by Steven James
His grandmother’s eyes grew large, and then she dropped the dishrag and tried to push him away, but he was strong for his age, stronger than she was, and she didn’t slow him down. Not at all.
Giovanni had cut steak; he knew that cutting meat wasn’t easy, and that his grandmother’s body would have meat on it, that everyone’s does, so he expected that it would be difficult to push the knife into her belly, expected that there would be more resistance, but it was much easier than he thought it would be. Quite easy, as a matter of fact. And pulling it out was even easier than pushing it in because it was slick and shiny with blood and other juices that he didn’t recognize.
She didn’t scream or cry out, just coughed slightly. A moist cough, and she trembled a little, and then leaned more of her weight against the counter beside the sink, and then sank to the floor.
Giovanni bent over her, and every time he pushed the knife in, it became easier and easier, especially after she stopped quivering so much. And it was quieter then too, after she stopped making those awkward sounds in the back of her throat.
Giovanni heard a knock at the morgue’s door, and then, wearing the somber, empathetic expression of a concerned doctor, he opened it and found Kelsey Nash in the hallway.
He told her how sorry he was for her loss and apologized for having to call her in so late like this, but then explained that he needed to ask her a few questions about her husband, now, tonight, before the cremation, because it might help clear up some questions that had come up concerning the circumstances of her husband’s death.
Kelsey wiped away a stray tear but didn’t enter the morgue.
He added that the police feared that Travis might have possibly been murdered, and that once again he was terribly sorry about the whole ordeal, but that this would only take a minute and then no one would be bothering her again.
And at last she stepped hesitantly into the room.
As Giovanni returned the knife to the counter he heard the crickets slowly resume their chirping. And he liked that. Liked that the world outside was still normal, that, really, nothing much had changed.
Except for his grandmother, who lay motionless in a widening pool of warm blood that was beginning to find the grooves in the linoleum and make straight, bright lines on the kitchen floor as it spread away from her.
That was something he liked to think about. The red lines traveling away from her like the streaks of sunlight he would make when he drew a sun in the corner of his papers at school.
He watched the blood slide through the grooves in the shiny floor, watched the sunlight escape from the body of his grandmother.
“Giovanni, did your father ever touch you?”
“Touch me?”
“Yes. In a bad place. In a place where your swimming suit covers?
On your buttocks or—”
“Is that a bad place?”
“No, no. It’s just—maybe a coach or someone? Did Coach Simons
ever touch you there? Or your grandmother?”
“In the bad place?”
“Where your suit covers.”
“No. Uh-uh. No one. Just good places. Just nice hugs. Nothing in the bad place.”
Giovanni motioned toward the freezer. “His body is right over here, ma’am.”
Kelsey looked so fragile and shattered by her husband’s recent death. She took one step, paused.
“I know how difficult this must be for you.” He put a compassionate hand on her shoulder so that she wouldn’t be afraid. “I promise you, I’ll make this as painless as possible.”
And with his left hand, he slid the hypodermic needle from his pocket.
He leaned over so he could look into his grandmother’s eyes. They seemed so odd, staring up at the kitchen light without blinking, and they were so round and glossy that they looked like oversized marbles that might roll out of her head at any moment.
“What was it like, Grandma?” His voice sounded large and strong and manly in the empty kitchen. He liked the grown-up sound of his voice, and he repeated the question, even though he knew she wasn’t going to answer him. Not anymore.
He watched those glassy eyes for a while, wondering if maybe they would blink, because, even though he was only eleven, he’d heard that sometimes things like that happen. Really, they do. Sometimes people move after they’re dead. Reflexes.
But no. Not his grandmother. Even though he waited until the blood stopped spreading and began to grow dark and angry-looking, even then, his grandmother didn’t blink.
He placed a finger lightly against the drying blood and found that it had turned sticky and thick and did not feel at all like the warm, soft rays of sunlight that had been landing on his face all summer.
It smelled coppery and warm.
And he liked how it felt on his skin.
Giovanni lowered Kelsey gently to the floor.
The muscle relaxant made her limp but left her conscious, and he could see her eyes moving, telling him that she was aware of what was going on. Her lips whispered silent syllables. Words that never formed.
He wheeled her husband’s corpse out of the freezer, removed the sheet that covered it.
“Officially, you’re supposed to die of grief,” he said. She lay motionless, except for her eyes, her lips, and her chest: her eyes, alert and tracking him, her lips, quivering slightly, her chest rising and falling, rising and falling with each breath. He wondered what it would be like to be conscious but unable to move, able only to anticipate what was about to happen. He wondered if she would be able to cry anymore. He wasn’t sure.
Tenderly, he slid one hand under her back and the other beneath her legs so that he could lift her without hurting her.
“I tried to think of a better way to do this, but I couldn’t come up with one.” He set her on the gurney beside the headless corpse. “I guess you could call this the next best thing.”
Since she was unable to offer any resistance, she was pliable, and it was easy for him to position her on her side and drape one of her arms across her husband’s bare chest.
He tilted her face toward the place where Travis’s head would have been. Her left cheek lay in the pool of congealed blood that had oozed from the damp stump.
“You’ve kept yourself in very good shape, so that should help. Not as much body fat to insulate you. You’ll be with Travis soon.”
Despite her paralysis, she was able to make a soft gasping sound that might have been a weak attempt to call for help.
The sounds reminded Giovanni of the ones his grandmother had made so many years ago. That day in the kitchen.
After finishing the dishes, he’d called the police and asked them to come because his grandmother wasn’t moving, and he’d told them that he thought he might have killed her with the knife and that there was lots of blood on the floor, all spreading away from her.
And as he waited for them, he carefully dried the glasses and put them away just like his grandmother had asked him to do before he pushed the knife into her stomach and she drifted, twitching to the floor.
“He poses no immediate threat to himself or to anyone else, Your Honor. We recommend that the boy receive counseling and be monitored until his eighteenth birthday, and if he appears to be mentally stable, that he be released under his own recognizance. That’s all, Your Honor.”
“Any closing comments from the prosecution?”
“We maintain that the boy is extremely disturbed and agree that he be institutionalized and receive the necessary psychiatric care, but this state has a mandatory life sentence for first-degree murder. We request that upon his release from psychiatric care, he serve the remainder of the sentence in prison for this egregious crime.”
“All right. We will take a brief recess, and I will announce my decision when we resume at one o’clock. Court is now in recess.”
Over the next few years Giovanni’s lawyers and the judges and all the doctors and counselors told him again and again that he really didn’t underst
and what he was doing that day in his grandmother’s kitchen. And after a while he almost started to believe them.
But in truth, deep down, he knew they were wrong. He did understand.
Yes, he did.
He had killed his grandmother because he wanted to see what it would be like to watch someone die. To see if it would matter to him, if it would make him feel sad or not.
And it had not.
As Giovanni took the sheet that had been covering Travis’s corpse and spread it over Kelsey, tucking it up to her neck, he thought fondly of that summer he’d spent in Kansas when he was eleven. The sunlight and the crickets and the memories. The books that he’d read. The stories he’d learned.
He rolled the gurney into the freezer and paused to brush a stray lock of hair away from Kelsey’s face.
For a moment, he listened to the moist sounds coming from her throat, sounds that reminded him of his grandmother, then he left the freezer and latched the door shut behind him.
After changing back into the custodian’s uniform and placing the doctor’s scrubs in the duffel bag Giovanni drove home, carefully avoiding all traffic light cameras.
Tomorrow was going to be a busy day.
18
Saturday, May 17
1833 Cherry Street
Denver, Colorado
4:59 a.m.
I did not have pleasant dreams.
I saw myself in the slaughterhouse again, tracking Basque. The stiff, rigid smell of blood in the air. The distant drip of a leaking pipe echoing through the darkness.
Meat hooks hung beside me. Swaying, clanking, even though there was no breeze.
In the dream, I stabbed at the black air with my flashlight, and as I did, a woman emerged. She took one step and then paused and gazed at me with cold, lifeless eyes. I recognized her as Basque’s last victim, Sylvia Padilla. Her torso was ripped open like it had been when I found her. Her face doubly pale, drained of blood by death and washed of color by the flashlight’s beam.
“Why didn’t you save me, Patrick?” She only mouthed the words, but in the dream I heard them as if she spoke them aloud.
Cold lips.
Whispering.
“Why, Patrick?”
And then, footsteps behind me. I whipped around, and my light shone on the faces of more walking dead, all approaching me.
“Why, Patrick?”
Crowding around me, reaching for me.
“Why?”
I pushed them aside, felt my hands smear against their warm, moist wounds, began to run through the dark, my light swinging wildly, shadows splintering, then re-forming, then splintering around me again.
And then I was sprinting through a field and through time and I was in the tunnel of the gold mine again and I was leaning over Heather’s body and she opened her eyes and then grinned a dead smile and held the terrible heart out to me.
Her lips, cold lips.
“For you.”
But then it wasn’t Heather’s face anymore, but Lien-hua’s, and she was offering me the heart. “Here is my heart, Patrick. For you.”
The heart reeked of death.
“No,” I yelled in my dream.
I stumbled backward.
She stood up, joined the corpses.
“No!”
And they all called to me, their words beating like a dark heartbeat over and over in my head. “Why, Patrick? Why?”
And then I awoke to a pale shroud of sunlight soaking through the curtains of my room.
I tried to relax, to let the dream fade away, but it refused to let go of me. I looked at the clock, and even though it was just after five, I didn’t want to go back to sleep and chance tipping into the dream again, so I climbed out of bed.
The images kept playing like a movie in my head. I slipped into some workout clothes and my rock-climbing shoes and went to the bouldering cave I’d built in our garage—a mini climbing gym with holds bolted to the walls and across the ceiling.
Since Tessa was sleeping over at her friend Dora Bender’s house, I didn’t have to worry about waking her, so I pulled out my twenty-year- old boombox, popped in some U2, turned it up loud enough to help me forget the dream, moved my car to the driveway, and laid some bouldering mats across the concrete so I wouldn’t hurt myself any more than necessary when I fell.
After traversing the walls for ten minutes to warm up, I began to cross the ceiling, hanging upside down, fingers gripping the climbing holds, toes wedged into small cracks or against the holds I’d passed.
Across the ceiling and back.
Arms pumped. Abs screaming. My side throbbed from meeting the axe handle yesterday, but it wasn’t as sore as I thought it’d be, so I guessed that no ribs were broken. However, it still ached, especially each time I lost my grip and fell from the ceiling onto my back.
The bouldering pads helped a little, but I could definitely feel the impact.
I worked the routes for forty-five minutes, but as much as I cranked on the moves, I couldn’t clear my head. So finally, I gave up and went back upstairs to get ready to meet Cheyenne.
Some people think that an investigator will be immediately reassigned to a different case if a killer mentions his name while corresponding with the authorities or does something to threaten him or his family.
And while the scenario might make for a good plot for a crime novel or cop buddy movie, it’s not the way things work in real life. Once you start on a case, especially a high-profile case with a serial killer, you stay on it, regardless of how many threatening phone calls, photographs, or recorded messages the killer might send you.
It has to be this way, otherwise as soon as an investigator started closing in, a killer could simply leave a threatening message or make a taunting phone call and—voila!—the one person who has the best chance of catching him would be reassigned. That’s just not the way it is.
It’d be too easy for the bad guys.
However, it is true that if they mention your name, it gets personal.
It’d been personal with Taylor and with Basque, and now I felt the same itch, the same intimate anger with this new killer who’d left the recorded message for me in Heather Fain’s mouth.
As I stepped out of the shower, changed clothes, and grabbed some breakfast, the message kept replaying in my head, making the case more and more personal each time it repeated.
“I’ll see you in Chicago, Agent Bowers.”
Maybe coffee would help. Give me a caffeine buzz. Help me think in a new direction.
I decided on Honduran estate-grown French Roast. After all, if Detective Warren was going to shuttle me around for the morning, the least I could do was offer her sixteen ounces of some world-class coffee. I ground enough for thirty-two ounces, brewed the coffee to perfection, filled two travel mugs—adding a little cream and honey to mine—and had just finished downing a bowl of oatmeal when she arrived at the curb.
Toting my computer bag and hugging the two travel mugs against my chest, I maneuvered out the door. I’d never ridden with her before, and now I saw that she drove a scrappy 2002 Saturn sedan. Maroon. Scratched up, mud-splattered. Homey.
Even though it was still early, the sky was already stark and blue, with just a single streak of cirrus clouds layered high in the west. A light, cool breeze wandered through the neighborhood, but other than that, the day had a still, solid feel to it.
Cheyenne rolled down her window. “Good morning, Pat.”
“Morning.” I set the cups on the roof and patted her car. “I have to say I figured you for a pickup truck kind of girl.”
“I’m hard to pigeonhole. Just throw your bag anywhere in the back.”
I opened the door and realized that following her instructions wouldn’t be as easy as it sounded. The seats and floors were piled with papers, the skeletal remains of at least four trips to KFC, three crumpled shooting range targets, a pair of rusted jumper cables, a mountain bike wheel, a very old pair of men’s cowboy boots that I thought it b
est not to ask about, and a helicopter flight manual. I motioned toward it. “I didn’t know you flew.”
“Not quite done with my lessons. Just have to pass my solo.”
In order to make room for my computer bag I slid the targets aside. They contained some of the tightest center-mass groupings I’d ever seen, so as I positioned my computer bag on the seat I asked her, “How often do you shoot?”
“Mondays and Tuesdays. I try not to miss a week.”
After closing the door, I grabbed the travel mugs from the roof and joined her in the front seat. “Looks like you try not to miss the bull’s-eye either.”
“Part of growing up on a ranch. You need to be able to pick off coyotes from a full gallop.”
“Don’t tell my stepdaughter about that. She doesn’t believe in hunting: ‘Nothing with a face should ever be murdered.’” I offered her one of the travel mugs. “Coffee?”
“Naw. I don’t touch the stuff.”
“Ah, but this is good coffee.”
“That’s an oxymoron,” she said.
OK, now that was just uncalled for. “And here I thought you were a woman of discriminating taste.”
She gave me a furtive glance. “I am. When it comes to some things.”
OK. This woman was not subtle.
Before I could give her any sort of witty reply, she slid a manila folder across the dashboard toward me. “Some reading material for the drive.”
“Thanks.”
As I picked it up I noticed a St. Francis of Assisi pendant hanging from her rearview mirror. I would never have pegged her for the religious type.
She really was hard to pigeonhole.
Cheyenne wove through traffic, hopped onto I-70. “By the way,” she said, “Heather Fain was poisoned. Same poison that Ahmed Mohammed Shokr died of on Wednesday.”
Ahmed was one of the victims in the double homicide on Wednesday. His girlfriend, Tatum Maroukas, had been stabbed with a sword.
There are only four ways to poison someone—inhalation, ingestion, injection, and absorption—so I asked Cheyenne, “Do we know how it was administered?”