Pearl smelled something all too familiar. Faint, but definitely there.

“Watch where you step and what you touch,” Quinn said.

Pearl could see beyond him a huddled form on a dining room floor.

“Lucille Denner,” Quinn said.

“No doubt,” Pearl said.

“Somebody must have answered her ad.”

“A dissatisfied customer.”

Quinn led the way as he and Pearl entered the dining room. It was dim, but neither of them wanted to open drapes or turn on lights and disturb a crime scene. Besides, there was more than enough light to see the dead woman on the hardwood dining room floor.

“Careful not to step in any blood,” Quinn cautioned.

Pearl moved closer to the body so she could see the dead woman’s forehead. The letters D.O.A. were there. They looked like the letters found carved on the earlier victims.

Quinn nodded toward the other side of the dining room, beyond a wooden table and chairs that were centered beneath a wrought iron chandelier.

Pearl moved carefully around the perimeter of the room, past a dark mahogany china cabinet, and saw half a dozen jagged pieces of ceramic on the floor. She fitted them together in her mind and came up with what looked like the head and torso of a bare-breasted woman who might have been Bellezza.

If the bust had been marble instead of ceramic.

Or had ever been touched by Michelangelo.

The classified ad in the Teaneck newspaper had obviously sent someone on a futile mission. Quinn could imagine the killer taking one look at the pathetically obvious imitation and hurling it to shatter on the floor before taking out his ire on the unfortunate Lucille Denner. His knife and lit cigarette had been wielded with particular viciousness.

“Do you think she really figured she might sell that thing to some naïf?” Pearl asked.

“Maybe to one out of twenty,” Quinn said. “And to somebody who thought they might be putting one over on her by getting a great work of art cheap.”

Pearl could only shake her head.

“What’s the percentage of hardcore addicts who get sick or die because of poison they thought was coke or heroin?” Quinn asked.

“Could be one out of twenty,” Pearl said.

“And the one out of twenty here might have been the first caller,” Quinn said.

Which made Pearl glance around uneasily, as if fate were creeping up on her.

“I checked,” Quinn said. “Her phone’s a land line. But we still might be able to get a caller log.” Even as he said it, he knew the killer would be too smart to leave a record of his call about the classified ad.

“What strikes me,” Pearl said, “is that he’d be too wily even to inquire about that obviously imitation piece of junk.”

“It served its purpose,” Quinn said.

“Which is?”

“To get us wasting time standing here talking and thinking about Lucille Denner’s murder instead of closing in on him.”

“Not motive enough.”

“Spooking us into thinking he could be going interstate again.”

“Still not enough.”

“And to demonstrate how powerful he is.”

“Motive enough,” Pearl said.

Quinn got out his cell phone and called a sergeant he knew in the Teaneck Police Department.

Then he called Minnie Miner. She might as well waste the time they might have wasted.

Quinn saw Pearl raise an eyebrow at the mention of Minnie’s name.

“Might slow her down” Quinn said. “Then she can talk about all those ads for Bellezza busts being withdrawn from eBay.”

“Pearl? Detective Quinn? Anyone?”

Jesse’s voice. It sounded as if she had her head stuck inside the open front door.

“Better stay where you are, dear,” Quinn said.

But she didn’t. Curiosity and concern for her aunt Lucille prompted her to enter the house. Pearl heard her coming and tried to head her off but failed. Jesse saw what was on the dining room floor.

And would have nightmares the rest of her life.

64

The killer parked behind a black SUV, diagonally across the street from the Far Castle. He was driving his old gray BMW. The car was a plain four-door model, and because it was a luxury car, so often had its styling been mimicked that it was a vehicle that drew little attention. It looked at a glance like a million other cars in Manhattan. At the same time, it was very fast. The killer valued anonymity and speed. Who knew when one or both would be needed?

He lowered the windows and switched off the engine and air conditioner. The radio was tuned softly to classical music, Holst’s “Jupiter.” One of the killer’s favorites.

Where he’d parked put him in a perfect position to observe diners at the restaurant’s crowded outside tables. He could also see people come and go.

He’d done this kind of surveillance before, but now he knew who he was looking for. The server Minnie Miner had mentioned—though not by name—on her daily TV news show.

The killer was by now familiar with all the food servers, and he was interested in the most recently hired, a blond woman in her forties. Quite attractive. His trained eye had become suspicious the first time he’d seen her. She looked her part as a Medieval serving wench and seemed to play it with gusto. More gusto, in fact, than skill at her job. Serving food wasn’t quite her thing, the first couple of times he’d observed her. Then she became more adept, less often accidentally knocking over water glasses, or stepping on diners’ toes, a quick study adjusting to her role. An adjustable wench.

The killer had to smile at his own cleverness. Perhaps he’d share the pun with his victim, at the proper time.

Then there was the evening when he was watching and the blond waitress had spoken briefly with Quinn when he passed her on the way to enter the restaurant. It wasn’t much, but it was more than an uninterested hello. They’d moved apart quickly, like magnets with opposite polarity. Too fast and too late. These two people knew each other, and had taken care not to display the body language of even a casual encounter.

So the woman was obviously a plant. The killer didn’t jump to that conclusion, but it took only a few more days to erase most of his doubts. The restaurant’s owner and wannabe famous chef, the unctuous Winston Castle, treated the blond one differently from the other food servers. He was almost deferential when speaking with her. The suggestion by Minnie Miner that there might be a food server who was some kind of spy cinched it—Blondie was an undercover cop.

With a little more investigation and a pair of binoculars he recognized her. Nancy Weaver. The one who almost got him.

What was she doing at the restaurant? Had she made the connection between Castle and the nutcase family searching for the Unholy Grail? She must be trying to solve the killer’s perfect murders. What—if anything—had she found out? Had Quinn, Pearl, and the rest of them made the connection between some of his victims and the search for Bellezza? Surely they had by now. That was part of the killer’s game. He had chosen Quinn as his adversary because the man was no fool.

At first the killer hadn’t been interested in anything but playing out his deadly game with Quinn. But after coming across the search for the missing (if it ever existed) art treasure, he’d become more and more interested because of the pure truths told by his dying victims.

The talkative Grace Geyer had piqued his interest at the museum. Grace had led him to question Andria Bell in the Fairchild Hotel at knifepoint and with fire. Andria couldn’t have lied to him. Not deliberately. But how much of what she’d told him was fact, he couldn’t be sure. He could be sure that she believed everything she’d told him.

And he’d be sure Weaver would speak the truth. She would tell him what she knew, what the NYPD knew, what Quinn knew. About the D.O.A. killer, and about Bellezza.