Precious Blood

by Jonathan Hayes

  He nodded at Garcia and said, “Hey, Detective. They’re on the third floor.”

  As Jenner followed the two cops through the clump of journalists, a hand grabbed his elbow.

  “Doc?”

  He turned to see Richie Parsons, the Post’ s Crime Beat reporter.

  “Sorry, Richie, can’t talk.”

  “On the way out, okay?”

  Roggetti stood holding the tape up, glaring at the reporters. Jenner shook his head and followed Garcia under the tape.

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  On the landing above the ground-floor methadone clinic, a young cop was bent over, hands on his knees, panting and ashen-faced, his older partner watching him with a look of vague distaste.

  The stairways were warm, and the air on the third floor had the acrid smell of rotting blood. The crime scene unit was still processing the tiny apartment. Mike Seeley was in the living room, which was also the bedroom and the kitchen. He was sweating and clearly upset.

  He nodded grimly at Jenner and said, “We moved the head. The super knocked it off the coat stand here when he opened the door.” He gestured to a cheap wooden coat stand lying at his feet. The floor where the base had stood was a pool of deep brown blood; from the dried droplet spatter, Jenner realized that the head had been impaled on the coat stand, and set in front of the door.

  Seeley seemed to be reading his mind. “Whoever opened the door looking for her was supposed to be staring right into her eyes,” he said, opening the door partway to demon-strate. “Give them something to remember. It worked, too—

  super’s an old guy, went to the apartment because of the smell, opened the door, and the head fell right off. The poor bastard’s over in the ER at Beth Israel with chest pain.”

  Seeley pointed to the floor. “Head fell here—I was afraid it’d get damaged by some clown opening the door too fast, so I moved it to the end of the landing, put it on some plastic on one of the chairs. I don’t think the uniform securing the stairway likes it too much, but I’m not about to screw up the evidence field inside the primary scene just because someone’s feeling a little delicate this morning.”

  Seeley passed Jenner a pair of gloves. “We photographed the head in its original position, but I think it’s all messed up because of the fall, at least in terms of spatter patterns.”

  Jenner, Roggetti, and Garcia walked back across the landing.

  The head sat on sheets of cling film draped over a stack of 124

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  cheap white plastic lawn chairs. It had been severed cleanly, the cut similar to Smith’s, canted downward toward the right-hand side in front, upward toward the left. Smooth edges on the wound suggested a sharp edge on the blade. The cervical spine had been disarticulated right at the top: he’d opened up the back of the neck and cut the ligaments at the top, rather than wasting time and energy sawing through the bone. That was new since Romen.

  He was learning.

  Jenner gently smoothed the skin down at the base of the back of the neck.

  “Huh.” He turned to Rad. “No markings.”

  Garcia shrugged.

  They went back to the apartment, stepped over the blood in the hall, and went into the living room.

  The girl’s naked body was in a big white armchair. She hadn’t been tall—alive, her head had probably barely reached the top of the backrest. Now her body seemed swallowed by the oversize chair.

  There was a lot of blood: focal droplet spatter, with a large area of soaked-in blood over the back of the top of the chair.

  But what was most striking—the first thing they saw when they looked at her—was the thick bouquet of iridescent deep blue and green peacock feathers blossoming from between her breasts.

  Roggetti spoke for all of them.

  “Fuck. ”

  Jenner approached the body. Looking closer, he saw that the peacock feathers were the fletches of arrows, at least a dozen. The shafts of the arrows were light brown wood, each the thickness of a pencil, the fletches clearly mounted by hand. The arrows had to have been pushed into the chest, the shafts protruding about eight inches from the skin. Dark dried blood covered the margins, but Jenner thought he could make out small radial cuts or tears extending into the edges of the wounds; the arrows were probably tipped with Precious Blood

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  broadheads, razor-sharp bladed heads used in bow hunting.

  Rad touched his arm. “Jenner, you gotta keep moving. The ME will be here soon, and you need to be gone before he comes.”

  “Anything else we should see, Mike?” Jenner glanced around the room. “It looks like he did her in the chair, cut her from behind; I can’t see blood elsewhere around the room, and there’s heavy soaking in the back of the chair, with what looks like arterial arc spatter to her right. He may be left-handed. He’s getting better at decapitation.”

  He stared at the torso in the chair. “And as for the arrows, Jesus, who the fuck knows?”

  Seeley nodded. “I’m with you on all that, Doc. Rad showed me those Pennsylvania photos yesterday, and this thing is really similar. Not the arrows, I mean the level of violence.”

  Jenner bent to examine her wrists.

  “Mikey, can you swab the backs of the hands for DNA?

  She’s got bite marks here . . . see? Both hands, and controls from the upper inner arms. Let’s do it here—they missed it in the morgue last time.”

  As he stood, Jenner realized he’d been smelling something strange in the room. Not the blood, not the early decomposition, something under the blood, something smoky.

  “Can I turn her?”

  “Just a couple more minutes, Doc. I need to get a bracketed set of her like this—the camera’s been acting up. Tell you what, though—you can lean her forward and sneak a peek.”

  With Seeley’s hands keeping the arrows in place, Jenner tipped her trunk forward. Her rigor was passing, the muscle tension readily releasing as she slowly folded, Seeley crouching with her.

  Jenner muttered, “Jesus.”

  Her back was densely lined with text, the skin almost blackened under rows of hundreds of carefully burned characters.

  Jenner shook his head. “Hours,” he said softly. “It must have taken him hours. ”

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  “Jenner, you think this is . . . uh, Coptic?”

  Jenner turned to Rad, nodding. “It looks just like the other stuff.”

  He heard footsteps behind him as they eased the body back into position. Turning, he found himself looking straight into the eyes of Steve Whittaker, his normally pasty cheeks flushed. Ray Scales, the chief of detectives, stood next to him.

  “Dr. Jenner.” Scales sighed, glanced at Whittaker, then said, “I’m sorry, sir, but there’s really no further place for you in this investigation. This is an NYPD matter. Roggetti, escort the doctor outside.”

  Jenner didn’t argue—Scales was a boss, a by-the-book cop with political smarts, and it was in his interest to placate Whittaker. Still, the official rejection stung.

  Seeley and Garcia looked away as Roggetti and Jenner moved toward the door.

  Whittaker snapped, “Jenner! Hold it, bucko!”

  Jenner turned, and Whittaker approached him, shoulders stiff, his index finger pointing at Jenner. “So help me God, if I see you at another crime scene, or if you come to the office, if I even hear you’ve been speaking with one of my employees, you’ll be arrested so fast your head will spin.”

  “Nice seeing you, too, Steve.”

  They continued down the stairs, the blood pounding in Jenner’s temples. When they were safely out of Whittaker’s hearing, Roggetti snorted. “Good one, Doc!”

  Outside, microphones and minicassette machines were thrust at them as the camera lamps flared on. Roggetti bawled, “Make way! Make way!” as he pushed through the scrum. As Jenner got into the car, someone was yelling,

  “How many body bags is she gonna need,
Doc? At least tell us that! ”

  *

  *

  *

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  Jenner was still seething in the late afternoon when Jun knocked on the door. He peered over Jenner’s shoulder, making sure Ana wasn’t around, then said quietly, “Jenner, there’s something you should see.”

  Jenner followed Jun into his loft, a vast white box with glossy walls, floor, and ceiling, every surface of which was encrusted with Jun’s bizarre menagerie of pop culture arti-facts, including an army of anime and video game figurines and a borderline pathological collection of ridiculous electronic gadgets.

  The heart of the space was the workstation. All day long Jun wrote code behind ramparts of glowing flat-screen monitors and humming computers—sometimes for days at a stretch, eyes bloodshot, heart rocketing from all the Jolt Cola and herbal diet pills he’d slammed down. When he wanted to come down, he’d collapse in front of a vast wall-mounted Toshiba plasma TV, often watching it with three separate channels of picture-in-picture tiled down the right side.

  Jun gestured at the TV; he’d been watching Tiger Woods playing in Bangkok on ESPN when he’d noticed the press conference on NY1. Jenner instantly recognized Scales at the podium. Roggetti, spit-shined and earnest as a choir boy, stood to his right, Whittaker to his left. Next to Whittaker stood a tired-looking man in a dark suit who Jenner didn’t recognize. Rad Garcia was barely visible toward the back.

  The caption read “Live: Hutchins Murders Press Conf.”

  Jun pressed a button on his laptop-size remote control, and the chief’s voice boomed out in five-channel surround.

  “. . . or contained. I stress again that this case is under active investigation, and that all potential leads should be immediately directed to the TIPS number displayed on the screen now, and on the NYPD Web site. I’d like to echo Provost Kleiber’s cautions to the students, and to thank Hutchins for providing additional security in dorms and on campuses. Finally, in addition to the fifty-thousand-dollar reward previously disclosed, the Hutchins Alumni Society is 128

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  offering a reward of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for information leading to the arrest of the perpetrator.”

  The dark-suited man nodded.

  “We’ll take a couple of questions now.” Whittaker moved closer to the podium.

  “Dr. Whittaker?” The first question came from a print reporter Jenner didn’t recognize, an older woman in a blue suit. “Doctor, had they been sexually assaulted?”

  Whittaker leaned down to the microphone, paused dramatically, and then said crisply, “No comment.”

  “Doctor, is it true that all three were decapitated?”

  “No, just two.” Behind him, Chief Scales winced.

  “Doctor, we understand that there is writing on the bodies; can you tell us what the writing says?”

  Whittaker straightened up. “All three had text on their backs. The NYPD has determined that the writing is Coptic, a Middle Eastern cult. I encourage anyone having information about individuals who are able to write in Coptic to come forward.”

  Behind him, the chief of detectives’ expression was dour.

  “I don’t mean to suggest that the killer is a practicing Copt,” Whittaker continued hastily, “just that, as yet, we have been unable to interpret these writings. Although, of course, it’s clear that the killer has some familiarity with the script. Next question.”

  A hand went up; Jenner recognized Richie Parsons by his Mets cap. As did Whittaker, to his apparent distaste.

  “Mr. Parsons.”

  “Doc, when you say you identified the writing as Coptic, did you mean to say Dr. Edward Jenner identified the writing as Coptic? I understand he’s part of the investigation, and my sources say he broke the code.”

  Whittaker flushed, a beautiful thing to behold on the huge screen. He leaned close to the microphone and said, “Dr.

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  investigation as a retained observer. He has no part in this investigation, and has no relationship to my office.”

  Jun raised his eyebrows. “That true, Jenner?”

  Jenner didn’t answer.

  Parsons wasn’t letting up. “But Dr. Whittaker, it was Dr.

  Jenner who identified the writing as Coptic, true or false?”

  “No. Comment. Next question? Anyone else?”

  Whittaker’s face was now flashing white on the screen as the TV lights glared off his sweating brow, his eyes searching desperately for the refuge of a softball question.

  The vague satisfaction he felt at Whittaker’s discomfort completely deserted Jenner a moment later, when Jun punched CNN up full-screen; they, too, were carrying the press conference live, sending it out across the entire country, around the entire world.

  Fuck.

  He told Ana in the evening. She was still avoiding watching TV, but he wanted to tell her before she found out some other way. She was stretched out on the sofa, reading a Calvin and Hobbes book; she said she couldn’t concentrate enough to read a regular book. He didn’t go into details, just that another Hutchins student had been killed, almost certainly by the same man who had killed her roommate.

  She smiled wanly, then took the gray cashmere throw into the TV room. He watched her put Miyazaki’s Spirited Away into the DVD player.

  He gave her a fake grin. “Well, you’re going to be seeing a lot more of me around the house! Apparently, they’re going to arrest me if they find me ‘interfering with the investigation.’ ”

  She nodded distractedly and then said, “Jenner, if you don’t mind, I don’t feel much like talking. I’m going to watch Jun’s movie.”

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  He went to the kitchen and emptied the dishwasher, listening to her cry under the blare of the sound track, a soft sound like tissue paper tearing.

  He knew what he had to do; he called Jun to say he’d be going out at around 2:00 a.m. Let them throw him in jail, take his license away—it would be a mercy killing, really.

  The girl deserved better, and he was going to make sure that she got it. He couldn’t stop now.

  Rad Garcia called at 10:00 p.m., apologetic.

  “Jenner, I’m sorry about all this. We both know that if it weren’t for you, we’d still be interviewing every damn male in the goddamn university, tracking down every phone number she’d scribbled for the last three months. Thing is, you shared your information, and the bosses think now they got enough to go forward from here. And they like you, most of them, at least, but they need Whittaker—word is he’ll be chief in six months’ time. You know how the game works.”

  Jenner snorted. “So, what are you doing with the skin text, Rad?”

  “We’re showing it to some guy at Columbia.”

  “Yeah, okay. Good. I hope he helps.” He paused. “I’m going to meet with an expert on Coptic.”

  Garcia was silent for a second. “You sure you want to do that?”

  “Sure. I copied those first letters as an authorized repre-sentative of the decedent’s family and the second at the invitation of the Pennsylvania State Police. The NYPD doesn’t have a say.”

  Jenner heard a woman’s voice as Rad quickly covered the receiver. A few seconds later he came back on and said,

  “Okay. You do what you have to. Just remember: Whittaker’s looking for any chance he can get to bury your ass.”

  saturday,

  december 7

  Jenner cut down East Thirtieth toward the river. The southern sky was dark and heavy, but over Manhattan the night was clear and bright. He cursed his luck—the mortuary had closed-circuit surveillance over First Avenue and Thirtieth Street. He was pretty sure that if he could get into NYU Medical Center next door, he could get into the morgue through the back.

  As he passed the security desk, he gave a casual smile and flashed
his expired NYU photo ID, saying, “Hey, buddy.

  Cold night, eh?” The guard nodded, eyes fixed on his portable TV.

  Jenner took the stairs to the second story, then headed to the men’s room at the end of the corridor. He opened the window wide and climbed through, onto the gravel-topped roof of the classroom wing. He made his way to the end of the roof, which put him just above the alley behind the morgue.

  Crouching, he realized that the drop was farther than he’d thought; it hadn’t looked that high from the alley.

  He landed hard. He stood for a second, feet stinging. His fall had sounded loud in the cold air—had anyone heard? He listened for a while, then cracked the door to the body-intake area; everything was quiet. Between deliveries, 2:15 a.m.: the techs were probably dozing in the break room.

  He slipped into the corridor. The light from the morgue office was up ahead; Brooklyn Frank would likely be there watching TV. Jenner cut through the men’s changing room to bypass the office.

  He stepped through the locker room door, past the battered stalls and the old wooden cabinets, past the locker where someone stole his shoes once while he was doing an autopsy. Then, quietly, out into the corridor, safely on the far side of the office. He breathed a sigh of relief. He eased the 134

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  swing door open, then slipped through into the dark corridor to the body coolers and the autopsy room.

  There was a click as all of the lights came on. He straightened to see Brooklyn Frank and three other technicians standing in the corridor. They started to applaud, then all collapsed with laughter.

  Frank pounded him on the shoulder, yelling, “You silent ninja muthafucka!” Jenner shook their hands, everyone laughing and pounding him on the shoulder or slapping him on the back.

  “How did you know?” Jenner asked Frank.

  “Roundtree. He said if you didn’t show up tonight, we could call him Captain Asshole for a year. Big drop from that rooftop to the alley, right?”

  “You saw me?”

  Frank turned serious. “We got a security camera back there. We would have nailed you in the alley, except then we’d be on video, too. You’ll be fine as long as Dr. Whittaker never sees the tape. Another thing: we can’t help you. Whittaker made a big deal about you. Tree said to do what we can, but don’t get caught with you. Obviously, external only, right? And you have to be out of here by five a.m.”