The Web

by Jonathan Kellerman

  "And you?" Moreland said to Spike.

  "Watch," I said. Walking to the door, I said, "Come, Spike." The dog ran immediately to Robin and flopped down at her feet.

  Moreland laughed. "Impeccable taste."

  When we were outside, he said, "What a lovely girl. You're lucky— but I suppose you hear that all the time. It's nice to have someone in Barbara's studio after all these years."

  We began walking. "How long has it been?"

  "Thirty years this spring."

  A few steps later: "She drowned. Not here. Hawaii. She'd gone there for a vacation. I was busy with patients. She went out for an early-morning dip on Waikiki Beach. She was a strong swimmer, but got caught up in a riptide."

  He stopped, fished in his pocket, drew out a battered eelskin wallet and extricated a small photo.

  The black-haired woman from the mantel portrait, standing alone on a beach, wearing a black one-piece bathing suit. Hair shorter than in the painting, pinned back severely. She looked no older than thirty. Moreland would have been at least forty.

  The snapshot was faded: gray sand, the sky an insipid aqua, the woman's flesh nearly dead-white. The ocean that had claimed her was a thin line of foam.

  She had a beautiful figure and smiled prettily but her pose— legs together, arms at her side— had a tired, almost resigned quality.

  Moreland blinked several times.

  I gave him back the snapshot.

  • • •

  "Why don't we work our way downward," he said, lifting a box from the top of an outer column, carrying it into the office, and placing it on the floor between the couch and the armchair.

  The carton was taped shut. He cut the tape with a Swiss Army knife and pulled out several blue folders. Putting on his glasses, he read one.

  "Of all things. . . ."

  Handing me the folder, he said, "This one isn't from Aruk, but it was a case of mine."

  Inside were stiff, yellowed papers filled with elegant, indigo, fountain-penned writing that I recognized from the card he'd left on the bed. Forty-year-old medical records of a man named "Samuel H."

  "You don't use full names?" I said.

  "Generally, I do but this was . . . different."

  I read. Samuel H. had presented him with gastric complaints and thyroid problems that Moreland had treated with synthetic hormones and words of reassurance for eleven months. A month later, several small benign nerve tumors were discovered and Moreland raised the possibility of travel to Guam for evaluation and surgery. Samuel H. was unsure, but before he could decide, his health deteriorated further: fatigue, bruising, hair loss, bleeding lips and gums. Blood tests showed a precipitous drop in red blood cells accompanied by a sharp rise in white cells. Leukemia. The patient "expired" seven months later, Moreland signing the certificate and directing the remains to a mortuary in a place called Rongelap. I asked where that was.

  "The Marshall Islands."

  "Isn't that clear across the Pacific?"

  "I was stationed there after Korea. The Navy sent me all over the region."

  I closed the chart.

  "Any thoughts?" he said.

  "All those symptoms could be due to radiation poisoning. Is Rongelap near Bikini atoll?"

  "So you know about Bikini."

  "Just in general terms," I said. "The government conducted nuclear tests there after World War Two, the winds shifted and polluted some neighboring islands."

  "Twenty-three blasts," he said. "Between nineteen forty-six and nineteen fifty-eight. One hundred billion dollars' worth of tests. The first few were A-bombs— dropped on old fleets captured from the Japanese. Then they got confident and started detonating things underwater. The big one was Bravo in fifty-four. The world's first hydrogen bomb, but your average American has never heard of it. Isn't that amazing?"

  I nodded, not amazed at all.

  "It broke the dawn with a seventy-five-thousand-foot mushroom cloud, son. The dust blanketed several of the atolls— Kongerik and Utirik and Rongelap. The children thought it was great fun, a new kind of rain. They played with the dust, tasted it."

  He got up, walked to the window and braced himself on the sill.

  "Shifting winds," he said. "I believed that, too— I was a loyal officer. It wasn't till years later that the truth came out. The winds had been blowing east steadily for days before the test. Steadily and predictably. There was no surprise. The Air Force warned its own personnel so they could evacuate, but not the islanders. Human guinea pigs."

  His hands were balled.

  "It didn't take long for the problems to emerge. Leukemias, lymphomas, thyroid disorders, autoimmune diseases. And, of course, birth defects: retardation, anencephaly, limbless babies— we called them "jellyfish.' "

  He sat down and gave a terrible laugh. "We compensated the poor devils. Twenty-five thousand dollars a victim. Some government accountant's appraisal of the value of a life. One hundred and forty-eight checks totaling one million two hundred and thirty-seven thousand dollars. One hundred-thousandth the cost of the blasts."

  He sat back down and placed his hands on bony knees. His high forehead was as white and moist as a freshly boiled egg.

  "I took part in the compensation program. Someone upstairs thought it a good use of my training. We did it at night, going from island to island in small motorboats. Pulling up to the shore, calling the people out with bullhorns, then handing them their checks and sailing off."

  He shook his head. "Twenty-five thousand dollars per life. An actuarial triumph." Removing his glasses, he rubbed his eyes. "After I figured out what the blast had done, I put in for extended stay and tried to do what I could for the people. Which wasn't much. . . . Samuel was a nice man. A very fine carpenter."

  "How'd the people react to being paid?" I said.

  "The more perceptive among them were angry, frightened. But many were grateful. The United States extending a helping hand."

  He put his glasses back on.

  "Well, let's crack another box. Hopefully something a bit more routine."

  "At least you tried to help them," I said.

  "Sticking around helped me more than them, son. Till then I thought medicine boiled down to diagnosis, dosage, and incision. Encountering my own impotence taught me it was much more. And less. You worked in pediatric oncology; you understand."

  "By the time I got involved, cancer was no longer a death sentence. I saw enough cures to keep me from feeling like an undertaker."

  "Yes," he said. "That's wonderful. Still, you saw the misery, too. Your articles on pain control— scientific yet compassionate. I read them all. Read between the lines. It's one of the reasons I felt you were someone who would understand."

  "Understand what, Bill?"

  "Why a crazy old man suddenly wants to organize his life."

  • • •

  The other cases were routine and he seemed to tire. As I scanned the chart of a woman with diabetes, he said, "I'll leave you alone. Don't try to do too much, enjoy the rest of the day."

  He stood and headed for the door.

  "I wanted to ask you something, Bill."

  "Yes?"

  "I met Tom Creedman in the village this morning. He mentioned something about a murder a half year ago and some social unrest that led to the blockade."

  He leaned against the jamb. "What else did he have to say?"

  "That was it. Ben told me he lived here, caused some problems."

  "Oh, indeed."

  I pointed to the rear storage room. "Was that where Ben caught him snooping?"

  "No," he said. "That was my office. Two bungalows down. Creedman claimed he'd wandered in and was on his way out when Ben found him. I might have let it pass, but he insulted Ben. That kind of thing isn't tolerated around here. I ordered him off the grounds. He delights in accentuating the negative about me and Aruk."

  "He called this place Knife Castle."

  "And probably told you that yarn about the slaves butchering every last Jap
anese."

  "It never happened?"

  "Allied bombs killed the vast majority of the Japanese soldiers. Three days of constant bombardment. On the third night, the Americans radioed victory and some of the forced workers left the barracks and came up here to loot— understandable, after what they'd been put through. They encountered a few survivors and there was some hand-to-hand fighting. The Japanese were outnumbered. Mr. Creedman calls himself a journalist, but he seems attracted to fiction— not that there's that much difference, nowadays, I suppose."

  "He also said that you did the autopsy on the murder victim. Do you agree with the theory that it was a sailor?"

  He sucked in breath. "I'm growing a bit concerned, Alex."

  "About what?"

  "Picker's accident, and now this. You certainly can't be faulted for seeing Aruk as a terrible place, but it's not. Yes, the murder was terrible, but it was the first we'd had in many years. And the only one of its type I remember in over three decades."

  "What type is that?"

  He pressed his hands together, clapped them silently and looked up at the ceiling fan, as if counting rotations.

  Suddenly, he opened the door and stepped out. "I'll be right back."

  11

  The folder he returned with was brown with a white paper label.

  ARUK POLICE

  INVEST: D. LAURENT.

  CASE NO. 00345

  The first four pages were a typed report composed by the police chief in slightly clearer-than-usual cop prose.

  The body of a twenty-four-year-old woman named AnneMarie Valdos had been found at three A.M. on South Beach by two crab fishermen, wedged between rocks overlooking a tide pool. The amount of blood indicated violence at the site.

  Other fishermen had been at that exact spot at nine P.M., allowing Laurent to narrow the time the corpse had lain there.

  During that period, birds and scavengers had done their work, but Laurent, referring to a conversation with "Dr. W. W. Moreland, M.D.," had been able to distinguish the "external shredding and mostly superficial laceration from multiple, deep knife wounds leading to exsanguination and death."

  The victim had lived on Aruk for two years, coming over from Saipan to work as a cocktail waitress at Slim's but losing that job after three months due to chronic intoxication and absenteeism. Her lodgings had been a rented room in the village and she was two months in arrears. She'd been known to socialize with Navy men. The only surviving relative was an alcoholic mother in Guam who had no money to travel or to pay for burial.

  Questioning the villagers produced no witnesses or leads but did elicit the repeated claim that the viciousness of the crime proved the perpetrator was a sailor.

  Laurent's final paragraph read:

  "Investigating officer has repeatedly attempted to communicate with Captain E. Ewing, Commanding Officer of Stanton USN Base, for possible questioning of enlisted men re: this crime, but has been unable to make contact."

  I started to turn the page.

  "You might not want to," said Moreland. "Photographs."

  I thought about it and flipped anyway.

  The shots weren't any worse than some of the ones Milo had shown me, which is to say they'd be additions to my nightmare file.

  I moved past them to Moreland's report.

  He'd been thorough, inspecting, dissecting, enumerating each wound.

  At least fifty-three wounds, additional ones possibly obscured by scavenger bites.

  The killing blow probably a neck slash.

  Contrary to what Creedman had said, no sexual penetration.

  All the cuts probably inflicted by the same weapon, a very sharp unserrated blade.

  The next page was written out in Moreland's elegant longhand:

  Dennis: You may want to keep this private.

  WWM Postmortem mutilation

  A. The left leg has been severed completely at the patellar joint.

  B. The left femur has been broken discretely in three places, with a considerable quantity of bone marrow removed.

  C. A deep 26 cm. longitudinal upward slashing wound extends from the pubic region to the sternum.

  D. Disembowelment has taken place, with the small and large intestines piled atop the chest region, obscuring both breasts. The breasts are intact. (Extensive crustaceal invasion of these tissues exists, as well.)

  E. Both kidneys and the liver have been

  F. Decapitation has occurred between the third and fourth cervical vertebrae with the head left next to the left side of the body at a distance of 11 centimeters.

  G. A deep, transverse wound of the neck is visible both above and below the decapitation line. Probable downward stroke from left ear across the neck indicates right-handed person slashing from the back. The trachea and jugular vein have been severed.

  H. Significant enlargement of the foramen magnum has been accomplished, possibly with some kind of grasping/crushing instrument. Portions of the occipital skull have been shattered, probably by blunt force.

  I. Both cerebral hemispheres have been removed, with the cerebellum and lower brain left intact.

  I shut the file and took a slow breath, trying to settle my stomach.

  "I'm sorry," said Moreland, "but I want you to see that I'm not concealing anything from you."

  "The killer was never caught?"

  "Unfortunately not."

  "And the Navy man theory?"

  He blinked and fidgeted with his glasses. "In all the years I've lived here, the islanders have never engaged in serious violence, let alone this. I suppose it could have been one of the cargo boat deckhands, though I've come to know most of them and they're decent chaps. And Dennis did question them. Unlike the sailors."

  Remembering Laurent's remark about not having his call to Stanton returned, I said, "He never got access to the base?"

  "No, he didn't."

  "Why do you still have the file? Is the investigation ongoing?"

  "Dennis thought I might come up with something if I studied it for a while. I haven't. Any suggestions?"

  "It's not your typical sadistic murder," I said. "No rape— though Creedman said there was."

  "You see," he said. "The man has no credibility."

  "No positioning of the body, either. Mutilation, but of the head and the back and the legs, not the genitalia or the breasts. Then there's the multiple organ theft— coring out the femur to remove the marrow. It sounds ghoulish— almost ritualistic."

  He smiled sourly. "The kind of thing some primitive native would do?"

  "I was thinking more of a satanic rite. . . . Were any satanic symbols left behind?"

  "None that we found."

  "Does the killing bear the mark of some sort of ritual?"

  He rubbed his bald head, took a thick, black fountain pen out of his pocket, uncapped it and inspected the nub.

  "What do you know about cannibalism, Alex?"

  "Mercifully little."

  "Conducting the autopsy brought to mind things I'd heard about when I was stationed in Melanesia back in the fifties."

  He put the pen back, uncrossed his legs, and rubbed a bony knee.

  "The sad truth is, from an historical perspective, eating human flesh isn't a cultural aberration. On the contrary, it's culturally entrenched. And I don't mean just the so-called primitive continents. Old Teuton had its menschenfressers; there's a grotto in Chavaux in France, on the banks of the Meuse, where archaeologists found heaps of hollowed-out human leg and arm bones— your early Gallic gourmets. The ancient Romans and Greeks and Egyptians consumed each other with glee, and certain Caledonian tribes wandered the Scottish countryside for centuries turning shepherds into two-legged supper."

  He started to sit back, then grimaced violently.

  "Are you all right?" I said.

  "Fine, fine." He touched his neck. "A crick— slept the wrong way. . . . Where was I— ah, yes, patterns of anthropophagy. The most common motive, believe it or not, is nutrition—the quest for protei
n in marginal societies. However, when alternative sources are provided, sometimes the preference endures: "tender as dead man' was once high praise among the old tribes of Fiji. Cannibalism can also be a military tactic or part of a spiritual quest: ingesting one's own ancestors in order to incorporate their benevolent spirits. Or a combination of the two: eating the enemy's brain grants wisdom; his heart, courage; and so on. But despite all this diversity, there are fairly consistent procedural patterns—decapitation, removal of vital organs, shattering the long bones for marrow. As the Bible says, "The blood is the soul."'