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Book 0: Frank Quinn Novel

by John Lutz

Genres: Police Procedurals; Thrillers; Crime Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

Find The Cat, Catch The Killer Dead in her penthouse apartment. Designer scarf around her neck. Dismembered finger in a place it should never be. What the police haven't found is her diamond-and-ruby bracelet, switched with a cheap imitation. A bracelet that mysteriously ended up around the neck of a little girl's pet cat. Now the feline is missing, the killer has struck again--and former NYPD detective Frank Quinn has to track down both the cat and the culprit before the next body drops. Quinn's played his share of cat-and-mouse games before. But this time, when fingers are pointed, the claws come out. . . "Lutz knows how to make you shiver." --Harlan Coben on The Night Spider "A heart-pounding roller coaster." --Jeffery Deaver on Night Victims "Nail-biting. . .dramatic suspense." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Mister X 18,000 Words

Release date: June 1, 2012

Publisher: Pinnacle Books

Print pages: 68

Sample

“There’s a finger in her,” Nift said, watching Pearl Kasner’s face for a reaction.

She didn’t show much of one.

Quinn and Pearl watched Medical Examiner Dr. Julius Nift, crouched low near the woman’s body, move his shoulders and arms, probe with what looked like long, thin tweezers, then stare and shake his head. Before him, lying between the corpse’s widely spread legs, was a small, bloody object.

“What do you mean,” Pearl asked, “a finger?”

Nift held up his rubber-gloved left hand, fingers spread. “One of these.” He made a fist except for his extended forefinger. “This one, to be exact. Or one like it.” He grinned. “It was lodged in her vaginal tract. Wanna take a look?”

Pearl did. So did Quinn.

Quinn said, “Man’s finger?”

“Almost certainly. Right size for a man’s. Nail’s trimmed close. No polish. Lots of stuff under it. Maybe rich with DNA.”

“Fingerprint?”

“Should be discernible. Once we get it cleaned up.”

Quinn nodded, standing with his fists propped on his hips, and glanced around Alexis Hoffermuth’s luxurious penthouse apartment, amazed anew by the vastness of the room they were in and the obvious wealth that showed in every facet of the place.

He had met Alexis Hoffermuth here just two days earlier, when she was alive.

Her body had been discovered scarcely an hour ago after she didn’t show up for an eight o’clock appointment (so unlike her), and failed to answer either her cell or land line phone.

The doorman had admitted the woman she was scheduled to meet in regard to a political fund-raiser, and there Alexis Hoffermuth was, in her altered state.

Pearl and Quinn looked at each other, each knowing what the other was thinking: money and murder were such close friends.

“Strange calling card,” said Nift, who liked to play detective, “a forefinger in her twat.” He glanced at Pearl to see if he’d gotten a rise out of her. “Whaddya make of it, Pearl?”

“If he’s a serial killer, he’s limited to nine more victims.”

“Unless—” Nift began.

“Shut up,” Pearl said, and he did.

“She was over fifty,” Quinn said, nodding toward the victim. “You’d never know it, even like this.”

The dead woman stared wide-eyed back at him, flecks of blood visible in the white around her pupils, the way eyes were after someone’s been strangled. In this instance, strangulation appeared to have been caused by the Burberry scarf around her neck. Yet the expression of pain and bewilderment frozen on her face wasn’t quite like that of a strangulation victim.

“There are a lot of imitation scarves like that floating around New York,” Nift said. “You think that one’s real?”

“It’s real,” Pearl said.

“The boobs aren’t,” Nift said.

“You would notice that.”

“Expensive job, though. But then, it would be.”

“No need to wonder about cause of death,” Quinn said, changing the subject before Nift and Pearl clashed. They often played this game. Nift seemed to regard making Pearl lose her temper a challenge. Not that she was his only target.

“Don’t be too sure,” Nift said. “Cause of death can be tricky.” Squatted down as he was, he craned his neck and glanced around, as if seeing the upper half of his surroundings clearly for the first time. “Place is big enough to be a museum. Looks kinda like one, the way it’s furnished.”

“What about time of death?” Pearl asked. She didn’t want to talk about décor.

“The victim sometime between midnight and three o’clock this morning. The finger sometime before then.”

“How do you know that?” Quinn asked.

“That the finger died before she did?” Nift grinned. “Putrefaction, discoloration, suggest several days, depending on ambient temperature. Also, I gave it the sniff test.” He grinned wickedly at Pearl. “Wanna smell?”

“That finger’s not the worst smelling thing in this room,” Pearl said angrily.

Nift ignored her. He’d gotten a rise out of Pearl again. He was temporarily ahead on points in the game he insisted they play.

Like Quinn, Pearl was a former NYPD homicide detective. Now they were part of Quinn and Associates Investigations—Q&A, as it was commonly called. The agency was formed when Quinn decided to extend his avocation beyond hunting down serial killers, which was his area of expertise. Q&A was more of a traditional detective agency now, and its employees were part owners and had a stake in its success.

Because of Quinn’s legendary and well-earned reputation for tracking and apprehending serial killers, the agency sometimes still did work for hire for the city. That work wasn’t exclusively serial killer cases; now it included almost any kind of criminal case that was high profile, sensitive, or for any other reason important to the city, or to the political well-being of its police commissioner. These contracts were mainly because the police commissioner, Harley Renz, and Quinn went back a long way.

Not that they liked each other. . . .