Night 'n' Day [Part 2] | serial
A hardboiled NYC detective finds himself the subject of a thickening conspiracy when the body of a woman is discovered butchered to resemble a creature of myth. Could she be a ghost from his past?
“The case is yours!” Daniel heard, just before feeling the nearly weightless slap of a manila envelope land atop the back of his head.
He groggily raised his face, wiping spilled tobacco from his forehead.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Did I wake you?” Lieutenant Schivo said, walking over to the window and opening the blinds as he sipped coffee from a ceramic mug. “Your wife must have cooked dinner again last night.”
“Ugh. What? Yes,” Daniel murmured, the light from early morning New York City splashing against his half-opened eyes.
“Oh, come on now, Mac. We both know you don’t cook.”
“What is this?” Daniel asked, picking up the paperwork that had nearly spilled out of the freshly folded file.
Inside, he found newly typed documents, including the coroner’s report, complete with a black and white photo of the deceased woman they had discovered the day before.
Taking note of this, Daniel looked down and saw Elyzabeth Lee’s file had been obscured beneath his body. Before Schivo could notice, he opened his top drawer and whisked the envelope inside. He shifted his focus back to the freshly minted report in his hands.
“The Chief gave you the taxidermy case,” Schivo explained. “It’s in your old haunting ground anyway. Oh, and the boys ran the prints they picked up at the apartment. No match. It seems that only one person ever went in and only one person ever came out. The perp is a nobody. The body hasn’t been identified yet either, but Goldstein says she looks like one of the cigarette girls he’s seen down at The Raven Room.”
“The supper club down on Bowery? Near Bleecker?”
“Heh. No one calls it that anymore, but yeah. That’s the one.”
“What the hell is Goldstein doing frequenting a place like that?” Daniel groaned, opening the file and thumbing through its contents with a yawn.
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
As Schivo took a sip of his coffee, Goldstein – a short, hunched young fellow with a head of curly blonde hair – burst through the glass door of Maith’s office. He seemed a bit too interested in the scene for Daniel’s taste.
“I see you got the Sphinx Killer case, huh? Lucky you.”
“Sphinx Killer?” Daniel asked, his eyebrow raised erroneously.
“Yeah, that’s what the papers are calling it. ‘SPHINX KILLER STRIKES IN LOWER MANHATTAN,’” Goldstein said, his hands held up to frame the imaginary headline. “Curse of the pharaohs, huh? Ha!” the young lieutenant guffawed, slapping the upper bicep of Schivo, who shook his head with a smile.
“Oh, for fuck sake! Who tipped off the presses about this? I swear to God!”
“Maith!”
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