The Death Artist (18 page)

Floyd pictured her pushing the thick streaked hair out of her eyes, the whiff of perfume he’d caught when he leaned in close to study those art pictures. Jesus, if there was one thing he didn’t need, it was to think about McKinnon as a woman.

Still, he couldn’t wait to tell Vonette that he was working with the art lady. She’d get a real kick out of that. Vonette, the art fan, who made him tape
Monday Night Football
so she could watch
Artists’ Lives.
As if watching a tape of a game you already knew the outcome to was worth watching.

Small world, though, that was for sure. The woman who ruined his one good TV night working with him on a homicide–maybe a series of homicides.

A month ago, he and Vonette had discussed the possibility of his retiring. But not with the possibility of a serial killer out there. And he’d have to make nice. This wasn’t just anyone advising. This was a friend of the chief of police.

The cubicle was just big enough for a desk and a chair, but it was something–Kate hadn’t expected anything. Certainly not the NYPD temporary ID, clipped to her cashmere pullover. She lit up another Merit. Yesterday it was Marlboro. Last week she’d promised, absolutely sworn to Richard, she would quit. For the hundredth time. But not right now.

She opened to a clean page in her notebook, rapped her disposable, ecologically indestructible auto pencil against the page, started to list the obvious things she needed to check–Elena’s friends, co-workers, mother, though she doubted Mrs. Solana would talk to her.

Kate thought back to Elena’s senior year in high school, the teenager’s tears as she confessed to Kate that Mendoza, her mother’s boyfriend, had been coming on to her, heavy, for months, her mother turning a deaf ear. That’s when Kate helped Elena get out of the house, find the East Sixth Street apartment, even paid the rent for the first couple of years. Now the thought of it stung: If Elena had stayed home, would she still be alive? She pushed the thought away, added Mendoza’s name to the list, underlined it.

Kate pulled hard on the Merit–might as well be sucking on a Tampax. She had to get herself some real cigarettes; she was smoking twice as many of these.

She wondered if the other cops would play ball with her. She liked what she saw in Maureen Slattery, even recognized a bit of herself in the young woman cop–the slight chip on her shoulder, for sure, but no dummy. And she’d already been helpful, turned over Elena’s phone records. Kate scanned them now, recognized her own number, Willie’s, others she would have to check out later. They could be important.

But what about Brown? Maybe it was time for a visit.

“Your wife.” Kate eyed the framed five-by-seven photo at the back of Floyd Brown’s desk. “Pretty woman. She trying to kill you?”

“What?”

“There’s enough starch in your collar to cut off your blood supply.”

“She’s particular.” Brown fought a smile, pulled the Pruitt file over. “So, you knew this guy. Any enemies?”

“Probably a waiting list. The guy was a fucking ass-kisser, a phony, maybe even a crook.”

“You sure you’re from Park Avenue?”

“The West Side,” said Kate, not specifying Central Park West.

“So what do you mean,
crook
?”

“There is the possibility of some stolen art.”

“It’s not in here,” said Brown, fingering the edge of Pruitt’s file.

“I just found out.”

“You been workin’ the cases, McKinnon?
Alone
?”

“I was curious.” Kate smiled, then explained what Pruitt’s mother had told her about the missing painting. “I’m venturing a guess that whoever killed Pruitt has the altarpiece.”

“Find the painting, find the killer. That it?” Brown made a note, then tugged a page out of Pruitt’s folder. “Did you see these statements?” He ran his finger down a list of names. “Richard Rothstein. Any relation?”

“Husband. He was at a museum board meeting with Pruitt, the morning of the day the man died.”

Brown locked his dark eyes on her. “Your husband didn’t kill him, did he?”

“Richard? Kill Bill Pruitt?” Kate snorted a laugh. “Well, you know, he didn’t say. I guess I’ll have to ask him.”

“Do that,” said Brown. He sat back in his chair. “I watched your show. Me and my wife.”

“Thanks.”

“I didn’t say I liked it. Just that I watched it.” He scrutinized her a moment, drummed his blunt-cut nails along the edge of the desk.

Kate waited. She knew to give the guy some space. It couldn’t be easy for him. A crackerjack detective with over twenty years experience stuck with her, an ex-cop he knew nothing about except that she had connections in high places. If it were the other way around, she’d be pissed as hell.

“You haven’t told anyone your theories, have you?”

“No one but Tapell.”

Brown screwed up his mouth. “It’ll be bad, real bad, if the press gets news of a serial killer–especially now, right after the Shooter.”

“If people weren’t so hungry to read about that sort of thing they wouldn’t print it.” Kate eyed the Pruitt file. “By the way, the contusion on Pruitt’s jaw. Was it fresh?”

“I couldn’t tell for sure.”

“What about the coroner?”

“Way backed up. We’ll have to wait awhile for the report.”

“Maybe,” said Kate. “And maybe not.”

The plastic name tag–RAPPAPORT, SALLY–was pinned, slightly askew, to the chest pocket of the ME’s lab coat, in between clusters of wine-colored stains, presumably dried blood, thought Kate, and not vintage pinot noir. Rappaport was anywhere from thirty to forty, medium height, thin. Skin that looked as if it hadn’t seen daylight in two years.

“Sorry to keep you here so late.”

“Are you kidding?” Rappaport shrugged. “I just started my shift.”

“Graveyard?”

The ME frowned.

“Sorry,” said Kate. She was desperate for any kind of humor. “Bad pun.”

The corridor leading to the main autopsy room was that awful gray-green color from the floor to waist height, then off-white to the ceiling. Kate followed Sally Rappaport’s thick-soled Adidas. They squeaked on the mint-colored ceramic tile floor.

An old Roman bathhouse. Multiple archways big enough for Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra to make her triumphal entrance into Rome. Polished white tiles and stainless steel. So cold you could see your breath. The smell of formaldehyde twenty times worse than a tenth-grade biology class.

The Astoria morgue, the one Kate knew from the old days, was part of Queens Hospital–one room outfitted with three or four cheap gurneys. A dozen of them could have fit into this place, easy.

Rappaport led Kate past a couple of gurneys, bodies laid out under green plastic sheets, waxy-white, blue-veined feet protruding. She offered up a mask, tied one over her nose and mouth, patted her curly brown hair, which was held in place with two blue plastic barrettes in the shape of fish–the kind you’d buy in Woolworth’s, if Woolworth’s still existed. Kate wondered if Rappaport had saved them from when she was a girl or bought them from some tacky street vendor. But why did she care, here, of all places, in this frigid house of death where she was about to view the body of a girl who was the closest thing to a daughter she had ever had? Hell, she didn’t need a therapist to explain that one. Plastic barrettes? Any distraction would do.

Rappaport plucked a pair of plastic gloves from a dispenser, nodded at Kate, who did the same. She moved to the bottom half of the east wall, all metal drawers, each with a large plastic handle and a slot holding an index card with numbers handwritten in black marker. An oversized library of the dead. The ME checked her clipboard, got a grip on drawer S-17886P, tugged. The drawer squeaked open.

Elena’s body looked like so many bodies Kate had seen before–flesh the color of old piano keys, tracks left from the autopsy’s thoracic Y cut, crude stitches where they’d literally reattached the top of Elena’s skull–but this was not just any body. Behind the mask, Kate was just barely breathing. How could she do this? Was she mad? No, she wanted to do it. Must do it. A tune, that’s what she needed. An old trick–plant some banal lyrics in the back of her mind–to make it possible to view the worst scenes.

“Baby Love.”

A bad choice. But too late to stop it. Diana Ross and the Supremes–all bouffant hair, big skirts, finger poppin’–had already laid down the Motown track inside Kate’s brain just as Rappaport began pointing to dark purple, almost black cuts in Elena’s chest: “. . . two, three, four . . . ten in the upper thoracic. One, two, three–these three look as though they’re one because they’ve run over one another, but it’s three separate entries.” She looked up at Kate, said “See?” then picked at them with a scalpel. “The original coroner’s report said seventeen stab wounds. But it’s really twenty-two.”

The refrain from “Baby Love” was playing over and over.

Rappaport exchanged the scalpel for an X ray, flipped it up toward the harsh fluorescent light. “These two, here . . .” She pointed. “Pierced the lungs. These other two went directly into her heart. They’re your killers.”

“It’s not the weapon that kills,” Kate whispered.

“True,” said Rappaport. She dropped the X ray onto Elena’s gray-white thigh. “These other wounds, here, on the abdomen, basically superficial.”

“Was she raped?” Kate managed to ask over the song, which continued to play in her brain.

“No semen, but some vaginal bruising.”

“So, it’s possible that there was an attempted rape–and that the assailant did not ejaculate?”

Rappaport was hovering about six inches over Elena’s thighs, picking through dark pubic hair with a metal probe. “Possible. Yeah. Too bad there’s no semen to DNA, though.”

Kate gently lifted one of Elena’s hands. It was stone-cold, rubbery. “Defensive wounds?”

The ME nodded.

“Anything under the nails?”

Rappaport regarded her clipboard, flipped a page. “Nothing. Surprisingly clean.”

Kate stared at the lifeless hand in hers. What was it that seemed wrong? The nails. Right. She’d read the report.

“Do you think the assailant filed the nails postmortem?”

“Impossible to say.” The ME’s tired brown eyes look bored above her mask.

“Elena wore her nails long,” said Kate. “He must have done it.”

“Well, he did a good job, too. Nothing under them. No hair, flesh, nothing.”

“Particles, hairs anywhere else?”

“Only the girl’s hair so far. We’ve got prelims on stomach, liver, and kidneys in the report here. Tests will take about a week.”

A week
? Kate wanted to scream, but her voice remained cool. Maybe she’d call Tapell. “Can you get those to me when they’re ready?”

“Test results will be sent over to Randy Mead’s office.” She squinted at Kate. “Tapell’s aide said you’re working with him, with Mead?” Her inflection turned it into a question.

Kate didn’t bother to answer. She said, “I’ll take those preliminaries now, see the rest later.” She was about to reach for the file, realized she was still holding Elena’s hand. For a moment, she did not want to give it up–as though holding on would keep them connected.

“The other body’s waiting.” Rappaport yawned. “We better get going.”

Kate gently lowered Elena’s hand to the gurney.

Rappaport gave the steel drawer a hard shove. It closed with a dull clunk.

Pruitt’s flesh looked rubbery, waxen.

“What about that bruise on his chin?” asked Kate.

Rappaport leaned over the body, poked at Bill Pruitt’s chin with her gloved finger. The flesh went from purple to white to slightly yellow, back to purple in about three seconds. “From the lividity, I’d say it probably happened during the murder, or certainly no later than the afternoon of his death.”

So it was the perp, their artistic unsub, who slugged Pruitt. Somehow that didn’t make sense to Kate. “Why punch someone while you’re holding them upside down under water? Seems like overkill.”

Rappaport shrugged.

“What about Ethan Stein?”

“The autopsy’s still in progress,” said Rappaport. “Now
there’s
a case of overkill.” She shook her head. “I’ll send those reports over once they’re done.”

Kate slid the preliminary reports on Pruitt into her bag along with the ones on Elena. She was more than ready to get out of here, and right now, she felt like firing a gun.

The smell of gunpowder hung in the low-ceilinged room like a cloud of acid rain. Kate squeezed the trigger, again, and again, and again. The gun jumped in her hand, sent tremors up her arm. She’d almost forgotten the thrill of shooting–all that force right in your hand. The target zipped forward. No bull’s-eyes, but all of her shots would have inflicted serious damage. Not bad for years out of practice. She reloaded, emptied another round, concentrated on keeping her arm steady, her mind clear and focused. She couldn’t help wondering what her friends, Blair and the girls, would think if they could see her now. That group? Every one of them would strap on a gun quicker than you could say “prenuptial agreement.”

Kate was finishing up her forth round when she spied Maureen Slattery, just a few lanes over. Pumped up on card-board killing, Kate strutted the three lanes over toward the young policewoman.

Slattery pulled her ear protectors off, dropped back to meet Kate at the screens.

“Nice shooting,” said Kate, checking out Slattery’s near-perfect round as the target zipped forward.

“Thanks. How about you?”

“Rusty.”

“It doesn’t take long to get it back. It’s like swimming, you know.”

“Or fucking.”

Slattery gave her a look. “You got quite a mouth on you, McKinnon.”

“I majored in Mouthing Off at Saint Anne’s.”

Maureen’s face broke into a grin. “Saint Mary’s. Bayonne, New Jersey.”

Kate gave Maureen a conspiratorial look. “Uniform?”

“The usual plaid number.”

“How short was
your
skirt?”

“Let’s just say it prepared me for those hot pants in vice. You?”