Sex, Lies, And Online Dating

Chapter 9

Serialdater: Seeks Killer Date…

Flashes of red, white, and blue sliced through the darkness and cut across the office windows and door of a motel known to rent by the hour. Traffic on Chinden Boulevard sped past, not slowing a click, not even to rubberneck the latest crime scene. Not at this time of night in the part of town plagued with flophouses and drug-related crimes.

Quinn fastened his identification to his belt as he moved between police cruisers parked at every angle in the small lot. He held a clipboard under one arm and his duffle bag in his hand. He glanced up at the second floor of the motel, and a frown pulled at the corners of his mouth. The place was bound to be a nightmare of fingerprints, hairs, and body fluids.

“Is the night manager in the office?” he asked several patrol officers standing around in front of the building.

“Yeah. We got him in there cooling his heels until you want him.”

While the patrol cops filled him in on what they knew, Quinn took out a pen and glanced at his watch. He wrote down the time of his arrival, the address of the crime scene, and weather conditions.

“Write down the license plate numbers of all these vehicles and run ’em.” The victim’s car was probably in the lot and would need to be impounded. He ducked under the yellow crime scene tape and moved up the outside stairs. He walked past three sets of windows with their curtains drawn and continued toward the patrol officers standing outside the open door of room thirty-six.

“How many other rooms are in use?” he asked.

“It’s Saturday night. Just about every one.”

Someone had to have seen or heard something. “Make sure no one leaves,” he said and walked into the room. Kurt, Anita, and two patrol officers stood next to the bed covered with a brown floral spread and a naked dead guy. Yellow nylon rope was bound to the bed frame and tied to the flexi-cuffs around the victim’s wrists. A Westco garment bag had been placed over his head and secured around his neck with silver duct tape.

Quinn took a pair of latex gloves from the duffle and moved to the head of the bed. He snapped on the gloves and looked down into a pair of brown eyes staring up at him from within the clear bag sucked tight around his face. Quinn unclenched two of the man’s fingers, then watched them curl once more. He’d say death had occurred within the last two hours. Sometime after Lucy had arrived at his house carrying a chocolate torte.

“Have you identified the vic?” he asked Kurt.

“Not yet. Anita and I just got here.”

Quinn glanced up at the other detective, and Kurt’s gaze slid away. While Quinn had been getting Lucy naked, and Kurt had been watching and listening from across the street, the real perpetrator had been doing her work. They’d fucked up. Big time, but he couldn’t think about that now. Lucy clearly wasn’t Breathless, and he would deal with her later. Right now, he had work to do. He had to deal with the dead man staring up at him through the child safety warning on the polyethylene bag.

Two crime scene investigators arrived, and Quinn had one of them snap a picture of the beige Dockers lying on the floor at the foot of the bed. Then he knelt on one knee and pulled a wallet from the back pocket. He flipped the wallet open and looked at the driver’s license of Robert D. Patterson. A forty-six-year-old white male. Brown eyes and hair. Five feet nine and one hundred and eighty pounds. Quinn stayed down on one knee, studying the dirty carpet for clues. He looked under the bed, then stood and secured Mr. Patterson’s driver’s license to the clipboard. He checked the other pockets of the victim’s pants and a light nylon jacket also thrown on the dirty carpet. Besides the wallet, he found a set of keys and a folded motel receipt. He placed the items in a paper bag and marked it.

While one investigator got to work snapping photographs from every angle, the other got busy with his bottles of latent print powder. Kurt left the room to question potential witnesses on the second floor of the motel, and Quinn tossed his gloves in the duffle and walked back outside. He shone the flashlight hooked to his belt into the garbage can at the bottom of the stairs. It was half full, and he knew there had to be a Dumpster somewhere on the property. Before the night was over, he was going to be in waders, ass deep in garbage. He walked into the office and was assailed with the smell of nicotine, fried chicken, and cherry sanitizer. Behind the pocked counter sat Dennis Karpowich, a man in his early sixties with thinning hair the color of Grecian Formula 16. He had bad teeth and a worse smoker’s hack. When Quinn showed him Mr. Patterson’s license, Dennis identified him as the man who’d paid for a four-hour stay in room thirty-six.

“Did you see anyone with him?”

“A woman.”

This was the first time anyone had placed a woman with any of the victims. “What did she look like?” Quinn asked as he wrote.

“I only saw her from behind as they was walking up the stairs. I remember because she didn’t strike me as one of the girls.”

“Girls? Do you mean hookers?” Dennis didn’t answer, and Quinn glanced up from his report. “I’m not a vice cop. I don’t care if you’re renting to whores or to guys who like donkeys. I’m just trying to find a woman who has a nasty habit of killing the men she dates.”

Dennis lit a generic cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling. “She didn’t look like one of the regular girls who stay here.”

“What made you think that?”

“ ’Cause she had on one of them long coats that looked like it cost a lot of money. Wool or something like that. The girls who come here don’t wear their good clothes to work.”

Quinn tried not to smile at that. Dennis made it sound as if the girls poured concrete or painted houses for a living. “Color of the coat?”

“Red.”

“How tall was she?”

“I’m not good at guessing stuff like that. I think she was about as tall as his shoulder.”

Quinn figured that made her around five-two. They would be able to determine better once the coroner measured the body. “Hair color?”

“She had on a hat. A turquoise hat.” He circled his head with his hands. “And it had one of those wide parts to it.”

“It had a wide brim?”

“Yeah, but it kind of flopped down, and it had what looked like a big peacock feather on one side.”

Quinn paused in his questioning to write that all down before he asked, “Did you hear her say anything?”

“No, but she was laughing.”

Quinn glanced up. “Laughing?”

“Yeah. Like he was saying something funny. You know. Like he told her a joke and she kinda hits his arm. Playful.”

Alaughing, playful serial killer. Now that was seriously twisted. “Did you see anything else?”

“I don’t think so.”

“If you remember anything, give me a call.” Quinn handed him a business card. “I’m sure I’ll be in touch with more questions.”

As Quinn left the office, a patrol officer informed him the couple in room thirty-five might have heard something. The deceased excluded, room thirty-six looked just like thirty-five. Aprostitute in a dingy white sweater sat on the bed, picking at her arms, her eyes vacant, drugged, bored. The man beside her looked up through a pair of thick glasses. His hair was slicked back and his arms were crossed over his thin chest.

“Can I smoke?” the woman asked.

“Go ahead.”

Quinn wrote down their names and the time they’d checked into the motel. The man stood up and started to pace. “I gotta get out of here. I was just going out for paper towels and dog food. My wife can’t know I had a date.”

Quinn looked at the guy and his choice of “dates” and didn’t feel a bit sorry for him. The slob’s wife should know what she lay down with every night. But that wasn’t Quinn’s job. Not these days. “You’ll leave when I’m convinced you’ve told me everything you heard or saw.”

“I told the other cops. I heard some banging like a bed hitting the wall, but I figured…someone was having wild sex.” He shrugged. “I didn’t see anything.”

“How about you?” Quinn asked the prostitute, who was now picking at her cuticles. Lovely.

“I didn’t see nothin’,” she said, moving her jaw like all addicts tended to do. “They was here before us.”

“How do you know?”

“I could hear ’em. Like he said.” She took a drag off her cigarette, then added, “Just some banging. But you hear that a lot around here.”

Quinn handed them both his card and told them to call if they remembered anything. As he left the room, the coroner arrived, and they entered the crime scene together. An investigator knelt in the doorway dusting the jamb with black powder. “There’s dozens of overlapping prints here,” he complained as Quinn slid past. “It’s going to take months to process these.”

Too bad they didn’t have months.

“Another poor bastard,” the coroner said as he and Quinn snapped on new pairs of gloves, “just trying to get laid.” The coroner estimated time and probable cause of death, and Quinn photographed the rope tied to the bedframe.

An hour after the coroner arrived at the scene, the body was released, and Quinn filled Kurt in on what the manager had seen. Admittedly, it wasn’t much, but it was more than they’d had before. He knew better than to get real excited about a woman in a turquoise hat and red coat. What Kurt told him next had him rethinking the direction of the case.

“There’s a lot of ladies with turquoise hats these days. It has something to do with that Peacock Society.”

Quinn took a measuring wheel from his duffle. “Peacock Society?” He looked over at Kurt. What the hell was a Peacock Society?

“Yeah. These days, all the older ladies are in that club where they wear big hats and bright colors.” Kurt placed an evidence flag on the carpet next to a black button. “I think they have meetings and stuff.”

“It’s on account of that book,” the investigator collecting prints at the door told them. “Some lady wrote a book about women wearing peacock feathers because they don’t need men.”

Quinn rolled the tape wheel across the small room and wrote down the measurement. “Did you read the book?” he asked the investigator.

“No, but I saw it at Walden’s in the mall,” the guy answered as he placed clear tape on the black prints, then transferred them to the lift card.

Quinn didn’t bother pointing out that seeing a book wasn’t quite the same as reading it. Instead, he took more measurements and drew a rough sketch of the room. Tomorrow he’d track down information on a Peacock Society. If there was such a club in town, he’d check it out.

“Why did Breathless kill in a motel this time?” Kurt wondered out loud as he looked for more evidence in the dirty carpet. “Why take the risk?”

“Probably because men are scared and aren’t taking women home,” Quinn speculated.

“Maybe she’s getting bolder.”

“They usually do.” Quinn glanced about the crime scene, then looked at his watch. He figured they might be done in time for breakfast.

Lucy poured herself a cup of coffee and pushed her wet hair behind her ears. She’d slept little the night before, tossing and turning and thinking about what had happened at Quinn’s house, until finally she’d gotten out of bed and decided to work. The upside was that she’d written ten pages. The downside was that she was tired this morning.

She’d finally fallen asleep around three, only to be back up again at eight. It could only mean one thing. One terrifying thing.

She was in love with Quinn. She didn’t know how it had happened. One second she’d been answering questions for the Women of Mystery, and then she’d looked up and seen him watching her. Wham, she’d felt it just like that, and there had been no turning back to the second before. No turning back her feelings to when she’d been confused about how she felt.

She’d known him just over a week. People didn’t fall in love in a week. It was supposed to take longer. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry or both.

Lucy took her coffee into her bedroom and slipped on a pair of pink panties and bra. Quinn hadn’t called her after he’d rushed her out the door. The last she’d seen of him had been his back as he’d hurried inside his house. Something horrible had happened, but all he’d told her was that it had been related to his work. So how horrible could it have been? Yeah, stopped-up toilets and busted pipes were a drag, but not life or death.

She pulled out a pair of jeans and a woman’s marathon T-shirt from the time she’d signed up to run but had accidentally on purpose slept in until after the starting gun. Maybe someone had broken into Quinn’s work and stolen equipment. She’d heard on the news the other night that theft on job sites was a real problem. Although honestly, she couldn’t understand the rush. He hadn’t been able to get rid of her fast enough, and that worried her.

Alot.

Her feelings were so new. So scary. So sudden, and she hadn’t a clue how Quinn felt about her. Well okay, there were certain times when she was sure he was attracted to her. Like when he looked at her or kissed her or touched her, but that wasn’t love.

Lucy pushed her feet into a pair of slippers, then grabbed her coffee on the way out of the room. Last night when she’d decided to get out of bed and work, she’d searched her briefcase for the six chapters Maddie had returned to her yesterday. The collapsible folder hadn’t been there, and she’d figured she’d left it in her car. As much as she felt safe in her home and in her neighborhood, there was no way she’d been willing to walk outside to her garage at 3:00 a.m.

The soles of her slippers slipped across the tiles in her kitchen and slapped the concrete stairs and sidewalk as she made her way outside to the garage. She searched the BMW and found a stick of gum, a pen, and a window scraper under the seats. No folder. She retraced her steps back inside, looked up the number, and called Barnes and Noble. Jan Bright hadn’t seen it, but she said she would ask the employees and the Women of Mystery.

The doorbell rang as she hung up, and she moved across the living room. She looked through the peephole at Quinn, and her heart did that crazy speedup slowdown thing. He wore black-framed sunglasses to shield his eyes from the brilliant morning sun, and dark stubble covered the lower half of his face.

She opened the door as a gust of cool air ruffled his dark hair. “Good morning.” He was wearing the same clothes that he’d worn the night before-a white dress shirt and jeans. He hadn’t been to bed, and he should have looked a rumpled mess. He didn’t. He looked like someone she’d like to reach out and touch, soothing his brow and feeling his rough cheek against her palm. He looked like someone she’d like to undress and tuck into her bed.

From behind his glasses, he gazed at her for several long moments before he asked, “May I come in?”

“Of course.” She opened the door wide, and he moved past her, bringing the scent of spring on his skin. “Coffee?” she offered as she shut the door.

“Please.” He pulled off his sunglasses and stuck them in his breast pocket. He had shadows beneath his brown eyes.

“Long night?” She moved past him, resisting the urge to touch him.

“Yeah.” He laughed without humor and followed close behind her into the kitchen. The heels of his boots sounded unusually loud against the tile floor.

Lucy reached into a cupboard and pulled out a mug. “I worked until about three this morning.” It was such a relief not to have to lie any longer. “I do that sometimes,” she explained. She’d had boyfriends in the past who’d hated the often erratic hours of a writer. Now that everything was out in the open, she wanted to be up front with Quinn. “Sometimes I work for days without much sleep. One time,” she confessed as she poured coffee into a mug and handed it to him, “I forgot to shave my legs for over a month. I looked like a Clydesdale.” Okay, maybe she should have kept that one to herself.

“Thanks.” The corner of his mouth curved up as he blew into his coffee. “Sorry about what happened last night,” he said before he took a drink. She looked at her slippers and fought the blush creeping up her neck. She wondered exactly which part of the night he was sorry for. That he’d had to run out? That they’d gotten to know each other better in his hall or that they hadn’t finished? She was really sorry about the latter. “Something came up and we need to talk about it.”

Okay, that didn’t sound good. “All right.” She moved to the small table in her kitchen and took a seat. Quinn sat across from her, and the light pouring in through the windows picked out strands of his dark hair. It lit his white shirt from behind and accentuated his wide shoulders.

“Remember when you confessed to me that you’re not a nurse?”

Was he mad about that after all? She hadn’t figured it was still an issue. “Yeah.”

“I have a confession to make, too.” His dark eyes stared into hers, tired but as intense as ever. “I’m not a plumber.”

She leaned forward in her chair. “What?”

“I’m a cop.” He reached for something hooked to the side of his belt and slid it across the table at her. It was a police shield. Yep, he was a cop. A detective. He’d lied to her. “Why did you lie?” And why hadn’t he confessed the same night she had?

“Because when I met you, I was dating on the Internet undercover.” When she didn’t say anything, he explained further. “I was posing as a plumber to catch Breathless.”

“Who?”

“Breathless. That’s the name the police have given the woman who’s killing men around town. We think she’s meeting them online.”

Lucy took a drink of her coffee and let the information sink in. “So the police are working undercover online to catch the woman we’ve been hearing about on the news?”

“Yes.”

Okay, so far she understood, although it seemed bizarre.

“Last night, she killed her fourth victim.”

“Oh, no.”

“While you were at my house, she was at a motel on Chinden suffocating Robert D. Patterson. That’s why I hustled you out so fast.”

That name sounded familiar. She sat back in her chair and thought of all the men who’d e-mailed her in the past few months. “Throbbinbob?”

“Did you know him?”

“Not really. He e-mailed me a few times.” He’d kind of been a pest, but he hadn’t deserved to die, for goodness’ sake. “Did you catch this Breathless last night?”

He shook his head and leaned back in his chair. “No, but we got some good leads.”

“So, you’re a homicide detective,” she said, testing it out loud. Now that she thought it over, it made more sense than his being a plumber. It explained his intense gaze and his attention to detail.

“Yes.”

She guessed she understood why he’d lied. She didn’t like it but couldn’t exactly get mad about it. That would make her a hypocrite. She watched him take a drink from his mug and took a moment to process what he’d just told her. So, he’d met her while he’d been working undercover. In a sense, she’d been working undercover too. It might not have been the best way to start a relationship, but it wasn’t something that was insurmountable. They could work on it. Maybe even laugh about it sometime in the future. “So, you met me at Starbucks to see if I could be a serial killer?”

He stared into her eyes and gave an abbreviated nod of his dark head.

Okay, so their meeting had been unconventional. People met under unusual circumstances all the time. Who cared about how and why they’d met. “That’s kind of funny when you think about it.” Only he wasn’t laughing. “How long before you realized I wasn’t a killer? A minute or two?”

He set the mug on the table. “A little longer than a minute or two.”

Something was wrong. Something she wasn’t seeing. She felt as if she was looking at the wrong side of a picture and not seeing what was in front of her face. Then everything shifted and turned and became really clear. “Wait.” She held up a hand like a traffic cop. “You thought I could be Breathless?”

“Yes.”

Good Lord. The guy she’d fallen in love with had thought she was a serial killer. “But you figured out right away that was ridiculous. Right?”

He shook his head slowly. “Not right away.”

“Not right away? How could you possibly think I was a serial killer for one second? Do I look like a serial killer?” Before he could answer, she said, “No, I do not!”

He sighed, and his hands moved to massage the back of his neck. “You know as well as I do that serial killers look just like anyone else.”

“Yeah, but you’re a trained detective. Aren’t you supposed to have an instinct about these things? Some sort of cop sense? Aren’t you supposed-Wait. How long before you realized that I wasn’t a serial killer?” He just looked at her, and she had to repeat her question. “How long?”

“Lucy, you have to understand-”

“How long, Quinn?” she interrupted him.

He dropped his hand to his side. “Last night.”

She sucked a shocked breath into her lungs, and her brows rose up to her hairline. “Before or after?…” His silence was her answer, and her head spun. She heard herself sputtering like an idiot, but she couldn’t stop. “You…me…I…what…the hell?” She stopped to take a few calming breaths, and when she was capable of speech again, she pointed across the table and asked, “Are you shitting me?” Not exactly brilliant, but an improvement over sputtering. “Don’t tell me the whole time we’ve dated that you thought I was a serial killer? Until last night?”

“No, I’m not shitting you. And yes to your second and third questions.”

The reality of what he was telling her hit her between the eyes. “And you took off my shirt and and and-” She tried for another calming breath as thoughts spun in her head. “You wanted to have sex with me even though you thought I’d kill you? You would have had sex with a serial killer?”

“No. We didn’t exactly have sex.”

She sucked in a hurt breath. Suddenly something that had felt pretty darn good now felt dirty.

“It’s complicated.”

Oh Lord. Oh Lord. That hit-he’d-given-her-between-the-eyes feeling was working its way south toward her throat. “What? Were you trying to get me to kill you?”

He frowned. “Something like that.”

She swallowed hard as the pain hit her chest. “So the whole time you were kissing me and undressing me last night, you were only doing it because you thought I was going to try and kill you?”

“I thought there was a chance.” He scrubbed his face with his hands. “Lucy, you have to understand something. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt anyone, but I had a job to do.”

Lucy didn’t think there was anything left that he could say that would hurt her more. She was wrong.

“I was just doing my job,” he said, adding insult to her injured heart.

“Oh my God.” She stood and placed a shaky hand on the table to keep from falling. “This past week wasn’t real. Nothing about it was. I thought you wanted to be with me because you liked me. But that wasn’t the case at all. You were doing your job, and I…”…was falling in love with a lie. “I was a complete fool.”

He stood and came around the table. “You aren’t a fool. You’re a great girl, and if things were dif-”

Before Lucy even knew she’d done it, she hauled off and slapped him across the face. She’d never hit anyone before in her life, and he looked as stunned as she felt. Her palm stung, and she curled her hands into fists. “Get out.”

He took a step back out of her reach, but he didn’t leave. “I’m sorry.”

Somehow, she doubted he was as sorry as she was. Anger and pain twisted in her chest, and she placed her hand over her heart, as if she could keep it from breaking. It broke anyway. A deep physical pain that shattered her into pieces. “Go. Please.”

“I’ll call you later.”

“I won’t answer.”

He lifted a hand toward her, then let it fall to his side. “I know you don’t believe it right now, but I am more sorry than you know.”

He was right. She didn’t believe it, and she didn’t particularly care if he was sorry. She’d fallen in love with a man who’d only dated her because it was his job.

“Good-bye, Lucy.”

She looked at the floor to keep herself from doing something stupid, like bursting into tears. For several more beats of her broken heart, he stood in her kitchen while she died a little with each passing second. Then he turned and walked from the room. She heard the front door open and lifted her gaze to see Quinn framed by the bright morning sun. He looked over his shoulder at her one last time. He opened his mouth as if he meant to say something, but in the end there was nothing to say. He shut the door behind him and was gone without a word.

For several long moments, Lucy stared at the door, reeling, her emotions and thoughts in total ruin. Her cat wove between her legs and she bent and picked him up. She took a seat at the table and buried her face against Mr. Snookums’s fur. A sob broke from her throat. How could she have fallen in love with a lie? How was that even possible? She was a smart, successful woman. She was thirty-four years old. Things like this didn’t happen in real life.

She felt so stupid.

She’d known the whole time that there had been something wrong with Quinn, but she’d made excuses and told herself it was because he was a widower. That trolling chat rooms wasn’t really weird. The signs had been there, but she’d ignored them.

Her fingers burrowed into Mr. Snookums’s fur, and a loving purr rattled his chest. “At least you love me, Snookie,” she cried as he licked her hand. But her cat’s love was no comfort. Not today.

She raised her gaze to Quinn’s coffee cup, then closed her eyes. Quinn hadn’t pursued her because he’d wanted a relationship with her. He hadn’t pushed to spend time with her because he’d been attracted to her. His intense gaze hadn’t had anything to do with longing or lust. He’d been watching and waiting for her to do a Lizzie Borden on him.

A hiccup lifted her aching chest, and she gave up on trying to hold back the flood. She’d fallen in love so fast, so ridiculously fast, and she felt so stupid. She could only hope that her heart would mend just as quickly.