by Harker Moore
She had not slept, but prayed all through the night. Prayed for the lost child, his suffering parents, and that her internal vision might be spared. Though in wishing for the last, she knew that this was not to be.
She put down the brush now, and rested her head against Taiko. “I am glad to be home.” The shepherd licked her face. “I know. You too are glad.”
That first moment at the airport when Jimmy had touched her, she knew she was at last home. She’d smiled secretly against his shoulder as he’d taken her into his arms, remembering well the hard thinness of his body, the square smoothness of his face. She recalled the familiar length of his fingers as he’d taken her hand, the coolness of his palm. And there was the scent of him, Jimmy’s smell—green and citrusy and something else uniquely his.
When she had reached inside his pocket for his handkerchief, he had laughed. “I could not tell Mr. Haspel how to fold my handkerchiefs, Hanae.”
“He did not do such a poor job, Husband. But it needs my hand.”
“Oh yes, my Hanae, we are all in need of your hand.”
They had laughed at his joke, but it would not be easy. For either of them. He had come home late last night, and had left early this morning without waking her. She had felt his burden, not wanting this new beginning to start where their old life had ended—with the pressures of his job. But she must make him understand that she did not resent his being a detective, that she could not be protected from the horrors of his work. She must make him believe that what had happened was as much her fault as his.
She had after all befriended a killer, had invited him into their home. She bore an equal share of the guilt. And most important, no secrets should ever stand between them. She reminded herself once more that Jimmy was indivisible from what he did. And if they were to heal, she must make him come to accept this truth as well.
The fading sunlight seemed to hover beyond reach, a pale competitor to the artificial light that reigned within his office. Sakura turned from the window and drained his cup of tea, reaching for the small jade disk lying on top of his desk. He rolled the smooth green piece round his fingers, and thought of his stepsister’s phone call this morning. His father was seriously ill—an unexpected message that caused him to wrestle with the old emotions, the same feelings that had plagued his small boy’s heart so many years ago. He was a man who still waged a child’s war.
“Knock, knock . . .”
Sakura looked up. “Willie, what a pleasant surprise. How about some green tea?”
“Still trying to reform my dietary habits, Sakura,” she said, slumping into a chair. “And don’t act so disingenuous. You know I want to see those photos.”
“You missed Michael.” He poured himself another cup of tea. “I think we might get a positive ID on the victim. An NYU grad student was reported missing on Friday afternoon. Her photo looks a lot like our Jane Doe. Michael and Delia went to interview the roommate.”
“No personal artifacts on the victim?”
He shook his head. “But hopefully the birthmark on the arm will make it definitive.” He handed her a file. “The first victim showed up about six months ago. Suffocated, then wrapped in Visqueen and dumped for garbage just like this one.”
Willie opened the folder and went quickly through the Polaroids taken at the crime scene. She stopped when she got to the first shot from last night’s autopsy.
“What’s this? Linsky using staples?”
“That’s the killer’s handiwork. Keep going.”
She flipped through the photos. “God, what’s he into?”
“That’s what I wanted to ask you.”
“The organs are inverted. I guess Linsky caught that.”
“Yes. So what’s it mean?”
“Hell, Sakura, let me work that out in the next five seconds.”
He grinned at her sarcasm. “I think you need some of my tea.”
“I need some caffeine.” She stood up now, spreading the photographs across his desk. “He’s real handy with the scalpel and staples. A surgeon couldn’t have done better.”
“So we look for a doctor?”
She frowned. “Too simple. The inside job is not so slick, but you couldn’t expect it to be.”
“The inversion of the organs has got to be important,” Sakura said.
“Did he do this to the first victim?”
“Yes.”
Sakura watched her handle the pictures like pieces of a puzzle, working her theories aloud. “No doubt he went to a lot of trouble. Cutting the organs out, reversing them, and stitching them back. Mimicking situs inversus totalis—a complete reversal of the position of major organs—must be primary to his fantasy.” She sat down again. “Sexual assault?”
“Linsky got negatives for semen on all the swabs,” Sakura said, “but it appears that she was raped like the first victim, both vaginally and anally. At this point there’s no evidence to assume anything other than penile penetration.”
“There are no defensive injuries?” she asked.
Sakura shook his head. “No. There’s nothing to suggest that either of the women was tied up or restrained, and that fits with the fact that both sets of toxicology screens showed positive for Rohypnol.”
She was nodding. “Sedation in minutes, an almost hypnotic state followed by unconsciousness. Victims have been known to black out for hours.”
“Plenty enough time to rape and kill.”
“The unconsciousness may be significant to his fantasy. Raping and killing an unconscious, or more, a dead woman is a lot different from raping someone who is struggling for her life. Certainly more impersonal.”
“Hard for me to think of what happened to these women as impersonal,” he said.
“Our guy’s a real piece of work.”
He had to smile at her proprietary label.
It was last night’s dream that had driven Michael Darius to the morgue this evening. He reached for and pulled a pair of latex gloves from a box on the counter. He signaled the attendant. The stainless steel shelf slid smoothly out of the wall cavity.
Darius drew the green sheet from the victim’s face. The cold fluorescence made the raised planes of flesh appear translucent, while recesses dropped away as dark fissures. His first impression was that the girl looked like a victim of Auschwitz.
He exposed the rest of the body. The impression that she’d been confined to a concentration camp was not relieved. Pale and thin, she seemed to have lost more than life. The long neck faded into shadow, and insanely he believed he could make out the faint rhythm of a pulse.
Linsky’s fine stitches puckered down the chest, mimicking the killer’s pattern, so that her breasts and torso seemed confined by a kind of bizarre corset. Pelvic bones jutted out between the basin of abdomen. He noticed her small delicate feet. The red toenail polish seemed an obscenity.
But this was not how he’d seen her in his dream. Rather she had come to him in a Gigeresque nightmare, an android of finely wrought metals. Of looping tubes and layered plates. Cones and domes. A mechanized whore. She’d jerked unaccountably while faceless workers checked each detail of her metallic seams, the head of each rivet. The only allusion to her true physiology was at the juncture of her groin, where a plasmalike liquid oozed. Her scream from inside the metal globe of her skull had awakened him.
Willie had been at his side. It was still a shock to find her next to him. Sleeping on her stomach, one leg drawn up. Naked, amid crumbled sheets. Real and raw and beautiful like the wood he used to create his models.
The bad dreams had come less often since she had moved in. After all, it had been Willie who had rescued him from the aftermath of his experience with the Death Angel. And his waking life had improved too.
He looked down now, carefully recovering the body of Leslie Ann Siebrig. Death had not completely erased the person in the photograph Missing Persons had sent over. Tomorrow Siebrig’s roommate would make it official.
It seemed to Willie that the w
ood was lit from within, warm and smooth and glowing. She stood beside the bed that she shared with Michael, running her hand over the exotic grain of the headboard. It is his soul you feel inside. She was remembering Hanae’s words that day last year in the library, Hanae’s hand moving next to hers on the staircase that Michael had made. She believed the words were true. Michael’s spirit did move in his carpentry. In this headboard, in all the pieces he had made for this room in the months she’d been away from New York.
Had he known when he’d started that he would ask her to return, to make love in this room that had once been a shrine to that other life with his wife? Or had it only been in the doing that the real healing had come? Was it only when the exorcism was complete that she had been allowed to enter this room as even an abstraction? She didn’t know why it should matter, only that it did, and that it was a question like so many others that she would never ask him.
She had been so shocked that first night when he’d brought her things into this room, and not to the smaller bedroom near his work space. She had hidden her reaction in her remarks on its beauty, as if her surprise was not that it existed in this form, but that it existed at all. For Michael could not know that Hanae had told her of the closed-off room where nothing had been changed from the day his wife had left him. He could not know that it was in this room that the killer had surprised her, a demon figure appearing in the vanity mirror, like a punishment, it had seemed, for her intrusion.
Her eyes, unable to help themselves, went to the place where the vanity had stood. Gone now, its fussy opulence replaced by a sleek armoire. But the image of that man remained to haunt her pleasure. As indeed he haunted them all.
She sat back down on the bed, next to some scribbled notes for the chapter she was working. She had finally spoken to Hanae this afternoon. They had talked of small things, as they had in their letters, never about him, as if a line had been crossed when each had fled the city. And now, though returned, neither could cross back.
Strangely, it was Michael, of all of them, who appeared to have recovered best. His brush with death had seemed to force some reassessment of what he really wanted. Besides his return to the police force, she knew that Michael was also seeing his boys, the twins that had been born after his wife had left him. That was a good thing, and she did what she could to encourage it, but she suspected that, despite his efforts, Michael had not yet overcome whatever impulse had once made a shrine of this room. He still loved his ex-wife, or thought he did. Which, in the end, was the same.
She wondered if the woman had ever loved him. It seemed impossible that she could, and still have walked out on him in a way so intended to wound. And never, that she knew of, had Margot called or come to visit when Michael was in the hospital.
Stupid to be angry with someone she’d never met. She settled against the piled-up pillows. Life was good. She loved New York. Loved this apartment in the building Michael owned. And her office. That was thanks to Michael too, since he’d been the one to suggest that she start seeing patients, probably to keep her from analyzing him. She smiled. Michael would always be a cipher. What they could share was his work. They’d spent hours last night speculating on this new investigation. Maybe that was the novelty that made him want her. Murder and mayhem, the basis for a beautiful relationship. She laughed out loud.
“What’s so funny?”
“Michael.” She hadn’t heard him come in.
“I brought Chinese.” He stood at the closet, taking off his clothes.
“Maybe later.” She picked up her notes. “I’m not hungry now.”
“I am.” He sat on the bed and took the notes from her hand.
The bedroom was dark as a cave. He depressed the play button on the remote, bringing on the flick-flicker before the video started in earnest. He frowned at the amateurish quality of the taping, finding inferior technicals almost unendurable. Yet he refused to permit any cinematic ineptness, even his own, to interfere with his concentration. He leaned back and allowed the scene to play.
The camera closed in tightly, panning from the red-painted toenails, slowly moving up the thin thighs, across the pale-haired pubis, to the slim torso, picking out the bridge of clavicle, up the column of fragile neck to the head. A strand of blond hair had been caught inside the mouth, and the pink tongue twisted unconsciously to dislodge it.
A long shot of the body on the table. It remained a white inert thing, since the senses had been tempered. Yet it jerked to life when the plastic went across the face. The arms rose, stiff-jointed. Fingers splayed, grasping empty air. The feet kicking futilely.
Its face, wild and wide-eyed, filled the screen. Its mute scream trapped forever inside its throat. Nostrils sucked hard for breath, its mouth reminding him of the pet goldfish he’d once taken from its bowl. He’d counted that day, with the aid of a magnifying glass, the number of times the circlet of orange mouth had stretched open and shut closed. And her arms, so like those tiny gill slits, pumping and pumping and pumping, as if their efforts could somehow get the lungs to work. Then shock and struggle at last surrendering to fate.
He paused the video, then rewound to that precise instant when death had come, replaying the exquisite descent of mortality, the dark draining of light from its eyes. That day he had had a stopwatch to time “how long it took” the goldfish. For the human, he’d have to settle for secondhand data using the tape.
He fast-forwarded to the point where the incision had been drawn from shoulder to shoulder, then in a single scalpel stroke through torso to groin. He watched the blood ooze, oil-like, out from the Y-slit. And then Right-brain dug in. Cracking the chest so that it gaped open like a purple-dark mouth. Hands plunged in. Steely scissors snipped tissue. Wet-click. Wet-click. Then the unplugging and rearranging. Reordering, till he was satisfied, and the task of resuspension began. Whipstitching the slippery puzzle pieces in place. Left-brain closed, stapling the flesh in tight neat puckers from beginning to end.
Then the body was cleansed. Its skin scrubbed shiny. Though Right-brain loved the sheer humanness of the gore, there was always too much blood for Left-brain. Bodily fluids were so unpleasant. Even his own semen trapped in the prophylactic was wholly distasteful. Though his pubic hairs were less a problem since he’d shaven himself raw.
Later followed the wrapping. Left-brain made certain the edges of Visqueen were neatly folded, the duct tape delivered in economical, straight lines. Though Right-brain believed such fastidiousness was foolish.
He stopped the machine. Listened to the whir of the tape rewinding. He would replay the video. But this time he would focus more fully on the moment of its death. Next time he would play it purely for pleasure, pull on latex gloves, and masturbate.
CHAPTER
3
Michael Darius hated these formal identifications. The secondhand apprehension impossible not to feel in the drab cramped space of the viewing room. The anticipatory grief breathed in like fog, standing with a stranger who was preparing to have to say “yes,” it was her daughter, or her husband, or in this case her roommate whose number had just come up in victim lotto.
Maggie Hoffman radiated anxiety like a dark sun. It had taken a lot of convincing yesterday before she had finally agreed to make the formal identification. But Leslie Siebrig had no relatives in the city. Her mother was dead, and her father, who lived in Virginia, had not yet returned from a business trip abroad. Johnson had made arrangements for them to pick Hoffman up this morning, as the only way to be sure that she would come.
It was Adelia who sat next to the young woman now, smiling reassurance as the whining elevator signaled its rise from the basement. The detective stood, patting her shoulder, leading her to the window where Darius was waiting.
The gurney with its burden had arrived. The attendant, at his signal, uncovered the face. The intervening hours had not been kind to what remained of Leslie Siebrig.
Air exploded from Maggie Hoffman’s chest. “That’s not her.” The words of
denial barely delivered with the last of her breath. She had already made as if to turn, but Johnson’s hand was firm on her elbow.
“Look carefully, Maggie,” Adelia said.
Darius signaled the attendant to roll down the sheet to completely expose the arm. The birthmark stood out clearly in the bluish-green pallor. And, on the chest, Linsky’s neat stitches, following the track of the staples.
“Oh, God.” Hoffman’s knees buckled as she tried to fold within herself. Her head jerked in affirmation. Face forming tears.
“Are you sure now that it’s Leslie, Ms. Hoffman?” he asked.
“Yes. Yes. Please”—she was begging—“I have to get out of here.”
“I already answered all your questions yesterday.” Tears still eased themselves from Maggie Hoffman’s face, but it was clear to Darius that the prime emotion to have settled in was resentment. She might sit in Police Plaza drinking coffee, but her mind was still many blocks away in that viewing room, would be in that viewing room for a long time. Why, he knew she was asking herself, had she let them talk her into it.
“I know you answered them, Maggie,” Adelia Johnson was saying, “but it’s possible you may remember something more today, something that could help us stop this from happening to someone else.” She patted Hoffman’s hand and, turning on the recorder, made the preliminary statement for the record.
Darius moved in. “You told us that the last time you saw Ms. Siebrig was around midnight on Thursday at the dance club. Is that correct?”
“Yes.” Hoffman seemed resigned. “I met her there after work.”
“You are also a graduate student?”
“I am, but I work part-time as a waitress.”
He stepped back. The ball was rolling.
“What’s this club like?” Johnson’s tone was conversational.
“Big. Noisy. A couple of dance floors.”