by David Levien
“They’re not very good anyway, just something I do,” he says. He is lying. His real projects are very good. They are amazing, unlike anything ever created by man.
“Wood or metal this time?” she asks.
“Well …” he says, when the phone rings.
“I’ll get that,” she says.
“Thanks,” he says, and continues out to the garage.
He works with total concentration, and skill built upon thousands of hours of contemplation and hundreds of hours of experience. He can’t stop and he can’t bring himself to go to bed. He loses all track of time. He works in a coat, the heater in the garage turned off, the winter cold outside chilling the air. He moves his hands over her velvet flesh, her still-pliant viscera. He has his saws and sharp knives. The textures and aromas are almost overwhelming. He positions the elements into the perfect composition and he shoots the whole thing with his camera placed in just the right position. It will soon be time to go out.
31
“Uh-oh, you’re getting the look,” Mistretta said, as Behr walked inside. This time he entered her house, not her office.
“What look is that?” Behr wondered.
“The zombified look of a zombie hunter,” she said, and raised a rocks glass full of clear liquid over ice. “Patrón Silver and a lime squeeze. Want one?”
“Sure,” he said.
She led him in across the small foyer, through the living room with the Mission furniture, and into a good-sized kitchen that had been recently renovated. Music was playing through both rooms.
“Is this …?” he asked and pointed to the ceiling speakers.
“Wilco,” she said.
He took a seat on a stool at the center island while she went to a stainless-steel fridge-freezer and started putting his drink together.
“Glad I wasn’t interrupting any important plans when I called,” he said.
“A whole lotta nothing on a Saturday night,” she said, turning around and sliding him his glass.
“Well, I’m outed on that front too,” Behr said.
“When’s the last time you slept?”
“A whole night? It’s been a while,” he allowed.
“ ’S what happens,” she said and raised her glass. “Why do you think I bailed?”
He raised his glass and they touched rims. They drank and the tequila hit him with a burn. She was wearing a sweater dress over tight leggings and those shearling boots that had caught on a few years back and never really went away. Her black hair had a bit more curl to it than it had the last time he’d seen her, and only her eyes and lips were touched with makeup. He caught a mini-cyclone of perfume and liquor off of her as she sat on the stool next to him. It was said the only subjects that mattered were sex and death, and she seemed to have them both well covered.
“So what do you got for me?” she asked.
He opened a yellow envelope and brought out the papers. It was background on two suspects—a violent man named Jose Aldes, with a history of assaults on women, and a man thought to be a serial rapist named Cowen, who had supposedly moved away to Wyoming nine months back. Neither man had apparently bound, killed, or mutilated. Prilo’s records were also there beneath the rest. Behr wasn’t testing her as much as trying to reclaim some objectivity.
They finished their drinks as she read through the Aldes file and tapped the edge of her glass, sending him for refills. Halfway through the next round she was coming to the end of the Cowen report when she murmured to herself, “What is this shit?”
Behr waited as she moved on to the Prilo documents, and murmured, “Oh … okay …”
She kept reading for a few more minutes, until their glasses were empty, and then got up. This time she did the refills, throwing the Aldes and Cowen paperwork in the garbage on her way. “You don’t mind, do you?” she asked.
Behr just shrugged. She leaned across the center island countertop so their heads were close together, bent over the Prilo history.
“This guy is a full-on beast,” she said.
“I know,” Behr said.
“What was with those others?”
“A selection of one is no selection,” he said.
“Right,” she said, smiling. “But I saw your timeline notes on the Prilo pages. What about the kills when he was locked up? I don’t like it.”
“I didn’t like it either. But here …” He went back into the yellow envelope for the case files on the two murders in question. “Don’t you think there are enough elements outside the pattern that those two could’ve been committed by someone else? Then Prilo resumed his activities once he got released?”
She read silently for a moment. Both of the victims were white females in the early half of their twenties. One of them had been discovered in a sealed fifty-five-gallon drum. She had been a grad student from Ohio. The other was found buried in a shallow depression near an access road in Wayne County. That one had been missing a leg and had not been positively identified.
“Well,” Mistretta said. “Could be. They weren’t showcased as much as the others. The evidence of binding and torture is there. But why have the other bodies been so easily found and these hidden?” she wondered aloud.
“Hell if I know. Maybe he was trying some new form of presentation,” Behr posited. “Oh, and by the way, Mary Beth Watney was as blond as a wheat field.”
“Look, farmer Brown, I like them for the same guy as the others. And the guy you’re going with was in jail at the time, so I give him a loud buzzer.”
“Yeah, on paper,” Behr said. “But with Prilo we’ve got a restraintrage sex killer. Admitted and convicted. We’ve got mutilation. Operating in the same location. I mean, how many of these guys could there be in any given area?”
A dark look came to Mistretta’s eyes. “You’d be surprised. Also, you have to consider that maybe the guy isn’t from the area and travels in, or worse, he’s got no record.”
“Let’s not go down those roads for now—”
“Besides, where’s the DNA? Not a speck on these bodies. Prilo left DNA on Mary Beth Watney, which is why he confessed. Or vice versa.”
“There was no one else’s DNA on these two vics that would rule Prilo out. None at all. I’m just saying, I’m gonna like him until I don’t like him—” Behr stated.
This time she cut him off with the actual buzzer sound as she moved around the island next to him.
“No, no. Like him. A little,” Behr insisted.
She gave him the buzzer again. Louder.
“All right—”
Buzzer.
“You want to make a night of it, going back and forth like this?” Behr said, nearly laughing.
She shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the worst I’d spent in my life,” she said, and gave him a bit of a body check with her shoulder. “Whoa, didn’t move you an inch.”
“Little thing like you can’t move me,” he said.
“Okay, big man …” she said in a mocking voice.
Their shoulders remained touching. Behr felt the air in the room change and grow charged. Their faces met in the space between them, and they kissed. Her full lips pressed against his, and he tasted tequila on her aggressive, seeking tongue. He turned toward her, still seated on the tall stool, and she pressed into him. He felt her warm, full body in his arms. He wanted her, but even as he did he felt self-disgust at breaking promises that he had not spoken, but had made nonetheless. Stirring passion mixed with deep feelings of dread and guilt within him. After a moment he broke off and pulled back.
“Yeah, I’ve gotta stop. I’m in a thing,” he said.
“Ah, fuck me!” she said, her dark eyes sparkling like glitter. “That kiss said maybe you’re not so sure.”
“I’m sure. Sure I’m in it, maybe not so sure what it is. But I can’t do this now.” Even as he said it, he felt regret, both for being there and at the idea of leaving. He’d put himself in a situation where remorse was behind every door, including the one to her bedroom.
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“All right, Behr,” she said after a moment. “I’ll give you a free pass this time—even though you did get me revved up.”
“That’s two of us who are revved,” he said.
Their breath returned to them, and the atmosphere in her kitchen lightened like that of a surfacing submarine.
“Can we still work this thing together?” Behr asked, gathering up his papers.
“Of course we can work it,” she said with a smile, “we’re not freshman lab partners, for fuck’s sake!”
“Good,” he said.
“Leave this with me,” she said, putting her hand on the Prilo pages. “I’m going to go back to the cases and next time we meet you’re gonna really see what I can do.”
32
It is done.
Cinnamon is out of his life. She’s been given back. He has released her to the world, and it is beautiful.
The silence was complete that night. There wasn’t a frozen cricket chirping. He’d worked quickly and then he’d left the office park, stopping between pools of streetlights to pull strips of black tape off his license plate. Then he drove away into the darkness. There was nothing left in the space she had filled but relief. Everything inside him was like a well that had been pumped off, leaving a void, a soothing, relaxing void.
Drive straight home, he tells himself.
But he can already feel new pressure seeping in. It will rise and get more turbulent with each passing day and it will soon be roiling again.
Drive straight home, he tells himself again.
But he doesn’t. Other won’t allow it. Instead he drives to the wrong part of town, where the girls work late. He sees them out there on the corners as he passes by.
Are we already considering the next one?
He wonders at himself, and the thing that is inside him that seems to be pushing up and taking over. He thinks about that stupid hooker, and how that punch wasn’t nearly enough. He drives around for over half an hour looking for her. But he doesn’t see her. He only sees black girls out tonight and that isn’t going to work. So he finally drives home.
33
“We’ve got another one, a real meat puzzle.”
It was Breslau calling at 6:45 A.M. Monday. Behr was awake. He’d already been out in the dark for his early-morning roadwork, in fact, trying to outrun the lingering memory of Mistretta’s tequila kiss.
“Like Northwestway. Even worse. We’re down at Donovan-Grant. It’s a complete fun house.”
“Can I come down?” Behr asked.
“Consider this your engraved invitation.” Breslau hung up. Behr dressed quickly and was almost out the door four minutes later when he remembered.
“Suze?” he said into his phone. “Did I wake you?”
“No, what’s up?”
“I was supposed to take Trev today, but I can’t. Something came up.”
“You’re really jamming me here, Frank, I told day care he wasn’t coming.”
“You think you can get him in?” he asked. There was a strained pause in which Behr saw his shot at the crime scene vanishing before his eyes.
“Yeah, I guess. They’ll probably be able to take him …”
“Great, Suze, I’m sorry—” but she’d hung up, so he headed for the door.
Behr was at the scene within twenty minutes, and “fun house” was an apt description, if not an understatement, of what he found there. A line of police vehicles, ambulances, and coroner’s vans were parked along the winding two-lane drive that led to the campus of Donovan-Grant, a large pharmaceutical corporation that had gone out of business two years earlier on the west side of town. Uniformed officers kept a perimeter more than twice the normal distance, and a few arriving news vans were being held at bay. Behr showed his identification and waited while an officer radioed for clearance, which was quickly granted. He was shown where to park at the end of a string of cruisers, and then he walked toward the cluster of uniforms and windbreakers bunched around ground zero.
The smell of death and vomit hit him as he reached the edge of the crowd. A few less seasoned officers had lost their breakfasts. A couple of them had gone down to their knees and were being treated by EMTs and then walked away from the scene, probably for immediate counseling. Behr took a step closer and nudged his way inside a ring of vets and caught a whiff of menthol in the air, as the experienced cops smeared Vicks VapoRub under their noses and passed the tub along.
Behr cleared the row of onlookers and finally saw it. He felt his eyes zoom and spin trying to take in the unnatural sight before him at the edge of the parking lot. The body of a female victim, her skin alabaster against the black asphalt, had been cut apart and twisted and then reassembled, into a strange, squat pyramid. Her head was pointed in the opposite direction it was meant to. Facing away from him, it sat on top of the pile. The base of her skull, covered by lank blond hair with dark ginger streaks, rested directly on the shoulders of the torso, while the neck was missing altogether. Then after another instant Behr located it, a cylinder, removed from its points of attachment, the severed spinal column a white ring centered by pink marrow, like a round steak, tucked between a pair of crossed and amputated feet. Behr saw that her breasts had been hacked off, and if they were on-site, he couldn’t see them.
He circled counterclockwise around the remains, passing between more officers who looked on in shocked silence, until he saw her face. Beyond lifeless, what remained of her eyes stared off into infinity. Her mouth hung open and was torn apart—as if small animals had gotten to it. Her hands were pressed to her colorless cheeks. Behr was no patron of the arts, but even he recognized the resemblance to the famous painting The Scream, by Edvard Munch. Except this version was real, and the subject’s hands were no longer connected to her arms.
Bobbing somewhere between horrified and mesmerized as he stared, Behr had to force himself to catalog his next impression, which was the lack of blood. There wasn’t as much as he expected. There was little, actually. What there was of it appeared to be seepage, as if the body had been vivisected and bled out elsewhere, before being placed.
Makes sense. The blunt sentence came to Behr’s mind, as he tried to think rationally. It would be impossible to do this kind of butchery out in the open. But the coherent thought was pushed away by panicked impulses of mortality, of death foretold, and the inevitable end of all living creatures that flashed through the core of his being at what he saw.
Then Behr noticed the quiet. It was as near silent a crime scene as he’d ever stood on. There was a man-made pond in the near distance, with a fountain that had been dormant since the company shuttered its offices, so there was no sound from it. There were occasional footsteps, some radio crackle, and a muffled sob or two, but no loud instructions were being barked, nor were there any of the caustic jokes one could count on being tossed around a crime scene, no matter how gruesome, as a defense mechanism.
Then a smooth burst of concerted movement at the edge of the site and a series of clicks and flashes caught Behr’s attention. A lithe, medium-sized man with longish hair clad in an army field jacket crouched down on the ground with a big-bodied Nikon digital. Speed lights on low stands cut the flat, slate gray of the sky. The man kneeled and kept on, lining up shot after shot, seemingly unaffected by his subject.
“Still life of death,” Breslau said, appearing at Behr’s elbow, chewing gum, a whiff of menthol about him, and a shine of Vicks above his upper lip.
“Huh?” Behr said.
“That’s what Quinn called it,” Breslau said, jutting his chin toward the photographer. “A still life of death.”
“Are those GSWs to the upper torso?” Behr asked of a pair of angry red holes on each side of the chest.
“No. First thought, based on the wounds, is that she was pierced and potentially suspended by rods or hooks through the skin.”
“Je-sus,” a cop next to them who’d overheard said.
“Has she been identified?” Behr asked.
“Nah. Is she yours?”
“Doesn’t look like it. Ninety-nine percent sure she’s not Kendra Gibbons.”
“That’s good, I guess.”
“Yeah. I’d like to do a DNA check though.”
“Sure.”
Behr’s eyes stayed on Quinn as the photographer moved in for a series of close-ups.
“You have anything?” Behr asked.
“We’re checking if security cams caught any footage, but it doesn’t look good. They seem to have been turned off and pulled out a while back when the company shut down the location.”
“Any security guards?” Behr knew that even defunct office buildings often employed night watchmen to keep trespassers out and reduce liability.
“Just doing twice-daily pass-bys. That’s who found this. He didn’t see anything, and he doesn’t know whether to shit or go blind right now. We’re talking to him anyway.”
Quinn was up from the ground now, dusting off his knees and drawing back several dozen yards, where he set the Nikon on a tripod.
“Lieutenant?” an officer said to Breslau.
“Yeah, Tommy?” Breslau drifted away to his conversation, and Behr headed for Quinn.
Behr waited a distance away while Quinn composed his shot, clicked the shutter, paused for a long beat, and clicked it again. He adjusted the aperture and took another few frames. The photographer reminded Behr of a hunter on a range sighting a rifle scope, such was his precision. Finally, he removed the camera from the tripod and began snapping what seemed to be final shots.
“Quinn?” Behr asked.
“Yeah,” the photographer said.
“Name’s Frank Behr. I’m an investigator here on a potentially related case.”
“Think I’ve heard of you. You used to be on the job?” Quinn said.
“Yep.”
“Call me Django.”
“Okay,” Behr said, wondering if it was his nickname or given one. “So, you ever see anything like this?”