by John Lutz
Even though it was dusk and still fairly early, Verna was exhausted. But then, that was her usual state. She waited until no one seemed to be looking, then shuffled into the show-window tunnel, going in as far as she could but at the same time being careful not to touch the shop’s glass door. There would almost certainly be an alarm system.
Verna lowered her aching body and sat with her back against the brick surface beneath the display windows. She let out a long sigh, wondering if other people ever got this tired. The way she lived must be whittling away at her life, making her old though she was still in her thirties.
Someday . . .
No, Verna cautioned herself. Someday was today, and tomorrow didn’t look any brighter. Hope could be cruel. In her circumstances, it was better not to let hope through the door. If hope wanted to hang around outside and taunt her, let it. She knew that you couldn’t trust hope.
Hungry as well as tired, she wolfed down one of the chocolate cupcakes and gulped some water.
One of the shadows toward the front of the entranceway moved, startling her. It might have been simply someone walking past, back-lit by the faint glow from the street.
But she knew that wasn’t true. She was beyond the crook in the zigzag glass panels.
The shadow moved again, and a man appeared.
From where Verna was sprawled propped against the bricks beneath the glass and a display of blazers, he appeared tall. He was wearing dark clothing, probably black. A light jacket, even though the evening was warm. He was carrying a gym bag.
He obviously expected to find her there. Must have followed her and watched her enter beneath the Ben’s sign. Then he’d waited for the right moment to come to her. It was almost completely dark now, time for the monsters to come out and play.
Verna didn’t move but kept her eyes trained on the man. She didn’t think she knew him. He wasn’t one of the neighborhood street people.
Or did she know him? He did look vaguely familiar.
He stooped beside her and placed the gym bag nearby. He smiled at her, then unzipped the bag and reached inside. She saw no fingernails and realized he was wearing flesh-colored rubber gloves.
When his hand came out of the bag, it was holding a knife with a kind of blade she’d never seen before. It was short and curved, and looked sharp and wicked.
Verna knew that if she tried to scream she’d be dead or unconscious within seconds. She was too tired to scream, anyway. Too tired to resist.
“You know who I am?” the man asked, placing her plastic water bottle aside carefully so it was a safe distance away and wouldn’t spill.
“I read the papers,” Verna said, “even if they’re a few days old. I know who you are.”
He reached into the bag again. “I’m going to put some tape over your mouth,” he said. “It’s a precaution. Try not to be afraid.”
“You don’t have to do that. I’m not going to scream.”
Very quickly, using both hands yet somehow not nicking her with the knife, he applied the tape. When she raised a hand to peel it off, he grabbed her wrist, then taped both wrists together. He ran a long strand of tape around her waist and arms so she couldn’t raise her hands high enough to touch her lips. Her right leg moved reflexively to kick him, but he merely intercepted the feeble effort and pressed her knee to the tiles.
“You’re going to scream,” he told her. “But this way it won’t be out loud.” He mashed her knee hard against the concrete, sapping the strength out of her leg. Then he grinned. “By the way, it’s okay to be afraid now.”
Verna bowed her head and closed her eyes. This man didn’t know she was beyond certain kinds of fear. Over the past few years she’d learned to endure. That was her strength, to let whatever was going to happen simply roll over her and happen. Afterward she would assess the damage. Whatever was left of her soul and body, she would drag from the scene after the madness had passed.
And if there was to be no afterward . . . that would be a mercy.
The sharp smell of ammonia jolted her so her eyes flew open. She gagged and choked, her body heaving as the rectangle of duct tape blocked her screams. Her coughing seared her throat and made sounds like a dog trying and failing to bark. The man’s powerful hands held her still until the coughing stopped. She could handle this, she told herself. If only she kept calm, she could endure it and then it would be over. She concentrated and forced herself to breathe evenly through her nose. The sharp ammonia scent was still in the air, nauseating her.
The man gazed down at her as if he pitied her. He was so calm and looked so kind. He might have been an angel here to rescue her from everything her world had become. He was that, she told herself.
You might not know it, but you are my salvation.
Then she remembered. It had been a long time ago, in her muddled mind, but she remembered. This was the man who’d wanted to talk to her. By the church.
I know you! The cop! You’re the one who gave me the five dollars. You helped me!
Kindness meant a chance. If nothing else, a less painful passage into death.
She tried to beg with her eyes, feeling like a bad silentfilm actress but not caring. Hope was stronger than she’d thought. Stronger than she was.
He wasn’t a cop—that was for sure. Still, he’d given her the five dollars....
“It isn’t going to be easy for you,” he said.
Very methodically, he sliced away her clothes and then taped her legs tightly together.
You’re a friend! You helped me! Help me! Help me!
His betrayal was of a magnitude that crushed her.
Verna understood that she was not beyond pain.
She did somehow manage to hold panic at bay. The kind of mindlessness that would turn her into something less than human. She kept repeating to herself that this would pass. She tried to beg for mercy through the tape but couldn’t make more than a low humming sound, over and over.
“That’s my favorite tune,” the man said, as he used the knife on her.
At first he bent to his task casually, but his concentration grew and the blade bit deeper and deeper and established a repetitive rhythm.
She noticed through the pain and horror that gripped and gripped and gripped her that he’d somehow found the time to light a cigarette.
59
Quinn had phoned Pearl and given him the address. She was driving the unmarked and arrived at the crime scene ahead of him.
The first thing she saw as she pulled the car to the curb was that the sidewalk on the right side of the street was cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. There was a big uniformed cop standing beneath the BEN’S FOR MEN’S sign, his arms crossed, his head cocked to the side, appearing as if he were contemplating trading in his uniform for the sharplooking suit displayed beside him in the window.
Pearl parked the car behind an NYPD cruiser, got out into the sun-drenched heat, and ducked beneath the tape.
When the uniform forgot about the suit and came toward her, she flashed her ID. He stepped back into the meager shade and motioned with his arm.
Pearl entered the dogleg tunnel of clothing display windows and heard echoing voices. The maze of glass seemed remote from the rest of the city and smelled musty. There was another smell Pearl recognized and could almost taste. Death assaulted all the senses.
The tech team was at work in its busy and concentrated fashion. Dr. Julius Nift, the obnoxious little ME, was crouched beside a woman’s body like a lascivious troll. His black leather medical case was open beside him.
Nift looked up at Pearl’s approach and nodded. “Our killer’s going downscale.”
Pearl looked at what was left of a thin, raggedly dressed woman. Obviously a street person. A rectangle of gray duct tape dangled from one corner of her gaping, blood-clogged mouth.
“The job’s fun sometimes, isn’t it?” Nift said. He removed something silver and sharp from his medical case and began poking and probing.
“You touch
the tape?” Pearl asked.
“Of course not. I left it for the real inspectors so they could make brilliant deductions.” He used a tweezers-like instrument to lift a shred of severed flesh from the victim’s abdomen and peered beneath it. “Yuk,” he said in a flat voice.
“Is this finally a female corpse that holds no sexual appeal for you?” Pearl asked Nift. In the corner of her vision she saw a tech’s head turn toward her in surprise.
Nift merely smiled, smug in his insensitivity. “Oh, I dunno. Maybe when I clean her up.”
“You’re an asshole,” Pearl said.
Nift shrugged. “You asked.”
Quinn had arrived and caught the last of the conversation. His bulk seemed to fill the confined space. “I don’t want to know the question,” he said, with a warning look at Pearl. The big uniformed cop had come into the display tunnel a few steps behind Quinn and stood stone-faced. He looked as if his nose had been broken almost as many times as Quinn’s.
“She died last night around nine to midnight,” Nift said, happy to change the subject now that Quinn was here. “I’ll give you a closer estimate sometime today.”
Quinn stooped near the body for a closer look.
“Ugly,” he said.
“I was just remarking on that,” Nift said.
“Tortured like the others. Same kind of knife cuts and cigarette burns.”
“Same kind of wounds, same kind of knife,” Nift said. “Short, sharply curved blade, very well honed.”
“But not surgical?”
“Not like any surgical instrument I’ve seen. For detail work, though, I would say.” He grinned. “Like for carving on models. Big models.”
“The tape on her mouth was like that when the body was found by the sales clerk who came in to open the store,” the uniform said. “I made sure nobody touched it till the CSU and ME got here.”
Pearl looked beyond him and saw another uniformed cop standing near the bend in the display windows. A redheaded guy in a cheap suit, whom Pearl recognized as a police photographer, was making his way toward them. Murder was a magnet. The troops had arrived in full force.
“Her tongue . . .” Quinn said, staring at the gaping bloody hole that was left of a human mouth.
“It’s been removed,” Nift said. “I think very deftly. I’ll have to clean her out to be certain of that. And unless she’s lying on it, the killer left with the tongue.”
“He would,” Quinn said. He carefully checked the victim for identification. There was nothing. Not even a scrap of paper in the pockets of the threadbare clothing. He looked at the victim’s tangled, bloody hair and figured it had been tangled even before she was killed. There was dirt beneath her jagged fingernails, but no sign that she’d resisted her attacker.
“She have a purse?”
“Not when we got here,” the bent-nosed cop said.
“Just another street woman,” Nift said, watching Quinn across the dead woman.
“I want her printed as soon as possible,” Quinn said, standing up. Feeling it in his legs
“My God!” a man’s voice said behind Quinn.
He turned to see a slender, handsome man with spiky blond hair and round-framed glasses. He was wearing a spiffy cream-colored suit that reminded Quinn the inveterate theater buff of Sporting Life in Porgy and Bess.
The reed-thin man was at least three inches taller than Quinn and wearing some kind of cologne giving off a scent that didn’t mix well with the coppery smell of old blood.
“The officer told me I could come back here,” he said. “I’m Ben. You know, of Ben’s for Men’s. Ben Blevin.” He held out his hand and Quinn shook it, noting that the reedy Ben was surprisingly strong.
Quinn thought about going inside the store with Ben and questioning the clerk who’d discovered the body, but that would mean leaving Pearl with Nift, along with a lot of other people who wouldn’t intimidate Pearl in the slightest. He glanced at his watch. Mishkin was looking after Weaver in the hospital, but Quinn knew that Fedderman and Sal Vitali would be here soon.
“Let’s go inside the store,” Quinn said to Ben. “I want to talk to your clerk.”
As Ben led the way into the store, Quinn glanced back at Pearl with what she recognized as his Behave Yourself look.
Pearl would try.
60
Edmundsville, 2008
Beth sat in the 66 Roadhouse and watched Link dance with her friend Annette Brazel. Annette was a small, attractive woman who was about as susceptible to Link’s flirting as a concrete post. She ran a leather-cutting machine at the plant and had a husband who acted in community theater in Edmundsville and had a reputation for meanness. Beth wasn’t jealous.
She never worried about that part of her marriage. Though a measure of passion had long since left her partnership with Link, some remained. And she was secure in the knowledge that Link would never leave her if it meant giving up Eddie. Of course, Eddie was fast becoming a young man. In a few more years he’d be going off to college. Hard to believe now, though; he still looked and acted so much like a green kid.
As Beth sat and sipped her Bud Light and watched the dancers, it struck her as it often did how much Link and Eddie resembled each other. Or maybe that was in her mind.
But no, she was sure.... When Link spun around and the light hit his face a certain way, it was almost like looking at an older Eddie. Almost as if . . .
Jesus! Get that out of your mind!
The contemporary country music ended, and the band began playing an old Hank Williams song. It reminded Beth of when she and Link had met here at the 66, when that same song—might have been, anyway—was playing.
Hank Williams, singing about love gone wrong.
Link and Annette stayed out on the dance floor, Link taking advantage of a slower beat. They were dancing close to each other, but not too close. Annette glanced over at Beth and winked.
As Beth sat watching them she noticed the beer can on the table where Link had been sitting. It was a Wild Colt can, the same brand that was found on Vincent Salas’s motorcycle the night of the—
Oh, God, stop it!
It was a popular brand locally. Half the men in the 66 were drinking it right now. DNA had proven it was a coincidence that Salas had been drinking it—
DNA can prove, or disprove, lots of things.
Beth told herself, as she had so many times lately, that she was torturing herself because of guilt.
But that didn’t mean—
“Annette’s got a sore foot,” Link said, settling down in his chair, behind the opened Colt can.
“That would be because you stepped on it,” Annette said.
Link grinned. “That’d be because you got your feet mixed up between the second and third steps of my grapevine maneuver.”
“Your what?” Beth asked.
“Mumbo jumbo,” Annette said. “That’s his escape when he knows he’s wrong, talking mumbo jumbo.”
“I’m hurt,” Link said.
“No, I’m the one with the toe.” Annette looked over at Beth. “Wanna go to lunch tomorrow? Might as well. It’s gonna rain all day.”
“Does most Saturdays,” Link said. “The weatherman knows we don’t work weekends.”
“The weatherman’s a son of a bitch,” Annette said.
“We’ll do it,” Beth said. “I’ll call you.”
“I’m not invited?” Link asked.
“Damned right, you’re not,” Annette said.
“He’s going to Kansas City for a coin show, anyway,” Beth said.
Link’s passion for coin collecting had grown. “Gonna be an auction of antebellum silver coins,” he said. “Some rich guy’s estate is selling his whole collection.”
“I don’t know what you see in that old stuff,” Annette said.
Link took a sip of beer. “It’s history. And art. And a pretty good investment.”
“And an obsession,” Beth said.
Link shrugged. “I guess it is, but
a harmless one.”
“I’m more interested in new coins,” Annette said. “The kind you can spend.”
The band was swinging into one of Beth’s favorite tunes. Link gulped down some more beer then stood up. He offered his hand to Beth.
“Wanna dance to this one? Give Annette’s toe a rest?”
Beth smiled. “You bet I do.” Trying to get into the mood. To shake her self-destructive suspicions.
Link led her onto the dance floor and they began a twostep with underarm turns. Within seconds the floor was too crowded for turns, and Beth and Link began close dancing.
He held her loosely and confidently, his wife, his lover, his possession. More beloved than his coins in their velvet-lined display folders.
Not more beloved than his stepson.
Annette had her shoe off and was sitting sideways in her chair, rubbing her toe. Beth saw her smile enviously at her and Link. Annette and her husband Mark had no children, and as far as Beth knew didn’t want any. Still, here was Beth with a husband who loved her and a child they both loved. Beth figured that what she needed in life, what she had—man, child, home—addressed an emotional void that most women had attempted to fill since the human race began. She was one of the winners.
That was how it must seem from the outside.
Link held Beth tighter, drawing her closer. But it seemed to Beth that now there was a limit to how close they could be.
61
New York, the present
A brief shower had cooled down the city, and the sun, back from behind scudding low clouds, made everything glisten in reflecting dampness. Quinn and Pearl couldn’t resist walking the short distance from the office to have lunch at home (as she lately found herself thinking of the brownstone). Besides, the rehab crew was closing in on finishing off the floor directly above, in what had once been the dining room. Quinn and Pearl could go upstairs and check on how things were going while a pizza heated in the oven.
They strolled down Amsterdam and saw by the faces passing them going the opposite direction that most people felt the way they did. This was one of those rare moments after rain when time seems to pause in order to give people a chance to glance around and really see fresh, wet actuality.