by Michael Beck
"I'm a reporter with the Times," I said, flipping open my ID. "Are you a relative of Mr. Abrahams?"
"Relative? I'm Detective Bensen with the 68th precinct. How did you get back here? This property is a crime scene."
So much for my powers of observation.
"Sorry, I was just trying to get a quick statement to meet a deadline. Can you tell me how Mr. Abrahams was killed? I understand he was stabbed?"
Bensen scowled at me. He had very white teeth. With the tan, he reminded me of a young George Hamilton. But was George Hamilton ever young?
"How did you know that? We haven't released any information at this stage. Did you say you were with the Times? Show me your ID again."
"Mark, what the fuck are you doing?" said a woman from behind me. "I thought I told you to stay away."
Detective Sanders was about thirty, slim, with brown hair that used to be long but was now cut in a bob. It suited her. Made her large green eyes stand out. I met Sanders two years ago when we worked a kidnapping case. She had been just as glad to see me then as she was now.
"You know this guy?" said Bensen.
"It's not something I brag about."
"We're best friends," I said.
"We're acquaintances from a previous case of mine," Sanders said, way too quickly for me.
"Detective, that hurts. The way we worked together on that kidnapping case, I thought we had a special bond."
"You mean the case that got me demoted? Yeah, that was real special."
"You've been demoted? What happened?"
"You have to ask?"
"Oh."
When I say we worked a kidnapping case together, it might be more accurate to say I butted in on a case she was working on. The dad was killed in the drop off but I got the girl back. A fifty percent success rate did not do it for the police brass. She needed to work for the justice department.
"Because of me?" Seeing as I was the only one there when the dad was killed, it was the obvious question.
"No, it was my fault. I shouldn't have lost him."
"Anyone would have."
"You didn't."
I shrugged. "It's what I do."
"Yeah, well now it's what I used to do. I'm working vice now."
"Can we have this beautiful reunion talk later?" said Bensen. "Sanders, is this guy really with the New York Times?"
Sanders cast an amused eye over my ripped jeans and stained sweater. "Perhaps in the comic section. He's as much press as I'm the princess of Siam." She sighed. "But he does have an interest in this case and might be able to help you."
"Well, sorry, but I don't normally discuss details of a murder investigation with some fruitcake faking his way in to my crime scene."
Fruitcake?
"Okay, don't discuss it with me but here's what I think you have up there," I said. "The victim is a male. He is wearing nothing but his underwear, his clothes have been cut off and he has a contusion on the back of his skull. Oh, and one other little thing, he's missing his heart."
"You've been talking about my case," Bensen accused Sanders.
"I haven't told him a thing. I haven't spoken to him in two years."
"Then how the fuck does he know all that?"
"Ask him yourself."
He moved into my personal space, his dark eyes angry. I felt like touching his cheek to see if his tan was a spray-on. How could he be so brown in the middle of Fall? "Who've you been talking to? Who's your source?"
"None of your people told me a thing."
"Then how do you know all that?"
"I know a similar case."
"A similar case? You're fucking kidding. I would have heard of one like this. Okay, I'll play along. Who was the victim?"
"My dad."
CHAPTER 8
Once again it was the smell.
The coppery smell of death. And something else, tantalizingly there, then gone.
Abrahams, dressed only in a pair of blue boxers, lay on the floor of the study. Like my dad, his chest cavity had been cleaved open. Next to him was a plastic container, the kind you might carry in the trunk of your car in case you ran out of gas. A pile of torn clothes were folded carefully over the mahogany desk that stood next to the bay windows.
I stood just inside the door, between Bensen and Sanders. Bensen was watching me as if he thought I'd suddenly break into dance and wreck his crime scene. He didn't want me here. Hell, if Bensen had his way I'd be in the slammer right now for obstructing a police investigation. Lucky for me Sanders and Fulton, who arrived shortly after, had convinced him I might be able to assist his investigation.
The murder was in Bensen's precinct so, until there was strong evidence indicating a link between my parents' murder and this one, the case would remain Bensen's. Fulton persuaded Bensen that, as I was the only half-witness to my parents' murder fourteen years ago, I might be able to see some links between the two. Bensen had me wearing gloves and pull-ons over my shoes as well as a pair of plain white overalls. I felt like I was ready to paint the place. The room, however, would need more than paint after this was over. An enormous amount of blood was soaking into the polished floorboards.
"May I?" I said, indicating the body.
"Don't touch anything and stay out of the blood," said Bensen.
Yeah, like I was going to walk in as much blood as I could.
I stood over the body and watched as the gray-haired, African-American medical examiner gathered samples from underneath Abrahams' fingernails.
I felt like I was standing in two places. Here and at 22 SunnyCrest Road fourteen years ago. My vision, like a poorly tuned TV, kept flipping between my dad and Abrahams. My dad seemed just as real as the body in front of me. Not surprising, since I probably had recalled this scene every hour of my life since fourteen years ago.
"When do you think he was killed?" My voice seemed to come from a distance.
"Won't know for sure until we get him back to the lab, but roughly two or three hours ago," said the medical examiner.
That would make it between 2:00 and 3:00 p.m.
"Any other sign of injury, Dodds?" Fulton said, as he squatted down on his haunches. Fulton had been the officer in charge of my parents' murder. He had been a young, lean thirty-year-old back then. His hair was graying now but he was still as lean and hard as weathered teak. It had been a long time for the both of us.
"He has a contusion on the back of his skull. Apart from that, nothing."
Bensen turned and inspected me. "So he was struck from behind by the perp, stripped of his clothes and laid out on the floor."
"And then had his fucking heart cut out. Jesus. Do you think he was alive at the time?" said Bensen's partner, Dave Graves. An unfortunate name for someone working in homicide. He must be a big hit when meeting the family of victims. Graves was stocky, about thirty and, from the way he deferred to Bensen, had hitched his career prospects to Bensen's star.
"Judging by the amount and type of blood spatters, I'd have to say yes," said Dodds.
"Well the perp would have to be covered in blood then. Someone surely would have noticed that?" said Graves.
"Check the bathrooms and basins," said Fulton. "See if there's any sign he tried to clean up. Look for blood down the pipes. Even if he tried to wash it away there should be some residue. You need to start canvassing the neighbors while they are all out there. Someone with that much blood spatter would be pretty noticeable."
Anyone would think that Fulton was the lead on this case and not just there on Bensen's approval. Bensen might look like a mini George Hamilton but he was no dummy. He knew that Fulton could provide him with valuable insights that could help him solve the case. And all of the credit would be Bensen's.
Bensen nodded. "Graves?"
"I'm on it." Graves called over a couple of uniforms and began to issue instructions.
"I'm guessing we might have got lucky and he didn't have time to clean up." Bensen tapped the plastic container.
"W
hat is it?" Sanders said.
"Gas. The gardener must have disturbed him. Five minutes later and there would have been nothing to find but ashes."
Fulton said, "Did the gardener see anything?"
"No, he saw the body through the bay window and called it in. He didn't come inside."
"What's that on the floor? Gas?" Sanders said.
Dodds leaned over and smelled the small wet patch next to Abrahams' head.
"Doesn't smell like it," he said. "Looks like water but we'll test it back at the lab."
"What do you think? Does it appear the same as your parents?" Bensen said.
"It's the same as my dad. He also was wearing only boxers and had a contusion on the back of his head. Is he the only victim?"
"Yeah. He's single, forty-five years old and lives here alone. Works as a stockbroker on Wall Street so he's doing okay for himself."
"Not stingy with his money though, is he?" Sanders held up a photo from the mantelpiece. "This is him donating fifty thousand dollars to a shelter for abused women."
"Should have put it in to Neighborhood Watch. Then we might not be here," said Bensen. "You said your mom was killed too?"
"Yes."
"Was it the same MO as your dad?"
"No. She was stabbed to death in the kitchen. They found fifty puncture wounds in her body."
"And how old were you?"
"Fifteen."
There was silence for a moment. Dodds had stopped working on the body and was looking up at me.
"Was she naked?" asked Bensen.
"No."
"So it looks like she might have been incidental."
I stared at him and he took a step back. I felt Sanders touch my arm.
"I mean, if it was the same perp, judging by Abrahams' murder, it's evisceration of the man that this freak is after. If he wanted to kill a woman he wouldn't have done Abrahams. He would have picked a family like--"
"Like mine?" I finished.
He nodded. "Was your mother sexually assaulted?"
"No."
"Well, there you go. If it was the same perp, he wasn't after her. She just got in the way. Kind of unlucky really."
"Yeah. Unlucky."
Bensen must have sensed my bitterness. He shrugged. "What about this incision? Is it the same as your dad's?"
Abrahams' chest, cut from his clavicle to sternum, gaped open. I closed my eyes for a moment as my vision swung crazily in my mind's eye between Abrahams and my dad.
"Tan, we can do this later," Sanders whispered in my ear.
I shrugged her hand away and bent down, pointing. "My dad was cut open from the center of the clavicle to the sternum. The ribs were pulled back just like Abrahams. You'll see it in the autopsy photos, but it wasn't a jagged cut. It was smooth, just like this."
"He probably used a scalpel," said Dodds. "A scalpel will cut through the bone and cartilage just as well as a pair of shears. And it would leave a smoother edge than shears."
"Would he need special training?" Fulton said.
"You mean like a doctor? It would help but not necessarily. The incision is very precise and calculated so he knew what he was doing. He may have had some sort of medical training. On the other hand--"
"On the other hand what?" said Bensen.
"On the other hand, he just may have had a lot of practice," completed Fulton.
Dodds nodded. "Precisely. Practice, as in everything, makes perfect. Even killing."
"So you think he's done this before?" said Bensen.
"Without a doubt. He has only had to make the one incision. There is no hesitancy or doubt. There are no double cuts. He knew exactly what he was doing."
"Well, where are the other cases? Some nutcase isn't going to wait fourteen years between murders. So what the hell has he been doing for fourteen years?" said Graves.
"Some freak stealing hearts is not something we're going to miss," agreed Fulton.
Sanders tapped the drum of gas with her foot. "You forget. There wasn't going to be anything left to find. You need to check all cases where the victims were, supposedly, burnt to death."
"You think this psycho has been doing it for fourteen years and incinerating his victims?" said Bensen.
Graves' face screwed up in disgust. "Slicing people open and stealing their hearts. What kind of sick fuck does this?"
"Cupid," said Fulton.
Benson jerked his head up. "What?"
"It's what we called him. Unofficially. We didn't want the media to get wind of it. You can imagine what sort of publicity a case like this would draw."
"You're right. It would, wouldn't it?"
I could see the wheels in Bensen's mind begin to turn.
Sanders was thoughtful. "Someone this sick isn't going to wait fourteen years to kill. There must be more bodies out there somewhere."
"Fourteen years of bodies," agreed Fulton.
"Why does someone do this?" Graves' voice was steady now.
"Kill?" said Fulton.
"Yes...no. Take someone's heart. Why do that? Have you ever heard of that?"
"No."
"Why would someone do that?"
"There's a better question," I said.
"What's that?"
"What does he do with the hearts?"
CHAPTER 9
If I ever wondered about the existence of God I only had to walk twenty yards from my Winnebago to find the answer.
Mole.
And the answer was no.
The door, as usual, clicked open automatically when the CCTV camera mounted over the door picked me up. Mole was seated in his pneumatic chair, his hi-tech prosthetic hands flying over the keyboard of his computer. Florence sat in the corner watching I Dream of Jeanie. She blew smoke in my direction which, coming from Flo, was like a warm hug. She was as social as a cat with a belly ache.
"Mole, I've got a lead on Cupid."
Mole just stared at me. Okay, as he didn't have any hands or legs I didn't quite expect handsprings, but we had been searching for Cupid for fourteen years. To say Mole was reticent was like saying Angelina Jolie was kind of attractive. I didn't know if he had always been like this. I first met Mole in a VE hospital, recuperating after he had been blown up by an IED in Iraq. He was wounded and burnt so badly the doctors had no choice but to amputate his legs and hands. Who knows, before the explosion he might have been as extroverted as a stand-up comedian. Somehow, I doubted it.
Lucky for him he was like the Michael Jordan of computer hackers. Got a question you need answered? What new product is your competitor coming out with? Who was going to win this year's Oscar? What do the military really spend their budget on? Who was that girl you saw on the 8.00 a.m. train to work? Does she have a boyfriend? You ask it and Mole can answer it.
Except the one most important question in my life.
Who killed my parents?
"A forty-five-year-old male Caucasian, Gene Abrahams, was murdered at about 3:00 p.m. today in Dyker Heights. He was killed the same way as my dad. Lying on the floor in his boxers, chest cut open and heart taken. We need to find out as much as we can about Abrahams and whatever the police have."
"So, Cupid is alive?" Mole's voice was always a surprise. If I closed my eyes I could picture George Clooney speaking. It always made me wonder what he looked like before Iraq. Had he been tall? Good looking? Judging from that voice, he could have been something of a ladies man. Now he lived in the dark because the explosion had made his eyes sensitive to light. I had never tried to find out what he had looked like. The knowledge would have been too cruel.
"Yes and I know now why we never found him. He's been burning his victims."
I explained about the container of gas found next to Abrahams. Mole and I had been tracking homicides for the past fourteen years and never found a similar one. We had begun to conjecture that Cupid may have died. Why else would someone commit a crime that reeked of such intense, mental aberration and suddenly stop?
"You must have disturbed
him," Mole observed.
It had been my thought too. I had arrived home early that day after the State Championship Football game. All of the team were going to a party to celebrate, but I had Bear's dad drop me off early.
Was Cupid still in my home, doing his unspeakable things, while I was outside saying goodbye and reveling in my football victory with Bear?
"He must have slipped out the back door," I agreed. I never heard a thing, I remembered, because the only sound I could hear was my heart, beating like a drum in my ears. "We haven't found a similar homicide because I interrupted him. He planned to burn the whole house down." It was only as I uttered these words that I realized, with horror, that Jade would have been burnt alive, unconscious in her bed upstairs. All along, I had thought that Cupid had spared her for some reason. Perhaps, he wasn't a complete monster and couldn't bring himself to kill a six-year-old girl? No. He'd knocked her out and planned on burning her alive. He was evil incarnate.
"What?" I said, not hearing Mole.
"I need to go back and look at all deaths where fire has been involved."
"Even deaths ruled accidental," I agreed. "Any death occurring in a house fire."
"You have any idea how many people have been killed in house fires the past fourteen years? Look." Moles' ten alloy fingers danced across the keyboard. "One person is killed in the States by fire every one hundred and sixty nine minutes."
"Perhaps you can narrow it down only to the worst cases where the victim is severely burnt. Don't worry about deaths by asphyxiation. Cupid would use enough gas to completely immolate the body."
"He enjoys burning them," whispered Mole, his blue eyes glittering like two diamonds resting on the floor of a cracked and dried up river bed. Mole's face was white with scar tissue from the fire that ripped through the Humvee after the explosion that left him a bleeding, scarred mess. He knew what fire could do.
"Yes. They would have been terribly burnt."
"Hard to miss a body with no heart, no matter how badly burnt it is," Mole pointed out.
"I know. If he's been killing people and burning them alive an autopsy sometime would have turned up the missing heart. But we haven't had any. Not one in fourteen years. I'm missing something but I don't know what."