Serial

31

Quinn and Pearl stood among the Crime Scene Unit techs, medical examiner, and police photographer, looking down at the dead body of Candice Culligan. In the corner of his vision Quinn saw Pearl absently cross herself. She was given to spells of Catholicism.

Dr. Julius Nift, the ME, was still bending over the bed on which Candice lay. He was feeling and probing, his jaw set, his eyes intent. Repugnant though the little ME might be, Quinn had no doubts about Nift’s competence.

“Last night around midnight, give or take two hours,” Nift said, in answer to Quinn’s question about time of death. “That’s all I can give you right now. It looks as if he started in on her hours before she died.”

“Stringing it out,” Pearl said through clenched teeth.

“Exacting torture,” Nift said, “with periods of rage. The way she’s so tightly taped indicates that. And look at the careful and precise stripping away of the top layer of skin so it dangles in shreds. Almost as if he were decorating her.”

Quinn forced himself to look again at what was left of Candice Culligan.

“Observe how those small cut marks and cigarette burns were done with such deliberation,” Nift continued. “Now look at her pubic area, the way it was slashed. Those long, curved cuts. This was a crime of passion. Sometimes cold passion, but passion nonetheless.”

“What about the shoe used as a gag?” Quinn asked.

Nift shrugged. “You tell me.”

“The way it’s taped to her face, so the spiked heel looks like it’s coming out of her forehead, makes it look almost like a unicorn horn.”

“So why would he give up on the wadded panties used as a gag?” Nift asked.

“He’s not satisfied with just pain,” Pearl said. “He wants to humiliate his victims. He’s getting more violent, more dangerous, if that’s possible.”

“Why all the dried blood around her mouth?” Quinn asked Nift.

“Shoe toe mighta been jammed in there so hard it took some teeth out. I’ll know more when I get her on the table and we get intimately acquainted.”

Pearl felt her stomach turn. It was all she could do to hold herself in check and not physically attack Nift.

“The name on the mirror this time is Nathan Devliner,” Fedderman said, walking back into the spacious bedroom. He’d been in another part of the apartment, checking for bloody writing. “I guess we have to check the Socrates’s Cavern membership again.”

Quinn said. “We still have the chain with the letter S.”

“We were speculating about the shoe jammed in her mouth, and bent and taped over her face so it looks like she’s grown a horn,” Pearl said.

“Unicorn horn,” Fedderman said.

Pearl glanced at Quinn.

“Great minds in the same channel,” he said. But the stiletto heel did resemble a unicorn horn.

“Maybe a reference to a goat,” Fedderman said. “A unicorn is a kind of goat.”

“Sacrificial goats,” Pearl said. She looked at Quinn and Fedderman. “Who knows what goes on in the minds of these sickos?”

“Isn’t it sacrificial lambs?” Fedderman said.

“Lambs don’t have horns,” Pearl said.

“They do if they’re rams.”

“Then they’re not lambs.”

“Enough,” Quinn said.

“Maybe the killer just happened to find the shoe handy and figured it would make an effective gag,” Fedderman said.

“The shoe’s mate is in the closet,” Quinn said. “He must have taken time out while she was unconscious or too scared to scream, and gone to get it and bring it back over to the bed. He was looking for effect. Whether he was thinking of sacrificial lambs-or goats-is hard to say.”

“Or unicorns,” Pearl said. “They’re mythological, and maybe that’s what our killer wants to become. That’s what most serial killers want to become-myths.” She did a double take and gave Fedderman a keen, appraising look. “What’s with the new suit, Feds? I miss your baggy brown outfit. You keep wearing those Armani threads and people will stop thinking of you as a sartorial disaster. The rumor is that you abuse your suits before you wear them so you’ll look like a suspect after a rough night in the lockup. It makes the riffraff identify with you and open up in interrogations.”

“That’s only a myth,” Fedderman said.

Quinn looked more carefully at Fedderman. He, too, had noticed something different about the potbellied, lanky detective. Fedderman’s obviously expensive blue suit made him look as if his mismatched body was made of matching parts, which was a triumph of tailoring.

The suit was a pip. Quinn could think of only a few reasons why Fedderman might suddenly have become a virtual GQ model. He didn’t like any of them.

After the techs left, Quinn and his detectives went through the apartment methodically. They were sure the lab wouldn’t come up with a useful fingerprint or palm print, and there would be nothing distinctive about the gloves the killer wore. The Skinner was nothing if not careful.

Quinn made it a point to check Candice Culligan’s address book. It contained no Nathan Devliner.

There was no Nathan Devliner in any of the NYC directories.

“Give me a minute,” Pearl said, from where she was seated on the sofa working her laptop. “I’ll check the Socrates’s Cavern membership list Lido came up with.”

The others stood silently while she bent closely over her computer.

“Here it is!” she said after a few minutes. “Devliner was a member.”

She raised a finger, asking for more time.

They gave it to her. More than a few minutes this time.

“Okay,” she said finally, looking up from her computer. “Nathan Ernest Devliner was a Socrates’s Cavern gold-key member from January, 1970, to September, 1975, when he moved out of the area. He died in Kingdom City, Arizona, in April of 1986. A cerebral hemorrhage. He was seventy-four. I guess he retired and moved west.”

“He retired and then some,” Quinn said. “What he didn’t do is torture and kill Candice Culligan. What he isn’t is the Skinner.”

Leaving them with the same puzzle they’d set out to solve.