“It’s us,” Harold confirmed. “We were just talking to Wanda—what’s your real name, hon?”

“Wanda Tennenger. Sometimes I go by Wanda Smith.” She smiled at Quinn. “And I don’t have to ask who this handsome gentleman is. I’ve seen his photo in the paper.”

“I wanted to be in on the conversation,” Quinn said, sizing up the woman in the tight black dress. A look into her eyes suggested she was a pragmatist.

Wanda didn’t seem particularly impressed by Quinn, but she brought him up to speed on the conversation with the other two detectives, to where Duke suddenly lost interest in her. “There was something else,” she said. “After the knocking from across the hall—once we knew what it was—me and Duke went on about our business. Though something had gone out of Duke after he looked out the door. I’m not accustomed to that.”

She described how Duke went to the door and peeked out, how the knocking was on the door across the hall, and what Duke told her he’d seen.

When she’d run down, she took a sip of her water that smelled like vodka.

“That it?” Quinn asked.

Wanda looked from Sal to Harold and back at Quinn. She knew she’d better not leave anything out or lie to Quinn. “The air kinda went out of us for a while,” she said. “I came down here to have a drink. That was about seven thirty. Duke stopped at the desk and made them give him a different room.”

Quinn waited silently. He knew Sal and Harold would also remain silent.

“Duke just suddenly stopped,” Wanda said.

“Stopped what?” Quinn asked.

“What he was doing. What we were doing up on the room. He just suddenly froze and said he couldn’t stop thinking about what he thought he’d heard coming outta that other room. And something else—he looked scared.”

“What did Duke say he heard?” Quinn asked.

“Thought he heard,” Wanda corrected. “He tried to explain it to me, said it sounded like an injured animal wailing, only it was soft like. That’s when he told me he’d seen somebody entering the room across the hall. He said maybe the guy had forced his way in. The reason he hadn’t said what he’d seen earlier was . . . he had other things on his mind.”

“Did you hear the sound?” Quinn asked.

“No.”

“Could it have been a woman who was gagged and screaming?” Harold asked.

“I suppose. Looking back on it, that’s what he mighta heard. Anyway, it gave Duke the creeps, and he didn’t want to play anymore.” She raised a shoulder in an elegant shrug that made Quinn think of art deco nudes. “Can’t say I blame him. Unless you go in for that kinda thing.”

“And you didn’t see the man who might have forced his way into the room across the hall?”

“That’s right. I was on the bed, still tending to my ankle.” She wagged a shoe, making her calf muscle flex. Half smiling. Knowing they were looking. “I’d damn near turned an ankle in these heels when Duke answered my knock and hustled me into his room. I was like, what’s this all about?”

“He say he was sorry?” Harold asked. One of his seemingly inane questions that sometimes later proved of value. But only sometimes.

“No.” Wanda smiled. “They get eager.”

Harold just bet they did.

Bonnie the Barista wandered over to see if Quinn wanted a drink. Quinn moved her back out of earshot with a glance whose meaning was unmistakable. Back off. Bonnie retreated all the way to the other end of the bar. She managed to look offended and defiant. She, not this cop, ran the place during work hours.

“What did you and Duke do after he heard the first noise?” Quinn asked Wanda.

“The mood had changed.”

Quinn could understand that.

“He got dressed and I got out of uniform,” Wanda said.

“Uniform?” Harold asked.

Quinn gave him the same look he’d given Bonnie, and Harold scooted back a few inches and was silent.

“Then Duke stuffed his clothes and Dopp kit in a suitcase,” Wanda said, “and we went down to the lobby. He went over to the desk and he asked to be moved to another room. More like demanded. Didn’t say why, and nobody asked him. The desk clerk just gave him a different key card and room number, and had a bellhop take his suitcase up.”

“Then what?” Quinn asked, almost casually. He needed to prime the pump now and then, keep Wanda talking.

“Then I came in here and had some drinks.”

“What time was that?”

“I’m not sure. Sometime around seven thirty. I was already here, and had been for a little while, before Duke came back down from moving things into his new room. He was with some convention friends.”

So around seven o’clock Duke had heard the torture and multiple murder in progress.

There was a pause in the conversation while everyone sipped his or her drink, maybe thinking about three hotel rooms, one unoccupied, one where murder had happened, and one that had contained a prostitute and her customer, worrying about what people would think and say and do if they were found out.

Something about that infuriated Quinn.

Harold gazed at Wanda and said, “Do you have a business card?”

Wanda looked at him as if he’d grown another head. Then she got a wrinkled scrap of paper from her purse and jotted down her address and phone number. She handed it to Quinn rather than to Harold or Sal. Alpha woman to alpha male. Quinn shot a glance at it and slipped it into his shirt pocket.

“You gonna stay around town?” he asked Wanda.

“Around the hotel, if you guys don’t mind.”

They didn’t.

“None of us heard that,” Quinn told her. Let the wheels of sexual commerce keep going ’round. They will anyway.

Wanda smiled.

“One thing,” she said, “so you don’t get confused when you talk to people. I was a redhead last night, not a brunette. I see some of the same clients, pass them in the lobby or halls, and changing my look kinda minimizes men doing double takes.”

“You mean triple takes,” Harold said. “One take because you look familiar, a second to make sure you’re really who they think you are, and a third because there’s something different about you.”

“You know, that’s right!”

Quinn mentally shook his head. It was just like Harold to think of that.

Wanda Woman smiled at Sal and Harold and touched Quinn lightly on the cheek as she left.

Quinn had to admit, it had an effect.

As they were leaving the hotel, Harold said, “Hide the key. How do you suppose—”

Sal said, “Forget it, Harold.”

PART TWO

I have heard the mermaids singing each to each.

—T. S. ELIOT, “The Love Song of

J. Alfred Prufrock”

15

England, 1940

In small ships and large, the evacuees kept arriving from Dunkirk. They staggered or were carried onto shore from ships tied up at docks along the coast, and sometimes where there were no docks.

Some of the evacuees were physically whole, but with hollow features and vacant stares, and memories that would haunt them forever. They were defeated men. Overjoyed to be home, but beaten. Some of them were French, but most were from the British Expeditionary Force, which, according to gossip that Betsy Douglass picked up from the other nurses, had almost ceased to exist on the continent. Where the Germans were.

Many of the men were physically wounded, some in ways fatal that wouldn’t claim their lives for weeks, but nonetheless would take them.

Betsy Douglass found herself holding a compress to a head injury to a man in a BEF uniform. He would have been soaked in blood were it not for the work of the Channel waves.

He looked up at her, smiled, and said what some nurses were accustomed to hearing. “Am I in heaven?”