The Cheriton police had questioned him from soon after his discovery of Muriel’s body until late in the evening. “I mean, they wanted information, and they were all excited because they thought it was the Bowler, and didn’t want me to know they were excited, because, after all, it was my friend who was dead, and I had seen her headless body in the trunk of a car.. . .”
Charis had a wide face, suitable for expressing emotion across a stage and into the last row of the second balcony. Up close like this, it was almost too much. Her hoop earrings swung and caught what little light there was. She put a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt on his shoulder and pushed him to sit down.
“Did they offer you any help? Support?”
He shrugged. “The usual. Grief counselors, stress counselors. Nothing that would really help me.” He packed some ground coffee into the coffee gadget and poured water. He clicked the spark on the cookstove, and the burner came to life with a heavy hiss.
“What would help you?”
“Understanding a few things would help me. They think the Bowler killed Muriel. That night. I saw her run off. She came here, then left, either with Madeline Ungaro or without, and then died.”
Charis caught it immediately. “You know she came here?”
Bernal reached into his shirt and pulled out a pink sash. It was soft, with satin on one side. He held it out to her, but she didn’t take it. “She had a pink nightgown on when I saw her. Over that ridiculous black Kevlar ninja outfit. She was over sixty, Charis. She shouldn’t have had anything like that in her wardrobe. I found this sash here, in Ungaro’s lab. She made it at least this far that night.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s put things in some order.”
“Okay. Makes sense. I’ve heard of the Bowler, of course. They were sure it was him, but they were pretending they still had their minds open to other possibilities. They asked about drug connections, her grief over her son’s long-ago death, all sorts of stuff, but their hearts weren’t in it at all. They knew it was the Bowler. The other possibilities were just ritual, so that they could pretend to themselves to be open-minded. I want information from you, Charis, so I can understand what they’re after.”
“What? About the Bowler?”
“Yes. I want your facts and your interpretations of those facts. I want to know how you see it.”
“First, pour coffee.”
A fountain of brown liquid spilled over into the serving flask. The gadget was too complicated but seemed to do the job. And it was light, presumably the point.
She held out her Social Protection travel mug and he filled it.
“In the past two and a half years, there have been four murders in the Black River Valley that involved beheading.” Charis spoke carefully. “That’s out of a total of fifteen murders, sixteen if you count one that got listed as accidental, but looked like a woman offing her abusing husband. The victims were Damon Fry, Warren St Amant, Christopher Gambino, and Aurora Lipsius. And now, they think, Muriel Inglis.”
“But you don’t?”
“My opinions are complicated. Like I said, let’s try to keep it a bit organized. Now, with a serial killer, ‘first victim’ is something you only know later, maybe much later. So, Damon Fry and Warren St Amant were known murders, and their heads were indeed cut off, but they weren’t tied together until the murder of Christopher Gambino.”
“Whose head ended up in a bloodstained bag at a bowling alley.”
“Right. That kind of focused people’s attention, as well as getting a lot of media coverage. But Gambino actually came out as Victim #3. There was a look back over the previous couple of years for common traits, and Damon Fry came up as the earliest in time. A manager at a marketing consulting company, forty-three, divorced father of two, man with a nasty whore habit, Caucasian. Liked to go down on South Main, pick up some drugs, and pick up a prostitute. He never used drugs himself— they were for his woman of that night. He was known for being ... a bit rough. Kind of a pudgy guy, not in the greatest shape, but he could get violent. I think the drugs were really for that, so that it was easier for him, dealing with someone whacked out. And, despite his rep, girls would go with him, because of the drugs.
“Then, two years ago on the night of January 18th, someone killed him. Bruises and cuts on his body: someone had decided to fight back, and fight back hard. No one ever figured out who he had been with that night. Area got rousted, everybody questioned, most of the girls had some story about Damon and his habits, but no one would say she was with him that particular evening. Cause of death was blunt force trauma that might even have been accidental. Near as anyone could tell, he was backing up, tripped over something, and hit his head on a concrete block. They later found the block, and the corner seemed to match the depression in his skull.
“That, of course, took a while to figure out, because when his body was pulled out of the Connecticut River, down around Sunderland, it didn’t have a head. It had been in the water two, three days. Someone saw it swirling around with a bunch of floating cans and milk bottles, downstream of a sewer outfall, coated with ice.
“Head had been removed by a high-quality carbon steel Chinese-style culinary cleaver. And I can say all those words that fast because that’s all anyone ever described the murder weapon as, a ‘high-quality carbon steel Chinese-style culinary cleaver,’ like it was all one word. That’s what the ME made of the scratches on the top remaining vertebrae, guess he was a bit of a cook, and everyone kind of glommed on to it. Bad practice, since one or another feature might be wrong, and accepting them all as necessary can cause you to miss stuff, like something only medium quality, or a heavy chopping knife instead of a cleaver.
“Now, whenever a reporter writes about a killer chopping a body up, he’ll always emphasize the ‘surgical exactness’ of the cutting. Same way any woman involved is a hottie and any kid an honors student. Well, in this case, the cuts didn’t show much surgical ability. Or even culinary. ‘Rushed chopping’ was the order of that night. Took the killer a while to find the gap between the vertebrae, and the neck got pretty well turned into hamburger in the process.”
“You guys did eventually find the head,” Bernal said.
“Yeah, we did. About two weeks later. It was dangling in a culvert, in a sling made of orange safety mesh. Nothing weird had been done to it, except that it had been kept in a freezer, and it was in pretty good shape. Aside from freezer burn. But it didn’t tell us anything.
Theory was, the killer, we guessed a woman at that point, panicked and cut the head off to conceal the body’s identity. That didn’t work, but no one could figure out who the killer was, so whoever it was finally dumped the head.
“Searching for Fry’s head had been a bit of a local hobby for a while, but other than that, it was a fairly normal case. Six months or so goes by. South Main had another regular, guy by the name of Warren St Amant, black guy, looked to be in his fifties, maybe older, but, later, when his body was identified, everyone found out he was thirty-six. Rough life. Rough death.
“He’d moved up here from New York, bus, the way people do. We got some good benefits up here, people say the town’s on the bathroom wall down at Port Authority. I’ve never gone down to check. Warren was a drug addict, with a preference for sedatives of various sorts. Oxycontin was his favorite, but he would do almost anything that depresses your central nervous system. Codeine. Heroin. He wasn’t fussy, Warren. He helped out with the girls, picked up some extra money from the pimps, did favors, people kind of liked him, he got by.
“One day he told some people he knew that he was going to make a big score. As in a big pile of product, somewhere. He was kind of vague as to what it was, and various people had different opinions: case of oxy that someone had stolen from the CVS warehouse, some H condoms a mule had crapped out in a stall in an interstate rest stop, not noticing because one had burst, and he was hallucinating and dying. Even a shoebox full of Quaaludes. Remember ’ludes?”
> “No.”
“Ah, kids these days. No contact with the self-screwing habits of their ancestors. Sad. With that particular variant, some guy was getting promoted to CEO and found a shoebox full of his old crap, hash pipes, ’ludes, a rolled-up hundred dollar bill white with old cocaine, who knows, and dumped it in a garbage can. I guess street folks can’t be expected to know much about vetting procedures at Fortune 500 companies, but they had a whole story going.
“Anyway, old Warren was heading for it. Knew where it was. People agreed on that. He went off and disappeared. No one thought much about him, until, a few days later, there was a huge flock of crows on the median of the Mass Pike, down near Springfield, tearing at something. Road crew got out there and found Warren’s head, or what was left of it.
“The body turned up the next day, inside an old boiler in an abandoned apartment building. His head had been chopped off with a guillotine of some sort, spring-loaded was the guess. And he’d died right there, right in the rusty boiler, lying on a bunch of trash, and bled out without being moved. There was no sign of any drugs.
“This time the slice was much neater. It was starting to look like some kind of weird drug-related thing, though no one could come up with a good motive. I suppose if Warren was right, if he’d actually found something valuable, someone else might have killed him for it. But there was no reason to try to conceal his identity, or any of the possible explanations for Damon Fry. And it looked . . . neat, kind of planned, even. Like someone set him up.”
“The Easter Bunny,” Bernal said. “Right?”
“I forgot about your little chat with our friend Jord. Maybe. Warren might have been looking for drugs, but not in there. He had been sedated and put in there by someone else. A transfusion from him would have knocked out a bull. He wasn’t even conscious when he died.”
“Oh,” Bernal said.
“Don’t worry. More support for that particular theory coming right up, with the next victim. But first, there was a gap. Almost a year. Damon dies in January, Warren in June. Then a whole year where everyone’s heads stayed on their shoulders, and we figured whatever conflict there had been in the local drug world had kind of run its course.
“Then Christopher Gambino’s head turned up in a bloody bowling bag at Memory Lanes. His body was found a day or so later, dumped in a patch of woods just over the border in New Hampshire. He’d been beheaded by a single swing of a sword. Some long blade anyway, with a bit of a curve to it. The ME went crazy with that one too, and it turned into an antique Samurai sword. He talked crystal structure, folded metal, all sorts of crap.
“Gambino was, no surprise, tied into drugs too. Just as a consumer. He was a smart guy, a professional, electronics and software when he could focus, and he had a whole spiel about souping up inadequate neurotransmitters, leveling the brain with hallucinogens. Saw himself as a kind of home garage mechanic, pimping his mind. Sometimes it seems that the only point to getting smarter is to have better explanations for why you’re doing something stupid. He could hold a job, and was good, when he’d leveled out. And here’s a piece of info for you: he did a bit of work for Hess Tech.”
“What? Did he work on Hesketh?”
“No way of telling. All we really have are some 1099s from the company—which, I don’t have to remind you, went bankrupt..But he had skills that would have made sense. He might have worked on some of those stepper motors up there.” She waved her arm at Hesketh’s dangling limbs.
“And Hess Tech was right next to Long Voyage.” Bernal found himself excited. “This was the connection. That was what put Muriel onto the Bowler in the first place. Gambino. She’d been trying to figure out what Ungaro was really up to and started checking out that connection.” He looked at Charis who stared back at him impassively. “What, you think it’s just coincidence or something?”
She wiggled her coffee cup until he refilled it. “No, I think they’re pretty clearly connected, just that the chain of causation runs opposite to what you want.”
‘“Chain of causation’?”
“What, I don’t have a graduate degree, so I can’t talk fancy?”
“I don’t have a graduate degree,” he said quietly.
She briefly put her big hand over his. “I’m sorry, honey. Someday you’ll get over it. But I can still say ‘chain of causation’ if I feel like it. The connection is Muriel. Now you’re making me do what I said I wouldn’t do, which is wander off a clear presentation of the facts—”
“All right,” he said. “All right. Park it. Put Gambino’s connection to Hess Tech, and to Muriel, aside, and we’ll get back to it.”
“You won’t forget?” she said.
“I won’t forget.”
“Gambino worked around, took his drugs, lived pretty clean aside from that. Had friends, though none of them knew where he lived, which was in an apartment over west. Old woodframes over there, mill housing, plastic factory housing, shoe factory housing. None of that’s there anymore, but the buildings still are, so the rent’s cheap. He had a little room there. Just a room, nothing much in it when we looked. He didn’t talk to anyone, he didn’t have a blog, he didn’t leave a diary, and he didn’t have a psychiatrist or confessor or spiritual leader he would spill his guts to. So no one knows what the hell he was up to or where he was when this happened. Blood spatter must have been something to see. No other damage to his body at all, so that was the one and only act of violence committed against him. No drugs in his blood that you wouldn’t expect. Meaning he had enough in there to knock any regular person out, but it probably just made him bubbly and attentive.
“That bowling bag thing made everybody go crazy for a while. Very popular image. And attention really got hot when Aurora Lipsius was murdered only two weeks later. She was a prostitute, from Gardner. Thirty-three years old, been in the business a long time, didn’t know any other. A couple of kids found her rear end sticking out of the trunk of an abandoned car over on Farthingale Road. Beheaded. Tight skirt, fishnets, high heels—her ass was in the newspaper, on TV, Everywhere. I’d been a cop for a while. It still disgusted me. Murdered prostitutes are just a decorative item now. Like cherubs used to be in old paintings. They don’t really have to have anything to do with the story.
“Her father left home before she was born. Mom raised her and her siblings alone . .. well, not alone, of course. Succession of boyfriends, even one more husband, looks like. Two of the kids had one dad, one another. To be frank, I don’t remember which group Aurora fell into. Now, it’s not like we investigated her whole spiritual biography. She made it through the junior year at Gardner High. Started having sex for drugs pretty early on. Suspended once her freshman year for dealing coke in the gym locker room. Typical story? Not really, but I see things like that often enough. It was the drugs, really, on top of everything else. She loved them, it seems. Could never get enough. I’m not sure this knowledge of her biography helped in any way, but I thought I owed it to her. For most people, the way they die has nothing to do with the way they lived. It’s not a natural consequence. It’s not something to be expected. People say that, afterward, but almost always, if that person had not been in the wrong place at the wrong time, they could have gone on living a whole lot longer.
“Anyway, Farthingale’s a common place for abandoned cars. People often torch the things, just to get something out of having their vehicle die on them. The thing’s usually traded hands a few times unofficially, lacks registration, and it’s not worth trying to stick someone with disposal fees. People trade drugs in the ones that don’t serve as bonfires, low-end pros work some of the ones with better upholstery in the back, so we do our best to keep them cleaned up. The car Lipsius died in had been there two or three days. Since it was directly involved in a murder, they did considerably more work tracing it. Not easy. Vehicle identification numbers had been burned off, even ones no one knows are there. And a fair number of the parts had been switched with other cars. Some of them were even from other
model years. There was some doubt whether the car would actually have run, in the configuration that we found it. Near as we could tell, the chassis, at least, was from a car that had been stolen in Yakima, Washington, a few months before. How it got to a side road near Cheriton, Massachusetts, no one has ever figured out.
“Her death obviously occurred right, there. Blood spatter. All pretty clear. She hadn’t been taken there and dumped. She had half-climbed into the goddam trunk. Why? Had someone forced her? Gunpoint? Who knows? What it really looks like is, she went looking for something and, instead, found something that took her head clean off. From the scratches on the vertebrae and the impact effect, the guess was something like a spring-loaded guillotine, similar to the one that had taken out Warren St Amant. Then, without the weight of her head, she slid back, until she was halfway out of the trunk again, feet resting on the ground.”
“So the guillotine wasn’t in the car when you found it.”
“No. Someone, whoever, came and took the head and the spring-loaded guillotine. We found it, later, or at least the spring part of it, in a stack of fence hardware at Home Depot. The blade never turned up. The soil under the car was soaked with her blood.”
“Did they ever find her head?”
“Nope. But here’s where we talk—”
“About the Easter Bunny. Someone who hides drugs in concealed locations. Jord was furious, saw it as some kind of unfair competition.”
“It’s a reasonable explanation: the Bowler, or whoever, puts drugs into hidden locations, suggests that people look for them, and then kills them when they find them.”
“You don’t believe it?” Bernal said. “It explains why anyone’s giving out free drugs in the first place and why at least St Amant and Lipsius ended up where they did.”
“Oh, no, I don’t think it’s a bad explanation at all. Fits into a nice progression, if you throw Gambino out as someone who just ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time: Damon Fry as the accidental first case, Warren St Amant as a kind of test of the concept, and Aurora Lipsius as the first successful use of an automatic death device of some sort. Everything’s getting automated now, can’t get any living being to answer the phone when you call to complain, so, sure.”
Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief Page 14