The murder didn’t make a big splash in the post-Christmas English media, and I only stumbled upon it thanks to my very well-trained AI search bots. Couldn’t find any photos from the murder scene online, but fortunately all the articles in the local papers (thank you, Google Translate) were as gory and detailed as any Jo Nesbø thriller: the reindeer hides on the ice bed, the icicle in the victim’s heart, the pack of cards on the floor.
More than anything in the world, I wanted to visit the scene of the crime—take a dog sleigh ride to the hotel, see the room, talk to the local cops. My budget constrained me to a Skype exchange with a fellow true crime enthusiast from Rovaniemi. Or at least he said he was from Rovaniemi. Who knows anything about anybody they meet online nowadays?
Anyway, Rovaniemi is the capital city of Lapland and the official home of Santa Claus, over three hundred kilometers away from the Ice Hotel.
“The cops won’t tell you anything,” he said. Not Santa Claus—the true crime enthusiast from Lapland, the only person in my online forum who seemed remotely interested in this murder. “They’re worried about the effect on the tourist industry. The press is cooperating by”—he hesitated, searching for the right English word—“downplaying the event.”
He didn’t have more for me, except to put me in touch with the local poliisipäällikkö, police chief in charge. After a lengthy video conference, in which I did things my mom taught me never to do online, I learned a few vital pieces of information not disclosed to the public. Sometimes it’s good to be a woman in this business, after all.
So, the victim remained unidentified, a Jane Doe or whatever they call them in Lapland. According to the ice hotel’s guest register, the room had been unoccupied that night. Being the Christmas period in a remote tourist attraction, the hotel had been nearly empty. All the other guests (all four of them, and all of them women travelling together) had been interviewed. Nobody had seen anything or anybody unusual.
Icicles were plentiful in the area after the recent unseasonal warming and then a subsequent drop in temperature, and no, nobody had been insane enough to go looking for its original hanging place, especially seeing that it had been inserted into the wound post-mortem. The actual murder weapon may have been an ice pick. Not of the Basic Instinct kind, more like an ice chisel used by sculptors.
There was no forensic evidence to speak of. The temperature in the room was below freezing point, so victim and perp alike would have been wearing gloves, leaving no fingerprints and no bits of skin under the fingernails. No stray hairs or fabric threads. No signs of sexual interference.
The pack of cards found in the victim’s room was brand new and not part of the hotel supplies. It was also incomplete: it lacked the Queen of Hearts.
“Clearly the work of a madman,” the police chief concluded. “I know all the local troublemakers, and I can tell you, none of them have the imagination.”
There it was again, that word. Imagination. People had no idea how twisted some minds could get.
In this case, though, I agreed. This was not a local yokel at play.
Frustrated. Disempowered. Immobilized. I felt all those emotions and many more. My mind loves puzzles, and it hates not having enough data to solve one.
New Year’s Eve found me at home in front of the TV, my son asleep next to me on the sofa, waiting for the clocks country-wide to strike midnight. I didn’t feel right watching my usual diet of serial killer shows with a preschooler curled up into my side, so I chose a nature documentary, which turned out to be nearly as disturbing.
We tend to think about animals as somehow better than humankind: less intelligent perhaps, but more in tune with Mother Earth, not wasting, not littering, killing only when hungry. Nothing could be further from the truth.
While we could argue about the precise definition of murder, and whether it requires murderous intent and guilty minds, the fact remains that we humans inherited our penchant for violence from our more primitive ancestors. Even if we ignore the predator-prey killings, the animal kingdom still teems with examples of intra-species slaughter such as infanticide, cannibalism, territorial wars, and even the good old you-pissed-me-off-now-die aggression. The documentary cited some figures: 8 percent of hyenas are killed by other hyenas, the percent figure for lemurs is an astounding 17, while human-on-human murder stands at less than 1.5 percent.
Misty, our silver-gray cat, chose this moment to jump into my lap. I rubbed the patch of soft fur behind her left ear, thinking about all the rodents she’s deposited on the living room carpet over the years—all intact yet very dead. Still, mice were food in her world, even if she chose to gift them to us. It’s not like she was killing fellow felines.
It was unfair to compare a serial killer to an animal.
The documentary on the screen gave way to a large clock, counting down the minutes. I opened a bottle of sparkling apple juice and woke up Jack. He lifted one eyelid, whispered, “I love you, Mommy,” and fell asleep again.
I drank the juice alone. The whole bottle. It was the beginning of another year.
“I love you too, baby,” I told Jack. “More than anything in the whole world.” Truth, that.
Second Murder, Wieliczka, Poland
A few months later, my industrious bots found a news item that fit the modus operandi of the Lapland killer: another tourist attraction, another Jane Doe, another murder scene from a horror B-movie. The date of the incident was 8 March. The country was Poland: still Europe, but moving south. A small part of me wondered whether the plan was to stay on the Old Continent or branch out. A much larger part tried to figure out the significance of the playing cards.
The victim died of a stab to the heart, to all appearances inflicted with a salt stalagmite broken off in the same chamber. The author of the piece seemed more concerned with voicing his or her grievance about vandalizing the cave’s rock formations than with the murder itself, or with stopping to think how likely it was to stab somebody with what was essentially a stick made of minerals. And, like, did the woman lie down on the mine’s stone floor and wait for the killer to position the stalagmite just so, above her chest?
The body was found in the Chamber of St. Kinga, which meant nothing to me at first, until I read up and learned that Kinga had been a queen before she became a saint. Eight hundred years ago, the Polish king had found himself in need of a wife, and had set his eyes on a Hungarian princess. According to Wieliczka’s legend, Kinga didn’t want jewels as her wedding gift. Instead, she asked her father for a salt mine. She got one in her native Hungary, but she didn’t know how to transport it to Poland. So she did the only thing she could think of: she prayed and threw her engagement ring into the Hungarian mine shaft. When she arrived in Poland, she stopped in the middle of nowhere and asked her servants to dig. Out came a lump of salt with Kinga’s engagement ring inside it, and that was the beginning of the Polish salt mine.
Back in the thirteenth century, salt was a commodity more useful than diamonds, because unlike diamonds, salt could be used to preserve meat (no fridges in those days). The twenty-first century woman lying dead in the Wieliczka salt mine, however, wore diamonds. Fake diamonds, the journalists were quick to report, but they sparkled just the same, in her earlobes, on her fingers, around her neck.
The article in Gazeta Krakowska online didn’t mention a pack of playing cards on the floor, but I could bet it was missing the Queen of Diamonds.
I checked my budget. No change. No chance for a trip to the south of Poland.
Nikolay, my fellow true crime enthusiast from Lapland, thanked me for bringing the new murder to his attention and offered to make the journey to Wieliczka. He went as far as suggesting he’d finance me to join him, with gentlemanly promises of no strings and separate rooms in separate hotels if I so wished. Tempted as I was, I had to say no.
The next day, Nikolay reported back. Yes, I was correct about the deck of cards a
t the scene of the crime, as well as about the Queen of Diamonds not being part of the pack. No, they still hadn’t identified the murder weapon, but it wasn’t the stalactite.
“You mean, the stalagmite?” I interrupted. “That’s what the newspaper said.”
Nikolay shrugged. “Newspapers. They probably don’t know the difference. It was a stalactite. Grew downwards. Like that icicle.”
Because of the public nature of the mine chamber and the number of tourists visiting the mine every day, there was forensic evidence aplenty, though none useful. Again, no sexual interference of any sort.
The victim remained nameless.
I did the only thing I could: spent all my thinking time between jobs, during boring stakeouts, while washing dishes and tossing sleeplessly in bed contemplating the two cases, examining the similarities, considering the fetishes. We had female victims, stabbings, decks of cards.
We had nothing.
Time spent with my son was off-limits to the investigation, though. When Jack and I played checkers, watched The Princess Bride for the tenth time, read bedtime stories, or walked our dog on the beach, my mind was solely focused on being a mom.
Compartmentalize—I could do it as well as any man. Love my son—I could do that as well as any woman loved her child. Solve the puzzle—I sure hoped I could do that way better than anybody else. Especially as nobody else seemed to be working on it.
Third Murder, Naxos, Greece
It was April the 12th before the killer struck again, this time in Greece, which confirmed my theory that he was moving down the map. A Naxos harbor drinking hole called the Queen of Clubs was the murder scene, down a steep half-flight of rocky stairs into what was generously called the wine cellar. A range of photos on a vacationer’s blog (“take a look, we were in this bar only last week, and now someone’s been murdered here”) showed me that the basement was more of a pantry, with a vat of olives, a few bottles of wine on the racks, and bunches of herbs hanging off the ceiling. The only place the body could have fitted was on the sandy floor.
Definitely part of the pattern. First the Queen of Hearts, then the Queen of Diamonds, now the Queen of Clubs.
As expected, the victim was an unidentified woman, the cause of death stabbing through the heart with a replica of a Greek kopis. I looked it up. A kopis was an ancient Greek short sword, single-edge, used both for cutting and for thrusting.
The news article mentioned a pack of cards found clutched in the woman’s hand as a teaser.
I emailed Nikolay. He had no contacts in the Greek police and couldn’t afford to take any more time off to travel to Naxos. He said he was sorry. Not nearly as sorry as I was, I told him.
Back on the home front, one of my clients got impatient after my three-day invigilation of her husband revealed no extramarital affairs. She suggested I should speed things along and use my female charms to entrap him.
“He’s going overseas tomorrow,” she told me. “A conference in Europe. Greece, I think. Or maybe Turkey. I wasn’t really listening. One of the islands, anyway.”
My ears pricked up at the mention of Greece-I-think-or-maybe-Turkey, despite my moral objection to her plan of action. She’d buy me a business-class plane ticket, I’d get her husband’s attention in the airport lounge, check into the same hotel.
“You don’t need to sleep with him if you don’t feel like it,” she continued. “I certainly don’t. Just get the intent recorded on your phone. In his job, he has to be squeaky clean. Any whiff of a scandal, and he’s out on his arse.”
“How will that help you? If he’s unemployed?”
She looked at me like I was a half-wit. “Naturally, I wouldn’t take the recording to his board of directors. I’d play it for him and make sure I get a fair divorce settlement.”
Somehow, I had a hunch our opinions differed on what was considered a fair divorce settlement, especially if blackmail were involved.
The trip to Greece-Turkey sounded exactly like what my serial killer investigation needed. Unfortunately, I despise blackmailers only a little less than I despise serial killers, so it was a no-deal.
No good deed goes unpunished. My refusal cost me the spousal invigilation contract as well.
Fourth Murder, Cape Town, South Africa
Less than a month later, I read the following in the Cape Times:
Cape Town—An unidentified woman was stabbed to death in a luxurious hotel in the Oranjezicht area on 9 May. Police have appealed to anyone with information about the killing to come forward.
According to Sergeant Noloyiso Mpayipheli, the murder is believed to have happened between ten p.m. and midnight. The body was discovered in the Queen of Spades hotel games room by a staff member at closing time.
“Police attended to the scene and upon their arrival they found a body of a woman with a stab wound to her chest,” Mpayipheli said.
Nobody has been arrested yet for the murder. It is unclear whether the woman was a local or a tourist; however, it is confirmed that she was not a guest at the hotel.
A spokesperson for Community Safety, Yvette de Jong, said crime is reaching rampant proportions in the Western Cape, with more than ten cases of murder reported every day last year.
Sergeant Mpayipheli said the circumstances were being investigated and an autopsy would determine the cause of death.
Anyone who has any information about the murder can anonymously contact the Oranjezicht police station, or Crime Stop on 0860010111, or SMS Crime Line on 32211.
I hadn’t needed my internet-trawling bots. I found the article myself. I knew what I was looking for: the Queen of Spades.
The order of the suits bothered me. As a bridge player, I’m used to the clubs-diamonds-hearts-spades sequence. That’s also the most common poker sequence, although some poker variations change it to alternate the red and black, ending up with diamonds, then clubs, then hearts, then spades. But hearts at the bottom and spades on top? I knew of only one game that used such a convention: the Russian Preference. Of course, the sequence might just be due to the rarity of appropriately named venues, and the north-to-south trajectory. What did I know?
Right. What did I know about the serial killer’s modus operandi so far? The cause of death was always a single stab wound to the chest. Now, if you know anything about the human anatomy, you understand how difficult it is to access the heart. It hides behind the breastbone, partially protected by the ribs as well as the tough intercostal connective tissue between them. To strike the heart with one stab on four occasions requires medical training, or military training, or many hours on YouTube and a medically-correct dummy to practice on. It also requires above-average strength of the upper body. There are much easier ways to kill a person. Even if you insist on stabbing as your method, almost any target would have been better: the major vessels above the breastbone, the throat, the eyes, the kidneys, even.
Who could kill with a single stab to the heart? A surgeon. A butcher maybe, like Jack the Ripper. Who else? A Green Beret, a Navy SEAL, a former KGB spy, a Mossad agent.
The dates didn’t seem important: 26 December (Boxing Day), 8 March (International Women’s Day), 12 April, 9 May. I ran them through Google anyway. 9 May turned out to be Victory Day, celebrating the fall of Berlin to the Russian army and the end of World War II in Europe.
The staging of the body: yes, it meant something for sure. I just didn’t know what.
What else? Most serial killings are about control and power and sexual pleasure, even, whether or not any sexual assault has actually taken place. This perp didn’t go for sexual activity.
In the name of due diligence, I also analyzed the victims. In my profession, we often use victimology to discover the motives of the killer—profiling the victims to profile the killer, so to speak. I compared the photographs of the murdered women. No obvious physical similarities, although all the victims were of
European descent. There were no further points of intersection. The hair, for example, ranged from sandy to black via red, and there was nothing in the faces to suggest a fetish for high cheekbones or beauty spots.
This time, I didn’t reach out to Nikolay. I didn’t have to. All it took was a phone call to my twin sister to please come over and babysit Jack for the afternoon (when he was younger, I sometimes wondered whether he could even tell us apart, and to this day I’m not entirely certain of the answer) while I drove up to Cape Town and spoke to Sergeant Mpayipheli.
Sergeant Mpayipheli turned out to be an extremely busy woman, with the Queen of Spades murder low on her list of priorities. Small wonder, what with ten murder cases reported in the area every day. Having perused my PI license and confirmed I wouldn’t be charging for my time, she was happy to hand over the thin case file.
“We have a computer backup,” she told me. “But with load shedding, we find paper more reliable.”
I nodded. South Africa’s electricity demand exceeded our supply. The solution was to schedule regular power cuts on parts of the network in order to avoid excessive load on the generation plants. Most companies and government institutions were backpedaling on their conversion to digital paperwork.
The report from the detective first on the scene, who happened to be Sergeant Mpayipheli, described the position of the body (on her back, on the billiards table), with the pool cue protruding from the chest. There was a lot of blood—this was the first significant difference between this case and the previous ones. At first, I wondered whether the cold temperatures in the ice hotel, the salt mine, and the wine cellar could have contributed to the victims bleeding out more slowly, but a quick Google search didn’t support my theory. More likely, the newspapers suppressed that fact to shelter their readers. I fired off an email to Nikolay asking him to check with his contacts in Lapland and Poland.
“Where is the autopsy report?” I asked the sergeant.
The Book of Extraordinary Amateur Sleuth and Private Eye Stories Page 15
