The Sleepless (28 page)

‘But somebody purposely stuck needles into their suprarenal glands?’ 

‘That’s correct – right into the middle, where adrenaline is produced. And, of course, under the circumstances, their suprarenal glands would have been producing a great deal of adrenaline.’ 

Thomas said, ‘You’re talking about the fear – the pain – the threat of imminent death?’ 

Victor nodded. ‘This can only be theory, of course. But it does suggest an alternative motive to simple sadism.’ 

Michael said, ‘Alternative motive? What alternative motive? Why the hell would anybody want anybody’s adrenaline?’ 

‘Hard to say,’ Victor replied. ‘Usually, we get all the adrenaline we need from animals, or produce it artificially. We use it in eye and nose operations, and all kinds of medical emergencies, because it raises the blood pressure, and constricts smaller blood vessels, and reduces bleeding. Sometimes we apply it directly onto a serious wound on a piece of gauze or lint, and it helps to stop a haemorrhage. It can be helpful in relieving asthma, too.’ 

Thomas stared down at Sissy O’Brien’s plundered body. He felt baffled, and he felt sickened, but most of all he felt sad. Megan, his wife, had been tragically hurt by fate, but Megan at least was alive. This poor girl’s life had ended for ever, in shock, and agony, and to satisfy some greed that nobody could understand. 

They stood around her in the bright, uncompromising light of the mortuary, and each of them wondered in his own way about pain. Not only that, but about God, and whether there was one. 

After two or three minutes, Thomas suddenly said, ‘The tail.’ 

Michael glanced at him. This was one revelation that he hadn’t been looking forward to. 

Victor raised the surgical sheet that covered the lower half of Sissy’s body. Michael didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t help it, and with a terrible feeling of sickness and prurience he glimpsed the bushy, bedraggled fur between Sissy’s thighs. 

‘I haven’t cut into the lower gut yet,’ Victor explained. 

‘But you do have a pretty good idea of what they’ve done to her?’ 

Victor nodded. ‘Yes.’ 

‘Are you going to do it now? We really need to know.’ 

‘You don’t have to stay here.’ 

Thomas looked at Michael over his handkerchief and thought: my God, this guy’s right on the edge. He knew Michael from way back. He knew that he was good, and that he was special, especially when it came to tangled, deceptive investigations. But Joe Garboden had warned him that he wasn’t quite the same, not since Rocky Woods. And he could see for himself that Michael was collapsing under the weight of his own traumas. His face was grey, his eyes were dilated, and as he stood beside Victor Kurylowicz’s dissecting-table, he was exhibiting all the signs of imminent shock. 

‘Victor ... ‘ said Thomas. ‘Maybe we’ll skip this part. You can send me up the pictures later.’ 

But Michael wanted to see. Michael
needed
to see. He was sure that there was some connection between what had happened to Sissy O’Brien and what had happened at Rocky Woods. He was sure that if he could solve one case, he could exorcize the other. His whole sanity depended on it. His whole soul depended on it. 

‘It’s okay,’ he told Victor. ‘Go ahead.’ 

Victor looked at Thomas, but all Thomas could do was say, ‘Sure ... if that’s what he wants.’ 

Victor beckoned over two young medical examiners and spoke to them quickly under his breath. One of them, a black girl, kept shaking her head, but Victor laid his hand on her shoulder and said, ‘This is as bad as it ever gets. If you can deal with this, you can deal with anything. Think about it.’ 

Michael felt perspiration sliding slowly down his back. He kept sniffing, as if he had a cold coming, but it was nerves. He was overwhelmed with dread. He felt as if the whole building were pressing down on him, while the darkness was rising up to engulf him. He watched Victor bend over Sissy O’Brien’s remains, his scalpel glinting, and he couldn’t turn away. It was too terrible to watch: but it would have been even more terrible not to watch. 

Only Victor spoke as he began to cut open the coiled pink large intestine – lower and lower, fat peeling apart, skin peeling apart. He was tape-recording his impressions so that he could give Thomas an accurate preliminary report. Later, on his own, he would spend hours dissecting and analysing and preparing a complete catalogue of everything that had happened to Sissy O’Brien, and in what sequence, and which particular event or events had finally killed her. 

‘We can see that the rectum and the lower section of the large intestine has been grossly distended by the forcible intrusion of a foreign object – an object approximately two feet in length and four inches in diameter.’ 

Michael knew what it was, and from the bloodied lacerated bulges in Sissy O’Brien’s intestines he could see what it was. But he still prayed that none of this had happened; and that nobody could have perpetrated such an act. He didn’t realize that his face was as bloodless as ivory, like a martyred saint in some medieval chapel. He didn’t realize that tears were streaming down his cheeks. 

This should never have been. This cannot be. Oh God in heaven, please tell me that it never was.
 

‘There are several perforations and intrusive lacerations of the lower bowel any one of which could have caused fatal peritonitis,’ Victor was saying. Michael could hear his voice only from a long way away, as if he were talking through a tin megaphone in another room. He felt cold and distant, and he could feel the blood draining out of his head. He was aware that he was probably going to faint. 

Victor held out his hand and the black girl slapped a scalpel into his palm. He bent over Sissy’s body, and carefully sliced into the dark, bulging section of her rectum. 

The whitish tissue parted, and Michael heard Thomas say, ‘Jesus,’ and that was all. He didn’t faint. He didn’t fall. But he couldn’t move either. All he could do was to stare at the fierce dead eyes of the cat which had appeared between the sliced-open folds of flesh. 

He found himself sitting on a hard chair. He wasn’t sure how he had got there. Somebody was holding his hand, a woman. He was staring down at an empty paper cup. He heard Victor’s voice, Thomas’s voice. He heard the squeaking of wheels. 

He was suddenly aware of the thick, pungent odour of death. 

Victor was saying, ‘ – don’t know what you’re dealing with, lieutenant.’ 

‘Insane,’ Thomas kept repeating. ‘Whoever did this is fucking insane.’ 

‘ – wrapped it up tightly in razor wire – wrapped it up tight like a baby – you know, like a goddamned round of beef – then
forced
it – Jesus – ‘ 

He was still standing by the window in Victor’s office when Victor came back. It was almost nine o’clock. The sky over southern Boston was thick with smoke, turned dramatically purple by the setting sun, and fires burned all along the horizon like the fires of a besieging army of barbarians, the Huns or the Goths or the Visigoths. 

He didn’t turn around when Victor came in, but he heard Victor collapsing into his tilting captain’s chair, and swivelling around, and opening up his desk drawer. He heard the chink of shotglasses and the liquid
galoop
of a whisky bottle. 

‘How about you?’ Victor asked him. ‘You want one?’ 

Michael shook his head. 

‘You want to talk to anybody?’ Victor asked him. 

‘I, er – I’ll be talking to my therapist later tonight.’ 

‘You can phone him from here if you want to.’ 

‘I did. He’s out right now, making a housecall. Hypnotizing some woman in West Yarmouth who wants to get thin.’ 

Victor came across to the window and stood beside him, leaning against the frame, swilling the bourbon in his glass around and around. 

‘Looks like you Bostonians are destroying your own city pretty good, doesn’t it?’ he remarked. 

‘Don’t ask me,’ said Michael. ‘After what I’ve seen today, I think that people are capable of absolutely anything. I mean, how can people – ‘ 

Victor waited for him to finish his sentence, but he didn’t, so Victor finished it for him. 

‘How can people torture an innocent young girl to death, and then kill her in a way that you or me couldn’t even dream up in our sickest nightmares?’ 

Michael looked at him, expressionless. Victor took off his glasses and smiled at him. ‘There’s one thing I learned in Newark,’ said Victor. ‘If somebody doesn’t give a shit for human life, then he doesn’t give a shit for human life. It doesn’t affect him,
how
he kills people. Shoot, stab, strangle, what difference does it make? So long as they end up dead. It’s only people like you and me who care
how
people died. Killers don’t care. They’re taking away somebody’s very existence – what does it matter if they suffer?’ 

Michael said, ‘You don’t think it mattered to the people who killed Sissy O’Brien or Elaine Parker, how much they suffered?’ 

Victor sipped his whisky. ‘I’m beginning to think that it did – but not in the way you mean it.’ 

‘I don’t understand.’ 

‘Okay, then, let me put it this way. I’m beginning to think that these needle marks are critical to the whole case. We don’t have any hard physical evidence that they were inflicted on Elaine Parker in order to penetrate her suprarenal glands. All of her internal organs were too badly decomposed. But Elaine Parker’s external needle marks are identical to Sissy O’Brien’s needle marks. They could even have been inflicted by the same needles. So – for the moment – I think that we can safely speculate that we’ve established some pretty strong connections between Elaine’s death and Sissy’s death. They were both sadistically tortured. Both of them went through hell, believe me – and Elaine went through hell for almost a year before they finally killed her. If you can stomach the post-mortem report, I’ll send you a copy. There’s a lot of razor wire involved, and a lot of lighted cigarettes, and cockroaches, and a live rat, too.’ 

‘Oh God,’ said Michael. He really didn’t want to hear any more. 

But Victor persisted. ‘The question is,
why
were they tortured? They couldn’t have been tortured for money, because nobody demanded a ransom for either of them, did they? They couldn’t have been tortured for information. Neither Elaine nor Sissy could have known any earth-shattering secrets, could they – and Sissy couldn’t have influenced her father’s legal opinions. They weren’t used for any kind of extortion, they weren’t used to twist anybody’s arm to do something they didn’t want to do.’ 

‘So why?’ asked Michael. 

Victor swallowed whisky. ‘I always used to say that there were only three great motivating forces in human life – money, power and sex. But if this isn’t about money, and it isn’t about power, and it isn’t about sex – what
is
it about?’ 

Michael stared at him, too numb to say anything sensible. 

‘It’s about life itself,’ said Victor, slapping his arm. ‘Not
just
the money, not
just
the power, not
just
the sex, but life itself.’ 

‘I don’t get you.’ 

‘I don’t get me, either. I don’t know what the hell’s going down here. But the minute people start tampering with human bodies, you can bet your ass that somebody, somewhere, is looking for
life.
Look at the Third World – India, Africa – people are selling all kinds of body-parts, and people in the West are buying them. There’s a market for kidneys, there’s a market for livers, there’s even a market for testes. Come to Dr Snipgood and have a ball. I mean, for Christ’s sake! And when people in the West can’t buy the organs that they want, they do the next best thing which is arrange for what we morticians call “a forcible donation”. Find a match, kill him, and take what you want.’ 

‘Are you serious?’ asked Michael. 

Victor nodded emphatically. ‘Nobody in their right mind should ever register for organ or bone-marrow transplantation. There’s always the risk that one day, somebody richer than you is going to want your liver, or maybe your lungs, or even your heart – and, man, if you just happen to match ... ‘ 

‘But this is adrenaline we’re talking about,’ said Michael. 

‘That’s right,’ Victor agreed. ‘Human adrenaline. And maybe cortisone, too. I don’t know why anybody should want it so bad ... but I have every intention of finding out.’ 

‘Did you tell Thomas about this?’ Michael asked him. 

Victor nodded. 

‘What did he say?’ asked Michael. 

‘Not much. Thomas is what you might call a pragmatist. Apart from that, Thomas has a sensitive stomach and doesn’t like to talk about physiological realities. Thomas doesn’t mind hearing how bad things are, as long as you don’t tell him that they’re probably a damned sight worse.’ 

Michael couldn’t stop remembering that cat’s horrific eyes, staring at him out of Sissy O’Brien’s remains. It was like something out of Edgar Allan Poe or George Fielding Eliot –
The Black Cat
and
The Copper Bowl.