Authors: Graham Masterton
He approached the man in the pale blue lab-coat, who wasn’t wearing any kind of mask at all. ‘Lieutenant Boyle,’ he announced himself, in a muffled voice. ‘I don’t think we’ve met, have we?’
‘Victor Kurylowicz,’ the medical examiner replied. ‘I moved here a month ago, from Newark, New Jersey. I won’t shake hands.’
Thomas looked down at the young girl’s body. Her hair half-covered her face, so that he could only see the lower part of her nose and her mouth. Underneath her chin was a mass of maggots. They looked almost as if they were boiling.
‘I don’t know how you can stand the smell,’ he said to Kurylowicz.
The medical examiner shrugged. ‘It’s not a question of whether I can stand it or not. It’s important. It tells me stuff. You remember what Coleridge said about Cologne? “I counted two and seventy stenches, all well defined, and several stinks!” ‘
‘Oh ... you’re a literary scholar,’ said Thomas.
‘I’m a medical examiner,’ Kurylowicz retorted. Behind his black-rimmed glasses, his eyes were sharp and dark. ‘What I know is bodies, and everything to do with bodies. Particularly bodies that have suffered this kind of treatment.’
Thomas looked at Kurylowicz over his handkerchief. The stench of dried blood and decomposing flesh was so strong that it even began to overwhelm the aromatic fumes of his clove-drenched handkerchief. It had an appalling ripeness that always reminded him of gas and apples and raw sewage. He thought that he was going to suffocate – or that, even if he didn’t, he would never be able to smell anything but death, ever again. ‘You want to tell me something about her?’ he asked, his throat tight.
Kurylowicz glanced down at his clipboard. ‘For sure. This unfortunate young lady is a Caucasian, about twenty or twenty-one years old, blonde hair, blue eyes. She weighed about no pounds I’d guess when she died, which meant that her weight was slightly below average for her age and height, but not drastically so. In other words, whoever was keeping her captive was feeding her good. On cursory examination, I’d say that life has been extinct for slightly more than two weeks.’
‘Any idea how she died?’
‘Oh, yes. She was tied up with razor wire, as you can see for yourself. Then her carotid, inferior mesenteric and popliteal arteries were expertly severed, which meant that she bled to death within less than ten minutes.’
‘What do you mean by “expertly”?’
Kurylowicz rubbed the tip of his nose. ‘I mean by somebody who knew what the fuck he was doing.’
‘A doctor?’
‘Maybe. They look like scalpel wounds, rather than knife wounds.’
‘A dentist?’
‘Whatever, who knows. Even a motor mechanic could have done it if he knew his anatomy.’
‘But this perpetrator knew his anatomy?’
‘For sure. All of the cuts were clean and accurate, no hesitation marks.’
Thomas forced himself to examine the girl’s body. There were scores of cigarette burns, and literally hundreds of bruises, cuts and scars and even crude tattoos – triangles and circles and squiggles. Somebody had even burned a Happy Face onto her shoulder blade.
‘This is serious sadism,’ said Thomas.
Kurylowicz nodded. ‘Maybe. On the other hand, maybe it’s serious
masochism.
I’ve come across plenty of girls who get off on this kind of thing. And plenty of guys, too. My last job before I came up here, this guy had cut off his own scrotum, and he was walking around with his balls in a plastic bag.’
Thomas didn’t want to hear about anything like that, especially not now.
‘This wasn’t all done recently, was it?’ he remarked. ‘Some of those scars look pretty much healed up.’
Kurylowicz ran his fingertips lightly over the cicatrices on the girl’s bare back. ‘It’s hard to date them exactly – but, yes, some of these marks could be six months old, or even older.’
‘So she’s been systematically tortured since Christmas, and maybe longer?’
‘Oh, longer. No doubt about it. Anything up to a year, eighteen months.’
‘And nothing to say who she is, or what she’s doing here?’
Kurylowicz shook his head. ‘No identifying marks whatsoever. No rings, no earrings, no birthmarks. We’ll check the dental work, obviously, but if she came from out of the area, or out of state, it could take us forever to make a match.’
‘Was she sexually assaulted?’
‘I’d say hundreds of times. She suffered severe vaginal and anal trauma. See for yourself. There are dozens of cigarette burns around her genital area, and other burns consistent with certain sado-masochistic practices which are rare but which I’ve occasionally come across before.’
Thomas breathed in cloves and death, cloves and death. Kurylowicz stared at him with glittering eyes.
Thomas said, ‘You want to explain what those certain sado-masochistic practices are? You know – just for one of those dumb, innocent guys who used to think that heavy petting meant owning a St Bernard?’
Thin-lipped, Kurylowicz almost smiled. ‘We’re talking sodomy with a lighted candle, lieutenant, either forcibly administered or self-administered. And we’re talking about not snuffing the candle out when it gets unbearable.’
Thomas slowly shook his head. ‘I’ve heard of some pretty weird stuff, but I never heard of that before.’
Kurylowicz looked down at the girl and for a moment Thomas thought he seemed almost sad. ‘People do things to themselves you can’t even imagine. I’m a Catholic, you know that? “The human body is a temple.” A few people treat their body like a temple. Two per cent. Most people treat their body like a shithouse. Then you get the ones who want to do more than treat it like a shithouse, they want to vandalize it – they want to tear it down, demolish it, brick by brick.’
There was a very long silence between them. The photographer finished taking his pictures of feet and packed up his equipment and waved and left. Thomas had never seen anybody move so jerkily and so fast. Talk about the Keystone Kops. The two forensic investigators, however, seemed to be unperturbed by the stench, and they were still laboriously crawling around on the rug, occasionally taking small polythene envelopes out of their pockets and inserting hairs or fluff or fragments of fibre, and labelling them, and marking the labels with felt-tipped pens.
‘Irving ... There’s a blue wool fibre here I haven’t come across before,’ one of them said.
The other took it, and peered at it closely. ‘Hmm,’ he said, and dropped it into an envelope, and marked it.
Kurylowicz said, ‘There’s one more thing ... I can’t quite understand it yet.’
‘Tell me,’ said Thomas. He was trying very hard to be patient, but he didn’t think that he would be able to stand the stench of this decomposing Jane Doe for more than two or three more minutes.
‘Let me ask you to look just here,’ said Kurylowicz, and pointed with his finger to two small wounds on the girl’s middle back, no more than six inches apart.
‘More torture?’ asked Thomas, not really sure what he was supposed to be looking for, or what he was supposed to think about it even if he found it.
‘I don’t know what they are, frankly. But they seem to be very deep wounds, small-diameter wounds or injection-holes which have been opened up, allowed to heal, then opened up again, then allowed to heal, and so and so on.’
‘Why would anybody want to do that?’
‘I don’t know ... maybe the perpetrator kept injecting stuff into her back to keep her quiet, or to ease the pain ... something like an epidural. Maybe it was part of the torture.’
Thomas said, ‘Jesus ... You can’t even imagine the suffering, can you? You can’t even think about it.’
‘There’s one more thing,’ said Kurylowicz.
‘What’s that?’
‘I’ll need to check it out back at the lab – but look at her lower legs.’
Thomas did as he was asked, trying not to focus on the girl’s bruised and lacerated calves. ‘I don’t see anything.’
‘It’s the way those bones protrude. I’m not going to second-guess myself, but I think that both of her legs have been broken – not recently, but not more than eighteen months ago. They’ve been set, but not by a highly-qualified surgeon. See how the left calf is kind of kinked.’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Thomas, baffled.
Kurylowicz tapped his teeth with his pencil, and then shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’m going to have to do a lot more work on it.’
One of the forensic investigators stood up and came over. He was short and fat with a Kookie Byrnes quiff and near-together eyes. His upper lip was beaded with perspiration.
‘How’re you doing, Irving?’ asked Thomas.
‘Slow but sure,’ said the investigator, with an asthmatic wheeze in his voice. ‘We’ve found seven different clothing fibres so far, and enough hair to stuff a mattress. Plus candle wax, cigarette ash, nine cigarette butts, several needles and skewers, burned book-matches, and fish hooks.’
Thomas nodded. The essence of cloves was beginning to make his eyes water, but his stomach was beginning to rebel against the stench of putrescence, and he didn’t dare to take the handkerchief away from his face. From under his shirt came an audible growl, and Irving looked at him in surprise.
‘Just hungry, that’s all,’ said Thomas. ‘I didn’t have any breakfast.’
‘Very wise,’ Irving replied. ‘The first thing I did when I got here was to hurl up three cups of coffee and a double order of scrambled eggs.’
Thomas looked back at Kurylowicz and Kurylowicz said, ‘It’s okay, sir. I don’t have anything else to show you right now. You must have plenty of other stuff to be getting on with. I’ll prioritize this one, and have it on your desk as soon as I can.’
There was a detectably patronizing edge in Kurylowicz’s voice. What kind of a homicide lieutenant couldn’t bear the smell of death? But Thomas was too relieved that he could go to worry about reprimanding him. And anyway, it would have been pretty damned ludicrous, trying to pull rank with a clove-filled handkerchief in front of his face.
‘All right, Kurylowicz. Good work. Sergeant Jahnke’s going to stick around in case you need anything.’
‘I’m sorry?’ asked Kurylowicz.
Thomas took the handkerchief away from his mouth, and took a breath in preparation to repeating himself. But the sickly-sweet smell that immediately filled up his nose and his lungs was so thick that he couldn’t say anything at all. He gave Kurylowicz a
Columbo-
like
salute with his hand, and left the bedroom.
‘Everything all right, sir?’ Jimmy the patrolman called after him, as he hurried down the stairs.
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. His mouth was flooded with warm, salty saliva, and his stomach was going into spasm.
With his hand clamped over the lower part of his face, he walked at top speed through the hallway, glimpsing jumbled images of those vase-shaped Victorian nudes, and a hatstand, and his own white face in a mirror beside the door, like speak-no-evil being hotly pursued by hear-no-evil. He took the front steps three at a time, and then he was out on the sidewalk in the warm morning wind, taking one deep breath after another.
Detective Jaworski had been talking to one of the patrolmen across the street. He came over and asked, solicitously, ‘Are you okay, lieutenant?’
‘No, I’m not okay,’ Thomas told him. ‘I’m very, very far from okay.’
Detective Jaworski reached into his pocket and produced a new pack of Marlboro. ‘It’s the worst one I ever saw. Even worse than that family on Otis Street, you remember that one?’
Thomas tried to light the cigarette that Detective Jaworski had given him, but couldn’t. Eventually Detective Jaworski steadied his hand for him, and he lit it, and took in a deep lungful of tobacco smoke.
‘You were lucky to puke,’ he said; and meant it.
Detective Jaworski said, ‘All those scars. All those burns. What do you think, some kind of cult killing? Maybe Satanists, something like that?’
Thomas glanced back at the house. ‘It’s still far too early to say. We have to find out who she is, first; and how she was tortured; and exactly how she died.’
‘You know what you said to me the first day I joined homicide?’ remarked Detective Jaworski. ‘You said that homicide was only another kind of theft; except that a murderer was stealing somebody’s time instead of their property.’
‘I said that?’
‘Sure. I thought it was such an incredible way of looking at it, that’s why I remembered it. You said, find that stolen time and you’ve found your murderer.’
‘I really said that?’
‘Sure,’ nodded Detective Jaworski, with an eager grin.
‘What did I mean by it?’ asked Thomas.
Very slowly, the grin faded from Detective Jaworski’s face. ‘You meant – well, you meant – kind of like – if somebody takes that time, you know – and if you can find it again – well, you kind of – ‘
Thomas laid a hand on Detective Jaworski’s shoulder.
‘You don’t know what it means,
I
don’t know what it means. If I ever talk such bullshit again, you have my permission to pour coffee down my shirt.’