Urge to Kill

Manders seemed tailor-made to be an unlikely murder victim, a maddening conundrum for the police.

They’d found nothing in his life that might lead to his murder. But of course there must be something, because he had been murdered.

Quinn sat at Fedderman’s desk, where the light was brighter, and propped the rectangular half-frames of his reading glasses on the slightly crooked bridge of his nose. Patiently, and in a pedantic pose that didn’t suit him, he began to read.

The statements of people who knew Manders seemed to lead nowhere, and the revisited facts concerning his murder also yielded nothing new.

Manders had been a fairly successful hedge fund manager for a firm called Prudent Power, which specialized in shorting the market using exchange traded funds. Quinn could barely make himself read about that, so boring did it become. But he scanned it, learned something about puts and calls, then decided it probably had little to do with Manders’s murder except in larger and general ways whose understanding didn’t require an MBA from Harvard. He hoped.

He stood up, stretched, and then poured some of yesterday’s coffee into a white foam cup. Tasting the horrid stuff and making a face, he snatched up the Manders file from Fedderman’s desk, sat down at his own desk, and booted up his computer.

After a minute or so, and several acidic sips from the foam cup, he peered over the frames of his glasses at the glowing monitor. Where to look first but the Wall Street Journal?

Interesting. The price of Prudent Power had plunged as the market rose, losing a lot of value for its investors. But wasn’t that what a hedge fund was supposed to do, move the opposite way of the stock market? Quinn wasn’t sure. It might not be that simple, meaning the manager of Prudent Power might have made enemies by the thousands. It would take only one furious client crazy enough to kill him.

But would that same killer then have moved on to take more victims, people who, presumably, had nothing to do with his (her?) finances? And Quinn wondered, how many serial killers had there been who were wealthy enough to have holdings in hedge funds?

He phoned the police profiler, Helen Iman, and asked her that question.

“Maybe Jack the Ripper,” she said. “But we’ll never know for sure. That’s about it. Don’t bother barking up that tree, Quinn.”

He was holding the phone to his ear with his left hand while leafing through papers in the file.

“What’re you doing, Quinn?”

“Looking for another tree to bark up.”

“I’m pretty busy here,” Helen said.

“I’m leafing through witness statements as we talk,” he said. “Not that there were really any witnesses.”

“The usual friends and relatives talking about what a great guy the victim was, and how he had no enemies?”

“On target.”

“Read me who they are.”

Quinn found the statements list and began reading her the names of people either his team or the earlier investigators had interviewed.

“That last one,” Helen said, interrupting him. “Same last name as the victim.”

“Zoe Manders,” Quinn said. “Sister.”

“The name sounds familiar to me. She the one who’s the psychologist?”

“Says here she’s a psychoanalyst. Got an office over on Park Avenue.”

“La-di-da. Well, maybe that’s where I heard her name, some convention or other.”

“Manders himself was no pauper. Lived on East Fifty-sixth Street, near Sutton Place.”

“Prosperous siblings,” Helen said.

“Like you and I would be, if we were related and had money.”

“Talk to her again,” Helen said.

“Says here she and her brother only saw each other half a dozen times a year, mostly on holidays. Didn’t go to the same places or have the same friends. And sis is solid with alibi.”

“She might know something she doesn’t know she knows,” Helen said.

“That’s pretty goddamned cryptic.”

“How old is Dr. Manders?”

“Forty-six,” Quinn said, adjusting his reading glasses to peer more closely at the file.

“Victim was forty-three,” Helen said. “They probably grew up together and were close. She was his big sister, and now she’s a psychoanalyst. Most likely looked out for him when they were kids. She probably knows a lot about him.”

“And being a shrink, she’d know how to root through her childhood memories in productive fashion.”

“Exactly,” Helen said. “All you have to do is get her to think like a cop, and she might tell you something illuminating about little brother. Dr. Manders might be a hidden undeclared asset.”

Had Helen been reading the Wall Street Journal?

“One way to get to know something about the killer is to know his victims,” Quinn said.

“You got it, Quinn. Cherchez la shrink.”

“Always,” Quinn said.

Hettie’s almost constant muted screams were like insane musical accompaniment to her agony. While they were barely audible, she could hear them. Each one echoed in every dark corridor of her mind, each echo sharper and more painful than the last. Hettie had given up hope long ago.

What filled her mind now, along with the pain, was a question.

Why must it take so long to die?

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