Free Carnage: Short Story by John Lutz Page B

papers’ morgues of back editions.
    Quinn was a former NYPD homicide detective who was justice personified. Or injustice. Depending on where you sat on the scales, and how much weight the justice or injustice upon you moved the needle. Quinn moved the justice scales a great deal. He was a big man, walking with a slight limp from being shot in the leg. One of those rugged types who seemed to get more rugged in middle age, and even when they were well beyond fifty. Which Quinn was. Not a handsome man, and with strong-boned features that were almost thuggish, he nevertheless had a reassuring effect on women. He looked like a guy who could take a punch and come back. Who would, if he was on your side, be there for you no matter what. At some point it usually came as a surprise to those who knew him that he had about him a roughhewn sophistication. Music, Cuban cigars, and Broadway productions were among his obsessions.
    Quinn, retired from the NYPD, had opened his own investigative agency: Quinn and Associates Investigations. Or simply Q&A.
    His specialty was serial murders.
    So was D.O.A.’s.

2
    New York, the present
     
    Frank Quinn sat at his desk in the office of Q&A on West 79th Street. The arrangement of desks and chairs was parallel, much as in a squad room, a reflection of Quinn’s years as an NYPD homicide detective. The other detectives, also lately of the NYPD, felt right at home in such a setting. They were Quinn’s former partner in the department, Larry Fedderman, Quinn’s live-in lover, Pearl Kasner, and detectives Sal Vitali and Harold Mishkin. All were former NYPD detectives. Q&A’s brilliant computer nerd, Jerry Lido, had drunk his way out of the department years ago. Only Pearl’s daughter, Jodi, an attorney and sometimes Q&A employee, had no experience as a cop. She seemed not to see that as a disadvantage.
    The old West Side building was cooled with two large air-conditioning units set in oversized barred windows. One of the units was running too hard and making a vibrant hum.
    The street door made its distinctive swishing sound, and a very tall, muscular redheaded woman in jogging clothes came in. She wore no makeup to disguise her freckles, and her thick, short hair looked as if it had been trimmed with a hacksaw. This was Helen Iman, a profiler with the NYPD. She exuded a scent of sweat and soap, like an athlete fresh from the shower. Helen was the only profiler Quinn had faith in. Not because she seemed to have a special talent the others didn’t possess, but because of her record. Quinn couldn’t deny the success of some of her insights and reasoning.
    In her left hand was a sheaf of envelopes and advertisements. She was wearing shorts, and the long muscles in her thighs and calves flexed as she walked across the room and dropped what she was carrying onto Quinn’s desk.
    “Your mail,” she said. “I caught the postal carrier just as she was about to stuff it into your box. Told her I’d bring it in.”
    “Isn’t that illegal?” Harold Mishkin asked. He sounded serious. Maybe he was. With Harold, sometimes it was hard to know.
    “Technically,” his partner Sal growled in his gravel-pan voice.
    “You want me to go back to the lobby and jam all this into the box?” Helen asked.
    Quinn ended the discussion by reaching out and dragging the mail across the desk to him, noting that his detectives were getting testy. Probably because of the heat wave that was torturing New York. He liked it when they were irritable. That was when they did their best work.
    Quinn saw, in with the envelopes and fliers, something small and rectangular and wrapped in brown paper and tape. It was addressed to him personally in neat, black printed letters that would leave a handwriting analyst nothing but guesswork.
    “I was wondering about that, too,” Helen said.
    Quinn held the package up between thumb and forefinger. “Was this delivered with the rest of the mail?”
    “Yeah. Renz got one just like it an