THE DEAD SOUL: A Thriller

by M. William Phelps

  Jake chirped the tires around the corner. A rumbling of the Chevelle’s throaty four-barrel carburetor echoed throughout the two–tiered cement parking garage. He popped the door, walked a few steps, then hit the elevator arrow button DOWN.

  There was, after all, no other place for the dead to go.

  The sudden drop turned Jake’s stomach to mud. He likened it to that feeling of ingesting too much cake frosting at once. Queasy, they called it. After his insides settled, Jake powered up his iPhone. Typed out a new file name: Mancini. He’d heard of the company, a major contractor for the Big Dig who had hired on- and off-duty BPD cops as part of a deal with the local Teamsters. Jake needed to find out where Mo fit into that mix. Mo was up to something, or would have never mentioned it.

  The doors ding-ed open and made a Star Trek-like swoosh sliding apart. Jake stepped from the elevator onto the white-tiled floor. As he did, that smell wafted up and hit him square in the sinuses. The awful, unmistakable aroma of decomposing flesh. Heavy and thick, like a landfill.

  “Wow,” Jake said, choking, cupping both hands over his nose and mouth. The air conditioning made it worse. Fresher. More pungent.

  “Hey, Cooper. How are you?” Dr. Leona Kelsey said. The pathologist had one of those proper, NPR, academic voices. Kelsey was often thrashed on the witness stand by defense attorneys, who chastised her for speaking to juries as if they were children.

  Indeed, that was Kelsey. Miss Finger-Wagger.

  Kelsey waited by the elevator door to greet Jake. Tiegs had called her to say Jake was on the way down. Kelsey had held off with her autopsy report on Jane Doe, now Lisa Marie Taylor. She wanted to get Jake down into her death suite first to explain a few things in person. From shoes to hairclip, Kelsey looked every bit of her fifty-six years. She was trained as a pathologist in New Hampshire at Green Mountain Institute. Her forensic training was in Albany. The BPD used Kelsey on just about every major homicide it put in front of a jury. She qualified in the state of Massachusetts as an expert by conducting thousands of autopsies.

  Kelsey’d had a long day, Jake Cooper could tell, and it was only a little after nine in the morning. “This smell, it doesn’t bother you?” It was worse than Jake could recall.

  “We got an accident in yesterday afternoon. A real tar-burner. Some sweet little college intern forgot to put her in the cooler until this morning. Sorry, Cooper. About your gal, Jane Doe …” The doctor pulled a chart out and, having trouble flipping the top page because she was wearing yellow rubber gloves, asked Jake for help. “Lisa Marie Taylor.”

  “Right. Missing five days. We think dead for probably four.”

  They walked toward the autopsy suite. Orderlies in hospital greens passed. An African-American coroner Jake knew stopped. “Yo, been a while, Coop. What’s up, son?” They bumped fists. “I’m feelin’ the whole Russell Crowe thing you’re rockin’ these days. Suits you, man. Lookin’ good.”

  “Not now, Nelsen. Call me, okay.” Jake looked at Kelsey, continued walking. “You find out anything? Something I can use? This is no routine rape-murder here, Kelsey. Am I right?”

  “No, definitely not routine. I can establish with ninety-nine percent certitude, however, that there was no rape, or sexual assault.”

  This surprised Jake. His man was strictly a killer, which meant the motive was buried deep inside him. Murder meant something to him personally. There was an emotional connection to killing. He wasn’t murdering to cover up other crimes or part of a series of crimes.

  “I’ve seen no other killer who cuts with such precision,” Kelsey said, almost as if she envied his knife skills.

  “What are we thinking, then? A doctor? Veterinarian? Some sort of medical professional? How ‘bout military? Any of those ring a bell here?” The smell still affected Jake. He couldn’t believe it didn’t bother Kelsey. He pictured her apartment having the same odor, only mellower, like a convalescent home.

  Pre-death.

  “I won’t take that leap just yet.”

  “Where’s Dickie?”

  “I’m told he’s on his way. Have a look at the incision here,” Kelsey explained as they approached Lisa Marie’s body. The vic had been scrubbed and washed. Placed under the lights on a stainless steel gurney with large-spoked wheels. There was a sink drain for fluids at one end. “It’s important for me to tell you, Cooper, that Lisa Marie here, she was unquestionably dead when her chest was opened.”

  They both sighed. Some consolation that was.

  “Tell me again how you ascertain these things?”

  “Well,” Kelsey pointed to where the incision in Lisa’s chest started, “there’s something very interesting here that I found.” Kelsey circled an area of Lisa’s stomach with her gloved finger.

  “What’s that?”

  “My prelims tell me there were no poisons, toxins, et cetera, in her system. We found a minor trace of chloroform on her lips and in one lung.”

  “Knocked her out.”

  “Yep.”

  “Likewise for the legs?” Jake knew better, but wanted to be sure. “I mean, she was dead when those legs were amputated, right?”

  Kelsey closed her eyes. Turned slowly to Jake. “No.”

  “What?”

  Kelsey took off her safety glasses and bit on the end of one of the ear pieces. The doctor had been involved with the dead for thirty years. She liked to tell reporters she could separate her job from her emotions. But that was the public side of being in this game, Jake knew. Dr. Kelsey was beaten down by the disfigured bodies of children and countless other senseless means of death she saw every day. Kelsey’s daughter was a few years older than Lisa Marie. How could she look into Lisa’s listless eyes, photograph and study those stubs, and not see Christine?

  “Any mysterious marks on her back?” Jake tried his best to keep the doc focused. Lisa was found face-up. If her body was frozen and then brought to the scene to thaw, Jake figured her killer might have preserved a piece of evidence without realizing it—her back was the largest section of her body left untouched.

  The elevator sounded. Dickie. Jake wondered how in the hell the guy had ever made it through school or kept a job. He was late for everything.

  Jake watched Dickie walk into the lobby, stopping first to pull up his trousers. Front first, then back. After that, both sides together before he tucked in the stray tongue of his dress shirt. Eying his partner all the way, Jake said to Kelsey, “I’m interested in one of the photos I saw this morning, taken at the crime scene. I thought I noticed an imprint of something on Lisa’s back.”

  “Funny you should ask. Come over here and look at this.” They stood over Lisa Marie. Stared down at her torso. Fluorescent lights shone on Lisa’s teenage body. Poor thing. So young and delicate.Kelsey flipped Lisa’s body on its side. She was stiff as a mannequin. Then pointed to a small indentation on the right portion of her back, down in the bottom corner, where the curve of her hip held that boomerang shape. It was postmortem, for sure. The indent would have been made after death. “It didn’t bounce back into shape,” Jake observed.

  “Exactly. Rigor. Blood sinks. Pools. Coagulates into the lowest part of the body.”

  “Tissue hardens like mud in the sun.”

  “Right! Before it reverses the process, heats up like compost, and begins to decay. Whatever made the mark in Lisa’s back was pushed into her skin and kept its shape.”

  Jake was interested. “Means she was placed on top of an object after death. Looks like some sort of light bulb, you think?”

  “Not sure. That’s not my thing. But I’d guess no. Just me. But it looks like, oh, this is just an educated assumption now, but it looks like some sort of handle.”

  “Get me several angles of that on film. I’ll have someone run it down. Can you make an impression of it, too, with silicone?”

  “Alexander?” the doctor yelled. A young Asian man stepped into the room. He carried a yellow legal pad and looked busy. “Do me a midsection tri-quarter-angle on t
his mark here. Get it done ASAP. Then have it sent over to Cooper this afternoon.”

  Jake was impressed by Kelsey’s command. He took out his iPhone and scanned the image himself. Wouldn’t hurt to get it into the database, see if he could come up with a hit. As he waited for the scan to finish, “You made it, I see.”

  Dickie had a funnel paper cup of water in his hand. “Bottoms up, Kid.”

  “Look at this,” Kelsey said, reaching into Lisa’s mouth, pulling her cheeks out as though she were a dentist, exposing Lisa’s mouth. This took some effort, seeing how tight her muscles were from post. “Morning, Detective Shaughnessy.”

  Dickie winked. Jake bent down, turned his head to get a better view. Using a magnifying glass Kelsey gave him, he stared at the crude mark.

  “We cannot figure it out.” Kelsey held Lisa’s mouth open with a pair of c-clamps and two hands as Jake studied what looked to be a scratch. “It’s not a bite mark, like when you miss a chomp at a piece of food or gum and clip the side of your cheek. It’s not a burn or a defect from birth.”

  “You mind?” Dickie asked.

  “Go for it,” Jake said, stepping back.

  Dickie took a look. Then reached into his pocket, scribbled something in his notebook.

  Kelsey reached above the gurney table and pulled down a square light. It was connected to the end of a metal arm she could maneuver around in an accordionlike fashion. The heat from the bulb as Kelsey pulled the light over his arms reminded Jake of reaching into a hot buffet. Kelsey exposed various areas of Lisa’s torso as she explained things to Jake and Dickie they knew already—technical terms and medical explanations of no interest to the Dynamic Duo. Lisa’s torso was wide open in front of them. Kelsey had used the same incision the killer originally made, but added two additional upward strokes, in a Y-pattern, toward Lisa’s bony, pointed, supermodel shoulders. Then she peeled the two chest flaps back and clamped them down to the sides of the gurney. Lisa Marie had been filleted open.

  Jake watched this with a jaded sense of envy, not paying much attention. He thought of the type of person who could do such a thing to another human being. It was not going to be easy to catch this psycho. Nonetheless, there was a clue here somewhere. A hair. Fiber. An imperative piece of the puzzle. All killers slipped up. Some left evidence on purpose.

  The signature.

  “Her face is in rather good shape, all considering,” Dickie said.

  “The inside of the mouth was purple yesterday,” Jake observed.

  “That color washed off. She was definitely beaten postmortem. Those bruises along her right cheek”—Kelsey pointed—“are superficial, they do not affect the muscle tissue. I cut a sample off her face out so we could run a few additional tests.”

  “Where is it?” Jake asked.

  “In the freezer. I placed it on a hockey goalie mask and froze it in the contour of her face to keep the texture and surface as natural as possible.”

  “Ah … yeah …” Jake said. He and Dickie looked at each other.

  Yikes. What an image.

  “Boston Bruin fan, I see?” Dickie said to the doctor.

  She gave him a cold stare over the top of her glasses.

  “We can check it out later.” Jake put his hands in his pockets. “Please continue.”

  “We’re ninety-nine percent alike,” Kelsey explained, glancing down at the chart in front of her, then looking back up at them. “All of us. Our DNA is just about all the same. It’s that one percent that makes each of us different. Just one percent. Two thousand proteins are created every second in our bodies. That adds to our make-up. But one percent separates us.”

  “Interesting lesson. Mr. Discovery Channel here,” Jake looked over at Dickie, “loves this shit. But how’s that got anything to do with my case?”

  The doctor pointed with a pen to Lisa’s chest cavity. “I’m getting to that.”

  Jake noticed that Lisa’s rib cage on the right side was gone.

  “What’s that?” he asked, puzzled. “You take it out?”

  “You don’t know?” Kelsey said. “No one told you?” She looked at Dickie, who held up his hands as if someone held a gun to his back.

  There was an empty space in Lisa’s chest about the size of a man’s fist. Her ribs were cut precisely with some sort of electric tool, exposing the tar-colored bone marrow inside like a dog bone.

  “It’s gone,” Kelsey said.

  “What’s ‘gone’?” Jake was missing something.

  “Her heart.”

  Jake looked at Dickie.

  “I’m no profiler,” Kelsey said, “but someone who takes out the heart of his victim has sexual issues to compensate for. Impotence, maybe? Viagra complex. Loss of love.”

  “The father?” Dickie tossed out.

  Jake walked over to the sink and turned on the water to wash his hands. “Wait a minute here. No. No. No. The heart has been extracted because he is telling us something. But the anomaly is somewhere else. Dickie, a father would never do that. Take out his daughter’s heart to cover up a sex crime.” Dickie had been hot on the father ever since they identified Lisa Marie.

  “Never overlook the obvious, Jake. Who taught us that. Anyway, we can put,” Dickie explained, scrolling through pages of notes, “Alyssa and Lisa Marie in the same library, same college café downtown, and same bar within the past few weeks.” He tossed the little notebook on the table next to where Jake stood scrubbing his hands.

  “Together?”

  Kelsey walked over. “Um, we use that sink to wash organs, Detective Cooper. The hand-washing station is over there.” She pointed to Jake’s left.

  “What? Damn it.”

  “We’re working on that connection,” Dickie said.

  “Doesn’t mean squat, Dickie. Or that they even knew each other.” Jake dried his hands with a brown piece of paper towel.

  “If they knew each other, boss, that certainly changes things.”

  10

  Friday, September 5 - 1:33 P.M.

  Dickie and Caroline Shaughnessy had lived on Plymouth Avenue in East Milton near Cunningham Park for the past twenty years. The neighborhood, dotted with three-deckers lined up so close to one another you could see what your neighbor was having for dinner, was an easy on-off jaunt from I-93, which made the trip downtown quick for Dickie.

  Dickie stopped at home to grab lunch after leaving the morgue. Jake had radioed to say he’d be by to pick him up. Something about a tip Jake had gotten from a sheriff up north. The sun beat down on Jake as he walked up the short stone pathway, the flower beds edged in perfect lines of cut earth. Caroline was standing, drilling holes in the mulch with a strange tool she had impulsively purchased from an infomercial—this, so she could plant her tulip bulbs for next year. Dickie’s wife had her bleached-blonde, shoulder-length hair tied back in a ponytail, her cell phone clipped to the side of her waist. She wore wool gloves so as not to damage a fresh manicure—purple polish with little white hearts and silver glitter at the tips—she had just gotten at the Somers Day Spa in Quincy, her weekly Friday afternoon treat. There was the perfect smear of dirt on Caroline’s right cheek. All her adult life she had worked as an insurance consultant for Met-Life, just recently from home. She had dinner on the table at five every night. If Dickie wasn’t there, Caroline ate in front of Golden Girls reruns on a TV tray by herself and told her man to fix his own damn plate when he came home.

  “Does it really take ‘the hard work out of yard work,’ Caroline?” Jake asked of the gardening tool, referring to the pitch line in the commercial.

  “You startled me.” Caroline stopped working.

  Jake kissed her on the cheek. Grabbed Caroline by the shoulders. Took a look at her. “You’re a sucker for those TV gadgets, Caroline.”

  “How are Dawn and Brendan?”

  Jake considered how independent today’s woman was. He adored that about Dickie’s wife. He wished Dawn was more like her. Free-spirited and tough. Caroline was one of those women who
insisted on separate checkbooks and bank accounts from her husband.

  “They’re wonderful, Caroline.”

  “Right, Jake. Everything’s just hunky-dory at home, uh-huh,” she said, wiping a bead of sweat with the back of her wrist from her crinkled brow.

  Jake walked away. Stepped up onto the wrap-around porch connected to the three-decker the Shaugnessyes owned. “No one uses ‘hunky-dory’ anymore, Caroline. Let’s you and I bring that one back, huh. Along with maybe ‘a million miles an hour,’ and ‘highway robbery.’ Now where is that husband of yours?”

  “Downstairs in ‘The Zone.’ ” Caroline looked up to the sky and shook her head. “Like a little kid sometimes—he is.”

  With his towering frame, Jake was forced to duck at the bottom of the stairs leading into Dickie’s finished basement. He didn’t want to hit his head on the ceiling above the final stair. Dickie had made some changes to the house since Jake’s last visit. The basement was now decked out in Red Sox memorabilia.

  “That thing tell you who our killer is yet?” Dickie asked as Jake came off the bottom stair keying something into his iPhone.

  “Close, but not yet. Don’t be such an obvious Luddite, Dick. Technology’s our friend.” Saying this, Jake realized he was speaking to a man who had a name for his basement. “You actually call this room in your house ‘The Zone,’ and you’re making fun of my phone.”

  Dickie laughed. He gave Jake a quick tour, pointing out the new additions. “Got this from Yaz at a card show last year.” He held up a baseball with the slugger’s signature at twelve o’clock.

  Jake shrugged off the memorabilia. “Come on, you know I could care less about this shit.”

  “You see, Jake, this is what makes us so different.” Dickie threw the ball up in the air and caught it a few times. “I come down here to get away. Escape.”

  Jake thought of the drives he liked to take alone along Cape Cod Bay in his Chevelle. His muscle car was his Zone. But how rare were those trips? Dickie was right. The guy couldn’t get away from the job. It consumed him.