Hush

by Anne Frasier

  She couldn't quit looking at the objects in the living room, each telling a more personal story about the owner. Origami; more watercolors, these of flowers; a black lacquered box; a silk pillow.

  A world of their own. A sweet, safe haven.

  God damn it. God, God damn it.

  She wanted to reroot the bonsai tree, but she knew she wasn't to touch anything. Normally a crime scene remained a crime scene for two or three days. After that, the plant could be picked up. By then it would probably be too late. It was probably too late already. Roots could only be exposed to the air for a short time before the plant died.

  In the kitchen area, on the refrigerator, was a birth announcement.

  Years ago, Chicago papers used to routinely publish all the births within Cook County. That was done away with during the reign of the Madonna Murderer, and even though the murders stopped, the announcements never resumed. Most people didn't even think about it. Most people wouldn't have been able to tell you why birth announcements were no longer in the paper. But Ivy knew.

  She forced herself to look elsewhere, to move in the direction of the hallway. Low voices could be heard floating from the bedroom. From inside came the click and whir of a camera shutter. A white flash lit the hall again and again and again.

  The room was crowded, and it suddenly occurred to her that Irving must have called her as an afterthought. The experts were wrapping things up. All the discussions had taken place. Party's over.

  It was a group of professionals doing their job. The medical examiner had apparently been there and gone. One woman was snapping pictures, another running a video camera. Two men, one in a suit, one in a black trench coat—probably officers from the mobile crime-scene lab—were bagging evidence. Around their necks hung white masks used to keep them from inhaling fingerprint powder. Two other men, possibly the coroner and his assistant, seemed to be waiting. Another man, Max Irving, stood over the bed. He had a tablet in his gloved hands, taking notes.

  He was wearing jeans.

  Well. Thank God she'd dressed appropriately, she thought, squelching a sense of hysteria that had been building in her ever since she'd stepped into the building. Incongruous thoughts come to a person at a time like this.

  Because it really wasn't the jeans that concerned her. It was what lay beyond the jeans, still within her field of vision, but blurred. Like peering through the lens of a camera, her depth of field grew and the background slowly came into focus. Past those jeans she saw a woman's bare legs dangling from the side of the bed, one foot almost touching the floor, the other slightly higher.

  She thought of the bonsai tree. She thought of the woman crying behind the dark door.

  Young legs. Pretty legs. Legs splattered with blood.

  The room smelled like a baby, like powder and bath soap. It also smelled like blood, and urine, and feces.

  Next to the bed was a white wicker bassinet with a mobile attached.

  White wicker.

  She moved across the bedroom to the bassinet. She looked inside.

  The infant seemed to be sleeping peacefully. Just lying there so sweetly. But upon closer inspection, she could see a tinge of blue around his eyes, his lips, his tiny fingernails.

  "A boy?" she asked, knowing the answer.

  Max looked up from his notebook, obviously surprised to see that she'd gotten there so quickly. Or gotten there at all.

  "Yeah. Born a week ago. The mother is Sachi Anderson. The grandmother, Sachi's mother, is downstairs giving a statement."

  The grandmother. So. That's who was sobbing downstairs.

  He reached into the back pocket of his jeans, pulled out a pair of white latex gloves, and handed them to her. Without comment, she took them and slipped them on.

  Inside the bassinet, tucked near the foot of the mattress, was a snow-globe music box. The killer's signature. He always left a gift for the baby.

  "Go ahead. We're done with the baby."

  Done with the baby. As if the child were nothing.

  She lifted out the music box. Inside the cheap glass globe was a mother holding an infant. Unfortunately there was nothing very unique about it. It was something that would have been mass-produced and sold fairly cheaply.

  She found the mechanism at the bottom and wound it just one turn, then released the catch. The tune was familiar:

  Hush little baby, don't say a word.

  The camera finally stopped clicking. Orbs of light floated in front of her.

  "That's that," the photo deputy said. "Let's roll her over."

  They rolled the body over, then the camera shutter began clicking again.

  Ivy shut off the music box and put it in the bassinet.

  When she turned, the dead woman was on her back, and the guy in the trench coat was bent over her. Ivy watched as he cut strands of straight dark hair from the woman's head and put them in an evidence bag. He did the same with her pubic hair. Then he clipped her fingernails and put the clippings in a small envelope, then a larger evidence bag.

  "Be thorough, Ellis," Irving said abruptly.

  The guy in the trench coat looked up. He was neatly groomed in a high-maintenance, expensive kind of way. Ivy could immediately tell he wasn't used to being bossed around.

  "Are you implying that I do half-assed work?" Ellis asked.

  "I just want you to know this case is important."

  "Haven't you read the rule book? All cases are important." Ellis laughed sarcastically and Ivy caught a glimpse of why Irving might not like him.

  Their little altercation had been enough of a distraction for Ivy to let down her guard, and now she could see what she'd been afraid to notice before. The woman was nude, with bruises on her wrists and ankles, and what looked like clothesline cord around her neck. Her face was so swollen that it was impossible to tell if she'd been beautiful. Worse than that, her fixed eyes were open and her mouth had been Scotch taped into a wide grin.

  There were several stab wounds; the mattress beneath the body was saturated with blood. The Madonna Murderer always went for the womb. Of that, Ivy could offer proof.

  She also knew that he killed the mothers out of hatred—but he killed the infants out of love. A sick, twisted love, but love all the same.

  When the coroner pulled out a thermometer, Ivy turned away. She couldn't watch. But it was all still there in her mind, just like a photo. Just like the photos in the case file. The grin. The glazed, pupil-filled eyes.

  Time of death would be calculated by taking the normal temperature of 98.6 minus the rectal temperature to come up with the approximate number of hours since the death.

  "Time of death, 11:15 P.M.," the coroner announced.

  She'd been dead less than three hours.

  "11:30 P.M. for the infant."

  Which meant the mother had fought to save her baby. That she had fought the killer until she could fight no more.

  Irving must have been thinking the same thing, because he looked up at a uniformed officer—a young, dark-skinned policeman standing near the bedroom door. "I want all units to be on the alert for a man with possible fresh scratch marks on his face," he told him.

  The body was lifted onto a gurney covered with an unzipped black body bag, ready to be taken to the morgue for autopsy. She was tucked in and the bag was zipped.

  "What about the baby? Can't we just put it in with the mother?" the assistant asked.

  "It probably won't make any difference," the guy Irving had been arguing with said. He looked at Irving. "But for the sake of possible cross-contamination of evidence, give it its own bag."

  Which they did, with everybody there knowing it was ridiculous, that the arrogant guy in the trench coat was just doing it for Irving's sake. All Ivy could think of was that he'd called the baby an "it."

  Then they were gone.

  The bodies.

  The coroner.

  The photographer.

  The only people left were the two guys from the mobile crime lab, Irving, and Ivy
.

  Ivy would have left immediately, but she didn't want to have to see the bodies being put in the ambulance.

  She really didn't want to be in this bedroom either.

  The crime-lab guys continued to prowl around, clipping here, dabbing there.

  "Get the drains," Ellis said to his partner. "And the toilet."

  His partner straightened. He was young and unremarkable. "Why don't you get the toilet? I got the toilet last time."

  Ellis stared at the younger man, whose eyes finally broke contact as he moved away, out of the bedroom to examine the toilet. Sometimes killers tried to flush things away, and sometimes objects were found trapped in the bend of the toilet bowl. Ivy felt a moment of sympathy, knowing that the young technician was going to have to reach into the toilet searching for possible evidence.

  With him out of the picture, Ellis stopped in front of her, looked her in the eye, and said, "What are you doing here?" Over his shoulder to Irving he said, "What the hell's she doing here? Every unnecessary person is one more set of footprints closer to a compromised crime scene."

  "She's supposed to be here," Irving said wearily, his tone conveying that her presence was out of his hands.

  "What's your purpose?" Ellis asked.

  There were very few people Ivy hated immediately, but she hated this man. He made Irving look like a damn saint, a damn bleeding heart.

  She never broke eye contact, saying, "I'm here to sell popcorn."

  From Irving's direction came a snort of laughter. Then again, maybe she was there for comic relief.

  The guy continued to stare at her, passing a pink- tipped tongue over his lips. Then he smiled and turned away to continue combing the room for evidence.

  Ivy followed him. "He's not an 'it,'" she said.

  The guy looked up.

  "The baby," she explained firmly. "The baby's not an 'it.'"

  "What the hell's your problem?" In one gloved hand, he held an evidence bag, in the other a blood- saturated swab. He looked truly perplexed, unable to figure her out.

  "These are real people," she said, gritting her teeth so her lips wouldn't tremble. Words bounced off the walls of her brain as she struggled to package her emotions so she could find something that would make him understand even though she knew it was useless. "You're dehumanizing them," she explained slowly. "Just like the killer."

  He continued to stare at her blankly, his mouth slack, his head tilted, his shoulders hunched in a what- did-I-do pose.

  Recognizing the futility of what she was trying to communicate, she pushed past him and walked out of the bedroom.

  As she moved through the living room, she wouldn't let herself look in the direction of the bonsai.

  Out. She had to get out.

  Soon she was outside, pulling in huge gulps of air, her heart pounding, her mind unable to shut off the images of the grinning mother, the blue-tinged baby.

  A camera flash went off in her face, momentarily blinding her. Someone grabbed her arm. "Can you tell me about the murder?" a male voice asked.

  Ivy blinked, finally able to make out the young reporter who'd stopped Irving in the lobby that first day. "You'll have to talk to Detective Irving," she said, pulling her arm away.

  Suddenly there was a little flurry of activity as an officer realized the reporter was inside the crime- scene tape.

  "Get the hell out of there," the female officer yelled, striding over.

  The reporter scrambled under the tape, disappearing into the darkness.

  Ivy ducked under the tape, walked a few yards, and there he was again, talking fast. Right in front of her, tablet in hand, pen poised. "A female. I know that," he said. "An infant," he said urgently. "I have to know if there was an infant."

  "I can't talk about it."

  "What about you? What's your involvement in the case?"

  She stopped and let out an indignant breath. "I can't tell you that either." A little warning flag went up. Can't tell. Poor choice of words. Damn poor choice.

  "Listen—" She put a hand to her forehead, then her hair—and realized she hadn't even brushed it before hopping in the cab. Not that it mattered. A woman was dead. A baby was dead. Her hair deserved no thought. If she were Catholic, she would have made herself say one hundred Hail Marys.

  "Oh, forget it." She shoved him out of the way, saying as she passed him, "Talk to Irving."

  Is this what happened when you lived alone for too long? You found everybody irritating? First Irving, then Ellis, now this reporter. Was her judgement skewed? Or was she seeing people the way they really were? Either way, it was disturbing, unpleasant. In the last hour, she'd had enough reality to last her sixteen more years.

  She kept walking, and thank God he didn't follow.

  She hadn't thought about how she would get home, otherwise she would have asked her earlier ride to return for her. There were no cabs around, and she had no way to get back to her apartment without one. She kept walking, knowing it wasn't safe and yet also knowing there was enough activity in the area, enough police and gawkers, to make the dangers of walking in a bad area of town late at night not any more dangerous than walking there at noon.

  She'd gone possibly two blocks when a siren let out a little squawk. She turned to see a police car gliding beside her. The passenger window silently opened and the young officer she'd seen speaking with Irving earlier leaned across the seat so he could look up at her.

  "Detective Irving told me to give you a lift."

  "I can find my own ride." She could see lights in the distance—hopefully an all-night gas station where she could use the phone.

  "I've got my orders," he said in a half-teasing, half- serious way.

  What difference did it make?

  She opened the door and got in, giving him her address.

  Chapter 14

  It was almost light when Alex Martin left the loft he shared with two other guys in the River North district of what was rapidly becoming known as "the" place to be, a trendy area where the rent was high and a lot of people his age lived. It was a place where warehouses had been converted into apartments with huge, curtainless windows, wooden floors, and room for parties of several hundred.

  Outside the subway entrance, he grabbed a copy of the Herald before catching the Red Line. It wasn't yet rush hour, and there were plenty of places to sit. He took a seat and unfolded the paper, smoothing the center crease. At one time there had been some discussion about the Herald going to a more user-friendly tabloid format, but they'd eventually decided against it. No matter how accurate and well written the articles, the tabloid presentation had a tacky stigma that would have been impossible to rise above, and the Herald prided itself in its credibility.

  Alex quickly skimmed the print, nothing sinking into his brain, his thoughts being pulled in a completely different direction.

  To his article on the third page.

  He'd been surprised to find that they'd wanted it at all since he'd thrown it together just minutes before the paper went to print. But they'd yanked a wire article and had a spot they were looking to fill.

  A lot of readers would probably have passed by it the way they'd passed by his story about the police- mentoring program, and the story he'd done on alcoholism in the police force—an article that had been hidden deep in the body of the paper. He wasn't very good with a camera. In fact, he rarely took pictures. He left that to the photo department, which meant he'd never had a story run with a photo. The photographers were always too busy with bigger stories. But last night, for some inexplicable reason, he'd grabbed a camera. It must have been a five-star day, or the planets were all aligned, or something, because when he got back to the photo lab with the roll of film he'd taken at the homicide scene, he found he'd captured a multitude of elements in one single click of a shutter.

  The photo was of the woman with the short red hair, the one who'd refused to talk to him. She was hurrying from the apartment building, caught in mid- flight by the camera, one foot
on the top step, the other touching air. Her expression, possibly undetectable to the human eye, captured in a fleeting one- sixteenth of a second, spoke of everything she'd seen, and everything she felt.

  Horror.

  Anger.

  Sorrow.

  It was all there, in one powerful image.

  The caption wasn't bad either: "Dark At The Top Of The Stairs."

  In the early morning hours, an unidentified woman leaves a homicide scene at a northwest- side apartment complex where a mother and her infant son were found dead.

  The article itself was one of his best, he thought, something that might get the attention of his bosses. It was nothing tike the fiction he'd put aside in order to keep food in his belly, but it was possibly some of the best of his nonfiction career.

  The caption was further validated by the article's opening sentence.

  The killer among us. He preys on every mother's deepest fear—the loss of her child. And if that isn't tragedy enough, the loss of that child under the most horrific of circumstances.

  The recent double homicide is the second to have occurred in the Chicago metro area in the last two weeks. There are many questions, but so far no answers. Questions like, Why aren't the police getting information to the public? If the people had been informed, would the latest victims be alive right now? The only thing we know for sure is this: The dark at the top of the stairs is real.

  At the paper, he felt like a star. Walking to his desk, people praised him. "Great story, Alex."

  "Nice going."

  Maude caught him before he could sit down. "Great stuff, Alex."

  "You didn't think it was too—" He paused, searching for the right word, and finally came up with, "Dramatic?"

  "Are you kidding? It was real. That's what we want. Reality."

  Superintendent Abraham Sinclair stared at the Herald's black-and-white photo of Ivy Dunlap. She had a fleeing-the-castle expression on her face, the kind you might have seen on the cover of an old paperback.