John Lutz - Pulse

“The police photographer and Nift are back there with them,” Renz explained.

“Them?”

Renz ignored the question. “The killer called the Times, and had the paper call me. The guy at the Times said the killer told him he might make me a leather product like he made for you.”

“He knew about the victims’ breasts being removed?”

“That so-called secret information meant he was the real thing. That’s how he got through to me instead of being brushed off as a head case.”

“You get a voice print or phone trace?” Quinn asked.

“A voice print, yeah. But he musta made the call with one of those cheap-ass throwaway phones. I listened to a recording. The voice was normal, and so was his phrasing, like he had some education. Even apologized for waking me up. He knew about the tits being cut off. I asked him how he knew, and he told me. I asked him, ‘Did you cut off the tits this time?’ He said yeah, he did it to one of them.

“ One of them. When I got here as he advised me-as if I wouldn’t have come anyway-I saw what he meant.”

Another flash from down the hall.

“Whaddya mean, ‘what he meant’?”

“C’mon,” Renz said. “I’ll show you.”

He started leading the way to the back of the apartment, then stopped and looked at Pearl. Then at Quinn.

“Jesus!” Pearl said. “I’m a cop. I’ve been to dozens of murder scenes. I’m not gonna faint or puke at the sight of a dead body.”

“Nice of you to think of her, though,” Quinn said to Renz. Not acting like yourself at all.

Renz gave his nasty fat man’s smile. “I just don’t want her upchucking all over the crime scene. Making a mess.”

When they entered the bedroom, Pearl did feel a queasiness she hadn’t expected. On the bed kneeled an almost nude dead woman in the usual hog-tied, body-bowed pose. Her wrists and ankles were wrapped and then tethered so that she was trapped in her awkward position, body arched, staring with unseeing eyes at the ceiling. She was gagged with a rectangle of gray duct tape. Her breasts had been removed. She looked afraid but not surprised.

Next to her lay another bound woman, this one flat on her back, her arms knotted by a rope to a belt cinched tightly around her waist. It was gray cloth and looked like a woman’s belt. There was identically colored material showing in a jumble of clothes that looked as if they’d been tossed into a corner. Her ankles were tied. She’d been stabbed in the heart, and her throat had been slashed. There was surprisingly little blood, suggesting that the stab wound had been first and fatal. Near the stab wound, just above her sternum, her breasts lay spread and flaccid against her torso, still attached and apparently uninjured. As with the first woman, a rectangle of tape was plastered over her mouth.

The kneeling victim was wearing blue panties, and also appeared to have been stabbed in the heart.

Nift, who’d been poking at the hog-tied victim with something resembling a large dental pick, said, “Looks like he went for the best of the pair. This one”-he pointed at the prone woman-“has got considerably more years and mileage on her.”

“They’re not used cars,” Pearl said through clenched teeth.

“They’re pretty damn well used, though,” Nift said, absently prodding the dead hog-tied woman with the steel instrument. She didn’t object, as Pearl halfway expected she might.

The supine woman seemed to be staring at the ceiling with half closed eyes that had the stillness of marbles. Blue eyes. She had blond hair, but it was obviously dyed. She hadn’t been bad looking but was nothing special.

The hog-tied woman next to her, festooned with the familiar knife nicks of violence, had dark eyes and genuinely dark hair, and appeared to have had large breasts.

“Have you guessed which one was Linda Brooks?” Renz asked.

“The one who looks like Pearl,” Nift said, from where he knelt on the floor in a position suggesting he was about to do some gynecological examination.

Pearl started toward him, but Quinn held on to her elbow.

“Damn it, Quinn, that hurts. All I want to do is twist his head off.”

Nift smiled. “By head I presume you mean-”

“Never mind that,” Renz said.

“What about her panties?” Quinn asked.

“Same size as the last victim’s,” Nift said. He smiled. “That was the first thing I checked.”

“I’ll bet not,” Renz said. He looked at Quinn. “How do you figure the second dead woman?”

“Offhand,” Quinn said, “I’d say she happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“She probably knew the dead woman.”

“Most likely,” Quinn said. “A visiting friend.”

“Maybe he didn’t have to undress them,” Nift said. “Maybe they were getting it on together and he interrupted them.”

Pearl gave him a hard look. “Listen, you scumbag-”

Loud noises, raised voices out in the hall, made everyone in the apartment stop what he or she was doing.

Nift gave Pearl a superior little smile and stood poised and motionless with a stainless-steel implement in his right hand, like a figure in a wax museum. Part of the Famous Assholes exhibit.

There was more noise from outside, down in the street. A man’s voice yelled something Quinn couldn’t understand.

“What the hell’s going on? Quinn asked.

“That would be a media wolfpack,” Renz said, looking at his wristwatch. “The killer said he’d wait an hour so the Times could have its scoop, then he’d call the rest of the papers and television news.”

“Did he say anything else?” Pearl asked.

“Only to give his best to you,” Renz said.

It didn’t take long to identify Linda Brooks’s visitor. Her purse with identification and seventy-three dollars in it was found beneath the pile of clothes in the bedroom corner.

“A doctor,” Quinn said.

“Not just any doctor,” one of the CSU techs said. He handed a white business card to Quinn. “This was in one of the victim’s desk drawers.”

The card identified the dead woman as Dr. Grace Moore, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

A further examination of the desk, Linda Brooks’s checkbook, and a nearby file cabinet, indicated that Dr. Grace Moore was treating Brooks, and had been for some time. There was a home file of rough and incomplete notes, but its contents, including documents signed by Grace Moore, described Brooks as a paranoid schizophrenic.

“That explains the pharmacy in the bathroom medicine cabinet,” Renz said. “The lady lived on pills.”

“I’ll send Feds to Moore’s office, see what else there is to see,” Quinn said. “No need for a warrant. Doctor-patient confidentiality doesn’t apply when both have been killed by the same madman.”

Questionable legality. Quinn was glad Jody wasn’t along on this one.

“Sounds right to me,” Renz said. “But I didn’t know you were gonna send somebody over there.”

“Send somebody?” Quinn said. “Over where?”

Renz placed his hands over both ears and turned away.

John Lutz

Pulse

And to die is different from what anyone supposed,

And luckier.

— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself ”

Leighton, Wisconsin, 1986

T ime passed, and no one ever found out what really had happened to Duffy. Maybe there weren’t enough clues. Or maybe it was because no one cared. No one other than Sherri, anyway.

The road repair was finished and looked much the same, only the trees began slightly farther from the gravel shoulder. Rory wasn’t sure what drew him there, but sometimes, at night, he went alone to the spot near where he’d buried Duffy. Gotten away with murder, Sherri would say. If she knew.