Urge to Kill

He made his way at a brisk walk through the crowded terminal and back out onto the sidewalk. He kept walking along Eighth Avenue, the gum-soled shoes he’d bought for his first hunt beating silently on the warm concrete, turned a corner, kept walking.

Away! Free!

After a while he slowed down. He was so hot. Is it ever going to rain again in this damned city?

His entire body was burning up and soaked in perspiration, as if with a fever. He clutched his shirt collar and yanked it to the side, causing one of the top buttons to fly off into the night.

Kept walking.

But without Thomas Rhodes’s gun.

The man in the matching black outfit broke the connection on his cell phone and slipped it into his shirt pocket. He was at an outside table at a restaurant on Second Avenue, sipping a cold draft beer and watching pedestrians and traffic hurrying past. So many people in a rush, scurrying and self-important. So many ambitions, dreams, obsessions, depressions, so much tenderness and callousness…all those separate, personal worlds and worlds-to-be that could be obliterated in a second by a thousand possibilities. All those people…their disparate notions of reality didn’t mean spit. Reality wasn’t so different from dreams.

Dreams…

He knew as he watched a particularly graceful woman walking across the street that it was time for Mitzi. Not that the woman looked at all like Mitzi except for her erect and alert carriage. She was much taller than Mitzi. And of course she didn’t have Mitzi’s platinum spiked hair.

Mitzi the birthday girl. Thinking of her did bring a smile to his face. She certainly had the gift.

A waiter who’d just delivered food to a nearby table paused on his way back inside the restaurant, noticing the almost-empty beer mug.

“Ready for another?” he asked.

“Sure am,” the man in the black outfit answered, “I’m ready for another.”

55

“Thomas Rhodes was a banker of no small reputation,” Renz said. Quinn knew he’d picked up the phrase from this morning’s Times account of Rhodes’s murder at the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

Renz was leaning back in his leather chair behind his desk. The harsh morning sun highlighted his drooping features and pockmarks from old acne scars. It was already warm in the office, and there was the faint scent of stale tobacco smoke. Quinn thought that if Renz was going to continue his furtive cigar smoking he should buy some sort of deodorizer.

When Quinn didn’t toss back the conversational ball, Renz said, “That puts additional pressure on thee and me, especially thee.”

A bad representation of a Quaker, Quinn thought. “We did get a break, though. The gun.”

Renz made his chair inch from side to side and nodded. “Ballistics make it out to be the same make and model that was used in the other Twenty-five-Caliber Killings.” He leaned forward and extended the ballistics report to Quinn.

Quinn glanced at it, ignoring all the technical jargon about grooves and lands. Even the fact that the gun’s serial number had been effectively removed with acid. What interested him was that the lab made it a dead certainty that Rhodes was carrying exactly the same kind of gun that was used on the previous victims. “A Springbok single-action twenty-five-caliber revolver,” he said. “You have to pull back the hammer before each shot on that kind of gun, which means you have to make each bullet count.” Without getting up, he placed the report back on Renz’s desk. “I never heard of a Springbok.”

“No one had. That’s why the damned things were impossible to identify from their bullets. Springbok was a South African manufacturer that went out of business almost twenty years ago, not long after apartheid ended. The problem is, what with all the political and social turmoil in that part of the world, there are thousands of this cheap but reliable model unaccounted for.”

“So someone could have bought a large lot on the black market.”

“Or even legally, years ago, and simply kept them, and now he’s found a use for them.”

“So it’s possible our killer is of South African origin,” Quinn said.

“Or spent time in Africa.”

“Hunting,” Quinn said.

Which made it all the more likely that they were indeed searching for only one killer. Neither man pointed that out. Renz was still afraid he might be wrong about the politically convenient single-killer theory, and Quinn still had his doubts. The two types of murders—one clean and professional, the other bloody hell on a stick—didn’t make sense. Unless of course Helen, the profiler, was right about one killer with two personalities. Quinn knew that was, in a way, true of most serial killers, though not to this degree. It was more a matter of them being accomplished actors who could present a benign, sometimes charming persona to the world in order to conceal the ugliness inside.

Quinn decided he’d ask Zoe’s opinion. She was a psychoanalyst. Killers weren’t her specialty, but she might well know more than Helen Iman about split personalities.