by John Lutz
“I need you to find this bastard, Quinn.”
Quinn didn’t think that required a reply and kept on silently writing.
They left Renz in his office to go to the West Side address where the torso had been found. Left him in the suddenly smaller room with his plaques and commendations and ego-inflating framed photographs.
Right now, it wasn’t a comfortable place for him.
14
The three of them were in Quinn’s old Lincoln on the way to the West Side address where the latest torso had been found. Quinn was driving, Pearl beside him, Fedderman in back. They were headed uptown on Broadway. Traffic was heavy, and there was a haze that smelled like exhaust fumes over everything. The sun angled in low along the side streets and turned the haze golden.
As Quinn veered around a sightseeing bus to make better time, Pearl’s cell phone buzzed and vibrated in her pocket.
She fished it out and saw by caller ID that the call’s origin was Golden Sunset.
Her mother. Had to be. A familiar dread and anger closed in on her.
Quinn glanced over at her, wondering if she was going to answer her call.
Feeling that she had little choice, Pearl made the connection. “Officer Kasner.” Let her mother know she was working. She glanced at Quinn, who was staring straight ahead. Was he smiling? Was that bastard smiling?
“It’s your mother, Pearl,” came the strident voice from the phone. Pearl didn’t want to hear it, yet she had to press the tiny phone close to her ear so Quinn and Fedderman couldn’t overhear.
“Pearl? Is that you, dear?”
“Yes.” Keep it terse and simple. Brief.
“I called your apartment, dear, and got your machine. Such a world since we started using machines to answer our phones. Maybe the phones could just talk to each other. Don’t you ever check your messages?”
“Sometimes.” Brief.
“Maybe your machine erases mine. What I wondered, dear, is if you and Milton Kahn left each other on good terms.”
Huh?
“I mean, after last night,” her mother said.
What? This was unacceptable. “Who told you? What do you mean?” Unacceptable!
“That’s two questions, dear.”
“Then answer them both.”
“Don’t snap, Pearl. That’s very rude. Mrs. Kahn told me. And why not? It’s no secret you and her nephew Milton are hotsy-totsy.”
Pearl had a pretty good idea where Mrs. Kahn had gotten her information. She fell silent, noticing Quinn watching her from the corner of his eye. “Some things you don’t talk about,” Pearl said.
“Don’t you know I agree with you, dear? But these were extraordinary circumstances. Mrs. Kahn tells me Milton is worried sick about you. About your personal safety. They—Mrs. Kahn and wonderful Milton—thought I should talk to you about it.”
Wonderful Milton’s going to learn to keep his mouth shut. “I appreciate his concern, but it’s really none of his business. Or the business of whomever he might have told.”
“The people who love you, darling Pearl, they’re concerned. What else do we have in this world where everything, including your own mother, will someday turn to dust? Someday soon, I might add in all sincerity, feeling more and more distressed every day as I do here in this nursing home hell.”
“Assisted living. It’s not a nursing home. Assisted-living apartments with televisions, comfortable beds, kitchens, private baths, recliners, all the food you can eat—including the pot roast you like so much. People who were on The Lawrence Welk Show come there to perform. There are game rooms, buses to Atlantic City. They’re assisted-living apartments.”
“Death’s waiting rooms, dear.”
Pearl was seething. “I think not.” She so yearned to terminate this conversation. “Is that all you wanted? If so, I’m busy.”
“You’re being snappish again.”
“I mean to be.”
“What I want is for you to consider the future, Pearl. Milton and a home—and children, God willing. A place without killers and guns and knives and rap talk. There are other jobs, Pearl. Milton said to Mrs. Kahn that you could work as his receptionist. It would be safe there. He wants you off the streets, Pearl. We all do. The people who—”
“Yeah, yeah. This is my job.”
“What I’m saying, Pearl, is there are other jobs.”
Like dermatologist receptionist.
Quinn blasted the horn and cursed at a battered, dusty cab that had cut him off.
“Is that that nice Mr. Quinn I hear, Pearl?”
“The same.”
“Such a good man. A protector and a provider. You should feel blessed, Pearl. You have your choice between two good men—one a mensch policeman retired with a generous pension, and the other a medical doctor, no less.”
“An obsessive maniac and a weasel.”
“What?” Quinn asked.
“I was talking into the phone.”
“What, dear?”
“I have to end this conversation, really.”
Quinn blasted the horn again, still focused on the cab that had cut him off. The driver extended his arm out the window and raised his middle finger.
Quinn leaned on the horn again. “If we had time I’d pull that bastard over.”
“We’ve got time,” Fedderman said from the backseat. “Lady we’re going to see is dead.”
“Look at that asshole, Feds!”
“Cabbies think they own the road like cops,” Fedderman said.
“Screw a buncha cabbies.”
“Pearl? Dear?”
“I need to go now. Sorry.”
Pearl broke the connection and sat seething over weasel Milton yammering his business to his motormouthed aunt.
What was wrong with the world?
“Was that your mother?” Quinn asked, seeing clear pavement ahead and goosing the car to higher speed.
“How’d you guess?” Pearl asked.
“Shoulda told her I said hi.”
“I should have, since she thinks you’re God.”
“Shoulda told her hi from me, too,” Fedderman said from the backseat.
“She thinks you’re a prick,” Pearl said.
The passageway where the dusty green Dumpster squatted like a military tank without a gun was blocked off at both ends with yellow crime scene tape. CSU techs were swarming busily about the scene with their luminol, magnifiers, tweezers, and plastic evidence bags. Tagging and bagging. The photographer was finished and tinkering with her equipment. Nobody seemed to want to look directly at the pale, waxy flesh object beside the Dumpster.
Quinn glanced around and didn’t see Nift. Maybe the Napoleonic little pest had come and gone.
Then a woman wearing jeans, a black T-shirt, and one of those vests with a thousand pockets approached. She was in her forties and had short brown hair in a practical cut, a trim body, and a sweet, lined face that was slightly red around the nose and eyes, as if she had rosacea. She was carrying a black medical bag.
“Detective Quinn?”
He admitted it.
She smiled. Nice teeth—probably used whitener. “I’m Dr. Chavesky from the medical examiner’s office.”
“I expected Nift.”
“He had to go out of town on business.” Again the smile. Blinding but natural. “Disappointed?”
“Not so far.” He nodded toward the torso. “Finished with it?”
“Her? Yeah. I’m up on the case. As far as a preliminary gets us, she’s the same as the others. Shot through the heart, obvious postmortem trauma to the vaginal area. The point of whatever was shoved into her snagged on her labia minor. The way she was taken apart—crude but effective dismemberment.”
“Bullet still in her?” Pearl asked. She and Fedderman had been standing off to the side, listening. Dr. Chavesky turned her attention to them, knowing they were with Quinn, a set. “Yes. No exit wound. It’s a small caliber and it feels like it went through the sternum. We’ll have to see if it didn�
�t break up too much to run a comparative ballistics test.”
“Kill her right away?” Fedderman asked.
“Probably not. But within a few minutes. Of course, it’s also possible the killer shot her more than once. Obviously, the entire body isn’t here.”
Quinn looked over at the torso, the headless end. He quickly looked away. “How long’s she been dead?”
“My estimate’s ten to fifteen hours. I’d say she was in her early thirties when the clock stopped for her.”
“Any other trauma to her body?”
She gave him a look. “Besides the vaginal penetration and dismemberment, no. Just the bullet. It appears to have entered from a point directly in front of her while she was standing.” Chavesky glanced at her watch. “EMS should be here any minute to remove the body, unless you want them to leave it for a while. I gotta go.”
“We won’t be long looking it over,” Quinn said.
Dr. Chavesky nodded. “I’ll get a comprehensive postmortem report to you as soon as possible.”
She and Quinn exchanged cards. He glanced down at hers and saw that her full name was Dr. Linda Chavesky. He slipped the card into his shirt pocket, behind his folded reading glasses, and watched the doctor duck gracefully beneath the crime scene tape and climb into a gray city car. Though she was slender, she had to be strong, judging by the effortless way she handled the large black medical bag.
Quinn and his two detectives walked over to the nude torso.
Nift would have remarked on the victim’s breasts, which were not large, but well formed even in death. A young woman, all right. So much life stolen from her. Quinn quickly examined where her arms had been severed, where her head had been severed. He was able to do so without suffering any reaction. That would come later, when he was alone and not on the job. She had black pubic hair, and it didn’t take a doctor to know that violence had been done to the vaginal area.
“It would have been easy to put her behind the Dumpster,” Pearl said. “Even inside it.” The sweet, rotting smell coming from the Dumpster—she hoped that’s where it came from—was making her nauseated.
“Our guy wanted her found as soon as possible,” Fedderman said.
“Question’s why,” Pearl said.
“We’ll think on it,” Fedderman told her, giving her a look that let her know she’d stated the obvious.
“Sure. We’re detectives.”
“Act like it,” Quinn said. He didn’t want them getting into a spat, especially in front of the CSU people. They were pretending not to be listening, but he knew they were.
“No tattoos on any of the victims,” Fedderman said. “Could just be coincidence.”
“No nipple, nose, or belly button rings, either,” Pearl said.
Quinn looked at her with something like approval.
“What the hell does that mean?” Fedderman asked.
“Maybe nothing.”
“Means they probably didn’t run with a kinky crowd,” Quinn said. “Not part of the S&M scene, that kinda thing.”
Fedderman pointed at the lifeless, violated torso. “You don’t call that sadism?”
Quinn let out a long breath. “You’ve got a point.”
“An interesting one to ponder,” Pearl said.
“Whether they’re S&M snuff victims?” Fedderman asked.
“No. Whether you’ve got a point.”
She’d said it thoughtfully, obviously not trying to rag Fedderman.
Neither man questioned her about it. When Pearl let her mind go off on its own, which she often did, they knew not to disturb her.
Let her ponder. It would keep her mind off her phone call from her mother, or whatever had upset her. Keep her from snapping at people.
Later that day, Linda Chavesky phoned Quinn on his cell. She told him the victim’s heart had been struck by a fragment of a twenty-two-caliber bullet that had nicked the sternum going in and broken into three pieces.
“It wouldn’t have killed her right away,” she said, “but it probably would have put her down, into shock.”
“A second shot, then,” Quinn said, “to a part of the body not found. Her head, probably.”
“Most likely. Or the severing of a large artery in her neck or thigh by a knife. We don’t know if she bled to death or the blood simply drained out of her when she was dismembered. That could happen if she was dismembered soon after death, and the blood hadn’t had time to coagulate.”
Quinn didn’t say anything, thinking this was sounding more and more like a professional hit man—the shooting part. One to the heart, another shot or two to the head, to make sure.
“Another thing. She suffered vaginal penetration, then beyond, by a cylindrical, sharply pointed wooden object, consistent with a sawed-off and sharpened broomstick. This was after she was killed.”
“How do you know it was wooden?” Quinn asked, figuring he was going to hear again about the furniture polish lubricant.
“I put in some extra time on this one. Found a splinter.”
“Excellent. That’s something for sure that we were only guessing at before.”
“That a compliment?”
“You bet.”
“Whatever penetrated her left a slightly oily residue.”
“Furniture polish,” Quinn said. “It was in the other victims. But it didn’t necessarily mean wood for sure, until you found the splinter.” He could imagine the killer lovingly sharpening and polishing the deadly piece of broomstick—if that’s what it was. Helen Iman would suggest it was a phallic symbol. She might be right.
“I’d put the victim in her early thirties, average weight, and most likely curvaceous,” Linda said. “A magnet for men.” She kind of surprised Quinn. Usually M.E.s weren’t so voluble or willing to speculate, especially over the phone to detectives they’d only recently met.
“Hold on a minute,” she said.
Quinn waited, the phone pressed to his ear, hearing unintelligible voices in the background on the other end of the connection.
Linda’s voice came back on. “My friend from ballistics just gave me the report on the bullet. It was fired by the same gun that killed the other victims. So there’s something else you know for sure. You wanna meet someplace for coffee?”
“Pardon?”
“You don’t need a pardon; you’re a cop. I’m asking you out on a date. You’re not exactly a real NYPD cop, and even if you were, you’d be my superior officer, so it wouldn’t be sexual harassment. A yes or no’ll do.”
Quinn got over his surprise and thought, what the hell. Laughed. “It’s a yes, Linda. We’ll meet somewhere for drinks.”
“I did say coffee.”
Quinn sensed that he’d tweaked a nerve. “Sure. Coffee it is.”
“I used to drink alcohol for nonmedicinal purposes. I’ll be up front about that.”
“You’ve got lots of company if you used to have a drinking problem,” Quinn said, thinking immediately that he shouldn’t have told her that. She hadn’t exactly said she’d had a problem.
“Nobody ‘used to have’ a drinking problem, Captain Quinn. I’ve been dry for over two years and intend to stay that way.”
“It’s just Quinn, Linda. Tonight at the Lotus Diner on Amsterdam suit you?”
“Sure does. I know where it is. About seven?”
“Let’s make it six. We might have coffee, then decide to go out for dinner.”
“We’ve got a date, Quinn.”
Quinn was smiling. Then he remembered this was an official conversation. “Anything else about the victim, Doctor?”
“She didn’t drown.”
A date, Quinn thought, staring at the phone’s tiny blank screen. What unsettled him somewhat wasn’t that Linda Chavesky had come on to him. In his early fifties, he was still at least presentable enough to be in the game. What struck him was that not once during his conversation with Linda had he thought about Pearl.
He knew he was as obsessive and stubborn, as Pearl often
told him he was, but even the most determined person finally got tired of knocking on a door and not getting an answer, of waiting patiently and then waiting some more.
Maybe Pearl had finally convinced him that any possibility of them ever being in a loving relationship again was gone forever. Possibly she was right and that was how it should be, accepted by both of them and not just her.
Or maybe he was simply giving up hope.
And grasping for more hope.
15
Jill had settled on E-Bliss.org.
She’d checked out several of the matchmaking services on the Internet, limiting them to those based in or serving New York City. There was no shortage of them, especially if you had some sort of exotic sexual preference. A few of them seemed respectable if not downright staid. It was among those that she’d found E-Bliss.org. She’d carefully filled out its online questionnaire for its personality profile. She’d had a flattering photo, a head shot from a wedding she’d attended a few years ago back home, already on her hard drive. She’d attached the jpeg along with the filled-out, surprisingly detailed questionnaire, then put it on “Mail Waiting to Be Sent” and given herself two days to reconsider.
Two days later, to the hour, she’d drawn a deep breath and clicked her computer’s mouse on SEND.
Almost immediately she’d received an e-mail telling her what a wise choice she’d made, how wonderful she appeared in her photograph, how perfect was her personality profile. She could be assured that there were many suitable males who would request a meeting with her. She could establish a password and browse through profiles of potential partners or, as most clients did, wait for the experts at E-Bliss.org to use their comprehensive database and special software to match her with the best possible choice.
Jill didn’t hesitate before moving her computer’s cursor to the button requesting expert matchmaking. That was what she was paying for on her Visa card. God knew she hadn’t done well on her own when it came to attracting and choosing among men. Let the experts do it for her. If they could design her closet and scrapbook, they could design her life. She clicked the mouse and immediately felt relieved. She’d made her choice and followed through.
