David said, ‘This way, sir,’ but Thomas said, ‘Wait.’ He was studying the framed pictures hanging in the hallway – partly because he wanted to put off the moment when he had to confront the deceased, and partly because he always found other people’s pictures to be most revealing. People had to think that a picture was very significant, before they decided to frame it and hang it on the wall. Sometimes they didn’t realize how much their choice of pictures gave them away. Particularly nudes. And these were all nudes – sepia and black-and-white photographs of Victorian and Edwardian and 1920s nudes, wide-hipped, pale-skinned, flirtatious and coy. Only one picture was different – a curious steel engraving of formally-dressed men and women standing around a table which was covered by a heavy damask cloth. In the centre of the table lay a small, dark curled-up thing which could have been a human foetus; but the picture-glass was very grimy and it was almost impossible to tell for certain.
‘What do you think that is?’ asked Thomas.
David obviously hadn’t looked at it before. He leaned forward and peered at it closely. ‘I don’t know ... some kind of dried-up root vegetable?’
‘Then why are all these people staring it so intently? I mean, what do we have here, the Swede Fanciers of America, or what?’
David looked up at him unhappily. ‘I really don’t know, sir. I’m sorry.’
‘Goddamned root vegetable my ass,’ Thomas sneered.
Embarrassed, David glanced at the picture again. ‘It could be a dead bird.’
‘Oh, sure. And it could be a shrivelled-up pancake or it could be somebody’s toupee, for Christ’s sake. Or a quarter of a pound of Limburger cheese that’s grown fur.’
‘I don’t know, lieutenant,’ said David, trying to sound level and reasonable. ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
Thomas looked around at all the other pictures. ‘I don’t want guesses, David, and I sure don’t want guesses that are only as good as mine. I want constructive detective work. I want analysis.’
David examined the pictures again, but he continued to look unhappy.
‘What do these pictures tell you?’ Thomas demanded. ‘Look at them, David. What do they say? They’re saying something! They’re saying ... ? Come on, David, they’re saying – ‘
Thomas circled his hand in the air as if he could coax the words out of David’s larynx. ‘Come on, they’re telling you something clear as a bell and country simple.’
David cleared his throat. ‘They’re telling me that whoever put them up was probably heterosexual.’
Thomas clapped his hands. ‘Wrong! You’re assuming that whoever put them up was male! Maybe a woman put them up!’
‘Then what do they tell me?’ asked David, in considerable discomfort.
Thomas lifted one down from the wall, turned it over, and read the framer’s label on the back. He hung it back up, and then he checked all of the others. ‘I’ll tell you what they tell you. They tell you that they were all framed locally, here on Chestnut Hill. They tell you that they were all framed at the same time, which may mean that they were simply hung in this house by an interior designer, and that they belong to the property itself rather than to Dr and Mrs Honeyman personally. They’re also telling you that whoever put them up sure liked their meat and potatoes. Look here: we’re talking substantial women here. So did you ask Ms Krovilavsky whether these pictures belonged to the previous tenants, or whether they belonged to her realty company?’
‘Ms Krasilovsky, sir. Not Krovilavsky.’
‘Same difference. And, no, you didn’t ask her, did you?’
‘No, sir. It didn’t occur to me.’
Thomas raised a single finger. ‘Whenever anything sexual comes into an investigation, ask. Sex is a motive in itself.’ He peered at the pictures again. ‘Especially when somebody has sexual taste as wacky as this.’
He was still examining the photograph of the group standing around the table when Detective Jaworski came down the stairs from the bedroom. Detective Jaworski was short and beefy with a furry blond crewcut and eyes as tiny as two steel nails knocked into a turnip. He had been transferred to homicide only five weeks ago. He was looking grey and sweaty, and he kept swallowing.
‘What do you think that is?’ Thomas asked him, pointing to the hairy object on the table in the engraving.
Detective Jaworski unenthusiastically examined it.
‘I couldn’t say, sir,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘Animal, vegetable or mineral?’
‘I really don’t know, sir. I never saw anything that looked like that before.’
‘No ... ‘ said Thomas. ‘Me neither. It looks kind of unhealthy, don’t you think?’
Without a word, Detective Jaworski suddenly turned around, walked three stiff steps along the hallway, pushed open the toilet door and slammed it behind him. Thomas and David waited with impassive faces while he was noisily sick.
He came out wiping his mouth with toilet tissue. He said, ‘Orange juice,’ as if that explained everything.
Thomas said, ‘That’s one reason I never eat breakfast.’
‘Don’t you get used to it?’ asked Detective Jaworski.
‘I’ll tell you when I do,’ Thomas replied. ‘Now ... we’d better take a look.’
They climbed a steep flight of brown-carpeted stairs to the first landing. In front of them was a large window of yellow and sepia-stained glass, in the pattern of orchids and wild arum. It gave the landing the same faded, brownish light as the photographs in the hallway.
On the right was a closed mahogany door. Thomas asked Detective Jaworski, ‘What’s in there?’
‘Bathroom, sir.’
Thomas opened the door and looked inside. The bathroom was chilly and smelled of damp. The walls were half-tiled with brown majolica tiles, and the walls were painted with yellow-ochre enamel and spotted with black pinpricks of mould. A huge old-fashioned bathtub stood in the centre of the opposite wall. Inside, it was thickly ringed with greyish grease, and stained with dark brown marks. The plughole was blocked with grey human hairs.
‘Forensics checked in here yet?’ asked Thomas.
‘Not yet, lieutenant. They got their hands full in the bedroom.’
‘Make sure they take samples of that hair.’ He went to the brown-measled mirror over the basin and ran his fingertip along the shelf beneath it. It was encrusted with old shaving soap and tiny black speckles. He held his finger under Detective Jaworski’s nose. ‘Human stubble. Tell ‘em to take a sample of that, too.’
Detective Jaworski examined it with undisguised distaste. ‘Whatever you say, sir.’
Thomas looked around the bathroom – walls, floor, ceiling, light fittings – then he stared at himself in the mirror for a long, thoughtful moment. At last he said, ‘Okay,’ and walked out, with David and Detective Jaworski closely following him.
The bedroom was the second door along the landing. Outside it stood a stocky, ginger-haired cop with his arms folded above his belly. From inside the room, electronic flash flickered like summer lightning, and Thomas heard somebody saying, ‘Give me two more shots of the feet. The feet, for Christ’s sake.’
Thomas clapped the cop on the shoulder. ‘How’s it going, Jimmy? Are you a grandpappy yet?’
‘Not yet, lieutenant, tenth of August,’ the cop replied. ‘And it’s a girl.’
‘Well, give my love to Eileen,’ said Thomas. ‘And don’t forget the cigars.’
Before Thomas could go any further, the cop held out his hand to stop him, and nodded toward the bedroom door. ‘Take a deep breath, lieutenant. This is a bad one.’
Thomas looked at him. If Jimmy O’Sullivan said it was a bad one, then it was a bad one. ‘Thanks, Jimmy,’ and sharply inhaled, and stepped into the room.
Four photo-floods had turned the bedroom into a dazzling surrealistic stage set. Two forensic officers were crawling around in the far corner, on their hands and knees, carefully brushing the white shaggy rug for hairs and fibres and any ot
her interesting minutiae. A young police photographer with a greasy quiff was adjusting his tripod to take close-up pictures at the end of the bed. And a thin, bespectacled man in a pale blue lab-coat was standing next to the bed, a clipboard tucked under his arm, a pencil tucked behind his elfish ear, looking thoughtful.
It was the bed itself that shocked Thomas more than anything else. At first sight, he thought that it had been draped with a dark brown sheet. It was only when he saw the blowflies crawling all over it that he realized it wasn’t a dark brown sheet at all, but a white sheet that had been totally drenched with blood – blood which must have been vivid scarlet when it was first spilled, but which had now oxidized to the colour of a vast blotchy scab.
In the middle of the bed, face down, lay the naked body of a young girl. She had been hogtied with three loops of tarnished razor wire, her hands behind her back, her knees lifted. Her long hair was so thickly clotted with dried blood that Thomas was unable to determine what her natural colour might have been. Putrescence was well advanced, so that her skin had taken on a grey-green pallor, almost luminous, but she was also bruised and scarred and burned beyond belief.
Out of one pocket, Thomas took out his handkerchief, unfolded it, and laid it flat on the palm of his hand. From another pocket, he took out a small bottle of essence of cloves, which Megan regularly bought for him from a small delicatessen near Faneuil Hall. He shook the essence into the handkerchief, refolded it, and then covered his nose and mouth.
He approached the man in the pale blue lab-coat, who wasn’t wearing any kind of mask at all. ‘Lieutenant Boyle,’ he announced himself, in a muffled voice. ‘I don’t think we’ve met, have we?’
‘Victor Kurylowicz,’ the medical examiner replied. ‘I moved here a month ago, from Newark, New Jersey. I won’t shake hands.’
Thomas looked down at the young girl’s body. Her hair half-covered her face, so that he could only see the lower part of her nose and her mouth. Underneath her chin was a mass of maggots. They looked almost as if they were boiling.
‘I don’t know how you can stand the smell,’ he said to Kurylowicz.
The medical examiner shrugged. ‘It’s not a question of whether I can stand it or not. It’s important. It tells me stuff. You remember what Coleridge said about Cologne? “I counted two and seventy stenches, all well defined, and several stinks!” ‘
‘Oh ... you’re a literary scholar,’ said Thomas.
‘I’m a medical examiner,’ Kurylowicz retorted. Behind his black-rimmed glasses, his eyes were sharp and dark. ‘What I know is bodies, and everything to do with bodies. Particularly bodies that have suffered this kind of treatment.’
Thomas looked at Kurylowicz over his handkerchief. The stench of dried blood and decomposing flesh was so strong that it even began to overwhelm the aromatic fumes of his clove-drenched handkerchief. It had an appalling ripeness that always reminded him of gas and apples and raw sewage. He thought that he was going to suffocate – or that, even if he didn’t, he would never be able to smell anything but death, ever again. ‘You want to tell me something about her?’ he asked, his throat tight.
Kurylowicz glanced down at his clipboard. ‘For sure. This unfortunate young lady is a Caucasian, about twenty or twenty-one years old, blonde hair, blue eyes. She weighed about no pounds I’d guess when she died, which meant that her weight was slightly below average for her age and height, but not drastically so. In other words, whoever was keeping her captive was feeding her good. On cursory examination, I’d say that life has been extinct for slightly more than two weeks.’
‘Any idea how she died?’
‘Oh, yes. She was tied up with razor wire, as you can see for yourself. Then her carotid, inferior mesenteric and popliteal arteries were expertly severed, which meant that she bled to death within less than ten minutes.’
‘What do you mean by “expertly”?’
Kurylowicz rubbed the tip of his nose. ‘I mean by somebody who knew what the fuck he was doing.’
‘A doctor?’
‘Maybe. They look like scalpel wounds, rather than knife wounds.’
‘A dentist?’
‘Whatever, who knows. Even a motor mechanic could have done it if he knew his anatomy.’
‘But this perpetrator knew his anatomy?’
‘For sure. All of the cuts were clean and accurate, no hesitation marks.’
Thomas forced himself to examine the girl’s body. There were scores of cigarette burns, and literally hundreds of bruises, cuts and scars and even crude tattoos – triangles and circles and squiggles. Somebody had even burned a Happy Face onto her shoulder blade.
‘This is serious sadism,’ said Thomas.
Kurylowicz nodded. ‘Maybe. On the other hand, maybe it’s serious masochism. I’ve come across plenty of girls who get off on this kind of thing. And plenty of guys, too. My last job before I came up here, this guy had cut off his own scrotum, and he was walking around with his balls in a plastic bag.’
Thomas didn’t want to hear about anything like that, especially not now.
‘This wasn’t all done recently, was it?’ he remarked. ‘Some of those scars look pretty much healed up.’
Kurylowicz ran his fingertips lightly over the cicatrices on the girl’s bare back. ‘It’s hard to date them exactly – but, yes, some of these marks could be six months old, or even older.’
‘So she’s been systematically tortured since Christmas, and maybe longer?’
‘Oh, longer. No doubt about it. Anything up to a year, eighteen months.’
‘And nothing to say who she is, or what she’s doing here?’
Kurylowicz shook his head. ‘No identifying marks whatsoever. No rings, no earrings, no birthmarks. We’ll check the dental work, obviously, but if she came from out of the area, or out of state, it could take us forever to make a match.’
‘Was she sexually assaulted?’
‘I’d say hundreds of times. She suffered severe vaginal and anal trauma. See for yourself. There are dozens of cigarette burns around her genital area, and other burns consistent with certain sado-masochistic practices which are rare but which I’ve occasionally come across before.’
Thomas breathed in cloves and death, cloves and death. Kurylowicz stared at him with glittering eyes.
Thomas said, ‘You want to explain what those certain sado-masochistic practices are? You know – just for one of those dumb, innocent guys who used to think that heavy petting meant owning a St Bernard?’
Thin-lipped, Kurylowicz almost smiled. ‘We’re talking sodomy with a lighted candle, lieutenant, either forcibly administered or self-administered. And we’re talking about not snuffing the candle out when it gets unbearable.’
Thomas slowly shook his head. ‘I’ve heard of some pretty weird stuff, but I never heard of that before.’
Kurylowicz looked down at the girl and for a moment Thomas thought he seemed almost sad. ‘People do things to themselves you can’t even imagine. I’m a Catholic, you know that? “The human body is a temple.” A few people treat their body like a temple. Two per cent. Most people treat their body like a shithouse. Then you get the ones who want to do more than treat it like a shithouse, they want to vandalize it – they want to tear it down, demolish it, brick by brick.’
There was a very long silence between them. The photographer finished taking his pictures of feet and packed up his equipment and waved and left. Thomas had never seen anybody move so jerkily and so fast. Talk about the Keystone Kops. The two forensic investigators, however, seemed to be unperturbed by the stench, and they were still laboriously crawling around on the rug, occasionally taking small polythene envelopes out of their pockets and inserting hairs or fluff or fragments of fibre, and labelling them, and marking the labels with felt-tipped pens.
‘Irving ... There’s a blue wool fibre here I haven’t come across before,’ one of them said.
The other took it, and peered at it closely. ‘Hmm,’ he said, and dropped it into an
envelope, and marked it.
Kurylowicz said, ‘There’s one more thing ... I can’t quite understand it yet.’
‘Tell me,’ said Thomas. He was trying very hard to be patient, but he didn’t think that he would be able to stand the stench of this decomposing Jane Doe for more than two or three more minutes.
‘Let me ask you to look just here,’ said Kurylowicz, and pointed with his finger to two small wounds on the girl’s middle back, no more than six inches apart.
‘More torture?’ asked Thomas, not really sure what he was supposed to be looking for, or what he was supposed to think about it even if he found it.
‘I don’t know what they are, frankly. But they seem to be very deep wounds, small-diameter wounds or injection-holes which have been opened up, allowed to heal, then opened up again, then allowed to heal, and so and so on.’
‘Why would anybody want to do that?’
‘I don’t know ... maybe the perpetrator kept injecting stuff into her back to keep her quiet, or to ease the pain ... something like an epidural. Maybe it was part of the torture.’
Thomas said, ‘Jesus ... You can’t even imagine the suffering, can you? You can’t even think about it.’
‘There’s one more thing,’ said Kurylowicz.
‘What’s that?’
‘I’ll need to check it out back at the lab – but look at her lower legs.’
Thomas did as he was asked, trying not to focus on the girl’s bruised and lacerated calves. ‘I don’t see anything.’
‘It’s the way those bones protrude. I’m not going to second-guess myself, but I think that both of her legs have been broken – not recently, but not more than eighteen months ago. They’ve been set, but not by a highly-qualified surgeon. See how the left calf is kind of kinked.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Thomas, baffled.
Kurylowicz tapped his teeth with his pencil, and then shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’m going to have to do a lot more work on it.’
One of the forensic investigators stood up and came over. He was short and fat with a Kookie Byrnes quiff and near-together eyes. His upper lip was beaded with perspiration.
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