“Or two.”
Quinn left a note for Pearl saying they’d be back soon. He didn’t mention where they’d gone.
Fedderman sneaked up and surprised Penny in Biographies. She seemed pleased to see him. She was wearing a mauve summer dress today that clung to her figure, white pumps with low heels, a thin silver necklace. Fedderman was wearing the suit.
Penny smelled like cinnamon and old books and perfumed shampoo. Fedderman drew a deep breath of that potpourri and committed it to memory.
He kissed her on her forehead. Her flesh was damp with perspiration though it wasn’t all that warm in the library. “I thought the research room was your department.”
“I’m versatile,” Penny said. “We librarians have to be, in the face of technology run rampant.”
“Complaining again?”
“I shouldn’t. I’m employed.” She lightly touched the back of his hand. “And I’ve got a lot to live for. I think we both do.”
“Which is why I came to see you,” Fedderman said.
“Oh?” She looked at him curiously, waiting.
“That’s it,” Fedderman said. “It’s why I’m here.”
Penny laughed. “Well, it seems to me you should have arrived at work a few hours ago.”
“Our hours are flexible.” He wriggled his eyebrows. “I’m flexible, too.”
Penny shook her head. “I keep seeing new sides of you, Feds. Sides I like. That doesn’t mean I like your jokes.” She glanced up and down the aisle and picked up a book from a cart and slid it into its assigned space on a shelf, between Truffaut and Truman. “Maybe I shouldn’t ask this, but is our relationship diverting too much of your attention away from the investigation?”
“The Skinner? I think you’re more important, Penny.”
“I don’t.”
That brought him up short.
“Remember he murdered my sister, Feds.”
Fedderman felt a rush of shame. Of course she was right. So elated was he over their affair that he’d forgotten it had come at the expense of Nora Noon’s life.
“You’re right, Pen. Damn! I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be. It’s just that while I care about you, I don’t want to distract you from your work. Especially since it involves stopping the animal that killed Nora.”
“Do you think about it a lot?” Fedderman asked.
“Only every other minute. And I don’t like knowing the killer is out there walking around free, maybe stalking some other woman. Maybe even me.”
Fedderman gave her shoulder a squeeze. “You can’t believe that, Pen.”
“Why not? He killed my sister.”
“We understand serial killers. They murder compulsively. Their urges are triggered in ways they themselves don’t understand. It would be highly unusual for a serial killer to claim two siblings in two separate murders.”
“You said he acted out of compulsion. If he saw something in Nora that triggered him to kill, maybe he’d see the same thing in me.”
“Pen, tell me you don’t stay awake nights worrying about that.”
“Sometimes I do worry,” Penny said. “I know it might sound crazy.
…”
He bent over and let his lips brush hers. “No, it doesn’t sound crazy. Only human. Notions like that can get a grip on you. But believe me, Pen, it isn’t likely.”
But Fedderman had to admit she had a point. It was something he’d never considered. He understood how, in her position, grieving for a dead sister, she might consider it.
“It only seems possible late at night, in the dark,” she said.
“Like a lot of things,” Fedderman said, thinking about his own nighttime world between wakefulness and sleep, the violence he’d seen, the blood and the faces of the dead. They came unbidden to him more and more often as the years passed.
Penny gave him a smile that looked as if it wanted to fly from her face. “I don’t want you worrying about me.”
“In a strange kind of way, I want to worry about you.”
She sighed. “Yes, that’s how it works. And I want to worry about you. Love and worry are close companions.”
He tried to kiss her again, but she turned away, grinning.
“I think it’s time for you to go to work, Feds.”
“Do you insist?”
“Common sense insists.”
“That’s been getting in the way all my life.” He looked into her eyes. “I don’t want you walking around scared.”
“I’m not. I’m walking around trying to stay employed.”
He nodded, glad she was joking about it now.
Someone had entered the aisle down near the opposite end of the library, so they didn’t kiss good-bye, merely touched hands.
As Fedderman walked past the front desk toward the exit, Ms. Culver gave him a disapproving look over the rims of her glasses, as she always did on his arrival or departure. He wondered if she meant it. If Ms. Culver really felt that way about him. It kind of bothered Fedderman to have somebody like that so strongly disapprove of him when they’d only recently met.
It suggested that she knew more about him than he did.
51
Weaver was wearing a cheap plastic raincoat, but it would have to do. It didn’t bother her that she had no umbrella to fend off the steady light rain falling from a dark evening sky. An umbrella would make her more noticeable.
Though the evening was still warm, the careless breeze blowing along the city’s stone canyons sometimes carried a chill. At least Weaver had found a temporarily dry spot, huddled deep in the doorway of an unoccupied building across the street from Jock Sanderson’s walk-up in a bleak brick structure that looked as if it should have been demolished decades ago.
Weaver had read Pearl’s notes and report. She was disgusted by Pearl’s account of her interview with Sanderson.
Jock Sanderson had every reason in the world to kill Judith Blaney. She’d even had a restraining order issued against him. Sure, he had a seemingly ironclad alibi for the time of Blaney’s death, but so what? It was obvious to Weaver that Pearl had been too easy on him.
It was easy to read between the lines. Instead of seeing a wino in a cheap-ass apartment, Pearl had seen an underdog in its pathetic lair. In Weaver’s judgment, this asshole had played Pearl like a piano, made her feel pity so he could little by little ease her over to his side.
And that’s how the interview had ended. With Pearl almost apologizing for disturbing this good citizen in his meager shelter from a heartless society.
Maybe Pearl was right in assuming Sanderson’s innocence so readily. But Weaver thought there was a chance she was wrong, and that he had killed Judith Blaney. Whether he was the Skinner was another question. He might have somehow found out about the severed tongues and used the Skinner as the basis for a copycat crime, made Blaney’s death simply look like another in the string of Skinner murders.
As terrified of Sanderson as Judith Blaney must have been, Weaver figured she deserved more than Pearl’s halfassed conversation with him, and then a perfunctory dismissal of him as a suspect.
Of course it was also true that Weaver saw this as an opportunity to show initiative and make her fellow officers-especially Pearl-seem incompetent. If she went out on her own, secretly, and nailed the Skinner, her career would be made. Renz would see to that.
Pearl had screwed up. There was opportunity here, and Weaver was going to seize it.
She straightened her posture and then stayed still as she saw a dark figure emerge from the apartment building. A man. Wearing a black or dark blue raincoat and a beret or beret-like dark cap. He stutter-stepped down from the apartment to the sidewalk in a quick, easy maneuver that suggested he was familiar with the wet concrete steps.
When he turned and passed beneath a streetlight, Weaver was sure the man was Jock Sanderson.
He picked up his pace, and Weaver had to hurry to keep up. She barely felt the rainwater finding its way beneath her coat collar and trickling down the back of her neck.
Sanderson went down the steps of a subway stop, used a MetroCard, and passed through the turnstiles. Weaver followed.