Cutter
Thomas Laird
© Thomas Laird 2001
Thomas Laird has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 2001 by Constable and Robinson Ltd.
This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Chapter One
She runs like someone who knows her business.The full stride,the long legs pumping fluidly.Pumping right toward me.She is only a block away.She’ll be right in my lap in just seconds,and I’ll reach out from behind this convenient thorny elm and I’ll have her.
Why do they run at dusk?Don’t they have any fear about that rush of darkness that comes on so quickly at this hour at this time of year?It is mid-fall.The day dies in a hurry at around 4.30 p.m.
Two hundred more feet and she is on top of me.I reach into my gym bag and I remove the bottle.I hurriedly pop the top and pour the ether onto the wad of balled-up T-shirt.The odor rises so rapidly that I’m almost woozy,but I cork the bottle and I hold the saturated pad downwind from myself.
Fifty more feet and she’ll be here.
The blade is in my right hand.I’ve taken it from my leather jacket’s pocket.No scent emanates from that finely honed steel.
I can’t tell the color of her running shorts nor can I discern the hue of the jacket she wears.It is already too dim.The sand and the water are behind her now and the beach has been deserted for the better part of a month.It is late October,the middle of this preparatory month of the year.Fall is like the fluttering inside a cardiac’s chest.They say that readiness is all.But I can’t remember where I read it.
She is fifteen feet away as I rise from my crouch.In three strides I appear before her in the middle of her running lane.The young woman cannot stop in time to avoid me.I lurch at her and I clamp the soaked sleep-laden cloth over her suddenly oval-shaped lips.
My runner doesn’t even have time to scream.
Chapter Two
He was reading poems to me as we headed toward the Lakeshore. Doc, the PhD copper with the degree in English Literature from Northwestern University in Evanston. He was reading poetry to his guinea homicide brother detective. Some Polish woman who’d just won the Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm, Sweden. I told him the Swedes are better known for big tits and manic depression, but he never skipped a beat, he just went on reading to me until we arrived on scene.
He was driving our new squad car — a navy blue Taurus that any street cheesedick could make as a copper ride in less than a heartbeat. But we’re homicides, so we didn’t usually have to sneak up on anyone’s ass.
We saw the lights and the yellow barrier ribbons as we came to a halt. I saw my temporary partner from a few years back. Jack Wendkos. He worked a double homicide with me when Doc was supposedly retired in order to finish his thesis at that very expensive university, north of the city. Doc never landed a teaching position, so he came moping back to homicide just in time to help me finish off several murders at a place called Cabrini Green. It was the time I lost two women inside twelve calendar months. First my wife, Erin, died of breast cancer. Then the woman I fell in love with later on found a way to get herself removed from my life via a street punk named Abu Riad. But that was another thing altogether.
‘Jack. How’ve you been?’
‘Jimmy. Just fine. I see the senior partner is still breathing.’
‘Hiya, sonny. What’ve you got for us?’ Doc cracked.
‘I don’t know that I can describe this one for you, Lieutenant Parisi.’ Wendkos grinned. It was one sorry-assed grin, too.
‘That bad?’ I asked.
He headed toward the victim.
‘Jesus. Holy Jesus,’ Doc lamented. I mean he truly sounded sad, moved. And he’d seen more stiffs than I had by a far piece.
The plastic had already been removed from her remains, and I felt as if the air had been sucked out of my lungs.
‘Oh my,’ was all I managed. I couldn’t come up with any on-site quip.
She was torn open from the throat to the pubic hair. Now I knew why all the uniforms were keeping their distance from this victim. They didn’t want to become ill: it was considered pussy to lose your dinner in front of a trio of homicide investigators.
I noticed the half-dozen or so stab wounds below the slit that had eviscerated this young woman. I also saw that her eyes were closed. Interesting. Either the knife guy closed the lids, which I doubted, or she was knocked out while he did his cutting.
‘Yeah. Her eyes are closed. I can see that,’ Doc told the forensics officer. ‘See if you can get any prints off the lids or off the eyeballs.’
The evidence copper was not enthusiastic about getting very close to our corpse. He looked like he was becoming a bit green. But he was part of the same fraternity we were and he clenched his cojones and decided he was not going to back away like some of the uniforms had.
Doc put his latex on and so did I. Jack Wendkos had the gloves on when we arrived.
‘Beautiful girl. She was until a little while ago, anyway,’ Wendkos said.
‘The ME is en route?’ I asked Jack.
‘Yeah. He’s on the way. I’m sure he’ll look into an assault. But other than the stab wounds and the gaping slice, it doesn’t appear that she was cut or abused elsewhere. At least I couldn’t make any bruises, contusions or whatever.’
Jack was a blond Polski with an oft-broken nose from his days in Golden Gloves. He took a second at his peak, and the guy who took first in that same bout ruined an otherwise GQ-handsome puss. He’d look like an actor if it weren’t for the mauled beak.
Dr Gray pulled up just then. He strode slowly toward us.
‘Why is it that we never meet socially?’ The doctor grinned. ‘I always get to say hello to you all in front of some flat-on-her-or-his-ass stranger ... What’ve we got?’
He never waited for an answer. He always went right at it. When he found out what he was after, he had some of the quickest response time I’d ever seen from his branch of the department.
‘We’ll have to wait to see on the sexual contact, if there was any. I can’t make a quick visual, Jimmy. Even with the klieg lights it was too hard to see. But it looks like he was a cutter, not a putter.’
It was his little bon mot for a rapist. No one ever laughed. Including Dr Gray. He was a very serious medical examiner.
When we’d scoured the immediate area, we wrapped it up when Gray sa
id his preliminaries were finished. The doctor came up to Gibron, my partner, and Jack Wendkos. It seemed that Jack had been assigned by our red-headed Captain to assist us.
‘She is missing some equipment, Jimmy. Boys, there are some missing parts in this stiff. I know because I took Anatomy. Got an ‘A’ in dissection, too.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked the ME.
‘There are a few organs missing is what I mean. As in major organs that are required to keep the motor running. As in liver, one of her lungs, and the big pump, as well.’
‘Her heart?’ Jack asked.
‘Yes indeed. The crux of her very being. The very subject of all that Valentine’s Day malarkey. The pump that pushes that serum through her arteries — at least, it pushed all that blood around sometime earlier in the day ... I’ll give you a call, Jimmy. Doc. See you, young Officer Wendkos.’
He walked toward his car. He never turned back to us.
‘Don’t even say it,’ I warned Doc.
He wanted to hit me with the FBI attitude. But he had nothing good to say about the FBI and neither of us liked working with the Fibbies. The only Federals we really respected were the US Marshal’s people. Most of the hackers and cutters we got were not nearly as flamboyant or bizarre. We got guys who sliced and diced and chopped, but had an average IQ of about twenty in the hole. No super-villains or geniuses.
‘So is it a sex thing or a control thing or is it all or none of the above?’ Doc mused out loud.
Jack Wendkos snapped his latex and Doc and I involuntarily jerked to attention.
‘That’s a good way to get your ass shot off on a site like this.’ Doc smiled. It was another particularly lame grin he shot us.
‘Sorry,’ Jack told us. Then he walked toward his vehicle. ‘I’ll see you both downtown in a few minutes.’
Doc removed his gloves smoothly and quietly.
‘So you don’t think this cutter eats what he kills,’ Gibron murmured.
I snapped off my pair of latex, and it caught my senior partner off guard, just like Jack had.
‘Goddammit, that ain’t funny at all, Jimmy P.’
He looked spooked, truly scared, so I didn’t press my luck. This had been the most silent crime scene I’d ever worked.
The specialists had the body bagged, and they were putting her aboard the retrieval vehicle. Some people — old-timers — still call it a hearse.
Chapter Three
There was a war for me.There is always a war for a man in this country.It was fought over the usual.Property.Texas Tea,more specifically.Oil.Mideastern black gold.We killed a quarter-million Iraqis.It was like popping mallards in a barrel.
I was a medic.The medical field seems to have been my calling.No pun intended.It took me just six months to get myself canned from med school.It seems I had a drug problem.I say ‘seems’ because I wasn’t the one with the problem—my customers had the addictions,I didn’t.The people at the U were not at all forgiving.They threatened to put the police on me if I didn’t leave the school immediately,so it wasn’t as if I had a choice.Which led me eventually to where I am today.You might say I’m an ‘arm’ of the medical profession.
It was a pity that I washed out of the business.No one’s better with a knife thanIam.I can cut you and you don’t feel the incision until you see yourself leaking all over the floor.I’m that good.No shit.That good.
What I do is called immoral,but I don’t see it as any more horrible than what we did to those poor raghead bastards in the Gulf.They came out of their holes with their hands high in the air begging for us not to slaughter them.They were just as innocent as the innocents I meet up with in my new business venture,so who’s to say what’s murder and what’s justifiable homicide?I’m no lawyer,but I don’t see much distinction between the killings.The government said it was all right so we capped a quarter-million sand niggers.I do a little business on my own and I’m like that gay blade from Victorian England.You have to admit that the line I walked across is rather blurred,don’t you?
It is what I do,after all.And a very good living it is.All I need is a little ether and one workable blade.There are no middlemen on my end.
The remarkable thing is that they all come running,literally running,to me.I never have to seek possibilities.They find me as surely as if I were a human magnet.
All I need to do is wait for them and suddenly there they are.Right at my feet.
And the best part of the whole sweet deal for them is that it is absolutely painless.They never feel the initial incision.Their sleep is always,always undisturbed.
Chapter Four
We were waiting in the weeds because Doc was sure that this guy would hit again. We were not playing by the rule that said we waited until he struck repeatedly so that we could start putting together a pattern. Killers like this guy wanted to come back to a location where they felt comfortable. The Lakeshore was a great place for a hit because there was plenty of natural cover for someone like our guy. Trees, brush, vegetation of all kinds. Plenty of places to lurk behind. Anybody on their own was like the antelope that brought up the drag on a herd. He got picked off as a straggler.
Doc had his headset on and was listening to his jazz station from Evanston. I was the ears for the first hour. Jack Wendkos was parked with another detective in a car near the edge of the beach.
The police decoy’s name was Edna Millett. She was just out of the Academy, so I was nervous about the whole concept of staking her out like that African antelope at the ass end of the herd. She had volunteered for this, and there was no reason for our red-headed Captain to deny her request. Not with all the sexual harassment and discrimination suits that were flying around the City. So she got her wish. Edna was armed, but it would only take a second to slash her throat, and the killer would be back into the weeds before we could come help her.
The ME, Dr Gray, had explained to us that the stabbing wounds below that gutting slit were done post-mortem. In other words, the cutter waited until after the fact to tear her corpse up a little more. Our copper shrinks told us it was a sign of rage. Doc thought our psychiatrists had an uncanny sense of the obvious.
‘No shit, the guy was angry. Who cuts open a live human being, helps himself to her major internal organs, and then gouges the living shit out of her thighs and lower abdomen? No, this guy is definitely an unhappy person,’ Doc cracked.
Wendkos raised me on the hand-held radio.
‘Anything, Jimmy?’
‘Doc is listening to Thelonious Monk. He always tells me who it is I’m not hearing. Him and his headset.’
‘Let me hear from you. I’m getting nervous over this kid Edna ... When is she due?’
‘In about two minutes. You got any shakes from where you two are sitting?’
He was paired with Neil Pierson, a brother Homicide.
‘Nothing. Slow night.’
I could hear Wendkos’s partner rustling some papers. Either a newspaper or some fast-food wrappers. It was hard to tell over the hand-helds.
I clicked off.
‘Dave Brubeck.’ Doc pointed to his headset. ‘“Blue Rondo a la Turk”.’ He smiled.
He started bobbing his head like a teenager whose ear was attached to a boombox.
Then we heard a rustling about twenty yards straight in front of our position, which was behind two thick oak trees.
‘It’s a little early for Edna, ain’t it?’ Doc asked when I tapped his shoulder twice.
He tore off the headphones and clicked off the radio in his jacket pocket.
‘Edna? Where are you?’ I asked into the headset I put on. Edna was hooked up with a small earpiece and a microphone on top of her bulletproof vest and windbreaker.
‘I’m about two hundred yards from your position by the trees ... Youare at those twin oaks, right?’
She sounded as nervous as I was. She was a twenty-four-year-old kid. An ex-stewardess who thought crosscountry flights with geezers who told sexually suggestive jokes to her were a
giant drag. So she entered the Academy and became a copper.
‘We’re right where we’re supposed to be. There’s someone else between us and you. Copy?’
‘Where?’
‘About fifty yards to forty yards in front of us. You want us to check him and abort?’
‘I’m running out of distance. I should be almost on top of him.’
‘Fuck it, Edna. If it feels wrong we’ll pop him before you go another step. Say it now. Hurry!’
‘I’ll keep going. Pull up behind him. Copy?’
‘We’re coming out, Edna. Keep your eyes open and palm that fucking Nine.’
I radioed Wendkos we had a shake. I told him the approximate location of that sound I heard, and then the four of us were closing the ground between the noise and Doc and me. Wendkos was approaching the intruder from the east; we were headed north. There was a lot of undergrowth between us and Edna and between us and whatever was a few feet in front of us. It was a black night. No moon. Total cloud cover. But we couldn’t hit whoever was crunching through the vegetation in front of us because he would bolt, and then we wouldn’t know if he had bad thoughts about our young ex-stewardess.
Forty yards into our sprint and I heard her.
‘Don’t you move!’ she shrieked loudly enough for Doc and me to hear clearly. But we still couldn’t see her. Too much greenery still obscured her.
In fifteen or twenty more strides we were in a clearing and we could now see Edna. She had assumed the shoot position, her hands and arms extended before her. She had the Nine gripped in both hands, and it was pointed straight ahead of her at a kneeling figure.
When we finally got close enough, we saw that the kneeling man was wearing only a T-shirt and a pair of gym shoes. When Doc flashed the big light on the guy, we saw ‘Why Bother?’ printed on the back of the white T-shirt.
We rushed around him and saw that he had no pants or underwear on. He was quivering like a pooch that had been left out in a thunderstorm.
Cutter Page 1
