“The little fucks have been back here,” he called to the man behind him, Mulcahy. “Tell Dispatch to call PD and see if they can find any punks walking through the park with matches or a lighter.”
“If I catch ’em,” said Mulcahy, out of breath, “I’ll put ’em under the ice myself.” He stopped and began to relay the message while Burns staggered on toward the circle of bushes.
Burns took a deep breath and broke through the last crust of ice and stumbled into the entrance to the bramble. The light disappeared. It was strange. The branches ahead of him were so perfectly laced together they seemed to have been arranged that way. He could hear the crackling of the dry timber ahead of him, but once he was in the dark brush, only tiny shoots of sun lit up the gloomy interior. He took four steps, ducking down to avoid the brambles that came down like a low roof over his head. The sound of his men tramping behind him faded as he entered the bush.
Finally, he saw the white of the snow and the red of flames through the dark branches ahead. He gripped the axe, ready to clear the brush away from the base of the tall trees that could light up and send sparks to the dead oaks that studded the park grounds. His kids played in Cazenovia Park during the summers, and it would be a shame to lose more of its trees. One of the brambles caught at his shoulders and threatened to hold him fast. He jerked forward, a tremor of claustrophobia shooting through him.
“Fucking punks,” he said.
He ducked his head down to avoid one last branch, but his helmet caught it and it snapped with a pistol-like sound. He closed his eyes to avoid the thorns and sharp twigs, then fell to his knees and began to shuffle forward. Finally, head down, drops of icy water falling onto his bare neck, he broke through into the center, exhausted. When he opened his eyes, he saw that the burning trees were actually farther away than he thought, twenty or so yards at least. He was now inside a nest of black branches, around ten feet in diameter. His eyes began to adjust to the gloom.
With a grunt, Burns jerked off the ground and back to his feet. The red he’d seen through the branches wasn’t flame. It was the snow itself, turned scarlet with … what the fuck was that? Blood. The snow was saturated with it, dark scarlet blood splashed around the interior.
“Jesus, Mary, and Jo—”
Burns snapped the axe into the air frantically, his eyes searching the bramble for something ready to spring at him. His other hand grasped for the radio that had been strapped to his shoulder, but the branches had torn it free and now it dangled somewhere around his knees. He was too petrified to drop his eyes from the woven mesh around him.
He thought of animal sacrifices, the rumors of dog killers and Satan worshippers in the woods at night coming true right in front of his eyes.
Muffled voices answered his call, but the words were blunted by the thick branches. Burns hefted his axe in his hand, feeling he’d been drawn into a trap, and that a knife was poised, waiting to split his scalp.
As he turned slowly to the left, axe heavy in his right hand, out of the corner of his eye he saw the pale thing, and he instantly dashed for the entrance.
“Mulcahy!” he screamed. “MULCAHY, WHERE ARE YOU?”
The voices grew closer. Burns ran to the passageway and crouched there, hunched on his knees, his hand groping for the radio swinging against his thigh. Finally, with a grunt, he found it and brought it to his lips.
“Dispatch, Dispatch, this is Burns 2-1.”
“Go ah—”
“Get Buffalo PD on the scene. We got some kind of animal sacrifice and blood all … all over the ground.”
The sound of crashing came clearly through the passageway.
Burns looked up to see the wide eyes of Mulcahy approaching in the gloom. He was crawling on his knees.
“Cap, what is it?”
“It’s a—it’s a—”
“Take it easy.”
“Don’t tell me to take it fucking easy. The sickos have been killing dogs in there.”
Mulcahy’s eyes tried to peer around him into the center of the brambles.
“Guys, hold on,” he called back. “We got something for PD.”
He looked directly at Burns.
“Cap, go around me, I’ll take a look and then we’ll know what to tell the cops when they get here.”
Burns nodded. He wiped his mouth with his hand, then began to squeeze by Mulcahy on the right.
“Don’t touch nothin’,” he said.
“Believe me, I won’t.”
Burns felt the adrenaline drain away as he saw the sunlight grow closer. Finally he was out into the open and he stood up to relieve the cramping in his back and to let the sunlight play on his face.
When he opened his eyes, he saw the other two firefighters looking at him strangely.
“You okay?” said the first one.
“No, I’m not fuckin’ okay. The devil freaks’ve been at work back there. Goddamn delinquents. I’d like to—”
The eyes of the second man shifted off his face to over his right shoulder and Burns heard movement behind him. He turned quickly, the axe bobbing in the air.
Mulcahy emerged from the black brambles, his face ashen. He took a gulp of fresh air and looked around, his eyes unfocused.
“Did you see it?” Burns said.
Mulcahy dropped down to his haunches, then sat back on the snow. He brushed a shaking hand through his ginger hair.
“Yeah, I saw it.”
“Can you believe they skinned a dog like that? Evil little—”
“It’s not a dog,” Mulcahy said.
Burns dropped the axe to his side.
“What did you say?”
“I said, that’s not a dog.”
His eyes came up and met Burns’s.
“It’s a man. They skinned him and hung him in the trees like a fucking anatomy lesson.”
Forty minutes later, Abbie stood outside the bramble patch. A trail to it had by now been beaten down into the snow, and there were things thrown to the ground around her: an empty Pepsi bottle, green and white packaging for a syringe, a coil of black plastic binding. She was waiting, watching the crows circle in the sky.
She called the Missing Persons desk at headquarters to see if there was anything new on Billy Carney; she’d phoned a report in the evening before. The cop who answered said that a detective had gone by the Gaelic Club again that morning but had been met with silence and stone-cold stares. Abbie snapped the phone shut in anger.
Was Billy waiting for her somewhere in the park, waiting patiently in his grave, carved up like Marty Collins? They’d found the victim’s wallet and there was no doubt Collins was the flayed man hanging just yards away. They hadn’t checked this part of the park yesterday because no trail had been broken from the main road after Collins had gone missing. But the killer had obviously outfoxed them. He’d snatched Collins, put him in a car, driven out of the park, taken a right on Seneca, gone a half mile down, right again down some local roads to a street that dead-ended back at the park. The end of that street was fifty yards from where she stood, completely hidden over the small rise in the ground to the east, and offered a shortcut for residents to the basketball courts and the park pool on hot summer days. A gap had been cut into the dead end’s fence there, years ago probably, and the chain link curled back to allow bodies through.
It was a perfect setup: the dead-end street occupied by two burned-out cars, a graffitied concrete wall, and the brown shards of Genesee beer bottles that had been whipped against it. A place where no one would see something being dragged out of a trunk or a back seat, a place that had been consigned to invisibility by years of freak parties and sloppy sex, consensual and otherwise.
A man, his green hood pulled almost completely over his face, emerged from the passageway holding something in his hand. He stood up and Abbie saw the blond goatee of Michaels, the crime scene tech.
“You ready for me?” she said.
Michaels nodded. He handed the plastic baggie he’d been holding t
o Abbie. She took it and saw what she knew would be there, had to be there: a brown plastic monkey, its hands held to its sides and the eyes squeezed shut.
“You told us it’d be there. Took a while, but I found it.”
Abbie turned to look at the thing in direct sunlight. Now she had to decipher the exact emotional intent of a mass-produced toy from thirty or forty years ago. Why was the monkey hugging itself? In excitement or despair? Was the monkey afraid, or was it laughing a hearty belly laugh?
“Where?” she said.
“It was … inserted into a fold of skin that had been peeled away from the body and left hanging. On his back, near the right shoulder blade.”
The toy appeared to be from the same set as the others. The paint around the left eye was worn away so that you could see the raw white plastic beneath it.
“Okay. Anything else?”
“We found this placed neatly on a nearby tree stump.”
Michaels handed her a business card. It was ivory, heavy stock, with embossed lettering.
It said “The Buffalo Gaelic Club” across the top in green letters, then, in the middle, “Marty Collins, President” in black.
Abbie shook her head. In her mind, all other possibilities just flew out the window. The killer was targeting members of the Clan na Gael. End of discussion.
“How’d he die?” she said. “I know we can’t say officially until the coroner arrives, but give me your call.”
Michaels shook his head. “Blood loss or exposure, one of the two. Besides … what you’ll see in there, there were no other major injuries except a major break to the right femur.”
“Exposure?”
“He was out here for a long time. I found cuts to the palm and deep grooves on the inside the fingers, with small bits of wood impaled in each of them.”
Abbie looked at the tech.
“He was alive when the killer put him into the trees?”
Michaels nodded. “Yep. Probably stunned while the perp wove him in, but he struggled and tore at the branches. Didn’t do him any good.”
“What else can you tell me?”
Michaels looked down at a plastic-covered notebook that he’d brought out from his hip pocket.
“I’m going to guess the blood—and there’s a lot of it—is all his. The killer milked the body for it, spread it around the snow in there evenly, like he was painting a floor.”
“Any similarities to the first two?”
“I just saw pictures on the Niagara Falls case, of course, but it’s the same guy. The knife blade looks the same, the cutting patterns. But this time … It—”
He broke off and Abbie looked up from her notes.
Michaels’s face looked greenish.
“You’ll see.”
Abbie nodded. “Okay, I’m going in. When the coroner shows up, send him through.”
She snapped her notebook shut, put the pen in her inside coat pocket, and pulled her hat lower over her forehead. When she looked up, she found Michaels hadn’t moved and his eyes were on her.
He swallowed. “He’s getting better, you know.”
“Yes, Michaels, I know.”
“Fast.”
Abbie nodded.
“Have you ever seen this before?” Michaels said with a frown.
“No.”
“So how’s he doing it?”
Abbie grimaced. “I think he’s been planning this for a long time. The killings are scripted. He knows what he’s going to do, doesn’t waste time. He’s following a story of some kind in his head, I don’t know. And these little things—”
She held up the monkey.
“Means the motivation goes way back. Childhood even. If you had twenty years to think of how you’d kill someone, you’d probably do it pretty well, too.”
Michaels nodded.
“You’ll have the write-up on my desk when I get back?”
“Sure.”
Michaels moved past her and Abbie headed for the tunnel entrance.
She took a breath before she ducked and walked in. A starling chirped as it swung by overhead. The light was more intense, throwing hard interlaced shadows onto the path as she bent slightly and cat-footed her way in. The ground was turning to slush under the boots of so many firemen and cops.
When she reached the circle, she stood up. The red snow had been scooped away and placed in plastic garbage bags to see if the blood all belonged to Collins. The brambles around her had clearly grown together thickly, but at ten feet she could see the green-white ends where a knife had cut through branches. The killer had created a sanctuary, she thought. He wanted to spend time here, alone, with Collins. Even in the dead of winter, he couldn’t be certain that a boy chasing a dog or a bird watcher wouldn’t stumble on this little obscure piece of the park. So he’d made the cover impenetrable.
Slowly, she turned.
The body was to her left and she felt her left knee give a bit when she saw it. The skin was mottled red and the faintest blue, the transparent blue of a fish gill. Collins was naked and spread-eagled, his hands and feet pinned tightly against the thick brambles, his small penis almost hidden in the nest of reddish-brown pubic hair. Two folds of skin had been cut just below the clavicle, then straight down to the belly button. Collins’s body was thin and wiry but his chest wasn’t tight with muscle. There was flesh and fat there, and it had been spread open on both sides, pulled back like a suit jacket open to the wind. The white of the rib cage was visible under one thin, near-translucent layer of skin.
The same had been done to the arms, the legs, the face. There the superficial layers of skin had been expertly sliced open and pulled back to each side of the forehead and pinned there so that Collins seemed to have on one of those strange hats that Swedish nuns wore. Strips of flesh hung from the cheeks, now stiffened by cold, and the web of bluish veins were clearly visible, as clear as the highway lines on an old gas station map. The cheek muscles were bunched above the rictus smile, each strip ridged on top of the next. With his flesh peeled away, it looked like a Pygmy or some kind of Amazonian forest dweller was trying to emerge from inside Collins’s face, an old Indian bursting forth.
Abbie swallowed, then stepped to the body. She imagined she could hear the little wings of flesh make a tiny threshing noise in the wind, but that was impossible. She did a quick check of the front of the body but could see nothing cut away, no trophies taken. Again, she felt the whisper of a private conversation, just like she had at the church where Jimmy Ryan died. But this message was even more personal.
She stepped back. What was the killer saying?
First a church and now a crude forest re-creation of the Crucifixion. But again something was off. Collins’s ankles, the skin split open to display the thick runner’s muscles and fat veins, were eight or ten inches apart, not closely bound like every depiction of Christ on the cross that she’d ever seen. The arms weren’t straight across, they slanted down at an angle of ten degrees or so. A killer working from an image in his head would have made this right. He had hours, and he was good with his tools. The legs would have been in a straight line and the first thought in a person’s mind would be Christ on the cross.
But the legs were out at an angle, and the arms were wrong.
The killer is not interested in games of detail, Abbie thought. He’s making one point and one point only. It was like the groove carved just beneath Jimmy Ryan’s belly button, saying, “Do you understand? No? How about now?”
Quick, just one impression, she said to herself. What is this about? What do you see?
But no single revelation came smashing down on her. She saw only details, heard the starlings fighting in a nearby tree.
Okay, if it’s not a crucifixion, why this pose? She went back to the brambles, shone her flashlight into the thicket of shadows. She played it upward slowly and saw among the twisting shapes a few straight lines. She followed the lines to the body and then reached her bare hand in through the tangle. One came out toward
Collins’s right ankle. She touched it. A thorn raked against her thumb and she drew her hand out fast.
“Damn it,” she hissed. She sucked the blood that welled up from the pad of her thumb and stared at the brambles. Then she pressed her fingers together and slipped the hand in again, bending her wrist to avoid the sharp thorn.
When she touched the straight line, she realized it was nylon cord, taut with Collins’s weight. The killer must have brought it with him. She got her flashlight out again and followed the cord from the ankle to a small stout trunk of a tree five yards away.
The killer had stripped Collins of his clothes. Displayed him, was that it? Then he took the first layer of skin off. Then the second. Slowly. It must have taken time and patience to work out here in the dark and the cold.
Had Collins been hiding a secret? Was he pretending to be someone he wasn’t? Or was it sexual for his torturer, punishing the nude body while exposing it for everyone to see?
But how did that fit with Jimmy Ryan?
Too damn fancy, Abbie. You’re out here in the elements. He drained him of blood, slowly. He didn’t cut his dick off.
Why? It seemed low on the ritualistic quotient. He didn’t paint messages in the snow or daub the trees with satanic symbols. He slowly, methodically, bled him out and then left him in the wind.
She tried to imagine the scene, the killer nicking a vein with his sharp knife, catching the spurting blood in a bowl, making the tinny, urgent sound of a farmer milking his cow. She leaned in for a look, Collins’s body shaking above her in a gust of wind, the patches of flesh slapping gently against the face. There were the little dabs of dark gray glue on the inside of Collins’s forearm. Bandages.
You bandaged him up to keep him alive longer. You dragged it out as long as possible, didn’t you?
Ladling the warm red stuff onto the snow. Would a red steam rise as the warm blood hit the frozen ground? A wave of nausea passed through her, and Abbie closed her eyes.
Come on, Absalom, this is basic stuff. The killer had one overwhelming thing to tell you and you can’t feel what it was?
She went closer to the body and examined it. Up high on the shoulder she found a tiny cut mark, almost purple against the translucent skin. She pushed the bramble near his ankles and got an angle on the back of his legs. Nothing. She leaned into it and looked further up. Clean skin. But when she drew back, she found another, deeper cut, just under the belly button.
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