Tick Tock

Chapter 88

AS SPY MOM DROPPED ME and Emily off in front of One Police Plaza, I felt a tingle run up my side. Instead of my Spidey sense cluing me in to Apt's current location like I was hoping, it was just my cell phone that I'd left on vibrate.

"The good news is that you don't have to attend this morning's piss-and-moan session," my boss said. "One guess what's behind door number two."

I took the phone off my ear and just stared at it as I leaned back on one of the massive concrete bomb-blast planters out in front of the building.

"Another one?" Emily groaned.

"How? Where?" I finally said into the phone.

"The Carlyle Hotel," Mirlam said. "Madison and Seventy-something. Looks like a hooker, Mike. You need to get up there before the news vans. This guy just won't quit."

Emily and I got my car and went crosstown to Sixth Avenue and made a right. It was another sidewalk-scorcher of a day. The overtaxed A/C started spitting water by the time we made it to Midtown. As we approached 42nd, the traffic actually halted, and we did the stop-and-go thing in the white-hot glare. I thought there was an accident or maybe the president was in town, but it turned out to be just a traffic agent blocking off two right-hand lanes for no discernible reason.

"Are you freaking kidding me? Get the hell out of the way!" Emily screamed, practically climbing out of the passenger window to get a piece of the stringy white traffic lady as we roared past.

"And an abusive morning to you, too, Agent Parker," I teased as I gunned it, hoping the city worker didn't catch our plates. "You want to stop for an iced coffee? Or I could pull over and throw open a fire hydrant for you to cool down if you want."

"I don't know how you do it, Mike," Emily said, taking her pulse. "This city. This heat. No wonder everyone here is nuts."

"Present company most definitely included," I said, pointing at her.

We rolled east over to Madison and picked up the pace. Fancy boutiques with even fancier foreign names started sailing past. Emanuel Ungaro, Sonia Rykiel, Bang amp; Olufsen, Christian Louboutin. Were they luggage shops? Jewelry stores? Law firms? If you had to ask, you couldn't afford it, and I most definitely had to ask.

The Carlyle was between East 75th and 76th on the west side of Madison Avenue. It was also right around the corner from Berger's Fifth Avenue co-op building. Was Apt getting sloppier now? I wondered. Was he homesick? Or was he taunting us? If he was, it was working. I most definitely felt taunted.

We had to circle around the block in order to double park on 76th near Fifth behind a patrol car. As we approached the Carlyle, I saw that a section of the hotel was actually under renovation. There was a sidewalk shed and an exterior construction elevator connected to the pale limestone of its north face. Outside the construction entrance, about twenty hardhats, half of them shirtless, were enjoying coffee and cigarettes and the passing women. They immediately shifted their attention to my partner as we passed.

The Carlyle had one of those lobbies that immediately makes you check the shine on your shoes and look to see if there are any spots on your tie. A piano played from somewhere as chandeliers the size of minivans glittered between palace walls of pristine white marble. The black stone floor was so highly buffed, I looked for a "Slippery When Wet" sign.

An almost-as-buffed short black man in a tailored blue suit immediately button-holed us by the check-in desk. The man looked incapable of perspiring, like he'd long ago had the offensive glands removed.

"I'm Adrian Tottinger," the manager said. "The um… unfortunate person is actually downstairs, where they're working."

It was hot again once we entered the hotel's drab concrete back stairwell. At the bottom of it, a uniform snapped his cell phone shut and led us along a stifling corridor past the hotel's kitchen and a rumbling laundry room.

Beyond some hanging plastic and another door, the section of the hotel under construction smelled faintly of an open sewer. The sound of nail guns and shouts rang from above as we walked over gravel to a corner where three more uniforms were standing.

The "unfortunate person" was lying in a large tublike pan used for mixing concrete. The woman had actually been cemented into the tub with just her head and arms and lower legs exposed. As if perhaps she'd mistaken the pan of ready-mix for a Jacuzzi and had fallen asleep.

She was pale and had white-blond hair and a Marilyn Monroe or Madonna look. Even with most of her face beaten black and blue and her neck swollen and purple, she'd obviously been quite attractive. Now she was naked and dead and tossed like so much trash among the construction site's drywall screws and spackle-flecked-compound buckets.

"Let me guess. This fits with the Joel Rifkin profile somehow," I said.

Emily was already on one knee, reaching into her bag, flipping through her stacks of photocopied research.

She tore out a sheet.

"Rifkin's second victim was beaten and strangled."

"Check," I said.

"The dismembered body parts hidden in buckets of concrete."

"This isn't technically a bucket, but a pretty reasonable facsimile."

"Reasonable?" Emily said as the sound of hammers rained down from above.