by E. E. Giorgi
Corpse wax.
I shoved the panel to the side and sent it sprawling against the shrubs.
Buried in the dirt was an old concrete cistern, about two feet wide and six feet long, probably a remnant of back when this part of town was farmland. The bottom was covered in black trash bags. One was torn open. Suddenly exposed to the light, from its gaping hole crawled out little creatures with multiple sets of legs: centipedes, beetles, spiders, scorpions. They ran in circles over the trash bags like a crowd of underage drinkers busted out of a bar.
“Party’s over, guys.”
I prodded the torn bag with a stick, but it felt empty. I shoved the stick in the hole and pulled. The bag came up offering no resistance, only a handful of dirt and sticks spilled from the hole. I prodded the other bags, and this time I felt something inside.
Katya got chopped up, my first thought.
The pit looked old, though, older than six weeks, when Katya Krikorian had disappeared.
I’d had enough experience with corpse wax to know that if it gets on your skin the reek will stay with you for days—corpse wax doesn’t wash off, you need to sweat it away. I gently poked a hole in the nearest bag and pried it open. What came out wasn’t a piece of sixty-two-year-old Katya. It was a charred little hand, no wider than an inch, one flimsy finger falling off right as I gently pulled it out of the bag.
A hand no wider than an inch… Damn it.
FIFTEEN
____________
The red ember of a cigarette breathed deep into the night then turned into ashes. Detective Ruben Ganzberg, from Hollenbeck Station, inhaled, a suspended look in his dark eyes, as if he were holding the woman of his dreams. He savored the cigarette in his mouth, laces of smoke curling up against the streetlight shafts.
I sat on the stairs at the bottom of the trail and rapped a finger on my knee. The medical examiner on call had agreed to meet us here at the trailhead so we could all drive together to the water tank.
Will sat patiently next to me, his nuzzle nestled on my lap.
“And you said you came to investigate a missing persons?” Ganzberg asked.
I nodded and waved to some indefinite point down the road. “Her car was found in this neighborhood.”
“Man. Life’s a bitch,” he said and took another drag. He smoked the cig all the way to the butt, then tossed it on the ground and crushed it with the heel of his shoe.
I kept digging my nose in the collar of my shirt and smelling corpse wax even though I hadn’t touched any of the bags. I was ravenous and stinky, and I tend to be in a bad mood when I’m ravenous and stinky. A little jazz in the background would’ve helped, but my car was too far and I doubted Ganzberg’s car stereo would’ve been equipped with anything different than Bruce Springsteen.
The headlights of a patrol unit washed on us. The driver’s window came down and a copper with a shaved head and a child’s face saluted us. “I brought the lights.”
“We’re still waiting for the coroner,” Ganzberg said.
The copper’s forehead corrugated. “Do you want me to radio the watch commander and try to locate him?”
“Hell no,” I said. It was no turf of mine, but I had no problem acting as if it was. “Listen to me, buddy. I want you to forget you even have that radio hooked to your belt, okay? The minute you touch it, the news hawks get here, and the minute the news hawks get here you can forget catching your perp.”
Ganzberg sucked in air. He let out a nice, complimentary swearword, and then added, “I’ll wait until I see those bodies, Presius, if you don’t mind, before deciding we even have a perp on the lam. I’ve seen enough shit in my career.”
I showed him my teeth with no effort to smile. “I don’t mind at all. You’re the one on call tonight, not me. I counted six, by the way. I’m sure your super will be thrilled.”
His foot went looking for the cigarette butt on the ground and started playing with it. “Park the vehicle, officer,” he said. And then, when the copper was out of earshot, “You know what they say about you, Presius, in the divisional rows? They say you’re an asshole. You know what else they say about you? That you’re brilliant. A brilliant asshole. Now, I have no friggin’ clue how you got ahold of six bodies of—you say—infants. You say you were looking for a sixty-two-year-old lady, and that’s what got you to a part of town where bums set up their cardboard beds at night, whores get fucked, and junkies get fixed. You say she liked to hike, and that’s how she walked straight into a body dump, and you after her. Let’s say I believe you. I want to believe you, Presius. After all, life’s a bitch to every one, you and me alike. All I ask is that you talk to me alone. I’ve seen enough shit in my career. All colors of shit, you get me? You do not address my officers. This is my part of town and I give the orders around here, understood? That way we all get along nice and smooth, and I’ll reciprocate the courtesy when I’m loaned over to your part of town. How’s that for starters?”
I pondered his nice little speech. Well delivered, I considered. I never heard of this guy, and here he comes, calling me asshole. Brilliant asshole.
I loved it. I really did. I imagined a fellow cop coming over and saying, “Hey, that dick over there? He’s a brilliant asshole.” It makes me instantly smile and want to shake the guy’s hand. It takes a lot of butting heads with the brass to get that kind of reputation in the LAPD. I’d done my part well.
I grinned, nice and slow. “Ganzberg,” I said. “What do they call you, Ganz?”
“Gaz,” he replied, studying me.
“Gaz. Who ever dumped those bodies is going to come back, and when they do, they better not find a welcome mat of yellow tape and news crews, you agree?”
He nodded, his brows knitted together in an elaborate ripple of furrows.
“So, here’s what I’d do if I were you. I’d get there, remove the corpses, then cover up the pit, spread around dead leaves and twigs, and pretend we’ve never been there. Leave a well-hidden surveillance camera, maybe two, and station a couple of blue suits out here twenty-four-seven.”
The ripple in his forehead deepened. I could almost hear the electrical flickering of his neurons. “You said one body had gone to dust. That means the pit’s pretty old.”
“It looked untouched for a few months. But somebody’s been there more recently. Visiting.”
What if Katya really walked straight to the dump? What an excellent reason to make her vanish…
A white van with the county coroner’s seal on the side pulled in front of us. The driver’s window came down, uncovering a familiar thirty-something face, unshaved, sleep-deprived, with blondish hair thinning at the temples. The face scanned us over, rested on me, and produced a thin sneer.
“Presius! What’s up with you and cadavers, eh? Is it you finding them or them finding you?”
I got up, walked around the vehicle, and opened the passenger’s door. “Shut up, Matt, or next time I’m gonna have you chase a zombie.” I let Will scramble to the back seat. “I hope you got AWD on this thing because we’re getting on a dirt road.”
* * *
The next four hours were hell. Emptying the cistern while leaving little traces was a pipe dream. Our first priority was to document everything and pull the remains out as intact as possible. I had to leave Will in Matt’s car—the mutt was sure to mess things up in the excitement of a concerto of reeks. We all got into the white LAPD coveralls and each one of us worked one side of the burial site. It was like walking on eggshells.
The stench was nauseating.
Ganzberg kept a handkerchief over his mouth whenever he could and held his breath every time he couldn’t. I stopped counting the times he’d muttered, “Life’s a bitch” under his breath.
Awakened by the lights and smells, crows came to watch the show. Perched on high branches, they cawed and bickered for the best view. Moths fluttered in our faces. Beetles crawled over the plastic bags, every flash from the photographer’s camera sending them in frenzied circles.
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Matt kneeled by the cistern and unrolled his measuring tape. “Never apply to a job ad that says, ‘Enjoyable outdoor working conditions,’ Track. There’s always a catch when they say that. This side is three feet, four inches.”
Ganzberg jotted down the information on his notepad, sketching the shape and location of the cistern.
I shone a flashlight on the tiny hand poking out of one of the bags and we all fell silent.
“Oh, shit,” Matt said.
“Life’s such a bitch,” Ganzberg felt the need to add.
The torn plastic bag was still there, on top of the others. I retrieved the stick I’d used earlier, fished it out of the pit, and let Matt vacuum the handful of dirt left inside.
“Now, here’s the thing with corpse wax,” Matt said, lying on his stomach by the edge of the tank. “Babies have enough fat that, given the right conditions, they easily turn into adipocere—what we commonly call soap, or corpse wax. To have a whole body turned into soap, though, is pretty rare. Most I’ve seen is body parts. Legs, arms. One time a whole torso and head.”
He used tongs to delicately pull the first bag onto an extended plastic pan attached to a long wooden rod.
“That must’ve been pleasant,” I said.
“It’s really like looking at a wax statue. The thing that gets you is the stench.”
Matt set the pan on the ground and pulled the edges of the bag apart with the tip of the tongs.
Ganzberg swallowed hard and took a deep breath as if about to go underwater. “Can you tell how old they are?” He gulped down air and covered his face again.
“That’s up for the examiner to say,” Matt replied. “I’m just an assistant. Problem is, corpse wax stops the tissue from decaying. The biological clock stops and there’s no way to tell how long they’ve been there. The process can take from months to years. Let’s see what we’ve got.” Matt cut through the polythene—two sealed bags, one inside the other—and for a moment I closed my eyes to let the wave of foul smell wash away. When I reopened them the sight wasn’t any more pleasant than the smell.
“It’s turned into soap, all right,” Matt said. “Which is good news, the internal organs should all be intact.”
The flash flared over the small body. We held our breaths, not for the reek this time, but rather taken by that sort of stupefied reverence you feel when in front of something sacred.
The body in the bag was perfectly preserved except for one thing.
There was no head.
Ganzberg’s shadow loomed over the corpse. I craned my head back and yelled at the officer, “Can you move the lamp closer?”
The light shifted and washed over the remains. The body was covered in a gray, waxy cast, with a round, pear-shaped belly and tiny legs still bent in a fetal position. If it weren’t for the smell, I would’ve said it was a broken doll a child had tossed away.
I examined the plastic bags. They were thick and sturdy trash bags, and while the outer one was faded, the one inside still had the Glad logo printed on it. The plastic looked ordinary polyethylene, black, thick and sturdy, with the usual wear and tear of time. Hard to tell how long it’d been dumped in there. I put the outer one in an evidence bag and labeled it for the Trace labs.
Ganzberg mumbled, “You think it could’ve been born like this?”
Matt took out a measuring tape. “Maybe. It reminds me of partial birth abortions, where they destroy the head in the uterus before delivering the fetus. Could be something like that. Or, it could be that only the lower body turned into wax and the bugs got the head.” He measured the length and girth of the body and wrote down the numbers on his clipboard. “If that’s the case we should be able to recover some of the cranial bones in the bag.”
Ganzberg and I looked inside the bag but there was nothing to the naked eye. Matt vacuumed the inside anyway and stored everything in evidence bags.
One by one, we took all six bodies out. They were all headless.
Like Matt had predicted, not all of them had completely saponified. Along the internal walls of the cistern, green lines of dried up mold accounted for past water levels, likely from flooding over the rainy season.
We tagged all bodies and zipped them up in blue bags that were too big for them. We placed the panel of corrugated metal back over the pit and covered up our tracks as best as we could. I made a few recommendations to my friend Gaz. He assured me he’d have a patrol unit on watch twenty-four-seven and issued a gag order for the press. He concluded reminding me, once again, what a bitch life was.
I rode with Matt back to my car, both our windows rolled all the way down. Crickets chirped low, monotone songs. Under the light of a crescent moon, the hills weaved the landscape in a cantabile of arcs.
Matt put the headlights out.
I flinched. “What’d you do that for?”
“Look at the moon, Track. Look at it.” He shook his head. “Those kids in the back, they’ll never see a moon like this.”
I inhaled and stared at the lights of downtown blinking in the distance. “They’ll never cry again, either.”
We wobbled down the rest of the dirt road at a lazy five miles per hour, neither of us speaking another word.
SIXTEEN
____________
Saturday, July 4
Two weeks earlier I had one missing person and one murder. Now I had one missing person, three murders, and six infanticides—possibly seven if Serology found DNA in the dust collected from the first, torn bag I’d pulled up.
I got home, dumped my clothes in the trash, and showered. It helped some.
There was no way to sleep. I tossed and turned but couldn’t get the image off my head—a headless corpse, folded onto itself in a fetal position. Defenseless.
At five the jays started screeching. At five thirty the first light of dawn crawled through the slats and reminded me I had a date with Cohen at 8 a.m.—Laura Lyons’s autopsy.
As if I hadn’t seen enough bodies in the past twenty-four hours.
I flung the bed sheets, pulled on some shirt and pants, shaved, and brewed two Mokas. I played Ahmad Jamal’s Stolen Moments on the car stereo as I drove to downtown while musing over all the stolen moments in my life.
The Five was blissfully deserted.
I found Satish pacing under the modern portico in front of the autopsy suite building, his usual latte in one hand and jingling car keys in the other.
“You look like you haven’t slept in twenty-four hours,” he said.
“I haven’t.”
I told him about my sleepless night. “I chased a ghost, found zombies instead. Maybe I’m in the wrong business.”
“Oh no, the business is right. The approach is wrong. You’re collecting murders rather than solving them.”
“Very funny, Sat. Is any of Laura’s family members coming for the show?”
He drained the last bit of his latte and tossed the cup in a trash bin. “Her sister’s coming down from Sacramento. I’m picking her up at the airport once we’re done here. Don’t think she’s interested in seeing the body, all she wanted to know was when she’d be released for the funeral.”
“That’s it? No father, mother, children?”
“She had no children. The father’s long gone and the mother’s paraplegic, lives up in Washington State.”
Laura Lyons’s autopsy wasn’t much different from Amy’s. Cohen found another fiber, on the left hand this time, which was promptly labeled and shipped to Diane’s lab. The scalp and skin harvesting had the same appearance as the ones found on Amy’s body, and the laceration of the face and neck were again consistent with an attack while still alive, followed by strangulation from behind.
The funneling indentation on the left edge of the ligature mark had our attention for a good ten minutes. Cohen measured its depth, width, shape—everything, and yet we couldn’t come up with anything that could possibly match it. A synthetic scarf with a brooch or large bead was our closest bet, though that would’ve
likely left other telltale marks rather than a smooth indentation.
I stepped out of the autopsy suite to breathe in fresh air, yet the smell of corpse, now mingled with corpse wax, kept following me. It filled my car when I slid behind the wheel, it lingered in my nostrils even when I rolled all the windows down and blasted the stereo to numb all my senses. I got home, started a new Moka, drank my espresso, then brewed another one. Which is not the equivalent of one mug of Americano. Never.
I was groggy and still in a bad mood. The fact that it was Saturday and, coincidentally, the Fourth of July, didn’t help.
I picked up the paper from the driveway and sat on the back porch waiting for the caffeine to percolate to my brains. Will wrapped himself around my legs and stared at me lovingly.
Every man needs an admirer. It’s an ego thing.
Caffeine or not, you try putting a warm, purring thing around your legs and, assuming you’ve had a really rough night, and a really rough day before that, count the seconds before you fall asleep…
…
Get the phone.
The phone kept ringing.
Get the damn phone.
The phone quieted down. I dozed off again. Then it rang again, and the ring was louder and angrier. It made me jump.
“Damn it.” I opened my eyes. Will had vanished and left a cold spot on my lap. I wondered what time it was, but in order to find out I had to get the phone. Which was still ringing. I staggered out of the chaise and back inside.
“Yello?”
“You better have a good excuse, Track. You’re forty minutes late.”
Damn it. It was Saturday, July Fourth, two forty p.m.
* * *
Diane Kyle wrapped her firing hand around the grip and lined her arms with the barrel. The sun glinted off her eyeshades. Her stance was solid, her knuckles too white.
Loosen up the grip.
After she’d been attacked twice last year, her dad bought her a Sig Sauer P226. A fine piece, but with a five-pound trigger squeeze and over two pounds on the waist when tucked into a holster, I could see how Diane was having a hard time falling in love with it.