Pulse

by John Lutz

  “I didn’t know it was Pearl’s,” Mishkin said quickly.

  “That’s okay,” Pearl said. “At least there’s coffee. The four of you must have pitched in and somehow gotten it made.”

  “Eat your doughnut,” Sal growled. “We were only kidding about Harold.”

  “It’s cream-filled,” Harold said.

  Pearl lifted the box’s lid to reveal a small and broken cream-filled doughnut with chocolate icing. Lucky she’d taken the time to toast and eat a bagel in the brownstone. Letting the box lid drop back into place, she made sure they all saw her disdain for the doughnut.

  “Since we’re all here,” Quinn said, “we need to have a meeting and coordinate what we know. Maybe get some kinda picture of what we’re dealing with.”

  Line one rang on the phones. Pearl picked up the unit on her desk and turned away so her conversation wouldn’t be a distraction. Also, it wouldn’t be overheard.

  When she’d finished talking and hung up, she turned back to the others. She was the one who looked distracted.

  “That was Rena Collins,” she said. “Macy’s mother. She’s flying into town today to talk to us, and to identify and claim her daughter’s body.”

  “This is a homicide investigation,” Quinn said. “We’ll want to hold the body.”

  “I told her that,” Pearl said. “I think she understands.”

  Quinn raised his eyebrows.

  Pearl shrugged. “She wants to see her daughter. She’ll wait for the body. She said she’s bringing a dress.”

  No one spoke for a while.

  Quinn said, “I’ll call Nift and make sure he makes Macy presentable.”

  He immediately realized how callous that sounded, but he couldn’t think of a better way to say that pieces of Mrs. Collins’s daughter were either missing or needed to be fitted back together.

  11

  Quinn picked up Rena Collins at her hotel and drove her to the morgue. She was an attractive woman in her fifties, with a trim figure that looked like the result of fanatical dieting and exercise. Her hair was blond, unlike her daughter’s, and she was tan, as if she’d been swimming or playing tennis within the past few days. Only the crow’s-feet at the corners of her narrowed and sad blue eyes hinted at her age.

  “You didn’t have to go to this trouble,” she said. “I could have met you there.” Her voice sounded rough and worn, as if she was an incurable smoker. Quinn thought it was probably from crying.

  “It’s no trouble.”

  “I thought at first this was a hired limo,” Rena Collins said. “It doesn’t look like an unmarked police car.”

  “It isn’t. It’s my personal car, a 1999 Lincoln. It does look like a hired car. That makes it one of the least conspicuous rides in New York.”

  “It must be,” Rena said. “Two of them just passed us.”

  “Newer models, but close enough.”

  Traffic was building up; almost lunchtime. The silence in the car became thicker and heavier. There wasn’t much for the two strangers to talk about, other than the dead woman. Neither of them wanted to discuss her at the moment, even though her foreboding presence was with them as surely as if she were sitting in the backseat.

  It wasn’t easy, what Rena Collins was about to do. Identifying the corpse of a dead child was about the worst thing you could ask of someone. Quinn would be glad when it was behind her. Behind both of them.

  He was relieved, mostly for Rena, when the dead face of Macy Collins appeared on the morgue monitor. The photo had been taken before the autopsy. Nift had done a good job of preparing Macy for viewing. The face on the screen didn’t look much like her recent photographs that the hometown media had dug up, but maybe that was a good thing, that she didn’t look like herself. Quinn recalled the horror that had been in her eyes, the constant silent scream that had been on her lips once the tape had been removed. At least Rena Collins was spared that.

  “It’s Macy,” she said in a choked voice, and turned away from the monitor. Her breasts were heaving. “Christ! I need to get outside where I can breathe.”

  “So do I,” Quinn said, glad she wasn’t going to demand to see the body up close and not on a monitor, as some surviving family members did. There were family members who felt it their duty to approach the dead, to touch them, as if in a magical way some life remained that would be responsive. In this case, the photo had been enough, and the law was satisfied.

  Quinn led Rena Collins back outside into the warm, exhaust-hazed air of Manhattan. It seemed infinitely better than the air inside the building.

  She was perspiring. Her breathing had leveled out but was still slightly ragged. He could hear it in the brief intervals when traffic wasn’t making itself known.

  “Sure you’re okay?” he asked, gently gripping her elbow to steady her.

  She made herself smile and moved away from his grip. “I’m okay. Really.”

  He stayed alert, in case she showed signs of giving in to the heat and what she’d just endured.

  In the car she said, “They won’t let me take her home for burial right away, will they?”

  “We’ll need to hold her for a while,” Quinn said.

  “I wish I could—” She thought better of what she was about to say. “Never mind.”

  He turned the Lincoln’s air conditioner on high, and after a few blocks she stopped sweating and her breathing was normal. Quinn wanted to talk with her about Macy. He drove slower.

  “Need anything?” he asked.

  “I want to call my ex-husband, but not yet.”

  “Macy’s father?”

  “Yeah. He’s out in California. He wanted to come here, to New York, but it was impossible, he said. He thinks he can be at the funeral.”

  Thinks he can be ... “I see,” Quinn said. But he didn’t. Macy had been the man’s daughter.

  Rena Collins stared out her side of the windshield for a while. At the windshield and nothing else, really. Her thoughts were directed inward. Then she looked over at Quinn. “Something to drink,” she said. “Not alcoholic.”

  “There’s a diner in the next block.”

  “I’d rather go to the hotel restaurant.”

  Quinn thought that was a good idea. The restaurant would likely be more conducive to conversation.

  He found himself wondering if Rena Collins had something more than conversation in mind. He’d seen it work that way, the near proximity of death acting as an aphrodisiac, a lusting for its polar opposite. At the end, underlying everything, we all wanted to live. We wanted life for ourselves and for everyone we loved.

  He told himself not to be an idiot. This woman didn’t want a roll in the hay with an aging ex-cop. She wouldn’t get one, in any event. She had just gazed on the remains of her dead daughter. He was at least partly responsible for having her do that, and he was responsible for whatever might happen after.

  Quinn was still plagued by guilt for what he’d contemplated, when he turned the Lincoln over to a hotel parking valet. He let Rena go ahead of him and then stepped in behind her and provided most of the power for the revolving glass door. They entered the cool lobby.

  The restaurant was serving lunch and was already crowded, so they went into the nearby bar and found a booth that afforded relative privacy. Three flat-screen TVs over the bar were showing last night’s Yankees–Red Sox game, but the volume was off. Rena ordered a Diet Coke with a lemon, and Quinn asked for a cup of coffee.

  When their drinks came, he added cream to his cup and stirred, and watched her squeeze her lemon wedge and drop it in the Coke. She stirred the ice deftly with her forefinger and then sipped from the glass, ignoring the straw that had been delivered with the drink. When she placed the glass back on its coaster, she pressed her cool hand to her forehead for a moment, then looked at him.

  “Isn’t it warm out to be drinking coffee?” she asked.

  He smiled. “Cops would drink coffee in hell.”

  She sighed, knowing that even though this
was her idea, they weren’t there for small talk. Cops would be cops in hell. “You want to discuss Macy.”

  “There are things I need to know,” he said. “You okay with that, or would you rather we do it later?”

  “Now’s all right.” Another sip of Coke. Another cold palm pressed to the forehead.

  “This might sound obvious,” Quinn said, “but did Macy have any enemies?”

  “Somebody who might do such a ghastly thing to a twenty-one-year-old girl? No, of course not. But then ...”

  “What?”

  “Obviously she did have such an enemy.”

  “What about at school?” Quinn asked.

  “We were in contact. I would have known about any sort of serious issue. Every indication was that things were going well at school. Macy liked being away from home, out on her own. She was proud of it. That’s why she decided to stay in New York instead of coming home for the summer. And she was interested in her job, interning at a law firm. Enders and Coil. Do you know it?”

  “Know of it,” Quinn said. “Big firm.”

  “Odd that she’d be so interested in a job like that. She was always kind of a counter-culture rebel, more the public defender type.”

  “Did she know the girls she subleased from?”

  “Not at all. She found the place on a school bulletin board.”

  “They aren’t students at Waycliffe.”

  “True, but they know where to look for someone who can afford to sublease their apartment when they leave the city.”

  “Did they all leave town?”

  “For the summer, yes. All but one of them.”

  “Jacqui Stoneman?”

  “I think so.”

  “Stoneman left ten days ago,” Quinn said. “The super and the other two girls said she’s backpacking around Europe. She isn’t due home for another month.”

  Rena nodded. She managed to sip her drink without using her palm to cool her forehead.

  “So Macy knew no one in New York?” Quinn asked.

  “Not well. Other than some of the people she worked with at the law firm. She did mention someone, an older woman named Sarah. And maybe she was a casual acquaintance of some of the girls from Waycliffe who live in the city and stay in New York year-round.”

  Quinn sipped his coffee and sat back in the upholstered booth. A smattering of cheering and applause came from the bar, where the recorded ball game was being shown. Someone hitting a home run and rounding the bases yesterday. “What about Waycliffe?” he asked. “Was Macy happy there?”

  “She said she was. And just in the past year she seemed to be maturing, becoming more ... practical. She was always a scholastic brain and made top grades. Waycliffe had her in their Vanguard program for gifted students. She seemed to have done a good job of adapting to college life.”

  “Did she mention any particular friends she’d made?”

  “Some, but their names don’t come to mind. Macy wasn’t exactly a social butterfly, but people liked her.” Rena’s lower lip began to tremble.

  Quinn guessed that the photo of her dead daughter was on the screen of her mind. Or maybe the murder itself, reconstructed from the horrible wounds. The recent past playing out again, like the ballgame. The Macy in the crime scene photos hadn’t looked peaceful and composed, as in the morgue shot. Rena hadn’t seen the crime scene photos, but she knew what had happened to her daughter, and she could imagine how it had been done.

  She took a slow sip of her drink. “Last time I talked to her on the phone, Macy did seem to hint that something at her job was bothering her, that it didn’t seem right.”

  “What does that mean, ‘did seem to hint’?” Quinn asked.

  Rena shook her head. “I don’t know, exactly. I shouldn’t have brought it up. Maybe it was just something I inferred. Macy had a way about her. Maybe because she was so smart. When we talked, it was always like what she meant was floating somewhere between the lines. It was kind of unsettling. Like once when she phoned me from her dorm room.”

  “So what exactly did she say on the phone?”

  “I can’t quote her verbatim. One thing I remember: she said it was possible somebody’d slept in her bed while she was gone.”

  “Maybe her roommate.”

  “She didn’t have one. The students in her dorm have small sleeping rooms without space for much more than a bed and a desk.”

  “Did she have a key?”

  “Yes, but the door hadn’t been locked. Hardly anyone in the dorm locks their room when they’re only going to be gone for a short while. That’s the sort of college it is.”

  “Everyone there is trustworthy?”

  “Apparently. Or rich enough that they don’t have to steal.”

  “Very exclusive?”

  “You have to have brains, money, or connections in excess even to think about going there. In Macy’s case it was brains. She scored perfect or near perfect on every aptitude test she took.”

  “Where had she been the evening of the bed incident?”

  “She’d attended a group discussion at the home of one of her professors. You know, drinks, snacks, endless analysis or political posturing.”

  For a moment it struck Quinn that on a certain level Rena might have been jealous of her daughter’s superior intellect.

  “Maybe she just forgot to make her bed,” Quinn said.

  “And forgot she forgot? That wouldn’t be like her.”

  Rena bowed her head and the lip trembling began again. She looked as if she was about to cry, but with great effort she gained control of her emotions. She methodically unwrapped her plastic straw and then plunged it like a lance into liquid and took a long series of pulls on her Diet Coke, almost emptying the glass.

  Quinn didn’t tell Rena that serial killers were sometimes driven to get into their intended victims’ minds by learning intimate things about them, even sneaking into their homes and mimicking their experiences. Like sitting and watching their TVs, reading their e-mails, wearing their clothes, using their combs or makeup. Or lying in their beds.

  “Where exactly is Waycliffe College?” he asked. “I mean, if I wanted to drive there.”

  Over another cool drink, she told him.

  12

  Fedderman and his wife, Penny, went out for dinner. Hot on a case as he was, he and Penny didn’t get to eat together often.

  This was a special treat, pasta and wine at D’Glorio’s, a block down the street from their apartment. Penny’s old apartment, actually. They’d moved in together after their marriage, choosing her place because it was larger and more of her furniture was worth saving. Most of Fedderman’s flea-market ensemble was hauled away as junk.

  In D’Glorio’s you knew you were in an Italian restaurant, with its red and white checked tablecloths, wax-coated wine bottle candle holders, Verdi operas playing softly in the background, the scents of garlic and mystery spices wafting from the kitchen.

  They were finishing their wine and waiting for their tiramisu desserts when Penny brought up the subject that had been nagging her for weeks, and almost unbearably for the past several days.

  “It isn’t getting any easier,” she said.

  Fedderman sipped his cabernet as if he knew good wine from bad, and raised his eyebrows. He’d known something was weighing on Penny lately. Now he was going to learn what it was.

  “Whenever you leave,” she said, “I can’t help thinking it might be the last time I see you alive.”

  How many cops’ wives have said that to their husbands ?

  He relaxed, but only slightly.

  “Accountants’ wives think that kind of thing, too,” Fedderman said. He actually wasn’t sure of that.

  “Accountants’ wives know the statistical probabilities and don’t worry as much as I do.”

  “You’ve thought this out,” Fedderman said.

  “I’m just saying ...”

  “What?”

  “I’m not sure I can keep living this way. Wondering
daily if I’m going to lose you.”

  He smiled at her, unable to disguise his pleasure in knowing she loved him enough to worry about him so. Yet it was the intensity of her emotions that was a threat to their marriage. At least she seemed to be telling him that.

  “It’s not like being a cop on TV, Pen. The truth is, most of the time it’s a boring job. Just like an accountant’s.”

  “Accountants don’t run around trying to confront serial killers,” Penny said.

  “Who are trying not to be confronted,” Fedderman pointed out lamely.

  “Don’t try to tell me about serial killers,” Penny said.

  Fedderman nodded. Her sister had been the victim of a serial killer two years ago. That was how he and Penny had met, when he’d accompanied her to identify the body.

  “What I’m trying to tell you about is my job,” he said. “Tomorrow I’m gonna attempt to contact the parents of a murder victim’s roommates, to see if any of their daughters mentioned anything we might find useful. That’s the sort of thing I usually do, Pen. I’ll be at a computer or on the phone most of the day. The only danger I’ll face is carpal tunnel syndrome. It’s more likely that a book at the library will fall from a shelf and injure you than that I’ll be hurt on the job.”

  Penny finished her wine. She didn’t look as if she believed him in the slightest. “Maybe you should worry about me, what with Henry James and Ayn Rand looming.”

  “Not really. Even Stephen King isn’t much of a threat. And talking on the phone to the parents of the dead woman’s roommates isn’t likely to be dangerous for me. Damned unpleasant, but not dangerous.”

  Their tiramisu arrived, along with coffee. They ate and sipped silently for a while. The restaurant was warm, but it was a comforting warmth that had more to do with the scents of spices from the kitchen than with the summer heat outside.

  “So tomorrow you shouldn’t worry,” Fedderman said.

  “What about the day after?”

  “Nobody knows about that one,” Fedderman said. “Not accountants or airline pilots or salespeople or hedge fund managers or cops. There isn’t much we can do about the day after tomorrow.”