design. There would be internal silence, almost. There would be a new mystery even if the same old need survived.
The need was immortal because love and hate and betrayal never changed. Not of their own accord.
They had to be changed.
In the brightness of an intersection, the Night Prowler glanced down at the name he’d scrawled five times in red ball-point ink on the inside of his wrist, where his blood pulsed and coursed visibly in a blue map of destiny.
Mary Navarre.
“You okay today?” Fedderman asked the next morning when he approached Quinn and Pearl, who were seated on the park bench off Eighty-sixth Street. He was wearing his usual baggy brown suit and had a folded Newsday tucked beneath his right arm.
“Still a little shaky,” Quinn said. “You and Drucker learn anything yesterday?”
“Not really. The usual see no, hear no, tell no. A next-door building in New York can be like another world.” He looked more closely at Quinn. “You sleep in your clothes?”
“Sort of. Those nighttime cold medicines knock you out.”
Fedderman looked at Pearl, who’d said nothing since his arrival. Not like Pearl. He sighed, and Quinn watched his eyes and saw his old partner catalog information in his mind.
Quinn knew it wouldn’t do any good to tell Fedderman he’d spent the night on Pearl’s sofa and nothing happened between them. Feds would believe what he chose, but he’d keep his mouth shut about it.
Fedderman held out the folded newspaper. “You might wanna look at this.”
“We take another flogging in the press?”
“You in particular. There’s an interview in there with Anna Caruso.”
Quinn unfolded the paper and saw the photograph of a beautiful young woman with dark hair and somber brown eyes. Not a child. No one he remembered.
But there was her name beneath the photo, and there was the old accusation in her eyes.
In the interview she recounted her rape by Quinn, then talked about her life now, how she’d put the horrible experience behind her. Or thought she had. Here it was again because Quinn was getting another chance. One he didn’t deserve. No one had served a day in prison for what had happened to her, and that injustice still haunted her. She didn’t like it, but she could live with it, she told the interviewer. Her father died recently, and she was concentrating on coping with that and going ahead with her music. With her life.
She played the viola and that was therapeutic. She wouldn’t be afraid, or think about Quinn. She would be fine, she said. People shouldn’t worry about her. People had better things to do. She had better things to do.
Hate burned between the lines.
23
Donald was out of town and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow night. After lunch at the Cafe Un Deux Trois, Mary reminded herself she was moderately wealthy and took a cab instead of a subway to the apartment on West End Avenue. She needed to take a few measurements and reconsider the window treatment for the master bedroom. Nothing must disturb the magnificent view.
As soon as she opened the apartment door, she saw the bouquet of fresh yellow roses. The flowers were in a clear glass vase, on a metal folding chair that was the only piece of furniture in the room.
Mary went to the bouquet and saw that there was a card attached by a green ribbon. But when she gingerly reached in among the thorns and maneuvered the card to where she could examine it, she found it blank.
She looked for some other marking on the flowers or the rounded vase, but there was nothing to indicate who’d sent the flowers or delivered them.
But Mary knew who’d sent them. Donald. He’d ordered them by phone so she’d find them when she came to the apartment, as he knew she would today and every day until they moved in.
It was so like him; he was thoughtful that way.
Still, it was odd that he hadn’t instructed a message be placed on the card. Or maybe he thought the blank card would heighten her interest and surprise.
He knew her so well.
Mary loved to be surprised.
“There doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern to the murders,” Pearl said. They were driving along in the unmarked. She was behind the wheel, with Fedderman beside her, Quinn in the backseat.
“Other than they took place in the kitchen,” Fedderman said, “and there were items around, food and such, that didn’t seem to belong.”
“Marcy Graham and her husband were killed in the bedroom,” Pearl reminded him. She made a quick left turn in front of a delivery truck, pissing off the driver and drawing an angry blast of the horn. “Screw you,” she said absently, while smoothly avoiding a pothole. Trash was still piled at the curb, waiting to be picked up, and its cloying smell wafted in through the car’s vents. None of the car’s occupants remarked on the odor; they were used to mornings in New York.
They were on their way to the Graham apartment to look over the crime scene again and try to find something they’d missed. That was what it had come down to, covering already explored territory, hoping for something like a match-book with a message written inside it, a forgotten receipt for the murder weapon, a hidden safe-deposit box key, like in TV or the movies. Why couldn’t it happen in the play called Real Life?
“There’s a pattern,” Quinn said, “just not clear yet, even at the edges. It’ll continue to emerge, no matter how hard our Night Prowler tries to disguise it.”
“I like it you’re so sure of yourself,” Fedderman said.
“These scuzzballs are all slaves to compulsion, Feds. It’s why they have to kill in the first place.”
“He’s been a pretty successful slave up to this point,” Pearl said.
“The kitchens,” Quinn said. “If you think of the apartments as sets in a play, the murders began in the kitchens, even if the Grahams were actually killed in their bedroom. Something drew them from their bed, maybe a sound in the kitchen, where the murder weapon came from, where the extra gourmet cheese was placed in the refrigerator. The killer was probably hiding in their closet, but he’d stopped off first in the kitchen.”
“Some weird play,” Fedderman said. “Like something by that Mammal guy.”
“Mamet,” Quinn said. He and May had gone often to live theater. It was their singlemost expensive indulgence. Quinn hadn’t been lately.
“Isn’t the mamet some kind of little animal?”
“No.”
“Did you ever get around to seeing The Lion King?”
“No.”
“You think something formative happened to our guy in a kitchen and he never let it go?” Pearl asked.
“Sounds right,” Fedderman said before Quinn could answer. “Assholes like this, they can go on a killing spree if their eggs are runny. I don’t see how that helps us much. The trouble is, our killer’s crazy and we haven’t got inside his mind yet. Maybe there’s no pattern to the killings because he’s a certifiable fruitcake without any pattern to his thinking.”
“Three things,” Quinn said from the back of the car. “The kitchens, the food items that were out of place, and the fact that the victims were reasonably attractive married couples living in apartments in Manhattan. That’s the pattern.”
“Except that I got a kitchen,” Fedderman said. “And my wife and I used to live in an apartment in Manhattan. And if you looked in our refrigerator, you’d find things so out of place you’d be afraid to eat them.”
“He’s got a point,” Pearl said, “even though he left out reasonably attractive.”
“He usually does have a point,” Quinn told her. “That’s how he’ll keep us honest.”
Quinn looked out the dirt-streaked car window at the Grahams’ apartment building.
“We’re here.”
Wherever here is.
