The Vault

by Karen Long

  “I don’t believe it to be him.”

  “Why the fuck not?” snapped Samuelson, irritated. “He carried out the exact same crime and was at large during the time period. You think we have a whole team of embalmers on the loose in the city, just waiting for that special someone to get the formaldehyde pumping?”

  “No sir. Tyler Baxton was an opportunistic sex offender. He didn’t murder anyone, neither was he responsible for the preservation of the women’s copses he abused. The murderer of Giselle, Tara Roques and Parminder Kaur was a very different man.”

  “You don’t even know that Tara is dead. She could have gone on a bender for a week! If we start finding links where there are none, we’re going to be chasing our tails and not solving crime.”

  There was a long pause, as Eleanor held Samuelson’s gaze.

  “What do you think?” he said, turning to Timms.

  Timms gave the board a final sweep. “I see what Raven is saying and think she’s on to something.”

  “On to something? What the fuck sort of non-statement is that?”

  Timms shrugged. “Best I can do.”

  Samuelson grimaced. “None of this is making me happy and I’ve just heard that Tyler Baxton’s father had a coronary, while waiting for you –” he pointed an accusatory finger at Eleanor “– to turn up this morning. If he’s not a contender, why is he sitting in a cell?”

  “He was brought in for questioning and so far hasn’t managed to convince either us or himself that he’s innocent,” said Timms.

  “What does that mean? Is he going to confess to something he didn’t do?” snarled Samuelson.

  “Yes sir. He confessed,” said Eleanor, carefully.

  Samuelson threw his arms up in despair.

  “However, Ms. Turner has just arrived to represent him,” smoothed Eleanor. “She should be able to help clarify Tyler’s statement for us.”

  “I want regular updates on this clusterfuck is that clear?”

  Timms nodded sagely. “Roger that!”

  “Yes sir,” said Eleanor. With a final shake of his head, Samuelson left.

  “Ok, what have we got to link these events, now that I’ve hitched my fortunes to it?” asked Timms stretching himself out and looking pointedly at Eleanor. She spread out a series of photographs and reports from the medical examiner’s office.

  “Ok, it’s not a great deal and so far it’s all circumstantial but the tox screen makes for interesting reading.”

  Laurence picked up a page and began to peruse.

  “Giselle’s tissues revealed large amounts of formaldehyde, eucalyptus oil and various synthetic dyes,” said Eleanor.

  “Regular embalming products then,” said Laurence.

  She nodded. “But there were also high levels of acetone and…” she checked her notes, “…tetraethoxysilane.”

  “That’s a hardener isn’t it? Used in plastination,” offered Whitefoot, tentatively.

  “What the fuck is that?” asked Timms.

  “It’s a method of preserving and hardening tissues, for the purposes of anatomical display,” replied Eleanor.

  “But that’s incredibly specialist stuff. It takes anything up to a year to preserve one of these specimens. Von Hagens had an exhibition called Bodyworks, didn’t he?” said Laurence tapping his pen against his teeth.

  “Bodyworlds,” Eleanor corrected. “There was a showing at the Ontario Science Centre in 2005 and 10.”

  “Anyone seen it?” asked Timms. Everyone shook his or her head. “Ok, so what do they look like?”

  Eleanor pushed forward some colour prints of partially anatomised bodies. Some were freestanding, others were held in position by thin, supporting wires. One human form sat on horseback, its brain held in its right skeletonised hand, neither animal clothed in skin.

  “What the hell are those? People spend money to go and see that?” said Timms. “Really?”

  “Gives people an opportunity to see what they’re made of. I think they’re beautiful,” said Laurence.

  “Yeah well, that apart, how does this happen? How’d you make your own?”

  “You embalm the body and then soak it in a bath of acetone. Then vacuum the acetone out and position the body. Then you seal it into a plastic cover and pump the hardener in and that sets it rigid. Have I got that right?” Eleanor said and turned to Laurence.

  “I’m no expert but it sounds about right,” said Laurence.

  Eleanor turned her attention to Laurence. “Could you do this in the confines of your home?”

  Laurence opened his mouth and then paused as he realised the importance of what he was about to say. “Not in an apartment but in a house, maybe.”

  “Could I? Someone without your medical knowledge or skills?” asked Eleanor.

  There was a pause. “You’d have to have some awareness of chemicals and how to use them, so you weren’t hurt. And be physically strong enough to manoeuvre a body around.” He shrugged and glanced at the ME’s toxicology report. “You’d have to have a basic technological grasp of how to rig up a vacuum chamber. But there’s nothing here that I couldn’t put together using high-street bought equipment.”

  “How long do these things last?” said Timms.

  Laurence shrugged, “I guess if they’re done well years, maybe tens of years upwards. The ones set in plastic could be centuries but I think you’d need to talk to someone who does the procedure, whether one that has the skin on is as good.”

  “Hmm, we know how Giselle died?” asked Timms.

  “No indicators apparently.”

  “So you think that Tara has been or is in the process of being…” Wadesky drew air quotes, “plasticised?”

  There was a silence, eyes on Eleanor. “I’d say so, yes.”

  “How we going to find her?”

  “Ok, yes the link’s come through now,” said Laurence, after glancing at his phone’s screen. “Can I contact you on this number later? Fantastic, you’ve been incredibly helpful… You too.”

  Eleanor lifted her eyes from the traffic and glanced at him.

  “Leda Schmidt, one of the techs at the University of Michigan. They’ve been plasticising specimens for ten years now, for the anatomy and med students. She sent me a link and password to their teaching video, so I can take a look.”

  “It’s round here,” said Eleanor slowing the car to a crawl.

  “There!” said Laurence pointing towards a break in the houses and a newly painted length of railings. “Where you meeting him?”

  “There,” she replied, pulling the Taurus over to the right and squeezing between a portable hot dog seller and a line of new cars, the majority of which sported ‘Baby on Board’ and ‘Mom’s Taxi’ stickers on the rear window. Ahead of them, leaning against the entrance was a bearded man, wearing a khaki uniform and official cap. He peered at them and then made an acknowledging wave.

  The blinding heat of the early afternoon, hit them hard and both Eleanor and Laurence reached for their sunglasses before shaking hands with Jacob Hareton. “Gonna be thirty-three degrees this afternoon. Let’s grab a soda and I can show you the files on Giselle.”

  A red-tarmacked pathway led them out of the sun into leafy cool, its access clearly delineated into pedestrian and cyclists by a solid white line. The area of grass beyond the trees was heaving with pre-schoolers and mothers. Eleanor noted that most toddlers were equipped with small cycles and over-large helmets, in pre-anti-gender labelling pinks and blues. Prams were invariably the three-wheeled, ergonomic models favoured by young, wealthy Torontans. She doubted whether any of these families had to survive on less than a robust, six-figure salary.

  “You get any social issues here?” she asked Jacob.

  “Annex kids seem to consume as much sex and drugs as the less socially placed. But the graffiti tends to be grammatically better.”

  A timbered shed, tucked under two large oaks, served as Jacob’s office. It was cool and cluttered and had an uninterrupted view onto a smal
l lake. “Okay, this is all the info I’ve got on Giselle,” he said, passing Laurence some paper-clipped sheets. “I remember her better than most due to the God-awful fuss she made.”

  “What annoyed her in particular?” Eleanor asked.

  Jacob sighed. “We’d allocated a fairly large percentage of the year’s grant to developing local park areas. I’m in charge of four other newly rehabilitated areas in the GTA. As a way to cut further costs and gain a little charitable funding, we teamed up with the Probationary Service and offered Community Service programs to low risk offenders. I had six parolees that season and most of them preferred to dig and clear weeds. Not Giselle. Never did a stroke of work and spent most of her time loafing around.”

  Eleanor passed him a photograph of Giselle. He nodded. “That’s her.”

  “It says she worked over on the north side of the park for three weeks?” noted Laurence.

  “That’s right, the only job I managed to get her focused on was painting picnic benches over by the play area.”

  “Can we take a look?”

  “At the benches?” asked Jacob puzzled.

  “The area she worked in.”

  The play area was easily located by the cacophony emanating from the swinging, sliding, dangling children that played with the ferocity of gladiatorial combat. Jacob made a looping gesture as he indicated where the park benches were situated. “It was pretty different two years ago, as it was closed to the public.”

  “How often did you come over to check on her?” asked Eleanor. “And when you did was there ever anyone here? Someone not on the program?”

  “Sorry I really can’t remember. I didn’t check that often because we were in the process of clearing the pond and it was pretty intense work.”

  Eleanor handed him a photograph. “Could that have been taken here?” she asked as Jacob peered at the partial image.

  “That looks like the old bandstand.” He pointed over to the left of their visual field. It was beyond repair, so we had it removed about eighteen months ago.” He brought the photograph closer to his face. “You’re gonna ask but I don’t know who that is. Maybe if there was a little more of his face…” He handed it back to her.

  “You’ve been very helpful. Thank you.”

  “Glad to help.”

  Laurence and Eleanor studied the street view that lay beyond the railings. The houses were detached two- and three-storey builds. Each was buffered from the traffic with a lawn area and either privet hedging, or a wall. “Didn’t Ruby Delaware say that our killer would live in a big house, probably inherited?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Eleanor lay in bath water that was far too hot and felt the scar tissue on her leg shrink and tighten unpleasantly. Shifting her position she decided to ignore the discomfort and focused her eyes on the two photographs pinned to the mirror at the bottom of the bath. She wasn’t, nor doubted she ever would be, a mother, and to her both photographs – one of Tessa Wadesky and the other, Rosalia Lombardo – looked like sleeping children, though she doubted whether Joe or Sarah Wadesky would agree. Perhaps to The Collector, as she was beginning to refer to him, it was difficult to differentiate between the living and the carefully-preserved dead. Or, maybe because the dead were more pliable and less judgmental than the living, they had greater appeal to a man who didn’t fit into society with any degree of ease? He had inserted a cylinder that enabled him to have sexual intercourse of some flavour with Giselle and, by the look of the body from Mackenzie Webber’s photograph, he had taken considerable effort in the dressing and presentation. Giselle would have to be seated and then manhandled into a more accommodating position, if penetration was to be achieved. She frowned and thought about Lola Andrews’ hand. It had been firm to the touch, cold and irredeemably dead. So, what about that appealed to the Collector? Jeffrey Dahmer had wanted to keep his victims in a state of compliance, so killed them and kept their body parts. He’d kept some pieces in the fridge but his killing spree had all the elements of wanting to preserve the moment, not necessarily to create an aesthetically pleasing and useable sex object. The Collector was eluding her mentally. Killers, particularly those that murdered strategically, could be understood, anticipated and thereby captured but so far she had nothing.

  She glanced at the bowl of uneaten rice she’d meant to consume but had left on the chair next to the bath and then at her shrinking frame. Her legs and arms were losing muscle tone and density and it was only a matter of time, she suspected, before she was deemed unfit for work. Growling, she sat up, ignoring the water that sloshed onto the wooden floor and the sudden tightening of her throat and began to spoon rice in mechanically.

  Toby was frustrated with the pump, rather than concerned. It had been notoriously temperamental during its last usage, and time and storage had not improved its reliability. He wouldn’t need it for another couple of days but anticipating further trouble he’d taken it to pieces, in order to ascertain exactly what the problem was. He suspected that his rather ‘Heath Robinson’ designs were probably the source. The system had been cobbled together using a combination of a vacuum pump, a homemade filtration system and various cooling and condensing sections that would clean and recycle the acetone. He rubbed his tired, sore eyes and treated himself to another glance at the wonderful creature that was metamorphosing in the tank.

  The original ‘tank’ had been an old galvanised container, covered in a heavy perspex sheet. It had proved rather unwieldy, as the hole he’d managed to drill through to insert the tube wasn’t a snug fit and on several occasions the tube had slid down into the liquid and flooded the pump. In order to seal the ‘lid’ he had applied a silicon medium, which had to be sliced away in its entirety for later stages of the procedure. This was time consuming and tended to make further sealing operations less effective. His second attempt had involved a chest freezer, which had seemed perfect, as its ability to lower the temperature of the acetone speeded up the process of saturation. Unfortunately, its size had meant that the body had been squeezed into an unnatural position, which shouldn’t have mattered, but sections of the specimen had not been adequately suffused with either acetone or later the polymer and like Giselle, that body had begun to flatten, discolour and eventually decompose.

  Tara had been suspended in two hundred and fifty litres of seventy-per-cent acetone. All the scientific papers recommended that the acetone be completely replaced at least twice before the polymerisation process began but the tank’s construction and weight made drainage almost impossible, which was why he had designed the filtration and recycling mechanism; the very thing that now wasn’t working. He sighed and put his hand on Monty’s head, casually stroking him. He’d fix it, as he had all of the other problems, including the tricky subject of his future family planning. He’d plucked up the courage to present his thoughts and desires to Olivia and had been rewarded by her complete acquiescence. She loved the idea of having a child and the young lad he’d described to her filled her with maternal longing. He’d been absolutely right in his choice of Olivia as his wife. It was true that she was a little young for him but compared to all the others he’d been wedded to over the years, she’d proved to be the most enduring and desirable. He didn’t want to bore her with all of the complications surrounding the acquisition of a child; that was his task as husband and provider. It was enough that she was willing to accept another’s child as her own.

  Eleanor turned off Dundas and tucked her car into a discrete temporary parking lot, next to a condemned building awaiting demolition. The area was dark and only a couple of hundred meters away from the Good Times. She wore a man’s tailed suit with a white shirt, platinum shoulder-length wig and heavy eyeliner to make her natural features less discernable and her clothing more appropriate to the evening’s theme. The street was alive with glitz, glamour and the falsetto shrieks of the partygoers. Sliding between the smokers, Eleanor made her way to the entrance, which was being patrolled ineffectually by an overweight bouncer dressed
as Spartacus, whose attention was focused less on the crowds and more on easing the chaffing from his leather pant arrangement. A noisy queue had formed on the stairs leading up to the bar and dance floor, the hold-up seeming to be due to excessive red tape at the ticket booth. Eleanor allowed herself to be squeezed between two middle-aged men, dressed convincingly as Bette Davies and Joan Crawford in ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?’ mode. A ripple of movement and momentary increase in the music caused everyone to take another halting step upwards. She relaxed and let her mind drift into neutral, allowing the snatches of conversation around her to swim in and out of her consciousness. Suddenly, “Daaarlinng… I knew you’d come!” and a pair of strong arms thrust through the collective sequins and grabbed her. “Come with me,” whispered Madame Angela, as she was extricated and led through the crowds, past the ticket booth and into the bar.

  It was filled to maximum capacity, if not beyond. The clientele were a mixture of opportunistic middle-aged men, un-costumed apart from shorts and T-shirts, mixed gender prostitutes, transvestites, whose costumes had been scrupulously selected and arranged, and transsexuals, a large proportion of whom seemed to be of Thai origin. Eleanor was ushered towards a table tucked strategically between the exit to the washrooms, the stairwell that led to the ‘meet and make-out’ rooms and which presented a panoramic view of the stage, dance floor and bar. Several chairs were tucked underneath the top, which had a large ‘Reserved’ notice propped against a bottle of chilling ‘Grey Goose’ vodka.

  “I call this The Bridge,” he giggled. “Keep my eye on everything and steer us out of trouble if necessary. How’s the investigation going?” he asked, as he helped her to a seat and poured two glasses of vodka. “I’ve not seen anything about Giselle in the papers yet. However….” He leaned towards her conspiratorially, “…I did see that a young lady named as a Ms Parminder Kaur had been found drowned in TT park. Would that be?” he raised his eyes questioningly.

  “The connection is being investigated,” replied Eleanor conspiratorially.