The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  Carole Stern lived in a small camelback house, a single-storey at the front against a two-storey rear, set in a small garden a few blocks off Bucktown’s main street. According to Morphy, Stern worked in a bar on St Charles but was currently serving time for possession of crack with intent to supply. Remarr was rumored to be keeping up the rental payments until she got out. We parked around the corner from the house and we clicked off the safeties of our guns in unison as we stepped from the car.

  ‘You’re a little out of your territory here, aren’t you?’ I asked Morphy.

  ‘Hey, we just came out here for a bite to eat and decided to check on the off-chance,’ he said, with an injured look. ‘I ain’t steppin’ on no toes.’

  He motioned me towards the front of the house while he took the back. I walked to the front door, which stood on a small raised porch, and peered carefully through the glass. It was caked with dirt, in keeping with the slightly run-down feel of the house itself. I counted five and then tried the door. It opened with a gentle creak and I stepped carefully into the hall. At the far end, I heard the tinkle of glass breaking and saw Morphy’s hand reach in to open the rear door.

  The smell was faint, but obvious, like meat that has been left in the sunlight on a warm day. The downstairs rooms were empty and consisted only of a kitchen, a small room with a sofa and an old TV, and a boxroom with a single bed and a closet. The closet contained women’s clothes and shoes. The bed was covered only by a worn mattress.

  Morphy took the stairs first. I stayed close behind, both of us with our guns pointing towards the second floor. The smell was stronger here now. We passed a bathroom with a dripping shower head, which had stained the ceramic bath brown. On a sink unit beneath a small mirror stood some shaving foam, blades and a bottle of Boss aftershave.

  Three other doors stood partially open. On the right was a woman’s bedroom. It had white sheets, potted plants, which had begun to wither, and a series of Monet prints on the walls. There were cosmetics on a long dressing table and a white fitted closet ran the length of one wall. A window opposite looked out on to a small, overgrown garden.

  There were more women’s clothes in the closet, and more shoes. Carole Stern was obviously funding some kind of shopping addiction by selling drugs.

  The second door provided the source of the smell. A large open pot sat on a camper stove by a window facing on to the street. It contained scummy water in which a stew of some kind was cooking on a low heat. From the stench, the meat had been allowed to simmer for some time, probably most of the day. It smelt foul, like offal. Two easy chairs stood in the room on a new red carpet. A portable TV with a coat-hanger aerial sat blankly on a small table.

  The third room was also at the front of the house facing on to the street, but its door was almost closed. Morphy took one side of the door. I took the other. He counted three and then nudged the door open with his foot and went in fast to the right-hand wall. I moved in low to the left, my gun level with my chest, my finger resting on the trigger.

  The setting sun cast a golden glow over the contents of the room: an unmade bed, a suitcase open on the floor, a dressing table, a poster on the wall advertising a concert by the Neville Brothers in Tipitina’s, with the brothers’ signatures scrawled loosely across their images. The carpeted floor felt damp beneath my feet.

  Most of the plaster had been removed from the ceiling and the roof beams lay exposed. I guessed Carole Stern had been considering some sort of restoration before her prison sentence put her plans temporarily on hold. At the far end of the room, a series of what looked like climbing ropes had been strung over the beams and used to hold Tony Remarr in position.

  His remains glowed with a strange fire in the dying sunlight. I could see the muscles and veins in his legs, the tendons in his neck, the yellow mounds of fatty deposits seeping at his waist, the muscles in his stomach, the shrivelled husk of his penis. Huge masonry nails had been driven into the far wall of the room and he hung partially on them, one beneath each arm, while the ropes took the main weight of his body.

  As I moved to the right I could see a third nail in the wall behind his neck, holding his head in place. The head faced to the right, in profile, supported by another nail beneath his chin. In places, his skull gleamed whitely through the blood. His eye sockets were almost empty and his gritted teeth were white against his gums.

  Remarr had been totally flayed, carefully posed and hung against the wall. His left hand stretched diagonally outwards and down from his body. A long-bladed knife, like a butcher’s filleting tool but wider, heavier, hung from his hand. It looked like it had been glued in place.

  But the viewer’s gaze was drawn, like Tony Remarr’s own blind stare, to the figure’s right hand. It stood at a right angle to his body until it reached the elbow. From there, the forearm was raised vertically, pulled upwards by a rope around the wrist. In the fingers of his right hand and draped over his right arm, Tony Remarr held his own flayed skin. I could see the shape of the arms, the legs, the hair of his scalp, the nipples on his chest. Beneath the scalp, which hung almost at his knees, there were bloody edges where the face had been removed. The bed, the floor, the wall, all were shaded in red.

  I looked to my left to see Morphy cross himself and softly say a prayer for the soul of Tony Remarr.

  We sat against Morphy’s car drinking coffee from paper cups as the feds and the New Orleans police milled around the Stern house. A crowd of people, some local, some on their way to eat in Bucktown’s seafood joints, hung around the edges of the police cordon waiting to see the body being removed. They were likely to be disappointed: the crime scene was highly organised by the killer and both the police and the feds were anxious to document it fully before allowing the body to be taken away.

  Woolrich, his tan suit now restored to its former tarnished glory, came over to us and offered us the remains of a bag of donuts from his suit pocket. Behind the cordon, I could see his own Chevy Nova, a red ’96 model that shone like new.

  ‘Here, you must be hungry.’ Both Morphy and I declined the offer. I still had visions of Remarr in my head and Morphy looked pale and ill.

  ‘You speak to the locals?’ asked Woolrich.

  We both nodded. We had given lengthy statements to a pair of homicide detectives from Orleans Parish, one of whom was Morphy’s brother-in-law.

  ‘Then I guess you can go,’ said Woolrich. ‘I’ll want to talk to both of you again, though.’ Morphy wandered around to the driver’s side of his car. I moved to open the passenger door but Woolrich held my arm.

  ‘You okay?’ he asked.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘It was a good hunch that Morphy followed, but he shouldn’t have brought you along. Durand’s gonna be on my back when he finds out that you were first on another crime scene.’ Durand was the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge in New Orleans. I had never met him but I knew what most SACs were like. They ruled their field offices like kingdoms, assigning agents to squads and giving the go-ahead to operations. The competition for SAC posts was intense. If nothing else, Durand was a tough customer.

  ‘You’re still at the Flaisance?’

  ‘Still there.’

  ‘I’ll drop by. There’s something I want to bounce off you.’

  He turned and walked back towards the Stern house. On his way through the gate, he handed the bag of crushed donuts to a pair of patrolmen sitting in their car. They took the bag reluctantly, holding it like it was a bomb. When Woolrich had entered the house, one of them climbed out of the car and threw the donuts in a trash can.

  Morphy dropped me at the Flaisance. Before he left, I gave him my cellphone number. He wrote it in a small black notebook, bound tightly with a rubber band. ‘If you’re free tomorrow, Angie’s cooking dinner. It’s worth the drive. You taste her cooking and you won’t regret it.’ The tone of his voice changed. ‘Besides, there’s some things I think we need to discuss.’

  I told him it sounded okay, although part of me wa
nted never to see Morphy, Woolrich or another cop again. He was about to pull away from the kerb when I patted the roof of the car with my palm. Morphy leaned over and rolled down the window. ‘Why are you doing this?’ I asked. Morphy had gone to considerable lengths to involve me, to keep me posted on what was happening. I needed to know why. I think I also needed to know if I could trust him.

  He shrugged. ‘The Aguillards died on my beat. I want to get the guy who killed them. You know something about him. He’s come at you, at your family. The feds are conducting their own investigation and are telling us as little as they can. You’re all I got.’

  ‘Is that it?’ I could see something more in his face, something which was almost familiar.

  ‘No. I got a wife. I’m starting a family. You know what I’m sayin’?’

  I nodded and let it go, but there was something else in his eyes, something that resonated inside me. I patted the roof of the car once again in farewell and watched as he drove away, wondering how badly Morphy wanted absolution for what he might have done.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  As I returned to the Flaisance I felt an overpowering sense of decay which seemed to creep into my nostrils, almost stopping my breathing. It lodged itself beneath my nails and stained my skin. I felt it on the sweat on my back and saw it in the weeds breaking through the cracks in the pavement beneath my feet. It was as if the city was corroding around me. I went to my room and showered under a hot jet until my skin was red and raw, then changed into a sweater and chinos, called Angel and Louis in their room and arranged to meet them in Rachel’s room in five minutes.

  She answered the door with an ink-stained hand. She had a pencil tucked behind her ear and a pair of pencils held her red hair back in a bun. There were dark rims under her eyes, which were red from reading.

  Her room had been transformed. A Macintosh PowerBook stood open on the room’s only table, surrounded by a mass of paper, books and notes. On the wall above it were diagrams, yellow Post-it notes and a series of what appeared to be anatomy sketches. A pile of faxes lay on the floor by her chair, beside a tray of half-eaten sandwiches, a pot of coffee and a stained cup.

  I heard a knock on the door behind me. I opened it to admit Angel and Louis. Angel looked at the wall in disbelief. ‘Guy on the desk already thinks you’re crazy, with all the shit that’s been comin’ in on his fax. He sees this, he’s gonna call the cops.’

  Rachel sat back in her chair and pulled the pencils from her bun, releasing her hair. She shook her tresses out with her left hand and then twisted her neck to ease her knotted muscles.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘who wants to start?’

  I told them about Remarr and, instantly, the tiredness went from Rachel’s face. She made me detail the position of the body twice and then spent a couple of minutes shuffling papers on her desk.

  ‘There!’ she said, handing me a sheet of paper with a flourish. ‘Is that it?’

  It was a black and white illustration, marked at the top of the page, in old lettering: ‘TAB.PRIMERA DEL LIB. SEGVNDO’. At the bottom of the page, in Rachel’s handwriting, was written ‘Valverde 1556’.

  The illustration depicted a flayed man, his left foot on a stone, his left hand holding a long knife with a hooked hilt, his right holding his own flayed skin. The outline of his face was visible on the skin and his eyes remained in his sockets but, with those exceptions, the illustration was profoundly similar to the position in which Remarr had been found. The various parts of the body were each marked with Greek letters.

  ‘That’s it,’ I said quietly. ‘That’s what we found.’

  I handed the illustration to Angel and Louis, who examined it in silence.

  ‘The Historia de la composición del cuerpo humano,’ said Rachel. ‘It was written by the Spaniard Valverde in 1556 as a medical textbook. This drawing –’ She reached out to take the page from Louis and held it up so we could all see it. ‘– is an illustration of the Marsyas myth. Marsyas was a satyr, a follower of the goddess Cybele. He was cursed when he picked up a bone flute discarded by Athene. The flute played itself, because it was still inspired by Athene, and its music was so beautiful that the peasants said it was greater even than that of Apollo himself.

  ‘Apollo challenged Marsyas to a competition to be judged by the Muses and Marsyas lost because he couldn’t play the flute upside down and sing at the same time. And so Apollo took his revenge on Marsyas. He flayed him alive and nailed his skin to a pine. According to the poet Ovid, at his moment of death Marsyas cried out, “Quid me mihi detrahis?” – “Who is it that tears me from myself?” The artist Titian painted a version of the myth. So did Raphael. My guess is that Remarr’s body will reveal traces of ketamine. To fulfil the myth, the flaying would have to be carried out while the victim was still alive. After all, it’s hard to create a work of art if the subject keeps moving.’

  Louis interrupted, ‘But in this picture he looks like he flayed himself. He’s holding the knife and the skin. Why did the killer choose this depiction?’

  ‘This is just a guess but maybe it’s because, in a sense, Remarr did flay himself,’ I said. ‘He was at the Aguillard house when he shouldn’t have been. I think the Travelling Man was concerned at what he might have seen. Remarr was somewhere he shouldn’t have been, so he was responsible for what happened to him.’

  Rachel nodded. ‘It’s an interesting point, but there may be something more to it, given what happened to Tee Jean Aguillard.’ She handed me a pair of papers. The first was a photocopy of the crime-scene photo of Tee Jean. The second was another illustration, this time marked ‘DE DISSECT. PARTIVM’. At the bottom of the page, the date ‘1545’ had been handwritten by Rachel.

  The illustration depicted a man crucified against a tree, with a stone wall behind it. His head was cradled by the branches of the tree, his arms spread by further branches. The skin below his chest had been flayed, revealing his lungs, kidneys and heart. Some unidentified organ, probably his stomach, lay on a raised platform beside him. His face was intact but, once again, the illustration matched the posture of Tee Jean Aguillard’s body.

  ‘Marsyas again,’ said Rachel. ‘Or at least an adaptation of the myth. That’s from Estienne’s De dissectione partium corporis humani, another early textbook.’

  ‘Are you saying that this guy is killing according to a Greek myth?’ asked Angel.

  Rachel sighed. ‘It’s not that simple. I think the myth has resonances for him, for the simple reason that he’s used it twice. But the Marsyas theory breaks down with Tante Marie, and Bird’s wife and child. I found the Marsyas illustrations almost by accident, but I haven’t found a match yet for the other deaths. I’m still looking. The likelihood is that they are also based on early medical textbooks. If that’s the case, then I’ll find them.’

  ‘It raises the possibility that we’re looking for someone with a medical background,’ I said.

  ‘Or a knowledge of obscure texts,’ said Rachel. ‘We already know that he has read the Book of Enoch, or some derivative of it. It wouldn’t take a great deal of medical knowledge to carry out the kind of mutilation we’ve found on the bodies so far, but an assumption of some surgical skills, or even some mild familiarity with medical procedures, might not be totally amiss.’

  ‘What about the blinding and the removal of the faces?’ I asked. I pushed a flashing image of Susan and Jennifer to the back of my mind. ‘Any idea where they fit in?’

  Rachel shook her head. ‘I’m still working on it. The face appears to be some form of token for him. Jennifer’s was returned because she died before he could start working on her, I’d guess, but also because he wanted to shock you personally. The removal could also indicate the killer’s disregard for them as individuals, a sign of his disregard for their own status as people. After all, when you remove a person’s face, you take away the most immediate representation of their individuality, their main physical distinguisher.

  ‘As for the eyes, there is a myth
that the image of the killer stays on the retina of the victim. There were lots of myths like that attached to the body. Even at the start of the last century, some scientists were still examining the theory that a murder victim’s body bled when it was in the same room as its killer. I need to do more work on it, then we’ll see.’

  She stood up and stretched. ‘I don’t mean to sound callous, but now I want to take a shower. Then I want to go out and get something decent to eat. After that, I want to sleep for twelve hours.’

  Angel, Louis and I started to leave but she held up her hand to stop us. ‘There’s just one more thing. I don’t want to give the impression that this is just some freak copying violent images. I don’t know enough about this to make that kind of judgement and I want to consult some people who are more experienced in this area than I am. But I can’t help feeling that there’s some underlying philosophy behind what he’s doing, some pattern that he’s following. Until we find out what that is, I don’t think we’re going to catch him.’

  I had my hand on the door handle when there was a knock at the door. I opened it slowly and blocked the view of the room with my body while Rachel cleared away her papers. Woolrich stood before me. In the light from the room, I noticed a thin growth of beard was forming on his face. ‘Clerk told me you might be here if you weren’t in your own room. Can I come in?’

  I paused for a moment, then stepped aside. I noticed that Rachel was standing in front of the material on the wall, obscuring it from view, but Woolrich wasn’t interested in her. His eyes had fixed on Louis.

  ‘I know you,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Louis. His eyes were cold.

  Woolrich turned to me. ‘You bringing your hired killers to my town, Bird?’