by John Lutz
Mishkin held the tube out to the young cop. “This’ll help,” he said. “Used to be we lit up cigars at times like this, before they declared open season on smokers.”
Henderson dabbed some of the cream beneath his nose and nodded his thanks to Mishkin. Another swallow, this time followed by a feeble smile.
Vitali was a little surprised by Henderson’s reaction to this crime scene. Cops saw a lot, even young ones like this. And what about the other one, Mumford? What had so badly shaken up these guys?
Time to find out.
“Let’s do it, Harold,” Vitali growled, and led the way inside.
Mishkin drew a deep breath and followed.
Their first impression was that the apartment was quiet.
No, not quiet.
As they moved farther into the living room they could hear a faint but persistent buzzing.
Both Vitali and Mishkin had heard the sound before and knew instantly what it was. The flies Henderson had mentioned. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of flies.
The mentholated cream was making Vitali’s eyes water as they made their way toward the short hall that must lead to the bathroom. With each step the buzzing got louder.
As they approached the open doorway they began to notice flies in the hall, all around them. Mishkin slapped one away from his face. Another threatened to fly into Vitali’s right nostril. He brushed at it and saw it circle away.
Where have you been, you little bastard?
The buzzing coming from the bathroom was very loud now, filling every chamber of Vitali’s brain with noise.
Just outside the bathroom’s open door, he and Mishkin looked at each other. Then Vitali stepped closer to the doorway and leaned forward so he could see into the bathroom.
No, no, no, no, no…
“Sweet Jesus!” he muttered.
He felt Mishkin move up to stand alongside him.
“Awww,” was all Mishkin said, as if he was terribly disappointed in someone or something.
The plastic shower curtain had been flung aside, maybe by the super, to reveal what was left of the woman. She was hanging upside down from some kind of metal contraption set up over the tub, covered with flies. They swarmed over her like a moving blue-black carpet, and their buzzing roared through Vitali’s consciousness. There was something fierce and frightening in the sheer volume of their collective, constant drone. They were in charge now. It was their turn.
The woman had been slit open wide from pubis to throat. Her internal organs had been removed. Through the undulating carpet of flies Vitali could see her spine and the backside of her rib cage.
Bile rose in his throat. He made himself move closer on numbed legs and peer into the bathtub.
Her entrails were there in a bloody pile. More flies, so many the mass of them flexed and shifted like one huge creature intent on its feast.
Vitali jerked back away from the tub, bumping into Mishkin, who stared at him in surprise. Fear glittered in Mishkin’s mild blue eyes.
“You don’t have to look at that, Harold.”
But Mishkin did, edging closer to the tub. When he turned back toward Vitali there was an expression of horror on his pasty face that Vitali would remember on his deathbed.
A fly bounced against Vitali’s cheek, found its way back, and crawled into his ear. He slapped at it and felt it fall out. He was sure he felt it fall out.
“Let’s get outta here, Sal,” Mishkin said calmly.
Vitali backed out first, then turned and almost ran toward the living room and the door to the hall. Mishkin was behind him at a fast walk.
Back out in the hall, they closed the door tightly so none of the flies, none of the horror, would follow them out.
Young Henderson was leaning against the opposite wall, looking somberly at them with his old eyes. You’ve seen it, too, the eyes said. Welcome to the club. There’s no way to resign. There went the Adam’s apple.
“Call for a CSU, Harold,” Vitali said. “Tell them about the flies. They’ll need to get rid of the damned things before they can get her out.”
Mishkin didn’t answer, but pulled his cell phone from his pocket and walked down to the end of the hall. He tried to open the window there, but it was jammed tightly closed, so he contented himself with standing, staring outside, as he made his call. Considering his own reaction, Vitali was surprised that Mishkin had managed to keep down his breakfast.
“Stick here,” Vitali told Henderson. “Keep the scene frozen. That means you don’t go in there, either.”
“I was just about to go check out that bathroom again,” Henderson said.
Vitali had to smile. Humor, no less. The kid with the old eyes was going to be okay. For a second Vitali considered explaining to Henderson how they were going to have to put what they’d seen somewhere in the dark cellars of their minds and not look at it or think about it, never let it escape back into the light. It wasn’t exactly forgetting, but it passed. Then he realized none of this would be news to the young cop. Besides, it wasn’t the kind of thing easily put into words.
“Don’t you even think of going back in there,” he growled at the kid, shaking a finger at him.
Then he went to get Mishkin so they could talk to some of the neighbors before the crime scene unit showed up.
“They’re on the way,” Mishkin said, still staring out the window at the end of the hall. “I was thinking, Sal, how this one looks like it could be habitual.”
Mishkin knew what he meant. A murder like this one, committed in such a brutal and bloody ritualistic manner, might not be the first such crime.
And it might not be the last.
28
“Here!” Fedderman said.
At first Quinn wondered where Fedderman had gotten the white board he was holding. Then he realized it was one of the bottom shelves of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. They were searching the Galin house’s den, or family room, wherein was a large red leather sofa and matching recliner, as well as the oversized oak desk where all the family’s bills were paid and correspondence was written.
Fedderman and Nancy Weaver had removed almost everything from the shelves, even the large encyclopedia set and coffee table art books on the bottom ones. One of the end-bottom shelves had a hole about half an inch in diameter drilled through it at a sharp angle toward the room, so that it was barely noticeable when the white enameled shelf was viewed by anyone facing it. But if it happened to be noticed, you could insert a finger at the angle of the hole, crook it, and easily lift out the shelf. The bottom shelves were set on a baseboard about five inches above the dark brown carpet, and in the space between this shelf and the floor had been hidden stacks of rubberbanded bills of large denominations. Along with the money were several large, plain brown envelopes.
Pearl had also heard Fedderman and came over with Quinn to see what he’d found.
“Neat little hidey-hole,” Fedderman said, nodding toward the space beneath the removed shelf.
“There’s a small fortune there,” Weaver said.
“Large fortune for a cop,” Pearl said. She glanced over at Weaver’s trancelike stare at the money. “Is it giving you ideas?” She and Weaver had never gotten along for more than minutes at a time.
Weaver’s face reddened, but she said nothing and moved away.
“Don’t start, Pearl,” Quinn said softly.
She didn’t bother to look at him.
Fedderman began opening the envelopes. Some of them contained more money, stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Others contained gold and silver jewelry. Even some gold coins.
“Looks like pirate treasure,” Pearl said.
Still miffed at Pearl and feigning disinterest, Weaver had gone into another room where her partner Vern Shults was working. Quinn saw movement near the door and thought she might have calmed down and was returning, but June Galin entered the den.
She stared at the books stacked on the floor, then at the white shelf, which was now leaning against the wal
l. Then she saw what was going on, and her eyes widened. Quinn watched her closely. She really did seem surprised.
When she got closer and saw what had been hidden beneath the removed shelf, she seemed genuinely shocked. Quinn was afraid her legs might buckle and braced himself to be ready to catch her if she fell.
But she managed to maintain her equilibrium.
“I don’t understand…” she said. But Quinn knew she did. The knowledge had come suddenly, and at a cost.
“Your husband never told you about this?” he asked.
She began to stammer and then clamped her lips shut. Obviously holding back tears, she looked bitterly up at him. “Who do you think he was hiding all this from?”
Quinn understood how she must feel, betrayed by her husband even after his death. Their relationship hadn’t been as loving and trusting as she’d imagined. It had to be difficult for her.
“I don’t know what to believe now,” she said, rubbing the heel of a hand into her eye. “What else might not be true?”
“We’re going to try to find out,” Quinn said, as gently as he could. He believed-his years of experience and his gut told him-this woman was an innocent caught up in her dead husband’s game.
She swiped the back of her hand across her nose, which had started to run. “I’m so goddamned confused…”
Quinn wasn’t confused. What he felt was rage toward the late Joseph Galin, dirty cop, almost certainly planning on keeping his ill-gotten gains and at some point leaving his wife.
“I’m sure your husband loved you,” he said, “whatever his faults.”
Pearl gave him a look, letting him know this was no way to talk to a suspect. That’s what June Galin had suddenly become, though Pearl had come to the same conclusion as Quinn: it was unlikely that June had known her husband Joe was a bent cop. The hiding place beneath the bottom shelf had been created mostly to keep her from finding that out.
June began sobbing in earnest now, and went to the red recliner and sat on its edge, her face buried in her hands.
Pearl and Fedderman both stared at Quinn, question marks in their eyes. Were they going to regard June Galin as a suspected coconspirator? Cuff her, read her her rights, and take her in?
Quinn, almost imperceptiblly, shook his head no.
Fedderman came over to stand near him, keeping his voice low. “If Galin was dirty, it could be his murder’s got nothing to do with the Twenty-five-Caliber Killer.”
“Maybe,” Quinn said, thinking the investigation was leaning in that direction. There was no shortage of motives when it came to who might have killed Galin.
Then he recalled that inside-out pocket in Galin’s suit coat. And there was something else…
“Hey!” a woman’s voice said.
Everyone turned to look at Nancy Weaver standing in the doorway. She was holding a six-foot-long oak board beneath her right arm, as if she might go surfing, but the surfboard was obviously a bookshelf. And she was grinning.
Quinn remembered the bookshelves in the living room, crowded with glass figurines and a pewter collection.
“There was one of those removable bottom shelves in the living room, too,” Weaver said. “Come see.”
The hiding place in the living room held more money and jewelry, along with an envelope containing three deposit box keys.
When the tally was completed the next day, it was determined that Joe Galin had hidden in his modest home two hundred thousand dollars in cash, as well as ninety thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry. The three deposit boxes had held another fifty thousand and a coin collection that hadn’t yet been appraised.
But what interested Quinn most was something found in the first hiding place they’d discovered. An empty yellow envelope that looked, by the way it was folded and impressed, as if it had once contained money.
Renz was telling Cindy Sellers over the phone whatever she wanted to know about the Hettie Davis murder. Sensational though it might be, it wasn’t what Vitali and Mishkin feared, the opening act of another serial killer in the city. Not yet, anyway.
“The thing about the flies,” Sellers said, obviously taking notes. “That’s great.”
“Yeah,” Renz said, and swallowed. Ice-hearted bitch.
“Any additional comment?” Sellers asked.
“Just that we’re working day and night and in between,” Renz said. “And the killer should know we’re getting closer with every breath he takes.”
“That’s good,” Sellers said. “You decide to give up police work and politics, you should be a writer.”
“Who’d believe any of it?” Renz said.
After the conversation, he hung up his desk phone, confident that Sellers wouldn’t speculate in her paper about yet another serial killer, this one focusing on women. The way Hettie Davis was killed must have taken a lot of hate, a lot of sickness, a lot of evil.
He pushed the intercom button and told his assistant out in the anteroom that he didn’t want to be disturbed, then got up from his desk chair and cracked the window a few inches. Then he sat back down in his chair and fired up a cigar. Not an illegal Cuban like the ones he knew Quinn was smoking, but a good cigar nonetheless. Smoking wasn’t permitted in the office or anywhere else in the building. Damned near nowhere in the city. But what was the point in being police commissioner if he couldn’t break the law?
He leaned back in his chair and smoked, thinking about Hettie Davis again. Her murder had shaken even two old pros like Vitali and Mishkin. It had to be hard stuff.
What was wrong with people out there in his city? Were they getting worse? Renz had seen plenty of all sorts of crime, most of it committed for the usual reasons: greed, passion, revenge, mental illness… But sometimes the reason was simply evil. Not often, but sometimes. Renz believed in evil, and he knew Quinn believed in it. They’d both seen it and would see it again.
Renz swiveled his chair so more of the cigar smoke would drift out the window. He didn’t want it to leave a telltale tobacco scent after he’d finished the cigar and sprayed the office with aerosol pine air freshener. He adjusted his position until he saw with satisfaction that the window was drawing well. Smoke seemed to be fleeing the office.
He rested his head against the chair’s high back and blew a perfect smoke ring that dissolved quickly and headed for the polluted outdoors. He thought some more about evil. It was difficult to define, and though you might deny it even to yourself, you could feel it when you were in its presence. It did something to your flesh and stirred something long dormant in the minds of those whose job it was to deal with it. Genuine evil, the real deal, stuck to people, and it scared the hell out of them. Ask Vitali and Mishkin. Ask anyone who’d been anywhere near that crime scene.
Renz tried and failed to blow another smoke ring. In his cynical, self-serving way, he prayed there wouldn’t be another Hettie Davis.
29
Black Lake, Missouri, 1985
The snow-painted woods were quiet after the reverberation of the rifle shot; then there was the crunching sound of boot soles breaking through the icy crust as Marty and his father made their way down the shallow grade toward the kill point.
They stood over the dead ten-point buck Marty had just shot. The action had quickened their blood, and despite the low temperature, neither of them felt the cold. Marty, in fact, was perspiring under his heavy coat.
“We draggin’ it back now?” he asked, his breath fogging out before his face as he looked up at his father.
His father smiled. “We ain’t got my deer yet.”
Marty returned the smile tenuously. “We gonna just let him lay here, pick him up later?”
“Can’t do that. We’ll tree-hang him, cut him so he bleeds out, then come back later and field dress him proper.”
“How we gonna do that?”
Marty’s father drew a coil of thin nylon rope from a coat pocket. “I’ll help you string him up; then I’ll show you what to do. Then you’ll do it.” He walked over to a tr
ee about ten feet away and tossed one end of the rope over a thick branch about ten feet off the ground.
“I’m rememberin’ when me an’ my dad did this,” Marty’s father said.
“How old was you then?”
“ ’Bout your age. Like he was when his father before him showed him how it was.”
“Long time ago,” Marty said.
“Not so long. Grab on, son.”
Marty and his father clutched the deer by its antlers and dragged it over the snowy ground to the tree. It left a long red track of blood along the trail of their boot prints.
Marty’s father made a large loop in the rope and pulled it tight to the branch so a single strand dangled from the tree. He held the dead animal’s rear hooves together and wrapped the rope around them in a weaving motion, around and in and out between the slender legs, so they were tied firmly together. Then he looked around for a stout fallen branch, found one, and broke it over his knee so it was about two feet long. This he inserted in the slack in the rope and began to wind it, tightening as one would a tourniquet. The rope drew taut, and as Marty’s father rotated the branch, his arms well above his head, the deer raised off the ground.
“There’s a wire gizmo called a gambrel you can use to fasten the rear legs,” Marty’s father said. “We use rope. Always have, always will.”
When the deer’s antlers had cleared the ground, Marty’s father looped rope around the piece of branch so it was firmly fixed. He stood back, breathing hard, his breath steaming, and surveyed his work. The deer dangled awkwardly upside down, but the knots were tight and the rope would hold.
“Ain’t goin’ nowheres,” he said.
“Guess not,” Marty said.
His father unbuttoned his coat and reached inside. He drew out his long bowie knife from the sheath on his belt, and with one swift, powerful motion slit the deer’s throat.
Blood spurted from the great severed arteries, brilliant red and steaming on the white snow. The shock and stink of it made Marty gasp and step back.
“Mind you don’t get none on you,” his father said.