by Harker Moore
“Two!” he yelled as the ball sailed through a gray web of old net.
“Jamal . . .” It was his baby sister LaShondra, standing on the front porch, holding open the storm door, letting out Buster. In a split second, the dog burst down the steps, into the street, barking his way to freedom.
“Shit, Shondra, look what you done,” he screamed in a run after the dog, Cyrus on his heels.
Buster didn’t travel far, but stopped just six houses down the street, giving his full attention to the rear of an abandoned car near the end of the block.
“What that dumb dog up to anyway?” He cursed, slowing down as he got closer to Buster. “He act like he ain’t never seen that pile of shit before.”
“Whoa, somethin’ stank, Jamal. Real bad.” Cyrus had come up right behind him.
“Yeah . . .” He approached the car cautiously, noticing for the first time that the trunk was half-open. “Shut up, Buster!”
For an instant, the dog seemed distracted by his voice, but just as quickly the open trunk had his complete concentration again. His muzzle rooting like a pig’s, his jaws working on something trapped inside.
He bent over, grabbing Buster’s collar, pulling at the dog. “Hey, boy, what’s the matter wif you?”
“He actin’ all crazy, Jamal.” Cyrus scrunched like a hermit crab in his brother’s shadow.
“Busta . . .” Now the dog’s head turned full around, just in time for Jamal to see the hand slide out of the trunk.
The car hummed along the thruway past Long Island Sound. Jimmy’s fingers tapped at the steering wheel as the electric guitar wailed like a frightened cat from the radio. Hanae shook her head. She would never understand her husband’s taste in music, but tonight the sound of hard rock was sweet, another small reminder that she was home.
It had been a good evening, she and Jimmy driving alone to their favorite seaside restaurant. Despite the cold that had blown from the Sound, they had rolled down the car windows so she could smell the ocean. And later, inside the restaurant, she had pressed her hand against the great sheet of glass, sensing the roll of the watery expanse that lay just beyond their cozy table.
Somehow it had seemed easier away from the apartment to fall into old ways. Jimmy had made her laugh with reports of his struggles to remaster aikido. She had begun to tell him all the funny stories about the months with her family in Japan. And it was suddenly no longer awkward to talk with her husband about the things that had happened in her time away from him. It was a moment of illumination, the months away from him receding to things past, even as she spoke of them, like a garment once binding that had slipped from her shoulders.
One short step toward healing. Another had been Jimmy’s sharing the news of his father’s illness and his own shame in allowing their estrangement to blind him to what should have been obvious at the time of Isao’s visit. It had touched her deeply that her husband could talk with her of such things.
“Why are you smiling?” He had turned down the volume on the song.
“Perhaps I find pleasure in the music.”
He laughed, and the cell phone rang. He cut the radio and answered. “Sakura,” his official voice.
It was moments before he spoke again. “I’ve got it,” he said to the person at the other end of the phone. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“Is it . . . ?”
“Another body,” he answered her. “I’ll get you home.”
“You must go to your crime scene.”
“My unit’s on the way. Michael will take care of it till I get there.”
“Kenjin is many things, but he is not you, my husband. This is your case. You must be there to take charge.”
She knew that he was smiling. Perhaps a little puzzled. She was a little puzzled too. She was thinking as fast as she could, not sure at all yet what it was she planned to do.
“What are you saying, Hanae?” he was asking.
“I can wait in the car. You can have someone drive me home. You are always saying there are too many people at the crime scene.”
She was expecting him to argue, but he laughed again instead. She was not sure she had won till she heard him slap the flasher to the roof, and they were wailing down the thruway together.
“Keep the doors locked.” Jimmy was putting the keys in her hand. “I’ll be back as soon as I can with an officer to drive you home.” He leaned across the seat and kissed her cheek. Hanae heard the locks slide into place, the flat solid whack as he shut the driver door. It was the rare moment when her blindness frustrated her. She had managed to place herself at Jimmy’s crime scene, but was not to leave the car. Not much that was good in that.
She rolled down the window. City sounds. Traffic from the cross street. The added buzz of police activity. An occasional shout or curse in the crude language of the ghetto—people from the neighborhood gathered like crows at the smell of death.
She rolled up the window and unlocked the door. Got out of the passenger seat and stood on the sidewalk with her long cane, her wrist twitch-tapping the hard tip at the uneven surface of the pavement. She closed the door behind her and began to move, the stick alive and searching, guiding her toward the uneasy beast—the pulse and energy of the crowd.
There was fear and agitation in the murmuring and shouts, but a warmth and connectivity. A smell. A color. She let the energy draw her, tapping into a seam, slipping like a ghost into the current of bodies. Her free hand outstretched, touching so briefly on a back or a shoulder. She could read the compass of the crowd’s attention in the lift of muscles, the shuffling of restless feet. Could hear the story in snatches of conversation. Jamal’s old dog . . . boy tol’ his mama . . . white girl in that trunk.
The crowd thickened, bodies shifting away at her tapping. She could sense the faces as they turned toward her. Blind apparition. Voices rose, and died, in her wake.
Emptiness loomed. The fluttering of crime scene tape brushed her outstretched fingers. The crowd closed in, jostling at her back.
She concentrated on sound, on the knot of activity in the open space before her—the police around the car, Jimmy among them. She tried not to imagine that at any moment he would turn and see her. She breathed, focusing on what she knew was before her, the latest of the killer’s victims. Yards away. The closest she might get.
It was less an impression than a wave of emotion. A blossoming of the dark and hopeless. Confusion. Dread. A boundless sadness. And outside it, as elusive as an unknown flavor, a sensation of otherness that she could not will to know. Then a moment when she lost herself. A rough closing like a premature healing.
A wound. A blackness sealing itself.
Just before midnight. The bedroom was dark. The mirror, like a narrow door-sized window, had collected the light. He sat in front of it nude, cross-legged on the floor, his penis sprouting obscenely from his lap. Behind him in the cabinet the television played mutely, a magic box that floated in the glass.
He wanted silence in the room. Wanted to hear his excitement, the way his breathing changed when the power approached. He studied his image and was pleased. His trophies glinted, cool and electric against his naked skin. He touched the metal to feel the energy. The rings and trinkets that would be hidden by his clothing, all on his left side.
This deliberate placement was both a joke and an appeasement. Left-brain disapproved of his souvenirs. In the mirror, left was right. All was reversed. And more. The death that flickered in the light on his face came from the ghost set in the mirror. It was his shadow self who watched the real TV across the room, who reflected its light in his phantom eyes. That same light reflected to him from the surface of the glass.
The thought of it was mesmerizing, like the sterile game of an infinite regress. But that was a left thought. What Right-brain saw was the stubborn persistence of energy.
The surgical needle lay on the plate by his knee, its cutting edge like a tease. He pretended to ignore it, stroked his penis to full erection w
hile the video looped in the glass. Five little souls to be tasted and retasted. Five, since Left-brain had thought to record their final moments. Horning in, dividing the power.
He could hear his breath, could feel it deepening. He left his erection, picking up the needle, drawing it tight across his nipple. Drawing bright blood. Courting the pain that drew the power. A drop of seminal fluid bloomed from the head of his penis. He mixed it with the blood. Consumed it. Watching, watching the videotape in the mirror, the pale slack face that filled the frame. The kohl-lined eyes coming open in confusion beneath the plastic membrane. The smearing of red from the mouth.
Her hands rose to her face, intruding momentarily into the frame. But weakly. No real fight left. A surrender to the fish death. Mouth moving, lip-painting more smears.
He grasped the needle. Made one sure jab. No anesthetic. He wanted the pain. The agony of the current from nipple to groin. Making the holes for the power to go in, the stored power in the taped transformation. Life to death.
In the last escape of videotaped breath, he heard his scream, heard the power roaring with its dark devouring mouth from the window inside the glass. He felt the explosion from his body. Emptying, emptying, till he was nothing but a black hole to suck the universe in.
CHAPTER
8
I wish I had a girl as white as snow, with cheeks as red as blood, and hair as black as ravens.” Linsky whispered the words, but Sakura heard them, glancing over at the medical examiner standing next to him.
“Snow White,” the doctor said, half-smiling, turning his attention again to where the girl’s mutilated body lay inside an air-tight plastic tent.
Sakura followed the ME’s eyes. Howard Keyes had been tapped again to do the fuming, in an effort to develop and recover possible latent fingerprints, before the body underwent the rigors of autopsy.
Linsky’s reference to Snow White was unexpected, and Sakura thought the serial’s latest victim, even with her pale skin and black hair, seemed nothing like the prettified Disney version he’d seen in the classic film. There was nothing homogenized about what lay on the gurney table, nothing charmed about being sliced open and stapled closed, no magic in being readied for a shroud of cyanoacrylate.
“Ever read fairy tales, Sakura?”
He retreated from his dark thoughts, turned back toward Linsky.
“It doesn’t matter if you read the Japanese versions,” the doctor went on, “or the German or French for that matter. The lessons are universal.”
He nodded, allowing the usually taciturn ME to ramble on, refocusing on the impending procedure. Keyes was inside the tent adjusting one of the locations of several coffee cup warmers used for heat acceleration. Small dish-shaped sculpts of aluminum foil had been placed over each warmer, and nickel-sized dollops of superglue had been dropped inside the foil containers. Mugs of hot water had been brought in to increase humidity. A battery-operated fan sat on a cardboard box to help with fume distribution.
“I took her out of the locker earlier to allow for condensation.” Linsky was making the point to emphasize how premature moisture could destroy impressions that might otherwise be developed. Then, “Ultimately, it’s about reaching sexual maturation.”
“Sexual maturation?” The ME was in a rare mood indeed. The switch in topic had caught Sakura off-guard.
“The oedipal desires between father and daughter, arousing jealousy in the stepmother, forces Snow White out into the world, onto a path of self-discovery and sexual maturation.”
This time he pushed himself to fix the implications of Linsky’s lecture onto the body in the tent. He supposed Solange Mansour—a positive ID had been made only hours ago by the parents—could be said to resemble some modern-day Snow White, with death elevating her flesh to an almost translucent pallor. The hair was certainly black, though he suspected she had enhanced the color. And now she lay inside the plastic tent. A glass coffin.
The sixteen-year-old had surely been making her way in the world, and even from the most cursory examination of her lifestyle, it was clear she was on a path of self-discovery and sexual exploration. Sakura understood the significance of the story of the little girl rescued by dwarfs, even without Linsky’s homily, enough to appreciate the truths the tale taught. In every undertaking lay the danger that unrestrained passion could become a young woman’s undoing.
But in this reality that was too close to faulting the victim for her own death. Even those who lived on the narrowest margin were not responsible for the evil perpetrated upon them. The crime resided solely in the heart and hands of the beast.
Keyes had just finished dusting the body with black magnetic powder as he turned up the heat. “It’ll take about ten minutes,” the forensic tech said, exiting the tent.
Sakura observed as a fog of cyanoacrylate filled the enclosure. Ironically, the body, once so white and stainless, was now reduced to a darkened heap on the gurney.
Keyes loaded his camera. If there were latents, photographs would be taken first, before transfers were made. The tech snapped on his third pair of fresh latex gloves of the day, put on a surgical mask.
“Almost there,” Keyes said, glancing at the clock.
It didn’t take long once Keyes got back inside the tent. He bent over the body like a man in search of a lost contact lens. He examined the tops of the feet, the calves, the flats of the thighs. The legs were spread open from the hips, and he bent to study the surfaces of the inner thighs. He stood, checking the mound of pubis, and up toward the abdomen. He stopped. A moment in limbo. But he went on checking every square inch of skin. In the end, he left shaking his head.
Pretty damn hot, Zoe was thinking. She liked watching herself on tape. Allen, her producer, was a great guy, but she preferred putting together her own stuff. And she was taking no chances with this edit.
Are you afraid? Her recorded voice had to shout over the sound system blaring in the club, asking the question of a halter-clad girl, who’d agreed to an interview at the fringes of the crowd, though still moving with the beat of the music.
Yeah, sure. The girl was nodding, her bouncing curls backgrounded in a grid of laser light and thronging dancers. But, I mean, what are the chances really? There’s lots of us, and only one of him.
She seemed not too bright, but she had a point. And silicone tits that shifted like softballs beneath the scanty fabric of her top. Implants, Zoe decided, with conscious superiority. Still, she approved of self-enhancement. And a little T&A never hurt the ratings.
She cut the player, leaning back for a moment in the padded studio chair. Tracking the Visqueen Killer, time-slotted for Saturday night, was going to be as good as she could make it. Thanks to her former job at the Post, she was used to flying by the seat of her pants, and her exclusives for the paper in last year’s Death Angel case had been her key to the big time. She’d jumped from the cop beat to cable and never looked back. Her weekday show, covering hot police and court cases from all over the country, was a formula that seemed to be working, with ratings that were more than respectable for a mid-afternoon slot. This weekend prime-time special was a reward for her hard work and tougher attitude. And not too shabby for a little girl from Queens.
For no reason she thought of Rozelli, the way he’d looked at her the other night in the bar. What had she hoped for, tracking him down like that in public? Protection, in front of his buddies? Certainly, she’d known there was no way he was ever going to feed her information again. So why had she done it?
Because she wanted to see him. Simple as that. Because in all these months, there’d been no one who did it for her like Johnny. She’d said it before, and she’d say it again: Johnny Rozelli might not be the handsomest guy she’d ever been with, or even the best lover, but they just had so much fun fucking.
She missed him. And she knew he missed her too, despite the way he’d finally blown her off in the bar. Just getting up and walking out, leaving her sitting at the table with her drink. Well, she hadn’t
cried into it, if that’s what he’d wanted. And she wasn’t crying now.
Her patience had paid off. She’d gotten her exclusive by dogging an attendant at the mortuary where Leslie Siebrig’s body had been sent. She had the revelation she needed in the world of cable, where every scrap of new information could be ballyhooed through a cycle, till you found another scrap. The big boys had gotten the point that Zoe Kahn could be trusted to deliver.
Take that, Johnny Rozelli!
Margot Redmond wrote in the date of the Leightons’ anniversary party in her engagement book. An afternoon appointment for the twins to have their teeth checked. A change in time for Pilates class next Monday. She’d also promised the boys she would let them pick out a pumpkin. That would mean a drive out to the country before Halloween. She would also have to begin thinking about costumes.
“Hello.” She picked up the ringing phone on her desk.
“David St. Cyr. I hope this isn’t a bad time.”
“No, I’m just getting my calendar up to speed.”
“Good. Then maybe you can pencil me in. I have some preliminary drawings I want to show you.”
“Great. Did you have a chance to drive up to see the property?”
“I did. It’s a beautiful piece of real estate.”
“I’m glad you approve. Let’s see. . . . Actually, tonight would be good. Reese is coming home early. Would that be all right? Around eight?”
“Perfect. I’m really looking forward to seeing you again and meeting Reese.”
“Wonderful. Tonight then. You have our address?”
“Yes, in Gramercy Park.”
“Right. Cocktails at eight.”
She replaced the phone. Well, that was a perfectly normal conversation. Maybe she had just been overreacting to St. Cyr; it wouldn’t be the first time. Anyway, she was glad that tonight had worked out and Reese was going to be with them. Besides, David St. Cyr had been her husband’s idea; she would have preferred an architect with a more traditional style. Hopefully she would like what he had worked up for them. She didn’t have to love it, but it had to be something she could live with. After all, the Connecticut home was probably going to be for a lifetime.