Blood Brother

by J. A. Kerley

  “SoHo. If I don’t get you there in five minutes, Waltz is going to chew my ass.”

  “I can’t imagine Waltz chewing ass.”

  “He does it without words. It’s worse that way.”

  “He’s an interesting guy,” I said, fishing for more info about the sad-eyed detective. “What’s your take on him?”

  Instead of answering, Koslowski pulled to a brick Italianate duplex, a FOR SALE sign in the tiny front yard. I saw one cruiser by the curb, and a battered SUV with NYPD TECHNICAL DIVISION stenciled on the door. Beside it was a van from the Medical Examiner’s office. A blue-and-white was sideways across two lanes to keep gawkers distant, its light bar painting the street in shaking, multihued bursts. I jumped out and hustled toward the house.

  “Hey, Dixie,” Koslowski called.

  I spun. “What?”

  “You asked me what I thought about Shelly Waltz.” He jammed the cruiser in gear. “When it’s nighttime for the whole world, and everyone is asleep, Shelly Waltz flies through the sky on a silver unicorn.”

  “What?”

  But Koslowski’s taillights were already flowing away. Shaking my head, I entered the house. A man and woman from the Medical Examiner’s office stood inside the door, opening a case of equipment. They looked shaken, ashen. They directed me down a hall to a bedroom. I smelled blood and my stomach shifted sideways.

  I entered the room. Like the front rooms, it was devoid of furniture. Shelly was alone, standing above a draped figure in the center of the floor. The white cover was turning red as I watched. Waltz was rubbing his eyes with his palms.

  “What is it, Shelly?”

  He shook his head, lifted the cover. A woman’s nude body. Her eyes stared wide from the center of her own belly. Blood and fascia and yellow fatty tissue surrounded the head, having squirted out when the head was jammed into the wound. I let it all register for a five count, then closed my eyes.

  “We’ve got a bad problem,” Waltz said.

  “Bad as it gets,” I affirmed.

  Waltz let the cover fall back over the corpse. When it fell it puffed out air, swirling hairs on the floor, the same amalgam I’d seen at Vangie’s crime scene: hairs of various colors and textures. Looking closer, I saw them scattered everywhere. On the tile floor, laying atop congealing pools of blood, on the window sill.

  We turned to a thunder of footsteps approaching down the hall followed by Folger’s bray.

  “Waltz? Are you back there?”

  The footsteps turned into three agitated faces, Lieutenant Folger and Tweedledum and -dee from this morning – the hulking Bullard and Abel Cluff, a smaller and older guy with bulging eyes and the forward-pointing facial structure of a stoat. Cluff was wheezing, like he’d run a dozen flights instead of walking up a five-step stoop out front. Both men were in dark suits and white shirts, Bullard’s plank-thick wrists hanging two inches from his sleeves, like he’d grown since he’d bought the suit.

  The trio moved past, stepping around the blood pools and smears. Cluff bent and lifted the cover from the corpse. His eyes showed neither surprise nor emotion and I figured being an older detective with the NYPD, he’d seen every possible permutation of horror.

  “Oh Christ,” Folger moaned when she saw the body. “Tell me I’m dreaming, we don’t have a mad butcher out there.”

  “Removing the head could be an attempt at depersonalization,” I ventured, trying to be helpful. “But inserting it in the abdomen could be a show of control: Behold my power. Or it might –”

  Folger snapped her face to me. “What the hell are you doing here?” She sniffed, wafting her hand past her nose at my scent. “Jesus, they don’t have soap or deodorant where you’re from?”

  Waltz said, “I invited Detective Ryder, Lieutenant. Given his experience with disturbed minds, I thought he might –”

  “He’s not needed,” she said. “Stick him on a bus and aim it south.”

  Bullard pinched his nose and gurgled a laugh. “You may want to spray him with something first.”

  “Have you seen all you need, Detective?” Waltz asked. He shot me a look that said he knew I hadn’t, but it was time to let the Lieutenant win one. I nodded yes for the sake of harmony, and we retreated outside. There were now three cruisers on scene, one ambulance, an ME vehicle, a forensic vehicle, a large command vehicle and Waltz’s dinged-up blue Chevy Impala. The area was cordoned with yellow CRIME SCENE tape. The kid from Tech Services, Cargyle, jogged by, phone to his face and a heavy case slung over his shoulder.

  I said, “Looks like you people are about to ramp into full investigative mode, Shelly. I’ll catch a cab.”

  “One question, Detective. The eyes of the two victims. What do you make of the eyes?”

  “That they’re open?” I said. “Not closed or covered or mutilated?”

  “Yes.”

  “He feels no shame at his actions, Shelly. There’s a good chance he feels pride his victims get to watch him at work.”

  Waltz nodded sadly and turned as white as a man struck by lightning. Photoflash. I spun and saw a photographer a dozen feet distant.

  Flash.

  “Hey, Detective Waltz, s’up in there? Who’s dead?”

  Flash Flash.

  I saw blue squares floating in the air. Waltz gestured for a uniform to move the guy away. The photog retreated on wide and flat feet, grinning like a donkey, holding his hands up in the I surrender pose. He was a short guy, round, round, and round – face, belly, and butt, respectively.

  I looked at Waltz. “One of the local media elite?”

  “That piece of waddling excrement is the infamous Benny Mac. The prize scribbler-slash-camera jockey from the New York Watcher. It’s the newspaper for citizens who don’t like to read. We’ll be in it tomorrow, unless something important takes the space, like a celebrity getting a DUI or a cat that uses a toilet.”

  I watched the guy pad across the street, shooting an arm into the air like an imperious wave. An engine roared to life down the block and a double-parked white Hummer sailed to Benny Mac’s side. He climbed inside, barked some command to the driver, and was whisked away, smirking through the window as he went.

  FOUR

  “Meester Ryder? Room service. I brought breakfas’.”

  The Spanish-accented voice and knocking seemed too close. I felt something hard against my nose, something gritty pressing my cheek.

  “Meester Ryder?”

  My eyes popped open. I was on the floor by the door, nose against the wood, cheek on the carpet. I’d been dreaming.

  “Just a minute,” I mumbled, staggering upright. “Be right there.”

  I saw covers, sheet and pillows trailing from the bed to the door. Having dreams so disturbing I’d try to crawl away from them happened several times a year. The imagery was consistent: moaning shadows, faces comprised solely of teeth, a house where all windows faced inward …dreams generated during childhood.

  I scooped the bedclothes up, threw the pillows and covers on the bed, wrapped the sheet around my naked body to answer the door. If the room service lady thought it unusual to find guests in ad hoc togas, her face didn’t let on. In fact, she beamed with recognition, and grabbed a newspaper from her cart. The woman waved the paper in my face, said, “Ees chew.”

  “No thanks.” I thought she was offering me the paper. “Ees chew,” she repeated, snapping the paper open and pushing it to my face again. “Chew ees famous.”

  I pushed it aside to look at her. “Pardon?”

  “Aqui,” she said, tapping the third page with her finger. I saw a photo of Waltz and me. Beside the photo was a brief article.

  Savagery in SoHo

  New York’s Finest are close-lipped about a woman found with her abdomen sliced open in a vacant SoHo property. Perhaps the gruesome crime scene explains the look on the face of renowned Detective Sheldon Waltz, here conferring with an unnamed colleague …

  At the housekeeper’s request – “Chew so famous!” – I autogr
aphed the article and took my breakfast tray inside. Naked on the bed with plate in one hand, fork in the other, I displaced the bad-dream bilge in my stomach with overcooked eggs and undercooked bacon and yearned for cheese grits with andouille. I showered for fifteen minutes, wishing I were at home on Dauphin Island, a hundred yards from the Gulf of Mexico, cool at this time of year, invigorating.

  I dressed and walked to the cop shop, finding it kin to every station house in the civilized world: agitated bodies and loud voices, the smell of burnt coffee and all-nighter sweat, phones ringing, jammed-together desks piled with files. Waltz was in a glass-windowed office along the far wall. When I entered his office, he held up a copy of the New York Watcher turned to our photo.

  “Must not have been any celebrity malfunctions overnight. You take a better picture than me. Have a seat.”

  I sat. Waltz fixed me with a despondent gaze. “The techs are at their wits’ end, Detective. The hair you noticed on the floor at the scenes? It’s from hundreds of people. Men’s hair, women’s, different races. Plus dozens of fiber types, all mixed together.”

  “What?”

  “They did some tests, figure the killer collected hair from barber shops and beauty salons, fibers from anything. It’s an evidentiary nightmare.”

  “Jeez, Shelly, even if you found something in the room that ID’d the guy …”

  “The evidence would be polluted,” Waltz finished. “No sane DA would bring it to trial. It’s brilliant. How many madmen could figure out a ploy like this?”

  I know one who could, I thought. But to everyone’s good fortune, my brother was in the fortress called the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior, locked up tight and forever.

  Waltz pushed aside files on his desk to make a place for his elbows and flicked a paper at me, Office of the Medical Examiner on the letterhead.

  “The prelims on the autopsies. Both were done last night and side-by-side. Folger and I pushed it through.”

  I grimaced at the bullet-pointed information. “The womb was taken?”

  “Basically, the victims received amateur hysterectomies. I attended the post mortem. The pathologist told me it was like an angry monkey hacking away with a knife. When all that was over, the head was pushed into the wound.”

  The picture that came to my mind was so ugly I shut it off.

  “Jesus. Forensics find anything useful?”

  “We’re screwed by the hairs and fibers on the scene. But we did ID the victim. Dora Anderson, thirty-six years of age. She works for the realtor. She went there to meet a prospective buyer.”

  “Alone? At night?”

  “It’s a fairly upscale neighborhood. The guy must have presented himself benignly on the phone. She felt safe in his presence, obviously.”

  A man who could tear another person apart and still present a perfectly normal appearance and demeanor was a total psychopath, a human chameleon. I shivered involuntarily and tossed the prelim on Shelly’s desk. It felt greasy in my hands, like the vileness of the murder had tainted the paper.

  “You realize our perp hates women, right? More than anything?”

  He nodded. “By removing the womb, he castrated her. I’ve seen my share of gender kills, though nothing quite that extreme.”

  “Shelly, you’ve got a real nightmare brewing out there.”

  Waltz’s phone rang. He grabbed it up. I turned my eyes away and pretended not to listen but, like everyone in the world, cops especially, kept an ear tuned to his voice.

  “I’m in the middle of a …She’s in town? The Chief wants me specifically? No, I can do it. I’ve got to do it, right? Listen, we have a guy here, a specialist in, uh, people with bad intentions. OK to bring him along? Good. We’re heading there now.”

  He hung up. “I know you heard that, Detective. I’d be disappointed if you hadn’t.”

  “I take it we’re going somewhere?”

  “There’s a political convention in a week or so, women from around the country, leadership types. I’m supposed to vet the threats, determine which are hot air, which are truly dangerous.”

  “Threats?”

  “The keynote speaker is Cynthia Pelham.”

  “Holy shit,” I whispered. Cynthia Pelham had been on the American political scene for over twenty-five years. Her saga started at age twenty-three, when the county sweet-potato queen with two years of junior college married a fifty-eight-year-old senator from Georgia.

  By thirty, she was making statements contrary to the senator’s positions regarding women’s right to equal pay and maternity leave. She had three-fourths of a law degree, obtained at night, since she’d had to spend her days on the senator’s arm and smiling the sweet-potato smile at cameras.

  By thirty-five, she had the degree, but not the senator. Following a high-profile divorce, the senator’s allies, of whom there were many, spread rumors that Cynthia Pelham was – depending on the day and rumormonger – a lesbian, a woman who bedded every man she saw, frigid, a drug addict, a drunkard and, according to the New York Watcher, maybe even an extraterrestrial. Ms Pelham’s friends, of whom there were few at that time, simply said, “She grew up.”

  By forty, Pelham was representing a mainly poor congressional district with such concern and passion she was uncontested in the next election. Since she was unmarried, held centrist feminist ideals, and kept her personal life personal, rumors of lesbianism persisted, her denials met with scorn. Websites and blogs sprang up calling for either her vilification or beatification.

  By fifty-two, her present age, she had been convinced by grass-roots support and a generous helping of ambition – never denied – to run for President of the United States. Though bitterly divisive among partisans and ideologues, she wielded enough centrist appeal that odds were even money she’d win.

  A few nights back I’d seen news from a typical Pelham event in Miami. Three-quarters of the crowd were supporters, the others ranting, waving fists, and carrying signs and posters. One showed a mangy female dog with bloated teats, Pelham’s face in place of the dog head. The caption said, “Time to Put the Bitch to Sleep.”

  I said, “How long will Pelham be here, Shelly?”

  “She’s coming to coordinate the eastern seaboard campaigns. The lady will be in and out of town all the next week.”

  “What about the Secret Service?”

  “They’ll accompany Pelham while we vet everything else.”

  “‘We’ meaning you?”

  “Basic security isn’t my problem, a special team handles the bodyguard routine, checking traffic routes and so forth.” He sighed. “The Chief wants me to explain to Ms Pelham’s handlers how the NYPD will keep snakes from wriggling under her door.”

  I nodded my sympathy. Given Pelham’s flashpoint index it would take someone with experience to determine which threats were hot air and which were dangerous. It was nasty work, like dredging sewage with your fingers.

  Waltz stood and grabbed his hat. “Like you heard, I bartered you into the mix. Straighten your tie and let’s get running.”

  The powwow was at Ms Pelham’s NYC headquarters, a storefront near Cooper Union. There were the usual banners and posters and photos of the candidate. The desks were staffed by earnest-looking folks with phones in one hand, pencils in the other.

  We met in a back room with Ronald Banks, a square, bespectacled African-American Secret Service agent in charge of the operation. I took the room to be a place for strategizing, a large map of NYC on the wall, broken down into precincts, voting registrations or projections sticky-taped to the map. There was a round table, a few chairs. Boxes of campaign flyers on the floor.

  “She getting many threats?” Waltz asked Banks.

  “People love her or hate her. The ones who hate her all seem to have rabies. Good luck, Detective Waltz.”

  Our heads turned to a commotion in the work area: Cheers, applause, whistles. Either someone was dispensing free money, or the candidate was visiting. Three minutes later, Cynthia Pel
ham entered our room, two aides de camp in her slipstream. Somewhere along the road the sweet-potato queen had been replaced by a whirlwind in a pantsuit and sensible shoes. She ran to a corner, cellphone to one ear, finger in the other, talking as loud as if she were alone for miles around.

  “Dammit, I don’t care how much money he has, the sonuvabitch is trailing garbage. The day after we take his donation the bastard will be indicted for screwing a goat or something. See if you can piss him off and maybe he’ll give the money to the other side …”

  The second she snapped the phone closed it rang again. She listened for a ten-count. “The answers are, respectively, Yes, Yes, No, Hell yes, and the lobster bisque.” She switched the phone off and tossed it to a woman beside her, a petite blonde with quiet eyes and a square jaw who tucked the phone in a fat briefcase I figured doubled as the candidate’s purse.

  The sweet-potato queen had turned from a pretty girl into a handsome woman, auburn hair now mixed with gray, her form shaded to the heavier side, skin lined with experience. The eyes that looked piercing on television seemed more curious in real life. She aimed the eyes at Waltz and me, moved to us as if pulled by gravity.

  “You gentlemen look official. Am I triple-parked again?”

  Waltz did his best to make his sad face smile. It looked like he was fighting a sneeze. “We’re here because a lot of folks don’t like you, Congresswoman. Men especially. At least that’s what I hear on the news.”

  Pelham laughed, hearty and deep and bordering on bawdy. Unlike many candidates, she wasn’t afraid laughter would mark her as more human than machine, therefore unfit for high office.

  “A lot of ladies don’t like me either. Hell, a lot of people’s pets don’t like me, if I’m to believe my mail.”

  “You do seem to seriously set some folks off,” I said.

  She raised an eyebrow at my voice, then the eyes went serious. “A lot of politicians get hate mail from people who live under rocks, but mine seems to come from the people beneath the people under the rocks. I showed a few letters to Rich Stanzaro when we were primary opponents. He said, ‘I see some strange shit, Cyn, but no one ever wants to cut my tits off.’”