Beth got a firmer grip on the paintbrush handle. “I don’t think I want that, Roy. I don’t go around thinking ill of you every day, and I can’t see where it does anybody any good to call up bad memories, or even good ones if they attach themselves to the bad. I’ve got a new life, and it looks like you do. Let’s leave it that way.”
Another step closer. “You sure that’s what you want?” He squared his new, overpowering body to hers and leaned toward her.
Gravel crunched out near where the truck cab was parked, and Eileen Millvany, who lived with her mother two houses up the road, slowed her SUV and glanced over at Beth, then drove on.
Roy and his truck had been seen, and Roy knew it. That made Beth feel better, safer.
“I’m sure and I’ll stay sure,” she said.
Roy stood and stared at her, a kind of quizzical expression on his face, and then he nodded, turned around, and walked slowly toward his truck. The confused expression was one she’d never seen before. She remembered him being certain of everything when they were together. The younger Roy thought he knew all the answers before he’d even heard the questions.
He climbed back up into the cab, shifted gears, and the truck rumbled away. Nothing was left of it but a thin haze of dust and a final dying growl from the direction of the county road.
Beth tried to make herself believe Roy’s appearance was something other than an illusion. It was so strange and unexpected, him suddenly turning up here like that.
She looked down at the brush in her hand and saw that the paint on it had become tacky and the bristles were stuck together. It needed to be placed in the jar of turpentine, and then she could continue with what she’d been doing and roll the porch’s paint-starved plank floor.
But not immediately.
She propped the brush in the turpentine jar and went inside the house.
She needed to make a phone call.
74
New York, the present
“At least a couple of days,” Dr. Julius Nift said. “That’s why it smells the way it does in here. But I’ve got other ways to telclass="underline" lividity, putrefaction in relation to ambient temperature-”
“All right, all right,” Quinn said. He was the one who’d asked Nift how long the woman had been dead.
“Of course I’ll be able to give you a more accurate estimate when I get her laid out at-”
“I know, I know,” Quinn interrupted.
Pearl was standing dangerously close to Nift, looking down over his shoulder at Tanya Moody’s corpse. Quinn caught her eye and gave her what he hoped was a cautionary look. Even in the initial stage of decomposition, it was obvious that Tanya Moody had been a gorgeous woman. Nift was almost sure to say something that might set off Pearl.
The CSU techs were busy in the front of the stylish but economically furnished apartment. There was a lot of polished wood and black vinyl. Tanya’s dark tangle of hair seemed in some grisly way to go with the decor. She was nude, what had once been her lovely body marked by cigarette burns and intricate carving. Her gaping mouth was stopped with dried blood. A wad of material, probably her panties, that had been used to gag her, lay near her left shoulder. There was a lot of blood on the floor. The look on Tanya Moody’s face suggested she’d died in unimaginable pain.
Quinn caught the slightest acrid whiff of ammonia. He leaned forward to confirm it was coming from the wadded panties and not from the contents of her voided bladder.
Nift had been watching him. “Very good, detective. That isn’t the smell of urine. The killer must have brought Tanya back from merciful unconsciousness by applying a few drops of ammonia on the wadded panties in her mouth. She’d have to breathe in the fumes through her nose. A very effective method.”
“Can you close her eyes?” Quinn asked.
“Why? She can’t see one way or the other.”
“Close her eyes,” Quinn said.
Nift stopped probing and poking with his instruments and deftly closed the dead woman’s eyes.
“Who found her?” Quinn asked.
A very tall uniformed cop standing just inside the bedroom door said, “A woman who lives across the street had an appointment at her place with the dead woman. Tanya never showed up, so she came over to see why not. When nobody answered her knock, she noticed the smell and called the super. They phoned, knocked, got no answer. Then the super used his key, and they found what you see on the floor. That’s when they called us.”
“What kind of appointment?” Pearl asked.
“Physical workout routine. The dead woman was a personal trainer. She made house calls, and also sold her clients home exercise equipment.”
“I thought she might be some kind of athlete,” Nift said, “with those legs.”
“Where are the woman and super who found the body?” Quinn asked the uniformed cop, with a glance at Pearl.
“Super’s in his basement apartment. Dianne Cross, the one who was supposed to get the training, is down in the lobby. My partner’s finishing up talking to her.”
Quinn looked down at Nift. “What about Tanya Moody’s tongue?”
“I probed,” Nift said. “Preliminary finding is that it’s been severed and is missing.”
“May the bastard burn in hell,” the tall cop said, to no one in particular.
Pearl said, “Amen.”
“Can you turn her over?” Quinn asked.
“She won’t object,” Nift said. He carefully rotated the body, disturbing as little around it as possible. Rigor mortis had come and gone, so posed no problem. There were circular burns and complicated carvings on the victim’s back, too. Her wrists were taped behind her, and where her fingers had rested near the small of her back was something she might have attempted to write in her own blood. The blood marks looked to Quinn as if they might mean nothing other than a doomed woman wriggling her fingers. Or the marks might spell out the letters T and S.
Quinn called Pearl over and pointed out the marks. They both stooped and looked more closely.
“What’s that look like to you?” Quinn asked.
“I’m not sure,” Pearl said.
“If I can join the Rorschach test,” Nift said, “that looks like TS. A dying message.”
“If she scribbled it behind her back,” Pearl said, “she might have written the letters backward and meant ST.”
“Then the S would be backward,” Quinn said.
“Maybe,” Pearl conceded.
Nift said, “I already checked the bathroom mirror. There’s nothing written on it, or on any of the other mirrors.”
“Playing detective again,” Quinn said.
“Somebody’s got to.” Nift probed a flaccid breast with some kind of silver instrument. When its point broke the skin, Quinn had to look away. He heard Pearl’s sharp intake of breath.
“It was no worse than her flu shot,” Nift said, amused. “A mere prick.”
“You’re the biggest prick around here,” Pearl said, “even if you’re not the sharpest.”
Nift looked at her seriously. “Have you had your flu shot?”
“Have you had your kick in the balls?” Pearl asked.
That was when Vitali and Mishkin arrived. Sal was his usual stubby and harried self, given to bursts of gravelvoiced comments and abrupt movement. Mishkin was quiet and looked slightly ill. The mentholated cream he used at homicide scenes lay glossy on his bushy mustache. Just standing near Harold could clear your sinuses.
Quinn instructed Pearl to fill in both detectives while he went downstairs to the lobby to talk with Dianne Cross.
He was on the elevator when his memory lit up. TS. He checked the tattered list he kept folded in his wallet and found that he was right. Those were the initials of Tom Stopp, the man who’d been released on DNA evidence after serving a prison term because of Tanya Moody’s inaccurate identification.
Quinn wondered if Tom Stopp had an alibi for the time of Tanya Moody’s death.