Skin Deep (4 page)

“Stop throwing that up to my face.”

“And stop telling me you're working on it. It's been twelve goddamn years. Just how much longer do I have to wait?”

“You know the reasons.”

“Yeah, I know the reasons. Your parents had a rotten marriage and divorce was rampant in your family, blah, blah, blah. Well, I can't change that, Stephen, nor the fact that I'm thirty-eight years old and want a family.”

“I'm sorry.” He had wanted to say more. He knew he should say more, but he couldn't. And he heard the protest die in his throat because she was right
—
about all of it.

“I wish she had never told me,” she had said.

Yeah, me, too, he had thought.
As he looked back, he was still amazed that he had the restraint to stop at a slap.

“Christ!” Dana had flared. “She's nearly half your age.”

“Dana, she means nothing to me. She's out of my life and moved to Florida.”

That was their exchange months ago, and since then Sylvia Nevins had taken a job in Pensacola and the last he had heard she was engaged to be married. But that was irrelevant. Dana could not forgive him despite his apologies and the fact that it was the first time in their twelve years of marriage that he had cheated on her.

Over the months he looked back on that night a thousand times and hated what he had done. Because friends and colleagues were at the party, he had been discreet for most of the evening, making beer talk with Sylvia. But when no one was looking, he arranged to meet later at her place, where he spent the night in boozy sex. Deep down he knew that their tryst had not arisen out of a bottle or Sylvia's seductive wiles. Steve had let it happen on his own volition, driven by despair and mortal sadness that his life with Dana was at the edge because he could not bring himself to fulfill her ultimatum. About his love for her he was not uncertain. It was about his capacity to be a father that had created a blockage. She was right: out of desperation, he had acted upon a stupid, spiteful impulse to get back at Dana for his own failings. The old blame-the-victim shtick he heard all the time in interrogations.

Steve moved to the refrigerator and removed his service revolver from the overhead cabinet. He strapped it on as she walked him to the front door, trying to repress the anger. “Sorry about the job.”

“I'll get over it.”

“Something else will come along.”

“Maybe.”

He looked at her across the kitchen. “Can we give this another chance?”

“I think we're out of chances. We are who we are and that's not going to change.”

The tired resignation in her manner caused a blister of petulance to rise. She was closing the door on him the way his parents had when he was a kid—abandoning him physically, mentally, emotionally, and every other goddamn way because they were too caught up in their own tormented egos to be a source of comfort and understanding. Too adamant to care enough.

“I can change,” he said. “So this need not be forever, right?”

“I just want to be on my own for a while.”

He nodded. And his eyes fell to her neck and the fine hairs that made a phosphorescent haze in the light. In a flash his head filled with distended blue-black tendons at the end of the stocking noose.

“Stephen, I want children. I want what my sister has, what our friends have. I want to have a family.” She opened the door.

The black air was thick with humidity.

She looked at him. “You get it, don't you?”

“I do.” He stepped into the night, his wedding vows echoing through the fog in his head.

DERRY, NEW HAMPSHIRE
SUMMER
1970

It started the morning his mother nearly killed him.

He was nine years old at the time—an age when young boys are beginning to realize that they are autonomous, self-contained creatures capable of independence but who still take refuge in the bosom of those who love them.

Lila was driving the new, big, gold 1970 Chrysler Newport convertible that looked like a small aircraft carrier on wheels. It was brand-new, a gift from his father Kirk on the fourth anniversary of their marriage. The top was down and the radio was blaring Creedence Clearwater Revival. Lila always drove with the top down and rock music blaring, unless it was pouring rain or below forty degrees. She wanted people to see her. She wanted them to take in the young sultry beauty in the big fancy convertible with the wind flowing through her fiery mane. She wanted people to envy her, to wish they were she.

And sitting in the passenger seat, he could feel the pleasure she radiated, tapping the steering wheel to the music, singing along with him, chewing gum, checking herself in the mirror, with her new red-frame Ray-Ban sunglasses and the black chiffon scarf trailing from her long swan neck. At stoplights she always posed so that other drivers could take her in. She was happiest at moments like this because her life looked like one of her commercials. A red-hot model on her way to becoming a Hollywood star.

And he was proud to be seen with her because she was so cool. They went everywhere together—to beaches, amusement parks, movies, Red Sox games. She even took him once to a street in Manchester where they were shooting a scene from a movie in which she had a part. He waited behind the cameras with the production people while she did her lines. It was a small walk-on, but it was fun. And when it was over, she introduced him to the stars and the director. All the cool things he did with her, never his dad.

Even though she was his stepmother and he called her Mom, Lila was more like his big sister—thirty-six years old and still young at heart, she would say. She dressed in tight hip-hugger jeans and miniskirts, funky stockings and tops, hair scarves, funny hats. Or she wore cutoffs, T-shirts, and sandals. Almost every week they went to a movie. She once said her favorite of all time was a French film called
Jules et Jim,
which was about two guys in love with the same woman. Nothing he'd be interested in at his age.

Lila had been in his life since she began dating his father, Kirk, five years ago. His own mother had died of cancer when he was four. Because Kirk was an airline pilot and away from home more days than he wasn't, he was sent to live with his aunt and uncle in Fremont, New Hampshire, about fifteen miles away. It was only when Kirk married Lila that he moved back home to Derry. He had taken to Lila immediately. She was the mother he had never really known. And for a while his best friend.

It was a beautiful late summer morning, and the air was warm and clear, the sky a radiant blue with scrappy clouds scudding toward the horizon. It was a little before eight o'clock, and they were on U.S. Route 1 where Lila was taking him to day camp on the New Hampshire shore just north of Hampton Beach. Then she would drive to Portsmouth to do a photo shoot.

“Hey, do I look okay?” she asked, glancing at him full face. She made an exaggerated smile to show all her even white teeth.

“Yeah. You look fine.”

“Well, you're my best critic, so you can tell me the truth.” She fluffed up her hair.

“So, what'll you be doing at the shoot?” He liked using such language.

She turned the radio down in the middle of “Bad Moon Rising.” “Would you believe, they're going to have me polishing a car.”

“Polishing a car?”

“It's for a car wax, Simoniz. Nothing too fancy, but it should be fun.”

“But you'll get all dirty.”

She laughed. “No, I'm going to change. And I won't really be polishing the car, just posing with a rag.”

“What'll you wear?”

“I think they're planning on having me in a bathing suit. Probably a bikini.”

“What's that?”

“A two-piece bathing suit. Kind of silly, if you ask me, but I guess it sells car wax.”

At home they had several photo albums full of magazine ads she had done for clothing and laundry detergent. Several were in bathing suits. She also had secret albums she once showed him of artists' sketches in charcoal and pen when she used to pose in the nude. Another of photographs in black-and-white. He once overheard his father claim in a heated moment that Lila would “lift her skirt for every Tom, Dick, or Harry.”

“Your father thinks I'm crazy, but it pays well. Besides, maybe somebody in the movies will see it and like what they see.”

He had also overheard Kirk say that she should stick to local plays and summer stock, that chasing after every little ad was crazy. He had used that word several times.
Crazy
. Sometimes
psycho.
Once he said that she “wasn't dealing with a full deck.”

“When you going to be in a movie again?” he asked.

“I don't know. Soon I hope.”

It was a subject that always made her a little anxious. More than anything else she wanted “the big break” as she called it. She even had a New York talent agent named Harry Dobbs she talked to a lot on the phone.

“Can I be in movies someday?”

“Maybe,” she said, and glanced at him. “You're sure pretty enough, Beauty Boy.”

She then turned her face back to the rearview mirror to fix her eye shadow with her finger. At the same time the truck in the right lane cut in front of her to avoid something in the road.

The next moment passed in a long loud blur. The truck screeched as it braked hard and his vision filled with red taillights as their car rushed full speed into its rear. Lila screamed before the horrible impact and his body lurched forward, sending his head into the windshield.

Three days later he woke up in a hospital bed.

As he emerged from unconsciousness, he noticed three things: the whiteness of the hospital room, Lila's crying, and the horrible pain that throbbed at the front of his head.

“Oh, thank you, sweet Jesus!” Lila said, and kissed the large gold crucifix that she wore, then leaned over and smothered his chest and neck with kisses, saying, “I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.”

His face was bruised and his eyes were puffy. A dressing covered his forehead where he had smashed into the windshield. His hands were also bandaged from glass cuts. Lila had had her seat belt on and had sustained only minor injuries. Tormented with guilt, she sobbed with apologies that she had nearly killed him. But when the nurses left to call Kirk with the good news that his son had woken up, she asked him, “Wasn't it scary how that big truck pulled in front of us like that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“We were just driving along minding our own business, both hands on the wheel, all eyes on the road, and suddenly he's right there in front of us and no signal light on. Remember? What an idiot!”

He nodded.

And she hugged him and gave him a big kiss. “My poor Beauty Boy. I'll take care of you.”

When Kirk showed up, the nurses and doctors came in to witness the reunion. Kirk was all smiles and gave his son a hug and laid a package on his belly. “So, how you feeling, big guy?”

“Pretty good, but my head hurts.”

“We can live with that.”

He looked over to Lila, and instantly he could see how anxious she was about Kirk's presence, fearing he'd know it was her fault. She took the package and helped him unwrap it because his hands were bandaged.

“Oh, neat,” he said. It was a model airplane kit.

“What is it?” one of the nurses asked.

“Boeing 747,” Kirk said. The plane he piloted.

Standing there at the side of the bed, he went on to explain how it was a new generation of jumbo jets, the fastest commercial airliner in the sky, traveling at 575 miles per hour, and how it had a wingspan of 210 feet and was 230 feet long and 63 feet high and could carry upwards of four hundred passengers.

While Kirk held forth, he could see Lila getting fidgety, casting nervous glances at him in bed. When Kirk finished, he turned to his son again. “So, you remember how it happened?” And he sat at the edge of the bed and looked down at him for a response.

“A little.”

Kirk nodded and waited.

“Well, we were just driving along minding our own business and the stupid truck turned right in front of us and slammed on his brakes and we couldn't help it, and we crashed right into it. The idiot.”

Lila looked at him and he felt her approval. It was their first secret. And Kirk bought it.

“Well, we're just glad you're alive.” As an afterthought, he looked at Lila and said, “Both of you.”

When he looked the other way, Lila gave her stepson a secret wink.

Over the next few days the doctors had done a lot of tests and decided that his memory was intact, as were his reasoning powers. For his cuts and bruises, they gave Lila some ointments and pills. For the swelling, she said she had her own Georgia home remedy—a bag of frozen peas to use as a cold compress. Because Kirk was flying that week, Lila brought him home on the morning of the third day following his emergence from the coma.

That's when the headaches began. That's also when Lila said he should sleep with her.

“Let's talk strangulation.”

Dr. Paul Ottoman, chief medical examiner assistant, was a thickset man in his fifties with an exuberant rubber face, thick graying hair, and the demeanor of a professor addressing students in a medical lecture rather than standing with Steve and Neil in the autopsy room, the woeful cadaver of Terry Farina laid out before them.

It was a little before nine the next morning, an hour after Steve received the call from the D.A.'s office that the M.E. had confirmed Steve's suspicions that Terry Farina did not die by accident. The autopsy room was a clean well-lighted place in white porcelain and stainless steel. A butcher's scale hung above the cadaver table.

Out of respect, a drape had been folded across Terry Farina's waist. Her skin looked like gray Naugahyde and her face was still swollen and blue, her mouth opened as if in mid-sentence, her neck ringed with purple from the ligature. The large
Y
incision from the shoulders down across the sternum to the pubis had been roughly sewn up. It was not cosmetic surgery, merely stitching to hold in her organs. An incision transecting her throat had been made and stitched closed. She looked less like a human being than something assembled from a Halloween kit.

Steve had to look away. That sensation was back—like a half-glimpsed memory or afterimage of an old TV set that's been turned off. But it eluded him again.

From their few interludes during coffee breaks, he had found Terry pleasant, bright, and attractive. Because he had begun to think of himself as a man at the end of his marriage, the thought had flitted across his mind that she was the kind of woman he could be interested in if he and Dana did not make it—more of a survival impulse than a plan. So maybe it was something she had said or a mannerism of hers or some vague association. Whatever, some memory would flutter like a night bird out of the shadows, then at the last moment it would flick back before he could clap his eyes on it.

“Strangulation occurs with the compression of the jugular veins and/ or the carotid arteries, which leads to a reduction of oxygen to the brain, the loss of consciousness, and, if sustained longer than three minutes, death.”

Neil flashed Steve a look. “I think we know that.” He was holding a Styrofoam magnum of coffee, the stirrer clenched in his molars. The sight of Terry's body had affected him also. Like combat soldiers, homicide cops were exposed to some of the worst images in life. Images that they'd rather not have in their heads—bodies in various stages of decomposition, the reduction of someone's face to raw meat and bone, teenagers lying dead in the street in a pool of blood. Autopsies. Images like mental land mines you were required to negotiate and still remain sane. You did your best to be detached and stoical, throwing yourself into cool dry stuff like reports, paper chases, and lab analyses to help distance yourself from both victim and victimizer. But this was different. They knew Terry Farina.

“I'm sure, but you may not know that the time interval from compression to loss of consciousness is about ten seconds if both carotid arteries are compressed. And that's what I believe we have here, which leaves us with three possibilities, at the top of which is suicide.”

Ottoman did not speak like a man jaded by what he saw on a daily basis. On the contrary, he held forth with the eerie enthusiasm of someone intellectually titillated by his work, like a math teacher explaining the Pythagorean theorem. But he had a disconcerting habit of flashing grins at dramatic moments as if repressing ghoulish delight.

“Most tourniquet suicides are by hanging with a slipknot noose fastened directly above the head so that full gravity quickens the loss of consciousness. Even when the body isn't completely pendant—that is, the victim is partially resting on feet or knees—there's enough pressure on the neck to cause unconsciousness in seconds. That's not the case here. The stocking was at a thirty-degree angle with the horizontal.”

“So what are you saying?” Neil asked.

“I'm saying that someone intent on suicide would wrap the stocking around her neck and tie a full knot in front. Otherwise, she'd fall unconscious, the muscles in her neck would relax, the ligature would loosen, and she'd start breathing again. But that's not the case here.” He flash-grinned again.

“What about accidental asphyxia?”

“Much more common with males, although the number of female victims has grown. So has the number of deaths—over a thousand each year—and the addiction rate of people unable to achieve sexual climax unless they're strangled.”

“Remember the time when people just got laid?” Steve slipped in.

Another flash-grin. “The pathological term is
asphyxiophilia,
” Ottoman continued. “Because of diminished blood oxygen to the brain, sexual pleasure is apparently heightened. But what's critical is pressure and timing. The orgasm must happen just before the person passes out or the ligature will continue to tighten.”

“Maybe she just miscalculated,” Neil suggested.

“That was my first guess since vaginal fluids suggest that she'd been sexually aroused. Also her nakedness, body position, and the intimate apparel. The headboard is high enough to provide the necessary pressure. She manually stimulates herself to achieve a climax before the pass-out point, but passes out instead. And she dies.” He grinned again.

Neil nodded. “That's what I'm saying.”

“But I have problems with that. First, we found no trace of vaginal fluid on her fingers. Second, the ligature pressure is inconsistent with gravity. If she had passed out against the stocking, the pressure against her throat would be about thirty pounds per square inch, and less along the sides and back of her neck. We took cell samples of the bruised tissue around the full circumference and could not find any variation in damage. Pressure was consistent all around—showing contusions from a force two to three times that. Plus her windpipe was crushed.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning she died of a sudden and powerful strangulating force applied evenly around her neck and great enough to have knocked her out in seconds.”

Silence filled the room.

Then Neil said, “Maybe she pulled it too tight and passed out.”

Ottoman made another out-of-the-blue grin. “No, because the force that produced this trauma would have embedded the stocking into her neck evenly all around. You can see in the photo there's a gap between her neck and the knot big enough to put two fingers into—just as the lieutenant reported.” He glanced at Steve. “Gravity could not account for that.”

“What about when the neck muscles relax?” Neil asked.

Ottoman removed two photographs from the pile and laid them out on the table. “Look at the knot—a standard double overhand knot, correct? Correct. But look at the short end of the stocking—about two inches, the other end stretched out to nearly four feet and tied to the bed. Unless she had an exceptionally strong grasp, I don't believe she could have pulled the short end against the other to have created the killing force.”

“You mean it was tied then retied,” Steve said.

“Yes, and by a righty. And according to the report, the victim was left-handed.”

Then Steve said, “You're saying the autoerotica was staged.”

“Yes, Lieutenant. I think she was murdered and set up to look like accidental asphyxiophilia.” He made a happy-face grin.

“But there were no signs of struggle,” Neil protested. “No forced entry. And nobody heard any cries or disturbances. No reports of visitors entering her apartment.”

“Yes, and no signs she was raped,” Ottoman added. “No semen, no vaginal bruises. No sign of condom lubricants. And no unattached foreign hairs on her body. And no sign of vaginal, anal, or oral sex. And, as you can see, no ligature marks on her wrists or ankles. No fingernail marks and scratches of the assailant on the neck. No defensive wounds anywhere.”

“So she knew her assailant but didn't have sex with him,” Steve said.

“That would be my guess.”

“What does that tell us about him?” Steve asked, wishing Ottoman would cover Terry's face with a cloth. The grotesque disfigurement was making his brain feel soupy.

“Or her,” Neil said. “It could have been a woman.”

“If so, a very strong woman.”

The thick purple ring of broken blood vessels looked like a tattooed necklace. “Let's assume she was strangled with two hands on the stocking,” Steve said. “After she died, one end was tied to the bed to look like an accident. Given the force and speed it took to knock her out, she had no time to resist.”

“Correct. And that's why her hands aren't bruised and her fingernails aren't broken even though we've taken scrapings for DNA.”

“So, she knew the attacker and let him in,” Steve said, as the image came together. And Ottoman nodded him on. “With her consent they go into the bedroom and engaged in some kind of sexual activity that did not involve intercourse. And during that the assailant suddenly strangles her and sets an accidental autoerotica scenario, then covers his tracks and leaves.”

“That would be my guess,” Ottoman said.

If he was correct, Farina's murder was premeditated, organized, and compulsive—not impulsive. In his mind he saw a faceless killer going through the place, wiping clean surfaces he might have touched, maybe even returning his own champagne glass to the cabinet, and pressing Terry's dead fingers on the bottle to make it look as if she drank alone.

Except nobody drinks champagne alone,
Steve thought. The killer had screwed up.

While Ottoman continued, Steve looked down at Terry's face. Slitted open, her eyes, once bright blue, were now dead gray globes of jelly. If Ottoman was correct, the last thing those sad smoky eyes had taken in was the face of the person who did this to her–who came into her bedroom, took pleasure in her nakedness, then wrapped that stocking around her neck and pulled until she passed out of this life. If only those dead jellies could project their last light.

The thought quickened his pulse. And out of the black, that sensation winged its way in and nearly came to roost but turned and sliced back into the gloom.

“What would you estimate for the time of death?” Neil asked.

“Between three
P.M.
and three
A.M.
”

“Twelve hours. Is that the best you can do?”

“I'm afraid so. The AC was turned to sixty degrees, which slows down the pooling of the blood, and, thus, postmortem lividity and decomposition. The temperature of her skin when she was found was room temperature, but her liver was sixty-four degrees. It takes about eight to twelve hours for the skin to reach ambient temp, but three times longer at the center of the body, which is why we measure the liver. That means her body temp dropped a little over thirty-four degrees. The rate of algor mortis is a decrease of one point five degrees per hour…”

Steve felt as if he were being lectured by the caterpillar in
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
“My head's spinning. What are you saying?”

“I'm saying she was dead for at least twelve hours, although it would help to know if the bed was turned on massage mode, but I doubt there's any memory in the electronics.”

“Livor mortis begins within half an hour after death.”

“Yes. And that's the point. If she were strangled in one position—say on her back or front—then moved to where she was found, it must have happened pretty fast since the discoloration is consistent with her position. The other unknown is why the low AC temp.”

“The temperature on Saturday was in the sixties,” Steve said.

“That's right,” said Ottoman. “There was no reason to turn the AC all the way down.”

“So, what are you saying?”

Ottoman grinned full teeth. “I'm saying that the killer was creating an alibi.”