by Harker Moore
He drove in and found the Navigator nearly at once. Parked by itself in a far corner at ground level, eerie in the weak light. He pulled in beside it and got out, looking around and under the chassis, peering into the tinted windows. There was nothing much to see inside but the twins’ car seats in the second row and a small flat package in the bay that was obviously the reframed canvas. No purse. No keys. No Margot, Jason, or Damon.
He brought out a tool from his trunk and tried the doors, preserving the surfaces for fingerprints. All doors unlocked, including the hatch. It sprung open on the lonely painting, so carefully wrapped. A frightening neatness that edged on the void.
Kiss of death. Easy to imagine the worst. Easy to believe the poison had caught up at last. That he’d foiled their escape . . . and his own. He shut down all else but raw will, took out his cell phone and called the Westchester County police. The next call he made would be harder.
If he could stand outside himself he would have said the same words. Would have screamed that what he had done was an insanity. That he was a savage beast. A cannibal. Lusting after flesh. Blood-boiling madness.
The stench of it still gagged.
The idea. How could he have so easily betrayed the idea? Surrendered the beauty of it? Razed the edifice of objectivity so carefully erected?
The process. How could he have run amok against the precise and perfect planning? Abandoned the structure? Exposed the hidden heart of it?
The product. How could he . . .
But this he understood. This was the easy part. Understanding the leaking mouth’s ravaging of her flesh. Forsaking the elegance of the scalpel’s articulation. Mother’s mutilation had been the same. Secreted in the charred remains of the husk left behind.
He was screaming now. Spittle flying as he cursed and ranted at Right-brain. Saying that Left-brain had been but asleep, not dead. A piece. A part. A portion. Half-acted was this offense, not whole. And so that when the news of Margot Redmond’s death had come alive like a pit of snakes, he had known. Had known what had been done. And who had done it.
And he, Left-brain, had freed it. This, whose hunger was never sated. Had it been merely the red hair? No, he told himself. The act of simple thievery had begotten it. Spawned from inside the purity of glass. It had been the mirror for this madness.
But the fire, like the ancient one, burned still. The smoke and soot and ash crusting inside like plaque along walls of arteries. And so many voices hiding so many secrets.
CHAPTER
23
For Darius, the night in Westchester County had been long and wasted. Waiting with the sheriff’s department officers for the tow truck to come for the Navigator. Waiting at the station house for Redmond to arrive with the photos that would go out on the computers both state and nationwide. He was back in the station house now, sitting next to Redmond in a line of plastic chairs, pinned like a bug in the cold light that never changed. The minutes indistinguishable since his last ride out with the officers on patrol to find no trace of the twins, or Margot.
The cop that he was continued to function, but the control he maintained was hollow. His calm a disguise. He watched, as from a distance, a game that was over. Though motion didn’t stop.
“A television station is sending a crew for an interview,” Redmond spoke from the second chair down. His glance drifted somewhere near Darius’s shoulder. They had been avoiding each other’s eyes. The tie of shared pain. The lie of hope too easily read. “You should be on too.”
“You’ll do fine,” he said.
“Have you found out anything new from Sergeant Schneller?” Redmond was referring to the detective in charge of the new shift, the second change of personnel since Darius’s call from the parking garage more than twelve hours ago.
“Nothing yet, but a forensic team has started processing the Navigator.”
“Processing?”
“Looking for evidence.”
“I see.” Redmond nodded. It was clear there were more questions he wanted to ask. Equally clear that he feared the answers.
Darius stood. “I’m going to have a smoke.” His excuse to escape.
He walked outside into the weak morning light and lit a cigarette, allowing the thoughts he wouldn’t share with Redmond. Into the second day with no ransom asked was not a good sign. And why take all three? A kidnapper would want only the children, with a frantic Margot left behind to convince her wealthy husband to accede to whatever demands had been made for her sons’ safe return.
And if it were some sick predator instead? Predators singled out victims. They didn’t snatch a mother and two children. This particular evil fit no pattern, and the outcome was therefore unpredictable. Even in the blackness that crowded his mind, there was that small space for hope.
He pulled out his cell, punched in numbers. “It’s me,” he said when Sakura answered. “I’m still—”
“Michael.” Sakura’s voice stopped him. “I was just going to call.”
He breathed out once, and waited.
“I’m up at the morgue,” Sakura was saying. A long pause to give one or both of them time. “A body was brought in here just a little over an hour ago. Female, Michael. . . . Red hair.”
Michael waited outside the viewing room while Reese Redmond went in with Jimmy and Adelia Johnson to identify the body. Sakura hadn’t confirmed that it was Margot when he’d called, but his former partner knew what his ex-wife looked like. A female with red hair was the closest he had come to telling him that Margot had been found in the city, and that she was dead. Red hair. He tried to recall the statistics on redheaded people. Five times as many brunets as blondes? Three times as many blondes as redheads?
He remembered being conscious of his own body those first seconds after the telephone call. Standing outside the station house. Reminding himself to swallow, to breathe, to put one foot in front of the other. To fight the truth growing like cancer inside his brain. He’d looked down at the hand still wrapped around the phone, his fingers biting the plastic. He had wanted to run. To scream bloody hell. To curse the gods, and the world, and himself. Most of all himself. But he had willed himself to stay sane.
But it would have been easy to go crazy, to simply cave in, to curl up inside himself, hugging the empty weight of his pain as though he’d grown comfortable with it because it had always been there. And hadn’t it? He thought of his sister Elena again, and his favorite photograph of her. A black-and-white taken with an old Kodak, a relic of his dad’s. High summer, and she stood posed in shorts and a pretty blouse which fell off her shoulders. She was leaning against the trunk of a tree, smiling, expectant, waiting for that next moment.
It was the sucking sound that had brought him back. To what was happening on the other side of the door. An attendant, with the body on a gurney, rising in the elevator up from the basement morgue. Charon navigating the River Styx. A whoosh-click of gears stopping. Then silence. A pause, as though the scene behind the glass window must first be set. Then a signal from Sakura. Into the land of the dead. And there would be a slow pulling away of the sheet. And Redmond’s eyes would be trying to make something identifiable out of what lay on the cold stainless. A moment of confusion, for denial, before truth.
The quiet was at last broken by Redmond, making a high keening noise. And then his long litany of No’s followed by a long litany of Margot, Margot, Margot. And after a moment, Sakura holding open the door as Redmond stumbled out, Adelia’s arm wrapped round his shoulder. Accepting the kindness of a stranger. And suddenly Redmond remembered he was there, his eyes finding him. He tried to speak, moving his lips. But there was no sound, no words, just a bit of spittle at the side of his mouth. But he’d understood what Redmond had wanted to say: Find Jason and Damon.
Now he stood alone inside the morgue. The attendant had pulled out the drawer for him, and he stared at the white undulating mound. Looked at the terrible landscape created by a single sheet, rising and sloping above the flat steel of the shelf
. If he stood long enough, concentrated hard enough, maybe he could wish away what lay beneath. So that by some miracle when he lifted the sheet, he’d find not Margot, but castaway toys, or baskets of soft old clothes gathered for some purpose or need.
When finally he removed the sheet, he saw the whole of her, naked and torn. Her always pale skin, now blue-cast in the cold hard light. He wanted to believe there was a blush of color in her cheeks, a flush in the webbing of veins at her temples, across her brow, in the soft flesh of her hands. Blood to match whatever it was that suffused every strand of her hair, alive still among so much death.
He glanced once at her ravaged breasts, remembering how he’d loved their compactness, how he’d once seen them nurse the boys. He had thought she would have asked him to leave that afternoon, his coming unexpectedly, only the third or fourth visit after almost a year of not seeing her. But she’d slipped out her breast and brought Jason, firstborn and greediest, to her nipple. He had stared in wonder and envy, understanding the power of what she was doing, knowing that whatever intimacy he might share with his sons, he could never have this.
Finally he took a step or two backward; the distance and the angle obscured the horror, and her body appeared merely white and bare. And if the mind could destroy, could it not also pity? Could it not grant him a measure of salvation even if he didn’t deserve it? And if it could do that, could it not work the impossible? Could it not will his boys back alive?
If summer had lingered like a warm ghost, that season was gone now. The first week of November had ushered in a creeping chill to discourage the sun, a harbinger of the harsher winter to come.
Inside the cutting room it was always winter. The coldness of death. Sakura would have wished to be anywhere but here tonight, in the presence once again of Margot Redmond’s body. But it had been vital that the autopsy be scheduled immediately, before postmortem changes made accurate impressions of the killer’s bite marks impossible.
There remained so little now of what Margot had been. It surprised him that he could not more easily objectify the ruin that was left. They had never really been friends, but he had known her in life, so that the image of what was lost was personal, and persisted. He had some understanding too of what she had meant to Michael. What she still meant. It was one reason why he was here, as his friend’s witness that these procedures would be carried out with dignity.
But there were other reasons.
Margot’s abduction with the twins seemed to have taken place in Westchester County. But her body had been recovered in Mo Martinez’s precinct, wrapped in Visqueen and dumped with the commercial trash like the bodies of Helena Grady and Leslie Siebrig before her. Those similarities could not be ignored, though there were differences in the condition of her body that might mean the work of a copycat. The seven previous victims had all been seriously violated, and yet the neat Y-track of staples seemed weirdly civilized in contrast to Margot’s ravaged flesh.
Dr. Linsky had agreed to perform the procedure, preserving continuity should it be determined that Margot was the killer’s eighth victim. Despite conflicting emotions, Sakura prayed it would prove so. For if this were the case, he knew he would be placed in charge of finding Michael’s twins. It was a responsibility he wished, if not welcomed.
He watched alongside Martinez as the preliminaries went forward. Documentary photographs taken. Swabs for saliva and semen. Fuming of the skin surfaces that yielded nothing. But impressions of the bite marks on the chewed breasts offered another chance for solid physical evidence. A proper registration of the killer’s dental pattern could be just as good an identifier as a fingerprint. Finally, after Bones Bailey had taken the casts, and the breast tissue had been excised and preserved, Dr. Linsky could begin the external examination.
“There is evidence of blunt force injury to the back of the skull”—the ME had begun removing hair in the area of the cranial wound—“most probably a blow to subdue the victim as she was leaning over, possibly buckling one of the children into a car seat. The swelling that is so prominent in the soft tissues around the eyes is often associated with this kind of trauma, the so-called raccoon eyes being indicative of fractures in the orbital roof with seepage of blood into the lids. . . . You might want a look at this.” He gestured them forward, indicating a long linear wound in the freshly shaved scalp. “This was done with something like a pipe.”
“Could the head injury have been the cause of death?” Martinez asked.
“It could have been the eventual cause,” the ME answered. “We’ll know more about that when we get inside. But I believe she was still alive when he bit off the nipples. Microscopic examination of the preserved tissue can more definitively establish whether or not the biting occurred before death.”
“Shouldn’t there have been more blood on her if she was alive when he bit her?” Mo asked.
“Not if the killer cleansed the body, Lieutenant Martinez.” Linsky was characteristically acerbic. He had begun rinsing away the dark residue from the fuming. Without its noxious coat, Margot’s body seemed even more despoiled, her marbling flesh a livid contrast with the raw excisions that had been necessary to preserve the bite marks.
“You are quiet tonight, James.” Linsky had turned to him. “Have you no questions at this point?”
Linsky inviting questions? Obviously there was some answer he was eager to provide. “I do have one question,” Sakura said. “Is there anything yet to convince you that we’re dealing with the same man?”
“Indeed,” Linsky said. “I was present when the Visqueen was removed and packaged for the lab. The killer’s method of wrapping and taping was precisely the same. As good as a signature, in my opinion.”
Mo was shaking his head. “I guess that seals the deal, Jimmy.”
“There’s something else.” Linsky was not finished. “The marks here are very faint”—he pointed out a portion of skin beneath the left shoulder blade—“but I believe you can see the beginning of an incision.”
“He was starting the Y-cut?” Mo’s question.
“It certainly seems so,” Linsky answered him. But he was looking at Sakura.
The twilit clouds seemed to boil as Willie watched them—a witches’ cauldron of a sky. The clotted masses of gray and black like bubbles of curdled wool.
She turned from the window and walked to the bed to sit among the scattered piles of her clothing. There was a box of tissues on the bedside table and she reached to pull one out, dabbing angrily at her eyes. She despised tears. She had not had a real cry since Switzerland when the news of her mother’s death had come, her sadness mixed with guilt for remaining with her studies through Lallie’s final bout with cancer.
But she was thinking of a time before that. Sitting on her bed. In her father’s house. Barely seventeen and gathering her clothes then too, clothes that were already too small in the waist. Packing in the wake of Edmond’s edict that she and her mother spend the summer away. Her father had called her a whore who at least had good timing. She’d be back for senior year with no one the wiser.
But she had been wiser. And she had not cried like that again until her mother had died.
She hated that she was crying now, though she knew it was stupid to bottle emotion inside. Certainly not something she would ever recommend to a patient. She turned on the bedside lamp and stroked the gleaming wood of the headboard. It was a totally maudlin act, and she let herself give in to it. She wanted to feel it again, Michael’s soul in this bed he’d made for the two of them. She feared it might be the last time.
She had no idea where Michael was now. She had seen him only briefly a few hours ago when he’d come in to change clothes. Before that she’d had only Jimmy’s reports about the discovery and identification of Margot’s body, the news that was no news regarding the fate of his sons. Waiting here in the apartment for Michael to come home had been the hardest hours of her life, a gaping hole in time that had forced her to confront the things she’d been refusing
to acknowledge. Feelings. Hopes. All futile now.
She had tried to imagine how bad it would be when Michael finally arrived, had tried to think out every possible response to any form that his pain would take. Her imagination had failed her. All her professional experience a hindrance to simple humanity.
There was no helping Michael.
She could hardly remember his words, a mere recitation of facts. What she remembered were eyes that could not look at her. She had sat in the bedroom and listened to him shower. She had watched him dress from the chair, remaining motionless and silent as he picked up his keys. The air so still between them. The sound of the front door closing was like a gunshot.
She shook her head and made herself get up from the bed. She scooped up the clothes that were still on hangers and made the first trip down the hall to the smaller bedroom. Her friends the Jamilis were spending the winter away, and as always she would be welcome to their Greenwich Village apartment. But she could not go there, not yet. Could not leave Michael so completely to himself. Perhaps he could stand it—might even welcome it. But she could not.
The answer for now was the limbo to which she consigned herself. She would remain in the apartment, as solitary and as silent as he wished her to be. Till he or her pride threw her out.
Hanae knelt before nothing. The altar rested within her heart. A shrine to her two unborn children, her “water babies.” She breathed deeply, yielding to their small spirits, allowing them to guide her, to help her focus the light behind her eyes, to fix upon a single point. A tiny dark star in the firmament of her mind. Another breath, and that which was finite grew in length and depth and breadth, expanding till it finally became . . . a nest of twigs and dried grass and browned needles of pine. And in the nest, a single egg with two yolks joined. Side by side, bound tentatively but inextricably, floating within the fragile armor of the shell. Alone in the nest, motherless because of the quick and common cunning of a cat. Abandoned in the tall tree, upon a branch that swayed in the force of wind and cold rain. The lids of her eyes quivered, and she inhaled, this time blowing her breath into the cup of her hands. She held the egg now. Close to her breast, a mother’s breast. Held it in the cradle of her fingers, warmed by her gentle exhalations, sheltered from the storm that she had foreseen. Nurturing. Sustaining. Until Kenjin’s sons were safely home.