Mister X (10 page)

While the cab she’d flagged down bounced and jounced over Eighth Avenue potholes, Pearl thought not about the murder scene she was speeding toward, but about Yancy Taggart. She found that odd.

Would he meet her?

Did she care?

Never one to lie to herself, she figured the answers were yes and yes.

Why did this guy appeal to her? He was probably at least fifteen years older than she was, and not her usual type.

Then she realized what might be the basis of the attraction. Taggart was sort of an anti-Quinn. Where Quinn was duty-bound and relentless, Taggart didn’t mind whiling away a morning over coffee and a racing form in a bar. Taggart would gamble his money; Quinn chanced every other kind of gamble but didn’t like the odds of house games. Taggart was slim and graceful—even languid—in posture and attitude; Quinn was lanky but powerfully built, stolid, calm, and intense. Taggart dressed stylishly and was neatly groomed; Quinn always looked like what he was—a cop in a suit—and his hair looked uncombed even when it was combed. While Taggart was elegant and classically handsome, Quinn was somehow homely enough to be attractive.

Maybe, she thought, Yancy Taggart was what she needed to chase Quinn completely out of her thoughts.

In time she might chase them both from her thoughts.

Pearl saw the yellow crime-scene tape, and her thoughts were jolted to where she was, and why. She asked the cabbie to pull to the curb half a block from the tape. She wanted to take the scene in as she walked toward it from a distance. Sometimes it was smart to begin with the long view.

Several radio cars were parked at crazy angles to the curb, as if they were the toys of some giant child who’d tired of them and walked away, leaving their colorful roof bar lights flashing. Beyond the police cars, Pearl could see Quinn’s black Lincoln with two wheels up on the curb to allow the remaining lane of traffic to pass. She noticed for the first time that the old Lincoln had whitewall tires. She hadn’t thought they made those anymore. But Quinn would know where to get them. Like his Cuban cigars.

The Lincoln’s engine was still ticking in the heat as she walked past it. Inside the trapezoid of yellow tape a group of large men huddled over what looked like a bundle of clothes on the sidewalk.

When Pearl got closer, she saw that the bundle was a woman.

One of the men standing over the dead woman was Quinn. He spotted Pearl and motioned her over. A uniform held up the tape so she could duck under it like a boxer entering a ring. He gave her a look, as if he might wink at her. Didn’t the idiot think she’d ever seen a corpse before?

This part of Eighteenth Street was being improved or marred—depending on your point of view—with neo-modern architecture, most of it angular glittering glass and metal, some of it appearing precariously balanced. The building the body was next to was an almost completed condominium project. According to the plywood sign leaning against the wall near the silvered glass door to what would become the lobby, it was The Sabre Arms. The optimistic advertising didn’t mention price.

Quinn nodded to Pearl and moved over to make room for her in the huddle. Pearl nodded back. Quinn’s sport coat collar was twisted in back, and he needed a shave. It struck Pearl again how different he was from Yancy. Yancy the lobbyist with the gift of gab and the sliding ethics. Quinn the taciturn engine of justice with a moral code like Moses that sometimes transcended the laws of man.

Pearl shook off her flash of dubious insight and refocused her mind on her work.

Julius Nift, the obnoxious little medical examiner who looked and acted like Napoleon, was bent over the dead woman. Pearl didn’t bother nodding hello to him.

Her gaze slid past him to the victim, and her stomach lurched. The corpse was wearing ragged clothing. Her face was dirty, her fingernails black, her brown hair a tangle. A homeless woman. Pearl felt pity well up in her as well as horror. What must be the woman’s panties had been knotted and used as a gag, and a slender shaft of silver protruded from the dead woman’s mouth, apparently a handle.

“It’s a spoon,” Nift said. “She died with a silver spoon in her mouth.”

“Might she have choked on it before her throat was cut?”

“We’ll have to wait till later to find out for sure, but I doubt it. There are no other signs of asphyxiation. No cyanosis, petechiae, or distended tongue.” Nift spoke in a tone suggesting Pearl should have noticed this lack of symptoms herself.

The woman’s threadbare dress was torn open in front to reveal her breasts and stomach. Her nipples had been sliced off, and there was the bloody
X
carved on her midsection, beginning just below a point between her breasts. There was a gaping wound in her throat, like a scarlet necklace. She appeared to have been in her late forties, had a crooked nose, prognathous jaw, and wouldn’t have been attractive even cleaned up and twenty years younger.
Odd
, Pearl thought; all the other Carver victims had been attractive women.

Nift had been peeking up at Pearl, amused by her discomfort.

“She had a face like a mule,” he said, “but you can see she had a pretty good rack, even with the nipples gone.”

“You’re such an asshole,” Pearl said. “Are the nipples gone from the scene?”

“Unless you’re standing on them,” Nift said.

Pearl doubled up a fist.

“Pearl,” Quinn said, cautioning her. He’d told her before she should let Nift’s remarks roll off her. She shouldn’t give the nasty little M.E. the pleasure of getting under her skin.

She knew Quinn was right. That was Nift’s game, using his gruesome trade to rattle people with his sick sense of humor. All cops used dark humor to help them cope with some of the things they saw in the Job, but Nift pushed it from diversion to something that filled a twisted need.

Pearl’s fist unclenched, and she flexed her fingers. But she still wouldn’t have minded choking Nift until she saw some cyanosis.

Nift smiled.

“How long’s she been dead?” Quinn asked.

“I told you—”

“For Officer Kasner.”

“More than ten hours. I’ll be able to know more when I get her in the morgue where I can play with her.” For Pearl.

“Any identification on her?” Pearl asked Quinn.

But it was Nift who answered. “Are you kidding? No purse or wallet. Every pocket is empty. This little number probably hasn’t slept indoors in weeks, maybe months. She’s been screwed over every which way, and if she did have anything on her person, her killer probably took it.”

“A shitty life,” one of the plainclothes detectives said.

“And a shitty death,” another added.

“You guys homicide?” Quinn asked.

“Vice. We heard the call and were only a few blocks away, so we came over to see what there was to see.”

“And I’ve seen enough,” the other vice guy said, but he made no move to leave. “What’s with the spoon?”

“A bad joke,” Quinn said.

“In bad taste,” the first vice guy said.

Quinn gave him a look that induced both vice detectives to fall silent.

“There isn’t much blood considering her throat’s been slashed,” Pearl said.

“Very good,” Nift said. “That’s because she was killed with a single stab wound to the heart.” As he spoke he absently probed one of the damaged breasts with a pointed steel instrument. The expression on the corpse’s face was one of mild insult.

“Why don’t you close her eyes?” Pearl said.

“Why don’t you ask her some questions? I’ll do my job, you do yours. She can’t see, just like she can’t talk.”

“Her body was stuffed behind the big plywood sign leaning on the building,” Quinn said, before Pearl could reply to Nift. “We figure she was killed late last night or early this morning. Nobody spotted her until half an hour ago.”

Pearl noticed a woman wearing a gray jogging outfit with a hooded sweatshirt standing across the street, staring at them. Her arms hung at her sides, and she didn’t move. Her face was in shadow, but something about her seemed familiar.

“Who found her?” Pearl asked.

“Woman who lives across the street. Her hat blew off, and she chased it and happened to glance behind the sign. She’s in her apartment over there with a uniform keeping her company. She’s still in shock.”

Pearl could understand that. Right in the middle of all this art-gone-mad architecture and expensive renewal, an ugly reminder of poverty and death might be especially jolting.

When Pearl glanced back across the street, she saw that the woman in the jogging outfit was gone. She’d been simply an onlooker who’d stopped to stare. Yet there was that familiarity. Pearl was certain she’d seen the woman before in the course of this investigation, somewhere standing in the shadows.
Shadow woman
, she thought.

Fedderman suddenly appeared. His suit coat was wrinkled, and where he might have worn a tie was what looked to be a spaghetti-sauce stain. Behind him were Mishkin and Vitali, looking like a bemused accountant tailed by one of the brothers in
The Godfather.

It was going to be crowded inside the crime-scene tape, so the two vice guys nodded their good-byes and left.

The three detectives who’d just arrived took in the scene. Fedderman’s face was a blank. Vitali looked keenly interested. Mishkin, who had a notoriously weak stomach, went chalk white and turned away.

“Bring them up to date, Pearl,” Quinn said.

“Can I have the body?” Nift asked.

“If you want it,” Quinn said. To Pearl: “Make sure there’s nothing interesting under it.”

“Like a nipple or two,” Nift said.

He straightened up to his full Napoleonic stature and motioned for the waiting paramedics to remove the body.

Quinn walked off to the side and punched out a number on his cell phone. He stood at the edge of the crime-scene tape with the phone pressed to his ear.

“Who’s he calling?” Vitali asked. “Everybody’s here except Eliot Ness.”

Pearl shrugged. She didn’t know for sure who was on the other end of Quinn’s phone conversation, but she figured that if she guessed Cindy Sellers, she wouldn’t be far wrong.

The devil getting her due.

Quinn’s phone call from Nift the next day at the office shed more light on the dead woman found on Eighteenth Street. She’d had a high alcohol level in her body, along with traces of methamphetamine. Cause of death was the stab wound in her chest. The slicing off of her nipples and the
X
carved into her abdomen had occurred after death, as had the slit in her throat. Probably the same knife had been used to inflict all the injuries.

“Was she stoned when she died?” Quinn asked.

“It’s doubtful. She wasn’t legally drunk, and the meth wasn’t enough to have made her stoned. I’m not saying she used these two substances simultaneously. The meth stays in the blood one to three days, in the urine even longer.”

“Time of death?” Quinn asked.

“I make it between midnight and three a.m. Something else, Quinn, she displayed all the signs of heavy drug use over a long period of time. And not just meth. She was a real veteran, and on the way out. Needle marks on both arms and between her toes. Hadn’t bathed in at least a week. This cunt probably smelled better dead than alive.”

“She was somebody’s daughter or sister,” Quinn reminded him, “so why be such a contemptible asshole?”

“Hey, I’m somebody’s son. Don’t have a brother, though. Don’t get your undies all twisted, Quinn. I’m just trying to get across to you the deplorable shape this vic was in even before she was spoon-fed and offed. If the killer hadn’t gotten her, she wouldn’t have lasted much longer on her own.”

“Any identification yet?”

“No. Who’d want to claim her?”

“Would your mother claim you?”

“You would have to ask her nice.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah. Next time try to get me a higher class of victim.”

Nift hung up before Quinn could reproach him.

That was okay. Quinn had other things on his mind.

Quinn sat staring at the phone on his desk, letting his mind continue to work on the conversation with Nift.

The death of the Chelsea woman certainly bore the Carver’s signature, except for the fatal stab to the heart. And the Carver had inflicted the breast and torso injuries
before
slitting his victims’ throats.

Was the Carver getting soft?

Not likely. That wasn’t the way with sadistic killers.

All but one of his other victims had been killed indoors, in their apartments, except for Rhonda Nathan, who’d been killed at work in her office. Possibly he’d learned his lesson. Maybe for some reason he’d had to kill the Eighteenth Street woman outdoors, and wanted to minimize the flow of blood. There would be nowhere to wash up after maiming her breasts and abdomen and then slashing her throat, and blood tended to spurt from the large arteries in the neck. The stab to the heart had been relatively neat. It would cause immediate death and minimize blood flow from subsequent wounds.

A warm flow of air stirred the papers on Quinn’s desk as Pearl entered the office and nodded a good morning to him.

“Doughnut?” she asked, holding up a Krispy Kreme bag.

He told her no thanks and said he’d just hung up on Nift.

“Glad I didn’t have to talk to the little asshole this early in the morning,” she said. She went over to the coffee brewer and poured some of the strong black liquid into her mug. The trickle of coffee caught the lamplight for a moment and glowed a beautiful translucent amber. Pearl added powdered cream, which did not look so inspirational going in.

While she sat at her desk dunking a doughnut, Quinn told her about his and Nift’s conversation.

She licked glaze from her fingers. “We could have a copycat killer, what with the news about the investigation being reopened.” She deftly flicked her tongue over the back of her thumb. “Could be some psycho thinks he can have a free one by blaming it on the Carver.”

“Or the Carver has simply changed his M.O. after all this time. His compulsion would demand that the essentials remain the same, but he might change the details. He might be more practical.”

“Huh?” Pearl sipped at her coffee.

Quinn told her his theory about the killer minimizing the bloodshed so he’d be less likely to have noticeable and incriminating stains on his clothes or person.

“Maybe,” she said, but she sounded dubious. She glanced around. “Where’s Fedderman?”

“He drove the unmarked down to Eighteenth Street. Gonna talk to the people who live and work around where the body was found. Maybe somebody noticed something. Mishkin’s down there, too.”

“How about Vitali?”

“He’s at a precinct house utilizing the vast resources of the NYPD.”

“Or reporting to Renz.”

“Better Vitali than me,” Quinn said.

He noticed that Pearl had left a glazed doughnut untouched on a paper napkin on her desk. As he gave in to temptation and parted his lips to ask her for it, his phone rang again.

This time it was Vitali.

“Waddya got, Sal?” Quinn asked.

Vitali started telling Quinn about the postmortem results on the Eighteenth Street victim, but Quinn interrupted him and said he’d already talked with Nift.

“Something new, though,” Vitali said. “We just got a positive ID on the dead woman. Turns out her prints were on file. Maureen Sanders, forty-four years old, no listed address, unmarried, probably unloved. She’s got a sheet. Two arrests for cocaine possession a year ago. Three arrests for prostitution the year before that. One conviction on the drug charges. She was on parole, but her P.O. hadn’t seen her in months.”

“A street person.”

“Street junkie,” Vitali said. “I’m still trying to find family. And by the way, that spoon that was jammed in her mouth—it was real silver.”

“Part of a set?”

“At one time, sure. But it looks old and like it might have been knocking around secondhand shops and flea markets for years. Good for
Antiques Roadshow,
but not much of a clue.”

“Died with a silver spoon in her mouth,” Quinn said. “Ironic humor. It fits the Carver. Let’s get a morgue photo to the media. Maybe somebody’ll claim Maureen Sanders.” Quinn thought of Cindy Sellers. “And Sal, soon as you can, will you fax that photo to me?”

“Sure.”

“I’ve got Mishkin down in Chelsea with Fedderman, canvassing the neighborhood where we found Sanders’s body. You gonna need him?”

“I thought it’d be a good idea to run a check of violent crimes in South Manhattan for the last six months,” Vitali said, “see if anything similar to the Sanders killing went down. I could use Harold for that.”

“I’ll send him to you,” Quinn said.

He hung up the phone and stood up to slip on his suit coat. He and Pearl could drive down to Eighteenth Street in the Lincoln. On the way, he could fill her in on what Vitali had found.

He remembered the doughnut on Pearl’s desk and turned to ask her about it, but he saw that it was gone. She was licking the back of her thumb again.

“Let’s go,” he said. “We’re joining Feds and Mishkin.”

She stood up, took a final sip of coffee, and wadded the white paper napkin the doughnut had rested on. She dropped the napkin into the Krispy Kreme bag, which she wadded and dropped into the wastebasket beneath her desk. It made the lightest of sounds in the metal wastebasket.

“You eat all those doughnuts?” Quinn asked.

“Yup. All three.”

“You’re gonna die of a sugar high.”

“About the time you die of doughnut remorse.”

Had she somehow known he was about to ask for the remaining doughnut? It was eerie sometimes, the way Pearl could almost read minds.

He didn’t mention doughnuts again as they went out to where the Lincoln was parked in front of the office.

As they were pulling away from the curb, Quinn said, “You putting on weight?”

Pearl smiled.