by John Lutz
He stood back with his arms folded and surveyed his work. The firmly taped shoe was immovable, its stiletto heel protruding from the center of her forehead like the horn of a unicorn. She could barely see beyond each side of the shoe.
He smiled as he thought that was what she’d look like if he applied more tape—a mummified unicorn.
But as it was, she closely enough resembled a goat.
He drew from his pocket a long silver chain with a silver letter S dangling from it. He held the chain before her so she could see it around the shoe, and then looped it over her taped head. It lay on her bare neck and chest like ice.
Then, seemingly ignoring her, he began to undress.
When he was nude, he used the knife to cut away her clothes. It took a while, and her clothes were ripped as much as cut cleanly. While this was occurring she closed her eyes and her mind and sent herself away. This wasn’t happening to her, simply because it couldn’t be. Somebody else. It was somebody else in this bed.
My bed!
Candice felt her bladder release. The warmth of her urine between her thighs and beneath her was strangely comforting.
But when he held the knife before her eyes, her horror made everything dark, darker, and she welcomed losing consciousness. She wanted nothing more in this world than to slip into nothingness.
Almost instantly she was choking, gagging. The stench of ammonia made her nauseated.
She saw the small bottle in his hand, with the tight cotton wad stuffed in its neck, and knew immediately what he’d done. She could imagine him holding the bottle beneath her nose, near the deformed shoe.
He brought me back! Damn him! He brought me back!
“I don’t want you to miss anything,” he said, reading her mind. He gave her a smile that was eerily beatific. “Aren’t you sorry now for what you did?”
Keeping the ammonia at the ready on the nightstand, he began to work with the knife.
He was quick, deft, engrossed.
Even as the pain roared through her blood she recalled a case where a woman’s throat had been slit but not deeply enough to kill her. The victim’s blood had coagulated faster and thicker than usual and she’d survived.
It could happen.
That was the one slender hope she clung to as she slipped into, and was yanked back from, unconsciousness. Again and again. Journeys in and out of pain.
And again.
Very calmly, he drew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. Like a character in an old movie, he let the cigarette dangle from where it was stuck on his lower lip, so that it waggled when he talked. The scent of burning tobacco mingled with the smell of ammonia.
“It’s funny, isn’t it?” she heard him say. “We both want the same thing now. For you to stay alive as long as possible.”
She moaned.
He giggled. “Well, I didn’t mean funny ha-ha.”
He held up the bloody knife so she could see it grasped in his rubber-gloved hand.
“Aren’t you sorry now for what you did?”
But she observed the dreaded knife only briefly.
During those times when she was conscious, she could not look away from his eyes.
PART 2
Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, The Tempest
31
Quinn and Pearl stood among the Crime Scene Unit techs, medical examiner, and police photographer, looking down at the dead body of Candice Culligan. In the corner of his vision Quinn saw Pearl absently cross herself. She was given to spells of Catholicism.
Dr. Julius Nift, the ME, was still bending over the bed on which Candice lay. He was feeling and probing, his jaw set, his eyes intent. Repugnant though the little ME might be, Quinn had no doubts about Nift’s competence.
“Last night around midnight, give or take two hours,” Nift said, in answer to Quinn’s question about time of death. “That’s all I can give you right now. It looks as if he started in on her hours before she died.”
“Stringing it out,” Pearl said through clenched teeth.
“Exacting torture,” Nift said, “with periods of rage. The way she’s so tightly taped indicates that. And look at the careful and precise stripping away of the top layer of skin so it dangles in shreds. Almost as if he were decorating her.”
Quinn forced himself to look again at what was left of Candice Culligan.
“Observe how those small cut marks and cigarette burns were done with such deliberation,” Nift continued. “Now look at her pubic area, the way it was slashed. Those long, curved cuts. This was a crime of passion. Sometimes cold passion, but passion nonetheless.”
“What about the shoe used as a gag?” Quinn asked.
Nift shrugged. “You tell me.”
“The way it’s taped to her face, so the spiked heel looks like it’s coming out of her forehead, makes it look almost like a unicorn horn.”
“So why would he give up on the wadded panties used as a gag?” Nift asked.
“He’s not satisfied with just pain,” Pearl said. “He wants to humiliate his victims. He’s getting more violent, more dangerous, if that’s possible.”
“Why all the dried blood around her mouth?” Quinn asked Nift.
“Shoe toe mighta been jammed in there so hard it took some teeth out. I’ll know more when I get her on the table and we get intimately acquainted.”
Pearl felt her stomach turn. It was all she could do to hold herself in check and not physically attack Nift.
“The name on the mirror this time is Nathan Devliner,” Fedderman said, walking back into the spacious bedroom. He’d been in another part of the apartment, checking for bloody writing. “I guess we have to check the Socrates’s Cavern membership again.”
Quinn said. “We still have the chain with the letter S.”
“We were speculating about the shoe jammed in her mouth, and bent and taped over her face so it looks like she’s grown a horn,” Pearl said.
“Unicorn horn,” Fedderman said.
Pearl glanced at Quinn.
“Great minds in the same channel,” he said. But the stiletto heel did resemble a unicorn horn.
“Maybe a reference to a goat,” Fedderman said. “A unicorn is a kind of goat.”
“Sacrificial goats,” Pearl said. She looked at Quinn and Fedderman. “Who knows what goes on in the minds of these sickos?”
“Isn’t it sacrificial lambs?” Fedderman said.
“Lambs don’t have horns,” Pearl said.
“They do if they’re rams.”
“Then they’re not lambs.”
“Enough,” Quinn said.
“Maybe the killer just happened to find the shoe handy and figured it would make an effective gag,” Fedderman said.
“The shoe’s mate is in the closet,” Quinn said. “He must have taken time out while she was unconscious or too scared to scream, and gone to get it and bring it back over to the bed. He was looking for effect. Whether he was thinking of sacrificial lambs—or goats—is hard to say.”
“Or unicorns,” Pearl said. “They’re mythological, and maybe that’s what our killer wants to become. That’s what most serial killers want to become—myths.” She did a double take and gave Fedderman a keen, appraising look. “What’s with the new suit, Feds? I miss your baggy brown outfit. You keep wearing those Armani threads and people will stop thinking of you as a sartorial disaster. The rumor is that you abuse your suits before you wear them so you’ll look like a suspect after a rough night in the lockup. It makes the riffraff identify with you and open up in interrogations.”
“That’s only a myth,” Fedderman said.
Quinn looked more carefully at Fedderman. He, too, had noticed something different about the potbellied, lanky detective. Fedderman’s obviously expensive blue suit made him look as if his mismatched body was made of matching parts, which was a triumph of tailoring.
The suit was a pip. Quinn could think of
only a few reasons why Fedderman might suddenly have become a virtual GQ model. He didn’t like any of them.
After the techs left, Quinn and his detectives went through the apartment methodically. They were sure the lab wouldn’t come up with a useful fingerprint or palm print, and there would be nothing distinctive about the gloves the killer wore. The Skinner was nothing if not careful.
Quinn made it a point to check Candice Culligan’s address book. It contained no Nathan Devliner.
There was no Nathan Devliner in any of the NYC directories.
“Give me a minute,” Pearl said, from where she was seated on the sofa working her laptop. “I’ll check the Socrates’s Cavern membership list Lido came up with.”
The others stood silently while she bent closely over her computer.
“Here it is!” she said after a few minutes. “Devliner was a member.”
She raised a finger, asking for more time.
They gave it to her. More than a few minutes this time.
“Okay,” she said finally, looking up from her computer. “Nathan Ernest Devliner was a Socrates’s Cavern gold-key member from January, 1970, to September, 1975, when he moved out of the area. He died in Kingdom City, Arizona, in April of 1986. A cerebral hemorrhage. He was seventy-four. I guess he retired and moved west.”
“He retired and then some,” Quinn said. “What he didn’t do is torture and kill Candice Culligan. What he isn’t is the Skinner.”
Leaving them with the same puzzle they’d set out to solve.
32
Jock Sanderson had done time for raping Judith Blaney. It had been hard time. A small man, with fine features and a lean, muscular frame, Jock had fallen victim to sexual abuse in prison. Half a dozen gang members had in fact made him their own, passing him around like depreciating property.
It had been a nightmare, and it had lasted until the team of Legal Aid lawyers, campaigning to overturn wrongful eye-witness rape convictions, used DNA evidence to prove that someone else had raped Judith Blaney.
Late last year, Jock Sanderson was pardoned.
The real evidence had been skimpy to begin with. Jock had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Judith Blaney had been the wrong woman. She’d wrongly identified him in a police lineup, and again in court. She more than anyone had caused him to live his nightmare. To live it over and over for more than five years.
So what was left of Jock had been freed to walk in a world that still thought him unworthy. He’d begun to drink, an old habit that soon became an addiction. Now he was a regular at AA meetings and had been dry for months.
The only job he’d been able to find was with Sweep ’Em Up Janitorial Service, sweeping and cleaning entertainment venues, from sporting events to Broadway and off-Broadway theaters, the days after evening performances. A weekly paycheck had enabled him to leave the halfway house and the constant pressure of church services and one-on-one attempts to convert him to Christianity. Jock dealt with that by doing what he figured most Christians did—pretend. Prison had taught him well how to do that.
He could sometimes even pretend and fool himself.
The way Jock figured it, he’d been done wrong. Somebody owed him. That somebody was Judith Blaney.
He hadn’t raped Judith. He’d been home in bed alone, suffering with a cold, on the evening of her rape. Of course he had no witnesses to corroborate his alibi. Usually you didn’t welcome company when you were flat on your back with a fever and congested chest.
Jock had never seen Judith before his arrest. But he dreamed about her a lot in prison. He’d seen her face almost every night in his dreams. Her nightmare lived within his nightmare.
Often, some of the things that had been done to him in prison, he did to Judith Blaney in his dreams. His muffled screams became hers. Also his humiliation. His pain. She would beg him with her eyes to stop. But he didn’t stop. Not in his dreams.
Sometimes, he thought, dreams meant something.
Jock had been following Judith for almost three months. He didn’t mind if now and then she noticed him. Let her wonder.
After the first month, she’d obtained a restraining order. He was forbidden by law to harass her, or even to approach within a hundred feet of her.
He knew what a hundred feet meant. He could measure the precise distance in his mind. So he continued to follow Judith. He would be far enough away that she couldn’t do anything about it. She would know he was there though. Not always, but she could never be sure when he was observing her. At times she’d forget and feel safe. Then she’d glance behind her and there on the crowded sidewalk, or perhaps across the street watching her pull away in the back of a taxi, there he would be, and any joy would drain from her features and an expression he interpreted as fearful would come over her. That would give him a cold satisfaction.
But most of the time she didn’t know he was tailing her. That also gave him satisfaction. He was becoming expert at watching her without her knowledge. Sometimes even moving close to her, inside the protective hundred-foot legal distance. Like a trespasser on a dare.
Like tonight. He’d been on the same crowded subway car, then only ten feet behind her on the teeming platform. He’d been nearby her on the escalator. He kept a more prudent distance behind her on the sidewalk on the way to her apartment. She would often glance behind her, especially if the night was dark and the sidewalks not crowded.
He was close enough tonight to hear the tapping of her high heels. If he stayed tight to the buildings, keeping an awareness of light and shadow, he could haunt her like a ghost whose presence she would barely sense.
Now and then he’d deliberately let her catch a glimpse of him, let her know she wasn’t alone in this fear-filled world that only the two of them inhabited and that she had helped to create.
Jock knew Judith now better than she could imagine. The way hunters knew the thing they hunted.
It was almost an hour after dusk. They were on a long block that was almost deserted. Only the two of them. Tap, tap, tap went her heels on the hard concrete. Echoing in the street and in his mind.
Can you feel my eyes on you?
Sense my thoughts?
I already served time for raping you. Maybe I have a free one coming. Maybe more than just rape. I paid. You should pay.
Her stride was brisk and rhythmic, hurried but not panicked. Not yet.
Tap, tap, tap . . .
Faster now. She was picking up her pace. Afraid of something. Did she know he was here? No, she couldn’t. She couldn’t be sure.
He was certain she hadn’t spotted him.
He dropped back, confused by her obvious uneasiness, and saw a figure detach itself from the shadows and fall in behind Judith. The figure was that of a man. Medium height. Medium build. That was all he could be sure of from this distance.
Jock slowed his pace and tailed the man who was following Judith. Unquestionably, the shadowy figure was acting furtively. What was going on? Was Judith getting plainclothes protection? Had she gotten the police interested in him again?
No, he was sure the police would have approached him or come to his door and warned him. Since the day Judith had pointed her finger at him in a lineup, he’d been close acquaintances with the police, with the prison system, with the thugs that kept the order. They were all alike.
Sometimes they wore uniforms, sometimes not. But he was positive the figure ahead wasn’t a policeman. The police didn’t work that way. Didn’t look that way. Didn’t feel that way.
Jock watched the man following Judith stand across the street from her as she entered her apartment building.
The man tilted back his head and stared up at the correct window and waited patiently until it became illuminated. Then he put his hands in his pockets and walked away. His gait was different now. More relaxed. The intensity had gone out of him.
Excitement rippled through Jock like a chill. Something strange was happening here. Someone else had entered their private, fe
arful world.
He wasn’t the only one stalking Judith.
33
It was a few minutes past eleven the next morning. Quinn was alone in the office, a quiet cocoon in the maelstrom of Manhattan. The sharp ring of the phone was startling. He squinted at caller ID. Nift from the morgue. Quinn reached for the receiver.
“I won’t keep you in suspense,” Nift said, when Quinn had picked up. “Official cause of Candice Culligan’s death was a heart attack.”
Quinn was slightly surprised. “Pain did that to her?”
“More likely the thought of more pain. Under the kind of torture she underwent, sometimes the body and mind simply can’t endure any longer. If Candy hadn’t had the coronary event, she would have soon bled to death from the knife wounds. The partial skinning process.”
Candy. Not only was Nift on a first-name basis with the woman’s corpse, he was using a nickname. Quinn wondered sometimes about Nift’s relationships with his female subjects. Pearl had voiced suspicions about the obnoxious little ME, and Pearl had an annoying way of being right about people.
“What about the way her throat was cut open?” Quinn asked, trying to shake the creepy feeling that sometimes came over him when he was talking with Nift.
“A sharp, broad, and curved knife blade did that in two intersecting cuts, probably done slowly. The cutting wasn’t as deep or damaging as it appeared. The throat wound might have been the final one inflicted, and the killer thought it was the coup de grâce. But she was already near death when her throat was cut. I say near death because her heart was still pumping when the injury was inflicted. The wound bled enough to indicate that.”
“Was the same knife used to inflict all her wounds?”
“It looks that way. A handy little blade. And by the way, there was no damage from the necklace chain with the S charm. And apparently it was put on the victim before her death.”
“I don’t suppose there was anything of the perpetrator on her.”
“Not even a hair. And the only blood on her was her own. There was no flesh beneath her fingernails. No saliva or sperm anywhere. Just the marks of long and arduous torture, mostly of peeling off her top layer of skin and leaving it hang in shreds, until finally her heart gave out. I’ve been over every inch of her, Quinn, and I can tell you this little tootsie went the hard way.”