drag from the scene after the madness had passed.
And if there was to be no afterward… that would be a mercy.
The sharp smell of ammonia jolted her so her eyes flew open. She gagged and choked, her body heaving as the rectangle of duct tape blocked her screams. Her coughing seared her throat and made sounds like a dog trying and failing to bark. The man’s powerful hands held her still until the coughing stopped. She could handle this, she told herself. If only she kept calm, she could endure it and then it would be over. She concentrated and forced herself to breathe evenly through her nose. The sharp ammonia scent was still in the air, nauseating her.
The man gazed down at her as if he pitied her. He was so calm and looked so kind. He might have been an angel here to rescue her from everything her world had become. He was that, she told herself.
You might not know it, but you are my salvation.
Then she remembered. It had been a long time ago, in her muddled mind, but she remembered. This was the man who’d wanted to talk to her. By the church.
I know you! The cop! You’re the one who gave me the five dollars. You helped me!
Kindness meant a chance. If nothing else, a less painful passage into death.
She tried to beg with her eyes, feeling like a bad silentfilm actress but not caring. Hope was stronger than she’d thought. Stronger than she was.
He wasn’t a cop-that was for sure. Still, he’d given her the five dollars…
“It isn’t going to be easy for you,” he said.
Very methodically, he sliced away her clothes and then taped her legs tightly together.
You’re a friend! You helped me! Help me! Help me!
His betrayal was of a magnitude that crushed her.
Verna understood that she was not beyond pain.
She did somehow manage to hold panic at bay. The kind of mindlessness that would turn her into something less than human. She kept repeating to herself that this would pass. She tried to beg for mercy through the tape but couldn’t make more than a low humming sound, over and over.
“That’s my favorite tune,” the man said, as he used the knife on her.
At first he bent to his task casually, but his concentration grew and the blade bit deeper and deeper and established a repetitive rhythm.
She noticed through the pain and horror that gripped and gripped and gripped her that he’d somehow found the time to light a cigarette.
59
Quinn had phoned Pearl and given him the address. She was driving the unmarked and arrived at the crime scene ahead of him.
The first thing she saw as she pulled the car to the curb was that the sidewalk on the right side of the street was cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape. There was a big uniformed cop standing beneath the BEN ’ S FOR MEN ’ S sign, his arms crossed, his head cocked to the side, appearing as if he were contemplating trading in his uniform for the sharplooking suit displayed beside him in the window.
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.
