Precious Blood

by Jonathan Hayes

  No! Not just the city, the entire country, maybe the entire world . . .

  Their nameless dread now had a face, had a name.

  His name.

  Crime Scene left Jenner’s loft at about 5:00 a.m., after taking endless pointless photographs of the box and wrappings lying on the kitchen counter. They clearly didn’t want to screw anything up, but still, what did they think they were doing? Back at the lab, the criminalists would photograph everything all over again, until the ink on the wrapping was just about starting to fade from all the flashes.

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  When they’d gone, the exhaustion and the wine overtook him; he passed out in the chair at the kitchen table. He woke to the cat trying to climb onto his lap, his claws digging into Jenner’s thigh as he sank back to the floor.

  It was already after 2:00 p.m. Angry with himself for sleeping at all, he headed to the shower.

  There was no return address on the box. Farrar had used self-adhesive stamps for postage. The ink of the postal franking was barely visible, obscured by the dark blue sky through which Santa’s sled flew on the fifty-cent stamps. In the shower, it occurred to him that maybe he could find something if he played around in Photoshop.

  He put on his robe, sat at the table, and uploaded the photos from his camera to his laptop. He’d photographed the box before Crime Scene had arrived, bracketing with shots from different angles and different illumination of the postal stamp.

  He opened the images in Photoshop, lightened them, and then bumped up the contrast. The image went grainy, and the numbers and letters started to swim on the screen, but he was pretty sure that the zip code ended in 378.

  He went online and looked through a zip code database for the city. Manhattan ran 10001 through 10286, Staten Island 10301 to 10314. In the Bronx, the numbers began at 10451, while Brooklyn numbers started with 112. He saw that 11378 was the post office code for Maspeth, Queens.

  He looked up the Maspeth post office on an online map.

  It was close to the Brooklyn border, near the high ground of the Olivet and Mt. Zion cemeteries, among the first sights a visitor saw on a cab ride from the airport. It was pretty close to the intersection of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Long Island Expressway, and so was easily accessible from anywhere in Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx—the whole of Long Island, if Farrar was using a car.

  But was he? He’d never got a New York State license, and he’d stolen the van he used when he took her. He probably 382

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  mostly took public transportation, or traveled on foot.

  He looked at the map again. Farrar was likely to be in an area where Dalrymple’s distributed flyers. On the Dalrymple’s Web site he found a branch in Williamsburg. He printed out the map in large scale, drew an X at the Dalrymple’s in Williamsburg, and then marked the Maspeth post office. Then he marked the address he had for Farrar’s old business.

  There were, at most, three miles separating the widest points on the map. And, he remembered, Farrar had stolen the van in Williamsburg, and it had been recovered in Queens, just under the Kosciuszko Bridge. Another X at the bridge. The marks now clustered on the Brooklyn/Queens interface. Greenpoint or Williamsburg, Jenner figured.

  It made sense that Farrar would stick to Brooklyn. He probably didn’t know the city that well, but he’d have been familiar with Greenpoint and Williamsburg from having worked there.

  It was almost 5:00 p.m. He should get moving.

  He went to change, threw his robe on the ground, and stopped, catching sight of himself in the mirror. The ugly bruising on his chest didn’t seem to be improving. Black threads poked through the crusting incision where they’d put the tube in to reinflate his lung; looking at it, he felt his side begin to itch and burn.

  As he gingerly put his T-shirt on, he heard his phone ring.

  He ran to the desk, snatching the receiver up just as the answering machine came on. Please, God, let it be Mullins with good news.

  “Dr. Jenner?”

  He recognized the voice instantly, the familiar thin, self-righteous tone: Steve Whittaker. He fought the urge to hang up.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Dr. Whittaker.”

  “What is it, Steve?”

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  Whittaker snorted. “Well, Edward . . . I was calling to see if you’d heard from the district attorney’s office yet.” He paused. “What, did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

  Jenner sat. “It’s more like I didn’t care if you found out.”

  “Always ready with a snide comeback! Well, I have some news for you—let’s see if you have a snide answer for this.”

  He paused dramatically, and then finished in triumph: “I’ve petitioned the state oversight board to have your license re-voked.”

  Jenner was silent.

  “Not so glib now, eh?”

  “Sorry, Steve. I was just putting on my pants.” He fastened the button and stood. “Yeah, I know, some friends in the DA’s office gave me a heads-up. Is there anything else? I’m in a bit of a hurry.”

  “Well, I think they’ll agree with me that any forensic con-sultant who’d break into a secure facility doesn’t have the integrity necessary to practice medicine in the Empire State.”

  Jenner shrugged. “They may well.” He grabbed his sweater. “Hold on a sec—I’m just putting my sweater on.”

  He put the receiver down and slipped into the sweater, then picked the phone up again.

  “You still there? Sorry about that.” He fixed the collar.

  “Now, where were we?”

  Whittaker’s pitch was rising. “You know you won’t be able to practice in New York, right? You do understand that, don’t you?”

  Jenner sighed. “Well, I probably needed a change of scen-ery anyway.”

  Whittaker seemed pleased. “You might want to consider working as a coroner’s pathologist in the South. The pay’s not great, but I think it’d be good for you to have a coroner overseeing your work, making sure you don’t screw up . . .”

  Whittaker paused expectantly. Was that all he had?

  Jenner said, “Yes, I’ve always liked the South. You know I trained in Miami, right?” He wedged the phone against his 384

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  shoulder while he fastened his watch. “Well, Steve, thanks for calling. I should scoot—there’s something I’ve got to take care of.”

  Whittaker was sputtering on the other end, and then Jenner had had enough.

  “Hey, you ever wonder why people hate you, Steve? It’s not because you’re an asshole—people forgive assholes all the time. And it’s not because you’re a manipulative, back-stabbing prick. It’s because, at the end of the day, you’re nothing. You’ll do whatever it takes to get ahead, but there’s nothing inside you—no kindness, no joy, no compassion.

  Nothing but ambition, nothing but the drive to claw yourself up on top of other people.

  “At the end of the day, what they can’t forgive is that you happily mess around with their lives, when you don’t have one of your own. ‘A petty little man’—that’s what Julie called you. Did you know that?”

  Whittaker struggled to formulate a comeback, finally spitting out, “Well, I don’t see Julie with you now, do I? What does that make you, Jenner?”

  “It makes her too good for the both of us. But we knew that, didn’t we?” Jenner laughed. “Since we’re talking about Julie, I should come clean. Remember the office party to celebrate your promotion to deputy chief ? Well, that was the first time she and I hooked up. We knew you’d never walk out on a party in your honor; Julie had the key to your office, so we fucked on your desk.”

  Whittaker squealed, “That’s a lie! ”

  Jenner, wrapping his scarf around his throat, said, “No, Steve, it’s not. Remember how you came in the next morning and you couldn’t figure out how your Hopkins diploma just ‘fell off’ the
wall? Well . . .” But Whittaker was already gone.

  *

  *

  *

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  He crossed the hall to Jun’s apartment and knocked. He heard giggling, and after a brief delay, Jun answered the door barefoot, in sweatpants and a loosely buttoned white shirt.

  “Jenner.”

  “Jun, sorry to bother you. I need to go to Brooklyn; I’m pretty sure that Farrar is around there, somewhere in those old factories and wasteland along the water in Williamsburg and Greenpoint. I’m going to walk around, see if I can see anything.”

  “Why don’t you call the cops?”

  “After last night? They think I’m a jerk—no way they’ll take me seriously. Besides, I’m pretty much grasping at straws.”

  Jun shrugged. “You sure you’re well enough? What did they say at Bellevue?”

  “I skipped my clinic appointment.”

  Jun shook his head. “Jenner, this sounds like a really bad idea.”

  “I can’t just sit in my loft doing nothing.” Jenner paused, then said, “Look, I’d like to borrow your gun.”

  “God, Jenner. This is insane.” He leaned back against the door frame and sighed. “Okay. Let me get dressed.”

  Before Jenner could argue with him, he stepped back into his apartment. There was a muffled discussion in Japanese.

  A couple of minutes later, Jun opened the door and said,

  “Come in, I’ll just be a second.”

  He disappeared into his bedroom. Jenner eased himself into a chair by Jun’s desk. Kimi came out of the kitchen with a glass of water for Jenner. She put a hand on his shoulder as he drank, and said, “Please be careful.”

  Jenner nodded.

  “And don’t let him get in trouble with the police again, okay, Jenner?”

  A few minutes later, Jun emerged, now in tight black leather pants, a white turtleneck, and trendy nerd glasses 386

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  with thick black frames, a virulent orange faux fur coat draped over his arm. He checked himself out in the mirror, nodded in approval, then turned. On his bookcase was a large diorama of Godzilla rampaging through a train yard; Jun lifted the plinth to reveal a hidden compartment from which he pulled a black semiautomatic.

  He showed it to Jenner. “It’s a Smith & Wesson ten-milli-meter pistol, just like the FBI.”

  “Ah, just like the FBI. Better than the nine?”

  “They think so.” He held it up. “Ten in the magazine, one in the chamber. This one’s a bit finicky—be careful with the magazine release safety: if the magazine slips down even a little, the gun won’t fire.”

  Jenner nodded vaguely.

  Jun said, “Okay, now, this is cool.” He flicked a tiny button on the trigger guard, then lifted the gun and pointed it at the far wall; a bright red bead of light appeared on a Transformer model on the shelf.

  “Crimson Trace laser sights in the grip. It senses when you’re aiming, and turns the laser on. With those sights, a Sunday school teacher who’s never even seen a gun could take out a bad guy at ten yards.”

  “ ‘Take out a bad guy’? Been hanging out with cops?”

  “Smith & Wesson puts on training sessions; in the coffee breaks, it’s all about shooting bad guys . . .”

  “You sound like an infomercial. Where’s the safety?”

  “Right here. This way, the trigger won’t pull, to fire, like this. Sometimes you have to squeeze pretty hard.”

  Looking at his watch, Jenner nodded. “We should get moving—it’ll be dark soon.”

  Jun lifted up his shirt and wedged the weapon into the band of his pants. He frowned, pulled it out, put on his coat, and pushed it into the pocket. He shrugged.

  “What else? It’s not too bright out—I’ll bring a flashlight.

  Cell phone. MetroCard, iPod. I can’t think of anything else.”

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  “I can’t either.”

  Jun paused. “Remind me again why we’re not just calling the cops?”

  “And tell them what? There must be hundreds of burned-out buildings and empty warehouses along that stretch.

  Anyway, they don’t want to hear from me—I sent them there once, and I wasted their time. They remember things like that.”

  “So, what do we do if we find something?”

  “Then we call the cops.”

  She could kill him. Wait for him to come to check on her, maybe make some noise to bring him closer, then just stab the knife into his face or his neck or something. God, how she loved the idea of slamming the knife into his chest with two hands, the look of stunned horror on his pocked face as she drove it in, seeing him stagger back as she pulled it out and stuck him again, his shirt filling with blood, his hot red blood spattering out of him, her wrists slippery with his blood as she kept on stabbing and stabbing and killing him.

  Maybe she would castrate him as he was dying, just hack his stuff off with her knife. She would stand over his dead body and spit on him. I spit on your grave.

  But she knew it wouldn’t go that way. She was weak, he was powerful; she was bound, he was fast; she was lying down, he was standing; she was in the dark, he was blinding her with that goddamn light. He’d see her coming, grab her arms, and take her knife away. And then he’d hurt her.

  And he was up to something. He kept making short trips, coming back and moving things. That morning he’d been using the grindstone for hours, sharpening things. Whatever it was, it was going to happen soon.

  She had to escape.

  No matter how she tried, she couldn’t cut her bonds.

  When she held the knife in her hands, she couldn’t reach the 388

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  ligature with enough pressure to actually cut into the coarse braid. She tried pinning the knife between her knees and rubbing the rope against it, but the knife kept slipping down, and it was hard to get it back. She was afraid she’d knock it away from herself and he’d come in and discover her trying to writhe her way over to it.

  She decided to make her hole to get into the crawlspace first.

  The floorboards that abutted the wall by her back were short; they’d been laid last, she figured, cut down from longer boards to fit. If she could pull up three of them, she thought she could get down underneath.

  The rusting nails had rotted smooth by the passing years.

  Finding the nails by touch in the pitch-black, stroking the floor with the backs of her bound hands, was almost impossible, but it occurred to her that all she had to do was find one nail at one end of the plank: the other nails would be neatly arrayed in a line across the width of the board.

  Getting the nails out was like trying to scoop baby powder with a twenty-pound pry bar. She had to dig around the nail heads with the blade, then lever them up with the back of the blade, usually finishing pulling the nail head out with her fingers. Sometimes the rusted heads broke off; those were almost impossible to pull out, but when she pried up the first board, the broken nails offered little resistance as the board rose.

  She almost yelled in triumph when the first came up. Her shoulders shook a little from the effort, and she teared up, but she felt her energy surging as she started on the second.

  She worked faster now, her fingertips torn and bleeding, the sides of her fingers cut repeatedly as the knife slipped through her awkward grip.

  The second board came up in a sudden shower of wood particles and dust that made her cough explosively. She heard his footsteps sprint toward the door.

  She let the plank slide back into its position, covering the Precious Blood

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  debris with her newspaper, and turned flat onto her back, putting her hands on her belly.

  She heard him flick the catch, then closed her eyes, burning with wood dirt, as he threw the door open.

  Her eyelids lit up yellow as he shone the light at her.

  “What are you d
oing?” His voice was almost a scream.

  “Nothing. I . . . I think I’m getting sick.”

  She heard him sniff the air.

  “I smell blood.”

  “I’m getting my period. I need some . . . pads . . . or some cloth.”

  He was silent for a second. She had to have blood all over her T-shirt from her bleeding fingers.

  He sniffed again, then said, “Use newspaper. You won’t be here much longer, anyway.”

  The light went off her face, then flickered back onto it; he was looking around. She held her breath, then spoke again.

  “Please. I really need cloth. I have very heavy periods.”

  “I don’t care. Use newspaper.”

  He sounded disgusted; he quickly pulled the door shut behind him, and she heard the latch close.

  She almost laughed—she could read that fucker like a fucking book.

  Farrar didn’t trust her at all. And he didn’t like that she was bleeding; for reasons he couldn’t explain, it repelled him.

  Disturbed him. There was something unclean about it, un-healthy, unholy.

  He was glad it wouldn’t be long now. He was going to take his time with her, start in the late morning, stretch it out over the day. She was tough, and even though she now looked thin and drawn, he figured she’d go the distance.

  He hadn’t settled on the final details. He’d sharpened every cutting tool he had, from the hooked carpet knife he’d used to mortify himself for Father Martin all those years 390

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  ago through to an ax—not the little hatchet he’d used on the Chinaman, but a full-sized ax.

  He could do it almost any way he wanted. With Anastasia there was plenty of room for artistic license. He had starved her, of course, had fed her bread and water and salt. Now it was a simple question of how to cut her, where to put her up, where to burn her. Ideally, she should be found while she was still in flames. Night would be best, but the location was important, and he still hadn’t figured it out.