Serial

70

New York, the present

Quinn wasn’t surprised when he picked up his desk phone and found himself talking with Nancy Weaver in Philadelphia.

He was the first one in the office, as he often was, and he suspected she’d phoned at the early hour to talk to him when he was alone, before things got busy.

Her voice had changed, he noticed, gotten huskier, and she seemed to be forcing her words.

“The news I’m reading and seeing makes it seem you’re not making much progress,” she said.

He smiled. “You call to chew me out?”

“No. To thank you, more than anything. You looked after me. Then you got me off the treadmill where I was running faster and faster but didn’t realize it.”

“Now that you’ve slowed down,” Quinn said, “how are you doing?”

“I’m feeling better, but after the first whack on the back of my head, I don’t remember much of anything until I woke up in the hospital. I lie in bed every night and work on it until I go to sleep, but I don’t think I got a clear look at whoever attacked me. I can’t say for sure it was Sanderson.”

“It doesn’t matter anymore-not to you, Nancy. You’re out of this one, and out of anything else, until you get back to being yourself.”

“I’m enough like myself to view what’s happening at a distance. It still looks to me like you’ve gotta pull out all the stops until you nail this asshole.”

Quinn wondered whether the way she was mixing metaphors meant her mind still wasn’t functioning at full capacity. Or maybe he was falling into the trap of playing amateur psychologist. “We’re doing what we have to,” he said. “We’ll get him. You take care of yourself and let us worry about who gets nailed when the stops are pulled.”

“Huh? You okay, Quinn?”

He grinned. “Maybe I need time off more than you do.”

He heard the street door, then the office door open. Pearl had arrived.

“What’s going on there?” Weaver asked on the phone.

“Pearl just came in.”

“Tell her I said hello,” Weaver said, and hung up.

Good buddies, as long as they’re in different cities.

“Who was that?” Pearl asked, from where she was standing by the coffee machine.

“Weaver.”

“Her brain still Jell-O?”

“More or less.”

The street door made its clattering, pneumatic sound again. There were footfalls in the tile foyer, and then the office door flew open.

Quinn had expected to see Fedderman. Instead, Jerry Lido came bursting in. His khaki pants were amazingly wrinkled, his gray shirt was crookedly buttoned, and his tousled hair stuck out over his ears like wings.

Lido’s eyes were swollen and bloodshot from fatigue, but his skinny body throbbed with energy. He was grinning with every snaggletooth and his face seemed to be illuminated from inside like a Halloween jack-o’-lantern’s.

“I got something!” he almost shouted, his voice cracking as if he were a teenager grown too old for the choir.

“I hope to hell it isn’t catching,” Pearl said.

He aimed his glow of animated enthusiasm at her and then plopped heavily into her desk chair. “Pour me some coffee, Pearl.”

She looked at him as if he’d gone insane. “I’ve got some boiling hot in this cup. Tell me where you want me to pour it.”

Lido ignored her and turned his illuminated glassy stare toward Quinn. He sighed, as if he’d finally caught his breath. “I’ve got something,” he repeated, only slightly more calmly.

“What have you got other than delirium tremens?” Pearl asked.

Quinn glanced at her and held out a hand palm down, signaling for her to lay off Lido so they could find out why he was so excited. He knew Lido and was sure that if he was this ecstatic he must at least think he had good reason. Besides, Quinn was sure that Lido wasn’t drunk or hungover. Quinn recognized the symptoms. Lido was high on adrenaline while walking the jagged edge of exhaustion.

Lido beamed at both of them. “I worked the Internet all night, and I came up with a name.”

No one moved or said anything for several seconds.

“The name we’ve been looking for?” Pearl asked.

Lido placed a cupped hand on each kneecap and nodded. “The name we’ve got for sure.”

Pearl walked over to the brewer and poured him a cup of coffee.

Tanya Moody had overslept. Her first thought when she opened her eyes was that she shouldn’t have taken that extra sleeping pill last night to calm her nerves. Daylight was streaming into the bedroom. She’d left the drapes opened wide and the window raised, so she could get some breeze during the first cool night forecast in weeks.

Tanya’s second thought was that she was going to be late for work, and cascading behind that came the realization that something was wrong. She couldn’t move. She became aware that she was breathing through her nose, and that realization made it suddenly difficult to breathe.

She tried to explore with her tongue, but even that was constricted. Her mouth was stuffed with material of some sort. Silk? She probed with her tongue’s tip and found the backs of her teeth, managed to open her mouth slightly, and beyond the folds of material felt the tacky surface of… tape!

And the material jammed into her mouth was silk…

She knew immediately what was happening. The open window she’d thought was far enough from the fire escape hadn’t been far enough away at all.

She had a visitor.

Panic hit her as if she’d been Tasered. Her body vibrated and bucked, but she remained lying on her stomach, her wrists taped tightly behind her at the small of her back, her legs taped firmly together.

Finally the panic passed. The terror remained.

For some reason she thought of mermaids. Mermaids have no legs, only a single tail that they can flop around helplessly when out of the water. But mermaids could at least speak. With her panties wadded into a mass in her mouth, and her lips sealed with duct tape, Tanya could make only a low humming sound.

“I’m glad you’re awake,” a man’s voice said.

She managed to swivel her head toward the sound, causing a sharp ache in her neck, as if she’d been jabbed with a needle. Outlined against the angled morning sunlight splashed on the white sheer curtains, she saw the dim silhouette of a man.

As he moved toward her she noticed something short and curved in his hand. She could tell by the way he was holding it-out away from his body and with respect-that it was a knife.

With an oddly delicate motion, he removed the thin sheet that was covering her.

Tanya was suddenly cold, and at the same time felt a spreading warm wetness beneath her as her bladder released. Until now, she had only thought she’d known fear.

He gently laid something over her head-the sheet-so that she couldn’t see what was coming. She knew that he wanted each singular agony to be a surprise.

Two, three drops of liquid fell onto the sheet, and she smelled the acrid scent of ammonia. Then came a sound she recognized-the ratchet catch of a cigarette lighter-and another scent she knew. He’d lit a cigarette.

If there had been any doubt as to who had her, there was none now.

Tanya began to scream, over and over, sounding very much like a desperate bee trapped in a tightly sealed jar.

There was only one person close enough to hear her, and he wasn’t going to help.