John Lutz - Serial

“Why the new threads?” Quinn asked, as Fedderman returned to his desk chair. He picked up some papers and idly scanned them, then dropped them back, as if he might not have heard Quinn.

“I thought it was time,” he said at last.

“I didn’t notice any patches on your old clothes,” Quinn said.

Fedderman sighed and met Quinn’s gaze directly. “You aren’t gonna let this go, are you? You or Pearl?”

Quinn smiled. “Sorry, Feds.”

“Okay. I’m interested in somebody, and she seems interested in me. I figured, in her honor, I oughta replace at least one of my old detective suits.”

“I would think you’d save the Master of the Universe outfit for when you weren’t working.”

“When am I not working?”

“You’ve got a point. In fact, you need another suit.”

Fedderman shrugged. “I got a couple of sport jackets that’ll get me by.”

“Do any of us know this woman who wields such sartorial influence?”

“I don’t think so.” Fedderman squirmed in his chair. “You know her name, though. Penny.”

“I don’t think-” Then Quinn remembered. “Penny Noon?”

“We’ve gone out a couple of times.” Fedderman made a backhanded, dismissive motion with his long fingers, as if the assignations meant nothing of importance.

Quinn knew better. “I dunno, Feds. A victim’s sister…”

“Are there rules and regulations?” Fedderman asked.

“No, no…” Quinn leaned back in his chair, almost toppling, and laced his fingers over his stomach. Fedderman was right. Penny Noon wasn’t all that close to what had happened to her sister Nora. Or didn’t seem to be. It wasn’t as if she was a suspect or an eyewitness. And this wasn’t the NYPD. He lifted his feet and let the chair tilt forward. “No problem, Feds. Live happily ever after.”

“Well, thank you very much, Your Honor.”

“Thanks for what?” Pearl asked.

Neither man had noticed her enter. She wandered over and got her morning mug of coffee. Third mug, actually. Her lush black hair was still mussed, almost the way it was when Quinn had left the brownstone this morning and she was tumbling out of bed.

As she moved toward her desk, she glanced in the direction of the coatrack, then at Fedderman. “You got an ascot goes with that thing?”

“I don’t need a mascot,” Fedderman said.

She plopped down in her desk chair, ostensibly uninterested in what he had to say. She got out the Swiss Army knife she kept in her drawer and used as a letter opener, and deftly sliced open an envelope she’d plucked from her post office box on the way to the job. Maybe she was going to forget about the portion of the discussion she’d overheard on entering the office.

“Thanks for what?” she asked again, absently.

Quinn said nothing. He and Fedderman knew Pearl was on the scent and would one way or another get an answer to her question.

“Penny Noon,” Fedderman said, in quick surrender.

“Penny Noon what?” Pearl asked, glancing at what looked like an ad that she’d slid from the envelope.

“Nora Noon’s sister,” Quinn said. “Feds is seeing her.”

“She’s been invisible?”

“No. Seeing her.”

“In a romantic way?”

“Yes.”

“Explains the amazing dream suit,” Pearl said. She crumpled envelope and ad and dropped them into her wastebasket. She looked deadpan at Fedderman. “Penny short for Penelope?”

“I don’t know,” Fedderman said.

“Must be serious.”

Quinn thought it was time to change the subject before Fedderman could come up with a retort. “Nift called about the postmortem,” he said to Pearl. He told her about the phone call and about Candice Culligan’s tongue being removed. Even tough Pearl blanched when she heard about the tongue. But she seemed to regain her equilibrium quickly.

“That’s sick, Quinn.”

“Don’t I know it? All in all, there’s not much we can use. The victim was methodically tortured and then stabbed twenty-seven times in and around the pubic area.”

“The things we do for love,” Pearl said.

No one spoke for a while. Pearl booted up her desk computer and fed something into it with a flash drive she’d brought with her and dug out of her purse. She seemed, in her mind, to be alone in the room.

Quinn wondered why she had to hound Fedderman so persistently. She did that to almost everyone she knew. Quinn could love her because he understood that these were defensive actions. Preemptory strikes, but defensive.

There were other, more admirable, facets to Pearl’s personality, and she was so damned smart. That last part was what made her at least bearable to her fellow detectives. There was no denying her talent. Or her doggedness.

Still, she could make life miserable for Fedderman. And for Vitali and Mishkin when they were unable to avoid her.

And, let’s face it, sometimes for Quinn.

“I did a few hours’ work on my laptop before coming in,” she said. “Made a discovery.”

“About our latest victim?” Quinn asked.

“Yeah. Six years ago Candice Culligan was beaten and raped. They caught the guy and he got fifteen to twenty at Elmira. Five months ago he was released because DNA evidence established that even though she’d identified him, he couldn’t have been the rapist.”

Pearl took a slow sip of coffee. Quinn knew she had more to say and was stringing it out. Fedderman was glaring at her, maybe still angry about the remark about not knowing Penny Noon’s full name.

“So she was a rape victim,” Fedderman said.

“They all were.”

Quinn leaned forward. “Say again, Pearl.”

“ All of the victims where there were Socrates’s Cavern clues were at one time or another rape victims. And the accused and convicted rapist in each case was released when DNA evidence overturned his conviction.”

“So that’s the relevant common denominator,” Quinn said. “Not Socrates’s Cavern.”

“It would seem so,” Pearl said. “We’ve been had.”

“The bastard was playing us,” Fedderman said. “Using Socrates’s Cavern’s old membership list to lead us down the wrong road.”

“We suspected it,” Pearl said. “At least, I did.”

Quinn laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back, back, back in his swivel chair. Pearl and Fedderman were used to Quinn tempting disaster. He’d never actually tipped the chair, only almost.

“Bears thinking about, doesn’t it?” Pearl said.

“Sure does,” Quinn said. “It’s too much of a coincidence that all these falsely accused and released rapists would all at once set about killing the women responsible for putting them behind bars.”

“And ruining those men’s lives,” Fedderman said, “breaking up their families, blackening their reputations, costing them their employment…”

“Yeah, yeah,” Pearl said. “You’re thinking these guys have actually all gone bonkers at once and are getting their evens with the women who messed up their lives?”

“It’s barely possible,” Fedderman said, but not as if he believed it.

Pearl got a comb from her purse and ran it through her hair. “We’re talking about a serial killer here, Feds. And a torturer. Not many people-even pissed-off falsely accused men-have that kind of monster living inside their skins.”

“But one of them does,” Quinn said. “One who knows he’ll be the prime suspect when his accuser is murdered. The initial victims and the Socrates’s Cavern connection are subterfuge. A forest so we won’t notice the tree. He’s killing the others so his intended victim will be just another corpse, part of a string of serial-killer victims.”

“And if he’s arranged for a halfway plausible alibi,” Pearl said, “we’ll never get onto him.”