'The FBI's running it through its computers, but I don't think we can hold out much hope there.'
Quinn knew the already vast database was still in its initial stages. The severed arm would have to belong to a woman who was a recently convicted felon and also had her DNA in the database. Those were long odds.
All three detectives sat silently and listened to the muffled hammering that punctuated the shrill cry of a power saw.
It was Pearl who finally said it. 'We've got a third victim.'
'Or else another killer who's dismembering bodies,' Quinn said.
Fedderman noticed his shirt cuff was unbuttoned and fastened it. 'Maybe the arm was cut off accidentally. By a boat propeller or something.'
Quinn smiled wryly. 'River patrol's got no reports of any such accident, and nobody's reported their arm missing.'
'Third victim,' Pearl said again.
Nobody disagreed with her.
'The killer chopped off her hand, too,' Fedderman said.
'To be on the safe side and not risk fingerprints being lifted and compared someplace,' Pearl said, 'even if they're not on file. His cautious nature worked in this case.'
Quinn sighed and stood up. 'The rest of her might still be in the river. The rest of all of the victims might be there, or in some lake or tributary somewhere. I'll call Renz and see if we can get a search going, check bodies of water in or around New York.'
'Grappling hooks,' Pearl said. 'That's how they drag a lake, with grappling hooks.' Though she'd seen several such operations, the thought of this one, for some reason, chilled her. Hard steel seeking soft flesh in the dark.
'They use underwater cameras now, too,' Quinn said.
'Divers,' Fedderman said. 'Eventually somebody's gotta swim down there in murky water and look for weighted-down arms, legs, and heads.' He made a face and ran a hand over his almost nonexistent hair. 'I'm glad I'm too old for that kinda stuff.'
'They might drain some of the smaller lakes,' Pearl told him.
He shook his head. 'Yeah, but try draining the river. That's where we found the arm.'
'He's got a point,' Pearl said to Quinn.
'Global warming,' Fedderman said. 'Eventually it'll dry up all the rivers. That's when we'll find the missing body parts.'
Pearl sipped her coffee.
'Global warming,' Fedderman said again. 'A cop's best friend.'
'Severed arm?' Cindy Sellers asked into the phone. She was at her desk at City Beat. She kept her voice low so Howie Baker, at the next desk, wouldn't overhear. 'Just an arm? How do we know it has anything to do with either of the two torso victims?'
'We know for sure it doesn't,' Nift said nervously. He was calling with his cell phone a few blocks from the morgue. You never knew about phones. Just about any phone might not be secure these days. Not to mention cameras. They were getting to be all over the place in New York City. He wanted to get the call over with as soon as possible. 'I can guarantee you that arm's not connected to either of the other victims' torsos.'
'Obviously,' Cindy said.
She was used to her informer's gruesome sense of humor and assumed that was what she was hearing. She thought Nift was a jerk, but he was reliable. And she'd been kind enough not to mention him in her expose of unlikely pornographic video rental customers. She had mentioned to him that she had photographs of some of the customers arriving at and leaving the video rental stores. She hadn't mentioned that, though Nift was observed renting a DVD about drunken coeds on a horse farm, he wasn't in any of the photos. Let him assume.
'So what else do we know?' she asked.
Nift told her what they'd discerned from examination of the arm.
'A third victim,' Cindy said when he was finished. 'And the killer's probably weighting down the body parts and hiding them underwater. The arm must have somehow broken loose from whatever was holding it down and floated to the surface.'
'You're jumping to conclusions,' Nift said.
'Hey, it's my job.' She was grinning. 'Be sure to keep me posted.'
'I will,' Nift said and broke the connection.
Cindy knew he would.
Gloria turned off the narrow secondary road onto a mostly overgrown dirt road and drove until she came to a rickety wooden swing gate with a faded NO TRESPASSING sign nailed crookedly on it.
David climbed out of the big Chrysler and opened the gate, then waited until Gloria had driven through. He glanced around in the fading light, thinking they had about an hour until sundown, then closed the gate, fastened its rusty latch, and got back in the car.
They were on a farm in New Jersey, an hour's drive from the city. The farm was deserted and had been in the legal limbo of estate law for several years. There had once been a frame house with a detached garage, a barn, and another outbuilding for equipment and tools. The house and garage were deserted wrecks. Two walls of the outbuilding had collapsed, allowing the elements to lay rust over an old Ford tractor without an engine, and some shovels and other implements leaning against a remaining wall.
Gloria drove the car around behind the garage, popped the trunk lid, and sat for a few minutes watching tall, shadowed grass dance rhythmically in the breeze.
'Place is as deserted as the moon,' she said.
'Time for the astronauts to get to work,' David said beside her, then unclipped his seat belt and opened the door. (He would continue to think of himself as David until they were finished with their work here.)
He was always in a good enough mood if not downright cheerful, Gloria thought. Always optimistic, no matter the situation. No doubt that was part of his appeal to women.
They walked around to the open trunk.
The two of them carried four bulky black plastic trash bags down a grassy slope and about twenty feet into the woods. The bags contained the clothing and remains of Shellie Marston, except for her heart-shot torso, which they'd left next to a construction Dumpster on the Upper West Side.
They chose a spot in the darkening woods and laid down the bags. David returned to the car to get the shovels.
While he was gone, Gloria used the side of her foot to clear away last year's leaves. It took her four or five minutes. Satisfied, she scraped mud off her shoe, then tapped her back pocket to make sure her small leather- bound Bible was still there.
She heard a sound and looked over to see that, besides the shovels, David was coming back with a rusty, long-handled pickax he'd found somewhere. That would make digging a lot easier, as it hadn't rained in three or four days and the ground was hard. Gloria smiled.
God was easing their task.
13
Pearl exhaled, inhaled, and said, 'God, that was good!'
It was apparently what Milton Kahn wanted to hear. He turned back toward her on her perspiration-soaked mattress and nuzzled his head between her breasts. Kissed her precisely there, then kissed both nipples. Pearl wasn't sure she was in love with this guy, but it wasn't bad having him around.
Milt was, in a way, a gift from Pearl's mother and her friend Mrs. Kahn at the Golden Sunset assisted-living apartments in Teaneck, a sort of arranged affair if not marriage. Mrs. Kahn was Milt's aunt. Under duress, Pearl had agreed to meet the elderly women and Milt for lunch in Golden Sunset's bleak dining room, and Pearl was surprised to find that she actually liked the guy. He was short, like she was, and good looking in a dark way, with a tiny imperial beard on the tip of his chin that tickled in the right places and made him look more like a magician or renowned psychiatrist than a struggling dermatologist.
