Not just any woman would do. They would be blond, preferably with blue eyes, and on the fleshy side. Such women would be in the most danger. But there would be other potential victims. He’d know them when he saw them. Innate victims. Prey for the predators. He knew them already. They recognized in him something perilous that drew more forcibly than it repelled.

The city had a police force numbering in the tens of thousands, but as far as Dwayne was concerned, that was simply lots of cops to get in the way of other cops. They were no match for him. Now and then they screwed up and did something right, but not so often that it did more than amuse him.

Which was why Dwayne was glad to find in his research a police lieutenant named Francis Quinn, who had made his reputation tracking and apprehending (or destroying) serial killers. Dwayne would strain forward and read more closely whenever he came across information about Quinn.

The guy was a throwback. He played straight, but he was more interested in justice than in legalities. He was tough, smart, and could be mean as hell. Sometimes he heeded red tape; sometimes he ripped it to shreds. Purportedly, he loved the theater and had even been spotted at the ballet. Odd, that. He looked more like a thug than a cop—a definite advantage in his world.

The only way to win a great war was to choose a great adversary. Quinn, who was practically worshipped by the New York media and, it seemed, by the NYPD, provided the ideal pursuer to match someone like Dwayne.

Did the man have experience and street creds? Dwayne read three times a piece about Frank Quinn in the New York Post. The journalist who interviewed and wrote about Quinn could hardly have drawn a meatier assignment. Some of the most gruesome homicides in the city’s history had been solved by Quinn. The photographs alone gave Dwayne an erection.

The Times saw Quinn as a human thinking machine, who was always two steps or more ahead of his adversary, and whose toughness and relentlessness never failed.

This man would be Dwayne’s principal opponent. His opposite number on the game board of New York.

Dwayne would kill in such a way that it quenched—at least for a while—his desire to kill certain women. The women he needed to kill, and those he knew when he saw them the first time. Women like Maude. Like Honey. It had come to him in a nighttime revelation that from the beginning he’d known he would kill the women.

He’d been their fate. And he would be the fate of more women.

New York would be his killing field, and he’d devise a calling card so the police would attribute each murder to him. He wanted them to know who was commandeering these women’s lives, putting them in hell, and flirting—only flirting—with the concept of dying with them.

He would, from time to time, feed the press information. That might seem to be a help to the police, until further thought would remind them that most if not all early initial information could be used to foul up an investigation.

Dwayne smiled at the idea of his “calling card,” the letters D.O.A. Those hunting him would assume the initials stood for Dead on Arrival, and not Dwayne Oren Aikens. Probably they would never become aware that there was a Dwayne Oren Aikens.

He would kill with increasing frequency and viciousness, this D.O.A. killer. Quinn and his minions would never find or stop him.

The police—Quinn—would come to respect him. Eventually they would envy him. He knew the police by now. He knew how they thought. And he knew the inevitable realization that would creep into their minds.

Secretly at first, even to themselves, they’d understand that they envied him. That they wished they could do what he did. That they were who he was.

They’d sample only an inkling, mostly at night in dreams, but that would be enough to inform them of what they were missing.

But of course they wouldn’t have the courage to expand, to experience. They would not act out what played in the theaters of their minds.

They could only guess how it was. Could be. Would never be. For them.

Dwayne paused to sit for a while on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum and watch the women walk past. Women of every sort and dressed in any fashion. There went the casual sophisticate in slouchy disdain and denim; the prim and businesslike in the costume of commerce (except for shoes made for walking); the twentyish undergrad type with unkempt hair and minimal makeup; the fashion model striding with crossover steps as if on a runway; the intellectual charmer, perhaps a researcher or book editor; the counterculture teenager new to drugs and sex, afraid and on the make.

They thought they were beautiful, these women, but they were not nearly as close to perfection as the women on canvas and in marble inside the museum. In timeless repose, displayed for the admiration of all who passed, their beauty was forever.

There, at an ascending angle to the steps, went a small blond girl with a pert way about her. What used to be called a vest-pocket beauty.

Dwayne realized he was smiling. He had so enjoyed his role in Honey Carter’s death. The manner of her death intrigued him. She had died slowly, inch by inch, breath by breath.

His only regret was that he hadn’t been there to observe her.

51

New York, the present

“So that’s where we are,” Helen the profiler said to Quinn.

Sal and Harold had just left to take over the watch on Weaver. Jody was with Pearl. Helen and Quinn were alone in the office. Fedderman was off someplace with Penny, trying to preserve his marriage.

Quinn poured himself half a cup of atrocious but hot coffee from the gurgling brewer and walked over to stand near Helen.

“Where is that?” he asked. “The that where we are, I mean.”

“A family—or what passes for one these days—finds purpose in its existence by searching for a missing piece of art.”

“Bellezza,” Quinn said. “Maybe it’s of great enough value that it’s worth the search.” He shrugged. “On the other hand, it’s not the Holy Grail.”

“It is to them,” Helen said.

“Most of them aren’t even blood relatives.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“No. And I’m afraid to start counting.”

“Maybe not being blood relatives makes them need a cause all the more,” Helen said.

Quinn thought there was a kind of twisted logic to that. But then “twisted” was his game.

“One thing’s for sure,” he said, “ when they’re talking, as often as not they’re lying. We can’t believe anything we hear unless it’s been substantiated.”

“They simply have a different slant on what’s factual,” Helen said.

“Those are the kind of distinctions that tend to disappear in courtrooms.”

“Has it been firmly established that Michelangelo sculpted Bellezza?” Helen asked.

“The church would say no, that Bellezza never existed in flesh or stone. But we know she exists. Rumor had it that a collector named Samuel Gundelheimer had her in his private collection when the Germans occupied France in World War Two.”

“He was also a very successful banker in Paris.”

“You know this how?”

“I’ve looked into the Gundelheimer family,” Helen said.

“Seems out of your bailiwick,” Quinn said.

Helen shrugged. “I’m Jewish.”

She said it in a way that Quinn knew meant something. He waited. Helen crossed her long arms, fought a mental conflict that showed on her face, and decided to share.

“Samuel Gundelheimer and his wife, Rebecca, were sent to Bergen Belsen in 1944,” she said, “and there is no firm record of them or of any of the Gundelheimer family after that. There was a daughter, Elna, thirteen; and twin sons, Jacob and Isador, eight years old. The girl was of no use to the Nazis, and the boys were too young for forced labor. There is some indication, but no firm knowledge, of Samuel and Rebecca Gundelheimer dying of typhus in 1945. The children seem to have been transported to other camps, where they simply became part of the missing dead. They might have been gassed, or used for medical experimentation—especially the twins—then possibly incinerated. They might have become part of a mass grave near the camp that contained several thousand.”