August 2006
H
ER BODY WAS FOUND
on a Sunday evening. It might have been discovered earlier, but floating in Boston Harbor it blended in with the logs and tires and trash that spilled over from the city.
She was the seventh, or so they thought at the time. Two weeks had passed since the sixth, and people were holding their breath, greedy in their anticipation. Not since the days when the Boston Strangler prowled his way across Beacon Hill had a singular fear so titillated New Englanders.
She was found by a police officer—Officer Paul Stone—who stumbled on her, almost literally. Twenty-two years old and fresh from the police academy, he spent his afternoons on foot patrol along the piers at the edge of South Boston—“Southie,” as it was known to the locals. It was a lousy assignment. Directly across Fort Point Channel from downtown Boston, the edge of Southie was lifeless on the weekends, particularly in the heat of late August. The Boston World Trade Center was deserted, as were the new Convention Center and the Federal Courthouse. Other than those outcast buildings, the area was dominated by warehouses, parking lots, and storage facilities, the majority of which were shut down on Sundays. Stone felt as if he were in some postapocalyptic version of his hometown as he patrolled up and down the center of empty streets.
He walked halfway across the abandoned Northern Avenue Bridge at around seven o’clock. It was nearing dusk and most of the lights were on in the skyscrapers in front of him. Many were of the fluorescent variety, beaming out unfriendly from office towers where the lights seemed to burn around the clock, but others glowed from apartment buildings, shimmering along the city’s edge and easing the evening’s transition. At the bridge’s center, he took one last look at the financial district, then turned and followed his patrol route back toward Southie.
The top of his shirt was open to the summer heat as he walked back along the bridge, but there was very little wind. A nice sea breeze might have made the beat more bearable, but the water was still and silent, and he cursed the heat as his collar rode up on his neck, soaked through with sweat.
It was high tide, and the piers seemed peaceful. The sunset over his shoulder cast a flat, pre-dusk light on the shoreline, highlighting the pockets of garbage floating by the shore along the harbor’s embankments.
One particular clump caught Stone’s eye; a dark mass stuck on a piling twenty yards or so east of the bridge. A metal object in the center of the lump was clinging unnaturally high on the piling. It had found the last rays of sunlight and was reflecting them right into Stone’s eyes. He followed the glimmer out of boredom and curiosity, leaving the bridge, turning left, and walking along the shoreline.
When he came to the piling, he leaned over the embankment to take a look.
He could see the object now. It was a watch—a nice one, too. A Movado. The crisp silver casing that formed the simple, understated watch face still held the sunlight from the west. Stone was no longer focused on the watch itself, though; his attention was riveted on the wrist to which it was attached. It was delicate yet firm, and extended up from the water, supporting a slim hand that seemed to be reaching for help. It was so desperate in its pose that Stone’s heart skipped a beat, and he reached over the harbor wall to grab hold. It was foolish, he realized, but he did it out of reflex and instinct. The cold, dead feel of the skin returned him to reality and he jerked himself back.
As he let go of the hand, the wrist slipped off its catch on the piling and the entire dark mass rolled over in the water. Stone found himself staring straight down into the face of a woman submerged just inches below the water’s surface. Her eyes were open, as if to take one final look at the late summer sky. She was dressed in what looked like a tight-fitting black outfit, and around her neck was a bright red ribbon holding a gold crucifix in place at the top of her chest. Stone had the feeling that she was staring at him, and his heart skipped again when he looked into her eyes. They were clear blue, and they were mesmerizing. Later that night, in trying to recall the entirety of the incident, his only specific recollection would be of those eyes.
He stumbled back from the edge of the embankment and reached for his radio. He was about to call the precinct when a wave of nausea overtook him and he lunged toward the nearest bushes.
After he’d taken a moment to compose himself, he picked up his radio again. “Dispatch, this is Patrol Twelve. I’ve got a DB Code Thirty in the harbor. Right by the Northern Avenue Bridge, south side. Over.”
It seemed like hours before the call was answered. “Patrol Twelve, this is dispatch, could you repeat that?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a body floating in the goddamned harbor! Caucasian female. Looks like she’s in her twenties or thirties. Is that you, Kate?” Stone was friendly with the dispatcher. They’d both grown up in Southie, as had many of the cops in the precinct, and she’d gone to school with his older brother.
“Yeah, it’s me, Paul. Don’t touch anything. I’m gonna get a team down there to take over on crime scene. Just make damn sure no one goes near the area.”
“That shouldn’t be too much of a problem. It’s just me and the seagulls down here, and I’m sure as hell not going swimming with a stiff.”
There was silence on the other end of the radio for a few moments, and after a while Stone started to get nervous. The humidity was oppressive, and he could feel his uniform sticking to his body, bunching uncomfortably in the crevices where his limbs met his torso. It was as if the air was pushing in on him; a stress test draining his arms and legs of their strength as the sweat ran in streams down his back and chest. He began to have the feeling that someone was watching him from a distance, but there was no movement along the waterfront, and he assumed it was just his imagination.
“Kate?” he said into his handset. There was no answer. He walked to the edge of the harbor and looked over the embankment again. The harbor-lady was still there, looking up at him in apparent indifference.
“Kate, you there?” he repeated. He could hear the edge in his voice and he hoped that it wouldn’t be obvious back at the station house. He didn’t really care, though. He was feeling spooked.
“Yeah, Paul, hold on a minute.” Kate’s voice calmed him down a little. “Okay,” she said after a brief pause. “We’ve got the task force from Area A-1 on the way down. They should be there in a couple of minutes.”
“Okay, I’ll be here.”
There was another pause. Then, unable to contain her curiosity, Kate asked the question. “Is it him?”
“I don’t know, Kate. Red choker. Gold cross. Yeah, I’d say it’s probably him. It’s just a guess, though.”
Kate didn’t respond. Stone stood for a moment, looking down at the lifeless figure in the water. Then he sat down on the embankment to wait in silence.
P
OLICE DETECTIVE LIEUTENANT
L
INDA
F
LAHERTY
looked at her watch. She hated Mondays. Always had. It sometimes struck her as odd that the hatred remained despite the fact that, in her line of work, Mondays held no particular significance. Weekends offered no break in the investigative cycle. On “the job,” Fridays blended into Saturdays and Sundays into Mondays without any distinction. Nevertheless, she hated Mondays, and, standing in the medical examiner’s cutting room at eight forty-five in the morning, she knew that this particular Monday was going to be a bad one.
She’d gotten the call at seven-thirty on Sunday evening:
Number Seven has been found.
She’d been at her desk, poring over the case files on the first six victims, looking for anything to grab on to that might bring her some redemption. That was what you did when you were the lead investigator on a case involving a serial killer—you searched for redemption. Until the case was solved and the bastard was rotting in jail, you were a failure, and every new victim was hung around your neck with a weight few could comprehend. So you searched through everything you had for that one clue that might break the case and keep the weight from dragging you down forever.
She wasn’t finding anything when the call came in.
Flaherty was the first on the task force to arrive on the scene. A young officer she didn’t know was sitting at the edge of the harbor when she pulled up. He stood as soon as he saw her car pulling into the vacant lot near the water. Two police vans from the crime scene unit pulled in behind her.
“What d’ya got?” she shouted to the officer as she got out of her car.
“Dead woman,” the officer replied. He sounded nervous. “She’s right over here at the edge of the water.”
Flaherty walked to the embankment and looked over the edge. This type of grim scene no longer had the power to shock her, but she felt her chest hitch involuntarily as she looked down at the corpse floating by the piling. The tide was still high, and she hadn’t expected the woman’s body to be as close as it was. When she peered over the embankment, she was looking straight into the most penetrating eyes she’d ever seen. They were pale blue, and they stared up at her with such vibrancy that she almost thought the woman was alive. She must have been beautiful, Flaherty thought. Any amount of time in the water violates a corpse’s integrity, and Flaherty could already see the blue swelling around the eyes and lips where the body had begun to decompose and bloat. But even in this deteriorated condition, she could tell that the woman had once been stunning.
“Is this how you found her?” Flaherty’s voice was rough, concealing her shock.
Stone hesitated.
“What’s your name?” Flaherty’s voice betrayed an anger she couldn’t explain. Not waiting for an answer, she read the name off the tag on his shirt, just below the badge that was still so new it shined even in the waning light. “
Stone
? Is that how you found her?” This time she got right up to his face and raised her voice to a bark. In her years on the force, she’d learned that, as an attractive woman, this was the best way to gain an advantage over the testosterone factories that populated the ranks. They had no idea how to respond short of physical violence, and the professional inappropriateness of violence against women had been so drilled into them that they were most often left without any defense. She also knew that if she gave a rookie any time to think, he’d tell her what he thought she wanted to hear rather than the truth. Better to frighten him out of using what few brain cells he probably had.
“I’m going to ask you one more time”—she was loud enough now that some of the crime scene team could hear her, and they were looking over nervously—“is that how you found her?”
“Not exactly,” Stone finally admitted.
“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?” Her voice was not as loud, but the edge was still there, sharp enough to cut through any rookie’s bravado.
“She was more on her side, facedown in the water. Her arm was sticking straight up, so I grabbed her hand and she rolled over.”
“Why the hell did you grab her hand?”
“I don’t know, I thought I could help her. I thought she needed help.”
“Well, you were right, she did need help … about a god-damned day and a half ago from the look of her.”
Stone was silent but continued to look Flaherty straight in the eyes. He knew he probably should have left the body alone, but he’d grabbed the hand out of reflex, to try and save the woman. As illogical as it seemed now, it wasn’t something he was ashamed of.
Flaherty continued to stare back at him, too. She was pissed off, but not at Stone. She was just taking her anger out on him because he happened to be there. She was pissed off at
him
— the one the media had taken to calling “Little Jack.” Some snot-nosed beat reporter at the
Herald
had started using the moniker because all of the victims had been prostitutes and the killer had eviscerated each of them, much like Jack the Ripper. Other reporters, lacking originality, had adopted the title, and it had stuck.
Flaherty suddenly wondered how long it had been since she’d had a decent night’s sleep. Not since she’d taken over the task force. There was a lot of political pressure that came with the job. Boston was held in the grip of a serial killer, and every politician with legs was running for cover, looking for someone to take the fall as the bodies piled up.
She sighed. “Don’t worry about it too much, Stone. We’re probably not going to get much from this crime scene anyway. He kills them someplace else before he dumps the bodies.” She shrugged. “And you can’t dust the harbor for fingerprints.”
“No ma’am.” Stone didn’t smile or show relief. His face was impassive, but he continued to hold Flaherty’s look straight in the eye. His self-assurance was unsettling.
“All right,” Flaherty said. “Clear out of here and let the lab boys do their work. Just make sure you have a written report on my desk by six a.m.”
“Yes ma’am.” Stone nodded and gave a stiff salute before he finally broke eye contact and walked away slowly. Flaherty watched him go, then leaned over the embankment again to look at the woman in the harbor.
She stayed at the crime scene for a while, watching the technicians photograph and record every detail. As she suspected, it was a useless exercise, but then, you never knew what was going to break open a case. When it was clear there’d be no immediate revelations at the crime scene, she left.
It was past midnight when she returned to her tiny apartment fifteen blocks from the downtown Boston police station where she spent almost all of her time. She caught a couple of hours of sleep, then rose early to be at the ME’s office to see the entire autopsy. She looked at her watch again, noting it was after the scheduled nine o’clock start for the procedure.
Dr. Tim Farmalant, the chief coroner, finally entered the cutting room. He’d kept her waiting on purpose. It wasn’t personal; he did it to everyone. It was his way of making sure everyone knew he ran the show in the Medical Examiner’s office, and if you wanted anything done, you were at his mercy.
Other than his obsession with administrative power, Farmalant was the antithesis of the stereotypical coroner. He was tall and handsome, with blond hair whipped back in a styled coif and bright blue eyes. Even under the blue-green of the fluorescent lights in the ancient government building, the depth of his tan was evident.
He smiled at Flaherty as he walked in. It was the type of smile she was used to seeing from men—warm and friendly, but with a hint of lechery lurking underneath. At first his passes had angered her, but Farmalant was so deliberately transparent that she decided to humor him, and even to play along when it gained her an advantage. It was harmless, she told herself, by way of an excuse to assuage the guilt that bit at the feminism she’d been forced to conceal throughout her career. The truth was, she also found it flattering.
“Linda,” he said in his most charming voice. “It’s good to see you again, even under these circumstances.” He reached toward her and took her hand, bringing it up to his lips and kissing it lightly.
Flaherty shook her head in mock disgust. “Doctor, you have the most romantic sense of timing.”
“My timing might be better if you would have dinner with me sometime.”
Flaherty pointed to the body on the steel table, still covered with a sheet. “I’ll tell you what, Doc. You get me something I can use to catch the asshole who did this, and I’ll not only go to dinner with you, I’ll buy.”
Farmalant raised his eyebrows. “You know how I love a challenge.”
He walked over to the steel table, letting his critical eye drift over the body even as it was still covered with a white antiseptic sheet. The whole scene made Flaherty shiver in spite of herself. Necessary though it was, an autopsy always struck her as the final insult to a murder victim. Stripped of her life, the woman on the table no longer qualified for the most basic protections against intrusion. What the police would learn might lead to her killer. Then again, it might not. One thing was certain, though: the autopsy would pull back the curtain on her final secrets. The most personal and carefully guarded pieces of herself would become fodder for review and speculation— and often ridicule—around watercoolers and bars once the rank and file learned about them. Necessary, yes. Kind, no. This was the part of her job she hated most.
With one fluid motion, Tim Farmalant’s gloved hand tore the sheet off the body and let it float gently to the floor. “Let’s begin, shall we?” He winked at Flaherty as he picked up a surgical saw and leaned over the dead woman’s body.