Pattern of Wounds

by J. Bertrand

  Between bites, he catches me up on his latest project, a book about Dean Corll, the notorious Candy Man serial killer from the early seventies, who terrorized the Heights neighborhood where I grew up, not so far from where Charlotte and I live now. Back then it was just as diverse ethnically, but more working class. Corll’s victims, mostly teenage boys, didn’t go unnoticed, but the police were all too quick to write them off as runaways.

  The city’s seedy underbelly has always been one of Templeton’s obsessions. His first book, which I’ve never read, was about a Houston real estate mogul from the late forties who was found hanging from the rafters in his stable. It would’ve passed for a suicide except that the man’s mistress had been strung up, too. During the interviews he did for The Kingwood Killing, he talked a lot about Dean Corll, so I’m not surprised he’d gone back to the story. Recent events may have contributed.

  “They’ve found another one of his victims,” Templeton says, using his fork to punctuate. “One of the bodies, I mean.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “So I was thinking maybe it was time to revisit that case. Tell the story from a fresh perspective. I’ve always been interested in Corll, you know that.”

  “The serial killer thing leaves me cold,” I say.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It just does. The whole cultural fixation. There are so many books written about these people that they’re practically celebrities. They’re the ones you’re making famous, not me. It’s no wonder you have imitators, the way the pathology’s been glamorized.”

  “That’s so naive,” he says. “The next thing you’re gonna tell me is that listening to gangsta rap turns good suburban kids into stone-cold thugs. It’s ridiculous. You can’t blame writers for turning people into serial killers—and anyway, I don’t think it’s possible to glamorize a man who tortured and murdered young boys.”

  “You’re right,” I say. “Maybe you should write about him. It’ll keep you out of my hair, for one thing. I was just a kid when it all happened. Unless you’re looking for some insight into what it was like in the Heights for an eleven-year-old.”

  “I actually would be interested in that,” he says.

  “It wasn’t like anything. We had no idea what was going on. I certainly didn’t. Compared to now, we were sheltered.”

  He puts his fork down and starts chuckling. “Sheltered in the seventies? Drugs and the Sexual Revolution? Disco? Where were you, man?”

  “I was eleven. And disco came later, anyway.”

  His smile fades. “But you’re not being honest with me, March. All the time we’ve known each other you’ve been holding back. You knew I was into the Corll thing, and you never said a word. I can hardly believe it—but then, it’s you we’re talking about.”

  “You know what? I’ve got to get going.”

  “Not so fast. I’m helping you with your investigation, so you have to help with mine.”

  “I don’t have any help to give, remember? I didn’t work that case.”

  “March,” he says. “I’ve been talking to your cousin.”

  “My cousin?”

  “Tammy Putnam. You know who I mean. She runs a website devoted to the victims of Dean Corll, including her brother Moody. Now, I knew about the site, but I didn’t know until I actually interviewed her that the two of you are family. She says you and Moody were inseparable.”

  “Brad, listen to me—”

  “She also says you’ve essentially kicked her out of your life, and this is why.”

  If I hadn’t been up all night, if I wasn’t operating on a diet of black coffee and the bagel Aguilar fed me four and a half hours ago, I could handle this bombshell a little better. But I have, and I am, so I handle it by slamming my mug on the table, sloshing the last of my coffee onto the last of his fish and chips. He scoots back in a rush, but his eyes alight with glee.

  “A palpable hit,” he says. “Now fair is fair. I want to know the truth about your cousin’s theory. She says Moody knew Dean Corll’s friends, was definitely taken by him, and that you know it too, but refuse to admit it.”

  “Tammy’s a lonely woman with a lot of bitterness about how her life’s turned out,” I say. “She never even heard about Dean Corll until she saw a thing on TV about him, and then she became obsessed. Moody, her brother . . . his disappearance is to her what the Kennedy assassination was to Oliver Stone. The moment when everything turned bad.”

  “So she’s making it up?”

  I shake my head. “She believes it. It’s just not true.”

  “Have you actually looked at her website, though? I did and it seems pretty convincing. I can tell you the Corll experts respect what she’s doing—”

  “Then they’re not too bright. No disrespect, but a lot of these armchair theorists aren’t. And no I haven’t read it. I don’t need to. I know for a fact Moody wasn’t kidnapped by Dean Corll. Please.”

  “And you didn’t become a cop in the first place because of his disappearance? That’s what she seems to think.”

  The sneer on my face must speak volumes.

  “You deny it,” he says. “But if you’re so sure your cousin wasn’t a victim, then what did happen to him? Answer me that.”

  “Like I said, I was just eleven. Moody was fifteen and that’s a world of difference. His sister wants a glamorous explanation for what happened to him, and in our sick and twisted society being the victim of a serial killer is glamorous. But that doesn’t make it true.”

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  “And I’m not going to, Brad. All I’m going to say is this: don’t spread around what Tammy tells you like it’s holy writ. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. There’s a reason I don’t return her calls—and if you want me to return yours, then drop it.”

  “You already don’t return my calls.”

  “Exactly,” I say. “And you wonder why.”

  I’m awake now and burning with anger, the same smoldering rage I feel every time Tammy Putnam’s name comes up. Charlotte knows better now than to even mention her. The woman is certifiable, and has a knack for dragging other people into her insanity.

  First she’d ruined her own marriage and poisoned her kids against her, then left alone had started chipping away at the rest of us. Before he died, she even had my uncle all turned around, the man who pretty much raised me, halfway convinced his flesh-and-blood son had been murdered by a psychopath—and I, his adopted son, was keeping the truth from him. She’s never had any idea the kind of grief she’s stirring up, and wouldn’t care anyway. Everything she does is about herself. It’s always been that way, even in the spring of 1973.

  I run a couple of lights on my way to the medical examiner’s office, and screech to a halt in the mostly empty parking lot. Inside, I follow a path of bright corridors to my brother-in-law’s lab, but Bridger isn’t in. The shades are drawn and the door locked tight. I continue down the hall to Dr. Green’s lair, wishing I’d gone home to sleep like Bascombe told me instead of wasting my time on Brad Templeton.

  “You’re early,” Sheila Green says.

  “Fine,” I snap. “I can come back later.”

  “Who put the burr under your saddle, huh? Is that any way to talk to a lady?”

  “I retract my statement.”

  “Good boy. Now let’s go downstairs and get started. I’m looking forward to this.”

  In the elevator she takes out her cell phone and shows me the pictures she snapped on Friday, the day of the snow. Her Mercedes in the ME’s parking lot, blanketed with an inch of white powder. A five- or six-year-old kid standing next to a stunted snowman in the front yard of a hulking brick two-story. Dr. Green and a distinguished-looking gray-haired man I assume is the other Dr. Green, the cardiologist, each of them palming snowballs like they’re about to start a fight.

  “What about you, March? You take any?”

  “I was working.” I rub my eyes. The snow seem
s like ages ago, but it’s been less than forty-eight hours since it came and went.

  “You were working,” she says. “So was everybody else, but that didn’t stop us from going outside and enjoying ourselves. I mean, when was the last time it snowed like that in this town? Oh, right: never. All people do around here is whine and complain about the weather, how hot it is, how miserable, all the mosquitoes flying around. I get sick of hearing it. Then something like this happens and you don’t even take a moment to experience it?”

  “Hey, I’m from Houston. Where were you born?”

  She frowns. “I didn’t know that about you. It explains some things.”

  “I don’t complain about the weather. I like the heat. It’s what separates the men from the boys. Only a certain kind of person can live in this town.”

  “Now, that I can agree with. You know what my husband says? This city is a cocktail of everything wrong in the country—suburban sprawl, consumerism, religious fanatics—with a little olive of sanity floating in the middle.”

  “Your husband sounds like an Inner Looper. Where’s he from?”

  She smirks. “Virginia. But like the bumper sticker says, we weren’t born here, but we got here as fast as we could.”

  “You and half the population of Louisiana.”

  Her mouth twists. As Templeton would say, a palpable hit. “You know I went to Tulane, don’t you?”

  “I’m just saying. If you come here from Louisiana and complain about the heat . . . well, what were you expecting?”

  Small talk with Sheila Green. I’ve definitely stepped through the looking glass. She seems to realize this, too.

  “While I’ve got you in such an obliging mood,” she says, “let me ask you one thing. Your lieutenant, that beautiful Denzel-looking man?”

  “You mean Bascombe? I don’t see the resemblance.”

  “You don’t have the right kind of eyes. Anyway, did you pick something up from him last night, something a little off?”

  “That tongue-lashing he gave me? Standard operating procedure.”

  The temperature drops as we enter the autopsy theater, where an assistant in scrubs is already busy arranging instruments. Simone Walker’s body lies on a stainless steel table, translucently white under the bright lamps. Green goes straight over, but I hang back.

  People say sometimes that you never grow accustomed to death, that something about a murder victim will always get to you, no matter how many you’ve seen before. But you do get used to it and it happens all too quickly. Perhaps the only profession that acclimatizes you quicker is war. Looking at the body on the slab, I feel nothing but curiosity. With the doctor’s help, it might speak to me. It might assist me in my work. Whatever a person really is—a consciousness, even a soul—is long gone at this point. Simone, to the extent she exists for me at all, isn’t lying on the table. She’s in the air, ever present and not at all.

  I approach slowly, taking in the cold, clinical details that only here can be revealed. From the rib cage down the long line of her body, the skin remains untouched, almost pristine. The fatal wound is just over the breast, and it looks like the blade was buried to the hilt and seesawed back and forth, opening the gash ever wider.

  “What I think,” Green says, “is that he killed her first with this one blow.” She leans over the wound with a gleaming pair of tweezers, clamping onto something within the opening, then holding it up for inspection. “See that? Some kind of fiber. If you had the top she was wearing, I would bet this thread would match up. But the clothes weren’t at the scene, were they?”

  “Just the shorts she was wearing,” I say.

  “The other puncture wounds are very different. See how uniform they are?” She points to six thin punctures in a row, arcing in a crescent across Simone’s chest. “He took her clothes off afterward, and probably straddled her, and started stabbing like this.” She reverses a scalpel in her fist and pummels the air. “I don’t know the significance of that, but it’s interesting.” The assistant hands her an instrument and she measures the depth of the wounds. “They’re shallower than the first stab.”

  “Like he used a second knife?”

  “Ah, I wouldn’t say that. It looks to me like the same blade; he’s just using the tip for the postmortem mutilation.”

  While I process this, she and the assistant turn the body. Once again, the skin is unmarked until halfway up her back, then suddenly destroyed by a chaotic flurry of puncture marks.

  “Look at this,” she says.

  “He went crazy on her.”

  “No, he didn’t. See this?” She uses the scalpel again to trace crescents over Simone’s back. “There it is. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. And there, too. Over and over again, but it’s that same pattern. Six in a row, all with the same arch.”

  “Like the shape of a frown,” the assistant says.

  Green shrugs. “Maybe.”

  I stare at the diced stretch of skin, the same shallow gashes that mark the front of the body, only repeated over and over, one series on top of another. I study the shape, visualizing Green’s arm moving up and down like the bloodless knife in Psycho.

  One, two, three, four, five, six, again and again—but for what?

  I take a few steps back, then turn, closing my eyes to concentrate. There’s something coming, echoing up from the recesses of my mind, but it’s not an image so much as a sound. A dull reverberation on wood.

  “Hand me that,” I say, reaching for the scalpel, but Dr. Green doesn’t oblige. I go to the empty table a few feet away, slipping out my pocketknife, snicking open the blade. Green and the assistant both follow me with their eyes.

  I spread my hand on the stainless surface, moving my fingers wider, then slowly—very slowly—I tap the point of the blade against the table. To the left of my pinkie. One. Between the pinkie and ring finger. Two. Between the ring and middle finger. Three. Between the middle and index finger. Four. Between the index and thumb. Five. To the right of the thumb. Six.

  “You see what it is?”

  I start to repeat the pattern, but Green raises her hand.

  “I see.”

  “It’s like a game,” I say. “A dare. You start slow and you go faster and faster to prove just how good you really are, and how cold-blooded.”

  She sets the scalpel down and holds her open hand just above Simone’s back, checking the pattern and nodding. “I think you’re right.”

  Everything’s related. Nothing’s coincidental. A seemingly random frenzy isn’t random at all once you break it down. The logic emerges as all the brutality is reverse engineered, peeling back the layers until the first blow has yet to fall, then running it forward to confirm that your conjecture is right on target.

  The man who killed Simone Walker stripped her to the waist and sat on top of her. He pressed his hand against her skin, spreading the fingers out, and then he tested himself. The shallow wounds weren’t meant to kill or even to cause her pain. She was only the canvas. No, not even that. She was the tabletop, existing only for one thing: to help her killer prove something to himself. He would have started slowly at first, just like I did. And once that initial practice was complete, he would have rolled her over to start fresh, going faster and faster.

  “This changes things,” I say. “It’s not what I was expecting.”

  “We’re not done yet.”

  “I realize that. But I better make a call.”

  I go into the hallway to use my phone, but all I get is Bascombe’s voicemail. I try Aguilar with the same result, and then Ordway, who picks up on the fifth ring and sounds winded. He listens to my news with mild interest, then informs me that after confronting Jason Young with his wife’s murder and his bloody clothes, the suspect responded as you’d expect.

  “He lawyered up.”

  “Is he still there?”

  “Not anymore. Everyone’s packed it up for the day, in fact. I’m just heading out.”

  “We’ll need samples from Young
,” I say. “There’s no way he did this without cutting himself—did you check his hands for cuts? I remember seeing some on his knuckles.”

  “Chief,” he says, “this’ll keep. The L.T. took his shot and came up with nothing.”

  “And prints? You did print him before cutting him loose, right?”

  “Beats me. Take it up with the man first thing in the morning.”

  Back inside, Green looks at me expectantly and then not at all, catching from my body language all she needs to know. She gives the wall clock a reflexive glance.

  “That Denzel-looking man just struck out,” I say.

  “There’s something up with him, March. And it’s not just you.”

  When she starts the Y-incision, I tune her out. The rest is merely confirmation of what we already know. Still, organs must be removed and weighed, the results spoken aloud for the benefit of the recording. My wave of excitement crests under the wet monotony of it all, my eyes growing heavy. I prop my back against the wall for support.

  “I’ve had people cry in here, and I’ve had them throw up. I’ve had them run out in disgust. But I’ve never had anybody fall asleep, March, and it better not happen today.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve got plenty to keep my mind occupied.”

  “Here’s something else.” She wipes a gloved hand on her apron and takes a step toward me. “I don’t see any signs of sexual assault. If you were thinking along lust murder lines, I’ve got nothing for you. This is about the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “That’s saying something.”

  “Not the most horrific, maybe. But the strangest.”

  I can’t argue with that.

  Outside, I strip my scrubs off and retreat to the back door where the cracked slab and sand-filled ashtrays serve as a smoker’s lounge. This is where Bridger always comes to decompress, but now I have it all to myself.

  Simone Walker didn’t have much in life, as far as I can tell, and what she did have she might not have valued. What she’d endured as a child, maybe that had made it impossible for her to ever find what she really wanted, or keep wanting it once she did. But the people in her life, they all used her. Her mother used her silence, and then her very existence, for her own validation. Her husband rewrote the rules on her, and finally just used her for sex. Her landlord, Dr. Hill, who’d admitted after all that self-absorbed chatter that Simone was “sweet,” was just using that sweet girl to keep up with the bills.