Slaughter (29 page)

 

I
t was mid-afternoon when Marta Jones, a maid at the Adam Park hotel in St. Louis, opened the door to room 333 and saw a white feather drift out. She knew immediately that it was from a pillow, and it might signify that the room was a mess. It always surprised Marta how destructive some of the guests were, especially if there was liquor involved. The Adam Park wasn't cheap, and Marta thought it was people with more money than they needed who caused most of the trouble and made most of the mess.

She hoped this wouldn't be too bad as she rolled her linen cart back a few inches so she could make the turn, then pushed it past the opened door and backed into the room.

My God! The place looked as if there'd been a snowstorm inside. More goose down. So much white and red.

Red?

The snow was spotted with red here and there, and smeared with red. As if it were real snow and someone had taken swipes at it with a paint rag.

Then Marta saw a young blond woman lying on the floor, with blood on her shoulder and chest and one side of her face. There was something awkward and not quite right about the way she was lying in the goose down. She was on her back, legs and arms akimbo. Almost as if trying to make a snow angel. Marta was momentarily paralyzed. Arms and legs didn't bend quite that way. She moved two steps closer.

Stopped and stood still again. Peered without moving forward. She didn't want to get closer to the blond woman, yet she wanted to see her better. She leaned forward and focused.

And saw that there was some space between the bloody neck and the head. She realized with a lurch of her stomach that the woman had been beheaded. And her limbs had been detached and lain or propped so they were close to where they'd be if only they weren't severed. One arm was slightly longer than the other. It was a man's arm, with an expensive-looking gold expansion-band wristwatch. Marta looked closer and saw that the watch was a Timex.

And there was the rest of the dead man, lying near the sofa, his limbs severed and carefully propped or laid near where they'd been removed. Marta didn't know him but thought she recognized him. He'd made a pest of himself with some of the hotel guests.

Marta had been numb, but now she was slightly dizzy. And more than slightly nauseated. Fearing she might vomit, she hurried into the bathroom.

From the bathtub a pair of infinitely sad blue eyes stared up at her. Dead eyes. The nude dead woman in the white porcelain tub was almost as white as the tub itself. Water had been run on her until most of her blood and other body fluids had been washed down the drain.

Her body was taut and shapely and looked young, but her face looked prematurely old.

In a way, it had been old.

 

 

Marta bumped her hip painfully on her linen cart as she ran from room 333, down from the steps leading from the catwalk, then the shallow wooden steps leading toward the levee.

She screamed as she ran, waved her arms, pointed back toward the hotel. One of her shoes flew off and she felt cool mud squish between her toes. At first people thought she might simply be enjoying herself, joking, a vacationing refugee from some boring job, suddenly set free and screaming with relief.

But it didn't sound like relief.

“
Mortandad! Policia!
”

Someone said, “I think she wants the police.”

The federal park ranger for that stretch of waterfront had been observing this from the beginning. His name was John Randall, but most of the river people who knew him called him Rocket.

Rocket saw now that the woman had a maid's uniform on, and she was definitely headed for the river. She was limping now, dragging one leg. Soon she'd be close enough to the brown rushing water that he wouldn't be able to catch up and save her, if she was one of those who needed saving. A swimmer didn't have to get very far out in the river before the deceptively powerful current would take charge. Some people who went in here had been found dead as far south as New Orleans.

The decision was made for Rocket when he suddenly recognized the woman. Marta! One of the maids at the Adam Park.

Marta seemed unhinged, and definitely was headed for the river. He didn't know if that was on purpose or if she simply didn't realize how soon she'd be getting wet. The way she was waving her arms and yelling, it was obvious that she wasn't going to slow down.

He began to run. He was a big man, a year out of Florida State, where he'd gone on a football scholarship as a wide receiver. It was no mystery why he was called Rocket.

He almost caught up with Marta, calling her name, reaching out for her and barely missing.

She seemed to run harder.

He tackled her, but as gently as possible, and they both were down on the edge of the water. What felt like gravel was only a few inches beneath them. Rocket thought it might have cut up his right knee.

The water lapped coldly at Marta, and she stopped struggling and began to tremble. Rocket held her close, saying over and over that she should take it easy, take it easy.

Marta calmed down somewhat and stared up at him. It gave him a jolt, how horrified she looked.

“
Policia!
” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, smiling at her to keep her calm. “Show me. If we need to, we'll call the locals.” He held his grin. “What happened, Marta? you see a mouse?”

“
Policia!
. . .”

 

S
t . Louis, Quinn decided, was a hotter place to live than New York. Most of the people in and around the Adam Park hotel had on casual clothes, jeans, shorts, pullover shirts, moccasins, sandals, or jogging shoes. Cross the street, stroll down to the river bank, and you were near the Mississippi. The wide, lazy river that held its secrets.

Even before it soared over the riverfront, the famously beautiful and utterly useless Arch had its fans. People who might as well have had
TOURIST
stamped all over them were lined up to enter the nearest leg. New York Police Commissioner Harley Renz, in his gray Joseph Abboud suit, white shirt, and polished black wingtip shoes, didn't seem to belong anywhere near this bunch.

But here he was, after a hurried flight from LaGuardia, following a lead on a New York killer. Might he gain national fame? He smiled. This was why he kept a suitcase packed.

Renz made his way toward the hotel entrance and air-conditioning. Quinn followed. “Some mess,” Renz said, mopping his face with a white handkerchief.

Quinn didn't bother voicing his agreement. Though the identification of all the Adam Park victims was missing, doubtless removed by the killer, it was assumed that all three of them had been killed by the Gremlin. No one else was murdering people and then turning them into puppet pieces without strings. Not at the moment, anyway.

Quinn peered into the bathroom, where a female victim was sprawled in the tub. He stepped closer and saw that she'd been eviscerated, her internal organs stacked neatly beside her. Most of the blood had been washed from the tub and the pale dismembered corpse.

“There isn't any question about these victims being the work of the Gremlin,” Quinn said. “I wonder if he knew we baited our trap at Faith Recovery Center, and that would occupy us while he committed his murders and mutilations here, in another city.”

“Maybe,” Renz said. “This doesn't seem at all unplanned.”

Quinn looked around at the carnage and wondered what was wrong with the human race. With the Gremlin. He doubted if the killer himself could tell the real reasons for his murder spree.

“Sick, clever bastard,” he said under his breath.

Renz stared at him. “You really think he's that smart? That he can move us around like chess pieces and commit murders without eventually being caught?”

Quinn said, “Exactly like chess pieces.”

“Well, we're chess pieces that fight back,” Renz said. “Soon as we get some blood and fingerprints here, we're gonna run them through the national databases.”

“I think we better concentrate on what's happening with Pearl and Weaver,” Quinn said. He couldn't help it. He still wasn't comfortable with all the electronics taking over police work.

“I made sure there was plenty of protection at Faith Recovery,” Renz said.

Quinn thought, Plenty of chess pieces, mostly pawns.

The techs arrived with their white gloves and medical equipment. Five minutes later the ME, a Dr. Nicholson, who looked amazingly like Nift, showed up, with his black leather case and cheerful, crude tactics.

He got to work immediately.

Renz appeared in the bedroom doorway. “Something odd about the toilet bowl,” he said.

Quinn went over to the hall bathroom. Behind him, Nicholson continued tending to his work, seemingly uninterested in the bathroom and untouched by the gore. Seemingly. Quinn stopped his thoughts from going where rumor might rule.

He stood in the bathroom, staring at the conventional-looking white toilet bowl. Quinn hadn't heard it flush, and was glad Renz had thought to lower the seat.

When Quinn moved to flush the toilet, he couldn't find the handle. He examined the toilet more closely and encountered only its smooth white surface. No handle. He held his breath and carefully lifted the seat of the modern, streamlined commode.

It had flushed on its own. Must have been automatically and silently.

“Very impressive,” Renz said.

Quinn waved a hand close to the top of the commode's tank. Two recessed rows of LED lights illuminated the smooth tank top. His fingers almost touched the tank, and silently the water in it swirled and disappeared.

“Very, very impressive,” Renz said. “Can you do that with folding chairs?”

Quinn cocked his head to one side. A faint sound. He lifted the commode lid and a tiny whirlpool swirled steadily at the bottom of the bowl.

“It doesn't work right,” Renz said. “Doesn't turn itself off.”

Quinn smiled thinly, getting a mental image of two hardcase cops standing and discussing a futuristic porcelain commode in a hotel bathroom. Maybe they should be working for the Department of Sanitation. Maybe they should be plumbers. “We better not touch this thing,” Quinn said. “My guess is that our Gremlin became intrigued by it. He had to take it apart and see how it worked, and how it didn't.” Quinn let his eyes range over the gleaming fixtures and blue ceramic tile. “He cleaned the place pretty thoroughly, wiped it down. But things didn't go exactly as planned. That threw him. He couldn't be sure about where he might have left his own fingerprints.”

Looking out the door into the bedroom, Renz pointed. “What the hell is that?” He was pointing to a metal object barely visible where the bed's comforter met the carpet.

Quinn went over and stooped down, feeling it in his legs. He used his ballpoint pen to ease out the object under the bed.

“Well?” Renz said, as they looked down at a strange metal contraption that faintly resembled an alligator with its mouth open wide.

“It's a wine-cork puller,” Quinn said. “Taken apart. Looks like whoever did it had to use a screwdriver, then couldn't get it back together.”

“Gee,” Renz said. “Who do we know who'd do that?”

“Let's hope somebody who left a fingerprint,” Quinn said. “And is rich, but not so sophisticated that he knows about self-flushing toilets.”

Renz wrestled his cell phone from his pocket and used it to check the time. 11:45. The murders here were hours old. How many people had come and gone in the room since then? “The way this place has been wiped down, even if somebody's prints are on file from these murders, they probably won't match.”

Quinn shook his head. “I say that the Gremlin either knows or is afraid there might be matching prints here, or he wouldn't have taken the chance and gone crazy trying to make sure he's wiped everything clean. And that commode . . .”

“What about it?” Renz asked.

“You tell me. You've had time to check on it.”

“You're right. I used my iPhone.”

“And?”

“The commode isn't broken—or if it is, the Gremlin broke it. It must have intrigued him because it doesn't have a flush handle and it's self cleaning.”

Quinn was relieved. He was afraid Renz was going to tell him about how someone might have drowned via the toilet bowl, an ignoble death no one should be forced to endure.

Almost no one.

“I'm informed that the so called auto-flush feature is in a lot of swank hotels,” Renz continued, “but none that our killer would have stayed in if he knew he wasn't going to pay the bill. This one tickled his fancy and he couldn't help taking it apart, or at least examining it to see how it worked. Gadgets are like porn for this guy. He couldn't get the thing back together and make it work, and he got flustered and had to rush to finish up here. That's why the place looks like it was given a once-over by a maid on speed.”

“If there are prints that can be matched,” Renz said, “the Crime Scene Unit will find them. They're a capable bunch, here in St. Louie.”

“Notice that nobody here says ‘St. Louie'?”

“I say it,” Renz said. “But then I'm not one of the Millennials.”

“Even if we don't have the killer's matching prints on file, he might think we have them,” Quinn said. “That could work just as well. The clock is ticking. That should prompt the kind of response we want.”

“I prefer being proactive,” Renz said.

“What the hell does that mean?” Quinn asked.

“Means I have to wrap this up, then get back to New York and catch up playing commissioner. Seems we've got other problems in town there. Not just our dead-then-undead girl. Which isn't even a crime, as far as I know. How are Pearl and Weaver holding up?”

“Impatiently. They want action. Haven't had so much as a nibble from the Gremlin. He's cautious and he's smart,” Quinn said. “You can bet he's at least mulling over going for the bait.”

“Meanwhile we've got another death of note. A famous architect engineer.”

“Victim or perpetrator?”

“Maybe both. I don't have the complete picture. It was a car accident but the police don't know whether it was an accident, suicide, or murder.”

“Got a name on the victim?”

“Ethan Ellis,” Renz said.

Quinn was surprised. “The guy who's designing the MOMA addition?”

“The same. I forgot you were a devotee of the arts.”

“Any connection between that death and what we're doing here?”

“Only in the way everything is in some way connected with every other,” Renz said. “Be sure to get in touch with me if there are any issues.”

“Are issues something like problems?” Quinn asked.

Renz said, “Have a blessed day,” and left to go to his car.