Night Kills (3 page)

The present

Cindy Sellers sat alone at a corner table in P.J. Clarke's on Third Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street. Around her were muted voices, the occasional clink of flatware on china, and laughter from the adjoining bar. The mingled scents of spices hung in the air.

The restaurant part of the venerable tavern was dim, with dark wood paneling, and there was something about the young woman seated in isolation before her bowl of stew and a Guinness that discouraged any of the rogues and business types at the bar or some of the other tables from approaching her. She was reasonably attractive, with inquisitive large brown eyes, short brown hair, and a trim figure, but there was an intensity about her that sometimes drove people away. She was very good at going after those people, overcoming their reluctance, and getting them to talk about matters they wouldn't have dreamed of telling anyone else.

It was still too early for the dinner crowd, and the place was quiet enough for her to think, which was why she'd come here. Before her on the table were her notes on what she'd chosen to call the Torso Murders, as well as a revised draft of what would be her story.

And a hell of a story it was. The time was near when she'd no longer feel obligated to keep it all off the record, as she'd promised Renz.

In fact, maybe the time
was
here.

Cindy took a sip of Guinness and allowed that the public had a right to know if a sadistic killer was in its midst and might kill again. It was, in fact, her professional obligation to inform the people, as long as it would sell papers and advance her journalism career. But Renz was police commissioner now, not just another workaday cop with rank, and he was riding a political high. Of course, he didn't know that he wasn't her only source, and that she was aware he'd called in retired homicide captain Frank Quinn, along with his detective team, that pushy bitch Pearl and the hapless but occasionally shrewd Fedderman, to work the case. There were people in the NYPD hierarchy who didn't like the prospect of semioutsiders covering themselves and Renz with glory so Renz could advance to an even higher office. These dissatisfied cops were people Cindy Sellers could and did use.

Certainly Renz wouldn't like it if the quasi-official presence of Quinn and his team was revealed too soon. On the other hand, he knew they'd be media subjects sooner or later—that was even the idea. They were, after all, part of Renz's team—working for him in particular as well as for the city. And Renz wouldn't be shocked by the fact that the NYPD had more than one leak.

Still, he
was
the commissioner. Cindy understood and respected power. She would give it its due, up to a point.

She took a long pull of Guinness and fished her cell phone from her purse on the chair beside her. Renz's direct number was on her speed dial.

No answer.

She tried his cell phone.

Apparently it was turned off.

Cindy dialed the general number of the Puzzle Palace, her term for One Police Plaza, and was politely put on ignore. She sighed and drummed her fingers. Waiting patiently for anything wasn't in Cindy's nature.

Hell with him, she thought, cutting the connection. She'd tried to give him a heads-up before releasing the story every other media outlet in the city probably knew about anyway but couldn't confirm. The clock was ticking and she'd done what she could.

Cindy had been here before and knew how it worked. When
City Beat
hit the newsstands and vending machines tomorrow morning, the hounds would be loosed. Renz as well as the killer would have to play the fox. Quinn and his detectives would occupy the area between hounds and foxes, perilous ground.

Keyed up as she was with anticipation, Cindy wasn't hungry. She took another long sip of Guinness and pushed aside her barely touched bowl of stew. Placing her half-rim reading glasses low on the bridge of her nose, she arranged the draft of her story—which was jotted down in her own custom shorthand that only she could read—before her on the table. Then she flicked down the menu on her cell phone and pressed the button that dialed her editor at
City Beat
.

“Are you sitting down?” she asked when he picked up.

Without waiting for an answer, she told him what she had and began reading aloud into the phone, but not so loud that anyone in the restaurant might overhear.

Just as she'd thought, he loved it.

By the time she flipped down the lid of her phone, Cindy's appetite had magically returned. She pulled the still-warm bowl of stew back close to her from across the table and ordered another Guinness.

 

He'd sawn the broomstick in half. Now he finished sharpening one end and began the sanding. He enjoyed this part. He would use increasingly more finely grained sandpaper as he shaped the end into a gradually tapered fine point.

For almost an hour he sanded, idly watching television as he worked. An old spaghetti Western starring Clint Eastwood was playing. The TV was on mute, so he could only read Eastwood's taut dialogue in closed caption at the bottom of the screen. That was okay. He'd seen the movie half a dozen times and could practically fill in the dialogue himself. The rhythmic sound of the sandpaper on wood was soothing as he felt the tapering broomstick take shape in his hands.

Finally, when his hands and forearms began to ache from the effort, he set the broomstick and sandpaper aside. He ran a finger along the shaft of the broomstick, all the way to its point. The wood was smooth now and would require only about an hour's more sanding with the finely grained paper. Then he would go over it with tack cloth, and later he'd apply a good oil and rub it in well. Not too much oil. He wanted the sharpened broomstick smooth, but not too smooth. Feeling the resistance, that was part of it.

It wasn't supposed to excite him; that hadn't been part of the plan. But it did. There was no denying it. And it made him wonder, did they have to be dead?

His throat was tight. He swallowed.

Amazing, he thought, the things you discovered about yourself. It was his job that kept opening doors in his mind. He was so good at what he did, sometimes it scared him.

Eastwood chewed on his stubby cigar and squinted at him from the TV screen.

Eastwood, or at least the characters he usually played in his movies, wouldn't approve of him. But when the actor was younger, he might well have been handed altogether different kinds of scripts and would now be seen in an altogether different light. The man was an actor; his public image and probably his personal image had been shaped by the scripts he was given, written by someone he might never have met. In a way, we were all in the movies, whether we knew it or not.

He smiled at Eastwood, then went over to an antique rolltop desk and removed a drawer. Reaching into the cavity left by the missing drawer, he worked a wooden lever that opened a secret compartment in the side of the desk. From the compartment he withdrew a gray metal lockbox with the key in it. He turned the key, opened the lid, and reached in and got out a small Colt semiautomatic, holding the gun by its checked handle. It fired hollow-point twenty-two-caliber bullets and made little more noise than a loud slap. Not a powerful weapon, but the hollow points would penetrate a human being and break into pieces that would rip and tumble through bone and tissue and cause a great deal of localized damage. One careful shot to the heart was enough to bring someone down. If the wound itself wasn't sufficient to kill, the person would lie there in shock. And while the person lay stunned and disbelieving, almost certainly dying, two shots to the head would be enough to make sure. That's what the little Colt was—sure. He had a fondness for the gun.

He glanced at the silent TV screen. Eastwood was on a horse now, raising a lot of dust while galloping hell for leather over terrain that looked like Arizona but was probably in Italy.

What must that be like, flying across a purpling plain on a white and brown speckled horse? It must really impress the ladies. The ones in Rome and Milan, anyway.

He'd heard or read somewhere that Eastwood bought his cigars in a shop in Beverly Hills and cut them in half for his movie scenes. So much in life was an act.

Ignoring the TV, he removed a cleaning kit and some gun oil from the metal lockbox, along with a soft white cotton cloth.

He was about to clean and oil the gun when his cell phone, on top of the rolltop desk, played the first few bars of “Get Me to the Church on Time.”

He glanced at the Caller ID before answering the phone. “I was hoping you'd call,” he said, smiling.

A pause.

“Yes,” he said, still smiling. “Of course. Of course. Yes. Yes. You know I do. Yes.”

He put down the gun and wandered the room as he talked, as if motion would lend import to his words. Whoever was on the other end of the connection was receiving his full attention.

“Okay,” he said, “I'll see you there. You can't know how much I'm looking forward to it.” He idly picked up the broomstick and observed its sharpened point as he listened to the caller.

“See you there,” he said again. “Love you.”

Death had drawn them together again. They met at Quinn's first-floor apartment on West Seventy-fifth off Columbus in the room he'd converted into a den. Quinn sat behind his big cherrywood desk, his rough-hewn features sidelighted by the shaded lamp, making his oft-broken nose seem even more crooked. One of the Cuban cigars he had illegally supplied to him was propped at a sharp angle in a glass ashtray. The cigar wasn't burning. It was pointless to start things off with Pearl already bitching.

She was seated cross-legged in an armchair to the left of the desk, facing Quinn, wearing faded jeans, a blue Mets T-shirt, gray socks. The loafers she'd slipped off lay askew on the floor near the chair. Her raven-black hair was pulled back and wound in a knot. She wore her usual dark eyeliner, which made her almost black eyes appear even darker. Quinn thought she looked fabulous.

Fedderman, perched on the less comfortable wood and leather casual chair, looked his usual discombobulated self. Though his face had gotten thinner, it still had its expectant, hangdog look, as if he'd just committed some transgression and now needed forgiveness. He'd lost a bit more of his graying hair since Quinn had last seen him and was now almost bald on top. Quinn was sure he recognized the baggy brown suit Fedderman was wearing, and noticed that his right white shirt cuff was unbuttoned and hanging out of his coat sleeve. For some reason that often happened to Fedderman's cuffs when he used a pen or pencil for any length of time. Quinn almost smiled, seeing the frayed, loose cuff peeking out of the coat sleeve at him. Old times.

Fedderman looked over at Pearl. “I heard you had some trouble at the bank.”

“Screw you,” she said, dismissing Fedderman. She turned her attention to Quinn. “Lauri's no longer living with you?”

Lauri was Quinn's daughter, now almost twenty. “She and Wormy are living in California, trying to promote his music career.” Lauri's lover, Wormy, so called because he was tall and painfully thin and kind of undulated when he walked, was front man for his band, The Defendants. Lauri's last letter said the group was close to a record contract. Her next-to-last letter had said that, too.

“I thought the boy had talent,” Fedderman said.

“But what about his music?” Pearl asked.

“What about these murders?” Quinn said, reminding them why they were here. He picked up four green binders, then moved out from behind his desk and handed two to each of his detectives. “Renz supplied copies of the murder books. I made copies for you two.”

“You must already have looked yours over,” Fedderman said. “Any conclusions?”

Quinn sat back down behind his desk, automatically reached for his cigar, then drew his hand back when he noticed Pearl giving him a look. “I already told you some of the basics: two torsos, female Caucasian, each shot through the heart, no prints on file, and no way to identify them. Twenty-two-caliber hollow-point bullets. Both of them separated when they entered the victims, but the pieces stayed in the bodies and the lab managed to reconstruct them enough to be sure they were fired by the same gun. Both victims were sexually penetrated by what seems to have been a long, sharp stake of some kind that left a residue of oil.”

“A sexual lubricant?” Pearl asked.

“Furniture oil,” Quinn said.

“He polished them off,” Fedderman said. He seemed obviously pleased by his humor.

“Shut up with that kind of stuff,” Pearl said.

Fedderman noticed his shirt cuff was unbuttoned and fastened it. “Where were they found?” Mr. Serious now.

“The first in a Dumpster behind a restaurant on the Upper West Side. The second in a vacant building in lower Manhattan.”

“Vacant why?” Pearl asked.

“Being renovated.”

“Actively?”

“Yeah. A condo conversion.” Quinn knew where she was going with this and was pleased.

“Found on a Monday?” Pearl asked.

“You guessed it.”

“The workmen would be bound to find it, then. And the torso in the Dumpster would be found next trash pickup.”

“Which was scheduled for the morning after it was placed there,” Quinn said. “Restaurant employees said they would have seen it during working hours, so it must have been put in the Dumpster the night before.”

Pearl uncrossed her legs and placed her stockinged feet on the floor, wriggling her toes. “The killer wanted the torsos found soon after they were dumped. Any idea why?”

“Not as yet,” Quinn said.

“I take it there's been a missing persons check on the two victims,” Fedderman said.

“Sure. No women their sizes, ages, or ethnicity have been reported missing lately in and around New York. Both were in their early thirties.” Quinn leaned back slightly in his desk chair and began swiveling gently an inch or so each way. He'd oiled the chair recently and it didn't make a sound. “Another thing. A journalist, Cindy Sellers of
City Beat,
knows everything I just told you and is sitting on the story as a favor to Renz.”

“I remember her,” Pearl said. “She's an asshole.”

“No more so than the other media wolves,” Quinn said, thinking Pearl would have made a good investigative reporter.

“Pearl's right,” Fedderman said. “The Cindy Sellers I remember won't sit on the story for long. Not unless Renz has got something on her.”

“If he does,” Quinn said, “it isn't enough to keep the lid on very long. That's why he activated us. He wants to be out in front of the story.”

“Wants to be mayor,” Pearl said.

Still astute, Quinn thought.

Pearl suddenly wondered what she was doing here. Why had she chosen this option? She seemed unable to escape Quinn's presence and influence. Another appeal from Renz to Quinn, another critical case, another psychopath, the call to her from Quinn, and here she was again. This held the repetition of madness. It was as if she were on a masochistic treadmill that she couldn't get off because some part of her didn't want to leave. This case…she felt in her bones it was something special. She had to be in on it.

“Go over the files on both killings,” Quinn said, “and we'll meet back here tomorrow and brainstorm.”

“We gonna keep meeting here?” Pearl asked. She had lived here with Quinn and wasn't comfortable with the idea. Their bedroom had been right across the hall.

“Renz has promised to get us office space, as usual. He won't want us in a precinct house. The idea is we can be NYPD, but at the same time more independent than ordinary homicide detectives. We'll be reporting only to him.”

“It'll be a roach-infested dump, as usual,” Pearl said. “But anyplace is better 'an here.”
Maybe not.
She remembered the last office space Renz had found for them, and the shrill scream of the drill from the dental clinic on the other side of the wall.

Quinn looked at his watch. It was almost midnight. Fedderman's flight out of Florida had been delayed, so the meeting had started late. “Nine o'clock tomorrow morning okay?”

Both detectives agreed to the hour, then stood up. Quinn got up to show them out.

As they passed the bedroom, Pearl couldn't help herself and glanced in at the bed. It was made, but not very neatly. A book lay on the table by the reading lamp on what she still thought of as Quinn's side, but she couldn't make out the title. Nothing seemed to have changed since she'd moved out two years ago. Quinn caught her looking and she glared at him.

She knew he was still in love with her, and it was a damned inconvenience. They'd tried to live together and found it impossible. Pearl didn't want to repeat the experience. It was obvious what the trouble was. Quinn was self-controlled, deliberate, and quietly obsessive. Pearl was impulsive, combative, and volatile. They clashed. Another difference was that Pearl knew when to give up on their relationship and Quinn didn't. He didn't know when to give up on anything.

At the street door, Fedderman said, “I've still got my rental. I'll drive you home, Pearl.”

“Okay. Better than a subway.”

“Better company, too,” Fedderman said.

“If you don't count dress, manners, and intelligence.”

Quinn was glad to hear them bickering. That was how it worked when they were a team, questioning and challenging each other, wearing away what wasn't solid or didn't fit, until only the truth remained.

Even if they might not like the truth.

 

Compared to most of the other New York papers, large and small,
City Beat
didn't have much of a circulation. But Deputy Chief Wes Nobbler always picked up a copy, because he knew of the relationship between Commissioner Renz and Cindy Sellers. More than once Sellers had been Renz's conduit to the larger media.

Nobbler, a large, portly man with squinty blue eyes and a complexion that made him always appear to have been out in the sun too long, was thinking about
City Beat
now. His bedroom was still dark, but he couldn't sleep, and the red numerals on the clock by his bed glowed the time to him: 5:02
A.M.
Too early to get up, and too late to bother going back to sleep. And his bladder was swollen, though not to the point of urgency. Why get up, switch on the light, relieve himself in the bathroom, and then go back to bed?

He couldn't think of a good reason.

Ten minutes passed. Now getting up or not wasn't the question. He had to take a leak.

With
City Beat
still on the periphery of his thoughts, he struggled to a sitting position on the squeaking bed, turned on the lamp, and plodded into the bathroom.

Might as well stay up now. He put on his wrinkled uniform pants from yesterday, knowing a freshly pressed uniform just back from the dry cleaners hung in the closet. He'd change into the clean uniform later, after he'd showered and shaved. He slipped bare feet into his shoes and left on the gray T-shirt he'd slept in. He went back into the bathroom, splashed cold water on his face, and used wet fingers to slick back red hair that hadn't a trace of gray in it.

Awake all the way now, he went into the kitchen and set up his Mr. Coffee to brew. Then he took a look out the window to make sure it wasn't raining and left the apartment to walk to the end of the block and get a
Times
and
City Beat
from their respective vending machines.

By the time he got back it was starting to get light out and traffic was just beginning to pick up. The apartment smelled of freshly brewed coffee, and he felt hungry and wished he'd found someplace open and bought some doughnuts. Not that he needed the calories.

He poured a cup of coffee, added a dash of cream from the refrigerator, and sat down at the kitchen table.

Nobbler glanced at the
Times
first. There was rioting in France, Congress was calling for an investigation into something Nobbler didn't understand, and beneath the paper's fold there was great consternation over the Yankees's seven-game losing streak.

The usual, Nobbler thought. All the money the Yankees had, you'd think they could buy some pitchers who didn't have arms ready to fall off. He put the
Times
aside, took a sip of coffee, and looked at
City Beat.

Holy Christ!

Nobbler forgot all about his appetite, the Yankees, and his coffee as he read.

He'd known about the first female torso being found, and the second dead woman. He hadn't known that, like the first victim, only the torso of the second victim was at the morgue. And he hadn't yet seen the results of the ballistics tests. Commissioner Renz had certainly thrown a blanket of secrecy over the second woman, so it wouldn't be obvious right away that a serial killer was at work. And the thing with the pointed stake or whatever it was—Nobbler hadn't known about that, only that the first woman had been sexually penetrated. He had to admit he admired the way Renz had been able to maintain even partial secrecy over matters like this. Renz wasn't shy about working the levers of power.

Well, neither was Nobbler. And Renz had done something that really pissed him off. Frank Quinn was back on the scene, and on the Torso Murders case, along with his two detectives Kasner and Fedderman. Nobbler wasn't crazy about the three of them, and in his mind they were no longer NYPD. Especially Quinn, who shouldn't be able to get anywhere near the department. They gave him a ton of money and cut him loose, so what the hell else did he want? Nobbler didn't so much resent Quinn because he was bent, more because he was bent in the wrong direction. He turned his thoughts to Kasner and Fedderman, but only briefly. Couple of losers.

What power did Renz have, to call these three retreads in as his private detective squad to solve a case that would benefit him politically?

But Nobbler knew what power—that of position and popularity. No one in or out of city government wanted to cross Renz, and strictly speaking, it wasn't illegal for the NYPD to hire outside contractors or temporarily reactivate former cops. Especially if they were acting under the auspices of the commissioner.

Right now Renz was on a roll and wanted to stay that way. Ambitious bastard. Not that Nobbler could hold
that
against him.

Disgusted, he tossed the paper on top of the
Times
and sat back and sipped at his coffee, which was now almost too cool to drink. The information in the
City Beat
article was probably all over TV and radio news, and late-edition papers would pick it up. Nobbler knew how it would go, now that the media had a hand to play, and he knew how he'd deal with them if he were in charge.

But he wasn't in charge. He didn't like having what he considered his turf trespassed upon. And that was exactly what was happening. He was sure as hell going to do something about it.

For a long time he sat sipping cool coffee and thought about just what it was that he could or would do. There were possibilities, always possibilities. And future opportunities to be seized.