In for the Kill

by John Lutz

  "He is a butcher," Quinn said.

  "A real one, maybe."

  The thought had occurred to Quinn. "He'd have the skills, as well as the tools of his trade."

  There was a uniformed cop in the apartment, standing and staring out the window. He hadn't turned around when Quinn and Fedderman entered. Now he did. He was a middle-aged guy with a gray military haircut, his cap in his hands, over his crotch. His face was so white Quinn thought the man might faint any second. Quinn and Fedderman flashed the shields Renz had provided, and the uniform pointed toward a short hall that Quinn knew led to the bathroom and only bedroom.

  "Maybe you oughta sit down," Quinn said.

  "I can stand okay," the cop said. Point of pride.

  Quinn nodded and led the way down the hall. He and Fedderman both slipped latex gloves on their hands as they walked. Quinn was a little surprised by how effortless and automatic it was, an old task still familiar.

  There was no way to prepare for what was in the bathroom. In the center of the tub, Ida Ingrahm's head lay propped on its side on the stack of torso and limbs. Her damp brown hair had been smoothed back so her face was visible. Her eyes were open, darkened by blood from capillaries ruptured as she'd drowned, but they didn't so much look dead as expectant. As if she'd been waiting for somebody to come into the bathroom. Maybe Quinn and Fedderman.

  "Some sight," said a voice behind them.

  Quinn turned and saw Nift from the Medical Examiner's office, not one of his favorite people. Nift was a pigeon-chested little guy with thick black hair that dangled in short bangs high on his bulging forehead. He had an imperious attitude, a smart mouth, and appeared to be strutting even when standing still. Always a meticulous dresser, he seemed to be dolling up even more for his work. Today he was wearing a black three-button suit, white shirt, and a black silk tie. Quinn thought he looked like Napoleon gussied up as a mortician.

  "Some stench," Fedderman said.

  "Smells something like the morgue on a busy day," Nift said. "I knew you guys were on the way, so I didn't touch anything, just tippy-toed in and looked at the poor woman. I determined that she was dead."

  "Cut up like the others?" Fedderman asked.

  "I wouldn't know if she had a sense of humor," Nift said.

  "I might throw you into that tub with her," Quinn said.

  Nift stared at him. "I believe you just might, Captain."

  "Maybe you oughta give us a straight answer," Fedderman said.

  "As near as I can tell, without having moved the body parts, she seems to have been dissected in the same manner as the two previous victims. She also fits the killer's type."

  "Now you're doing detective work," Quinn said.

  Nift smiled. "My weakness. Too many TV cop shows, I suppose. But I really can't tell you much more than the obvious until after the postmortem." He shrugged. "Cut, hack, saw."

  "Drowned first," Fedderman said.

  "Yes, I can about guarantee you that. Just like the first two. And like with the first two, I doubt if there'll be any indications of recent sexual activity." He smiled. "Wanna take a closer look?"

  "We'll take your word for it," Quinn said. "Was her hair pulled back from her face like that when you arrived?"

  "Sure was. Just as the killer wanted you to find it. Or maybe it was simply a gentle gesture after the beheading."

  There was a flash behind them. The police photographer had arrived, armed with a digital camera about the size of a cigarette lighter. There were three techs beyond him, nosing around the living room for prints or stray hairs or dying messages or whatever. Quinn figured they wouldn't find much, if anything, of use. This was a clean and careful killer they were hunting. Cleanliness and caution were deep in his methodology and would be essential in his psychology. The police profiler should be having a ball with this guy.

  "I'll finish my preliminary," Nift said, "then get out of the way."

  Quinn and Fedderman moved aside so Nift could squeeze back into the almost sanitarily clean bathroom. Chromed faucet handles glittered. The ceramic tiles gleamed. Admirable.

  Except for what was in the tub.

  "Let's go into the bedroom," Quinn said.

  Fedderman followed. "We'll look for clues where it's less crowded and the light's better."

  Quinn was glad Fedderman was recovering his cop's sense of humor that helped to keep him sane. Like Nift, maybe, only without the mean streak.

  Fedderman knew why Quinn wanted to examine the bedroom--to get a better sense of Ida Ingrahm, who she was before she became victim number three.

  The bedroom was neatly arranged, the bed still made. The room didn't seem to have been touched by the crime except for the odor. Their bed had been against the other wall when Quinn and Pearl had slept here. He tried not to think about that.

  Ida Ingrahm seemed to have fit the mold of thousands, maybe millions, of single women in New York. On her dresser was the framed family photo, a man and woman and two teenage girls, posed smiling in front of a lake ringed with trees that looked about to surrender their leaves to autumn. The females in the photo looked quite a bit alike. Quinn figured he was looking at Mom, Dad, Sis, and the future murder victim. There was nothing in the smiling faces of either of the daughters that portended an early, violent death.

  Ida's closet held an assortment of mix-and-match black clothing, a rack of shoes. Near the foot of the bed was a small TV on a white wicker stand. There was a bookshelf that held mostly self-help and diet books, a few paperback mysteries. On the lamp table next to the bed, a pair of glasses was folded atop a Stuart Kaminsky novel. Pearl used to read Kaminsky's series about a cop named Lieberman, and Quinn wondered if she'd left behind the book when she moved out. It bothered him that the dead woman had read the same book as Pearl, maybe even turning down page corners the way Pearl did to keep her place. He went to the glasses and, careful not to touch anywhere that might obscure prints, examined the lenses. Single power and weak. They looked like drugstore reading glasses.

  "Lots of shoes," Fedderman said behind Quinn, still staring into the closet.

  "Lots of women have lots of shoes," Quinn said, glancing over at him. When he turned back, he saw something he hadn't noticed before because it was mostly hidden behind the lamp base. A cell phone.

  Maybe with speed dial numbers, information, a log of recent numbers called or received. Maybe with a recorder, a calculator, a digital camera with a stored photo of the killer. Well, who knew, these days? It looked like an ordinary cell phone, but who could tell? Quinn couldn't keep up with technology.

  He left the bedroom and went halfway down the hall, then summoned one of the techs, a bright looking young guy with dark-rimmed glasses and a bow tie. Quinn had always thought that men who wore bow ties were a separate breed, understood only by themselves. Probably had a secret handshake.

  Like Quinn and Fedderman, the bow-tied tech was wearing white evidence gloves. Unlike Quinn and Fedderman, he was under thirty and would understand cell phone technology.

  "Do what you want with this so we can check out any information stored," Quinn said, pointing to the phone.

  The tech nudged the phone with a gloved fingertip, then began dusting for prints.

  After a few seconds, he looked up at Quinn, smiling. "Something you should know about this phone, sir."

  Quinn liked it when a tech called him "sir." Very rare. He put it down to youth. "There something different about it?"

  "Yeah."

  What happened to "sir"?

  The tech carefully lifted the phone between thumb and middle finger, then lightly squeezed. It began to buzz.

  Quinn was just about to tell the tech to let him answer the phone, when the buzzing stopped.

  "It's not a phone, sir. Only looks like one. It's a vibrator."

  "That's to let you know you got a call when you don't want people to hear it ring," Fedderman said.

  "It's not a phone. Really, it's a vibrator."

  "Huh?" Fedderman said, fina
lly getting it, interested.

  The kid pushed another button and the buzzing got louder. The little cell phone became a blur.

  "Whoa!" Fedderman said.

  Quinn didn't know what to say.

  "It's not the kind of vibrator you'd use on your sore back," the tech said. He was still smiling, but looking thoughtful. "I guess it's so women can carry it around, maybe use it when they travel, and it won't draw attention and embarrass them if security or customs root through their luggage."

  "What a great idea," Fedderman said.

  The tech turned off the mock phone and placed it back down exactly in its original position. "I think I know whose prints'll be all over this for everyone to see."

  "She's beyond embarrassment," Quinn said.

  "What are you doing in my bedroom?" demanded a woman's voice.

  Startled, all three men turned to look.

  Pearl.

  "Who's guarding the bank?" Fedderman asked, after Pearl had been filled in and had looked around the apartment. They were outside on West Eighty-second, standing in the shade near the building's concrete stoop.

  "Someone else," Pearl said. "I'm on a leave of absence."

  Quinn looked closely at her. She was simply Pearl. Compact, buxom, and beautiful. She had on her usual deep red lipstick today, so stark against her pale complexion that her generous mouth seemed to have been painted on by some manic, inspired artist. With her large dark eyes, perfect white teeth, black hair, she was so vivid she often reminded Quinn of some kind of cartoon character. But she was real. Quinn knew she was real.

  "Renz call you?" he asked.

  "Even before he called you."

  "I thought you weren't interested in this case."

  "This sick asshole killed somebody in my old apartment. Somebody who might just as easily have been me. That makes it personal."

  "Also makes it coincidental," Fedderman said.

  "Doesn't it, though?" Pearl said.

  A brisk summer breeze kicked up and moved a crumpled white takeout bag along the sidewalk. Quinn stood his ground, merely lifting a foot to let the bag pass and continue along the pavement.

  "We need you, Pearl," Fedderman said.

  She smiled. "Thanks, Feds."

  "You one of us again, Pearl?" Quinn asked.

  "The smart one," she said.

  They spent the next several hours talking to Ida's neighbors, some of whom remembered Pearl. No one had seen or heard anything unusual. Those who knew Ida Ingrahm said she was quiet, and worked as some kind of artist or graphic designer at a company in midtown. She rode the subway back and forth to work.

  All the detective team's time and effort left them right back where they'd started hours ago, standing on the sidewalk just outside the building. Ida Ingrahm's remains had long since been removed, and the crime scene unit had pulled out. A uniform remained in the hall outside the apartment, with its door yellow-taped, and would be relieved in a few hours by another cop who would remain there all night. Sometimes criminals really did return to the scene of the crime. Especially if they forgot something incriminating.

  Quinn unwrapped a Cuban cigar and lit it. The butcher shop stench had stayed with him and become taste. The acrid scent of burning tobacco helped. A few people walking past on the sidewalk glared at him as he exhaled a large puff of smoke. So arrest me. Neither Pearl nor Fedderman complained; they'd been upstairs like Quinn. It seemed to them that the entire building smelled like a slaughterhouse, but Ida's neighbors didn't seem to notice. Maybe the death stench had grown on them slowly, and they became accustomed to it.

  Or maybe it was mental. The other tenants hadn't been in Ida's apartment to bid her farewell.

  Ida nude. A three-dimensional Picasso. In pieces like a disconnected puzzle doll, chalk white and eerily pure in her drained bathtub.

  Ida clean.

  Her sins washed away?

  Quinn knew better, but he wished for Ida that it worked that way. He felt an overbearing sadness not only for her but for himself and the entire human race.

  The things we do to each other...

  "You cab over here?" he asked Pearl.

  Pearl nodded. Did a thing with her lips so she could take in some secondhand smoke.

  "That's our unmarked across the street," Quinn said.

  "I know," Pearl said. "It's the only car that looks like it should be wearing a fedora."

  "Since you're on the case, come with us back to the office and we'll bring you up to speed."

  "We have an office?"

  "Such as it is," Fedderman said. "And not far from here."

  "Has it got a coffee machine?"

  "No."

  "Then it isn't an office."

  "Let's move," Quinn said, already starting to cross the street.

  "Vroom! Vroom!" Pearl said behind him.

  Smart-mouthing me already, Quinn thought. Hiding behind her wisecracks where no one could touch her soft spots.

  Well, who doesn't? At least sometimes?

  A car pulled out of a parking space and had to brake hard to keep from hitting the three of them. The driver leaned on the horn. Pearl made an obscene gesture, otherwise ignoring the man.

  Quinn thought this wasn't going to be easy.

  So why, whenever he looked at Pearl, did he feel like smiling?

  7

  The office: three gray steel desks (as if Renz had known Pearl would be joining them); four chairs; a file cabinet; and a wooden table with a lamp, computer, and printer on it. The printer was the kind that copied and faxed and scanned and did who knew what-all that Quinn would probably never figure out. The table was directly over one of the outcroppings of wire on the floor, everything mysteriously connected to it via another tangle of wire emanating from computer and printer.

  "This thing work?" Pearl asked, walking over to the computer. It was an old Hewlett-Packard, gigantic.

  Quinn pulled a cord that opened some blinds, letting natural light in to soften the fluorescent glare. "Yeah. And some computer whiz from the NYPD's gonna set us up with more of them. Update our system. We're coded into the NYPD and various data banks. Codes and passwords are on a piece of paper under the lamp base."

  Pearl grinned, the brightest thing in the gloomy office. "Everybody hides their passwords under the lamp base. First place burglars and identity thieves look."

  "Nobody's gonna break in here," Fedderman said. "And far as I'm concerned, somebody else is welcome to my identity."

  Quinn settled into the chair behind his desk and rocked slightly back and forth. The chair squeaked. The other two chairs at the desks were identical--cheap black vinyl swivel chairs on rollers. The fourth chair was straight-backed and wooden, presumably for an eventual suspect.

  Pearl and Fedderman rolled the other two chairs up close and sat down. Quinn's desk was strategically placed directly beneath one of the fluorescent fixtures, so there was plenty of light even if it was ghastly. He slid open one of the rattling steel drawers and handed Pearl the murder books on Janice Queen and Lois Ullman.

  "You can look them over now, if you want," he said, "then take them home and study them."

  Pearl rested the files on her lap, and opened the top one. Quinn watched her scan each piece of paper or photograph inside, then move on and repeat the process. A tune from Phantom of the Opera was seeping over from the Nothing but the Tooth side of the building. Music to fill molars by? That, the hum and swish of traffic outside, and Pearl leafing through the files, were the only sounds for a long time.

  Then Fedderman said, "'Music of the Night.'"

  Pearl, not looking up, said, "Uh-huh."

  Along with a ballpoint pen and the glass ashtray with BILTMORE HOTEL on it, was a telephone on Quinn's desk. It wasn't a rotary, but it was old and black with a base and receiver.

  And it was ringing.

  Quinn lifted the receiver and pressed it to his ear.

  The caller was Nift, with a more detailed autopsy report.

  "Death by drowning," he
said. "Probably carved up by the same cutting instruments used on the previous victims. Looks like a power saw was used on the larger bones and tougher ligaments. Tightly serrated blade, like an electric jigsaw or maybe a circular. Her family should be glad she was dead at the time."

  "A portable saw?"

  "Could've been a portable. It'd almost have to be, wouldn't it, not to make too much noise? And they make them powerful these days."

  "That's how we figure it," Quinn said.

  "No signs of sexual activity of any kind around the genitals or on any of the body parts. No traces of semen anywhere at the scene. A residue of adhesive on ankles and arms, and around the mouth, from when the victim was taped in such a way that she wouldn't have been able to move anything but fingers and toes. In short, Ida Ingrahm died just like the first two victims. And she was a brunette, like the first two. If there was any doubt before that you're on the trail of a serial killer, there shouldn't be now. The beautiful if disassembled Ida was number three."

  "You think it coulda been a doctor or a butcher? The way the work was done and he cleaned up after himself?"

  "Coulda been almost anyone," Nift said. "It only took rudimentary knowledge, maybe gained from animals. Coulda been a fastidious janitor."

  Quinn didn't say anything for a few seconds.

  "Anything else I can help you with while I'm on the phone?" Nift asked.

  "You called me," Quinn said. "Most of the time medical examiners wait for the detectives to call."

  "I find this killer interesting," Nift said. "You know me, how I like to play cop. Also, I thought I should call and let you know there's a journalist from City Beat hot on this story. Woman named Cindy Sellers. She's a hard charger, and serial killers make for big news. These murders take 'if it bleeds it leads' to an extreme."

  "I never heard of City Beat."

  "It's fairly new, not much circulation yet. But you know the way it works: One wolf gets the scent, then the whole pack's on the hunt."

  Quinn knew. He thanked Nift, then hung up and relayed the information to Fedderman and Pearl.

  "No surprise there," Pearl said. She leaned forward and placed the murder files on the desk, then rolled back a few feet in her chair so her gaze could take in both Quinn and Fedderman. "But there is something."