Authors: John Lutz

Tags: #Thrillers, #Fiction, #Suspense, #Espionage, #General

Pulse (6 page)

BOOK: Pulse

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T
here was something wrong with the air conditioner that caused it to run and not run in long cycles. Or maybe it was just overwhelmed by the heat wave. Right now it was in its not-run phase.

It was unnaturally quiet in the office, as if the warmth were smothering sound. There was a smell like wet paste, maybe from the plastic or wiring in Fedderman’s computer heating up. If there still was any wiring in computers. Everything might be modular now. Sometimes Quinn felt like he was modular and didn’t fit anywhere, a time traveler from the Bronze Age.

Quinn was working the phones. Only the intrepid, ill-clad Fedderman was there with him, at a desk fifteen feet away, facing Quinn’s. Fedderman dressed somewhat better since his recent marriage, but his right shirt cuff still usually managed to come unbuttoned when he wrote with pen or pencil. And it would stay that way, flapping like a signal flag when he walked. He was busy transferring his written notes to a file on the computer. Both copies would be saved, to add to a growing physical as well as electronic file.

The jangle of the phone broke the silence and Quinn picked up. The receiver of the landline phone was hard and slippery against his ear.

The caller was Pearl, checking in from the brownstone. She’d worked late last night, making connections with Macy’s three roommates, who were out of town for the summer. Pearl, bearing the bad news.

Macy’s roommates had been horrified when they learned of her death. Other than that, they didn’t have much to add to the investigation. They were all college students, home for the summer. Two were in Chicago. The third was in Europe. None of them had really known Macy, though all of them cried during their conversations with Pearl. They’d had nothing negative to say about the dead, apparently thinking they might draw down an ancient curse upon themselves if they were anything but complimentary. Pearl had run into that attitude before, when the young were unexpectedly confronted with the death of someone who’d touched their lives.

It could happen to anyone.

Quinn thanked Pearl and asked if she was still in bed.

“Why?” she asked. “Are you interested in phone sex?”

“I didn’t know phones had sex,” Quinn said.

Pearl’s cue to hang up, which she did.

Quinn had read Sal and Harold’s respective reports. So far, the interview with Charmain Graham, Macy’s neighbor in an adjacent apartment, had proved the most fruitful. She might actually have heard the killer in Macy’s bedroom. No one else in the building other than the super seemed to have even met Macy other than to say hello or nod to in the hall. No one had noticed anything suspicious in or near the building during the weeks leading up to her death.

The killer had committed a clean and seamless crime, except for the soft laughter overheard through Charmain Graham’s bedroom vent. That laughter so soon after the process of human slaughter infuriated Quinn. He kept imagining it, even though he’d never heard it. Had the killer laughed that way while butchering the gagged and still-alive Macy? Or while working the blue panties onto her corpse?
What the hell was that all about, with the panties?

Quinn picked up a different sheet of paper and scanned it yet again.

What the CSU had removed from Macy’s apartment yielded little of use other than the names and addresses of Macy’s mother and father. Her mother lived in Davenport, Iowa. Her father in Oakland, California.

Quinn figured Pearl had done enough death notification.

He sighed and made the necessary calls. The reactions of both parents made rips in his heart. He thought of his own daughter, on the other side of the continent, in California. People didn’t have children with the notion that they might be tortured and butchered by a monster. Across the office, Fedderman had heard sound but not substance. But he knew what the calls were about and his eyes had teared up. He quickly looked away from Quinn.

Another phone call, incoming, was also less than a pleasure. Nift from the medical examiner’s office, with Macy’s postmortem findings.

“Official cause of our girl’s death was heart failure brought about by extreme shock,” Nift said, getting right down to business.

“No surprise there.”

“Slicing off her tits took a bit of know-how and skill.”

“Medical skill?”

“No. More like practice-makes-almost-perfect skill. They were done antemortem. It’s a wonder she didn’t die of shock early in the process. The killer was expert at keeping her alive as long as possible. He was the one who chose almost the precise instant of death. I would imagine that was important to him.”

“Try not to imagine,” Quinn said. But he knew Nift was right. It simply irritated him that the smarmy little M.E. enjoyed playing detective.

Nift gave a low chuckle that reminded Quinn of Charmain Graham’s description of the killer’s laugh. “Macy’s evening wasn’t all bad,” Nift said. “Stomach contents were steak, salad, red wine, consumed approximately five hours before her death. She was wined and dined and then—”

“Raped?”

“Maybe. Could have been consensual. But damage to the vaginal tract suggests otherwise. And there was residue of the kind of substance used on pre-lubricated condoms.”

“You sure about that?”

“Positive. I see it over and over,” Nift said, in an oddly cheerful voice.

“Our killer practicing safe sex,” Quinn said.

“Whatever entered her might not have been a penis.”

“A dildo?”

“Maybe. Or some make-do inanimate object that required lubrication.”

“Or some object ceremonial to the killer.”

“It could be we’re making too much of it,” Nift said. “We can’t rule out simple, consensual sex. She might have been wined, dined, and reclined—and enjoyed that part of it, even though it had to have been rough. There’s some frictional damage to the vaginal wall. But you know women.”

“I wish.”

“There isn’t any sign of her resisting until after she was gagged and taped.”

“The wine, maybe.”

“Could be. If she wasn’t used to it. And there are traces of an over-the-counter sedative in her stomach. Bruising on her arms is consistent with the killer straddling her and pinning her down. Maybe keeping her hands away from her face after slapping that tape over her mouth. He had to have taken some of the fight out of her before taping her arms to her sides.”

“That would take a strong person.”

“Average-strength man, stronger-than-average woman. He was probably seated on her boobs, then slid down toward her pubic area while applying the tape. My guess is he waited until she was stunned and exhausted from torture before he lopped off her jugs. There are small cut marks, or stab marks that barely penetrated the flesh, in sensitive areas all over her body.”

“Made while she was still alive?”

“Definitely. He wanted her to see as well as feel what he was doing. Wanted them to experience it together.”

“He wanted to take the trip with her,” Quinn said, “but not all the way.”

“Company loves misery.”

“
Company
being Daniel Wentworth, aka Daniel Danielle, aka Danielle Daniel?”

“That would be my guess.”

“Only a guess?” Quinn asked, holding in his anger at the killer, feeling slightly sick. The heat.

“At this time, yes. But I remember the original Daniel Danielle murders. Between us, this is the same guy.”

“He’s dead,” Quinn said. “Nobody on foot where he was could have survived that hurricane.”

“Zombie love. But if that’s not a good enough explanation for you, we got some human flesh out from under one of Miss Macy’s painted but broken nails. We’ll have a DNA comparison shortly. You wanna bet some money on this?”

“No,” Quinn said. “And what I heard was the Florida cops either didn’t take or lost Daniel Wentworth’s swab, and the DNA sample from under the nail of an original victim was too small and too old to be of much help. Most of it was used up during the trial.”

“Same guy, though,” Nift repeated. “It’s very distinctive, his work with the knife. It had to take some thought, some practice.” Nift paused. Quinn could hear him breathing. It was possible that Daniel had taken over a hundred victims, their bodies still lying in shallow graves or disposed of in ways unimaginable to the normal mind. “Something else I couldn’t help thinking about when I was working on this one, Quinn. Something you really oughta keep in mind. Looking down at Macy, before I peeled back the face and did the brain pan—even after—she kept reminding me of Pearl.”

Quinn hung up the phone hard, causing Fedderman to stare over at him.

“You okay?” Fedderman asked.

Quinn was sweating. Trembling slightly. He dragged the back of his hand across his clammy forehead and sat back. “Yeah. Just talking to Nift about the postmortem.”

“That’ll do it,” Fedderman said. “Anything useful?”

Quinn related his conversation with Nift, now and then thinking about Pearl.

No doubt that was what Nift wanted, not knowing that Quinn would have been thinking about Pearl without being prompted.

Pearl herself entered the office an hour later. She was neatly dressed in gray slacks and blue blazer, shoes with slight high heels on them to raise her at least somewhat above her five-foot-one height. Her breasts didn’t look so prominent beneath the loose cotton fabric of her white blouse. Her eyes were dark and alert, her pale complexion set off by her jet-black hair, which fell to below her shoulders.
Vivid
was the word most often used to describe Pearl. A sketch in black and white by an artist who loved women.

She nodded good morning to Quinn and Fedderman, and to Sal and Harold, who’d only just arrived themselves. Then she went over and poured herself some coffee in her initialed mug. She was glad to see that someone else, knowing she’d be coming in late, had taken the trouble to make coffee.

“We saved you a doughnut,” Sal said, motioning toward a shallow white bakery box resting on the printer, “but Harold ate it.”

“I didn’t know it was Pearl’s,” Mishkin said quickly.

“That’s okay,” Pearl said. “At least there’s coffee. The four of you must have pitched in and somehow gotten it made.”

“Eat your doughnut,” Sal growled. “We were only kidding about Harold.”

“It’s cream-filled,” Harold said.

Pearl lifted the box’s lid to reveal a small and broken cream-filled doughnut with chocolate icing. Lucky she’d taken the time to toast and eat a bagel in the brownstone. Letting the box lid drop back into place, she made sure they all saw her disdain for the doughnut.

“Since we’re all here,” Quinn said, “we need to have a meeting and coordinate what we know. Maybe get some kinda picture of what we’re dealing with.”

Line one rang on the phones. Pearl picked up the unit on her desk and turned away so her conversation wouldn’t be a distraction. Also, it wouldn’t be overheard.

When she’d finished talking and hung up, she turned back to the others. She was the one who looked distracted.

“That was Rena Collins,” she said. “Macy’s mother. She’s flying into town today to talk to us, and to identify and claim her daughter’s body.”

“This is a homicide investigation,” Quinn said. “We’ll want to hold the body.”

“I told her that,” Pearl said. “I think she understands.”

Quinn raised his eyebrows.

Pearl shrugged. “She wants to see her daughter. She’ll wait for the body. She said she’s bringing a dress.”

No one spoke for a while.

Quinn said, “I’ll call Nift and make sure he makes Macy presentable.”

He immediately realized how callous that sounded, but he couldn’t think of a better way to say that pieces of Mrs. Collins’s daughter were either missing or needed to be fitted back together.

Q
uinn picked up Rena Collins at her hotel and drove her to the morgue. She was an attractive woman in her fifties, with a trim figure that looked like the result of fanatical dieting and exercise. Her hair was blond, unlike her daughter’s, and she was tan, as if she’d been swimming or playing tennis within the past few days. Only the crow’s-feet at the corners of her narrowed and sad blue eyes hinted at her age.

“You didn’t have to go to this trouble,” she said. “I could have met you there.” Her voice sounded rough and worn, as if she was an incurable smoker. Quinn thought it was probably from crying.

“It’s no trouble.”

“I thought at first this was a hired limo,” Rena Collins said. “It doesn’t look like an unmarked police car.”

“It isn’t. It’s my personal car, a 1999 Lincoln. It does look like a hired car. That makes it one of the least conspicuous rides in New York.”

“It must be,” Rena said. “Two of them just passed us.”

“Newer models, but close enough.”

Traffic was building up; almost lunchtime. The silence in the car became thicker and heavier. There wasn’t much for the two strangers to talk about, other than the dead woman. Neither of them wanted to discuss her at the moment, even though her foreboding presence was with them as surely as if she were sitting in the backseat.

It wasn’t easy, what Rena Collins was about to do. Identifying the corpse of a dead child was about the worst thing you could ask of someone. Quinn would be glad when it was behind her. Behind both of them.

He was relieved, mostly for Rena, when the dead face of Macy Collins appeared on the morgue monitor. The photo had been taken before the autopsy. Nift had done a good job of preparing Macy for viewing. The face on the screen didn’t look much like her recent photographs that the hometown media had dug up, but maybe that was a good thing, that she didn’t look like herself. Quinn recalled the horror that had been in her eyes, the constant silent scream that had been on her lips once the tape had been removed. At least Rena Collins was spared that.

“It’s Macy,” she said in a choked voice, and turned away from the monitor. Her breasts were heaving. “Christ! I need to get outside where I can breathe.”

“So do I,” Quinn said, glad she wasn’t going to demand to see the body up close and not on a monitor, as some surviving family members did. There were family members who felt it their duty to approach the dead, to touch them, as if in a magical way some life remained that would be responsive. In this case, the photo had been enough, and the law was satisfied.

Quinn led Rena Collins back outside into the warm, exhaust-hazed air of Manhattan. It seemed infinitely better than the air inside the building.

She was perspiring. Her breathing had leveled out but was still slightly ragged. He could hear it in the brief intervals when traffic wasn’t making itself known.

“Sure you’re okay?” he asked, gently gripping her elbow to steady her.

She made herself smile and moved away from his grip. “I’m okay. Really.”

He stayed alert, in case she showed signs of giving in to the heat and what she’d just endured.

In the car she said, “They won’t let me take her home for burial right away, will they?”

“We’ll need to hold her for a while,” Quinn said.

“I wish I could—” She thought better of what she was about to say. “Never mind.”

He turned the Lincoln’s air conditioner on high, and after a few blocks she stopped sweating and her breathing was normal. Quinn wanted to talk with her about Macy. He drove slower.

“Need anything?” he asked.

“I want to call my ex-husband, but not yet.”

“Macy’s father?”

“Yeah. He’s out in California. He wanted to come here, to New York, but it was impossible, he said. He thinks he can be at the funeral.”

Thinks he can be ...
“I see,” Quinn said. But he didn’t. Macy had been the man’s daughter.

Rena Collins stared out her side of the windshield for a while. At the windshield and nothing else, really. Her thoughts were directed inward. Then she looked over at Quinn. “Something to drink,” she said. “Not alcoholic.”

“There’s a diner in the next block.”

“I’d rather go to the hotel restaurant.”

Quinn thought that was a good idea. The restaurant would likely be more conducive to conversation.

He found himself wondering if Rena Collins had something more than conversation in mind. He’d seen it work that way, the near proximity of death acting as an aphrodisiac, a lusting for its polar opposite. At the end, underlying everything, we all wanted to live. We wanted life for ourselves and for everyone we loved.

He told himself not to be an idiot. This woman didn’t want a roll in the hay with an aging ex-cop. She wouldn’t get one, in any event. She had just gazed on the remains of her dead daughter. He was at least partly responsible for having her do that, and he was responsible for whatever might happen after.

Quinn was still plagued by guilt for what he’d contemplated, when he turned the Lincoln over to a hotel parking valet. He let Rena go ahead of him and then stepped in behind her and provided most of the power for the revolving glass door. They entered the cool lobby.

The restaurant was serving lunch and was already crowded, so they went into the nearby bar and found a booth that afforded relative privacy. Three flat-screen TVs over the bar were showing last night’s Yankees–Red Sox game, but the volume was off. Rena ordered a Diet Coke with a lemon, and Quinn asked for a cup of coffee.

When their drinks came, he added cream to his cup and stirred, and watched her squeeze her lemon wedge and drop it in the Coke. She stirred the ice deftly with her forefinger and then sipped from the glass, ignoring the straw that had been delivered with the drink. When she placed the glass back on its coaster, she pressed her cool hand to her forehead for a moment, then looked at him.

“Isn’t it warm out to be drinking coffee?” she asked.

He smiled. “Cops would drink coffee in hell.”

She sighed, knowing that even though this was her idea, they weren’t there for small talk. Cops would be cops in hell. “You want to discuss Macy.”

“There are things I need to know,” he said. “You okay with that, or would you rather we do it later?”

“Now’s all right.” Another sip of Coke. Another cold palm pressed to the forehead.

“This might sound obvious,” Quinn said, “but did Macy have any enemies?”

“Somebody who might do such a ghastly thing to a twenty-one-year-old girl? No, of course not. But then ...”

“What?”

“Obviously she did have such an enemy.”

“What about at school?” Quinn asked.

“We were in contact. I would have known about any sort of serious issue. Every indication was that things were going well at school. Macy liked being away from home, out on her own. She was proud of it. That’s why she decided to stay in New York instead of coming home for the summer. And she was interested in her job, interning at a law firm. Enders and Coil. Do you know it?”

“Know of it,” Quinn said. “Big firm.”

“Odd that she’d be so interested in a job like that. She was always kind of a counter-culture rebel, more the public defender type.”

“Did she know the girls she subleased from?”

“Not at all. She found the place on a school bulletin board.”

“They aren’t students at Waycliffe.”

“True, but they know where to look for someone who can afford to sublease their apartment when they leave the city.”

“Did they all leave town?”

“For the summer, yes. All but one of them.”

“Jacqui Stoneman?”

“I think so.”

“Stoneman left ten days ago,” Quinn said. “The super and the other two girls said she’s backpacking around Europe. She isn’t due home for another month.”

Rena nodded. She managed to sip her drink without using her palm to cool her forehead.

“So Macy knew no one in New York?” Quinn asked.

“Not well. Other than some of the people she worked with at the law firm. She did mention someone, an older woman named Sarah. And maybe she was a casual acquaintance of some of the girls from Waycliffe who live in the city and stay in New York year-round.”

Quinn sipped his coffee and sat back in the upholstered booth. A smattering of cheering and applause came from the bar, where the recorded ball game was being shown. Someone hitting a home run and rounding the bases yesterday. “What about Waycliffe?” he asked. “Was Macy happy there?”

“She said she was. And just in the past year she seemed to be maturing, becoming more ... practical. She was always a scholastic brain and made top grades. Waycliffe had her in their Vanguard program for gifted students. She seemed to have done a good job of adapting to college life.”

“Did she mention any particular friends she’d made?”

“Some, but their names don’t come to mind. Macy wasn’t exactly a social butterfly, but people liked her.” Rena’s lower lip began to tremble.

Quinn guessed that the photo of her dead daughter was on the screen of her mind. Or maybe the murder itself, reconstructed from the horrible wounds. The recent past playing out again, like the ballgame. The Macy in the crime scene photos hadn’t looked peaceful and composed, as in the morgue shot. Rena hadn’t seen the crime scene photos, but she knew what had happened to her daughter, and she could imagine how it had been done.

She took a slow sip of her drink. “Last time I talked to her on the phone, Macy did seem to hint that something at her job was bothering her, that it didn’t seem right.”

“What does that mean, ‘did seem to hint’?” Quinn asked.

Rena shook her head. “I don’t know, exactly. I shouldn’t have brought it up. Maybe it was just something I inferred. Macy had a way about her. Maybe because she was so smart. When we talked, it was always like what she meant was floating somewhere between the lines. It was kind of unsettling. Like once when she phoned me from her dorm room.”

“So what exactly did she say on the phone?”

“I can’t quote her verbatim. One thing I remember: she said it was possible somebody’d slept in her bed while she was gone.”

“Maybe her roommate.”

“She didn’t have one. The students in her dorm have small sleeping rooms without space for much more than a bed and a desk.”

“Did she have a key?”

“Yes, but the door hadn’t been locked. Hardly anyone in the dorm locks their room when they’re only going to be gone for a short while. That’s the sort of college it is.”

“Everyone there is trustworthy?”

“Apparently. Or rich enough that they don’t have to steal.”

“Very exclusive?”

“You have to have brains, money, or connections in excess even to think about going there. In Macy’s case it was brains. She scored perfect or near perfect on every aptitude test she took.”

“Where had she been the evening of the bed incident?”

“She’d attended a group discussion at the home of one of her professors. You know, drinks, snacks, endless analysis or political posturing.”

For a moment it struck Quinn that on a certain level Rena might have been jealous of her daughter’s superior intellect.

“Maybe she just forgot to make her bed,” Quinn said.

“And forgot she forgot? That wouldn’t be like her.”

Rena bowed her head and the lip trembling began again. She looked as if she was about to cry, but with great effort she gained control of her emotions. She methodically unwrapped her plastic straw and then plunged it like a lance into liquid and took a long series of pulls on her Diet Coke, almost emptying the glass.

Quinn didn’t tell Rena that serial killers were sometimes driven to get into their intended victims’ minds by learning intimate things about them, even sneaking into their homes and mimicking their experiences. Like sitting and watching their TVs, reading their e-mails, wearing their clothes, using their combs or makeup. Or lying in their beds.

“Where exactly is Waycliffe College?” he asked. “I mean, if I wanted to drive there.”

Over another cool drink, she told him.

BOOK: Pulse

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