‘Pastor Elijah Olsen,’ said Margaret, reading from the sheaf of papers Ron had left us. The body bag sat peacefully on the table, still unopened. ‘Deceased six days, give or take. Full autopsy, organs bagged, hands and tongue missing. Bullet wound in the back, exit wound in the chest, stab wounds in the back. Everything else is normal, assuming Ron did his job right.’ She set down the papers with a small, humourless laugh.
Nobody moved.
‘I’m really getting sick of this,’ said Mom, staring at the body bag. ‘Can someone please die of natural causes once in a while?’
‘Think of it this way,’ said Margaret, putting her hands on her hips. ‘The Clayton Killer bought us a new ventilator, and Clark Forman bought us a new computer for the office. If the Handyman hangs around long enough, we can buy a new sound system for the chapel.’
Mom laughed drily and shook her head. ‘Then please let us never afford a new sound system.’
As hesitant as they were to get started, I was even more eager. ‘Let’s get this show rolling.’
‘Let’s hope the fan doesn’t give out on us,’ said Margaret. It was an old saying, from back in the days when our fan was worse and our chemicals more strident, but it had become a tradition. We couldn’t start until she said it. We nodded and got to work.
I opened the bag and peeled it back, exposing the dead man inside. In a normal case we’d get the body about a day after it died, still in its clothes and stiff with rigor mortis, but rigor mortis only lasts a day or two, and post-autopsy murder victims arrived flexible, washed, and in several pieces. This body’s chest was marked with a giant Y where the Coroner had cut it open, taken everything out, and then loosely stitched it back together. The organs that had been removed and examined were sealed in a bag and placed back inside. The body’s arms ended in severed stubs where the killer had removed its hands, and the Coroner had bandaged them lightly to staunch the bleeding. Corpses don’t bleed much, because the heart isn’t putting any pressure on the circulation, but blood can still seep out, and it was cleaner to transport the body this way.
Mom and I lifted the body while Margaret pulled the body bag out from underneath it. We’d done this so many times that we worked without talking, each of us knowing exactly what had to be done and what our part would be: Mom covered his groin with a sterile cloth, Margaret started loosening the stitches in his belly to take out the organ bag, and I pulled away the bandages on his wrists.
The severed wrists were perfect cross-sections of meat and bone and tendon, and I ran my gloved fingertip across one, trying to imagine what could have done it. My first guess was a bite. Mr Crowley had been able to distend his jaw and sprout dozens of long, needle-sharp teeth, and it was entirely possible that our new demon, Nobody, could do the same. But the wrist bore no teethmarks at all – no vertical lines where teeth had scraped down across the flesh, and no horizontal line where two rows of teeth had met in the middle. The stump was simply too clean. But what else could it be?
Mr Crowley had also been able to turn his hands into vicious claws, capable of cutting through almost anything, and I could see how a claw like that could have made this cut. A single slashing motion, severing flesh and bone and tendon in one swipe: it made sense. It was also further proof that the killer was strong, to swing a claw so powerfully and cut so cleanly. I filed it away in my mental folder and began helping Mom wash the corpse.
Margaret carried the bag of organs to a side table, preparing to clean each one individually and fill them with formaldehyde. That job would take her a few hours on her own, while Mom and I got to clean the body, set the features for the viewing, and pump preservatives through the remains of its circulatory system. A body in this condition was usually a huge hassle for a circulatory embalming, because the blood vessels were so perforated in so many places that the pump couldn’t do its job. Instead of flowing through the entire corpse, the embalming fluid would seep into the chest cavity and out through the wounds. Fortunately (or not, if you asked my mom), we’d had so many mutilated corpses over the past year that we’d developed a fairly simply workaround: petroleum jelly. It took a whole jar, but if you slathered it all over wounds and then wrapped them in surgical tape, you could stop up most of the holes. When we finished washing the limbs, head and chest, Mom pulled out a fresh jar of Vaseline and we set to work sealing the wounds.
There were a lot of wounds to seal.
First were the wrists, of course, which got a pretty good layer of the stuff. After that I went to work on the presumed death wound: a large bullet-hole above the heart, presumably matched by a smaller one in the back. I wasn’t stingy with the jelly, and packed it into the front bullet-hole pretty tightly. When I had finished with that, I opened the pastor’s mouth and coated the tongue – or the tiny stub of what used to be a tongue – with another liberal glob. If the cut on the wrists was clean, the cut on the tongue was pristine; it had been severed with astonishing care and attention to detail. By another, smaller claw perhaps? Or a separate tool, like a scalpel? Whatever it was must have been as sharp as a razor, with a long blade and a fine point for precision work.
It was the very preciseness of it that got me thinking. We already knew that the demon was extremely cautious, bringing tarps and ponchos and goodness knows what else to keep herself clean of blood. That suggested a very meticulous killer, and the surgical removal of the tongue backed that up. I could see a bit of my own caution reflected in her, and that would make her very hard to trace. But there was more going on here, I guessed – something that both did and didn’t fit with the rest of the attack. I puzzled over it and continued to work.
While I was covering the exterior wounds, Mom slathered Vaseline all over the inside of the chest cavity, coating it from top to bottom in a thick layer. She had to reach her whole arm inside to make sure she got it everywhere; the Coroner sawed open the breastbone during an autopsy, so he could fold out the ribs and work inside, but Mom hated doing that and thus left them where they were and tried to work around them.
‘That’s it for the inside,’ she said after a moment.
I nodded. ‘I’m done on the front. Let’s roll him over.’
We set down our jar of Vaseline and stood on the body’s left; I grabbed his shoulder while Mom grabbed him under the hips, and we rolled him up and over onto his face. Mom gasped out loud, and we both stared.
‘I think we’re going to need a second jar of Vaseline,’ I said.
The back of the body was full of holes, presumably stab wounds – some long, some jagged, all deep and deadly. Any one of them could have been a killing blow. The two holes where the poles had been inserted were obvious, as they were slightly wider and rounder than the others, but the police had never said anything about any other wounds in the back. I touched one, lightly, trying to guess what had caused it – a single claw, or a whole hand of them? I glanced over the body quickly, looking for a pattern, but there didn’t seem to be one.
The holes were ragged and messy, wet with dark black and purple blood like a liquid bruise. The entire surface had been mutilated and tenderised with almost animalistic ferocity. Nothing about the killer’s clean, meticulous method had hinted that there might be anything like this.
‘What on earth did he do?’ Mom whispered. It was a brutal sight, even six days later in a sterilised room. Margaret stopped her work to come and stare as well. Mom looked up at me, eyebrows raised in a silent question.
‘Holy . . .’ said Margaret, touching the body gingerly. ‘Did they talk about this on the news?’
‘Not a word,’ I said. ‘I don’t remember hearing about it from the other Handyman killings either.’
‘It looks like he stabbed him thirty times,’ said Margaret. ‘Maybe forty.’
‘What does it mean?’ Mom demanded, still looking at me.
‘What does it mean?’ I echoed.
‘You’re the expert, right?’ Her voice was hard to read – angry and curious and desperate all at once. I couldn’t tell who the anger was aimed at. ‘You’re the one who studies this kind of stuff. What does it mean?’
I looked back at the body. ‘The first thing it means is that the police are keeping it quiet – partly to avoid freaking people out, but mostly it’s a marker. It’s like a signature, that nobody knows but the killer, so they can always tell which is a real Handyman killing and which is a copycat. It can also help identify any letters that come in to the police or to the media. If the letter mentions the stuff the police haven’t revealed yet, they know it’s a real letter from the real killer.’
‘Does that happen a lot?’ asked Margaret.
‘More often than you’d think,’ I said. ‘A lot of serial killers like to involve themselves in their own investigations.’
‘But what does it mean about the killer?’ asked Mom. She was still watching me, her eyes sharp and penetrating. ‘What does this say about the person who did this?’
I looked back at her for moment, then down at the body.
Is she asking about the demon?
‘It means that she’s angry about something,’ I said.
‘She?’ asked Margaret.
‘Or he,’ I said quickly. ‘He or she premeditates everything, and she’s very meticulous about everything she does. But then after it’s dead, and after she’s done whatever else she needs to do, she just goes crazy on it.’ I touched the back again. ‘This is pure rage. Whatever else the killer wants, whatever other needs her killing serves, the base of the whole thing is anger.’
‘At what?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said slowly. ‘Pastors? Men? Us?’
‘Us?’ asked Mom.
I looked at her.
Is this what she wanted to know? If the demon is really on a vendetta?
I chose my words carefully.
‘Whoever did this came halfway across the country to do it. He or she is very driven, and very careful, and very angry. Without more evidence, all it really tells us is that we’re going to be getting more evidence soon. Probably very soon.’
We looked back at the body, watching half-congealed blood shine darkly in the harsh light. Now I had more pieces of the puzzle, and a better idea of how this demon was killing, and that was good. It was very good. But even as I learned more about the ‘how’, I was starting to doubt that I knew the real ‘why’.
And that wasn’t good at all.
Chapter 4
It was Sunday, and I was going to church.
I’m not a religious person, in any real sense, though I don’t consider myself an anti-religious person either. The truth is I just don’t really think about it that much; I didn’t go to church because my parents never went to church. When I chose the word ‘demon’ to describe the monsters I’d seen, I honestly didn’t even realise it was religious in origin. I used it because David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, used it in a letter to the cops. Just because ‘demon’ was a cool word, it didn’t mean that the Handyman was a fallen angel or anything goofy like that.
So no, I wasn’t going to church in the sense that I was going to attend a meeting and sing and pray or whatever. I was going to a church building because that is where pastors hang out, and I was doing it on Sunday because that is the best day (I assumed) to find one. Specifically, I was going to St Mary’s Catholic Church to talk to Father Erikson, who all the news programmes claimed was Pastor Olsen’s best friend. St Mary’s Catholic Church and the Throne of God Presbyterian Church were always working together on something or other, like soup kitchens and service projects, so I guess that made sense. A victim’s friend was the best lead I’d had in two months, so I figured it was time to ask the priest some questions.
The parking lot was full, so I parked on the far side of the street and sat in the car until people started to file out: girls in floral dresses and men in white shirts and ties. There were more than I expected, but I sat quietly as they wandered to their cars, watching their faces intently. They talked and laughed. They smiled and scowled. They blinked in the light and stared at the world in sombre reflection. What were they guilty of? How far would they go if you pushed them?
Everyone was a suspect in my eyes, from the oldest man to the youngest child. Any one of them could be the demon.
They got in their cars and drove away. I climbed out of my seat and walked across the street and up into the church, ignoring the smiles of a group of old ladies who passed me in the foyer. Father Erikson was inside the chapel, walking up and down the pews and straightening a bunch of little red songbooks.