John Lutz - Pulse

Hog-tied.

She’d been hog-tied and then positioned so her upper body stretched backward, leaving her staring at the sky. There was a constant tension in her backward arched body that was in itself painful.

The natural urge to straighten her upper body to the perpendicular was in constant battle with the tautness of the rope that ran between wrists and ankles. She was drawn backward like a bow, as if to shoot an arrow into the night sky.

And it hurt. Her spine felt as if it might snap.

Now what?

A sole made a scuffing sound beside her. Nearby.

He loomed above her, and cold terror ran like a chill through the marrow of her bones. The violent cramps returned as her body strained again for its unattainable release. Her agony worked its way through the rectangle of duct tape over her mouth as a drawn-out keening plea, like the muted wail of a siren. Another soft wail, the tape playing in and out.

He showed her the knife, rotating the long silver blade so it caught the starlight, and smiled down at her.

“Let me know if you’re uncomfortable,” he said softly through the smile.

The knife’s sharply honed blade found flesh, and then blood.

The muffled human siren wailed longer, louder, but not so loud that anyone nearby would hear.

Not that it mattered. The building was unoccupied. There was no one nearby.

They were in the small, brick courtyard of an East Village six-story walkup that was being rehabbed. Dawn had broken. CSU techs were busy doing their white-glove ballet, staying well away from Quinn, Pearl, Nift, and what was left of Ann Spellman.

“Shock, shock,” said Nift, the pugnacious little M.E. “The victim has dark hair and eyes, and a great body with a terrific rack. Well, obviously had a terrific rack.”

“I can see that,” Quinn said, “even through the blood.”

Nift, leaning over the awkwardly bound corpse, glanced sideways and let his gaze flick up and down Pearl. He didn’t say what he was thinking, that the dead woman facedown on the hard paving stones, her back arched so drastically that she might have broken it in her death throes, was very much the same type as Pearl.

Pearl said nothing, but she stared unblinkingly at him in a way that would have embarrassed a man with the slightest sensitivity or consideration.

“After hog-tying her, he must have gripped her under the jaw and lifted so her breasts dangled. Then held her under the jaw and gone to work with the knife,” Nift said. He was grinning. “Then he rocked her back on her knees and left her like she is, stargazing.”

Quinn rested a huge and powerful hand on Pearl’s shoulder, gently, but in a way that restrained her.

“She still has her panties on,” Quinn said.

“Sure does,” Nift said. “All pink and lacy, too. Dolled up to screw or die.”

Quinn felt a sudden embarrassment for the dead woman, the way they were talking about her when she was right there with them. He was surprised. He’d thought he was past that. Somewhere in his mind it registered that this killer could get to him, make him feel that way.

“Rigor mortis has come and gone,” Nift said, not seeming to notice that Pearl had almost sprung on him and sunk her teeth into his arteries-and still might do so. “I left her like this so you could see her before the paramedics removed the body. Her tits, incidentally, seem nowhere to be found. Like with the previous victim.”

Quinn lifted his hand from Pearl’s shoulder and patted her, then stepped forward and more closely examined the arched body on the redbrick pavers. The freeze-frame of terror in the woman’s bulging eyes was something he’d dream about, even twenty years later, from time to time. If he made it that many more years in a world where people did things like this to each other.

“You should have seen the funny grin on her face before I removed this. It was jammed crossways in her mouth. I didn’t know what it was till I got it out.”

Quinn stared at a flat half circle of steel and then saw that it was marked. It was a protractor, used by draftsmen to calculate and draw angles.

“You should have left it where it was,” he said.

“I know,” Nift said. “Curiosity got the best of me. And I knew it was going to the morgue one way or the other. I found it interesting what the killer did. After everything that happened, he made her smile.”

Both men looked down again at the dead woman.

The knots binding her were simple square knots of the sort anyone might tie. The rope itself looked like ordinary clothesline, impossible to trace even in this era when hardly anyone actually hung clothes out to dry. Here and there, the victim was cut for what seemed like pure meanness. The raw flesh and blood where her breasts had been made Quinn swallow bile and anger.

The rope and hog-tie were something new in Daniel’s repertoire-and Quinn was becoming more firmly convinced that the killer was Daniel-but Quinn didn’t find that surprising. Serial killers, even locked as they were in their obsessions, sometimes introduced variations in their methods. Often that was to mislead the police, but it could also be that Daniel had thought about ways to increase his pleasure and his victim’s pain and fear, and come up with the hog-tie restraint. Classic serial killers were works in progress. That was what made them so terrifying.

Some of the simple knots were double tied, as if to make sure that rope crossed rope correctly. Simple but effective, like double tying your shoelaces. Quinn knew he was looking at precaution and not expertise.

“Our man’s not a sailor,” he said.

“Or Boy Scout,” Pearl added.

“Depends on the kind of merit badge we’re talking about,” Nift said.

Fedderman came out the door into the courtyard, moving carefully so as not to interfere with the techs. He had on one of his cheap brown suits with the coat open and flapping. As he moved in his awkward gait, the coattails swung like pendulums, brushing and almost knocking over a pot of dead flowers on a rusty plant stand. He’d been talking to the super of the building next door, who’d discovered the body early this morning while searching for his runaway cat.

Quinn gave the okay to remove the body as long as the techs were finished with it, and then motioned for Fedderman to follow him back through the building and outside to the street. Pearl waited until Nift had finished packing up his instruments and was on his way out before joining them. As if she needed to stand guard over the dead woman to protect her from a necrophiliac. For years there had been whispered rumors about Nift.

Who’ll protect her in the morgue?

As she was leaving, Pearl hesitated, then bent over the distorted corpse and looked at the label in the panties. They weren’t an expensive brand, and were fairly new. She examined them more closely.

“So whadda we got?” Quinn asked Fedderman, when the three of them were standing out on the sidewalk.

Fedderman got out his leather-bound notepad, which he opened to the proper page and stared at as he spoke. “The super, a guy named Willy Fernandez, lives and has an office in the building next door. He’s also been hired to keep an eye on this building while it’s being rehabbed, and he has a key. His cat, Theo, took off and Fernandez had to go look for him. He saw Theo run into the next-door building with the door hanging open, so Fernandez let himself in and went looking for him. When he found Ann Spellman, he forgot all about Theo.”

“I’ll bet he did,” Pearl said. “He the one called it in?”

“Yeah.” Fedderman stuffed the notepad back in his pocket. “He’s watched enough cop shows on TV to know not to touch anything, so he went back to his apartment next door and called the police.”