by John Lutz
“They were all killed the same way,” a nasty nasal voice said. It belonged to Dr. Julius Nift, the medical examiner. He was a short, fashion plate of a man, best described as Napoleonic. He used some sort of a shiny steel instrument to poke at the end girl on the bed, a slender redhead who looked about sixteen years old. Most of all the girls’ clothes had been cut away, some of the remnants used to cover where their throats had been cut, to minimize arterial blood being splashed around during their death throes. “Same knife, and probably its point was used for the torture leading up to their deaths.”
“Same knife used to slice the initials in their foreheads?” Quinn asked. The letters D.O.A. had been neatly carved into the foreheads of all the victims.
“Don’t know for sure, but probably.”
“Old friend of yours,” Renz said to Quinn, and just like that Quinn was back at the lake in Maine, listening to—feeling—the reverberation of a rifle shot.
The scar where the bullet had ripped into the right side of his back began to burn, as it often did when he thought of that day at the lake. Unfinished business. It drove a man like Quinn. He often revisited Creighton Lake in his memory.
Memory was a powerful engine that drove him. He would never forget, but there was one way to lessen the pain.
“My dead friend, we hope,” he said. “This could be a copycat killer, a secret admirer.”
Nift glanced at the row of dead, all-but-nude young women. “He left the good parts alone, anyway.”
Quinn felt a surge of anger but pushed it away. It was Nift’s impulse to try getting under people’s skin. “What about the victim in the other room?” Quinn asked. “Why was she tied down on the coffee table?”
“Maybe the killer just ran out of room on the bed,” Renz said.
“No,” Quinn said. “She got special attention.”
Nift was grinning at him lewdly. “You have a good eye.” There were stories about Nift, about his attitude toward the dead. Especially if they’d been attractive women. Quinn thought some of the stories were probably true. “She was older, too,” Nift said.
“Thirty-seven,” Renz said. “According to her Ohio driver’s license.”
“You got all the IDs?” Quinn asked.
“Yeah. The special one on the table was Andria Bell. She was chaperone and guide for the others. The young girls were art students at some academy in Cleveland.”
“Andria was an artist?”
“A teacher, anyway.” Renz propped his fists on his hips and shook his head in dismay. “Damn it all. Those young girls, never had much of a chance to get to know life. Imagine how the news media’s gonna be all over this mess. High school yearbook photos of those girls, beautiful and smiling. Interviews with the families. Awkward questions. The media assholes will pull out all the stops.”
“Why shouldn’t they?” Quinn said.
“Oh, no reason in the world. The bastards are doing exactly what I’d do. Only there’s only one of me. They’re like a pack of wild dogs, gonna ravage everything and everybody in the way of a juicy story. A police commissioner who can’t catch a killer who’s like a local Richard Speck who’s been on vacation, and now he’s back. Now there’s a story. All it needs is some poor sacrificial schmuck to rip to pieces on news programs and in the papers.”
“There are five dead women here,” Harley said. “Plus we’ve got two killed in Maine, plus at least four in New York prior to Maine. And you’re feeling sorry for yourself.”
“Isn’t that just the point? I’m still alive.”
And still wants to be mayor someday.
Quinn pushed the thought from his mind. He knew Renz was right. The voracious New York news media would make the most of what was a sensational story anyway. The dead women would get more than their fifteen minutes of fame, and then, except for the memories of those who’d loved them, they would be forgotten.
He looked around at the carnage. “Any computers?”
“If there were any,” Renz said, “the killer took them with him. But that’s doubtful.”
“Why?”
“Everybody here has an iPhone, or something like one. Damned things are like little computers themselves.”
Renz gave Quinn a steady look with his flesh-padded eyes. The commissioner has a busy day ahead of him, the look said. It was time to make it official. “Are you on this one, Quinn? Usual arrangement?”
“Yes and yes,” Quinn said. No hesitation.
“It’s yours, then. Keep me apprised, and I’ll handle the media unless I tell you otherwise.”
So I can take the serious media shots and be blamed for every day the killer isn’t caught. “Of course,” Quinn said. He’d known the second he saw the letters carved on the victims’ foreheads that this was his case, whatever the painful memories and dark deceptions.
He’d been chosen, and not only by Renz.
Renz moved toward the door. “I’ll get the papers to you to sign. And appoint some kind of liaison.”
Quinn nodded.
Liaison. Another word for informer. Just what Quinn needed.
A man in white coveralls appeared in the doorway. The crime scene unit had arrived. Usually they arrived at crime scenes about the same time as the ME. Quinn wondered if Renz had purposely delayed them so Quinn could get a better look at the victims. Make him really want this case. Quinn knew that was the way Renz thought. Always there was more than one reason for whatever he did.
“Where’s Pearl?” Nift asked. Working the love-hate thing they had going but without the love.
“She’ll be here,” Quinn said. “It’d be a good idea if you were gone by then.”
Nift grinned. He was too insensitive to scare. “A threat?”
“Yeah. You’d be surprised what Pearl’s capable of if you piss her off.”
There was something to that, and Nift knew it. He began putting away his instruments in a compartment of his black valise where they’d be separated from those that were still sterile. “Tell Pearl I said hello. I’m done here, anyway. Got a hot date with all these beautiful ladies, down at the morgue.” He shrugged. “Well, not so hot.”
Quinn didn’t bother answering.
“Let’s get some breakfast,” Renz said. “Let the CSU do its thing without us in the way.”
“I already ate breakfast,” Nift said.
“Good,” Quinn and Renz said simultaneously.
Nift didn’t seem to notice their obvious gratefulness that he wouldn’t be joining them.
“One thing,” Quinn said. “I want any iPhones, regular cell phones, or anything else that’s tech, set aside for Jerry Lido.”
Lido was the alcoholic but brilliant tech analyst for Q&A.
“No problem,” Renz said. “So let’s go get some waffles.”
“I’m gonna wait for Pearl,” Quinn said.
“Soon as the CSU people and photographer give the word, I’ll send these dead folks to the morgue,” Nift said. “If that’s how you wanna do it.”
“That’s how,” Quinn said. He’d looked enough at the dead women.
“Or I could wait around for Pearl with you,” Nift said.
Quinn gave him a look. “I think not,” he said.
He went outside with Renz and watched the corpulent and corrupt commissioner lower himself into the back of his personal limo. Watched as the long black vehicle drove to the end of the cordoned-off block. A uniform moved a blue wooden sawhorse to make room for the limo to glide through and continue on its way.
Quinn stood in the sunlight and leaned against the stone face of the Fairchild Hotel, waiting for Pearl.
He thought about the D.O.A. initials carved in the victims’ foreheads. The same bloody initials had been the “signature” of the infamous D.O.A. killer who’d murdered four young women in Manhattan two years ago.
That killer was the one that had flown away from Quinn. Had shot him and left him for dead beside a lake in Maine. And then died himself when his plane went down.
&nb
sp; That had been the assumption.
Now the killer—or a copycat—was back. That was why Renz was so sure Quinn would take the case. That Quinn would jump at it.
With Renz the case was political. With Quinn it was personal.
Quinn caught familiar movement among the knot of pedestrians crossing with the signal down at the corner. He pushed away from the sun warmed stone wall and his day immediately brightened.
Here came Pearl.
Pearl saw Quinn right away, standing in front of the Fairchild Hotel. When she strode closer to him, she could see the look on his face, and she knew why it was there and what it meant. It took a lot to make Quinn look like that. Like a Mt. Rushmore figure only pissed off.
She’d heard what was upstairs in the hotel. And she knew what it would mean to Quinn. “The last time you and this killer met, he almost made you one of his victims,” she said.
“Almost,” Quinn said.
“I don’t want that to happen,” Pearl said.
Quinn smiled. “Neither do I.”
“Would it do any good to beg you not to get involved with this killer again?”
“In all honesty, no,” he said. And then, “I’m sorry.”
She knew that he was. Which made her want to curse him and cling to him and kiss him all at the same time. “You know you’re obsessive,” she said.
“Persevering.”
“Obsessive.”
“You’ve been talking to Renz.”
“Of course I have. He doesn’t mind if you get yourself killed.”
“More than you might think.”
Pearl felt herself approaching the point where frustration would become ire. Men! she thought. Some men!
“I’m going upstairs to the crime scene,” she said.
For a second she thought he was going to advise her against that, for her own good. Forbid it, in fact. But he knew her better than that.
“Nift is still up there,” he said.
“So are maggots.”
“Pearl . . .”
“Screw Nift.”
Pearl pushed through the tinted glass revolving door, somehow not missing a step, as if dancing in concert with its myriad moving images.
She noticed how cool the lobby was.
Like the morgue.
7
Dunkirk, France, 1940
The day could hardly be bleaker. There was blood on the uniform of British Expeditionary Force Corporal Henry Tucker. He checked carefully with hurried hands and decided with immense relief that none of it was his own.
He looked up and down the beach and saw people running and diving for cover.
The German Stuka dive bombers hadn’t gone away. He could see them as tiny dark specks in the sky out over the channel, wheeling in formation so they could take another strafing run at the beach.
His heart raced and he began to run. Everyone on the beach was running.
Tucker saw the Stukas, much closer now, awkward and dangerous looking even without the bombs slung beneath them. The planes went into a dive to come in low over the beach. Their “Jericho Horns” began to scream, scaring the hell out of people on the ground, which was their purpose. Tucker was sure as hell scared. He knew that any second machine gun bullets from the planes would start chewing up the beach, and anyone in the line of fire.
Scared as a human being could get, that’s what Corporal Tucker was, and not too proud to admit it. From the east, German troops and tanks were closing in, and would soon push the BEF, including Corporal Henry Tucker, into the channel. Death by bullet or drowning waited there.
Gathered at and around the damaged docks along the beach were boats of various kinds and sizes, not military ships, but private craft. Little by little, they were moving the British, and some of the French, troops across the channel to England. It was a terrible gamble. Those who didn’t die on the beach, or when the boats they were on were strafed, bombed, and sank, were the lucky ones who got out of France alive.
Tucker prayed to be in their number.
He saw sand kick up from the impact of bullets. Watched an abandoned troop truck shudder as heavy-caliber rounds tore into it. In the corner of his vision a woman was waving at him, frantically beckoning him.
She was standing next to a small, damaged beach cottage with two stucco and concrete walls still standing in a crooked L-shape that provided some cover.
The first trio of Stukas was past, flying almost wing to wing. A second grouping was on the way, flying even lower than the first.
Tucker heard the scream of their approach as he sprinted toward the wrecked cottage. The woman, tall, with long brown hair, motioned for him to follow her behind the protective walls jutting from sand soil. There was no decision to be made by Tucker. What was left of the house was the only cover around.
The Stukas’ screams reached a crescendo, then Tucker was around the corner and comparatively safe in the crook of the house. Sand flew as machine gun bullets from the Stukas raked the beach where he’d been only seconds ago.
The woman was on her knees, yelling something Tucker couldn’t hear. Not that it mattered. She was speaking French.
The planes were gone suddenly, reduced to a distant drone becoming fainter by the second.
Then there was silence. At least for a while.
Tucker, who’d dived for cover behind the chipped concrete walls, sat up and saw that he wasn’t alone with the woman. A dirty-faced blond child in her early teens was there, looking more dazed than frightened. And a sturdy man with a huge stomach and with dark hair and a darker mustache. He was wearing baggy gray trousers, with some kind of blue sash for a belt.
“They’ll come back,” the woman said, in English but with a French accent. She sounded terrified.
Tucker nodded. “Don’t I know it, love.”
The woman stared at him.
“She doesn’t understand English,” the rotund man said, “just speaks it.”
That seemed odd to Tucker. The teenage girl observed him silently, her eyes huge.
“I speak the English,” the man said.
“Ah!” Tucker said.
The man grinned with very white teeth beneath his black mustache. “We need of you a favor.”
“You’ve already done me a favor,” Tucker said, looking at the woman, noticing for the first time that cleaned up, with her wild dark hair combed, she would be attractive. “Saved my bloody life, is all.”
The man reached behind him and dragged a tan canvas backpack around so it lay between him and Tucker. He shoved it forward so it was only inches from Tucker, and grinned again, though he looked afraid and serious.
“This,” he said, “is the favor. Take it to England with you. There is a note inside with a London address on it. And a name. There will be money for you at the other end.” He reached forward and nudged the backpack even closer to Tucker. “Jeanette saved your life, no? Yes. So, a favor returned.”
Tucker hoisted the backpack and found it surprisingly heavy.
“Is what I’m doing legal?” he asked.
Mustache laughed. The woman, Jeanette, smiled.
“We have to trust you,” the man said.
Sirens in the sky began yowling. Jericho sirens. The Stukas were back, diving toward the beach. Tucker knew they would soon flatten out their dives and trigger their machine guns.
But these were different planes and hadn’t yet dropped their bombs. One of them attacked the already shot-up troop carrier that probably looked intact from high above.
The screaming sirens grew deafening and there was a tremendous explosion. Shrapnel, something, slammed into the remains of the cottage’s walls. Something flew over Tucker’s head. He thought it might be the woman who’d invited him to share her shelter.
Henry Tucker placed his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut.
When Tucker opened his eyes he was alone. He would think what just happened was a dream, a hallucination brought on by all he’d seen during the three weeks he’d s
pent in France. The madness on the beach whenever a boat of any kind might be boarded for an escape across the channel to England.
Tucker looked all around him. What had happened to the woman, child, and man? Had they been blown to bits? Had they simply run from the bombers and were now cowering somewhere else? They must have left him here, alone. Maybe they thought he was dead.
He started to sit up higher to peek over what was left of the cottage’s only remaining wall. And his arm bumped the backpack.
His hearing, which had been temporarily blocked, returned. There was a commotion on the beach, voices yelling.
Tucker raised himself higher to look toward the beach.
Amazing! There were two small boats at the dock. That they’d made it across the rough, gray channel was unbelievable. The larger of the two looked like somebody’s personal yacht. It was listing badly. The other was a small fishing boat. It had SONDRA painted in black letters on its bow.
There didn’t seem to be any planes in the sky at the moment.
Tucker got shakily to his feet and started to run toward the nearer of the boats, the little fishing boat Sondra. Then he stopped and turned back, grabbed up the backpack, and continued his dash toward the small boat. It was in close enough that he wouldn’t have to try to swim. As he ran, he tossed aside everything other than his rifle and the backpack.
Miraculously, he made it to the dock when the boat was only about half full of British and French troops. He splashed through water up to his waist, then was grabbed by people already aboard and hauled up onto the deck. On the way up, he dropped his rifle into the water. But he hung on to the backpack.
On deck, he scrambled away from the rail and leaned sitting against the wheelhouse. The boat smelled like fish, like the open sea. It smelled great to Tucker.