Mister X Bundle with Urge to Kill, Night Kills, In for the Kill, & Darker than Night

by John Lutz

Genres: Mystery Anthologies & Collections; Police Procedurals; Thrillers

Synopsis

The Naughty ListDeck the halls with white-hot passion! Donna Kauffman Naughty But Nice Businessman Griffin's never believed in luck. . .until sassy-sweet small-town baker Melody turns his world around. Except there's a catch: There's no way he'll be able to build his empire and hold on to her. His new "lucky charm" could destroy all his dreams. . .or make this Christmas better than he ever imagined possible. . . Cynthia Eden All I Want for Christmas Good girl toy inventor Christie takes a walk on the naughty side when she sparks a no-strings fling with Santa--actually, sexy cop Jonas in a Santa suit. She loves her new "bad girl" persona, except as the holidays approach, she starts falling, and hard, for this known' "love 'em and leave 'em" ladies man. . . Susan Fox Tattoos and Mistletoe Charlie returns to her hometown to fix up her aunt's B&B, but she doesn't count on LJ handling the renovations. Nerdy LJ pined for her in school, but now he's grown into the town's hottest bachelor. Charlie's been burned before and won't let him get close. But LJ's determined to break down her walls and make her dearest Christmas wish come true. "Donna Kauffman writes smart and sexy, with sizzle to spare." --Janet Evanovich "I dare you not to love a Cynthia Eden book!" --Larissa Ione The Night Before Christmas 'Tis the night before Christmas and all through the house, things are definitely stirring. . .because if you're going to wait up for Santa, you might as well have some very sexy company. . . The Night Before Christmas White Knight Christmas by New York Times bestselling author Lori Foster Snowed Under By Erin McCarthy Ms. Humbug By Jill Shalvis I'll Be Home For Christmas By Kathy Love Seducing Scrooge By Katherine Garbera The Good Girl's Guide To A Very Bad Christmas By Kylie Adams Yule Be Mine Sparkling days, crackling fires, long steamy nights. . .Christmas is all about making memories. In four delicious tales of seduction and romance, New York Times bestselling author Lori Foster brings you all the pleasures of the season--and then some. . . Booker Dean knows exactly what he wants for Christmas: his next-door neighbor, Frances Kennedy. And he's got a gift planned for her that involves lots of delicious unwrapping. Officer Parker Ross hates Christmas, while Lily Donaldson lives for it. But he's willing to be converted, especially when Lily is the one doing the persuading. Sergeant Osbourne Decker suspects pet psychic Marci Churchill is barking mad, but she's also a knockout. And when she's accused of stealing a donkey from the local nativity scene, he can't stop thinking about frisking her. Furious at her cheating fiancé, Beth Monroe decides to enjoy a payback tryst with his gorgeous best friend, and finds that revenge is best served hot and sweet. . .

Release date: October 1, 2010

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

Highest Praise for John Lutz

“John Lutz knows how to make you shiver.”

—Harlan Coben

“Lutz offers up a heart-pounding roller coaster of a tale.”

—Jeffery Deaver

“John Lutz is one of the masters of the police novel.”

—Ridley Pearson

“John Lutz is a major talent.”

—John Lescroart

“I’ve been a fan for years.”

—T. Jefferson Parker

“John Lutz just keeps getting better and better.”

—Tony Hillerman

“Lutz ranks with such vintage masters of big-city murder as Lawrence Block and Ed McBain.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Lutz is among the best.”

—San Diego Union

“Lutz knows how to seize and hold the reader’s imagination.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“It’s easy to see why he’s won an Edgar and two Shamuses.”

—Publishers Weekly

Chill of Night

“Since Lutz can deliver a hard-boiled P.I. novel or a bloody thriller with equal ease, it’s not a surprise to find him applying his skills to a police procedural in Chill of Night. But the ingenuity of the plot shows that Lutz is in rare form.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“Lutz keeps the suspense high, populating his story with a collection of unique characters who resonate with the reader, making this one an ideal beach read.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A dazzling tour de force…compelling, absorbing.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“A great read! Lutz kept me in suspense right up to the end.”

—Midwest Book Review

Night Kills

“Lutz’s skill will keep you glued to this thick thriller.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Superb suspense…the kind of book that makes you check to see if all the doors and windows are locked.”

—Affaire de Coeur

In for the Kill

“Brilliant…a very scary and suspenseful read.”

—Booklist

“Shamus and Edgar award–winner Lutz gives us further proof of his enormous talent…an enthralling page-turner.”

—Publishers Weekly

Fear the Night

“A a tense, fast-moving novel, a plot-driven page-turner of the first order…a great read!”

—Book Page

“A twisted cat-and-mouse game…a fast-moving crime thriller…Lutz skillfully brings to life the sniper’s various victims.”

—Publishers Weekly

Darker Than Night

“Readers will believe that they just stepped off a Tilt-A-Whirl after reading this action-packed police procedural.”

—The Midwest Book Review

Night Victims

“John Lutz knows how to ratchet up the terror…. He propels the story with effective twists and a fast pace.”

—Sun-Sentinel

The Night Watcher

“Compelling…a gritty psychological thriller…Lutz draws the reader deep into the killer’s troubled psyche.”

—Publishers Weekly

“John Lutz is the new Lawrence Sanders. The Night Watcher has enough twists to turn you into a raging paranoid by page thirty. I loved it.”

—Ed Gorman, Mystery Scene

Jan Elzner jolted awake in alarm.

Something…a sound from the kitchen, had intruded in gentle dreams she could no longer recall. She reached over to prod her husband, Martin, but her hand found only smooth sheet, cool pillow. Maybe he’d been awakened before her and had gone to investigate the sound.

Jan smiled, drifting back into shallow sleep, sure that her husband would return to bed and everything would be all right. Probably the sound was nothing, the icemaker doing its work, or a delicately balanced object falling in one of the cabinets. Martin would handle the situation, as he did most things. He was a man who—

A voice.

Unintelligible, but she was sure it was Martin’s.

Who could he be talking to at—she glanced again at the clock radio by the bed—three A.M.?

The talking stopped.

Jan opened her eyes wider and lay in the still darkness. The distant sounds of a half-awake Manhattan filtered in through the bedroom windows. A faint, faraway shout, a siren like a distant wolf on the hunt, a growling whisper of traffic below. Night sounds. She rolled over on her back, listening, listening….

Frightened. Though she shouldn’t be.

I’m not afraid! There’s nothing to fear!

But she knew she was wrong.

Martin never talked to himself. She couldn’t imagine it.

Something clanked, bounced lightly, then rolled over the kitchen’s tile floor.

She swiveled to a sitting position on the edge of the mattress, her heart drumming a rapid message of alarm. She remembered what her grandmother had told her years ago. The heart knows before the head. Knows everything first. Beyond the bedroom doorway she could see a rectangle of light from the kitchen, angled over the hall floor. Then the light altered as a shadow passed across it.

What is Martin doing out there?

She stood up, one bare foot on the woven throw rug beside the bed, the other on cool hardwood floor. That was one of the things she and Martin had liked most about their Upper West Side apartment, the polished oak floors. They knew somehow they could be happy there.

And we were happy. Are happy!

What did her heart know that her mind didn’t?

Fear was like a drug, yet it propelled her through her dread toward the light near the end of the hall. She had to find out—had to know what it was that terrified her. She walked stiff-legged in her silk nightgown, her pale fingers clenched around her thumbs. The only sound she heard now was the faint thump, thump of her bare heels striking the wood floor as she lurched toward light and a horrible knowledge she couldn’t avoid.

She turned the corner and stood in the kitchen doorway.

Her breathing stopped as she took it all in—the bright kitchen, Martin curled on the tile floor in what looked like a black shadow, the plastic bag and groceries scattered on the gleaming gray surface of the table. A tuna can lay on the floor near Martin’s right arm. That’s what I heard fall. It must have rolled off the table.

She heard herself utter Martin’s name as she took a step toward him.

She wasn’t surprised—not really—when a dark figure straightened up from behind the cooking island and moved toward her. It was more like a confirmation of what her terror had already told her. Something in his right hand. A gun? No. Yes! A gun with something attached to it. A gun with a silencer.

“Please!” She saw one of her hands float up in front of her face. “Please!” Not me! Not me! Not yet!

She barely heard the sput! of the gun as the bullet ripped through tissue and bone, between her breasts, into her heart, a leaden missile tumbling and tearing through her world, her life, ending her past, her future, everything.

She was still alive on the floor, beyond pain but not horror, as the man with the gun momentarily bent over Martin, then delicately stepped over her, careful not to get blood on his shoes, and continued toward the door.

For an instant she glimpsed the expression on the face of the monster who had taken all that she had and was. Him! He was so calm, smiling contentedly, like a simple workman who’d accomplished a routine and necessary task.

He glanced down at her with faint curiosity, then obviously dismissed her as dead.

He wasn’t wrong, only a few seconds early.

Flash!

Fedderman blinked as yet another photo was shot and the auto winder on the camera whirred like a miniature blender. The crime scene unit was all over the apartment, photographing, luminoling, vacuuming, plucking with tweezers.

The Elzners didn’t seem to mind the intrusion. Or the carnage in the kitchen. Not even what had been done to them.

Sudden death did that to people. In the midst of all the horror he’d seen during his time in the NYPD, Fedderman had often thought that was the single mercy.

“About done with these two?” his partner, Pearl, asked the ME, a self-important, meticulously groomed little man named Nift, who, if his life had taken another direction, might have had a film career playing Napoleon. He’d been fussing over the bodies for the last fifteen minutes, giving Pearl and Fedderman some first impressions.

“Sure. You can diddle with them awhile now. Just be sure and zip up when you’re finished.”

A nasty Napoleon.

Fedderman watched Pearl step hard on Nift’s instep, perhaps deliberately, as she moved toward Martin Elzner’s body. Those comfortable-looking black shoes of hers, with the two-inch heels to make her appear taller than her five-foot-one stature, could be dangerous.

Nift winced and jerked backward, almost kicking away the tuna can on the kitchen floor.

“Try not to step in any blood,” Pearl said.

Then she ignored Nift entirely as she bent down and gingerly pried a Walther semiautomatic handgun from Elzner’s dead fingers, then used a pencil inserted in the barrel to transfer the gun to a plastic evidence bag.

Nift glared at her and made for the door, taking his sick sense of humor with him and not looking back. One thing Fedderman knew about Detective Pearl Kasner was that she didn’t take any crap from anybody, not even Napoleon. It was the character trait that had gotten her into trouble and sidelined her career. It was why Fedderman liked her but figured she wasn’t going to be his partner much longer. Probably this time next year she’d be driving a cab or demonstrating perfume in Macy’s.

She was a looker, Fedderman thought, with the great rack and nice ass, and could be an actress or model if she were taller. Searching dark eyes, wavy black hair, turned-up nose, a way about her. Fedderman sometimes mused that if he were younger, unmarried, didn’t have trouble getting it up sometimes, didn’t have bad breath, a chronically upset stomach, and wasn’t balding and thirty pounds overweight, he might make a play for her.

Pearl handed one of the techs the evidence bag with the gun, glancing at Fedderman as if she knew what he was thinking.

She knows. They were partners. Had been for months, since Pearl’s troubles began. Neither of them was getting a bargain, and they both knew it. That was the idea. If they got tired of each other’s company, that was tough shit. Like with the couple on the kitchen floor.

Homicide had been called in after the radio car uniforms arrived at the scene, called by a next-door neighbor who noticed what looked like a bullet hole in her kitchen wall. When the super had let them in, they discovered the hole was indeed made by a bullet. It had gone through Jan Elzner, then the wall separating the Elzner apartment from the adjacent unit. The uniforms backed out and secured the scene.

Pearl and Fedderman had questioned the tenants on either side of, and above and below, the Elzners. None of them remembered hearing anything like a gunshot, but then Nift had said the killings occurred sometime between two and four in the morning. Sleep was deepest then. Or was supposed to be. Fedderman knew that when people were awake at that time, for whatever reason, terrible things could happen.

He glanced around at the carnage, feeling his stomach kick even after all the years, all he’d seen. He looked at the kitchen table. “How do you figure the groceries? It looks like one or both the Elzners had just come back from shopping and they were putting away what they bought.”

Pearl gave him one of her sloe-eyed dark looks. “At three in the morning? In their pajamas and nightgown?”

“It doesn’t make sense now, I know. But maybe they shopped earlier and forgot to put stuff away, then remembered and got up and were finishing the job when they started arguing. Hubby got the gun and did Wifey, then himself. It could happen in the real world.”

“That would be our world?”

Fedderman didn’t want to get into some kind of metaphysical conversation with Pearl. “So whadda we tell Captain Egan, murder-suicide?”

“I don’t like telling the prick anything.”

“Pearl…”

“Yeah, yeah…that sure looks like what it was, murder-suicide. Stemming from the pressures of the big city and what comes of marital bliss.”

Fedderman breathed easier. She wasn’t going to buck the system and cause problems. He had enough problems.

“But it isn’t complete.”

“Nothing’s ever complete,” Fedderman said, “but we gotta go with the evidence. Two dead bodies. And what will no doubt be the weapon still in Hubby’s hand, powder burns around the hole in his head. It appears he shot the wife, realized what a shit deed he did, then killed himself. The honorable thing. Murder-suicide. Crime solving being on a kinda assembly-line basis with new crimes always demanding our attention, we chalk this one up and move on to the next problem coming down the line.”

“Move on but not up,” Pearl said.

Fedderman knew what she meant. Even if somehow she kept her job in the NYPD, she wasn’t going any higher. Promotions were not for Pearl.

She knew where she stood and so did everyone else, after what she’d done to Captain Egan.

Pearl and Egan.

Sometimes, when he thought about it, Fedderman caught himself smiling.

“Ah, it’s Quinn, is it?”

The man who had spoken stood in the doorway of the West Side walk-up. He was middle-aged and balding, with a long, jowly face, fleshy purple bags beneath somber brown eyes, and a neatly trimmed downturned graying mustache. A big man, but sagging at the middle, he seemed to have been assembled with mismatched body parts so that his expensive tailored blue suit looked like something plucked off the discount rack.

As only four years had passed, he’d recognized Quinn, and Quinn knew it.

Quinn didn’t move from where he sat on the threadbare sofa, facing the door. “It is Quinn,” he confirmed unnecessarily to Harley Renz, NYPD assistant chief of police.

Frank Quinn was a lanky, hard-edged man an inch over six feet, with a twice broken nose, a square jaw, and short-cropped dark hair that wouldn’t stay combed. But what people remembered about him were his eyes, green, flat, cop’s eyes that seemed to know your darkest secrets at a glance. Today was his birthday. He was forty-five. He needed a shave, a fresh shirt, a haircut, new underwear, a new life.

“You didn’t lock your door,” Renz said, stepping into the tiny, messy apartment. “Aren’t you afraid somebody’s gonna walk in and steal you blind?”

“To wanna steal anything from here, you’d have to be blind.”

Renz smiled, which made him look like a dyspeptic bloodhound. Then his expression changed, but he still looked like a dyspeptic bloodhound. “I never told you, but I’m sorry about you and May, the divorce and all. You still see her much? Or the girl? Laura, isn’t it?”

“Lauri. May doesn’t want to see me. There’s no reason to, except for Lauri. And Lauri isn’t sure what she wants. What she believes about me.”

“Have you told her your side?”

“Not lately. May has her ear and keeps telling her what to think. They’re out in L.A. Went there to get away from me.”

Renz shook his head. “About all you can say in favor of marriage is that it’s an institution. Like prisons and mental hospitals. I was married twenty-six years before my wife ran away with my brother.”

“I heard about that,” Quinn said. “It was worth a laugh.”

“Even I can laugh about it now. That’s how things can change in this amazing world. Even your shitty situation could change.”

Quinn knew what situation Renz meant. Four years ago, Quinn had lost his reputation, his job, and his family, when he’d been unfairly accused of child molestation—the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl. She was a girl he’d never met, much less molested. He knew why he’d been set up. The problem was, he didn’t know how.

He’d been a good cop, even a great one, widely respected for his toughness and clever approach to cases. He didn’t give up. He didn’t back down. He got results.

And in the end, he’d been too good a detective not to notice little things during the investigation of a drug dealer’s murder. Quinn had dug deeper, wider, and discovered a network of kickbacks and corruption that involved many of his fellow cops. He was anguished about what he had to do, but he knew, and they knew, that eventually he’d go to internal affairs with his suspicions. Quinn had spoken with his superior officer, Captain Vince Egan, and told him as much.

But somebody else contacted IA first. About the brutal rape of a young girl in Brooklyn. Quinn had been astounded, but not too afraid at first. He was innocent. The accusation had to be a mistake.

He was shown a button found at the scene of the crime, and it matched one that was missing from the shirt he’d worn the evening of the rape. Then, astounding him further, the girl picked him out of a lineup, identifying him by size and build and the jagged scar on his right forearm, even though the rapist had worn a stocking mask.

Quinn knew the accusation wasn’t a mistake. It was a preventative.

They confiscated his computer from his desk in the squad room, and on it were three suggestive e-mails to this girl he’d never seen. And there was the worst kind of child pornography on the computer’s hard disk.

It looked bad for Quinn, he was told. And he knew it was bad. He understood the game. He knew what was coming next.

They were going to show him a way out of his predicament.

And they did. Retirement with partial pension, or he would be charged with child molestation, the rape of a minor.

Quinn realized it must have been Egan who’d tipped off the corrupt cops, and who was part of the corruption himself.

And probably it was the politically savvy Egan who prevented Quinn from being prosecuted, thus keeping a lid on the rot in the NYPD. Quinn, knowing he wasn’t going to be believed anyway, understood the arrangement, the addendum to corruption. He was if nothing else a realist.

So he preserved his meager pension, but lost his job and everything else.

Everything.

He hadn’t known the devastation would be so swift and complete. His reputation, credibility, and marriage were suddenly gone.

Not only that, he found himself existing only on his partial pension, a pariah unable to find a job or a decent place to live because he was on an unofficial NYPD sexual predator list. Every time he thought he was making progress, word somehow got to whoever controlled his future.

Whoever had put Quinn down wanted to keep him there.

After May left, he missed her so much at first that it affected his health. He thought his aching stomach would turn to stone.

Now, though he thought often of Lauri, he hardly thought of May at all. Renz was right. Things did change.

Quinn had never cared much for Captain Harley Renz. Ambitious, conniving bastard. He liked to know things about people. To Renz, personal information was like hole cards in a poker game.

“You been drinking?” Renz asked.

“No. It’s only ten in the morning. What I am now is fucked up with a headache.”

Renz drew a tiny white plastic bottle from a pocket and held it out toward Quinn. “Would some ibuprofen help?”

Quinn glared at him.

Renz replaced the bottle in his pocket. “This isn’t such a bad neighborhood,” he said, glancing around, “yet this place looks like a roach haven.”

“The building’s gonna be rehabbed, so the rent’s cheap. Anyway, I’ve hired a decorator.”

“Johnnie Walker?”

“Uh-uh. Can’t afford him.”

“Good fortune might change all that. Might throw you a lifeline of money and regained self-respect.”

“How so?”

“I’m here.”

“You said it was a roach haven.”

 

“It’s good to know you’re still a smart-ass,” Renz said. “You’re not completely broken.”

Quinn watched him settle into the worn-out wing chair across from the worn-out sofa. Renz made a steeple with his fingers, almost as if he were about to pray, a characteristic gesture Quinn recalled now. He’d never trusted people who made steeples with their fingers.

“My proposition,” Renz said, “involves an unsolved homicide.”

Despite his wish that Renz would make his pitch and then leave, Quinn felt his pulse quicken. Once a cop, always one, he thought bitterly. Blood that ran blue stayed true. Wasn’t that why he found himself sitting around all day drenched with self-pity?

“You know the Elzner murder case?” Renz asked.

Quinn shook his head no. “I stay away from the news. It cheers me down.”

Renz filled him in. Jan and Martin Elzner, husband and wife, had been discovered shot to death ten days ago in their Upper West Side apartment. The deaths occurred in the early-morning hours, at approximately the same time. The gun that fired the bullets was found in the dead husband’s hand. It was an old Walther .38 semiautomatic. Its serial number had been burned off by acid.

“Like half the illegal guns in New York,” Quinn said.

“Seems that way. He was killed by a single shot to the temple.”

“Powder residue on the hand?”

“Some. But it mighta been transferred there if the gun was exchanged.”

“Burns near the entry wound?”

“Yeah. He was shot at close range.”

“Murder, then suicide,” Quinn said.

“That’s how it’s going down. That’s what they want to believe.”

“They?”

“The NYPD, other’n me. I think the Elzners were both murdered.”

Quinn settled deeper into the sprung sofa and winced. His headache wasn’t abating. “What makes you different?” he asked Renz.

“For one thing, I intend to be the next chief of police. Chief Barrow’s going to retire for health reasons early next year. The department’s considering candidates for replacement. I’m one of those up for the job.”

“You’ve got the asshole part of it down pat.”

“You were the best detective in homicide, Quinn. You can be that again, if you take me up on my offer.”

“I haven’t heard an offer,” Quinn said. Christ! Another offer. He licked his lips. They were dry. “But let’s take things in order. What makes you think the Elzners were both murdered?”

“I’ve talked to the ME, Jack Nift, an old friend of mine.”

Quinn wasn’t surprised Nift and Renz were friends. A couple of pricks.

“Nift tells me in confidence that the angle of the bullet’s entry isn’t quite right for a suicide—too much of a downward trajectory.”

“Does Nift say it definitely rules out a self-inflicted wound?”

“No,” Renz admitted, “only makes it less likely. Also, there’s what might be a silencer nick in some of the spent bullets, where they might have contacted a baffler or some irregularity in a sound suppressor, and the gun in Elzner’s hand wasn’t equipped with a silencer. There were marks on the barrel, though, where one might have been attached.”

“But the marked gun and slugs are no more conclusive than the bullet wound angle.”

“True,” Renz said, “but then there are the groceries.”

“Groceries?”

“Some groceries were out on the table, along with a couple of half-full plastic bags, and a can of tuna was on the kitchen floor. The nearest grocery stores and delis don’t remember either of the Elzners shopping there or ordering a delivery that day or evening, and there was no receipt in the grocery bags.”

“Odd,” Quinn said.

“People don’t interrupt unbagging their groceries after midnight so they can commit murder, then suicide,” Renz told him.

Quinn thought Renz should know better.

He waited for more, but Renz was finished. “That’s it? That’s your evidence?”

“So far.”

“Not very convincing.”

“So far.”

Quinn stood up and paced to the window, pressing his palm to his aching forehead. He had to squint as he looked down at the street three stories below. The morning was warm but gloomy. Some of the people scurrying along the sidewalks were wearing light raincoats. A few of them wielded open umbrellas.

“Now, what would be the proposition?”

“I want you to investigate the Elzner murder secretly,” Renz said, “with my surreptitious help. I’ll sit on the evidence as long as possible, so you and I will be the only ones to know it in its entirety. You’ll be paid well, and you don’t ask where the money’s coming from. And if I—you—solve the case and I become the next chief of police, you’re back in the NYPD and part of its inner circle.”

“A crooked deal.”

“Sure, sure. And you’re so fucking ethical. I know your reputation, but you mighta noticed you’re about out of options. I’m holding out a chance for you. And it’s my chance, too. The way it looks, it comes down to me or Captain Vincent Egan as the new chief, and you know Egan’s not gonna play it straight.”

Quinn had to smile. Renz had gotten his ducks in a row before coming here. Quinn knew something else: Renz would never have come to him with this if somebody higher in the NYPD or in city politics hadn’t approved it. Maybe somebody had his suspicions and wanted to place Egan and Quinn, and possibly Renz himself, under a microscope.

“There’s no way I can conduct an investigation without Egan and the rest of the NYPD finding out about it,” Quinn said.

“Egan won’t find out if you work fast enough. And if he does, we’ll think of something else. What I’m asking is that you climb outta this physical and psychological shit hole you been in and do your job the way I know you can.”

“That last part’d be easy enough,” Quinn said, still gazing out the window.

“Not without the first part. Can you manage it?”

Quinn saw more umbrellas opening below, like dark flowers abruptly blooming. He thought it would be nice if the sun would burst out from behind the clouds, send him a sign.

Screw it. He didn’t need a sign.

“I can try,” he said, turning away from the gloom. “But even if I get it done, I don’t see how you can get me back in the NYPD.”

“I can if I’m chief.”

“All things considered, I don’t see why you’d take a chance on me.”

“I noticed coming over here, there’s a few schools in this neighborhood.”

“One right down the street. And there’s a church near here, too. I don’t pay much attention to either of them.”

“I know,” Renz said. “That’s why I decided to drop by.”

Moving day.

Claire Briggs stood in the center of the vacant living room, looking around with satisfaction at the fresh paint. She decided the off-white made the pale blue carpet look older, but that was okay for now. She’d spent her budget on paint and what new furniture she needed, and she was grateful she could exchange her tiny basement apartment in the Village for this one.

It was all thanks to her landing a supporting role in the continuing Broadway comedy Hail to the Chef. Claire, with her newly dyed blond hair and faux French accent, played Mimi the restaurant owner, in love with her insane but talented sous chef.

A slender woman of medium height who looked taller due to her long neck and erect posture, Claire tucked her fingertips in the side pockets of her tight jeans and walked over to peer out the window.

Twenty-nine stories below, she saw the movers dolly her flea-market antique china cabinet out of the van and roll it down the truck’s steel ramp into the street. The cabinet was tightly wrapped in thick padding to prevent damage. She smiled. Claire was glad to have hired this moving company, Three Hunks and a Truck, on the recommendation of one of the dancers in Hail. Despite their gimmicky name, they were careful and hardworking movers. Not to mention hunks, as advertised. The moving company, actually more like twenty men and several trucks, based across the East River in New Jersey, was fast gaining a reputation in Manhattan for reliability.

Claire left the window and wandered around the rest of the two-bedroom West Side apartment. She’d had only the living room and kitchen painted; the bedrooms were good enough for now, and only one of them would be used for sleeping. The other would be for storage, a home office, and would contain a small sofa that could be made into a bed—a sometimes guest room. It was a luxury in New York to have an apartment with a spare room, but Claire had always wanted one. It fit into her plans that, even to her, weren’t fully formed.

She heard voices, scuffing sounds, then the hall door being shoved open. She went into the living room and saw one of the movers holding the door while another wheeled in the china cabinet. The one with the cabinet was husky and blond, with long, lean features and clear blue eyes, handsome enough to be an actor. And maybe he was one, Claire thought. Manhattan was like that. Anyone might be an actor. Anyone might be anything.

“That wall,” she said, pointing. She wanted them to be careful with the old mahogany cabinet, even though it wasn’t particularly valuable. She was fond of it, and it would hold the stemmed crystal left to her two years ago by her grandmother, now buried in Wisconsin.

“Nice piece of furniture,” said the blond one, as he and his almost-as-handsome dark-haired partner stripped away straps and padding and wrestled the cabinet against the living-room wall. “’Bout here okay?”

“A little to the left, if you don’t mind,” Claire said.

“We don’t,” the dark one said. “You’re the boss.”

“And a pleasure to work for,” said the blond one with a wink.

Claire couldn’t help smiling at him. He was definitely a magnetic guy, like a sort of modern-day Viking. If she weren’t involved with Jubal…

But she was involved. She altered her smile, trying not to make it mean too much.

It took the three movers about an hour and a half to bring up the rest of the furniture in the service elevator and place it more or less where Claire wanted it. All the time they worked, the blond one paid special attention to Claire, which seemed to amuse the other two, the dark-haired man and a handsome, bald African American who had a dancer’s build and way of moving.

When they were finished, it was the blond one who presented Claire with something on a clipboard to sign and told her she’d be billed. She preferred to write them a check today, she said; she didn’t like leaving things hanging. That brought a wide smile to the blond one’s face.

“That’s good,” he said. “You can sometimes get stiffed in this business.”

He was waiting patiently for her reply, but Claire decided not to play the double-entendre game. Strictly business. She wrote a check, adding a large tip, and handed it to the Viking. He was sweating, standing closer than he had to, emanating heat and a scent that should have been unpleasant but wasn’t. Claire had to admit he made her uncomfortable in a way she liked.

He made a show of examining the check, then smiled and said, “My name’s Lars Svenson, Claire.”

“Lately of Sweden?” She didn’t know what else to say and the inane question had jumped out.

“Not hardly,” Svenson said. “Well, a few generations ago. What about Briggs? What kind of name is that? A married one?”

“Not yet,” Claire said. “Soon, though.”

“Soon is no. The date been set?”

“No.”

“Question been popped?”

“Not in so many words. We have an understanding.”

He gave her a wide, sensuous grin. “Understandings aren’t exactly contracts.”

She shook her head no to his obvious intention. “I’m afraid this one is.”

Svenson shrugged. “Well, if he turns out to have murdered his last three wives…”

She laughed. “Then I’ll need a mover.”

He gave her a jaunty little salute, then shot another smile at her as he went out the door.

“Whew!” Claire heard herself exclaim.

She walked again to the window and watched below as Svenson swung himself into the truck’s cab with the other two men, and the blocky little van pulled away from the curb.

 

Claire toured the apartment again, checking on where the furniture had been placed. She moved a table closer to the sofa, then exchanged two lamps.

She was standing with her hands on her hips, planning on where to place wall hangings in the living room, when her cell phone chirped in her purse.

She hurriedly crossed to where the purse sat on the floor in a corner and dug the phone from it.

“Claire? It’s Maddy,” came a woman’s voice on the other end of the connection. Madison Capp, the dancer friend who’d recommended the movers.

“Hi, Maddy,” Claire said.

“The movers been there?”

“And left. Thanks for recommending them. They were terrific. They didn’t dent or scratch anything.”

“And they’re very decorative, aren’t they?”

“I have to say yes.”

“Was the big blond one there? Lars whatever?”

“Yeah. Lars Svenson.”

“He come on to you?”

“Somewhat. He an actor or something?”

“Nope, just a hunk with a line of bullshit. A friend of mine went out with him after he helped move her into an apartment a few months ago.”

“Oh? She give you any reports?”

“Haven’t seen her. She left the city. I heard she got a movie part in Europe in one of those erotic coming-of-age flicks. She’s bi.”

“Bisexual?”

“No, bilingual. But she must have been more than satisfied with Lars in any language.”

“Must have been,” Claire said, laughing.

“Anyway, you’re serious about someone, right?”

“Right. Jubal Day. He’s an actor.”

“Ah! Played in Metabolism in the Village last year?”

“Same Jubal Day.”

“Then I can see why you’re serious. What’s he doing now?”

“Metabolism’s touring. He’s in Kansas City.”

“Too bad he can’t be with you. Well, if you need anything, Claire, give me a call.”

“I will. And thanks again, Maddy.”

“So be happy and get back to nesting.”

Claire replaced the phone in her purse and did just that. She continued her rounds of the apartment, touching, adjusting, rearranging, feeling very domestic.

She was feeling that way more and more—domestic. It was strange. Maddy had used the word nesting. Birds did that, made a nest, a home. Homemaking. That was what was on Claire’s mind these days, and there was a deep pleasure in it.

She wondered what was wrong with her.

She realized suddenly that in the excitement of moving, she’d forgotten to check the box downstairs to see if the postal service had started mail delivery at her new address.

At first, when she stood in the tiled lobby and opened the brass mailbox beneath her apartment number, Claire thought she might as well not have bothered. The box was empty except for yet another offer to open a new charge account, and a coupon for free pizza delivery.

Then she noticed the letter-size white envelope scrunched up against the side of the box.

In the envelope was her second major stroke of luck.

It was a gracefully handwritten letter from Aunt Em, her favorite relative, who lived in Maine. The letter was creased and folded around a check.

After Claire had e-mailed the good news about taking over one of the most important roles on Broadway, Aunt Em e-mailed back that she was sending Claire a congratulatory gift. And here it was. Enough money to do what Claire had often told her was one of her fondest desires—hiring a professional decorator. Aunt Em’s generous check was the perfect gift, with the new apartment.

Claire thought about calling Maddy back and sharing her good news, then decided against it. Maddy thought about little beyond dancing. Her idea of a well-decorated apartment was one with more than one place to sit.

Which, Claire had to admit, was maybe the reason why Maddy was one of the most frequently employed dance gypsies in New York.

Claire liked Maddy, but she’d always thought a human being should have more than one interest.

She was pretty sure she’d locked the apartment door behind her, so she left the lobby to go outside and walk to the Duane Reade drugstore two blocks down, where she could buy a nice thank-you card for Aunt Em.

It was a beautiful warm day, sunny, so that even the curbside plastic trash bags glistened with reflected light like jewels set along the avenue. Maybe it was only her mood, but people on the sidewalk seemed less preoccupied, more tuned in to the world and happier.

Sometimes, Claire thought, life could be just about perfect.

Also surprising.

Pearl lay in bed in her crummy fourth-floor walk-up, staring at the cracked ceiling that needed paint like the rest of the place.

She’d bought decorating supplies last month after renting the apartment six months ago—colonial white latex flat paint with matching glossy enamel. Also brushes, scrapers, rollers, paint trays, plastic drop cloths, even some kind of sponge contraption for trimming corners and around window and door frames. She had everything she needed other than enthusiasm. And time.

Things kept getting in the way, like murders, rapes, robberies, occupying most of her hours and demanding most of her energy.

So the painting supplies all sat in a narrow, shelfless closet in the hall, waiting to be used. Pearl hadn’t looked at them in weeks.

The Job, her job, where was it going? She knew where everyone, including her, thought it was going, since the evening she’d had the run-in with that asshole Egan.

 

She’d been off duty and had gone into the Meermont Hotel to use the ladies’ room, such facilities being rare and precious in Manhattan. To reach the restrooms she had to walk through the Meermont’s softly lit, oak-paneled lounge, and she’d heard her name called.

When she’d stopped and turned, there was Captain Vincent Egan seated on the end stool at the long bar.

She’d smiled, wanting to move on, desperately having to relieve herself. But she couldn’t ignore or be brusque to the man who commanded her precinct, and who in many ways controlled her future.

“Captain Egan! Hello!” She feigned surprise and pleasure convincingly, she thought, while managing not to stand with her legs crossed.

Maybe she’d been too convincing. Egan slid his bulky, bullnecked self down off his bar stool and advanced on her. Seeing his unsteadiness, looking into his somewhat glazed blue eyes, she realized with a shock he was drunk.

“You undercover?” he had asked, moving close to her so she could smell that he’d been drinking bourbon and plenty of it. She glanced over at his glass on the bar. An on-the-rocks glass, empty but for half-melted ice. “If you’re undercover,” Egan slurred at her, “you really shouldn’t have addreshed me as captain.”

And I really have to go to the bathroom. “I know that, sir. I’m not undercover. I’m between shifts, on my way to meet someone for dinner, and just stopped in to use the ladies’ room.”

She saw his eyes gain focus and travel up and down her body. She was wearing a sweater, skirt, and navy high heels. The sweater might be too tight. Pearl had dressed up for the man she was meeting, an assistant DA she’d struck up a conversation with in court. She didn’t see much hope that anything might come of the dinner, but still she had to try. Or so she told herself.

Egan had been swaying this way and that, as if he were on the deck of a ship, while he’d stared at her chest. “I’ve never sheen you sho dolled up.”

Uh-oh. He was loaded, all right. She’d heard right the first time; he was slurring his words.

“I’ve never sheen you sho attractive.”

You’ve never seen me piddle in public.

“You have great…,” he said. “I mean, I’ve alwaysh greatly admired you, Offisher Kashner.”

“Captain Egan, listen, I’ve gotta—”

His beefy hand rested on her shoulder. “Politicsh, Offisher Kashner. You are a fine offisher, and I have noted that. A hard, hard worker. Determined. But are you conshidering politicsh’s role in your career?” A spray of spittle went with the question.

“Oh, sure. Politics. I really—”

He’d moved to within inches of her, and his fingertips brushed her cheek. “Lishen, Pug—”

“I really don’t like to be called that, Captain.” She knew it was short for pugnacious, but she also thought some of her fellow officers might be referring to her turned-up nose. One of them had even said it wasn’t the kind of nose he expected to find on a girl named Kasner. She didn’t bother telling him her mother had been pure Irish. She’d instead elbowed him in the ribs, not smiling.

But Captain Egan had been smiling, and it was a smile Pearl had seen on too many men. “I happen to know the hotel manager and can get a room here for the night,” he said. “We are, I can shee, compatible. That ish to shay, we like each other. I can tell that. It would be in both our intereshst to think about a room.” He swayed nearer. “They all have bathrooms.”

“Not a good idea, Captain.”

“But I thought you had to…uh, go.” He winked. She realized he thought he was being charming.

“Not that bad, I don’t.” She moved back so his fingertips were no longer touching her face. The bastard actually thought he was getting away with something, making progress with her. It was pissing her off. If she didn’t have to go so bad…

“I’m your shuperior offisher, Pug.” His hand, suddenly free, dropped to her left breast and stayed there like Velcro. “If you sheriously object—”

He didn’t finish his sentence. Pearl did seriously object. She hit him hard in the jaw with her right fist, feeling a satisfying jolt travel down her arm into her shoulder. It was a good punch. It sent him staggering backward to sit slumped on the floor between two vacant bar stools.

He had fought his way up frantically, like a panicked non-swimmer who didn’t know he was in shallow water, flailing his arms and legs and knocking over a bar stool he tried to use for support. His broad face was twisted and ugly with anger.

He’d looked amazingly sober then. “Listen, Kasner!”

But Pearl had spun on her high heels and was striding toward the ladies’ room, where she knew he wouldn’t follow.

She understood immediately the gravity of what she’d done. Knew she’d screwed up. At least there were witnesses in the bar, a lineup of men and a few women, many of them grinning at her in the back-bar mirror as she passed. Hotel guests, most of them. Witnesses. She could locate them if she had to. Asshole Egan would have to know that.

“Kasner!”

Now she did turn. She balled her right fist and raised her voice. “You really want me to come back, Captain Egan?”

He flinched. He was in plain clothes, but he didn’t like his rank and name spoken so loudly. Not in these circumstances.

Maybe he knew what she was doing and suddenly realized his own vulnerability, because he seemed suddenly aware of the other lounge patrons and the two bartenders, all staring at him.

He dug out his wallet, threw some bills on the bar next to his empty glass, then stalked out.

Pearl continued to the ladies’ room.

When she emerged ten minutes later, calm but still angry, Egan was nowhere in sight.

As she walked swiftly through the bar toward the lobby, she heard applause.

 

The dinner date was disastrous. Pearl couldn’t stop thinking about Captain Egan and what had happened, what she’d done. She couldn’t stop blaming herself as well as Egan.

Anger, depression, stress. Pearl’s world.

Days had passed, and that world didn’t collapse in on Pearl. Word had gotten around, though, like a subterranean current.

Still, there had been no reprisals. Egan was married. There were witnesses to his altercation with Pearl, and he’d been close to falling-down drunk, while she’d been sober. Internal affairs was never involved. No official charges were ever filed. NYPD politics at work.

She, and everyone else, knew that Egan was patiently waiting for his opportunity. Pearl didn’t figure to have a long or distinguished career as a cop.

 

“Damn!” she said to her bedroom ceiling, and tried to think about something else. Her mind was a merry-go-round she couldn’t stop. Maybe she should get out of bed and paint.

Yeah, at eleven-thirty at night.

It was one of the few times in her life when Pearl wished she had something other than her work. But she’d had several disastrous romances and had lost her faith in men. Most men, anyway. No, all men. The entire fucking gender. None of them seemed to be for her.

Fedderman, being her partner, was the man she spent the most time with. A decent enough guy, married, three kids, overweight, overdeodorized, eighteen years older than Pearl, and more interested in pasta than sex.

Not much hope there.

The other men in her life, her fellow officers and men she encountered in other city jobs, sometimes made plays for her. None of them interested her. These guys were far more interested in sex than pasta, or anything else. Invariably, they talked a great game, but it was talk. The few guys she’d given a tumble couldn’t keep up with her in or out of the sack, and they tended to run off at the mouth. Pearl didn’t like that. Pearl figured the hell with them. When it came to what really mattered, they didn’t have it.

Maybe she picked them wrong. Or maybe that was just men.

She laced her fingers behind her head and closed her eyes. If she could only meet some guy who wasn’t all front. Who wasn’t shooting angles or afraid to care and act like he cared. Who wasn’t so dishonest with her.

Who knows how lonely I am.

Who isn’t so…

She fell asleep thinking about it.

Him.

Like she sometimes did on nights when she didn’t drink scotch or take a pill.

 

Lars Svenson wouldn’t let the woman sleep. Whenever he knew she was dozing off, he’d lay into her again with the whip. It was a short, supple whip, and about as big around as a shoelace, so it stung and left narrow but painful welts on the woman’s bare back.

She couldn’t avoid the lashes, because she was lying on her stomach on her bed, her hands tied to the headboard, her feet to the iron bed frame’s legs. She couldn’t cry out, because a rectangle of silver duct tape covered her mouth.

He lashed her again and she managed a fairly loud whimper.

Lars stood back and smiled down at her. Through the web of hair over her left eye, she stared up at him. He loved the pain in her dark gaze and the message it sent.

He gave her a few more, striking her just so, barely breaking the skin.

It wasn’t the first time for her. He’d known that when he picked her up in the Village bar, where she wouldn’t have been if she wasn’t cruising for this kind of action. She was plump and dark, maybe Jewish or Italian, with a mop of obviously dyed blond hair and the kind of wide smile people called vivacious. He’d seen in her eyes what she wanted. She saw in his that he’d supply it. After only one drink she’d suggested they go to her apartment.

When they’d undressed, he saw that she was even plumper than she’d appeared in clothes. Not exactly what you’d call fat, though.

Lars knew where to look. He saw bruises around her nipples, faint scars on her thighs and buttocks. Her back looked fresh, though. He’d take care of that.

Tiring of using the whip, he propped it in the crack of her ass and went over to the dresser, where he had a cold beer sitting on a coaster so as not to mar the finish. Lars respected furniture.

The woman was sobbing now. He took a sip of beer and regarded her. It might be time to talk to her, softly tell her what else he was going to do to her. Then he realized he’d forgotten her name. It sounded Russian or something and was hard to recall.

He grinned. She wasn’t in any position now to refresh his memory.

She twisted her neck, trying to get him in her range of vision, wondering if he was still in the room. He shouldn’t have gone yet, leaving her bound and gagged. That was breaking the rules.

Then he remembered. Or thought he did.

“Flo?”

She reacted immediately, tensing her buttocks and straining to look in the direction of his voice.

“If you’re a good girl, Flo, maybe I’ll take you out for breakfast tomorrow.” Letting her know he was staying the long night through.

She managed only one of her whimpers.

He decided the bottoms of Flo’s bare feet shouldn’t be ignored.

Quinn was up late at the kitchen’s tiny gray Formica table, smoking a cheap cigar and studying the Elzner murder file. Rather, the copy of the file, which Renz had provided.

He was drinking beer from a thick, clouded tumbler that looked as if it had been stolen from a diner years ago. The foam head had disappeared except for a light, sudsy film along the glass’s sides, and the beer was warm.

Quinn exhaled cigar smoke and leaned back away from the open file. There really wasn’t much of value inside it. Sure, there were things that didn’t quite add up, that suggested someone other than Martin Elzner had fired the shots that killed Elzner and his wife. But almost always in cases of violent death, there were such loose ends, questions that would never be answered. Lives that were stopped abruptly left them behind as if to haunt and not be forgotten. If you were a cop long enough, you didn’t expect to ever understand everything.

He propped the cigar in a cracked saucer he was using as an ashtray, then took a sip of beer. There was one thing, though, that stuck like a bur in his mind. The groceries. The Elzners must have bought them before the stores closed, then were putting them away when the shooting occurred. But no one in any of the surrounding grocery stores or all-night delis, where they might have bought groceries, recalled them being there. Of course it was possible they’d shopped just down the block from their apartment and not been recognized. Or had been recognized and forgotten. People didn’t go around paying attention to everything around them in case they might be quizzed later.

So, maybe the groceries were going to remain another of those unanswered questions.

But there was also the gun, a Walther .38-caliber semiautomatic. It was a large enough caliber to make plenty of noise, yet no one in neighboring apartments had heard shots.

That, too, was possible, especially at the time of the Elzners’ deaths. But it made the marks on the gun and the bullet nicks all the more likely to have been made by a silencer.

Which, of course, would mean a murderer other than the late Martin Elzner. One who couldn’t risk making noise, and who knew no one would bother using a silencer for a murder-suicide. Missing silencer: a killer still at large.

Quinn glanced at his watch, a long-ago birthday gift from May. Past midnight. He decided to go to bed. Renz had set it up for him to visit the Elzner apartment tomorrow morning, so Quinn wanted to be alert, and to resemble as much as possible the man he’d been.

Still am!

He closed the file, then snuffed out his cigar in the saucer and finished the tepid beer that would help him get to sleep.

Quinn was satisfied with his chances. He never expected or needed a brass ring.

A toehold would do.

In the bathroom he brushed his teeth, then leaned close and examined them in the mirror. Too yellow, and they seemed slightly crooked, and maybe that was a cavity way back there. He’d neglected them too long. A trip to a dentist wouldn’t be a bad idea for his appearance. He’d lost a couple of molars in a long-ago fight, and broken the bridgework since. Other than that, he still had his own teeth. He smiled, then shook his head at the rawboned, luckless thug looking back at him. Rough. Downright grizzly. Scary.

The smile disappeared and he turned away, sickened with himself.

He’d sunk. He could see it now that he was looking up again. He’d sunk so goddamned far! An outcast, a sexual predator the neighbors whispered about and avoided. He drank too much and thought too much, and spent too much time alone. His wife and his own daughter were afraid of him.

It isn’t fucking fair!

He turned again toward the mirror and drew back his fist, thinking of smashing his ruined image, cracking it into fragments so it resembled his broken life.

There again was his sad smile. And his own sad eyes staring back at him. Movie shit, punching mirrors. Heavy-handed symbolism. In real life it accomplished nothing and meant nothing.

Self-pity was his problem. Self-pity was like a drug that would pull him down as surely as any of the drugs on the street.

He went to the closet and rooted through his clothes. Whatever he had, it would have to do until he got an advance on his salary from Renz.

Bum’s clothes. Goddamned bum’s wardrobe!

Or maybe it wasn’t that bad. He didn’t have a decent suit but could put together what might loosely be called an outfit. A wrinkled pair of pants, a white dress shirt that had long sleeves and would be hot as hell this time of year, and a blue sport coat that wasn’t too bad if he kept the ripped pocket flap tucked in. Shoes were okay, a black pair, which he’d bought years ago, that weren’t too badly worn and were actually comfortable.

A shave, a reasonable taming of his unruly hair—starting to gray—and he could still look enough like a cop.

Which he was, damn it!

He was a cop.

 

A lot of blood.

That was the first thing that struck Quinn the next morning after he’d unwrapped crime scene tape from the door-knob and let himself into the Elzner apartment with the key Renz had taped to the back of the murder file.

The Elzners had died in their kitchen. Though it wasn’t so evident in the crime scene photos, it looked as if the wife, Jan, had dragged herself a few feet before expiring and left some bloody scratches on the freshly painted white door. Quinn didn’t think the scratches were an attempt at writing a dying message, more the result of death throes.

Stepping around the crusted dried blood on the kitchen floor, Quinn made his way to the table. The groceries were still there. The can of tuna that had been on the floor near the body was now next to one of the two small, unmarked plastic bags. There were some oranges, a loaf of wheat bread, a jar of peanut butter. Nothing perishable other than the oranges, according to the file. Also there were two jars of gourmet strawberry jam.

Quinn didn’t touch anything as he leaned down to peer at the price tags on the jam jars. Expensive.

He left the table and examined the holes in the walls from the bullets that had gone through Jan Elzner. Two holes. One wide and jagged, struck by a misshapen, nearly spent bullet that had passed through too much tissue or bone. The other hole was as circular and neat as if it had been made by a drill bit, from the bullet that had made it through to the next apartment and led to the discovery of the bodies.

Standing there in the kitchen, Quinn felt something stir deep in his gut. The crime scene didn’t feel like murder-suicide. The roughly outlined positions of the bodies, the half-finished mundane task of putting away groceries. No foresight or even rudimentary planning was evident here.

Hubby was supposedly the shooter. If the wife had been interrupted by sudden, violent death while putting away groceries, her body probably wouldn’t have dropped where it had. And Hubby wouldn’t have been in such a rush to kill himself that he’d knock a can of tuna off the table.

Of course it was all possible.

But it didn’t feel that way. It felt like murder. And an unlikely, perhaps senseless one. An unsuspecting couple living out their domestic lives, and some evil bastard decided they’d had enough and ended it for them, maybe for no reason other than so he could watch them die. Evil. It wasn’t a word Quinn shied away from, because he’d learned long ago it was a palpable thing that never quite left where it visited. And it was here, in the Elzners’ kitchen, his old and familiar enemy.

Do something about this. You can do something about who did this if you don’t screw up.

Quinn realized he’d turned a corner and was assuming the killer wasn’t Martin Elzner.

It was the kind of gut assumption any old cop knew not to ignore.

 

Quinn went into the Elzners’ bedroom. Everything was neat in there except for the unmade bed, obviously slept in by two. There was a set of women’s pink slippers on the floor near the bed, the kind without heels that you could slide your feet right into. Mules, he thought they were called. But maybe not.

He made a mental note to check and see if Jan Elzner’s corpse had bare feet. If so, it suggested she might have awakened suddenly, maybe heard something in the kitchen that alarmed her, and hurried out there, in too much of a rush even to step into her slippers. Which would mean she’d been in bed alone at the time, or she would have alerted her husband.

Interesting, the slippers.

Mules?

Quinn nosed around in the bedroom some more, then the bathroom, finding nothing of use or interest.

He returned to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. The usual. A carton of milk, now gone bad. Some half-used condiments, a six-pack of diet Coke, two cans of Budweiser. In the door shelves were a bottle of orange juice, an unopened bottle of Chablis, a jar of pickles, and two plastic Evian bottles, one of which was opened and half-empty. And something else: a jar of the same kind of gourmet strawberry jam that was on the kitchen table.

Quinn used a dry dish towel wadded on the sink counter to open the jar. It was almost full of jam.

After screwing the lid back on and replacing the jar, he shut the refrigerator door and tossed the towel back on the counter, near a glass vase containing a small bouquet of neglected yellow roses that had died not long after the Elzners. Then he opened the freezer compartment at the top of the refrigerator.

Three frozen dinners—free-range chicken. How free were they, really? Some frozen meat wrapped in white butcher paper. A rubber-lidded dish containing chocolate-chip cookies. Quinn leaned forward and peered into the icemaker basket—full of cubes.

The apartment was warm and the cool air tumbling from the freezer felt good, but he shut the narrow white door and heard the refrigerator motor immediately start to hum. A couple of decorative magnets were stuck to the door—a Statue of Liberty, an unfurled American flag—but there was nothing pinned beneath them. No messages. Such as, who might try to kill us.

Quinn figured he’d seen enough. He left the apartment, locking the door behind him and replacing the yellow crime scene tape. He was glad to get away from the smell. Even dry, so much blood had a sickly sweet coppery scent that brought back the wrong kind of memories. Too many crime scenes where death had been violent and gory. Years of cleaning up the worst kinds of messes that people made of their lives and other lives. The woman in Queens who’d slashed her sleeping husband’s throat with a razor blade, then mutilated his nude body. The Lower East Side man who’d shot his wife’s lover, then three members of her family, then himself. So many years of that kind of thing. What had it done to him that he hadn’t noticed? Didn’t suspect?

And why did he miss it so?

What had made May leave him so soon after he’d been discredited and lost his livelihood? Had she doubted his innocence from the beginning? Or had she seen something in him that was beyond his awareness?

While he was waiting for the elevator, he examined his reflection in its polished steel door. He looked okay, he decided, with his fresh shave, white collar, and dark tie. A homicide cop on the job.

Except for the shield. There wasn’t one.

The elevator arrived with a muted thumping and strumming of cables.

When the gleaming door slid open, a uniformed cop Quinn knew as Mercer stepped out into the hall. A big, square-shouldered guy with squinty eyes and a ruddy complexion. Quinn had only been in the man’s company a few times, years ago, and wasn’t sure if he’d be recognized.

Mercer nodded to him and politely stepped aside so Quinn could enter the elevator. Quinn nodded back, studying Mercer’s eyes.

They were good cop’s eyes, neutral as Switzerland.

Marcy Graham absolutely and without a doubt had to try on the soft brown leather jacket, and that was what led to the problem.

She knew her husband, Ron, was arguing against buying the jacket not because he disliked it, but because he disliked paying for it. All this talk of it putting weight on her was absurd. Her image in the mirror of Tambien’s exclusive women’s shop confirmed it. The tapered cut of the three-quarter-length jacket made her look slender. Not that I have a weight problem. And the price was unbelievable. Half off because it was out of season.

But later in the years, when the weather was cooler, she could wear such a coat anywhere. What she liked about it was its simplicity. She could accessorize it, dress it up or down. With her blue eyes, her light brown hair, and her unblemished complexion, the soft color of the leather was just right.

“It makes you look ten pounds lighter,” whispered the salesclerk when Ron wandered away to deposit his chewing gum in a receptacle that had once been an ashtray. “Not that you need it, but still….”

Marcy nodded, not daring to answer, because Ron was already striding back to where she and the clerk were standing before the full-length mirrors that were angled so you could see three of yourself.

The salesclerk was a slight, handsome man in a blue chalk-striped suit of European cut. He had brown eyes, with long lashes, and black hair slicked back to a knot at the base of his neck. He also wore rings, gold and silver, on two fingers of each hand, and a dangling diamond earring. Marcy knew the earring and rings were enough for Ron not to like him.

“Look at yourself from all sides,” the salesclerk urged, nudging Marcy closer to the triptych mirrors. “The coat lends you a certain curvaciousness, doesn’t it?” He winked not at Marcy but at Ron.

“Don’t try including me in bullshitting your customers,” Ron said. He was smiling, but Marcy, and probably the salesclerk, knew he was serious.

The clerk smiled at Marcy. “It’s the truth, of course, about what the jacket does for you.”

“It’s a subjective thing,” Ron said.

“Or it’s the lines of the jacket complementing the lines of the woman. Or maybe the other way around.”

“You really think so?” Ron asked sarcastically. Marcy could see him getting angrier. On dangerous ground now. Close to losing his temper with this slight, effeminate man.

She shrugged and grinned in the mirror at the salesclerk. “I guess my husband doesn’t like it, so—”

“Ah! For some reason I thought he was a friend. Or perhaps your older brother.”

Ron glared at the clerk. “I’m not quite sure, but I believe I’ve been insulted.”

The clerk shrugged. “It certainly wasn’t intentional.”

“I believe it was.”

The salesclerk shrugged again, but this time there was a different and definite body language to it. A taunt.

Marcy thought he didn’t look so much like a harmless salesclerk now, perhaps gay, but not so effeminate. Not the sort of clerk you might expect to find in a semiswank shop like Tambien’s that—let’s face it—put on airs to jack up prices. His lean body appeared coiled and strong beneath the chalk-striped suit, and she noticed that his manicured hands were large for such a thin man, the backs of them heavily veined. Faded blue coloring, what might be part of a tattoo, peeked from beneath his right cuff. Marcy didn’t want to see those hands, with the rings, made into fists.

“Don’t push it, Ron, please,” she said, starting to unbutton the coat.

“Push it?” But he was looking at the clerk and not Marcy. Unlike Marcy, he didn’t seem to sense that the slender male-model type might be a dangerous man.

The clerk smiled. Though possibly fifty pounds lighter than the six-foot-one, two-hundred-pound Ron, he was obviously unafraid. The long-lashed brown eyes didn’t blink.

“Why not push it?” Ron said. “I don’t appreciate this guy’s attitude.”

“I apologize for anything you mistook as improper,” the clerk said, his smile turning superior and insincere. His teeth were perfectly even and very white.

Ron’s face was darkening. Marcy could see the purple vein near his temple start to throb, the way it did when he was about to lose control. Another customer, browsing nearby, a tall woman in designer slacks, a sleeveless blouse, and too much jewelry, glanced at them from the corner of a wide eye and hurried away on the plush carpet.

“Please, Ron, I’m taking the coat off.” Her fingers trembling, Marcy fumbled at the buttons. “I’ve decided I don’t want it.”

“Can I be of some help here?” a voice asked. A man who stood in a rooted way, as if he had authority, had drifted over to move between the clerk and Ron. He stood closer to Ron. He was short, bald, had a dark mustache, and was wearing a chalk-striped suit like the clerk’s, only his was chocolate brown instead of blue. “I’m the store manager.”

“I don’t think you will help,” Ron said, “but this jerk was coming on to my wife.”

Marcy shook her head. “For God’s sake, Ron!”

The salesclerk stood with his hands at his sides, perfectly calm. Almost amused. It occurred to Marcy that he might be one of those small men who felt compelled to pick on large men as a way of proving themselves. The kind of man who’d learned the hard way how to fight and was eager to back up his bravado. Showing off for the lady, but mostly for himself.

“You were flirting, Ira?” the manager asked, glancing at the clerk. His tone suggested he was astounded by the possibility.

“Of course not. If it appeared so, I certainly apologize.”

Marcy removed the coat, relieved to be out of it, and handed it to the clerk.

He gave her a little bow as he accepted the garment and extended a card to her with his free hand, smiling. “If you think about it and change your mind, I’m Ira.”

“She knows you’re Ira, and she won’t change her mind,” Ron said. “And you won’t change it for her.” He clutched Marcy’s elbow. “C’mon, Marcy. We’re outta here.”

Marcy let him lead her toward the door. She knew he felt he’d topped the clerk and was ready to leave while he was ahead. She was thankful for that. The situation was already embarrassing enough.

“Marcy’s a nice name,” she heard Ira remark softly behind them.

Ron seemed not to have heard, but she wondered if he had.

He stood in the doorway of a luggage shop across the street and watched Marcy Graham leave Fifth Federal Savings Bank, where she worked as a loan officer. She paused in front of the bank’s glass doors, set between phony stone pillars, and glanced up at the sky as if contemplating rain, then seemed to reject decisively the idea of going back inside for an umbrella and began walking.

He followed.

He knew her routes and her timetable by now, her haunts and habits. After work, she boarded the subway at a stop two blocks from Fifth Federal. He enjoyed watching her walk. She would stride down the block in her high heels, the warm breeze pressing her skirt against her thighs, her breasts and brown hair bouncing with each step, and she would unhesitatingly enter the long, shadowed stairwell to the turnstiles.

It was a wonder to watch her descend the concrete steps, moving rapidly if there was no one in her way. Almost like a graceful, controlled near-tumble. His eyes took all of her in, the strength and looseness of her legs, the way her arms swung, her hair swayed, her hips switched, motion, countermotion, the rhythm of time and the cosmos. In some women there was everything.

She would take the train to within two blocks of her apartment building, then walk the rest of the way home, playing out her daily routine, locked in the worn pathways of her life. He knew routine made her feel secure. There was safety in repetition simply because there were no surprises; life was habit and redundancy all the way to the edges of her perception. What a comfort! How wise she was, yet didn’t know herself.

Sometimes he followed closely all the way from the bank, taking the same uptown train, even riding in the same car, watching her, imagining. In the gray world of the subway, they were both sometimes lucky enough to find seats. And more often than not, there were the usual subway creeps staring at a woman like Marcy. That meant she didn’t pay much attention to him, worrying about the silent watchers who so obviously wanted every part and morsel of her.

The pink and red of her, the hues of her flesh and hidden white purity of bone.

Not that Marcy had to worry about the creeps. She belonged to someone already, even if she didn’t yet know it.

He would follow her up to the multicolored surface from the drab subway stop, then down the street to her apartment in the building with the dirty stone facade. Then he’d cross the street and find a spot where he could stand out of the flow of pedestrian traffic and watch the Grahams’ apartment windows.

He would see one or the other of them pass from time to time, fleeting movement behind glass panes. Glimpses into another world in which he was only a ghost and she its brightest inhabitant.

Only a few minutes, perhaps ten, would he stay there. Best not to attract undue attention. But it intrigued him that Marcy and her husband were unknowingly walking where he’d walked, touching what he’d touched, maybe sitting in a chair not long cooled from his own warmth. Living, breathing, touching themselves and each other. Being their private selves in the place he’d just left in order to follow her back to it. He didn’t shadow Marcy home from work so he could find out where she was going, but to observe her closely when she thought she was alone.

This evening was cooling down and comfortable. It wouldn’t be dark for several hours, so the apartment lights wouldn’t come on anytime soon. That was a shame, because he particularly wanted to see what would happen this evening between Marcy and Ron. After night fell was when watching was best, when Marcy and her husband moved behind the glass. When, if they happened to glance out, they could see only in—their own reflections and the reflection of their world.

When, even if by chance had they looked precisely in his direction, they couldn’t see him.

Color me invisible.

 

A uniform wanted to see him and only him. Captain Vince Egan was puzzled. It took a lot for a uniformed cop to skip the chain of command and confide in a captain. It meant trouble for the cop if he guessed wrong, and if what he had to say wasn’t deemed worthwhile.

Glancing with satisfaction around his paneled office, Egan understood why it took guts for a mere patrolman to approach him. There were framed photos of Egan with various NYPD elites, posed at banquets and various ceremonies with top New York pols. Among the career photos and commendations were a few shots of Egan with show business types, like the old black-and-white photograph of Egan with his arm slung around Tony Bennett, taken years ago in L.A., though Egan always said it was in San Francisco. And there was one in color with Egan chatting with Jennifer Jason Leigh and Bridget Fonda after a New York movie premiere a while back. Egan with Wayne Newton. All of these photographs were signed.

An impressive office. An impressive and important person must occupy it. Somebody you didn’t approach lightly with a shit piece of information or some whine about how the department was run.

Egan was getting tired of waiting. Who the fuck was this guy, and what did he want? And what would be his future after he said his piece and walked out of here?

This better not be about charity. Some kind of pet cause Egan couldn’t refuse to contribute money or time to without looking like an ass.

Like the time the guy swallowed his nervousness and asked Egan to make a public announcement about the abominable way chinchillas were treated on chinchilla ranches before they became coats.

What did Egan care about chinchillas? What the fuck actually was a chinchilla?

Egan glanced at his watch and wished again the guy would get here. He was already five minutes late, which was inconveniencing people. Like Doris, Egan’s uniformed secretary who called herself his assistant, who ordinarily would have left by now but was waiting in the outer office.

Doris, sitting straight as a soldier behind her desk as she always did, like she had a pole up her ass, maybe catching up on some word processing. Egan leaned back in his leather desk chair and thought about Doris. She wasn’t a beauty, and Egan didn’t usually mix business with fornication, but since her divorce six months ago, Doris was beginning to look more attractive to him. Sure, she was in her fifties, but she still had a shape, and if she wasn’t a blue-ribbon beauty, she wasn’t butt ugly. And there was another thing Egan liked about her: now more than ever, she needed to hold on to her job.

Egan smiled. Doris was highly ethical and acted around the office like she didn’t even have erogenous zones. But with hubby having left her for some younger cunt, she still might come around, like her predecessor. What some women will do to stay employed….

There was a familiar three-knock tattoo on the office door; then it opened halfway and Doris stepped into sight.

Was she wearing tighter uniform slacks since she’d become single? She was definitely getting grayer, Egan noticed, and thicker through the middle. Still…

“Patrolman Mercer is here, sir.”

Mercer. Damn it! He’d told Charlie Mercer not to come here unless it was important. Even now, four years later.

Egan felt suddenly uneasy. So, maybe it’s important.

He nodded and sat forward in his leather chair, using his right hand to push away some papers on his desk, as if he’d been busy contemplating them.

“Send Officer Mercer in, Doris.”

Marcy Graham couldn’t figure it out, and she wondered if she should even try.

There was the leather coat she’d tried on at Tambien’s, the one that had prompted the argument between Ron and that salesclerk who was trying so hard to work her; just doing his job, and Ron got all pissy. It was lying draped over the arm of the sofa, not carelessly but as if someone had carefully arranged it there so she’d see it when she came in. A nice surprise.

Marcy put down her purse on a lamp table and went to the coat, touched it, stroked it. The leather was so soft. That really was what had attracted her to it in the first place. She lifted a lapel, then an arm, and could find no sales tag.

She held up the coat at arm’s length and looked it over. There was no clue as to where it had come from. She slipped it on, thinking it felt as good as it had at the shop, and walked to the full-length mirror near the door.

Smiling at her reflection, she turned this way and that, almost all the way around, gazing back over her shoulder as if at a lover she was leaving.

She removed the coat and placed it back on the sofa arm. A gift from Ron? Most likely. In fact, that was the only possible explanation. He felt guilty about smarting off and almost blowing up in Tambien’s, and he wanted to make it up to her. It wouldn’t be unlike him. He had a temper, but he could be sweet.

She stood with her hands on her hips, staring at the coat. Now, how should she react? What would Ron expect when he walked in the door? Should she leave the coat on the sofa? Maybe it was better to hang it in the closet, play dumb, toy with him and make a game of it. The kind they used to play. Or she could lay the coat on the bed and let him find it. That might be interesting. Then she’d show him her appreciation for his unexpected gift, making a gift of herself. The old games.

There was a slight sound in the hall; then the ratcheting of a key in the dead-bolt lock.

The door opened and her options disappeared as Ron stepped into the apartment.

At first he didn’t notice her or the coat as he turned and closed and relocked the door. Then he turned back, saw her, and immediately his gaze shifted to the sofa where the coat lay. He appeared genuinely puzzled, but she knew he could act convincingly if he had to, feigning surprise at seeing the coat.

“Isn’t that—”

“You know it is,” she interrupted, smiling.

“You went back and bought it?” She could see his confusion changing now to anger, and silent alarms went off in her head.

“Of course not. You know I didn’t!”

“How would I know that?”

“Because you bought the coat and put it there on the sofa so I’d find it when I came home.”

He yanked his tie loose violently so it hung crookedly around his neck, reminding her of a hangman’s noose, then jutted out his chin and unfastened his top shirt button. “Now why the hell would I do that?”

Marcy was stunned, searching for words. “I…uh…Well, I don’t know.”

Not because you love me. Your eyes and that throbbing vein in your temple say now isn’t the time to remind you of that.

“You thought it was a gift from me?” He pulled the narrow end through the knot and let the tie drape loosely around his neck. Almost as if he were preparing to remove it and strangle her with it if that was what he decided.

“What else would I think? I came home from work and there was the coat you knew I wanted.”

“And that we didn’t buy.”

“You could’ve changed your mind.”

“The point is, I didn’t change it. So where’d the coat come from?”

“I told you, I assumed it was from you. Who else would have left it there? I was at work all day, and you and I are the only ones who have keys. Except for Lou the super.”

Ron shook his head. He might have been angrier, only he couldn’t quite figure out who was his target. “Lou’s sixty-five years old and couldn’t afford a coat like that. Besides, it’s impossible to get him in here to fix a leaky faucet, much less shower us with gifts. After the chat I had with him, Lou wouldn’t let anybody in here even for a minute without one or both of us being present.”

“Then who?”

He clenched his right hand into a fist, holding it close to his chest. “That asshole salesclerk at Tambien’s—Ira.”

“But how could he? Why would he?”

“He knew you wanted the coat.” Ron went to the coat and lifted it, then wadded it and tossed it in a heap back on the sofa. “There was no note or anything?”

“Nothing. I found it just like you saw it.”

He picked up the coat again and tucked it, still wadded, beneath his arm. “C’mon!”

“Come on where?”

“To Tambien’s.”

“You’re taking it back?”

“No. I never took it from! We’re giving it back to Ira the wiseass salesclerk, along with a warning.”

“We simply can’t give this back, Ron! I can’t. Let’s put this off, think about it some more.”

“There’s no place else the coat could have come from. Nobody else who might have given it to you.”

“How could Ira get in?”

“I don’t know, Marcy,” Ron said impatiently. “I don’t know how magicians guess the right card, either, but they do.”

“But why would he give me a gift? What would he expect to get out of it?”

“Jesus, Marcy, what do you think?”

“We only met once, and you were there.”

“So what? Maybe he’s one of those fucked-up psychos who only have to see a woman once and some kind of weird connection’s made.”

“I guess that’s possible….”

“Goddamned right it is!”

“If it is, I don’t want to go near him again.”

Ron drew a deep breath, then sighed and dragged his forearm across his mouth, as if he’d just taken a long, sloppy drink from a stream.

“All right,” he said. “You stay here. I’m gonna take this thing and return it to Tambien’s. We’re gonna find out about this! And do something about it!”

And he was out the door and gone.

 

An hour later Ron was back, empty-handed. Marcy watched her husband remove his sport coat and drape it on a hanger in the hall closet. He seemed calmer now. His face wasn’t so flushed, and the blue vein in his temple wasn’t even visible. “Did they take the coat back at Tambien’s?”

“No,” Ron said. “They claimed they didn’t sell it. Said it was sold in at least a dozen shops in and around New York. I told them maybe Ira just walked out with it so he could give it to you. Ira got pissed and I threatened to twist his head off. He just smiled, the little bastard.”

“I think he might be dangerous,” Marcy said. “There’s something creepy about him.”

Ron shrugged. “Whatever he is, I told him if he ever came around here again, I’d cut off his balls.”

Before or after you twist off his head? “What did he say?”

“That Tambien’s wouldn’t take the coat in return unless I had a sales slip. He and that numb-brain manager went into their professional salesclerk mode, polite but underneath it acting like assholes.”

“So what’d you do?” Marcy asked.

“I told them I didn’t want a refund; then I tossed the coat on the floor and walked out the door. You shoulda seen the look on their faces.”

“That’s an eight-hundred-dollar coat, Ron.”

“Not to us, it isn’t. It’s worse than worthless.” He stalked into the kitchen and a few minutes later returned with a glass of water with ice cubes in it. Marcy watched him take a long sip, his head back, the Adam’s apple working in his powerful neck.

“You still think Ira somehow sneaked in here and left the coat?” she asked when finally he lowered the glass.

He’d downed half the water. His head bowed, he stared into the glass and swirled its remaining contents around so the ice cubes rattled. “I don’t know,” he said. “I honestly don’t. But if it was him, he won’t do something like that around here again. He’s been scared away.”

Marcy wasn’t so sure.

For some reason she doubted if Ira had ever been scared away from anything in his life.

This time Harley Renz knocked politely on Quinn’s apartment door.

Quinn peered through the round peephole and viewed the distorted police captain. Renz shifted his weight impatiently and raised his elongated arm to look at his watch. Busy man in a hurry, taking valuable time off to talk to a lowlife like Quinn.

Quinn waited awhile, until Renz knocked again, louder, before opening the door.

“Quinn,” Renz said simply, nodding hello. “I would’ve called up on the intercom, but I saw there was sixty years of enamel over the button.” He studied Quinn, who was in his stocking feet but was wearing new gray slacks and a white T-shirt, and didn’t look quite so like a thug as he had during Renz’s last visit. “You got a haircut.”

“Got a lot of them cut,” Quinn said. “You wouldn’t have noticed just one.”

Renz smiled. “Some new threads, too. I’m glad you put the money I sent to good use. May I enter your shit can abode?”

“Sure. You’re a fit with the decor.” Quinn stepped back and to the side, closing the door behind Renz after he’d entered.

Renz sat down on the sofa and crossed his legs, then looked around. “I don’t know or care if that’s an insult. You’ve cleaned up the place. No magazines, newspapers, or orange peels on the floor. And is that new mold in the corner?”

“Mold’s the same. Orange peels clashed with the carpet, so they had to go. You clash, too.”

“Remember I’m your friend now, Quinn. Your way up and back in.” Renz made a big deal of sniffing, wrinkling his nose, and squinting. “It doesn’t smell as bad in here. Is that insecticide? Or are you burning incense?”

“Have you come to pay me more money?”

“Do you need more?”

“Not yet,” Quinn said honestly.

“Come up with anything in the Elzner apartment or murder file?”

“Not much,” Quinn said. “The groceries bother me. The strawberry jelly.”

“Jelly?”

“Jam, actually. A fairly expensive gourmet brand. There were two jars in with the groceries in the plastic bags and on the kitchen table. And there was a nearly full jar of the same stuff in the refrigerator.”

Renz uncrossed his legs and crossed his arms, thinking about that. “Somebody else bought the groceries. Somebody who didn’t know the Elzners had plenty of jelly.”

“Jam.”

“Still odd, though. Two jars…”

“Maybe they were a gift from somebody who knew how much one or both of the Elzners liked that kind of jam.”

“A gift.” Renz made a steeple of his fingers. He liked the idea of a gift, except for…“But why would somebody buy the Elzners a gift and then kill them?”

“Maybe he hadn’t planned on killing them.”

“Maybe.” Renz grinned. “And he just happened to be carrying a gun equipped with a silencer. The important thing is, if you’re right, it points to a third party for sure. A killer still on the loose.”

“A third party who might’ve left before the Elzners were killed.”

Renz sneered at Quinn. “Don’t send me up, then bring me down. You’re coming around to my way of thinking about this case; you know you are.”

“I’ve moved in that direction,” Quinn admitted. He didn’t want Renz to think he’d moved almost all the way. “Also, it might be coincidental that the plastic grocery bags aren’t the kind that have the name of the store on them. Or it could be the killer deliberately bought groceries someplace where they couldn’t be traced by the bags and someone might remember him.”

“Very good, Quinn. I was sure you’d have a different slant on this and come up with something new. You didn’t disappoint me.”

“I’m flushed with pride. Are you here to tell me anything new?”

“Yeah. I’m afraid things have changed. Egan found out you’re on the case. I think from a uniform named Charlie Mercer.”

“Big, square-shouldered guy, blue and brown?”

“Fits him.”

“He was coming out of the elevator in the Elzners’ building when I stepped in.”

“He get a good look at you?”

“Like I got at him.”

“Then there’s no mistaking it; the bastard must’ve told Egan.” Renz’s brow furrowed. “Mercer’s made a mistake. One he’ll pay dearly for, and sooner than he thinks. Egan’s probably already notified the chief’s office. Maybe somebody in the news media. That last won’t help him.”

“Why not?”

Renz’s forehead relaxed, but the furrows didn’t fade away. “Because I’ve gone on the offensive. I’ve notified all my media contacts I’ve taken a chance on a good man—that’d be you. The safety of the community comes before NYPD politics and petty revenge, so I’ve asked Frank Quinn to look into the Elzner case because he’s the best. If the story’s not already on the news, it will be soon, before Egan’s. The department won’t move to take you off the case, because it’d be bad PR. There was never a criminal charge and a trial in the rape case. The public’ll see you as a hero, Quinn. A victim of unsubstantiated rumor who deserves a second chance. I’ve also assigned a team of detectives to work under your command.”

Quinn was surprised. “Team?”

“Two detectives, but you’ll have additional temporary help, if and when you need it.” Renz leaned forward on the sofa. “You know how it works, Quinn. The killing of a typical Manhattan couple means media by the shit load. Media means pressure. Can you deal with it?”

“I can deal. This team…are these good cops you’re giving me?”

“Sure, they are. Your old partner from your radio car years, Larry Fedderman, and his new partner, Pearl Kasner.”

Fedderman. Quinn almost smiled. Other than the people who’d set him up, Fedderman was probably the only one in the NYPD who didn’t think Quinn was guilty of raping a minor. Fedderman had paid for it, in wisecracks and dirty looks and shitty assignments. The word was, he still believed in Quinn. “Fedderman’ll do. What about Kasner?”

Renz shifted on the sofa cushion as if he’d just noticed he was sitting on something sharp. “She’s got kind of a reputation in the department, but she’s also got great skills.”

Uh-oh. “Reputation?”

“She’s got what you might call a temper. Not so unlike yourself. She gets in the same kinda trouble you used to.”

“She in any of it now?”

“Yes and no.”

“What’s the yes part?”

“Vince Egan made a play for her in a hotel lobby, and she knocked him on his ass.”

Quinn stared incredulously. “A working cop swung on an NYPD captain? She’s on her way out, then.”

“Let’s just say she’s on the bubble.” Renz explained to Quinn that Egan was drunk at the time and there were witnesses. It was the kind of trouble the NYPD didn’t need aired in public. An IA investigation had been spiked before it could get under way. “It’s the kinda process you should understand,” Renz said.

“Egan’ll get her some other way.”

“Not if you, Pearl, and Fedderman break the Elzner murder case.”

Quinn understood Renz’s angle better now. He jammed his hands in his pants pockets and paced in his stocking feet. “I don’t like this. Too many last chances. How about Fedderman? He got something big riding on this, too? Will solving this case somehow cure him of a fatal disease?”

“You’re the one who might be cured of a fatal disease, Quinn. Loneliness and rot.”

That one got through. Quinn stopped pacing and turned to face Renz.

“You oughta know last chances aren’t so bad,” Renz said. “In fact, they’re what life’s all about.”

Quinn felt the anger drain from him. Renz was right.

“You can meet with Fedderman and Kasner tomorrow morning,” Renz said. “You name the time and place. I didn’t figure you’d want the meet here, since the apartment’s not set up for entertaining, even without the orange peels.”

“Tomorrow’s supposed to be a nice day,” Quinn said. “We can meet just inside the Eighty-sixth Street entrance to Central Park, say around ten o’clock.”

“That’ll work. They’ll be in plain clothes.”

“I’ll watch for Fedderman. What’s Kasner look like?”

“You should know Fedderman’s put on some weight, mostly around the middle. Kasner’s short, a looker with brown eyes, a lotta dark hair, and a good rack.”

“And a good punch, apparently.”

“A short right,” Renz said, grinning as he stood up from the couch. “I got the story from a bartender I know at the Meermont. She knocked Egan ass over elbows. You and Pearl, you oughta get along fine.”

“Like salt and pepper,” Quinn said, liking Kasner a little already, even though he knew she might be playing a double game, reporting to Renz as well as to him.

“More like pepper and pepper,” Renz said, going out the door.

Quinn listened to Renz’s receding footsteps on the creaking wooden stairs, then the faint swishing sound of the street door opening and closing.

He wasn’t sure what he was getting himself into, but at least his life was moving forward again.

Or some direction.

 

Pain!

It would never stop. Or so it seemed.

The woman continued crawling toward the door, and the whip continued to lash her bare buttocks, her meaty thighs, and sometimes, to surprise her, her bare back.

She’d known what she was getting into—so this was her own doing, as her father used to say. She was to blame. She bore the guilt like invisible chains. When she’d received the pain and punishment she deserved, she’d be the better for it. The chains would drop away and she’d be pure again.

She was off the carpet now and crawling faster toward the door, knowing she wasn’t going to escape, that she had no chance, as always. A woman with an M.B.A. and a responsible job…what am I doing here? She clenched her teeth and whimpered. She wouldn’t scream. That was one of the rules. She’d been commanded not to scream. And if she did, if her neighbors heard and called the police, how would she explain? Her bare knees thumped on the hardwood floor, and her hands made desperate slapping sounds louder than her moans.

The whip whistled near her ear, sending a line of fire across her upper back and curling around her shoulder. It burned again across her tender inner right thigh. He knew how to use a whip, this one.

Ten feet from the door.

The whip set fire to her right buttock. There was less time between lashes now. She crawled even faster, hurting her knees and the heels of her hands. The whip followed, flicking her like a dragon’s fiery and agile tongue.

The man standing over her was the dragon.

Afterward, maybe she’d lie with him, cuddled in his arms, and he’d pretend to love her. It wouldn’t be real, like what he was doing to her now wasn’t exactly real, but that didn’t matter. She had no right to expect real.

As she stretched out an arm and her fingertips brushed the door, he clutched her ankles and dragged her back and away from freedom.

It began again.

What am I doing here?

Bent Oak, Missouri, 1987.

Two days before Luther Lunt’s fourteenth birthday, state employees in Jefferson City dropped a cyanide pellet in the gas chamber, killing Luther’s father.

Luther’s mother had already been dead for more than a year. She’d died on the same day and in the same way as his sister, Verna, beneath the thunder and buckshot hail of his dad’s Remington twelve-gauge. Luther had hunted with the gun twice and knew what it could do to a rabbit. What it had done to his mom and Verna was lots worse.

Seeing it, hearing it, smelling it, even listening to the slowing trickle of blood from his mom’s ruined throat, was the kind of thing that stayed in the mind.

Luther cried almost nonstop for days and nights, wondering why Verna had to go tell their mom what she and Dad had been up to. He shouldn’t blame her, Luther knew, as she was only twelve, and it was his father, after all, who’d squeezed off the shots from the old double-barrel.

But the fact was, Luther did blame Verna, as well as his mother. They all knew anyway, and it was Verna and his mom who brought it all into the open, who uttered the words that made it real so something had to be done about it. Everything had been going along fine until then. Going along, at least.

And since his father had taken it on himself to start going into Verna’s room, he’d stopped coming into Luther’s.

Verna’s fault.

Verna and his mom’s.

Then his father’d been taken from Luther to rot away in a cell in Jeff City, waiting to die when his appeals ran out.

Leaving Luther alone.

“He’s suffered something terrible,” Luther’s great-aunt Marjean from Saint Louis had said of him after the murders, “but I’m eighty-seven years of age and get by hardscrabble on my Social Security. No way I can help the poor thing.”

So Luther had gone into the foster-care system, and was taken in by the Black family, Dara and her husband, Norbert. The Blacks had temporary custody of three children besides Luther, who was the oldest. Dara Black, a stout woman with an apple-round face who almost always wore the same stained apron, watched over the children in the old farmhouse, while Norbert was away painting barns and houses in the surrounding countryside.

Luther used to watch her bustle around the house, smiling too much and even sometimes whistling while she got her work done. Luther was aware that she knew and didn’t know that Norbert was molesting the children. Nobody ever talked about the subject. Luther thought that was best.

The state paid the Blacks a stipend for their foster care, and Norbert’s painting brought in some more money. And it was true Luther would someday have to learn a trade, which was the excuse Norbert came up with to take Luther in as an unpaid apprentice, meaning Luther would do a lot of the heavy work, lugging five-gallon paint buckets, moving ladders and scaffolding, scraping weathered paint off hardwood with Norbert’s good-for-shit tools. What Luther learned mostly was how to work all day in the boiling sun.

The day after his father was executed, he ran away.

And eleven months and three days later he was found sleeping behind a Dumpster in Kansas City and returned to the Black farm.

Life as Luther knew it, with its hardships and terrible, intricate balances, began again.

New York, 2004.

Anna Caruso remembered.

She had no choice, because now he was back, and they were reminding her of him in newspapers, on television, in conversations overheard in subways and at bus stops and in diners. Frank Quinn, her rapist.

They were also reminding people of his past, of the terrible thing he’d done to her a little over four years ago, but Anna could already sense the drift of the story. Quinn, who had never even stood trial for what he’d done, would be forgiven. After all, he’d never been charged, much less found guilty. And wasn’t a rapist innocent until proven guilty? Even a child molester? It was in the Constitution.

That was what the prosecutors had told Anna and her mother and family, how they couldn’t arrest and try Quinn because, in the minds of the prosecutors, there simply wasn’t enough evidence for an arrest. A big man, a stocking mask, a scar seen by a terrified child in her dim bedroom, a button like one missing from one of Quinn’s shirts and a thousand other shirts. Evidence, but not solid. Then there were the child porn sites visited on his police computer. It would all make for emotional but not really substantial testimony, so said the prosecuting attorney. It was a shame the rapist had been smart enough to use a condom, or they’d have DNA to use against him.

On the other hand, Anna might be pregnant.

What the hell kinds of alternatives were those, when whichever happened to you, you’d be wishing for the other?

Anna at eighteen wasn’t much bigger than she’d been on her fourteenth birthday. She had breasts now, and her legs and hips were those of a woman rather than a child. But she was still thin, frail, and afraid. Still, in many ways she was the same narrow-faced, brown-eyed girl Quinn had molested, but now made even more beautiful by the sweep of her jaw and her slightly oversize but perfect nose. She was a raven-haired, Hispanic child-woman with a bold, even hawk-like look in profile. But when she turned, you saw in her eyes that she was haunted and, in her way, would always remain young and in pain.

Sometimes she wondered if it would have been otherwise except for Quinn. Had he actually somehow altered her exterior as well as interior growth? Had he cursed her for all time?

She looked away from the cracks in her bedroom ceiling and closed her eyes. This was not fair! Especially this morning. This is not goddamn fair!

For the past several days she hadn’t been able to control her thoughts. The dreams were back, which meant he was back, his hunched form as he squeezed through her stuck bedroom window in her mother and father’s apartment—her mother’s now, since her father had left. Quinn, when she’d first seen him. A big man who appeared huge in night and shadow, wearing a stocking mask that disfigured his face and made him other than human. His bent spine had scraped the metal window frame through his shirt, making the only sound in the quiet room. A sound that remained to this day in Anna’s mind, that played over and over and begged for meaning and release. She knew it was in her music sometimes, and she tried to stop it.

Anna, a month shy of her fourteenth birthday, had been too terrified to scream. She was paralyzed; her throat was closed, so she had to struggle for breath. There in her perspiration-soaked bed, her panties and oversize T-shirt seemed so little cover and protection.

And they were.

Some of the details of what followed she still chose not to confront. They were hidden somewhere she never wanted to revisit.

She did recall that her attacker’s sleeves were rolled up and she noticed the jagged scar on his right forearm. Something told her to remember the scar. Remember.

She knew even through her terror and agony that he was being deliberately rough, trying to hurt her.

Why? What had she done? She didn’t even know this man.

Or did she?

She rejected the notion as soon as it entered her mind, and she concentrated on being somewhere else, someone else, until this was over. Someone else was being humiliated, soiled forever, ruined forever. The sisters at school had warned her, had warned all the girls.

Whores! A whore in the Bible! What could be worse?

You know you’re sinning. You know and don’t care!

When finally he rose from her, leaving her destroyed and unable to move on the sweat-soaked bed, she saw something pale in the night and knew he was wearing a condom.

She realized later it wasn’t for her—it was for him. He didn’t want to catch some dreadful disease from her. That made what happened all the more demeaning.

“Anna!”

Her mother’s voice.

Anna had dozed off again, lost in the old dreams she thought were gone. No, not gone, but finally confined in a place in her mind where they couldn’t escape.

But they had escaped. Like tigers. Quinn was back.

“You’ve overslept, Anna. Get up. This is your big day. What you’ve been slaving for the past four years. You don’t want to be late.”

Anna made herself roll onto her side, then sat up gingerly on the edge of the mattress, as if the old pain would be there with the old shame. She was thirteen again. Unlucky thirteen.

That was the problem—Quinn had the power again. When she saw his photograph, his name in print, heard people talking about him, she was thirteen even though she was almost eighteen.

She wished she could kill him. The nuns would tell her she shouldn’t think such thoughts, but she’d graduated and she could think whatever she wanted now.

She wished she could kill Quinn. That was her almost constant thought.

“You don’t want to be late,” her mother warned again.

And Anna didn’t. She had to concentrate on the present, not the past. Her first day of summer classes at Juilliard. The first day of her music scholarship.

What she’d been slaving for. Her therapy and escape that, as it turned out, hadn’t quite worked.

She stood up unsteadily and made her way toward the bathroom.

Unlucky thirteen. Unlucky Anna.

At least she had her scholarship. That was all that was left for her, all that was left inside her…her music. Thirteen. A child.

She knew she wasn’t going to kill anyone.

Quinn sat in the sun on a bench just inside the Eighty-sixth Street entrance to Central Park and watched them approach.

Fedderman looked the same, only a little heavier, the coat of his rumpled brown suit flapping, his tie askew, the same shambling gait. He had less hair to be mussed by the summer breeze, and he seemed out of breath, as if he was trying to keep up with the quick, rhythmic strides of the small woman next to him.

Pearl Kasner seemed to generate energy even from this distance. She was economical, deliberate and decisive in her movements to the point that there seemed something robotic in her resolute walk. She was a study in contrasts of light and dark, a mass of black hair framing a pale face from which dark eyes glared, lips too red, a gray skirt and a black blazer despite the warm morning. It was as if a small child had been given only black and white crayons and told to draw a woman, and here she was, with a compact completeness about her and a vividness almost unreal.

Quinn stood up from the bench, feeling the sun warm on his shoulders. “Hello, Feds.”

Fedderman smiled. “Quinn! Back in harness where you belong!”

The two men shook hands, then hugged. Fedderman slapped Quinn on the back five or six times before they separated.

“Make the most of this chance, buddy!” he said.

“Count on it,” Quinn told him.

“I’m here,” Pearl said.

Quinn looked at her. “So you are. Sorry if we ignored you. Fedderman and I are old—”

“I know,” Pearl said, “you go back a long way. You’ve watched each other’s backs, broken bread together, flirted with the same waitresses, fought the same fights. Fedderman filled me in.”

Fedderman grinned at Quinn. “This is Pearl. She’s a fighter.”

Quinn stepped back and regarded Pearl. Despite her sarcasm, she was smiling with large, perfect white teeth. “I’ve heard that about you, Pearl. A fighter. Also that you have talent as a detective.”

“And I’ve heard about you, Lieutenant.”

“Just Quinn will do. Officially, I’m only doing work-for-hire for the NYPD.” Quinn buttoned his sport coat to hide ketchup he’d already dribbled on his new tie. “So, everybody’s heard about everybody else, except maybe for some things I might tell you about Fedderman. And we all know why we’re meeting here.”

“Because your apartment’s a shit hole,” Pearl said.

Fedderman shook his head. “Pearl, dammit!”

“Mine’s a shit hole, too,” Pearl said. “Tiny, hot as hell, and thirsty for paint.”

“Roaches?”

“They won’t tolerate the place.”

Quinn grinned at her. She was still smiling, a dare in eyes black enough to have gotten her burned as a witch four hundred years ago. Probably, Egan would like to burn her now. There was something in her favor. What kind of pain is driving you?

“Am I the boss?” he asked her. “Or are we gonna have a contest?”

“It’d only be a waste of time,” Pearl said.

Quinn decided not to ask her what she meant. “You two go ahead and sit down,” he said. “I’ve been sitting awhile.”

When they were on the bench, Fedderman slouched with his legs apart. Pearl sat stiffly, with her notepad in her lap, looking as if she were about to take dictation.

Quinn told them what he’d learned from the Elzner murder file, and what he speculated.

Pearl made a few notes and listened intently. He got the impression her eyes might leave scars on him.

“The jam bothered me, too,” she said when he was finished. “An almost full jar in the refrigerator, and they bought two more identical jars when they went grocery shopping.”

“Which means they didn’t know how much jam they had,” Fedderman said, “or they were gonna hole up in their apartment for a few weeks and live on strawberry jam, or someone else did the shopping for them. Someone who didn’t know what kinds of foods they were out of.”

“Or someone who thought they just couldn’t have enough gourmet jam,” Pearl said. “I lean toward your possibility number three, that somebody else bought the groceries.”

Fedderman leaned forward and scratched his left ankle beneath his sock. Quinn wondered if he still wore a small-caliber revolver holstered to his other ankle. He looked up at Quinn, still scratching. “So, we working on the assumption somebody killed both Elzners?”

“It’s the only assumption we’ve got, “Pearl said, “if you don’t want to finish your career doing crap assignments, I don’t want to be out of work, and Quinn doesn’t want to go back to being a—”

“Pariah,” Quinn finished for her.

She nodded. “Okay, pariah. I like that. It’s so Christian.”

“It isn’t biblical,” Fedderman said, “it’s ancient Greek.”

She stared at him. “That true?”

“I have no idea. You’re so naive, Pearl.”

“That I doubt,” Quinn said. He made a show of glancing at his watch. “So as of now, we’re on the job.”

“We don’t have anything new to work with,” Fedderman pointed out.

“Then we’ll work with what we have. Again. You two go back over the evidence and see if there’s anything I missed. Then we’ll talk to the Elzners’ neighbors again. Anyone in the adjoining buildings who might have seen anything. See if there wasn’t a dog that didn’t bark in the night, that kinda thing. You do the murder file again, Pearl. Fedderman and I will work on the witnesses.”

Pearl looked as if she might say something about being assigned to paperwork, but she held inside whatever words she wanted to speak. She knew Quinn was assessing her, testing her. Something told her it was one of the most important tests she’d ever have to pass.

“We’ll meet back here at six this evening. If it’s raining, the meet’ll be at the Lotus Diner on Amsterdam.”

“That place is a ptomaine palace,” Pearl said.

“I know,” Quinn said. “I chose it because I don’t think it’s gonna rain. Where’s your unmarked?”

“Parked over on Central Park West,” Fedderman said.

“Let’s go, then. Pearl can drop us off at the Elzners’ building, then take the car on to the precinct house and get busy with the murder file.”

Pearl and Fedderman stood up. Fedderman stretched, extending his back and flailing his arms, which still looked abnormally long even though he’d put on weight. Then he and Pearl walked in the warming sun toward Quinn. They all knew they were probably wasting their time, but nobody objected.

Quinn was pleased with the way their first meeting had gone. Beneath the bullshit and hopeless humor was the beginning of mutual understanding, maybe even respect.

Maybe the beginning of a team.

He lay curled in a corner, a folded white cloth clutched in his left hand. He was smiling.

Slowly he raised the saturated cloth to his nose and inhaled deeply of the benzene fumes. Benzene was a solvent not often used these days, but he’d become accustomed to it a long time ago, adapted to it. His drug of choice for the visions and memories long and short.

He inhaled again, his eyelids fluttering. He was back in the Elzners’ kitchen, carefully, silently, removing groceries from plastic bags and placing them on the table before putting them away. As usual, he was wearing flesh-colored latex gloves. He giggled, looking down at them in his dream; they were like real fingers, only without fingernails. He reached for the tuna can.

And there was Martin Elzner, the husband. This time he’d been willed there, but he appeared as he had that night—that early morning. Elzner was stunned, his mouth hanging open, surprise, anger, fear…all flashing like signs in his eyes. His sandy hair was mussed from turning in his sleep. Had it actually stood up in points like that? It made him look even more astounded to find this stranger in his kitchen, busy at a domestic task.

The stranger—who wasn’t a stranger—set the tuna can on the table. The husband’s sudden presence in the dim kitchen was a surprise to him, too. Yet not exactly a surprise. He was doomed to disappointment and betrayal and knew this could happen, would happen, and he was prepared for it. Wanting it?

He smiled.

He inhaled.

Back to Elzner, too astounded even to speak. More fear in his eyes as he saw the gun with its bulky silencer. A terrible understanding. He grimaced and turned sideways, raising a hand as if to wave some irritating insect away if it buzzed near again. Death could be such a pest.

Step close…. Don’t shoot the hand…. They must think he died last…a suicide, poor deranged creature.

The betrayer would die second.

Close enough. Up came the gun, steady in seconds, inches from his head. The satisfying putt! of the silenced gun, like a tiny engine trying once to turn over. Martin Elzner, down with a loud double thumping sound on the kitchen floor.

Backward, step backward, as it actually occurred. The choreography of dreams.

A sudden clattering. His free hand had brushed the tuna can near the edge of the table. As it actually occurred. If the sound of Elzner hitting the floor hadn’t awakened his wife, the can striking and rolling across the tiles would.

He inhaled. He wondered if the tiles had been damaged. The floor was actually quite attractive. An unusual beige with flecks of—

Enough. There she was as she’d been, standing in the doorway with the sudden alteration of her life, the cancellation of her past and future, all on her face. They knew. They always knew.

His hand not clutching the cloth moved down to his crotch as she instinctively lurched toward her fallen husband, her true love, her only, her lifemate, her deathmate, drawing her, drawing her, gravitation, the inevitable physics of love, the end of love….

The end of love…

 

After a while it was time for the second show. He played in his mind once more that night in the Elzners’ kitchen. It amazed him the force of his intellect, the control he had over his recall. He’d reached the point where he could even fast-forward or rewind the reconstruction, as if he were pressing mental buttons, watching the sped-up images moving back and forth across his spectrum of recollection: stop, pause, replay. Slower now—relishing it, seeing it, and reliving it from a more vivid angle….

Unpacking the groceries, the tuna can. There was Martin Elzner, the husband. Surprise, surprise…. Pause, play, speedup, aim, fire the silenced handgun. The acrid scent of the shot lingering in the air, in his mind. Fast-forward. He inhaled. Jan Elzner was barefoot, in her knee-length flimsy nightgown…half speed…. She sees her husband on the floor, the blood, a rich scarlet almost black, and moves toward him, the blood…. Wait until she’s very near him, almost over him…slow motion….

Her eyes…what she knew!

The hand without the folded, saturated cloth moved back down.

He climaxed as he squeezed the trigger again and again.

The colors! The colors are magnificent!

He inhaled.

 

Finally evening.

It hadn’t even hinted at rain that warm summer day, so Quinn met with his team of detectives again on the park bench just inside the entrance at Eighty-sixth Street. He sat awkwardly but comfortably on the hard bench, sipping from a plastic water bottle he’d bought from a street vender, and watched New Yorkers enjoying their park while there was still daylight and the muggers hadn’t yet come out with the stars. There were more people now that it was cooler, a woman pushing a stroller, a few joggers, and some helmeted and padded rollerbladers zooming about like cyber creatures who’d escaped a video game.

Pearl and Fedderman approached together. They looked hot and tired. Pearl’s pace was dragging and Fedderman had the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up and was carrying his suit coat slung over his shoulder. Quinn thought back to a time when the younger Fedderman had entered rooms with his coat slung like that on a crooked forefinger over one shoulder and would say “ring-a-ding-ding,” like Sinatra when he was a hot item in Vegas and everywhere else. Quinn couldn’t imagine that coming out of the older, heavier Fedderman, who carried the weight of his experience on his shoulders along with the coat.

“Ring-a-ding-ding,” Fedderman said wearily.

Quinn grinned and Pearl stared at both men. She still looked beautiful, her irises so black in contrast with the gleaming whites of her eyes. Her mascara had run a little with the heat, making the right eye appear slightly bruised, as if she’d gotten into a scuffle sometime today. Not impossible.

“Old joke,” Quinn explained.

“Secret male-bonding bullshit,” she said.

“Nothing to do with you, Pearl,” Fedderman assured her, thinking he was too tired to put up with her if she decided to be in one of her moods.

Quinn thought the brief ring-a-ding-ding jingle could apply to Pearl. She was somehow even more attractive when worn down from a difficult and probably futile day’s work. He pulled from beneath his folded sport coat, where they’d stayed cool out of the sun, the other two water bottles he’d bought and handed them up to Pearl and Fedderman. Both detectives expressed gratitude, then uncapped the bottles and took long sips. Quinn watched Pearl’s slender pale throat work as she swallowed.

“So what’ve we got?” he asked when they were finished drinking.

“Nothing new,” Pearl said, using her wrist to wipe away water that had dribbled onto her chin, “but at least we’re more sure of what we do have. I mean, we’ve got everything in the file almost goddamn memorized.”

“Cop work,” Fedderman said with a shrug. He rested a hand on Pearl’s shoulder while looking at Quinn. “One thing she hasn’t mentioned yet. We questioned the witnesses again and one of the tenants in the Elzners’ building, a lonely old guy down the hall, responded to Pearl’s feminine wiles.”

Quinn took a sip of water and stared at Pearl.

“I use them sparingly and selectively,” she said.

“So how did this old guy respond?”

“By remembering something he hadn’t had a chance to tell the police. He’s three apartments away and was only questioned briefly and by phone.”

“So why did you question him?”

“His apartment’s by the elevator.”

Quinn smiled.

Pearl smiled back. “He can hear the elevator through the wall. Like a lot of lonely old people who live alone, he doesn’t sleep well, and he was awake most of the night of the Elzner murder. He heard the elevator, and recalled it because of the late hour. He said he’d never heard it before at that time.”

“Two fifty-five A.M.,” Fedderman said to Quinn.

“Exactly?”

“He said he looked at his watch,” Pearl said. “He sleeps wearing it. Said it sounded like the elevator stopped at his floor. His and the Elzners’. About twenty minutes later, it went back down.”

“He seem credible?”

“Very. And his watch is the kind made especially for old guys with failing eyesight, about the size of an alarm clock and with luminous hands and numerals you could read a book by.” She took another sip of water, then watched a wobbly rollerblader for a moment. “It really isn’t much.”

“It helps fix the time of death,” Quinn said.

“So what have you come up with?” Fedderman asked.

“I visited my sister, Michelle.”

They both looked at him. “The stock analyst?” Fedderman asked.

“The same.”

Pearl shook her head and grinned. “Their credibility’s not the highest.”

“Not about stocks, no. But Michelle isn’t only interested in stocks. She’s a math and computer whiz. She runs comparative analyses on other things, sometimes just for amusement. I asked her a question yesterday, and she spent most of last night and some of this morning finding the answer. Insofar as it can be found.”

“Question about killers?” Pearl asked.

“Right. She used her sources via the Internet and came up with statistics gathered from and about serial killers. It seems a surprising number of them don’t plan concretely but come prepared for murder, compelled to seek situations where they’ll have little choice, and the deaths, in their minds, won’t be their fault.”

“Sounds like public-defender bullshit,” Fedderman said.

“He means they set up the situations,” Pearl said. “Like teenagers baiting their parents. Grown-ups aren’t supposed to lose their tempers, so if they can be made to, whatever comes of it is their responsibility. Or so think the teenyboppers.”

Fedderman uncapped his plastic bottle and took a swig of water. “Some of them think that way up to about age seventy.”

“It’s not the analogy I’d have chosen,” Quinn said, “but it’s pretty accurate. I think of it as Michelle’s scenario-for-murder theory. If the Elzner murders weren’t random, if the killer at least expected he’d have to do them and was prepared for it, or even possibly planned it in detail just in case, that means he killed for his own internal reasons. The kinds of reasons that don’t go away.”

“And?” Fedderman said.

“He’s gone through a door that opens only one way, and leads only to another door.”

Fedderman shook his head. “You’ve gotten cryptic in your old age.”

Pearl understood immediately. “You saying we should wait for him to kill again?” she asked. “That maybe we got a serial killer here?”

“In the bud,” Quinn said, smiling.

The smile sort of gave Pearl the creeps. It wasn’t about amusement. It was more the smile of a hunter who’d picked up the spoor of his prey. Who now wouldn’t be shaken off, no matter what.

In fact, it was exactly that kind of smile. She knew where she’d seen it before: while walking past a mirror in the bedroom of the sister of a murdered child, when she’d unexpectedly glimpsed it on her own face. It had scared her a little then. It scared her now.

And Pearl wondered, how did Quinn know so much about doors?

 

Marcy Graham got home from work before Ron. The subway had been a mob scene, and the first train had been so crowded she had to wait for a second. To add to her ordeal, some oaf in a big rush had stepped on her toe as she’d been climbing the steps to the street.

Tired, overheated, irritated, she sat down on the sofa and worked her shoes off. She examined her ankles, which were as swollen as she thought they’d be after a hard day on three-inch heels. The toes of her left foot, which was slightly larger than her right, felt as if they’d been pressed together in a vise. Dressing for success was dressing for discomfort.

Marcy sat and massaged her sore, stockinged feet for a while, then realized she was thirsty. Probably dehydrated after the struggle with crowds and summer heat on her way home.

It seemed too warm in the apartment. She stood up, leaving her shoes lying on their sides on the floor, and padded over to the thermostat. After edging the dial down a degree, she heard the air-conditioning click on. The apartment could be a cool refuge, and would be soon.

It was freshly painted and comfortably furnished. The advance Ron had gotten on his new position at work had been well spent, even if maybe too hastily. Decorating the apartment, buying new clothes they’d both need if they were to stay in style, then paying off old debts, had left the checking account almost in the red.

Marcy swallowed dryly, reminding herself of her thirst.

Feeling a rush of cold air from an overhead vent, she made her way into the kitchen. She was pretty sure there were some diet Cokes in the refrigerator.

And there they were on the bottom shelf, a six-pack, the cans still joined by their plastic harness.

As Marcy worked one of the cold cans loose, then straightened to close the refrigerator door, she noticed a wedge of Norstrum Gouda cheese, her favorite to spread on crackers for snacks. It was shrink-wrapped and unopened, yet she was sure she’d eaten some since the last time she’d bought groceries at the D’Agostino.

She pulled open the plastic meat-and-cheese drawer and saw a half-consumed wedge alongside a plastic container of leftover meatballs. She shrugged. Apparently, she’d bought two wedges when she last shopped. That should be all right. Did cheese ever really go bad? Might it be the only thing in the world that didn’t?

Sipping soda from the can, she went into the bedroom, bending down adroitly to pick up her shoes on the way. It would feel good to ditch the panty hose and get into some cool slacks and a sleeveless blouse. She removed her gray skirt and blazer, then sat on the bed and peeled off her panty hose. After draping skirt and blazer on a hanger, she took off her blouse and dropped it in a white wicker clothes hamper. She extended her elbows out and back, in a practiced gesture made somehow graceful, and unhooked her bra, then slipped it off. Bra and panties followed the blouse into the hamper. Nude now, she went to her dresser to get another pair of panties.

When she opened her lingerie drawer, there was a small, flowered box of chocolates. It was lying on top of her folded panties. No note. No card. No explanation.

She picked up the box and examined it more closely. The plastic encasing it hadn’t been disturbed, and it was an expensive brand.

A gift from Ron?

Not likely. She remembered the dustup over the coat.

Yet the chocolates had to be from Ron. Who else had access to the apartment, to her dresser drawers? And, in truth, the leather jacket that caused all that trouble had to have come from Ron. Unless she bought into the weird idea that Ira, the salesclerk at Tambien’s, had a way into the apartment and harbored a compelling crush on her. But the truth was, there wasn’t any way Ira could even know where she lived.

Ron. It must have been Ron. But what was going on? Did he have some kind of mental glitch? He’d been under strain with the new position. Marcy knew people weren’t always logical. They did do inexplicable things and then sometimes denied them even to themselves—like that girl where she used to work who sent people to various addresses for deals on clothes and jewelry. Only the addresses weren’t real, and the shops and people she referred to didn’t exist except in her mind. Ron’s little eccentricity wasn’t as serious as that.

So, if he had a kind of mental hitch in his thinking, leaving her gifts and not remembering, what was the harm? It was probably only temporary. So why should she—

Marcy heard the door from the hall open and close. Ron. He was home!

It took her only a second to decide not to mention the chocolates. It sure hadn’t helped to show him the coat.

She shoved the box beneath her folded panties and closed the dresser drawer.

Just in time. His shadow rippled over the carpet as he approached the bedroom doorway.

“There you are,” he said, smiling when he saw she was nude, in the middle of changing clothes. “I bought you something.”

He tossed her a glittering object and she caught it. Almost weightless. A thin gold bracelet with a tiny diamond in a plain setting.

“Don’t think it’s real. Some guy on the street was selling them, and I couldn’t resist.”

“It’s beautiful.” She slipped it on her wrist, then rotated it before her as if she were on the Home Shopping Network. Fully clothed, of course.

He watched her, obviously enjoying her pleasure. “It’s a pretty well-made knockoff. Either that or it was a hell of a sale.”

Marcy went to him and kissed him on the lips, and after a few seconds felt him return the kiss. His arm slipped around, behind her bare back. He truly did love her. So maybe he did have this strange compulsion to buy her gifts, sometimes anonymously.

She could live with that.

Quinn finished the last of his spaghetti and used his half-eaten roll to sop up sauce from his plate. He was in his sister Michelle’s dining room. She had a spacious—by New York standards—apartment on the West Side with a river view. Never having seen a floater gaffed like a fish and hauled to shore, she obviously didn’t think about what Quinn did when she looked at the river.

About once a month she’d invite Quinn over for dinner and prepare spaghetti using an old family recipe for the sauce. Quinn had become tired of the recipe, which called for too much garlic, but he always made it a point to eat all that was served. His sister had been his lifeline to a world where he could hold his head up, and he didn’t want to insult her. Besides, the apartment, furnished in expensive modern, was a welcome change from his usual surroundings, and Michelle always served a good red wine with her meals.

Though she ate out most of the time, Quinn knew she enjoyed cooking. Michelle had lived in a lesbian relationship with a woman named Marti in Vermont until six years ago. She’d told Quinn about it after their parents were both dead, not long after the passing of their father. Both their father and mother would have been horrified if they’d known the truth about her, or so Michelle assumed. Quinn, who’d seen the full range of the human spectrum as a New York cop, didn’t give it much thought. As far as he was concerned, Michelle’s sex life was none of his business.

When Marti had been struck by a car and killed only months later, Michelle returned to New York and put her formidable mathematical ability and her Harvard M.B.A. to work. She was deeply involved now with her job and her computer. Quinn didn’t know anything about her love life and didn’t ask. Anyway, he was in more of a position to be stoned than to cast the first one.

Michelle poured them both another glass of the excellent Australian red she’d found, probably on the Internet, and surveyed Quinn over the dirty dishes and what was left of the salad and hard-crusted rolls. Four years older than Quinn, she’d put on weight and was a big woman now, but still more large-boned than fat. Though she looked more like their mother, she shared Quinn’s square jaw and green eyes. Also his unruly brown hair, which she wore almost as short as his but in a considerably neater style.

“You going to take me into your confidence?” she asked.

“Are you kidding?”

He filled her in on his thinking about the Elzner case.

She stared at him for a moment, then asked, “What about your partners? What sort of people are they?”

She’d met Fedderman years ago and liked him. Quinn told her about Pearl.

“Sounds like the type who thinks outside the box,” she said.

He knew she wasn’t talking about Fedderman, the good, stolid cop. “There are some who’d like to put her in a box. I think she’s a damned fine detective, but she’s got a temper and a political tin ear.”

Michelle grinned. “And doesn’t that sound familiar?”

“Also,” Quinn said, “I’m still not completely sure I can trust her.”

“Oh? How so?”

“Only because Renz assigned her to me, and I know I can’t trust Renz. It’s possible that part of her job is to keep him informed about me.”

“Spy on you?” Michelle was never one to equivocate.

“Yeah, you could use that word.”

“I suppose it’s something to keep in mind.”

“On the other hand, Renz might simply have assigned her to me because she’s—”

“A fuckup.”

“Well, she might seem so to him, but she really isn’t that. She has…maybe too much character.”

“Ah. You like her.”

“Sure. You can’t help but like her. But lots of people liked Hitler before he became Hitler.”

“Hitler, huh?” Michelle leaned back in her chair and sipped wine, regarding him over the crystal rim.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“Figuring the odds.”

“Like always,” Quinn said. He didn’t have to ask her about the object of her figuring.

He finished his wine, then stood up to clear the table.

It was past nine when Quinn got back to his apartment and found his phone ringing.

He shut the door behind him, crossed the living room in three long strides, and scooped up the receiver.

“It’s Harley,” Renz said after Quinn’s hello. So now they were on a first-name basis. “I got some info for you, Quinn.” Almost first-name basis.

“Will I like it?”

“Doesn’t matter. Info’s info. And does it matter what you like?”

“I hope that’s a rhetorical question.”

“Or what you hope? Anyway, I talked to my source in the lab. Marks on the gun that was in Martin Elzner’s dead hand were definitely made by a sound suppressor attached to the barrel. They’re consistent with a Metzger eight hundred model, a rare sort of one-size-fits-all for semiautomatic handguns.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Neither did I, but then neither of us is a silencer expert. Turns out it’s a cheap unit made in China and marketed mostly mail order. Not a lot of them are sold. They advertise in magazines for gun nuts and guys who see themselves as soldiers of fortune and other kinds of armed romantic figures.”

“What with the big market in used guns and gun gear, it could be difficult to trace even though it’s not a popular item.”

“Yep, it mighta changed hands ten times at gun shows, or was sold from car trunks.” Renz seemed almost happy about the odds. That Harley! “On the other hand, we can try. I’ll keep you informed.”

Quinn thanked Renz and hung up, thinking it was hard enough to find a particular gun in this wide world, much less a silencer.

But if searching for it helped to silence Renz even a little bit, the Metzger 800 was still doing its job.

 

Pearl had a late supper alone in her apartment, a Weight Watchers chicken dinner washed down with scotch and water. My own worst enemy.

She rinsed out the empy glass and replaced it in the cabinet, and dumped what was left of the dinner into the trash. Dishes done.

Sometimes she wondered what her life would be like if Vern Shults had lived. They’d been very much in love when they were twenty, or Pearl had thought so. What was left of her family had ostracized her for becoming engaged to a devout Catholic. How devout even Pearl hadn’t guessed. Vern had announced to her one night after sex that he was breaking their engagement; he’d decided to study for the priest-hood.

A week later, he’d been found dead in his bathtub, drowned after apparently falling and striking his head. Leaving Pearl as alone as a woman could be alone.

God moving in His mysterious circles. Pearl trapped in the celestial geometry.

Where she remained trapped.

She watched TV for a while, then didn’t think she’d be able to sleep, so she got the glass back down from the cabinet.

 

Marcy Graham couldn’t sleep, knowing the anonymous gift of a box of Godiva chocolates was only about ten feet away in one of her dresser drawers, not fifteen feet away from her sleeping husband. She remembered how unreasonable he’d been about the leather jacket from Tambien’s, the problems it had caused.

Even if the chocolates were from Ron, he might not admit it. Or for some reason she couldn’t understand, he might not even remember leaving them for her.

Marcy waited until her nerve built, then quietly climbed out of bed and opened her dresser drawer. Moving silently, she removed the box of chocolates and carried it into the kitchen.

She couldn’t resist opening the box and sampling one of the chocolates.

Delicious! Light caramel with a cream center.

She ate another before closing the box and sliding it into the trash can beneath the sink. Then she tore off a paper towel and placed it over the box so it wouldn’t be visible to Ron if by chance he decided to throw away something.

When she returned to the bedroom, she carefully slipped back into bed and lay awake awhile, listening to Ron’s deep, even breathing.

She was sure he was still asleep.

She felt safe now.

He didn’t anger easily. He was beyond that.

He’d thought.

He paced silently. This was an insult, a rejection. A thoughtless, callous act. Who wouldn’t anger at the sting? Sting at the slap?

There was no reason to fear making too much noise as he paced. The steady, reverberating buzzing covered the slight sound of his soft-soled shoes on the tiles.

The buzzing, in fact, seemed to be growing louder and was getting under his skin. Where’s it coming from? What’s its source? He’d checked outside, but there was nothing in sight that might be making such a relentless sound. And inside the building no one seemed to be cleaning their carpets or running an appliance without cessation.

The buzzing continued. It was almost as if he were trapped in the confines of a small space and being observed by some gigantic, predatory winged insect that threatened him, that could almost reach him with its painful and paralyzing venom, that would never give up because it knew that eventually it would reach him.

Black…black…

The sound became even louder and more piercing, a buzzing that tripped the frequencies of his body and caused a terrifying vibration in every cell. A buzzing like death and dying. The buzzing of ending and becoming. Of the swarming insects of decay and the whirring of buzzards’ wings, of bees and wasps in the damp and dark of the underground. Beelzebub…

He knew if he didn’t do something it would make him scream. And if he screamed…

With trembling fingers, he groped in his pocket for the Ziploc plastic bag that contained a folded cloth.

 

At first Anna Caruso was pleased to be living her long-sought dream, wandering Juilliard’s Lincoln Center campus, the library, and Alice Tully Hall, where she knew someday she would give a concert or at least play in the Juilliard orchestra or symphony. It could happen. The Meredith Willson Residence center towered over the campus, but Anna’s partial scholarship didn’t include residency. She rode the subway each day to Juilliard, usually lugging her viola in its scuffed black case so she could practice at home, as well as in one of the school’s many practice rooms.

She’d taken up the viola seriously about six months after the rape. The instrument suited her. It was slightly larger than a violin, tuned a fifth lower, and produced a more sonorous, melancholy tone. While playing it did nothing to cheer her, it was somehow soothing.

Her bliss at attending Juilliard lasted only a few days. Anna was soon disappointed in the way things were going, her progress with her lessons, her relationship with her instructors, but most of all she was disappointed with herself. Discouraged. She was told that was normal. Suddenly she was among musicians of equal or superior talent. It was natural that she should be overwhelmed at first. And, of course, there was Quinn, in her mind and in her music now. Her hatred for Quinn.

As soon as she entered the apartment and saw her mother, she knew something was very wrong. Linda Caruso was slumped on a chair by the phone and obviously had been crying. Her eyes were red and she clutched a wadded Kleenex in her clawlike right hand with its overlong red nails.

“Mom?” Anna went to her, and her mother immediately began sobbing.

When she gained control of herself, she looked with pain in her eyes at Anna. “Your father died a few hours ago. A heart attack.”

Anna felt the news like a physical blow to her stomach, and her body assumed the same hunched attitude as her mother’s. At the same time, recalling all the things her mother had said about her father, all the old arguments, she wondered how her mother could be so upset. She staggered backward and sat on the sofa.

“But he didn’t have a bad heart!”

“He did,” her mother said. “We just didn’t know it. According to Melba, he didn’t even know it.”

Melba was Anna’s cousin, a chatty fool Anna couldn’t stand. “Was it…I mean, did he go to the hospital?”

“No, it was sudden. Melba said he didn’t suffer. At least there’s that.” Her mother ground the wadded tissue into her eyes, as if trying to injure herself and started crying again. Her loud, rolling sobs filled the apartment, transforming it. The very walls seemed to weep.

“Jesus Christ!” Anna said.

“Don’t curse, Anna. At a time like this…”

“All right,” Anna said absently. “Will there be a funeral?”

“Of course. He’ll be laid out at a mortuary near where he lived. Melba didn’t know exactly when or where the funeral will be.”

Anna’s father, Raoul, had left her mother only months after the rape, and in a way Anna blamed herself for their divorce. Her father had moved into a home on the edge of Queens, near the auto repair shop where he kept the books. Anna had heard the place was a chop shop, where stolen cars were taken and dismantled to be sold for parts, but she’d never believed it.

She visited her father less and less frequently in his sad and solitary home, and they’d gone out for breakfast or lunch and struggled for words, but Anna had never quite stopped loving him. His loss was an unexpected force taking root in her, entangling and weighing down her heart.

Unconsciously she crossed herself, surprised by the automatic gesture. How odd, she thought. Religion wasn’t where she’d found any solace. Her music was her religion. Her music that might not be good enough. She felt, just then, like playing the viola.

Her mother stopped sobbing. “Anna, are you okay?”

“No,” Anna said.

 

Marcy Graham had noticed that morning when she poured the half-and-half for Ron’s coffee that it was thinner than usual and barely cool.

She opened the refrigerator and laid a hand on jars and shelves as if checking for fever. Not as cold as they should be. When she checked the cubes in the icemaker, she found they’d melted into a solid mass. She wrestled the white plastic container out, chipped away with a table knife, and dumped the ice into the sink.

“Fridge fucked up?” Ron asked.

“Looks that way. I’ll call the repairman.”

“Nothing should be wrong with it. It’s under warranty. Don’t let anybody tell you it isn’t.”

“I won’t. Don’t worry.”

“Think it’s safe to use this cream?”

“I wouldn’t,” Marcy said. She stood back and looked at the refrigerator, less than a year old. Then she opened the door and memorized the phone number on the sticker affixed to its inside edge and went to the phone.

Which is how she found herself here in her kitchen, home early from work to meet the repairman.

He was Jerry, according to the name tag above his pocket, a grungy guy in a gray uniform. But he was young and rather handsome, and he kept his shirt tucked in. A pattern of dark moles marred his left cheek just below his eye and he needed a shave, but still he would clean up just fine. Not what Marcy had expected.

She hoped he wasn’t so young he didn’t know what he was doing. He had the refrigerator pulled out from the wall and had spent the last half hour working behind it. A stiff black cover lined with fluffy blue insulation leaned against the sink cabinets, and whenever Marcy went to the kitchen to see how Jerry was doing, she saw only his lower legs, his brown work boots she hoped wouldn’t leave scuff marks, and an assortment of tools on the tile floor.

Finally, only about an hour before Ron was due home from work, Jerry scooted backward, out from behind the refrigerator, and reached for the insulated panel. It took him only a few minutes to reattach it.

He stood up, came around to the front of the refrigerator, and opened the door so he could work the thermostat. Immediately the motor hummed. He stuck his hand between a milk carton and orange juice bottle, then turned to Marcy and smiled. “Better’n new.”

“You sure?” Marcy asked.

“Why? You wanna make a bet it’ll stop cooling?”

Marcy grinned. “No. I wasn’t questioning your work.”

“This was an easy one,” Jerry said. “There’s a belt attached to the motor that turns a fan blade, so a blower moves cold air and evens out the temperature in the refrigerator. Those belts usually last at least five years before they break.”

“My luck,” Marcy said.

“Oh, this one didn’t break, I’m sure of that.”

“What do you mean?”

“If it’d broke, I’d have found it laying there. It’s missing.”

“Underneath the refrigerator, maybe?”

“Nope. I looked everywhere for it.”

Missing? Marcy frowned. “How could it not be somewhere in the kitchen?”

The repairman smiled and shrugged, then leaned down and began tossing wrenches and screwdrivers and things Marcy didn’t recognize back into his metal toolbox. “It ain’t up to me to figure ’em out. I just fix ’em. You mind if I use your phone?”

Marcy told him she didn’t, and listened as he called his office to report he was finished and leaving for his next job.

After she’d signed at the bottom of a pink sheet of paper on a clipboard, he told her she should take care and left.

Alone in the apartment, she felt suddenly afraid. It was one thing for her anonymous benefactor to leave gifts, but why would he sabotage the refrigerator? Was that what really happened?

Would Ron have done such a thing? Had he even had the opportunity?

Unexpected presents were one thing. They were eccentric, weird, even, but flattering and not at all scary. Though they sure as hell made you wonder. She stared at the blank white bulk of the humming refrigerator. This was different. This was eerie.

She went to the left sink cabinet and opened it, then reached in through the hinged lid of the plastic trash can and felt beneath the loosely folded paper towel on top. Then she felt deeper beneath the paper towel.

Nothing. At least, not what she expected to feel despite her icy hunch.

She removed the plastic lid and looked to be sure.

The box of chocolates she’d thrown away last night was gone.

 

Pearl sat at her kitchen table and sipped from a bottle of water. She’d just finished a late-night snack of leftover pizza, which had been warmed and zapped of all form and structure in the microwave. It had become a kind of edible Dalí painting—surreal, like her world.

She could feel the beginnings of trouble, a gentle, hypnotic draw that could deceive and suck her into a maelstrom if she’d let it. If she fell for it.

As she sometimes did.

She found herself thinking about Quinn too often. He’d seemed at first so much older that an affair with him wasn’t an option. She wasn’t one of those helpless, hopeless women looking for a substitute father.

But he actually wasn’t that old. Besides, she had a birthday coming up.

It was the weathered look to his features that made him appear older, as if he’d spent a hard life in the outdoors and the sun had leathered and seamed his features. A difficult life, especially lately, buffeted by storms within and without. With a face that suggested character and toughness even if masculine beauty had passed with the years and hard knocks. She could imagine him slouched in the saddle on a weary horse, overlooking a windswept plain. Big white horse, since he was the hero of her imagination.

Bastard belongs in a cigarette commercial, not in the NYPD.

She finished her water and smiled at her own recklessness. She didn’t always have to be her own worst enemy. Sometimes she was like a kid who couldn’t help reaching out and touching a flame.

She leaned back and looked at the stained and cracked kitchen walls that had once been some weird yellow color. She knew what she should do now. She should paint. Everything she needed to brighten up the place—brushes, rollers, scraper, drop cloths, masking tape, five gallons of colonial white paint—was waiting in the hall closet. And she had the blessing of the landlord. One thing about a dump like this, she could do what she wanted here, short of setting it on fire. Yes, she should paint.

Pearl knew she could spend the next few hours at least getting started on the job, maybe finish a couple of walls, and still have time to get a good night’s sleep before meeting Quinn and Fedderman tomorrow morning.

She also knew she wouldn’t paint. She had the Elzner case for an excuse.

She couldn’t put out of her mind what Quinn had said about the Elzners not necessarily being the first victims, but maybe simply the latest, of a serial killer who did couples. It seemed to Pearl that Quinn was working on insufficient knowledge to make such a statement. On the other hand, this wasn’t an ordinary man or an ordinary cop. He’d been right a lot of times in his long career.

Couples. Why would anyone want to murder couples? Resentment? Because they were happy couples and he was single and unhappy? Not likely. How many single, unhappy people were out there wandering around and not killing anyone? In New York alone?

Me. I’m a suspect.

So’s Quinn.

Depressing thought.

Okay, enough. Time to give up and go to bed.

She stood up from the table and placed her empty glass in the sink, then went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth. She secured the apartment all the way, chain lock and dead bolt, and turned out the lights, so there was only the illumination from outside that filtered through the flimsy drapes. On her way to the bedroom she gave the hall closet containing the paint and supplies a wide berth and didn’t glance in its direction.

At least I didn’t succumb to that temptation.

She made a detour into the bathroom to wash down an Ambien, which the doctor had prescribed so she could escape her thoughts and go to sleep. The pills worked okay, but she didn’t want to take too many and become dependent, so she spaced them out, trying not to take them on successive nights.

This was a logical night for one of the pills, what with the microwaved pizza’s potential effect on her dreams. Pepperoni and anchovies. She wasn’t about to give her subconscious and stomach that kind of chance to team up against her. It was a pill night for sure. Her belly was already growling in pizza protest.

Nude but for her oversize dark blue NYPD T-shirt, the window air conditioner humming and rattling away as it sent a cool breeze over her bare legs, she lay on top of the sheets and thought about the Elzner case.

Which led her to think about Quinn.

There he was again, slouched on his damned horse.

C’mon, pill!

Marcy Graham woke again from the dream she’d been having lately. Someone would be in the room with her and Ron, standing at the foot of the bed, watching them sleep. She would drift nearer and nearer to consciousness, then come all the way awake with a start.

And there would be no one there.

Again! So real!

She sat up in bed and looked around in the dimness, then relaxed and lay back, noticing her sheet and pillow were damp with perspiration though the room was cool. Ron stirred beside her, then sighed and rolled over onto his side, facing away from her. She took comfort in his bulk, in his nearness.

Yet she couldn’t return to sleep, so real was that dream. More real than at other times, she realized. She could almost recall the man’s dark form, the silent, motionless way he stood and stared.

But it didn’t make sense, any of it. What kind of maniac would want to simply watch other people while they slept?

Unless he wasn’t simply watching. Maybe he was making sure they were asleep so he could…do what? Something else? Something more? Knowing he wouldn’t be disturbed.

Marcy flung herself onto her side and fluffed her pillow so violently she woke up Ron. He rolled onto his back and looked over at her.

“Somethin’ wrong?” His voice was slurred by sleep.

“I can’t sleep.”

“Yeah. I gathered s’much. Wha’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Fine.”

“Something!”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

He breathed in deeply and sighed. “An’ you want me to find out.”

“Would you?”

Instead of answering, he sat up and opened the drawer of the nightstand on his side of the bed. She knew he kept a souvenir baseball bat there, but while it was a miniature bat, bearing Sammy Sosa’s signature, it made a handy club about the size of a policeman’s nightstick.

She watched his muscular, slope-shouldered form, dressed in white undershorts and sleeveless undershirt, cross the room and go into the hall, saw the hall brighten as lights in the living room came on. She could hear him moving around out there, checking things, looking where someone might hide, opening closet doors. Master of his domain, stalking a possible enemy who’d gotten through the defenses.

Suddenly uncomfortable alone in the dim room, Marcy climbed out of bed and went to join him. Besides, if by some remote chance an intruder was in the apartment, two against one would be better than just Ron—though Marcy sure didn’t want to put that to the test.

Ron was standing in the middle of the living room, the miniature bat held low in his right hand.

He looked over at her, hair tousled, eyes sleepy. “Nothing. The door’s still locked, everything looks normal, nobody hiding anywhere in here.”

“Did you look in the kitchen?”

“Sure. Normal. Everything’s okay, Marcy.”

“The bedroom.”

“Huh? We just left the bedroom.”

“There are places to hide there.”

“Sure, I guess there are.”

She smiled at him. He’d been brave for her. Now he was humoring her. But that meant he was thinking of her, showing his love.

“You wait here while I go check.”

He trod barefoot back into the bedroom, looking forward to going back to sleep. But why not give Marcy her way? He was too tired to argue. And he’d been revved up a few minutes ago, thinking maybe she had heard something or knew somehow there was someone in the apartment.

Damn, he’d been revved up!

Calmer now, reassured, he entered the dim bedroom and didn’t bother turning on the light. As he moved toward the closet door, he held the bat higher. Anything’s possible.

“Don’t forget to look under the bed,” Marcy called from the living room.

Ron paused and lowered the bat.

 

The man lying flat on his stomach beneath the bed switched the long-bladed knife to his other hand, on the side of the bed where he could see Ron Graham’s bare feet. Watching the feet gave him some idea of where Graham’s face and vulnerable throat might appear any second if he peered beneath the bed. Using the knife might be awkward. It was all a question of body position. Graham would be surprised and horrified and frozen for a second, allowing the opportunity for a quick body shift and a slash with the knife. But the bare feet were so important, where they were, where the toes were pointed. The man with the knife lay very still, his upper body an inch off the floor, watching the pale bare feet, watching….

 

Ron walked close to the bed and sat down on it. He sure didn’t feel like bending over and checking for monsters. He would humor Marcy only so far.

“Nobody under there!” he called to her. “Just a few dust bunnies.”

He rose and went to the closet, quickly opened the door, felt afraid as he inserted an arm and parted the clothes to make sure no one was hiding back there in the darkness.

Then he caught himself. He’d bought into Marcy’s delusions.

What the hell am I doing?

Feeling foolish, he grinned and stepped back, closing the door. Shaking his head, he returned to the living room.

“All clear,” he told Marcy, who was standing near the sofa looking worried.

She let out a long breath, then hugged him tightly.

He kissed her cool but damp forehead. “Can we go back to bed now?”

“Yeah. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve been worried lately and having the damnedest dreams.”

“Dreams can’t hurt you.” He put his arm around her waist and led her back toward the bedroom.

“They can sure as hell scare you.”

When they were back in bed, he moved close to her. “Since we’re awake…,” he said.

She felt her nightgown being tugged and worked upward, and she dug her heels into the mattress and raised her back until her breasts were no longer constrained by the taut material. His fingertips and then his lips were light on her right nipple. Desire moved at the core of her and she raked her fingers through his damp hair. Still she was outside of herself, of what was happening. She wanted to do this, but it was too soon after being so frightened.

He was toying with her left nipple now, not going to stop. She knew him so well. He wasn’t going to be talked out of this. And she didn’t really want to talk him out of it.

“Can I use my vibrator?” she asked. “I need to relax, and I’m still pretty shook up.”

“You’ll be shook up in a different way soon,” he reassured her.

“Ron…”

He raised his head. “Okay.” He kissed her between the breasts, using his tongue on her bare flesh, then shifted his weight and stood up. The vibrator was fine with him, anyway. He’d tell her where and how to use it, then let her decide she was ready, then—

“Hurry, please!” she said behind him as he opened the closet door to get the vibrator down from the top shelf. He smiled and didn’t answer.

And gasped when he saw the face and eyes staring out at him, felt the cold blade slice in and up toward his heart. Everything was devoured by the searing pain…his world, his loss, his love, his hope…. All of it fell away and he dropped swiftly and breathlessly in a dark elevator plunging toward blackness.

He tried to say Marcy’s name, as if it were the magic that might somehow stop the fall and save him, but that, too, died in darkness.

 

Marcy, lying back with her eyes closed and massaging her nipples with her fingertips, sensed something was wrong. Then she heard the funny, gasping sound Ron made and sat up in bed as suddenly as if a puppeteer had yanked her strings.

She saw Ron standing against the black background beyond the open closet door, then watched him sink to the floor.

Marcy tried to call to him but made only a strangled, cawing sound.

And out of the closet stepped her nightmare.

 

Half an hour later, while walking away from the Grahams’ apartment building, their killer decided this had been much better than his last late-night encounter.

It was because of the knife.

He’d left his gun in Martin Elzner’s hand. The police could do wonders with their ballistics tests, and they could connect gun to crime, therefore he could no longer have it in his possession. It was simply too risky, and he’d learned not to take unnecessary risks within the larger risks that he must take. So, as planned, the gun made a convincing prop.

But it should have been a knife to begin with. Always a knife.

So he’d left the gun, wiped clean of fingerprints other than those of Elzner’s dead hand. The silencer, too, was of no further use, so he’d disposed of it by tossing it in a Dumpster. Surely by now it was lost in a vast landfill.

Two days later, at a flea market on the West Side, he’d bought a produce knife, the sort used by warehousemen and shippers of fruits and vegetables. It was a long folding knife, slender, with a bone handle and a high-quality steel blade that would hold an edge.

When he’d bought the knife, he was sure it would do what he needed, and now it had.

Most of the blood was from the wife. Quinn could almost taste its coppery scent along the edges of his tongue in a way that brought saliva and a queasy stomach.

Along with Pearl and Fedderman, he stood in the Grahams’ bedroom near the body of the husband, Ronald. The dead man was lying tightly curled on his side on the floor, partly encircling most of the blood that had spilled from him, as if he’d tried to conserve the precious substance and failed. The frozen expression on his face suggested he’d experienced an agonized death. Quinn had seen similar expressions on the faces of too many victims of gunshot or knife wounds that incapacitated immediately but allowed a period of suffering before the end.

“That one’s pretty simple,” said Nift the ME, who was standing near the bed where the wife lay. “He was stabbed once beneath the sternum with an upward angle that got the heart.” He motioned toward Marcella Graham. “This one, on the other hand, is more complicated. Over a dozen stab wounds, and deliberate damage to erogenous zones.” He motioned toward two lumps in the puddled, crusted blood on the bed. “Those are her nipples.”

“Jesus!” Fedderman said.

Nift grinned at the veteran cop’s reaction. “I’d say your killer had his beef with the wife, and Hubby had to be eliminated so he wouldn’t interfere.”

“You’re playing detective,” Quinn said.

“That’s okay,” Nift said. “You can play medical examiner.”

Quinn ignored him and stuck to business. “Did she die early or late in the game?”

“The pattern of bleeding suggests she died with the last stab wound, to the heart.”

“He wanted her to suffer,” Pearl said.

“What about time of death?” Quinn asked.

“Early morning,” Nift said. “One or two o’clock. Three, three-thirty at the outside. I’ll be able to make a closer estimate later.”

Quinn had moved to get a different perspective of the room, which was well furnished and looked freshly painted. Most of the furniture looked new.

“They live here long?” he asked nobody in particular, getting into the mode of command again. An assumption of authority that had become part of him. He sent a look Fedderman’s way.

Fedderman understood and left the bedroom to talk to one of the uniforms who’d taken the call and were first on the scene. Nobody said anything until he returned a few minutes later.

“The Grahams moved in three months ago. Neighbors didn’t know much about them. Guy next door said they argued a lot. He could hear them through the ducts.”

“We oughta find out what else he might have heard through the ducts,” Pearl said.

Quinn seemed not to have heard her. He was studying the room, the way the dead man lay, the closet door hanging open and how the clothes were draped on the hangers, the way the wife was sprawled on her back with her nightgown up so her breasts showed. What had happened to her breasts. He felt his stomach turn and he swallowed bile that rose bitterly at the back of his throat. All these years on the job, and he still didn’t understand how people could do this kind of thing to each other.

He made himself walk over and look more closely at the wife, and at the area around her body.

“Looks like our killer was hiding in the closet,” he said, “and surprised the husband when he opened the door. After stabbing the husband, he went for the wife.”

“Killer musta gotten blood on him from the wife,” Fedderman said.

Quinn wasn’t so sure. Someone expert enough with a knife knew how people bled, and could avoid being marked.

“No sign of him having washed up,” Pearl said, “but we can check the drains for traces of blood to be sure.”

“Maybe she had a lover on the side, and Hubby came home unexpectedly,” Fedderman said. “The lover hid in the closet, but maybe made some noise the husband heard and went to investigate. Bad things ensued.”

“Hubby must have had time to get undressed and ready for bed,” Pearl said with an edge of sarcasm.

“Could have gone that way. The wife’s lover mighta been trapped in the closet for hours, hoping for an opportunity to leave before daylight.”

“Like in those French bedroom farces,” Pearl said.

Nift laughed.

Quinn and the others looked at him.

“Detectives!” Nift said. “Your theories are all bullshit.”

Quinn cocked his head at the little man. “Why so sure?”

“You didn’t look close enough at the husband. He’s still gripping the knife he used to kill his wife, then to stab himself through the heart.”

Quinn returned to the husband and got down on one knee beside him. He could see the end of a knife handle in one of the dead hands drawn close to the husband’s midsection. He moved an arm slightly to peer at the knife, which appeared to be a paring or boning knife with a long, thin blade.

“Murder-suicide,” Nift said.

Quinn nodded. “Looks that way, Detective Nift.” He glanced at Pearl and Fedderman and made a slight sideways motion with his head to signal they were leaving. “We’ll give you a while, then get back to you about exact time and cause,” he said to Nift.

“It’ll all be in the autopsy report,” Nift said. He looked down at Marcella Graham and shook his head sadly. “Damned shame, great rack like that.”

Quinn didn’t look at him as he left the bedroom, Pearl and Fedderman following. They made their way through the techs who were busily luminoling the living room, nodding to a few they knew, then went into the kitchen.

“Some blood on the soap,” said one of the techs, a curly-haired guy about Nift’s size, leaning over the sink. He was slipping a small bar of white soap into a plastic evidence bag. “Looks like somebody washed up here. There’ll be more blood residue in the drain.”

“If any of it’s the killer’s blood, we got this asshole’s DNA,” Fedderman said.

“Then all we’d need is the asshole himself,” Pearl said, “and we’d have a match.”

“Knife come from there?” Quinn asked, nodding toward an open drawer above one of the base cabinets.

“Probably,” said the tech. “That’s the drawer where the knives were kept, and it was open like that.”

Quinn walked over and peered into the drawer. It had one of those plastic dividers. He saw an elaborate wine cork puller, spatulas, a long-tined fork, and lots of knives with wooden handles. Like the knife in hubby’s hand.

He turned away from the drawer and looked at the refrigerator. It was large and appeared to be fairly new. There was a big clear bowl on top, probably for salads, and next to the bowl a slender glass vase with a yellow rose in it. “Fridge been dusted?”

The tech nodded. “Not that it matters. The way the prints are smeared and overlaid, I can tell you somebody was in here recently wearing gloves.”

“Why would Ron Graham have worn gloves?” Pearl asked Quinn and Fedderman.

But it was the tech who answered. “I’ve seen this before, when it was somebody in the kitchen doing cleaning while wearing rubber gloves. Some women protect their hands that way.”

Everybody’s a detective, Quinn thought. But the tech was right. Not too much could be made of the gloves. Still…

“Found any rubber gloves in here?” he asked the tech.

“Not so far.”

“Uh-huh.”

Quinn went to the refrigerator and used two fingers to open it. Pearl and Fedderman crowded close to peer inside with him.

“Nothing unusual,” Fedderman said in a disappointed voice, feeling cold air spilling out around his ankles as he looked at milk and juice cartons, condiment jars and bottles, soda and beer cans.

Pearl, who’d been standing very close to Quinn, opened the meat drawer, then the produce drawer.

“Cheese,” she said, as if about to be photographed.

Quinn and Fedderman looked where she was pointing, near a head of lettuce. There were four large wedges of white cheese there, identical except that one of them was half gone, with the plastic wrapper tucked around it. The labels said the cheese was NORSTRUM GOURMET and it was imported from the Netherlands.

“Look at the price of this stuff,” Fedderman said.

“That’s why it’s gourmet,” Pearl told him. “It’s probably delicious.”

“Four wedges. Or almost four. Stuff must last a long time, and it’s pretty costly to be buying it four wedges at a whack.”

“And there’s no sign the Grahams were planning a party.”

Quinn was listening to them, pleased by their acumen and absorption. They were into the case all the way now, as he was. It was much more than a job.

“Dust the cheese for prints,” he said.

The tech grinned. “You kidding? Cheese doesn’t—”

“The wrappers,” Quinn said. “Dust the plastic wrappers.” He nudged the refrigerator door shut and glanced at Pearl and Fedderman. “Let’s go downstairs.”

He didn’t say anything while the three of them were in the elevator, waiting till they were outside on the sidewalk and out of earshot of anyone in the building.

“I think it’s our guy,” he said.

“Yeah,” Pearl said. “Making it look like murder-suicide.”

“But he used a knife this time instead of a gun,” Fedderman pointed out. “Does that add up?”

“If it doesn’t touch on his core compulsion,” Quinn said.

“Or if he’s read the literature on serial killers,” Pearl said, “and knows enough to alter his methods.”

There was a break in traffic, so they crossed the street to where the unmarked was parked in bright sunlight.

When they were seated in the car—Fedderman behind the steering wheel with the engine idling and the air conditioner on high—Pearl, in the backseat, said, “Nift’s gonna go with murder-suicide, and it might wash. The weapon still in hubby’s hand, no sign of a break-in….”

“It won’t wash for long,” Quinn said. “It can’t. There was a chair pulled out from the kitchen table as if somebody’d been sitting there. And there were skid marks on the floor near the bed. Somebody’d been hiding under there and dragged dust with him when he slid out.”

“Maybe the husband, hiding and waiting for the lover to show,” Fedderman suggested.

“But he was in his underwear,” Pearl said. “I think the killer was hiding under the bed. He thought he saw his chance, got out, and was about to leave, maybe out the window, and he heard the Grahams coming and made for the closet.”

“Where would the Grahams be coming from?”

“I don’t know. The kitchen, maybe. They might’ve both been awake and gotten up for a snack.”

Fedderman was quiet for a moment, trying to work out a scenario that made sense where the husband might have slid under the bed in his underwear. Part of a plan. It was difficult if not impossible.

“And there’s the cheese,” Pearl said. “How many people buy something that expensive four at a time?”

“It happens,” Fedderman said. “The rich are, you know…different.”

“The Grahams weren’t the Rockefellers.” Pearl looked out the side window, across the street toward the apartment building they’d just left: red brick above a stone facade, green awnings, ivy growing up one corner out of huge concrete planters. No doorman, but a security system with a keypad, buzzer, and key-activated inner door. It wasn’t the best building in the neighborhood, but it was a good one. It would be interesting to find out what the Grahams were paying in rent.

Fedderman put the car in drive but didn’t pull away from the curb. “We haven’t had breakfast, and looking into that refrigerator made me remember I was hungry.”

“Maybe there’ll be some prints on the cheese wrappers,” Pearl said in a hopeful voice.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Quinn said. “Our guy must have known whatever he bought for his potential victims might be examined, so he probably wiped everything he carried into the apartment. He’s smart.”

“So are we,” Pearl said from the backseat.

“A cheese omelette doesn’t sound bad,” Fedderman said.

Quinn smiled, then said, “Drive.”

 

After lunch, while Pearl and Fedderman were questioning the Grahams’ neighbors, Quinn sat on a bench in a pocket park on East Fiftieth and called Renz on the cell phone Renz had furnished. It was supposedly a secure line, or nonline, less likely to be tapped than a regular wire connection. Easier to listen in on with a cheap scanner, perhaps, but no one knew Renz had the phone.

“You’ve solved the Graham case,” Renz said when Quinn had identified himself.

“Taken the first step,” Quinn said. He had to speak somewhat loudly because of an echo effect and the constant trickling sound of a nearby artificial waterfall. “We can be pretty sure both Grahams were murdered.”

“What’s that noise?” Renz asked. “You calling me from a men’s room?”

“Maybe you didn’t hear—”

“I heard you,” Renz cut him off. “Of course they were murdered. Just like the Elzners. That’s why I hired you, remember? I figured we had a repeater and the case would blossom. Thing is, Egan will still be seeing murder-suicide.”

“That’s what Nift thinks. I let him think it.”

“Good. I know the basic facts of this case, though, and after the autopsy Nift will have to reveal everything to Egan.”

“I thought Nift was your man in t. . .