Death Watch

by Elizabeth Forrest

  Two uniforms looked up as he started to duck under the tape after the coroner’s gurney. They stepped toward him.

  Carter held up his press credential and added, “Franklin and Sofer called me.”

  The one young cop he recognized from that long night three days ago at Mt. Mercy. He said, “They told me you might show. You’re here as a consultant.” To his partner he added, “It’s okay. The suits called him in.” Carter passed him a thermal pitcher, a box of doughnuts, and a stack of paper cups. “Throw the empty in the back of my car when you’re done.”

  “Thanks. You’re all right.”

  Carter did not linger to hear more. He followed the gurney attendants who followed the steady stream of investigators and uniforms moving in and out of the doors like ants.

  Someone exiting the building took an abrupt right, leaned over, and spewed into the pink hawthorn bushes ringing the complex. She hugged her rib cage tightly. Carter slowed. “That bad, huh?”

  The lieutenant nodded and waved him on, her face a cadaverous gray under the poor lighting. She vomited again, finishing with a moan as he stepped past her.

  The complex had to be vacant. There were no sleepy-eyed occupants leaning out of the windows or walking the lawn trying to figure out what had happened. He’d seen only one car at the curb which had probably belonged here, and the line of carports to the rear of the complex had looked fairly empty as well. Inside the lobby of the building, which was fairly small and probably only existed for the mailboxes, the gurney attendants were stopped.

  Sofer held them up. He wore the same solemn gray suit he’d worn earlier to Carter’s apartment, only now he and the suit seemed rumpled. He said quietly, “Take it downstairs to the laundry room, right turn at the bottom of the stairs. Don’t touch anything, we’re not done there yet. Got a body thermometer?”

  They nodded. Sofer grunted. “Good. Get a body temp if you can. Make a note of it on both boys, one for me and one for the police. Got that?”

  They nodded.

  “Use gloves. Try not to step in anything, it’s a little wet down there.”

  Carter leaned past and into the stairwell. The stink of fire reeked worse here, and he knew it had probably been started down below. There was another smell, too, one that he tentatively identified as burned flesh.

  The attendants flashed their hands to show they were already gloved. Carter grabbed up the second box of doughnuts, the coffeepot, and the cups as they steered downward.

  Sofer looked at him with gimlet eyes. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “Franklin told me to. You’ll have to drink it black though, I only have two hands. Couldn’t carry the cream and sugar.”

  “God. Lewis must have a cast-iron stomach.” Nevertheless, Sofer reached for a cup and let Carter pour. He took a glazed twist from the box as Carter set both on the floor.

  “I’m here as a consultant?”

  “That’s right. No story yet. Franklin wants to get your take on the scene before it gets cleaned up.”

  He poured himself a cup and took a strong hit before asking, “What’s downstairs?”

  “Two juveniles. He started the fire down there, but the building was retrofitted for sprinklers. They worked down there, not up here. Piping hadn’t been connected up here yet. The building’s just been readied for new tenants. Go on down and take a look, but don’t touch.”

  He swallowed slowly. He had no desire. Police photos would be bad enough. He shook his head, saying, “I’ll wait for Franklin.” Then, quietly, he added, “Mr. Blue doesn’t do kids.”

  “Bingo.” Sofer finished his doughnut after stirring it around in his coffee. He wiped his wet lips off on the back of his hand, then licked a sticky finger. He picked up the coffeepot. “Walk this way.”

  Carter bent over and retrieved the doughnuts. The agent waited for him, as they entered the main floor of the building to the left.

  He stopped immediately. “Oh, shit.”

  Sofer paused. He commented, “We’ve got photos.”

  Photos would not do the scene justice. The walls had been freshly repaired, freshly painted. There was still a faint odor to them of the drying paint. That odor now was all but drowned by the sweet iron stink of blood. The scent of blood added to the primitive fury of the drawings done on the corridors. Pictographs splashed hastily were of the most basic, the sun, stars, the symbol for infinity, fire, man, woman, the woman prone in death. When freshly done on the cream background, they must have been pulsating with redness. Now, as they dried and the wall absorbed them, they had begun to turn a rusty brown. Bauer . Bauer had drawn pictures. They hadn’t always been found at first, because he rarely left the bodies where the killing had taken place. When investigators were able to backtrack later, crude drawings had been found at the murder site. It had never been written up publicly, just as many of the actual atrocities done to the victims had never been released. One, to protect the integrity of the crime scene and evidence, two, to protect the families who’d already suffered enough.

  Carter felt his heart stutter, thump heavily once or twice, and then stagger back into its rhythm. His eyes shut involuntarily as he realized what he looked at.

  “Wyndall.”

  He looked out. Franklin had joined Sofer in the framed doorway of an apartment the next door down. “In here.”

  He didn’t want to go in. His body knew it, his thumping heart forbade it, his feet dragged, but as the two agents watched him, their stares seemed to draw him along inexorably. Past the crude paintings drawn in a victim’s life stream. Past the speckled droppings on the floor. Past the final strokes which showed a woman, her torso cavity opened, gutted as if she’d been venison.

  “You told me it was Mr. Blue,” he said. He’d gone cold. The hot coffee in his hand threatened to burn him through the cup.

  Franklin still wore the current god-awful purple tie. Sofer had splashed a little coffee onto it. It could only be an improvement. He smiled thinly in response to Carter. “Isn’t it? You haven’t even been inside the apartment yet.”

  Carter shoved the cardboard box of doughnuts into Franklin’s hands and went into the apartment. He stood for a moment and then closed his eyes to avoid abrupt dizziness. The coffee cup dropped from fingers suddenly gone numb.

  One of the police lieutenants looking over the scene reacted. “Damnit.” He knelt down and marked it off, saying, “Get this blotted up and out of the way.” He looked up, unshaven, shirt unbuttoned at the collar. “Don’t mess it up or keep out.” He gave a hard look at the FBI agents. “I don’t care who he is. If he can’t stay out of the way, I want him out of the crime scene.”

  Carter nodded. Words failed him, words that would issue from his mouth. His hands began to twitch as they imagined the words he would type to describe the scene.

  Whoever she was, she had just moved in. Her belongings were meager almost beyond belief. Almost no furniture, though they did have a television set, resting on a precarious-looking tray stand. Cardboard boxes had been neatly unfolded and stacked in a corner. Blood splashed across them, all the way from the kitchen, for she had surely died in the kitchen, though it was apparent she’d first been caught at the other end of the living room, at the sliding glass doors.

  She’d tried to get out. The first, high spurt of bloodletting had splattered there, blood driven by a heart still beating furiously, through a severed jugular. She’d been dragged, then, into the kitchen. Her heel marks sliced blood into the carpeting, tracks that marked how she’d been taken.

  Several investigators milled around in the kitchen. The corpse must be there, just beyond his line of sight. He could only see the congealing pool of blood on the floor through the narrow doorway.

  There was a measuring cup lying on its side a hand’s span away from the main pool of blood. It held crimson as well. The primitive artist had used it to capture his medium. One of the investigators was stretching into the kitchen, and powdering its surface for prints. He called out, “Somebody go over
the corridor closely. The son of a bitch might have used a paintbrush or something. Look for fibers in the blood.” He added, “Any luck finding the blade?”

  A clammy sweat covered Carter’s forehead. “He used a knife?” It was to be expected. Murders of such sexual violence almost always involved a knife.

  “Yeah. Bite marks are all excised. Head’s nearly been decapitated. Took two cuts from left to right to do it. Seven stab wounds in the frontal area, in the breasts. Uterus has been punctured several times as well. That appears to be postmortem.” The investigator never looked up from his careful brushing. “We’ll know more after the autopsy.”

  Carter pivoted around to face Franklin and Sofer. Franklin had been eating a powdered sugar doughnut. The evidence covered his chin.

  “Not Bauer,” Carter said. “She died fast and furious. This guy was in a real frenzy. Bauer liked to do them slowly. Sometimes he took days. He didn’t lose much blood, either, except for the paintings.” Nelson and the other caseworkers had never found out what Bauer had done with the blood, either.

  Sofer remarked, “She’s been partially scalped. Mr. Blue likes to do that.”

  Franklin said, “So is he or isn’t he?”

  “What do the kids look like?”

  That stopped the agent. He dropped his half-eaten doughnut back into the box. “You sure you want to go down there?”

  “I don’t want to. But that’s the only way to tell if it was Bauer or not.”

  Sofer ticked his head to follow him. Stepping carefully, Carter started back out of the apartment. He stopped, as a new bloody pattern caught his eye.

  Thank you.

  It had been splashed extravagantly on the interior living room wall.

  He felt his throat close. Sofer caught his elbow. “We saw,” he told Carter gently. “We know.” He drew him back down the hallway toward the basement stairwell.

  His surety that it couldn’t have been Bauer fled. He scarcely noticed where the agents led him.

  The stench from the laundry room grew worse step by step. He pulled a crumpled handkerchief from his back pocket and held it over his mouth. Sofer and Franklin had left their coffee behind, Sofer’s pasty white skin going even paler and Franklin gray under his tan.

  Franklin stopped him at the entrance to the room. It looked like a concrete bunker and smelled like a charnel house. Carter knew where the policewoman had come from when she’d charged out of the building to vomit. He raised his handkerchief from his mouth to his forehead, then returned it.

  The gurney partially blocked the doorway. Franklin bent over it. He straightened.

  “They’re taking body temps now.” He licked his lips as he faced Carter. “You don’t have to go in there. Tell me what you’d look for, if you were looking for Bauer.”

  He owed the agent one, and could tell from the expression on Franklin’s face that the Fed knew it, too. Carter took the handkerchief down. “He liked children best. What do we have down here?”

  “Two juveniles, males, age and race indeterminate at this point in time, bodies partially burned. One killed by neck slashing, the other uncertain. One body bound with duct tape, the uncertain not.”

  “Tortured? Genitals mutilated. Bite marks on the neck, just below the hairline? Possible sexual assault?”

  Franklin leaned back in. Then he came out and shook his head. “Not as far as I can tell.”

  “Not Bauer, then. He wouldn’t, he couldn’t, change that much.”

  Not Georg Bauer.

  No matter what the message read upstairs.

  Franklin said to him apologetically, “I’d like to go back up with you, and go through the evidence line by line. What Bauer might do, what he wouldn’t do.”

  What could he say? “All right.” He started back up the stairs. “It’s going to be a long night.”

  “We don’t have much choice. This was Mr. Blue, until he lost control. Mr. Blue doesn’t do kids, or pictures. He’s never done wet work like this before.”

  “Do you think he’s disintegrating, becoming disorganized? Or do you think he’s trying to mislead us?”

  Both agents shook their head in the negative. “No. But ask yourself ... what if he’d learned from Bauer? What if he’d been a victim who’d survived? He relieves it, exorcises it, by killing himself and this time lost control ... flashing back.”

  “I can’t answer that until I know what you know about the perp. As far as I know, no one ever survived an attack by Georg Bauer. We’ll have to go back to the victims, to see what draws Mr. Blue, what he’s looking for and what he wants and what he finds.” Carter braced himself, braced himself for the kind of knowledge that had torn him apart before, driven him to suicide twice.

  He prayed he was strong enough to handle it this time.

  Chapter 28

  Stephen Hotchkiss decided during the dawn of his second morning that he had no way out. It was a rather pitiful life anyway, relegated to a computer screen for sex and companionship. He was a voyeur only because he knew his needs weren’t acceptable. He had no other choice. He would prefer to love a warm-skinned being, to love and be loved in return. It was the knowledge that he did not, and could not, that made him decide it was no longer worth living. He had never called the number left for him. His nimble mind had come to the inevitable conclusion that it was his own doctor, his own therapist, who’d betrayed him. Susan Craig had him by the short hairs if that was true. He could never safely hope to impugn her. No one would believe him.

  He wrote out his instructions and laid out his clothing. He pulled his dress shoes out of his bag. As was his habit, he’d wrapped them in newspaper to keep them clean and to keep them from soiling anything else. Stephen spread the paper out.

  It was the headline section from several days ago. The cover story was a feature on the tragic drive-by shooting of a child, and the heart donor good which had come out of it. He recognized the byline: Carter Wyndall. Carter did not cover politics, but he had a good reputation as a well-researched and honest writer.

  Stephen stared down at the newspaper. The more he stared, the more he felt as though a door were opening, a door into the pit which trapped him, a ray of light into the darkness.

  He picked up the phone and got information in the Los Angeles area, then the main number for the newspaper. As he dialed the newspaper, preparing to run the gauntlet of the voice mail system, he mentally composed what it was he was going to say.

  What he could say that would be compelling enough for Carter Wyndall to want to investigate and open up a can of worms. The phone system cycled him ever closer.

  The line clicked. “Hello, you have reached the mailbox of Carter Wyndall. Please leave a message and I’ll get back to you.”

  Hotchkiss began to speak. The words spilled out of him, a dam bursting, and he did not stop until he’d become absolutely breathless. Then he hung up.

  If Wyndall did not return his call in forty-eight hours, then he would reconsider his final solution again. Hotchkiss carefully rewrapped his good shoes and set about dressing for breakfast. The lake lodge had a nice restaurant. He felt like comfort food: hash browns and eggs, and freshly squeezed orange juice.

  Carter’s eyes felt like raw scrapes. It was only a little after nine, but the crime scene had emptied and there were only a scattering of uniforms and two lieutenants left. The air inside the rental car smelled of their sweat and Sofer’s occasional cigarette. He decided he wouldn’t be much good any longer. He smothered a yawn as he told Franklin and Sofer, “I’m heading for bed.” He put his fingers on the car door handle to let himself out.

  Sofer smothered a yawn of his own, muttering, “I should be so lucky.” His chin rested on top of the steering wheel.

  Franklin had been searching for crumbs in the doughnut box. He looked up. “Thanks for coming, Carter. Nelson was right. You’re a boy scout. We can use some of them from time to time.”

  Carter started to slide out of the rental car. He answered, “I liked Nelson, too.�
�� He hesitated in the open door. “Since you showed me yours, I guess I should show you mine. Remember that photo you took off me?”

  “The one you had updated?”

  “That’s the one. My assistant ran a search on it. He came up with a match. I think we have the same woman here in L.A. She’s a psychiatrist now, Dr. Susan Craig. I put her at the psych ward at Mount Mercy, but she probably has a private practice, too. Her company’s called CyberImago.”