“Know where the Johnston farm is?” the driver asked.
Wally was on his feet, getting the idea.
“You run there, Wally. Fast as you can. Get them to use their phone, get some firefighting equipment out here.”
“Yes, sir,” Wally said as the doors hissed open.
Jordan stood, gripping the seatback in front of him hard with both hands, whitening his knuckles. “Let me go,” he pleaded.
“No, no!” the driver said. Obviously imagining what the poor kid might see or hear. “You don’t wanna go there, son.”
Jordan couldn’t remember when anyone had called him son.
He slumped back down in the seat, glimpsing Wally running along the road in the direction of the Johnston farm, the closest phone. Wally’s heels were kicking up dust that hung in the air behind him. He was making good time at a pace made to seem slow by distance.
Jordan looked toward the house and saw orange glowing here and there through the thick black smoke. The house was blazing. He knew it would take forever for the volunteer fire department to reach the fire. Then their equipment would be inadequate. And how much water could they bring?
He lowered his head so his face was enveloped by his arms, and sobbed.
“Stay where you are, kids!” Ben the driver yelled.
The bus was hot inside and out, and smelled like fuel. Everyone on board was slick with sweat. Jordan’s eyes stung from it and his nose was running. One of the girls was crying.
Jordan counted to ten and then raised his head. Through the bus window he could see Ben the driver running toward the burning house, limping clumsily under the weight of a brass fire extinguisher jouncing in his right hand. Wally, head down and arms pumping, was pulling away from him at an angle, toward the Johnstons and their phone.
Jordan got off the bus and followed Ben.
When they got closer to the house, he saw that a spark or burning tree limb had set the barn roof on fire. Some of the animals were sure to die.
Forget the barn.
He made it to the house.
There were two . . . somethings . . . just inside the porch door, curled and blackened. No one else seemed to have made it that far.
Jordan didn’t hesitate. Holding his breath, he made a fast tour of the burning house. He could feel the heat coming up through the soles of his shoes.
Now he had seen them, all of them . . .
A powerful hand gripped Jordan’s shoulder and squeezed. It was Ben the bus driver, stopping him, pulling him close, closer. Jordan could hear him breathing. Or was he crying?
Ben dragged him outside, and then Jordan found his balance and was walking on his own. Ben pointed, and immediately Jordan knew what he meant. Unhindered by each other, they began to run.
That was when the propane tank alongside the house exploded.
20
New York, the present
Quinn and Pearl stood alongside Nift the ME and watched him explore with his instruments what was left of Margaret Evans. Where she had been eviscerated and her intestines neatly coiled, her breasts had been severed and laid aside.
Reaching so he could probe something in her abdominal cavity, Nift had to stretch and for a second looked as if he might fall across the corpse.
He shook his head, smiled. “Some set of jugs she has—had,” he remarked.
Pearl looked at him as if he were last week’s spoiled meat. She thought that someday without warning she would kick the little prick, hard in the ribs. Maybe the head.
Renz came in. He’d been out in the hall, talking to one of his detectives. Quinn and Pearl both wondered if Renz was sharing information as generously as they’d agreed. Renz, playing his customary parallel game.
He walked over to Quinn and Pearl, careful not to step near the nude dead woman’s oddly disjointed body on the bedroom floor. “Our guy?” he asked, looking at Nift for confirmation.
“No doubt about it,” Nift said.
Renz went over and looked in at the bathroom without entering. He stayed that way about half a minute, then backed away awkwardly, but without touching the doorframe and obscuring any fingerprints.
“Killed her and let her bleed out in the bathtub,” Renz said, “then dismembered her in the tub, washed most of the blood down the drain, and moved her in here piece by piece, where he more or less put her back together.”
“Naughty Gremlin,” Nift said.
“He was reasonably neat,” Pearl said, noting that there wasn’t much blood on the bedroom carpet.
“Unreasonably neat,” Quinn said.
Pearl was thinking how closely, and horrifyingly, the dead woman resembled a ventriloquist’s dummy.
If I sat her on my knee, would she tell me who killed her?
Renz said, “You might want to talk to the super. Name’s Bud Peltz. His is the apartment right off the foyer. He told one of the uniforms he got a good look at the killer as he was running away.”
Quinn was surprised by this stroke of luck.
“Don’t get too excited,” Renz said. “The uniform—his name is Bill Toth—says Peltz’s story doesn’t ring true.”
“He say why not?”
“It set off an alarm behind his right ear.”
“That should play well in court.”
Fedderman showed up. He looked tired and was wearing a gray suit that appeared clean but was amazingly wrinkled, as if it had been scrubbed and rubbed over rocks. The narrow end of his tie extended half an inch beneath the wide end. It didn’t matter as long as he kept his suit coat buttoned, which he never did.
Everyone glanced at him, but no one said anything as they let him walk around and take in the crime scene.
“Our gremlin,” he said.
“Nasty gremlin,” Nift said.
Pearl said, “Why don’t you shut up? Or at least think of something else to say.”
Nift grinned at having gotten under her skin. “Baaad gremlin.”
Quinn was sure he heard Pearl’s teeth gnash. He thought about her going with him and Fedderman to talk to Peltz the super, then decided it would be better if she talked with Toth, the uniformed cop who’d been one of the first on the scene. They could get together later and see what fit and what didn’t.
Pearl didn’t object to the plan. Anything to get away from Nift.
Bud Peltz was a tall, thin man with a bushy, droopy gray mustache that looked a lot like Harold Mishkin’s. The rest of him looked nothing like Harold. The super had handsome Latin features and a muscular leanness about him. Dark, direct brown eyes, and large, callused hands.
His street-level apartment was small and tidy. It was well furnished, but would have looked larger and more comfortable without such a clash of colors. He invited them to sit on the flower-pattern sofa, which they did. Springs sang softly beneath them. Fedderman had his notepad out and a short yellow pencil tucked behind his right ear. Peltz sat on some kind of woven basket chair that creaked beneath his weight. A large-screen TV sat muted in a corner near what looked like a door to the kitchen. It was showing an old Carole Lombard movie from the forties. Quinn found himself wondering if anyone had actually been watching the TV when he’d knocked on the door. Maybe Lombard was still known and popular in some quarters. Who was famous, who wasn’t . . . it was hard to gauge such things.
A slender, remarkably attractive young woman entered the living room and switched the TV off. She was wearing shorts, and had a ballet dancer’s shapely, muscular legs.
“My wife, Maria,” Peltz said.
Quinn and Fedderman didn’t say anything. Peltz was uneasy, as if he should have to explain his ancestry. He hated that feeling. But a visit from the police . . .
Quinn wondered if these two were not long out of Mexico.
Peltz said, “My mother’s maiden name was Rodriguez.”
“And mine’s was Perez,” Maria Peltz said.
Quinn smiled. He didn’t want to know too much about these two. “The great melting pot. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Peltz.”