Free Urge To Kill by John Lutz

affecting him more than he’d imagined.
    He understood why she felt the way she did about her mother, but Quinn rather liked the woman. She could be a pest, insistent and insufferable, but she had her finer points. Would Pearl be like her when she grew older? Maybe. Would Quinn still love Pearl? Probably. Simply being so near to Pearl, smelling the subtle combination of her soap and shampoo, being aware of the energy that seemed to emanate from her compact and curvaceous form, made him understand that he would never really get over her. That didn’t mean they’d ever be able to coexist as lovers, but he’d always feel something for her. As for Pearl, it seemed to Quinn that she’d completely gotten over him. He wondered if he could do anything about that.
    “You missed your turn,” Fedderman said from the backseat.
    His thoughts interrupted, Quinn glanced over and saw that he’d passed West Seventy-ninth Street.
    “Woolgathering?” Pearl asked.
    “Whatever that means,” Quinn said.
    He drove around the block and parked by a fireplug in front of the building where Renz had found them city-provided office space.
    The three detectives climbed out of the Lincoln and stood in the heat, looking up at the three-story brick and stone structure. The windows on the top two floors were boarded up. The first-floor windows had aluminum frames and looked new.
    “Renz said the place used to be a meth lab,” Quinn said. “There was an explosion on the second floor that damaged a lot of the building, including the third floor and the roof. First floor’s okay, Renz says. That’s us.”
    Pearl shook her head. “You gotta admire the way Renz keeps finding us cheaper and cheaper space in a city like New York.”
    “The city actually owns this building,” Quinn said. “It was confiscated from the perps running the meth lab.”
    They went up half a dozen worn concrete steps and entered the vestibule. Lots of cracked gray tile there, and a bank of tarnished brass mailboxes. Also some black spray graffiti that was illegible but might have been some kind of gang code none of them knew. It was hard to keep up with the city’s gangs. For some of them, graffiti was their lives.
    Pearl wrinkled her nose. “Jesus! You smell that?”
    Fedderman and Quinn sniffed. There was a slight but acrid scent in the still, warm air.
    “I told you,” Quinn said, “it used to be a meth lab. There was what Renz called a minor explosion.”
    “Smells like it might explode again,” Pearl said.
    They went up another short flight of stairs to the first-floor apartments, one on each side. Quinn tried the door on 1B and found it unlocked. He opened it to see a spacious apartment stripped down to lathing and wooden studs. The bare wood floor was littered with trash, and raw lumber was stacked high in the middle of what must once have been a living room. Several wooden sawhorses and a stack of metal folding chairs stood along the far wall.
    “Tell me this isn’t for us,” Pearl said.
    Quinn was thinking the same thing. He crossed the hall, tried the door to 1A, and found it unlocked.
    It opened to an apartment whose interior walls had been removed except for the kitchen and bathroom. It was one large space, in need of paint to cover the grimy raw wallboard. There were unpainted vertical strips of rough concrete where interior walls had been detached. From inside the spacious room, the new windows appeared dirty and streaked. Some of them still had triangular blue stickers in their upper right corners with the name of the manufacturer. The acrid burnt wood and meth odor had permeated here, too.
    “This is more like it,” Quinn said dryly.
    Along one wall were three gray steel desks with identical swivel chairs sitting on top of them. Two dented three-drawer black file cabinets sat nearby. Also on each desk was a computer. Lettering on cardboard boxes alongside the desks indicated they were from a used electronics shop in Times Square. Renz doing it