Twist

by John Lutz

  “What’s that?” he asked, looking at a blood-smeared object protruding from the victim’s laid open abdomen.

  Nift had obviously seen the object before. He deftly used a large tweezers to lift it from the gore of Bonnie Anderson’s body cavity.

  “Statue of Liberty,” he said, grinning. “We’re dealing with a patriotic killer.”

  “It’s a cheap plastic souvenir,” Renz said. “Sold all over town. His calling card.”

  Quinn knew what Renz meant. Serial killers often left something behind so their crimes would be connected. They were interested in their grisly body count, yearning for the anonymous sort of fame that would eventually destroy them.

  Quinn was convinced now. There was ritual and compulsion here. And a certain kind of structured madness. In all likelihood, they had a serial killer on their hands.

  “Usual arrangements?” he asked.

  Renz nodded. Q&A often did work for hire for the NYPD and had a standing agreement as to terms. This worked because Renz had the public fooled into thinking he was brilliant and honest, and because Quinn had a well-founded reputation as the best there was in tracking and apprehending serial killers.

  “Let me know about the postmortem,” Quinn said to Nift, who was standing now and giving paramedics room to wrestle the corpse into a body bag. “And fax me photos.”

  “Will do,” Nift said.

  Pearl walked in, and he seemed to brighten. He was standing rigidly to his full height of under five-foot-five, his chest expanded and his expensively tailored suit coat buttoned. Pearl had opined that he had a Napoleon complex. In fact, she’d mentioned it to the little bastard to get back at him for insulting her. Nift had seemed pleased by the comparison, which had served to increase Pearl’s anger.

  Obviously for Pearl’s benefit, Nift absently inserted his open hand inside his suit coat lapel in the iconic Napoleon portrait pose.

  He noticed Quinn watching, and quickly removed the hand.

  With a last glance around, Quinn moved toward the door. Renz detoured around a lot of blood to join him. Pearl followed, saying nothing. She knew Quinn would fill her in later.

  As for the murder scene, she’d seen all of it that she wanted, and didn’t want to see any more of it than was necessary.

  They stepped around the uniform posted in the hall and walked toward the elevator.

  “You two had breakfast?” Renz asked Quinn. “I got some papers for you to sign, Quinn. And there’ll be more info coming in on the victim.”

  Quinn glanced at Pearl, who nodded.

  “We can stop for some doughnuts,” he said.

  “That how you keep in such good shape?” asked the rotund Renz.

  “Doughnuts are brain food.”

  “This meal is on the city.”

  “Not doughnuts, then.”

  8

  The morning rush was over, so the diner wasn’t crowded. The scents from the grill behind the counter were still heavy in the air, along with the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. The atmosphere was almost a meal in itself.

  They were settled in a booth in the White Star Diner on Amsterdam. What they had all recently seen in Bonnie Anderson’s apartment they could set aside so they still had appetites. In their business, compartmentalization meant survival.

  Quinn ordered eggs over hard and hash. Renz asked for scrambled and sausages. Pearl had an everything bagel. They all had coffee. Cop pop.

  Quinn and Renz got contractual business out of the way before the food arrived. They’d just finished eating and ordered more coffee when Renz’s cell phone jangled.

  He dug the phone from his pocket as he stood and pivoted, graceful for such a fat man. He walked a few feet away for privacy. Quinn and Pearl looked at each other and knew that neither could overhear.

  Renz returned to the booth and sat down in front of the fresh cup of coffee the waiter had put on the table during the phone conversation.

  “Nift,” he said.

  “Fast worker,” Quinn said.

  ”I told him to get right on it, then give me the preliminaries. Also what the techs have come up with so far.”

  “So what’d Nift do?” Pearl asked. “Confirm the victim’s dead?”

  Renz dabbed at his lips with a white paper napkin and grinned at her. Looked at Quinn. “She’s still a smart-ass,” he said.

  “Never outgrown it,” Quinn said.

  Renz had been taking notes on a folded envelope during his phone conversation. He consulted them, then sat back, keeping his voice down so they had to strain to hear him.

  “Victim’s full name,” he said, “was Bonnie Maria Anderson. Twenty-nine years old. Originally from Chicago, been in New York two years. Last year and a half, she was a sales clerk at Gowns ’n’ Gifts. On West Eighty-first Street. I figured Pearl might wanna check that out. Woman who found the body owns the place.”

  Pearl wondered if she’d just heard a sexist remark. She decided to let it pass.

  Quinn didn’t know what she’d decided. “We’ll both go,” he said. “What else did you learn from Nift?”

  “The blood all over the carpet was the victim’s. Same blood that was smeared in the bathroom when the sicko cleaned up after the murder.”

  “She wouldn’t have had much opportunity to put up a fight,” Pearl said. “The creep probably wasn’t even scratched.”

  “True. That’s why there’s nothing we can use under her fingernails.” Renz squinted down again at his notes, causing the fat to bulge out above his collar. “Footprints at the scene look like they came from surgical slip-ons or oversized socks. Our killer appears to wear a ten-and-a-half or eleven shoe. The lab people are just getting started. Anything pertinent comes up, I’ll let you know.”

  “The eyelids . . .” Pearl said.

  “Oh. Looks like he cut them and tossed them aside,” Renz said. “They were in all that blood and nobody noticed them at first.”

  “Why do you suppose he’d cut off her eyelids?” Pearl asked.

  “He wanted her to look at him,” Quinn said. “He wanted them to be looking at each other when she died, so it was a shared experience.”

  Renz grinned. “Man knows his psychos.”

  “In and out of the NYPD,” Quinn said, and sipped his coffee. “They find her computer or pad?”

  “No sign of a computer in the apartment, though there was a printer near a desk.”

  “So he probably took her computer, either to be on the safe side because he might be mentioned or shown on it, or simply as a precaution.”

  “Or simply to steal a computer,” Pearl said.

  “There’s always that,” Renz said. “But I think we can all agree that what happened to Bonnie Anderson wasn’t the result of a screwed-up burglary.”

  Quinn and Pearl agreed with him. The killer had come prepared.

  “Last meal material,” Renz said.

  Pearl said, “We gotta catch him first.”

  “It’s good that you can still joke, after what we saw this morning,” Renz said. “You got a strong tummy for a woman.”

  “I hear that all the time,” Pearl said.

  Quinn picked up in her voice that she might be getting irritated with Renz. He wanted to head that off.

  “Speaking of last meals,” Quinn said. “What was Bonnie Anderson’s before she was killed?”

  “Fish,” Pearl said.

  The two men looked at her.

  “I saw it,” Pearl reminded them.

  “True,” Renz said. “Cod, to be exact, with some kind of sauce on it. Also some kind of pasta with white sauce. Looks like she had that instead of a salad. White wine. Traces of Ambien. Nift said that along with the wine it’d be enough to knock her for a loop, but only for a little while.”

  “Long enough to get her bound and gagged,” Pearl said.

  “So he could control her,” Quinn said, “but he didn’t want her to miss what he was doing to her.”

  “Thoughtful of him.”

  “The eye
lids again,” Pearl said.

  The waiter returned and poured fresh coffee. No one spoke until he was gone.

  “So she had Italian food,” Quinn said.

  “Probably. It was ingested about nine-thirty.”

  “Late dinner,” Quinn said.

  “Maybe they were at a play,” Pearl suggested. “There wouldn’t be a playbill or ticket stubs if they were. The killer would have been smart enough to take them with him.”

  “Have to be a short play.”

  “There are some.”

  “Maybe there’ll be something on a charge card account,” Renz said.

  “More likely on her killer’s account. Even more likely he paid cash for their tickets—if they even attended a play.”

  “What about Lady Liberty?” Pearl asked. “The plastic statuette stuck in the carnage where her stomach was laid open.”

  “Cost approximately seven dollars. You can buy them all over New York wherever people are screwed out of their money by cheap merchandise.”

  Pearl shook her head. “I mean, why would he leave a souvenir in his victim’s fatal wound?”

  “His signature,” Quinn said. “Or one of them. The smart ones sometimes use various ways to obscure what they must leave at the scene. It means something, but probably only to him. Same way with the eyelids.”

  “So how do we know his real signature hang-up?”

  “We’ll know.”

  They all knew how. It would require more victims in order to discern the consistent calling card.

  Renz finished his coffee and leaned back. The bulk of his stomach inched the booth’s table over toward Quinn and Pearl.

  With a glance at Renz’s ample abdomen, Pearl said, “Any notion as to why he’d open a woman’s midsection?”

  “That’s the kinda thing you’re paid to find out,” Renz said, not liking it that Pearl had asked her question while staring at his stomach. Or maybe any thinly veiled insult was only in his mind. It was hard to know with Pearl; she could find so many ways to aggravate the hell out of people.

  He stood up from the booth and buttoned his dark uniform coat over his white shirt. The coat was way too small for him. Pearl hoped the buttons wouldn’t fly off like bullets and wing her.

  “Stay in touch,” he said to Quinn. “I gotta get some work done. So do you guys. I’m gonna stop on the way in and get some doughnuts.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Pearl said.

  “It’s tradition,” Renz said, and swaggered away in full regalia. “Tradition . . . !” they heard him sing loudly as he headed for the door.

  “His version of Fiddler on the Roof,” Quinn said.

  Pearl sneered. “I wish the fiddler would fall through the roof.”

  “Mess up a great musical,” Quinn said.

  “That’s what tradition gets you.”

  Quinn remembered that was what the musical was about, tradition and what it could do, but he didn’t share his thoughts with Pearl.

  9

  They were in Gowns ’n’ Gifts, a small shop on West Eighty-first Street. The place was full of white this and white that. Most everything was cute. Sal could abide cute only so long.

  The Plunket case was now inactive. Bob Plunket’s wife, Joan, had confessed her affair with Foster Oaks, though Bob hadn’t confessed his with Laura Loodner. The Plunkets were going to start seeing a marriage counselor.

  Of course, Bob wanted to drop the Q&A investigation. He did want the photographs, though, of his wife and Oaks at the motel. He made mention of posting them on the Internet. Harold said he couldn’t harbor much hope for that marriage. Sal said he couldn’t much care.

  The thing was, they were off the Plunket case now, and full time on the Bonnie Anderson murder.

  Harold Mishkin glanced around the bridal shop and sniffed and smiled. “More than one sachet, I bet.”

  Sal grunted. He thought the shop smelled like a cheap hotel room immediately after sex.

  “You’re standing on a train,” Melanie Tudor said. Harold, a slender man, slightly bent, slightly gray, and with a completely gray drooping mustache, looked around in alarm, as if expecting the wail of a locomotive whistle.

  “She means wedding-gown train,” Harold’s partner, Sal Vitali, grated at him. It was Sal who flashed ID and introduced himself and Harold to Melanie Tudor, a short woman with an intricately wrought orange hairdo.

  “I suppose you’re here about poor Bonnie,” Melanie said.

  “We are, ma’am,” Sal grated.

  A man with a dry cleaner’s plastic bag slung over his shoulder stopped and put his hand on the shop’s doorknob, then walked on.

  “He lost his nerve,” Melanie said, “but he’ll be back.”

  “What marriage is all about,” Harold said.

  Melanie glared at him.

  “We understand you found the body,” Sal said.

  Melanie bowed her head. “Yes, yes. It was awful.” A tear glistened at the edge of her right eye, but maybe she could cry on cue, owning and operating a wedding shop.

  “Do a lot of people return things here?” Harold asked.

  Sal pretended his partner hadn’t spoken. “Could you describe that morning, Miss Tudor?”

  “Misses,” she corrected.

  Sal smiled. “Good.”

  “Only for business purposes, Detective. I live quite happily alone.”

  “Were you ever married?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I’m prying.”

  “Once. For a short time.” He glanced over to make sure Harold was taking notes.

  “What prompted you to go to the victim’s apartment?”

  “Bonnie was half an hour late for work, and not answering her phone. That wasn’t at all like her. And I needed her that afternoon so I could attend a showing of the latest bridesmaids styles.”

  “You sell those, too,” Harold muttered. “Their dresses, I mean.”

  “Oh, yes.” Melanie pointed to a rack of dresses off in a corner.

  “They’re kind of drab,” Harold said.

  Melanie Tudor smiled. “They also don’t fit well.”

  “So you went to Bonnie Anderson’s apartment,” Sal said, nudging her along, wishing Harold would shut up and take notes.

  “Yes. I got no answer on the intercom, of course. So I rang for the building’s super and explained that it was extremely important that I see Bonnie. When we went upstairs and he knocked on her door, there was no answer, and no sound from inside.”

  “And that’s when you called the police?” Harold said. It was his role to prod and keep the subject talking, a routine he and Sal had used for years. It had never occurred to Sal that maybe that was how Harold had developed his annoying manner.

  Melanie was looking only at Sal. “We didn’t call the police just then. I told the super Bonnie was diabetic and might need immediate attention, and kept orange juice in the refrigerator just for that purpose of reviving her if she went into a coma.”

  “You were lying about that?” Harold asked.

  “Of course. Bonnie was in perfect health. But the super had little choice but to use his key.” Melanie moved back a few steps, surrounding herself with diaphanous white material. ”A woman’s life might have depended on it.”

  “Lies and marriage,” Harold muttered, “go together like a horse and—”

  “Harold!” Sal interrupted him.

  Melanie Tudor was staring at him from her nest of virgin white material with contempt. She seemed to be concentrating on mere insult, which people usually didn’t do if they were lying like crazy to save their lives. Or somebody else’s life. Melanie and the super slid lower on Sal and Harold’s suspect list.

  “When you first entered Bonnie’s apartment,” Sal asked, “what did you notice?”

  “The smell,” Melanie said immediately. “It was so odd. Like burnished copper. It was almost like taste.”

  Sal knew she was describing the smell of copious amounts of blood. It was something tha
t stayed with a person, which maybe explained all the sachets smelling up the shop. The odor was better than what Melanie’s memory might keep conjuring up.

  “And the first thing you saw . . . ?”

  “Bonnie. What was left of her. She was lying nude on her back with her eyes . . . her eyelids were gone. She looked as if she’d been flayed. And her stomach was . . .”

  Melanie’s own eyelids fluttered and she fainted dead away into the surrounding folds of nuptials material. Sal and Harold both moved quickly to break her fall, though she would have landed softly in all that white.

  She was conscious but weak, and they led her over to a chair for men, uncomfortable and little so they’d soon become restless and pay almost anything to get out of the shop.

  “I’m so sorry,” Melanie said, sipping from a glass of water Harold brought her from a small half bath near the changing rooms.

  With trembling hands, she guided the glass’s rim to her lips. Harold’s hands were trembling, too. He and Melanie looked like a couple of startled deer.

  Melanie gazed up at Harold. “Are you married?”

  “Not anymore,” Harold said. “No one can abide me.”

  “No one can,” Sal reiterated.

  He waited until Melanie seemed her usual self.

  “We won’t get into what you saw,” he told her. “Did Bonnie have any plans for marriage?”

  “Oh, lots of them. Everything was worked out except for the groom.”

  “Did she date a lot of men?”

  “In the hopeless search for a good one, yes. She used T4Two.net, a genteel online dating service.”

  “Did she mention any of the men she met that way?”

  “No, she kept that part of her life private. Other than that the men she met online were almost always duds, she was not talkative about her experiences. But I should say . . .”

  “What?”

  “That Bonnie was particular. Some of the men she met through T4Two.net, other women might have thought they were just fine.”

  Sal wondered if Melanie had inherited any of the rejects.

  “Did you know any of Bonnie’s friends or acquaintances?”

  “Not really. Ours was a business relationship. I’ve found it’s never wise to become too friendly with my employees. It’s only inside these walls that we’re the best of friends. It’s important that we project good cheer and optimism.”