The truthif you asked even the most casual observerKate was a knockout. She smoothed her hair, then headed down the hall past framed Mapplethorpe photos of sumptuous, erotic-looking flowers, past the eclectically decorated living room, where designer furniture and flea-market bric-a-brac coexisted perfectly. The walls were a mix of modern and contemporary paintings, with a couple of medieval artifacts that Richard was particularly proud to own displayed with a kind of studied nonchalance: one leaning on the mantel, the other on a side table beside a dozen art books, the cover of the top one sporting a Picasso self-portrait which happened to be hanging on the wall just above it.
For a split second it made Kate sad. Paintings instead of family snapshots, artifacts rather than the baby pictures or formal shots of kids in caps and gowns she’d always imagined.
Yes, they had tried. Over and over. Even going for in vitro fertilization. Nothing had worked. Of course they’d considered adopting, and probably would have if Kate hadn’t become so involved in Let There Be a Future, and all of those kids who needed her that came along with it. A blessing. Kate glanced at the wall of living room windows that displayed the park below better than any painting, her vision blurred. Tears? Kate swiped at them with the back of her hand. No way she would allow herself any self-pity. Not with her life, her luck. Ridiculous. Anyway, she’d gotten over the idea of having children of her own years ago. The fact was Let There Be a Future had supplied her with plenty of kids. So what if they weren’t her biological kids. They were all terrific, and they all needed her help.
Kate turned away from the paintings and the spectacular view.
At the front hall closet she reached for her jacket and stopped. For a moment she had the feeling that something terrible was about to happenor already had and she just didn’t know it.
She tried to shrug it off, thinking she was not so different from the mother she’d lost way too youngor every one of her Irish aunts who were forever crossing themselves and looking heavenward and saying Hail Marys, who were tied to every damn superstition known to mankind, and loving every one of them. Man, the fears those women had.
No, Kate was not like them.
She slid her arms into the sleeves of her jacket, pulled the collar to her neck.
There it was againnot so much a chill as a sense of foreboding, nothing specific, but the kind of feeling she used to get all the time when she was a cop and things had gone really wrong.
But she wasn’t a cop and nothing
had
gone wrong.
Kate shook her head against the dread. She was late. That was all. She’d go to her luncheon, have her manicure, meet Nola for dinner, and everything would be fine. Just fine.
F
loyd Brown brought his unmarked NYPD Chevy Impala to an abrupt stop beside the three battered trash cans that no one seemed to usethe street, curb, everywhere was littered with garbage. It was one thing to have shit piling up in front of the run-down tenements that lined most of these streets, but in front of the police station? Brown made a feeble attempt to shove some of the debris closer to the bins with the side of his foot.
Damn.
Didn’t these cops have enough respect for the job to take a minute out of their precious day to clean up this mess?
Nothing changes, thought Brown, as he mounted the pitted stone stairs of the Bronx precinct, his old station. Eight lonely years walking a beat. Until the year when he’d finally made detective. That’s what got him over to “the city,” to Manhattan.
Of course being the detective who broke down the Gutterthe name given to the serial killer who literally scooped out his victim’s insides and took them as souvenirsdidn’t hurt. Floyd could actually smell the guilt on that guy. Nerdy, Buddy Holly–type glasses, wispy goatee, a real librarian type. No one, not the other cops, not the FBI robots, thought this was their guy. They’d brought him in because he lived next door to one of the victims. That was all.
But when Elliot Marshall Rinkie walked into the interrogation room, took off his polyester jacket, Floyd smelled it: a mixture of sweat and something…feral.
He’d broken the guy down in less than three hours, had him crying, snot dripping out of the little creep’s nose right into his stupid little goatee.
After that Floyd not only got respect, but a nicknamethe Nosewhich, thank God, the guys tired of pretty quickly. But the other thing he got was a promotion and a chance to join an elite homicide squad in Manhattan. And that stuck.
Floyd liked it, was good at it toogoing on the hunt, sniffing the psychos out, bringing them in, getting them into stiff-backed chairs in airless little rooms where he could go at them. Unfortunately, the cooler ones did not give off any tattletale aroma, no eau de killer. But there were other ways of getting to them. Floyd had learned a lot in his fifteen years as a homicide detective in New York City, had seen things that most people couldn’t even imagine.
He pushed through the heavy wooden precinct doors, memories coming at him faster than scenes in a Jackie Chan moviedark street corners, lukewarm coffee in Styrofoam cups, hookers, pimps, con men, junkies.
Floyd had been on the brink of retirement a year ago, would have done it too, if it hadn’t been for the case that was supposed to be his last big one and an ex-cop named Kate McKinnon, who became his de facto partner. Man, that first day he’d despised herthe way she had strutted into the police conference room looking like Park Avenue, having all the answers.
But he’d been wrong.
McKinnon was good police. Despite the fact that she’d been out of the scene for years, her instincts were intact and she never pulled rank or any other kind of shit. Truth: it had been Kate who brought down that fucking psycho, the Death Artist, though she’d given him the creditwhich was the reason he became Chief of Special Homicide, replacing that pain-in-the-ass crew-cut Randy Mead, who was now sitting at some desk job in the police library probably sucking his teeth and growing an ulcer. Yeah, he owed McKinnon, though sometimes he wished he had just retired. Like tonight, when he should have been home hours ago with his feet up watching the game with a cold beer in his hand and his wife, Vonette, beside him.
Instead he was
consulting
a word he hated since it was just a euphemism for working overtime without overtime payon this case that was taking him to the Bronx, which hadn’t been his beat for well over a decade. But McNally had asked personally, and when your old chief requests a favor it isn’t easy to say no, at least not for Floyd Brown.
The pea-soup-green walls were the same as Floyd remembered, only dingier, though the peeling paint had gotten a lot worse, as if the walls were exfoliating. Who could blame the paint for wanting out of this place?
Timothy McNally met him halfway down the hall.
Floyd thought his old boss looked like he could use a new paint job too, his pallor oddly close to the greenish color of the walls, bags above and below the man’s eyes like sacks of crumpled laundry.
McNally whacked Floyd on the back. “Hey, stranger. I gotta have a twisted unsub to get you to visit, huh?”
“Hey, Tim. How’s it going?” Floyd tried to smile but he wasn’t sure his face muscles were cooperating. He got right to the point. “So this unknown subjectwhy me?”
The older cop nodded toward the end of the hall. “Come on. I’ll show you.”
Floyd followed McNally’s slow shuffling steps.
“Thought you might have some ideas,” said McNally, holding the door open for Floyd.
The bad lighting in the conference room made McNally’s skin appear even greener. But Floyd’s attention was taken up by the crime scene photos pinned to the bulletin board, two different bodies, both women, so mutilated it was hard to tell what had happened to them.
“This one’s in her early twenties, according to the ME,” said McNally, tapping one group of photos.
Brown looked closer. The victim’s age was hard to tell with all the makeup she was wearing on her blank dead face. “Totally eviscerated. A real fucking mess,” said McNally. “Super found her. Freaked. They had to take her to Bellevue, feed her some meds.” McNally drew the back of his hand across his mouth, then licked his dry lips. “The other one’s also been gutted.”
“That why you called me?” asked Brown, shifting his glare to the other photos, these of an older woman, somewhere between thirty and forty, he’d guess. “The similarity to my old case, the Gutter, because”
“No, no.” McNally shook his head vigorously, his jowls and the bags over and under his eyes doing a little cha-cha-cha. “No, that’s not it at all.”
McNally led him down another corridor, one Brown knew well, toward the evidence room.
“What d’ya think?” McNally gestured at the long metal table. On it were two paintings on slightly sagging unstretched canvas encased in clear plastic. Beside each painting was a numberthe same numbers that Floyd had noted under the photos of the two bodies. “These were found at the scenes,” said the older cop. “One at each.”
Brown narrowed his eyes. The paintings didn’t look like much. One was of fruitapples, bananas, pearsthe shapes of the fruit the only thing that identified them because the color was completely off. The banana was purple, the pear orange, the apple blue. The other painting was a street scene, almost entirely black and white except for a pink sky and bright red clouds. Floyd guessed the painter was
experimenting,
though he or she needn’t have bothered. To Floyd’s untrained eye they looked pretty bad.
“So?” McNally regarded Brown through his hooded eyes.
“I’d say the guy’s got a lot to learn.”
“I was thinking that you might know something, have an idea. I mean, tell you the truth, if the Death Artist wasn’t dead, I’d be thinking maybe he was back in business.”
“No, his work was nothing like this. The Death Artist didn’t just paint.” Brown thought back to the bizarre clues, the collages and postcards that McKinnon had deciphered for the squad, the only way they’d ever have caught that psycho. “He’d never do shit like this.” For a moment Brown realized he was insulted that McNally could even think that the Death Artist would do such bad artas if the Death Artist really had been some kind of artistic genius. He blew air out the side of his mouth. “You said these were left at the scenes? You sure they didn’t belong to the vics?”
“Possible.” McNally tugged at his blubbery chin. “But the lab’s tellin’ us that the paint used in both is the same. Ditto for the canvas. So either the vics took a painting class together”he snickered“or they shared art supplies. Pretty fuckin’ unlikely, wouldn’t you say?”
“Name-brand paint and canvas?” Brown asked.
McNally swiped a sheet of paper off the table. “Uh, lab just says oil paint. Canvas is cotton duck, it says.”
Brown took the sheet from McNally’s hand. “Generic oil paint and cotton duck. Don’t know if that makes a match, Tim.” He offered his old boss a sorry look.
McNally’s sad-sack face sagged a bit more.
Floyd looked again at the paintingsthe banal scene, the fruit, the weird color. They could be the work of the same person, but no way he could be sure. “I’m no art expert.”
McNally stopped pulling on his neck, which was now red like the clouds in the one painting. “What about that woman, you know, the one you worked with, from TV? She knows all about this art shit. Maybe she’d take a look.”
“I don’t know.” Brown knew how traumatic the Death Artist case had been for Kate, that now, finally, she had gotten her cushy life back on track. He doubted she’d want to hear from him or have anything to do with tracking another killerand he couldn’t blame her. Still, there were two bodies in the morgue with the same MO and maybe she could tell them something they should be looking for.
“It’d make Tapell real happy,” said McNally. “She’s coming up for reappointment as chief of police and she don’t need no serial killer out there to make her look bad.”
“Two murders are no serial, Tim. You know that.” Floyd looked again at the two paintings, a grenade going off in his gut. Two eviscerated women, two paintings left at the scenes. It had all the markings of a ritual, of a serial killer. He just didn’t want to think so. Maybe he should call Chief Tapell, see what she thought about contacting McKinnon. After all, Tapell and McKinnon were friendsthe two of them went all the way back to Astoria, when Tapell was Queens Chief of Police and McKinnon was a cop under her.
McNally frowned. “Two murders in a month. Within blocks of each other. Both vics killed in the same way.” The older cop sighed. “But I guess you know best.”
Floyd gave him a look. “It’s not my jurisdiction.”
“Jurisdiction?”
McNally repeated the word as though Brown had taken a dump on his feet. “I’m not askin’ you to move back to the Bronx. Just help me out here.” He slumped into a stiff-backed metal chair. “They’re retiring me. Next month. I’d like to go out in style, you know?” He forced a smile. “Don’t know what I’m gonna do with myself. Watch TV all day, follow the soaps, right?” He laughed, but there was no cheer in it. “I never did develop no
hobbies
.”
Brown took in his old chief’s blurred featuresthe effect of thirty-five years on the force. “Look, I’ll talk to Tapell, but I’m not even sure that the chief would want me interfering in another borough. But”he pinched the bridge of his nose“I’ll see, okay? But no promises.”
BAD PAINTER GOOD KILLER
The NYPD has a new psycho on their hands with two murders reported in the Bronx now very possibly linked. The victims, whose names are being temporarily held until families can be notified, were both savagely mutilated. But the most bizarre element in both cases was the oil painting planted by the killer at each scene.
Though the police declined to discuss the details of these paintings, it has been confirmed by an inside source that they were rather ordinaryone a still life of fruit, the other a street scene. No one has yet determined the paintings’ particular relevance to the victims or if they contain clues to the murders, though it appears as if Manhattan’s elite murder squad has been called in…
F
loyd Brown crumpled the newspaper in his fist. How the hell these damn reporters got information so quickly, he’d never know. There was no “inside source” as far as he knew, nor had the police intentionally leaked the information, which they did when they wanted to flush out a perp or bring additional witnesses to the surface. Floyd was quite sure that Chief of Police Tapell wanted this kept under wraps until they had more information. Well, too late for that. He figured Tapell was reading this too, probably taking someone’s head off. Plus, the reporter had used his special homicide squads’ nickname, the “murder squad”and he had yet to agree they would be a part of it.
Brown scanned his desk, the files of unsolved homicides stacked in the corner like a mini Aztec pyramid, then reached for the phone. Better to call Tapell before she called him.
H
e was dragging the man by his feet, blood trailing behind like a comet, just visible in the darkness. The body was heavier than he’d anticipated, considering that half the man’s guts were ten feet behind him in the middle of the alley.
It had to be discovered soon. Not two days from now, when some street cleaner felt ambitious and went into the alley behind the Manhattan office building, or some crack addict needed a place to shoot up.
He took his time arranging it so that one of the man’s legs peeked out of the alleyway just enough to catch a passerby’s attention, though they’d probably think it was some homeless person and keep on walking.
Under the jumpsuit, sweat from his armpits was dripping down his sides, and his hands were damp under the gloves.
Somewhere a dog was barking. Odd, he thought, in this part of the city, mainly offices, all shut down for the night. He checked the time. It would be several hours before any of them opened for business.
He unwrapped the still-wet canvas he’d brought with him, and arranged it beside the body. Or should he figure out a way to get it on the alley wall? He wasn’t sure about that part. Did it matter? He studied it a minutea still life of fruit in a blue-striped bowlthen nudged it with his gloved hand a bit closer to the dead man’s head.
Y
ou know I don’t want to hear this, Dominic.” The phone felt hot against Tapell’s ear. “You’re supposed to keep your union members happy, remember? That’s why I put you in the job.” Clare Tapell regretted the statement the second the words had left her mouth. She sighed into the phone. “Look, Dom, I’m sorry. But I don’t need this. Not now. I just can’t have a police strike. And it’s illegal, remember? Besides, the mayor is threatening to trim the budget,
again,
which sure as hell means less money for police. You just can’t let it happen.”