‘What time?’
I thought for a moment. ‘Eight. Eight-thirty at the latest. There was no reply.’
‘And then?’
‘I headed out to Ronald Straydeer’s place, came back here, read, went to bed.’
‘When did you find the toy?’
‘Maybe three a.m. You might want to get someone down here to take moulds of the boot prints outside my house. The frost will have held the marks in the mud.’
He nodded. ‘We’ll do that.’ He stood to leave, then stopped. ‘I had to ask. You know that.’
‘I know.’
‘And here’s something else: the presence of this –’ he raised the bag containing the clown ‘– means someone has marked you out. Someone’s drawn a line between you and Rita Ferris, and it seems to me that there’s only one likely candidate.’
Billy Purdue. Still, it just didn’t sit right, unless Billy had decided that I was to blame for the events leading up to the death of his son; that, by my actions in helping Rita, I had forced him to act as he did.
‘Look, let me go with you, see if there’s anything about it that strikes a chord,’ I said, at last.
Ellis leaned against the door frame. ‘Hear you applied to Augusta for a PI licence.’
That was true. I still had some cash left from Susan’s insurance policy and the sale of our home, and from some work I had undertaken in New York, but I figured that sooner or later I’d have to make a living somehow. I’d already been offered some work in ‘corporate competitive intelligence’, a euphemism which covered tackling industrial espionage. It sounded more interesting than it was: a sales rep suspected of selling a competitor’s goods in violation of a non-competition agreement; sabotage of a production line in a software factory in South Portland; and the leaking of information on bids for a new public housing development in Augusta. I was still debating whether or not to take on any of them.
‘Yeah, the licence came through last week.’
‘You’re better than that. We all know what you did, the people you’ve hunted down. We could do with someone like that.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying there’s a badge waiting, if you want it. There’s something coming up in CAP pretty soon.’
‘Property or Persons?’
‘Don’t be a jerk.’
‘A minute ago you were implying that I might be a suspect in a double homicide. You sure are a changeable man, Ellis.’
He smiled. ‘So how about it?’
I nodded. ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘You do that,’ he said. ‘You do that.’
Rita Ferris lay facedown on the floor of her apartment, close to the TV. The coiled ends of a rope hung at her neck, and the tip of one ear, visible through the twisted strands of her hair, was blue. Her skirt was pushed up almost to her waist but her panty-hose and panties were in place and undamaged. I felt a rush of pity for her, and something more: a kind of love born out of a brief feeling of intense loss. It made my stomach tighten and my eyes burn and, on my face, I could feel, once again, her last, brief touch, as if I had been branded by her hand.
And in that small room, clean and neat but for the toys and clothes, the diapers and pins, the everyday beauty of her child’s slow-forming life, I made myself feel her last moments. I felt –
I see – the blur of movement as the ligature is flipped over her head, the sudden instinctive shifting of her own hands to her throat in an effort to slip her fingers beneath the rope, the brief burn at her fingertips as she fails and the rope tightens around her.
It is a long death, this slow choking of life from her body. It is a bitter, terrible struggle against the gradual, remorseless crushing of her throat, the progressive destruction of the cricoid cartilage and the eventual soft death knell as the fragile hyoid bone snaps.
She panics as her pulse rate increases; her blood pressure soars as she struggles and gasps for breath. She tries to kick back at the body behind her, but the action is anticipated and the rope is pulled tighter. Her face becomes congested, her skin gradually turning blue as cyanosis develops. Her eyes bulge and her mouth froths and she feels as though her head must explode under the pressure.
Then her body convulses and she can taste the blood in her mouth, can feel it flowing from her nose and over her lips. Now she knows that she is going to die and she makes a final desperate effort to release herself, to save her child, but her body is already failing, her mind darkening, and she can smell herself as the light fades, as she loses control of her bodily functions and she thinks to herself.
but I have always been so clean . . .
‘You finished?’ said a voice. It was the medical examiner, Dr Henry Vaughan, speaking to the police photographer. Vaughan was grey haired and erudite, a philosopher as much as a doctor, and had been the ME for over twenty years. The post of ME was an appointed job with a seven-year term, which meant that Democrat governors, Republican governors and independent governors had all appointed, or reappointed, Vaughan down the years. He was due to retire soon, I knew, and was set to leave his storage room in Augusta lined with old peanut, mayonnaise and sauce bottles, each now containing some small part of someone’s remains. He wasn’t too unhappy about it: according to Ellis, he wanted ‘more time to think’.
The photographer took one final photograph of the knot, then nodded his assent. The preliminary sketches had already been made, the measurements taken. The evidence technician with responsibility for this room had finished his work around the bodies and had moved on to the periphery of the crime scene. A pair of medics waited in one corner with a stretcher, but they prepared to move forward as Vaughan spoke.
‘We’re going to flip her,’ said Vaughan. Two detectives, both wearing plastic gloves, took up positions beside the body, one at her legs, one at her torso, their feet at the edge of the taped outline surrounding her, while Vaughan held her head.
‘Ready?’ he said, then: ‘Here we go.’
They flipped the body, gently but expertly, and I heard one of the cops, a muscular, balding man in his forties, softly whisper: ‘Ah, Jesus.’
Her eyes were wide open and filled with blood where the tiny capillaries had burst under the pressure of the rope, the pupils like dark suns in a red sky. Her fingertips were blue and her nostrils and mouth were covered in blood and dried white froth.
And her lips, the lips that had kissed me softly barely three nights before, that once were red and welcoming and now were cold and blue,
say bye-bye
her lips had been sewn together with thick black thread, the stitches crisscrossing from top to bottom in ragged ’v’ shapes, a tangled knot of thread at one corner so that it would not work itself through the hole while the stitches were still being put in place.
I moved closer and it was only then that I saw the child. His body had been obscured by the couch but, as I walked, his small, covered feet became visible, and then the rest of his body, dressed in purple Barney the dinosaur rompers. There was blood around his head, blood caked in his fine blonde hair and blood on the corner of the windowsill where his head had impacted.
Ellis was beside me. ‘There’s bruising to his face. We figure whoever did this hit him, maybe while he was crying, maybe because he got in the way. The force of the blow knocked him into the windowsill and broke his skull.’
I shook my head and remembered how the little boy had flailed at me as I touched his mother the night before.
‘No,’ I said, and I squeezed my eyes shut hard as the burning became too much. And I thought of my own child, lost to me now, and the others, their bodies wrapped in plastic, bodies buried beneath the earth of a damp cellar in Queens, tiny faces in jars, a small host of the lost stretching into the darkness, walking hand in hand to oblivion.
‘No, he didn’t just cry,’ I said. ‘He was trying to save her.’
While the bodies were placed in white body bags to be taken to Augusta for autopsy, I walked through the a
partment. There was only one bedroom, although it was wide and long and held a double bed and a smaller bed with retractable side bars for Donald. There was a pine chest of drawers and a matching pine wardrobe, and a box piled high with toys beside a small bookshelf stacked with picture books. In one corner, beside an open drawer, an evidence technician dusted for fingerprints.
And the sight of the clothes stacked neatly on the shelves, and the toys packed away in their box, brought back a memory that speared me through the heart. Less than one year before, I had stood in our small house on Hobart Street in Brooklyn and, in the space of one night, had gone through the possessions of my dead wife and child, sorting, discarding, smelling the last traces of them that clung to their clothing like the ghosts of themselves. My Susan and my Jennifer: their blood was still on the kitchen walls and there were chalk marks on the floor where the chairs had stood, the chairs to which they had been tied and in which they had been mutilated while the husband and father who should have protected them was propping up a bar.
And I thought, as I stood in Rita’s bedroom: who will take their clothes and sort them now? Who will feel the cotton of her blouse between his fingers, caressing it until the material holds the stains of his prints like a seal? Who will take her underwear, her pink bras without the support wiring (for her breasts were so very small), and hold them carefully, recalling, before he puts them away forever, how he used to undo the clasps with just one hand, the weight of her forcing the straps apart, the cups gently falling?
Who will take her lipstick and run his finger along the edge, knowing that this, too, was a place she touched, that no lips but hers had ever touched it before, or would ever touch it again? Who will see the small traces of a fingertip in her blusher, or carefully unwind each strand of hair from her brush, as if by doing so he might begin to remake her again, piece by piece, atom by atom?
And who will take the child’s toys? Who will spin the wheels on a bright, plastic truck? Who will test a button nose, the glass eyes of a bear, the upraised trunk of a white elephant? And who will pack away those small clothes, those little shoes with laces that young fingers had not yet learned to master?
Who will do all of these things, these small services for the dead, these acts of remembrance more powerful in their way than the most ornate memorial? In parting with what was once theirs they became, in that moment, intimately, intensely present, for the ghost of a child is still, for all that, a child, and the memory of a love is still, even decades later, love.
I stood outside the apartment in the cold winter sunlight and watched as the bodies were removed. They had been dead for no more than ten hours, according to Vaughan, possibly less; the precise time of death would take longer to establish, for a number of reasons, including the cold in the drafty old apartment and the nature of Rita Ferris’s death. Rigor mortis had set into the small muscles at the eyelids, the lower jaw and the neck, gradually spreading to the other muscles of their bodies, although in Rita Ferris the process of rigor mortis was hastened by her death struggles.
Rigor mortis is caused by the disappearance of the energy source for muscle contraction, called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP. ATP usually dissipates entirely four hours after death, leaving the muscles rigid until decomposition starts to occur. But if the victim struggles before death, then the ATP energy source becomes depleted during the struggle and rigor mortis sets in more quickly. That would have to be taken into account in the case of Rita, so Vaughan reckoned that Donald Ferris would provide a more accurate estimate of the time of death.
There was fixed lividity on the underside of both bodies, where gravity had drawn the blood down, which normally occurs six to eight hours after death, and pressure applied to the area of lividity did not cause ‘blanching’ or whitening, since the blood had already clotted, meaning that they had been dead for at least five hours. Thus the window for a time of death was certainly greater than five hours but probably not in excess of eight hours to ten hours. There was no fixed lividity on the backs of either body, which meant that they had not been moved after death. They had not been dead when I had tried to find Rita the night before. Maybe she had gone shopping, or visiting friends. If I had found her, could I have warned her? Could I have saved her, saved them both?
Ellis walked over to me, where I stood away from the throng of curious onlookers.
‘Anything strike you about it?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not yet.’
‘You think of anything, you let us know, y’hear?’
But my attention had already been distracted. Two men in plain-clothes flashed ID at the cop keeping the crowds back and made their way into the building. I didn’t need to see what was in their wallets to know what they were.
‘Feds,’ I said.
Behind them, a taller figure with jet black hair and wearing a conservative blue suit followed.
‘Special Agents Samson and Doyle,’ said Ellis. ‘And the Canadian cop, Eldritch. They were here earlier. Guess they don’t trust us.’
I turned to him. ‘What do I not know here?’
He reached into his pocket and removed a clear plastic evidence bag. It contained four hundred-dollar bills, still crisp and new except a single fold on each.
‘Let’s barter,’ said Ellis. ‘Know anything about these?’
There was no way to avoid the issue. ‘They look like the bills Billy Purdue gave me for Rita as part of the child-support payments.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, and started to walk away. I could see that he was angry at me, although I wasn’t sure why.
I reached out and gripped him by the upper arm. He didn’t look happy about it but I didn’t care. My gesture attracted the attention of two uniformed cops, but Ellis waved them away.
‘Don’t be presuming on my good humor, Bird,’ he warned, looking at my hand on his arm. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that he gave you this money?’
I didn’t release my grip. ‘You owe me something,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t have known then the money was important.’
He frowned, then replied: ‘Just testing, I guess. You want to let go of my arm now? My fingers are going numb.’
I took away my hand and he rubbed his arm gently.
‘Still working out, I see.’ He glanced back towards the apartment building, but the feds and the Canadian cop were still inside.
‘That business out at Prouts Neck a couple of nights back?’ he began.
‘Yeah, I watch the news. A dead Irish-American fed, three dead Italians and four dead Cambodians: an equal-opportunity slaughter. What about it?’
‘There was another player. Took out Paulie Block and Jimmy Fribb with a pump-action, and that’s not all he took.’
‘Go on.’
‘There was an exchange going on at the Neck: cash for something else. The feds were tipped off to it when Paulie Block and Chester Nash turned up in Portland. They figure a ransom, for someone who was already dead. Norfolk County Sheriffs Office down in Massachusetts dug up a body out by the Larz Anderson Park yesterday, a Canadian national named Thani Pho. A dog sniffed her out.’
‘Let me guess,’ I interrupted. ‘Thani Pho was of Cambodian extraction.’
Ellis nodded. ‘Seems she was a freshman student at Harvard; her bag was found with her. Autopsy indicated that she’d been raped, then buried alive. They found earth in her throat. The way the feds and this guy Eldritch figure it, Tony Celli’s crew kidnapped the girl, pulled a double-cross on the Cambodians and then blew them away under the noses of the feds. The main focus of the investigation is Boston. Despite the sideshow at the Neck, the feds are concentrating their attention on Tony Celli. Those two agents are just clearing up loose ends.’
‘Who paid the ransom?’
He shrugged. ‘The FBI Free Information Store closed for business at that point, but they believe that the exchange and the murder of Thani Pho are connected, and maybe there’s a Canadian angle if this guy Eldritch is involved. These bills came from a bank in T
oronto, and so did the bills that fell from the ransom stash out at the Neck. Trouble is, the rest of the cash is gone, and that’s where the other player comes in.’
‘How much?’
‘I heard two mil.’
I pushed my hands through my hair and kneaded the muscles on the back of my neck. Billy Purdue: the guy was like some kind of infernal ricocheting bullet, bouncing off people and destroying lives until he ran out of energy or something stopped him. If what Ellis said was true, then Billy had somehow heard of Tony Celli’s deal at the Neck, may even have been involved somewhere lower down the scale, and decided to make a big score, maybe in the hope of getting his ex-wife and son back and carving out a new life somewhere else, somewhere he could leave the past behind.
‘You still think Billy killed Rita and his own son?’ I asked quietly.
‘Possibly,’ shrugged Ellis. ‘I don’t see anyone else on the horizon.’
‘And sewed her mouth shut with black thread?’
‘I don’t know. If he’s crazy enough to cross Tony Celli, he’s crazy enough to sew up his old lady.’
But I knew that he didn’t believe what he was saying. The money changed everything. There were people who would cause a lot of pain to get their hands on that kind of cash, and Tony Celli was one of them, especially since he probably felt that it was his money to begin with. Still, the damage to Rita’s mouth didn’t fit in. Neither did the fact that she hadn’t been tortured. Whoever killed her didn’t do it in the course of trying to find out something from her. She was killed because someone wanted her dead, and her mouth was sewn up because that same someone wanted to send a message to whoever found her.
Two million dollars: that money was going to bring a storm of trouble down on everybody’s head from Tony Celli, maybe from the guys he tried to double-cross. Jesus, what a mess. I didn’t know it then, but the money had attracted others too, individuals who were anxious to secure it for their own ends and didn’t care who they killed to get it.
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