Mister X (22 page)

Lilly Branston stood in her Park Avenue apartment that she’d soon be unable to afford and assessed her possibilities.

The apartment was luxurious, near MoMA, in a much-desired area. Lilly had done well selling high-end real estate for the Willman Group until the markets soured. Both the stock market and the real estate market.

New York City real estate prices and demand had held up longer than anyone had a right to expect in a declining market. Then had come the big slide down in the stock market, followed by the financial turmoil and the bailouts.

It got worse as Wall Street came apart and the layoffs started at the brokerage and financial houses. As far as the real estate market went, Wall Street had caught up with Main Street, and Lilly was out of a job.

She soon learned that it wasn’t going to be easy getting reconnected. Real estate prices had come back slightly, but most of the agents still active, and the agencies still surviving, were suffering declines in business. People simply weren’t moving, or buying, in a drastically down market.

Lilly was still in her thirties and attractive, slimly built with dark brown hair and eyes. Her oval face with its perfect bowed lips and narrow nose looked as if it belonged in a medieval painting. She had, in fact, worked as an artist’s model to make extra money during college. While doing so she’d met her husband, the one she’d helped put through law school, and who had then used his skills to gain maximum advantage during their divorce. He was now practicing corporate law in California, married to the woman who’d tutored him in tort law so he could pass the bar. From the divorce on, Lilly had thought of it as “tart” law.

No children from that mess, fortunately.

Lilly had learned her lesson, and out of necessity found that she had a gift for selling real estate. She’d started with residential property in New Jersey, and soon went on to the more lucrative area of luxury condos and co-ops in New York City. She’d helped to make the Willman Group one of the most successful agencies in the city. But her sales and listings had shrunk. Now they’d repaid her by putting her on reduced commission—which in the Willman Group was tantamount to being fired.

Lilly wasn’t surprised. She’d learned long ago how the world worked. Sometimes you ate the little fish. Sometimes you
were
the little fish.

After a month of unemployment, Lilly realized she was lonely. Misery really did yearn for company

What she wanted was a man. Someone she could talk to, lean on, rely on. Someone who’d screw her senseless in this senseless world.

Lilly didn’t like thinking that way, but circumstances were harsh and she couldn’t help it. She weighed her chances. Even though she had time on her hands, she didn’t want to spend it in singles bars or popular pickup spots like bookstores or produce departments in grocery stores. She was almost forty and tired of that kind of mindless dance.

Then chance played a hand. When she was reading a glossy
Executive World
magazine in her dentist’s waiting room, she noticed something that immediately made sense to her. It was a small ad for a company called CC.com. Reading on, Lilly learned that “CC” stood for
Coffee and Conversation
, an online matchmaking service. It advertised in select places so that narrowly targeted people could use a special password and meet similar people. Thus philatelists could meet philatelists, ballroom dancers meet ballroom dancers, real estate professionals meet real estate professionals. Lilly saw C and C as an opportunity not simply to meet a man with whom she had something in common, but perhaps the chance to network her way back to a new sales job with actual potential.

The best thing about C and C, according to the ad, was that it guaranteed complete privacy. Its clients contacted each other directly rather than through C and C. That way there was no record, nothing that might embarrass you or jump up and bite you during some future job interview.

The next afternoon, after a job interview she knew was hopeless, Lilly visited the C and C website, registered, and paid a reasonable fee. She screened the profiles of various male hopefuls. She settled on Gerald Lone, a handsome man (or so he’d referred to himself without going into detail) who’d sold commercial real estate for a large agency in the Midwest. For the last three years he’d had his own small agency in the city. According to him, the real estate market in New York still had pockets of profitability, if one knew how to find them. And knew how to sell.

Lilly smiled when she read that. Contacting Gerald Lone might in itself be a moneymaking proposition.

Thinking of it that way made his personal profile seem like one of those thinly veiled advertisements for escort service employees. That was okay with Lilly. The prospect of employment, along with the prospect of sex, made meeting this guy seem all the more desirable. Possible ulterior motives didn’t scare her away. If he was trolling for a good salesperson as well as a good time, that might work with Lilly.

Lilly walked over to the full-length mirror in her apartment’s tile foyer and tried to observe herself as someone might on their first meeting. She was wearing black three-inch heels that gave her ankles a graceful turn and made her five-foot-six frame seem tall. Her dress was simple and black but obviously expensive. She’d bought it at Saks last year after closing on an uptown condo unit. Her jewelry was silver and modest, a small diamond and opal ring and hoop earrings. No necklace. The skillfully tailored cut of the dress did its own wonders with her neck, making it look even longer and more elegant than it was.

Beautiful swan.

That’s what someone would think on first meeting her.

She hoped.

Gerald Lone sat in a booth in the coffee shop of the Worthingham Hotel near Times Square. The Worthingham was old but still fashionable, and its room rates were competitive with those of the older bargain hotels that were still hanging on in the area. Its restaurant, which looked out on throngs of tourists and Times Square characters streaming past, was small and intimate, with wooden booths that had tall backs that ensured privacy.

In front of Gerald was a cup of hot chicory coffee, which from time to time he sipped from as he kept an eye on the restaurant’s street door as well as the entrance from the hotel lobby. He had only Lilly’s description from her CC.com profile. Like many of the women, and more than a few men, who were C and C clients, Lilly had declined to post a photo of herself online.

Gerald understood. Dating services still carried a slight stigma with some people. And with most clients, as with Gerald, the whole idea was anonymity. With the direct e-mail contact, there would be no C and C record of who’d met whom, nothing to connect one client with another unless someone connected one individual computer with another.

Not likely, since the computer Gerald had used to contact Lilly was in an Internet café and ensured privacy.

It was a good system, he’d decided. One without exposure to personal risk. Like could find, contact, and meet Like.

Or someone pretending to be Like.

Gerald Lone settled back in his chair, sipped, and waited.

And just when he was about to give up and conclude that she wouldn’t show, there she was.

It had to be her. The description, including the black dress, was precise.

She was older than he’d expected. Surely closing in on forty. But not at all a disappointment. Confident. Smart. Put together. Long, graceful neck like a swan’s. The kind of neck he’d like to—

She spotted him immediately and came toward him, smiling as she drew near. He liked her smile. It was that of a woman up for adventure.

Smiling back, he slid out of the booth and stood up. He was the taller of the two, even though she was wearing high heels.

When they shook hands and looked into each other’s eyes, he was sure she would be his next. Everything would work out fine.

She was the one.

“We saw her again,” Fedderman said, when everyone had reported back to the office. This was the time for the evening summing-up and for setting the strategy for the next day.

Dusk was beginning to envelop the city, and no one had bothered to switch on the overhead fluorescent fixtures as one by one the desk lamps were turned on. The light in the office was less official and revealing in the muted illumination. It had a shadowed yellow cast that created soft side lighting. Maybe it was because of the concealing and flattering lighting that the mood was more relaxed.

“
Her
being our shadow woman?” Quinn asked.

“Right. Pearl and I both saw her just after you left to drive back here. She was standing across the street again, near where she was last time. Had her arms crossed, the way she does. Just then one of those two-piece buses like short trains went past, and when we could see across the street again, she was gone. But she’d been there, watching.”

Watching what?
Quinn wondered. The three of them, Quinn, Pearl, and Fedderman, had simply stayed in Joyce House’s apartment building most of the time, when they weren’t visiting witnesses in surrounding buildings to clear up inconsistent statements regarding the time leading up to and including House’s murder. Nothing useful had been learned, other than additional confirmation that any two people could see or hear the same things quite differently.

“So did you go after her?” Mishkin asked Fedderman.

“Pearl did, but it wasn’t much use. She’d had plenty of time to lose herself in all the traffic and people headed home from work.”

“It looked like she was wearing the same gray outfit,” Pearl said. “Gray sweats, and a blue baseball cap worn low over her eyes.”

“Yankees cap?” Vitali asked.

“Could have been Mets,” Pearl said. “They’re both blue.” She felt like adding that if they knew which team the woman rooted for, they could search the ballpark next time there was a home game. But she knew Vitali wasn’t an easy target for sarcasm like Fedderman. The gravelly voiced little bastard would catch on to what Pearl was doing and maybe take offense. Vitali was laid-back, but he could also bite back.

Addie, who’d worked a computer and answered the phones in the office all day, said, “There are lots of blue ball caps floating around that aren’t connected to sports teams. Maybe it was even one of those generic caps you buy at sidewalk sales. The kind that come straight from where they’re made and haven’t been stenciled or embroidered with anything yet. A lot of them are from China.”

Pearl thought,
We’re really zeroing in on this cap. Stick to profiling, toots.

Quinn was looking at Pearl, maybe in a cautioning way. Or maybe he was still pissed because of her engagement to Yancy. Pearl hadn’t meant to hurt his fragile male ego, and when was the last time
he’d
proposed marriage to her?

“What about the missing Chrissies?” Quinn asked Sal and Harold.

“I’m afraid they’re still missing,” Harold said. “The phony Chrissie’s hotel room was long ago cleaned and has had two guests stay there since her disappearance. Any DNA evidence we gathered wouldn’t tell us much, even if there happened to be any after the maids did their spit-and-polish work.”

“Our assumed actual Chrissie was never even in New York, for all we know,” Sal said. “We checked with her hometown police and sheriff’s department. There’s nothing on her, no sheet, no friends or neighbors who say anything negative or revealing about her—or about her mother, for that matter.”

“What about the father?” Pearl asked.

“Long gone after the divorce. You know how it works. Tiffany’s death tore up the family. There was no way it could survive intact. The father was a sales rep for an auto parts company and moved to Detroit.”

Detroit
, Pearl thought. Where Geraldine Knott was attacked years ago by a man who was probably the Carver. Where Addie Price was also attacked, possibly by the same man, then fought for her accreditation, worked as a profiler, and went on to a career as a local media talking head. A bit of a coincidence.

Pearl filed the information away in the back of her mind.

Quinn stood up behind his desk and stretched, clenching and unclenching his powerful hands as if to make sure they still worked. “We’ll do legwork again tomorrow,” he said, “and see what, if anything, comes of it. Pearl and Feds can go back to House’s neighborhood and haunt it, see if our shadow woman turns up again. Maybe even find out who she is and what she wants.”

“It’ll probably be in tomorrow’s
City Beat
that she was spotted across the street from where Joyce House was murdered, and then disappeared again,” Pearl said. She shot a look Addie’s way, letting Addie know she was under suspicion, at least as far as Pearl was concerned. Addie had learned Pearl’s game and ignored her.

“Maybe I’ll call Cindy Sellers and tell her about the latest shadow woman sighting,” Quinn said. “It might shake something loose out there. Could be that somebody else in the neighborhood saw our mystery woman and knows who she is.”

“Could be,” Pearl agreed.

And the killer is going to shoot himself outside 1 Police Plaza and leave a confession.

“So we sleep on it,” Quinn said.

Everyone was ready for that. Chairs groaned. Notebooks snapped shut. Desk lamps began winking out, and someone switched on the fluorescents for the last one out the door to switch off.

Quinn stayed behind so he’d be the last to leave. Pearl was next to last. He watched her go out the door without looking back, not bothering to say good night.

She was no doubt irked by his reference to Cindy Sellers. Quinn couldn’t understand why. They all knew what kind of journalist Sellers was, and that she had informants in the NYPD. Informants everywhere, in fact.

Quinn watched Pearl walk past outside the window that looked out on West Seventy-ninth Street. In the illumination from headlights and the nearby streetlight, her expression was serious and her dark eyes were trained straight ahead. The breeze blew a lock of raven-black hair across her forehead, and she instantly brushed it aside. Then she was out of sight.

He sat feeling the loss of her presence like a dull ache.

They were in business together, so Pearl would be in his life as long as that lasted. In his life during their working hours, anyway.

For now, he’d settle for that because he had no choice.

But when Pearl became Mrs. Yancy Taggart, would she continue with the agency? Would she feel the same drive she and Quinn felt now?

Or would she no longer need the hunt? Would she no longer share the feeling that at least some of what was wrong with this screwed-up, dangerous, and unfair world had to be set right, and that for some reason accomplishing that was their responsibility?

Would Mrs. Yancy Taggart think that way?

Quinn knew it was possible, even likely, that someday soon Pearl would walk out of his life for good.

On a practical level he should be able to live with that, but he had no idea how.