“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.