by John Lutz
Sal shrugged and smiled at her. “Tell me anything that comes to mind. I’ll figure out whether it’s suspicious.”
“The policeman who was here earlier said the murder took place in the park, but the killer came here afterward to clean up. How weird is that? They know that’s what he did because of the blood all over—”
“Yes, we’ve already established that,” Sal said, putting a little bite in his already gruff voice. He wanted some free association here, but he didn’t want the conversation to go off a cliff.
Charmain got the message. She teetered for a moment as if about to lose her balance, and then righted herself, her fingertips touching the base of her throat, and assumed a new attitude. She was an actress in one of those CSI episodes now. “At approximately seven minutes after three this morning, I heard laughter from next door.”
“You mean Macy Collins’s apartment.”
“It would be her bedroom, to be exact,” Charmain said. “I couldn’t sleep, like usual, and I woke up about quarter to three and just laid there. You know, tired but mostly awake and hoping I’d pass out altogether. But all I could do was keep changing positions. I had the air conditioner on high, but it wasn’t doing much, so I went over to adjust it and found it had frozen up, like it does sometimes. It was shooting out little flecks of ice but not much of a breeze. Well, there’s nothing to do then but switch it off and wait for it to thaw out, which it does pretty fast in this weather.”
“So that’s when the room got quiet,” Sal said, trying to keep her on point.
“That’s right.”
“And you heard laughter.”
“Not right away. I went back to bed, but I still couldn’t sleep. Macy’s bedroom is—was—right on the other side of my bedroom wall. They’re thick walls, though, in this old building. Mostly soundproof. But there’s a vent near my bed, and it sort of magnifies sound. I heard moving around in Macy’s bedroom. Couldn’t tell what it was. And now and then a voice.”
“Voices?”
“No. Just a man’s voice. At least, I think it was a man. I can’t be positive. Nothing I could understand. Just a low murmur now and then. And then, after about ten minutes, he laughed.”
“How do you mean? Like a big guffaw?”
“What’s a guffaw?”
“I mean, do you think he might have thrown back his head and laughed real loud?”
“No, more like a chuckle.”
“I’m not sure what a chuckle sounds like.”
“More like he was amused than that he was slapping his thigh with laughter.”
“Have you ever seen anyone actually do that?” Sal asked. “Laugh real hard and slap their thigh?”
“No.”
“Did you hear Macy’s voice at all?”
“No. Not a peep. She was already dead, wasn’t she? In the park?”
“ ’Fraid so.” Sal folded his black leather-bound notepad and stood up. “I’d like to see your room. Where you were when you overheard the laughing.”
“Chuckling.”
“Sure.”
Charmain fought her way up out of her creaking chair and led the way into her bedroom.
“Did you know Macy well?” Sal asked.
“Hardly at all. She didn’t live here all that long, and she was always busy, always on the go. Like she didn’t have time to make friends. No, wait a minute. I did see her once with an older woman, eating at a diner over on Broadway. They seemed friendly enough, like they had lots to talk about.”
“How old was this older woman?”
“In her forties, I’d guess. But she was one of those sort of larger women who might look older than they are. You know what I mean?”
“Sure. Did she often entertain men in her apartment?”
“Not that I noticed.”
The bedroom was as neat as the living room. The bed and dresser were IKEA. There was a small TV on a table where it could be seen from the bed. The floor was bare hardwood but for a small black and red oval throw rug. In the one window, the air conditioner that sometimes froze up was softly humming away. The bed was tautly made with a pale blue spread. A tattered brown stuffed bear was lodged between the pillows. It looked uncomfortable.
“I’ve had Andy since I was a little girl,” Charmain explained, noticing Sal staring at the bear.
“Do you sleep on the right side of the bed?” Sal asked. “Or does Andy?”
“I do.”
“Near that vent?” Sal pointed toward narrow grillwork that had been painted over countless times and was now the same cream color as the walls.
“Near enough.” Charmain seemed slightly embarrassed.
“When you heard noises from Macy’s bedroom, did you get out of bed and put your ear to the vent so you could hear better?”
Her round face flushed. Then she seemed to gather herself and put on a don’t-give-a-damn expression. “Of course I did. Wouldn’t you?”
“To tell you the truth, yes,” Sal lied. Or thought he lied. He smiled at her. “Stay right here.” He moved briskly from the room.
Charmain stood where she was for a minute or so, and then sat down on the edge of the bed. Her back was rigid, as if she might leap up any second.
Sal returned shortly, glanced at his watch, then walked over and stooped low so he could place his ear against the vent.
Within a few seconds he heard Harold tell him that now was the time for all good men to come to the aid of something. Then Harold said, quite distinctly, “Ha, ha, ha.”
Sal straightened up and stretched his back. Charmain remained seated on the edge of her bed, smiling at him in a way he didn’t like.
“If Macy talked in bed, you could hear her,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You’ve heard her before?”
Charmain smiled. “I said she didn’t bring men home often, not never.”
“You heard them through the vent? Having sex?”
“Why would you ask that?”
“It seems to deepen voices. Turned my partner into a baritone.”
“When you say partner—”
“I mean fellow detective, just now, through the vent,” Sal said, wanting no misinterpretation.
Charmain kind of half closed her eyes and regarded him. “I guess sex does change people’s voices. A man like you, in your work, you must meet lots of women... .”
Sal knew where this was going and wished Harold was here. And just like that, as if wish were command, Harold walked into the bedroom.
“Did I come through loud and clear?” he asked.
“Loud enough, but not completely clear,” Sal said. He introduced Harold to Charmain.
“Would you like a Kleenex for your nose?” Charmain asked.
Harold thanked her and accepted a tissue from a box by the bed.
“Was I any help?” Charmain asked.
“Sure were,” Harold said.
“I mean, my testimony? Not the vent thing.”
“I thought you meant the tissue.”
“Yes and yes,” Sal said. Charmain had heard the killer celebrating with himself over the recent murder. She had helped to establish the time of death, but Sal saw no point in telling her that. And if the killer had been bouncing around in Macy’s bed, he might have left a good DNA sample. Or maybe he’d done that earlier in the evening, in the park. “You’ve been a big help,” he said. He moved toward the door. Harold and Charmain followed.
At the door to the hall, Charmain winked at Sal in a way that Harold wouldn’t notice. All this talk about murder seemed to have excited her. “If you need anything else, like more experiments with the vent, under more realistic circumstances, just let me know. I’m available.”
Sal just bet. He thanked her politely and formally for her help, then ushered Harold toward the elevator.
“That was nice of her, with the Kleenex,” Harold said on the way down to the lobby.
“It was because you smell like jet fuel,” Sal said.
“It was be
cause she likes me,” Harold said, “and you’re jealous.”
Knowing Harold, Sal said nothing in reply.
10
There was something wrong with the air conditioner that caused it to run and not run in long cycles. Or maybe it was just overwhelmed by the heat wave. Right now it was in its not-run phase.
It was unnaturally quiet in the office, as if the warmth were smothering sound. There was a smell like wet paste, maybe from the plastic or wiring in Fedderman’s computer heating up. If there still was any wiring in computers. Everything might be modular now. Sometimes Quinn felt like he was modular and didn’t fit anywhere, a time traveler from the Bronze Age.
Quinn was working the phones. Only the intrepid, ill-clad Fedderman was there with him, at a desk fifteen feet away, facing Quinn’s. Fedderman dressed somewhat better since his recent marriage, but his right shirt cuff still usually managed to come unbuttoned when he wrote with pen or pencil. And it would stay that way, flapping like a signal flag when he walked. He was busy transferring his written notes to a file on the computer. Both copies would be saved, to add to a growing physical as well as electronic file.
The jangle of the phone broke the silence and Quinn picked up. The receiver of the landline phone was hard and slippery against his ear.
The caller was Pearl, checking in from the brownstone. She’d worked late last night, making connections with Macy’s three roommates, who were out of town for the summer. Pearl, bearing the bad news.
Macy’s roommates had been horrified when they learned of her death. Other than that, they didn’t have much to add to the investigation. They were all college students, home for the summer. Two were in Chicago. The third was in Europe. None of them had really known Macy, though all of them cried during their conversations with Pearl. They’d had nothing negative to say about the dead, apparently thinking they might draw down an ancient curse upon themselves if they were anything but complimentary. Pearl had run into that attitude before, when the young were unexpectedly confronted with the death of someone who’d touched their lives.
It could happen to anyone.
Quinn thanked Pearl and asked if she was still in bed.
“Why?” she asked. “Are you interested in phone sex?”
“I didn’t know phones had sex,” Quinn said.
Pearl’s cue to hang up, which she did.
Quinn had read Sal and Harold’s respective reports. So far, the interview with Charmain Graham, Macy’s neighbor in an adjacent apartment, had proved the most fruitful. She might actually have heard the killer in Macy’s bedroom. No one else in the building other than the super seemed to have even met Macy other than to say hello or nod to in the hall. No one had noticed anything suspicious in or near the building during the weeks leading up to her death.
The killer had committed a clean and seamless crime, except for the soft laughter overheard through Charmain Graham’s bedroom vent. That laughter so soon after the process of human slaughter infuriated Quinn. He kept imagining it, even though he’d never heard it. Had the killer laughed that way while butchering the gagged and still-alive Macy? Or while working the blue panties onto her corpse? What the hell was that all about, with the panties?
Quinn picked up a different sheet of paper and scanned it yet again.
What the CSU had removed from Macy’s apartment yielded little of use other than the names and addresses of Macy’s mother and father. Her mother lived in Davenport, Iowa. Her father in Oakland, California.
Quinn figured Pearl had done enough death notification.
He sighed and made the necessary calls. The reactions of both parents made rips in his heart. He thought of his own daughter, on the other side of the continent, in California. People didn’t have children with the notion that they might be tortured and butchered by a monster. Across the office, Fedderman had heard sound but not substance. But he knew what the calls were about and his eyes had teared up. He quickly looked away from Quinn.
Another phone call, incoming, was also less than a pleasure. Nift from the medical examiner’s office, with Macy’s postmortem findings.
“Official cause of our girl’s death was heart failure brought about by extreme shock,” Nift said, getting right down to business.
“No surprise there.”
“Slicing off her tits took a bit of know-how and skill.”
“Medical skill?”
“No. More like practice-makes-almost-perfect skill. They were done antemortem. It’s a wonder she didn’t die of shock early in the process. The killer was expert at keeping her alive as long as possible. He was the one who chose almost the precise instant of death. I would imagine that was important to him.”
“Try not to imagine,” Quinn said. But he knew Nift was right. It simply irritated him that the smarmy little M.E. enjoyed playing detective.
Nift gave a low chuckle that reminded Quinn of Charmain Graham’s description of the killer’s laugh. “Macy’s evening wasn’t all bad,” Nift said. “Stomach contents were steak, salad, red wine, consumed approximately five hours before her death. She was wined and dined and then—”
“Raped?”
“Maybe. Could have been consensual. But damage to the vaginal tract suggests otherwise. And there was residue of the kind of substance used on pre-lubricated condoms.”
“You sure about that?”
“Positive. I see it over and over,” Nift said, in an oddly cheerful voice.
“Our killer practicing safe sex,” Quinn said.
“Whatever entered her might not have been a penis.”
“A dildo?”
“Maybe. Or some make-do inanimate object that required lubrication.”
“Or some object ceremonial to the killer.”
“It could be we’re making too much of it,” Nift said. “We can’t rule out simple, consensual sex. She might have been wined, dined, and reclined—and enjoyed that part of it, even though it had to have been rough. There’s some frictional damage to the vaginal wall. But you know women.”
“I wish.”
“There isn’t any sign of her resisting until after she was gagged and taped.”
“The wine, maybe.”
“Could be. If she wasn’t used to it. And there are traces of an over-the-counter sedative in her stomach. Bruising on her arms is consistent with the killer straddling her and pinning her down. Maybe keeping her hands away from her face after slapping that tape over her mouth. He had to have taken some of the fight out of her before taping her arms to her sides.”
“That would take a strong person.”
“Average-strength man, stronger-than-average woman. He was probably seated on her boobs, then slid down toward her pubic area while applying the tape. My guess is he waited until she was stunned and exhausted from torture before he lopped off her jugs. There are small cut marks, or stab marks that barely penetrated the flesh, in sensitive areas all over her body.”
“Made while she was still alive?”
“Definitely. He wanted her to see as well as feel what he was doing. Wanted them to experience it together.”
“He wanted to take the trip with her,” Quinn said, “but not all the way.”
“Company loves misery.”
“Company being Daniel Wentworth, aka Daniel Danielle, aka Danielle Daniel?”
“That would be my guess.”
“Only a guess?” Quinn asked, holding in his anger at the killer, feeling slightly sick. The heat.
“At this time, yes. But I remember the original Daniel Danielle murders. Between us, this is the same guy.”
“He’s dead,” Quinn said. “Nobody on foot where he was could have survived that hurricane.”
“Zombie love. But if that’s not a good enough explanation for you, we got some human flesh out from under one of Miss Macy’s painted but broken nails. We’ll have a DNA comparison shortly. You wanna bet some money on this?”
“No,” Quinn said. “And what I heard was the Florida cops either di
dn’t take or lost Daniel Wentworth’s swab, and the DNA sample from under the nail of an original victim was too small and too old to be of much help. Most of it was used up during the trial.”
“Same guy, though,” Nift repeated. “It’s very distinctive, his work with the knife. It had to take some thought, some practice.” Nift paused. Quinn could hear him breathing. It was possible that Daniel had taken over a hundred victims, their bodies still lying in shallow graves or disposed of in ways unimaginable to the normal mind. “Something else I couldn’t help thinking about when I was working on this one, Quinn. Something you really oughta keep in mind. Looking down at Macy, before I peeled back the face and did the brain pan—even after—she kept reminding me of Pearl.”
Quinn hung up the phone hard, causing Fedderman to stare over at him.
“You okay?” Fedderman asked.
Quinn was sweating. Trembling slightly. He dragged the back of his hand across his clammy forehead and sat back. “Yeah. Just talking to Nift about the postmortem.”
“That’ll do it,” Fedderman said. “Anything useful?”
Quinn related his conversation with Nift, now and then thinking about Pearl.
No doubt that was what Nift wanted, not knowing that Quinn would have been thinking about Pearl without being prompted.
Pearl herself entered the office an hour later. She was neatly dressed in gray slacks and blue blazer, shoes with slight high heels on them to raise her at least somewhat above her five-foot-one height. Her breasts didn’t look so prominent beneath the loose cotton fabric of her white blouse. Her eyes were dark and alert, her pale complexion set off by her jet-black hair, which fell to below her shoulders. Vivid was the word most often used to describe Pearl. A sketch in black and white by an artist who loved women.
She nodded good morning to Quinn and Fedderman, and to Sal and Harold, who’d only just arrived themselves. Then she went over and poured herself some coffee in her initialed mug. She was glad to see that someone else, knowing she’d be coming in late, had taken the trouble to make coffee.
“We saved you a doughnut,” Sal said, motioning toward a shallow white bakery box resting on the printer, “but Harold ate it.”