Pulse

10

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.