The Safe Word

by Karen Long

  “Yes ma’am,” he answered stiffly but his blue eyes twinkled and she felt her eyes drop for a moment, despite her resolve.

  Chapter Twelve

  Laurence had followed Eleanor’s instructions to the letter. He’d entered the Xxxstacy bar at least five minutes after her and had propped himself up at the bar, cradling a bottle of beer in his left hand and tucking his right into his front pocket. He couldn’t help an inward smile when he saw at least four other guys adopting the same posture, all surreptitiously stroking their members while gawping at the cage girls. The atmosphere felt very different to that of the midday sushi crowds. The lighting was low and the heavy metallic grinding of the music felt oppressive and unnerving. The girls who had seemed so languorous and sanitised earlier were now sweaty and enervated. Their bonds looked tighter, their expressions more convincing. Laurence felt uncomfortable and censorious. He watched as a hand groped through the bars of a dancer’s cage and stuffed what looked like a fifty into the girl’s panty line, pinching her flesh and digging in with his fingernails. The girl groaned theatrically and shuffled away from the hand, straining against the leather wristbands and chains that pinioned her. She looked, Laurence thought, like an ad for an animal welfare charity. He took a swig of his beer and searched for a sign of Eleanor, trying not to let the stress of the situation prevent him from detecting. But what was he looking for? Suspicious behaviour? It all looked fucking suspicious to him. Guys stroking their dicks as they imagined a pretty girl in pain. He took another long gulp and called for another beer. This evening was certainly going to test his mettle.

  Eleanor glanced at the bar from the dark and over-populated alcove that housed the basement stairs and wished that Mo had been standing there rather than the sanctimonious rookie she’d had dumped on her. He was drinking too much and noticing too little. She sighed and determined that she would speak to Marty Samuelson tomorrow; maybe he’d swap him for Smith. But now wasn’t the time to be distracted. She moved through the crowd, pausing occasionally to meet an eye or tilt her head in a gesture of submission. She got several return looks but no one she considered interesting enough to pursue. It was time to move deeper into the building. The stairs were illuminated by ‘black lights’ and reminded Eleanor of a ghost ride she’d been on as a child at the local fairground. The teeth around her glowed an intense white making the feral scene even more eerie. Muffled sounds from rooms secreted behind seemingly doorless walls put her senses on high alert. A man brushed against her as he hurried up the stairs, the heavy stench of sweat and fear caused her to stop and watch him as he stumbled ahead of her. As she turned away from him she saw the outline of a face in the shadows. It was too dark to make out any features but she watched mesmerised as the face split slowly open to reveal glowing white teeth in a smile the Cheshire Cat would have been proud of.

  The basement corridor writhed with movement but there was too little light to distinguish between individuals or even identify body parts. Eleanor made her way carefully to the restrooms, sliding cautiously past a couple grinding noisily against the adjacent wall. As she stepped into the restrooms the sounds and smells changed instantly. Heavy perfumes and piercing fluorescent strips above the mirrors gave the women gathered there a ghostly, surreal appearance. Immediately Eleanor divided the nine women into three prostitutes, two transsexuals and one very unconvincing transvestite. She walked over to the mirror observing the scene whilst applying a heavy coating of purple lipstick. One heavy woman in her thirties, with tattooed eyebrows peed into the bowl as she chatted to her friends with the door open. As she struggled to pull up her complicated panty arrangements a second friend pushed past her and settled her ass onto the seat. They were discussing the apparent merits of a girlfriend’s latest surgical reconstruction. Eleanor wanted to single out some attention. One of the prostitutes was writing a comment on a card on the notice board.

  “Is this safe?” asked Eleanor with exaggerated concern, waggling the ‘Kidnappings Arranged’ card cautiously in front of her.

  The prostitute gave her careful scrutiny. “You a cop?”

  Eleanor looked confused and giggled, “Only on the last Saturday of every month.”

  The woman grinned her approval and leaned into her. “How hard d’you play honey?”

  Eleanor drew in her breath and leaned a little closer to the woman. “Hard,” she whispered, meeting her eyes.

  “Hmm, well I heard it was ok but expensive. There’s a woman comes in every so often, Bella somethin’ or other. She’s got a dungeon and rents it out for a reasonable rate, if you’ve got a private party in mind I’m very flexible,” she cooed leaning closer to Eleanor.

  “You wanna watch who you go wiv honey.” One of the transexuals had sashayed over from the mirror to join in the conversation. She was identifiable as such by her bulging biceps, enviable flat stomach, slim hips and huge silicon breasts. She’d applied foundation with a trowel but otherwise would be pretty convincing to anyone other than prostitutes and cops.

  “You stick with who you know honey. There’s some bastard that’s killin’ girls round here lookin’ for the same fun as you darlin’. You take Mandy’s advice and stick to who you know!”

  “Girls?” whispered Eleanor in a shocked tone.

  “Huh-huh. One of them came in here last week…”

  “Who’s that Mandy?” asked a second woman engaged in reapplying a wayward false eyelash.

  “That posh girl with the blonde hair. You know, Tracy’s friend?” responded Mandy.

  “You mean Tracy Earnshaw? I know her! She works at the gym on Wellesley Street,” gasped Eleanor.

  “I don’t know about that hun. But I was sitting on the pan when…”

  She was interrupted by the eyelash woman, “Honey you don’t sit on the pan.”

  She and the first woman burst into shrieks of laughter. Mandy looked theatrically offended.

  “Oh you nasty bitches,” she shook her head with disappointment. “Anyhow,” she sloughed off the insult and continued with her story. “I was sitting on the pan, doing what a girl needs to,” She ignored the sniggering. “And I heard them talking. The blonde girl was asking Tracy all about her bein’ dragged into a van and whipped and all and Tracy was sayin’ that it was great and fabulous and she came all over the place about a hundred times.” Mandy was well into her storytelling now and emphasising it with eye rolls, hand gestures and flips of her long glossy hair. “And the blonde girl was just lappin’ it all up and said how’d she get all turned on and everything.”

  Now several other women had gathered round to listen. Mandy was enjoying the attention.

  “So who got killed?” asked the heavy woman.

  “For fuck’s sake Lu, just fuckin’ listen,” responded another.

  “Who got killed? I missed that bit,” Lu repeated undaunted.

  “Some posh blonde girl, looking for rough,” sighed the first.

  “Ok, I shall re-continue… so ‘posh blonde’ girl is telling Tracy how much cum she’s gonna do and Tracy says if your boyfriend…”

  “Who’s her boyfriend?” asked Lu, much to the irritation of the other women.

  “Shut the fuck up and listen you fat bitch! Mandy is tellin’ us.”

  “I dunno, some guy wiv money girl ’cos Tracy said the guy’d want five thousand bucks for roughin’ her up.”

  “What the fuck? I do it for two hundred,” snipped Lu outraged. “And they go home afterwards!”

  “Not if you sit on ’em,” sniggered the first woman.

  “Skinny bitch who’d…”

  “Shut the fuck up! I’m tellin’ this or what?” snapped Mandy, theatrically exhausted. The women settled down.

  “Soooo. Tracy says to her that she’ll do the organising, you know phone the guy and after ‘posh girl’s’ bitch boyfriend drops the money off, then she’ll get the deal.”

  There was a pause as the information sank in. “But how’d you know she’s dead?” asked Lu.

  “’Cos I r
ecognised the picture in the paper. They never said how she was killed but you can read between the lines,” Mandy nodded knowingly.

  “You said ‘girls’,” coaxed Eleanor.

  “Huh? Oh yeah. Remember that European girl who used to work Gary’s place?” The other women looked blank. “You know, she had one eye.” Mandy slapped a hand over her eye as a visual aid.

  “What happened to her eye?” asked the first woman, concerned.

  “How the fuck should I know? What am I? Her mother?” shrieked Mandy.

  “Oh I remember her,” said Lu. “Brenda or Deirdre or some such… she got murdered down the railway didn’t she?”

  “Yeah that’s right… six months ago wasn’t it? I heard about that! One trick too many.”

  “Why’d you think she was murdered by the same guy?” asked Eleanor trying to conceal her excitement.

  “Well…” drawled Mandy. “They found her in a plastic bag too didn’t they?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Laurence sat in the cramped office and gazed at the information on the screen. The photographs of Belinda Myrtle were spread haphazardly across his desk in a manner not dissimilar to that of her body on the rail track. It had been difficult to ascertain exactly how Belinda had been killed, as her body had been hit by a freight train travelling at close to ninety. The resulting soup had been reconstructed as best as possible by the pathology department but Belinda had been identified mainly by her jewellery and the presence of a ‘Daffy Duck’ tattoo on a small section of midriff. There had been evidence that the body had been wrapped in a plastic bag, which had made the likelihood of this being an unlawful killing rather than a suicide or accident, all the more likely. However, the transparent plastic bag had been shredded and had provided little in the way of clues. Eleanor pushed the door to the office open with her back and maneuvered a large cardboard evidence box onto her desk.

  “Ok, this is everything apparently,” said Eleanor, yanking some wipes out of her desk drawer and rubbing her face and eyes vigorously. Balling the wipe and flinging it into the trash, she selected a knife from her office tidy, slit open the evidence tape and opened the box. It contained a small plastic handbag, heavily stained with dried blood and tissue. The items within had been separately bagged and recorded as a purse containing filter papers, chewing gum and thirteen bucks and eight cents in loose change. There was a broken compact, containing a well-used compressed powder in a beige tone. There were several condoms and a small penknife. Also, a romance paperback novel, stained with blood and dirt with a sadly dog-eared page that gave a human veracity to the unidentifiable mess in the photographs. No cell phone or keys were found on or near the body.

  “So the tranny you met in the washroom was convinced that the two murders were connected?” Laurence looked at Eleanor’s stony face. “Sorry, I meant the gender reassigned but politically egalitarian…” he sighed theatrically.

  Eleanor looked at him puzzled and then smiled. “I was just thinking about the same thing. Why would she think the two murders were connected?” Eleanor rubbed her neck and closed her eyes for a moment.

  “She probably didn’t see the first body because she’d have mentioned that rather than the plastic wrapper, so she must have got her information from the newspaper or TV coverage,” said Laurence.

  Eleanor snapped open her eyes.

  “Give me the date of Belinda’s murder,” she said activating the media archive that County had been trialling for the past eighteen months and hurriedly tapping in the victim’s name. Eleanor began to scan through the pages. “I’ve twenty-three articles, three of which are front page…” She read quickly her lips occasionally jumping as her eyes travelled faster than her ability to process the information. The printer whirred into action, spitting out a steady stream of heavily inked images and text. Laurence squeezed past the edge of Mo’s desk and strained to lift the papers out of the tray. The articles had been collected from the two local tabloids and three nationals, two of which were broadsheets. The headlines varied from ‘Prostitute Minced by Train’, to the more conservative, ‘Body Found on Track’; Laurence scanned them looking for any mention of plastic bags. He’d found a couple of oblique references to its presence and a few page two suppositions that the body had been wrapped before being dumped on the track. The reports petered out after the first week or so as a lurid dope and party death was linked to a mayoral candidate.

  Laurence was halfway through the papers when he saw the link. Someone from a local paper had managed to see a morgue shot of Belinda’s face, or rather the remaining third of her face and had written a rather florid account of what he’d seen. The paper hadn’t had either the nerve or the material to print the image but the description of the victim’s smeared red lipstick set off alarm bells. Eleanor glanced up as she saw Laurence rummage through the morgue photographs until he found what he was looking for. The woman’s face had a coronal severance leaving the face as an eyeless mask. Most of the underlying tissue was missing as was the left cheekbone and zygomatic arch. The skin had a white pallor, which made the thick smear of dark lipstick appear even more obscene. Laurence twisted the print so that Eleanor could see for herself.

  “Shit,” she retorted snatching the autopsy prints from Laurence’s desk and banging her elbow on Mo’s desk. “For fuck’s sake will someone get rid of this bloody table!” she barked and on catching sight of Laurence’s satisfied expression, “Stop smirking and find the corresponding revelation on Lydia Greystein.”

  Laurence had a pile of recent newspaper articles on the Greystein murder. It didn’t take him long to find an article in both the Toronto Sun and The Star, which pointed out that the victim’s face had been heavily smeared with red lipstick. None of the papers had made a connection between the murder of Belinda Myrtle and that of Lydia Greystein.

  “Maybe we should recruit Mandy and her observational powers?” said Laurence but Eleanor wasn’t listening she was calling her boss.

  Wadesky was the first of the team to arrive followed by Timms. “Why’d she connect the two deaths?” asked Wadesky, puzzled. “If she told you it was the plastic bags I’m not buying that. Surely she’d have mentioned the lipstick as a more likely connection?” Wadesky compared the two articles that mentioned the smeared lipstick. “You think she could have seen the first body or maybe the morgue photos?”

  Eleanor stared at her. “You’re right and I’m going to send some patrols to do some casual digging. But first let’s put all the circumstantial evidence from both cases together and run a link to any other earlier crimes that might fit the bill.” Wadesky nodded and began to wade through the paperwork.

  Timms sauntered in swigging a huge coffee and brandishing a box of donuts. “What we got?” he addressed the room. “Hey puppy you still here?” he said, ruffling Monster’s furry head roughly much to the dog’s delight. Monster’s loyalty was being gradually won over by Timms’ liberal application of rough love and junk food.

  “A tranny hooker with an ability to detect what we couldn’t,” growled Wadesky.

  “Well send that bitch an application form!” Timms snorted offering Monster a donut.

  “Pass me one Timms,” snapped Wadesky. “I aint had no breakfast.”

  “No waaay!” drawled Timms. “And have your Joseph telling me off for feeding his unborn child carbohydrates and E numbers? No way girl! Your body is a goddamn temple to reproduction and I aint gonna foul it.”

  “You know what Jo is gonna say?” hissed Wadesky. “He’s gonna say why’d you shoot the nasty fat detective honey? Was it ’cos he didn’t share his food when you were starving?”

  Timms giggled, “Whoa! Steady on…” He passed the donut tray in her direction. Wadesky shoved one into her mouth and placed a second on her notebook. Timms put out a hand to retrieve the box but Wadesky waggled it in Laurence’s direction.

  “Hey honey, you want one?”

  Laurence smiled and grabbed a couple much to Timms’ distress.

 
; “There’s going to be a blood bath before this night is through!” said Timms ominously.

  From the sudden slamming of doors and sound of raised voices it was clear that Marty Samuelson was on his way. The door to the incident room flew open. “Why are we here at five in the morning?” exclaimed Samuelson. “It better be fabulous!” He stared pointedly at Eleanor.

  “Whitefoot and I trawled the Xxxstacy club this evening and in conversation with a prostitute she proffered a link between the killing of Greystein and Belinda Myrtle last February.”

  “The prostitute found on the railway line?” Samuelson asked.

  “Yes,”

  “What’s the link?”

  “Both were wrapped in plastic bags and both had heavily smeared lipstick that had been applied by their killer.”

  “Why didn’t we pick this up and why did she?” queried Samuelson.

  “We don’t know yet. The link seems tenuous and apart from the circumstantial, very little links the two,” replied Eleanor thoughtfully.

  “But you think the two crimes are linked. You see the same MO?” Samuelson stared at Eleanor.

  She thought carefully for a few moments and glanced at the morgue shots of Belinda and those of Lydia. “Yes. I believe it’s the same guy,” she said decisively.

  “Ok, then why’d this one get dumped on the railway lines to be pulped?” Samuelson tapped the photograph of Belinda with a thick finger. “Meanwhile this one gets to be displayed?” He tapped Lydia’s photograph.

  “Because he wasn’t happy with Belinda’s final appearance. She didn’t look right and our killer’s all about the appearance. I believe that Belinda was probably his first victim, though I’m not one hundred per cent on that one. But he destroyed her rather like an artist will burn or rip a canvas that they don’t like or fails to convey their meaning.”

  “What meaning?” asked Samuelson moving closer. The room was silent as Eleanor ran with her thoughts.