Denial
Denial
Clevenger 01
by
Keith Ablow
Contents
Tuesday, 5:50
A.M.
I shot up, sweat dripping down my face. I searched the darkness for my father and panicked at a glint of light off his silver belt buckle. I turned to flee, but felt his fingers wrap around my forearm, dragging me back where I was desperate not to go. I struggled, but weakly, knowing I would lose, until the ringing of my bedside telephone pulled me awake.
Kathy was tugging on my arm. "C’mon, get it."
I fumbled for the receiver. "Clevenger," I gasped.
"Frank, Emma Hancock. Sorry I woke you up."
"Don't be." I collapsed back on the mattress. I was breathing in gusts. The pillow was soaked with sweat. It felt cold against my neck. "Less running."
"Less what?"
I ground the heel of my hand into my eyes. "I was getting up to go out for a jog."
"A little six
A.M.
workout, huh? Good for the soul."
"Right. You didn't call this early to discuss my soul."
"I'm afraid not. We have another case for you — a homeless man who killed a young woman in the woods behind Stonehill Hospital."
"And?"
"And what?"
"You're calling me, Emma. What's the crazy part?"
"He cut off her breasts. Deep, down to the ribs. Butchered her. He called us from a pay phone screaming like a maniac that he'd killed a virgin, then waited with the body until we met him. When we got there, he was covered with her blood."
Part of me wanted to hang up before I heard any more. It hadn't been a month since my last murder, and that one had been bad enough to end six months of sobriety for me. I'd given some thought to quitting forensics and reopening my psychotherapy practice, but I knew I was in no condition to heal anyone. Maybe I never had been. "What do you know about him?" I asked.
"I know he's a loon. That's all. We found a full, two-year-old bottle of Thorazine on him when we picked him up. And he says his name is — get this — William Westmoreland. The general. Another advertisement for head-shrinking, huh Frank?"
I let that go. Homicide detectives like Hancock have to keep their distance from psychiatry. Otherwise they might start wondering whey they hang around killers. They might start fantasizing about crossing the line. "So what's the rush?"
"The rush is I need your stamp of approval that he's sane — at least sane enough to give us a statement. He says he wasn’t to confess; I don't need him thinking it over too long."
"Confess to what?"
"Huh?"
"He wants to confess to what?"
"Are you awake? I just told you I have a woman in the morgue with craters where her breasts are supposed to be."
"Who was she?"
"She didn't have an ID on her, Frank. She was naked. OK? When can you make it down here?"
"Give me two hours." I hung up the phone, switched on the lamp on the nightstand and lay back down on my sweaty pillow, waiting for inspiration to get up.
"Leaving me for a dead person again?" Kathy whispered. She rolled flush to me, still half-asleep, and rested her head on my chest.
"I said a couple of hours."
"Good," she smiled. She brushed the sheet off of her so I could see her naked body, tan everywhere except the creamy skin of her bottom.
"Another goddamn murder. I don't know if I can—"
"Shhh." She held a finger to her lips, then slithered down the mattress and drew her tongue along the shaft of my penis.
"I—"
She took the head in her mouth and bit down playfully.
Usually, we'd get woken up by the Stonehill Hospital obstetrical service calling for Kathy in the middle of the night, and I'd try to get off before
she
left. I'd get hard picturing Kathy in the delivery suite with a patient spread-eagled in front of her crying out in pain. But the idea of having sex just before going to see a corpse was getting me stiff, too. I grabbed a fistful of Kathy's long blond hair and thrust myself deeper, into her throat.
* * *
Just as I had on thousands of mornings, I watched the whole world change in the ten-minute drive to Lynn from my Victorian perched over Marblehead's Preston Beach. The houses along the water slowly shed awnings and brass numbers, then fresh paint, then windows. My tires stopped gliding along the road and started dropping into potholes. Crossing the Lynn line, I knew in advance to press the Rover's air-recirculation button to keep out the stench wafting from a leaky sewer pipe that had spawned a mile of tenacious, foul algae. I slipped the B-52's into the CD player, snorted a blast of cocaine from the vial I keep in the glove compartment and turned up the volume.
I took the first exit off Lynn Shore Drive, heading away from the water and onto Union Street, ten blocks of boarded-up storefronts, graffitied walls and abandoned cars. The tension melted out of my neck and shoulders. My breathing slowed. For as long as I can remember, I have been soothed by squalor, one symptom of having grown up in Lynn as it decayed.
Almost at the end of Union I pulled over in front of the morgue. Paulson Levitsky, the city pathologist, had graduated Tufts Medical School with me in 1981. I wasn't buddy-buddy with him while we were there, but the whole class had known how skilled he was at dissecting his cadaver, which he had named U. B. Dead. The muscles had been meticulously separated from one another, with pristine red and green and violet tags labeling each point of origin and insertion. The organs looked exactly like their pictures in
Gray's Anatomy
. My stiff, Abra Cadaver, had looked like hash by the time I'd gotten done with her.
"Ha, ho, look who's here," Levitsky shouted when I walked into the autopsy suite. "I knew I'd see
you
when I saw
her
." He pointed down at a gray body lying on a gleaming stainless steel table. Kevin Malloy, a Lynn cop I'd once reported for brutality, was observing the autopsy.
"It's a job," I said. "A strange job, but a job." I smiled when I noticed Levitsky's lab coat was spotless despite the work he was doing. Not a hair on his head was out of place. I walked over to the table. The smell of death — a combination of feces, urine and pooled blood — blanketed me.
"She was hot, don't you think?" Malloy winked.
I just stared at her.
"I mean, when she had tits," Malloy said.
Levitsky put a hand on my shoulder. "It's one of the worst wounds I've seen, Frank. And I've been at this a long time."
"Frankenstein's gone soft on us," Malloy said. His dry, cracked lips smiled around his yellowed teeth. "You know, he feels for people — people who can fork over a hundred bucks an hour."
"Why don't you have some respect?" Levitsky seethed.
I felt light-headed.
"She ain't gonna tell you her problems, Doc, no matter how long you wait." Malloy laughed, his fat body jiggling.
"Shut the fuck up!" Levitsky said.
I grabbed the side of the dissecting table to steady myself. "I know her," I said. All I could hear for a while was the hum of fluorescent bulbs.
"You
know
her?" Malloy asked finally?
I was still staring at the haphazard holes on either side of her chest. Then, although I tried not to, I let my eyes drift to her crotch. It was shaved clean. "Sarah Johnston. She's a psychiatric nurse at Stonehill Hospital. The locked unit."
Malloy slammed his fist into his open palm. "That's pay dirt. Ten to one, our General Westmoreland was treated there."
"She's a friend of Kathy's," I said.
"I'm sorry you walked into it," Levitsky said. "Why don't we have somebody call Chuck Sloan? I hear he's taking forensic cases now."
"No. I want it."
"Are you sure?" Levitsky asked.
I dragged my eyes away from Sarah and turned to him. "I'm staying on this case."
"You'll tell me if you change your mind..."
I nodded.
"OK, then. Let me get you caught up." Levitsky produced a telescoping stainless steel pointer from his lab coat pocket, pulled it crisply to its full length and began speaking loudly for the microphone hanging over the table. "Surface inspection of the wounds shows they were caused by a sharp, straight edge, most likely of a pocket knife, or even of a razor blade. There are many short lacerations at multiple levels, indicating the blade was not long enough to penetrate deeply. But each laceration is straight and clean, not jagged." He aimed the pointer at me. "You know we don't have the breasts. They're missing."
"Westmoreland must have hidden them," Malloy said. "Or eaten them."
"Eaten them?" I said. "Either you're going to bad movies or you're still enraged about being bottle-fed."
"Give it a rest," Malloy said. "I don't have time for your psychobabble."
"How about the murder weapon? Did you have time to find that?"
"Not yet. He probably buried that, too."
"Maybe he ate it."
Levitsky sliced the pointer through the air between us. His face screamed we were violating the sanctity of his workplace. "You are guests in this laboratory, at my discretion," he said. He waited a few seconds, then pointed to the crown of Sarah's head. "There is a single depressed skull fracture, of the kind made by a blunt object, which is the likely cause of death." He began to walk slowly around the table. "Multiple skin contusions are present on the dorsal surfaces of the forearms, which may indicate the victim had attempted to ward off blows. There are parallel spotty surface bruises on the arms and shoulders of the type caused by a powerful grip." He stopped at the foot of the table and put the tip of the pointer between Sarah's legs. "The genitals had already been shaved when the body was presented for autopsy. There is evidence of recent sexual intercourse, with semen recovered from the vaginal orifice and vault," he said. He paused. "But there is not evidence of forced vaginal entry." He walked to the instrument tray at the side of the table and picked up an oversized iron scissors. "It gets a little messy from here, gentlemen," he said. "You can stay or you can go. I'm not sure how much more we're going to learn on the inside, but everything will be in my report."
"I've seen enough," I said. I didn't care to see Sarah filleted, and I needed another blast from my vial. "I'm headed over to see Westmoreland."
"I'll stay," Malloy said.
Levitsky squinted at him. "You have a special interest in pathology?"
"In
evidence
."
"Right." Levitsky looked at me and rolled his eyes. "Please tell Kathy I'm sorry about her friend."
"I'll do that." I walked to the door, but stopped and turned around. "By the way, Kevin, it's one-eighty," I said.
"What's one-eighty? What are you talking about?"
"My time. One-eighty an hour. I don't want to get the reputation of giving it away cheap, you know?" Then I walked out.
* * *
I grabbed the vial out of my glove compartment, sprinkled some coke onto a Visa Gold card and snorted it. Then I took another little pinch and spread it over my gums. They went numb a few seconds later, and my anxiety died down a minute after that. I looked into the mirror, tied my hair back in a ponytail and started for the station.
I dreaded breaking the news to Kathy. She had met Sarah a year earlier, when a new mother on Stonehill's obstetrical service had become severely depressed and had to be transferred to a psychiatry unit. The two of them had hit it off immediately. They were both bright and attractive, thirty, and moving in with older men who had sworn off marriage. I was Kathy's problem. Sarah's was Ben Carlson, Stonehill's chief of cardiothoracic surgery. The four of us had begun to spend most of our free time together, until, just a few months later, Carlson abruptly moved on — alone — to a teaching position at the University of Texas.