Pulse fq-7

by John Lutz

  Quinn felt his throat tighten as he observed the two white-clad men. Taking out the dead. Some occupation, always to arrive at a crime scene when the battle’s lost.

  Beyond the ambulance a black Chevy was parked properly at the curb. Quinn recognized it as Nift the M.E.’s car. Pearl had noticed the car, too. “He’s put himself on all these cases,” she said.

  Quinn nodded. “He always does.”

  “Who is he?” Jody asked, walking alongside Pearl.

  “Dr. Nift,” Quinn said.

  “Think of a cross between Napoleon and Frankenstein,” Pearl said.

  Jody didn’t quite understand that, but she didn’t push it, reminding herself she was here as an observer.

  A big uniformed cop was standing sentry at the building entrance. Quinn knew him. His name was Harmon and he lifted weights and could pass for thirty even though he had to be about Quinn’s age. Quinn wondered why he, Quinn, didn’t work out, as he always wondered when he saw Harmon.

  “Apartment’s on the fifth floor, right where you get off the elevator,” Harmon said to Quinn and Pearl, pointing and making a huge bicep stretch the material of his shirt. He looked at Jody and smiled. It was scary. “Journalist?”

  “Observer,” Quinn explained.

  Harmon didn’t press. If the young woman with the springy red hair was with Quinn and Pearl, that was good enough. But she had that look about her, like a journalist. Curious as a cat that had used up about eight lives.

  They entered the building and took the creaky old elevator to the fifth floor.

  When the door slid open, there was the crime scene.

  The opened apartment door had 5-A on it in those luminous stick-on parallelogram labels. A tech guy with white gloves looked out at them as he passed the door carrying a plastic evidence bag. There were two more techs in the room, one of them a woman. The corpse was in the middle of the room, centered on the carpet as if on display.

  Beside Quinn, Jody said, “Holy shit!”

  Everyone in the room except the dead woman looked at her.

  “Observer,” Quinn said, by way of explanation.

  After a few seconds, the rest of the room’s occupants turned back to their work.

  Fedderman came in from a hall that led to the back of the apartment. He came over to stand by Quinn and Pearl. “Her name was Deena Vess. Twenty-four, single, occupation food server.” He glanced over at Jody, back to Quinn.

  “This is Jody Jason,” Quinn said. He turned toward Jody. “This is Larry Fedderman. Don’t let his casual sloppy persona fool you. He’s even worse than he seems.”

  Jody nodded hello to Fedderman with a sickly smile.

  “She’s an observer,” Quinn said.

  “Really?” Fedderman might never have heard the word before.

  “Pearl’s daughter,” Quinn said.

  “Huh?” Fedderman stared at Jody. Everyone alive in the room stared at her. Deena Vess stared straight ahead. The expression on her face made you wonder what she might have been looking at when she died.

  “Explanations later,” Pearl said. Mind your own damn business!

  Everyone dutifully looked away. Even Nift, though he looked away last. He smiled. “I can see the resemblances.”

  “It’ll be the last thing you see if I shove those tweezers up your ass,” Pearl told him. Jody stared at her.

  Nift shrugged and continued to pick with the tweezers where Vess’s left breast had been.

  Jody swallowed loud enough for everyone to hear. No one spoke. Quinn looked at Jody and she looked back, knowing what he was wondering. She subtly shook her head no and he smiled.

  The victim, who was wearing only panties, had been hog-tied in the same manner as the previous victim, tilted back on her knees so her breasts would have jutted out, if she’d still had breasts. A rectangle of duct tape was fixed firmly to her mouth. Quinn didn’t want to ask Nift if she’d been alive when her breasts were sliced off. He already knew the answer; she’d been alive, like the other victims.

  “It looks like what he did to her was the same as with Ann Spellman,” Nift said. “Hog-tied her, then stood straddling her, grabbing her by the hair or under the chin, and bent her up toward him so her breasts dangled and he could reach down and remove them easily and completely.”

  “You pretty sure about that?” Pearl said.

  “It’s how I’d do it. Unless…”

  “What?”

  “The victim’s breasts were very firm. Then I’d have her on her knees, bent back and facing up. Looking at the ceiling.” Nift’s mind seemed to have drifted. He came back abruptly. “Our killer’s certainly a breast man,” he said. “Likes his women with long dark hair, too.” He pointedly did not look at Pearl.

  “How long’s she been gone?” Quinn asked.

  “I’d say only a few hours.”

  “Same guy?”

  “Same guy, and probably the same knife. He made small torture cuts on her. Some of them are beneath her panties.”

  “Which are the size worn by Ann Spellman,” Quinn said.

  Nift looked at him in faux admiration. “Damn, you’re smart.”

  “Sometimes,” Quinn said.

  “He puts the previous victim’s panties on them,” Pearl said softly, explaining to Jody.

  “Why?”

  Pearl shrugged. “Why does he kill them in the first place?”

  “Something different here, though.” Nift had held something back, as he often did for dramatic effect.

  Quinn arched an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “She had a broken ankle.”

  “ He broke it?” Pearl asked.

  “I don’t think so. Be a good detective and look over there.”

  “The cat?” Pearl asked, seeing a tabby-striped gray cat slide around the corner of the sofa and disappear. Sometimes she wondered if she was the only person in New York who didn’t own a cat. City of cats.

  “Not the cat. Though she might be the only witness to the crime. Over there.”

  Pearl looked where Nift was pointing and saw a metal cane and a plastic cast. The cane was leaning in a corner. The cast was near it on the floor as if it had been carelessly tossed there. “Looks like the killer removed the cast and used the ankle to torture her. A broken bone must have been like a gift to him.”

  “You would understand that,” Pearl said.

  “Another thing,” Nift said, ignoring her. He pointed to a small metal object near where the victim’s long hair spilled onto the carpet from her thrown-back head. “That was balanced on her forehead when she was discovered.”

  “What is it?” Quinn asked, looking closer.

  “It’s a roller-skate key,” Pearl said. “The sort that tightens the kind of skates that fit over your shoes.”

  “What the hell could that mean?” Fedderman asked. He looked at Jody as if she might supply the answer. She felt flattered that he was including her in the conversation. “The key to the case…” she offered.

  There was a ripple of laughter.

  “She might be right,” Quinn said, in such a way that all laughter stopped. What the hell am I doing now, getting protective?

  “One thing it might explain,” Pearl said. “She might have hurt herself skating, and the broken ankle is why he wasn’t able to lure her someplace and decided to kill her in her apartment. She’s the first victim found indoors.”

  “How many of Daniel Danielle’s victims were found indoors?” Fedderman asked.

  “Two out of twelve,” Pearl said. “Of course, he might have murdered over a hundred women, so we don’t know for sure how many were indoors when they were killed.”

  “More than a hundred? ” Jody asked.

  Quinn stared at her somberly. “It’s a dangerous world.”

  She looked dubious and shook her head. Even let slip a slight smile.

  Oh, God! He was beginning to feel like a parent again, not being taken seriously.

  Pearl was looking at him in a kind of surprised way. Had s
he experienced the same sensation?

  She had, he was sure.

  It was disconcerting.

  “I’ve got a question,” Jody said. “What’s going to happen to the victim’s cat?”

  “No!” Quinn and Pearl said simultaneously.

  37

  J ody, unaware of a similar cat that had run away, renamed this dark gray tabby cat Snitch, after a cat she’d had when she was ten years old. She would feed it and it would sleep in her room. Everyone agreed to that but the cat. The food plan was okay with Snitch, but she slept where she damn well pleased. Sometimes that was at the foot of Quinn and Pearl’s bed.

  Living in the brownstone was light-years better than living in the cramped apartment Jody’d had. And she was allowed to keep the rent money allocated to her. The only downside was that she had to travel farther to get to work, across town to the East Side.

  Jody stood now in the Enders and Coil conference room with the firm’s avuncular and wise senior partner, Joseph Coil. Well-padded black leather chairs rimmed the long mahogany table. There was on the table a large crystal vase of incredibly realistic silk roses as a centerpiece that was removed when the room was being used for serious business. That Coil hadn’t sat down, or invited Jody to sit, indicated this was to be a short, informal conversation.

  The light was at Coil’s back. Behind him stretched a panoramic view of the East River. He politely shifted position so the light wasn’t in Jody’s eyes, as if to assure her he wasn’t going to subject her to that obvious strategy of domination. He wasn’t playing games.

  Coil smiled at her in a way so genuine she had to smile back. His blue eyes shone with bonhomie, and his lips curved upward in a way that suggested he smiled even in his sleep. His hair was expensively trimmed and gray, his cheeks so rosy they appeared almost rouged.

  Jody assumed this was going to be a conversation about her unwarranted interest in the Dash-Meeding eminent domain case.

  But it wasn’t. Yet.

  “I realized,” Coil said, “that the two of us had never had a serious friendly conversation. I wanted to talk to you about the law in general. To get your views on it.”

  Jody was surprised. Why would a man like this be interested in the views of a lowly intern? “I agree with the position that our legal system is fallible, but it’s the best there is.” Yada, yada. But she did believe it.

  “And possibly the most pliable and useful,” Coil said. The smile never left his face.

  “I suppose,” Jody said. “Truthfully, I hadn’t thought about it in those terms.”

  “Well, it takes time to understand the utilitarian side of the law.” He bowed his head and shook it slowly side to side, as if amused. “You have grasped by now that it is quite malleable?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “The law is in fact so malleable that at a certain high level it is more about how to manipulate the system within the penumbra of the law, than about the law itself.”

  Jody struggled for a moment with that one. “I can see how it might be used that way,” she said.

  “The longer you practice the law, and the more importance your duties take on, the more you come to understand the law’s true and most important purpose. It’s like higher math: the loftier and more complex it is, the further it moves into the realm of what might be thought of as a more sublime logic.”

  “It becomes more and more malleable,” Jody said.

  Coil fairly beamed. “Smart woman. At a certain plateau, that malleability is what it’s all about. It’s vitally important that you comprehend that. Justice, truth, guilt, innocence, those all lose their meaning under the sword of the law; and the clay of malleability is worked in ways never imagined at the beginning of a legal process. Malleability is the king of the court.”

  “I think I-”

  “No, no. Give it some thought before you decide you really do understand.”

  Jody smiled. “All right, I will.”

  “I won’t insult you by reminding you it doesn’t matter whether our clients are guilty or innocent.”

  “Everyone deserves the best counsel they can afford,” Jody said. “For that matter, the most malleable.”

  “Ah!” Joseph Coil said, obviously pleased that he might have an apt pupil here. Well, that was what Jody was supposed to be, coming out of Waycliffe. And with Elaine Pratt and Chancellor Schueller’s recommendations.

  He didn’t say anything else for a few seconds, and Jody thought their conversation might have ended.

  But it hadn’t.

  “It’s come to our notice that you’ve shown an interest in Dash-Meeding,” Coil said.

  Uh-oh.

  “I do find it interesting,” Jody said. “I’ve always been drawn to eminent domain law.”

  “Oh? Something in your background?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “It seems like the rich stealing from the poor?”

  “I’m not that naive,” Jody said with a grin.

  “Yes, no reason to single out eminent domain. But the Mildred Dash case seems to command your attention.”

  “I suppose that’s because it’s sort of a classic situation: a large developer and a holdout old lady standing her ground. All she’s asking is to continue living in her apartment, where her life unfolded. The place holds special significance for her.”

  “It holds a special significance for Meeding Properties, too.”

  “I understand that,” Jody said. “I guess it’s the familiar story, and the familiar emotion-sympathy for the old lady guarding the gate against progress.”

  “I suppose you could call it progress. Meeding is going to build a lot of retail space and condominiums and overcharge its tenants. Meeding will make a lot of money.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that,” Jody said.

  Coil raised his shoulders and crossed his arms as if hugging himself. “Not for Meeding. Not for us.”

  “Especially not for us,” Jody said. “It’s just that there’s the valiant old lady fighting insurmountable odds.”

  “Things aren’t always what they seem, Jody.”

  “But this seems to be exactly what it seems. “Meeding Properties is gigantic; Mildred Dash has lived in her apartment for twenty years, and there she stays while demolition goes on all around her building. She seems to have enough legal claim to hold the developer at bay.” Jody couldn’t help herself. “She must have a lawyer who knows about malleability.”

  Coil’s mild blue gaze fixed on her and his smile held. Such a charming man. “Mildred Dash isn’t an old lady unless you count forty-eight as old. She’s a cutthroat corporate attorney with inoperable pancreatic cancer. And she doesn’t want to live in her apartment, she wants to die in it.”

  Inoperable cancer. Jody could think of nothing to say other than, “Oh.”

  “These things are unknowable. If she does get her wish and dies at home, it might cost Meeding Properties millions of dollars. Millions,” he repeated. “The clock is already ticking on that money.”

  “Oh,” Jody said again.

  Joseph Coil nodded a smiling good morning and moved toward the door. He paused going out. “Keep thinking malleability, Jody.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I’m malleable, she added, to herself, not without a certain degree of disgust.

  Sal Vitali called in just before noon. The call was on his cell phone, but Quinn was sitting at his desk in the Q amp;A office. Pearl and Fedderman were across the room at their desks. Fedderman was working the phone. Pearl was on her computer. Knowing she owed her mother a phone call, Pearl had waited until she knew it was time for This Is Your Life reruns at Golden Sunset and her mother wouldn’t be able to answer her phone.

  Pearl left a cryptic message and hung up, feeling better. Feeling free. Obligation fulfilled. Her mother and Jody could explore their relationship without her.

  But Pearl’s mother wasn’t watching This Is Your Life. That was because her granddaughter had taken a long lunch an
d then a long cab ride, and here she was in the spacious carpeted lobby of Golden Sunset Assisted Living in New Jersey. Handshakes, smiles, and stiff hugs had been exchanged.

  Jody found her maternal grandmother to be a heavyset, formidable-looking woman with a rigid hairdo and searching dark eyes. She had on a perfume that didn’t mingle well with the food scents wafting in from the nearby dining room.

  The two women were seated facing each other, Jody in an uncomfortable wooden chair with upholstered arms, her grandmother in the corner of a soft leather sofa.

  Jody noticed all the liver spots on her grandmother’s arms and then glanced around. “This looks like a nice place.”

  “Let me tell you, sweetheart,” said her grandmother, “if I may call you that, you being the one precious issue of my barren offspring, that perhaps it looks nice but so, when you first arrive, might hell.”

  “You mean the people-”

  “Are disguised as people, if you mean the staff, and some of the inmates, if I may call them that. People? I would say right out of Dante’s imagination.”

  “Really? Everyone I’ve talked to seems nice. And Pearl-Mom-said you have your own apartment.”

  “Own cell, I would say with knowledgeable accuracy. Like they have on Devil’s Island.”

  “That’s terrible,” Jody said, “that you should feel that way.”

  “You’re such a smart girl. If only your mother would listen and learn.”

  “Mom can be stubborn.” Jody stared at her grandmother, looking for herself in her, perhaps seeing it, trying to figure out what she thought, how she felt.

  “Are you all right, sweetheart?”

  “Yes.” Jody forced a smile. “Maybe we should go into the dining room and have some lunch.”

  “That isn’t food they serve in there. Come to my apartment and I have at least, learning of my granddaughter’s arrival, prepared some good and healthy soup. Not without crackers. Even croutons.”

  “That sounds wonderful.”

  Jody’s grandmother produced an aluminum cane that had been propped out of sight against the back of the sofa. She planted the cane’s rubber tip in the carpet and began struggling to her feet. Jody rushed to help her.

  After a little dance they were both standing. Jody’s grandmother was breathing hard, even softly wheezing. “That’s fine, dear. Thank you. There are some people I want you to meet, so I can show you off, then we can have our soup and talk about your mother. Did I say croutons?”