Night Kills. John Lutz

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      Gloria tossed him the pointed shaft so it remained vertical in the air, as if she were a dancer tossing her partner a cane. Matching her stagecraft, he snatched it neatly with one hand. He felt the point with his index finger, testing for sharpness.

      Gloria walked around closer to stand next to him over Shellie’s dead body.

      “Look at her face,” she said. “She was surprised. You didn’t disappoint her.”

      “I never disappoint the ladies,” David said.

      He bent low with the sharpened section of broomstick, and then slowly straightened up without it.

      Gloria was breathing hard as she stared down at the foot or so of wood protruding from Shellie.

      “Don’t you ever wonder, David, how it would be if you didn’t wait until they were—?”

      “Grab the other end of this plastic sheet and let’s move her so we can get busy.”

      “For everything there is a purpose under the heavens,” Gloria said, still staring at the protruding section of broomstick. “Sometimes more than one purpose.”

      “Aside from your cynicism, this is no time to go biblical on me.”

      “It’s exactly the time,” she said, grinning. “And you didn’t answer my question.”

      11

      “Only an arm,” medical examiner Dr. Julius Nift said, kneeling alongside the pale object before him on the wet bricks. “Yet look at the attention it’s attracted. Some show. I wish somebody would give us a hand.”

      Pearl despised Nift and his callous sense of humor, but she said nothing, because, sick jokes aside, she agreed with him. A hand would mean fingerprints. She wasn’t sure how much this arm that had been fished from the East River would be able to help them.

      Nift continued to probe and examine the arm. He was a short, chesty man inflated by self-importance who dressed more like a banker than a doctor who spent a lot of time with corpses. He wore his black hair combed forward, resulting in sparse bangs that made him look Napoleonic. That was how Pearl thought of him, as a crude, cynical Napoleon. It was lucky the little bastard didn’t have an army.

      Quinn, standing a few feet away with Fedderman, gnawed his lower lip as he stared down at the handless severed arm. It had obviously been in the water a long time. He glanced around, squinting in the early afternoon sunlight. They were near Sutton Place, home of some of the most expensive real estate in New York. It wasn’t likely the arm belonged to any of the neighbors. A missing arm in Sutton Place wasn’t the sort of thing to go unreported.

      The arm had been spotted by a Mrs. Grace Oliphant, while walking her Yorkshire terrier, Clipper. She’d noticed something pale snagged on some deadwood that had drifted up against the bank and thought at first it was a large, dead fish. She skirted a black iron fence and moved closer. Clipper began barking frantically, and she wasn’t so sure she was looking at a dead fish. It was the forty-five-degree crook in the blanched object that made her peer more intensely and with fearful curiosity. There was something about the thing, something that reminded her of…an elbow.

      Mrs. Oliphant straightened up immediately and backed away, nauseated, tugging at the leash to get Clipper away from the dreadful thing. The arm. It was no wonder the dog had been barking so frantically. He must have picked up the terrible scent, realized before she did what they were looking at. Yorkies were so smart.

      She gave the leash a firm yank, momentarily choking off Clipper’s shrill barking, then looked him in the eye and shushed him so he’d stay quiet while she used her cell phone to call the police.

      The uniforms who’d arrived first knew immediately they were looking at a human arm that had been severed at the elbow. Its hand had been cut off at the wrist. One of the cops picked up a branch and edged the arm closer to the concrete wall where the water lapped, then gingerly inched it up and over and onto the bricks. He didn’t like touching it, even with a branch, but he knew he had to move it before it broke free from where it was snagged and floated away, or maybe sank.

      The water had blanched away most of the color, leaving the arm a dull white. The uniforms could see how the woman who’d called thought at first she’d been looking at a dead fish. There was some obvious damage from what lived in the river nibbling at the arm. Gleaming white bone showed beneath flaps of skin at both ends.

      Both cops knew about the Torso Murders and recognized the possible significance of the arm. The police investigated weird things found in New York rivers almost every week, and those were only the ones that were reported. Still, human remains…and with the sicko on the loose killing and cutting up his victims…it was a situation that called for diligence.

      One of the uniforms had listened to Grace Oliphant’s story and taken notes, while his partner called their lieutenant. Up the bureaucratic chain the information went, but in a way tightly controlled. Within fifteen minutes, Renz had called Quinn.

      “Right or left arm?” Quinn asked Nift.

      “Does it matter?”

      “It matters because I asked you,” Quinn said in a flat voice that had unnerved hundreds if not thousands of suspects.

      It didn’t seem to unnerve Nift, armored as he was by ego. Still, he decided it was time to be businesslike. He pressed a forefinger to the side of his chin, striking a thoughtful pose, as he shifted slightly to peer at both ends of the arm. “I’d guess left, but I can’t tell you for sure till we get this to the morgue and examine it more closely.”

      “How long’s it been in the water?”

      “I can only guess, but I’d say about a month.”

      Quinn figured it would belong to the first victim, if it was an arm from one of the mystery torsos. It almost had to be, he figured. Even in New York, it wasn’t every day that the odd severed limb turned up. “Can you match it with either of the torsos we found?”

      Nift glanced up at him with a confident, nasty smile. “With my skill, if it matches, I’ll know. There’ll be distinctive marks on the bone from the cleaver or hatchet. And comparable patterns in the way the flesh was cut away. Also, we should be able to match it by age to one of the torsos, if that’s where it came from. And of course there’s always DNA. Takes a while for a full report, but we might be able to hurry through a preliminary yes or no on a simple match.”

      A siren grew louder, then yodeled to silence, causing Clipper, held by Mrs. Oliphant, over by a small grouping of ornamental trees with orange berries, to fill the vacuum by emitting an earsplitting series of barks. A boxy vehicle with flashing lights had braked to a halt on the rise beyond steps leading to one of the pocket parks bordering the river at that point. Quinn could see a swing set and monkey bars and was glad some kid hadn’t wandered down to the river and found the arm.

      A white-uniformed paramedic jogged effortlessly down the concrete steps, then stepped over the low brick wall bordering the park and came toward them. While he was nimble, he was a chubby guy, holding a black rubberized zip case that looked like a portfolio an artist would carry samples in. Quinn figured there was no need for a stretcher here. The arm would fit in the case diagonally with room to spare.

      The paramedic had dark hair combed severely sideways and a name patch that said JEFF.

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