by John Lutz
Little tootsie. Jesus, Nift!
“There were twelve carefully placed cuts on her body, used to initiate the peeling process, and twenty-seven stab wounds in and around her pubic area. The knife penetrated her vagina at least twice. Not far, but it did great damage.”
“Raped with a knife blade,” Quinn said. “Was she dead at the time?”
“No, those injuries were all antemortem.”
“He’s one sick bastard,” Quinn said. “What about the blood around her mouth. The shoe do that?”
“No,” Nift said, “her tongue was cut out.”
“God! I hope he didn’t do that to her while she was still alive.”
“She was dead, or there would have been even more blood. And maybe we’d have gotten lucky and she might have bitten him. That would have given us some DNA to work with. He’s one careful killer, Quinn.”
“And angry.”
“The tongue might have been removed by the same knife he used to skin her. Actually, it did a neat job, like it had a hook blade and was made expressly for removing tongues.”
“People eat calves’ tongues. Do slaughterhouses use a special kind of knife to remove them?”
“I don’t know. Your department. Go question some cows. If you don’t have any more questions, I’m going to terminate our conversation, Quinn. I got another hot date waiting. Well, cool date.”
“I’ll call you if I think of anything,” Quinn said.
“I was just about to suggest that,” Nift said, and broke the connection.
The street door opened with a draft of warm air, and Fedderman came in wearing his brand-new suit and a fresh white shirt. He walked like a model in need of a runway. “There’s no Nathan Devliner in the New York phone directories,” he said.
“No surprise there,” Quinn said.
“Also, I talked with all the residents in Candice Culligan’s building. Nada for my efforts.” He strutted over and poured himself a mug of coffee, careful not to drip anything on his sleeve. “What the animal did to her couldn’t have made much noise.”
Fedderman went to his desk and slouched in his chair, ruining the suit’s effect so that he was once again the familiar Fedderman. Quinn told him about Nift’s phone call.
“Cut her tongue out?” Fedderman’s face screwed up as if his own tongue ached in sympathy.
“ ’Fraid so,” Quinn said. “Nift said the Skinner did a neat job of it. Probably with the same knife that inflicted the other wounds. Happened after she was dead. Killer probably knew there’d be too much blood if he tried it while she was still alive. Besides that, she might have managed to bite him.”
“Killer’s smart,” Fedderman said. “He leaves us nothing to work with except what he chooses. Sends us the way he wants us to go.”
“Toward Socrates’s Cavern,” Quinn said. “The members’ names written in blood, the letter S on or near the victims, maybe even a victim resembling a sacrificial animal . . . it all points too clearly in that direction. By now the killer must know we’re not buying into it.”
“Oh, I dunno,” Fedderman said. “He might think we’re not very smart.”
“I can’t imagine what would give him that idea,” Quinn said, “except he’s getting away with murder.”
“Maybe he believes in ghosts. All the suspects he’s given us are dead.”
Fedderman stood up from his chair in seemingly disjointed sections, the way he always did; even the Armani suit couldn’t disguise that. He walked over to the rack and removed his suit coat, then draped it carefully on a hanger.
“Why the new threads?” Quinn asked, as Fedderman returned to his desk chair. He picked up some papers and idly scanned them, then dropped them back, as if he might not have heard Quinn.
“I thought it was time,” he said at last.
“I didn’t notice any patches on your old clothes,” Quinn said.
Fedderman sighed and met Quinn’s gaze directly. “You aren’t gonna let this go, are you? You or Pearl?”
Quinn smiled. “Sorry, Feds.”
“Okay. I’m interested in somebody, and she seems interested in me. I figured, in her honor, I oughta replace at least one of my old detective suits.”
“I would think you’d save the Master of the Universe outfit for when you weren’t working.”
“When am I not working?”
“You’ve got a point. In fact, you need another suit.”
Fedderman shrugged. “I got a couple of sport jackets that’ll get me by.”
“Do any of us know this woman who wields such sartorial influence?”
“I don’t think so.” Fedderman squirmed in his chair. “You know her name, though. Penny.”
“I don’t think—” Then Quinn remembered. “Penny Noon?”
“We’ve gone out a couple of times.” Fedderman made a backhanded, dismissive motion with his long fingers, as if the assignations meant nothing of importance.
Quinn knew better. “I dunno, Feds. A victim’s sister . . .”
“Are there rules and regulations?” Fedderman asked.
“No, no . . .” Quinn leaned back in his chair, almost toppling, and laced his fingers over his stomach. Fedderman was right. Penny Noon wasn’t all that close to what had happened to her sister Nora. Or didn’t seem to be. It wasn’t as if she was a suspect or an eyewitness. And this wasn’t the NYPD. He lifted his feet and let the chair tilt forward. “No problem, Feds. Live happily ever after.”
“Well, thank you very much, Your Honor.”
“Thanks for what?” Pearl asked.
Neither man had noticed her enter. She wandered over and got her morning mug of coffee. Third mug, actually. Her lush black hair was still mussed, almost the way it was when Quinn had left the brownstone this morning and she was tumbling out of bed.
As she moved toward her desk, she glanced in the direction of the coatrack, then at Fedderman. “You got an ascot goes with that thing?”
“I don’t need a mascot,” Fedderman said.
She plopped down in her desk chair, ostensibly uninterested in what he had to say. She got out the Swiss Army knife she kept in her drawer and used as a letter opener, and deftly sliced open an envelope she’d plucked from her post office box on the way to the job. Maybe she was going to forget about the portion of the discussion she’d overheard on entering the office.
“Thanks for what?” she asked again, absently.
Quinn said nothing. He and Fedderman knew Pearl was on the scent and would one way or another get an answer to her question.
“Penny Noon,” Fedderman said, in quick surrender.
“Penny Noon what?” Pearl asked, glancing at what looked like an ad that she’d slid from the envelope.
“Nora Noon’s sister,” Quinn said. “Feds is seeing her.”
“She’s been invisible?”
“No. Seeing her.”
“In a romantic way?”
“Yes.”
“Explains the amazing dream suit,” Pearl said. She crumpled envelope and ad and dropped them into her wastebasket. She looked deadpan at Fedderman. “Penny short for Penelope?”
“I don’t know,” Fedderman said.
“Must be serious.”
Quinn thought it was time to change the subject before Fedderman could come up with a retort. “Nift called about the postmortem,” he said to Pearl. He told her about the phone call and about Candice Culligan’s tongue being removed. Even tough Pearl blanched when she heard about the tongue. But she seemed to regain her equilibrium quickly.
“That’s sick, Quinn.”
“Don’t I know it? All in all, there’s not much we can use. The victim was methodically tortured and then stabbed twenty-seven times in and around the pubic area.”
“The things we do for love,” Pearl said.
34
No one spoke for a while. Pearl booted up her desk computer and fed something into it with a flash drive she’d brought with her and dug out of her purse. She seemed, in her mind,
to be alone in the room.
Quinn wondered why she had to hound Fedderman so persistently. She did that to almost everyone she knew. Quinn could love her because he understood that these were defensive actions. Preemptory strikes, but defensive.
There were other, more admirable, facets to Pearl’s personality, and she was so damned smart. That last part was what made her at least bearable to her fellow detectives. There was no denying her talent. Or her doggedness.
Still, she could make life miserable for Fedderman. And for Vitali and Mishkin when they were unable to avoid her.
And, let’s face it, sometimes for Quinn.
“I did a few hours’ work on my laptop before coming in,” she said. “Made a discovery.”
“About our latest victim?” Quinn asked.
“Yeah. Six years ago Candice Culligan was beaten and raped. They caught the guy and he got fifteen to twenty at Elmira. Five months ago he was released because DNA evidence established that even though she’d identified him, he couldn’t have been the rapist.”
Pearl took a slow sip of coffee. Quinn knew she had more to say and was stringing it out. Fedderman was glaring at her, maybe still angry about the remark about not knowing Penny Noon’s full name.
“So she was a rape victim,” Fedderman said.
“They all were.”
Quinn leaned forward. “Say again, Pearl.”
“All of the victims where there were Socrates’s Cavern clues were at one time or another rape victims. And the accused and convicted rapist in each case was released when DNA evidence overturned his conviction.”
“So that’s the relevant common denominator,” Quinn said. “Not Socrates’s Cavern.”
“It would seem so,” Pearl said. “We’ve been had.”
“The bastard was playing us,” Fedderman said. “Using Socrates’s Cavern’s old membership list to lead us down the wrong road.”
“We suspected it,” Pearl said. “At least, I did.”
Quinn laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back, back, back in his swivel chair. Pearl and Fedderman were used to Quinn tempting disaster. He’d never actually tipped the chair, only almost.
“Bears thinking about, doesn’t it?” Pearl said.
“Sure does,” Quinn said. “It’s too much of a coincidence that all these falsely accused and released rapists would all at once set about killing the women responsible for putting them behind bars.”
“And ruining those men’s lives,” Fedderman said, “breaking up their families, blackening their reputations, costing them their employment . . .”
“Yeah, yeah,” Pearl said. “You’re thinking these guys have actually all gone bonkers at once and are getting their evens with the women who messed up their lives?”
“It’s barely possible,” Fedderman said, but not as if he believed it.
Pearl got a comb from her purse and ran it through her hair. “We’re talking about a serial killer here, Feds. And a torturer. Not many people—even pissed-off falsely accused men—have that kind of monster living inside their skins.”
“But one of them does,” Quinn said. “One who knows he’ll be the prime suspect when his accuser is murdered. The initial victims and the Socrates’s Cavern connection are subterfuge. A forest so we won’t notice the tree. He’s killing the others so his intended victim will be just another corpse, part of a string of serial-killer victims.”
“And if he’s arranged for a halfway plausible alibi,” Pearl said, “we’ll never get onto him.”
“Oh, we will,” Quinn said. “Sooner or later we’ll nail the bastard.”
“I like the imagery,” Pearl said.
“I wonder how many other women are out there in the same positions,” Fedderman said, “with the men they falsely identified as their rapists recently sprung from prison.”
“According to Blood and Justice—” Pearl began.
“What’s that?” Quinn asked.
“The organization of attorneys dedicated to using DNA evidence to right legal wrongs. I used their website statistics to work it out. The number of mistakenly identified and convicted rapists released in the last five years in the New York area is thirty-two.”
“You’re joking?” Fedderman said.
Pearl finished with the comb and put it back in her purse. Her hair was still disheveled. “DNA doesn’t joke.”
“Assuming all those women are still in the area,” Quinn said, “they’re all in danger. We need to talk to them.”
“And the men who did time because of them,” Fedderman said. “One of them is probably the Skinner.”
“I’ll print out the list of women,” Pearl said. “Then I’ll work up the list of their exonerated alleged rapists.”
“Names, addresses, whatever else you can find out,” Quinn said.
Pearl was smiling. “I was just thinking, the safest of those women is the one the murderer doesn’t want to harm until he’s ready to risk drawing attention to himself—the woman who mistakenly identified the Skinner.”
“If she isn’t dead,” Fedderman said. “One of the early victims.”
Quinn shook his head no. “To be on the safe side, our guy will wait and take her down somewhere in the middle of his trophy hunt. He’ll want the camouflage.”
“Crazy old world,” Fedderman said.
“It is if you’re mooning about Penelope,” Pearl said.
Fedderman was about to say something when Quinn caught his eye. Fedderman let out a long breath and sat back. Some things, said the look on his face, you simply have to endure.
Like Pearl and inclement weather.
“First thing we need to do,” Quinn said, “is talk to the three men who were falsely accused of raping the first three victims.”
“Keeping in mind,” Pearl said, “that part of what we believe could be bullshit, and we might be talking to the killer.”
Pithy Pearl.
“There is one other job I figured I’d give to Feds,” Quinn said. “We need somebody to go to a slaughterhouse and find out if they use a special knife to remove calves’ tongues. If so, see if they’ll give you one.” Quinn grinned. “A knife, that is.”
Fedderman got up and deftly slipped on and buttoned his suit coat, as if he were about to model it. “Somebody’s gotta look into this tongue thing, so why not me?”
“It’ll keep your mind off Penelope,” Quinn said.
Pearl said, “God, I hope so.”
When Fedderman had left, Quinn phoned Renz at One Police Plaza.
“A breakthrough on the Skinner case?” Renz asked.
“Any second now,” Quinn said. “Did you talk to Nift or read his report?”
“Yeah. The thing with the tongue—that’s new. Give you any ideas?”
“Symbolism, maybe,” Quinn said. “The victims talked at a trial and sent people to prison for rapes they didn’t commit.”
“All of the victims?”
“So far, yeah. And there are twenty-nine more women out there who might fit the profile. They need to be offered protection.”
“They will be,” Renz said.
The phone was silent for a few seconds.
“Then the entire goddamned chain of murders is symbolism,” Renz said. “I don’t see why we should settle on the tongue.”
“The killer apparently took it with him. Maybe that means something.”
“Or not.” Renz was thinking about what else might not mean something. Protecting as many as twenty-nine women around the clock. Three eight-hour shifts times thirty-two. Yeah, find me ninety-six cops with nothing to do, Quinn.
Renz would do what he could.
“Either way, let’s keep this tongue business from the media,” Quinn said. “Only the Skinner and us will know about it. That way we can use it to test for false confessions and weed out all the crazies.”
“Good idea, Quinn. Seems like everybody and their cousins are confessing to these murders, except for the real killer. Keeps our phone lines burning.
And sometimes people actually walk into precinct houses and confess. Why the hell do people do that?”
“Maybe the same reason they confess in church,” Quinn said.
“There,” Renz said, “is a scary thought.”
It wasn’t as scary as the ones Quinn was thinking.
35
Hogart, 1991
“You’re what?” Roy Brannigan asked his wife. He jumped out of his chair as if lightning had struck nearby.
It was a warm summer night. The sky was still a faint purple, and dusk had sent its advance scout shadows among the trees. Crickets were chirping. Beth and Roy were on the porch. Beth had thought this would be a good time and place to tell him. Good as any, that is. She was pretending to sip ice water, and Roy had just finished drinking his second beer. Beth thought two beers might make him mellow enough that he wouldn’t turn mean when she . . . surprised him. She sure didn’t want to wait and take her chances with five or six beers.
She said the word again, realizing it was like dropping a stone into a calm pond: “Pregnant.”
Roy paced three steps this way and that on the plank porch, a man walking nowhere, banging his heels so they made a lot of noise. “For the love of Jesus, Beth!”
She remained seated in her rocking chair, knowing that if she stood it might escalate whatever was going to happen.
“Roy, please! It’s not like it’s my fault.”
He stopped pacing to face her with his fists propped on his hips. “How were you dressed? What were you doing taking a shortcut I told you over and over not to take? And at night! What were you carrying under your arm? How’d you just happen to cross paths with that Vincent Salas?”
“How do you know—”
“That it isn’t mine?” He turned his head to the side and spat. “I haven’t touched you since you became unclean in the eyes of the Lord. I hadn’t touched you the month before the . . . thing with Salas.”