John Lutz - Serial

Pearl parked the car behind an NYPD cruiser, got out into the sun-drenched heat, and ducked beneath the tape.

When the uniform forgot about the suit and came toward her, she flashed her ID. He stepped back into the meager shade and motioned with his arm.

Pearl entered the dogleg tunnel of clothing display windows and heard echoing voices. The maze of glass seemed remote from the rest of the city and smelled musty. There was another smell Pearl recognized and could almost taste. Death assaulted all the senses.

The tech team was at work in its busy and concentrated fashion. Dr. Julius Nift, the obnoxious little ME, was crouched beside a woman’s body like a lascivious troll. His black leather medical case was open beside him.

Nift looked up at Pearl’s approach and nodded. “Our killer’s going downscale.”

Pearl looked at what was left of a thin, raggedly dressed woman. Obviously a street person. A rectangle of gray duct tape dangled from one corner of her gaping, blood-clogged mouth.

“The job’s fun sometimes, isn’t it?” Nift said. He removed something silver and sharp from his medical case and began poking and probing.

“You touch the tape?” Pearl asked.

“Of course not. I left it for the real inspectors so they could make brilliant deductions.” He used a tweezers-like instrument to lift a shred of severed flesh from the victim’s abdomen and peered beneath it. “Yuk,” he said in a flat voice.

“Is this finally a female corpse that holds no sexual appeal for you?” Pearl asked Nift. In the corner of her vision she saw a tech’s head turn toward her in surprise.

Nift merely smiled, smug in his insensitivity. “Oh, I dunno. Maybe when I clean her up.”

“You’re an asshole,” Pearl said.

Nift shrugged. “You asked.”

Quinn had arrived and caught the last of the conversation. His bulk seemed to fill the confined space. “I don’t want to know the question,” he said, with a warning look at Pearl. The big uniformed cop had come into the display tunnel a few steps behind Quinn and stood stone-faced. He looked as if his nose had been broken almost as many times as Quinn’s.

“She died last night around nine to midnight,” Nift said, happy to change the subject now that Quinn was here. “I’ll give you a closer estimate sometime today.”

Quinn stooped near the body for a closer look.

“Ugly,” he said.

“I was just remarking on that,” Nift said.

“Tortured like the others. Same kind of knife cuts and cigarette burns.”

“Same kind of wounds, same kind of knife,” Nift said. “Short, sharply curved blade, very well honed.”

“But not surgical?”

“Not like any surgical instrument I’ve seen. For detail work, though, I would say.” He grinned. “Like for carving on models. Big models.”

“The tape on her mouth was like that when the body was found by the sales clerk who came in to open the store,” the uniform said. “I made sure nobody touched it till the CSU and ME got here.”

Pearl looked beyond him and saw another uniformed cop standing near the bend in the display windows. A redheaded guy in a cheap suit, whom Pearl recognized as a police photographer, was making his way toward them. Murder was a magnet. The troops had arrived in full force.

“Her tongue…” Quinn said, staring at the gaping bloody hole that was left of a human mouth.

“It’s been removed,” Nift said. “I think very deftly. I’ll have to clean her out to be certain of that. And unless she’s lying on it, the killer left with the tongue.”

“He would,” Quinn said. He carefully checked the victim for identification. There was nothing. Not even a scrap of paper in the pockets of the threadbare clothing. He looked at the victim’s tangled, bloody hair and figured it had been tangled even before she was killed. There was dirt beneath her jagged fingernails, but no sign that she’d resisted her attacker.

“She have a purse?”

“Not when we got here,” the bent-nosed cop said.

“Just another street woman,” Nift said, watching Quinn across the dead woman.

“I want her printed as soon as possible,” Quinn said, standing up. Feeling it in his legs

“My God!” a man’s voice said behind Quinn.

He turned to see a slender, handsome man with spiky blond hair and round-framed glasses. He was wearing a spiffy cream-colored suit that reminded Quinn the inveterate theater buff of Sporting Life in Porgy and Bess.

The reed-thin man was at least three inches taller than Quinn and wearing some kind of cologne giving off a scent that didn’t mix well with the coppery smell of old blood.

“The officer told me I could come back here,” he said. “I’m Ben. You know, of Ben’s for Men’s. Ben Blevin.” He held out his hand and Quinn shook it, noting that the reedy Ben was surprisingly strong.

Quinn thought about going inside the store with Ben and questioning the clerk who’d discovered the body, but that would mean leaving Pearl with Nift, along with a lot of other people who wouldn’t intimidate Pearl in the slightest. He glanced at his watch. Mishkin was looking after Weaver in the hospital, but Quinn knew that Fedderman and Sal Vitali would be here soon.

“Let’s go inside the store,” Quinn said to Ben. “I want to talk to your clerk.”

As Ben led the way into the store, Quinn glanced back at Pearl with what she recognized as his Behave Yourself look.

Pearl would try.

Edmundsville, 2008

Beth sat in the 66 Roadhouse and watched Link dance with her friend Annette Brazel. Annette was a small, attractive woman who was about as susceptible to Link’s flirting as a concrete post. She ran a leather-cutting machine at the plant and had a husband who acted in community theater in Edmundsville and had a reputation for meanness. Beth wasn’t jealous.

She never worried about that part of her marriage. Though a measure of passion had long since left her partnership with Link, some remained. And she was secure in the knowledge that Link would never leave her if it meant giving up Eddie. Of course, Eddie was fast becoming a young man. In a few more years he’d be going off to college. Hard to believe now, though; he still looked and acted so much like a green kid.

As Beth sat and sipped her Bud Light and watched the dancers, it struck her as it often did how much Link and Eddie resembled each other. Or maybe that was in her mind.

But no, she was sure… When Link spun around and the light hit his face a certain way, it was almost like looking at an older Eddie. Almost as if…

Jesus! Get that out of your mind!

The contemporary country music ended, and the band began playing an old Hank Williams song. It reminded Beth of when she and Link had met here at the 66, when that same song-might have been, anyway-was playing.

Hank Williams, singing about love gone wrong.

Link and Annette stayed out on the dance floor, Link taking advantage of a slower beat. They were dancing close to each other, but not too close. Annette glanced over at Beth and winked.

As Beth sat watching them she noticed the beer can on the table where Link had been sitting. It was a Wild Colt can, the same brand that was found on Vincent Salas’s motorcycle the night of the-

Oh, God, stop it!

It was a popular brand locally. Half the men in the 66 were drinking it right now. DNA had proven it was a coincidence that Salas had been drinking it-

DNA can prove, or disprove, lots of things.

Beth told herself, as she had so many times lately, that she was torturing herself because of guilt.

But that didn’t mean-

“Annette’s got a sore foot,” Link said, settling down in his chair, behind the opened Colt can.