John Lutz - Pulse

“I wish.”

“There isn’t any sign of her resisting until after she was gagged and taped.”

“The wine, maybe.”

“Could be. If she wasn’t used to it. And there are traces of an over-the-counter sedative in her stomach. Bruising on her arms is consistent with the killer straddling her and pinning her down. Maybe keeping her hands away from her face after slapping that tape over her mouth. He had to have taken some of the fight out of her before taping her arms to her sides.”

“That would take a strong person.”

“Average-strength man, stronger-than-average woman. He was probably seated on her boobs, then slid down toward her pubic area while applying the tape. My guess is he waited until she was stunned and exhausted from torture before he lopped off her jugs. There are small cut marks, or stab marks that barely penetrated the flesh, in sensitive areas all over her body.”

“Made while she was still alive?”

“Definitely. He wanted her to see as well as feel what he was doing. Wanted them to experience it together.”

“He wanted to take the trip with her,” Quinn said, “but not all the way.”

“Company loves misery.”

“ Company being Daniel Wentworth, aka Daniel Danielle, aka Danielle Daniel?”

“That would be my guess.”

“Only a guess?” Quinn asked, holding in his anger at the killer, feeling slightly sick. The heat.

“At this time, yes. But I remember the original Daniel Danielle murders. Between us, this is the same guy.”

“He’s dead,” Quinn said. “Nobody on foot where he was could have survived that hurricane.”

“Zombie love. But if that’s not a good enough explanation for you, we got some human flesh out from under one of Miss Macy’s painted but broken nails. We’ll have a DNA comparison shortly. You wanna bet some money on this?”

“No,” Quinn said. “And what I heard was the Florida cops either didn’t take or lost Daniel Wentworth’s swab, and the DNA sample from under the nail of an original victim was too small and too old to be of much help. Most of it was used up during the trial.”

“Same guy, though,” Nift repeated. “It’s very distinctive, his work with the knife. It had to take some thought, some practice.” Nift paused. Quinn could hear him breathing. It was possible that Daniel had taken over a hundred victims, their bodies still lying in shallow graves or disposed of in ways unimaginable to the normal mind. “Something else I couldn’t help thinking about when I was working on this one, Quinn. Something you really oughta keep in mind. Looking down at Macy, before I peeled back the face and did the brain pan-even after-she kept reminding me of Pearl.”

Quinn hung up the phone hard, causing Fedderman to stare over at him.

“You okay?” Fedderman asked.

Quinn was sweating. Trembling slightly. He dragged the back of his hand across his clammy forehead and sat back. “Yeah. Just talking to Nift about the postmortem.”

“That’ll do it,” Fedderman said. “Anything useful?”

Quinn related his conversation with Nift, now and then thinking about Pearl.

No doubt that was what Nift wanted, not knowing that Quinn would have been thinking about Pearl without being prompted.

Pearl herself entered the office an hour later. She was neatly dressed in gray slacks and blue blazer, shoes with slight high heels on them to raise her at least somewhat above her five-foot-one height. Her breasts didn’t look so prominent beneath the loose cotton fabric of her white blouse. Her eyes were dark and alert, her pale complexion set off by her jet-black hair, which fell to below her shoulders. Vivid was the word most often used to describe Pearl. A sketch in black and white by an artist who loved women.

She nodded good morning to Quinn and Fedderman, and to Sal and Harold, who’d only just arrived themselves. Then she went over and poured herself some coffee in her initialed mug. She was glad to see that someone else, knowing she’d be coming in late, had taken the trouble to make coffee.

“We saved you a doughnut,” Sal said, motioning toward a shallow white bakery box resting on the printer, “but Harold ate it.”

“I didn’t know it was Pearl’s,” Mishkin said quickly.

“That’s okay,” Pearl said. “At least there’s coffee. The four of you must have pitched in and somehow gotten it made.”

“Eat your doughnut,” Sal growled. “We were only kidding about Harold.”

“It’s cream-filled,” Harold said.

Pearl lifted the box’s lid to reveal a small and broken cream-filled doughnut with chocolate icing. Lucky she’d taken the time to toast and eat a bagel in the brownstone. Letting the box lid drop back into place, she made sure they all saw her disdain for the doughnut.

“Since we’re all here,” Quinn said, “we need to have a meeting and coordinate what we know. Maybe get some kinda picture of what we’re dealing with.”

Line one rang on the phones. Pearl picked up the unit on her desk and turned away so her conversation wouldn’t be a distraction. Also, it wouldn’t be overheard.

When she’d finished talking and hung up, she turned back to the others. She was the one who looked distracted.

“That was Rena Collins,” she said. “Macy’s mother. She’s flying into town today to talk to us, and to identify and claim her daughter’s body.”

“This is a homicide investigation,” Quinn said. “We’ll want to hold the body.”

“I told her that,” Pearl said. “I think she understands.”

Quinn raised his eyebrows.

Pearl shrugged. “She wants to see her daughter. She’ll wait for the body. She said she’s bringing a dress.”

No one spoke for a while.

Quinn said, “I’ll call Nift and make sure he makes Macy presentable.”

He immediately realized how callous that sounded, but he couldn’t think of a better way to say that pieces of Mrs. Collins’s daughter were either missing or needed to be fitted back together.

Q uinn picked up Rena Collins at her hotel and drove her to the morgue. She was an attractive woman in her fifties, with a trim figure that looked like the result of fanatical dieting and exercise. Her hair was blond, unlike her daughter’s, and she was tan, as if she’d been swimming or playing tennis within the past few days. Only the crow’s-feet at the corners of her narrowed and sad blue eyes hinted at her age.

“You didn’t have to go to this trouble,” she said. “I could have met you there.” Her voice sounded rough and worn, as if she was an incurable smoker. Quinn thought it was probably from crying.

“It’s no trouble.”

“I thought at first this was a hired limo,” Rena Collins said. “It doesn’t look like an unmarked police car.”

“It isn’t. It’s my personal car, a 1999 Lincoln. It does look like a hired car. That makes it one of the least conspicuous rides in New York.”

“It must be,” Rena said. “Two of them just passed us.”

“Newer models, but close enough.”

Traffic was building up; almost lunchtime. The silence in the car became thicker and heavier. There wasn’t much for the two strangers to talk about, other than the dead woman. Neither of them wanted to discuss her at the moment, even though her foreboding presence was with them as surely as if she were sitting in the backseat.

It wasn’t easy, what Rena Collins was about to do. Identifying the corpse of a dead child was about the worst thing you could ask of someone. Quinn would be glad when it was behind her. Behind both of them.

He was relieved, mostly for Rena, when the dead face of Macy Collins appeared on the morgue monitor. The photo had been taken before the autopsy. Nift had done a good job of preparing Macy for viewing. The face on the screen didn’t look much like her recent photographs that the hometown media had dug up, but maybe that was a good thing, that she didn’t look like herself. Quinn recalled the horror that had been in her eyes, the constant silent scream that had been on her lips once the tape had been removed. At least Rena Collins was spared that.