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thoughts.
    He lifted her from the sofa and placed her gently on the floor on her back so she was bound in her curled-forward position in the middle of the living room. The harsh carpet fibers made her back itch terribly.
    She strained her neck to look to the side rather than at the limited view between her hands and bare feet. He was reaching again into his briefcase.
    Bag of tricks . . .
    He removed from the briefcase a plain yellow envelope, opened it, and slid out some eight-by-ten photographs.
    He squatted low so he wouldn’t have to bend over to show them to her.
    They were vivid. They were in color. They were photos of a nude woman on her back, bound with tape the same way Bonnie was bound. Her stomach had been laid open in a wide U-shaped cut beneath her naval, arcing down low toward the pubis. Some of the woman’s internal organs had been removed and were lying on the floor near her. Jutting from her exposed intestines was what looked like a plastic statuette of the Statue of Liberty.
    Bonnie did everything she could to keep from vomiting, knowing she’d choke to death behind the firmly fastened rectangle of duct tape.
    One by one he displayed the photos in front of her so she could see them. He didn’t bother looking at them closely himself. He was interested in her .
    “I want you to know what’s happening,” he said. “So we’ll wait a while longer while the sedative wears off before we get truly serious. In the meantime . . .”
    He reached into the briefcase and withdrew a coiled leather whip.
    The pain began.

7
    “W orked at a place called Gowns ’n’ Gifts, over near Broadway,” Renz said. “She was the ideal employee, never late even a minute. But she didn’t show up for work this morning, so they sent somebody around, and this is what they found.”
    “This” was Bonnie Anderson, nude and lying on her back with her legs splayed, her abdomen laid open with a single curving slash. The wound was ragged, and the large flap of skin peeled back to reveal internal organs. A lot of blood had soaked into the living room carpet. There were footprints in the blood, but obscure ones.
    Dr. Julius Nift, the obnoxious little ME, looked up at Quinn and said, “Where’s Pearl?”
    “Doing other things,” Quinn said. “She’ll be along later. I’ll tell her you missed her.”
    Nift smiled. “I do wish you would.” He loved to get under Pearl’s skin and seemed sincere in lamenting her absence.
    There were half a dozen radio cars parked outside, and CSU techs were in the other rooms, already finished in this one.
    “Why did you call me?” Quinn asked Renz.
    Renz was wearing his full police commissioner’s uniform today. There must be a ceremony scheduled. A bead of sweat escaped from his hat and tracked down his forehead. Renz noticed Quinn studying him.
    “Funeral today,” Renz explained. “Detective Norman Land.”
    Land had been killed while pursuing a burglar in the Garment District last week. “One of the good ones,” Quinn said.
    He looked again at the dead woman. She’d been young, in her twenties. There was the usual duct tape plastered over her mouth, distorted by her attempts to scream.
    Her eyelids had been removed, giving her a startled expression that Quinn knew he would never forget.
    “Why did you call me?” he asked again.
    “Because it’s obvious we’ve got a serial killer here. This is not a good time for that to be happening. My special review and reappointment are coming up next month.”
    Renz had gotten into trouble over some missing drug raid money. Quinn thought he probably was innocent. Not that Harley Renz had any principles; there simply hadn’t been enough money involved to interest him. The shameless, conniving Renz was an expert when it came to calculating the risk-to-gain ratio.
    “She bleed to death?” he asked Nift.
    Nift, still squatting next to the corpse and his black bag of instruments, managed a slight shrug. “Maybe. My guess is she died of