Jill kept her parka on as she hurried through the jumbled, mustard-colored hall, cringing at the sharp formaldehyde smell of her anatomy lab days.
Alex and Kerri waited in the autopsy room. Having barely slept last night made them look like they hated the place worse than usual. They were listening as a white-coated assistant M.E. scrawled on a freestanding female body diagram.
Kerri sent Jill a sickly smile, rolled her eyes. She looked almost out of it.
“Bizarre,” the M.E. was saying. “Very weird.”
He stopped for a moment as the detectives introduced Jill. His name was Eddie Kim. He smiled, then returned to his felt-tip pen and his diagram.
Stab, stab, stab. He was X-ing the wound sites, pounding with his pen.
Celie’s wounds. Jill felt nausea rise, felt each stab of the pen pound into her. She inhaled, tried looking back out the window to the hall she’d just rushed through.
Big improvement. Long, stacked steel boxes; gurneys holding toe-tagged bodies under sheets. In New York City, there’s even gridlock in death.
She looked back; tried to focus on the hand-waving M.E. Most of the bodies on the tables around them were covered, but two were exposed and open, literally - slit like fish in the shape of a Y from the shoulders to the pubis. The ribs of one were pulled apart, exposing organs another assistant M.E. was pulling out. His bone saw buzzed; he resumed dissecting.
Jill wondered miserably how anyone could do this.
“…some knife,” said stabbing, X-ing Eddie Kim, whose eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses looked grossed-out. He stepped back and grimaced at the riddled human diagram. “Nastiest blade I’ve ever seen.”
Jill frowned in confusion. “You saw it?”
An overhead light flashed on Kim’s glasses. “Patience,” he smiled, giving a little bow. “You’ll see it too.”
Jill stared at him.
“You got here just in time,” Kerri whispered to her, looking relieved she was there. Alex watched as creaking wheels approached, and behind them a technician pushing a covered gurney.
Celie coming. Oh God…
“We were lucky,” Eddie Kim said, helping the technician lift the lifeless, gray-shrouded form to an examining table. “It was forty degrees when they found her and we put her right in the fridge. I worked in there. Figured it out in five minutes.”
From the bottom of the sheet Jill saw small, tragic feet with pink toenails protruding. This was so bad, so terrible. An accidental victim who just happened along.
Kim pulled the sheet all the way back.
“Oh Christ,” Kerri gasped.
Jill went numb.
Celie Jarrett’s face was frozen in the horrifying moment of her death. She was a gray, silently screaming doll with matted red hair. Her Y incision from her autopsy had been re-sewn and looked like a tightly laced sneaker. In her naked starkness, slashed, ragged punctures gaped from her throat to nearly her hips.
“Killer was smart,” Kim said, reaching for what looked like a gas station dipstick. “Tried to make this look like a maniac did it. Watch.”
He pushed his flexible dipstick into one wound after another. Showed them shallow stabs above Celie’s diaphragm, and deeper stabs below it.
“That tell you anything?” he asked, looking at Jill.
She had sunk onto a tall stool, looking ill. “Ribs are harder to stab through,” she breathed, her voice cracking. “Soft tissue below is easy. Looks like he got her abdominal aorta. Killer’s an ice-cold thinker.”
Kerri and Alex watched, grim, as if this were a first for them.
“Yes!” Kim said, getting excited. This was unusual for him too. “Killer also knew how to avoid getting blood on himself. See this here?” He maneuvered Celie, pushed his dipstick into a stab toward the back of her neck, then, leaning, into a second wound in the back of her right thigh. He pulled out his dipstick to show them.
“Three-quarters of an inch, both shallow with the ends angled backward - the only wounds not on the front of her body, the only ones sloppy-sliced. She was running from him and these were his first cuts, which make him right-handed. The angle and depth also suggest he kept his elbow straight, kept his distance from any possible spatter.”
In a straight-armed lunge Kim showed how the killer must have stabbed. Jill cringed. The horrible, heartbreaking image of Celie’s pain and terror tore at her.
“He yanked her by her hair, brought her down on her back. Now he goes for the kill from behind her head, judging by the angle of the stabs. Look at these.”
The dipstick moved to Celie’s belly and into punctures here, there. “This one’s four inches, this one’s six, this one too. She’s fatally wounded now, gushing like a fountain. Judging by the arterial spray at the scene, none of it hit him if he was behind her.”
Kim frowned, pointing back up to the ribs. “So! Why do you think he kept going with these shallow stabs up here? You can tell they came last because they didn’t bleed. He’d waited half a minute, she’d bled out and was dead, why bother?”
Brand sank onto a stool by Jill. He looked more pale than Kerri, who’d been clench-jawed, scribbling in her notebook.
“You said it.” Jill found her voice. “Sonofabitch wanted to look crazed, not like someone who knew what he was doing.” She touched Celie’s hand, aching, silently telling her sorry, so devastated and sorry. Then withdrew her hand, clenched it into a fist. “So where’s the knife? You said-”
“Coming.” Kim smiled. “Oh, here we go.”
The technician was back, stirring a beaker of pale, steaming liquid. Kim took it. “Thanks, Juan. Something else -- would you get me a tray for this? And cover it. Find something dark.”
Juan said sure and left. Kim gave the beaker another stir and said, “Okay, the knife. See, with deeper stabs like this stomach one it didn’t make sense that the tops gaped so wide, then seemed to narrow and curve back on themselves.” Kim waved his dipstick. “Wiggly incision tracks, weird! So - watch.”
He started pouring the pale liquid, filling wounds up and down Celie’s chilled torso like a housewife pouring batter. Jill left her stool and stood, breathing shallowly, and both cops stared. The stuff Kim poured smelled familiar, but who could tell in this place’s reek of formaldehyde?
“Paraffin!” Kim exulted. “Good old melted wax. Hardens fast.” He finished pouring, placed his steaming beaker by Celie’s head, and peered impatiently at her belly. “Takes longer for the deeper cuts to chill. I’ll start up here by her collarbone.”
It takes a lot to astonish cops. But astonished Alex and Kerri were when Kim extracted the first, pale wound replica and held it up. “Yow, looks like a corkscrew tip.”
Wheels screeched, and Kim turned to thank Juan who was back again, pushing an instrument table covered with dark muslin. Juan left, and Kim placed his first wax replica to the far left on the table’s dark surface.
Jill forgot to breathe as Kim eased out more replicas and placed them in a line. From left to right the dagger-forms grew longer, until the last one on the right showed the whole grotesque, S-shaped blade. No question, it was the missing one.
The glass doors thudded. Dark gusts blew at the red velvet board.
“Must have scared the pirates.”
With his forceps Kim held up the long dagger form, gaping at it. The wax blade glinted under his track light.
“Jody Merrill’s apartment, it has antiques?”
20
They spoke, the three of them, in solemn tones in Kim’s small office while he rushed to his next case. It was their first chance since Jody’s death to catch up on the big picture.
Both detectives thanked Jill again; couldn’t stop about how they owed her and David big time. With no warrant for Jody’s apartment, her death might have still seemed an accident or suicide. They wouldn’t have known she’d been murdered, wouldn’t have discovered Celie. Twenty-four hours would have been lost, maybe more.
“What a head start you two gave us,” Kerri sa
id. “If a crime isn’t solved in the first forty-eight …”
“The trail goes cold,” Alex finished the police statistic. His blue eyes looked watery and sagged with fatigue. “Especially something like this with a boatload of suspects.”
Jill looked questioningly at him, and he shrugged. “Yeah, we like Reid best for this, but everything we have on him is circumstantial.”
Kerri explained, drooping in her chair: “Forensics found one of Reid’s hairs tangled in Jody’s ring, which unfortunately proves nothing since she was all over him at the party, then struggled with him in the street when he tried to get her into a car to take her home.”
Jill nodded, as if in a daze. Flashes of Celie, naked and mutilated, flashed horrifyingly in her head. And Jody, lying so piteously on the ER floor. She saw them playing with the sick kids again; then the horrid images stormed back.
Alex blew air out his cheeks. “Anything helpful turn up with Edna?”
She gave an uncertain shrug. Fought her grief and nausea. Forced her mind back to that dim, dusty parlor.
“Edna heard a crash around eleven. Saw someone with dark hair and dark pants chasing Celie down the back stairs. Didn’t see the killer’s face, she was half asleep.” Jill gave a shrug. “Edna’s also an unreliable witness.”
She got out her phone and played its recording: “That dreadful man... Well I THINK it was him. That Rick fellow…”
“Did you see his face?”
“Whose face?”
Jill fast-forwarded. “Deceased? I should say not! Mr. Polsen is right here with me in that lovely urn.”
Kerri shook her head and took notes.
Alex brooded. “Celie’s boyfriend Rick Fowler’s been interviewed. An out of work actor so drunk after a fight with Celie they had to carry him out of the bar he was in - and on surveillance tape from ten to midnight.”
Scratch Celie’s boyfriend, Jill thought, and inhaled. “What about Eric Rennie?”
Kerri described other detectives’ interview with Rennie, and the fact that he had no alibi for the time of the murders. “He said he left the party for home and was alone, mad and getting drunk. Ran to the hospital when he heard, but has no one to verify his whereabouts when Jody and Celie were attacked.”
Kerri grimaced. “He’s lawyered up, and we have nothing on him. Zilch. He shouted at the detectives that no woman was worth endangering his career - and with a narcissist ego like that, they practically believed it.”
“Still, no alibi,” Jill repeated, pursing her lips. Then she frowned.
“His hair is dark brown, which could look very dark at night, and like Reid he’s right-handed. I saw him use his right hand on TV.”
Kerri’s phone buzzed. She answered, listened, and hung up.
“That lawyer Jay Arender,” she said. “Farrell and Jacobs just interviewed him. He’s working late at the office and was co-operative. Said he left the party in disgust and just went home. Has no one to vouch for his whereabouts, so no alibi either.”
Jill shrugged unhappily. “Well, it sounds like there was nothing between him and Jody but dislike. Nothing suggesting violent hatred or any crime of passion.” She heaved in a momentous breath, and punched her recorder again. “So back to Edna talking about Rennie.”
“He was jealous, you know.”
“Who was jealous?”
“The other one, Jody’s boyfriend Eric. He was horribly jealous because she loved another man - Misty, I said, stop that! – and she wanted to get away but lived in fear of Eric’s temper, which is no excuse in my book, and Mr. Polsen agrees with me. ‘Any man who makes a woman afraid of him isn’t a man,’ that’s what my honey says about that.”
Alex raised an eyebrow. “Mr. Polsen in the lovely urn?”
“Uh-huh.”
All three looked down; tapped their fingers in frustration. A long moment passed.
Jill glanced at her watch. “I gotta get back. I’ll tell you more on the way out.”
They accompanied her to the hall, where she dropped her voice and told them about Deborah Wylie’s bad back. A white-coated technician was passing them. They waited till he was gone, stepped closer together, and Jill pressed her phone’s play again.
“You had the key to Jody’s place?”
“Deb did. Ugh, carrying water back and forth in Jody’s big watering cans…I think that’s what threw Deb’s back out.”
“Deborah has back trouble?”
“Yeah. Sciatica. Bad pain down her right leg. Takes pills that don’t help.”
“So she gave you the key?”
“Yes. We both love plants. Hey Deb, Jody’s plants! We can’t let them die!”
“Robin Abel,” Kerri repeated in a murmur.
“Yup,” Jill managed in a sly little smile.
“The first time you asked if she had Jody’s key, she ducked the question. Spewed misdirection about Deborah’s back.”
“Right. I had to ask again. More misdirection the second time.”
Alex soft-punched Jill’s arm. “Damn, you should have been a cop.”
Mounting the stairs, Jill commented about Robin’s hair: dark and short but longer than a man’s. Both detectives nodded, and Alex started cussing, complaining that more than half the partygoers would fit the description they were talking about. Dark-haired and wearing dark pants, goddammit, including some of the women. The female writer Connor and Zienuc interviewed wore a dark pants suit. Robin Abel, too. And Deborah!
“Who has a bad back and is emotionally weak and forgives too easily,” Kerri muttered in frustration. She looked at Jill. “Was she limping?”
“Favoring her right leg. Not at first, but by the time we’d walked a block. Before that, outside Jody’s, she was crying her eyes out. Didn’t know I was there.”
In the vestibule, Alex’s face showed more than its usual tic of agitation.
“I still like Reid for this. He decides enough - Jody’s never going to give up. Only a former cop could stage a clever kill like that. Coldly get Jody to die ‘accidentally,’ then crash through glass doors without hurting himself, fake a maniac kill on Celie while getting no blood on him, and leave no evidence - a few lousy partials worth nothing.”
“So you need more on him.” Jill exhaled, looking out the glass doors at the cold, blowing night.
“Can’t get it! Dead end! He’s too clever. This damn thing’s never going to get solved.”
“Never say never.” Something hit, and Jill looked back to him, to Kerri. “The empty glass in Jody’s sink. Anything there?”
Kerri explained that it had been rinsed out; forensics found drops of diluted chocolate milk in it, nothing else. No penicillin. “She must have been comforting herself with it when her visitor came.”
Her visitor…
A dark figure, then the shattered, blowing glass doors flashed in Jill’s mind. Thud! She felt so cold, sick at heart.
A patrol car pulled up for her. She zipped up her parka as they moved down the steps, with Alex tensely asking how she’d left things with Deborah. “Good-bye? Don’t worry, all will be peachy?”
Jill gave him the edge of a smile. “No, she hugged me. We exchanged cards and she asked me to help prove Reid innocent.”
“Work it,” Kerri said. “Those two are lawyers. They’re done talking to us.”
She’d said it abruptly. Jill felt uncomfortable until she saw Jody and Celie, alive again, playing with the sick kids, and she stiffened with rage.
“Okay.”
“Seriously,” Kerri insisted as if sensing her hesitation. “If Deborah’s so sure hubs didn’t do it, she’ll be poking around too. You can find out more.”
“If she calls. Maybe she was just being polite.”
The young patrol officer had stepped out of his car and opened the door for Jill. As she went to him she looked back at the two detectives, and asked a question that had nagged: “Wonder where the real knife is?”
Alex and Kerri shook their heads. Under the feeble overhead li
ght they both drooped with fatigue.
“Probably in the East River,” Alex shrugged, shoving his hands in his pockets.
Kerri said no. “I think the killer’s pleased with himself. Bet he’s keeping it.”
“Me too,” Jill said, getting into the car.
The time was 8:45.
21
From shock and sadness to chaos and sadness. The rest of the night was awful: a brutal rape Jill was needed for the minute she rushed into Emergency; then fifty minutes later a woman who’d delivered in an EMS truck, had started to hemorrhage, and had to be sent to David; then two deliveries one right after the other, the second one harder – but Jill had helped bring forth life, that was splendid, wasn’t it? She kept telling herself that, but her heart stayed in knots. Her fatigue turned into a going-on-her-nerves, trained blur. She kept trying not to cry…and then, just before midnight, did.
Charlie Ortega and Ramu Chitkara tried to comfort, perched with her on a gurney in a corridor of the OB suite.
“Coffee,” she demanded between tears, mopping her face with a towel from the scrub room. “More coffee.”
“Your teeth are chattering,” Charlie protested, an arm around her slender shoulders; and Ramu on her other side said, patting her arm, “You’ve been in overdrive all night. Trying to deal with too much. Try tea instead.”
Then they started arguing whether tea had as much caffeine as coffee, and Jill tuned them out; tried to remember where the night had gone.
Her mind still flared with images of Celie dead, and Eddie Kim’s horrid wax dagger. The nausea she’d felt in the morgue had never left her. Celie’s killer was Jody’s killer.
The thought made her feel helpless and furious. Her face must have shown it.
“You obsessing again?” Ramu asked gently.
“No,” she snapped. “I’m dreaming of rainbows. And puppies living forever.”
Charlie dove into his phone, as if seeking help. “David ought to be out soon,” he said. Involuntarily, all three looked down the hall to the third OR. David almost done with a cancer-caused GYN hemorrhage.
EMBRYO 5: SILVER GIRL (EMBRYO: A Raney & Levine Thriller) Page 10
