by John Lutz
Wearing only Jockey shorts, Quinn stood up, a tall, muscular man in the autumn of life but still strong. His shoulders were sloping and powerful, his hands large and dangling like grappling hooks at the ends of his long arms.
The CD player, clock, radio, alarm, phone beeped.
A phone call.
“Damn!” Pearl said, quite clearly.
Quinn saw on the glowing ID panel that the caller was Police Commissioner Harley Renz.
Quinn didn’t like talking with Renz anytime, much less when he was still half asleep.
He picked up the receiver, with trepidation.
“Quinn?”
“It’s me,” Quinn admitted.
“You still in the sack?”
“Sack. Yes.”
“Had breakfast yet?
“No.”
“Don’t. I got something for you.”
Quinn’s interest quickened. He and his investigating agency, Quinn & Associates (Q&A), sometimes took on cases on a work-for-hire basis for the NYPD. Renz was a purely political animal, stepping on necks and trading in corruption on his way up the bureaucratic path to the top. If a case had political ramifications and was deemed by Renz to be too hot to handle, he passed it down to Quinn and his detectives. Quinn had worked his way, and Renz had bought and extorted his way, to the higher echelons of the NYPD, before Quinn had gone into business for himself.
“You don’t want to get your fingers dirty?” he asked Renz.
Renz laughed. “You’re my go-to guy when a case looks like shit that might rub off. I admit it. Our business, you gotta expect some shit.”
“I like to limit it.”
“And I like to roll in it,” Renz said. “I don’t mind admitting I’m ambitious. We both know the score. We got things to trade. You take the risk and the media flack, and the money. I come away clean, move up a notch or two, and there’s more money for me down the line.”
Quinn didn’t know how Renz figured that, and didn’t want to ask. “What is it that you have,” he said, “that you’re so afraid will bite you in the ass?”
“Someone is dead,” Renz said. “A young woman whose purse contents identify her as Lois Graham. Got an address in SoHo.”
“Is that where the body is?” Quinn asked. He heard and felt Pearl stir next to him.
“Nope. Central Park. Near the Eighty-first Street entrance, not far off Central Park West.”
“Sexual assault?”
“Maybe.”
“That why she was killed?” Women were murdered occasionally in Central Park. So why was Renz calling Quinn about this one?
“The why isn’t what bothers me. It’s the how.”
“So what’s the how?”
“You’d have to see it.”
Quinn knew Renz was right. Despite the aggravating word games, Quinn would be curious enough to get up and drive to Central Park, even at this early hour.
“I’ll be there soon as I can,” Quinn said.
“Bring Pearl.”
Quinn glanced toward the other side of the king-size bed and saw that Pearl was gone. Pipes rattled and squealed and he heard the shower run. Pearl could shower and dress faster than any woman Quinn had known.
“Try to stop her,” he said.
4
After parking the Lincoln illegally near a loading dock on a side street, Quinn propped his NYPD plaque in the windshield, and he and Pearl jogged across Central Park West toward the park.
It wasn’t difficult to find the crime scene. White canvas panels were propped on two sides of where Quinn and Pearl assumed the body to lie. Yellow crime scene tape kept gawkers at a distance on the other two sides. A uniform appeared and moved to stop them. Then the young cop recognized Quinn and backed away, pointing needlessly toward the canvas and the knot of uniforms as well as plainclothes cops in suits and ties. Most of the detectives had taken off their suit coats, and their shirts were glued to them so the color of their flesh showed through the damp material.
Quinn and Pearl moved through dappled morning sunlight toward the crime scene. Today showed every indication of becoming another scorcher. Quinn, as usual, wore a coat and tie as if already on the hunt. Pearl, vividly attractive as ever with her dark hair and eyes and generous figure, had on casual navy slacks and a white tunic. A breeze rattled the leaves on the branches above as they moved toward the body, careful to avoid where the CSU techs told them not to step. Renz noticed them and gave a half wave. He was wearing a light tan suit instead of his commissioner’s uniform. His increasingly rotund form put to waste the expensive material and expert tailoring.
Doctor Julius Nift, the little necrophiliac (it was rumored) ME, was kneeling by the nude dead woman and looked up and smiled at them. Especially at Pearl, who hated him with a passion.
Renz also smiled, his flesh-padded cheeks almost hiding his eyes, the fat pink of his bull neck spilling over his white shirt collar.
“Meet Lois Graham,” Nift said. “Beautiful in death.” He rose to his full height, which wasn’t much, and expanded his chest. He saw himself as Napoleonic. Quinn thought of him as a banty rooster with a sour disposition.
Lois Graham’s clothes were stacked neatly folded off to the side. It took a second look to realize they appeared to have been cut away from her body rather than removed in ordinary fashion. Her pale, still form lay on its back so she seemed to be staring up at the sky with frozen wonder.
“She has some rack on her,” Nift commented, doubtless trying to get a rise out of Pearl, who ignored him.
But that wasn’t what sickened and angered Quinn. Lois Graham had been eviscerated, her intestines coiled next to her body. And there was something about how she lay. A strange awkwardness. Quinn and Pearl moved closer.
And suddenly understood. The corpse’s limbs had been neatly sawed through at the joints. Her wrists were a quarter of an inch short of her hands. Her arms had been severed at the elbows and shoulders. Same kind of sawing with her legs, at the ankles, knees, and hips. Quinn had assumed her throat had been cut. He saw now that her head had been sawn off and replaced slightly crookedly on the stump of her neck. There was, oddly enough, not a lot of blood.
“The injuries are postmortem,” Nift said. “If her heart hadn’t stopped first there’d be blood all over the place. But as you can see, there isn’t.”
“Thank God for that,” Pearl said.
“Did the killer have medical knowledge?” Quinn asked.
Nift shook his head. “Some. He isn’t a surgeon, but he has a basic knowledge of the human body.”
“Med-school dropout?” Pearl asked.
“Doubtful. A med-school student would have done this a bit differently, and with different instruments.”
“Still . . .” Quinn said
Nift shook his head. “Not part of the curriculum. Though my guess is that he’s done this kind of thing before.”
They all glanced at Lois Graham. Her corpse reminded Quinn of a marionette that had been carefully laid out because its strings had been removed. Unlike some of the recently dead they had seen, she didn’t look as if she might surprise them by getting up and walking away. Something about the detached but related parts. Then there was the compactly coiled length of intestine. Quinn regarded the incision from her sternum to pubis.
“What do you think made the cuts?” he asked.
Nift shot a look at Renz, who had already asked him some of these questions. Renz said nothing. Nift sighed and knew he’d better answer again. He winked at Pearl, who stood stone-faced.
“Not a surgical tool that I could identify,” Nift said. “Some kind of sharp, agile saw with a narrow blade. It cut cleanly through bone and gristle, along with flesh.”
“Electrical?”
“You mean battery powered?” Nift smoothed his tie. “I doubt it. Not because a portable saw wouldn’t do this. It looks to me that the instrument was sharp enough that an electrical or fuel-powered saw wouldn’t have been needed. And I’m sure the cutting was done
right here. She wasn’t sectioned off like this and then moved here and so neatly reassembled.”
“But it’s possible?” Pearl said.
“Possible,” Nift conceded. “More like the work of a jigsaw in the hands of a reasonably strong man.”
“Or woman?” Pearl asked.
Nift shrugged. “I doubt it, but I wouldn’t rule it out.”
“This was . . . sex to him,” Pearl said.
“Understandable,” Nift said.
Pearl looked at him as if he were the most loathsome thing on the planet.
“Control’s what it’s all about,” he explained. “That’s why victims die such slow deaths.”
Pearl said, “It’s almost as if she was a doll and he took her apart to see how she worked.”
Quinn thought it was exactly like that. “Jigsaw,” he said. “Do you really suppose that’s how he killed them?”
“That’s how I’d do it.” Nift winked at Pearl. “If I wanted these same results. Of course, I’m a professional. I’d do a cleaner, neater job.” He waved a hand to take in the death scene. “This guy was a butcher, but not one without promise.”
“As a surgeon,” Pearl said.
Nift smiled at her. “No, as a serial killer.”
Renz looked at his watch. “I’ve got important meetings this morning.”
And we don’t. Pearl considered Renz and Nift. Control.
“I’ll drop by and sign the work-for-hire contract, and pick up some NYPD shields,” Quinn said. “Then we’ll go look over the victim’s apartment.”
“Crime scene techs have already been there. No sign of the killer having visited. Nothing unusual. Place neat enough, if you don’t count a D-cup bra draped over a chair in the bedroom.”
“I’m gonna give you Helen for this one,” Renz said. Helen Iman was an NYPD profiler, a six-foot-plus amazon in her forties who looked like a women’s basketball coach. She was the only profiler Quinn had much faith in. She talked some of the familiar and obvious profiler-standard yammer, but there was no arguing with her results.
“Does Helen know that?” Quinn asked.
“She does,” Renz said. “She’ll be by for you to brief her later this morning. Remember, she reports to you and works for me.” Renz smiled. “She has a tightrope to walk. Not so unlike yourself.”
“Who discovered the body?” Quinn asked.
“Early morning jogger. Health nut like the victim. Name of Rose Darling.” Renz glanced again at his gold watch. “I’ll fax you what we got when it comes in. Keep the info tight, though. The sooner the media find out, and the more they know, the harder it will be to find this psycho and put him down.”
“There’s only so much we can do with media,” Quinn said. “We can’t keep this a secret, unless we pay off Rose Darling and send her away on vacation someplace nobody ever heard of.”
“It’s the mob that does that kind of thing,” Renz said.
Pearl concealed a thin smile. Control.
“Let Rose Darling talk,” Renz said. “I run an open shop and play square with the citizens. We just won’t mention anything in detail about the manner of death, especially about the dismemberment. And we’ve got a couple of days before we have to officially ID the body.”
“A few facts and an inconclusive story will drive the media wolves crazy. They’ll have their fangs out and will be pressing for answers.”
“Not to worry,” Renz said. “I’ve got a guy who can handle them.”
“Who would that be?” Quinn asked.
“You.”
5
Jordan Kray sat in his apartment watching the news on his small flat-screen TV. Although he could easily afford a bigger set, he liked to watch the news small, so he could wrap his mind around it. Understand it. Learn how things work.
He sat in his stocking feet with his knees drawn up sideways. His living room was spacious, with a view of the tree-lined street where he’d moved a year ago, when a well-thought-out financial strategy had brought him a windfall. Moving the money from his victims’ accounts to his own had been painful for them but a pleasure for him. He relived their agonies each time he turned the key in his front door.
There were two kinds of people in the world. He was a winner, and the other kind didn’t matter. Once they were dead and disinterested, what was theirs became his. Cash, jewelry, valuable antiques . . . it all became negotiable and found its way into his portfolio of ETFs and mutual funds. The devil’s own treasure chest for one of his disciples.
He’d stopped off at the kitchenware department of a store on Broadway and bought two identical automatic pop-up toasters—one to use in his kitchen, and one to disassemble so he thoroughly understood how the toasters worked. Did they raise the toasted slices of bread when they had become sufficiently toasted, or was the whole thing all about times? Like it took a certain amount of time to toast bread and that was that. Simple. No thermostat, nothing that Jordan couldn’t understand.
But what about the timer? If there was one.
He glanced at the TV screen. People in Arab clothing were throwing rocks at each other, while those not involved in some kind of demonstration cowered and tried to stay safe. This was news?
He shifted his attention to the toaster and used a screwdriver to remove its chrome cover.
There were the heat baffles that were within fractions of an inch of the bread slices. They would probably glow red and stay that way until the bread was sufficiently browned.
But how does the toaster know?
On the TV screen, a battered pickup truck arrived on the scene. Men with what looked like Kalashnikov automatic rifles began jumping out of both sides of the truck’s bed as it coasted down the street toward the rock throwers.
The killer glanced at the TV, then returned his attention to the toaster. It appeared that what he thought of as heat baffles were actually spring-loaded devices whose purpose was to isolate the toast so it was kept from touching the heating coils.
Not wanting to be fooled twice, the killer left the chrome body of the toaster off, and slipped the power cord into a wall socket. He put no bread in, but depressed the toaster’s handle.
It took less than a minute for the coils to glow bright red.
The sound of gunfire erupted from the TV, and a woman’s breathless voice began talking about “the army and the terrorists.”
There were several explosions. The pickup truck that had recently arrived at the scene was now upside down and burning. People were bent over and running, crossing the Arab street to escape gunfire.
The killer unplugged the toaster and let it cool. He had it now. He understood how it worked. How this brand of toaster worked, anyway. It was controlled by a timer rather than by a thermostat to register the temperature that would brown the bread without burning it.
Crowd sounds drifted in from the TV.
There was a soft sproing! sound and a spring about an inch long flew out of the toaster and landed on the table. The killer bent over and studied what he could see of the toaster’s mechanism. There was no sign of where the spring had come from, but he wasn’t worried. He could figure it out later. Or maybe the toaster didn’t even need the spring in order to work.
He suspected that more expensive toasters had some kind of thermostat and were controlled by heat rather than time. This one was a cheapy, bought for research rather than jelly or jam. Time now to put it back together.
It didn’t want to go back together. At least, not to its previous form. Not for the killer. The chrome cover wouldn’t go on straight, and he seemed to have broken the Bakelite handle on the lever that depressed the bread.
He picked up a smaller screwdriver and used it to pry the toaster’s cover. He needed only about an eighth of an inch. The sleek chrome body of the toaster still wouldn’t quite fit. He pried with the smaller screwdriver.
Yeow!
The damned thing was still hot!
And there was that damned spring, rolling off the table.
He went to the sink and filled a glass with cold water, then sat on a kitchen counter stool and soaked his left hand.
He found himself facing the TV. Someone, a man or woman, was on fire and crawling away from the burning truck.
The truck exploded. The person crawling away was enveloped in flames.
The killer removed his hand from the glass and dried it on a dish towel. His burned fingers didn’t look serious enough that he’d need ointment and a Band-Aid. He resumed reassembling the toaster.
A man in neatly pressed pajamas, sitting on the edge of a bed, came on the TV screen and began talking about the benefits of a new pill that helped people get to sleep and wasn’t habit-forming. It also sometimes eliminated erectile dysfunction.
The killer remained zeroed in on toaster dysfunction. This time being more careful.
Until he heard a local newscaster’s voice say Lois Graham’s name.
He put down the toaster and sat watching the flat-screen TV. The newscaster, Tad something, was interviewing a detective the killer was familiar with, a man named Frank Quinn. It took the killer only a few seconds to recognize Quinn, but who could forget the imposing figure? He was a big man, too rugged to be a leading man, but with the kind of honest ugliness that attracted some women.
“We’re searching now for whoever killed her,” Quinn was saying. No doubt talking about Lois Graham. “It appears that he panicked, probably scared away by someone or some animal. Unfortunately, no one reached her in time to save her.”
The killer almost laughed out loud; I guess not, with her insides all over the grass, and the rest of her taken apart like a puzzle.
He was proud of his work.
“There’s nothing special about this killer,” Quinn was saying.
The killer smiled. You’re lying!
“But we would like to warn people again about the park,” Quinn continued. “Sometimes such places are scenic and safe during daylight hours, but are much different after dark. Central Park is a great place, but don’t go there unless you have to after sundown.”
“To Central Park?” Tad the newsman seemed incredulous.
“To any park. Cowardly killers like this are friendly with the night.”