by Jason Parent
Tessa closed her eyes but kept her hands clenched in her lap.
“Okay,” Michael said. “Your guess is as good as mine how this fortune-telling bullshit works, but you still want me to try?”
“I think so.”
“Then stop wasting my time, and give me your hand.”
Something wild flashed across her face. Michael couldn’t be sure, but for a moment, he felt a connection to her. It excited him, and briefly, he was thrilled to have her company.
Then, she reached out and placed her hand in his.
Michael felt fear creep into the back of his mind, the part still anchored in reality. As an alternate universe unfolded before him, Tessa and his surroundings withered and peeled like an old painting.
Michael is sitting in a room with a sofa, two chairs, and a large television, an old one with a triangular back. He doesn’t recognize the place.
Knickknacks are positioned on shelves with perfect spacing between them. Every horizontal line—from the bottom of a portrait to the edge of a wall shelf or the borders of a coffee table—is perfectly parallel or perpendicular to the four walls of the room. End tables are equidistant from each arm of the wrinkle-free sofa, identical lamps standing dead center on each. Everything is set with steadfast accuracy. Everything has its place.
Everything, except for the blood.
Michael gasps. He jumps from his seat and circles behind it. A mammoth-sized tick squirms in the spreading blood. Michael blinks in an attempt to get his eyes to adjust in the dim light. The tick is actually a man in an unzipped ski jacket. His legs and groin are difficult to see as they match the color of the floor beneath them—black with shades of red where light from outside hits a liquid surface. The man is clutching his belly as if his guts might spill out.
It’s just a vision. I have to remember that.
The man’s eyes are hidden behind thick-rimmed mirrored glasses. He appears to be in his late forties or early fifties, with skin so pale he could pass for the dead. Sweat gathers like air bubbles, one each side of the man’s widow’s peak. Spit slides down his lip as he breathes rapidly through gritted teeth, and the veins in his neck bulge.
The man stares upward, looking somewhere to Michael’s left. Michael turns to see a naked girl standing a few feet away from him.
Tessa.
Michael gapes at her. He can’t help it. She’s the first naked girl he’s ever seen that wasn’t on a late-night cable show, in a magazine, or on the Internet. Somehow, Tessa seems so much better than all those starlets and porn queens. She is real, both flawed and perfect. He bites his lip, frightened, excited, and ashamed, all at once.
But the shame isn’t enough to make him look away. He starts at her eyes—and he prides himself on that—then works his way down to her chapped but full lips. There, he lingers, thinking himself spying and knowing it wrong, able to see her breasts but trying not to ogle them. Temptation strips him from the horror around him. For a moment, he and Tessa are alone in the universe.
His penis throbs against the zipper of his jeans as he takes in her breasts, wanting more than anything to touch them. They are small, the nipples like erasers on the ends of pencils.
He likes the way her shoulder bones form bulges beneath her skin that look like the caps over the air valves on the Huffy he had before it got stolen. He lowers his eyes to the smooth, flat plains that close the distance from her hips to her blond pubic hair.
What’s that in her hand?
She’s holding a butcher knife, and by the looks of it, the biggest one from the rack. And the blade is dripping blood.
Fuck. Michael’s hormones die in a fiery crash, but his heart skips faster. He raises his eyes to meet hers and sees an animalistic ferocity on her face. The wildness he’d seen in her earlier has returned with a vengeance. Its intensity is amplified, and she scares the shit out of him.
He rubs his temples and tries to stay calm. “It’s just a vision,” he mutters, pacing. “It hasn’t happened yet.”
Pictures lining the wall show Tessa with two adults. Her parents, Michael assumes. They look happy. They look like the type of family Michael used to wish he had, until he just stopped caring.
The man on the floor, a bit older now, is definitely the same man in the photographs.
She’s killing her own father!
A part of Michael knows he is rushing to judgment. But the man is defenseless, and he’s dying. Michael glances at the woman in one of the pictures and wonders where she is. Has Tessa already murdered her?
“Tessa, honey,” the man whines. Dark, almost black blood seeps through his fingers. “Haven’t I always taken care of you? Haven’t I always been there to provide for you?”
Tessa’s heavy breathing makes her chest and shoulders heave like a cartoon ape’s. Her muscles flex. The wildness she exhibits continues to mount, a fury burning as blue as the hottest part of a flame. Michael fears that, like fire, it might consume her. He wonders if it already has.
With a howl as bloodcurdling as it is primal, Tessa lunges at the man. The knife rips through his shirt and pierces his skin just below the rib cage. Again and again, the blade rises and falls, leaving two-inch slits wherever it strikes. Each groove bubbles out more blood.
A sound blares in the background. Sirens.
Back on the bench, Michael lurched violently over the rusty metal armrest. He leaned over and vomited.
“Are you okay?” Tessa asked, placing a hand on his back.
“Don’t you touch me!” Michael jumped to his feet, knocking her hand away. “Don’t ever touch me.”
He pulled a napkin from his brown lunch bag and wiped his chin. Angry and embarrassed, he turned from the mess he’d made and slung his backpack over his shoulder.
“Wait.” She reached for his arm but stopped short of making contact. “What did you see?”
“I saw what kind of person you really are.” He started walking away.
Behind him, Tessa started crying. “I can’t do it again,” she said through sobs. “Please don’t make me do it again.”
Michael didn’t stop or turn back. He was through trying to help.
Chapter 13
Sam pinched her nostrils as she descended the slippery stairs. Her black boots weren’t the right footwear for managing the wooden steps eaten away by years of rain, wind, and ocean spray. The city hadn’t spared any resources for cleaning up the waterfront, and no one had swum at the beach for decades. Only junkies and teenagers looking for a secluded place to fuck or drink hung out in the shadows of the rocky shoals.
Junkies, teenagers, and the occasional disposer of a dead body. Sam shrank from the cold wind, reaching out for a handrail that wasn’t there. Like a tightrope walker, she held her hands out by her sides as she made her way down to the sludge-covered coastline. The scattered seaweed reminded her of an old Charlton Heston movie about a disturbing food product.
The thought made her miss her former partner, Bruce, who would’ve gotten the reference immediately. He had been a surly detective who seemed to like no one but her. He had also been her mentor, but he had fallen in the line of duty. She’d never requested another partner, never wanted one, instead preferring to pull uniforms in to serve as backup or assist with footwork. She didn’t know why the department had never forced another partner on her—a young apprentice, perhaps—but she guessed it had something to do with politics and budget cuts or some other bureaucratic bullshit.
The tide was coming in. The beach was mostly rocks and mud, and a salty garbage stench hung over her like a thick cloak. The rancid dark water frothed with brown bubbles, making it look a little like soda, but Sam would have drunk her own urine before swallowing Taunton River water.
Sam ducked under the tape that cordoned off the crime scene. A tent had been erected over a small patch of surf, its tail end jutting out a few feet into the water. She
headed toward it, knowing the body she had been called in to see lay beneath it.
As she approached, a heavyset man in a bulky winter jacket, knit hat, and waders stepped into her path. “It’s not a pretty one,” Dr. Prentiss said.
Sam rolled her eyes. “You and I both know I’ve probably seen worse.”
The medical examiner chuckled. “So you have.” His bifocals fogged up as he stuck out his lower lip and released a breath. “Okay, then. Right this way, Detective. This one is… mostly intact.”
Dr. Prentiss led her to the tent. “We haven’t moved the body yet. No ID or personal effects were found on or near the remains, but we’ll take a closer look once we get her on the table. We’ve bagged her hands but otherwise left her where we found her. We’re going to have to pull her out soon, though. The water is rising.”
“What can you tell me about the victim?”
“Female. African-American. Approximately five-foot-nine, mid to late forties. Hard to nail it down on account of all the missing skin.”
“Possible homicide?”
“Most certainly homicide.”
Dr. Prentiss unzipped the tent flap and stepped inside. Before following, Sam surveyed the area. Most of the uniformed officers were outside the tape, some questioning the Department of Transportation crew that had been working on the nearby bridge, others keeping reporters and busybodies away from the scene. She had instructed Sergeant Rollins and Officer Bova to scan the vicinity for possible weapons and evidence, with instructions to photograph and bag anything of interest. Officer Cromartie gave her a nod then scribbled on a notepad. He was tasked with recording the names of all those who entered the scene and the times each came and went. So far, no one had reported sighting anything of note, not even a footprint that didn’t belong.
Sam braced herself and stepped inside the tent. Two feet beyond the entrance, Dr. Prentiss crouched near a corpse that lay half out of the water like a shipwreck survivor crawling onto shore. Except this victim wasn’t crawling or moving at all, save for the rolling tide’s sloshing her repeatedly against the rock to which it had her pinned. Whether the body had washed up between those rocks or been dumped there, Sam could only guess. On publicly owned land situated between a polluted river and a highway with a landfill beyond, the rocky shoreline was as good a place as any to dispose of a body. A corpse blended well with the rest of the decomposition. If not for the nearby construction workers, the body might never have been spotted. The landfill might have been the smarter choice, but perhaps the killer couldn’t get past the fence and thought the river his next best option. If so, he was right. The river eroded evidence as easily as it did the shore.
Sam walked as close as she could without stepping into the water. Her heels sank into the wet sand. With every minute shifting of her weight, air bubbles gurgled up from the resting place of some underground mollusk.
“We’re ready to move the body,” Dr. Prentiss said.
Two members of his staff carried over a stretcher. One waded into the water and grabbed the body under its knees, while the other reached under the victim’s arms, and together, gently but quickly, the two lifted the corpse from the water with a plop, as if the river didn’t want to let the body go. Seaweed fell from dark, matted hair. A tattered blouse dripped with liquid ranging from clear to black. The doctor rolled the body over, revealing the face.
Sam gasped and covered her mouth. “How long has the victim been in the water?”
Dr. Prentiss grunted as he positioned the legs on the gurney. “Hard to say. I’ll know more after further examination, but if I had to guess, not more than a day.”
Sam had seen what a body looked like after it had soaked in the Taunton River for a long time: bloated, gray skin covered with a mucus-like film, an assortment of creatures making it their home. Neither the water nor its indigenous life had laid claim yet, not even the worms.
But the victim’s head was missing one eye, half an ear, and portions of the upper lip. The nostrils were slit, and huge swaths of hair were gone, along with the scalp beneath them in some places. In its somewhat preserved state, the corpse’s lacerations were horrific. Sam’s years on the force had prepared her for nearly everything. She had seen ritualistic sacrifice, explosions, and bodies broken and contorted by accident or intent, a host of unclean ways to die. Just by looking at the body, Sam understood why Dr. Prentiss had been so confident that a murder had been committed. What the killer had done to this victim was abhorrent.
Filleted. That was the word that came to Sam’s mind. The left thigh was missing strips of skin and, in some places, chunks of muscle. The right thigh was worse, the femur exposed like a spiral ham that had been carved down to the bone. Her left arm was much the same, skeletal, the meat stripped away like ribs gnawed clean. Pieces were missing from just about everywhere.
The polluted saltwater had infested the wounds, turning the meat into what looked like ground beef left out to gray and rot. The stench of the sea, already worse than death, hid any odor the body might have been releasing. Sam held in her lunch and went about her work with professionalism and as much detachment as she could muster. Her detective mind was already considering the usual suspects—husband or former lover, most likely—but she couldn’t shake the feeling that the killing was something more than heat of passion, that a darker motive was at play. She had long ago learned to trust her hunches.
Only someone truly fucked up would do something like this. Fortunately, people this batshit crazy usually stick out like elephants at a raccoon dance party. The thought did not improve Sam’s gloominess. Solving a murder without knowing the motive was rarely as easy as picking a face from the crowd. She would need to learn everything there was to know about the victim, and the sooner, the better.
“Can you give me anything, Dr. Prentiss? Time of death? Murder weapon? Anything that might help me identify her killer?”
“I can’t say much without a full autopsy, I’m afraid. Although, the victim does appear to have been carved.” He pointed at the exposed bone of the victim’s left arm. “See those little divots? The way their walls are sort of shredded suggests a serrated blade, perhaps a saw, but I can’t be certain. I do know one thing for sure: some of these wounds were made pre-mortem.”
“She was tortured?”
He nodded. “It appears that way.”
Sam shook her head. “Sometimes I wonder if the crazies and sickos outnumber us ten to one.”
“Only in our lines of work, Detective.” Dr. Prentiss laughed. “It could be worse. I’ll take dealing with dead bodies any day over my thirteen-year-old’s horrid taste in music. If I have to hear one more song about teenagers in love or falling out of love or re-finding love or learning how to love or whatever other lovesick crap those boy bands spew, you’ll be visiting another crime scene real soon.”
Sam faked a chuckle. She saw something familiar about the victim. Then, it came to her. “I know this woman! She is… she was a guidance counselor over at Carnegie High. Gloria. Gloria Jackson. Yeah, that was her name.”
Sam had met Gloria Jackson several times in the course of past investigations. She’d even had a few arguments with the counselor concerning the proper punishment for criminals that were both products of abuse and alumni of Carnegie High School.
She wanted to save them all, Sam remembered. She wondered if Gloria would still have wanted to save them all if she could have seen what somebody had done to her. Some people aren’t worth saving.
“Well,” Dr. Prentiss said, “it looks like you have a starting point for your investigation, Detective. I should have a full report for you within a couple of days. Schedule a time with Charlotte, and I’ll meet you at the morgue to go over it.” He gestured for the two staff members to lift the gurney. “Let’s go.”
Sam followed Dr. Prentiss out of the tent with one question on her mind. Who would want to kill a high school guidance cou
nselor? She sighed. Gloria, what did you get mixed up in? She cleared her throat and, with it, her attachments. At that moment, Gloria Jackson ceased to be a person and became a puzzle to be solved. Sam’s detachment gave her focus. It was time to work.
Chapter 14
Michael slouched in his seat, his eyes turned away from Sam, watching rain droplets slide down the car window. He had only a half day of school that Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and he agreed to spend it with her at the morgue. In the window, he caught sight of his own reflection: tousled brown hair that he had combed with his fingers, eyes red at the corners and encircled with purple smudges. The shirt he had picked up off the floor where it had lain for more than a week was wrinkled and crooked at the collar. He pictured Tessa’s face—not wearing the feral expression from his vision but that of the timid girl who had come to him for help. He sneered. The face of a liar.
He jolted upright. His bitterness woke him up a bit, but not much. He would have to tell Sam all about Tessa and his vision, but that could wait until after he poked a dead body.
“This whole thing seems stupid,” Michael said.
Sam smiled softly. “You never know.”
“She’s dead. Whatever happened to her is in the past. And as far as I can tell, I only can see what might happen in the future. I sure ain’t an expert on this, but… all I’m saying is, I think you’re wasting your time.”
“You can learn a lot from a corpse… if you know how to read it. I guess I’m hoping maybe you can read it even better than the rest of us. Besides, I was heading down here anyway for the medical examiner’s report.” She rubbed a spot under her lip. “But if you don’t want to do this…”
“No, no. I’m fine. A little creeped out, maybe, but other than that, just fine.” He shrugged. “I mean, how bad can it be?”
“You’ll be happy to know that John Crotty pleaded guilty to kidnapping charges,” Sam said as she pulled up to a red light at an intersection. Charlton Memorial Hospital loomed tall on their right. She turned to Michael. Her mouth looked as though it was threatening to smile, one side of it having the slightest curl. “He won’t be going away forever, but it will be a long time before he has a chance to put his hands on another woman.”