Tom Harper and Eddie Kasper felt the icy breeze coming through the open sash window at the end of the hall. Someone had already been feeling queasy. The smell of a corpse could choke you, but the sight was worse. They looked down at the body.
The stark glare of a naked 100-watt bulb illuminated the grainy early-morning darkness of the room. Below it, the bloody remains of a sweet college kid, her future now brutally crossed out with yellow police tape: college, life, marriage, career, kids, grandkids - nada. No entrance.
Both men felt their nerves jangle. The girl’s body was directly in the doorway, her legs close together, a white cloth covering just her groin as if hiding her modesty. She was cut to pieces.
Eddie grimaced and popped a strong mint into his mouth. He offered one to Harper, who declined and pressed his palm to the door frame. ‘This bastard wanted that to be the first thing anyone saw.’
They had to step over the body to get into the apartment. The floor was red and slimy throughout with large bloody footprints all over the carpet and linoleum. This killer didn’t care enough to cover his traces.
The victim’s body was lying cruciform and naked, posed like a dead Christ. Harper looked down across the body. Small cuts all over the arms, down the thighs and calves, and even in the feet. The Medical Examiner called them torture cuts. Too shallow to kill, deep enough to really hurt and always on the veins so there was enough blood to cause fear.
‘He’s taken another trophy,’ said Harper. ‘See?’
Kasper was looking round at the room. ‘I ain’t sure I could say what organs you’re supposed to have.’
‘He’s cut off her breasts,’ said Harper.
It was their man again. It had all the savagery of the three earlier kills and the body was again strangely posed. She was a young blond-haired student who had started the day with her whole life ahead of her and ended it cut to ribbons. Tom saw the two highball glasses on the small side table and leaned in. He smelt the vodka and cranberry. ‘Seems like the kid here had a guest.’
‘A date?’
‘Yeah, maybe. They had a drink and then he put enough holes in her to make a sieve. Some date. He likes to cause pain, doesn’t he? And he likes to shock. You see any flowers anywhere?’
Eddie shook his head and then pointed at the white loincloth and screwed up his face.
‘Maybe. You want to take a look?’ said Harper.
‘No. You?’
Harper pulled on a latex glove and reached across. The white gauze lifted easily from the corpse. ‘What you see?’ said Eddie.
Tom replaced the gauze, shook his head and looked closely at the victim’s hands and arms. ‘So many cuts. Jesus.’
‘It’s the American Devil again,’ said Kasper. He clicked on the CD player. ‘Hound Dog’ by Elvis erupted into the room. The two men looked at each other. ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ said Eddie.
‘Music you can torture by - loud enough to hide the screams.’ Tom kept looking at the corpse, counting the small black knife slits. ‘There’s a lot of work gone on here. Upward of fifty individual wounds.’
‘What are you thinking?’
‘She’s got a similar look to the others. He likes them fair-haired, wide-eyed and pretty. And if she’s a student, then she’s got a helluva place. Wealthy parents, no doubt.’
‘I got something else, Tom.’
Harper looked up. ‘What?’
Eddie Kasper was standing further into the room. From behind, Tom could see the tension in his shoulders as he kept himself from throwing up. ‘He’s left a picture.’
Harper rose slowly and moved to the window. He felt the horrible anticipation from the slight quiver in Kasper’s usually deep and robust voice.
On the window was a photograph printed out on a sheet of plain white paper. It was a picture of the victim before she was dead. She was sitting on the floor in an old dress, staring up. Both her feet and her hands had already been cut but she was smiling a horrible forced smile and staring up at the camera.
Below the photograph, there was a quotation.
Subtle he needs must be, who could seduce Angels.
The two men remained speechless. They found somewhere inside themselves to hide as they stared at the photograph. Her eyes were so full of pain and fear, yet she thought she was going to live if she behaved. This killer was enjoying the feeling of absolute control.
‘What’s your reading?’ said Kasper. ‘He’s some kind of religious nut? Maybe it’s some kind of revenge attack.’
‘No damage - look at the place. Nothing turned over. No struggle.’
Harper had a strong sense of pitiless evil. He looked at Kasper. ‘This is going to get worse before it gets better. He’s a well organized killer with a plan and he has all the features of your all-American psychopath - sex, religion and violence.’
The two cops walked out of the room to wait for Crime Scene to arrive. They both headed straight for the open window in the corridor and gulped the cold air.
Chapter Twenty-Two
OCME
November 19, 2.02 p.m.
O
ut in East Manhattan later that day, at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Tom Harper and Eddie Kasper were led into the blue-tiled morgue for Jessica Pascal’s autopsy. It was windowless and claustrophobic, with great banks of white and steel drawers.
Closets of the dead.
Robert Toumi, the diener, had worked for the OCME for twelve years. He pointed across to the autopsy room. ‘We’ve not even got her on the slab, gentlemen. Laura’s scrubbing up. You’re welcome to watch me work, but it ain’t pretty.’ He went across to a body bag on a gurney. ‘I’ve weighed her and she’s had an X-ray. Pretty busted up by the look of it. Gangbangers, was it?’
Kasper shook his head as Toumi wheeled the gurney through to the autopsy room. The two detectives followed silently. It was never nice being inside the morgue. Dead or alive.
In the centre of the room, the stainless steel autopsy table shone clean and bright. Kasper took a sideways glance at the instrument table and began to feel less than comfortable. Bone saws, hammers, scalpel. Kasper suddenly jumped.
‘Jesus, man, that’s a fucking pair of garden secateurs!’
Toumi laughed. ‘Gardening equipment is cheaper than surgical stuff, often better too. The ribs can be a little tough.’
‘That’s not right,’ Kasper said and took out his shades. He put them on. He would be able to close his eyes if it got too much.
Toumi rolled the gurney beside the autopsy table and unzipped the body bag. ‘Seeing as you’re so quick on the case, I’m figuring this ain’t your average murder. What’s the situation? She been cut down by the new psychopath in town?’
‘That’s what we want you guys to tell us,’ said Kasper, watching intently as Toumi lifted and dropped the corpse’s feet on to the steel and then humped the upper body half on to the slab.
‘You got to roughhouse these babies,’ the diener said, yanking the torso across and letting it drop unceremoniously. ‘This one’s only a hundred twenty-two pounds. You should see how I get the obese ones on the slab. I played football in my younger days - you ever watched a linebacker sack a corpse?’
‘I imagine it ain’t like watching the salsa,’ said Harper.
The floor, like the dissection table, was sloped slightly towards a drain. A hose in the corner indicated how they did their cleaning. The whole room smelled of disinfectant. On the gurney, Jessica’s naked pale blue corpse glowed under the strong lamps.
Harper hadn’t seen a corpse on the slab for a while. He felt a stab of anger and breathed deeply. There was nothing more liable to make you question your belief in the soul than a lifeless, mutilated corpse.
Dr Laura Pense entered dressed like someone about to do a spot of riot control. She was wearing a plastic face shield, surgical scrubs and gloves. She’d worked with Manhattan North for five years, and knew the team well.
‘How you doing, guys? You want to watch some theatre? I understand this is an important one for you.’ She looked at the corpse. ‘Is this our American Devil? I’ve had three of his girls through here already. You get to know the work. You in a hurry?’
Harper nodded. ‘We’re pushed, yeah. I was just about to go see if there’s anything like this on ViCAP. I don’t know what to input: I’ve no idea how they died. Just wondered if you could give me a sense of what happened.’
‘I will in about four hours, Detective.’
‘We’ll be back in four, Laura, but if there’s anything you can tell us now, we’d appreciate it.’
Laura Pense turned and winked at them. ‘Let’s see what I can do.’ She looked at the corpse. ‘This is quite some overkill, I can tell you that.’ Toumi handed her the X-rays in an envelope. She opened them and flicked through them quickly. ‘Someone’s been tossing this body around like a rag doll. Jesus, that would take some strength.’
Harper looked down at the red-stained corpse of Jessica Pascal. Kasper was looking at the floor, his eyes concealed by his shades.
‘What happened?’ asked Laura.
‘A nice apartment in Yorkville out near the East River. The victim was left at the door, just like a cat leaves a dead bird. You can see what the killer did to her.’ Harper looked down at the woman again. Her face was blood-splattered, her body a strange livid purple with slits the colour of eggplant. What kind of monster could do this?
‘You think it was just one killer?’ asked Laura.
‘We aren’t making any assumptions.’
Deputy CME Laura Pense was sharp and to the point. She was a first-rate forensic pathologist and destined for any job she wanted in the city.
‘Right, ready for your four-minute autopsy?’
Laura turned on her Dictaphone, checked the microphone at her lapel, then read the tag on the corpse’s toe.
‘Dr Laura Pense, November 19, OCME, New York City. Body number CNZ14135. In attendance, Robert Toumi and Detectives Harper and Kasper from the NYPD Homicide. Initial inspection of the body.’
Laura did a quick once-over, took the plastic bags off the corpse’s hands and looked closely under the fingernails. She examined the scratches, and started to mark wounds.
‘This is going to take some unravelling, gentlemen. But she’s got upward of sixty stab wounds. Deep wounds on the right side of her neck. Breasts sliced upward through the pectoral muscle and removed. He must’ve used a variety of knives. Finger-shaped bruising on the cheek. Several lacerations to the heart area with shallow striations - slash marks. Several deep wounds to the abdomen. But the majority of the wounds are shallow. Teaser wounds. And a number of torture wounds crossing the veins. He was probably cutting her for a good while. She probably died from the neck wound, but he continued. He’s getting to enjoy time with these bodies.’
She leaned in and looked closely at the corpse’s arm, then looked up at both men. ‘There’s a print of his lips here and here. Looks like he was sipping at the wounds - or kissing them. We need to get Latent Prints down here.’ She examined the woman’s lower abdomen. ‘Open her legs for me, Robert. Foreign object inserted into the vagina. He’s been working down here too. Robert, get me the forceps. Okay. Okay. Yes, I think I know what this is.’
Laura attached the forceps to the end of the object and slowly pulled it out. Harper watched closely, his face impassive. Kasper’s eyes were shut tight.
‘Petals. It’s a flower of some kind,’ said the doctor and pulled the forceps out. She placed the bloody cherry blossom on the autopsy table.
‘That’s not nice,’ she said. ‘That’s no way to give a girl flowers.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
East Harlem
November 19, 2.13 p.m.
T
he killer was disguised as a doctor and had assumed the name Dr Mark Keys. He was feeling good about life and was smiling as he parked up and got out of his car. He looked at the worn-out building ahead. It was a flat-roofed, unimpressive two-storey building that must’ve housed between twenty and thirty rehabilitating inmates. A halfway house for the half insane.
The killer looked at his hands and noticed a line of blood under his fingernails. He suddenly felt his stomach tingle with excitement again. He’d spent the morning with his girls. He’d been working on
The Progression of Love
. He’d be a world-famous artist one day. His works would last for centuries.
Four clear glass vitrines were already complete, the first containing the eyes of girl number one, the second with the hair of girl number two, the third containing the heart of girl number three, the fourth the breasts of girl number four, which the police had just discovered were missing.
His photographs and news stories were pasted up behind the vitrines. The latest was a large photograph of Jessica Pascal, smiling, staring right at him. She was wearing an old dress he had taken to the scene and looked just like a girl he once knew. The killer felt he had perfected his art. It was just as he dreamed. He could bring her back to life, love her again and, more important, kill her all over again.
The man disguised as Dr Keys shuffled his shiny black shoes in the dirt and walked across to the green front door. It had metal bars across it, but it was wedged open. Dr Keys walked right in and up to the small reception desk.
A black lady at the counter didn’t look up. Not nice, thought Keys - doesn’t matter who you are, you ought to be polite. He slapped his ID down in front of her. He hadn’t intended to, but her arrogance annoyed him.
‘Dr Mark Keys, senior investigator for the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations. Do you always ignore your guests, miss?’
Her eyes rose to meet his. ‘We ain’t under your jurisdiction, Doctor, and the name is Felicity Adams.’
‘No, but your patients are. You recently admitted a psychiatric patient released from Manhattan State.’ He looked at her. ‘Yes or no, Miss Adams?’
‘Yes. I’m sure we have.’