by Dan Mahoney
Dwyer had called himself Josephine Stacy Dwyer, and like Winthrop, had a fair complexion and small, feminine breasts. Strangulation had been the ultimate cause of death.
The difference between the Winthrop and Dwyer cases was the object that had been used for sexual penetration and the hair color of the victims. There had been no semen found at either crime scene, but in the Dwyer case, the killer had left an enormous white dildo protruding from his victim’s anus. Winthrop’s blond hair was long like Dwyer’s. Dwyer had dyed his brown hair strawberry blond, which brought McKenna to another point that linked three murder cases closer together and made him think harder.
Dwyer’s dyed hair was very close to Meaghan’s natural color. Like Meaghan, Dwyer had also been born in Ireland, and McKenna wondered if more similarities among the three victims would come up as the day progressed.
The Dwyer case still irritated McKenna whenever he thought about it. The small, filthy room yielded hundreds of fingerprints, but none matched those of any known sex offenders. McKenna had been able to get from the desk clerk a fairly good physical description of the monster who had checked in with Dwyer, enough of a description to have the Artists Unit make up a sketch.
Then, after a week of asking around, McKenna had located Dwyer’s boyfriend, Roberto Da Silva. The boyfriend had also served as Dwyer’s street protection and pimp. Da Silva hadn’t been the slightest bit effeminate, but he had loved his Josephine Dwyer. Loved him, but not enough to stabilize the terror and fear he had felt whenever he thought about the man who had tortured and killed his mate and best friend. It had taken McKenna two days of coaxing before he had been able to induce Da Silva to reveal the details of what had happened the night of the murder.
Dwyer had been working the stretch of Tenth Avenue on the West Side where many of the prostitutes, both females and transvestites, plied their trade. Da Silva had also been around, standing on Tenth Avenue and West 13th Street, his usual corner. One part of his job was to yell to Dwyer whenever he saw a radio car approach and the other was to protect his friend from the occasional band of drunken teenagers who sometimes cruised the area, harassing the transvestite prostitutes.
Around three in the morning on the night of the murder, Da Silva had seen a blue, beat-up Chevy Nova pull up to where Dwyer was standing. There had been one white man in the car, a good prospective customer as far as Da Silva was concerned. The man and Dwyer had talked for a moment, then Dwyer gave the signal to Da Silva that the deal had been made. Following their usual procedure for so late at night, Da Silva had gone over to get a look at the customer before Dwyer had gotten into the car.
That had been the last time that Da Silva ever saw his friend, but he had done something else that had caused McKenna’s heart to skip a beat. Da Silva had memorized the plate number of the Chevy Nova.
McKenna’s joy had been short-lived. The car had been reported stolen in the Bronx the night before the murder, and it had already been recovered and returned to its owner. The police had found it empty in the Woodlawn section of the Bronx.
McKenna had brought Da Silva to the Artists Unit to have another sketch made. It had been so close to the previous sketch that McKenna had felt sure he would eventually get his man.
But he hadn’t. After weeks of hanging around Tenth Avenue late at night and after checking with homicide squads and sex crimes squads all over the Northeastern U.S., McKenna had been ordered by his squad commander to give up the chase. Like all unsolved homicide cases, it had been left open, but once McKenna left the Manhattan South Homicide Squad, another detective had been assigned to do the required annual report that stated, “Case open, no further results.”
Then McKenna remembered something peculiar about the case and he went through the Winthrop morgue notes. By the time he put the photos back in the envelope, he was almost certain that he was once again looking for the same killer. In the Dwyer case, the victim’s nipples had never been found, and neither had Winthrop’s.
McKenna lay down on the bed, fully dressed, and tried to clear his head. The Dwyer case still bothered him and he usually tried not to think about it, but it was once again very much on his mind as he stretched out in the presidential suite of the Saga Hotel, three thousand miles from that other very different kind of hotel where Joseph Dwyer had suffered and died.
Worse, McKenna realized, was that because he hadn’t caught that killer then in New York, Meaghan Maher had also suffered and died horribly. That thought made McKenna feel like crying. He knew that eventually, he might.
McKenna had picked up Chris O’Malley at his room, given him two Dramamine tablets, and they were waiting outside the hotel when Thor surprised them by walking out of a side door halfway down the building from where they were standing. In contrast to O’Malley’s ashen appearance, Thor looked positively elated. He was carrying a clear plastic envelope in his hand and a yellow piece of paper was visible inside.
“Where you been?” McKenna asked him.
“Heaven in a garbage heap. I’ve got it,” Thor answered, giving the envelope to McKenna.
It was Meaghan Maher’s receipt from the Hotel Loftleidir. It was folded in four, but in one corner her name was typed in blue print. “What now?” McKenna asked.
“Get lucky, stay lucky. After lunch, I’m going to take this to headquarters and see if there are any prints on it. If there are, I’m coming back here to take elimination prints of all the hotel employees who had anything to do with sorting out the garbage. Last stop will be the Hotel Loftleidir to take the prints of the desk clerk who gave the killer this receipt.”
“You’re going to have to be really lucky if somebody else’s prints didn’t smudge the killer’s prints, if they even are on this wonderful piece of paper,” McKenna said.
“Then the good thing is, I usually am lucky.”
Good detectives usually are, McKenna thought, aware that other NYPD detectives frequently swore that he was the luckiest detective on the Job.
“Ready for the morgue?” Thor asked.
“No, but we might as well get it over with. Where’s your car?”
“In the lot, but we can walk if you want. It’s not far from here.”
“Then the walk will do us good. We’ll all probably need some air by the time we leave there,” McKenna said, then turned to O’Malley. “Walking okay by you, Chris?”
“Whatever you say, but you both might wind up carrying me back here.”
It was smaller and cleaner than most morgues McKenna had been in, but there was no disguising where they were. Morgues around the world shared that same antiseptic smell that made McKenna’s stomach jump.
The morgue attendant in the crisp and starched white uniform stood in front of the double row of large stainless steel doors with his hand on the handle of door number one. “Ready?” he asked the three men in line facing him. All nodded weakly, so the attendant swung the refrigerator door open and grabbed the handle on the stainless steel tray inside. He pulled just enough to slide the tray out three feet. The body was covered by a spotless white sheet. The attendant pulled the sheet back to expose the battered and swollen face of a red-haired young girl.
McKenna heard a gasp and then O’Malley fainted dead away so suddenly that McKenna and Thor barely had time to catch him before he fell. They lowered him to the tiled white floor and McKenna cradled O’Malley’s head in his lap.
“I’d say that’s a positive identification,” McKenna suggested to Thor, but the big Icelander just shook his head.
The attendant left and returned a moment later with a glass of water, an ampoule of smelling salts, and a pillow. McKenna took the pillow from him and placed it under O’Malley’s head. Then he took the offered ampoule and broke it under O’Malley’s nose.
The effect was instant. O’Malley’s eyes opened wide and he shook his head from side to side, trying to rid his nostrils of the smell. He tried to stand up, but McKenna placed his hand on O’Malley’s chest. “Chris, just lie there and relax for a
few minutes. Have some water before you get up,” he suggested.
“You’re right. Good idea,” O’Malley said. He laid his head back down on the pillow and closed his eyes.
McKenna patted him on the shoulder, then stood up and took a good look at the dead girl’s face. She had been scrubbed clean, so there was no blood visible, but there was no hiding the bruises on her face and around her neck. Both eyes were swollen shut, her nose was broken, and her lips sunk into her toothless mouth. Although he had seen at least a hundred photos of Meaghan Maher and would have said with confidence that he would know her anywhere, at that moment he wasn’t totally sure that the battered face on the tray in front of him was hers. She had four earring holes in each ear, but McKenna needed more. He bent over and put his hand on O’Malley’s forehead.
O’Malley opened his eyes and stared up at him. The morgue attendant passed the glass of water down to McKenna and he held it to O’Malley’s lips. O’Malley drank half the water in the glass before he shook his head and McKenna gave it back to the attendant.
“Chris, I want you to think hard,” McKenna said softly. “What is there about Meaghan’s body that makes her different from every other girl in the world? What particular thing is there about her that would make you say, ‘That’s my Meaghan, I’d know her anywhere’?”
O’Malley’s brow furrowed in concentration, then he shook his head. “Nothing, really. Not a thing I can think of.”
“No marks, no moles, no bumps, no little something?”
O’Malley thought some more, then gave McKenna the best smile he could give under the circumstances.
“Where and what is it?” McKenna asked.
“I’ve never actually seen it, but I’ve felt it,” O’Malley said, his face getting redder. “She’s got a little mole under her hair on the left side of her head, right behind her ear.”
“Good. Thank you. Now just lie there and relax for a few minutes more.” McKenna stood back up and sifted with his fingers through the red hair at the place O’Malley had described. It was Meaghan. Certainly not good news, but the positive identification made necessary the next unpleasant chore.
McKenna slid the body tray all the way out and took a deep breath. He pulled the sheet completely off and his breath left his body in an involuntary rush. As he stared down at the horribly tortured body, he felt himself get dizzy, then felt Thor’s strong grasp on his shoulder.
McKenna didn’t move until his head cleared. “Thanks, Thor. I’m going to be all right,” he said, and Thor removed his hand. And McKenna was all right. It was the anger that helped and kept him focused on the task at hand.
It was bad, maybe even worse than it had been for Dwyer and Winthrop, McKenna decided. The body had been autopsied, but he felt that even that invasive procedure hadn’t done more damage to her dead body than the killer had done to her when she was still alive. The rope burns were there on her ankles and wrists, indicating the spots where she had been tied to the bed legs. There were more burns and bruises all over Meaghan, but most of the cigarette burns were centered around her breast and vaginal areas. Her nipples had been pulled off her petite breasts and her vagina had been ripped open, but, horrible as it was to see and think about, McKenna had expected that.
What drew McKenna’s attention were Meaghan’s hands. All her fingers were gone from the first joint down, but they hadn’t been cut off as he had expected. The bone was showing through where each finger had been, and the skin and thin muscles were shredded around it.
McKenna bent over and looked closely at her left hand, at the place where her index finger should have been. What was left of the bone of the top joint was cracked, chipped, and shaved. He picked her hand up and looked at the other side of the bone. It was in the same condition.
McKenna was sure of what the killer had done, but he didn’t want to say it in front of O’Malley. The fiend had bitten her fingers off, one by one. McKenna fervently hoped that Meaghan had been dead by that time, but suspected that she hadn’t been.
With Thor’s help, McKenna replaced the sheet over the body, leaving just her face exposed again, then looked down at O’Malley. The big man was watching him with the most apprehensive look McKenna had ever seen.
No easy way to say this, McKenna thought as he bent over O’Malley again. “Chris, I’m sorry. It’s her.”
Willing disbelief showed in O’Malley’s eyes. “It’s Meaghan? Are you sure?”
“Yes, it’s Meaghan and I’m sure,” McKenna answered softly.
For a moment, O’Malley appeared to accept the news and McKenna thought it wasn’t going to be as bad as he had figured it would be. But only for a moment. Then O’Malley broke down and sobbed, loudly and with abandon.
McKenna and Thor didn’t say another word and let O’Malley go on until he cried himself out. It took a while, but finally he did. This time McKenna didn’t bend over to speak to him. “Chris, there’s something to be done here and you have to do it. I’ve already told you that it’s Meaghan, but it’s not officially her until you tell me it is. You have to stand up, look at her face, and then say, ‘I know this person. I’m certain that this is the body of Meaghan Maher.’”
“Suppose I don’t do that or say that?”
“Then she can’t get a proper burial, yet. She waits for her mother or her brother to come here, all the way to Iceland, just to do the hard job you should be doing for them. Is that the way it should be?”
“No. What happens, once I say it’s her?”
“Then we try to forget all about it for as long as we can. We leave here, we go back to the hotel to straighten you up, and then we go to Thor’s house and we try to eat because his wife is making us lunch.”
“I don’t think I can ever eat again,” O’Malley said with conviction.
“Sooner or later, you will. Now get up and do your job like the man I know you are.”
O’Malley took a moment to compose himself and stiffen his resolve, then pushed himself to his feet.
Thirteen
Maybe, as he had said, O’Malley would never eat again, but it was soon evident to all that eating had nothing to do with drinking. He hadn’t even sat at the table as Frieda served the salmon steaks cooked in her special cream sauce, potatoes au gratin, and her homemade apples-and-rasberries concoction to Thor and McKenna. Instead, O’Malley just sat in a chair in the corner of the room, drinking Scotch straight from the bottle, saying not a word, and paying not the least bit of attention to the polite dinner conversation shared by McKenna, Thor, and Frieda. He was lost in his own world, or what was left of it.
By unspoken agreement, not a word about the bombing or Meaghan was mentioned over dinner. Instead, they talked about Thor and Frieda, how they met, and the life they had made for themselves together. It was a story so bizarre that McKenna wasn’t sure, at first, that they weren’t putting him on.
Ten years before, Frieda had been a fun-loving lady who made good money as a featured stripper at one of Reykjavík’s hot night spots. Being enterprising, she had made a little extra money by dealing recreational drugs to her fans during her breaks in the wee hours. Eventually, this small enterprise of hers had become known to the Icelandic authorities who wink at nothing and tolerate very few slips. Thor had been assigned to investigate and bring an end to this impending collapse of public morality.
Investigate he did, and before long he had developed enough information on Frieda to accomplish his mission. But a major problem had developed. Along the way the straight-arrow Thor had fallen in love with the loose and exotic Frieda. Sometimes opposites do attract, because Frieda had also gone head-over-heels for her investigating constable, soon to be her arresting officer. They had become involved in an intolerable situation, so they had sat down to talk it over and search for some solution.
“And?” McKenna asked, waiting for the punch line.
“Really, there was no solution,” Thor said simply.
McKenna thought he knew better than that. “No soluti
on? But you’re here together. How did that happen?”
“I did my job and Frieda did her time.”
McKenna was astounded as he looked back and forth from Thor to Frieda, waiting for one of them to crack a smile. They didn’t. “You put her in jail?” he finally asked, settling on Thor. “Are you telling me you put the woman you love in jail?”
Thor had nothing more to say, so it was Frieda who tried to explain. “I was younger and I wasn’t thinking correctly about my life. I knew I was doing wrong, but I didn’t care. I had no direction until I met Thor. Then I saw in him the type of person I wanted to be, but there was only one way I could be that person and still keep Thor.”
“Jail?”
“Yes, jail. We had a nice dinner and Thor brought me in. I pled guilty, and then I did my two years in prison.”
“Two years? Had you ever been arrested before?”
“No, I had been lucky.”
“So it’s two years for a first-time small-scale drug offense? You do two years for that here?”
Frieda couldn’t see what it was about her sentence that was bothering McKenna, but she saw that further explanation was necessary. “Two years was what my crime called for. Our judges have very little latitude when it comes to sentencing, no matter who the prisoner knows or how sorry she is for the crimes she’s committed.”
“In Iceland, the law is the law,” Thor said, feeling a need to explain further. “We are a very old democracy, the oldest in Europe. The elected representatives of the people enact the laws, and it’s expected that they will be obeyed. If we allowed exceptions, then the people would question the fairness of our system, wouldn’t they?”