This was family ritual.
44
New York, the present
Quinn and Zoe had just left D’Zello’s Ristorante and were walking slowly along Broadway in the heat. He hadn’t tried to talk to her at lunch about what was bothering him. If it led to an argument, he didn’t want it to be where everyone could hear them.
They were moving faster than the traffic, which was backed up because one lane was closed for construction. Wooden sawhorses and yellow caution tape were everywhere, but it was impossible to tell what exactly was being done. Whatever it was involved a lot of digging, though no one could be seen at present doing work of any sort. Now and then a frustrated driver would lean hard on his horn. A siren yowled deafeningly and quickly faded, as if an emergency vehicle was going like hell a block over. Quinn knew it was probably bogged down in traffic and the driver was venting his frustration.
“Is there something you’d like to tell me?” he asked, as he strolled beside Zoe toward where his car was parked illegally with an NYPD placard on the lowered sun visor. A warm breeze kicked up, and he could feel the grit of construction dust on his teeth.
“About lunch?” she asked.
“You’re the psychoanalyst,” he said. “You think that’s what I’m asking about?” Immediately he regretted the tone of his own voice; it was almost as if he were interrogating a suspect.
But damn it, she asked for it.
Or had she? Maybe he’d misinterpreted her words and facial expression.
After four more, slightly slower steps, she said, “What are you asking?”
“When we were together this morning and I joked about how I tended to get a phone call about a murder after we’ve had sex, the look on your face suggested something had crossed your mind.”
“I’m that transparent?”
He smiled. “ ’Fraid so.”
They walked silently for a while. A hybrid bus accelerated away from a stop in the street alongside them, leaving a strong scent of environmentally proper exhaust. A new smell for the olfactory stew of New York.
“I hesitated mentioning what I thought,” Zoe said, “because it’s probably meaningless, and if I told you about it there might be unnecessary trouble.”
“Should you be the judge of that?”
“Maybe. There’s also a professional obligation.”
They were at the parked Lincoln. Quinn slowed and stood beside the car. Sunlight glinted off its roof and obscured his vision so he had to move in order to see Zoe clearly. “This is about one of your patients,” he said.
“No, nothing like that.”
He rested a hand very gently on her back, spanning her shoulder blades beneath the thin material of her blouse with his long fingers. The slight contact made her heart thump, and not only from aroused sexual memory. There was something about Quinn that made people want to give up their secrets. She thought he would have made a damned good psychoanalyst. Better yet, a priest.
In a way, that’s what he is.
“Zoe?” he said, as if reminding her that he was there, waiting for her explanation.
The words seemed to flow from her of their own accord. “When you mentioned the coincidence of learning about two of the murders when we were together, each time after we had sex, it made me think of someone.”
“Someone you suspect?” He really didn’t see how that was possible.
“Someone I…used to be involved with.”
Ah…! He didn’t like where this might be going. “The way you’re involved with me?”
“Not exactly. Not in any way. You and Alfred aren’t at all alike.”
Alfred? “But you were lovers?”
“Yes. For a brief while. It ended over a year ago.”
“Who—”
“I ended it. Alfred…our sex was becoming more and more violent.”
“He hurt you?”
“Sometimes. When he was in sexual thrall. Or when he became angry with me.”
She seemed to be recalling the affair with the objectivity of her profession. She might have been talking about two other people, and to someone she barely knew. “Angry about what?” he asked.
“Anything and everything. Alfred had—probably still has—anger issues. Sometimes they find an outlet when they’re sexually engaged. He’s sadistic and admits it. He was looking for something in me I wasn’t prepared to give him.”
“How badly did he hurt you?”
“It was nothing serious. Minor bruises. Whip marks.”
“Whip marks? Jesus, Zoe!”
“You’ve been a cop a long time, Quinn. You know the spectrum of human sexual activity, especially in this city. Alfred tried to persuade me to engage in things that left me cold, sometimes things that repulsed me. I hope I don’t need to go into detail. In fact, I won’t go into detail.”
Quinn sensed her getting mad at him. So Zoe had her own anger issues. Well, maybe she had good reason.
“I’m not pressing you for any information you don’t want to give. And I can see why, when the subject of women being murdered and defiled came up, you’d naturally think of…does he have a name beyond Alfred?”
“Beeker. Dr. Alfred Beeker. He’s a psychoanalyst.”
“Like you?”
“Not exactly. He’s a cognitive analyst.”
“And you are…?”
“What you might call a creative Jungian.”
Quinn thought he’d better take a different tack. “If Beeker’s a psychologist, can’t he figure out he needs help himself?”
“He’s a psychiatrist, actually, who practices psychotherapy and augments it with drugs, and apparently he doesn’t think he needs help. There are plenty of people out there playing the same games he plays, so he’s not at a loss for partners.”
“It can be a dangerous game.”
“That’s part of the allure. Listen, Quinn, Alfred moves in a world he considers normal. And for the people in it, maybe it is normal. No laws are being broken, and everything is consensual. But what it came down to was I wasn’t part of that world and didn’t want to be, and he couldn’t accept that.”
“I more or less agree with you about consensual adults, but what you described between the two of you didn’t sound consensual.”
She smiled in that gradual, quiet way that devastated him. “The problem was that sometimes pretending to be forced was part of the game. It got so Alfred couldn’t see the difference. As far as he was concerned, the game was always on.”
“And for him it wasn’t a game,” Quinn said.
“For me it wasn’t always a game.” She moved away from Quinn and leaned with her buttocks against the car’s sun-warmed fender, crossing her arms. “He didn’t like it that I left him.”
“You afraid of him?”
“Not anymore. I haven’t even seen him in months. Maybe he doesn’t think of me at all.”
“That’d be a tough job for any man. What you were thinking this morning, Zoe?…Was it that he might know about you and me, might resent it, and it could somehow be tied in with the Slicer murders?”
Again Quinn surprised her with his nose for the truth, as if he were some sort of psychic bloodhound. He would get there sooner or later on his own, so she might as well tell him.
“He…” She tightened her grip on her elbows and swallowed. “He sometimes insisted on role playing, doing a scene where he raped me at knifepoint. He even wore a mask and pretended he’d just come in through my bedroom window. He took photographs with a digital camera. He told me he’d posted some on the Internet, though nothing too suggestive. But I was always afraid he’d…taken some I wasn’t aware of.”
“Hell, Zoe…”