Not that it mattered.
She’d soon find out she was going somewhere much more interesting.
3
It was dawn when Patti LuPone’s vibrant voice began imploring Argentina not to cry for her. Frank Quinn lay on his stomach, still half asleep, musing that he could never hear enough of the score from Evita. Usually he was awake and out of bed before the CD player’s timer turned the bedroom of the brownstone on West Seventy-fifth into Argentina. This morning he clung to sleep, as if for some reason he knew he shouldn’t get out of bed. If only he had a note from his mother for his teacher, he thought with a smile. He realized he’d been dreaming about algebra, and his math teacher in school in Brooklyn. He could hear her voice telling him that once he conquered algebra he would have no trouble with geometry. You can always find an angle, Francis.
And that’s what he was doing in life, only looking for other people’s angles.
“Turn shong off,” a voice muttered beside him.
Pearl, lying close with one arm slung over him, her face half buried in her wadded pillow.
“Shong off!”
Quinn worked his way out from beneath her arm, propped himself up on one elbow, and sat on the edge of the bed. With thick fingers he fumbled the digital controls on the combination CD player, clock radio, alarm, phone. Finally he touched the right button and the bedroom was silent except for the background noise of the city outside the brownstone.
“Thanksh,” Pearl said into her pillow.
Wearing only Jockey shorts, Quinn stood up, a tall, muscular man in the autumn of life but still strong. His shoulders were sloping and powerful, his hands large and dangling like grappling hooks at the ends of his long arms.
The CD player, clock, radio, alarm, phone beeped.
A phone call.
“Damn!” Pearl said, quite clearly.
Quinn saw on the glowing ID panel that the caller was Police Commissioner Harley Renz.
Quinn didn’t like talking with Renz anytime, much less when he was still half asleep.
He picked up the receiver, with trepidation.
“Quinn?”
“It’s me,” Quinn admitted.
“You still in the sack?”
“Sack. Yes.”
“Had breakfast yet?
“No.”
“Don’t. I got something for you.”
Quinn’s interest quickened. He and his investigating agency, Quinn & Associates (Q&A), sometimes took on cases on a work-for-hire basis for the NYPD. Renz was a purely political animal, stepping on necks and trading in corruption on his way up the bureaucratic path to the top. If a case had political ramifications and was deemed by Renz to be too hot to handle, he passed it down to Quinn and his detectives. Quinn had worked his way, and Renz had bought and extorted his way, to the higher echelons of the NYPD, before Quinn had gone into business for himself.
“You don’t want to get your fingers dirty?” he asked Renz.
Renz laughed. “You’re my go-to guy when a case looks like shit that might rub off. I admit it. Our business, you gotta expect some shit.”
“I like to limit it.”
“And I like to roll in it,” Renz said. “I don’t mind admitting I’m ambitious. We both know the score. We got things to trade. You take the risk and the media flack, and the money. I come away clean, move up a notch or two, and there’s more money for me down the line.”
Quinn didn’t know how Renz figured that, and didn’t want to ask. “What is it that you have,” he said, “that you’re so afraid will bite you in the ass?”
“Someone is dead,” Renz said. “A young woman whose purse contents identify her as Lois Graham. Got an address in SoHo.”
“Is that where the body is?” Quinn asked. He heard and felt Pearl stir next to him.
“Nope. Central Park. Near the Eighty-first Street entrance, not far off Central Park West.”
“Sexual assault?”
“Maybe.”
“That why she was killed?” Women were murdered occasionally in Central Park. So why was Renz calling Quinn about this one?
“The why isn’t what bothers me. It’s the how.”
“So what’s the how?”
“You’d have to see it.”
Quinn knew Renz was right. Despite the aggravating word games, Quinn would be curious enough to get up and drive to Central Park, even at this early hour.
“I’ll be there soon as I can,” Quinn said.
“Bring Pearl.”
Quinn glanced toward the other side of the king-size bed and saw that Pearl was gone. Pipes rattled and squealed and he heard the shower run. Pearl could shower and dress faster than any woman Quinn had known.
“Try to stop her,” he said.
4
After parking the Lincoln illegally near a loading dock on a side street, Quinn propped his NYPD plaque in the windshield, and he and Pearl jogged across Central Park West toward the park.
It wasn’t difficult to find the crime scene. White canvas panels were propped on two sides of where Quinn and Pearl assumed the body to lie. Yellow crime scene tape kept gawkers at a distance on the other two sides. A uniform appeared and moved to stop them. Then the young cop recognized Quinn and backed away, pointing needlessly toward the canvas and the knot of uniforms as well as plainclothes cops in suits and ties. Most of the detectives had taken off their suit coats, and their shirts were glued to them so the color of their flesh showed through the damp material.
Quinn and Pearl moved through dappled morning sunlight toward the crime scene. Today showed every indication of becoming another scorcher. Quinn, as usual, wore a coat and tie as if already on the hunt. Pearl, vividly attractive as ever with her dark hair and eyes and generous figure, had on casual navy slacks and a white tunic. A breeze rattled the leaves on the branches above as they moved toward the body, careful to avoid where the CSU techs told them not to step. Renz noticed them and gave a half wave. He was wearing a light tan suit instead of his commissioner’s uniform. His increasingly rotund form put to waste the expensive material and expert tailoring.
Doctor Julius Nift, the little necrophiliac (it was rumored) ME, was kneeling by the nude dead woman and looked up and smiled at them. Especially at Pearl, who hated him with a passion.
Renz also smiled, his flesh-padded cheeks almost hiding his eyes, the fat pink of his bull neck spilling over his white shirt collar.
“Meet Lois Graham,” Nift said. “Beautiful in death.” He rose to his full height, which wasn’t much, and expanded his chest. He saw himself as Napoleonic. Quinn thought of him as a banty rooster with a sour disposition.
Lois Graham’s clothes were stacked neatly folded off to the side. It took a second look to realize they appeared to have been cut away from her body rather than removed in ordinary fashion. Her pale, still form lay on its back so she seemed to be staring up at the sky with frozen wonder.
“She has some rack on her,” Nift commented, doubtless trying to get a rise out of Pearl, who ignored him.
But that wasn’t what sickened and angered Quinn. Lois Graham had been eviscerated, her intestines coiled next to her body. And there was something about how she lay. A strange awkwardness. Quinn and Pearl moved closer.
And suddenly understood. The corpse’s limbs had been neatly sawed through at the joints. Her wrists were a quarter of an inch short of her hands. Her arms had been severed at the elbows and shoulders. Same kind of sawing with her legs, at the ankles, knees, and hips. Quinn had assumed her throat had been cut. He saw now that her head had been sawn off and replaced slightly crookedly on the stump of her neck. There was, oddly enough, not a lot of blood.
“The injuries are postmortem,” Nift said. “If her heart hadn’t stopped first there’d be blood all over the place. But as you can see, there isn’t.”