Pulse

by John Lutz

  She forced calm on herself, made herself breathe evenly through her nose. Her mind refused to function fully as she tried to remember. The man, the drink ... he must have put something in her drink. She remembered walking with him, supported by him. She hadn’t been drunk—she knew that. She never drank enough to get drunk.

  Had they walked to her apartment?

  Had they just left her apartment?

  Ann wasn’t clear on any of it.

  She attempted to move her arms and legs, and shuddered with painful, wracking cramps.

  Where am I?

  When she screamed almost silently into the unyielding tape and opened her eyes wide, she realized everything was upside down. She was on a hard surface and staring at the night sky. She could see stars through the leaves of overhanging branches.

  What an awkward, painful position she was in! How ... ?

  A man’s voice spoke to her in memory: “The best thing you can do in a situation like this is unplug the computer.”

  Standing behind her, near her, when she was seated at her crashing computer.

  He must have gotten in somehow and been hiding in the apartment when I locked the door. All the time I was thinking I was safe.

  And now she was paying for her carelessness. She remembered now that she’d lost consciousness, and he’d forced her to drink, not wine. He’d said it was wine, but it was something else. It had made her dizzy, made her feel small, smaller, so that she did what he said, went with him somewhere. To a car?

  She craned her neck and looked around. There were planters with brown, dead plants, a surrounding stockade fence with vines growing up it. There was a brick wall—dark, old brick. She seemed to be in something like a small courtyard. There was a moon. Light from somewhere else—maybe a streetlight.

  A slight scuffing sound near her, where she couldn’t see, made her muscles tighten with alarm. Her legs began cramping and she could do nothing to relieve the pain.

  The fear, the dread knowledge she wanted so badly to deny, invaded her mind and body. Nausea expanded in her in waves and she had to swallow, terrified that if she vomited she’d choke to death. She began to tremble and felt her bladder release.

  This is happening to me. To ME!

  Make sense of it! For God’s sake, concentrate and make sense of it so you can deal with it!

  I’m not alone, but he hasn’t done anything to me. Not yet. Maybe he won’t. Maybe this is it. He’s a sex nut who gets his jollies tying up women, then simply watching them, enjoying their helplessness.

  It’s possible. There are such men.

  By the time she’d gathered her wild and errant thoughts, the cramps had subsided. She determined that she was on her knees with her wrists bound tightly behind her. A short, taut rope led from her bound wrists to where her ankles were crossed and tied together, causing her knees to splay out, her back to arch painfully.

  Hog-tied.

  She’d been hog-tied and then positioned so her upper body stretched backward, leaving her staring at the sky. There was a constant tension in her backward arched body that was in itself painful.

  The natural urge to straighten her upper body to the perpendicular was in constant battle with the tautness of the rope that ran between wrists and ankles. She was drawn backward like a bow, as if to shoot an arrow into the night sky.

  And it hurt. Her spine felt as if it might snap.

  Now what?

  A sole made a scuffing sound beside her. Nearby.

  He loomed above her, and cold terror ran like a chill through the marrow of her bones. The violent cramps returned as her body strained again for its unattainable release. Her agony worked its way through the rectangle of duct tape over her mouth as a drawn-out keening plea, like the muted wail of a siren. Another soft wail, the tape playing in and out.

  He showed her the knife, rotating the long silver blade so it caught the starlight, and smiled down at her.

  “Let me know if you’re uncomfortable,” he said softly through the smile.

  The knife’s sharply honed blade found flesh, and then blood.

  The muffled human siren wailed longer, louder, but not so loud that anyone nearby would hear.

  Not that it mattered. The building was unoccupied. There was no one nearby.

  They were in the small, brick courtyard of an East Village six-story walkup that was being rehabbed. Dawn had broken. CSU techs were busy doing their white-glove ballet, staying well away from Quinn, Pearl, Nift, and what was left of Ann Spellman.

  “Shock, shock,” said Nift, the pugnacious little M.E. “The victim has dark hair and eyes, and a great body with a terrific rack. Well, obviously had a terrific rack.”

  “I can see that,” Quinn said, “even through the blood.”

  Nift, leaning over the awkwardly bound corpse, glanced sideways and let his gaze flick up and down Pearl. He didn’t say what he was thinking, that the dead woman facedown on the hard paving stones, her back arched so drastically that she might have broken it in her death throes, was very much the same type as Pearl.

  Pearl said nothing, but she stared unblinkingly at him in a way that would have embarrassed a man with the slightest sensitivity or consideration.

  “After hog-tying her, he must have gripped her under the jaw and lifted so her breasts dangled. Then held her under the jaw and gone to work with the knife,” Nift said. He was grinning. “Then he rocked her back on her knees and left her like she is, stargazing.”

  Quinn rested a huge and powerful hand on Pearl’s shoulder, gently, but in a way that restrained her.

  “She still has her panties on,” Quinn said.

  “Sure does,” Nift said. “All pink and lacy, too. Dolled up to screw or die.”

  Quinn felt a sudden embarrassment for the dead woman, the way they were talking about her when she was right there with them. He was surprised. He’d thought he was past that. Somewhere in his mind it registered that this killer could get to him, make him feel that way.

  “Rigor mortis has come and gone,” Nift said, not seeming to notice that Pearl had almost sprung on him and sunk her teeth into his arteries—and still might do so. “I left her like this so you could see her before the paramedics removed the body. Her tits, incidentally, seem nowhere to be found. Like with the previous victim.”

  Quinn lifted his hand from Pearl’s shoulder and patted her, then stepped forward and more closely examined the arched body on the redbrick pavers. The freeze-frame of terror in the woman’s bulging eyes was something he’d dream about, even twenty years later, from time to time. If he made it that many more years in a world where people did things like this to each other.

  “You should have seen the funny grin on her face before I removed this. It was jammed crossways in her mouth. I didn’t know what it was till I got it out.”

  Quinn stared at a flat half circle of steel and then saw that it was marked. It was a protractor, used by draftsmen to calculate and draw angles.

  “You should have left it where it was,” he said.

  “I know,” Nift said. “Curiosity got the best of me. And I knew it was going to the morgue one way or the other. I found it interesting what the killer did. After everything that happened, he made her smile.”

  Both men looked down again at the dead woman.

  The knots binding her were simple square knots of the sort anyone might tie. The rope itself looked like ordinary clothesline, impossible to trace even in this era when hardly anyone actually hung clothes out to dry. Here and there, the victim was cut for what seemed like pure meanness. The raw flesh and blood where her breasts had been made Quinn swallow bile and anger.

  The rope and hog-tie were something new in Daniel’s repertoire—and Quinn was becoming more firmly convinced that the killer was Daniel—but Quinn didn’t find that surprising. Serial killers, even locked as they were in their obsessions, sometimes introduced variations in their methods. Often that was to mislead the police, but it could also be that Daniel had thought abou
t ways to increase his pleasure and his victim’s pain and fear, and come up with the hog-tie restraint. Classic serial killers were works in progress. That was what made them so terrifying.

  Some of the simple knots were double tied, as if to make sure that rope crossed rope correctly. Simple but effective, like double tying your shoelaces. Quinn knew he was looking at precaution and not expertise.

  “Our man’s not a sailor,” he said.

  “Or Boy Scout,” Pearl added.

  “Depends on the kind of merit badge we’re talking about,” Nift said.

  Fedderman came out the door into the courtyard, moving carefully so as not to interfere with the techs. He had on one of his cheap brown suits with the coat open and flapping. As he moved in his awkward gait, the coattails swung like pendulums, brushing and almost knocking over a pot of dead flowers on a rusty plant stand. He’d been talking to the super of the building next door, who’d discovered the body early this morning while searching for his runaway cat.

  Quinn gave the okay to remove the body as long as the techs were finished with it, and then motioned for Fedderman to follow him back through the building and outside to the street. Pearl waited until Nift had finished packing up his instruments and was on his way out before joining them. As if she needed to stand guard over the dead woman to protect her from a necrophiliac. For years there had been whispered rumors about Nift.

  Who’ll protect her in the morgue?

  As she was leaving, Pearl hesitated, then bent over the distorted corpse and looked at the label in the panties. They weren’t an expensive brand, and were fairly new. She examined them more closely.

  “So whadda we got?” Quinn asked Fedderman, when the three of them were standing out on the sidewalk.

  Fedderman got out his leather-bound notepad, which he opened to the proper page and stared at as he spoke. “The super, a guy named Willy Fernandez, lives and has an office in the building next door. He’s also been hired to keep an eye on this building while it’s being rehabbed, and he has a key. His cat, Theo, took off and Fernandez had to go look for him. He saw Theo run into the next-door building with the door hanging open, so Fernandez let himself in and went looking for him. When he found Ann Spellman, he forgot all about Theo.”

  “I’ll bet he did,” Pearl said. “He the one called it in?”

  “Yeah.” Fedderman stuffed the notepad back in his pocket. “He’s watched enough cop shows on TV to know not to touch anything, so he went back to his apartment next door and called the police.”

  “Not nine-one-one?” Quinn asked.

  “No. He’d seen enough to know it wasn’t an emergency.”

  “Where’s Fernandez now?”

  “In his apartment in the building next door. I told him we might wanna talk to him again.”

  “We do,” Quinn said.

  Fedderman stayed around to watch the body being removed, while Quinn and Pearl left to go to the building next door and talk to Fernandez the super.

  An ambulance with its siren off but its red and yellow lights flashing was already coming down the block toward them. Ann Spellman’s ride, picking its way through traffic. Fedderman could see the two paramedics behind reflections playing on the windshield.

  He didn’t envy them their job.

  20

  The foyer of the super’s building was the same as that of the one next door, with a stairway falling away toward the basement, as well as ascending to a landing and a stairwell running up the rear wall. The walls had just been painted a pale green and there was no graffiti. An elevator had been installed in this building, but it had a handwritten OUT OF ORDER sign taped to its door. Quinn didn’t mind, as he went ahead of Pearl down the steps and felt her lightly touching his shoulder as if for balance.

  He pushed a button near a brass-lettered SUPER sign on the door, and it opened almost immediately. Fernandez had heard them descending the steps.

  “I thought you’d be along soon,” Fernandez said, as Quinn and Pearl flashed their IDs. He had a slight Spanish accent. He raised dark eyebrows. “You are NYPD?”

  “Working with them,” Quinn said.

  “Closely?”

  “Like lovers.”

  Fernandez grinned and stepped aside so they could enter. He was a short, handsome man in his forties, with sharp features and only a few gray strands in his jet-black hair combed straight back. He was wearing a green work outfit, but it was easy to imagine him in a tailored European suit playing a sleek gigolo in a play or movie.

  Quinn had expected a modest basement apartment, but this one was spacious and well furnished, with a large flat-screen TV on one wall. A green recliner faced the TV directly. There was a small table next to the recliner with a beer bottle sitting on a magazine so it wouldn’t leave a ring. Quinn could see a modern kitchen with white appliances beyond the living room.

  “You live here alone?” he asked.

  “I was with my wife until six months ago.” Fernandez motioned with his arm toward a stiff-looking leather or vinyl sofa. “You want to sit down?”

  Quinn and Pearl both declined.

  “You and your wife separated?” Pearl asked. Fernandez hadn’t struck a tragic note, so she assumed the wife hadn’t died. Maybe the couple was divorced.

  “She ran away with an electrician.”

  Pearl resisted asking him if it had come as a shock. She almost smiled.

  Quinn, seeing something was going on with her, took over the conversation. “Did you know Ann Spellman?”

  “The vic?”

  Obviously Fernandez used his big TV to watch cop shows.

  “The vic,” Quinn confirmed.

  “I never saw her before but to glance at her,” Fernandez said.

  A large gray cat entered the room, took brief notice of the presence of Quinn and Pearl, then ignored them. Quinn watched the cat effortlessly jump up onto a plush chair and curl into a ball, facing the other way.

  “That Theo?” Quinn asked.

  “The one and only,” Fernandez said. “He slipped out when I was opening the door to go check and see if I had mail in my box. I forgot to look earlier, and I got a Netflix coming. Lie to Me. You ever see that one?”

  “Constantly,” Pearl said.

  “So I go after Theo, up into the foyer, and damned if the street door wasn’t open a few inches, the way it sticks sometimes, and I saw Theo squeeze through and outside.”

  “What time was this?” Quinn asked.

  “About midnight.”

  “You wanted to watch Lie to Me at midnight?”

  Fernandez shrugged. “What else I got to do, with the wife gone? I sure as hell couldn’t get to sleep.”

  “Thinking about her and the electrician,” Pearl said.

  “You got it.”

  “Did you notice anyone coming or going at the building next door?”

  “Just Theo. When I went outside to try to get him and bring him back, I saw him go into the other building. Its street door was hanging wide open.”

  “That was unusual?” Quinn asked.

  “You bet. It might be an unoccupied building, but there’s stuff to steal in there. Raw lumber, copper plumbing, even tools the workmen leave behind. That’s why they hired me, to make sure nobody unauthorized came or went. The place is usually locked tight.”

  “But not tonight,” Pearl said.

  “No. The lock had been forced. Like somebody wedged a pry bar or something between the door and frame and leaned hard on it.”

  “A large knife, maybe?” Quinn asked.

  “Yeah, that’d do it. The screws just popped out of the old wood door frame, and the lock wasn’t worth diddly.”

  “So Theo was inside,” Pearl said. She and Quinn could be a smooth team when it came to keeping someone talking.

  “And I went in after him.”

  “You’re a brave man,” Quinn said. “Seeing the door had been forced, didn’t you think there might be someone in there?”

  Fernandez gave his little
shrug. “I love my cat. And I did run back here and get a flashlight and a baseball bat. Then I went back next door and went inside. I knocked the barrel of the bat against the floor and kept calling Theo as I went, making plenty of noise so if there was somebody in there he’d have plenty of time to get away. I wasn’t looking for trouble; I was looking for my cat.”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t find Theo, but I saw that one of the French doors out to the courtyard was open. I went to it, shined my light out there, and saw ...” Fernandez stopped and swallowed.

  “The vic,” Pearl said.

  Fernandez gulped again at the grisly memory. “Yes. Right away, I came back here and phoned the police.”

  “Not nine-one-one,” Quinn said.

  “Madre de Dios, I knew she was dead.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I waited till a police car came, then I told the officer what happened. He went in, then came back out and called for help. He asked me where I lived, then told me to come back here. First thing I saw when I stepped inside was Theo. He acted like he’d never been gone.”

  “Cats,” Pearl said.

  “Is there any way to get into the courtyard from the street?” Quinn asked.

  Fernandez shook his head. “No, all these buildings, you got to go through them to get to the courtyards. They’re built that way for security, I guess. That’s why whoever took that lady—the vic—back there had to get through the door, then go through the apartment to the French doors.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t notice anyone suspicious hanging around next door, or even in the neighborhood, the last few days or so?”

  “Everybody in the neighborhood’s suspicious,” Fernandez said.

  “Every neighborhood,” Pearl said.

  “Hey!” Fernandez said, as if jolted by his memory. “I did see someone last week. Mr. Kemmerman, in the apartment right across the street, he’s been having trouble with his toilet leaking at the base. I been working and working on it. He seems to think it’s the flapper, making the water overflow and run down the sides of the bowl when he’s not around. Water pressure or something. I don’t see how—”