Serial

2

“Why would you invite anyone sane to see this?” Quinn asked.

But he had a pretty good idea why.

New York Police Commissioner Harley Renz wouldn’t be at a bloody crime scene like this unless he considered it vitally important. Renz was standing back, well away from the mess in the tiny living room. The air was fetid with the coppery stench of blood.

The commissioner had put on even more weight in the year since Quinn had seen him. His conservative blue suit was stretched at the seams, rendering its expensive tailoring meaningless. His pink jowls ballooned over the collar of his white silk shirt. More and more, his appearance reflected exactly what he was, a corpulent and corrupt politician with the fleshy facial features of a bloodhound. He looked like a creature of rapacious appetite, and he was one.

“Look at her,” he said, his red-rimmed eyes fleshy triangles of compassion. “Jesus, just look at her!”

What he was demanding wasn’t easy. The woman lay on her back on the bloodstained carpet, with her legs and arms spread as if she’d given up and welcomed what was being done to her so the horror could end. Quinn knew it had taken a long time to end. It looked as if the tendons in the crooks of her arms and behind both knees had been severed so she couldn’t move other than to flop around, and her abdomen had been opened with some kind of knife. Small circular burns indicated a cigarette had been touched to her flesh. Shreds of flesh dangled from her corpse in a way that suggested it had been violated with a blade and then peeled from body and bone with a pair of pliers.

Quinn figured the butchery for an amateur job, not done by anyone with special medical knowledge. The killer’s primary goal was to torture. He’d burned her and stripped away skin for no purpose other than pain.

He must have done this while she was still alive.

Pink bloodstained material, what appeared to be the victim’s panties, was wadded in her mouth. The elastic waistband of the panties was looped around her neck and tightly knotted at the base of her skull.

Quinn looked over at Renz.

“Nift says she was alive and what was done to her took hours,” Renz said. “The stomach was done first.” His voice broke slightly. Not like him.

For the first time Quinn noticed the usually loquacious and obnoxious little medical examiner, Dr. Julius Nift. He was standing alongside a wall with a uniformed cop and a plainclothes detective with his badge dangling in its leather folder from a suit coat pocket. A crime scene tech wearing a white jumpsuit and gloves was over near the door. Everyone seemed to be standing as far away as possible from Renz.

“That’s why there’s so much blood,” Nift said. “A stomach wound like that looks horrible, but the victim doesn’t necessarily die right away. Whatever her condition, he somehow managed to keep her heart pumping for quite a while. There’s a slight ammonia smell around her head, too. Could be he used ammonia like smelling salts, to jolt her around whenever she lost consciousness. So she’d feel everything.”

Quinn could hear a slight hissing and realized it was his own breathing. Being here with the dead woman, where there had been so much agony, was like being in a catacomb with a saint. Then he understood why he’d made the comparison. Clutched tightly in the victim’s pale right hand like a rosary was a silver letter S on a thin chain that was wrapped around her neck. Careful not to step in any of the darkening puddles of blood, Quinn leaned forward to more closely examine the necklace.

“Kinda crap you find in a Times Square souvenir shop.” Renz said.

“That’s where it might have come from,” Quinn said. “It says ‘New York’ in tiny letters on the back.”

“I noticed,” Renz said, probably lying.

Quinn straightened up and looked around. The living room was tastefully decorated, with wicker furniture and a large wicker mask on one wall. On the opposite wall was a framed Degas ballerina print with “MoMA” printed on the matting. Not expensive furnishings, but not cheap. The apartment was cramped, and the block in this neighborhood in the East Village wasn’t a good one.

Quinn wondered what made this a big case for Renz. Major money didn’t seem to be involved. This woman appeared to have lived well but modestly. Politics might be at play here. Maybe the victim had been somebody’s secret lover. Somebody important.

No. If that were true Renz would be using it for leverage. He seemed emotionally involved here. It wouldn’t be because of the goriness of the crime. He’d seen plenty of gore in his long career. He-

Nift was saying, “You wouldn’t know it to look at her now…”

Careful, Quinn thought, knowing how Nift was prone to make salacious remarks about dead female victims.

“… but she was kind of athletic, especially for her age,” Nift finished, avoiding an explosion from Renz.

“I wanna show you something else,” Renz said, ignoring Nift. He led Quinn from the bedroom and into a small bathroom.

There was a claw-footed porcelain tub there, and a washbasin without a vanity attached to the wall. Everything was tiled either gray or blue. White towels stained red with diluted blood were jumbled on the floor and in the tub. The tub, as well as the washbasin, had red stains that looked like patterns of paint applied by a madman.

“Bastard washed up in here after he killed her,” Renz said, “But more than that.” He pointed at the medicine chest mirror, on which someone, presumably the killer, had scrawled in blood the name Philip Wharkin.

“The killer?” Quinn asked.

“Maybe. The kind of asshole who’s daring us to catch him. It’s happened before. They’re out there.”

“Don’t we know it.”

Quinn moved closer to the mirror and leaned in to study the crudely printed red letters. “I don’t think he’s one of those. He was careful. This was written with a finger dabbed in blood, and it looks like he had on rubber gloves.” He backed away from the mirror. “If nothing else, this is a passion crime. Maybe the victim had a thing with Philip Wharkin and it went seriously bad.”

“That’s how I figure it,” Renz said. “If she did, we’ll sure as hell find out.”

Quinn could see Renz’s jaw muscles flex even through the flab. This one was important to him, all right. Maybe, for some reason, his ill-gained position as commissioner depended on it.

They left the stifling bathroom and returned to the living room. The techs were still busy, having taken advantage of the extra space created when Renz and Quinn had left. Nift was down on one knee packing his black bag, finished with the body until it was transported to the morgue.

The corpse was unaffected by any of it. Its pale blue eyes, widened in horror, gazed off at some far horizon they would all at some time see. Quinn felt a chill race up his spine. Hours ago this bloody, discarded thing on the floor had been a vital and perhaps beautiful woman.

“How old do you estimate she was?” Quinn asked Nift.

It was Renz who answered. “Twenty-three. And it’s not an estimate.”

“You got a positive ID?” Quinn asked.

“Yeah,” Renz said.

He leaned over the corpse and lifted it slightly off the carpet, turning it so Quinn could see the victim’s back.

Her shoulders and the backs of both arms were covered with old burn scars. Quinn had similar scars on his right shoulder and upper arms.

“The killer didn’t do that to her back,” Renz said, returning the body to its original position.

Quinn looked again at the victim’s features, trying to imagine them without the distortion of horror and the scarlet stains.

He felt the blood recede from his face. Then he began to tremble. He tried but couldn’t stop the tremors.

“It’s Millie Graff,” Renz said.