Darker Than Night. John Lutz
her destroyed and unable to move on the sweat-soaked bed, she saw something pale in the night and knew he was wearing a condom.
She realized later it wasn’t for her—it was for him. He didn’t want to catch some dreadful disease from her. That made what happened all the more demeaning.
“Anna!”
Her mother’s voice.
Anna had dozed off again, lost in the old dreams she thought were gone. No, not gone, but finally confined in a place in her mind where they couldn’t escape.
But they had escaped. Like tigers. Quinn was back.
“You’ve overslept, Anna. Get up. This is your big day. What you’ve been slaving for the past four years. You don’t want to be late.”
Anna made herself roll onto her side, then sat up gingerly on the edge of the mattress, as if the old pain would be there with the old shame. She was thirteen again. Unlucky thirteen.
That was the problem—Quinn had the power again. When she saw his photograph, his name in print, heard people talking about him, she was thirteen even though she was almost eighteen.
She wished she could kill him. The nuns would tell her she shouldn’t think such thoughts, but she’d graduated and she could think whatever she wanted now.
She wished she could kill Quinn. That was her almost constant thought.
“You don’t want to be late,” her mother warned again.
And Anna didn’t. She had to concentrate on the present, not the past. Her first day of summer classes at Juilliard. The first day of her music scholarship.
What she’d been slaving for. Her therapy and escape that, as it turned out, hadn’t quite worked.
She stood up unsteadily and made her way toward the bathroom.
Unlucky thirteen. Unlucky Anna.
At least she had her scholarship. That was all that was left for her, all that was left inside her…her music. Thirteen. A child.
She knew she wasn’t going to kill anyone.
13
Quinn sat in the sun on a bench just inside the Eighty-sixth Street entrance to Central Park and watched them approach.
Fedderman looked the same, only a little heavier, the coat of his rumpled brown suit flapping, his tie askew, the same shambling gait. He had less hair to be mussed by the summer breeze, and he seemed out of breath, as if he was trying to keep up with the quick, rhythmic strides of the small woman next to him.
Pearl Kasner seemed to generate energy even from this distance. She was economical, deliberate and decisive in her movements to the point that there seemed something robotic in her resolute walk. She was a study in contrasts of light and dark, a mass of black hair framing a pale face from which dark eyes glared, lips too red, a gray skirt and a black blazer despite the warm morning. It was as if a small child had been given only black and white crayons and told to draw a woman, and here she was, with a compact completeness about her and a vividness almost unreal.
Quinn stood up from the bench, feeling the sun warm on his shoulders. “Hello, Feds.”
Fedderman smiled. “Quinn! Back in harness where you belong!”
The two men shook hands, then hugged. Fedderman slapped Quinn on the back five or six times before they separated.
“Make the most of this chance, buddy!” he said.
“Count on it,” Quinn told him.
“I’m here,” Pearl said.
Quinn looked at her. “So you are. Sorry if we ignored you. Fedderman and I are old—”
“I know,” Pearl said, “you go back a long way. You’ve watched each other’s backs, broken bread together, flirted with the same waitresses, fought the same fights. Fedderman filled me in.”
Fedderman grinned at Quinn. “This is Pearl. She’s a fighter.”
Quinn stepped back and regarded Pearl. Despite her sarcasm, she was smiling with large, perfect white teeth. “I’ve heard that about you, Pearl. A fighter. Also that you have talent as a detective.”
“And I’ve heard about you, Lieutenant.”
“Just Quinn will do. Officially, I’m only doing work-for-hire for the NYPD.” Quinn buttoned his sport coat to hide ketchup he’d already dribbled on his new tie. “So, everybody’s heard about everybody else, except maybe for some things I might tell you about Fedderman. And we all know why we’re meeting here.”
“Because your apartment’s a shit hole,” Pearl said.
Fedderman shook his head. “Pearl, dammit!”
“Mine’s a shit hole, too,” Pearl said. “Tiny, hot as hell, and thirsty for paint.”
“Roaches?”
“They won’t tolerate the place.”
Quinn grinned at her. She was still smiling, a dare in eyes black enough to have gotten her burned as a witch four hundred years ago. Probably, Egan would like to burn her now. There was something in her favor. What kind of pain is driving you?
“Am I the boss?” he asked her. “Or are we gonna have a contest?”
“It’d only be a waste of time,” Pearl said.
Quinn decided not to ask her what she meant. “You two go ahead and sit down,” he said. “I’ve been sitting awhile.”
When they were on the bench, Fedderman slouched with his legs apart. Pearl sat stiffly, with her notepad in her lap, looking as if she were about to take dictation.
Quinn told them what he’d learned from the Elzner murder file, and what he speculated.
Pearl made a few notes and listened intently. He got the impression her eyes might leave scars on him.
“The jam bothered me, too,” she said when he was finished. “An almost full jar in the refrigerator, and they bought two more identical jars when they went grocery shopping.”
“Which means they didn’t know how much jam they had,” Fedderman said, “or they were gonna hole up in their apartment for a few weeks and live on strawberry jam, or someone else did the shopping for them. Someone who didn’t know what kinds of foods they were out of.”
“Or someone who thought they just couldn’t have enough gourmet jam,” Pearl said. “I lean toward your possibility number three, that somebody else bought the groceries.”
Fedderman leaned forward and scratched his left ankle beneath his sock. Quinn wondered if he still wore a small-caliber revolver holstered to his other ankle. He looked up at Quinn, still scratching. “So, we working on the assumption somebody killed both Elzners?”
“It’s the only assumption we’ve got, “Pearl said, “if you don’t want to finish your career doing crap assignments, I don’t want to be out of work, and Quinn doesn’t want to go back to being a—”
“Pariah,” Quinn finished for her.
She nodded. “Okay, pariah. I like that. It’s so Christian.”
“It isn’t biblical,” Fedderman said, “it’s ancient Greek.”
She stared at him. “That true?”
“I have no idea. You’re so naive, Pearl.”
“That I doubt,” Quinn said. He made a show of glancing at his watch. “So as of now, we’re on the job.”
“We don’t have anything new to work with,” Fedderman pointed out.
“Then we’ll work with what we have. Again. You two go back over the evidence and