John Lutz - Serial

Millie Graff’s feet were sore. She was a hostess at Mingles, a new and popular restaurant on West Forty-fifth Street near Times Square, and hadn’t sat down for over five hours. After work, it was a three-block walk and a long concrete stairwell descent to a downtown subway platform. In the crowded subway, someone would probably step on her toes.

She didn’t mind the work or the time at Mingles. Her paycheck was big enough that she’d soon be able to move out of her cramped Village apartment into something larger, maybe on the Upper West Side. Her job was secure, and there was still a chance she could land a spot in an off-Broadway chorus line.

Dance had been Millie’s first love. It was what had brought her to New York City from the small town her folks had moved to in New Jersey. Dance and dreams.

She’d kept her weight down and was still built like a dancer: long-waisted, with small breasts, muscular legs, and an elegant turn of ankle that drew male glances.

In fact, as she jogged up the concrete steps to the entrance to her building, holding level a white foam takeaway container from a deli she’d stopped at on her way home, a middle-aged man walking past gave her a lingering look and a hopeful smile.

Not till you grow some hair on your head, Millie thought- rather cruelly, she realized with some regret, as she shouldered open the door to the vestibule.

She saw no one on the way up in the elevator or in the hall. Pausing to dig her keys out of her purse, she realized again how weary she was. Just smiling for seven hours was enough to wear a person down.

After keying the locks, she turned the tarnished brass doorknob and entered.

She’d barely had time to register that something was wrong when the man who’d been waiting for her just inside the door stepped directly in front of her. It was almost as if he’d sprung up out of the floor.

Millie gasped. The foam container of chicken wings and brown rice dropped to the carpet and made a mess.

The man was so close that his face was out of focus and she couldn’t make out his features. She thought at first he was simply shirtless, but in a startled instant realized he was completely nude. She could smell his sweaty male scent. Feel his body heat. She was looking up at him at an angle that made her think he was about six feet tall.

He smiled. That frightened the already-stunned Millie to the point where her throat constricted. She could hardly breathe.

“You know me,” he said.

But of course she didn’t. Not really.

“I have a gift for you,” he told her, and she stood in shock as he slipped something-a necklace-over her head carefully, so as not to disturb her hairdo.

She was aware of his right hand moving quickly on the lower periphery of her vision. Saw an instantaneous glint of silver. A blade! Something peculiar about it.

He was thrilled by the confusion in her eyes. Her brain hadn’t yet caught up with what was happening.

The blade would feel cold at first, before pain overwhelmed all other feeling.

He was standing now supporting her, a length of her intestines draped in his left hand like a warm snake.

He thought that was amazing. Incredible! The expression on Millie Graff’s face made it obvious that she, too, was amazed. Her eyes bulged with wonder. He felt the throb of his erection.

Despite the seriousness of her injury, he knew she wasn’t yet dead. He lowered her gently to the floor, resting her on her back so she wouldn’t bleed so much. Carefully, he propped her head against the sofa so that when he used the ammonia fumes to jolt her back to consciousness, she’d be looking down again at what he’d done to her.

She’d know it was only the beginning.

“Why would you invite anyone sane to see this?” Quinn asked.

But he had a pretty good idea why.

New York Police Commissioner Harley Renz wouldn’t be at a bloody crime scene like this unless he considered it vitally important. Renz was standing back, well away from the mess in the tiny living room. The air was fetid with the coppery stench of blood.

The commissioner had put on even more weight in the year since Quinn had seen him. His conservative blue suit was stretched at the seams, rendering its expensive tailoring meaningless. His pink jowls ballooned over the collar of his white silk shirt. More and more, his appearance reflected exactly what he was, a corpulent and corrupt politician with the fleshy facial features of a bloodhound. He looked like a creature of rapacious appetite, and he was one.

“Look at her,” he said, his red-rimmed eyes fleshy triangles of compassion. “Jesus, just look at her!”

What he was demanding wasn’t easy. The woman lay on her back on the bloodstained carpet, with her legs and arms spread as if she’d given up and welcomed what was being done to her so the horror could end. Quinn knew it had taken a long time to end. It looked as if the tendons in the crooks of her arms and behind both knees had been severed so she couldn’t move other than to flop around, and her abdomen had been opened with some kind of knife. Small circular burns indicated a cigarette had been touched to her flesh. Shreds of flesh dangled from her corpse in a way that suggested it had been violated with a blade and then peeled from body and bone with a pair of pliers.

Quinn figured the butchery for an amateur job, not done by anyone with special medical knowledge. The killer’s primary goal was to torture. He’d burned her and stripped away skin for no purpose other than pain.

He must have done this while she was still alive.

Pink bloodstained material, what appeared to be the victim’s panties, was wadded in her mouth. The elastic waistband of the panties was looped around her neck and tightly knotted at the base of her skull.

Quinn looked over at Renz.

“Nift says she was alive and what was done to her took hours,” Renz said. “The stomach was done first.” His voice broke slightly. Not like him.

For the first time Quinn noticed the usually loquacious and obnoxious little medical examiner, Dr. Julius Nift. He was standing alongside a wall with a uniformed cop and a plainclothes detective with his badge dangling in its leather folder from a suit coat pocket. A crime scene tech wearing a white jumpsuit and gloves was over near the door. Everyone seemed to be standing as far away as possible from Renz.

“That’s why there’s so much blood,” Nift said. “A stomach wound like that looks horrible, but the victim doesn’t necessarily die right away. Whatever her condition, he somehow managed to keep her heart pumping for quite a while. There’s a slight ammonia smell around her head, too. Could be he used ammonia like smelling salts, to jolt her around whenever she lost consciousness. So she’d feel everything.”

Quinn could hear a slight hissing and realized it was his own breathing. Being here with the dead woman, where there had been so much agony, was like being in a catacomb with a saint. Then he understood why he’d made the comparison. Clutched tightly in the victim’s pale right hand like a rosary was a silver letter S on a thin chain that was wrapped around her neck. Careful not to step in any of the darkening puddles of blood, Quinn leaned forward to more closely examine the necklace.

“Kinda crap you find in a Times Square souvenir shop.” Renz said.