The Death Artist Read online

  Who were they?

  Back home, Kate headed for the guest-room closet, grabbed a chair on the way. She did not like the way she felt when Fat Wally came out of nowhere. Way too vulnerable. And the next guy might not be as out of shape. She had better be prepared.

  She pushed aside a stash of silky scarves. There it was, the plain gray shoe box marked “Slippers, crushed velvet,” in neatly printed Magic Marker. Exactly where she’d put it almost ten years ago. She tugged out the box, sat on the edge of the bed, pushed back layers of tissue paper as though peeling away time. Gently, she extricated her old Glock.

  Kate turned it over in her hand, could still, remarkably, smell the slightly acrid odor of gun-metal cleaner. There was a full clip in the shoe box. Kate snapped it into place and felt the rush. The power she’d given up a long time ago, exchanged, you might say, for the power of money. Back in the old days, Kate hadn’t known about money or what it could do. Her fingers tightened around the gun handle. Now she had a gun and a checkbook. And yes, she felt a lot stronger than she had only minutes earlier. Ask any fifteen-year-old who has had his hand around a gun and he’ll tell you the power it offers, the sudden, stupid bravery. Who was the NRA trying to kid?

  Kate exchanged her destroyed designer duds for Gap khakis and a plain blue cotton shirt. Much better. A lot less flashy than the way she dressed as a detective in the old days, when she favored miniskirts and V-necks. But those days were gone, no matter how many miles she logged on that damn treadmill.

  Her reflection in the mirror told her she could use a solid week at a spa. She ran a brush through her hair, dabbed her wrists with Bal à Versailles.

  Why was it she had always felt embarrassed, as though somehow it had been her fault that she didn’t have a mother? It wasn’t until the tenth grade, at St. Anne’s, that she learned the truth: Mary Ellen Donaghue taunting her, “You think you’re such hot stuff, McKinnon, well, at least my mother didn’t kill herself,” and Kate punching her, over and over, until finally one of the nuns pulled her off.

  Why had they all lied to her? Did they think it was her fault?

  Oh, man, the years spent on the shrink’s couch over that one.

  Kate tucked the Glock into her most sensible bag—a smallish black leather pouch with a long strap—looped the bag over her shoulder, then sorted through her closet for another lightweight jacket. The only non-designer item was an old jean jacket with an appliquéd peace sign over the breast pocket left over from who-knew-when.

  Outside, the trees bordering Central Park West had sprouted their spring greenery to spite the dreary weather. Kate patted the artillery in her bag. Insurance, that’s all it was. It wasn’t as if she were planning to shoot anyone.

  17

  Kate’s heels echoed in the long dark hallway. Catacombs, she thought. Peeling paint, damp cold. The basement of the Sixth Precinct. The Crime Lab.

  Hernandez slid the graduation photo into the glass contraption, lit the superglue.

  The two women watched as vapors swirled around the collage, searching for prints.

  “This is a mess,” said Hernandez, removing the photo with tweezers. “Prints on top of prints.”

  “Sorry,” said Kate. “I didn’t know what it was when I got it. Had my hands all over it.”

  The technician gave her a sorry look, pulled gloves off her chubby hands, dropped them into the trash. She was maybe thirty-five, her ample figure straining against the snug lab coat.

  Kate offered up the ballpoint pen wrapped in tissue. “This should be a lot neater. See if there are any prints that match what was found at the Solana scene.”

  Hernandez sighed.

  Kate pulled out a Marlboro.

  “In the hall,” said Hernandez. “No, better yet, take a walk. Gimme a half hour to print the other ones. I’ll see what I can get.”

  One coffee and three cigarettes later, Kate was getting the lowdown from Hernandez.

  “The pen’s got a few good prints, but they match nothing at Solana’s or any other scene.”

  “It was a wild shot,” said Kate. “What about the collage?”

  “Not much. Mostly smudged. I got maybe one clean quarter-print.”

  “Could be mine, I must admit.”

  “They’re called gloves, McKinnon.”

  “I don’t wear gloves when I open my mail.”

  “Well, from now on you should.” Hernandez handed Kate a couple pages of mechanical printouts—numbers, symbols, words. “Not much to tell you. The glue he used in the collage is acid-free but otherwise standard. The photo’s a Kodacolor, four to five years old. The material over the eyes is some kind of tempera paint, water-based, for sure. The other one, the Polaroid—” She shook her head. “No prints. Unlike you, your unsub is wearin’ gloves.”

  “Can you make copies of the collage and the photo for me?”

  Hernandez nodded toward a Xerox machine in the corner. “You can do it yourself. The pictures are in plastic now. Protected.” She offered a caustic smile.

  A minute later, Kate was watching the Xeroxes spill out of the machine.

  “Oh, McKinnon.” Hernandez called her over. “Before you leave I wanna mess up your manicure. Gotta have your prints on file to check against anything else you decide to drag your hands across.”

  Floyd Brown squinted at the stat sheet.

  NO SIGNS OF FORCED ENTRY

  PROBABLE WEAPON: NINE-INCH SERRATED KITCHEN KNIFE FOUND AT THE SCENE (KITCHEN DRAWER) MATCHED 2 OTHER KNIVES IN DRAWER—NO PRINTS

  He studied the photo. Seventeen stab wounds. Brutal, for sure.

  Through a magnifying glass he searched for signs of pleasure. No bite marks, no nothing. And the usual trophies—nipples, earlobes—were intact. So what was the guy after?

  UNDER NAILS: TRACES OF ALUMINUM

  A manicure? Now that, even to Floyd Brown, who had seen it all, was odd. Some kind of ritual they hadn’t yet figured out, or was the killer just smart enough to file away any traces of flesh that may have lodged under the dead girl’s nails? Either way, Brown could see the guy took his time.

  Three murders.

  One killer?

  Maybe.

  Mead didn’t want to believe it—hell, who wanted to think there was a serial killer out there? Brown pushed away from his desk, swiveled back and forth in his chair. Twenty-plus years of detective work told him this was no coincidence. McKinnon was probably right. Plus, he was impressed with what she’d already delivered—though he hated to admit it. Who was she anyway? Some uptown dame with all the answers.

  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.”

  18

  The coroner’s office might be backed up. But a call from Chief of Police Tapell opened doors.

  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.