John Lutz Bundle

by John Lutz

  Pearl could understand that. Right in the middle of all this art-gone-mad architecture and expensive renewal, an ugly reminder of poverty and death might be especially jolting.

  When Pearl glanced back across the street, she saw that the woman in the jogging outfit was gone. She’d been simply an onlooker who’d stopped to stare. Yet there was that familiarity. Pearl was certain she’d seen the woman before in the course of this investigation, somewhere standing in the shadows. Shadow woman, she thought.

  Fedderman suddenly appeared. His suit coat was wrinkled, and where he might have worn a tie was what looked to be a spaghetti-sauce stain. Behind him were Mishkin and Vitali, looking like a bemused accountant tailed by one of the brothers in The Godfather.

  It was going to be crowded inside the crime-scene tape, so the two vice guys nodded their good-byes and left.

  The three detectives who’d just arrived took in the scene. Fedderman’s face was a blank. Vitali looked keenly interested. Mishkin, who had a notoriously weak stomach, went chalk white and turned away.

  “Bring them up to date, Pearl,” Quinn said.

  “Can I have the body?” Nift asked.

  “If you want it,” Quinn said. To Pearl: “Make sure there’s nothing interesting under it.”

  “Like a nipple or two,” Nift said.

  He straightened up to his full Napoleonic stature and motioned for the waiting paramedics to remove the body.

  Quinn walked off to the side and punched out a number on his cell phone. He stood at the edge of the crime-scene tape with the phone pressed to his ear.

  “Who’s he calling?” Vitali asked. “Everybody’s here except Eliot Ness.”

  Pearl shrugged. She didn’t know for sure who was on the other end of Quinn’s phone conversation, but she figured that if she guessed Cindy Sellers, she wouldn’t be far wrong.

  The devil getting her due.

  22

  Quinn’s phone call from Nift the next day at the office shed more light on the dead woman found on Eighteenth Street. She’d had a high alcohol level in her body, along with traces of methamphetamine. Cause of death was the stab wound in her chest. The slicing off of her nipples and the X carved into her abdomen had occurred after death, as had the slit in her throat. Probably the same knife had been used to inflict all the injuries.

  “Was she stoned when she died?” Quinn asked.

  “It’s doubtful. She wasn’t legally drunk, and the meth wasn’t enough to have made her stoned. I’m not saying she used these two substances simultaneously. The meth stays in the blood one to three days, in the urine even longer.”

  “Time of death?” Quinn asked.

  “I make it between midnight and three a.m. Something else, Quinn, she displayed all the signs of heavy drug use over a long period of time. And not just meth. She was a real veteran, and on the way out. Needle marks on both arms and between her toes. Hadn’t bathed in at least a week. This cunt probably smelled better dead than alive.”

  “She was somebody’s daughter or sister,” Quinn reminded him, “so why be such a contemptible asshole?”

  “Hey, I’m somebody’s son. Don’t have a brother, though. Don’t get your undies all twisted, Quinn. I’m just trying to get across to you the deplorable shape this vic was in even before she was spoon-fed and offed. If the killer hadn’t gotten her, she wouldn’t have lasted much longer on her own.”

  “Any identification yet?”

  “No. Who’d want to claim her?”

  “Would your mother claim you?”

  “You would have to ask her nice.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. Next time try to get me a higher class of victim.”

  Nift hung up before Quinn could reproach him.

  That was okay. Quinn had other things on his mind.

  Quinn sat staring at the phone on his desk, letting his mind continue to work on the conversation with Nift.

  The death of the Chelsea woman certainly bore the Carver’s signature, except for the fatal stab to the heart. And the Carver had inflicted the breast and torso injuries before slitting his victims’ throats.

  Was the Carver getting soft?

  Not likely. That wasn’t the way with sadistic killers.

  All but one of his other victims had been killed indoors, in their apartments, except for Rhonda Nathan, who’d been killed at work in her office. Possibly he’d learned his lesson. Maybe for some reason he’d had to kill the Eighteenth Street woman outdoors, and wanted to minimize the flow of blood. There would be nowhere to wash up after maiming her breasts and abdomen and then slashing her throat, and blood tended to spurt from the large arteries in the neck. The stab to the heart had been relatively neat. It would cause immediate death and minimize blood flow from subsequent wounds.

  A warm flow of air stirred the papers on Quinn’s desk as Pearl entered the office and nodded a good morning to him.

  “Doughnut?” she asked, holding up a Krispy Kreme bag.

  He told her no thanks and said he’d just hung up on Nift.

  “Glad I didn’t have to talk to the little asshole this early in the morning,” she said. She went over to the coffee brewer and poured some of the strong black liquid into her mug. The trickle of coffee caught the lamplight for a moment and glowed a beautiful translucent amber. Pearl added powdered cream, which did not look so inspirational going in.

  While she sat at her desk dunking a doughnut, Quinn told her about his and Nift’s conversation.

  She licked glaze from her fingers. “We could have a copycat killer, what with the news about the investigation being reopened.” She deftly flicked her tongue over the back of her thumb. “Could be some psycho thinks he can have a free one by blaming it on the Carver.”

  “Or the Carver has simply changed his M.O. after all this time. His compulsion would demand that the essentials remain the same, but he might change the details. He might be more practical.”

  “Huh?” Pearl sipped at her coffee.

  Quinn told her his theory about the killer minimizing the bloodshed so he’d be less likely to have noticeable and incriminating stains on his clothes or person.

  “Maybe,” she said, but she sounded dubious. She glanced around. “Where’s Fedderman?”

  “He drove the unmarked down to Eighteenth Street. Gonna talk to the people who live and work around where the body was found. Maybe somebody noticed something. Mishkin’s down there, too.”

  “How about Vitali?”

  “He’s at a precinct house utilizing the vast resources of the NYPD.”

  “Or reporting to Renz.”

  “Better Vitali than me,” Quinn said.

  He noticed that Pearl had left a glazed doughnut untouched on a paper napkin on her desk. As he gave in to temptation and parted his lips to ask her for it, his phone rang again.

  This time it was Vitali.

  “Waddya got, Sal?” Quinn asked.

  Vitali started telling Quinn about the postmortem results on the Eighteenth Street victim, but Quinn interrupted him and said he’d already talked with Nift.

  “Something new, though,” Vitali said. “We just got a positive ID on the dead woman. Turns out her prints were on file. Maureen Sanders, forty-four years old, no listed address, unmarried, probably unloved. She’s got a sheet. Two arrests for cocaine possession a year ago. Three arrests for prostitution the year before that. One conviction on the drug charges. She was on parole, but her P.O. hadn’t seen her in months.”

  “A street person.”

  “Street junkie,” Vitali said. “I’m still trying to find family. And by the way, that spoon that was jammed in her mouth—it was real silver.”

  “Part of a set?”

  “At one time, sure. But it looks old and like it might have been knocking around secondhand shops and flea markets for years. Good for Antiques Roadshow, but not much of a clue.”

  “Died with a silver spoon in her mouth,” Quinn said. “Ironic humor. It fits the Carver. Let’
s get a morgue photo to the media. Maybe somebody’ll claim Maureen Sanders.” Quinn thought of Cindy Sellers. “And Sal, soon as you can, will you fax that photo to me?”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ve got Mishkin down in Chelsea with Fedderman, canvassing the neighborhood where we found Sanders’s body. You gonna need him?”

  “I thought it’d be a good idea to run a check of violent crimes in South Manhattan for the last six months,” Vitali said, “see if anything similar to the Sanders killing went down. I could use Harold for that.”

  “I’ll send him to you,” Quinn said.

  He hung up the phone and stood up to slip on his suit coat. He and Pearl could drive down to Eighteenth Street in the Lincoln. On the way, he could fill her in on what Vitali had found.

  He remembered the doughnut on Pearl’s desk and turned to ask her about it, but he saw that it was gone. She was licking the back of her thumb again.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “We’re joining Feds and Mishkin.”

  She stood up, took a final sip of coffee, and wadded the white paper napkin the doughnut had rested on. She dropped the napkin into the Krispy Kreme bag, which she wadded and dropped into the wastebasket beneath her desk. It made the lightest of sounds in the metal wastebasket.

  “You eat all those doughnuts?” Quinn asked.

  “Yup. All three.”

  “You’re gonna die of a sugar high.”

  “About the time you die of doughnut remorse.”

  Had she somehow known he was about to ask for the remaining doughnut? It was eerie sometimes, the way Pearl could almost read minds.

  He didn’t mention doughnuts again as they went out to where the Lincoln was parked in front of the office.

  As they were pulling away from the curb, Quinn said, “You putting on weight?”

  Pearl smiled.

  23

  Quinn and Fedderman were in the field. Pearl spent much of a rainy afternoon alone at the office, working at her computer. The new alliance with the NYPD gave her access to select databases, but so far she hadn’t learned much more that was useful about Maureen Sanders.

  Not that she hadn’t learned some things. Sanders’s fingerprints and arrest record led to her connections with various welfare agencies in New York. Slowly her background had come to light on Pearl’s computer monitor. She’d been born in 1966 in Kansas City, Kansas, to parents who’d died within a few months of each other five years ago. Maureen had attended Kansas State University and at age nineteen had been expelled after falsely accusing her history professor of sexually assaulting her. Days later she was arrested for possession of cocaine, but claimed the drug had been planted in her car. Maybe it had been, because the charge was later dropped.

  Still, it was easy to read between the lines that Sanders had developed a serious drug problem. After her expulsion from KSU she’d attended the University of Missouri for two months before dropping out. Then she seemed to have given up on higher education. Sanders had worked for three years as a waitress in a Columbia, Missouri, restaurant and then was arrested for stealing from her employer. She moved to San Francisco and worked off and on as an exotic dancer. Eight years ago, after her first arrest for prostitution, she’d left San Francisco for Las Vegas, supposedly for a job as a dealer in a casino.

  There the thread of scant information played out. Pearl could find no record of Maureen Sanders in Las Vegas. She seemed to have been in suspended animation somewhere until she was arrested twice for prostitution in Trenton, New Jersey, three years ago. Again a gap after she failed to report to her probation officer. She appeared on New York welfare rolls two years ago, and was arrested twice on drug charges. For whatever reason the charges in New Jersey never followed her to New York, just as the California charge hadn’t followed her to New Jersey, perhaps because she lived on the streets and had no known address. Pearl guessed that until the move to New York Sanders had been able to sustain herself through prostitution. Then her drug habit and lifestyle had taken their physical toll and made that kind of work impossible.

  Pearl sat back and watched the summer drizzle running blurrily down the window facing West Seventy-ninth Street. She thought about what a familiar and dreary life Maureen Sanders had lived. Hers was a tragedy too often played out in New York, and doubtless in every big city. She happened to have fallen victim to a killer rather than to a bottle or a needle or a bitterly cold winter.

  Pearl got up and started to pour herself a cup of coffee, then decided against it and made a cup of instant hot chocolate instead. It looked so dreary outside that chocolate seemed the better choice to improve her mood.

  She returned to her computer and decided to take a break from researching Maureen Sanders. She’d probably learned all she was going to anyway. Besides, simply reading about the woman’s wasted life was depressing as hell and had probably more than the weather resulted in the choice of chocolate over coffee.

  Pearl let her fingertips drift idly over the computer’s keyboard, barely touching the hard plastic. The rain continued to fall and began making a steady dripping sound on something metallic outside the window.

  Casually—or so she told herself—she keyed in the name Yancy Taggart.

  She soon became so engrossed in her search that she’d taken only an initial sip of her chocolate.

  Yancy’s full name—apparently his real name—was Yancy Rockefeller Taggart. He’d been born in 1954 in Pasadena, California. (Twelve years older then Maureen Sanders, yet he seemed so much younger.) Pearl was relieved when she was unable to find a police record. He had a business administration degree from Brandon University, served four years in the Coast Guard as something called an information officer, and finished his tour of duty in Norfolk, Virginia. Back in civilian life he’d gone to work in public relations for Philip Morris, then lobbied for the company when it became Altria. He was actually registered in Washington, D.C., as a lobbyist, though he’d lived at the time in North Carolina. Two years ago he’d moved to New York City and shortly thereafter resigned his position at Altria.

  Lobbyist. What sort of man would admit to being a lobbyist? And for a tobacco company?

  Of course, now he lobbied for some kind of wind power consortium. Curiously apropos.

  Pearl worked her keyboard, then the mouse.

  Though it didn’t list all its employees, there really was a National Wind Power Coalition.

  Pearl let out a long breath and sat back in her chair.

  So it’s true. Everything he told me is true. He actually is a lobbyist for something called the National Wind Power Coalition, headquartered in New York City. Windmills on skyscrapers. Maybe it’s possible. At least some people think so. Maybe not Yancy, their lobbyist, but some people.

  Pearl closed the windows she’d visited, then clicked on the computer’s history and deleted everything pertaining to Yancy Taggart. He was her own personal business, certainly not Quinn’s or Fedderman’s.

  She had wronged Yancy. As much as called the poor man a liar. Why did she always treat men’s small talk or compliments as lies or insults? Had she become too cynical?

  She decided to call Yancy and suggest they go to dinner tonight. He’d accept her invitation. They’d dine and sip wine in a nice, quiet restaurant, and he’d almost surely find some excuse to try to smooth talk her into going with him to his apartment.

  Pearl decided that she’d go. Not without a bit of a hassle, but she’d go.

  She was reaching across her desk to call Yancy’s number when Quinn’s desk phone rang.

  Pearl punched the glowing button that directed the call to her line. She told the caller he’d reached Quinn and Associates Investigations.

  “It’s Sal,” Vitali said in his gravelly voice. “Quinn around?”

  “Just me at the moment. You got Quinn’s cell number?”

  “Yeah, but you’ll do. I was just being polite. I’d much rather talk to you.”

  “You’re so full of bullshit I’m surprised grass doesn’t gro
w on you.”

  Damn it! There I go again!

  “Be that as it may,” Vitali said, “you guys need to know something. Harold was working his computer, doing some cross-checking with violent crimes against women in and around New York. He found an interesting one. Woman named Mary Bakehouse, attacked in her Village apartment three nights ago by a guy who was about to work her over with a knife, when he was scared away by something. Could’ve been our guy.”

  “Three nights ago, you said?”

  “Yeah. The uniforms who took the call said she was scared shitless, had a hard time even telling them what had happened.”

  “You’d think she’d have wanted police protection.”

  “The guy warned her not to tell anyone, and she took it seriously. Besides, she was embarrassed as well as terrified. Not all women are like you, Pearl, with a set of balls.”

  “Aw, that’s one of the nicest things you ever said to me, Sal. Should I adjust my protective cup and go talk to this shrinking violet?”

  “Pearl, I meant it as a compliment.”

  “I know, Sal.”

  “Harold and I were gonna go talk to the victim while there’s still time today. I just wanted to keep you guys informed.”

  “Thanks,” Pearl said. “I’ll let Quinn know.”

  “Okay. We’ll check with you tomorrow. And Pearl…”

  “What?”

  “You okay, Pearl?”

  “Fine. Very good, in fact. Balls and all.”

  “I didn’t mean about that.”

  “Then why would you ask?”

  “I dunno. You seem distracted.”

  Pearl almost blushed. Jesus!

  “I’m fine, Sal. Just tired from sitting at my computer. Learning some sad facts about Maureen Sanders.”

  One part of her mind still thinking about calling Yancy, she told Vitali what she’d discovered about Sanders.

  “Hell of a life,” he said, when she was finished.

  “Not unlike a lot of others.”

  “So true, Pearl. Talk to you tomorrow.”