6

“The maid came in this morning and found them,” New York Police Commissioner Harley Renz said. “I figured this was one for you.”

Former homicide captain Frank Quinn, now with his own investigative agency, Quinn and Associates Investigations (Q&A), simply nodded. His old friend and enemy the commissioner sometimes contracted Q&A in work-for-hire arrangements with the NYPD. Quinn was perfect to lead especially sensitive and perilous investigations. Cases that might do political harm to the ambitious and avidly unscrupulous commissioner.

Quinn did recognize that Harley Renz harbored a twisted kind of honesty. He not only ass-kissed and blackmailed his way up the bureaucratic ladder, he was proud of it. In fact, he cheerfully bragged about his abhorrent behavior, rolled in and reveled in his corruption.

Greed of every sort had helped to make Renz fifty pounds overweight. He was wearing his artfully tailored commissioner’s uniform this morning, knowing there’d be plenty of photographs and maybe a TV spot. The pink flesh of his neck ballooned over his stiff white shirt collar, lending him multiple chins.

Quinn, though he was the same age as Renz, was still lean and muscular, with a face so homely it was handsome, and unruly straight brown hair parted at the side. He appeared as if he needed a haircut, even immediately after a haircut. With his height, broad shoulders, plate-sized rough hands, and nose broken one time more than it had been set, he came across as a thug. Until you took a second look into his steady green eyes, at the intelligence that lived there. Intelligence and something else that most people didn’t want to look at too closely.

“They were all killed the same way,” a nasty nasal voice said. It belonged to Dr. Julius Nift, the medical examiner. He was a short, fashion plate of a man, best described as Napoleonic. He used some sort of a shiny steel instrument to poke at the end girl on the bed, a slender redhead who looked about sixteen years old. Most of all the girls’ clothes had been cut away, some of the remnants used to cover where their throats had been cut, to minimize arterial blood being splashed around during their death throes. “Same knife, and probably its point was used for the torture leading up to their deaths.”

“Same knife used to slice the initials in their foreheads?” Quinn asked. The letters D.O.A. had been neatly carved into the foreheads of all the victims.

“Don’t know for sure, but probably.”

“Old friend of yours,” Renz said to Quinn, and just like that Quinn was back at the lake in Maine, listening to—feeling—the reverberation of a rifle shot.

The scar where the bullet had ripped into the right side of his back began to burn, as it often did when he thought of that day at the lake. Unfinished business. It drove a man like Quinn. He often revisited Creighton Lake in his memory.

Memory was a powerful engine that drove him. He would never forget, but there was one way to lessen the pain.

“My dead friend, we hope,” he said. “This could be a copycat killer, a secret admirer.”

Nift glanced at the row of dead, all-but-nude young women. “He left the good parts alone, anyway.”

Quinn felt a surge of anger but pushed it away. It was Nift’s impulse to try getting under people’s skin. “What about the victim in the other room?” Quinn asked. “Why was she tied down on the coffee table?”

“Maybe the killer just ran out of room on the bed,” Renz said.

“No,” Quinn said. “She got special attention.”

Nift was grinning at him lewdly. “You have a good eye.” There were stories about Nift, about his attitude toward the dead. Especially if they’d been attractive women. Quinn thought some of the stories were probably true. “She was older, too,” Nift said.

“Thirty-seven,” Renz said. “According to her Ohio driver’s license.”

“You got all the IDs?” Quinn asked.

“Yeah. The special one on the table was Andria Bell. She was chaperone and guide for the others. The young girls were art students at some academy in Cleveland.”

“Andria was an artist?”

“A teacher, anyway.” Renz propped his fists on his hips and shook his head in dismay. “Damn it all. Those young girls, never had much of a chance to get to know life. Imagine how the news media’s gonna be all over this mess. High school yearbook photos of those girls, beautiful and smiling. Interviews with the families. Awkward questions. The media assholes will pull out all the stops.”

“Why shouldn’t they?” Quinn said.

“Oh, no reason in the world. The bastards are doing exactly what I’d do. Only there’s only one of me. They’re like a pack of wild dogs, gonna ravage everything and everybody in the way of a juicy story. A police commissioner who can’t catch a killer who’s like a local Richard Speck who’s been on vacation, and now he’s back. Now there’s a story. All it needs is some poor sacrificial schmuck to rip to pieces on news programs and in the papers.”

“There are five dead women here,” Harley said. “Plus we’ve got two killed in Maine, plus at least four in New York prior to Maine. And you’re feeling sorry for yourself.”

“Isn’t that just the point? I’m still alive.”

And still wants to be mayor someday.

Quinn pushed the thought from his mind. He knew Renz was right. The voracious New York news media would make the most of what was a sensational story anyway. The dead women would get more than their fifteen minutes of fame, and then, except for the memories of those who’d loved them, they would be forgotten.

He looked around at the carnage. “Any computers?”

“If there were any,” Renz said, “the killer took them with him. But that’s doubtful.”

“Why?”

“Everybody here has an iPhone, or something like one. Damned things are like little computers themselves.”

Renz gave Quinn a steady look with his flesh-padded eyes. The commissioner has a busy day ahead of him, the look said. It was time to make it official. “Are you on this one, Quinn? Usual arrangement?”

“Yes and yes,” Quinn said. No hesitation.

“It’s yours, then. Keep me apprised, and I’ll handle the media unless I tell you otherwise.”

So I can take the serious media shots and be blamed for every day the killer isn’t caught. “Of course,” Quinn said. He’d known the second he saw the letters carved on the victims’ foreheads that this was his case, whatever the painful memories and dark deceptions.

He’d been chosen, and not only by Renz.

Renz moved toward the door. “I’ll get the papers to you to sign. And appoint some kind of liaison.”

Quinn nodded.

Liaison. Another word for informer. Just what Quinn needed.

A man in white coveralls appeared in the doorway. The crime scene unit had arrived. Usually they arrived at crime scenes about the same time as the ME. Quinn wondered if Renz had purposely delayed them so Quinn could get a better look at the victims. Make him really want this case. Quinn knew that was the way Renz thought. Always there was more than one reason for whatever he did.

“Where’s Pearl?” Nift asked. Working the love-hate thing they had going but without the love.

“She’ll be here,” Quinn said. “It’d be a good idea if you were gone by then.”

Nift grinned. He was too insensitive to scare. “A threat?”

“Yeah. You’d be surprised what Pearl’s capable of if you piss her off.”

There was something to that, and Nift knew it. He began putting away his instruments in a compartment of his black valise where they’d be separated from those that were still sterile. “Tell Pearl I said hello. I’m done here, anyway. Got a hot date with all these beautiful ladies, down at the morgue.” He shrugged. “Well, not so hot.”

Quinn didn’t bother answering.

“Let’s get some breakfast,” Renz said. “Let the CSU do its thing without us in the way.”