Styx

by Bavo Dhooge

  “Sometimes,” Crevits said, “that’s for the best. Would you want to wake up if you were going to spend the rest of your life crawling around on all fours?”

  The commissioner got to his feet, more easily despite his bulk than Raphael Styx could have managed it.

  “Look at me,” said Crevits. “If I hadn’t listened to my doctor, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you. If I was you, I’d get on the phone to that orthopedist and schedule the operation. They’re doctors, Styx. They’re there to help. They’re not going to leave you sitting in the dark.”

  Styx didn’t want to think about it anymore. He went over to the bulletin board and studied the snapshots of the human statues the Stuffer had created, a catalog of the exhibition. For the hundredth time, the women’s empty eyes returned his gaze.

  The first victim, Reinhilde Debels, had been found in the sculpture garden behind the Mu.ZEE, Ostend’s museum of modern art. She’d been tucked in among the other statues, an ordinary greeting card leaning against her left foot. At first, the museum’s visitors had mistaken the corpse for a work of performance art or perhaps something to do with the Bodies exhibition, which used polymer preservation to turn actual human remains into works of scientific art. But those bodies hadn’t been murdered, let alone murdered and then stuffed with sand.

  The carefully handprinted words on the Stuffer’s first message had read: #1 IN A SERIES: A BRAND-NEW STATUE FOR YOUR LOVELY GARDEN.

  Styx remembered the morning that police forensic pathologist Tobias Ornelis had cut Reinhilde Debels open in the morgue. In his capacity as homicide detective, he’d been present when Ornelis had laid her out on a gurney and sliced through her skin with a surgical scalpel like a butcher laying open a hog.

  There’d been no blood, no intestines or other organs spilling out of the body, just sand.

  Sand, as if the woman were a shattered hourglass.

  Styx had no idea if he was supposed to find the sight disgusting, vulgar, or simply weird. In fact, it had been peaceful. Unreal, yet somehow serene. He stood there for long seconds as the grains of sand slowly leaked out of the dead body and cascaded over the edge of the gurney to the morgue’s tiled floor.

  It all unfolded in utter silence, like the action in a silent film. And the damn sand just kept on coming. How much fucking sand had the murderer managed to pack inside the body, and how long had it taken him to do it?

  That outré moment had given him nightmares for most of the next week. It was a stranger, more gruesome sight than the bloodiest crime scenes he’d investigated in his sixteen years on the Ostend police.

  Styx had come to one conclusion: whoever the Stuffer was, he was a man of intense passion. Only a man of passion could be so driven. When he was finally able to tear his eyes away from the dead woman, his shoes were half-buried in sand. It covered the floor of the morgue, dancing beneath the air-conditioning like a miniature sandstorm.

  An hour later Styx was still standing in front of the bulletin board when Joachim Delacroix came into his office with an update. He could see that the young Congolese immigrant had just come on shift. That was the new generation for you: you could haul them out of bed in the middle of the night, but they’d keep track of their hours and put in for comp time if you worked them a minute longer than they were paid for. It was sad to see things heading in that direction.

  Beneath the fluorescent lighting, the rookie stood there in a dapper charcoal-gray pinstriped suit. On his own time Delacroix dressed in colorful three-piece suits with matching ties and brilliantly polished shoes, never the same outfit twice. Luckily, Styx hadn’t witnessed that spectacle all too often, just at the occasional after-hours birthday and retirement parties. Who even wears a tie anymore, Styx had wondered more than once.

  Today, Delacroix’s thick dreadlocks were set off by a pair of bright orange sunglasses. He looked like he’d stolen them from an American film star.

  “You get anywhere canvassing the neighborhood?” asked Styx.

  “Yeah, but it’s not good news. Nobody saw or heard a thing. That early in the morning, you wouldn’t expect any different.”

  “Nobody except Spilliaert, you mean?”

  “Except Spilliaert, right.”

  “He back from work yet? What does he do, anyway?”

  Delacroix shook his head. “Our guy’s still watching the house, but Spilliaert hasn’t shown up.”

  “Our” guy, Styx thought, as if he and Delacroix were equals.

  “What has he got, three jobs? He should be home by now.”

  “The apartment he called from, in the Hofstraat? He rents it. We contacted the owner, and he confirms that the place is leased to a Mr. L. Spilliaert who pays his rent on the first of every month, like clockwork. A perfect tenant, apparently.”

  “I guess so,” Styx drawled, “seeing as how he’s never there. And you’ve checked with Spilliaert’s bank?”

  “There’s no bank.”

  “What do you mean there’s no bank?”

  “He pays in cash, drops an envelope in the landlord’s mailbox.”

  “Shit. So it’s off the books?”

  Styx eyed the young man, but there was no response.

  “Well, welcome to Belgium,” he sighed.

  “Anything from Toxicology?” asked Delacroix.

  Styx looked up sharply. The fucking dandy ought to keep his mind on his own work. The toxicology report was none of his business. But Styx could see he’d sunk his teeth into the case and wasn’t about to let go. The new goddamn generation.

  Styx didn’t want to give too much away. He preferred flying solo. That limited the risks. Styx couldn’t dodge the thought that he’d spent sixteen years building a career in this department, while this newbie’d been around for one year and was trying to pass himself off as Dirty Harry.

  “No, not really. Victim died a few hours before we got there. Coroner estimates the time of death around midnight.”

  Delacroix changed the subject. “According to people who knew her, Madeleine Bohy was well liked.”

  “Aren’t we all?” said Styx, not counting himself.

  He went back to his desk. Dr. Vrancken had instructed him to keep moving when he could, to prevent his hip from locking up. Stand a bit, sit a bit, stand a bit, sit a bit. Raphael Styx, the human metronome.

  “What do you want me to do next?” asked Delacroix, suddenly ceremonious, standing stiffly in the doorway as if he was afraid to cross the threshold into Chief Inspector Styx’s unfamiliar underworld.

  “I want you to do your job and let me do mine,” said Styx. That ought to get rid of the punk, he thought. He didn’t bother looking up as the rookie made his exit. But then Delacroix turned and came back.

  “A hundred and ten pounds,” he said.

  “What?”

  “A hundred and ten pounds.”

  “A hundred and ten pounds of what?”

  “Sand. In the body.”

  Styx stared at him, speechless.

  “You said you wanted to know, so I checked. A hundred and ten pounds. That’s a little more than five full twenty-pound buckets.”

  “I can do the math,” said Styx, and he waved the detective out of his office.

  Raphael Styx had trained himself to treat both victims and criminals like the figures in a wax museum, not people. Only in that way was he able to focus on his job. He had to keep it all at a distance, which over the years had turned him into something of a robot. And now Joachim Delacroix was trying to lure him out of his protective hiding place with this little personal detail.

  A hundred and ten pounds of sand.

  “Bastard,” Styx muttered.

  He tried to concentrate on the reports, the interviews with the neighbors, the lab results, the facts. But that number kept intruding. A hundred and ten pounds. What drove a man like the Stuffer—assuming it was a man—to commit such horrifying crimes? Was he trying to shock the city awake? Was that his message?

  Styx got back to his feet, restle
ss now, and tacked a photograph of Madeleine Bohy beside the pictures of the two previous victims. They formed a lugubrious triptych, there on the bulletin board, and Styx eyed them emotionlessly, like a visitor to the City Museum considering a piece of abstract art.

  At four PM he sat in his Cabrio outside Our Lady Academy in the Vindictivelaan, waiting for Victor. These last weeks, picking his son up from school had been torture: the ride home was like a silent funeral procession.

  Today was no different. The boy slid into the passenger seat and, without bothering to ask permission, changed the radio station, slitting Schumann’s throat and replacing him with a Studio Brussels DJ who introduced Daft Punk’s “Around the World.”

  “How was your exam?” asked Styx, turning down the volume.

  Victor shrugged, and turned it back up to full blast.

  “What subject was it again? History?”

  “Art history.” Those two words seemed to cost the boy enormous effort.

  Styx watched his son out of the corner of his eye. Thirteen years old, and a royal pain in the ass—just, he admitted, like his old man.

  Victor stared out the window.

  “And? What was it about?”

  “Art history, duh.”

  “Well, what period?”

  “All of them.”

  “Surrealism? The Belgian painters? Ensor? Magritte? Delvaux?”

  “Yeah,” said Victor.

  “Good thing it wasn’t an oral exam,” Styx tried.

  But his son was too busy hating him to appreciate the joke. The unanticipated death of Grandpa Marc and its aftermath remained a thick curtain that hung between them.

  “What’s tomorrow’s test?”

  “A different subject,” said Victor coldly.

  Styx was desperate to find a way to make things right, but how was he supposed to do that?

  This was the first time the boy had ever dealt with death—a subject that formed an integral part of Styx’s everyday life. So then why wouldn’t Victor talk about it with him? Why couldn’t he trust his own father?

  It was tearing Styx apart, and all he could do was hit the gas and get his son home as fast as possible—as if he were some juvenile delinquent.

  Styx felt like an outsider, more so than ever. Victor’s connection with his grandfather had been so strong that the two of them could understand each other without even speaking, while Styx needed a dictionary just to get his son to pass the butter.

  “Say, is that stuff I got you doing any good?”

  “What stuff?”

  “From the drugstore.”

  “No, it’s crap.”

  “The ads say it—”

  “I threw it away.”

  “What?”

  “It didn’t work.”

  “Well, you have to use it for at least three weeks. It’s not magic, Vic. You can’t expect it to make everything disappear in two days.”

  “What do you care?” Victor demanded.

  “I just thought it’d help if you gave it a fair shot.”

  The thirteen-year-old beside him was changing, not only on the inside, but on the outside. His nose was taking a more prominent place on his face, his skin was getting oilier, and pimples were becoming more of a problem for him than for the other boys his age. His grandfather had suffered from acute acne, too, and it had left permanent scars on both cheeks. To spare his child the same disfigurement, Styx had brought home a special salve the pharmacist had promised him would protect the boy from the worst of it, but that was the problem with kids these days: no patience.

  “I wish you’d asked me before you threw it out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was really expensive,” said Styx.

  “I didn’t want to bother you, Dad,” Victor replied, putting sarcastic emphasis on the last word. “I know you’ve been really busy dealing with the funeral and the lawyers and the will and everything. Are you in it, Grampa’s will?”

  Styx didn’t respond. He pulled into the parking area at the Milho Apartments in the Godtschalckstraat and tried to be the first one out of the car, but his hip wouldn’t cooperate.

  For the rest of the afternoon, Victor Styx stayed closeted in his bedroom, avoiding the daylight, as if afraid that even a millisecond of illumination would cause the whiteheads that dotted his face to explode.

  At eight PM, well after dinner, John Crevits called Styx at home to report that they’d been trying Spilliaert’s phone number without success.

  Styx’s stomach was upset—the oral Voltaren he took three times a day for pain always left him feeling bloated. “What difference does it make?” he said, resigned. “You said it yourself, John, he just found the body. What could he tell us that we don’t already know?”

  “He’s a key part of the investigation. Maybe there were things he saw that were gone by the time we got there.”

  “Like what?”

  “How do I know?”

  “Listen, John. This is just more of the same thing we’ve already been through. Serial killers don’t change their spots. They’re predictable. They play the same song, over and over. All we know is that Madeleine Bohy was well liked, lived to help others, practically a saint, just like the other two victims. Spilliaert isn’t going to tell us any different.”

  “You sound tired.”

  “You’d be tired too if you were in my shoes.”

  “Madeleine Bohy was strangled,” said Crevits, out of the blue. “It was hard to tell, because of the beheading, but they found evidence of strangulation on what was left of her neck.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “I wasn’t sure you knew.”

  “I didn’t notice,” said Styx. “I was busy looking at that fishing line.”

  “You given any more thought to taking some time off?”

  “John, we’re in the middle of a homicide investigation, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  Styx knew the meaning of the silence that followed. The commissioner didn’t have to say it aloud: no cop was irreplaceable. So far, there’d been three murders, and Styx had gotten precisely nowhere. Was Crevits suggesting that it was time to turn the reins over to someone else? That was hitting below the belt. But it wouldn’t be the first time the commissioner had pulled an inspector who wasn’t getting results off a case.

  “Maybe you’re right,” Crevits said at last. “Maybe we should be concentrating on the killer instead of a possible witness.”

  “The bastard’s trying to be the next Banksy.”

  “The next what?”

  “Banksy. He’s a street artist, goes around the world painting graffiti.”

  For some reason, Styx found himself wondering if Victor had studied Banksy in art history. Or maybe the current generation of artists hadn’t made it into the textbooks yet.

  After hanging up with Crevits, Styx took the dog, Shelley, out for his nightly walk in the dunes. He kept a tight grip on the leash, since he knew the pit bull had a short fuse. A year ago, Shelley had gone after a resident of the neighborhood so violently that the man had had no choice but to defend himself with the ferrule of his umbrella. Since that incident, Shelley had gone through life with only one eye.

  “They need to put that rotten beast down,” most of the residents of the Milho Apartments would have agreed. “It’s dangerous.”

  But Styx couldn’t bring himself to part with the dog. He believed that even the world’s lowest creatures deserved a guardian angel. So every evening he and Shelley strolled along the dike, out onto the beach, and then back home past the Kursaal. It was either that or a lethal injection—if dogs could suffer from dementia, then Shelley had it bad, and the “new and improved” Shelley grew meaner and more aggressive by the day.

  “Why can’t you just let the poor thing go?” Isabelle had asked him more than once. Shelley was yet another bone of contention between them. “He’s had it, can’t you see that? You keep him alive for yourself, Rafe, not for him.”

  “That�
�s not true,” said Styx.

  But the more time passed, the more the animal’s temperment came to resemble its owner’s.

  “The exercise helps my hip,” he argued.

  And above all else, their half-hour walk—late in the evening, when the streets were quiet and peaceful—gave Styx an opportunity to think.

  It also gave him a reason to visit the harbor once a week, to stroll past the cargo ships painted in primary colors and between the long rows of containers, stacked in their hundreds like so many giant Legos. Styx knew that the Ostend harbor was riddled with crime, everything from drug smuggling to weapons dealing and even human trafficking. Last year, a dozen refugees had been discovered trapped in a mildewed container. Half of them hadn’t survived their confinement, and the half who had were deported back where they came from—in that case Kosovo.

  The only thing that distinguished Ostend’s harbor from others around the world was Gino Tersago, a notorious crook who over the years had served Styx as a valued stoolie in exchange for the cop’s willingness to overlook certain of Tersago’s malfeasances. What goes around comes around.

  Tonight, they met by appointment in the rusted dark-blue container in Sector D that served as Tersago’s headquarters. Tersago had washed up in Ostend after washing out as the owner of a pizzeria elsewhere in Belgium. These days Tersago dealt mainly in counterfeit designer goods he imported from China and Thailand.

  With Shelley on the leash, Styx slipped into the container, where he found the tall, rail-thin gangster with the black brush cut and the scar from a surgically corrected harelip sitting at a rickety metal table, sipping from a can of beer.

  “Yo, look what the wind blew in: Chief Inspector Styx.”

  “Terry,” said Styx. He checked behind him to make sure no harbor police were in the area.

  “Welcome to my world. To what do I owe this honor?”

  Honor, Styx thought. Nope, honor’s got nothing to do with it.

  “Where’s your crew?”

  “I was just closing up shop,” said Tersago. “It’s dead tonight. I sent ’em all home. You can see they put in a full day today.”