hissed, drawing his attention.

      He watched the young woman step down from the bus that had stopped near the corner. She was in her thirties, with dark eyes and luxurious shoulder-length dark hair that bounced with her generous breasts as she took the long, lurching step down to the pavement. Her dress was pale green, made of some kind of thin material that clung to her body in the light summer breeze.

      How gracefully she moved. So like a cat. Her high heels flashed as she extended her long legs with each stride, her calf muscles working like silk.

      Dancer’s legs, he thought. Maybe she was a dancer. Maybe she was—

      He realized he’d begun following the woman without even thinking about it. As if some part of him had already made the decision that their lives and her death should converge.

      No, goddamn it!

      He stopped walking, using all his willpower to avert his eyes from the woman.

      I don’t do that anymore.

      I don’t even have a hard-on.

      He turned around and started walking in the opposite direction the woman was going. He didn’t even glance back at her for one last look. One additional memory of her he could recall in detail at least for a while. He walked faster, lengthening his stride, pounding his heels down hard as if testing the resiliency of the sidewalk.

      I don’t do that anymore.

      I don’t have to do that anymore.

      But he found himself recalling the way her hair and her breasts had bounced as she’d stepped down out of the bus.

      He smiled. Even though that part of his life was over and he was somebody else now, it did no harm to remember. To think about how things were, or even how they might have been. Even how they might be. After all, he wasn’t the one who’d stirred up the past and started the thoughts playing like movie scenes in his mind. Scenes that he was in or was simply observing, looking at them usually from above, as if he’d been a spirit in the room.

      Thoughts…

      Thoughts never hurt anyone. How could they? They weren’t real. You couldn’t even touch them.

      And sometimes you couldn’t stop them.

      But he did stop thinking about leaving the city.

      8

      Even though she’d brushed her teeth, the aftertaste of last night’s scotch that she’d used to relax and make herself tired remained. Pearl didn’t mind. She knew she was having trouble sleeping because she was on the hunt with the pack she knew and in strange ways loved. Or was it the hunt that she loved? Either way, she liked it that her internal engine was running like a separate heart.

      The engine had awakened her early from her disturbed slumber, which was why she was the first one in the office this morning.

      Pearl sat down at her gray steel desk and booted up her computer. She’d done some research at home on her laptop, so she copied files from her flash drive to her desk computer. That completed, she replaced the flash drive in her purse and set to work running Internet searches for information pertaining to Chrissie Keller.

      When that failed she got up and went over and poured coffee from the brewer’s glass pot into her personalized ceramic mug, then added powdered cream and stirred until not much of it floated on top. Her second coffee of the morning. Cop pop.

      She glanced at her watch. Almost nine o’clock, and she was still alone in the office. What the hell?

      Then she remembered that, instead of meeting at the office this morning, Quinn and Fedderman were going to the East Side to interview some witnesses. Pearl might be alone a while longer.

      She sat down again at her computer and sipped her coffee while she idly typed “the carver, serial killer” into her browser and began another Internet search.

      Most of what came up she’d already seen, but there were a few unfamiliar sites. She sighed, sipped coffee, and visited the first one. It had to do with a butcher’s theft of Christmas turkeys from a halfway house for ex-convicts in 1997 in Miami.

      Off to a good start.

      The next link took her to a site that sold exotic wood carvings of birds. As she continued to link from one site to another, they became more and more remote from her subject. Still, she kept on. Sometimes doggedness turned the trick. Give Pearl the right haystack and she’d find the needle.

      The word “carver” alone eventually linked her to “Initials Carved in Trees,” which linked her to “Initials of the Famous,” which linked her to “Initial Reports,” categorized by city, which linked her to “Crimes against persons reports, Detroit PD,” which linked her to an amateur crime site called “Initial Attempts” that featured cases where inept beginner criminals had been interrupted during their attempted