Serial (14 page)

No one spoke for a while. Pearl booted up her desk computer and fed something into it with a flash drive she’d brought with her and dug out of her purse. She seemed, in her mind, to be alone in the room.

Quinn wondered why she had to hound Fedderman so persistently. She did that to almost everyone she knew. Quinn could love her because he understood that these were defensive actions. Preemptory strikes, but defensive.

There were other, more admirable, facets to Pearl’s personality, and she was so damned smart. That last part was what made her at least bearable to her fellow detectives. There was no denying her talent. Or her doggedness.

Still, she could make life miserable for Fedderman. And for Vitali and Mishkin when they were unable to avoid her.

And, let’s face it, sometimes for Quinn.

“I did a few hours’ work on my laptop before coming in,” she said. “Made a discovery.”

“About our latest victim?” Quinn asked.

“Yeah. Six years ago Candice Culligan was beaten and raped. They caught the guy and he got fifteen to twenty at Elmira. Five months ago he was released because DNA evidence established that even though she’d identified him, he couldn’t have been the rapist.”

Pearl took a slow sip of coffee. Quinn knew she had more to say and was stringing it out. Fedderman was glaring at her, maybe still angry about the remark about not knowing Penny Noon’s full name.

“So she was a rape victim,” Fedderman said.

“They all were.”

Quinn leaned forward. “Say again, Pearl.”

“
All
of the victims where there were Socrates’s Cavern clues were at one time or another rape victims. And the accused and convicted rapist in each case was released when DNA evidence overturned his conviction.”

“So that’s the relevant common denominator,” Quinn said. “Not Socrates’s Cavern.”

“It would seem so,” Pearl said. “We’ve been had.”

“The bastard was playing us,” Fedderman said. “Using Socrates’s Cavern’s old membership list to lead us down the wrong road.”

“We suspected it,” Pearl said. “At least, I did.”

Quinn laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back, back, back in his swivel chair. Pearl and Fedderman were used to Quinn tempting disaster. He’d never actually tipped the chair, only almost.

“Bears thinking about, doesn’t it?” Pearl said.

“Sure does,” Quinn said. “It’s too much of a coincidence that all these falsely accused and released rapists would all at once set about killing the women responsible for putting them behind bars.”

“And ruining those men’s lives,” Fedderman said, “breaking up their families, blackening their reputations, costing them their employment…”

“Yeah, yeah,” Pearl said. “You’re thinking these guys have actually all gone bonkers at once and are getting their evens with the women who messed up their lives?”

“It’s barely possible,” Fedderman said, but not as if he believed it.

Pearl got a comb from her purse and ran it through her hair. “We’re talking about a serial killer here, Feds. And a torturer. Not many people—even pissed-off falsely accused men—have that kind of monster living inside their skins.”

“But one of them does,” Quinn said. “One who knows he’ll be the prime suspect when his accuser is murdered. The initial victims and the Socrates’s Cavern connection are subterfuge. A forest so we won’t notice the tree. He’s killing the others so his intended victim will be just another corpse, part of a string of serial-killer victims.”

“And if he’s arranged for a halfway plausible alibi,” Pearl said, “we’ll never get onto him.”

“Oh, we will,” Quinn said. “Sooner or later we’ll nail the bastard.”

“I like the imagery,” Pearl said.

“I wonder how many other women are out there in the same positions,” Fedderman said, “with the men they falsely identified as their rapists recently sprung from prison.”

“According to Blood and Justice—” Pearl began.

“What’s that?” Quinn asked.

“The organization of attorneys dedicated to using DNA evidence to right legal wrongs. I used their website statistics to work it out. The number of mistakenly identified and convicted rapists released in the last five years in the New York area is thirty-two.”

“You’re joking?” Fedderman said.

Pearl finished with the comb and put it back in her purse. Her hair was still disheveled. “DNA doesn’t joke.”

“Assuming all those women are still in the area,” Quinn said, “they’re all in danger. We need to talk to them.”

“And the men who did time because of them,” Fedderman said. “One of them is probably the Skinner.”

“I’ll print out the list of women,” Pearl said. “Then I’ll work up the list of their exonerated alleged rapists.”

“Names, addresses, whatever else you can find out,” Quinn said.

Pearl was smiling. “I was just thinking, the safest of those women is the one the murderer doesn’t want to harm until he’s ready to risk drawing attention to himself—the woman who mistakenly identified the Skinner.”

“If she isn’t dead,” Fedderman said. “One of the early victims.”

Quinn shook his head no. “To be on the safe side, our guy will wait and take her down somewhere in the middle of his trophy hunt. He’ll want the camouflage.”

“Crazy old world,” Fedderman said.

“It is if you’re mooning about Penelope,” Pearl said.

Fedderman was about to say something when Quinn caught his eye. Fedderman let out a long breath and sat back.
Some things,
said the look on his face,
you simply have to endure
.

Like Pearl and inclement weather.

“First thing we need to do,” Quinn said, “is talk to the three men who were falsely accused of raping the first three victims.”

“Keeping in mind,” Pearl said, “that part of what we believe could be bullshit, and we might be talking to the killer.”

Pithy Pearl.

“There is one other job I figured I’d give to Feds,” Quinn said. “We need somebody to go to a slaughterhouse and find out if they use a special knife to remove calves’ tongues. If so, see if they’ll give you one.” Quinn grinned. “A knife, that is.”

Fedderman got up and deftly slipped on and buttoned his suit coat, as if he were about to model it. “Somebody’s gotta look into this tongue thing, so why not me?”

“It’ll keep your mind off Penelope,” Quinn said.

Pearl said, “God, I hope so.”

When Fedderman had left, Quinn phoned Renz at One Police Plaza.

“A breakthrough on the Skinner case?” Renz asked.

“Any second now,” Quinn said. “Did you talk to Nift or read his report?”

“Yeah. The thing with the tongue—that’s new. Give you any ideas?”

“Symbolism, maybe,” Quinn said. “The victims talked at a trial and sent people to prison for rapes they didn’t commit.”

“
All
of the victims?”

“So far, yeah. And there are twenty-nine more women out there who might fit the profile. They need to be offered protection.”

“They will be,” Renz said.

The phone was silent for a few seconds.

“Then the entire goddamned chain of murders is symbolism,” Renz said. “I don’t see why we should settle on the tongue.”

“The killer apparently took it with him. Maybe that means something.”

“Or not.” Renz was thinking about what else might not mean something. Protecting as many as twenty-nine women around the clock. Three eight-hour shifts times thirty-two.
Yeah, find me ninety-six cops with nothing to do, Quinn.

Renz would do what he could.

“Either way, let’s keep this tongue business from the media,” Quinn said. “Only the Skinner and us will know about it. That way we can use it to test for false confessions and weed out all the crazies.”

“Good idea, Quinn. Seems like everybody and their cousins are confessing to these murders, except for the real killer. Keeps our phone lines burning. And sometimes people actually walk into precinct houses and confess. Why the hell do people do that?”

“Maybe the same reason they confess in church,” Quinn said.

“There,” Renz said, “is a scary thought.”

It wasn’t as scary as the ones Quinn was thinking.

Hogart, 1991

“You’re
what
?” Roy Brannigan asked his wife. He jumped out of his chair as if lightning had struck nearby.

It was a warm summer night. The sky was still a faint purple, and dusk had sent its advance scout shadows among the trees. Crickets were chirping. Beth and Roy were on the porch. Beth had thought this would be a good time and place to tell him. Good as any, that is. She was pretending to sip ice water, and Roy had just finished drinking his second beer. Beth thought two beers might make him mellow enough that he wouldn’t turn mean when she … surprised him. She sure didn’t want to wait and take her chances with five or six beers.

She said the word again, realizing it was like dropping a stone into a calm pond: “Pregnant.”

Roy paced three steps this way and that on the plank porch, a man walking nowhere, banging his heels so they made a lot of noise. “For the love of Jesus, Beth!”

She remained seated in her rocking chair, knowing that if she stood it might escalate whatever was going to happen.

“Roy, please! It’s not like it’s my fault.”

He stopped pacing to face her with his fists propped on his hips. “How were you dressed? What were you doing taking a shortcut I told you over and over not to take? And at night! What were you carrying under your arm? How’d you just happen to cross paths with that Vincent Salas?”

“How do you know—”

“That it isn’t mine?” He turned his head to the side and spat. “I haven’t touched you since you became unclean in the eyes of the Lord. I hadn’t touched you the month before the… thing with Salas.”

You never touched me enough
, she thought, and was immediately ashamed of herself.

“You got inside you a child with the mark of the beast,” Roy said.

“Don’t talk like that, Roy. I need you.”

“Oh, you got what you need. Dressed like a whore, with alcoholic drinks on display, and wandering through the dark woods. What did you think might happen? What did you
want
to happen?”

“Not what happened, Roy! I swear it.”

“You got nothin’ left to swear to,” Roy said, and hurled his empty beer can far out into the night.

“When you get raped,” Beth said, remembering the ER nurse’s words, “it’s something that happens
to
you. You have no control over it.”

“Like you got no control over lots of things once you start tempting fate and the devil.”

“But I didn’t start—”

He stomped inside the house and slammed the door after him. It made a sound like a gunshot. An execution.

She looked in through a front window a few minutes later and saw him seated at the desk reading his Bible. The hand that wasn’t turning pages was clenched in a fist.

The devil was very real to Roy.

They exchanged no more words before going to bed and lying with their backs turned to each other. Beth couldn’t stop crying and lay with tears tracking down her face and making her pillow damp. Outside the house, insects buzzed loudly and seemed to be accusing her, as if they knew what she was and disapproved. As if all of nature disapproved of her.

When she awoke in bright morning light, only seconds passed before dark dread began smothering her again, tightening her throat and making her sick to her stomach.

The baby…!

She felt with her right hand what might already be a swelling of her abdomen.

Too early. Too early for that.

A slight noise made her raise her head and look around. She was alone in the bed. Roy was fully dressed and standing over by his dresser. He had a suitcase propped on a chair and was stuffing clothes from the dresser drawer into it.

“What’re you doing, Roy?”

“Just what it looks like.”

“You’re packing.”

“That’s what I’m doing,” he said, not bothering to glance her way. “I’m packing.”

Within five minutes she heard the front door slam, and then the car door outside like a belated echo.

The car’s engine kicked over and immediately roared. Tires crunched on gravel and spun faster, casting rock and dirt as if sowing seed.

When the sound of the car had subsided, Beth climbed out of bed and plodded into the living room. The house was silent and felt empty, as if even
she
weren’t there.

Absently dragging her fingertips over furniture, reassuring herself as to its substance, she wandered across the room to the desk and opened the top drawer.

The Bible, King James Version, with its worn red leather cover, wasn’t in its usual place, tucked in the front right corner of the drawer.

She slid open a bottom drawer. There was no sign of the plain yellow envelopes containing Roy’s pornography collection.

Roy was gone.

She was alone.

New York, the present

Adam Wright lived in a basement apartment in Lower Manhattan that wasn’t fit for rats. He was a man in his forties, but he looked older. His face was the color of slate. His eyes were only slightly darker and refused to be still, though they were always downcast. The way his facial bones seemed about to pierce his flesh suggested that once he might have been a handsome man. Now he was wasted as if by some persistent disease.

After Pearl had knocked on his door and shown him her ID, he’d offered her the only chair. It was a rickety, wooden straight-back with wriggly armrests and lots of spindles. On it sat a blue, absolutely flat pad decorated with a faded New York Mets team logo. Pearl settled down carefully on the chair, hoping it wouldn’t collapse beneath her, and got out her notepad and her gnawed yellow pencil. Wright sat slumped on the edge of the unmade bed. She didn’t have to tell him why she’d come.

He said, “I felt as bad as anyone when I heard about Millie Graff being killed.”

“How
did
you hear about it?” Pearl asked. The stench of stale perspiration and something she couldn’t identify made her want to jump up and flee from the tiny efficiency. There was no stove, only a hot plate with a dented old pressure cooker on its double burner. Maybe Wright had been cooking something that produced the rotten smell.

“I saw it in a newspaper somebody threw away. Soon as I read it, I got scared. I think you know why.”

“How’d it happen?” Pearl asked.

“The murder?” His pale eyes remained downcast, roaming this way and that, as if he were trying not to stare at her breasts.

She waited patiently until he looked up at her face. “Not the murder,” she said. “How’d you get the bad collar on the rape charge?”

Eyes down again, focused somewhere to the right of her knees. “I was working on a construction crew over on Tenth Street. Repairing a stone fascia. It was hard work, but it paid good. I’d just been transferred there after a roofing job in SoHo. The others had been there over a week. The guys I was working with talked a lot about Millie Graff, though none of us knew her name then. She had great legs, they said, and whenever she walked past, she’d put on a kind of show for us. Tried to get a reaction. You’d be surprised how many women do that.”

Pearl wouldn’t be surprised by how many construction workers
thought
that. “Maybe it was in your imagination about Millie Graff. She was a professional dancer, so she’d have great legs and a certain way of walking.”

“Yeah, she sure as hell had that. Those. Anyway, the guys that appreciated her pointed her out to me one day, and it seemed to me she gave me the look.”

Pearl raised her eyebrows. “
The
look?”

“That one. So I didn’t think she’d mind if I put a move on her next time she passed. You know, just talked to her.”

“According to the court record, you suggested oral sex, only not in polite language.”

“Yeah, I guess that was kinda outta line.”

“Dumb, too.”

“Sure. But not punishable by five years in prison for a crime I didn’t commit.” His eyes were steadier now, more injured than angry.

“I agree.”

“Sure you do, now, when it’s too late.”

“I’d apologize if it’d do any good,” Pearl said.

Despite herself, she was beginning to like Adam Wright. Or at least beginning not to
dis
like him. It was easy to see what he’d been, and might be now, if he’d had better luck. Beneath the grime and stench was a decent man approaching a premature middle age and the abyss all humans feared. He had been picked up by a whim of fate and plunked down here in a crappy life, and his future looked even worse.

“What do you do now, Adam?” she asked.

“Do? You mean to survive? I get a Social Security disability check because I fell off a ladder a few months ago washing windows. Messed up my back.”

“What’s in that sack over there?”

Immediately she wished she hadn’t asked. Wright began to tremble. He attempted a smile. “You got a search warrant?”

“I don’t want a warrant,” Pearl said. “I’m not gonna look in the sack.”

She made an obvious show of
not
writing in her pad. She’d be damned if she was going to report some poor wreck for selling aluminum cans to augment his disability payments. All so he could pay the rent for this shit hole.

Wright nodded gratefully. He tried to shrug but seemed too weary even for that. “You get outta prison, and even if it’s DNA evidence that sprang you, people still associate you with rape. Now, even with murder. I had a good job doing construction work. Since then I haven’t been able to find anything. I know why, and even understand. Hell, I wouldn’t hire me.” He looked so disgusted he wanted to spit, and probably would have if he wasn’t entertaining company. He dragged a hand with ragged fingernails across his lips. “It’s easier to lose a reputation than to find one.”

“What about the night Millie was murdered?” Pearl asked.

“I was in the hospital, watching hour after hour of
South Park
reruns.”

“My God, Adam.”

“I didn’t kill Kenny, either. Not even once.”

“Get serious, Adam.”

“Okay. That was the night I had my rare bit of luck. I’d bent over earlier that day to pick up a…to pick up something, and I couldn’t straighten up. This happened up at Fifty-fourth Street and Lexington, and a lot of people gathered around me. Some guy with a cell phone called for help and I got taken to a hospital emergency room. They helped me some but not much, and I spent the entire night there, watching TV and driving the nurses crazy, trying to get them to give me more pain pills. Angels of mercy—bullshit!”

“They might turn out to be angels after all,” Pearl said, “if they give you an airtight alibi.”

“That’s what the other cop said.”

Pearl paused in her note taking.

“What other cop would that be?”

“The one who was here a few days after Millie Graff’s murder.”

“What was his name?”

“Her name? Hell, I don’t know. She wasn’t as pretty as you. She had an NYPD badge, though. She was all business.”

“Don’t think I’m not,” Pearl said.

“No, ma’am.”

“I can see how you got into trouble.”

For the first time, Wright smiled. Briefly he looked ten years younger and Pearl saw again what he might have been, and it made her sick.

She put away her pencil and notepad in her purse and stood up, careful not to lean her weight on the chair’s spindly arms.

“That’s it?” Wright asked.

“It.”

He looked disappointed. Probably he never got visitors unless someone in the neighborhood was raped or murdered.

“I was told my alibi checked out,” he said, as if struggling to maintain conversation, to keep her there. His starvation for human contact had overwhelmed his fear. Again Pearl felt a thrust of pity for him. To be such an outcast, to be shunned, could in itself be a disease.

But what could she do? She couldn’t give him back his reputation. His five years.

“How’s your back now?” she asked.

“Not good. I need an operation to repair some ruptured disks. Tell me the city’s gonna pay for that.”

“I would if I thought it’d help.”

“But it won’t.”

“It won’t,” Pearl said, and left him alone in the ruins.

“Wright is just a poor schmuck,” Pearl said, sitting at her desk in the Q&A offices. “My gut tells me he couldn’t kill anyone.”

“Anyone under the right circumstances can kill anyone else,” Quinn said. He was standing, with his sleeves rolled up, drinking a diet Coke.

“You really believe that?” Pearl asked.

Quinn wiped foam from his chin and stared at her, wondering how she could think otherwise, considering the experience she’d had as a cop. “Yeah. I don’t like it, but I believe it.”

Pearl knew he was right, but she didn’t feel like giving Quinn the satisfaction of agreeing with him. Besides, she was still feeling sorry for Adam Wright.

“Wright was in the hospital the night Millie Graff was killed,” she said. “He’d been collecting aluminum cans and hurt his back.”

“That’s his alibi? He hurt his back picking up an aluminum can?”

“Well, he didn’t admit he was a can collector, but I’m sure he is. The important thing is, he hurt his back and was hospitalized at the time of Millie’s murder.”

“You feel for this guy, Pearl?”

“His life is a load of shit. But aside from that, he really does have an alibi.”

“Did you check out his story?”

“No. I will.” Pearl had no doubt that hospital records, along with eyewitness accounts, would substantiate Adam Wright’s alibi. Still, she should be reserving judgment until she verified his alibi. Was she getting soft?

“You getting soft, Pearl?”

Damn it!
Thinking parallel thoughts again. It angered her. It was almost as if her privacy was being invaded.

“You should move in with me permanently,” Quinn said. “We could be like an old married couple that finishes each other’s—”

“Sentences,” Pearl interrupted. She smiled and shook her head. “I don’t think so, Quinn.”

“We’re sleeping together some of the time, anyway, even if we are practicing celibacy.”
Yancy Taggart, even dead, is still in the way
.

“Almost celibacy,” Pearl said. Things had changed lately, and were still changing, but slowly.

“I said
practicing
,” Quinn said. “And I’m redecorating the brownstone for you.”

“That place is an investment,” Pearl said. “And eventually it’ll be a good one. That’s why you’re rehabbing it.”

Quinn smiled. “Pick a room and choose a color.”

“Your room, black.” She laughed. “Never mind. Anyway, if I moved in with you, my mother wouldn’t approve. She still calls it shacking up, like I’m young Barbara Stanwyck in one of those movies where she winds up in an electric chair.”

“Could happen,” Quinn said.

“Yeah, to anyone. You told me so just a few minutes ago.”

“Barbara Stanwyck. Didn’t she usually get last-minute reprieves in those movies?”

“Not all of them.”

“Think about it, Pearl. Please.”

“I have. And my gut feeling is that Adam Wright didn’t kill anyone.”

Quinn sighed, making sure it was loud enough for Pearl to hear. “Okay. Just check his story before we strike him from the list.”

“Of course,” Pearl said. “Quinn?”

“Yeah?”

“The brownstone tonight wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

“Your air conditioner broken?” Quinn asked.

“I’ll break it if you want.”