by David Levien
“Stabbed you?”
“Cut me.”
“Tell me everything.”
She poured fresh drinks, and Behr relayed the details of the fight, her eyes flickering with excitement that she barely tried to hide. She poured refills, and they moved to the living room couch and got to the start of the “interview.”
“What’d he know?” she asked.
“Everything,” Behr said. “Nothing, as far as hard facts, nothing about Kendra Gibbons, but everything about our guy and what he’s doing.”
“Fuck me …” she said, for the first time of the evening, and shook her head and sipped her drink as her mind ran.
“He confirmed a repeat signature killer at work, and your assessment about the type.”
“He used the same language?”
“Not as academic as yours, but he’s got a PhD too, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“He said whoever’s doing this is putting the bodies out there, but also putting himself out there,” Behr said.
“He craves the attention.”
“That’s what Prilo said. He’s making a relationship with the world.”
She nodded, deep in thought, and they both fell silent.
“Hey, Behr,” she said, looking up. “How did you get him talking? After you fought and you choked him out. You kind of glossed over that part. I don’t imagine he was real willing.”
“No, he was pretty reluctant …”
“So?”
“Well, I had his hammer in my hand,” Behr said. “And he got convinced.”
That’s when he saw a desire in her eyes that matched the hunger he felt deep inside him. Their bodies came together. She was electric, her body supple and charged. She tasted like tequila and lime squeeze. Their mouths and hands were all over each other, and they started on the couch but weren’t finished until they’d moved to her room and destroyed her bed too. Afterward, Behr lay there in a tangle of sheets, her hair and her smell, drunk and happy and miserable all at once.
Sometime later, it could have been hours, neither of them sleeping, he heard her voice in the darkness and felt her fingers on the mottled buckshot scars along his collarbone.
“Would you have done it? You know, with his hammer …”
The question floated there in the air for a moment. He knew better than to answer it.
“I should go,” he said and started to move.
39
Tired and hungover from more than the tequila and pills, Behr stepped out of the shower and leaned on the sink. He peeled the plastic garbage bag from his stitched arm, used a hand to wipe the condensation from the mirror, and stared into his own eyes for a long moment. Animal and abject with pain and emptiness, he was glad when the steam reclaimed the spot he’d cleared. Thoughts of Trevor and Susan filled his head, as they often did, especially in the morning, and he pushed them away with an effort that was almost physical. Facing the loss of his family could make a person crazy. Behr had heard stories about his friend Eddie Decker, who’d lost his in a horrible manner. The ex-cop was on the West Coast now, and he had taken to going into biker bars wearing a Hells Angels patch even though he wasn’t a member, and fighting all comers who took exception. Behr understood it was his method of purging the pain, or his penitence, or practice. He had been there before himself. He stood in the bathroom for another moment and steered his attention back to his case, and Prilo’s words rang in his head: he’s making a relationship with the world.
Behr walked out of the bathroom in his towel and began to get dressed. It was a little after 7:00, still too early, but he knew where he needed to go.
“I just need to retrace my steps, that’s all I need to do … And tell myself: this is a good job for me … Slow down …”
The middle-aged librarian, a small mentally challenged man who’d steered Behr to the art section, was now talking to himself as he wheeled away a cart of books to be reshelved.
“Just very anxious about getting it all done … It’s just the way my mind is … Just need to retrace my steps …”
Maybe he’s speaking for the both of us, Behr thought.
Behr had spent the morning in the stacks of the university library sifting through books and magazines, looking at the works of painters and sculptors. If the body found at the pharmaceutical plant evoked The Scream, perhaps it was an insight into the killer’s mind. So Behr was going over extreme images, by Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, Damien Hirst and Patricia Piccinini, and others, to see if the way the bodies were being presented actually mimicked their famous works. If he found that, Behr hoped it would lead to further information. As he flipped through pages of their portraits he noted how visceral and violent their depictions of their subjects could be. They trafficked in intense emotion, even madness, but nothing he was seeing resembled any of the bodies that had been found.
After a few hours his hope had begun to die as he recognized that what he was doing was ludicrous. He’d set out to learn what had happened to a young quasi-prostitute. That had evolved into the search for a murderous butcher, and now he had ended up in a library. It was not a progression that Gene Sasso would have put much stock in.
Behr felt a warm flood of humiliation, even though no one knew what he was doing. The idea that these bodies had been staged as copies of classic works of art, and that they would lead to a killer’s identity, was a silly fantasy. But as he continued to thumb through the texts that accompanied the paintings, Behr read about the condition of the artist, and the artist in relation to mankind. It was all suffering and alienation, desperation and lack of human connection, and that did evoke the interior state of killers in his estimation, so he continued. While Behr’s initial supposition began to crumble into rubble, the foundation that remained was an actual idea: that this man, this murderer, wasn’t a copycat or appreciator, but saw himself as some kind of an artist and his kills were his works.
Before long, Behr found himself reading some of van Gogh’s letters, because he knew the man had worked in obscurity and had apparently died by his own hand. He hoped to discover something illuminating in such a tortured soul but was surprised to find writings that were filled with positivity and appreciation for people, for life, and the belief in the search for a higher power that if not God was something akin to grace, so Behr moved down the row until he pulled a book on a Swedish artist who had lived in England in the 1800s named Oscar Rejlander. He flipped through the images and then read the biographical section on the flap and felt his mind stop.
“I’m in the wrong section,” Behr said aloud, realizing how quickly the library environment could get you talking to yourself.
He took out his phone right there in the stacks and made a call.
“Quinn? It’s Frank Behr, I need to see you.”
40
“Coffee?” Django Quinn offered.
“Only if you have any ready,” Behr answered.
“It will be in three minutes.”
Quinn lived in the Block, a large building that had once been the W. H. Block Department Store but had been converted into residential lofts. If Behr expected a dwelling featuring more gore than his own thanks to a profusion of Quinn’s crime scene photos, he was very wrong. Instead there were countless framed photos, shot by Quinn, hanging and stacked against the walls of the stylish space, but all were of living subjects. Most were striking black-and-white studio shots of a beautiful son and daughter who bore Quinn a strong resemblance. As they played on jungle gyms, skipped rope, and ran in the park, Behr felt what a charmed life the photographer was leading. There were also portraits of musicians, not to mention landscapes, and shots by other photographers, and no pictures of victims whatsoever.
“So Django—is that your real name? Not one you hear every day,” Behr asked.
“My dad played jazz trumpet, still does. But he loves the guitar and hoped I’d take it up, so he named me after Django Reinhardt. I picked up a camera instead. It was just an old Pentax ME, but once I mad
e my first picture, that was all she wrote.”
“What was it?”
“A shot of my dog. I still have it somewhere.”
Quinn’s wife Sheri, a pretty, petite brunette, emerged from the kitchen with a tray bearing cups and a pair of steeping French presses.
“You want me to push these, or can you able-bodied men handle it?” she asked, revealing a bit of Michigan in her accent.
“You do it, honey. You know how I always botch it up,” Quinn said.
Sheri shot Behr a look. “He can break down and reassemble a camera body in the dark, but he can’t push a cup of coffee,” she said as she pressed down the plunger and then poured.
“I just like your touch,” Quinn said.
“Oh, my ass,” Sheri said.
“That too.”
“Enough out of you,” she said to Quinn. “If you need anything else, Mr. Behr, let me know.” With that Sheri Quinn left them. Fullbodied and robust, the coffee was one of the best cups Behr had ever tasted, and it made his own life seem the poorer for the crap he served himself.
“I’m glad you called,” Quinn said. “I was thinking about you this morning. Did you see it?”
“See what?” Behr asked. “I’ve been in the library all day.”
“Papers and website announced it—the body got identified. Name was Danielle Crawley. The DNA was getting run on a rush, but there was a missing-persons report out that fit the description and mentioned a tattoo on the right calf—a small shamrock. They called in the girl’s sister who had filed it, and she made the ID.” Quinn put down his coffee. “The girl was a bartender, DJ, and played in a rock band. She still drank a little, but she was recently out of rehab, clean after getting caught up in hard drugs.”
“Really,” Behr said. “Police checking known associates from that world?”
“They are,” Quinn said, “but she’d only recently got here to stay with the sister. She’d been living up in Milwaukee, and no one has reason to believe any trouble like this would follow her. Since we got the other cases with similar circumstances they figure it’s related to that. Point is: that tattoo—you identified that body.”
“It was just an idea. Someone else would’ve had it,” Behr said.
“Yeah, but you did,” Quinn said.
“Do the articles tie it to Northwestway?”
“Yep, you know it.”
Behr winced, knowing what a pain in the ass this would be for Breslau. “What about any other murders?” he asked.
“Official line: ‘Police are looking into connections to past cases,’ ” Quinn said. “So what can I help you with?”
Now Behr put down his coffee and took out his notebook.
“A still life of death. That’s what you called it out at the crime scene. It’s an art term.”
“Right.”
“And that, along with some other elements, got me thinking: this guy we’re dealing with is a killer, but he sees himself as an artist. He feels cut off and at odds from society in many of the ways artists do.”
“Yeah,” Quinn said, interested. “Misunderstood, misanthropic.”
“It hit me: his medium is killing, and mutilation. But there’s also a visual component that’s supposed to last afterward. So I thought: what if the bodies are just the subjects of what he considers his real work?”
“I see where you’re going.”
“At first I thought he’s keeping souvenirs, certain parts and pieces, but that’s not really enough. So then I thought: painter or a sculptor? But that seemed like it was coming up dry, and right when I started to doubt myself, I found a book on this guy Oscar Rejlander, who’d—”
“He started out a painter and became a photographer.”
“Yeah.”
“He was considered pretty damn good with the brush, but he abandoned it for photography when he saw how well a photograph captured the folds of a sleeve. He made some haunting images, especially for his time …”
Behr nodded and saw Quinn hit by a bolt of understanding, just as he had been.
“He photographs them. He’s making pictures before he puts them out …” Quinn said aloud.
Behr shrugged. “I think he might be. I started looking up well-known photographers after I called you, figuring I could find one he was imitating, and it would lead somewhere. But the books in the library were mostly portraits, famous actors, buildings and mountains. Fashion. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, Man Ray, Diane Arbus—no one on the library shelves is even close. Man, I don’t know where else to look.”
“No, no, no. Those aren’t the right references,” Quinn said, excited now. He motioned Behr over to his bookshelves. “These are more along the lines …”
Quinn started pulling large, worn coffee-table-sized books of black-and-white prints from the shelves and handing them to Behr. “E. J. Bellocq. He shot New Orleans prostitutes …” Behr took a look at the grim, evocative portraiture of the fallen women of Storyville until Quinn handed him the next volume.
“Weegee—his real name was Arthur Fellig. The guy is my personal North Star, he’s like the godfather of crime scene photography.” Behr took the book and began flipping through pages of stark, graphic imagery of downed bodies on flashbulb-lit pavement, and denizens of the streets of New York City in raw couplings back in the 1940s, long before such things were considered acceptable. The shots created a visceral reaction in Behr, the mark of good art, he supposed. “There’s something hypnotic in a photo of a body,” Quinn said, almost to himself, as he looked over Behr’s shoulder, offering a window into his profession. “The way light hits a dead eye. It reflects total …”
“Nothingness,” Behr said.
“This is a Danish guy named Asger Carlsen.”
Behr looked over black-and-white photos of headless bodies with extra arms and legs jutting out in various directions. The images were odd, but there was a certain smoothness to the presentation that made it all slightly comfortable.
“Ah, here it is …” Quinn said, pulling a book from the shelf. “Witkin.”
Behr opened the heavy book and froze. Nothing he’d seen in the crime scene photos was specifically re-created in its pages, but the distressed black-and-white images there were gruesome, gothic, and sickening, almost like high-level torture porn. There were genitals punctured and stretched, nipples with nails through them, people in black masks hanging from hooks plunged through the skin of their chests and backs, cut-off heads. The photos communicated a deep pain and sadness of existence, not just in the subjects but in the photographer as well.
“My God,” Behr said quietly as he continued flipping. Beings from beyond the edges of regular society—hermaphrodites and dwarves, massively fat women wearing crow-like masks, emaciated and wrinkled ancient men—all passed before Behr’s eyes. He wasn’t sure how the images had been created, what special effects were at play in capturing the decapitations and amputations. Perhaps he used lifelike mannequins or corpses he’d acquired somewhere.
“I haven’t looked at these for a long time,” Quinn said. “The feeling is similar to seeing our killer’s displays. Shit, I should’ve thought of this. You’re getting inside his head.”
“That’s where I need to be,” Behr said. “Can I borrow this?” He raised the book.
“Sure, give it back whenever.”
“I need to find a way to smoke this bastard out,” Behr said.
“How?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I doubt he’s gonna invite you to his gallery show.” Quinn laughed over the rim of his coffee cup.
Behr looked up with an idea. “No, he’s not, but I can invite him to yours.”
41
What does he know, and what is there yet to learn before he acts?
There is no man in Sunbeam’s life. No husband or boyfriend who lives with her, he is fairly sure. He’s been watching her for the better part of the last several days and hasn’t seen one come or go, and she sleeps at home each night. So no h
usband or boyfriend, or even one of those popularly, and disgustingly, referred to as “friends with benefits.” He could be wrong, the significant other could be out of town, or merely a much more infrequent visitor, but he just has a feeling: she’s alone.
He’s learned she works at Crossroads Hospitality Group, which oversees a group of mid-level restaurants, according to their website, in a freestanding building off Rangeline. He knows she parks next to the building and that the lot is too well lit. And that her daily jogging is limited to daylight hours, with plenty of traffic on the streets, and that the sidewalks and paths she uses have too many people on them for his taste. On an inclement day he saw her drive her Honda Accord to a fitness center that has a row of treadmills and stationary exercise bicycles displayed behind a plate-glass window, where she and her brethren worked themselves into a repetitive sweat in the name of health. He admires it as much as he doesn’t understand it. The only strength building and fitness he is familiar with is the kind that comes with hard labor. Muscles built by and for utility, and not for vanity or as a mere hobby.
Still, he just can’t seem to get her good and alone outside the house. Darkness has fallen while he’s been sitting outside, waiting and watching. She doesn’t lead an external life. She doesn’t bebop down to local bars, or to liquor stores like Cinnamon did, so her home will have to do. In fact, she is home now. He clicks open his car door and feels the cold night air flood in, washing over him like river water. He closes the door behind him and walks deliberately across the street. He doesn’t belong, but nothing announces that more than creeping about, lurking and hoping not to be spotted.
He nears her front door. It is solid and well fitted with shiny, new-looking locks. The windows appear almost new as well, weather-tight and strong. He can test them and see if any are unlocked, but there is risk to it—if neighbors catch sight of him doing that, they’ll call Sunbeam or the police right away. Instead, he steps out of the throw of the streetlights and melts into the shadows along the side of her house, then heads toward her backyard.
