Dark Passions

by Jeff Gelb

  Like all of the nine previous victims, she was heavily pregnant—seven or eight months. A photographer was taking pictures of her from every angle, while a crime-scene specialist in a white Tyvek suit was kneeling down beside her. He almost looked as if he were praying, but he was using a cotton-bud to take fluid samples.

  The intermittent flashing of the camera made the young woman’s body appear to jump, as if she were still alive. Helen bent over her. As far as she could tell without unwrapping her head, she was young and quite pretty, with freckles and short brunette hair.

  “Do we know who she was?” asked Helen.

  “Karen Marie Dozier,” Klaus told her. “Age twenty-four. Her library card gives her address as Indian Hills Avenue, St. Bernard.”

  There was no need to ask if the young woman had been sexually assaulted. There were purple finger bruises all over her thighs, and her swollen vagina was overflowing with blood-streaked semen.

  Klaus said, “Same MO as all the others. And the same damn calling card.”

  He held up a plastic evidence envelope. Inside was a ticket for Son of Beast, the huge wooden roller-coaster at Kings Island amusement park, over two hundred feet high and seven thousand feet long, with passenger cars that traveled at nearly eighty miles an hour. Helen had tried it only once, and she had felt as sick to her stomach as she did this morning.

  “That’s nine,” said Lieutenant Colonel Melville. “Nine pregnant women raped and suffocated in sixteen months. Nine.”

  He paused, and he was breathing so furiously that he was whistling through his left nostril.

  “The perpetrator has left us dozens of finger impressions. He’s so damn lavish with his DNA that we could clone the bastard, if we had the technology. He always leaves a ticket for the roller-coaster ride. Yet we don’t have a motive, we don’t have a single credible witness, and we don’t have a single constructive lead.”

  He held up a copy of the Cincinnati Enquirer with the banner headline, NINTH MOM-TO-BE MURDER: COPS STILL CLUELESS.

  Lieutenant Colonel Melville was short and thickset with prickly white hair and a head that looked as if it were on the point of explosion even when he was calm. Today he was so frustrated and angry that all he could do was twist the newspaper like a chicken’s neck.

  “This guy is making us look like assholes. Not only that, no pregnant woman can feel safe in this city, and that’s an ongoing humiliation for this investigations bureau and for the Cincinnati Police Department as a whole.”

  “Maybe we could try another decoy,” suggested Klaus. He was referring to three efforts they had made during the summer to lure Son of Beast into the open by having a policewoman walk through downtown late in the evening wearing a prosthetic “bump.”

  Helen shook her head. “It didn’t work before, and I don’t think it’s going to work now. Somehow, Son of Beast has a way of distinguishing a genuinely pregnant woman from a fake.”

  “So how the hell does he do that?” asked Detective Rylance. “Do you think he’s maybe a gynecologist?”

  Klaus said, “Maybe he’s a gynecologist who was reported by one of his patients for malpractice and wants to take his revenge on pregnant women in general.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Helen. “Not even a gynecologist could have told that those decoys weren’t really pregnant, not without going right up to them and physically squeezing their stomachs. But if Son of Beast knows for sure which women are pregnant and which ones aren’t, maybe he has access to medical records.”

  “Only two of the victims attended the same maternity clinic,” Klaus reminded her. “It wouldn’t have been easy for him to access the medical records of seven different clinics—three of which were private, remember, and one of which was in Covington.”

  “Not easy, agreed. But not impossible.”

  “Okay, not impossible. But we still don’t have a motive.”

  Helen picked up her Styrofoam cup of latte, but it had gone cold now, and there was wrinkly skin on top of it. “Maybe we should be asking ourselves why he always leaves a Son of Beast ticket behind.”

  “He’s taunting us,” said Detective Rylance. “He’s saying, here I am, I’m going to take you on the scariest roller-coaster ride you’ve ever experienced. I’m going to fling you this way and that. You’re helpless.”

  “I’m not sure I agree with you,” said Helen. “I think there could be more to it than that.”

  “Well, look into it, Detective,” said Lieutenant Colonel Melville. “And—Geiger—you go back to every one of those maternity clinics and double-check everybody who has access to their records. I want some real brainstorming from all of you. I want fresh angles. I want fresh evidence. I want you to find me some witnesses who actually saw something. I want this son of a bitch hunted down and nailed to the floor by his balls.”

  Helen went back to her apartment at three-thirty that afternoon, undressed, showered, and threw herself into bed. It was dark outside, and the snow was falling across Walnut Street thicker than ever, muffling the sound of traffic, but she still couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking of Karen Dozier staring up at her through all those layers of cling film the way she must have stared up at the man who was raping her.

  She thought she heard a child crying out and the slow clanking of a roller-coaster car as it was cranked up to the top of the very first summit. But the child’s cry was only the yowling of a cat, and the clanking noise was only the elevator at the other end of the hallway.

  She switched on her bedside lamp. It was 7:35 PM. For the first time, in a long time, she missed having Tony lying beside her. They had split up at the end of September, for all kinds of reasons, mostly the antisocial hours she had to work and her reluctance to make love after she had witnessed some particularly vicious sex crime. She had found it almost impossible to feel aroused when she had spent the day comforting a ten-year-old boy whose scrotum had been burned by cigarettes, or a seventeen-year-old girl who had been forcibly sodomized with a wine bottle.

  She went into the kitchen and switched on the kettle to make a cup of herbal tea. In the darkness of the window, she saw herself reflected, a slim young woman of thirty-one years and seven months, with scruffy, short-cropped hair and a kind of pale, watery prettiness that always deceived men into thinking that she was helpless and weak. She decided that she needed some new nightwear. The white knee-length Sleep T that she was wearing made her look like a mental patient.

  The kettle started to whistle piercingly. At the same time, her phone began to play “I Say A Little Prayer.” She took off the kettle, picked up the phone and said, “Foxley.”

  “I didn’t wake you, did I?” said Klaus.

  “What’s this? Déjà vu all over again? No, you didn’t wake me. I’m way too tired to sleep.”

  “I’ve just had some old guy walk in from the street, says he can help us with You-Know-Who.”

  “You have him with you now?” She had picked up on the fact that Klaus had deliberately refrained from saying “Son of Beast.” The investigations bureau had never released the information that the Moms-To-Be Murderer had left roller-coaster tickets at every crime scene, nor what they called him.

  “Sure. He’s still here. He says he needs to speak to you personally.”

  “Me? Why does he need to talk to me?”

  “He says you’re the only person who can do it.”

  “I don’t understand. The only person who can do what?”

  “He won’t give me any specific details. Look”—he lowered his voice—“he’s probably a screwball. But we’re really clutching at straws, right, and if he can give us any kind of a lead—”

  Helen tugged at her hair. Her reflection in the kitchen window tugged at her hair too, although Helen thought that her reflection did it more hesitantly than she did. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll be crosstown in twenty minutes. Buy your screwball a cup of coffee or something. Keep him talking.”

  She drove across to Cincinnati Police headquarters on Ezza
rd Charles Drive with her windshield wipers flapping to clear the snow. Klaus was on the fourth floor, sitting on the edge of his desk and talking to an elderly man in a very long black overcoat. The man had a shock of wiry gray hair and rimless eyeglasses. His face was criss-crossed with thousands of wrinkles, like very soft leather that has been folded and refolded countless times. An old-fashioned black homburg hat was resting in his lap, and his hands, in black leather gloves, were neatly folded on top of it.

  Klaus stood up as Helen came into the office. “This is Detective Foxley, sir. Foxley, this is Mr.—”

  “Hochheimer,” said the elderly man, rising to his feet and taking off his right glove. “Joachim Hochheimer. I read about the murder of the pregnant woman in the Post this evening.”

  Helen didn’t take off her coat. “And you think you can help us in some way?”

  “I think it’s possible. But as I have already said to your associate here, it will require a considerable sacrifice.”

  “Okay, then. What kind of considerable sacrifice are we talking about?”

  “Do you mind if I sit down again? My hip, well, I’m waiting to have it replaced.”

  “Sure, go ahead. Klaus—you couldn’t buy me a coffee, could you? I think I’m beginning to hallucinate.”

  “Sure thing.”

  When Klaus had left the office, the elderly man said, “Young lady—you may find it very difficult to believe what I am going to tell you. There is a risk that you will dismiss me as senile or mad. If that turns out to be your opinion, then what can I do?”

  “Mr. Hochheimer, we’re investigating a series of very brutal homicides here. We welcome any suggestions, no matter how loony they might seem to be. I’m not saying that your suggestions are loony. I don’t even know what they are yet. But I’m trying to tell you that we appreciate your coming in, whatever you have to tell us.”

  Mr. Hochheimer nodded, very gravely. “Of course. I consider it an honor that you are even prepared to listen to me.”

  “So,” said Helen, sitting down next to him. “What’s this all about?”

  He cleared his throat. “As you know, hundreds of German immigrants flooded into Cincinnati in the middle of the nineteenth century to work on the Ohio River docks and in the pork-packing factories. Among these immigrants was a family originally from Reuthingen, deep in the forests of the Swabian Jura. They were refugees not from poverty but from prejudice and relentless persecution.”

  “They were Jews?”

  “Oh, no, not Jews. They were a different sort of people altogether. Different from you, different from me. Different from the rest of humanity.”

  “Their bloodline came originally from Leipzig, from the university, which is one of the oldest universities in the world. In the fifteenth century, several physicians at the university were carrying out secret genealogical experiments to see if they could endow human beings with some of the attributes of animals, or fish, or insects.

  “For example, they tried to inseminate women with the semen from salmon to see if they could produce a human being who was capable of swimming underwater without having to breathe. They tried similar experiments with dogs, and horses, and even spiders.

  “Today we think such experiments are nonsense, but we should remind ourselves that in fourteen hundred and thirty, people were still convinced that a pregnant woman who was frightened by a rabbit would give birth to a child with a harelip, or that an albino baby was the result of its expectant mother drinking too much milk.”

  “Go on,” said Helen.

  “Almost all of the experiments failed, naturally. But one experiment—just one—was what you might call a qualified success. A young serving-girl called Mathilde Festa was impregnated with sperm from a horse leech. The idea was that her child, when it was grown, could be trained as a physician and suck infected blood from its patients’ wounds itself, without the necessity for leeches.”

  What a nutjob, thought Helen. To think I got out of bed and drove all the way across town to listen to this.

  “Forgive me,” she said, trying to sound interested. “I thought that leeches were hermaphrodites, like oysters.”

  “They are, but they still produce semen. Some species of leech have up to eighty testes.”

  “Eighty? Really? That’s a whole lot of balls.”

  Mr. Hochheimer closed his eyes for a moment, as if he were trying to be very patient with her.

  “I’m sorry,” said Helen. “I’m kind of frazzled, that’s all. I haven’t slept in thirty-seven hours. And I’m beginning to wonder what point you’re trying to make here.”

  Mr. Hochheimer opened his eyes again and smiled at her. “I understand your skepticism. I told you that this wouldn’t be easy to believe. But the fact is that Mathilde Festa gave birth to what appeared to be a normal-looking baby, except that his skin was slightly mottled in appearance. He was also born with four teeth, which were rough and serrated, like those of a leech.

  “After his birth, the physicians at Leipzig kept him concealed, because the university authorities and the church would have been outraged if they had discovered the nature of their experiments. But when he was four years old, the boy managed to escape from the walled garden in which he was playing.

  “The physicians found him two days later, in the attic of an abandoned house close by, in a deep coma. Beside him was the body of another small boy, so white and so collapsed in appearance that they couldn’t believe that he was human. Mathilde Festa’s son had bitten this small boy and had sucked out of him every last milliliter of blood and bodily fluid and bone marrow, until the unfortunate child was nothing more than an empty sack of dry skin and desiccated ribs.

  “What was even more remarkable, though, was that Mathilde Festa’s son had grown to nearly twice his size. He had been only four years old when he escaped from the garden. Now he looked like a boy of eight.”

  “This is beginning to sound like something by the Brothers Grimm,” said Helen.

  “A fairy story, yes. I agree. If they had strangled Mathilde Festa’s son there and then, as they should have done, that would have been an end to it, and nobody would ever have believed that it really happened.”

  “But they didn’t strangle him?”

  “No—at least two of the physicians were determined that their life’s work should not be lost. They believed that the death of one small boy was a small price to pay for successfully interbreeding one of God’s species with another. They smuggled Mathilde Festa and her boy to Munich, and from Munich they took him to Reuthingen, deep in the forest, where he grew up as a normal child. Or as normal as any child could be, if he were half human and half leech. Mathilde Festa christened him Friedrich.”

  “I hate to push you, Mr. Hochheimer, but it’s getting kind of late, and I’m very tired. How exactly is any of this relevant to the Moms-To-Be Murderer?”

  Joachim Hochheimer raised one hand to indicate that Helen should be patient. “When Friedrich was grown to manhood, he took a wife, a very simpleminded farmer’s daughter who hadn’t been able to find any other man to marry her. They were very happy together, by all accounts, but they were persecuted by other people in Reuthingen because of the strangeness of Friedrich’s appearance and also because of his wife’s backwardness. Children tossed rocks at their cottage, and whenever they went out people shook their fists at them and spat.

  “One day, when she was walking home from the village, a gang of young men attacked Friedrich’s wife. She was pregnant at the time with Friedrich’s first child, almost full term. The young men dragged her into a barn, and one of them raped her. Or tried to rape her.”

  He hesitated and squeezed his hands together as if he couldn’t decide if he ought to continue. His leather gloves made a soft creaking sound.

  “Go on,” said Helen. “I deal with sex crimes every day, Mr. Hochheimer. I’ve heard it all before.”

  “This, young lady, I don’t think that you have heard before. As the young man forced his way into F
riedrich’s struggling wife, her waters broke. Her womb opened, and the baby inside her seized her attacker’s penis with his teeth.

  “The young man was screaming. His friends helped him to pull himself out. But the baby came out too, its teeth still buried in his penis, and even when his friends battered the baby with sticks, it refused to release him. He fainted, and his friends ran away.

  “The next morning, Friedrich found his wife lying in the barn, desperately weak but still alive. Close beside her, sleeping, lay a young man, naked, almost fully grown. Beside him, amongst the bales of straw, lay something that was described as looking like a crumpled nightshirt, except that it had a face on it, a face without eyes, and tufts of hair.”

  Helen sat back. “Well, Mr. Hochheimer, that’s quite a story.”

  “A description of what happened was written in great detail by one of the physicians from Leipzig, and his account is still lodged in the university library. I have seen it for myself.”

  “You think it’s true?”

  “I assure you, it is completely true. The descendants of the family of which I spoke are still here in Cincinnati.”

  “Well, it’s a very interesting story, sir. But how can it help us to solve these murders?”

  “It said in the Post that you have been unable to track down your suspect in spite of a wealth of evidence. It said that you have even tried decoys pretending to be pregnant, but your suspect seems to know that they are not genuine.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Supposing a decoy were to be genuine.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Helen. “We can’t possibly ask a pregnant woman to expose herself to a serial killer. What if something went wrong? The police department would be crucified.”

  “Ah! But what if the pregnant woman were quite capable of defending herself? What if her unborn child were quite capable of protecting her?”

  Helen suddenly understood what Joachim Hochheimer was suggesting. It made her feel as if she had scores of cicadas crawling inside her clothes. At that moment, Klaus came back with a cup of coffee in each hand.