Claire was about to open the door when Nick grabbed her hand. “Listen,” he said. “We're not releasing any of the details of the Central Park murder to the media.”
“So you're telling me to keep my mouth shut with Ian,” Claire surmised.
“All he knows is that you're being protected as a potential witness,” Nick said. “I need you to keep it that way.”
“You have my word, Commander,” Claire said facetiously.
It made Nick grin. “C'mon, let me introduce you,” he said.
They got out of the car. Claire ran right into Ian's arms. “You okay?” he asked.
“I will be,” Claire answered, not letting him go.
“Dr. Claire Waters,” Nick said, “Detective Maggie Stolls.”
Claire reached out her hand, still clutching Ian with the other. It made Detective Stolls chuckle as she shook it. “I'm your roommate for as long as this takes,” she said. Maggie had an open face that Claire immediately liked. She was tall and well toned, her dark brown hair pulled back into a ponytail, which Claire thought made her look like a professional tennis player she'd seen on television.
“Maggie'll be with you around the clock,” Nick said. “Including when you're at the hospital.”
Claire broke her embrace with Ian and looked at him. “You're not staying?” she asked.
Ian indicated the duffel bag. “I packed up some stuff for you,” he said, “but they want me to stay at our place.”
“Then you better protect Ian,” Claire demanded.
“We have undercover cops on your block twenty-four-seven in case Quimby shows,” Nick reassured her.
“What about you?” Claire asked Nick. “Are you staying with me?”
Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a momentary look on Ian's face.
Is he jealous?
Claire liked the idea that Ian loved her so much he could be jealous of another man she spent time with, even if it was only for work.
A squawk from Nick's walkie-talkie broke Claire's thoughts. “Car seven-oh-two,” said the radio dispatcher, “ten-two, your command.”
“Ten-four, Central,” Nick replied into the walkie. “Uh, they're calling me back to the office,” Nick said to Claire, indicating the radio. “It's against procedure for male officers to guard female protectees overnight. And Quimby's my case, so the quicker I collar him, the quicker we can send you home to your life.”
“C'mon,” Detective Stolls said to Claire, trying to break the tension. “Let me show you your temporary digs.”
Claire looked after Nick as he headed for the car. “Please,” she called after him, “keep me posted.”
“I will,” Nick said back, getting into the Impala, starting the engine, and pulling away.
C
HAPTER
12
“T
he problem with tracking this guy is he's all over the map,” Lieutenant Wilkes said from the front of the cramped squad room. It had been nearly eighteen hours since the body was found in Central Park, and the orders from One Police Plaza, the office of the police commissioner, couldn't be clearer: Stop Todd Quimby at all costs.
In front of Wilkes stood his detectives and twenty other casually dressed cops on loan for this evening's stakeout duty. Behind him were two dry-erase boards and a blackboard, all “misappropriated” from various offices in the precinct. The blackboard on the left sported a large blown-up mug shot of Todd Quimby, his pertinent information written neatly in chalk around it. The center board displayed a map of the city; blue pins indicated every location that could be tied to Quimby, and red pins showed where each of his victims was found. And the board on the right held their photos, in life and in gruesome death. Folding chairs were jammed into every free space so that the detectives on loan had a place to sit and sort through all the leadsâmost of them uselessâthat were being phoned in.
An hour earlier, Brooklyn South Homicide had finally come through with the identity of the body at Coney Island. Rose Grimaldi was twenty and had traveled to the amusement park that Saturday night from Long Branch, New Jersey, with a group of four friends. When asked later why they never reported her missing, her friends explained Rosie wasn't feeling too well when she got off the Cyclone and said she was going home in the car she had driven up from the Jersey Shore. It wasn't until Rose failed to show up for work early Monday morning that the local cops were called, and it took another day before they linked her to the brutal murder at Coney Island.
Nick taped up the material on the Central Park victim, whose identity was only as difficult to find as it was for Assistant Medical Examiner Ross to roll her fingerprints and feed them into the Printrak. Wilkes now pointed to her photos.
“Quimby's latest kill is one Sharon Corbett, twenty-two, came to us from beautiful Flagstaff, Arizona, six months ago. Took her bite outta the Big Apple by running up an impressive string of fifteen collarsâprostitution, loitering, blah blah blah. Her latest humping ground was the Eleventh Avenue stroll between Thirty-Ninth and Forty-Second streets.”
“Anybody see her there last night?” asked Detective Potts.
“Yeah,” said Nick. “The other whores (which Nick, like all good New York cops, pronounced “hoo-ahs”) on the track. But none of them saw her with Quimby.”
“I thought this guy found his victims at carnivals,” said a young Anti-Crime cop, Logan, from the back of the room.
“There's the rub,” Wilkes replied, “since there ain't no carnivals on Eleventh Avenue.”
“Times Square at night looks like the mother of all carnivals, though,” offered Savarese.
“And Quimby's last two victims have been women with short blond hair,” said Nick. “If he didn't find what he was looking for on Forty-Second, makes sense he'd go hunting elsewhere.”
Wilkes pointed to the board as he spoke. “Rose Grimaldi, Saturday night, Coney Island. Catherine Mills, Sunday morning, Times Square. And Sharon Corbett late last night in Central Park. This guy's on a spree. He gave us three corpses in the last four days, and there's no reason to think he'll take a break tonight.”
He turned to Nick. “Detective Lawler's run lead on these cases, and he's gonna take it from here.”
Nick stepped up to the front of the room. “Quimby's last two victims were hookers, so we're sitting on every pross stroll in the five boroughs, every night, till he shows up and we nab him. We've got units deploying in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island. We're gonna cover Manhattan North and South. Patrol will back us up with extra radio cars along the West Sideâ”
“Lieutenant Wilkes,” came a voice from behind Nick. A uniformed sergeant, Ramirez, stood in the doorway.
“Not now, Pablo,” Wilkes said to him.
“It's urgent,” said Sergeant Ramirez. The look on his face told Nick everything he needed to know.
The rat bastard struck again.
“Where?” Nick said before Wilkes could get any words out.
“De Witt Clinton Park,” said Ramirez.
“Everybody goes,” shouted Wilkes as the room full of cops emptied out.
Â
De Witt Clinton Park is a two-block-square oasis in the West 50s between 11th Avenue and the Hudson River. The eastern two-thirds of the park consist of three softball diamonds that, during warm weather, are lit up for night games. Tonight, though, the floodlights illuminated only the foulest of play.
Nick could see her as soon as he stepped through the gate into the park. She was lying in the grass behind home plate on the largest of the three ball fields.
He couldn't help but think Quimby put her there on purpose, as a message to the police. Or to him personally.
I can steal home base any time I want. And you bastards can't do a goddamn thing to stop me.
As he and Wilkes ducked under the hastily strung crime scene tape, Nick switched on his video camera and put the viewfinder up to his right eye. Zooming in, he saw immediately the telltale signs of Todd Quimby's work.
“Short blond hair, rope around her neck's knotted in a Dutch marine bowline,” he said to Wilkes.
“Son of a bitch,” Wilkes muttered.
As they drew closer, Nick could see the woman was lying faceup, wearing a black Armani cocktail dress. No jewelry. His stomach churned. Like it always did when something didn't make sense.
“You thinking what I'm thinking?” he asked the lieutenant.
“Damn right,” Wilkes replied. “She ain't no pross.”
“There must be a dozen nightclubs within six blocks of here,” Nick offered. “That scumbag knows we're looking for him, so he finds the perfect place to hunt for his next victim.”
“Inside some club, where we'd never see him.”
Nearby, two Crime Scene Unit detectives snapped photos of the scene. Nick realized one of them was Terry Aitken, the kid from the Coney Island homicide.
“Hey, Aitken,” Nick called to him.
Aitken lowered his Nikon. “Nick Lawler. Thought you'd be catching this.”
Nick decided to test the kid. “Anything you want to know about what happened here?”
“For a girl who's been lying in a baseball field, why's the front of her dress look so clean?” Aitken pondered. “And why are there footwear impressions in the dirt and grass all around her, but no drag marks or signs of a struggle? I think you got a dump job on your hands.”
“Quimby ain't exactly Stone Cold Steve Austin,” Wilkes growled. “How'd the wimpy bastard carry her from the street all the way here?”
“He had wheels, Lieutenant,” Aitken said, pointing to a spot behind the fence. “Four of them. Got some nice pictures.” Aitken brought the photos up on his digital Nikon and showed them to Nick and Wilkes.
“Shopping cart,” said Nick. “Rolled her up to the backstop, carried her the rest of the way.”
“Were the lights on when the body was found?” Wilkes asked.
“No, we had someone from Parks meet us here to turn them on,” Aitken said.
“That kind of dark, he could've carried her in here naked and nobody would've seen them,” Nick said. “How many more photos you need?” he asked Aitken.
“We're done,” Aitken replied. “She's all yours.”
Nick knelt beside the woman's body. With a gloved hand, he opened her left eyelid.
“Eyes are white. He burned her. It's him all right,” Nick said.
He tried to move her right arm. It wouldn't budge. “Jesus,” he exclaimed, “she's in full rigor. How long ago did he kill her?”
And then Nick smelled something. Sniffed several times, enough for Wilkes to notice. “What?” asked the lieutenant.
“There it is again. Bitter almonds,” Nick answered.
“You're crazy,” Wilkes said, kneeling down. “I don't smell a goddamn thing.”
“Not everyone can smell cyanide,” Nick reminded him.
“ME said he didn't find any cyanide in any of the victims,” Wilkes replied.
Nick spotted the medical examiner's van pulling up just outside the fence. “ME just showed,” he said.
Wilkes nodded. “We'll let him check her out before we roll herâ”
“Detectives!” a voice boomed from across the park.
They looked up. The shout seemed to come from the 52nd Street side, where someone was waving a flashlight. “I got a witness!”
“Holy shit,” said Nick, standing up.
“Go,” said Wilkes. “I'll stay with the ME.”
Nick sprinted across the park to a break in the fence where a patrol cop, D'Ambrosi, waited. “What've you got?” Nick asked him.
D'Ambrosi guided him toward a homeless woman sitting on a bench beside her shopping cart. “Her name's Sonya,” he said, “and she's wearing a little too much ice for someone of her station in life. If you know what I'm saying.”
He aimed his torch on Sonya, whose earlobes glittered in the light.
“Sonya, baby,” D'Ambrosi said as he and Nick reached her. “Why don't you show the nice detective here your lovely earrings?”
Nick needed about a second to know exactly where the princess-cut diamond studs had come from.
Sonya smiled. “My boyfriend gave them to me,” she said in a husky voice betraying years of nicotine and alcohol abuse.
“Sonya was headed out on the town with those rocks and her new Prada handbag,” said D'Ambrosi, snatching the purse away from her.
“Hey, sonny, you gonna arrest yourself? That's my property you're stealing,” Sonya snapped as D'Ambrosi riffled through it.
“Your property?” Nick asked her politely. “Your boyfriend give that to you too?”
“You look like a nice young man,” Sonya said to Nick, coming on to him. “I found that bag in the garbage.”
“Is that where you found the earrings too?” Nick asked, kneeling beside her.
She looked away, ashamed.
“Sonya, dear,” Nick said, “did you see the young lady out there on the baseball field?”
She avoided his eyes as she answered. “She wasn't breathing. She wasn't gonna need this stuff.”
“I need it, Sonya,” Nick said. “I need it because someone hurt that girl and I have to find out who. You'd want me to do that for you, right?”
“I guess so.”
“Sonya, did you wheel your cart out there?”
“Couldn't leave it here. Vultures around here'd take it before I got three steps away. I got all my stuff in there, you know.”
“Detective Lawler,” said Officer D'Ambrosi. “Think we got an ID on the victim.”
He handed Nick a New York State driver's license he found in her purse. The smiling woman in the photo was absolutely the victim.
“Who is she?” asked Lieutenant Wilkes, joining them.
“Tamara Sorenson, twenty-eight. Address in Bedford.”
“Bedford, huh? Rich girl from the suburbs comes to the big city for a good time, gets more than she bargained for,” said Wilkes.
“Least we know who she is,” said Nick. “Bad news is the shopping cart that made those tracks out by the body belongs to Sonya here, not Quimby. He must've carried her out there after all.”
“After he stripped her,” said Lieutenant Wilkes.
Nick shot him a look. “What're you talking about?”
“When the ME rolled her, there was grass and dirt on the victim's back. Under her dress.”
Nick realized what that meant. “So she was naked when Quimby raped and strangled her. Then he carried her out here and threw the black dress on her after she died to try to make her look like the whore he wanted her to be.”
Wilkes glanced back to where the medical examiner was working on Tamara Sorenson's body. “I told the ME to front-burner this one,” he said to Nick. “Finish the scene, then get down to the morgue. If they don't have her on a table and cracked by the time you get there, light a fire under their asses. I want every piece of forensics they can tweeze or scrape off her.”
Â
Four hours later, at three in the morning, Nick walked into the autopsy suite. Assistant Medical Examiner Ross was just finishing sewing the “Y” incision he'd made in Tamara Sorenson's torso.
“You're late and I couldn't wait,” Ross said, not looking up.