by Ritu Sethi
It feels so good strangling that rope hard – even though my arm muscles burn – even though my insides are exploding... so powerful and glorious like I’ve never felt before. I’m the bringer of life and death – filled with a raging kind of blood – I am alive for the very first time.
She buckles under my grip.
I am no longer myself.
I am a killer.
CHAPTER TWO
G
ray stood and pushed his heels into the ground, only just managing to avoid falling backward again. He was in the body farm and the glistening limb had moved. He shut his eyes. The air, thick and pungent, tasted of human flesh.
When he reopened them, the blurred image of the leg came into focus.
Maggots swarmed across the rotting, open flesh of the calf, streamed down the ankle, and into the curdled ground.
An elastic band snapped within his chest. He shoved the reaction down, especially before two medical doctors with the authority to declare him unfit to do his job and take away his only lifeline. He didn’t have to continue with this case. Why not walk out of here without a backward glance, go on with his Christmas vacation? Sergeant Slope had total jurisdiction.
Emmy came up beside him. “Are you alright, Chief Inspector? You’ve gone dead white.”
“I’m perfectly fine. It’s the smell. I’m accustomed to one rotting body, two at most. A hundred is throwing me off.”
“We currently have one hundred and eleven permanent residents.”
“A kind of Hotel California,” Gray said.
She merely blinked.
Seymour joined them. “Emmy hasn’t told you the best part. Wait for it.”
“What best part?” Gray said.
Emmy put her hands on her hips. Her red mouth looked coated in blood. “The lips, Chief Inspector. They were sutured shut, with 4.0 surgical nylon.”
Both sets of eyes were upon him, but Gray couldn’t think, couldn’t move.
Seymour stepped closer. “Now, what do you make of that?”
Gray’s world went blank.
“A surprisingly competent suturing job,” Emmy said. “Although, a 3.0 nylon thickness is more cosmetically appropriate on the lips.”
All sound…all thought flew into nothingness before roaring back like a tidal wave crashing through Gray’s head. Lips sutured, stitched? It couldn’t be.
Not now, after so many years—not here of all places where his estranged wife and newfound, two-year-old daughter lived.
Seymour stared at him, uncharacteristically quiet. He’d purposely left out the most pertinent detail, maybe because he couldn’t bear to tell Gray, maybe because he knew you had to hook a fish before reeling him in.
Gray stepped closer to Emmy, his parched tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. “Please repeat what you just said.”
“Lips stitched with 4.0 nylon suture?” Emmy looked at Seymour and back and shrugged her shoulders. Did it not occur to her to mention the sutured lips sooner? Didn’t she realize what that meant?
Of course, she didn’t. Seymour probably didn’t either.
A steady rain beat his head, plastering down his hair, droplets flicking off the nearby tarp and pooling in one crinkled corner of the thick blue plastic. Gray wasn’t himself. He grew so hot that the water going down his back felt like steam—and thoughts raced faster than he could reign in. Even as they sped out of control, a small voice told him to stop.
“You’re shaking,” Seymour said. “Breathe evenly.”
But Seymour didn’t understand the significance of what Emmy had revealed…the sutured mouth...the strangulation. Gray wasn’t about to tell them.
Visions of the spread-eagled body, the pink underwear flashed obscenely in his mind – except now, the unbidden image of a small sutured mouth came, accompanied by the high-pitched screaming of his two-year-old – even as it made no sense, even as he knew he was being crazy.
“Dr. Kaur. We’ve been here for fifteen minutes, and you didn’t bother to mention the sutured lips until now?”
Her eyes widened. “I explained in the order –”
“A maniacal killer strangles and mutilates defenseless women, evidence is being destroyed by the second, and you decided to explain things in order?”
“Easy, James. This isn’t like you.” Seymour moved between them. Gray pushed him aside.
“This...this isn’t a very p-professional t-tone, Chief Inspector.”
“I’m not the official officer here. I don’t need to be professional.”
“You’re losing control,” Seymour said.
Gray frantically searched the grassed area for the one object he expected to find at the site—where was it? Where was it? It wasn’t there.
Seymour was muttering in a low tone. “I’m sorry about this, Emmy.” He turned to Gray. “I’m sorry to you too, in a way.”
“Don’t trip over your remorse.” It was all Gray could do to stop the walls from closing in. In fifteen years on the force, he’d never lost control before; he’d never spoken this way to a witness before. What the hell happened to him this past week at Searock? He controlled his voice. The words came out between clenched teeth. “That girl lay strangled, her lips sutured shut, murdered –”
Emmy stepped back. “But –”
“– and you’re recounting your daily research routine.”
“You don’t understand –”
Seymour said, “Let her speak.”
“You came back after making the call to the police from the cabin, didn't you?” Gray said.
“Y-yes, b-but, it isn’t her –”
“And the body disappeared? How long did the call take?”
She lowered her head, shoulders hunched, voice a whisper above the mounting rain. “Four or five minutes.”
Seymour bristled. “She’s shutting down, James. Back off.”
“Sergeant Slope d-didn’t believe me,” she said. “He said, no one dead.”
“Slope accused her of making it up,” Seymour explained. “He didn’t understand Emmy any better than you, didn’t understand her reactions, the way she sees the world.”
Emmy blurted, “Neither of you understands. It isn’t – her.”
Gray pushed past Seymour. “Isn’t who? Did you recognize the victim, is that what you mean? For God’s sake, spit it out.”
“I...I said... not her.”
Gray wanted to put his fist through a wall. He needed to know everything about the Stitcher’s return—now. Her wide eyes betrayed fear, but of him or the killer? In his heart, he knew the answer.
Enough.
“If not her,” he yelled, “then who? Who was the dead girl?”
Seymour bellowed. “James!”
She straightened, lifted her head. Her voice boomed out.
“Not a girl. Why did you think it was a girl? You misogynistic men are all the same. Always making sexist assumptions.”
He caught Seymour’s confused glance.
“Not ‘her’,” Emmy said. “The body I found wasn’t a woman’s. It belonged to a man. Now, do you understand? And then, someone took away the corpse. Slope didn’t believe me, Chief Inspector. Do you?”
Gray took a deep breath and adjusted his vision of the crime scene. His brain began to work and sped forward. He scanned the area around the site for what he had expected to find. Two curious sets of eyes were upon him. He didn’t plan on explaining.
It wasn’t there. Anywhere. What the hell did that mean?
Five minutes later, they were back in Emmy’s cabin.
“You forget to take your Prozac or something?” Seymour’s words struck home, and Gray felt an uncharacteristic regret.
“Don’t joke,” he said. “I know I crossed the line. I haven’t been myself lately.”
“You obliterated the line, James. I’ve never seen you do that to a witness. You’re the coolest and most fair inspector on the force. She didn’t deserve it.”
“I know. I’ve apologized. I’m not myself th
is last little while.”
“You’re telling me. Wasn’t coming back to Searock and figuring things out with Sita supposed to help all that?”
Dr. Emmy Kaur wasn’t the only one who needed to recover; Gray did, too.
The inside of her rustic cabin contrasted the austerity of the body farm facility grounds.
Cedar lined the walls and soothed Gray’s traumatized nostrils; an old sofa embroidered with flowers reminded him of his grandmother’s cottage when he was a child; the heat from the small roaring fire warmed his numb fingers and toes.
But his cramped right hand would take a while to recover, the three immobile middle fingers jutting forward like melting icicles, the scar snaking from wrist to forearm now red and raw.
It was a reminder of the most pivotal moment of Gray’s life. An accident he may as well have caused, which took everything, leaving only the nightly obsession to sculpt his son’s face at age nine, ten, eleven – all the ages Craig would never see.
Gray had cut back on the obsession to sculpt. He fell asleep without the need now, a small success.
The color was returning to his stiff fingers, along with a burning sensation and pins and needles. He would never get the hand fixed. Never.
Gray returned to the present. “What your Emmy says – it isn’t possible.”
Seymour polished his glasses, fogged by the rain still pelting outside the cabin. “Yet, it is, my friend. We have to find this monster before he strikes again.”
“You believe her? With no body and no evidence, I’m tempted not to.”
Emmy sat on the dining table by the small open kitchen with her head lowered and her knees tightly together, a steaming mug between her hands. She seemed to be counting the ridges in the grain pattern of the worn oak table.
Her head lifted, and her face scrunched up, as though Gray were a particularly recalcitrant corpse who refused to decompose.
“There isn’t much time,” he said to Seymour. “We have to gather any possible evidence from the scene before the rain destroys everything. Minutes are vital.”
Seymour shook his head. “Without SOCO?”
“Without a single scene of crime officer.”
They left Emmy and headed back out towards site 144. Rain pelted across his forehead and cheeks, tasted bitter in his mouth. The warmed wet clothes clinging to his body suddenly turned cold, making him shiver.
“You don’t get Emmy, do you?” Seymour said.
“Procuring information from her is like having teeth pulled. I get that.”
They reached the site, and Gray lifted a corner of the blue tarp. Seymour took the other end, and together they moved the six feet of plastic to one side, when a gust of wind spurted cold water from its surface onto their faces.
Gray blinked and pointed a few feet away.
“There. See those drag marks. They lead back towards the road.” Marks Slope might well have seen earlier before it rained if he’d bothered to look.
The cramp in Gray’s right hand worsened, along with the pins and needles. He clenched and unclenched his fist, trying to release the muscles.
“Why would Slope ignore these marks and disbelieve your witness?” Gray said.
“You don’t know that he noticed them. Seems like an incompetent man to me.”
“Not incompetent. More like self-serving.”
Seymour rubbed his palms together and shuffled to keep warm. “You can thank Emmy for putting on the tarp, right? Admit it.”
“I admit it. Although, your friend doesn’t know what she’s dealing with, and neither do you.”
Gray was loathed to remember the details or to recount them out loud.
The drag marks disappeared a few feet towards the center of the path as a slight downward incline caused the water to run in a steady and muddy stream which pooled at one spot. No boot imprints or other marks were visible.
Primarily, Gray was looking for the one item he’d expected to find – but still hadn’t.
A fact that both worried and reassured. A fact he couldn’t voice to anyone.
“Tell me more about Dr. Kaur,” he said, sloshing towards the parking lot.
“Call her Emmy. She hates being called a doctor. Probably because clinical medicine never worked out for her.”
Gray smiled. “The same applies to you. A dead patient has always been preferable to a live one, yet you make waiters refer to you by title.”
“To each their own. Emmy and I have been communicating about her forensic research at the farm for months now. I could tell from our brief telephone calls that she had some social challenges. She means well, but she can only do what she can do. And you were awful to her.”
Gray examined the ground. Dormant blueberry bushes looked like spiked skeletons awaiting their turn at glory.
“Something about this crime is making you react,” Seymour said. “But what? You’ve solved grisly murders before.”
The doctor’s pale eyes stared unblinkingly. Something dawned on him. “You imagined someone close to you lying in place of the victim, didn’t you? That’s what set you off.”
“Don’t mess with a man with nothing left to lose,” Gray said.
“But you have something to lose now. That’s what shattered the calm you’ve achieved these last three years following the accident. You had nothing left to lose, so life became easy, uncomplicated. Enter Sita and Noel. Your wife returns from a three-year absence carting a toddler she never told you about. Enter risk – life beyond murder and death.”
Seymour invariably chose the most inopportune moments for his philosophical soliloquies. Seymour ran a hand through his wet hair. The widow’s peak receded further back with each passing year, exposing a pink and flaky scalp.
Talking about the Stitcher suddenly became more difficult. Gray had to get that crazy image out of his mind.
“Who did you imagine lying there sutured when you lost control?” Seymour persisted. “It wasn’t your wife. It was your two-year-old daughter, Noel, wasn’t it?”
Gray gave the doctor a look before turning away. He resumed his search. Here, too, a steady stream of rainwater snaked across the ground towards the cottage. No other marks or evidence were visible. Seymour followed and kept talking.
“With only a few hundred people in this town, I can see why you’d be worried. But there’s no indication we’re dealing with a serial killer or one that targets children.” He stopped Gray again. “Nothing’s going to happen to Noel.”
“I won’t inadvertently kill my daughter, you mean?”
Seymour paused.
Gray’s breathing sounded heavy, as though they were in a claustrophobic box.
“You didn’t kill him,” Seymour said.
“Sure I did.” He didn’t give the doctor a chance to reply. “I don’t want details about the suturing leaking out to the public. It’s imperative you grind that into Emmy. That kind of information stays within the investigation. I’ll speak to Slope.”
Seymour’s long nose shadowed the thin albino-like lips. The expected retort never came.
They reached the narrow, winding dirt path leading out of the facility to the main road.
Seymour said: “Interesting name Sita chose: Noel.”
“All those years in Montreal, I never met a Noel.”
“Not one who was French, anyway. But the English like that name. I saw your ex-wife –”
“– we’re not divorced.”
“I know. I saw her with Slope the other day. Is that why you punched him?”
Who could resist punching that face? “We have a history,” Gray said.
The torchlight bobbed along the path, now muddy and flooded until they reached the front gate from which they’d entered.
Stepping onto the gravel road, Gray flashed the torch onto tracks heading up the mountain – tracks he’d seen on their way in and mentioned to Seymour earlier.
“Look at these,” he said running forward five feet. “Those aren’t from my car; we arrived
from town, from the other direction. And your Emmy presumably drives that parked truck with the much wider thread. Now, who do you suppose these track marks belong to?”
“Slope’s team? The last people who came to visit? I don’t know; they could have been made at any time.”
“Slope would have arrived from town, the way we came. These lead up the mountain. We need to ask your Emmy about any recent visitors.”
The tracks disappeared within ten meters, washed away by the rain. If only they’d gotten to this evidence sooner instead of spending all that time talking; if only Seymour had brought him to the farm hours ago when the tracks were fresh.
A crunch sounded from the dense collection of cedars to the left. Was that a silhouette of someone standing about twenty feet away, shrouded by the branches, or was Gray imagining it? Before he could tell, the shadow was gone.
He sprang into action and ran. The cold air whipped his face. From behind, Seymour shouted his name – which would only serve to alert the culprit – which would only make it harder to catch The Stitcher.
Within seconds, he reached the spot, and despite the doctor’s continued shouts to stop, to not risk going into the steep-edged thicket in the dark, to not risk breaking his neck – Gray went in.
He shoved aside the tangled branches. Long, needle-like trunks heading downward morphed into a globular darkness. Thorns scratched his face; the smell of Black Cottonwood and Western Red Cedar filled his nostrils.
Immediately, he caught sight of the fleeing amorphous shape. A rain-smudged ball of light bobbed down the jagged incline – moving towards the right fast and coming in and out from within the trees – before rapidly disappearing around a large boulder.
Flashing his own light, Gray edged down the muddy mountainside – dead trunks and overturned branches making it a neck-breaking proposition. The BC forest could be deadly at night, even for the most experienced hiker. Around him, the call of timber wolves broke the background pitter-patter of the rain.
The descent felt slow, but it wasn’t. His feet moved with a life of their own, anticipating debris, gripping the mulch and mud as well as his loafers could. Seymour had, at least, stopped shouting.
