Dead Meat

by Joseph M. Monks

  “Greene’s on the door, the other kid’s eating. You ready for a break?”

  I was. My head was spinning from the tedium of sifting through Weaver’s meticulous recordkeeping.

  “We’re gonna head downstairs for a few,” I told Greene. “We’ve still got some time to put in inside. You know the drill.”

  “I’m on it. I can give you the info on the tenants I spoke to when you’re done.”

  “Good. Anything...interesting?”

  Greene shook his head. “Not so far. Nobody saw or heard anything. She—“ he pointed to the door across the hall. “Hasn’t been in. According to Mr. Vicelli, she works stage for the Lunt-Fontanne theatre, doesn’t get off until after midnight.”

  I considered that. Did Weaver’s killer know that her neighbor worked nights? Late nights, at that?

  We trudged downstairs. Burton had been right to think about food. Not surprising, as Burton was always thinking about food. I was running on empty. We’d been at it, including the Phipps bust, for going on twenty hours. Right now, that arrest felt like it had taken place a week ago.

  It wasn’t what you’d call cool outside, but the fresh night air was a marked improvement over the stuffy atmosphere indoors. A couple passed us, walking a rat-like dog that yipped and howled as we made for the car.

  “Must think we’ve got one of its relatives in the bag,” commented Burton, just loud enough to be heard. The couple took one look at us and hurried on.

  Bell slid into the back of the unmarked, tossed her legs up on the seat and kicked off her shoes. She took a still-steaming combination platter from her bag and used the cardboard as a tray. Burton, who’d angled for the passenger seat from the minute we hit the sidewalk, had gone with his first instinct, the Moo Goo Gai Pan. I had a General Tso’s chicken special pinned between myself and the steering wheel. Bell passed out forks. The heady aroma of Chinese food filled the car, a welcome change from the death smell clinging to our clothes.

  “Find anything?” Burton asked, before scooping a forkful of moo-goo into his mouth. I swear, the man could swallow an eggroll whole.

  I detailed my discoveries. First, the birth control pills. The Neiman Marcus purchase that narrowed the window for time of death, and finally, the cryptic entry in the Day Runner. The Ike angle intrigued them both.

  “Just Ike, huh? No last name or place, just a time?”

  “That’s all,” I confirmed, swallowing a mouthful of rice and spicy chicken. “Both numbers resolve to addresses up in Harlem.”

  “So this Ike guy might be a connection, then? Think our vic might’ve been using?” Burton asked. I paused, fork hanging between the tray and my mouth. Bell piped in.

  “No way. I’d bet my virginity on it.” Burton and I looked at each other, then peered over the seat.

  “Hey, it’s been a while, all right? I reclaimed it.”

  “What makes you so sure about Weaver?” I asked, deciding to let the virginity comment go. For now.

  “First, we didn’t find any. That apartment might have plenty of hidey holes, but she wasn’t holding. Plus, you don’t get the sense of a user in that place, not at all. Everything is clean, neat, organized. Not spotless or OCD clean, but stable kinda clean. And, she’s got food in her fridge. Real food. Cookies in her pantry. Oranges and grapefruit. Salad in the crisper. She doesn’t eat like a user. Doesn’t look like she drinks, either, at least, not any more. She’s got a chip.”

  “Chip?” It was Burton.

  “Yeah, an AA chip or one just like it. It’s on her key ring. 6 months clean. The bottle on the counter? Looks like wine? It’s sparkling grape juice. Not a user, that’s my two cents.”

  After a thoughtful pause, Burton remarked, “So, we got you putting two cents up against your virginity?”

  Bell kicked the back of the seat. Some moo goo, or gai pan, I couldn’t tell which, slipped from his fork.

  “What about you? Anything interesting up front?” I asked.

  “This,” he said, reaching into his jacket and tossing a plastic evidence bag onto the dash. I turned on the dome light to get a better look.

  “What is it?”

  “Some detective you are,” he huffed, inhaling another forkful of Chinese food. I carefully examined the object in the bag. It looked like a charred lump of plastic. It was about an inch long, had the circumference of a cigarette, each end a blackened nub.

  “Okay, I give up. What is it?”

  “Fuck if I know,” shrugged Burton. He tilted his tray and began scraping the remnants into one corner.

  “Any thoughts from the peanut gallery?” I held up the bag. Bell didn’t have any suggestions, either.

  “So, we collected...a piece of melted plastic?” Nods all around. “And, you’re thinking—?”

  “It’s out of place. I checked her exercise equipment, it didn’t come from any of the machines. Her electronics are all black or silver. This isn’t from any of her appliances. Best I can tell, it isn’t from anything.”

  “Making it important...why, exactly?” I continued. Burton knew I wasn’t challenging him. I trusted his instincts as much as he trusted mine. He’d felt this piece of plastic belonged in an evidence bag, in much the same way I felt the Lybrel did. Neither of us had solid reasons. Just two evidence bags.

  “You get a look at her shelves? Nothing, I mean nothing out of place. No knick-knacks. No crystal animals or little picture frames. No clutter. Just...that lump of burnt plastic. Struck me as weird, that’s all.”

  “Where’d you find it?”

  “On the bottom shelf of the cabinet next to the TV. Where the DVDs were.”

  I held the bag up to the light. I couldn’t fault Burton’s logic. I’d rooted through Weaver’s bedroom, bathroom and home-office. I’d searched her closets and drawers, gone through her medicine cabinet and the space beneath her bed. I’d found nothing that didn’t belong. A melted lump of plastic would have given me pause, too.

  Did it mean anything? If it did, I was certain, we’d find out soon enough.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was after one when Burton dropped me off and we’d agreed on the ungodly time he’d pick me up later that morning, having spoken little on the drive to Astoria. The big man isn’t the most talkative of guys, but when he settles in to brood, you could mistake him for a statue. Like the Lincoln Memorial. Only black.

  For my part, I stared out the window, letting my own thoughts drift. Year-old birth control pills, unused. A melted lump of plastic, as out of place as a nun at a stag party. A cryptic Day Runner entry. My grandfather had coined a term to describe the kinds of clues we had thus far: shadows in the dark.

  I watched the unmarked’s taillights shrink into red pinpricks before they finally disappeared. On the street, nothing stirred. I stood there a while, just listening to the night. In time, I settled down, felt some of the stress beginning to bleed off.

  The second floor of the house on 121st Street has been home base for the past three years, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. My landlady, an Asian woman named Qiang Huan Li, lives on the ground floor and occasionally graces me with homemade dishes any 5 star restaurant would be proud of. Plus, the price is right.

  I made my way to the ‘fridge, not bothering with the lights. I uncapped a Diet Coke and drained a third of it before coming up for air, then scratched a timid Fuzz behind the ears and poured some kibble into a bowl. Mrs. Li had recently dumped the kitten on me, feigning allergies I didn’t believe existed, while claiming that I needed more in my life than dead things. I hadn’t yet found a new home for the cat. Burton suspected I wasn’t going to keep trying.

  I checked the answering machine. Two telemarketers, a state-of-the-union from my Mom, concluding with an invite for dinner on Sunday. I saved her message, deleted the others and tossed my jacket on the sofa. My eyes felt grainy, my neck was stiff and I needed a shower, but decided that could wait ‘til morning. I peeled off my clothes and fell into bed, flashing back to Naomi Weaver’s body. I th
ought about duct tape and Doc Loscalzo’s belief that the person who’d killed her had done it in such a way as to keep her alive throughout the ordeal.

  Living through your own dismemberment. The prospect chilled me. Had Weaver been conscious? Had she felt the blade biting into her flesh, sawing through muscle and bone? Had she watched, wild-eyed, as the killer carefully positioned the limbs he’d shorn from her body? At some point, had she looked her executioner in the eye, silently demanding to know why?

  Despite the tape, she’d tried to scream. Loscalzo’s words rattled around in my head like loose marbles. I’d seen victims restrained with duct tape before. Men and women who’d left this life in a bad way. But I’d never seen a case where somebody had been able to overcome the makeshift gag. Not once.

  How agonizing had Weaver’s final moments been that she’d managed such a feat?

  Those who come to sudden, unattended or violent deaths wind up in an autopsy suite at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Death is constant, and violent death is no exception. Job security isn’t something me, Burton or the Doc are ever likely to be concerned about.

  Doris, who’s been running the Manhattan office since my grandfather walked a beat, directed us to autopsy suite 4, commenting on Burton’s new look. He’d recently traded in a bristle-brush crew cut for the simplicity of no hair at all. While my partner had previously appeared military-menacing, he now looked bad-ass bouncer menacing. Doris approved.

  We gowned up, donned latex gloves and smeared a dab of mentholatum beneath our nostrils. Burton had showed up at my place with a bag from Bagel City, and I didn’t relish the thought of stirring up the bacon and cheese everything bagel currently being digested. I’d never yakked at an autopsy or crime scene, but I wasn’t too cocky to recognize there was a first time for everything.

  The Doc was in his scrubs, mask on, the Y incision already made. I wasn’t quite sure it had been necessary, especially with Weaver’s organs removed and her abdomen evacuated, but I guess old habits die hard.

  “Louis already X-rayed the remains,” Loscalzo informed us, not looking up. “Fingerprints and dental X-rays match. She’s definitely Naomi Weaver.”

  “Any surprises?” I asked, though Loscalzo had clearly just begun.

  “Nothing surprising, and nothing pleasant, I’m afraid,” he answered, before reciting measurements into a microphone mounted over the table. He deftly peeled back a layer of dermis with a scalpel, studied it, then noted his observations. Though we’d viewed her remains in situ the previous evening, seeing them laid out on the stainless steel table was somehow more disturbing.

  “Have you been able to determine if Ms. Weaver made any of her Friday appointments?” he asked, tweezing something from a jagged spur of bone. He examined it closely under a magnifying lamp, then frowned. I assumed it was a carpet fiber, and that he’d been hoping for something better.

  “Not yet. We’ll be running down her appointments after this.”

  “It’s my bet,” the Doc continued, “that she did make at least one of those appointments. Find out if she ate anything at that coffee shop. There was very little in her stomach, and what I found is almost certainly some type of cake.”

  “Anything else?”

  Loscalzo put down his tweezers.

  “I believe I have the sequence of the excisions, though I’m not sure how that might help.” He gestured with his scalpel. “Your killer began by severing the left foot here, just above the ankle. He then moved on to his second incision.” He touched the blade to a spot just below the knee. “Then here.” The tip of the scalpel tapped the flesh midway up Weaver’s thigh.

  “Shouldn’t she have bled out?” Burton wondered aloud. “Once he cut through the femoral artery?”

  “She would have,” the Doc agreed. “But he didn’t want her to. Here, look.” Loscalzo swung the magnifying lamp into position above Weaver’s thigh. Burton and I each took a look.

  “What you see here? This tissue damage?” the Doc pointed out. “It’s consistent with extended constriction of the blood vessels. Not only did the tape act as a restraint, it doubled as a sort of tourniquet. It didn’t entirely prevent blood loss, but it severely limited it. Your boy knew enough to keep the blood loss from the femoral to a minimum.“

  “And the arms?” I asked. The Doc nodded.

  “The upper arms were bound extremely tight. The lower arms less so. He did this, I assume, knowing that he would be making multiple incisions. By staunching the flow of blood high on each thigh and above each bicep, he guaranteed his victim wouldn’t bleed out before he completed...whatever it was he imagined he was doing.”

  “Which one was the fatal one?” I asked, though I felt sure I already knew the answer.

  “The coup de gras was the throat wound. I found blood in her mouth, in her nostrils, and her lungs. She aspirated blood, meaning that she was still breathing when he began the decapitation.”

  “Jesus Christ,” snarled Burton, gritting his teeth.

  “If he does exist,” Loscalzo proclaimed, ‘then surely he was out of the office when Ms. Weaver was being killed.”

  “Let me ask you something, Doc,” I interrupted. “You said that the tissue damage suggests an extended period of tight binding, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long are we talking about? Minutes? Hours? What?”

  “Upwards of half an hour, minimum. Perhaps an hour.”

  I chewed on that, shot a look at Burton. He was following my train of thought.

  “Why wait that long? Why immobilize her and then hold off on the cutting?”

  “Only he knows for sure, but I can tell you this much. The feet don’t show signs of blood flow having been restricted for an extended period of time.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning,” Loscalzo clarified, “Your perp spent time securing her. But he didn’t wait long. I doubt he was sitting around talking to her or jacking off. My guess is that he began cutting right away. He took her left foot off when it was still well-supplied with blood.”

  “Would it have taken long to make those cuts?” I asked. I had no idea how long it took to saw through a human leg.

  “No, it wouldn’t take long. There’s a possible scenario that explains the delay, though it’s only an educated guess.”

  “Your guessin’s always been good enough for me,” prompted Burton.

  “Okay. We know that the thigh bindings served as tourniquets, reducing blood flow to the lower extremities. But there’s no signs of damage to her feet that would suggest an extended interruption of circulation. Once the first two amputations were completed, though, he stopped for a time. Long enough for the tourniquets to damage the tissue. There are two possibilities—maybe more but two that are most likely—that could account for what happened between incisions. One, is that he took time to place the body part. He might have...exhibited it to her. At this stage she would almost certainly have been conscious.”

  “Geez, what’s the alternative?” I took a breath, wondering if my mentholatum was losing its strength.

  “The alternative is that he may have made her...handle the extremities.”

  “What?!” exclaimed Burton. It was a rare outburst coming from the big man.

  “You think this sick fuck handed Naomi Weaver her own severed feet?” I asked, hoping we’d heard wrong. We hadn’t.

  “I think that’s a distinct possibility. If I had to guess, I’d go so far as to say probability.”

  “Why?”

  “I found blood on her palms. Not surprising, and alone, that would be proof of nothing, that apartment was an abattoir. But I also found fragments of torn skin, as well as fine splinters of bone. The only scenario that accounts for the transfer is for her to have handled at least one of the severed appendages.”

  We fell into an uncomfortable silence, staring at Weaver’s mutilated remains. Though the essence of what had once been Naomi Weaver was long gone, agony radiated off her corpse in waves. I couldn
’t wait to get out of there.

  “Weapon?” I managed. It came out as a croak.

  “I’ll know more when we examine the x-rays and get bone samples under the scope. But it’s a saw, definitely a toothed instrument. That’s all I can give you at the moment.”

  “All right. Thanks, Doc,” I said, backing away from the table. There would be more, but if he added to it now, it would be lost in sensory overload.

  “I’ll get you my preliminary report this afternoon,” Loscalzo said to my back. Louis flicked a switch and I heard the whine of the Stryker saw.

  We were out of there, mercifully, before it bit into her skull.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Elsa Langley ad agency was spread out across the fourteenth and fifteenth floors of a high rise on Second avenue between 43rd and 44th. Unlike some counterparts who chose the glass and glitz closer to Lexington, the Langley was modest and efficient-looking, and survived its drab surroundings wholly on reputation. Not a single one of their ad slicks adorned the walls. You knew what you were getting when you hired Langley—they didn’t need the hard-sell.

  Elsa Langley, the company’s matriarch, had largely removed herself from day to day operations. Two sons, Phillip and Donovan, handled the hands-on end of the business.

  Donovan Langley was on the West Coast, meeting with clients in San Francisco, where he’d been since the first of the month, effectively ruling him out as a suspect. Phillip Langley sat before us, looking for all the world like he’d just been notified aliens had landed on the roof and were bringing ugly looking probes to insert in his rectum.

  “Dead?” he repeated. It was the third time he’d done so, as if trying on the word to see if it fit. So far, it didn’t.

  “I’m afraid so,” I responded, watching the demoralized look fix his features like plaster of Paris. I pegged him to be about 45, give or take. He wore wire rim Brooks Brothers glasses and a tailored designer shirt, no tie. His gold cufflink scraped across his desk as he took up the phone. I thought he might hold up a finger while he dialed, but he mechanically pressed buttons as if we weren’t there.