Precious Blood

by Jonathan Hayes

  “Yes?”

  “I have to go out for a little while. Will you be okay?”

  She was silent a second, then asked where he was going.

  “I just have to take care of a couple of things—I’ll be down in your uncle’s studio.”

  “Will you be long?”

  “A couple hours. Just call me if you need me—a friend of mine will be in the hall, in case you need anything. His name is Jun.”

  She said, “Your neighbor, right? My uncle mentioned him.”

  “Yes.”

  She slushed back down. “Okay. Thanks.”

  Across the way, Jun was leaning against the door frame, eating Lucky Charms from the box. He was wearing surfer shorts, his fake dreadlocks gathered under a big green wool tam.

  “Need some coffee, Jenner?”

  Jenner shook his head.

  “How’s she doing? It’s all over the papers. You see the body?”

  Jenner nodded.

  “Sounded pretty bad.” He took another fistful of cereal.

  “Yeah.” Jenner pulled the door shut behind him. “I’ll be a while. I need to make a few calls, and I don’t want Ana to hear.”

  “Take your time. I have a stack of papers on raster graphics to grade, and they’ll all suck. These kids think if you’ve mastered Donkey Kong, you’re already nearly a video game designer.”

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  Walking down the stairs, Jenner remembered the first time they’d met. Jun’s girlfriend at the time, an exquisite model from Hokkaido with a deep tan and an ocher sun-burst tattoo on the small of her back, had overdosed on methamphetamine. Jun had appeared in Jenner’s doorway, tapping lightly on the frame, explaining carefully that he’d heard about Jenner’s work, and wondered if Jenner would perhaps help him with a problem. The two had worked with the Japanese embassy to repatriate her body, and had been friends ever since.

  Jenner knew Jun was involved in video game design, and was doing graduate work at New York University, but it wasn’t until Jun invited him to an open house at the school that he’d discovered his friend was a legend: apparently, while still an undergraduate at Keio University in Tokyo, Jun had written some sort of genius video game software—

  not a complete game, but a software element so brilliant that the code was still in use today. It had made Jun rich enough to buy his loft in the Lightbulb Factory, and then open a Stüssy store in Aoyama, which promptly earned him a second fortune.

  The door from the stairwell onto Pyke’s floor was in frosted glass, etched pyke: world image. Douggie owned the whole fourth floor, and had divided his space into living areas and a studio. The studio was as much an archive as a workspace; white enameled cube shelves covered two walls, packed with magazines and books that Douggie had either been published in or was collecting. There were dozens of photographs, everything from Pyke’s own work to photographs by John Wylie and Dennis Hopper. The single color photo was a twenty-by-twenty that had originally appeared on the cover of ZOOM—a self-portrait of Douggie in a bear suit with the Hong Kong supermodel Sarah San.

  Jenner sat down at the big steel desk and booted up Pyke’s Mac: time to see if Whittaker had killed his data access privileges.

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  Within minutes, Jenner knew that Whittaker had missed at least one opportunity to humiliate him. A few keystrokes took him onto the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program; his passwords to CODIS and AFIS and even some of the regional databases were still valid. He now had access to investigational records from the country’s most violent murders.

  He began. For search parameters, he guessed at things about Andie that might have appealed to her killer—her age, her occupation, modality of homicide (here, Jenner went with the generic “asphyxia”), and location.

  A three-year record search in VICAP only delivered a handful of consonant cases, homicides that, for all their viciousness, turned out to be disappointingly straightforward.

  Worse, all seemed to have been closed by capture or death of the perpetrator. He printed out short case abstracts on all six anyway.

  Maybe the last killing was too recent to show up in the database? Busy state police officers and detectives pissed and moaned about spending hours inputting data into a federal program they thought of mostly as a research tool for federal showboaters. Despite the Bureau’s offer to install a free, dedicated terminal in any office requesting one, compliance with VICAP was lax, and even in departments where the reports were submitted, the program had low priority. Ac-cordingly, many—maybe even most—murders never made it into the database at all, or if they did, it was often after a delay of months.

  He would have to do it the old-fashioned way. He opened his small black address book and placed it flat on the desktop. As an ME, he had lectured frequently at regional and national meetings and at the NYPD Death School; he was happy talking casework with the cops, whether from big-city precincts or single-man squads in the ass end of nowhere, many of whom had terrible forensic backup. By the time he resigned, he’d almost filled the address book. Now 64

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  he combed through it, culling the names and addresses of detectives, state troopers, criminalists, a cadaver dog trainer, even a couple of undertakers—anyone who’d know about any unusually violent deaths in their area.

  It was close to 5:00 p.m. when he started calling; he’d missed the eight-to-four shift. Many of his contacts had already left, but Jenner found that introducing himself and the reason for his call was all the entrée he needed. Striking out in the five boroughs of New York City, he began calling farther afield.

  By 9:00 p.m. he had burned through his numbers for southern New York and northern New Jersey and had nothing to show for it. He was now on eastern Pennsylvania; he decided he’d give up as soon as he got as far as the midpoint of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

  Danny Barton had retired from the Ninth Precinct a couple of years back and gone over to the Pennsylvania State Police.

  He was stationed near Romen—halfway to Ohio. This would be his last call for the night.

  No answer, no voice mail. Just as Jenner was hanging up, a state trooper picked up. Barton had left for the day, so Jenner left a message.

  “Wait—Doc Jenner? From the New York ME’s office?”

  “Yes?”

  “Doc! It’s Bobby Dowling! I was in the Ninth with Danny, retired six months ago, Danny brought me on up. You remember me? We had that working girl who went out the window on East Fourth at A, the one who killed the bartender at that bar down the street from Spiral?”

  Jenner did remember him—dark hair, average height, thinning hair, a little soft in the middle, a fast talker. They spoke for a few seconds about life in New York versus life in the country, then Jenner, his stomach starting to growl, said,

  “Bobby, the reason I called, it’s a bit of a long shot, but I’m looking to see if you guys have caught any extremely violent murders recently, anything weird.”

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  Dowling paused. “Doc, you didn’t know we got the Smith case?”

  “The Smith case?”

  “You don’t watch TV? Couple of weeks ago, in Romen, we had the girl who was decapitated.”

  Jenner stopped tapping his pen.

  “A homicide, Bobby?”

  “Worst I ever seen. Girl named Sunday Smith. We’re running the investigation—Romen is like a one-stoplight town, maybe three cops in the whole county. Less, even. Good guys, but this is way out of their league. She wasn’t just decapitated: she was all hacked up. Happened maybe two weeks ago. I’m kinda surprised you never heard of it—it was on CNN!” He sounded a little aggrieved.

  “I haven’t been watching the news very much. What did she look like, Bobby? Blond, brunette? How old?”

  “Young. Dark hair. Not really from around here—she’s in her last year at some college in New York, took the semester off, moved hom
e for a while. A tough break.”

  Jenner asked which college.

  “I wanna say NYU, but I don’t think that’s it. I can check.

  But wait, there’s more.”

  He paused, as much to savor the opportunity to tell the story one more time as to gather his thoughts.

  “So Jimmy Barrett gets the call from a construction crew working on a barn nearby—door ajar in residence for maybe a couple of days. Not expecting anything, walks through the living room, nothing unusual, through the hall, nothing. He’s calling out ‘Hello? Anyone home?’ Goes upstairs, nothing. Goes back downstairs, walks into the dining room, nothing. Figures he’ll close up the house, call it in as nothing disturbed, family away. He’s just about to leave when he pushes through the swing door to the butler’s pantry, then notices blood on the door to the kitchen. So Jimmy pulls his gun and calls it in. Opens the kitchen door real slowly and boom! Blood everywhere—walls, floor, even the ceiling.

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  But y’know what? Jimmy doesn’t even notice it. Because he’s staring straight into the eyes of the dead girl’s head, right there on the countertop . . .

  “I tell you, guy was nearly hysterical. Jimmy’s so freaked out, what with the blood and the head and all, he doesn’t see the weirdest part of all: her head is sitting in a puddle of milk.”

  “Milk?”

  “Yeah. The coroner here—he’s not like New York, but he seems like an okay guy—he said they kill the girl, cut off her head, and a while later put it in the milk. You could tell he put it there on purpose because of the blood splatter in the milk—he had to lift it over and place it right there in the middle.”

  Jenner was quiet.

  “I tell you, Doc, it was the freakiest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. You walk into the kitchen, and bang! The head’s right there, in this puddle of rotting milk. Swear to God.

  Jimmy’s still seriously fucked, nightmares, the works.”

  “You said she was cut up?”

  “Oh, yeah—big-time. Body’s lying on the floor nearby, hacked open. It looked like someone tried to do an autopsy on her.”

  Jenner leaned back in his chair. “Any ideas on the perp?”

  “We’ve got nothing. Zip. They brought in a special blood-splatter guy with the State Police criminalistics crew from near Pittsburgh, but they got nothing usable. I mean, they got some prints, but no matches in regional databases or through AFIS. I said at the time—and you know just how much I like working with the feds—they should call the FBI, but the coroner wasn’t having any of that, particularly from a new guy.”

  “And where’s the investigation at now?”

  “Nowhere. She was alone in the house, family out of the country, no one saw anything. We think she may have known the killer—there was snow, and it looks like he came Precious Blood

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  right on up the front path and knocked on her front door. No tracks anywhere else, and the doors and locks and windows are fine.”

  He paused, and in the silence Jenner could hear his grinding frustration.

  “We really got nothing. The rest of the family is out of the country, and she had apparently lost touch with her local friends after she went off to college. Nothing looks to be stolen. This close to I-80, it could have been a random thing—y’know, some freakfest looking for kicks just takes a turn off the highway, and it’s Sunday Smith’s unlucky day.

  VICAP showed up nothing, whatever that’s worth.”

  “Sexual assault?”

  “Don’t know. She was starting to go bad. The rape kit showed a questionable on semen, but the lab guys at Life-codes think the specimen may be too degraded to extract DNA. There’s nothing else to suggest rape. Really, we’re at a brick wall. And everything got put on the back burner last week after the school shooting. I got a bad feeling that this one is going to get away.”

  Jenner said, “Bobby, we might be able to help each other.”

  He briefly described the Delore killing, then asked if he could have a look at Dowling’s case file.

  “Doc, that’d be great. Some of the bosses here are real arrogant pricks, but this one’s got to the stage where he’ll take all the help he can get, short of the feds. I’ll dupe the paperwork, and burn a CD of the crime scene and autopsy photos. Shoot me an e-mail with your address, and if I catch a slow night tonight, I’ll be able to get it to you tomorrow.

  It’s only a two-hour drive, plus some of those mopes on the Ninth squad owe me a drink or two.”

  As Dowling spelled his e-mail address, Jenner felt the hair on his arms prickling.

  tuesday,

  december 3

  She was making Jenner breakfast. It felt good to do something, anything, rather than just sit around, slowly going insane. She felt guilty, being in his space. He didn’t like having her there; he was polite enough, but she clearly made him uncomfortable. He never said much, and she’d noticed that when she came into a room, he’d leave fairly soon afterward. Not immediately, but fairly soon.

  Whatever. Even if the breakfast didn’t make him like her, it made her feel better.

  Rad said it was best if she just stayed put until things had sorted themselves out. She agreed—it wasn’t as if she had anywhere else to go. And Joey Roggetti had stopped by her apartment and brought a suitcase of her clothes. Spending all her time at Jenner’s would be hard enough, even if he weren’t so withdrawn around her; she found she couldn’t focus enough to read or watch TV.

  Jenner said she should call some friends and have them come over and hang out, but it felt too soon for that; she liked not having to talk. She’d lost her cell phone, and told herself it would be a pain to get their numbers. Although it wouldn’t, really. Anyway, she wasn’t sure he really meant it.

  Busy work was good, though. She’d done laundry (his as well as hers), folded stuff. Putting it away, she discovered his secret: his apartment might be spare and modern, but behind the sliding slabs of dark wood that hid his closets, Jenner was as messy as any other bachelor. Any straight bachelor, at least. And there had been a bonus: when Jenner saw her putting his clean clothes into his closet, he’d blushed. That was kind of cute.

  She smiled at the thought, standing at the range in one of his tattered gray sweatshirts. She cracked eggs into the skillet, and stole a glance over at the couch to see if Jenner was still asleep.

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  He was handsome. Too old for her, sure, but definitely good-looking. Dark hair, green eyes. When he slept, he relaxed a little, and his face seemed younger. But sad: even in sleep, his face was sad. Rad said he’d had problems after 9/11, and warned her to tread gently around the topic; he hadn’t lost anyone or anything, he just had a bad time, apparently, with all the bodies. It was weird she could read it so plainly in him. Or maybe it was just that she knew he was messed up, and was projecting it onto him. But there was something around his eyes, shadowy, and in his look, the way his gaze would settle on her and quickly dart away.

  She was still studying his face when his eyes opened.

  She quickly looked away. “Hey. Sorry if I woke you. I wanted to have breakfast ready when you got up.”

  Jenner rubbed his eyes. “Where did you get the bacon?”

  “Jun picked it up for me at Dean & Deluca. Look—I made blood orange juice! Just the thing for a coroner, hah hah.”

  Jenner made a face at the pun, but smiled as he took the glass.

  She went back to the range and busied herself with the eggs, then cut thick slabs of bread and put them into the big steel toaster.

  She kept her back to him. “Hey, Jenner? You allowed to talk to me about Andie?”

  “I don’t know if I should. Do you need to talk about it?

  Rad can get you a grief counselor.”

  “A grief counselor? No, thanks. I’m okay.”

  He sat up. “It would really be a good idea if you spoke with someone.”

  �
��Okay, I will, I will.” She picked up the butter, still turned away. “So you can’t talk with me about Andie, I get it. But can you talk with me about me?” She paused. “Do you think I’m in danger?”

  He got up and walked over to the table and sat, forcing the lie: “I don’t think there’s much risk. He’s probably long gone. But I think it’d be a good idea to take it easy, hide out Precious Blood

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  here till your uncle gets back. Then maybe you could both go somewhere together.”

  She turned to face him, eyes now red-rimmed, faking a smile to match his lie.

  “Oh, we can talk about it later—I don’t want to spoil your breakfast! Eggs, bacon, toast, OJ. You have jam? I can make more toast if you want.”

  She put everything onto the tray and carried it to the table, her feet sliding quietly across the dark wood floor.

  She slipped the tray in front of him from behind, so he couldn’t see her tears.

  The man tried again.

  The cursor flickered tentatively on the screen, then the university splash page loaded in stuttering blocks.

  He moved through the sequence of screens quickly, knowing his stolen phone signal could hang at any second. From the administration page, to admissions, to archived admissions.

  He opened a separate Command Line Interface window, rattled off a few keystrokes, and then he was in, all the safe-guards and barriers bypassed.

  He watched the choppy scroll of surnames, tapping the space bar to halt it when he reached D. He overshot and landed on delore_andrea; he stepped up one line, high-lighted de_jong_ana, and pulled up the record.

  He remembered Ana’s admission photograph from months back, when he was first considering Andrea Delore; she peered into the camera like a little pixie, her hair short and spiky. Since that photo, she’d put on weight—what did they call it, the Freshman Fourteen?—but the curviness suited her; she had been too thin before. Her hair was longer.

  The architects of the university’s Next Millennium Data Access project had created a system that allowed administrators, depending on their system privileges, access to 74

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  every scrap of paper associated with a particular student, from first admissions inquiry through to the final alumni donation. The page linked to her active schedule, her grades, everything, even a scanned copy of her personal essay. He skimmed through it—trite crap about what she hoped to con-tribute to the school, to the world. How her sense of herself had changed after her parents died in a car crash, blah blah blah. That crash had been her lucky day, he figured: her SAT