by Chelsea Cain
“Yep,” Archie said. Henry was supposed to work with a therapist twice a week. But it was hard to keep appointments as a cop. Homicides had a way of cropping up at inconvenient times.
The soft bed of cedar needles on the ground under the body was soaked with blood, and as Archie inched closer to the victim he was careful to stay on the outside edge of it. Blood draining from a victim who is still alive will coagulate. It’s what stops people from bleeding to death every time they nick a finger slicing a bagel. Assuming you don’t open an artery, an open wound won’t gush; it will pour something red and thick and sticky, like honey. Coagulated blood still hung from the corpse’s feet in viscous strings.
Standing there, Archie was almost eye to eye with the corpse. The killer had suspended his victim at that height intentionally, Archie thought, so that they could stand nose to nose. It put the killer at around Archie’s height, five-ten.
It had not been an easy death. A makeshift gag had been stuffed in the dead man’s mouth, forcing his jaw so far open that his chin nearly touched his neck and his cheeks bulged. Rigor had caused his lips to peel back, so that his teeth and gums grinned madly around the gag, making his mouth appear all the larger. His face was frozen with pain, forehead muscles contracted, dark brows raised, crow’s-feet splintering into his hairline. His eyelids had contracted, revealing a flat, fixed gaze. With the exception of his head and arms, his entire body was glazed in blood.
“Take a close look,” Robbins said.
Archie leaned forward. He could make out brown body hair on the dead man’s shoulders. He let his eyes travel down the body and saw the same fine hair on the man’s thighs, thicker and curlier around his genitals. Walking in a slow circle around the corpse, cedar needles crunching under his feet, Archie saw, amid the rivulets of blood, freckles, patches of skin, surrounded by red. The man had not been completely skinned from the neck down. The killer had taken his pound of flesh only from the man’s chest and abdomen. The victim had then been allowed to bleed. A lot. Slowly.
Archie was aware of Henry stepping back beside him. Archie had to fight his instinct to nursemaid Henry now that he was back on the job. He didn’t ask how he was doing every ten minutes. He didn’t ask if he was making his physical therapy appointments, or try to help him get out of the car. No special attention. That was how Henry wanted it. Now Archie gave his old friend a few moments to survey the scene. It didn’t take long for Henry to come to the same conclusion Archie had reached. Henry scratched the stubble on his head and adjusted his sunglasses. The bloody corpse was reflected in his mirrored lenses. “The amount of blood on the ground,” Henry said. “He was still alive when he was tortured.”
“The wounds look premortem,” Robbins agreed. “He’s been dead four to six hours.”
Archie batted away a fly. Cautious people didn’t kill in public places. Cautious people killed in rented apartments and on lonely roads and in the backs of stolen vans. It took a special kind of someone to commit murder. It took a special kind of special to commit murder in a public place, and to take time doing it. It didn’t bode well. People who didn’t make logical choices were hard to predict, which made them hard to catch.
“Park closes at midnight, opens at five A.M.,” Henry said. “So if they came in a vehicle it was last night or this morning.”
“You’re assuming they came in together by car,” Robbins said.
“Maybe the victim came of his own free will,” Archie said. “Maybe they met in the park. Maybe they walked.”
“Or cycled,” Robbins said. “On a tandem.”
Henry ignored him. “No one matching his profile has been reported missing today,” Henry said.
“Do they sweep the park at night looking for cars?” Archie asked.
“They’re supposed to,” Henry said.
It was a big park. A little recon to discover which areas of the park weren’t swept on that final patrol, and the killer could have driven his victim in, tortured and killed him, and then driven out after the gates went up in the morning.
It was one forty-five P.M. The body had been found an hour before. Archie could make out the scars in the dirt where the cyclist had lost control and skidded ten feet before wrapping his mountain bike around the trunk of a cedar. The bike was still there, on its side, one wheel bent. A cracked rearview mirror had snapped from the handlebar and lay on the ground a few feet away.
Underneath the darkened canopy of conifers, Archie counted the mounted spotlights of at least three television news crews. The cameras winked, light reflecting off the lenses. The police tape perimeter had been generous, but with a zoom lens and some creative angling, those cameras could get a shot of the body.
“We need to get him down,” Archie said.
“Just waiting for the word, boss,” Robbins said. He dug into his open ME kit, snapped out two pairs of latex gloves, and held them out to Archie and Henry.
Archie stretched the gloves over his hands. Even after a year, the left one still looked wrong without a wedding ring.
A few flies buzzed around the corpse’s head. One landed on his open eye, fluttered its wings for a moment, and then flew off.
Robbins unrolled a white body bag on the ground and then unzipped it. Body-bag zippers did not sound like other zippers. The big plastic slider grinding against all those plastic teeth, down the side and across the bottom in a J-shape, carried a special menace. Robbins flicked open a medical-looking blade and handed it to Archie. “You cut,” he said. “I’ll catch.”
“What about me?” Henry asked.
“You stand there and if I shout that my back has given out, help me. Otherwise, try not to contaminate my crime scene.”
There was a white plastic step stool already set up near the body, and Archie climbed up on it with the knife in his hand. The rope around the corpse’s wrists didn’t look remarkable, and neither did the knotting, but Archie still hesitated.
“Photographed it from every angle,” Robbins said.
Robbins was the best ME Archie had ever worked with. There was no more discussion. Archie gripped the branch with one hand and started to saw at the rope with the other. Robbins stepped behind the body and placed his gloved palms on the dead man’s back. When the rope gave, the dead man dropped an inch to the ground. He did not slouch back or crumple in a heap. He dropped straight down, like a lawn dart, his arms frozen straight up above his head, stiff with rigor, his toes pointed. Robbins eased him back into the waiting body bag, like a piece of furniture.
Zip.
Robbins stood up. His latex gloves and the arms of his Tyvek suit were smeared with blood. “Hands look okay,” he said. “I should be able to lift a good set of prints.”
Archie unwound the rope from the branch and stepped back to the ground.
“We’ve searched the immediate area. No sign of his clothes.”
“Check the trash cans throughout the park,” Archie said. “And see if anything’s floating in the reservoir.”
Henry held out an evidence bag and Archie dropped the rope in it.
“Not exactly a cornucopia of clues,” Henry said.
“There’s one more,” Archie said. He squatted alongside the body bag, and pulled open the zipper to expose the dead man’s head. Then he reached into the corpse’s gaping mouth, dislodged the gag, and pulled it out. It was a fist of white and yellow rubber, caked with dried saliva. Archie had to use both hands to carefully tug the ball open, turning it inside out and separating the two parts, the rubber peeling apart with a final sticky snap to reveal a pair of yellow kitchen gloves.
Archie held the gloves out to Robbins. “Print them,” Archie said.
CHAPTER
4
Susan Ward gave a great hand job.
It hadn’t come easy. She had read books. She had practiced. It had been, at times, a slog. But she had overcome her general lack of manual coordination and mastered the technique.
She pressed her palm flat against the fly of Leo’s slacks an
d held it, feeling the heat of his body under her fingers. He was wearing a skinny black Italian leather belt and she unbuckled it and unhooked the tab of his pants and slid her hand underneath his boxers.
She loved this part, the promise of it—the control.
He started to say something. “Shhh,” Susan said.
The hallway to the bathrooms was dark. But Susan had positioned herself so that she could see back into the restaurant bar where they’d been sitting. She could see the massive dark wood countertop, the TVs above it, the lunch crowd perched on tall chairs, downing their tapas and wine. She’d see anyone coming. Then again, with her bright orange hair—a shade of Manic Panic called Electric Lava—they’d be sure to see her. That was part of the thrill, the tension that came with the possibility of public humiliation. It made Susan’s face hot and the arms of her skin prickly.
Leo’s breathing quickened.
God, he was pretty. He was the prettiest boyfriend Susan had ever had. She gazed up at his face, his pale smooth complexion and his dark hair, those eyelashes. She licked her lips and kissed him lightly on the chin, feeling a warm flutter move through her lips, down her neck and chest, to her center.
She kept her hand moving—green glittery nails, bitten to the quick—teasing him. His face didn’t change. She liked that, his self-control. He watched her with his dark eyes, mouth turned up in a slight smile, his expression registering only the tiniest amount of surprise. But he was alive under her hands, his body responding to her touch. She used one hand to free him from his trousers, careful not to break rhythm, listening to her own internal metronome.
Leo’s breaths came long and slow now, like he was concentrating on them, but his expression did not change.
It took two hands to execute a hand job. She ringed her thumb and forefinger around the base of the target. A gay friend had taught her that. It heightened engorgement. But mostly it made the target look bigger, which, Susan had learned, was incredibly important to every guy on the planet. The other hand was trickier. Twist. Roll. Twist.
It was not an easy maneuver. The first couple of times Susan had tried it, her arm cramped up and she’d had to ice it. Nothing breaks the mood like a freezer gel pack.
But she had practiced since then, and could now Twist Roll Twist like a concert pianist, which is to say, elegantly and by body memory. In fact, she had found that it helped to not think about it, and to just let her hand Twist Roll Twist on its own.
She breathed in Leo’s smell, the spice of his expensive aftershave, the tobacco of his occasional cigarette, the starch of the shirt. She felt light-headed and content. Leo swallowed hard and flattened a palm on the wall behind her.
She could feel his rhythm. The target was on course. There was no turning back. He was all hers.
Susan leaned her head contentedly onto his chest, her eyes just above his shoulder, looking out toward the bar. Making a guy come gave her an inordinate amount of satisfaction. She was pondering the psychological significance of that when the “Breaking News” graphics on the TV caught her attention. It had only been three months since she’d been fired from the Herald, and she still had a Pavlovian reaction anytime she saw those two words. Her pupils dilated. Her heart rate increased. Her muscles tensed.
Leo put his hand on her breast.
Susan pressed herself into his palm, still keeping one eye on the TV.
Leo’s eyelids were heavy, his lips open. Twist. Roll. Twist. But the TV news headlines kept calling to her. Murder. Torture. Mount Tabor.
There was a helicopter shot of a thicket of trees. Then a ground shot, taken from a distance, of a blurred body hanging from a branch. She saw Lorenzo Robbins next to the body, recognizable with his dark skin and white Tyvek suit.
Leo came, catching her by surprise. His stomach muscles clenched and a spurt of hot semen shot between them through her hand.
And at that exact moment, Susan saw someone else she recognized on TV. He was also standing next to the body. Something in the woods seemed to catch his eye and he looked up, right at the camera, right into the restaurant, right at her, standing there with Leo Reynolds’s dick in her hands.
“Archie,” she said.
CHAPTER
5
Archie stood in the parking lot feeling the sweat congeal on the back of his neck. It was mid afternoon now, and the heat was starting to radiate off the asphalt. The Life Works Center for Young Women was located in an old three-story house in Southeast Portland, in a neighborhood full of rambling old wooden houses, most of them long since converted to apartments. The front of the house was painted pastel pink, but the sides and back were lemon yellow, as if whoever had been painting the house had gotten busy, or distracted, or just forgot to come back and finish the job. The house had a big covered front porch, a front yard planted with overgrown vegetables, and a neighboring lot that had been paved over with black asphalt to create off-street parking.
The blood-splattered basket of laundry was in the parking lot, between two silver Priuses. Priae? Archie didn’t know.
Blood spatter came in three categories: passive, transfer, and projected. Passive bloodstains were caused by gravity. Blood dripping off a butcher knife, blood pooling around a body, blood dribbling down a chair leg. It was relatively neat and contained.
Transfer blood spatter occurred when wet blood was transferred from a primary surface to a secondary one. Then it got tracked around on the nice clean carpet leaving boot prints, or smeared from a palm onto a windowsill, or wiped on someone’s jacket. Transfer blood was ugly and messy, but it meant clues—fingerprints, shoe size, a bloodstained item of clothing in the killer’s closet.
Projected blood spatter was much more interesting. It was created by force, by impact, something greater than gravity, like, say, a fist, hammer, baseball bat, or car windshield. It spurted, gushed, sprayed, and misted—it made art.
It told a story.
The bloodstains on the white sheets in the laundry basket were projected spatter. Tiny drops of various sizes created a constellation of red on the white sheets, like paint flicked from a paintbrush. The drops were elongated, with rounded tips and tails, revealing the direction of the blow. The crime scene investigators would measure the length and width of the bloodstains, plug the results into trigonometry equations, and use a computer program to reveal the point of origin and the exact impact angle. Archie didn’t remember the trig he took in high school being nearly that interesting.
The bamboo that formed a hedge between the house and an adjoining property swayed gently in the breeze, and the hollow stalks knocked together softly like a wind chime. The garden had been freshly composted and the air carried a faint smell of sun-baked manure. Overhead, the clear sky was streaked with jet contrails.
“We haven’t touched it,” Bea Adams said. “If that’s what you’re thinking.”
Archie had been quiet for too long. He did that sometimes. He knew it made people nervous, but he couldn’t help it.
“Of course,” Archie said.
Bea Adams was the director of the Life Works Center. Gray hair sprang from her head in electric spirals, and she wore a pocketed linen smock over a turtleneck even though it had to be ninety-five degrees. Her glasses had red plastic frames with orange stars on them. A red kabbalah string encircled one wrist. “Is it him?” she asked. “I heard the story on public radio. The body in the park. I thought Jake had gone home. Then I came out here and found this.” She fluttered a hand at the basket and then lifted it to her mouth. “God, he’s not dead, is he?”
The blood spatter was significant, a hard blow, but not a fatal one. The body on Mount Tabor had skull damage. “When did you last see Mr. Kelly?” Archie asked.
“A little after eight,” she said. “He volunteers in the kitchen for the breakfast shift. He stayed late cleaning up. I told him he didn’t have to.”
Archie gave Henry a look, thinking of the rubber kitchen gloves they’d found at the crime scene.
The time fra
me fit. Archie checked his watch. It was almost three P.M. “You didn’t notice his car was still here before then?” Archie asked.
She looked around at the three silver Priuses in the parking lot.
“Right,” Archie said. Every other car in Portland was a Prius or a Subaru.
Archie heard his name and looked up to see Henry motioning for him to come over. “Excuse me,” Archie said to Bea, and he walked over to where Henry was lurking in the shade of the bamboo. Henry held up his cell phone and said, “Kelly’s not picking up his phone.” He added, “And I sent a unit over to his house, and he’s not answering the door.” A patrol cop came over and handed Henry a DMV photo printout. They could do that now—enter data in a dashboard computer and out spits a photo. Archie and Henry both looked at the image off of Jake Kelly’s driver’s license. The laser quality wasn’t great, but he could have been the man in the park.
Archie scanned the eaves of the house for cameras. The center was a nonprofit group home for teenage girls. Some were court-referred for repeated minor offenses—shoplifting, fighting, property damage—others had been expelled from every high school in town, some had been kicked out of one too many foster homes. They were all, in one way or another, difficult. The center offered the girls a chance to get their GED and the possibility of a life that might not include prison.
“Any surveillance?” Archie called to Bea.
“No,” she said.
Archie didn’t ask why. No money? A gesture of trust? It didn’t really matter. It was the same result: no photographic evidence. Robbins was comparing the corpse’s teeth to Jake Kelly’s dental records right now. But based on the evidence so far, Archie was fairly confident they’d have a match.
“You do background checks?” Archie asked Bea.
“Sure,” she said. “We get state funding. It’s required.” Kelly would have been fingerprinted for the check, but the state destroyed fingerprint cards after the applications were approved. Still, the forms would provide a wealth of other information. Next of kin, past jobs.