Adele retrieved the cell phone. She rubbed it with a clean corner of her shirt, making sure the screen wasn’t broken. “He put his hands on me,” she said with a grunt of disgust.
“Hey,” said Eric, walking over to her and lifting her head up delicately. His fingers were under her chin so that he could look her in the eye. The weak lamplight shone on her face. Her eyes were clear, trusting. Adele swallowed and her lips trembled a little, attracting his attention.
And then, before he could stop himself, Eric bent down and kissed her.
At first she didn’t move. Then she opened her mouth a little, but she didn’t respond to his kiss in any other way.
The impulse, born of a desire he’d been repressing for a long time, quickly turned to guilt. In a sober flash, he pulled away from her. Adele stared up at him, a look of astonishment on her face.
What on earth was he thinking? Someone had just attacked this woman, and the best he could come up with was to take advantage of her the moment her defenses were down?
He stumbled backward a couple of steps. “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I don’t know what came over me.” Then he turned away, ashamed.
“It’s okay,” she said behind him.
Oh no, it wasn’t. “I’m mortified. Please excuse me.” Eric couldn’t even bring himself to meet her eyes as he said it.
“Really,” she insisted. “It doesn’t matter.”
He could hear her moving, so he started walking. He couldn’t stand to be close to her. He just wanted to get away.
“Eric!” Adele’s voice echoed down the alley.
He stopped. It was the first time she’d ever called him by his name. She had no idea what hearing his name come out of her mouth did to him.
A moment later her hand was on his shoulder, and a moment after that she was standing in front of him. She didn’t seem scared anymore, or in shock. She was the same old Adele, breathtakingly beautiful and tough as nails. Sure of herself.
A drop of rain fell on her face, then another. Eric felt rain on his hair as he watched it wet her face, falling harder and harder. Thunder rumbled across the sky above them. Lightning flashed.
Adele smiled and raised herself up on her tiptoes, her mouth open, as rainwater poured down on them both. She began laughing, and he did too. He’d moved from desire to guilt and then to this unusual sensation, at once pleasurable and comforting. Whatever was happening, whatever this was, he never wanted it to stop.
When Adele stepped back, their eyes met. Both were still smiling. Their clothing was soaked, but who cared?
He put his hands on her sides, and she put hers on his face. A tingle of desire, indistinguishable from the electricity already in the air. Finally their mouths met in a long, passionate kiss as a downpour thundered all around them, isolating the couple from the rest of the world.
For a little while time seemed to have lost all meaning. Then, once they were both out of breath, they pulled apart and stared into each other’s eyes.
Not long after that the rain began to peter out, and as it lessened, the sense of completeness that had filled Eric’s heart began to diminish, as did the smile on Adele’s face. The rain stopped altogether.
It was as if an enchantment had been broken. The couple pulled apart, disconcerted. They looked silently at one another for a few moments, before Adele looked away. “I think it would be better if I went home.”
A deep sense of disappointment threaded its way through Eric’s heart. No. He didn’t want her to leave. Maybe he should offer to give her a lift? But he didn’t have his car. What the hell was he thinking? He was what she was trying to get away from. He could see her regretting what had just taken place between them.
Adele took another step backward and began digging frantically in her purse. She removed her keys and, without even looking at him one last time, nodded over her shoulder, back toward the pub. She moved her lips slightly, like she was searching for the right thing to say, but in the end just murmured, “Good night.” She took off as if escaping.
He watched her go, wanting nothing more than to stop her, but he couldn’t say a thing. He stood there, immobile, until he couldn’t see her anymore. He heard the distant noise of an engine starting up, roaring, and then a car taking off with a screech of rubber. Only then did Eric move again.
He made his way back to the pub, but the last thing he wanted to do was go inside and celebrate.
Reluctant, he went inside and was immediately met with the happy roar of the crowd. It seemed like he’d been gone for hours. He’d tell Miriam he wasn’t feeling well and take a taxi back to the apartment.
“Hey, boss!” Martin Stern appeared at his side. “I didn’t see you come in.” This was a vaguely drunken version of Stern. He was unquestionably more carefree than usual, but that made him no less annoying to Eric at the moment. “You’re all wet. What the heck happened?”
Eric skewered Martin with an icy stare, and his colleague reacted as usual, despite the alcohol, by lowering his head in submission. “See you around, b-boss,” he stammered before disappearing into the crowd.
“Detective Shaw?” A man’s voice rose above the hubbub.
Eric turned around to see who was calling him.
“Right here, Detective.” A hand waved above people’s heads. Gavin Lennox’s face was beneath it. A group of people passed nearby, pushing him to one side, but Lennox kept coming toward him.
“You’re here too,” said Eric. It was half-question and half-statement. Jane really had invited all of Scotland Yard. At this point he wouldn’t be surprised to see the mayor’s head pop out from the other room.
“I was looking for you.” Now the two men were standing in front of one another, and Lennox could talk in a normal tone of voice.
Shaw’s brow furrowed. What the hell did this guy want now?
“Detective Leroux had to take off for . . . something urgent.” Lennox made a gesture. “She couldn’t find you anywhere, and she asked me to let you know.”
“Miriam’s already left?” It was a rhetorical question. What he really wanted to say was, Why the fuck did she take off like that?
Lennox shrugged. “I don’t know why. We were talking, sort of. And at a certain point she glanced at her watch, then took off like a jackrabbit.”
CHAPTER 10
He grabbed his kit out of the trunk and handed another to Jane, and the two detectives headed for the entrance to the small house. That morning the sun had finally decided to break free of its cloud cage, and even though it was only ten in the morning, the day was already starting to heat up.
Eric sighed. He wished he could take his jacket off. “Are you sure this is the right address?” he asked, turning to look at his colleague. It was too calm. Where were the other squad cars?
Detective Hall nodded yes. That’s when he saw a uniformed policeman step out of the garden.
“Detectives,” said Agent Mills. “We’re all back here, on the other side. The crime scene is in the garage.”
“Okay. Lead the way.”
The man’s face was distraught. “I’d better warn you—it’s not a pretty sight.”
They followed the officer across the lawn. Once they’d passed a row of hedges, they could finally see the squad cars, all their lights still on and flashing, as well as the coroner’s van parked along the sidewalk. They rounded a corner and found themselves in front of the garage, its door stuck halfway open. They could see the legs of people walking around inside.
At that very moment Miriam bent down and came out of the garage, white as a sheet. She walked quickly, then started running, toward the little street. She threw a glance toward them but didn’t stop.
“What’s up with her?” asked Jane, turning to watch her go and practically running into Eric.
“No idea.”
Once she reached the street, Miriam bent over
and vomited.
“I’ll be back in a moment,” said Eric, alarmed. “You go on ahead.” He ran over to Detective Leroux.
Miriam was steadying herself with one hand on the back of a car. She heaved, trying to vomit again, but nothing came out except a little bile.
“Hey, Miriam, are you okay?” Shaw handed her a tissue. He’d never seen her get sick at a crime scene before.
“Better than the guy in there, that’s for sure,” she responded, wrinkling her lips. She took the tissue and wiped her mouth.
Eric sighed. The day was off to a marvelous start.
“I feel like shit . . . ,” said Miriam in a low voice. She seemed angry with herself for her reaction. Or maybe she was feeling bad about something else?
“What happened to you last night?”
Miriam rolled her eyes and smoothed her hair. She didn’t seem in the mood to make conversation. “I had something to do.”
“What? And it popped into your head in the middle of the party?” He wasn’t really angry with her for having abandoned him the night before, even though she’d insisted on taking him. He wasn’t used to this kind of behavior from her, though. He was angry, but not with her.
“Jonathan called.” She waved her hand as if she wanted that to be the end of it, for that vague explanation to finish the conversation.
“Jonathan called you?” Eric said with an inquisitive tone. “Lennox told me that you glanced at your watch, then practically sprinted out of the pub. He didn’t say anything about a phone call.”
“What is this,” she demanded, annoyed, “an interrogation?”
Eric looked at her, saying nothing. He was waiting for an answer, and she knew it.
“He called me five minutes before that, and I told him to go fuck himself . . . Then I regretted it, okay?”
“How did it go?” he asked. Every time they talked about Jonathan, he wound up cutting her off. Who knew why? At this point, he was just curious.
“Oh, forget about it.” She made a grimace of denial. She wouldn’t say anything more about it. “I’m going to go ask the neighbors some questions. Have fun in there,” she said before walking away.
Eric could tell she was hiding something from him. She was nervous, preoccupied, but as long as she refused to talk to him about it, there was little he could do to help her.
Reluctantly Eric walked back to the garage. In order to get inside, he had to slide his kit under the door first, then bend over and scoot beneath the garage door.
What he saw when he straightened back up chilled the detective to the bone.
For a few brief moments horrible images from the past bubbled up in his mind and were superimposed on what he now found himself facing. Eric released a long, pent-up breath.
“Eric,” said Dr. Dawson by way of hello. He was kneeling in front of the chair the victim’s body was in—what was left of the victim’s body, at least.
A flash lit up the garage, blinding Eric for a moment and shocking him out of the stupor he’d slipped into. He blinked furiously. Once he could see clearly again, he realized Adele was there, circling the cadaver and taking pictures.
The body was misshapen and covered with blood. There was a bullet hole in the back of the head. The victim had been bound at the wrists and ankles, with another rope wrapped around his chest, strapping him into the chair and preventing him from falling forward. Jane was collecting the fingerprints spread out across the floor one by one with a portable tool.
“The house and the car both belong to a man named Tom Ridley, director of an art gallery downtown.” Mills was talking quietly, his gaze pointed at the wall. “Sixty-two, a widower, no children. We’re trying to track down a relative who can identify the body, unless we get something from the prints.”
Eric couldn’t stop staring at the corpse. He found it magnetic. “What else do we know about this Ridley?” He realized he was hyperventilating. He needed to calm down, immediately. “Does he have any priors?”
Agent Mills shook his head. “Nothing, not even a parking ticket. He’s clean.”
“You said he ran an art gallery,” said Jane. She had finished collecting fingerprints and was now loading the data into their server so that it could be forwarded to IDENT1. “Maybe he had something valuable in the house, or here in the garage.” She turned to look at the shelving—dusty but empty. “Did you see if there were any signs of robbery in the house?”
“Nothing obvious.”
“If it’s a robbery, it took a decidedly wrong turn,” said Dr. Dawson.
Hearing those words, Eric felt a wave of nausea rise up inside him. No, it couldn’t be true. Couldn’t be.
Another flash. Adele stepped in front of him and knelt down to photograph the hands.
“They chopped off his fingers with one clean blow. Likely with that,” said the doctor, pointing to a small bloody cleaver lying on the floor. “Given the amount of blood here, I’d say he was still alive while they were torturing him. And then . . .” The doctor stood up and reached out to the victim’s head with his latex-gloved hands, turning it a little. “They struck him repeatedly in the head with a blunt instrument.” He examined the wounds more closely, then used a pair of tweezers to pluck some wood fiber from one of them, tucking it into a little plastic bag.
“There are medium-velocity blood sprays in almost every direction,” said Jane. “He was struck repeatedly, over and over again, from different directions and just kept on bleeding.”
Adele took a picture of the floor where her colleague was pointing. Backing up, she bumped Eric’s arm for a brief moment, and their eyes met. He opened his mouth to say something, even though he had no idea what, but she turned away before he had the chance.
“Finally they shot him in the head,” concluded Dawson. “But you’ll have to wait for the autopsy before I can get the bullet.”
Shaw nodded slightly, still in shock. Deep in his heart he already knew what kind of weapon the killer had used. Now he understood that strange sense of familiarity he’d felt the day before during the meeting. The images of the three victims’ bodies marched through his mind, one after the other, followed by a little girl’s frightened eyes.
From Mina’s Blog
This time it was harder. When you pull a trigger and the other person dies, it almost seems like a game. You can fool yourself into thinking that it is a game, just to keep from realizing that you’re taking a life away. The second time it was simply fun. The hunt, chasing down the prey. But Ridley’s death took a long time—too long. All that blood kept coming out and coming out, pumped by a stubborn heart that just wouldn’t give up.
At first he didn’t understand what was happening. He truly believed he was being robbed. He stayed calm and told me to take whatever I wanted, never thinking that I might be something more than a simple thief. He didn’t realize I was there for him.
After I tied him up in the chair, he started to feel afraid—I could practically smell the fear on him. Then he saw the knife and heard my name, and suddenly he realized what was in store for him. He wasn’t coming out alive, not after he knew who I was, and it wouldn’t be over for a long time yet.
His calm vanished in an instant. The monster turned into a weeping, whining baby. He didn’t display even an ounce of the dignity my father had shown when he was in the same situation.
He would have sold his own children in the blink of an eye to save himself—if he’d had any, that is. He begged me, even when he knew it was no use.
He fainted away each time I amputated something. I had to shake him back awake so that he wouldn’t sleep through the next one.
By the time I was done with the hands, he’d become completely hysterical. He kept screaming like he was possessed, even though I yelled at him to stop, telling him I’d make it last a lot longer if he didn’t. He wasn’t listening to me anymore. I grabbed one of the lo
gs stacked against the wall and started whacking him in the head with it. Bright-red stains spread all over the floor, the walls, my clothing. I even felt that viscous liquid squirt onto my face. He begged me to get it over with and kill him, but I kept going, over and over again, until all my strength was gone. He was immobile, but his blood kept pumping out, along with bits of brain.
Suddenly his entire body seized with convulsions.
“Stop it! Stop it!” I shouted at him, as if he could hear me, as if he could obey me.
I was gripped with an extremely powerful wave of nausea and became afraid I might vomit from one moment to the next. I pulled out the pistol and shot him in the head. Then everything stopped.
CHAPTER 11
“I need to see the files from an old case for an investigation currently underway,” said Eric, flashing his badge to the agent who oversaw access to the Metropolitan Police archives.
The woman gave him a distracted smile, barely raising her eyes from her computer screen. It seemed like she’d been interrupted during some very important task, like posting her thoughts on the meaning of life to a social network. At this hour the department was half empty. Everyone was out on lunch break, and she probably hadn’t been expecting a visitor. She absentmindedly grabbed the sign-in sheet and put it on the counter in front of him. “Just write down your badge number and sign here.”
Eric looked around for a pen. He was about to ask her for one, but she anticipated the question and waved one in front of his face.
“Thanks.”
He was filling out the registration form when he heard the lock click and the door open in front of him.
Eric wandered through the dusty shelves. Evidence from cases that had been closed were stored for many years in these archives, filling up most of the space available in that enormous storage area. Then there were cases that were still open, cases with no deadline other than the statute of limitations. But there was no statute of limitations on a triple homicide, not even after twenty years. He worked his way back in time until he reached 1994.
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