by Stav Sherez
The interior was lit up by sodium lights and stuttering camera flashes. Techs were silently measuring, taping and sampling. Two video operators filmed the scene. Carrigan looked over at the woman. The illusion of life was gone. Plastic bags were wrapped around her hands and shoes. Her body had been moved so that her head now lay at an awkward angle, making the wound in her neck more prominent, a small dark mouth mirroring her own.
‘This is some fucked-up shit, all right.’ The blood spatter expert approached Carrigan, breathing in short sharp bursts, his white suit spotted and dark. He was young, clean-shaven and looked like a teenager.
‘Shelby.’ They were both wearing plastic gloves, there was no reason to shake hands.
‘That your first name or last?’
‘Neither,’ Shelby replied, pointing down at the floor. ‘The blood is all hers and the pool on the floor consistent with a severed jugular.’ Shelby stroked his chin, his fingers small and delicate as a child’s. ‘Almost consistent, but we’ll get to that.’
Carrigan looked back up at the wall. A checkerboard of blood and brick. That gap. He saw the woman’s final moments, freaking on fear and drugs, tied up and helpless as the killer cut her throat, the blood spraying the wall until there was no more left inside her.
Shelby took out a small black tube, pressed a button, and shone a fine blue light at the floor. ‘This is all consistent with the victim standing up and having the right side of her throat cut. This is what you would expect. Blood does what blood always does. It has a purpose outside the body just as it does inside it. Blood wants to get out. See how it leaps and arcs and splashes? Those thick streaks over there?’
Carrigan followed the blue light.
‘Arterial spray. What you’d expect, as I said, but this . . . this is where it gets interesting.’ Shelby swept the light over to his left. ‘Smudged sole prints from when he cut her throat. She wasn’t wearing her shoes when he did this. He held her up but her feet kept kicking. See the shape of the drops? The way they curve? Now – these?’ Shelby pointed to another set of dark whirls. ‘He made these moving her into position.’
Carrigan saw the ballet of steps inked out on the floor like an old-fashioned dance pattern. Had the woman been facing the wall when she died? Had she been facing her killer?
‘And yet there’s not a speck of blood on her clothes?’
Shelby shook his head. ‘No, there isn’t.’
‘What about that?’ Carrigan turned and pointed at the wall.
Shelby smiled. ‘I was wondering when you’d ask about that. Look carefully and tell me what you see.’
Carrigan didn’t need to, he’d already spotted it. ‘It’s what I don’t see that bothers me.’
‘Exactly,’ Shelby said, and for a dread moment Carrigan thought the tech was going to try and high-five him. ‘There’s a large gap in the spatter. Something was in the way.’
Carrigan scanned the room. ‘The sofa?’
‘Too low,’ Shelby replied, bending down and imitating blood spraying from a neck with his fingers splayed and thrust into the air.
Carrigan looked at the floor then at the wall. He saw a flicker of presence, a fleeting sense of someone else in the room. ‘The killer was standing in the way.’
Shelby nodded. ‘Would have taken at least a couple of minutes for her to bleed out. It must have got messier than he’d bargained for. He’d cut her and she was still fighting back so he had to restrain her and most of the blood ended up on him. Stupid mistake to make. People don’t realise how messy bleeding to death is.’
Carrigan took a step forward and ran his hand against the grainy brickwork. He felt the shadow’s last leavings, these scant clues. He rubbed the dried blood from his gloves. ‘What if it wasn’t a mistake?’
8
‘I killed Diana! It was me!’
The bare-chested man stood atop DC Jennings’s desk. His hair was long and white and snarled into thick clumps and his skin deeply tanned by dirt and grime. ‘She was cheating on me. She deserved to die,’ he told the gathered detectives. ‘That was my baby, not Dodi’s.’
Karlson and one of the uniforms wrestled the man down from the table and led him away. A chorus of jeers and groans erupted across the room.
Carrigan had never seen anything like it.
Tramps of every variety were being processed and interviewed by members of the team, everyone’s chairs a little further back than normal. They’d scoured the abandoned house from top to bottom and found twenty-four people scattered among its many rooms. There were mountain men tramps with beards that seemed carved out of stone. Old Testament types with glowing eyes and seared vision. A woman quilted in intricate layers of litter and a skull-tattooed brute who could have been plucked from the pages of Moby Dick. Some looked as if they’d lived their entire life on the streets but there were others whose fall had been more recent, the suits they’d once worn to work now clinging to their diminishing bodies, flesh and cloth slowly fusing together.
Carrigan was fielding questions, issuing directives and trying to corral this unruly mass into a semblance of order. A headache pressed against his skull. The phones kept ringing. Coughs, cackles and cries filled the room as uniforms tried to coax names and memories from people who’d left the world of time long ago. Berman was setting up an incident room but until it was ready they were all squeezed in here, some officers only just coming in, others tired and irritable at the end of their shifts.
Carrigan retreated to his office and noted the latest developments in his policy book. The irony of the timing, that a case should come now, didn’t escape him. His forehead creased and he reached for the strip of pills then remembered he’d taken some less than an hour ago. He was putting them back in the drawer when the door swung open. Carrigan looked up to see Geneva standing in his office.
‘I need to talk to you.’ A small muscle ticked in her left cheek.
Carrigan pointed to the incident room. ‘Can we do this later?’
Geneva took in the extra uniforms and assistants, the derelict and homeless being led to desks, a man puking into a bin, then turned back, and he could tell she’d made her decision, her eyes hard and sharp as baby stones.
‘I only need a minute.’
He thought briefly of deflecting her, several excuses rapidly springing to mind, but he knew that would only make her more determined. He glanced at the blue file.
‘Madison wasn’t hallucinating. The alley is there.’ Geneva explained about the glass vial she’d found by the dumpster. She’d sent it for analysis first thing that morning. ‘It’s evidence Madison wasn’t making it up.’
Carrigan took a moment to understand what Geneva was saying, his head still focused on the splayed woman in that dark and terrible room. ‘Do you really think he’d be so careless as to leave that behind?’
‘I don’t know, maybe Madison’s presence startled him? Maybe he didn’t expect two girls?’
‘And maybe some junkie dropped it after his fix. It’s only a glass vial. Until you can corroborate it with something concrete, it doesn’t mean anything.’ The phone rang. Carrigan picked it up, listened, mumbled Yes, fine and put it back down.
Geneva pulled out her notebook. ‘Okay, here’s corroborating evidence. Madison’s not answering her phone. I also talked to Anna Becker’s phone provider.’ Geneva paused, noting the flicker in Carrigan’s eye. ‘They couldn’t give me details without a warrant but they were able to confirm there’s been no activity on Anna’s mobile since 7.24 p.m. on Friday night.’ Geneva stopped and slipped a hand inside her pocket. Carrigan saw her bicep flex. ‘Madison wasn’t imagining it. Someone abducted Anna.’
The phone rang again. Carrigan ignored it. ‘You’re off the audit.’
Geneva started to say something then stopped, her mouth creasing into a smile. ‘Thank you. We should probably start by sending a team to the hostel so we can—’
‘That’s not why I’m putting you back in rotation. There’s something else now.’
Carrigan reached over and picked up a slim green file. The phone buzzed again. ‘I need you to get up to speed on this. First briefing’s in ten minutes.’
Geneva stared at the green file, her mouth pursed tight. ‘Did you hear any of what I just said?’
‘I’m sorry. You’re going to have to pass this off to downstairs. Madison’s phone’s probably out of battery. Anna might have come back last night. Either way, it’s not your concern any more. I need you focused on this. The girl in that file was found dead this morning.’
‘This better not be some bullshit.’ Geneva frowned and opened the folder, flicking through it, skim-reading the contents, and then she stopped. The file fell from her hands, the papers scattering across the floor.
‘Fuck.’
She flipped the photo over so that Carrigan was once again facing the splayed woman.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I felt the same way when I first saw her.’
Geneva was shaking her head. She took out her phone and swiped and stopped and compared the photo onscreen to the one she was holding. ‘You wanted proof? Here’s your proof.’ She flung the photo onto the table. ‘This is Anna Becker.’
9
They were in one of the newly refurbished incident rooms. Gone were the wall-to-wall whiteboards and in their place was a state-of-the-art A/V suite taking up almost the entire wall. The one remaining corkboard stood like a throwback to an earlier civilisation. Carrigan pinned the photograph to it and addressed the team.
‘I do this every time. Those of you who’ve worked with me before know this, but for all of you who’ve been drafted in, I want you to look at her. Take a good look at Anna Becker.’ Her face was curiously serene in death, the angle of the photograph hiding the wound in her neck. ‘Burn this picture into your mind. Remember her in every question you ask and every lead you follow.’ Carrigan stopped and scanned the room. Even though he knew most of them had heard this talk several times before, he believed it was important to begin with it every single time. You started with the victim – their lives, loves and rages – and only from there did you wind your way back to the killer.
Carrigan studied the control panel for the media suite. He’d uploaded the crime scene photos half an hour ago with Berman’s help. He pressed a button and a close-up of Anna’s neck appeared on screen. The younger constables were visibly shocked, their good humour quickly turning mute. Carrigan felt a lurch in his stomach as he stared at the glossy image. However many times he’d done this, whatever things he’d seen, he knew he’d never get used to it and prayed to God it would stay that way. He didn’t want to think what became of you when you got inured to it and yet he’d seen it often, in more senior officers, a slow drift away from the world and all it held good.
‘Anna Becker was found in the ground-floor bedroom of 12 Kingsleigh Avenue. As I’m sure you’ll have noticed, we’re interviewing the tramps found sleeping in the property, but the nature of the abduction and the evident staging make it highly unlikely that one of them did it. This was a very organised and controlled scene. Anna was fully clothed but there was barely a trace of blood on those clothes. It’s probable the killer made her undress, killed her, then dressed her again. We don’t know what this means to him, if indeed it means anything.
‘We’re hoping the post-mortem will be later today but, initially, cause of death appears to be exsanguination through the wound in her neck. The killer cut her jugular very precisely and then he watched her bleed and flail and struggle to keep her own life inside her.’ Carrigan saw constables wiping sweat from their brows or fanning themselves with crime sheets. ‘The details of the snatch and the disposal of Anna’s body indicate the perpetrator knows the immediate area well.’ Carrigan flicked through several more photos – the abandoned house, a succession of ruined rooms, Anna spread-eagled on the floor. He explained what the blood spatter expert had found.
‘He did this on purpose?’ Jennings said.
‘He could have easily avoided the blood but he chose not to,’ Carrigan replied. ‘Which suggests he was probably naked. There’d be no point to it otherwise.’
‘Christ, that’s a bit of a stretch.’ Karlson’s eyes were still jittery from what he’d seen earlier but his voice was back to its usual tart tone.
‘It’s what the evidence points to,’ Carrigan replied. ‘There’s a man-shaped void in the blood spatter. He stood in front of her. He got extremely close. The blood guy confirmed that to make that particular pattern, the killer would have had to angle the cut directly towards him. The blood on the floor also suggests he spent time positioning her while she was alive and able to kick and it’s not as if we haven’t come across this kind of thing before. We know this happens. There’s plenty of precedence for it. Blood rites were present at all stages of human history and killers and sickos have always been drawn to it, from Caligula to Countess Bathory to the Manson girls.’
‘You’ve got to be kidding?’ DC Singh said.
‘I can’t explain to you the sickness that lies in some men’s brains,’ Carrigan replied. ‘I don’t think anyone can, priest or psychiatrist – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Every act leaves its particular mark on the world, in this case the narrative of blood. That’s the only answer we can hope to get and the only answer we need. We do know that for some killers it’s all about the sensation of blood – they crave it – the smell, the sticky feel, the pressure at which it leaves the body. It’s not the killing but the release of blood that gets them off. He could have let her bleed out on the floor but he didn’t. He held her up and positioned her the way you would a shower head.’ Carrigan blinked and saw the house on Cielo Drive, the giddy eyes of the Manson girls, their long blonde hair striped with gore, giggling and chanting and baptising each other in Sharon Tate’s blood.
‘But why do it there?’ DC Singh looked up from her notes. ‘It’s a massive risk. One of the tramps could have interrupted him.’
‘We don’t know,’ Carrigan admitted. ‘Could be proximity and ease. The house is only a few doors down from the hostel. Perhaps he thought it’d be empty. But what it does tell us is that he probably can’t do it at home – maybe he lives with someone, maybe his place is too small.’
‘Or maybe it’s symbolic.’
Carrigan looked over at Geneva. She stared back, a wisp of defiance in her eyes.
‘If he knows the area, he’d know tramps use the house and she’d be found almost immediately.’ Geneva propped her arms on the table. ‘Look at the way he staged the scene – how he positioned her, the close attention to detail – he fanned her skirt out, he closed her eyes, he manoeuvred her limbs. He wanted us to find her there. Dumping her where he didn’t need to and putting himself at risk by doing so tells us what he really thinks of her. He could have left her body anywhere yet he chose this place specifically.’ Geneva paused, a wrinkle disturbing her forehead.
‘But?’
She hadn’t realised she’d zoned out. Christ. ‘But, on another level, it doesn’t make sense. The behaviour’s contradictory, a mixture of extremely organised and extremely disorganised.’ She rifled through her notes. ‘The clothes she’s wearing are so precise. The cut on her neck is so precise. The angle he must have kept her at while she struggled is precise. But the room? The house? It’s the opposite of all that. It’s a mess. As Singh pointed out, anyone could have stumbled in and interrupted him, so we have to ask ourselves, was the house merely convenient? Or does it go deeper – does he see her as trash, something to be dumped? Maybe that’s how he wants us to see her?’
There was silence as everyone considered this. They knew a random dump site meant the perp had got careless or panicked and that was good for them, but planning would mean something else entirely.
‘Do you think he intended to spike both of them?’
Carrigan looked over at Jennings. The constable had been silent and withdrawn this past month, rarely chipping in at briefings, an ever-shrinking presence as if he were subsiding into himse
lf.
‘That’s a good question.’ It was one of the things that bothered Carrigan the most. ‘And no, we don’t know why both girls were spiked but only one snatched. Once we know that, we’ll know much more about his MO. We don’t even know if he happened on these women by chance or if it was planned.’ Carrigan stopped and waited for the sharp stabbing pain below his left eye to subside. ‘We need to put out a request for any sightings of the van. It blocked the alley for at least a few minutes. There’s no CCTV coverage on that street but someone might have noticed it. We also need to go back to the hostel and reinterview Madison now she’s sober. Hopefully, she’ll have remembered something new.’ Carrigan scanned the room. ‘Anything else?’
‘We should forget Madison and focus our victimology on Anna,’ Geneva said. ‘Anna has to be his primary target. Otherwise, he would have snatched Madison at the same time, when it was easy, when she was incapacitated. And if Anna was the focus of his attentions then he was probably stalking her beforehand, which means there’s a chance he may have left a trace, and if he did, that’s how we’re going to find him.’
10
Geneva watched the woman’s face sparkle in the neon glare of the pub. The woman was surrounded by friends, all of them gathered around a small table stacked with empty bottles, and it looked as if she was enjoying herself, smiling and laughing and knocking back several large cocktails.
Gradually, the crowd thinned out, went home to babies and babysitters, last Tubes and late-night TV. The woman said goodbye to her friends, her gestures overemphatic and a little unsteady, her facial expressions turned up a notch by the alcohol. The street cameras pick her up as she attempts to hail a cab, swaying in the splash of lights and trying to balance on heels that had seemed a good idea at the start of the night. Geneva saw the red car pull to a stop beside the woman. It didn’t look like a minicab but it was getting increasingly hard to tell these days. The door opened and the woman hesitated for a moment before stepping in. The door closed and the car sped off into the dark.
