Blood Brother

by J. A. Kerley

  “Count of three and up,” the tech said. “One, two …three!”

  Grunting in unison, the two techs lifted the body. A heel of the tech nearest me stepped backward into a scarlet pool and skidded sideways. He went down hard, dropping the body. The concussion popped the head free of the abdomen and it tumbled across the floor and bumped the gurney. The open belly wound vomited intestines.

  “Oh my God,” a young woman from Forensics said, grabbing her mouth and sprinting from the room.

  Someone moved in to bag the head and the body was finally placed on the gurney. I stepped outside and watched the onlookers part to let the ambulance take the body away. Bullard and Cluff worked the crowd, interviewing. I saw Waltz standing in the door of a Tech Services van, the height letting him scan faces in the crowd. He was looking for the face showing too much interest. Psychopathic killers loved to see the reaction to their handiwork. If there was a way to be at the scene, they would.

  Cargyle had driven the van, I figured, the kid leaning against its hood, one of his phones in his hand, the other to his cheek. The victim’s digs belonged to someone with a middle-class income and that almost invariably meant a computer. It would be Technical Services’ job to disconnect the device and pertinent peripherals like backup drives, check for anything helpful. If the victim knew her killer, maybe. If not, Cargyle and his colleagues would shovel a lot of hours into the toilet. But it had to be done. There were a thousand things needing to be done in a murder investigation.

  I saw Shelly step down from the van, knew by his face he’d seen nothing. He started toward the apartment and I stepped in beside him. We went back inside, where Folger was in a corner with one of the ME’s people.

  “I put on my running clothes, left the station, got home ready to fix real food for the first time in days. Now I may never eat again.” She saw me. “Yeeee-hah, there he is. My favorite reverse carpetbagger. I’ll bet the ME is going to find the woman’s equipment got yanked out through the cut in the belly. He looked like he used a chainsaw on her. Ridgecliff’s ramping up, Ryder. I probably don’t need to tell you that.”

  I felt a flash of guilt that I hadn’t yet read my brother’s files. I knew him, did I need to read about his crimes?

  Cluff stepped up, snapping through pages on his notepad. “Angela Bernal. New arrival on the block, a couple months maybe, no one knows much about her. Everyone says she was cheerful, pleasant. Christ, if I had a dime for every cheerful, pleasant corpse I’d –”

  “Check for personal papers, find what she does,” Folger commanded. “This looks like the home of someone with a decent job. Stable. Any indication of a man around?”

  One of the other dicks shuffled up. “I only saw women’s clothes in the closet and drawers.”

  Folger shot a glance inside the house. The Forensics people were darkening the walls and furniture with fingerprint powder. The television had been left as found: on, but muted. It was one of the 24-hour news channels. Folger started to turn away, but something on the TV caught her eye and she stared at the screen with a frown. All I saw was an insert of a weather pattern in the Caribbean, a satellite shot, timelapse, white clouds spinning over blue water. When the insert disappeared, she turned to me.

  “You’re the one supposed to know about the crazies, Ryder. At least that’s how the late Dr Prowse had you pegged. What have you figured out to put us in front of this bastard?”

  “I …don’t have anything yet.”

  She crossed her arms, tapped her foot. Studied my face.

  “Gee. Maybe I’m expecting too much here, but isn’t it about time you started earning your keep?”

  I turned to leave, feeling the heat rise to my face.

  ELEVEN

  I bypassed returning to the station and went to the hotel, ashamed at allowing personal issues to freeze me into investigational impotence; stung by my inability to find the courage to read the reports on my brother’s past crimes.

  I opened the files and spread them on the table and phoned room service for the opening salvo of coffee. A cold shower blasted me awake. I pulled the drapes to blot the visual distraction of the city and sky.

  Me and my brother’s murders, alone at last.

  I took a deep breath, opened the files, and read for four hours. It was a wrenching journey, a surfeit of grief. Twice during the reading I broke down, weeping like a child. For my brother’s victims. For my brother. For my sick and broken family. For me.

  I closed the last report at three a.m., retreating to the bathroom to wash numbness from my face, brush coffee from my teeth, a sonic montage of my brother’s words banging through my head.

  “How did you lure the woman to you, Mr Ridgecliff?” the interrogator asked, the transcript describing Jeremy’s encounter with a victim taken from the river park in Memphis.

  “For that particular lady I used the Dear John Letter concept,” Jeremy replied. “Dejection is best displayed in the shoulders, so mine were slumped. I never overdid the tears angle – a crying adult frightens people – so I’d dab at my nose with a tissue. I liked blue tissues because they enhanced my eyes.”

  And later, when the woman had been shown a knife and coerced to a secure and deadly location.

  The interrogator: “How did you kill her?”

  “She needed the knife. It needed her as well, aching for her supple, coral skin. Jeremy watched her. She needed to display her love of the gleaming blade and had to talk to it before it talked to her …”

  I read another case in my head.

  “I wrapped my hand in a handkerchief spattered with red paint, fumbling with the handkerchief, like I couldn’t get it wrapped. I said I’d cut myself on the fender of my bicycle. I’d picked up a battered old cruiser in a Goodwill store. The bike was so goofy it made her trust me even more: dangerous men don’t ride purple bicycles. My props were always very well considered.

  “Pardon, sir? Was it difficult to lure her? It was easy to lure them all. I simply became the archetypal Sad Child or Hurt Child or Lost Child.”

  And later:

  “Jeremy saw her crying, crying was natural, a purifying act. Then the knife entered the room and started looking for company …”

  Jeremy spoke in first person when describing the baiting of his targets. When it came to the killing, he jumped to third person, a detached voice. No more I, but Jeremy.

  Odd. Or was it?

  I thought back to my many prison interviews, both in college and as a detective. I’d heard point of view shifts before, especially in schizophrenics. But the shifts seemed random, dependent on whatever the mental voices or pictures were saying at that moment, lacking the defining line I heard with Jeremy. Luring, first person. Killing, third.

  In every case, the separation.

  I sat and pulled the reports close again, separating out the interviews with my brother. At places in the reading, I had skimmed the uglier parts, as if jumping over greasy puddles. There had been a rote sameness to the events: the luring mechanisms, the trip to the killing ground, the kill. Read one, you basically read them all.

  “I saw her pause and move in my direction, her interest in my feigned sadness clearly piqued …

  “I saw no one near and dark was falling. I showed the knife and told her to follow me …

  “She stepped clumsily into the garage. The woman was terrified, but it was the price of her betrayal. Jeremy saw the knife watching her …”

  In each instance, the shift in point of view was clearly demarked. The luring mechanism, first person. The trip to the killing ground, first person. For the kill, Jeremy always shifted to third. It was as if he’d walked through a door and changed at the threshold.

  Plus there was the sudden personification of the knife. It seemed a tool in the luring phase, but in the kill phase seemed to assume a strange conjoined personality.

  Was Jeremy so subconsciously ashamed of his murders he had generated the distinction? Or was it something other than a linguistic quirk: Had he given bi
rth to a secondary persona to handle the killing …an avatar of death?

  It made a cold and perfect sense.

  I yanked open the curtains and stared into the waning night, letting my thoughts roam between the buildings, across the light traffic rolling in the street below. What changed within Jeremy’s internal structure to make him shift his descriptions during the interrogations? And if he was generating a secondary persona to handle the horror of his killing scenes, what was the persona like?

  Where inside him did it hide?

  “More cognac, sir?” the waiter asked, bottle in hand.

  “Satisfaça sim,” Ridgecliff-Caldiera replied. “Please …yes. I would much.”

  The glorious liquid slid into the glass like thinned honey. Ridgecliff sat in candlelight at a front window table in the restaurant, spooning a dessert he’d invented with a little help from the chef, a goblet in which a chocolate torte had been placed, the torte overlaid with flaming Cherries Jubilee, white and dark chocolate shaved on to the cherries as they blazed.

  Utterly delicious. He’d dubbed it Cerejas e chocolate no estilo de Jeremy: Cherries and Chocolate in the style of Jeremy.

  He took a sip from the snifter and pulled a notepad from his pocket, flipped to a page labeled Tasks. He scanned to the small box he’d drawn beside the word, Transportation. Cabs were the most agile form of transportation, but every taxi ride was another pair of eyes on him. It was far safer to have a dedicated driver, and Jeremy had placed an electrically charged Latvian on retainer, ready to race to him if the need arose.

  He checked the box, accomplished.

  The next box was Money. He now had a grubstake, but it was New York, and he wanted a decent – no, make that decadent – lifestyle, so when the chance to earn more presented, he’d add to his account.

  The box received a check. The next box was Lodging. Finding a decent midtown apartment had been easy. Money and the correct attitude had that effect.

  Check.

  Beneath Lodging were the words Alice Folger, Lieutenant, NYPD. They were underlined and encircled. Jeremy left the box unchecked. There were several sub-items needing attention before he could mark that chore off his list. He tucked the pad in the pocket of his suit jacket, happy with his progress, well ahead of schedule.

  With time to kill, he thought, taking another sip of cognac and staring at a woman walking past the window. Like so many of the fashionable young women in Manhattan, she had a belly as flat and tight as a painter’s canvas.

  What a magnificent city. Truly a land of opportunity.

  I was deep into sleep when a housekeeping cart rolled down the hall of the hotel and bumped into my door, hoisting me through filmy dreams. An eight a.m. meeting had been scheduled at the morgue. The autopsy on Ms Bernal wouldn’t take place until a relative or relatives had been notified, but the pathologist would do a thorough visual and non-invasive check of the body to ascertain how the wounds compared to those of Ms Anderson. My alarm, set for seven a.m., hadn’t buzzed. I yawned, pulled the pillow close, shot a glance at the clock.

  Saw 8.36 turn to 8.37.

  I howled and bailed from bed, raging at myself for forgetting the prime dictum of travelers: Never trust a hotel clock. Still dressing in the elevator, I sprinted into the street waving at the sea of cabs, all occupied. I ran for a block before a hack plucked me from the pavement.

  It seemed wherever the cabbie turned, a traffic jam waited, vehicles welded to the street with horns blasting. I grabbed my phone, thought, then slid it back into my pocket. The inspection would proceed as scheduled, and calling wouldn’t have made the difference of a raindrop in the Hudson. It took forty-five minutes to arrive at the morgue.

  “The meeting about the Bernal victim?” I asked the guard as I scrawled my name in the log.

  He shrugged. “That started an hour back. Folger’s case, right? That lady’s running on overdrive.”

  I ran down the hall. A section of the floor had been mopped, a cleaning cart straddling the floor as a warning. My shoes skidded on the wet floor and I grabbed the handle of the cart, barely kept from falling. I pushed through the door into the autopsy room. A morgue worker was rolling a draped body toward the coolers. A gray-haired pathologist snapped off his gloves, jamming them in the biohazard disposal. I figured by the look he gave me that I’d been a topic of conversation.

  Waltz, Folger, Cluff, and Bullard looked up from comparing notes beside the autopsy table. “Good of you to show up, Ryder,” Folger said. “Was it you I remember pissing and moaning about being included in every little everything? Or was that someone I forgot to invite?”

  “It was one of those mornings.” A limp and idiotic statement.

  Cluff tapped his watch. “Don’t worry, you’re only off by an hour or so.”

  “Not a world-shaking event,” Waltz said, downplaying my non-attendance. “It was pretty much like Ms Anderson. The womb was gone. There were more extensive injuries. Ridgecliff went wild with the knife, as you saw at the scene.”

  “I saw a lot of blood. They were loading the body when I arrived. I didn’t get into the kitchen, I stayed in the hallway.”

  “Outside looking in,” Bullard said. “I get the feeling that’s a pretty regular occurrence for you.” He tongued something from a tooth, spat it to the floor near my shoes. He winked.

  Folger stepped up. “Let’s all go deal with the rest of the crap in our lives, then check back together this afternoon, three or so, see if anything’s broken loose. That fit with your schedule, Ryder? Leave you enough time for your nap?

  “I’ll be fine, Lieutenant.”

  Waltz had to check the paperwork on another case and we made plans to meet later. I headed out the door, Folger and her two boyos signing forms saying they’d witnessed the procedure. I was twenty paces down the hall when Bullard’s voice called behind me.

  “Hey, Bubba, hold up.”

  I stopped beside the cart of cleaning supplies. It held bottles of disinfectant, a stack of rags, an empty two-gallon pail with a handle on a metal loop.

  “What is it, Bullard?”

  He stepped into my personal space. I felt heat from his body, smelled his breath and body odor. Overgrown bully types learn that trick early on, a wordless challenge. He tapped his watch. “Advice for the time-crippled. You can buy a Jap watch for twenty bucks. It’ll tell you the time if you can’t figure it out on your own. I mean it really tells you, you know?” He winked.

  “I must be missing something.”

  “The watch talks. In a dumb-ass robot voice even you could understand.” Bullard did an imitation: “‘Hey, you hick pussy …it’s eight-o-fucking-clock.’” He grinned like a Jack-o’-lantern carved from tallow, did the taunting wink again.

  I feigned dumb hick amazement. “No shit, Bullard? What’s your watch say?”

  His eyes shot to his wrist. “Nine fort –” He realized what he’d done, said, “You’re a smartass cunt. A little bitch.”

  Bullard hadn’t liked me from the git-go. I’d not cared much for him, either, but so what? We had work to do. But Bullard was one of those keep-pushing guys, needing me to either hold up my hands in surrender or tangle ass, him figuring he’d win by four inches of height, two of reach, and thirty pounds of gym-bred meat.

  My thinking was contrary. His pejoratives insinuated I was as low as a woman to him – not unexpected. I’d noticed him mocking Folger a couple times when her back was turned, pulling at his groin, licking his lips, grinning like the class clown. He knew crude jokes I’d forgotten in high school. “Hey, you heard this one? Two whores and a gorilla walk into a bar …” I’d filed Bullard into the class of men preferring women as receptacles first, arm candy second, companions and confidants, never. It gave me some buttons to push. I side-eyed the cart with the rags and pail, an arm’s length away, gave Bullard a mocking look.

  “Don’t worry, Bullard. I’ll be out of here soon. Back where there’s more testosterone in the departmental structure, if you get my drift.”<
br />
  His eyes flashed. “What are you saying?”

  I lowered my voice as if sharing a locker-room confidence. “I’m talking about sucking Folger’s ass. Some guys can’t climb the ladder on their own so they ride someone’s shirt-tails. But it takes someone special to ride skirt-tails.”

  I figured Bullard for a groin-shot type, and he was: Faking a left shoulder roll as if loading a punch, then the foot snap toward my cojones. I blocked it with my thigh and he had to throw the half-spent punch. It caught my shoulder, spinning me away from the cart, not where I wanted to go. Grunting curses, he fired the right at my eyes. But he was power first and speed second. I ducked the punch and scrambled to the cart. I snatched the pail by the handle, flipped it over his head, and laid everything into a horizontal yank, firing his pudding face into the wall like a cannonball.

  Thunk.

  He spun from the wall with knees collapsing, a skater going into a drunken sit-spin. When his butt hit the floor I expect he saw a half-dozen versions of me whirling above him. One or two of them might have winked.

  I put my hands in my pockets and walked away. When I turned, Bullard was limping in the other direction, heading for the restroom or the parking lot. I didn’t expect he wanted to explain what would soon be a blue-ribbon knot on his forehead.

  After my tussle with Bullard, I walked a few blocks until I came to a subway station, asked the woman in the cage what needed to be accomplished to get to Central Park. Not long afterward I was climbing into the sunlight at Lexington Avenue and 59th Street, continuing toward the oasis at the center of the city, arriving in a few minutes.

  The scent of a vendor’s cart caught my attention and I grabbed a soft pretzel, a Coke, and some spicy chicken impaled on a wooden spike. I sat on a bench beneath an oak tree and ate, trying to fathom the sense of separation in Jeremy’s files, the feeling that he had split into two entities.

  A woman of perhaps twenty-five years of age stumbled by, gums so rotten they couldn’t hold teeth, facial skin like wet fabric printed with sores – the effects of methedrine addiction. I heard frantic, overlapping sirens on the far side of the park, police vehicles racing to an emergency. I realized I was a few blocks from the Dakota apartments, John Lennon’s home until a madman shot him dead outside the front door.