by Ingrid Black
My own view was that killers simply took their opportunities for fun where they could find them, and in a country as segregated as the United States they were inevitably going to find most of those opportunities in whatever particular sub-group they belonged to. There was nothing profound about it, it was merely a reflection of where they were at.
Or was that just an example of me and Burke finding different ways to describe the same phenomenon?
In addition to all this, there was a list of those who had been present at the execution of each prisoner, and there used to be a description of the prisoner’s chosen last meal until the publication of that information was deemed insensitive and ordered to be kept secret. Though why the revelation of a psychopath’s Big Mac and fries should be considered out of the bounds of decency, whilst the final degradation and suffering of victims at the hands of these same losers with a grudge against society was published for all to see, was beyond me.
Depressed, I read through Howler’s final statement again - the expressions of regret, the best wishes for the future for his friends and fellow inmates and guards, the born again claptrap - looking for something I couldn’t be certain I would recognise even if I saw it. Whatever Howler had done to get Kaminski on his scent, I still didn’t have enough information to determine. All this effort, and I was no closer to an answer.
I scraped back my chair in frustration and roughly yanked open the door of the fridge to get another Coke. Or better still, a beer. The fridge shook in protest at my delicate, lady-like touch, dislodging some further sheets of paper which had been pushed into the gap between the top of the fridge and the microwave that sat up there.
I caught them as they fell. I saw at once what they were. They were brochures for house sales. Detached Victorian villa in Rathgar and Ranelagh. Edwardian semi-detacheds in Dalkey and Sandycove. Period features, original fireplaces, en suite bathrooms, fitted kitchens. I guess house hunting wasn’t as on the backburner as I’d thought.
Chapter Eleven
“You’re going bald,” I said when they arrived at the door an hour later.
“Bald is sexy,” growled Healy.
“Whoever told you that must’ve had one sick sense of humour.”
“Stop talking nonsense, woman, and bring me some food.”
It was after two and Healy’s car had just pulled into the driveway with Fitzgerald in the passenger seat, and I’d got up from the kitchen table, where I was still reading, to open the door for them. The scent of the sea was in the breezeless air.
They both looked spent. Not sleeping tends to have that effect. But as it happened, Healy was right. His hair may have been thinning and greying a little, but it made him look more attractive. These days he almost looked distinguished.
He was nearly fifty now, a veteran of many cases, and remained the one person in the department that Fitzgerald probably felt most comfortable with, the one she related to and could talk to. He’d never had the same problem working for a female Chief Superintendent that some of the other members of the team did, and just as important he’d never had a problem with our relationship. Plenty of the others either found it threatening or a vehicle for trademark crude humour. Healy just regarded ours as a normal relationship like any other.
We often found ourselves eating together when they were working a case.
Tonight he headed through to the tiny kitchen, and threw himself into a chair.
“What a day,” he said.
I saw Fitzgerald’s eye move to the pile of property brochures which had fallen on me from the top of the fridge, and then look at me sharply, like I’d caught her out.
“It’s fine,” I said in a low voice.
“What’s fine?” said Healy, not noticing anything was wrong.
“Supper,” I said.
“I should think so,” he said. “A man comes in after working hard, he expects to find some decent chow waiting for him at the table.”
“I’ll get your pipe and slippers later, good master of mine,” I said. “Meanwhile, why don’t you help yourself to a cold drink whilst I get the food ready?”
“Beer?” he said hopefully.
“You’re driving,” said Fitzgerald.
“Drat.”
I took the various trays of pre-prepared food from the fridge and began to scoop them out onto plates – cold chicken, potato salad, olives, hummus, pitta bread.
Red Ned was right. I was turning into a housewife.
“What’s all this?” said Healy, lifting a sheet and peering at it.
“Just some research I’ve been doing,” I said.
“Death Row Killer in Final Appeals To Texas Governor,” he read aloud. “You know, I sometimes think it wouldn’t be such a bad idea if we had the electric chair here too.”
“They don’t have the electric chair in Texas,” I said, taking it neatly from him.
“They don’t?”
“Lethal injection,” I said. “Sodium Thiopental to sedate the prisoner, Pancurium Bromide to relax the muscles and collapse the lungs, Potassium Chloride to stop the heart.”
“You really know how to make a girl look forward to her food,” said Fitzgerald.
“Oh, I don’t know. It doesn’t sound too bad,” said Healy. “Not compared to what they’ve usually done.”
“All assuming you get the right man,” Fitzgerald pointed out.
“That’s true,” he admitted. “Do you remember that guy in Churchtown?”
“Parker?”
“No,” said Healy. “Parker was Islandbridge. The Churchtown one was supposed to have killed his wife. Maybe it was before your time. They all merge into one after a while. Anyway, everything checked out. He did five years before the real killer was finally picked up. Standish something, that was his name. He’s remarried now. Owns a pub. Bought if with his compensation money. If we’d had capital punishment, he’d probably have been hanged.”
“Exactly,” said Fitzgerald. “The graveyards in Texas must be filled with men like Standish something.”
“But you can’t help wishing sometimes,” said Healy, “that there was some punishment in place that even came close to matching the crime. You kill someone now, and what do you get? Ten years, if you’re unlucky. And it’s not exactly a Siberian gulag when they’re in there. More like a holiday camp.”
“Don’t let’s go there again,” said Fitzgerald, raising an eyebrow across the table at me. “He gets so bad sometimes he even starts to sound like you.”
“I’m serious,” said Healy. “It makes you wonder what the point is of catching them when all they get is a slap on the wrist and a few years somewhere warm and cosy, with all their meals cooked and paid for. And what then? Freedom, so they can do it all again.”
“And as I’ve told you a hundred times before,” said Grace, “it’s not our business to worry about that. We can only do our job. If the courts and the government don’t do theirs, that’s not our fault. We’ve done all we can.”
“I know, I know,” said Healy. “It just pisses me off.”
“Sounds like you’ve both had a rough 24 hours,” I said.
“The first 24 hours are always the worst,” said Fitzgerald. “Then routine kicks in.”
“You manage to find out anything more about her?”
“Did we?” asked Fitzgerald, talking to herself. She frowned. “I suppose we must have done. We’re building up a picture, let’s put it that way, but I still couldn’t honestly say that I have the slightest idea what she was like. She was 28. Blonde. Single. Not much by way of family. Good-looking. Drove a Ferrari. Lived in a recently converted chapel. She worked for one of those small theatre companies down in Temple Bar, off Fishamble Street.”
“An actress?”
“She had ambitions to be an actress, she’d taken a few small parts in some plays, even got her name onto some of the posters, but her day job was in publicity, PR, fundraising. To be honest, I don’t know what she did exactly. You know what these groups are li
ke, everyone does a bit of everything, it’s hard to pin them down.”
“There can’t be that many small theatre companies in Temple Bar doing so well that their part time actresses can afford to drive a Ferrari and live in a converted chapel,” I said.
“It’s not in such a terrific area. It’s in the Liberties. But I take your point. The money came from her father,” explained Fitzgerald. “He’s a widower, made his money in the building trade, she was an only child. I think he probably spoiled her a bit.”
“Was it the father who found her?”
“No. That pleasure went to a girl she worked with in the theatre company. Name of Kim. She was the one who told us about the ring. She says she hadn’t heard from Marsha for a couple of days, so she went round last night to see what was wrong. When there was no answer, she made her way round the side of the church, climbed up to look through a window, and saw what seemed to be a body lying across the bed. That’s when she spoiled our plans for an evening at the theatre by calling 999.”
“A starring role at last,” I said sadly.
“My words exactly,” said Fitzgerald.
“Did she have a boyfriend?”
“Did she ever,” said Healy between mouthfuls of food.
“Busy lady?”
“Seems like Marsha Reed was something of a swinger,” Fitzgerald explained. “And not just your average swinger. From what we’ve been able to learn, she was heavily into the whole S&M scene. She belonged to some private members club in town that puts on parties for broadminded citizens who like to get their kicks in the modern equivalent of a mediaeval torture chamber. I exaggerate slightly, but only slightly. She was a regular visitor.”
“Plus there was a diary,” said Healy, “with dates and details of a whole bunch of men she’d been with, some women too, and what she’d been doing with them.”
“Names?”
“Mainly initials,” said Fitzgerald.
“Meaning it’ll be all but impossible to trace each one,” I said.
“I certainly doubt they’ll be lining up at HQ to identify themselves to the police.”
“It’s a lead, at any rate,” I said. “You’ve had less to work on in the past. What’s your feeling? You think she met her killer that way?”
“Hard to tell. It’s certainly a dangerous world to be getting into. On the other hand, it could be simpler than that. You know what it’s like.”
“Sado-masochistic sex, or murder?”
Fitzgerald smiled.
“Both. But seriously, sometimes we make things more complicated than they have to be. It could be unrelated. We’re going to try and track down her movements, who she was seen with last, that sort of thing. We have statements coming out of our ears already, but nothing much that leaps out of the chart as yet. If anything, the club complicates things.”
“How?”
“Because how do we know what’s part of her consensual sex life and what was part of her murder? Butler couldn’t even say for sure whether Marsha was sexually assaulted. There were certainly signs she’d had some very rough sex a few hours before she died, but there were also old vaginal and anal abrasions that had healed up that suggested she wasn’t exactly a stranger to rough sex. Then there’s the cords around her ankles and wrists. Were they restraints used to keep her under control or just a part of her usual lovemaking routine?”
“I see what you mean.”
“Butler says the cords were tied quite lightly, considering. The bindings weren’t excessive. They were sufficient to render her helpless, but not any more than was needed to restrain her from getting away. Tying her to the bed looks like a means to an end rather than an aim in itself. As for the bag over the head, it’s not exactly the stuff of romantic fiction, but it’s not unheard of in the kind of circles the victim was moving in to use partial suffocation as an aid to orgasm. What if this was just a sex game that went horribly wrong?”
“Sex games don’t generally involve one party cutting off the other one’s finger,” I pointed out. “If she died accidentally whilst having weird sex, and he panicked, that’s one thing. But post mortem mutilation’s something else. So is theft. You didn’t find the ring?”
“No,” said Healy. “And that wasn’t all that was missing.”
“It wasn’t?”
“She also had a necklace that she’d started wearing the last three months or so,” explained Fitzgerald. “Never took it off, apparently. The taxi driver confirms she was wearing it when he dropped her off. That wasn’t at the scene either.”
“So your guy took a ring and a necklace?”
“Maybe we’re looking for a psychopathic jeweller,” said Healy.
“That’s not funny,” said Fitzgerald.
“Never said it was.”
“And that’s not even mentioning the cash,” I said. “You don’t really think theft was a motive, do you?”
“Right now, I can’t see a motive at all. We just have to concentrate on eliminating names. The reasons why can come later.”
“Unfortunately,” said Healy, “the swabs came back clean for semen, so that’s not going to help. Either whoever she had sex with that night wore a condom, or else they were using some other kind of object for penetration. And let’s face it, from what we saw and learned today, that could be practically anything, animal, vegetable or mineral.”
“We’re just going to have to put the frighteners on all those bondage-type groups around the city,” said Fitzgerald. “Crank up the pressure on them to come up with names.”
“Surely there can’t be that many of them around,” I said.
“Where have you been?” said Healy. “The things people get up to are limitless. When I was in vice, we raided this place that made the club Marsha belonged to look like a kids playground. There were all these men there chained up like slaves.”
“You see everything in this job.”
“You’re not lying,” said Healy. “They were even wearing these tight loincloths that made them look like babies with nappies on, and they had pins and chains stuck in places you wouldn’t believe. Or places you probably would believe, knowing you. And you want to know the worst thing about it? They’d all paid for the privilege of being there. There were businessmen, priests, teachers.”
“Men are nuts,” I said.
“You’re only realising this now?”
“What can I say?” said Healy. “Everyone needs a hobby. You women have shopping, we have perversion.”
“Give me shopping any day,” said Fitzgerald with feeling.
“Marsha Reed obviously didn’t think so,” I said darkly.
“No,” she acknowledged.
“Do you have a picture?” I asked.
“Of Marsha?” she said. “I’ve got one somewhere.”
“Here,” said Healy, reaching into his pocket and taking out his wallet. He opened it up and slid out a small snapshot. “Her friend Kim gave me this one.”
I took the picture from his fingers – and gasped. A blonde-haired woman smiled shyly out of the photograph at me, and I was struck again by incomprehension at how the dead could not know what was going to happen to them. How could they be so unsuspecting?
How could they smile?
But it wasn’t that which had made me gasp.
“I do know her,” I said.
“You knew Marsha Reed?” said Healy.
“I told you she recognised her name,” Fitzgerald reminded him.
“So where’d you meet her?”
“She was in my class,” I said. Then, realising Healy probably didn’t know what I was talking about, I explained: “I took an evening class for aspiring writers last year at a college in York Street. I was meant to be showing them the disparity between real police and FBI procedure and what you read in books and see in movies. But I’m not much of a teacher. We spent most of the time just shooting the breeze and eating chocolate chip cookies. One of the students used to bring them in.”
“What about Mars
ha?” said Fitzgerald.
“It’s like you were saying earlier,” I said. “I never felt I really got to know her at all. She did plenty of talking, don’t get me wrong, she was fascinated by the whole subject, used to ask detailed questions, take notes. But she never talked about herself, except to say she was writing a novel.” I looked again at her photograph, and shook my head. “I’d never in a million years have pegged her down as the kinky swinger type.”
“Do you still have a list of the other students?” asked Fitzgerald.
“Somewhere.”
“Try to dig it out,” she said. “The more people we can find who knew Marsha, the better the picture we can draw up of her.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow when I get home. And if can’t find anything, I’ll ring the college. They should have contact addresses and telephone numbers. Ironic, isn’t it? They wanted to know more about authentic police procedure, and now they’re going to get a lot closer experience of it than they ever wanted.”
“Hence the old proverb about being careful what you wish for,” said Fitzgerald.
*************
“What’s up?” I asked her later as we stood in the door, watching Healy reverse out of the drive and swing the car round to face the main road.
On the other side of the cul de sac, another curtain was twitching as one of Grace’s neighbours hurried to discover what depraved debaucheries could be going on in the house opposite. Cars coming and going after midnight indeed. Was nothing sacred?
“Nothing’s up,” she said innocently.
“Come on, Grace, I know you better than that. What’s eating you? It’s not the brochures, is it? You don’t have to worry about that. It’s way past the time we found a place.”
“Really?” she said. “I thought you’d be angry.”
The look of relief on her face made me feel guilty.
