Highest Praise for John Lutz

“John Lutz knows how to make you shiver.”

—Harlan Coben

“Lutz offers up a heart-pounding roller coaster of a tale.”

—Jeffery Deaver

“John Lutz is one of the masters of the police novel.”

—Ridley Pearson

“John Lutz is a major talent.”

—John Lescroart

“I’ve been a fan for years.”

—T. Jefferson Parker

“John Lutz just keeps getting better and better.”

—Tony Hillerman

“Lutz ranks with such vintage masters of big-city murder as Lawrence Block and Ed McBain.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Lutz is among the best.”

—San Diego Union

“Lutz knows how to seize and hold the reader’s imagination.”

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“It’s easy to see why he’s won an Edgar and two Shamuses.”

—Publishers Weekly

Serial

“Wow, oh wow, oh wow ... that’s as simple as I can put it. You gotta read this one.”

—True Crime Book Reviews

Mister X

“Mister X has everything: a dangerous killer, a pulse-pounding mystery, a shocking solution, and an ending that will resonate with the reader long after the final sentence is read.”

—BookReporter.com

“A page-turner to the nail-biting end ... twisty, creepy whodunit.”

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Urge to Kill

“A solid and compelling winner ... sharp characterization, compelling dialogue and graphic depictions of evil ... Lutz knows how to keep the pages turning.”

—BookReporter.com

Night Kills

“Lutz’s skill will keep you glued to this thick thriller.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Superb suspense ... The kind of book that makes you check to see if all the doors and windows are locked.”

—Affaire de Coeur

In for the Kill

“Brilliant ... a very scary and suspenseful read.”

—Booklist

“Shamus and Edgar award–winner Lutz gives us further proof of his enormous talent ... an enthralling page turner.”

—Publishers Weekly

Chill of Night

“Since Lutz can deliver a hard-boiled P.I. novel or a bloody thriller with equal ease, it’s not a surprise to find him applying his skills to a police procedural in Chill of Night. But the ingenuity of the plot shows that Lutz is in rare form.”

—The New York Times Book Review

“Lutz keeps the suspense high and populating his story with a collection of unique characters that resonate with the reader, making this one an ideal beach read.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A dazzling tour de force ... compelling, absorbing.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“A great read! Lutz kept me in suspense right up to the end.”

—Midwest Book Review

Fear the Night

“A twisted cat-and-mouse game ... a fast-moving crime thriller ... Lutz skillfully brings to life the sniper’s various victims.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A tense, fast-moving novel, a plot-driven page-turner of the first order ... a great read!”

—Book Page

Darker Than Night

“Readers will believe that they just stepped off a Tilt-A-Whirl after reading this action-packed police procedural.”

—The Midwest Book Review

Night Victims

“John Lutz knows how to ratchet up the terror... . He propels the story with effective twists and a fast pace. “

—Sun-Sentinel

The Night Watcher

“Compelling ... a gritty psychological thriller.... Lutz draws the reader deep into the killer’s troubled psyche.”

—Publishers Weekly

ALSO BY JOHN LUTZ

*Pulse

Single White Female

*Serial

*Mister X

*Urge to Kill

*Night Kills

*In for the Kill

Chill of Night

Fear the Night

*Darker Than Night

Night Victims

The Night Watcher

The Night Caller

Final Seconds (with David August)

The Ex

*featuring Frank Quinn

Available from Kensington Publishing Corp. and Pinnacle Books

SWITCH

JOHN LUTZ

PINNACLE BOOKS

Kensington Publishing Corp.

www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

Highest Praise for John Lutz

ALSO BY JOHN LUTZ

Title Page

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

May 6, 2:47 p.m.

May 6, 4:35 p.m.

May 6, 4:58 p.m.

May 6, 8:15 p.m.

May 7, 2:06 a.m.

May 7, 4:48 p.m.

PART TWO

May 7, 5:12 p.m.

May 8, 2:02 p.m.

May 8, 3:32 p.m.

May 8, 8:12 p.m.

May 9, 10:17 p.m.

May 10, 9:20 a.m.

May 10, 9:21 p. m.

May 11, 1:19 p.m.

EPILOGUE

Pulse

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Copyright Page

PROLOGUE

May 9, 10:40 a.m.

“There’s a finger in her,” Nift said, watching Pearl Kasner’s face for a reaction.

She didn’t show much of one.

Quinn and Pearl watched Medical Examiner Dr. Julius Nift, crouched low near the woman’s body, move his shoulders and arms, probe with what looked like long, thin tweezers, then stare and shake his head. Before him, lying between the corpse’s widely spread legs, was a small, bloody object.

“What do you mean,” Pearl asked, “a finger?”

Nift held up his rubber-gloved left hand, fingers spread. “One of these.” He made a fist except for his extended forefinger. “This one, to be exact. Or one like it.” He grinned. “It was lodged in her vaginal tract. Wanna take a look?”

Pearl did. So did Quinn.

Quinn said, “Man’s finger?”

“Almost certainly. Right size for a man’s. Nail’s trimmed close. No polish. Lots of stuff under it. Maybe rich with DNA.”

“Fingerprint?”

“Should be discernible. Once we get it cleaned up.”

Quinn nodded, standing with his fists propped on his hips, and glanced around Alexis Hoffermuth’s luxurious penthouse apartment, amazed anew by the vastness of the room they were in and the obvious wealth that showed in every facet of the place.

He had met Alexis Hoffermuth here just two days earlier, when she was alive.

Her body had been discovered scarcely an hour ago after she didn’t show up for an eight o’clock appointment (so unlike her), and failed to answer either her cell or land line phone.

The doorman had admitted the woman she was scheduled to meet in regard to a political fund-raiser, and there Alexis Hoffermuth was, in her altered state.

Pearl and Quinn looked at each other, each knowing what the other was thinking: money and murder were such close friends.

“Strange calling card,” said Nift, who liked to play detective, “a forefinger in her twat.” He glanced at Pearl to see if he’d gotten a rise out of her. “Whaddya make of it, Pearl?”

“If he’s a serial killer, he’s limited to nine more victims.”

“Unless—” Nift began.

“Shut up,” Pearl said, and he did.

“She was over fifty,” Quinn said, nodding toward the victim. “You’d never know it, even like this.”

The dead woman stared wide-eyed back at him, flecks of blood visible in the white around her pupils, the way eyes were after someone’s been strangled. In this instance, strangulation appeared to have been caused by the Burberry scarf around her neck. Yet the expression of pain and bewilderment frozen on her face wasn’t quite like that of a strangulation victim.

“There are a lot of imitation scarves like that floating around New York,” Nift said. “You think that one’s real?”

“It’s real,” Pearl said.

“The boobs aren’t,” Nift said.

“You would notice that.”

“Expensive job, though. But then, it would be.”

“No need to wonder about cause of death,” Quinn said, changing the subject before Nift and Pearl clashed. They often played this game. Nift seemed to regard making Pearl lose her temper a challenge. Not that she was his only target.

“Don’t be too sure,” Nift said. “Cause of death can be tricky.” Squatted down as he was, he craned his neck and glanced around, as if seeing the upper half of his surroundings clearly for the first time. “Place is big enough to be a museum. Looks kinda like one, the way it’s furnished.”

“What about time of death?” Pearl asked. She didn’t want to talk about décor.

“The victim sometime between midnight and three o’clock this morning. The finger sometime before then.”

“How do you know that?” Quinn asked.

“That the finger died before she did?” Nift grinned. “Putrefaction, discoloration, suggest several days, depending on ambient temperature. Also, I gave it the sniff test.” He grinned wickedly at Pearl. “Wanna smell?”

“That finger’s not the worst smelling thing in this room,” Pearl said angrily.

Nift ignored her. He’d gotten a rise out of Pearl again. He was temporarily ahead on points in the game he insisted they play.

Like Quinn, Pearl was a former NYPD homicide detective. Now they were part of Quinn and Associates Investigations—Q&A, as it was commonly called. The agency was formed when Quinn decided to extend his avocation beyond hunting down serial killers, which was his area of expertise. Q&A was more of a traditional detective agency now, and its employees were part owners and had a stake in its success.

Because of Quinn’s legendary and well-earned reputation for tracking and apprehending serial killers, the agency sometimes still did work for hire for the city. That work wasn’t exclusively serial killer cases; now it included almost any kind of criminal case that was high profile, sensitive, or for any other reason important to the city, or to the political well-being of its police commissioner. These contracts were mainly because the police commissioner, Harley Renz, and Quinn went back a long way.

Not that they liked each other. Quinn lived by his code, and Renz was without a code and enthusiastically corrupt. Still, the two men got along. Frequently they could help each other obtain what they wanted, however different those wants might be.

The techs from the crime scene unit were still going over the vast apartment with their lights and chemicals, cameras and print powder.

“Maybe they’ll find something,” Nift said, motioning with his arm to take in the activity around him.

“I know what they won’t find,” Quinn said.

Nift straightened up beside his black bag and looked at him. “You know something about what went on here?”

“Maybe,” Quinn said.

PART ONE

May 6, 2:47 p.m.

It all started not-so-innocently enough.

Ida Beene from Forest, Ohio, who called herself Ida French, knew exactly what she was doing when she slid into the backseat of the parked limo in her preoccupied manner, pretending it was a mistake and she’d thought it was a different limo, one that was waiting for her.

Craig Clairmont, Ida’s current love interest, watched her from a nearby doorway. He could make out her pale features inside the limo’s tinted rear window. Watched her mouth work as over and over she said how sorry she was, how she’d made a terrible mistake by entering the wrong car. Her active, shapely form was never still as she jabbered and waved her arms, pretending to be a bit zany but at the same time apologetic. All the while, he knew she was substituting the gray leather Gucci purse on the seat with her almost identical knock-off Gucci bag she’d bought on Canal Street for thirty dollars.

An embarrassing mistake, that was all. She kept repeating that as she reversed her trim, shapely derriere out of the limo, yakking, yakking all the time, overplaying it, keeping Alexis Hoffermuth distracted and confused. Her words drifted to Craig: “Oh, my God! So sorry, sorry. I’m such a goofball. Never did this before ... should have been paying attention ... please, please forgive me. Never, never ... Such an embarrassing mistake.” All the time gripping the gray leather Gucci purse by its strap.

Only it wasn’t her Gucci purse. It was Alexis Hoffermuth’s. And inside Alexis Hoffermuth’s purse was the little item Hoffermuth had bragged in the society columns that she wanted dearly and was going to purchase at auction. The item for which she’d kept her public word and outbid everyone, including a pesky telephone bidder who kept running up the bid.

Ida slammed the limo door behind her with a solid thunk! and strode quickly away, showing lots of ass wiggle, clutching the purse tight to her side. The limo driver, a burly man in a dark uniform with gold buttons, got out and stood on the other side of the car, looking after her. Obviously wondering.

Craig tensed his body, knowing he might have to act. This could go either way. Nonviolent would be best, but Craig and Ida could play it rough if they had to.

Fortune was precariously balanced here.

It teetered, leaned, and fell Craig and Ida’s way.

The chauffeur made no move to follow Ida, and lowered himself back into the gleaming black limo, behind the steering wheel.

The limo dropped a few inches over its rear wheels and glided out into Manhattan traffic, like a shark released into the sea.

But the sharks were behind it, on land.

Craig walked down to where Ida was waiting outside an electronics store. She was near a show window, pretending to gaze at the various gizmos: thumb-sized cameras, video game players from China, and cell phones that incorporated every imaginable capability. She looked like an actress who could play a ditsy blonde on TV, maybe missing a card from the deck, barely smart enough to lose at tennis. Craig knew that look was deceptive. Ida was wicked smart. And right now she was thinking hard, waiting for Craig.

He stood next to her, leaned over, and kissed her cheek. “You make the switch okay?”

“This is a genuine Gucci,” she said, clutching the purse tighter.

“I’m only interested in what’s inside.”

“So let’s go home. I know you don’t want to look at it here on the sidewalk.”

“It deserves more careful treatment than that,” Craig agreed.

Ida smiled. “Fifty cents on the dollar treatment.”

That had been the deal—fifty percent of the bracelet’s bid price. It didn’t seem like such a good deal, but it was safe and came to almost a quarter of a million dollars.

Craig took Ida French’s arm. They made a striking couple, the slim blond woman and the tall, classically handsome man with steady blue eyes and wavy black hair. They both dressed well and expensively. They could afford it. Especially now.

Home, in the small den off the apartment’s living room, they rooted through Alexis Hoffermuth’s purse. There was, somehow surprisingly, the usual women’s items: makeup essentials; a comb; wadded tissue with lipstick stain on it; a wallet that, disappointingly, held nothing but credit cards; a cell phone (which Craig would get rid of soon, along with the purse, in case it was one of those phones that could be electronically traced if it got lost); a Sotheby’s auction catalog; and, of course, the Cardell diamond-and-ruby bracelet, that for a brief time had been the Hoffermuth bracelet.

Craig smiled. Now it was the Craig and Ida bracelet.

They dumped the rest of the purse’s contents out onto a tabletop. Not even a dollar in cash. The rich lived large and traveled light.

Craig opened a drawer and drew out a paste bracelet that was a duplicate of the real Cardell bracelet they had stolen. He dropped it in the Hoffermuth bitch’s purse then scooped all the other contents in on top of it. Before closing the drawer, Craig got out another paste duplicate of the bracelet and laid it on the table away from the genuine one. The fake bracelet in the purse was for fooling Alexis Hoffermuth for at least a little while. That was the second duplicate Cardell bracelet. A third one, the one Craig placed on the table, was for fooling someone else.

They held hands as they went into the living room. Craig poured them each a flute of champagne.

They toasted each other.

“You’d better get rid of the purse with that cell phone soon,” Ida said, placing her glass on a paper napkin.

Craig agreed, but he wasn’t worried. It would be a little while before Alexis Hoffermuth noticed the leather of her purse wasn’t its usual softness, and the brassware was a bit bright and tacky looking. And the clasp didn’t quite hold.

Then, with a plunging heart, she would realize that it wasn’t her purse.

But it was exactly like her purse.

She would open the purse and see that it contained only wadded white tissue.

And it would dawn on her like a nuclear sunrise—the Cardell bracelet, for which she’d just paid $490,000 at Sotheby’s Auction—was gone.

Spirited away by a thief!

Or had it been?

She would try to recall the features of the woman who looked and acted like a flustered young Lucille Ball. Alexis would realize the woman had switched purses and left her with nothing but wadded tissue.

But there’d be something else in the purse ... Alexis Hoffermuth’s fingers would jab and dance through the tissue, then close on a familiar object and draw it out.

The bracelet!

Relief would course through her. But not without some reservations.

Craig Clairmont smiled. Alexis Hoffermuth wouldn’t understand. The bracelet somehow had been removed from her purse and then found its way into the substitute bag. Had the thief made some sort of mistake? She certainly was the type to do so.

Alexis might wonder that again, when her real purse was recovered with the bracelet still in it. A bracelet like it, anyway. It might be a long time, and a lot of wishful and confused thinking, before it occurred to her that the recovered bracelet was yet another not-so-cheap imitation. That the thieves were simply playing for time.

The very clever thieves.

Ida and Craig each took another sip of champagne.

That was when Ida’s eight-year-old daughter, Eloise, flounced into the room.

May 6, 4:35 p.m.

They thought at first he’d been struck by the sanitation department truck, one of those behemoths with the huge crusher in back.

But the man in the alley seemed unhurt except for the fact that he was bending over, holding one hand folded in the other.

When the trash truck had left the narrow passageway and turned a corner, Otto Berger and Arthur Shoulders exchanged glances. They were both bulky men in cheap brown suits. Otto was slightly the taller of the two. Arthur was slightly wider. Otto made a motion with his head, and the two professional thugs swaggered toward the lone figure in the shadows. The man looked up at them, and Otto smiled, not parting his lips. This was who they were expecting.

“Bingo, bango,” Arthur said.

“Gee, what happened to your hand?” Otto asked.

The man, whose name was Jack Clairmont, grimaced. “I got it caught in the trash truck’s mechanism when they used that damn grinder.”

“That’s a lotta blood you’re losing,” Arthur said.

“I’m goddam afraid to look.”

“What was you doing,” Otto asked, “tossing something into the truck?”

“Didn’t I see you get something from one of them guys who sling the trash bags?” Arthur asked.

“Like making an exchange,” Otto said.

The injured man squinted painfully at them.

Otto, though huge, was quick. He stepped forward and kicked Jack Clairmont hard in the side of the knee. Clairmont yelped and dropped to his elbows and knees on the concrete.

“Don’t make no noise now,” Otto said

Arthur was holding a knife. “He makes noise and it’ll be the last time,” he said.

Otto gave Jack Clairmont a wide grin. His teeth were in need of thousands of dollars worth of dental work. “Very good, Arthur. This gentleman can’t make noise if his vocal chords are flapping around.”

“If vocal chords do that,” Arthur said.

Otto kicked Jack in the buttocks, not hard this time. “Crawl over there into them shadows,” he said.

Jack Clairmont craned his neck and stared up at them. He looked as if he were about to cry. “Who are you guys?”

“I’m Mr. Pain,” Otto said.

Arthur’s turn to smile. Perfect teeth. “And I’m Mr. Suffering.”

“And you better become Mister Crawl,” Otto said. “Right now would be a good time to start—What the hell was that?

“Only a cat,” Arthur said.

“Thing was jet propelled. And black.”

“Bad luck.”

“Not for us, Arthur.”

“What’d it have in its mouth?”

“Who gives a shit? We got business here, Arthur.”

“Then business it is.” Arthur looked down at the injured man and grinned. Sometimes he loved his job.

Otto stared hard at Jack Clairmont and motioned with his head, as he had earlier to Arthur, indicating direction.

Jack Clairmont began to crawl.

Then he stopped. “Oh, my God! My hand!”

Otto sighed. What the hell was this about? He remembered the black cat.

“I’m missing a finger!” Clairmont moaned. “That goddam crusher on the trash truck cut off my finger! My finger.”

Otto shrugged. “It ain’t as if anybody’s gonna be asking you for directions.” He kicked the man again and pointed with his finger.

Moaning, sobbing, Clairmont resumed his crawl toward the shadows, favoring his right hand.

Still holding the knife, Arthur stood with his beefy arms crossed and stared at him. “He ain’t very fast.”

“Yeah,” Otto said. “That missing finger, maybe.”

“You think it could affect his balance? Like when you lose your little toe?”

“I never lost a little toe, Arthur.”

Arthur said, “Hey, that cat! You don’t suppose ...”

“We ain’t got time to look and find out,” Otto said. He glanced around. “This is far enough,” he said to the crawling Clairmont.

“Yeah,” Arthur said. “Time for you to rest in pieces.” He laughed. No one else did. “I was referring to the separated finger,” Arthur explained. But a joke never worked once you deconstructed it.

“This guy’s kind of a wet blanket,” Otto said, shoving Jack with his foot so he turned and was leaning with his back against the wall. “We been here too long already. Stick him, Arthur, so we can leave this place before somebody happens by.”

“Happens by? You must watch the BBC.”

“Pip, pip. Do stick him, Arthur.”

Arthur stuck him.

May 6, 4:58 p.m.

Ida and Craig were sitting in the living room, watching cable news on the TV with the sound muted. There was no news yet about the Cardell bracelet theft.

“Where’s Boomerang?” Eloise asked.

Craig looked at her, this annoying child that came with Ida as part of a set, half of which Craig loved. Loved enough to use, anyway.

“Who’s Boomerang?” Craig asked, without real interest.

“Her cat,” Ida said. “You know Boomerang.”

“Only in the way you can know a cat,” Craig said.

“I think he ran away again,” Ida said.

Eloise shrugged. “He doesn’t run away. He always comes back. Like a real boomerang.”

“Usually with a gift,” Ida said, cringing at the thought of some of the grisly trophies Boomerang had left on the kitchen floor as offerings. Everything from dead sparrows to rat heads. The more horrific the better. Boomerang would reenter the way he’d left, through the kitchen window, always open a crack to the fire escape, and deposit his offering on the throw rug. Then he’d be demonstrably proud. Cats seemed to think that way. At least cats like Boomerang.

“He’s probably out doing it to the lady cats in the neighborhood,” Craig said.

“Craig!” Ida warned.

Craig smiled. Maybe he and Boomerang weren’t all that different from each other.

“Trash pickup happen yet?” he asked.

Ida gave him a stern look. They weren’t supposed to talk about this in front of Eloise. Craig’s brother Jack was going to make the switch of the Hoffermuth bracelet for cash to one of the sanitation workers. Over $240,000. A bargain for the fence, Willard Ord, considering he would remove the bracelet’s jewels and sell them separately for more than twice that much. A steal for Willard. Except for the fact that Jack was going to give Ord’s emissary the remaining duplicate paste bracelet patterned on the Sotheby’s catalog illustration.

Jack was supposed to call brother Craig on his cell phone when the switch was completed.

Only he hadn’t called.

Craig stood up from the sofa. “Goin’ out for a smoke.”

“Don’t let anyone see you,” Ida said. “The mayor’s given the cops orders to shoot smokers to kill.”

“Funny, hah, hah,” Craig said. He picked up Alexis Hoffermuth’s purse and folded a sheet of newspaper over it. “Might as well drop this in a mail box.”

“Not one too close. And bring that damned cat in if you see him.”

“He’s not a damned cat,” Eloise said.

Ida pulled a face. “No, honey, he’s not. I’m sorry I said that.”

“Anyway, he won’t go far. And nobody’ll think he’s a stray, ’cause I put his collar on him.”

Craig looked at Eloise. “Collar?”

“That pretty collar with the jewels in it you brought for him,” Eloise said. “The one you left on the table. I put it on him and fastened the clasp. It fits perfect.” She grinned. “Makes him an even handsomer cat.”

Craig and Ida stared at her, comprehending but not wanting to believe, stunned.

“Good Christ!” Craig said. He walked in a tight circle, one foot staying in the same place.

“You put the bracelet on Boomerang?” Ida asked.

“Collar,” Eloise corrected.

Craig doubled his fist.

“Eloise, go to your room!” Ida said.

Aware that something horrible was going on, and somehow she was the root of it, Eloise obeyed without argument.

“I wasn’t going to hit her,” Craig said.

“We knew that, but she didn’t.”

Craig sighed. “Yeah ...” He stared helplessly at Ida. “What are we gonna do?”

“Cats don’t like playing dress up. Especially tomcats. But if Boomerang didn’t work the col—bracelet off right away, it probably doesn’t bother him and he’ll leave it alone. When he comes home, he should still be wearing it.”

“So we do nothing?”

“Seems the thing to do.”

“You mean not to do.”

Ida looked slightly confused. Still in character from earlier that day.

Craig strode toward the door. “I need a cigarette.”

Ida would have gone with him; she could use a cigarette herself. Only there was Eloise. Ida didn’t see herself as the kind of mother who’d leave her guilt-stricken kid alone for a cigarette. “Don’t light up till you get outside,” she said to Craig. They’d gotten the landlord’s notice that smoking was no longer allowed in the building.

“I’m not going out only for a smoke,” Craig said. “Jack was supposed to switch the other fake bracelet for cash with the sanitation guy, then call me. I wanna find out why he never called.”

Ida told Craig good-bye and counted to ten. She knew she wasn’t as ditzy as the role she played. And she understood what had to be done in this situation even if Craig didn’t. He’d argue with her, and forbid her to do it. That was why it had to be done before he had a chance to disapprove.

The cat, the bracelet, simply had to be recovered. Craig wouldn’t understand that there were times when your enemies could become your best friends.

Ida picked up the phone and called the police.

Craig Clairmont walked over to Amsterdam through a warm May mist before dropping the purse in a mailbox. Then he retraced his steps until he was half a block away from the passageway where the switch was supposed to have taken place.

Jack was almost invisible in the dark. Craig had to squint and stare hard to see his brother. Jack was down at the far end of the passageway, sitting on the ground as if he might be exhausted, his back propped awkwardly against the brick wall.

Jack saw Craig, but dimly. He raised his right hand, tried to crook a finger to summon Craig.

Aw, Jesus!

But Craig saw the movement and jogged toward him, fearing the worst.

When he got near his brother, Craig saw all the blood.

Jack had so much to tell Craig. Things Craig had to know.

He struggled to speak but couldn’t translate thoughts into words.

Craig said something to him he didn’t understand.

The light was fading.

Jack was barely alive. He rolled his eyes toward his brother Craig. His face was damp from the mist, his breathing ragged.

“What the hell happened?” Craig asked, bending down next to Jack. He saw a lot of blood, but no injuries, though Craig was holding his stomach with both hands.

“Double-cross,” Jack said. “Bastard took the bracelet, then instead of giving me the money he started beating on me. I fought back and he hopped in the truck and it started to pull away. I grabbed onto it and that big trash crusher thing came down. My hand got caught in the machinery and it cut off my finger.” Jack hadn’t been gripping his stomach; he’d been clutching one hand with the other and keeping them both in close to his body. He held up the mutilated hand. “Cut the damned thing right off, Look at this, Craig! For God’s sake look!”

Craig looked and felt his stomach lurch.

Jack whimpered. “You gotta get me to a hospital.”

Craig didn’t like this at all. Things would get even more dangerous when the thugs who stole the bracelet realized it was another fake, a paste duplicate, like the one he’d slipped into the Hoffermuth bitch’s purse before dropping it in a mailbox.

“What’re we gonna do?” Jack asked his older brother, who usually had all the answers.

Craig grinned to lend Jack hope and courage. “We’re gonna call the police. Get you an ambulance.”

When Jack didn’t answer, Craig was surprised.

He looked down and saw that his brother was dead. He hadn’t noticed the mass of blood around Jack’s chest and stomach.

“Christ, Jack! Somebody stabbed you in the heart!”

Of course, Jack still didn’t answer.

Craig stood over his brother, emotions rushing through him, over him, anger, grief, fear, panic.

But the panic, and then everything else, passed. Reality had to be faced. Manipulated.

Craig knew he was something Jack never really was—a survivor.

He also knew that now wasn’t a good time to bring in the police. For any reason.

There wouldn’t be another trash pickup for several days. Probably nobody would wander down this shadowed passageway. Nobody who’d contact the police, anyway, if they came across a dead body.

Still, Craig knew that to feel safe for even a short length of time, he’d have to at least partially conceal the body.

Down near the far end of the alley a Dumpster squatted like a tank without treads. They didn’t empty those Dumpsters very often. And when they did empty this one, there was always the chance Jack wouldn’t be noticed.

Craig bent over and gripped his brother beneath the arms. Digging in his heels, he began to pull the dead weight that had been Jack.

If Jack were still alive, he’d understand.

By the time he’d returned to the apartment, Craig thought he was as depressed as possible.

That was when Ida told him she’d called the police. About Boomerang the missing cat, not the bracelet, she assured him.

She thought he took it well.

May 6, 8:15 p.m.

They were in the office late. Pearl and her daughter, Jody Jason, had come by to wait for Quinn to finish up so they could leave together and have a light supper and wine.

But Quinn wasn’t interested in only finishing paperwork. He had something to say.

Pearl looked at Quinn, not knowing if he was kidding. “You’re serious? This is a case for Q&A Investigations? You want me, personally, to look for someone’s missing cat?”

Her jet black hair hung to her shoulders, framing a pale face and dark, dark eyes. Her teeth were large and white and perfect. Quinn thought, as he often did, that everything about her was perfect. She was a small woman somehow writ large, as vivid as poster art.

He nodded. “Boomerang.”

“Pardon?”

“That’s the cat’s name—Boomerang.”

“Is this cat an Aussie?”

Quinn made a face and shrugged.

“I was just wondering if this case was going to require international travel,” Pearl said.

Quinn sat quietly. It was the thing to do when Pearl was in this kind of mood. Ignore her. Best not to be in any way assertive. It was pointless to goad her.

Pearl said, “This cat business is coming to Q&A by way of Renz, right?”

“Well, yes.” It didn’t do to lie to Pearl.

“You regard this as women’s work, looking for a missing cat?”

“In this case, yes. Yours and Jody’s.”

Something in his voice made Pearl understand that she’d bitched enough about this one.

Pearl’s long-lost daughter, with whom she’d been reunited only recently, looked like a slimmer Pearl only with springy red hair. She lived with them in the West Seventy-fifth Street brownstone that Quinn was rehabbing. Jody had a mid-level bedroom, bath, and sitting room, where she spent much of her time when she was home. She had inherited a streak of independence from her mother.

“It’s your case because you have a cat,” Quinn said. “You and Jody.”

“Snitch is your cat, too.”

“Come off it,” Quinn said. “The cat hardly looks at me. Tries to scratch me if I pick it up.”

“Cats are like that.”

“I don’t see Snitch trying to scratch you or Jody.”

“We pick him up right. He knows we like him.”

“You think I don’t like him?”

“I’m not so sure.”

“Whatever, the job is yours and Jody’s. Feds and I are working the Hoffermuth bracelet case, and Sal and Mishkin are doing field work in Stamford on that truck hijacking.”

A missing bracelet and a truck hijacking, Pearl thought. Times were hard.

And now a missing cat case.

“I thought we were working the Hoffermuth case.”

“We are. How much time can a missing cat case take?”

“Did Boomerang just run away, or was he catna—stolen?” Pearl asked.

“All we know is that he’s missing.”

“A male cat. It figures, name like Boomerang.”

Quinn didn’t know what she meant by that and didn’t want to get into it. “We’re not sure yet. He’s simply missing.”

“Maybe run over by a truck,” Pearl said.

“Damn it, Pearl!”

“Okay. But if the cat doesn’t return in seven years, do we declare it legally dead?”

“Seven times nine,” Quinn said.

“Who’s our client? Other than Renz?”

“A couple. Craig Clairmont and Ida French. They’re the cat’s owners.”

“Usually it’s the other way around,” Pearl said.

Quinn sighed, losing his patience with her, insomuch as he ever really lost his patience. “We’d be wise to keep Renz happy.”

“You can’t keep him happy unless he already is,” Pearl said. “And he isn’t, ever.”

“Except when he’s involved in something unethical, immoral, and contagiously corrupt.”

“You would stand up for him,” Pearl said.

Quinn reached into his top desk drawer, drew out a yellow file folder, and tossed it on the desk near Pearl. “For you and Jody to read.”

“The Boomerang file, no doubt.”

“Treat this like any other missing person case,” Quinn said without smiling.

She rolled the folder into a tight cylinder. “Renz give you this?”

Quinn nodded.

“I’d like to return it to him in a special way.”

“Behave, Pearl. Same goes for Jody.”

“We will,” Pearl said. “How, I won’t promise.”

“This is weird,” Jody said.

She was slouching on the sofa in the living room of Quinn’s brownstone. She and Pearl could have waited until morning, or returned to the office after dinner, to study the Boomerang files, but they didn’t. That was Pearl’s idea, making the Boomerang investigation a home project. Pearl didn’t want to defile the office by using it as headquarters for a cat hunt.

Pearl agreed with Jody—the case was weird. Reading the file made that apparent.

The clients, the married couple—if they actually were married—used different names. The woman kept her maiden name. Ida French. The husband was Craig Clairmont. They lived in the West Eighties with their eight-year-old daughter, Eloise. They had faxed a photo of the errant Boomerang. He was a black cat with long whiskers and a direct stare into the camera that could only be described as haughty.

The clients themselves hadn’t yet visited the office (or faxed photos of themselves). It turned out that Fedderman had interviewed them initially. He’d talked to them in their apartment, then phoned Quinn. Q&A had accepted the case, and just like that they were cat hunters.

Thinking about it, Pearl yawned and absently shook her head. The things a tight economy begot.

May 7, 2:06 a.m.

They were here to search.

Otto Berger and Arthur Shoulders carefully approached the passageway where they’d killed Jack Clairmont. Willard Ord, the fence and their boss, had a nose to smell a rat. He also had a multitude of sources, and years of experience in such transactions. A tongue had wagged; a word had been dropped. He knew Jack was going to try to pass off a paste imitation bracelet to them. In Willard’s line of work, there was only one way to deal with that kind of betrayal.

Betray first.

That had worked out okay, for the most part.

So here were Otto and Arthur, sent to search the passageway to dispose of Jack Clairmont’s body, and to make sure Clairmont’s finger went with it. All under cover of darkness.

Clairmont’s severed right forefinger was important. It might provide a print, which could lead to trouble. Of course the finger might have fallen into the trash truck, where it almost certainly wouldn’t be noticed. But there was no guarantee of that.

Their first problem was Clairmont’s body. It was gone. Someone seemed to have moved it.

They were secretly relieved. They might be killers, but neither man was fond of handling people once they’d been dead for a while. Otto wouldn’t even touch raw hamburger.

There was nothing to do about this state of affairs except find what they’d come for, and let Willard Ord figure out what to do about the missing corpse. Willard would still want the severed finger. Its fingerprint might lead to Craig Clairmont, and then to Willard. It was also possible someone other than the law had taken the body. Like the brother. Craig might do their work for them and dispose of the body permanently. They hoped whoever had taken Jack Clairmont had also found and concealed his finger. It wouldn’t do for it to turn up someplace when least expected.

They went about their task in workmanlike fashion, keeping their hands cupped over the lenses of their flashlights to direct the diffused beams downward.

Arthur happened to lift the lid of the Dumpster and shine his light into it. Still looking for the finger. And he found the rest of Jack Clairmont.

“What do you think, Otto?” he asked.

Otto was staring at the body, lying barely visible among trash bags, an old baby stroller, and some broken-down cardboard cartons someone had tossed in the Dumpster. It was possible—even likely—that Clairmont’s body would be unnoticed and go into the trash truck’s compactor to be dumped in a landfill. Then there would be no reason for Willard Ord to know what happened.

Or so Otto convinced himself.

“I think the brother,” Arthur said. “He musta known where Jack was going for the money-bracelet exchange, then came and found him dead and figured he had to get rid of him or he’d draw cops as well as flies.”

“I have no wish to get in there with all that yuk,” Otto said.

“Nor do I,” Arthur said. “If we cover him up some more, Jack Clairmont might never be seen again. He’ll go unnoticed to a landfill.”

“We might as well wish for the best,” Otto said. “Safest thing would be to leave Jack right where he is. Pretend we never came across him.”

“Willard would accept that only if we find the finger,” Arthur said. “That would prove we came here and searched.”

Otto agreed.

They searched on.

“This is hopeless,” Arthur said, after a while. “If the finger did drop to the ground, some animal could have taken it away.”

“No way to know that for sure,” Otto said.

“Who knows anything for sure, Otto?”

“I do. You should, too. If we slack off on this job and that finger turns up for the cops, Willard will see that we lose some of our fingers. Or worse.”

“Worse?” Arthur didn’t have much of an imagination when it came to subjects other than torture and assassination, but what he did have was working hard.

Both men knew that someone might have to get in the Dumpster and root around for the finger. They could flip a coin. But even that seemed too risky.

“I believe this is impossible,” Arthur said, after a while. “I have a suggestion. Since I thought of it, my belief is that you should do it.”

“What is it?” Otto asked.

“We satisfy Willard’s wishes by returning with a finger. Jack’s remaining forefinger.”

“Yuk, yuk, yuk,” Otto said, but he knew he was going to do it. Willard wouldn’t know one finger from another. Arthur had come up with a solution to their problem.

“Easier than rooting through trash and garbage for a finger that probably isn’t there,” Arthur said.

So Otto used his knife and did it. Then he let himself down out of the Dumpster with Jack’s newly severed finger. Said, “Yuk!” again—and dropped the finger to the ground.

At the same time, in the corner of his vision, Arthur saw a flitting dark shape, like a moving shadow.

When he reached down for the severed finger, the dark form beat him to it, snatched it up, and whirled. The animal had its teeth and claws bared and looked very possessive. With grave misgivings, Arthur reached for the creature, was hesitant, and got only a brief feel of fur.

The cat shot between his legs and broke toward the far end of the passageway.

Otto was waiting, squatted down like a Sumo wrestler, and his huge, foreboding form caused Boomerang to halt for a moment.

Otto’s right hand darted down, and his fingers closed on fur and loose flesh at the back of Boomerang’s neck. He didn’t like the feel of the animal, but he kept a good grip.

Boomerang thought something like What the hell? Before he could react, all four of his feet were off the ground.

The big human had him by the back of the neck. Boomerang hated to be lifted like that. He snarled, spat, windmilled with his legs, claws extended, tried to bite, to tear.

“Little prick is pissed off,” Arthur said. “I’ll throw him in the Caddie’s trunk and we’ll take him with us so he won’t come back here and hang around the Dumpster.”

Otto kept a strong grip on Boomerang and held him extended well out from his body so the cat couldn’t inflict injury. The animal suddenly became still, but that didn’t fool Otto.

They started back toward where their black Cadillac was parked.

Otto abruptly stopped and pointed.

“What?” Arthur asked.

“The finger,” Otto said. “What we came for. Get it Arthur.”

“Jesus!” Arthur said. “We almost forgot.”

“You almost forgot.”

“Oh, no! Don’t try to hang that one on me.”

While Otto and Boomerang watched, Arthur soon found where the cat had dropped the newly severed forefinger. He stooped and gingerly inserted the finger into a plastic baggie of the sort that held sandwiches.

“It doesn’t matter who almost forgot what, Arthur. Just so we give the finger to Willard.”

“You know, I always wanted to give Willard the—”

“Don’t say it, Arthur. Don’t even think it.”

They walked on toward the street. Mission accomplished. Confident now in attitude and stride.

Boomerang dangled limply in Otto’s iron grip, eyes narrowed, almost shut, biding his time.

May 7, 4:48 p.m.

It hadn’t occurred to Ida and Craig that Alexis Hoffermuth not only regarded the police as public protectors; she saw them as her personal servants. Through taxes and contributions, she paid a large portion of their salaries, and she wanted a return on that investment.

Her call to the police had been prompt, distraught, and demanding. When Alexis Hoffermuth spoke, people listened. When she was upset, they listened extra hard.

The bracelet in the imitation Gucci purse had itself been an imitation. Even though it wasn’t the real Cardell bracelet, it was a pretty good paste facsimile. Some smartass crooks were playing with Alexis Hoffermuth’s mind to keep her off balance and buy time, toying with her, toying with the police, making a fool of her and the police commissioner—Harley Renz.

Renz wouldn’t have that. Absolutely wouldn’t.

Neither would Alexis Hoffermuth.

So here Quinn was with Pearl to see Alexis in her apartment in the exclusive Gladden Tower, an impressive edifice her late husband had constructed.

Rather, paid to have constructed.

An unctuous doorman met them in the marble lobby and interrogated them as if they really didn’t belong in the building, but maybe, just maybe, he would permit their temporary presence. Quinn made a mental note of the fact that the marble desk where the doorman usually sat had a brass plaque on it identifying him as Melman. No first name, unless it was Melman.

Quinn would remember Melman.

After they’d passed inspection in the lobby, they were given the privilege of riding the private, walnut-paneled elevator to the fifty-ninth-floor penthouse. They stood side by side, their bodies touching, as they rocketed up the core of the building. The back wall of the narrow elevator was lined with tufted taupe silk. There was no sound.

“Zoom,” Quinn said.

“Reminds me of a vertical coffin.”

“You can take it with you.”

Quinn had been expecting a butler, but when the elevator finally settled down, rather than enter near space, its paneled door opened, and Alexis Hoffermuth herself met them.

The widow had the immediate commanding presence that sometimes accompanies great wealth. She was in her early fifties, lean, cosmetically enhanced, and attractive. When twenty years younger, she’d probably been stunning. She was wearing a sleek black dress and black high heels, and looked as if she might be ready for a luncheon date to discuss a million-dollar endowment. Society page newspaper photos Quinn had seen came to mind. Alexis was active in the city’s social as well as political life and would usually be on the arm of a younger, handsome escort.

More accurately, he would be on her arm. Alexis was what the current flock of society journalists called a cougar. Quinn thought she looked the part. She even moved like a—

—Cat, Pearl thought. The woman looked and moved more like a cat than any human she’d ever seen. She gave Pearl the creeps.

“Please do sit down,” Alexis said, gracefully gliding to the side. She motioned toward a sitting area defined by a large Persian rug, matching cream-colored sofas, and easy chairs. One wall of the vast penthouse was glass, affording a stunning view of the buildings to the east and then the river. The high, high ceiling was also partly glass. Beyond it clouds floated past like lost souls of the city. All in all, the apartment reminded Pearl of an airport terminal. If dirigibles were still in fashion, surely they would dock here.

Looking as if any second she might pause and arch her back, Alexis moved to a small mirrored table. She opened the drawer and drew out a handful of glitter.

Pearl and Quinn were seated side by side on the soft leather sofa facing the glass wall. Quinn thought they must look like the pilot and copilot of the Enterprise.

Alexis glided over and showed them the two bracelets.

“They’re beautiful,” Pearl said, staring at the glinting clear diamonds and gleaming rubies.

“But they’re imitations.” Alexis pointedly turned her attention to Quinn. He was the power half of the duo that had come to see her. “Good imitations, for sure, but I want the genuine bracelet back.”

“Tell me how it was stolen,” Quinn said.

Alexis recounted how some blond woman had piled into her parked limo, yammering and pretending she’d made a mistake and entered the wrong vehicle. Black limos looked so much alike. Oh, she was always screwing up. “Bad girl! Bad girl!” she had actually said.

During all the apologies and confusion, she’d switched purses.

“She apologized a dozen more times as she clambered out of the car, and left me with an imitation Gucci purse containing an imitation Cardell bracelet,” Alexis said. “Later, my actual purse was returned to me by the postal authorities. Someone had dumped it in a mailbox. Either the person who stole it, or someone who found it after the thief had disposed of it. Miraculously, it still contained all its contents, and something else—what appeared to be the Cardell bracelet. Closer inspection revealed it to be almost worthless paste, yet another imitation.”

“Somebody went to a lot of trouble,” Quinn said.

Alexis Hoffermuth nodded sagely. “People will do that,” she said, “for a lot of money.”

“But it’s an odd way of stealing,” Pearl said.

Alexis stared at her as if offended. “Why? It caused confusion and misdirection, bought time, and by now the crooks might be in some other country, toasting their success and each other.”

“Or that might be what they want us to think,” Quinn said.

Alexis looked at him not at all the way she’d looked at Pearl. The handsome-homely Quinn filled his space and could inspire confidence and give hope, sometimes just by being present. He gave the impression he’d wandered down from Mt. Rushmore to become a cop.

Alexis smiled dazzlingly at him. Cougarishly, Pearl thought. “Do you really think, Detective Quinn, that we have a decent chance of recovering the real Cardell bracelet before it’s disassembled and sold by the stone?”

“It’s enough of a chance that it’s worth taking, dear,” Quinn told her.

Bastard! Pearl thought. Dear! Why did women fall for his bullshit?

Why did I?

“Commissioner Renz spoke very highly of you and your agency,” Alexis said. “Of course, he’s as much a politician as he is a policeman. I would go so far as to say he can’t be completely trusted.”

“I would go so far as to say you might be right.”

Alexis favored him with another predatory smile. “I appreciate the restraint of your reply.” She repositioned herself about five feet to her left, slim hips moving like silk, so she was facing Quinn directly and placing Pearl on the periphery. “Shall we talk fee?”

“I appreciate your directness,” Quinn said.

And fee they talked, as if Pearl didn’t exist.

But Pearl listened, and was astounded by how much Alexis Hoffermuth would pay for the return of the genuine Cardell bracelet.

Pearl didn’t look at Quinn as they were shown back to the private elevator, fearing that they both might break out in grins. As the elevator descended she could imagine Alexis Hoffermuth upstairs cleaning herself with her tongue. She decided not to mention that imagery to Quinn. Men and women saw the Alexis Hoffermuths of the world differently.

When they’d left the elevator and exited the lobby, both of them did smile.

“I can still smell the money,” Pearl said, as they walked away from the stone and glass tower where Alexis Hoffermuth lived like Rapunzel with a short and stylish do. She glanced over at Quinn. “You weren’t shy about asking for our share.”

“Alexis is the type who isn’t shy about giving.”

“I sensed that about her, too.”

“I was thinking about her charity events.”

“Me, too.”

There was a break in traffic, so they jaywalked.

“You’ve got Jody pissed off now,” Pearl said, as they gained the curb on the other side of the street. “First you put her on the cat case because it wasn’t important, and now you’ve got her back at the office doing paperwork and missing cat research while we go talk with Alexis Hoffermuth.”

“The case got more important,” Quinn said. “I know that because Renz is bugging the hell out of me to get it solved.”

They came to where Quinn’s aging but gleaming Lincoln was parked in a loading zone.

“Back in the real world,” Pearl said, when they were in the old car’s quiet interior and buckled up.

“You sure?” Quinn asked.

“Never.”

She smiled. She liked it when Quinn got all metaphysical.

“Seldom,” she amended, hoping to draw him into a complex, philosophical discussion. That was always good for some smiles.

But he drove in near silence, his usual taciturn self. Complicated yet simple in way and deed. Smart enough to be direct and unerring in his aim.

She wouldn’t love him nearly so much if she could figure him out.

PART TWO

May 7, 5:12 p.m.

But what was time to a cat?

It took so little of it to extend a paw and lift the latch on the metal cage wherein Boomerang had been tossed after the ride in the dark car trunk.

Then, of course, a cat could find a window open a crack, or a door slightly ajar. Easy egress for the sleek and the furred.

And underlying it all, the mission.

Boomerang planned to get back home with his find eventually. He was named Boomerang because, when left to roam, he invariably, sooner or later, came back—and with some kind of offering. He seldom left and returned without having accomplished something important. His proffered souvenirs were a point of feline pride. The object clasped in his jaws now was especially prized.

He peered around a corner with cat elasticity, then detoured into a narrow passageway that was one of his favorite haunts. The dim brick and concrete corridor ran between two apartment and commercial buildings, where trash bags were piled like lumpy pillows.

This looked interesting.

Boomerang paused and struck a pose, alert to traffic and voices and the stirring of garbage-sweetened air in the fetid alley. Nothing unusual. Nothing dangerous.

Temporarily losing interest, he dropped his future offering alongside a dented metal trash can and moved smoothly as a miniature panther to the nearest black plastic bag.

With the delicacy of a surgeon, he extended a claw and made an incision in the bag. Ah! He withdrew a foam take-out container with leftovers that contained some sort of sea food. A real find!

He glanced back at his intended offering, to make sure it was safe, then began maneuvering the take-out container so he could lick its interior.

He was in a secluded place where he wasn’t in any rush to finish his meal. The trophy he was transporting could wait until he was good and ready to continue his journey back to where he’d come from. What was the hurry? It wasn’t as if he had an appointment; and if he had one, he might not bother to keep it. He was, after all, a cat.

And a handsome one at that.

May 8, 2:02 p.m.

Quinn decided that to mollify Jody he’d go with Pearl for an initial interview concerning the missing cat. That they would do this should send the right parental message.

“You reported your cat missing?” Quinn asked Craig Clairmont. At least he assumed it was Craig Clairmont. The guy fit the description Fedderman had given him, but Quinn was to the point where he was taking nothing for granted. If he were a cat, he’d find something jarringly wrong with Clairmont. As it was, he felt only a vague unease.

Quinn was standing. Pearl was seated in a stiffly upholstered chair that looked as if it should be behind a desk rather than in a living room. The apartment was furnished that way, mismatched and mostly functional. An interior decorator would puke.

“We only rent here,” Clairmont said, as if reading Quinn’s mind.

Quinn found that disconcerting. “Your cat,” he reminded Ida French.

“Boomerang,” she said.

Pearl smiled. “Because he always comes back?”

“Yeah. Only this time he didn’t,” Ida French said. She was a sleek dishwater blonde, almost beautiful. But there was something about her blue eyes, an intensity that was unbecoming.

Clairmont seemed embarrassed. “I guess you think it’s foolish, contacting a private investigation agency to search for a missing cat.”

“They can be like part of the family,” Pearl said.

As if on cue, a small child with hair exactly the color of her mother’s sidled into the room. She was wearing blue shorts and a color-keyed blue and white blouse. Blue socks and jogging shoes. About nine years old, Pearl estimated. Cute, cute, cute.

“This is Eloise,” Ida French said. “My daughter.” The girl went to her and clung. She completely ignored Clairmont.

“About nine?” Pearl asked.

“Eight.”

Pearl smiled at Eloise. “A big girl for eight. And so pretty!”

Eloise smiled back.

“Now I understand the urgency about getting Boomerang back,” Quinn said. But he wondered. How many kids must there be in this city with missing cats, and nobody was phoning detective agencies about them?

Pearl must have been thinking the same thing. “If you give us a better description,” she said, “we can put out an ACB.”

The Clairmont-French family appeared puzzled.

“All Cat Bulletin,” Pearl explained, with not a trace of a smile.

Quinn felt like twisting her nose. Maybe he would, in the elevator.

Nobody else seemed to think Pearl was less than serious.

“He’s black with three white boots,” Ida French said to Pearl. “A good-sized cat. Likes to roam, but always returns. Only not this time. And, oh, yeah, he’s wearing a cheap kind of bangle collar. Looks like jewels.”

Pearl thought, Huh?

“You like to dress up your cat?” she asked Eloise.

“Not much,” Eloise said.

“The collar was a gift,” Ida French explained.

Craig Clairmont spread his hands hopelessly. “That’s about all we can give you by way of description.”

“He’s a handsome cat,” Eloise said defensively.

Ida French patted her daughter’s head. “No one says otherwise, dear.”

Quinn pretended to write it down in his notebook. “Handsome cat ...” Then he looked more seriously at Clairmont and Ida French. “We’ll do what we can, send some people around the neighborhood to talk with folks, keep an eye out for Boomerang.”

“Cats don’t usually go far from home,” Pearl said.

Quinn wondered how she could know. Or if she really did know. He wanted to get out of there before she mouthed off.

“We’ll be getting busy,” he said, and moved toward the door.

Pearl stood up and moved with him.

The Clairmont French family stirred. Craig Clairmont and Ida French thanked them. Eloise said good-bye.

In the elevator Pearl said, “Jesus H. Christ!”

Quinn reached for her nose, but the elevator stopped its descent on the second floor and a woman walking with a metal cane entered.

Pearl started to say something else, but Quinn raised a finger to his lips, cautioning her.

“Renz must have his reasons,” he said.

Pearl said, softly, “And Clairmont must have his reasons for wanting Boomerang back.”

“Jeweled collar,” Quinn said. Or maybe a bracelet.

“See it all the time in New York,” Pearl said. “Cats decked out like fashion plates. Accessories aren’t just for people.”

The elevator lurched and continued its controlled fall.

“World like a puzzle,” Quinn said.

The woman with the cane ignored them.

When they got back to the office, Quinn phoned Renz to try to find out more about who and what they were investigating. What was the motivation for this concern about a missing cat?

“I’ve got my reasons,” Commissioner Harley Renz said, when Quinn had finally gotten through on the phone. He recognized Renz’s clipped, official voice.

“I need to know those reasons,” Quinn said, “if I’m going to waste valuable hours and shoe leather because of a missing cat. Even if he is handsome.”

“You need to take this seriously, Quinn. I certainly do.”

“I need to have a reason. Probably it would be the same as yours.”

“No, no ...”

“Try me, Harley. I do understand that you place some importance in this. It would make it seem more worthwhile if you’d condescend to share.” Quinn also understood that Harley Renz valued information as the currency that bought power. Not to mention more actual currency. “I don’t need to know it all, Harley. Just some of it.”

There was a long silence on the phone. Quinn thought at first that the call had been dropped. Then Renz said, “Craig Clairmont has a sheet. He’s a jewel thief.”

Big surprise.

“And Ida French?”

“Nothing on her. But that just means she hasn’t been caught yet.”

“Eloise?”

“Who the hell is that?”

“Their eight-year-old daughter.”

“Oh, yeah. Ida’s kid.”

“Is Clairmont the father?”

“It’s possible,” Renz said. “Conjugal visits and such.”

“Jewels ...” Quinn said thoughtfully.

“And we both know some jewels have been stolen,” Renz said.

“Belonging to Alexis Hoffermuth. The Alexis Hoffermuth.”

“What are you getting at, Quinn?”

“The missing cat, Boomerang, was wearing a cheap jeweled collar when he disappeared.”

There was silence except for the gears in Renz’s brain meshing.

“You’re shittin’ me!” he said.

“No,” Quinn said, “and a cat might slip a loose collar off, even back on again. Over and over. They like to play around with things.”

“Like certain people. Mostly of the female persuasion.”

“We got some kinda connection,” Quinn asked, “between Alexis Hoffermuth and Clairmont-French?”

“It looks like we do,” Renz said. “A half-million-dollar jeweled bracelet. And of course, little old me. It’s a connection, but it isn’t proof. You receiving the message?”

“Received,” Quinn said, and hung up the phone.

He wondered if Renz had already known about the cat wearing the bracelet around its neck. Maybe even Alexis Hoffermuth had known. Maybe she’d pressured Renz into using NYPD resources to search for a missing cat, even while she wanted him to pull out all the stops trying to recover a bracelet. Money could addle people’s thinking.

Half a million dollars ...

Pearl was at her desk, staring at him. She knew he’d been talking to Renz.

Quinn looked back at her. Said, “We gotta find that cat.”

May 8, 3:32 p.m.

The cat, the bracelet, Alexis Hoffermuth.

Only one of them could talk.

Quinn and Pearl returned to the palatial penthouse where, with Alexis Hoffermuth, they discussed again the day of the theft.

“I only glimpsed the man,” Alexis Hoffermuth said. “And it all happened so fast, I’m not sure I could identify the woman.”

“You have some sense of their respective sizes?” Quinn asked.

“Average. Both of them.”

“Hair or eye color?”

“The woman had blond hair streaked with dark. Blue eyes. The man’s hair was dark. I think very dark. I seem to recall that he had blue eyes, too.”

“Any distinguishing marks? Tattoos, scars, moles ...”

“Not that I noticed.” Alexis Hoffermuth shook her head in frustration. “It all went down so fast.”

“Went down?”

“You know—happened. Like on TV cop shows.”

“Ah.” Quinn shifted position in his chair. Leather creaked. “What about another vehicle? What were they driving?”

“If the perps had a car, it was parked out of sight. And to tell you the truth ...”

“What?”

“It all went down so fast, I’m not even sure if the man was with the woman. At the time I thought she was this ditsy tourist or something who thought the limo might be for hire. I didn’t expect jewel thieves.”

“Or thief, singular.”

“No, wait! On second thought, I’m certain the man was with her. They hurried from the scene together.”

“What about the cat?”

“I saw no cat.” She arched an eyebrow. “Police Commissioner Renz told me a couple called to report that their cat had run away. I thought that odd. Isn’t that what cats do? Run away?”

“My cats always do,” Pearl said. She was seated on the sofa, facing Quinn and taking notes. They were both taking notes, making a bit of a show of it.

“Boomerang,” Quinn said. “That’s what they call this cat, because he roams but he always comes back.”

“A tomcat,” Alexis Hoffermuth said. “Just like the male human species.”

Amen, Pearl thought.

“There’s something else interesting about Boomerang,” Quinn said. “He’s wearing a jeweled collar that might be a bracelet. And he belongs to a professional jewel thief.”

“The man and the woman?”

“Just the man is a pro, as far as we know.”

Alexis Hoffermuth shook her head again. “Men get women to do things ...”

Quinn nodded. “Keeps us busy.”

May 8, 8:12 p.m.

Otto Berger and Arthur Shoulders, sitting across a table from their boss Willard Ord, listened to Willard sum up what he’d told them: They were in Ord’s garden-level apartment in the Village. The rest of the brick building, upstairs, was vacant except for storage and also owned by Ord.

“So it could be the fake bracelets,” Ord said. “The nonsense with the cat, all or most of it, was to help mislead and convince the insurance company the real bracelet was stolen. It looks like an insurance scam to me, with Alexis Hoffermuth using the Clairmont brother and Craig’s wife. Hoffermuth has probably already filed for a big settlement.”

“The cat didn’t have no bracelet around its neck when we snatched him,” Otto pointed out.

“I take your point,” Arthur said.

Willard stared at him, disgusted. “There is definitely the possibility that no bracelet was ever stolen, and Alexis Hoffermuth still has it.”

“Insurance fraud,” Otto said. “Makes a lotta sense.”

“We need to find out for sure,” Willard said.

“The easiest thing might be to make her talk,” Otto said.

Willard smiled. “Easier than chasing a cat.”

“More fun, too,” Arthur said.

May 9, 10:17 p.m.

“What on earth is the emergency?” Alexis Hoffermuth asked, when her private elevator door slid open and two huge men in cheap suits stepped out. She was wearing blue silk lounging pajamas and a matching top with decorative string ties and a low neckline. Her slippers were fur-lined and matched her outfit. “The doorman phoned up that I should admit you. That it was important.”

“Melman,” one of the men said. “He sent us up here.”

“Yes,” she said, puzzled. But she trusted Melman completely. “Why did he let you in? Are you acquaintances of his? Family?” She found both possibilities highly unlikely.

They said nothing. One of them smiled, displaying horrendous teeth. The other blatantly observed the unfastened top buttons on her pajama top.

Alexis didn’t like this at all. Tomorrow she’d have a serious talk with Melman.

Fearless as ever, she crossed her arms and stared unblinkingly at both men. If it was a fight they wanted, she didn’t mind stepping up out of her weight class. “Well?”

“You actually sleep in that outfit?” asked the slightly smaller man, with good teeth.

“That would be beside the point,” Alexis said.

She’d had enough of this. Her evening had been disturbed, and that made her grumpy. She stalked toward the nearby phone to call the doorman’s desk and set things straight with Melman.

Alexis was amazed that the two men had entered farther into her domain. They’d even moved apart somewhat as if to block her access to her elevator.

She held the receiver down near her waist and could hear the phone down in the lobby ringing.

Then it stopped ringing, but no one spoke.

Alexis pressed the receiver to her ear. “Melman? Melman?”

The man with the horrible teeth grinned and said, “Get her.”

Alexis actually advanced on the man, raising her hand to slap him.

But before she could bring the flat of her hand forward, he punched her hard in the stomach. She made a whooshing sound, then panicked and thrashed around when she couldn’t inhale. Her mind was functioning, but not well.

She began a harsh rasping that caught in her throat. The pristine white ceiling with its skylight was in front of her.

How did I get on the floor?

“When she catches her breath, she’s gonna wail like a train whistle,” one of the large men said.

“I’ll find something, Arthur,” said the man with the bad teeth.

He disappeared in the direction of her bedroom.

The one called Arthur began to undress her. He worked a few buttons on her pajama top, then lost patience and ripped the top apart, sending buttons flying. Alexis was now able to breathe in a labored way, but she still couldn’t muster enough strength or will to move of her own accord, enough air to scream. Someone—it must be me!—was whimpering.

Arthur had a wicked looking knife now, and was skillfully slicing material in order to undress her. Except for her pajama bottoms, which he simply yanked off.

Through her terror, Alexis felt a mounting rage. Who are these animals, that they think they can do this to me? I’ll be able to speak in a few minutes. Then I’ll tell them who I am, what’s going to happen to them, how very sorry they’ll be. Damn them! They’ll be so sorry!

Breathing was still a great effort, but she thought that with even more effort she could talk—could scream.

She attempted to scream but heard only a soft croaking sound.

“Here, Arthur,” said the man with the bad teeth. “She’s getting her sea legs. Better stuff this in her mouth before she yelps.”

“We’re not on a ship, Otto.”

“This is no time to be a grammarian,” Otto said, handing something to Arthur.

My favorite Burberry scarf! Oh, damn them! Alexis managed another moan. Louder.

“Better stuff,” Otto said.

But instead of wadding the scarf and stuffing it in her mouth, Arthur wound it tightly around Alexis’s neck. “Help me flip her on her belly,” he said. “She can try to tell us what we wanna know, but whenever she gets spunky and raises her voice, I’ll give the scarf a tug, choke the bitch a little at a time. She can live quite a while that way.”

“That sounds productive, Arthur. We are, after all, here to get information.”

“No point in stuffing the goose that lays the golden egg,” Arthur said.

Alexis felt their hands on her, and her stunned body was rotated onto its stomach. A hand pressed her head against the carpet. The one called Arthur used a pants leg from her pajamas to bind her wrists tightly behind her. Then he made a fist with the hand holding the knife and pressed it painfully into the small of her back. When Alexis cried out, he used his other hand to yank the scarf tight, bending back her neck and choking off any sound other than a strangled gurgle. She kicked hard against the carpeted floor and against Arthur, but he simply ignored her kicks. Seemed, in fact, to enjoy watching her flail around.

“What I’m gonna do,” he said, leaning close to her ear, “is what I done plenty of times, so don’t think it won’t work. I’m gonna ask you a question, then you’re gonna lie to me, then I’m gonna insert the point of my knife between two of your vertebraes—”

“Vertebrae, I think that is, Arthur,” said the one called Otto.

“Wouldn’t that be singular?”

“No. It’s like octopus or medium.”

“What about stadium?”

“You got me there,” Otto said.

Arthur turned his attention back to Alexis Hoffermuth. “Thing is,” he said to her with his foul breath, “I know just where and how to insert the blade between your vertebrae, and believe me, next time I ask a question you’ll be eager to answer it and I’ll know you’ll be telling the truth.”

“I’ll still—” The scarf contracted like a vise against Alexis’s larynx and her words were choked off.

“You’ll be dying to tell the truth,” Otto assured her. “Nobody refuses telling the truth to Arthur. He’s the best at his job.”

“Like a polygram,” Arthur said.

“Polygraph,” Otto corrected.

“Of course!”

“It’s a thousand-to-one chance Arthur’s not gonna eventually kill you when he knows you’ve spilled everything you know or ever knew, but at a certain point, you’ll think that’s a bet worth making. It’ll be all you got left.”

“Making folks speak the truth,” Arthur said, “is a psychological thing. Long time ago, my psychiatrist told me I was the one should be the psychiatrist. He had something there. And I got something here. Show her, Otto.”

“Yuk,” Otto said. He pulled a plastic bag from his pocket and drew something from it. He held the object out where Alexis could see it. “Know what that is?”

Alexis stared. The thing he was holding was tubular, darkly splotched, with gray and white showing and red and—a fingernail!

My God, it’s a severed finger!

“She knows, Arthur,” Otto said. “See her eyes?”

“I do, Otto.”

“You need some lubricant?”

“She’s pissed all over the place. I’ll use that. She should feel it go in.”

Alexis did feel it. She struggled to scream, her eyes wide with horror. They were inserting the horrid thing into her! The scarf got so tight she momentarily lost consciousness.

“... Like I said, psychological,” she heard Arthur say. “While you’re laying there—”

“—Lying,” Otto said.

“Lying there wishing your back pain would stop, you can also think about that finger. I got nine more of them for you, counting thumbs.”

That last was a lie, but Arthur thought the powers that be would forgive him. He was, after all, seeking the truth.

“I wonder if all those fingers will fit,” Otto said.

“Oh, they will,” Arthur said.

Alexis felt the knife slide into her back, into her spine. The pain traveled everywhere inside her body. It was electric. It was unimaginable.

When the scarf was loosened she was breathing hard from attempting to scream.

“You got a lot more vertebraes—vertebrae,” Arthur said. “So, are we ready to talk about the insurance scam?”

“What insurance scam?” Alexis asked. “What on earth—”

Arthur smiled. She was a good little liar.

He inserted the knife again.

This process might take hours.

He was patient.

May 10, 9:20 a.m.

Melman, the Gladden Tower doorman, was inside his drab studio apartment overlooking a parking lot in Queens, He didn’t know for sure if Otto and Arthur were Alexis Hoffermuth’s cousins, here from California, who wanted to surprise her. Didn’t care, either, once they’d paid him a thousand dollars in tens and twenties to look the other way and let them use the private elevator to the penthouse. As a crooked ex-cop, he’d accepted larger bribes. But considering his present salary, and the state of the economy, this one looked too good to refuse.

Melman saw on TV news this morning that he’d been only half right.

The two men weren’t really Alexis Hoffermuth’s cousins from California, here to surprise her.

But they had surprised her.

That left Melman with two choices—he could run, or he could be implicated as an accessory to murder.

He thought the situation over and decided he’d better not even take time to pack. He phoned in his resignation, leaving it on an answering machine. That might at least slow things down a little. Then he hurriedly grabbed up a few items to take with him in his small carry-on. After a quick glance around, he headed for the door.

He had to get out of here before the police showed up. Or worse still—

Melman had saved time by packing only the carry-on, but there wasn’t much time to save, when it was so rapidly running out.

When he opened his apartment door, the two big guys were standing there, the so-called California cousins.

Melman’s mind raced. This was not good. The resignation, the hurried getaway. He could easily be fitted for Alexis Hoffermuth’s murder.

If the police had been at his door, he at least would know his body wouldn’t be buried in a shallow grave over in New Jersey. That would be some very small, very brief, comfort.

“Going someplace?” the big man asked.

“Oh, he’s going someplace,” the even bigger man said. “He just don’t know where.”

Melman knew the man was wrong. He realized with a certainty glowing like a star, illuminating his entire mind, that from the time he’d taken his first bribe as a rookie cop in Brooklyn, he’d known where he was eventually going.

May 10, 9:21 p. m.

Renz called Quinn’s cell phone that evening when Quinn and Pearl were home in the brownstone watching an early episode of The Good Wife on TV. Jody was upstairs studying for a legal exam. Quinn thought maybe she could learn more down here in front of the television.

Pearl glanced at him, curious about the phone call. Quinn pointed to the TV and she used the remote to freeze and mute the DVD picture.

“I hope this is important, Harley,” Quinn said into the phone. “Like I’m just about to see a case broken and all the bad guys going to jail.”

“Unreality television,” Renz said.

Quinn wandered out of the living room, in case Pearl wanted to press Play and watch the conclusion of the Good Wife trial. It was about a crooked international pharmaceutical company. The DVD would retain its position on the disk only so long. If the phone call lasted a little while, the TV screen would go blank and they’d have to go back to the beginning and fast-forward. Or choose scenes. Whatever the hell you did with a DVD.

“Okay,” Quinn said. “Court’s in recess.”

“Preliminary tests show we got no record of the DNA left from that severed finger that was found in Alexis Hoffermuth’s vaginal tract. Got something else, though. A fingerprint. A match turned up right away in the FBI database.”

Quinn waited three or four seconds, knowing Renz was in love with dramatic pauses. “So tell me, Harley.”

“The fingerprint—right forefinger, incidentally—belongs or belonged to John Wayson Clairmont. Goes by Jack. Three arrests in upstate New York for burglarizing jewelry stores. One conviction. Did a three-year stretch behind walls, was released four years ago.”

“Tell me he’s related to Craig Clairmont.”

“His brother,” Renz said.

Quinn paced with the cell phone, wondering about this development.

“You wanna send one of your people to talk to brother Craig?” Renz asked.

“No. Let’s not tell Craig, or Ida French, about the owner of the finger yet. See how this plays out.”

“Jack might not have had anything to do with Craig, and Craig might have nothing to do with Alexis Hoffermuth’s missing bracelet.”

“Or Jack’s missing finger.”

“But it isn’t missing—”

“Jack would disagree.”

“The rest of Jack might be as dead as his finger,” Renz said, “tucked away someplace where it won’t be found.”

“Jack was at one time in that alley where we found his finger,” Quinn said. “Unless somebody transported the finger there.”

“Always a possibility,” Renz said, “somebody running around with a spare finger. Good for counting beyond ten. But where the finger was found is easy walking distance from Craig’s apartment. You believe that much in coincidence?”

“No,” Quinn said. “You got anything else?”

“Ida French. Real Name Ida Beene. From Cincinnati. Used to be a hooker, one conviction, then went to work as a hotel maid in Cleveland. Seems to have cleaned up her act.”

“So many people go to Cleveland to start over,” Quinn said.

“Craig’s real name is Lester,” Renz said. “Not much about that couple is real.”

Quinn waited, then said, “That it for tonight?”

“Not quite. Nift’s postmortem on the Hoffermuth woman is in. She died of a heart attack.”

“I thought the scarf—”

“Probably it was only used to choke off her screams when the knife was applied to her back. There were a lot of knife wounds along her spine, very precise, between the vertebrae. Nift said whoever wielded the knife was skilled. The insertions must have produced incredible pain. She had her heart attack simultaneous with being throttled to keep her quiet.”

“Hell of a way to die.”

“There are a few good ways, but hers wasn’t one of them.”

“Any other cheerful news?”

“That’s it for now,” Renz said. “You can sleep on it.”

“But not very well,” Quinn said, trying to hang up on Renz. But Renz had already broken the connection. Renz liked to do that. Thought it made him the dominant party.

When Quinn returned to the living room, he saw that the DVD had timed out and Pearl was now watching a Yankees game with the TV on mute.

Quinn told her about Renz’s phone call.

“Sounds as if Craig was in on stealing the Hoffermuth bracelet with his brother,” Pearl said.

“And maybe the cat has the bracelet around its neck. Eloise thought it was a collar.”

“Which is why Craig and Ida Bee—French—are so hot to find Boomerang.”

“But what’s the deal with Jack’s finger?” Quinn wondered aloud.

“Maybe Jack told somebody something he shouldn’t have,” Jody said. She had come downstairs and listened at the living room doorway to Quinn’s account of his phone conversation with Renz. Her springy red hair was flat on one side from reading lying down. “He might’ve fingered somebody, and the severed finger’s a mob message to anyone else who might have similar ideas.”

“Sounds plausible, but I’ve never heard of the mob doing that,” Quinn said, “cutting off somebody’s finger because they fingered someone. They usually cut off more than that.”

“But it’s his forefinger,” Jody said. “His pointer.”

“Wouldn’t they cut out his tongue?”

“You ever try to cut out somebody’s tongue?”

“Well, I—”

“She might have something there,” Pearl said, mostly to defend Jody.

Jody glanced gratefully at her mother.

These two were about to gang up on Quinn. He could feel it.

“Let’s all sleep on it,” he said, echoing Renz’s suggestion. “What’s the score on that ball game?”

“Detroit’s winning eleven to two in the eighth inning,” Pearl said.

“Let’s go back to the DVD and see if that international pharmaceutical company gets convicted of testing that dangerous drug on kids in third world countries.”

“What pharmaceutical company?” Jody asked, her ire obviously up.

Quinn loved to do that with Jody.

“Have you ever considered,” Jody said, after the pharmaceutical company’s entire board of directors were successfully tried in the Hague for murder, “that Alexis Hoffermuth might have set up this whole thing? She might still have the genuine bracelet.”

“And all this running around and bracelet switching is to deceive the insurance company,” Pearl said. “Everyone’s so curious about where the bracelet is, they’re beyond questioning whether the thing was ever stolen in the first place.”

“I’ve thought about it,” Quinn said, though he had only briefly. With Alexis Hoffermuth, you’d better be damned sure you have something before opening that particular door.

Jody, whose thirst for justice hadn’t been quenched by the downfall of Big Pharma, looked from one of them to the other.

“We shouldn’t rule it out,” Quinn said.

Pearl’s cell phone chirped, and without thinking to check who might be calling, she answered it.

“Pearl!” her mother’s voice said, from Golden Sunset Assisted Living in New Jersey. “I have been trying to get in contact with you in regard to an outrageous change in dining room seating in this nursing home hell—”

“Assisted living,” Pearl corrected, as she often did.

“Anyway, to continue my diatribe—and I know that is how you regard it, unable to conceptualize as you are that nefarious things do go on in this purgatory of pain that reasonable people ...”

“Is that Grandma?” Jody asked, her face lighting up. “Let me talk to her!”

Pearl tossed her the phone, and Jody snatched it from the air and walked off into the next room, yammering.

Pearl and Quinn smiled silently at each other.

May 11, 1:19 p.m.

“Jack is dead?”

Ida seemed astounded.

Craig Clairmont looked suddenly out of breath and sat down hard enough in a patched vinyl wing chair to move the heavy piece of furniture six inches across the hardwood floor.

“We don’t know that for certain,” Quinn said. “We only have the finger.”

Ida French went to stand at the back of the chair, over Craig’s right shoulder. She appeared ill. “And you know it’s Jack’s finger?”

“Yes,” Pearl said. “Fingerprints. Print.”

“Jack would never harm anyone,” Craig said. “Not physically, anyway.”

Quinn thought that an odd thing to say but let it pass. Jody was seated off to the side, observing. She’d wanted to come with them, actually meet these people. She viewed it as research for her own fledgling career in criminal law. You couldn’t know too much about the criminal mind.

“It could be theorized,” Quinn said to Craig, “maybe even proved, that you stole Alexis Hoffermuth’s bracelet and were also implicated in her death.”

Craig appeared to have been struck a glancing blow. “Wow! That’s wild.”

“Jewel theft and homicide are wild.”

“First Jack, then that poor Mrs. Hoffermuth,” Craig said, pacing. “Or maybe it was the other way around.” He seemed unable to sit down.

Jody looked at Quinn and smiled slightly, appreciating the performance.

“Mrs. Hoffermuth was a number of things,” Quinn said, “but not poor.”

“I meant, what she must have gone through.”

“Do you know something about it?”

“How she was tortured. It was on the news. It—”

There was a scratching on the door to the hall. Craig exchanged glances with Ida French.

More scratching. Insistent.

The kitchen window must be completely closed.

Both of them leaped toward the door, bumping into each other. It was Craig who wrestled the door open.

A large black tomcat strutted in, arched its back, stretched, then continued toward a hall leading to what Quinn assumed were bedrooms and a bathroom. It had three white boots and the slightest touch of white between its eyes.

On the welcome mat behind him the cat had left a glittering jeweled bracelet.

This time Ida French managed to elbow Craig aside and snatched up Boomerang’s offering.

“Boomerang?” Pearl asked, to make sure.

“There isn’t any doubt,” Craig said, staring at the bracelet in Ida’s cupped hand. “But that bracelet looks like an imitation.”

“Sure does,” Ida French said, after a slight hesitation.

Quinn and Pearl got up and went over to examine the bracelet. Ida never offered to release her grip on it. The jewels might have been fake, but then no one there was an expert.

“It has to be imitation” Ida French said.

“Unless Alexis Hoffermuth was trying to pull off an insurance scam,” Craig said.

Quinn guessed that Craig, inspired, was trying to set up a scenario wherein he could convince everyone the bracelet was paste jewelry and it might as well stay with him and Ida French. But if that didn’t work, blame might be shifted to Alexis Hoffermuth, dead and unable to defend herself.

“You would know about scams,” Quinn said.

Craig looked at him, surprise on his handsome features. Then he smiled. “Part of your job, I guess, looking into people’s unsavory pasts.”

“ ’Fraid so,” Quinn said.

He saw that Jody was leaning forward in her chair, the only one in the room more interested in what was being said than in the half-million-dollar bracelet. She was a people person.

“Where is your daughter, Miss Beene?” Pearl asked.

Ida French seemed not at all fazed. Pearl had to hand it to her.

“Eloise is with my sister in Queens.” She gave a wistful smile. “I didn’t think you set up this appointment for just a chat.”

“You planned the theft of the bracelet from the limousine,” Quinn said to Craig, “executed when Alexis Hoffermuth was being driven home from the auction. Ida is the one who actually stole the bracelet, using a confusing exchange of identical purses and a paste copy of the real Cardell bracelet. You and your brother Jack planned to turn the bracelet over to a fence in exchange for cash, only you were greedy. You were going to slip the fence a second worthless replica of the bracelet. Double crossing somebody like that got Jack killed, after his killers amputated his finger.”

“It didn’t happen exactly like that,” Craig said.

“The details will be tended to later in court,” Quinn told him. “Ida, here, judging by the expression on her face, didn’t know you and Jack were going to take the money from the sale of the second replica and disappear with that and the real bracelet. Boomerang upset that plan when he ran away after Eloise had mistaken the bracelet for a cat collar and put it on him.”

Quinn exchanged a look with Jody. Divide and conquer.

“Everything was going to be split three ways!” Craig said.

Ida French appeared dubious.

“The fence spotted the makeshift cat collar at the pickup point, as Boomerang was running away. It looked exactly like the bracelet he’d just bought. That was when Jack ran afoul of the lawless. The fence also came to wonder what we wondered—was Alexis Hoffermuth working an insurance scam from the beginning?”

“Maybe we can work a deal as to who that fence was,” Craig said. “Who killed my brother. Along with whatever else you need to know.”

Ida French stared at him in disgust. She knew he’d give her up in a minute. Even a New York one.

Pearl’s phone played its four musical notes from the old Dragnet TV show theme.

She checked to see who was calling.

“That Grandma?” Jody asked.

Pearl nodded, furious at her mother. She could pick the damnedest times to call.

“Can I talk to her?” Jody asked.

“You don’t have—”

“I want to,” Jody said. “You never know when it might be important.”

Pearl tossed her the cell phone. Jody caught it and went out into the hall.

“You can do your plea bargaining with the prosecutor,” Quinn said to Craig. “As can you, Miss Beene.”

“My daughter—” Ida said in a choked voice. But not before Quinn had seen the calculation in her eyes. Eloise was a bargaining chip.

“The people we want—and are going to get—are the ones who killed Jack Clairmont and Alexis Hoffermuth.”

“I can tell you who they are!” Craig said.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Ida said. She’d apparently thought this out. “We didn’t kill anyone. Didn’t have the real bracelet for very long. There might not even be enough evidence to convict us. Especially if I keep quiet and don’t testify against you. They can’t make a wife testify, you know.”

“You two are really married?” Pearl asked.

Ida grinned. “In Las Vegas, two years ago. We did it so we could file jointly and not pay so much tax on some gambling money we won.” She glared at her husband. “Alexis Hoffermuth can’t identify that woman who got into her limo; she’s dead. And we don’t know where the hell that cat got that bracelet. Or who killed Jack or cut off his finger.” She laughed, staring directly at Quinn. “They don’t even have enough evidence to arrest us.”

Quinn wasn’t sure if what she said was true, but he didn’t have time to give it the test of reasonableness.

Boomerang strutted into the room, and when Quinn and Pearl were looking at him, Craig and Ida broke for the door to the hall. Boomerang got in the spirit and dashed with them. Caught up with them in two large bounds. Quinn and Pearl followed.

The door to the hall burst open. Jody was there, still talking on Pearl’s cell phone with Pearl’s mother. She extended her foot daintily and tripped Craig Clairmont. Ida tripped over Craig. Quinn tripped over Ida. Pearl managed to leap over them all but fell and skidded to a halt near the stairs. She caught a glimpse of Boomerang streaking down the hall toward God and cat knew where.

She quickly struggled to her feet, and staggered over to help Quinn handcuff Craig and Ida before they could gather their senses.

Jody took several steps backward, the phone still pressed to the side of her head.

“So now you can go back to sitting with the same people for dinner?” She was asking her grandmother.

She grinned at the obviously affirmative answer on the other end of the connection.

If a person was persistent enough, things had a way of working out.

“The insurance company has agreed to let the heirs cancel their claim and place the bracelet in a vault,” Quinn said to Ida Beene and Craig Clairmont in an interrogation room at the precinct house. “We won’t make any media statement about that.”

Craig and Ida silently nodded in unison. They both looked small and pale.

“It’s possible that we haven’t enough to charge you, or to get a conviction, but the people who cut off your brother’s finger and killed him in an attempt to make him talk, probably the same ones who tortured and killed Alexis Hoffermuth, are still out there. There isn’t enough evidence against them, either, to trigger an arrest.”

“Damned legal system!” Craig said.

“You want some advice?”

Craig shrugged. “Why not?”

“You and Ida should make arrangements for the kid, maybe with Ida’s sister or Social Services, and then move far away.”

“Arrangements?”

“I’m thinking long term,” Quinn said. “You wouldn’t want Eloise to talk about what she might have overheard. You need to cut ties completely to guarantee her safety.”

He didn’t say Eloise would be better off with a family that didn’t deal in jewel theft.

“My sister’s place in Queen’s is no good,” Ida said. “I have an aunt back in Ohio.”

“That’d work,” Quinn told her. “And there’s one more condition. Eloise takes Boomerang with her to Ohio.”

“Done,” Craig said. “But the damned cat will probably find its way back.”

Later, in the brownstone, Jody questioned whether the deal Quinn had made was entirely legal.

“Maybe the outcome isn’t exactly legal,” Quinn said. “But it’s just. And it gives the kid a chance.”

Jody looked to her mother.

But Pearl was as impossible to read as Quinn.

Jody shook her head and grinned. “You two!”

“Three,” Pearl said.

EPILOGUE

May 16, 11:37 p.m.

Jody wasn’t along on this one. Fedderman and two uniforms had the front door of Willard Ord’s house in the Village covered. The back door was being watched by two more uniforms and a plainclothes detective from the nearby precinct house. In the front and back of the building were also Emergency Service Unit sharpshooters, the NYPD equivalent of a SWAT team. In dangerous situations, the safest strategy was to overwhelm the suspects.

Pearl and Quinn stood to the side, and Quinn reached over and rang the doorbell.

Within a few moments, floorboards creaked softly inside the old brick building in the Village. A yellow porch light to discourage bugs flickered on, and the door opened.

Willard Ord stood in the doorway. He was wearing what looked like a white bathrobe and glossy black wing-tip shoes with black socks.

“You’re police,” he said with a smile. “You don’t need any identification other than your eyes.”

Quinn could see beyond Willard a table covered with cards and poker chips. There were three chairs at the table, and three beer cans on it.

“Are you alone in the house?” Quinn asked.

“Yes. In fact, I’d just gone to bed when I heard the doorbell.”

There were shouts from around the back of the house, and several gunshots. Most of the shots, and the last of them, sounded as if they came from ESU sniper rifles. ESU snipers always hit what they aimed at, and they shot to kill.

Quinn and Pearl both had their handguns aimed at Willard, who shrugged.

“I’m alone now,” he said.

Don’t miss John Lutz’s next compelling thriller Featuring Frank Quinn

Pulse

Coming from Pinnacle as a print and electronic book, July 2012.

Keep reading for an exciting excerpt ...

Highway 72, Central Florida, 2002

It gave Garvey the creeps, transferring somebody like Daniel Danielle. The sick bastard had been convicted of killing three women, but some estimates had his total at more than a hundred.

They were the women who lived alone and let their guards down because the sicko could be a charmer as a man or a woman; the single women who disappeared and were missed by no one. Those were the kinds of women Daniel Danielle sought and tortured and destroyed.

Nicholson was seated next to Garvey. Like Garvey, he was a big man in a brown uniform. Their job was to transfer Daniel Danielle to a new, and so far secret, maximum security state prison near Belle Glade, on the other side of the state from Sarasota. It was in Sarasota where Danielle Daniel (he was dressed as a woman then) had been arrested while crouched over the body of one of his victims, and later convicted. The evidence was overwhelming. As a “calling card” and a taunt, he had put his previous victim’s panties on his present victim, panties he had apparently worn to the murder. He was damned by his DNA.

Daniel was all the more dangerous because he was smart as hell. Degrees from Vassar and Harvard, and a fellowship at Oxford. Murder should have been a piece of cake, like the rest of his life. But it hadn’t been. When his appeals were exhausted, he would be executed.

No one was visible on State Highway Seventy-two. This part of Florida was flat, undeveloped, and mostly green vistas streaked with brown. Cattle country, though cattle were seldom glimpsed from the road except off in the distance. Wind and dust country for sure. Dust devils could be seen taking shape and dissipating on both sides of the road. Miles away, larger wannabe tornados threatened and whirled but didn’t quite take form.

The latest weather report said the jet stream had shifted. Hurricane Sophia, closing in on Florida’s east coast, now had a predicted path to the south, though not as far south as the dusty white van rocketing along the highway. Taking time to replace a broken fan belt ten miles beyond Arcadia had slowed them down. They were still okay, if the hurricane stayed north. If it didn’t, they might be driving right into it.

Now and then a car passed going the other way, with a Doppler change of pitch as the boxy van rocked in the vehicle’s wake. Off to the east there were more dust devils, more swirling cloud formations. The insistent internal voice Garvey often heard when some part of his mind knew something bad was about to happen wouldn’t shut up.

Suddenly it began to rain. Hard. Garvey switched on the headlights. Hail the size of marbles started smacking and bouncing off the van’s windshield and stubby hood.

“Maybe we oughta go back,” Nicholson said. “See if we can outrun whatever’s headed our way.”

“Orders are to deliver the prisoners.” Garvey drove faster. The hail slammed harder against the windshield, as if hurled by a giant hand.

The prisoner chained in the back of the van with Daniel Danielle was a young man with lots of muscles and tattoos under his orange prison jumpsuit. He was scarred with old acne and had a face like chipped stone, with a crooked nose and narrow, mean eyes. He was easy to take for a hardened ex-con, but he was actually an undercover cop named Chad Bingham, there for insurance if something weird happened and Daniel Danielle made trouble.

Bingham would rather have been someplace else. He had a wife and two kids. And a job.

The easy part of the job was just sitting there sulking and pretending he was someone else. But the way things were going, he was afraid the hard part was on its way.

The hail kept coming. Nicholson was on the edge of being downright scared. Even if it didn’t make landfall nearby, Sophia might spawn tornados. Hurricanes also sometimes unexpectedly changed course. He reached out and turned on the radio, but got nothing but static this far out in the flatlands, away from most civilization.

Garvey could see his partner was getting antsy so he tried to raise Sarasota on the police band. The result was more static. He tried Belle Glade and got the same response.

“Storm’s interfering with reception,” he said to Nicholson, looking into wide blue eyes. He had never seen the man this rattled.

“Try your cell phone,” Nicholson said in a tight voice.

“You kidding?”

Nicholson tried his own cell phone but didn’t get a signal. Both men jumped as a violent thumping began under the van.

“We ran over a branch or something that blew onto the road,” Garvey said.

“Pull over and let’s drag it out.”

“Not in this weather,” Garvey said. “That hail will beat us to death.”

“What the hell was that?” Nicholson asked, as a huge many-armed form crossed the road ahead of them, like an image in a dream.

“Looked like a tree,” Garvey said.

“There aren’t many trees around here.”

“It’s not around here anymore,” Garvey said, as the wind rocked the van.

The van suddenly became easy to steer. Garvey realized that was because he was no longer steering it. The wind had lifted it off the road.

They were sideways now, plowing up dirt and grass. Then they bounced and were airborne again.

“What the shit are you doing?” Nicholson screamed.

“Sitting here just like you.”

The van leaned left, leaned right, and Garvey knew they were going to turn over.

“Hold tight,” he yelled, checking to make sure both of them had their seat belts fastened.

The wind howled. Steel screamed. They were upside down. Garvey could hear Nicholson shouting beside him, but couldn’t make out what he was saying because of the din.

The van skidded a long way on its roof and then began to spin. Garvey felt his head bouncing against the side window.

Bulletproof glass came off in sharp-edged, milky strips, and he was staring at the ground. With a violent lurch, the van was upright again, then back on its roof. Garvey realized that as addled as his brain had become, his right foot was still jammed hard against the brake pedal.

The van stopped. Hanging upside down, Garvey looked out the glassless window and saw that they were wedged against one of the rare trees Nicholson had mentioned. He looked over and saw that Nicholson was dazed and wild-eyed. And beyond Nicholson, out the window ...

“Looks like a kind of low ridge over there,” he shouted at Nicholson. “We gotta get outta the van, see if we can burrow down outta the wind.”

“Everywhere!” Nicholson yelled. “Wind’s everywhere!”

Garvey unhitched both safety belts, causing the weight of his body to compress onto his internal injuries. Ignoring the pain, he leaned hard to his right, against Nicholson, and kicked at the bent and battered door. It opened a few inches. The next time it opened, the wind helped it by wrenching it off one of its hinges and flattening it against the side of the van.

“Wind’s dying down a little,” he lied to Nicholson, and then was astounded to notice that it was true. The roaring had gone from sounding like a freight train to sounding like a thousand lonely and desperate wolves. A hurricane-spawned tornado, Garvey guessed. Moving away from them, he hoped.

He wormed and wriggled out of the van. The hail had stopped, but rain was still driven sideways by the wind. Garvey was sore all over. Later he’d have to take inventory to see if he was badly injured. With great effort he could stand, leaning into the wind. Nicholson was near him, on hands and knees, his head bowed to Sophia’s ferocity.

The overturned van’s rear doors were still closed, though the roof was crushed and the wire-enforced glass was gone from the back windows. A pair of orange-clad legs and black prison shoes extended from one of the windows, and a voice was screaming.

Inside the back of the van, Chad Bingham was cut and bleeding from the long shard of glass in Daniel Danielle’s hand. Daniel was bleeding himself, from cuts made by sharp glass or metal. Bingham’s scalp was laid open and his face was covered with blood. In the wild tumble of the van, Daniel Danielle had managed to wrench the .25 caliber handgun from where it was taped to Bingham’s ankle. Bingham, with his outside-the-walls complexion, hadn’t fooled Daniel for a second.

Daniel held the small handgun against Bingham’s throat. Bingham’s legs were twisted backward, under him. The steel rail both men had been cuffed to had broken at the weld. They were free, though their wrists were still cuffed.

It was Daniel’s legs protruding from the van’s window. Both men knew the gun had hollow-point bullets and would kill easily and messily at close range. Daniel dropped the shard of glass, then used the hand without the gun and rubbed some of Bingham’s blood over his, Daniel’s, face and into his hair. Both men had prison haircuts. Bloodied up as they were, they could be mistaken for each other. Daniel needed only a moment of mistaken identity, and he would act.

He dug the gun’s barrel into Bingham’s throat. “Yell that I’m dead, and you want outta here. Do it if you want to live,” he said to Bingham. “Don’t do as I say, and bullets start slamming around your insides.”

Bingham’s eyes rolled with fear. He knew Daniel’s reputation, and knew the killer had earned it.

“It’s me!” he yelled. “It’s Bingham. Daniel’s dead. Get me the hell outta here!”

All the time he was yelling, Daniel was kicking with his free lower legs.

It seemed a lot of time passed. He jabbed again into Bingham’s neck with the gun barrel. “Hey!” Bingham yelled, “Help!” While Daniel kicked.

Finally Daniel felt strong hands encircle his ankles, exert pressure. Pulling, pulling. As his body began to slide out of the van he stared into Bingham’s eyes and kept the gun pointed directly at his testicles. Bingham didn’t make a sound.

And then Daniel was free—like a cork out of a bottle.

“Thanks!” he kept repeating, as he faced into the wind and gained his feet. “You guys okay?”

“We’re—”

Garvey shut up when he realized the mistake they’d made.

Daniel stepped close and shot him in the forehead.

Nicholson wheeled to run and Daniel shot him twice in the back of the neck. He fell and the wind rolled him a few feet and then lost interest. Daniel bent low into the wind and made his way back to the van. Bingham was still inside, curled into a ball and playing dead. Daniel shot him in the testicles and Bingham began to wail. Daniel knew no one would hear even if they were nearby.

Still cuffed, he began his search for keys.

Five minutes later Bingham watched through the van’s distorted rear window as a limping Daniel Danielle disappeared into the rain and wind.

Within minutes the hurricane sweeping across the state hit the area in earnest.

Chad Bingham would later testify in his hospital bed that Daniel almost certainly died from his wounds or from Hurricane Sophia. There was no way he could have survived out in the open as he’d been, without any nearby shelter.

It was Bingham who died from his wounds.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A multiple Edgar and Shamus Award–winner, including the Shamus Lifetime Achievement Award, John Lutz is the author of more than thirty books. His novel SWF Seeks Same was made into the hit movie Single White Female, and The Ex was a critically acclaimed HBO feature. His recent titles include Serial, Mister X, and Urge to Kill. He lives in St. Louis, Missouri, and Sarasota, Florida.

PINNACLE BOOKS are published by

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Copyright © 2012 John Lutz

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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ISBN: 978-0-7860-3076-7

First electronic edition: June 2012