Pulse

21

W hen the super let them into Ann Spellman’s apartment, both Quinn and Pearl noticed a door near the end of the hall edge open a few inches and then close. Someone sneaking a peek at death.

Yet when the neighbors were questioned, they usually didn’t want to get involved and had little to say.

Quinn dismissed the super and closed the door behind them. The super seemed to want a look around the dead woman’s apartment, too. It made Quinn wonder if the man had entered and had his look-see earlier. It was odd how anything that had to do with a publicized murder victim held a certain attraction. Ann Spellman was dead and had died the hard way, so the super might have been unable to resist treading sacred carpet and hardwood, touching sacrosanct personal objects the recently deceased had touched.

The aftermath of violent death still resonated in the apartment, as if the tenant were sadly lingering and hesitant to leave. Quinn and Pearl each knew the other could feel it, and said nothing. The air was heavy and the only sounds were from traffic outside the building.

They set about carefully looking over the apartment, not hurrying but not wasting motion. Pros who knew their job.

They found no computer, but there was a Lexmark printer on a small table by the desk. On the desk pad was what looked like an indentation where a laptop might have regularly sat when it wasn’t traveling.

The contents of the desk did reveal that Ann Spellman had run up a sixteen-hundred-dollar Visa card balance, and that she worked for Clinton Industrial Designs, on East Fifty-fourth Street near Second Avenue.

With that information, and some personal notes and letters, they learned that she’d recently been fired, and gathered that she’d been having an affair with her boss, one Louis Gainer.

Damn him! Damn him! Damn him! was scribbled in pen on the top sheet of a Post-it pad. Quinn thought it was a good bet that the object of the scribbling was Louis Gainer, and the affair was over. The split had probably happened recently, since the note hadn’t been disposed of when a better use arose for the pad.

The apartment’s kitchen was neat and clean except for an empty carry-out pizza box stuffed into a wastebasket surrounded by a scattering of crumbs on the tile floor. The spotlessly clean oven and meager contents of the refrigerator suggested that Ann Spellman had eaten out often, or had food delivered. A hardworking career woman. Until last night.

Nothing unusual in the medicine cabinet. Tylenol, a bent tube of toothpaste, dental floss, a bottle of antibiotic tablets with an expired date, mint mouthwash. On a top shelf were some morning-after pills. Cautious Ann Spellman. Not cautious enough. The pills that prevented life couldn’t prevent death.

The closet revealed a female mid-level executive’s wardrobe: slacks and blazers, modest blouses, and at least half a dozen pairs of high-heeled shoes. Black was the predominate color. There was the expected basic black dress, with flimsy straps and a neckline low enough that the garment kept slipping from its wire hanger whenever Quinn touched it.

There were also faded jeans, worn-down joggers, and a pair of blue Crocs-for weekend casual wear, no doubt. But most of Ann Spellman’s wardrobe wasn’t casual; it was conservative business wear. Not high-end designer clothes, but nonetheless expensive. Possibly she was as talented as Fernandez the super had suggested, and had held-and been fired from-a fairly responsible job.

A search of the dresser drawers netted nothing of significance. Tucked beneath conservative slacks, and more folded jeans and T-shirts in the bottom drawer, were leopard-print thong panties and a vibrator shaped like a penis. Big whoop-de-do. No whips, chains, leather outfits, or anything of that sort.

There were a couple of Robert B. Parker books on the bottom shelf of a bedside table, along with a book of photographs of Frank Lloyd Wright homes. Wright was on the cover in an old black-and-white photo, looking grim. As if he knew what had happened to Ann Spellman.

Pearl, standing by the dresser with its drawers still open, said, “She wore lots of thong underwear.”

“Do a lot of women wear that stuff?” Quinn asked. “It looks uncomfortable as hell.”

“That’s never stopped us,” Pearl said. “But I can’t answer your question. I’ve never seen a poll. I do know stores sell the hell out of thong underpants. Men go for women who like that kind of thing.”

“You’ve seen a poll?”

“They conduct them hourly in hook-up bars all over the city.”

“Hmm.”

“The thing is,” Pearl said, “Ann Spellman’s panties were a size too large for her.”

Quinn stood still and looked at Pearl, knowing where she was going.

“Right,” Pearl said. “They were the right size for Macy Collins. The size of all her other panties.”

Quinn should have realized it himself-Daniel Danielle usually left the corpses of his victims wearing the panties of his previous victim. For continuity, the Florida police profiler had said, which suggested the killer might be obsessive-compulsive.

Aren’t they all?

“Judging by the panty count I just made,” Pearl said, “the chances are better than fifty-fifty that the next victim will be wearing thong underwear the same size as what’s in this drawer.”

“I’d put it at sixty-forty,” Quinn said. “She must have gotten some kind of kick out of it, wearing her conservative business clothes over a thong.”

“Like half the working women in New York,” Pearl said.

“You really think so?”

“That’s what the polls say.”

“Who do they ask?”

“Men.”

“Ah.”

Quinn cupped his chin in his hand and glanced around the room. Ann Spellman seemed to fall within the amorphous definition of normal. Quinn had found no drug paraphernalia, serious S and M equipment, or extreme pornography. Nothing in her life suggesting danger.

Except, maybe, her recent firing from her job, and her breakup with Louis Gainer.

Quinn wondered which had come first.

Damn him! Damn him! Damn him!

The killer always enjoyed sipping an espresso at a sidewalk table at one of the city’s restaurants featuring outside dining. This Upper West Side restaurant, Spirit, had a wide, mustard-colored awning to ensure shade, and two large box fans providing something like a breeze. People were frequently walking past on the sidewalk beyond the black iron railing, a narrow passageway between the seating area and the traffic.

It was pleasant here, watching the hurrying pedestrians and the traffic on Amsterdam. The dinner crowd hadn’t yet arrived. There weren’t many other customers. A man and woman sat three tables away, leaning toward each other and engaged in intense conversation. The woman, with a small, shaggy dog resting at her feet, had her blond hair pinned up, and an oversized nose that made her unattractive. The man with her was also blond. He had a sparse ponytail, and was wearing jeans and a blue denim vest over a white T-shirt. They were both drinking beer from green bottles. Not far from them was a balding man who had a blue backpack resting beside his chair, and two men with heavy gray beards. The bearded ones were playing chess.

At a table near them sat a tall, thin man sipping what looked like iced tea and munching nuts from a small ceramic bowl.

The killer looked around his open netbook at the expanse of his glass-topped table and saw no nuts. Saw none on any of the other tables. He guessed you had to ask for them. He worked the computer’s touch pad, clicking the netbook’s cursor on the various pages of, one of the many websites that promised men the opportunity to meet whatever type of lonely woman they preferred. It was like browsing through a catalog. The killer found the website immensely entertaining. Tech was wonderful. Other people struggled with each new device or application that made its way to the market. Not the killer. He seemed to have been born to be a tech head.

“May I have some nuts?”

A waiter nodded and disappeared inside the restaurant.

The killer turned his attention to the two bearded men playing chess. They appeared to be in their sixties. Each was bent over the board, giving the game his rapt attention. One of them had several more pieces than the other. Traffic hummed and fumed past only a few feet from them, but they were oblivious to what was happening out in the street, beyond the shade of the awning. Right here, right now, the game was everything to them. Winning was paramount.

The killer had to smile. The chess players were completely unaware of him. They had no idea that going on very near them was a much more serious game of move and countermove. A game where lives were involved.

And deaths.

After another slow sip of espresso, the killer smiled even wider, at least on the inside.

He was contemplating how women, if you chose them carefully, became terrified and evasive when they knew they were being stalked, when they understood what was intended. They became truly desperate.

Then, at a certain point, they became played out and tired of watching and taking alternate routes, of double-checking locks, of constantly being cautious, of being afraid. They wanted it to happen, to be over. They welcomed it, whatever it was. They welcomed him.

Women. The perfect prey animal, surely made that way by God for the predators.

Of course, when they learned what it was really like, they changed their minds. Always. But too late.

They were like the prey animals on television nature channels that stood gasping and heaving after the chase, waiting for the inevitable because finally, on a primal level, they understood what and why they were. They would run no more. They accepted their predetermined end.

But when fang and claw were applied, when their last seconds arrived, they always struggled meagerly and futilely. A final and feeble burst of life force, not enough.

It interested him, that inevitable summoning of dying effort. Why did they cling so to every last tick of life? What did they know, or see, that frightened them so? A glimpse behind the curtain? Perhaps something looking back at them.

Or perhaps, nothing at all

He thought of Ann Spellman. Of how she’d fought so for her last few seconds of life. Of how her fingers had fluttered like a poignant good-bye at the end.

Of Frank Quinn and his dangerous band of misfit detectives.

Of Pearl.

God, he loved the game they were playing! A part of him worried that maybe he was beginning to love it too much and it cautioned him with inner voices. But for now he’d ignore those voices. He hated to use the word fun, because it seemed so inadequate to describe what he was capable of feeling. But the fact was-

The waiter reappeared, and the killer beckoned him with a languid wave of his hand.

“Some nuts, please.”