Devon noticed the slip of his tongue. Normally, they would have referred to the bodies as the victims or corpses, but not this time. Loch had bequeathed them the gift of gender-specific pronouns, although no one had uttered their names, yet.
Involuntarily, Devon checked the neatly placed shoes on the rice mat in the mudroom. Beka’s shoes were there, but Beka was outside, dead. She must have fled in a hurry.
Devon’s mouth creased as she fought the urge to remove her shoes as she had done so often before upon entering the house. Instead, keeping partway with Japanese tradition, she slipped Tyvek booties over her shoes. Next she pulled latex gloves over her hands and raised the camera to her eye to take the first of many sceneestablishing shots.
Beka Imamura had been Gabriel Montebello’s model since the early ’80s—long before they had finally married—and appeared in almost every objet d’art in the house. Gabe had said he would make her a star through his art, and he probably had. Whether it was a sculpture, an abstract, or a portrait, Beka reigned supreme even in death, and Devon had the feeling that her friend’s eyes were following her every move through the living room. Twenty-foot ceilings arched above her, and the picture windows reflected the light of the room rather than the moon on the pond outside. Furniture was an afterthought, as if the necessity of sitting down were a curse upon the space.
A path of dark red spatter marks lapped the inside wall almost to the ceiling. It was a stabbing. She saw the Buddha and, raising one hand in line with her forehead, gave an imperceptible bow. There were even spatter marks on his enlightened face. A six-foot-high halogen lamp lay across the floor, and on a rough-cut, marble-slab coffee table sat a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. The house smelled of bourbon and blood.
Devon and Frank walked through the house examining each room, from the front door to the bedroom and back again. Once the sequence of events was clear, she placed the first yellow numbercard, numbered one, under Gabriel’s nine-by-six painting over the fireplace. Lochwood was right; this was where the violence began, under the painting that Gabe had given to Beka for a wedding gift. Her Red Shoes was an oil with a lot of red in it already. Beka had always said that dance was in her blood. The painting had now become more than a metaphor for her statement—Devon could barely tell the difference between the killer’s spatter marks and the painter’s.
She lifted the camera up to her eye and began photographing the room, moving from the painting outward in a spiral. Residue from the blade’s point left an arc of red splotches, indicating that the knife had been raised high in the air and thrust into Gabe several times, but the light color of the spatters suggested that the assault had hit muscle tissue, not arteries or vital organs.
She photographed the bottle where it lay, focusing first on position and then moving in to cover a latent print coagulating on the glass. It was probably too thick to be accurate, but Devon would try to pull the whorls and ridges later in the lab. She scraped the residue of nude color-stick—Beka’s color—creased along the lip of the bottle. With a white number-card by the bottle she photographed the finger and lip prints, then shot the black label—the Jack portion had been torn off and carefully pushed down to the glass. The adhesive had bunched into small ridges where a fingernail had plowed through the paper. The last time Beka drank Jack Daniel’s was in 1984—of that Devon was certain.
Acts of violence have a story line, and Devon knew how to read them. It was her job to paint the pictures that would help Homicide tell the story to the DA, who would later tell the story to the jury. Like a complicated version of the child’s game of Telephone, they passed on the information from one to the other and hoped it didn’t get withheld, suppressed, or ruled inadmissible, because leaving out one part of the story could change the entire ending. Devon rarely felt bothered by the stories she read—it was simply her duty to help the victims speak so justice could prevail.
“I’m done here.” Frank balanced the video camera casually on his right shoulder as he walked back down the hallway. “You need more clapboards?” Devon shook her head, but couldn’t find her tongue. “You okay?”
“Fine,” her voice squeaked.
“It gets kind of rough back there.”
She swallowed. “I’m okay.”
“Just go slow.”
She started to inhale deeply but stopped herself. It wasn’t the sickening sweet stench of blood invading her nose that was making her queasy, but whose blood it was. Frank squeezed her elbow and headed out the door.
The medical examiner’s Ford Taurus station wagon pulled up to the crime scene just as Lochwood and his partner were coming back outside. It was always best to let the Crime Scene Unit shoot the house with as little activity as was feasible, and Lochwood always tried to keep a scene as free of people as possible.
Dr. Pankow was already dressed in the departmental issue paper suit. She hated the things, but lawyers had found so many problems with evidence collection in recent years that police departments across the nation now treated crime scenes very differently. She stamped her feet in the snow and looked at Lochwood coming down the drive. “Brennen, you just get handsomer and handsomer with every gray hair. Why is it men always age so well?”
“Jo, if you weren’t a married woman, I’d tell you.”
She slapped his arm. “I’m going to tell Ken you were flirting with me again!” Dr. Pankow leaned her heftiness back into her car to pull out an equally rotund purple leather medical bag, and Lochwood smiled for the first time since the news that Gabriel Montebello and his wife Beka were dead had reached the Fourth Precinct.
Dr. Pankow sighed as she stood upright. “How come you folks can’t put a moratorium on holiday violence?” Her North Carolina twang strummed words like a bluegrass banjo player made music.
“I was just asking myself the same thing.”
“You just had to call me up outta bed for the first one of the year, didn’t you?” Despite all her years above the Mason-Dixon Line, Jo kept true to her roots. She had once told Brennen that it took too much energy “to talk Yankee.”
“This one’s hitting a little too close to home tonight, Jo.” Brennen quietly told her who the victims were.
“Poor Halsey.” It was the shortest response he’d ever heard her give.
“Don’t say that to her.”
“Course not.”
He held out his arm. “We’re up here.” The big-bodied woman squeezed his elbow tightly in her hand and let him lead her up the hill to where the corpse of Devon’s best friend lay, face up.
There were footwear impressions throughout the house that Devon captured on film; some of them were left by the local authorities who had arrived first on the scene. She was always cautious on this point because it was hard to tell at first glance which footwear impressions pertained to a case. More than one Crime Scene detective had photographed the perfect footprint only to find out it belonged to a paramedic or cop. There had been no need for paramedics tonight.
She took close-ups of the footwear impressions in the living room in hopes that they might later be able to distinguish which bloodstains belonged to the perpetrator. The living room carpet had soaked up too much, though, and Devon knew the tracks she wanted would be farther away from the scene, on the wood floor perhaps, or outside on the pavement now being covered by snow. Blood tended to stick up inside of shoe treads and drip down yards away from a crime scene, leaving nice latents in unsuspecting places. Even when the soles looked clean on the outside there could be blood up in the treads … unless the someone was barefoot, Devon reasoned, like Beka. She placed a small orange cone and turned her mind like a camera lens. Focus. She clicked the frame, then stopped to change rolls and mark the outside of the cartridge with a black Sharpie. When the living room was done, she had shot two rolls.
She turned her focus to the hallway where something, a blow perhaps, had brought him to his knees. Handprints on the floor verified her quickly forming theory. The scene played out in her mind; she could see how h
e crawled away on all fours down the hall toward the bedrooms. Like feet, palms were just as unique as fingerprints; she photographed the palm imprints on the maplewood floor. Next to his struggling crawl were the curved ridges of someone’s bare foot, about the size of Beka’s. Devon clicked the shutter twice, then a third time. She would be able to compare Beka’s feet with the photograph later, when she got back to the morgue.
The hall revealed how the violence had escalated. The floor beneath the samurai sword that had once belonged to Beka’s grandfather had smear tracks on it. He had probably been dragged the rest of the way to the master bedroom. Smears on the wood-paneled walls indicated that the victim had started to struggle for freedom halfway down the hall but had found nothing firm to grasp until the master bedroom doorjamb. His fingers must have gripped the molding, leaving little fingernail crescents in the wood. Devon focused on these elements as if she were adding detail to an oil painting that was anything but abstract—these were the ambient factors of the story she had to tell. Whoever had dragged him had been exceptionally strong. She left a cone by the fingernail marks in the doorjamb so they wouldn’t miss them when it came time to collect evidence.
The master bedroom still had a night-light by the door casting an eerie green glow. Surveying the room in one sweep Halsey snapped the first of several wide shots, then entered. His corpse was wedged upright against the closet door. The stomach wound gaped like an open mouth trying to tell her something she would never hear. Whoever killed him had wanted him dead—very, very dead.
There were no more arcs of spray, just the simple gush of life spewing from the body of a dying man. The face had been disfigured by long slashes across the eyes. In cases where an attack was perpetrated upon an acquaintance or loved one, the eyes were often assaulted, as if this one feat could stop the dead from identifying the murderer.
She leaned down to get a closer look at the marks strangely crisscrossing his chest. The blood had clotted in the wounds, meaning he was not alive when they had been carved. They seemed oddly familiar, but she could not figure out why. She clicked off six photographs and twisted her lip around in puzzlement. Why had this one act occurred after death?
Her camera flashed. She blinked, then angled the light away and to the left of the body before drawing the lens of her Nikon even closer. The light bulb flashed involuntarily.
Focus, she reminded herself. Her eyes felt dry. Stay in control. It wasn’t the gore that was distracting her concentration. She had been on the scene in the TWA Flight 800 crash, been brought in to assist at the Long Island Railroad massacre. She focused the camera once more and clicked the shutter. It was the light flashing that made her think about the party. There had been a camera then, too.
“Shit.” Devon stood up and changed rolls of film while surveying the scene around her. “I should have returned her call,” she told the corpse sadly. “Maybe it wasn’t about Todd. Maybe she was in danger.”
She had said the name—Todd.
Focus. She reminded herself and wound the film. Take your time. She stooped down, looked right at Gabe through the lens of her camera, and reeled off three strobes. One, two, three. Devon’s eyes ached.
CHAPTER TWO
There’s death in that damp, clammy grasp. Oh God! …
There must be life yet in that heart—he could not thus me.
—LORD BYRON, The Two Foscari
The camera illuminated the crowd of New Year’s revelers with three blinding strobes of light, right in their faces. David Bowie was hypnotically chanting the mantra of their age—“1984“—above their heads.
1984. The year they had all been waiting for. Ever since the book had become required reading in high school. A majority of the partygoers had ranted, no, raved about the advent of this year, touting its promise as if 1984 were guaranteed to be a wonder etched on memory’s calendar. In 1983 everyone was hoping that on the stroke of midnight some miracle of society would change the world forever. It was the first important New Year’s for them—the brat pack—the kids who, missing the ’60s, had gotten lost to the ’70s and swallowed up by the ’80s. It wasn’t that they had forgotten that Orwell’s novel portrayed a futuristic science fiction nightmare—subconsciously, they were all too aware of the possibilities technology was already providing their culture—but they were young, full of hopeful delusions. They were immortal.
1984. Devon made her way through the crowd and down the hall. Some guy was leaning on the wall chatting up Aileen, her childhood friend. Devon came to the rescue. “Leenie, can you help me open the front window? It’s so stuffy in here.”
Aileen darted under the confused man’s arm and followed Devon down the hall. They climbed out on the fire escape and watched the sparks of gold and pink and white lights spew across Canal Street. It was as if dragons had entered Chinatown and were setting the night ablaze with scarlet streamers.
Aileen stood against the railing on the fire escape. “Why I come into the city for these parties is beyond me.”
“I thought you were going to find your soul mate this year,” Devon replied.
“If my soul mate’s at this party, his soul is in serious jeopardy!”
“So is yours!” They knocked their beer cans together in a toast.
Every year, between the Gregorian and Chinese New Years, the air on Canal Street crackled like sizzling rice soup. Firecracker vendors hawked their wares long after midnight, and red tissue paper spurted from rooftops like blood across the snow-white streets and alleyways. The night air was helping Devon regroup. For some reason the incessant popping of Zebras, Blooming Flowers, and the occasional boom of a Cherry Bomb echoing deep within the borders of Chinatown seemed to ground her more than the driving beat of the dance music behind them.
“This is not our crowd,” Aileen reminded her. They were both born and raised in rural Sag Harbor—the un-Hampton—where fishermen and artists comingled in semicontentment and mutual resentment of the encroaching rich who were taking over the land. Aileen’s parents had owned the local fish store where both girls learned to bait hooks, gut fish, and flirt with the local boys.
“It wouldn’t be any different in Sag Harbor. We’d be doing the same thing at Bay Street’s Disco.”
“But I could walk home.”
“I like New York. I like this crowd.”
Aileen shook her head at her friend. “They’re a bunch of wannabe artists who don’t know how to make a living in the real world. What are you doing here?”
“Research.” Devon laughed suddenly, realizing that what she had said was true.
“Researching what? Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll?” Gabe stuck his head through the window.
“Going nowhere fast.” Devon swigged the last of her beer.
“I’m tired of going nowhere,” Aileen said. “I want to make my mark, you know?”
“The hardest part is figuring out what mark to make.” Devon looked up to the roof where someone was dangling their feet over the ledge.
“It doesn’t matter what mark you make, as long as you make one!” Gabe advised them. “Like Beka—she’ll be a star. My sculptures, my paintings of her will help make her star—we have a symbiotic relationship.”
“Symbi-what?” Aileen looked at him like he was full of it.
“Two life forms living off one another, providing each with what the other needs to survive. Like the shark and its pilot fish.”
“Whose the shark?” Devon asked him.
“Beka, of course. She’s a man-eater.”
Aileen started laughing. “On that note, I need a drink!”
Gabe shook his head earnestly. “This year is going to be it! I can feel it in my bones.”
“Do you really think things will change because the clock changes from 12:00 to 12:01? That’s stupid.” Aileen headed back through the window.
“Happy New Year anyway,” Devon called after her. She and Gabe stared at each other.
“Does she really think I’m a wannabe artist?”
He was incredulous. “I own two homes.”
Aileen was right that most of these people were not their crowd—they belonged in the Hamptons at summer parties, but they would never make it through the isolation of winter on the East End. Only fishermen, farmers, and real artists could do that. Gabe could do that.
Time hung like the parachute on the ceiling, draping over the loft and ensnaring them in its folds. Devon had no idea what time it was, or how long she had been standing in the crowd sipping her drink and flirting with strangers. Beka was starting to transform herself from one of the dancing mob into the performer that she was—a Japanese version of a Chinese firecracker, an inferno of flashing legs and spiraling hair. Her high heels dug gouges into the loft’s unfinished floor and small chunks of wood sprayed out from under her feet until it looked as if she were making tinder to feed the fire in her soul. There were no low sparks or high-heeled boys—Beka was the only diva in the loft.
Beka began preparing herself for a career as a soloist back in high school, when boys fled the dance floor before the demon erupted and they were suddenly the center of attention. Devon remembered those days, before anyone knew Beka’s name or recognized her face, before she had finally, in one grand tour jété, reached Carnegie Hall and “made it.”
At the Mud Club some guy had once tried to stop Beka from dancing. Hanging onto her wrist he had demanded, “What are you on?”
“Life!” she had answered.
“Where do I get some?”
She had wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him onto the floor—in much the same way she was now wrapping herself around Todd. “Me!” she had shouted over the music.
The same energy was pulsing off of her now, but where Beka had been high on life then, now she seemed desperate to capture it. Devon was not sure what had changed or why.
Awkward on his feet and clumsy, Todd Daniels stumbled alongside Beka’s grace and power. He looked drunk and was obviously smitten with the ebony-haired temptress as her arms wove the air over his head and her legs seemed to float up to her ears. When she twirled, it was as if he were the sun she revolved around. She could make anyone look good, and Todd was no exception. He leapt in the air like a young colt kicking up its heels, and gave a war whoop.
The Weeping Buddha Page 2
