“Didn’t get a cold hit, so whoever your motel guy is, he ain’t in AFIS. Nothing from Interpol yet, which ain’t necessarily good, either. If it’s obvious, you usually know in an hour,” he says.
“Let’s print this guy and get him into AFIS as fast as we can.” I try not to sound anxious. With a lens I check the hands, front and back, for any obvious trace evidence that might be dislodged by my getting fingerprints. I clip fingernails and place them in an envelope that I label and leave on a countertop with the beginnings of the paperwork, then I ink the fingertips and Marino helps me with the spoon. I take two sets of prints. Berger is silent and keenly curious during all this, her scrutiny like the warmth of a bright lamp. She watches my every move, listens to my every question and instruction. I don’t focus on her but am aware of her attention, and in the far reaches of my consciousness, I know this woman is making assessments that I may or may not like. I gather the sheet around the body and zip up the pouch, motioning to Marino and Berger to follow me as I roll the gurney to the cooler against one wall and open the stainless steel door. The stench of death blasts out in a frigid front. Our residents are few this night, only six, and I check the tags on pouch zippers, looking for the John Doe from the motel. When I find him, I uncover his face and point out his burns, and the abrasions at the corners of his mouth and around his wrists.
“Jesus,” Marino says. “What the hell is this? Some serial killer going around tying up people and torturing them with a blow-dryer?”
“We need to let Stanfield know about this right away,” I answer him, because it is apparent that the death of John Doe from the motel may be connected to the body dumped in Mosby Court. I glance at Marino, reading his thoughts. “I know.” He makes no effort to disguise his disdain at telling Stanfield anything. “We’ve got to tell him, Marino,” I add.
We walk out of the cooler and he goes to the “clean hands” wall phone. “Can you find your way back to the conference room?” I ask Berger.
“Sure.” She looks almost glazed, maybe puzzled as distant thoughts show in her eyes.
“I’ll be right there,” I say to her. “I’m sorry for the interruption.”
She hovers in the doorway, untying her surgical gown in back. “Strange. But I had a case a couple months back, a woman tortured with a heat gun. Burns looked a lot like the ones in these two cases.” She bends over to pull off her booties and drop them in the trash. “Gagged, tied up and had these round burns on her face, her breasts.”
“Did they catch who did it?” I am quick to ask, not happy about the parallel.
“A construction guy working in her apartment building,” she says with a small frown. “The heat gun was for burning off paint. A real dumb shit, loser—broke into her apartment about three o’clock in the morning, raped, strangled her and all the rest, and when he went out several hours later, his truck had been stolen. Welcome to New York. So hello, he calls the cops and next thing is in a patrol car, a duffel bag in his lap, giving a statement about his stolen truck at the same time the victim’s housekeeper shows up, finds the body, starts screaming hysterically and calls nine-one-one. The killer’s sitting right there in the cop car when the detectives roar up, and he tries to run. A clue. Turns out the asshole has clothesline and a heat gun inside the duffel bag.”
“Was there a lot about the case in the news?” I ask.
“Locally. The Times, the tabloids.”
“Let’s hope it didn’t give someone else the idea,” I reply.
CHAPTER 10
I AM SUPPOSED to handle any sight, any image, any smell, any sound without flinching. I am not allowed to react to horror the way normal people do. It is my job to reconstruct pain without feeling it vicariously, to conjure up terror and not allow it to follow me home. I am supposed to submerge myself in Jean-Baptiste Chandonne’s sadistic art without imagining that his next mutilated work was supposed to be me.
He is one of the few killers I have seen who looks like what he does, the classic monster. But he didn’t step from the pages of Mary Shelley. Chandonne is real. He is hideous, his face formed of two halves set together unevenly, one eye lower than the other, teeth widely spaced, small and pointed like an animal’s. His entire body is covered with long, unpigmented, baby-fine hair, but it is his eyes that disturb me most. I saw hell in that stare, a lust that seemed to light up the air when he pushed his way into my house and back-kicked the door shut behind him. His evil intuition and intelligence are palpable, and although I resist feeling even a breath of mercy for him, I know the suffering Chandonne causes others is a projection of his own wretchedness, a transient re-creation of the nightmare he endures with every beat of his hateful heart.
I found Berger in my conference room and now she accompanies me down a corridor as I explain that Chandonne suffers from a rare disorder called congenital hypertrichosis. It afflicts only one in a billion people, if such statistics are to be trusted. Before him, I had encountered only one other case of this cruel genetic disorder, when I was a resident physician in Miami, rotating through pediatrics, and a Mexican woman gave birth to one of the ghastliest deformities of human life I have ever seen. The infant girl was covered with long, gray hair that spared only her mucous membranes, her palms and the soles of her feet. Long tufts protruded from her nostrils and ears, and she had three nipples. Hypertrichotic people can be overly sensitive to light and suffer anomalies of their teeth and genitalia. They might have extra fingers and toes. In earlier centuries these wretched people were sold to carnivals or royal courts. Some were accused of being werewolves.
“Then do you think there’s significance to his biting his victims’ palms and feet?” Berger asks. She has a strong, modulated voice. I would almost call it a television voice: Low-pitched and refined, it gets your attention. “Maybe because those are the only areas of his own body that aren’t covered with hair? Well, I don’t know,” she reconsiders. “But I would have to suppose there’s some sort of sexual association, like people, for example, who have foot fetishes. But I’ve never seen a case where someone bites hands and feet.”
I turn on lights in the front office and pass an electronic key over the lock of the fireproof vault we call the evidence room, where the door and walls are reinforced with steel, and a computer system logs the code of whoever enters and when and how long he stays. We rarely have much in the way of personal effects locked up in here. Generally, the police take such items to the property room or we return them to the families. My reason for having this room built is I face the reality that no office is immune from leaks and I need a secure place to store extremely sensitive cases. Against a back wall are heavy steel cabinets, and I unlock one of them and pull out two thick files sealed with heavy tape that I have initialed so no one can snoop without my knowing. I enter Kim Luong’s and Diane Bray’s case numbers in the log book beside the printer that has just hammered out my code and the time. Berger and I continue talking as we follow the hallway back to the conference room where Marino awaits us, impatiently, tensely.
“Why haven’t you had a profiler look at these cases?” Berger asks me as we pass through the doorway.
I set the files on the table and give Marino a look. He can take this one. It is not my responsibility to send cases to profilers.
“A profiler? What for?” he answers Berger in a manner that can only be described as confrontational. “The point of profiling is to figure out what sort of squirrel did it. We already know what sort of squirrel did it.”
“But the why? The meaning, the emotion, the symbolism? Those sorts of analyses. I would like to hear what a profiler has to say.” She pays no attention to him. “Especially about the hands and feet. Weird.” She is still focused on that detail.
“You ask me, most profiling is smoke and mirrors,” Marino holds forth. “Not that I don’t think there are some guys who really got the gift, but most of it’s bullshit. You get some squirrel like Chandonne who’s into biting hands and feet and it don’t take no FBI profiler
to consider that maybe those body parts have some significance to him. Like maybe he’s got something oddball with his own hands and feet—or in this case, it’s the opposite. Those are the only places he ain’t got hair, except inside his friggin’ mouth and maybe his asshole.”
“I can understand him destroying what he hates in himself, mutilating those areas of his victims’ bodies, such as their faces.” She will not be bullied by Marino. “But I don’t know. The hands and feet. There’s something more to that.” Berger rebuffs him by her every gesture and inflection.
“Yeah, but his favorite part of the chicken’s the white meat,” Marino pushes. He and Berger treat each other like lovers who have turned on each other. “That’s his thing. Women with big tits. He’s got some mother-thing going when he selects victims with certain body types. Don’t take no FBI profiler to connect them dots, either.”
I say nothing but give Marino a look that tells him plenty. He is acting like an insensitive ass, apparently so intent on battling this woman that he fails to realize what he is saying in front of me. He knows damn well that Benton had a genuine gift based on science and a significant database the Bureau has been building by studying and interviewing thousands of violent offenders. And I don’t appreciate references to the victims’ body types since mine was selected by Chandonne, too.
“You know, I don’t like the word ‘tit.’” Berger says this matter-of-factly, as if she is telling a waiter to hold the béarnaise sauce. She looks levelly at Marino. “Do you even know what a tit is, Captain?”
Marino, for once, is without words.
“A small bird, maybe,” she goes on, shuffling through her paperwork, the energy of her hands betraying her anger. “A blow. Tit for tat, blow for blow. Etymology. And I don’t mean the study of bugs. That would be with an N—Entomology. I’m talking about words. Which can offend. And can offend back. Balls, for example, can be something used in games—tennis, soccer. Or refer to the very limited brains between the legs of males who talk about tits.” She glances at him with a weighty pause. “Now that we’ve crossed our language barrier, shall we proceed?” She turns expectantly to me.
Marino’s face is the color of a radish.
“You have copies of the autopsy reports already?” I know the answer, but ask her anyway.
“I’ve been through them numerous times,” she responds.
I peel tape off the cases and push them in her direction while Marino pops his knuckles and avoids our eyes. Berger slides color photographs out of an envelope. “What can you tell me?” she asks us.
“Kim Luong,” Marino begins in a workmanlike tone, reminding me of M. I. Calloway after he persisted in humiliating her. Marino is seething. “Thirty-year-old Asian, worked part-time in a West End convenience store called Quik Cary. It appears Chandonne waited until there was no one there but her. This was at night.”
“Thursday, December ninth,” Berger says as she looks at a scene photo of Luong’s mutilated, seminude body.
“Yeah. The burglar alarm went off at nineteen-sixteen,” he says as I puzzle. What did Marino and Berger talk about last night, if not this? I assumed she met with him to go over the investigative aspects of the cases, but it seems clear the two of them have not discussed the murders of Luong or Bray.
Berger frowns, looking at another photograph. “Sixteen past seven P.M.? That’s when he came into the store or when he left after the fact?”
“When he left. Went out a back door that was always armed, on a separate alarm system. So he came into the store sometime earlier than that, through the front door, probably right after dark. He had a gun, walked in, shot her as she was sitting behind the counter. Then he put up the closed sign, locked the door, and dragged her back into the storeroom so he could do his thing with her.” Marino is laconic and on good behavior, but beneath all this is a volatile concoction of chemistry that I am beginning to recognize. He wants to impress, belittle and bed Jaime Berger, and all of it is about his aching wounds of loneliness and insecurity, and his frustrations with me. As I watch him struggle to hide his embarrassment behind a wall of nonchalance, I am touched by sorrow. If only Marino wouldn’t force misery upon himself. If only he wouldn’t invite bad moments like these.
“Was she alive when he began beating and biting her?” Berger directs this at me as she slowly goes through more photographs.
“Yes,” I reply.
“Based on?”
“There was sufficient tissue response to the injuries of her face to suggest she was alive when he began beating her. What we can’t know is whether she was conscious. Or better put, how long she was conscious,” I say.
“I got videotapes of the scenes,” Marino offers in a voice meant to suggest he is bored.
“I want everything.” Berger makes that patently clear.
“At least I filmed the Luong and Diane Bray scenes. Not brother Thomas. We didn’t videotape him in the cargo container, which is probably a damn lucky thing.” Marino stifles a yawn, his act becoming more ridiculous and annoying.
“You went to all the scenes?” Berger asks me.
“I did.”
She looks at another photograph.
“No way I’d ever eat blue cheese again, not after spending quality time with ol’ Thomas.” Hostility bristles closer to the surface of Marino’s skin.
“You know, I was going to put on coffee,” I say to him. “Would you mind?”
“Mind what?” Stubbornness holds him in his chair.
“Mind putting on a pot.” I look at him in a way that strongly suggests he leave me alone with Berger for a few minutes.
“I’m not sure I know how to work your machine here.” He makes a stupid excuse.
“I have complete faith you’ll figure it out,” I reply.
“I can see you two have a nice rhythm going,” I ironically observe when Marino is down the hall and can’t hear us.
“We had plenty of opportunity to get acquainted this morning, very early this morning, I might add.” Berger glances up at me. “At the hospital, before Chandonne was sent along his merry way.”
“Might I suggest, Ms. Berger, that if you’re going to spend some time around here, you might want to start by telling him to keep his mind on the mission. He seems to have some battle going with you that overshadows everything else, and it simply isn’t helpful.”
She continues studying photographs with no expression on her face. “God, it’s like an animal tore into them. Just like Susan Pless, my case. These could just as easily be photos of her body. I’m halfway ready to believe in werewolves. Of course, there’s the theory in folklore that the notion of werewolves might have been based on real people who suffered from hypertrichosis.” I am not sure if she is trying to show me how much research she has done, or if she is deflecting what I just said about Marino. She meets my eyes. “I appreciate your words of advice about him. I know you’ve worked with him forever, so he can’t be all bad.”
“He’s not. You won’t find a better detective.”
“And let me guess. He was obnoxious when you first met him.”
“He’s still obnoxious,” I reply.
Berger smiles. “Marino and I have a few issues that we still haven’t worked out. Clearly, he isn’t used to prosecutors who tell him how a case is going to work. It’s a little different in New York,” she reminds me. “For example, cops can’t arrest a defendant in a homicide case without the D.A.’s approval. We run the cases up there, and frankly”—she picks up lab reports—“it works a whole lot better, as a result. Marino feels it excruciatingly necessary to be in charge, and he’s overly protective of you. And jealous of anyone who comes into your life,” she sums it up, skimming the reports. “No alcohol on board, except Diane Bray. Point-zero-three. Isn’t the thought that she’d had a beer or two and pizza before the killer showed up at her door?” She pushes photographs around on the table. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody beaten this badly. Rage, unbelievable rage. And lust. If you ca
n call something like this lust. I don’t think there’s a word for whatever he was feeling.”
“The word is ‘evil.’”
“I guess we won’t know about other drugs for a while.”
“We’ll test for the usual suspects. But it will be weeks,” I tell her.
She spreads out more photographs, sorting them as if she is playing Solitaire. “How does it make you feel, knowing this might have been you?”
“I don’t think about that,” I answer.
“What do you think about?”
“What the injuries are saying to me.”
“Which is?”
I pick up a photograph of Kim Luong—a bright, wonderful young woman by all reports, who was working to put herself through nursing school. “The blood pattern,” I describe. “Almost every inch of her exposed skin is smeared with bloody swirls, part of his ritual. He fingerpainted.”
“After they were dead.”
“Presumably. In this photo”—I show her—“you can plainly see the gunshot wound to the front of her neck. It hit her carotid and her spinal cord. She would have been paralyzed from the neck down when he dragged her into the storeroom.”
“And hemorrhaging. Because of the severed carotid.”
“Absolutely. You can see the arterial spatter pattern on the shelves he dragged her past.” I lean closer to her and show her in several photographs. “Big sweeps of blood that start getting lower and weaker the farther he dragged her through the store.”
“Conscious?” Berger is fascinated and grim.
“The injury to her spinal cord wasn’t immediately fatal.”
“How long could she have survived, bleeding like that?”
“Minutes.” I find an autopsy photograph that shows the spinal cord after it has been removed from the body and centered on a green towel, along with a white plastic ruler for a scale. The smooth creamy cord is contused a violent purple-blue and partly severed in an area correlating with the gunshot wound that penetrated Luong’s neck between the fifth and sixth cervical disks. “She would have been instantly paralyzed,” I explain, “but the contusion means she had a blood pressure, her heart was still pumping, and we know that anyway from the arterial blood spatter at the scene. So yes. She was probably conscious as he dragged her by her feet along the aisle, back to the storeroom. What I can’t say is how long she was conscious.”
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