John Lutz - Serial

Fedderman, standing with pencil and notebook and talking to Michelle Roper, looked over at Quinn.

“Do either of you know or know of someone named Simon Luttrell?” Quinn asked.

“He don’t live in the building,” said the super immediately.

Michelle gave the question a few more seconds’ thought. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of him.”

Quinn nodded and said, “Come on into the apartment when you’re done here, Feds.”

“Just a few more questions,” Fedderman said.

“You hear that a lot on TV,” the super said.

Quinn edged his way around Sorkin and his partner and went back into Noon’s apartment. Mishkin was standing in the living room. Vitali came in from the hall that led to the bedrooms and bathroom.

“The bedroom she’s not in,” Vitali said. “It’s full of nothing but clothes. I mean really full of clothes.”

“The second bedroom, you mean?” Mishkin asked.

Vitali stared at him.

“How would you know which is which, Harold?” Mishkin could be a trial sometimes. Vitali bore him like a cross.

“The second one’s usually smaller. Did you check to see about size?”

“It’s not supposed to matter,” Vitali growled. “The thing is, that bedroom’s damn near bursting open, what with all the clothes in there. Most of them are on hangers, but some are just piled on the floor. I mean, a hell of a lot of clothes.”

“Maybe she was in some kinda clothes business,” Mishkin ventured.

“Nothing in there looked secondhand to me, Harold.”

“Maybe she was a designer,” Mishkin said.

Sal smiled. “Or a master of disguise.”

“Wouldn’t it be mistress of disguise?” Mishkin asked.

“Not unless she was a dominatrix or some married guy’s secret girlfriend.”

“Couldn’t she be both?”

Quinn knew what they were doing, cracking wise to stay sane, to scare away the ghosts. Cops had to learn to do that, if they were going to last.

He stopped listening to Vitali and Mishkin as he heard a commotion in the hall, a lot of clinking and clacking of equipment along with hurried, shuffling footfalls on the carpet. The sirens outside were fully stopped now. The troops had arrived, and in force. Sorkin and his partner moved back as if facing a tsunami to give them a clear route to the apartment.

Pearl was the first one through the door.

Michelle Roper had informed Quinn that Nora Noon had a sister somewhere in New Jersey. It hadn’t taken long to find her, not very far away in Teaneck. Fedderman waited at the morgue the next morning for the sister, Penny Noon, who was driving in to the city to identify the body.

The victim’s sister turned out to be a half sister, an attractive woman with choppy blond hair with dark streaks in it that looked deliberate. There wasn’t much of a family resemblance to her murdered sister, maybe because the victim was obviously much the younger of the two. Penny had a fuller face, calm gray eyes with the beginnings of crow’s-feet, and full lips with pink gloss. She did have the same deeply cleft chin as the victim. Her demeanor was tense but controlled, her strong features seemingly placid.

After the introductions, Penny, Fedderman, and a guy named Clarkson, from Renz’s office, stood and waited for Nora Noon’s postmortem photograph to appear on a monitor mounted at eye level on the wall. Clarkson wasn’t yet forty and dressed in a sharp gray suit, starched white shirt, and gold-clasped tie, making Fedderman by comparison look… like Fedderman.

There were chairs angled around the viewing room, but no one was sitting down. Penny had refused the offer of a chair, and the two men felt obligated to stand with her. She was slightly behind Renz’s man and standing on Fedderman’s right, about a foot away from him. Fedderman recalled the victim’s bulging eyes and horror-stricken expression. He knew what might happen and made himself ready to catch a falling body.

But Nora Noon’s head-shot photo was surprisingly without the horror of yesterday in that stifling apartment. Her eyes were closed and her facial muscles worked into a neutral expression. The photo was cropped so it showed none of the burn marks on her neck and farther down on her body. None of the stripped flesh.

“Her,” Penny Noon said from somewhere deep in her throat. And in a steadier voice: “That’s Nora.”

Then she emitted a soft sound halfway between a sigh and a sob, and her body sagged against Fedderman.

He caught her and helped her-carried her, actually-to one of the padded black chairs and lowered her gently into it.

She came around suddenly, as if someone had waved smelling salts under her nose. She looked into Fedderman’s eyes, causing something in him to turn over and over, and appeared profoundly embarrassed.

“It’s all right,” he heard himself say. He watched his arm move independent of thought and his hand pat the back of hers.

He realized he was kneeling down in front of the chair like an idiot about to propose marriage. His knee was sore from supporting his weight on the hard tile floor. For some reason he was afraid to look again into her eyes, as if a part of him knew that something profound might happen. Again.

Listening to his aching knee creak, Fedderman made himself stand and turn at the same time. As he did so he glanced up, and was relieved to see a blank monitor screen rather than the dead woman’s photo.

“It’s all right,” he repeated. “This part’s over.”

“For Nora, everything’s over.” He thought she was going to start sobbing, but she bit back any show of emotion or loss of control. “It’s so goddamned unfair,” she said in a resigned voice.

“It is,” he agreed.

“I guess everyone says that.”

“Everyone’s right.”

She looked around slowly, as if gradually waking from a dark dream and finding herself in strange surroundings.

“God!” she said, shaking her head.

“He’s in the mix somewhere,” Fedderman said, knowing as he heard the words that it was an inane thing to say.

She gave him a closer look, curious, her eyes intent and traveling in brief glances, as if she was mapping his features. He could not look away.

“Are you a religious man?” she asked.

“I have been a few times,” Fedderman said, “when I was sufficiently scared.”

Her wide lips curved upward in a slight smile that stayed. Her hands were in her lap, turned palms up and trembling, as if she were waiting for her fortune to be told and dreading the prognosis.

“That applies to me, too,” she said.

Renz’s man had come over and was standing looking down at her. “You okay, ma’am?” he asked.

“Okay enough.”

He nodded, gave her a smile that meant nothing, and left the room, his mission as witness to the identification completed.

“There goes a piece of the bureaucracy,” Penny said.

“I’m a piece of the bureaucracy, too.”

“You don’t seem a precise fit.”

Fedderman didn’t know what she meant by that remark, but he was sure he approved.

“I need something,” Penny said.

“A drink?”

“Something warm. Coffee, decaffeinated. I think I saw a vending machine when I entered the building.”

“You wouldn’t want to drink anything that came out of that,” Fedderman heard himself say. “I know a place where we could go.”

I must be out of my mind.

She looked at him for several seconds before nodding, as if confirming what he’d been thinking.

Despite the early hour, Quinn and Jerry Lido sat next to each other on bar stools at O’Keefe’s Oasis. They were the only ones in the place consuming alcohol. The three other drinkers, two men and a woman, were sipping coffee. Quinn had consumed only half of his mimosa-a mixture of champagne and orange juice-when he generously ordered another scotch and water for Jerry. It had been Quinn’s idea to come here.