The Death Dealer

by Heather Graham

Page 28

 

  Of course, Gen thought, as a shudder rippled through her, much the same could be said of her. She’d chosen to connect herself to the case, too.

  There were certainly no obvious similarities between Marie Rogers’ death in the eighteen-forties and the situation Joe found when he reached New Jersey.

  He met Raif and Tom first, and they briefed him as they arrived at the mortuary, where the body had already been taken.

  “The corpse was dragged out of the river about an hour and a half before I spoke to you,” Raif said.

  “She’s been in the water some time,” Tom told him.

  “From what I’ve heard, she isn’t very pretty,” Raif said.

  “Water really does a number on a body. Even after only a few days,” Tom said.

  Joe knew that already. “Cause of death?” he asked.

  “Looks like strangulation,” Raif told him. “Though they won’t know for sure until they finish the autopsy. We should be just in time for it to start. They’re rushing it, just in case there’s a connection to the Bigelow case,” he explained.

  “Thanks for letting me in on this,” Joe said. “Any trouble with the Jersey boys? Over me, I mean?”

  “No. Vic says you’ve worked with him before,” Joe told him.

  Vic? It had to be Victor Nelson. He would be about fifty now, and he had apparently moved from Vice to Murder. Years ago, Joe had been hired to find a missing teenager. She’d been living in a crack house in Jersey City. When he’d found the girl, he’d helped the cops—including Victor Nelson—close down the house, and as a bonus, they’d broken up a gun ring that had been based there, too.

  Victor Nelson greeted Joe and the others civilly inside one of the autopsy rooms. The doctor on duty was a man named Ben Sears. He nodded in acknowledgment as they came in, then got started.

  Lori Star’s skin was mottled, discolored, and her flesh gnawed. Fish and river creatures had already been busy, mostly on her extremities.

  “You couldn’t see the bruises on her throat when she was wet,” Victor said. He was a gruff man, a good, steady cop. His looked a little green around the gills, though, and Joe thought it was good to see that, even after all these years, the autopsy of a murder victim still bothered him.

  The coroner explained that the bruises had appeared as the skin had dried out.

  They were deep blue and black, forming a horrible necklace around the woman’s throat, just like in Joe’s dreams. Except that in his dreams…

  They had been around Genevieve’s throat.

  He swallowed hard as he felt bile rise in the back of his throat. He’d been to too many autopsies to get sick at one now. But if he were ever going to…

  This would be the one.

  Or was he only queasy because he had looked at the corpse’s face and seen another? A face he knew intimately. Stared not into Lori’s eyes but into Gen’s. Eyes that he couldn’t help thinking were staring back at him accusingly.

  He found himself thinking back to a passage he had read online that morning.

  July 28th, 1841. A group of young men out for a casual walk along the shoreline of the Hudson River, on the New Jersey side, in an area of Hoboken known as Sybil’s Cave, a place where people often come to escape the busy, hectic crowding of New York City, came across what appeared to be a mass of clothing in the water. When the young men hurriedly took a boat from a nearby dock and went to investigate, they discovered that what they had taken for clothing was really the body of a young woman. Her face seemed to have been severely battered. She was a terrible spectacle to behold.

  They would never have associated the decomposing corpse drawn from the river with the missing girl who had been regaled by an entire city for her sheer loveliness.

  Joe swallowed hard and forced himself to stare at Lori’s ravaged face.

  No one would readily associate this corpse with someone who had once been young and pretty.

  There was no way that Lori Star was looking at him. It was difficult even to see where her eyes should be.

  Ben Sears spoke in a clear, emotionless voice, directing his words to the microphone that hung down above the body as he worked on it. The corpse had already been photographed, washed and laid out for him. Additional pictures were being taken by a police photographer as Sears pointed out injuries done to the flesh, asking for close-ups.

  “Marks at the neck suggest manual strangulation. There is also a strip of lace, apparently from the young woman’s blouse, that was tied around the neck so tightly that it sank into the flesh, even before postmortem swelling due to immersion. The pattern of bruising suggests that the killer is right-handed. ”

  His voice droned on as he commented on the fact that the physical damage inflicted by her assailant appeared to be mainly to her face and head. The decomposition and damage done elsewhere on the body appeared to have been from her days in the river.

  Joe stood by silently while the chest was opened and Sears stated firmly that strangulation was the cause of death, not drowning.

  Organs were weighed.

  Specimens were taken.

  In the back of his mind, Joe was aware of the constant gurgle of running water washing away the fluids that leaked from the body as the medical examiner went about his work.

  Scrapings taken from under the nails suggested that the victim had lacked the chance to fight back against her attacker, and ligature marks on the wrists suggested that her hands had been bound. Damage to the sexual organs was postmortem and possibly due to the depradations of the river creatures.

  Sears ended the autopsy by asking his assistants to sew the body back up, and telling the microphone above the corpse that further comments on the death would come after he received the lab work on various samples he had taken.

  Joe realized, looking at the cops assembled around the stainless-steel autopsy table, that the procedure had seemed to affect them all the same way it had affected him.

  Every man there seemed frozen.

  Finally they all roused themselves to walk out. There was no goodbye to the man at the front desk, nothing.

  “Jesus,” Vic said when they got outside, looking up at the sky and taking a huge gulp of fresh air.

  “That was a bad one,” Tom Dooley said.

  “So do you think this murder’s related to your guy?” Vic asked the New York detectives.

  “I think we have to operate on that assumption,” Raif said.

  That assumption became fact a moment later, when one of the coroner’s assistants came running out after them, holding a sealed evidence bag containing a torn piece of typing paper.

  “Detective Nelson?”

  Vic turned around.

  “Doctor Sears thought you should take this to the lab right away. It was in her pocket. We’re sending the clothes over for analysis ourselves, but he thought you’d want this first. ”

  Vic held the bag up to the sun, so they could all see the contents.

  It was just a ripped piece of what appeared to be run-of-the-mill printer paper, but there was something written on it that had all but faded away. Joe read the typed words aloud.

  Quoth the raven: die.

  There was a media frenzy.

  Dr. Sears denied mentioning the scrap of paper to anyone, so maybe it had been one of his assistants. But it didn’t really matter how word got out, only that it was out.

  By the time the evening news aired, every station in the Tri-State Area was carrying the story, and linking the murder of Lori Star—born Lori Spielberg, one of the stations discovered—to that of Thorne Bigelow.

  Someone had come up with a picture of Lori at her prettiest, and some enterprising reporter had made the Mary Rogers-Marie Roget connection, so she was now being compared to the beautiful cigar girl who had once worked at Anderson’s Tobacco. The girl who had been given eternal life in her pathetic death by the great American
author Edgar Allan Poe.

  Lori was more famous than she ever could have imagined.

  Her somewhat questionable past had been forgiven. She was the medium who had witnessed the accident through some spectral magic, connecting Sam Latham’s injuries to Thorne Bigelow’s death, a connection the police were now avidly following up on.

  Joe had watched the news at a bar, sharing a beer with Vic, Raif and Tom. Then, disgusted with the over-the-top coverage, he excused himself and headed out. On the way to his car, he decided to follow the trail of the murder that had taken place in the eighteen-forties. He walked the Hoboken shoreline, but since he couldn’t really go back in time over a hundred and fifty years, he could only close his eyes and try to imagine.

  Of course, the contemporary killer couldn’t possibly have gone back in time, either. And Joe didn’t think the killer had done a particularly impressive job of murdering Thorne Bigelow à la Poe, anyway. The man had died via his love of wine, true, but he hadn’t been walled up to die slowly, gasping for air, thirsting, known that the end was coming. He had been poisoned, a somewhat less drawn-out method.

  Poisoning the unsuspecting was easy, while strangling an eager and unsuspecting young woman, though not impossibly difficult, would taken a certain amount of strength.

  Did that eliminate the women as suspects?

  He walked the shoreline, and realized after a while that he’d been waiting for something.

  And then he knew what.

  Dead people were talking to him.

  He was hearing whispers in his ear when he shouldn’t have been.

  He spoke aloud to the breeze. “If I’m going to go crazy, you might want to give me some useful information. ”

  Luckily there was no one around to hear him and think right along with him that he was going nuts.

  He felt like a fool anyway.

  When it seemed as if the voices weren’t going to tell him anything, he gave up and walked back to his car, ready to return to Manhattan.

  This murder had changed everything. There couldn’t possibly be a Raven who wasn’t frightened now. Not that Lori Star had been a Raven, but she had connected Bigelow’s death with Latham’s accident, and that had been enough to paint a target on her back.

  He put a call through to Genevieve’s apartment, his irrational sense of fear for her growing again. She answered on the first ring, and he was glad to hear her voice.