Urge to Kill

On a collapsible luggage stand was a suitcase with three changes of clothing. There was no luggage tag on the suitcase. The clothes were expensive casual and included a pair of designer jeans. There were three baseball caps, three different colors, each from a different team.

“Fickle fan,” Pearl said.

Quinn looked in the tiny bathroom. There was a shaving kit and lineup of containers on the vanity. Also a coffee brewer that hadn’t been used. The soap hadn’t been unwrapped. No tissues, nothing, in the plastic-lined waste basket. The dead man hadn’t been a hotel guest long enough to leave any stamp of personality.

Quinn took a wary look at himself in the vanity mirror and went back into the main room.

“A wallet,” Fedderman said, standing at the open desk drawer. He thumbed through it. “We got us a Floyd Becker, SoHo address, fifty-one years old and will be forever.” He riffled the money like a skilled bank teller. “Three hundred even.”

“That’s not the name he used when he checked in with cash at the front desk,” Quinn said.

“ Jones,’ I’ll bet,” Fedderman said. “And he used his initial for his phony first name.”

“ Smith,’” Pearl said, “and no same initial.”

Quinn shook his head. “You’re both wrong. Answer’s ‘Bob Green.’”

“Shit!” Pearl said.

Fedderman chuckled nastily. “I was sure you said ‘Smith.’”

There was something unusual about this one, Quinn thought, despite Becker’s lack of imagination in choosing a pseudonym. Something that deviated from the pattern in a meaningful way. Maybe it had to do with the body being dragged outside. Or maybe it was something else.

Terri Gaddis thought she’d found heaven. Her own Camelot, at least.

Richard Crane was the most gentle, skillful lover she’d ever experienced. She lay now in her bedroom, hungover and exhausted from the wine and sex, her head resting on Richard’s bare chest. She could hear, could feel, his regular, coursing heartbeat. It must, she thought, be in rhythm with her own.

The pungent scent of their bodies, of their coupling, was still in the room, and she wished it would never leave. The air conditioner was humming, gradually catching up with the heat the two of them had generated. Soon, Terri knew, the room would return to normal, and so would her life.

Or would it?

Surely Richard had felt the same intensity she had, known the same revelation. Yes! Two people can be this gloriously happy!

He was the kind of man who would feel it. She knew that about him now. It was all she had to know.

Which reminded her that she didn’t know very much. He’d mentioned that he worked for a Wall Street firm, but he didn’t say which. Obviously he was successful, had money, or he couldn’t dress the way he did, with the tailored suit and expensive gold watch and cuff links. And he took care of himself, judging by his muscularity and—she smiled—his endurance. She absently ran a hand over her right breast, her erect nipple.

We could do this again. And again and again and again.

She shifted her body and reached over to the nightstand where her half-full glass of wine sat and managed to wrap two fingers around the slender glass stem. After downing the rest of the wine to sate her thirst, she settled down again, snuggling against Richard’s warm body. The last thing she remembered before falling asleep was his arm working its way beneath her neck and pulling her closer.

The room was cool when she awoke in the morning, and she was alone in the bed.

Terri sat up, looking around with something like alarm, and found herself the only one in the room.

“Richard…?”

“In here, darling.” He appeared in the doorway, buttoning his shirt that he hadn’t yet tucked in. “I was getting dressed in the living room so I wouldn’t wake you.” His dark hair was wet, uncombed but smoothed back with his fingers, so he must have already showered. Terri had never been so relieved to see anyone.

“I thought we might go out for breakfast,” he said. “Celebrate us.”

“I can think of other ways to do that,” Terri said.

He grinned. “It isn’t either-or.”

“Almost everything else is,” she said.

The handsome grin stayed. “No, there are some things that are predestined. Nothing we do can change them.”

“Are we predestined?”

“Most definitely.”

“Then I can accept predestination.” She climbed out of bed, unashamed of her nakedness in front of him. After what they’d done with each other…“I need to shower,” she said. She padded barefoot to him, kissed him lightly on the lips, then squeezed past him and made her way into the bathroom.

She’d got under a hot shower, soaped up, and tilted back her head to rinse shampoo from her hair when she noticed the large metal hook screwed into the bathroom ceiling.

Surely it hadn’t been there before.

Or had it? Maybe she simply hadn’t noticed it.

No, impossible. I would have noticed.

Obviously, Richard had put it there while she was asleep.