Serial

16

Michelle Roper had informed Quinn that Nora Noon had a sister somewhere in New Jersey. It hadn’t taken long to find her, not very far away in Teaneck. Fedderman waited at the morgue the next morning for the sister, Penny Noon, who was driving in to the city to identify the body.

The victim’s sister turned out to be a half sister, an attractive woman with choppy blond hair with dark streaks in it that looked deliberate. There wasn’t much of a family resemblance to her murdered sister, maybe because the victim was obviously much the younger of the two. Penny had a fuller face, calm gray eyes with the beginnings of crow’s-feet, and full lips with pink gloss. She did have the same deeply cleft chin as the victim. Her demeanor was tense but controlled, her strong features seemingly placid.

After the introductions, Penny, Fedderman, and a guy named Clarkson, from Renz’s office, stood and waited for Nora Noon’s postmortem photograph to appear on a monitor mounted at eye level on the wall. Clarkson wasn’t yet forty and dressed in a sharp gray suit, starched white shirt, and gold-clasped tie, making Fedderman by comparison look… like Fedderman.

There were chairs angled around the viewing room, but no one was sitting down. Penny had refused the offer of a chair, and the two men felt obligated to stand with her. She was slightly behind Renz’s man and standing on Fedderman’s right, about a foot away from him. Fedderman recalled the victim’s bulging eyes and horror-stricken expression. He knew what might happen and made himself ready to catch a falling body.

But Nora Noon’s head-shot photo was surprisingly without the horror of yesterday in that stifling apartment. Her eyes were closed and her facial muscles worked into a neutral expression. The photo was cropped so it showed none of the burn marks on her neck and farther down on her body. None of the stripped flesh.

“Her,” Penny Noon said from somewhere deep in her throat. And in a steadier voice: “That’s Nora.”

Then she emitted a soft sound halfway between a sigh and a sob, and her body sagged against Fedderman.

He caught her and helped her-carried her, actually-to one of the padded black chairs and lowered her gently into it.

She came around suddenly, as if someone had waved smelling salts under her nose. She looked into Fedderman’s eyes, causing something in him to turn over and over, and appeared profoundly embarrassed.

“It’s all right,” he heard himself say. He watched his arm move independent of thought and his hand pat the back of hers.

He realized he was kneeling down in front of the chair like an idiot about to propose marriage. His knee was sore from supporting his weight on the hard tile floor. For some reason he was afraid to look again into her eyes, as if a part of him knew that something profound might happen. Again.

Listening to his aching knee creak, Fedderman made himself stand and turn at the same time. As he did so he glanced up, and was relieved to see a blank monitor screen rather than the dead woman’s photo.

“It’s all right,” he repeated. “This part’s over.”

“For Nora, everything’s over.” He thought she was going to start sobbing, but she bit back any show of emotion or loss of control. “It’s so goddamned unfair,” she said in a resigned voice.

“It is,” he agreed.

“I guess everyone says that.”

“Everyone’s right.”

She looked around slowly, as if gradually waking from a dark dream and finding herself in strange surroundings.

“God!” she said, shaking her head.

“He’s in the mix somewhere,” Fedderman said, knowing as he heard the words that it was an inane thing to say.

She gave him a closer look, curious, her eyes intent and traveling in brief glances, as if she was mapping his features. He could not look away.

“Are you a religious man?” she asked.

“I have been a few times,” Fedderman said, “when I was sufficiently scared.”

Her wide lips curved upward in a slight smile that stayed. Her hands were in her lap, turned palms up and trembling, as if she were waiting for her fortune to be told and dreading the prognosis.

“That applies to me, too,” she said.

Renz’s man had come over and was standing looking down at her. “You okay, ma’am?” he asked.

“Okay enough.”

He nodded, gave her a smile that meant nothing, and left the room, his mission as witness to the identification completed.

“There goes a piece of the bureaucracy,” Penny said.

“I’m a piece of the bureaucracy, too.”

“You don’t seem a precise fit.”

Fedderman didn’t know what she meant by that remark, but he was sure he approved.

“I need something,” Penny said.

“A drink?”

“Something warm. Coffee, decaffeinated. I think I saw a vending machine when I entered the building.”

“You wouldn’t want to drink anything that came out of that,” Fedderman heard himself say. “I know a place where we could go.”

I must be out of my mind.

She looked at him for several seconds before nodding, as if confirming what he’d been thinking.