LITMIR.BIZ

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It was strange to look up and see people still hurrying along with their lives intact, while for him just getting out of bed was an act of enormous willpower. Now, looking down at them on the street below, he had the same feeling of distance, of being an alien in a world where everyone except him seemed to know where they were going. He envied them, but he also felt that he knew something they could never know. He had seen into the very center of things, into hell itself, and come back alive somehow—damaged, perhaps, but alive.

      He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Nelson standing behind him. Was it Lee’s imagination, or were his blue eyes moist? It was hard to tell with the light coming from behind him.

      “I can see that nothing I say is going to stop you. So let me just say this: be careful, Lee.”

      “I will.”

      “Good. Now go out and get that son of a bitch.”

      Lee looked down at the street again. Somewhere, in the throng of people, with a face that could blend into any crowd, a pair of footsteps clicked along the sidewalk next to a hundred others, footsteps belonging to a murderer with only one thing on his mind: his next victim. Lee silently vowed to do whatever he could—at whatever cost—to get between that killer and his goal.

      Chapter Seven

      “You know,” Detective Butts remarked, “all this hocus-pocus stuff doesn’t solve crimes. Shoe leather does.”

      “Right,” Lee answered. He had heard it all before, and was tired of defending himself to cops. He wasn’t an official member of the police force—he had not attended the academy, and carried only an ID card identifying him as a civilian consultant to the NYPD. He was keenly aware of the separation between him and the gun-toting members of the police force. People like him were not necessarily included in the tight, exclusive circle of the Brotherhood of Blue.

      It was the next morning, and they were standing in front of an examination room at the medical examiner’s office, waiting for the pathologist who had done Marie Kelleher’s autopsy. She entered hurriedly, apologizing for her lateness. Gretchen Rilke was a rather glamorous-looking woman, blue-eyed and pink-cheeked, with thick, dyed blond hair and a suggestive lilt of Alpine hills in her accent.

      “I was in a conference call that went late,” she said, pushing a strand of implausibly yellow hair from her eyes. With one hand she pulled the body from the morgue freezer compartment, the oversized drawer sliding smoothly on its metal rollers. With the other hand she pulled back the sheet covering Marie’s body just enough to expose her neck. In spite of the bluish tinge to her pale skin, it was still hard to think of her as dead.

      “You see the bruises?” Gretchen asked.

      Lee looked at the thick collar of purple discoloration that ringed Marie’s neck. It appeared darker now, which could be a result of the harsh fluorescent lighting—but he knew that bruises could deepen or even appear after death. Now, under the bright lights, he could see several separate bands of bruising.

      “I see,” he said.

      “This indicates that he repositioned his fingers, probably several times.”

      “So he didn’t kill her all at once?” Butts asked.

      The pathologist shook her head. “No. There’s no crushed cartilage, and no serious damage to the larynx.”

      “So,” Lee said, “that means he applies minimum force—enough to make her lose consciousness. And then he waits until she comes to and starts all over again.”

      “That scenario would be consistent with the physical evidence,” Dr. Rilke agreed.

      “Shit,” Butts muttered. “This is one sick bastard.”

      “Okay,” Lee said, almost to himself. “He’s not in a hurry. This means that he’s comfortable where he is—that he’s not worried about getting caught. He’s killing them somewhere other than the church. And no sign of sexual assault?”

      “Right,” Dr. Rilke answered.

      “And no sign of a struggle?”

      “Her fingernails aren’t even broken, so she didn’t have time to fight back. There are no defensive knife wounds, so I’m guessing he took that out after she was already subdued.”

      Lee gulped in some air, avoiding breathing through his nose. “So the carving was postmortem?”

      “That would be consistent with the amount of bleeding—or lack of it,” she replied. “On the other hand…”

      “What?” Lee said, his stomach twisting around itself. He swallowed hard. He hated visiting the morgue.

      “Well, he didn’t carve that deeply, so it’s just possible it was done while she was still alive.”

      Lee felt his stomach give a heave. He swallowed again and concentrated on taking deep breaths.

      “How would he get her to stay still, though?” Butts asked.

      “There were no signs of ligature around her wrists or ankles, right?” Lee asked.

      “No,” Rilke answered. “But she might have been too weak to struggle by that time.”

      “Any idea what he used?” Butts asked.

      “Nothing fancy. An ordinary kitchen paring knife would do the job. Something with a pretty short blade—probably a couple of inches at most.”

      “Could it have been a scalpel?”

      “The wounds are too jagged for that—even in unskilled hands, a scalpel would do a neater job.”

      “Too bad we can’t use handwriting analysis on this,” Butts remarked.

      “No, I doubt there would be a correlation,” Lee agreed, “although there might be something about the way he forms certain letters…”

      “It’s not much of a sample to go on,” Dr. Rilke pointed out.

      None of them wanted to say what they were all thinking: the last thing they wanted was to have a larger sample, because that would mean having another victim.

      “No prints at all?” Lee asked.

      “No,” said Rilke. “We superglued the body—nothing. He must have worn gloves.”

      “Supergluing” meant using cyanoacrylate (superglue) to develop latent prints that might not otherwise be visible.

      “We gotta get going,” Butts said, looking at his watch. “The parents in Jersey are expecting us.”

      “Okay, thank you,” Lee said to Gretchen, who smiled grimly.

      “Good luck.”

      “Thanks,” he replied, thinking, We’ll need it.

      Forty minutes later Lee and Butts were seated next to each other on the DeCamp bus to Nutley, New Jersey. As the bus rumbled out of the Lincoln Tunnel and onto the corkscrew stretch of highway leading up the hill past the town of Weehawken, Lee turned to look across the river at Manhattan. The mid-morning sun lingered low in the eastern horizon, lurking behind the buildings, its furtive rays refracted by the glass skyscrapers of Midtown. The river appeared perfectly still and opaque under the hazy gray February sky.

      Marie Kelleher’s parents had already come into the city once to identify their daughter’s body, and Chuck Morton, trying to spare them further grief and stress, had dispatched Lee and Butts out to the couple’s house in Nutley to interview them.

      Lee leaned back in his seat and stretched his legs out under the empty seat in front of him. The DeCamp bus was expensive, but it was comfortable and quiet. It wasn’t crowded at this hour; they were traveling in the opposite direction of the commuters headed into the city. The few people scattered around the bus were reading, staring out the window, or napping. Talking on cell phones was forbidden, according to the sign

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