“I already ate breakfast,” Nift said.

“Good,” Quinn and Renz said simultaneously.

Nift didn’t seem to notice their obvious gratefulness that he wouldn’t be joining them.

“One thing,” Quinn said. “I want any iPhones, regular cell phones, or anything else that’s tech, set aside for Jerry Lido.”

Lido was the alcoholic but brilliant tech analyst for Q&A.

“No problem,” Renz said. “So let’s go get some waffles.”

“I’m gonna wait for Pearl,” Quinn said.

“Soon as the CSU people and photographer give the word, I’ll send these dead folks to the morgue,” Nift said. “If that’s how you wanna do it.”

“That’s how,” Quinn said. He’d looked enough at the dead women.

“Or I could wait around for Pearl with you,” Nift said.

Quinn gave him a look. “I think not,” he said.

He went outside with Renz and watched the corpulent and corrupt commissioner lower himself into the back of his personal limo. Watched as the long black vehicle drove to the end of the cordoned-off block. A uniform moved a blue wooden sawhorse to make room for the limo to glide through and continue on its way.

Quinn stood in the sunlight and leaned against the stone face of the Fairchild Hotel, waiting for Pearl.

He thought about the D.O.A. initials carved in the victims’ foreheads. The same bloody initials had been the “signature” of the infamous D.O.A. killer who’d murdered four young women in Manhattan two years ago.

That killer was the one that had flown away from Quinn. Had shot him and left him for dead beside a lake in Maine. And then died himself when his plane went down.

That had been the assumption.

Now the killer—or a copycat—was back. That was why Renz was so sure Quinn would take the case. That Quinn would jump at it.

With Renz the case was political. With Quinn it was personal.

Quinn caught familiar movement among the knot of pedestrians crossing with the signal down at the corner. He pushed away from the sun warmed stone wall and his day immediately brightened.

Here came Pearl.

Pearl saw Quinn right away, standing in front of the Fairchild Hotel. When she strode closer to him, she could see the look on his face, and she knew why it was there and what it meant. It took a lot to make Quinn look like that. Like a Mt. Rushmore figure only pissed off.

She’d heard what was upstairs in the hotel. And she knew what it would mean to Quinn. “The last time you and this killer met, he almost made you one of his victims,” she said.

“Almost,” Quinn said.

“I don’t want that to happen,” Pearl said.

Quinn smiled. “Neither do I.”

“Would it do any good to beg you not to get involved with this killer again?”

“In all honesty, no,” he said. And then, “I’m sorry.”

She knew that he was. Which made her want to curse him and cling to him and kiss him all at the same time. “You know you’re obsessive,” she said.

“Persevering.”

“Obsessive.”

“You’ve been talking to Renz.”

“Of course I have. He doesn’t mind if you get yourself killed.”

“More than you might think.”

Pearl felt herself approaching the point where frustration would become ire. Men! she thought. Some men!

“I’m going upstairs to the crime scene,” she said.

For a second she thought he was going to advise her against that, for her own good. Forbid it, in fact. But he knew her better than that.

“Nift is still up there,” he said.

“So are maggots.”

“Pearl . . .”

“Screw Nift.”

Pearl pushed through the tinted glass revolving door, somehow not missing a step, as if dancing in concert with its myriad moving images.

She noticed how cool the lobby was.

Like the morgue.

7

Dunkirk, France, 1940

The day could hardly be bleaker. There was blood on the uniform of British Expeditionary Force Corporal Henry Tucker. He checked carefully with hurried hands and decided with immense relief that none of it was his own.

He looked up and down the beach and saw people running and diving for cover.

The German Stuka dive bombers hadn’t gone away. He could see them as tiny dark specks in the sky out over the channel, wheeling in formation so they could take another strafing run at the beach.

His heart raced and he began to run. Everyone on the beach was running.

Tucker saw the Stukas, much closer now, awkward and dangerous looking even without the bombs slung beneath them. The planes went into a dive to come in low over the beach. Their “Jericho Horns” began to scream, scaring the hell out of people on the ground, which was their purpose. Tucker was sure as hell scared. He knew that any second machine gun bullets from the planes would start chewing up the beach, and anyone in the line of fire.

Scared as a human being could get, that’s what Corporal Tucker was, and not too proud to admit it. From the east, German troops and tanks were closing in, and would soon push the BEF, including Corporal Henry Tucker, into the channel. Death by bullet or drowning waited there.

Gathered at and around the damaged docks along the beach were boats of various kinds and sizes, not military ships, but private craft. Little by little, they were moving the British, and some of the French, troops across the channel to England. It was a terrible gamble. Those who didn’t die on the beach, or when the boats they were on were strafed, bombed, and sank, were the lucky ones who got out of France alive.

Tucker prayed to be in their number.

He saw sand kick up from the impact of bullets. Watched an abandoned troop truck shudder as heavy-caliber rounds tore into it. In the corner of his vision a woman was waving at him, frantically beckoning him.

She was standing next to a small, damaged beach cottage with two stucco and concrete walls still standing in a crooked L-shape that provided some cover.

The first trio of Stukas was past, flying almost wing to wing. A second grouping was on the way, flying even lower than the first.

Tucker heard the scream of their approach as he sprinted toward the wrecked cottage. The woman, tall, with long brown hair, motioned for him to follow her behind the protective walls jutting from sand soil. There was no decision to be made by Tucker. What was left of the house was the only cover around.

The Stukas’ screams reached a crescendo, then Tucker was around the corner and comparatively safe in the crook of the house. Sand flew as machine gun bullets from the Stukas raked the beach where he’d been only seconds ago.

The woman was on her knees, yelling something Tucker couldn’t hear. Not that it mattered. She was speaking French.

The planes were gone suddenly, reduced to a distant drone becoming fainter by the second.

Then there was silence. At least for a while.

Tucker, who’d dived for cover behind the chipped concrete walls, sat up and saw that he wasn’t alone with the woman. A dirty-faced blond child in her early teens was there, looking more dazed than frightened. And a sturdy man with a huge stomach and with dark hair and a darker mustache. He was wearing baggy gray trousers, with some kind of blue sash for a belt.

“They’ll come back,” the woman said, in English but with a French accent. She sounded terrified.

Tucker nodded. “Don’t I know it, love.”

The woman stared at him.

“She doesn’t understand English,” the rotund man said, “just speaks it.”

That seemed odd to Tucker. The teenage girl observed him silently, her eyes huge.

“I speak the English,” the man said.

“Ah!” Tucker said.

The man grinned with very white teeth beneath his black mustache. “We need of you a favor.”

“You’ve already done me a favor,” Tucker said, looking at the woman, noticing for the first time that cleaned up, with her wild dark hair combed, she would be attractive. “Saved my bloody life, is all.”