This time, the bodies were in the basement of the house on Magnolia Street. Forensics was already sweeping the place as Czarcik carefully descended the cellar’s rotted wooden staircase.
Czarcik was relieved to find Lieutenant Cappy Walsh in charge. He had worked with Walsh on numerous occasions. He was plainspoken and cared little about department politics, which meant he didn’t automatically see Czarcik as a threat to his domain. Plus, it was rumored he had a little gambling problem. Nothing too serious—the ponies mostly. This pleased Czarcik. He trusted men with vices. Especially vices they didn’t advertise.
Walsh waved Czarcik over the moment he spotted him. “Thanks for coming so quickly, Paul,” Walsh said, dispensing with further pleasantries. He handed Czarcik a pair of latex gloves, which the detective snapped on.
“What do we got, Cappy?”
Walsh took a deep breath. “Name’s Marisol Fernandez. Thirty-six years old. She’s legal. Grew up in Pilsen. Owned a laundromat on Bryn Mawr with her husband.”
The woman was curled up in the fetal position, her elbows pulled tightly into her body, as if warding off blows from some invisible attacker. Both her eyes were black, raccoon-like, and her nose was broken. Her lips were far too swollen to see inside her mouth, but Czarcik was certain she was missing plenty of teeth.
Scattered around the body were a variety of instruments: a metal pipe, a coaxial cable, a wooden sorority paddle devoid of Greek letters.
There was something else. A dead chicken was tied around her neck.
Czarcik pointed to the blood-caked items. “I assume these are what did her in?”
Walsh nodded. “According to the preliminary examination,” he confirmed. He then dotted the air over each item with his finger, playing a morbid game of Clue. “The pipe shattered her orbital socket. The paddle busted her lips.” He gestured up and down Marisol Fernandez’s broken body. “She also has welts all over her legs, from the cable.”
“Husband?” Czarcik asked, expecting confirmation. It was one of those truisms every cop learned his first year in the academy: ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s the loving spouse.
Walsh shook his head slowly and offered a wry smile, as if holding back the twist of a popular mystery novel most people had already read. He took Czarcik’s elbow and led him into a small room off the south wall of the basement. At one time it was probably used to store pickling jars. The Fernandezes had used it to store chemicals for their laundromat. Now somebody had used it to store a body. A headless body.
“Is this him?” asked Czarcik.
Walsh shrugged. “We assume. But without a head, we need to wait for prints or DNA.”
The body was naked from the waist up. Cigarette burns, all fresh, dotted the torso like a child’s ghoulish art project. There were hundreds of them—tiny eyes, grayish at the rims, open wide in agony, with no mouth from which to scream.
The victim’s hands were tied behind his back. The rope then continued down between his legs and around his ankles.
“No one else in the house?” Czarcik asked.
“It’s clean.”
“Kids?”
Walsh glanced down at his tiny spiral notepad. “According to the neighbor, there were three foster children. But all were removed from the home late last year.”
The reason for their removal was relevant but not urgent. Czarcik would come back to that. The condition of the body, on the other hand, was pressing.
Czarcik examined the stump upon which once had sat the head of Luis Fernandez. He reached out and lightly ran his latex-covered finger around the circumference of the wound. Jagged tooth-shaped lacerations pocked the neckline.
Czarcik looked over at Walsh. “Wound’s a mess. This guy wasn’t decapitated with a single blow. It wasn’t an ax. Or a sword or machete. Nothing like that. If I had to guess, I’d say a hacksaw.”
Walsh nodded. “That’s what forensics thought. But we couldn’t find the weapon anywhere.” He scratched the side of his cheek. “There had to be a reason he took it with him. With Mrs. Fernandez, he left all his tools. Didn’t even make an effort to clean or hide them.”
There had to be a reason.
The phrase reverberated in Czarcik’s brain. That’s what he was here for, after all. Nowadays, even the most preternaturally intuitive detective was at the mercy of forensic science. He remembered the days when he would speculate, postmortem, whether a body had been sexually violated. Now tiny measurements of the capillaries in the vaginal walls could render an absolute verdict. He recalled all the hours he once spent trying to match a single fiber to a specific article of clothing. Now atomic microscopes could break down anything to the fundamental building blocks of matter. Guesswork was moot. Answers definitive.
What a computer with unlimited processing power could never explain, however, was the why.
The human condition was nature’s last unbreakable code. Against it, even the descendants of Deep Blue were no more than blind men groping at an elephant. It’s why men like Czarcik still had jobs. They were modern oracles, the rare few who could still read the tea leaves.
There was something about the whole scene that Czarcik didn’t like. It was too imperfectly staged. But staged it was; random it wasn’t. Of this he was certain.
Czarcik was far from spiritual, yet he had worked plenty of crime scenes where he had felt a palpable evil. Despite the carnage laid out in front of him, this wasn’t one of them. This was something equally unsettling. It was phony.
Walsh intruded on his thoughts. “What do you think, Paul? Some sort of ritual, huh?”
“Could be,” Czarcik replied.
“It’s got to be. ’Specially with that chicken. Why the hell else would you go to the trouble of tying a dead bird around someone’s neck?”
“Voodoo is certainly a possibility,” Czarcik suggested. This would satisfy Walsh for the remainder of their time together. Corroborate his suspicions. Give him purpose. All bullshit, of course. Because if there was one thing Czarcik was sure of, it was that this had nothing to do with voodoo.
Czarcik peeled off his latex gloves and balled them up. He was finished for the time being. “I’ll need the case file.”
“Soon as everything is back from the lab,” Walsh promised.
“And the medical examiner’s report.”
“I’ll have his office send it directly to you at the bureau.”
Czarcik nodded once and began to walk away.
“Paul,” Walsh called out.
The detective stopped at the bottom of the cellar steps and turned around. Walsh approached him; his breath stank of subtle spearmint. He’s trying to stop smoking, thought Czarcik.
“Listen, Paul,” Walsh began, somewhat apprehensively. “I know how you BJE guys like to work. But if you need anything . . . I’m here.”
Czarcik considered the offer and concluded that gratitude would be the fastest way to get his colleague to leave him the fuck alone. “Thanks, Cappy. I will.”
FOUR
Daniel Langdon lay on the bed in the cheap motel room he had paid for in cash.
His eyes were closed, and he massaged his temples in concentric circles, pressing the first two fingers of each hand against his skull as forcefully as he could endure. As expected, the headaches were becoming much more frequent. He considered an injection of Palladone directly into the vagus nerve but decided against it. The pain wasn’t yet agonizing, and he wanted to remain lucid, at least until the task at hand was finished.
He thought back to the initial diagnosis. How the doctor had entered the examination room as solemnly as a pallbearer to deliver the death sentence. From that point, he remembered only bits and pieces. The four lobes of the brain and their impact on memory, speech, cognition, intelligence, emotion, and most of all, behavior. Behavior. Because of its size and location, behavioral changes were inevitable. As inevitable as the pain. That’s what the good old doc had assured him. But that’s also when, for the first time, Daniel decided he mi
ght not go quietly into the night.
On the bed next to him, in the same spot where a warm lover once nestled into the contours of his body, was the head of Luis Fernandez sitting atop a plastic drop cloth. Bloodless, gray, and misshapen, it looked more like a well-made movie prop than what was once the control center of a human being.
Daniel popped four Advil and turned on the television. It took him a minute or two of channel surfing through reality shows about Alaska and old public-domain horror films before he stopped on a rerun of The Brady Bunch. It was the episode where the Brady children, convinced their house is going to be sold, decide to stage a haunting to scare off prospective buyers. In one completely preposterous scene, Alice comes across the three boys, who are wearing sheets with eyeholes cut out. Despite the amateur costumes, and the fact that all three ghosts are exactly the same height as the Brady boys, Alice mistakes them for actual apparitions and has what would amount to a sanitized nervous breakdown.
This was exactly what Daniel needed. Nothing about which he had to think too hard. Once the ibuprofen kicked in and the pain subsided, he had a lot of work to do.
During his preparations, Daniel had used a Tor web browser to conceal his identity while he researched the best ways to dispose of a human skull. He remembered being both surprised and depressed not only at how easily accessible the information was but at its sheer quantity.
Most of the questionable websites focused on the entire body, so he was forced to take some liberties. He assumed the teeth would be the easiest to get rid of. After prying them from the gumline with an ordinary pair of pliers, he could crush them into a fine powder using a stone mortar and pestle. From there, the dust could be flushed down the bathroom toilet. Even a motel with substandard plumbing would be able to handle the residue.
Hydrochloric acid, which wouldn’t harm the ceramic tile of the bathtub, would be used to dissolve the flesh. This would take eight hours or so, which was fine, since Daniel needed a good night’s sleep. When the skin and sinew were reduced to a liquid no more viscous than water, he would use a metal crowbar to lift up the tub’s stopper and send the noxious brew swirling down the drain.
The skull was more problematic. He wished he could just donate it to a medical school and be done. Unfortunately, even the most unscrupulous institutions had rules preventing the donation of off-the-street specimens.
Daniel decided the most prudent thing to do would be to wrap the skull up in bath towels to muffle the sound and then pound it into small pieces with a cinder block he had found behind the motel. He would then place the pieces in various fast-food containers, which he would throw away at random rest stops between here and his next destination. It was feasible that a curious sanitation worker might somehow come across the remains, identify them as human, and contact the authorities. But it was much, much more likely that they would remain forever the bedfellows of half-eaten burgers, soggy fries, and congealed milkshakes at the bottom of some garbage dump.
Back on the television, the industrious Bradys had convinced a would-be home buyer that a family who would go through so much trouble to scare off prospective suitors should really be the rightful owners. Daniel smiled to himself, amused by how none of the targets of this elaborate ruse seemed the least bit put off by the shenanigans. He was such a sentimentalist, even if his own life had disabused him of the notion of happy endings.
With the Advil now pulling at the edges of his throbbing headache, Daniel got to work, pouring the first bottle of hydrochloric acid into the tub. There was still a lot to do. And miles to go before I sleep, he thought before his mind wandered down those two roads that diverged in a yellow wood. He was slightly troubled that the imagery was taken from two different poems and much more upset that he hadn’t realized it until he was back on the road. That was the temporal lobe, no doubt. Altering his memory. Robbing him of the joy he still derived from even the most simple of pleasures.
The woods were dark and deep, indeed. But not so lovely.
The Illinois Bureau of Judicial Enforcement’s current headquarters was carved out of a former cold-storage building on the bank of the South Fork of the Chicago River.
Apparently, its construction was significant. All the tree huggers had gotten hard-ons about the fact that it was the first LEED-certified building in the city. Czarcik didn’t know what the fuck any of that meant, but he did know that there was something unnatural about a building with grass growing on its roof.
Czarcik sat at his desk, completely oblivious to the din around him. Whatever the space was designed for, it wasn’t privacy. When possible, he preferred to work from home, away from prying eyes. But the reports were coming in today, and he wanted to be here when they arrived. Having them messengered to his home would waste precious hours.
His area was Spartan: a metal filing cabinet, gooseneck lamp, papers, and office supplies strewn across the desktop, at odds with the vibe the architect was going for.
He leaned back in his completely nonergonomic chair and put his feet up on the desk. He chewed on a Rocky Patel cigar, his favorite brand. How that Indian knew how to make such a fine smoke, he didn’t know, but goddamned did he ever. Even with Czarcik’s unusual dispensations, he couldn’t flout the city’s no-smoking rule. He distinctly remembered when the ban went into effect. How the chief stood before the local TV cameras and asked hypothetically how many police officers’ lives would be saved by eliminating tobacco from the workplace. Czarcik was still a relatively young detective in the Chicago Police Department and didn’t think it would be conducive to his career to interrupt the press conference in order to inquire how many additional lives would be saved by those police officers for whom tobacco was nothing short of a magical elixir, keeping them motivated and focused on the business of saving lives.
Right now, with the stogie’s nicotine being absorbed into his bloodstream, Czarcik was completely focused on the black-and-white photograph of Luis Fernandez’s headless body. Besides the absence of a head, the most conspicuous detail was the cigarette burns. They were all fresh, most likely administered hours, or even minutes, before his death. Czarcik searched for a pattern, a purpose to their placement. If he were in a pulp detective thriller, this was the point at which he would nearly tumble out of his chair, having just discovered that the burns formed a pentagram. These, however, didn’t form anything.
There was something else peculiar about the body—it had no tattoos. If this were gang related, the corpse would be covered in them. Furthermore, anyone involved in the black arts would have some type of body art, if only to adhere to the cliché. Then again, he was certain none of this was occult related.
Walsh slapped a file down on the desk, startling Czarcik. “I told you I’d send the reports over, but I figured I might as well drop them off myself”—he glanced dramatically around the room—“to see how you BJE guys live.”
Czarcik put down the crime scene photos and picked up the file. He began to skim through the contents. “Anything interesting?”
Walsh raised his eyebrows and flopped his head from side to side. Czarcik couldn’t tell whether he was being coy or just annoying. “Medical examiner’s report came back as expected. The woman, Marisol Fernandez, died from blunt force trauma. Her husband . . . well, he died from getting his fucking head cut off.” Czarcik was already halfway through the report when Walsh added, “But there is something very curious . . .”
“The foster kids . . .” Czarcik muttered, mainly to himself, finishing Walsh’s sentence.
Walsh ignored him. “Remember when I told you that Family Services had removed them from the home?”
Czarcik didn’t answer. He already had all the information he needed. Walsh continued anyway. “Turns out the kids were abused in ways similar to the victims. Social worker interviewed said it was one of the worst cases she had ever seen. These pieces of shit didn’t want a family. They were just goddamned leeches. Saw a way to get easy state money for their failing business. Hardly paid attention to
the kids and barely gave them enough to eat. If any of them spoke up or asked for more, they’d get the paddle. Or the cable. And if these assholes were really angry, they used the kids as ashtrays.”
Walsh paused. Czarcik remained stoic, engrossed in the verbiage of the postmortem. “You get to the part about the chicken yet?” Walsh asked.
Czarcik still didn’t look up or acknowledge Walsh’s presence. He continued. “Kids were finally saved when a neighbor found the youngest, six years old, crawling around the yard with a dead chicken tied around his neck.” It was as if he were reading directly from the report. Which he wasn’t.
“According to Mrs. Fernandez, the kid was being punished for ‘stealing’ a few bites of a chicken nugget,” Walsh added.
“What I don’t see . . .” Czarcik said as he leafed through a few more pages, “is why these two received such light sentences.”
A glimmer of satisfaction passed across Walsh’s face. “Kids clammed up. Parents claimed the cigarette burns, not to mention all the other wounds, were self-administered. Suggested they did it to each other. After all, these were violent, fucked-up kids whose real parents had abandoned them. And with the kids not talking, the DA thought a year was the maximum he could get. Only thing the wife would admit to was the chicken. The DA said his hands were tied.”
Czarcik was suddenly hit by a familiar feeling, as if his whole body had just recharged itself, shocked by an invisible defibrillator. The first time this happened, when he was a rookie, Czarcik thought he was having a massive heart attack. The second time, that same year, he chalked it up to an equally powerful panic attack.
Rain Will Come Page 3
