Precious Blood

by Jonathan Hayes

  The phone rang. Dan Israel from the DA’s office. More bad news—he should stop answering the phone.

  Apparently, Father Sheehan, who was enjoying sudden celebrity in ancient language circles, had given an interview to the Times. Trying to share credit, the priest had cited the tracings Jenner had made of Barbara Wexler’s back. When Whittaker read the article, he’d discovered that Jenner had seen the body at the morgue; he’d had the surveillance video pulled and reviewed by Security. They’d identified Jenner breaking into the office early that morning, coming over the rooftop next to NYU Medical Center.

  Whittaker had turned the tapes over to the DA’s office and was demanding that charges be pressed. Jenner’s actions were technically a class D felony, and the evidence against him was strong. Dan and Ken Salt had arranged for Jenner to quietly appear before a friendly judge the following day; 368

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  both felt that it would be best to plead guilty. Conviction could carry a sentence of up to seven years in prison, but given the circumstances, Jenner would receive a fine and probation.

  If Jenner didn’t make his court date, a warrant would be issued for his arrest. If he pleaded guilty, the fine wouldn’t be large, and the probation wouldn’t be long. But there was something else: the felony conviction would go on his record, and Whittaker would be lodging a formal complaint with the state licensing board. A felony conviction made it quite possible that Jenner’s license would be suspended or withdrawn, particularly with Whittaker’s growing influence in Albany.

  Jenner thanked Dan and hung up.

  After he’d showered and dressed, he called Rad at Bellevue.

  A nurse’s aide told him that Garcia’s wife had had the phone removed from his room.

  Jenner broke down and called Pat Mullins. Some news, no real progress. Every trail for Farrar had gone cold. They’d located the former CEO of Farrar’s software company in a federal prison in South Carolina, doing time for embezzlement. He’d been interviewed, and had volunteered that there was something wrong with Farrar physically—he needed to have regular hormone shots—but something even more wrong with him socially. The man said Farrar straight out had no idea how to communicate with other people.

  They’d done a broad-area canvas through the neighborhood around Farrar’s old company in Williamsburg; other than a lot of bums, the search had been negative. Since they had no photograph of Farrar, it had been a shot in the dark at best. Besides, who’d hang around in the place where their life’s work went belly-up?

  Looking for a photo, they’d run a DMV search; they’d just now located a record for him in Pennsylvania. His full name was Robert Sebastian Farrar, age thirty-five. They had Precious Blood

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  requested the photo from his expired driver’s license; more than ten years old, but better than nothing. They were considering doing another sweep through Williamsburg, this time with the photograph.

  The Pittsburgh-based forensic unit was in Snowden at that moment. They’d shoveled their way into the storage shed and were going through its contents. A Questioned Documents specialist on the team had been faxed copies of the text on Barbara Wexler’s back; he was currently working a comparison to the painting in the priest’s bedroom. Document examiner or not, Mullins said, it was pretty much a slam dunk, given the case history and the subject matter of the painting—the man having text cut into his face.

  They’d subpoenaed the phone records from the rectory in Snowden, but he figured that was likely a dead end.

  “And that’s about it. When we get the photo, it’ll go out to the media. He’ll be on every TV in New York tonight, and on the cover of every newspaper in the country tomorrow morning.”

  He was silent for a second, then continued, a little softer.

  “Look, Doc. We’ll find him. Probably by tomorrow morning it’ll be all over. Once his photo’s out, someone’ll drop a dime. You’ll see. Leave the worrying to us, okay?”

  “Thanks.”

  “We’ll take care of this. You rest up. How’re the ribs?”

  “Fine, Pat. They’re fine. Thanks for being straight with me.”

  The detective hesitated a second, figuring out how he was going to say what he wanted to say.

  “So you should rest up. And . . . Doc, look, it would probably be better if you didn’t call me on this line. My battery’s almost dead, and with things going the way they are, every-body and his brother is calling me. If anything happens, I’ll let you know right away, okay?”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  The line went dead.

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  He sat at his table and watched the fading light die out over the water. He couldn’t even think. No bright ideas, no sudden inspiration.

  Jenner paced the loft, measuring out the room in long strides, wall to wall. He was losing his mind; he had to get out. What could he do? Where could he go?

  He couldn’t stop thinking about her, the image in his head throbbing between life and death. Ana bound to a chair, alive; Ana butchered and burned, dead.

  He would go out. He had to get out.

  He couldn’t stop imagining her dead, imagining that Farrar had killed her and butchered her and burned her.

  Jenner didn’t have to shut his eyes to see how she would look now, her hair singed to bristle against her blackened scalp, the splitting of her baked skin, the wounds he’d inflicted

  . . .

  He had to stop. His clothes felt strange. Not too tight, not too loose, not itchy, just . . . strange. Hanging on him like body armor. The elevator door opened, and he was in the basement; he’d pushed the wrong button. The basement hallway reeked of rotting fruit and roach spray; it never had when Pete was alive.

  He rode back up to the lobby, but there was nowhere for him to go. Why would he go out? He would stay home. He should stay home, in case someone called.

  He checked his mailbox, clogged with junk. Flyers, mailings from real estate agents, menus, bills. There was a small gray cardboard box of new checks, and a plastic-wrapped sample issue of a new lifestyle magazine for rich New York-ers. He was going to toss them out then and there, but the elevator opened, and he climbed in, his bones aching.

  He threw the mail on the table, then opened a bottle of wine. Glass full, he sorted the mail, threw out most, and took the check box over to the desk where he kept his check-Precious Blood

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  books.

  He opened the box, and was surprised to find it was packed with newspaper. He looked at the front of the box and saw there was no bank logo, no return address.

  The hair on the back of his neck began to prickle.

  It wasn’t newspaper, it was a supermarket flyer, carefully folded. It smelled funny, but the newsprint wasn’t running, and the paper was free of oily staining or powder particles that would suggest an explosive charge.

  Completely focused now, he went to the bathroom and found his manicure set, a gift from his mother when he started medical school. He sat at the desk and gently picked up the paper using a tweezers and a clippers. The papers came out as one, and he saw that the inner pages of the flyer had been carefully folded to create a small packet the size of a thick sausage.

  Holding the packet with the tweezers, he swept everything off the desk. He covered the desktop with a clean sheet of drafting paper, then carefully set the little packet down in the center, switching on his desk lamp.

  The wrapper was in black and red ink, a flyer from Dalrymple’s Discount, a budget market chain with branches in poorer neighborhoods throughout the Northeast.

  He opened the drawer and pulled out his camera. He photographed the wrapped packet, rolled it, and photographed it methodically on each side. On the underside, where the flyer had been tucked under into folded points, he saw russet staining, possibly from the red flyer ink running.

  He carefully folded open the points, then the wrappings.

  The package had been mad
e by simply rolling and folding the flyer around its contents. It was a page from the butcher’s section, with kitschy illustrations that looked like they’d appeared in Dalrymple’s holiday catalogues since the early 1950s: turkey, ham, lamb, and an image of a family at Christmas dinner. Inside the layers of paper there was a wadded-up clear plastic bag; he slowly unrolled it with the 372

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  tweezers.

  At first he thought they were two pale green olives. Bemused, he nudged them toward the opening of the bag; they rolled out onto the paper and lay there, and the sickly sweet stench of putrefaction rose from the bag, quickly engulfing the room, and he knew then that he was looking at the eyes of Lucia Fiore.

  The man was gone, she was pretty sure of it. He went out most nights—he brought fresh newspaper every morning, usually the previous day’s Post, and he had to be getting it from somewhere. She had heard the creak, and then silence, and she was left alone in the dark and the cold.

  Her candle was gone now, used up; he wouldn’t give her another. She had begged, but he’d just closed the door without saying a word—he hadn’t spoken to her since the first day.

  It was a bad sign that he was avoiding making any connection with her. She wanted him to talk—she’d read that it’s harder for killers to go through with it if they see you as a person. Then again, she’d also read that it was an inability to feel empathy that allowed them to torture and kill.

  She struggled to sit. She was weak now, she realized. He’d stopped feeding her—another scary sign. Before, he’d been feeding her nothing but bread and water, and once, pretzels.

  It was some kind of sick joke, she thought—cartoon prison food. Maybe it meant something to him. Bread and water.

  And salt?

  Whatever it meant, he was weakening her. It was a struggle to get upright on the mattress now, wriggling on the rotting ticking, pushing herself up onto her hips with frozen knuckles—he checked her wrist bindings several times a day, making her hold her hands like she was praying as he tied her wrists tightly with coarse rope.

  The effort to sit up—just to sit up—left her breathless now, Precious Blood

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  and it took a few seconds for the dizziness to fade. But being upright, difficult and unstable as it was, made her feel a little better.

  She listened for him.

  Nothing. She’d learned that before his absences there’d be a metallic creak—a door or latch or something. When he left he’d be gone for up to three or four hours. As soon as he came back, he’d rush to check on her, his precious treasure.

  It disgusted her. It was like Hansel and fucking Gretel, the witch poking them through the bars of their cage to see if they were fat enough to eat.

  He’d been growing increasingly suspicious. Several times that day, he’d burst through the door without warning, blinding her with his flashlight. But now she heard the sighing squeaks of the floorboards outside her room as if they were notes on a piano, and she knew the tune his feet played, and she’d hear him coming and quickly cover up what she was doing.

  Because she was doing something now: she was escaping.

  It was his own doing: she’d found a way out because he hadn’t given her another candle. That morning, rolling around on the mattress to find a position to ease her numb shoulder and arm, she’d knocked the stub of remaining candle into the hole in the floor.

  The feeling of loss was devastating. It was only a one-inch cylinder of wax, and she’d been hoarding it so resolutely that she might never have lit it, but now it was gone, and she would be left in pitch-black until he killed her—for the rest of her life. As she felt herself disappearing into the dark, she realized she’d heard a soft thunk when the candle fell through the hole.

  It hadn’t sounded like the stub had bounced off something so much as it had landed on something.

  She rolled to her side and stretched out her hands, sliding them across the floor until she found the opening. The air 374

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  was cold—maybe colder even than in her room. She’d just assumed that the hole led through to the floor below, but perhaps she’d been wrong.

  She reached out, letting her hands slip down into it. She leaned forward and wedged her arms into the void up to the elbow, and felt her fingertips touch cold, damp debris and wood.

  There was a crawlspace under the warehouse floor.

  It wasn’t deep, sixteen inches if that, but if she could get into it, she might be able to crawl through it until she found a way out. If the air inside the crawlspace was that cold, maybe the wood of the ceiling below had holes in it. Maybe even a trapdoor that let out to the floor below.

  But how could she get into the crawlspace? She could barely get her arms in to the elbow—what was that, an eight-inch diameter? But if the wood was softened by age and rot . . .

  She pressed the wood as hard as she could. Her heart sank—it felt pretty sturdy. Stroking the floorboards around the hole, she found them all quite solid, the edges of the hole smooth with age; maybe there’d been a pipe or something.

  But perhaps, if she could get enough leverage on the individual planks, she could somehow pry them up.

  She hooked her fingers around one plank and tipped backward, hauling on the wood as hard as she could, but it didn’t budge. When she finally brought her hands away, they were raw and wet, and she could feel blood on her fingers, scraped on the splintering edges.

  But she didn’t cry.

  She felt around, trying to get a sense of what it was like in the space beneath the floor. There had to be a way.

  But even if she got into the crawlspace, what then? The subfloor was damp and soft—would it hold her weight? So what if it didn’t! She’d fall through to the next floor, maybe twelve feet or so. She doubted that the fall would be more than maybe fifteen feet, and it might hurt, and she might be stunned for a bit—maybe even knocked out—but she would Precious Blood

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  live.

  She imagined herself lying half-conscious on the floor, fragments of rotten wood around her. Sunlight from big factory windows flooded the floor, and it was warm. She’d lie there for a second, get her bearings. In the light, it would be easy to undo the knots. She imagined pulling herself to her feet, then making her way to the window. She’d slip onto the fire escape, and creep down to the ground. And then she’d run, and someone would find her and she’d be saved.

  She just had to get through the floor.

  But how?

  There was nothing in the room, just the mattress, her toilet bucket, and newspaper. The bread plate and the plastic water bottle. Nothing she could use for a lever or a pry tool.

  She couldn’t stop to think about that now. Keep moving.

  She reached back into the crawlspace again, patting the subflooring. Her hands brushed something loose. She grasped it and passed it between her hands, feeling the smooth surface, the row of metal bumps of the edge of a corkscrew.

  Her knife. She’d dropped it the first day, and now it had come back to her.

  She lifted it carefully through the hole and held it in her right palm. With some difficulty, she managed to open the blade with her left. She held the open knife in her hands, pressing the blade flat against her thigh, showing herself it was real.

  She had a weapon.

  This time, she cried.

  tuesday,

  december 24

  Farrar walked briskly down Greenpoint Avenue, the length of plastic hose shoved back into his pack, swinging the five-gallon canister of gas—filled to the brim, an easy fifty pounds in weight—by his side as if it were filled with cotton candy. He felt a bit like vomiting.

  His mouth and nose still burned, and he kept on raking up phlegm in the back of his throat. The gas he’d spilled while siphoning made his shirt stink like a service station, which didn’t help.

  But he had plenty of gas, and that was what mattered.

  More than enough
for the generator and the girl.

  He looked at his watch. After midnight! Just twenty-four more hours.

  Good.

  He didn’t like keeping the girl. Well, he liked parts of it, but there was something about her that wasn’t right. She didn’t behave like the others, who had begged, cried, even offered actual sex if he’d let them go.

  Sure, this girl had cried, and yesterday she’d begged for another candle, but still: she wasn’t like the others.

  There was something about her he didn’t trust. Sometimes she was completely immobile when he went in, just lying there in the dark, eyes closed. She knew that she wasn’t to look at him, but the fun part was that he got to look at her.

  He knew it got to her. He’d sometimes just stand there, looking at her on the mattress, letting the light play up and down her shivering body, knowing she could feel the movement of the flashlight beam through her eyelids, that she knew he was standing there, looking at her.

  But at other times, he could almost feel her thinking.

  Plotting. Scheming. Waiting for him to let his guard down.

  Maybe he should tie her ankles.

  But that would be an admission of weakness. He wasn’t 380

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  afraid of her—what could she do to him? She had no weapon, and he’d been feeding her what the Blessed Anastasia had eaten when she was in the convent. Now he’d stopped her food, as Publius the Prefect had punished Anastasia at Diocletian’s request. She would grow weaker. The ankle bindings were unnecessary.

  He stopped short, stunned to see himself on TV. There he was, in the display window of Walkuski Brothers Electronic, his face filling a twenty-seven-inch Sony television screen surrounded by glittering garlands of red and green tinsel. It was his face of twelve years ago, from his driver’s license.

  How on earth had they got that? And then, underneath, his name appeared on the screen.

  For a fraction of a second, panic rose into the back of his throat, and then, just as quickly, there was a rush of satisfaction.

  Recognition.

  They knew who he was! Everyone knew that it was he, Robert Farrar, who had done these things. That he could strike at will, reach in among them and transform their daughters, slay their sisters, even murder their guardians, throwing cops aside as if he were brushing lint from his sleeve. His name would be on the lips of the city by morning.