by John Lutz
He placed one hand on her head, and the other on her right thigh, using her to brace himself as he stood up. Suddenly his weight was off her entirely. She felt her shirt yanked up to cover her head.
She lay curled and quiet on her side, not attempting to stand.
The woods were silent.
It seemed as if forever passed.
Beth tried a scream and merely choked. Tried again.
This time she emitted a loud screech.
Then several more.
A great roar startled her and she drew her body into a ball.
Another roar. She recognized this one as a motorcycle engine.
The cycle gave two loud, abrupt snarls, as if issuing a final warning to Beth, and then roared intermittently and unsteadily as it made its way along the narrow path. Beth heard the Harley clear its throat like a triumphant beast as it broke from the woods. A few seconds later it emitted a steady yowl as it reached the state road.
Beth screamed some more, and then fell silent.
She continued to lie on her side, motionless. She didn’t want to rejoin the world outside the woods anytime soon. The darkness that had been her enemy had now become her ally and protector. Time moved for her, but slowly and in a disjointed manner.
Willis, at the convenience store, heard the scream when he stepped outside to bring in his LIVE BAIT folding sign.
He was sure it wasn’t an animal.
15
New York, the present
Mishkin and Vitali phoned Quinn on their way to the Nora Noon crime scene and arrived before anyone other than the two uniforms who’d taken the call in their radio car. One of the uniforms, a guy named Sorkin, had worked before with the two detectives and nodded to them. Sorkin had a long, lean face dotted with moles. His features were pale, making the moles more prominent, and he was perspiring. Vitali knew it would take a lot to bring about that kind of physical reaction in the veteran cop.
They were in the hall outside an open apartment door.
“We got a dead woman in the bedroom,” the other uniform said. A black man with a small, neat mustache and sad eyes with a lot of white showing beneath the dark irises. Sorkin nodded as if to show that he agreed with his partner.
Before entering the apartment, Vitali glanced over at a graceful, astonishingly attractive woman with black hair and high cheekbones. Alongside her was her physical opposite, a sweaty, chubby guy in dark green work clothes. They were down the hall about twenty feet, pretty much out of earshot.
“Those two are the building super and a friend of the vic,” Sorkin said.
“Which one’s the super?” Vitali asked in his gravel-pan voice.
“Not the time to joke, Sal,” Mishkin admonished him. He looked at Sorkin with his mild blue eyes. “Go on with what you were saying.”
Sorkin bobbed his head. “They discovered the body when they found the chain lock on and nobody answered their knock or call. Michelle, that’s the female one, had an appointment with Noon and she never showed. Michelle couldn’t raise her on the phone or by knocking, so the super-he’s the-”
“We know,” Mishkin said.
“Well, he couldn’t get in with his key because of the chain lock. Michelle told him to go get a bolt cutter, and he did.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Vitali growled.
“They smelled something coming from the bedroom, like what you can smell even out here.”
“Not barbecue,” Sorkin’s partner said.
“We’ll go in and have a look,” Vitali said. “Hold on to Michelle and the super, figuratively speaking, so we can get their statements.”
“I get Michelle,” Sorkin’s partner said.
Mishkin gave him a withering look.
“Everybody on the way?” Vitali asked.
It was Sorkin who answered. “Sure, we called it in. That’s procedure. You know that. Crime scene unit’s on the way, along with the ME, some real detectives-excuse me, Sal, but I mean, you two guys have gone private.”
“Semi-private, in this case,” Sal said.
“What exactly does that mean?” Sorkin asked.
“We got special powers even though we’re once removed, like a divorced father on visiting day.”
Sorkin seemed to think that over and find it adequate.
Mishkin removed a small tube from a pocket, squeezed a worm of something onto the tip of his right forefinger, and smeared it into his bushy gray mustache. The eye-watering smell of menthol displaced the faint odor of scorched flesh. If he didn’t supplant the various stenches of death with the overriding pungency of mentholated cream, Mishkin’s stomach sometimes acted up at homicide scenes.
“Ready, Harold?” Vitali asked.
Mishkin dried his finger with a handkerchief, nodded, and they went in.
The first thing they noticed was the blood. It was all over the body. Then it became obvious that some of it wasn’t blood, but the red of raw flesh showing at the edges and beneath where skin had been sliced. Peeled flesh. The victim appeared to have been partially skinned alive. Some of her pale skin was dangling in shreds, left attached at the top and narrowing to points at the bottom. There was more blood that had come from where skin had been broken on the victim’s wrists and ankles, from her struggle against the pain.
Pain showed in every line and angle of her face, as if she still suffered even in death. Like the first victim, her eyes were fixated with horror and staring at nothing. There was a thin silver chain around her neck, bearing the letter S.
On the nightstand next to the bed was an electric hair curler. Sal noted that it had been switched off. He also noted the dozens of narrow rectangular burns all over the victim’s nude body. Burns where they would hurt the most. Was she burned before or after the partial skinning? Any of the injuries would have caused the victim to lose consciousness, but there had been no relief from the pain. As with the last victim, around this one lingered the faint but sharp odor of ammonia. Vitali figured Harold might not have needed his mentholated cream this time.
“Sadistic bastard!” Harold said.
“The window’s partly opened over there,” Vitali said. “That’s why the chain lock was on. He locked her in before going down the fire escape.”
Noises behind them made them turn, figuring it was the crime scene unit, or even real detectives.
It was Quinn.
“Feds is out in the hall interviewing the super and the woman who found the body,” he said. “Pearl’s on the way.”
Sirens began echoing through the city’s stone canyons. Everyone stood and listened for a moment, and it became obvious the yowling was headed in their direction.
Of course, all that yowling didn’t mean the vehicles were making good time in Manhattan traffic. Emergency vehicles could howl and yodel as if they were doing ninety while sitting perfectly still blocked in by cars.
“Bet you Pearl will beat them here,” Sal said.
Quinn shook his head. “I wouldn’t bet against Pearl.”
He strained forward toward the corpse, noticing something, then went over and looked more closely at one of the bound and bloody ankles.
“Looks like something, probably a finger, has been dragged through this blood,” he said.
They all glanced around, and then moved toward the bathroom at the same time. The other two detectives fell back in deference to Quinn and let him enter first.
There were bloodstains in the white basin and on white towels. But most of the blood was on the medicine cabinet mirror, where it had been used to write what presumably was a man’s name: Simon Luttrell.
Quinn left the bathroom and moved through the bedroom and down a short hall to the living room. Sorkin and his partner were still there, the partner leaning in the doorway, Sorkin visible outside in the hall. Guarding the crime scene even though Harley Renz’s growing and unhealthy influence had gotten Quinn and his team inside before the yellow tape went up.
Quinn nodded at the two uniforms as he went out into the h
all. The sirens were right outside now, some of them growling to silence. They were going to beat Pearl here after all.
Fedderman, standing with pencil and notebook and talking to Michelle Roper, looked over at Quinn.
“Do either of you know or know of someone named Simon Luttrell?” Quinn asked.
“He don’t live in the building,” said the super immediately.
Michelle gave the question a few more seconds’ thought. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him.”
Quinn nodded and said, “Come on into the apartment when you’re done here, Feds.”
“Just a few more questions,” Fedderman said.
“You hear that a lot on TV,” the super said.
Quinn edged his way around Sorkin and his partner and went back into Noon’s apartment. Mishkin was standing in the living room. Vitali came in from the hall that led to the bedrooms and bathroom.
“The bedroom she’s not in,” Vitali said. “It’s full of nothing but clothes. I mean really full of clothes.”
“The second bedroom, you mean?” Mishkin asked.
Vitali stared at him.
“How would you know which is which, Harold?” Mishkin could be a trial sometimes. Vitali bore him like a cross.
“The second one’s usually smaller. Did you check to see about size?”
“It’s not supposed to matter,” Vitali growled. “The thing is, that bedroom’s damn near bursting open, what with all the clothes in there. Most of them are on hangers, but some are just piled on the floor. I mean, a hell of a lot of clothes.”
“Maybe she was in some kinda clothes business,” Mishkin ventured.
“Nothing in there looked secondhand to me, Harold.”
“Maybe she was a designer,” Mishkin said.
Sal smiled. “Or a master of disguise.”
“Wouldn’t it be mistress of disguise?” Mishkin asked.
“Not unless she was a dominatrix or some married guy’s secret girlfriend.”
“Couldn’t she be both?”
Quinn knew what they were doing, cracking wise to stay sane, to scare away the ghosts. Cops had to learn to do that, if they were going to last.
He stopped listening to Vitali and Mishkin as he heard a commotion in the hall, a lot of clinking and clacking of equipment along with hurried, shuffling footfalls on the carpet. The sirens outside were fully stopped now. The troops had arrived, and in force. Sorkin and his partner moved back as if facing a tsunami to give them a clear route to the apartment.
Pearl was the first one through the door.
16
Michelle Roper had informed Quinn that Nora Noon had a sister somewhere in New Jersey. It hadn’t taken long to find her, not very far away in Teaneck. Fedderman waited at the morgue the next morning for the sister, Penny Noon, who was driving in to the city to identify the body.
The victim’s sister turned out to be a half sister, an attractive woman with choppy blond hair with dark streaks in it that looked deliberate. There wasn’t much of a family resemblance to her murdered sister, maybe because the victim was obviously much the younger of the two. Penny had a fuller face, calm gray eyes with the beginnings of crow’s-feet, and full lips with pink gloss. She did have the same deeply cleft chin as the victim. Her demeanor was tense but controlled, her strong features seemingly placid.
After the introductions, Penny, Fedderman, and a guy named Clarkson, from Renz’s office, stood and waited for Nora Noon’s postmortem photograph to appear on a monitor mounted at eye level on the wall. Clarkson wasn’t yet forty and dressed in a sharp gray suit, starched white shirt, and gold-clasped tie, making Fedderman by comparison look… like Fedderman.
There were chairs angled around the viewing room, but no one was sitting down. Penny had refused the offer of a chair, and the two men felt obligated to stand with her. She was slightly behind Renz’s man and standing on Fedderman’s right, about a foot away from him. Fedderman recalled the victim’s bulging eyes and horror-stricken expression. He knew what might happen and made himself ready to catch a falling body.
But Nora Noon’s head-shot photo was surprisingly without the horror of yesterday in that stifling apartment. Her eyes were closed and her facial muscles worked into a neutral expression. The photo was cropped so it showed none of the burn marks on her neck and farther down on her body. None of the stripped flesh.
“Her,” Penny Noon said from somewhere deep in her throat. And in a steadier voice: “That’s Nora.”
Then she emitted a soft sound halfway between a sigh and a sob, and her body sagged against Fedderman.
He caught her and helped her-carried her, actually-to one of the padded black chairs and lowered her gently into it.
She came around suddenly, as if someone had waved smelling salts under her nose. She looked into Fedderman’s eyes, causing something in him to turn over and over, and appeared profoundly embarrassed.
“It’s all right,” he heard himself say. He watched his arm move independent of thought and his hand pat the back of hers.
He realized he was kneeling down in front of the chair like an idiot about to propose marriage. His knee was sore from supporting his weight on the hard tile floor. For some reason he was afraid to look again into her eyes, as if a part of him knew that something profound might happen. Again.
Listening to his aching knee creak, Fedderman made himself stand and turn at the same time. As he did so he glanced up, and was relieved to see a blank monitor screen rather than the dead woman’s photo.
“It’s all right,” he repeated. “This part’s over.”
“For Nora, everything’s over.” He thought she was going to start sobbing, but she bit back any show of emotion or loss of control. “It’s so goddamned unfair,” she said in a resigned voice.
“It is,” he agreed.
“I guess everyone says that.”
“Everyone’s right.”
She looked around slowly, as if gradually waking from a dark dream and finding herself in strange surroundings.
“God!” she said, shaking her head.
“He’s in the mix somewhere,” Fedderman said, knowing as he heard the words that it was an inane thing to say.
She gave him a closer look, curious, her eyes intent and traveling in brief glances, as if she was mapping his features. He could not look away.
“Are you a religious man?” she asked.
“I have been a few times,” Fedderman said, “when I was sufficiently scared.”
Her wide lips curved upward in a slight smile that stayed. Her hands were in her lap, turned palms up and trembling, as if she were waiting for her fortune to be told and dreading the prognosis.
“That applies to me, too,” she said.
Renz’s man had come over and was standing looking down at her. “You okay, ma’am?” he asked.
“Okay enough.”
He nodded, gave her a smile that meant nothing, and left the room, his mission as witness to the identification completed.
“There goes a piece of the bureaucracy,” Penny said.
“I’m a piece of the bureaucracy, too.”
“You don’t seem a precise fit.”
Fedderman didn’t know what she meant by that remark, but he was sure he approved.
“I need something,” Penny said.
“A drink?”
“Something warm. Coffee, decaffeinated. I think I saw a vending machine when I entered the building.”
“You wouldn’t want to drink anything that came out of that,” Fedderman heard himself say. “I know a place where we could go.”
I must be out of my mind.
She looked at him for several seconds before nodding, as if confirming what he’d been thinking.
17
Despite the early hour, Quinn and Jerry Lido sat next to each other on bar stools at O’Keefe’s Oasis. They were the only ones in the place consuming alcohol. The three other drinkers, two men and a woman, were sipping coffee. Quinn had consumed only hal
f of his mimosa-a mixture of champagne and orange juice-when he generously ordered another scotch and water for Jerry. It had been Quinn’s idea to come here.
“Better ease up on those,” the bartender said to Jerry, as he placed the drink on the bar.
“Not to worry, Jim,” Jerry answered with a grin. “I got my desecrated driver.”
Jim glanced disapprovingly at Quinn as he moved away down the bar. O’Keefe’s was near Jerry’s apartment, and Jerry was one of the regulars. Maybe they liked him here. Jerry wasn’t a bad guy when he wasn’t involved in selfflagellation.
Quinn got Jerry talking about the investigation and his computer expertise, and suggested they leave so Jerry could demonstrate something online. On the walk to Jerry’s apartment, they ducked into a liquor store and bought a bottle of J amp;B scotch, Jerry’s favorite. Quinn paid. He knew Jerry was great with his computer when he was sober. Drunk he was brilliant.
After about an hour, Quinn said good-bye and left Jerry’s apartment. Deep in an alcoholic and electronic trance, concentrating on his monitor and mouse and nothing else, Jerry barely noticed.
When Quinn entered the office, Pearl looked at him pretty much as Jim the bartender had in O’Keefe’s.
“You smell like booze,” she said.
“I’ve been-”
“I can guess what you’ve been doing. Drinking with Jerry Lido. Where is he?”
Quinn glanced around. “Where’s who?”
“Are you drunk, too?”
“Who’s too?”
“ Too would be Jerry Lido, who I’m sure is soused despite the early hour.”
“No, I’m not soused. Nor am I smashed nor looped nor plastered. Jerry’s on the edge, I’d say.”
“You’re sure right about that.”
“He’s working now on his computer. Maybe he’ll come up with something.”
“Like sclerosis of the liver.”
“Don’t be so rough on him, Pearl.”