Slaughter

“If there are prints that can be matched,” Renz said, “the Crime Scene Unit will find them. They’re a capable bunch, here in St. Louie.”

“Notice that nobody here says ‘St. Louie’?”

“I say it,” Renz said. “But then I’m not one of the Mille

“Even if we don’t have the killer’s matching prints on file, he might think we have them,” Qui

“I prefer being proactive,” Renz said.

“What the hell does that mean?” Qui

“Means I have to wrap this up, then get back to New York and catch up playing commissioner. Seems we’ve got other problems in town there. Not just our dead-then-undead girl. Which isn’t even a crime, as far as I know. How are Pearl and Weaver holding up?”

“Impatiently. They want action. Haven’t had so much as a nibble from the Gremlin. He’s cautious and he’s smart,” Qui

“Meanwhile we’ve got another death of note. A famous architect engineer.”

“Victim or perpetrator?”

“Maybe both. I don’t have the complete picture. It was a car accident but the police don’t know whether it was an accident, suicide, or murder.”

“Got a name on the victim?”

“Ethan Ellis,” Renz said.

Qui

“The same. I forgot you were a devotee of the arts.”

“Any co

“Only in the way everything is in some way co

“Are issues something like problems?” Qui

Renz said, “Have a blessed day,” and left to go to his car.

74

New York, the present

At Faith Recovery Center, Qui

A second monitor was trained on the door to the next room, so that anyone entering or leaving would be seen. Qui

In the wall monitor, Qui

As Qui

“Watching old Adam-12 reruns?” Fedderman asked.

Qui

“Says her flak jacket chafes. We both agreed that if that was our biggest problem we were doing okay.”

“You’re early if you’re here to relieve me,” Qui

“I came in to show you these,” Fedderman said. “Renz wanted me to make sure you saw them.” He reached beneath his tan light raincoat and handed Qui

There were three copies of black-and-white photographs, front and profile views of a teenage girl. They weren’t mug shots. She was wearing different blouses and might even have been older in one of the shots. In that one she had a more mature profile, and a different hairdo. It was cut short rather than shoulder length, as in the other photos.

The third printout wasn’t a photo but an appeal to report the whereabouts of a missing sixteen-year-old girl named Jasmine. It was dated fifteen years ago. She had disappeared from the family farm one night and never been heard from again.

“Twenty-year-old Jordan Kray, a hired hand on the farm, disappeared at approximately the same time as Jasmine’s sudden and unexpected departure.”

“A co

“They might have been an item,” Fedderman said. “A week after the disappearances, several people noticed half a dozen buzzards circling in the clear blue sky. Two men drove out to investigate.

“They saw more buzzards on the ground. Some of them were pecking and standing on something dark among the corn. One of the men got a shotgun from the truck’s rear window rack and blasted away. Scared the birds, but they didn’t go far.

“The man with the shotgun saw what interested the big birds. There was a man—or what used to be a man—barely visible in the rows of corn. His clothes were ripped and filthy, and birds and animals had gotten to him.

“There was an empty, worn, and weathered leather wallet near what was left of the dead man’s body, Nothing in the wallet. No identification. The man who owned the farm kept asking the Highway Patrol troopers to remove the dead man from his field. He was informed that he was growing crops on a government easement.

“As the body was dragged a few feet closer to the tracks, onlookers saw that the victim was male and had on oversized Levi’s that were reduced to rags that fell away when he was moved.

“The dead man was barefoot. Empty wallet, missing shoes. No watch—wrist or pocket. He’d been picked clean.”

More and more it looked to Qui

Sometimes they were lambs. Sometimes wolves. All the time they couldn’t be trusted.

75

New York City, the present

In Faith Recovery Center, the uniform was seated in a chair outside where Officer Nancy Weaver lay in bed, where she was pretending to be Pearl pretending to be lost in a coma. Her protector was Sergeant Dave Gregg, three inches over six feet, and forty pounds over two hundred. He’d been with the NYPD over twenty years and had seen about everything that cops saw. He’d considered it an honor rather than duty when he’d been assigned this job. The two men ru

For the third time this evening Officer David Gregg braced with his arms and lifted his bulk up out of his chair. He hitched up his black uniform belt, yawned, and slowly strolled down to the waiting area near the end of the hall to get a candy bar out of one of the vending machines.

None of the nurses or occasional doctors seemed to take the presence of the big uniformed cop as an indication that something might be wrong. Or, if not wrong, unusual. They were quick to return his smile, but always they hurried along. All that weaponry on his belt was made to inflict injury or death, the two things the doctors and nurses in the recovery center were trained to detest.