Blood Innocents (3 page)

“Sure it is,” Mathesson said sympathetically. He smiled. “Christ, this one is a little gruesome even if you haven't been away from it.”

“Uncover the other one,” Reardon said.

“Go have a cup of coffee first. There's no big hurry about this, is there?”

“I want to finish it up now.”

Mathesson shrugged. “Okay, John.”

Slowly Mathesson made his way to the other covered body and bent down to pull the tarpaulin back. He looked at Reardon. “This one's not so bad. Not like the other one. This one went out fast.”

When Mathesson pulled back the covering, Reardon saw what he meant. The deer's spine had been severed at the neck in one powerful sweep, and the blood had surged from its throat in a broad, deep wave. As Reardon had suspected, death had come instantaneously to this fallow deer.

Reardon nodded for Mathesson to cover the body and gently released the pen in his pocket.

“Now why don't you go have a cup of coffee?” Mathesson said. “All the legwork is being done. You can take a break. Nothing's going to happen in the next few minutes.”

Reardon smiled. “Okay, maybe I will.”

As he left the cage, Reardon's legs felt unstable under him. He was afraid and he knew that he was afraid of something that did not seem to have anything to do with the fallow deer. He was afraid of a surging feeling that had plagued him during the first years of his career, when he had walked the streets as a young policeman. In the neighborhood where he had grown up, in the destitute tenements and littered streets, there had been three avenues of escape: crime, the priesthood or the police force. He had never considered the first, but the decision to choose the police had had much of the priesthood in it. He had wanted to minister to distress, to protect helplessness and innocence from the abuse that constantly threatened them. It had been a romantic notion and he had quickly discarded its more sentimental aspects. But something of it had always lingered in him; nothing could destroy it altogether, and Reardon sensed that he should not let it be destroyed. He suspected that this sensation of protection and guardianship formed the better part of him, and he did not want to lose it. But now its power seemed to be rising in unpredictable and uncontrollable bursts. And he was afraid.

2

In the coffee shop across from the park Reardon remembered something from his childhood. It seemed to rise like the steam from his cup of coffee. He and his father had been walking back from Sunday morning Mass, his father in the one suit he owned, seemingly for no other reason than to wear it to Mass, when his father had stopped to buy a paper from the blind newsdealer at the corner. They had stopped a few feet beyond the stand and his father had begun to flip through the paper when two men stepped up to the newsstand. The man closest to the stand asked for a
Times
and put a one-dollar bill in the blind man's hand.

“A single, sir?” the blind man asked.

“No,” the man said, “a ten.”

The owner smiled. “Excuse me, sir,” he said and called out into the street. “Could someone passing step over here a minute, please?”

When the second man stepped forward and asked what the problem was the blind man said, “Sorry to trouble you, but could you tell me the denomination of this bill?”

The two men looked at each other and one of them, Reardon remembered, grinned.

“It's a ten,” the second man said.

“Thank you,” the blind man said and started counting out change for a ten.

Reardon thought that he alone had seen the exchange. But suddenly his father dropped his newspaper and wheeled around. “Just a minute there,” he said, and as the first man, startled, turned to run, Reardon saw his father pitch abruptly forward and seize the man by his coat collar.

The second man bolted and was quickly gone from sight, but Reardon's father slammed the first one up against the side wall of the newsstand and, holding him half suspended by his coat collar, stared coldly into his face. “You're a filthy pig,” he said, and Reardon had been shocked by the contempt in his voice. “Only the lowest of the low would stoop to robbing a blind man.” He slammed the man's head back against the wall. “Where do you live?”

Head forced back by the fists gripping the coat together under his chin, eyes bulging, the man struggled to free himself but said nothing.

Reardon's father slammed him against the newsstand wall again. “Where do you live?”

When the man didn't answer, Reardon's father suddenly released him and backhanded him across the face. Caught unprepared, the man staggered and went down on one knee, and Reardon's father seized him by the hair and, placing a knee in the small of his back, yanked his head back.

“Tell me where you live,” he said contemptuously.

“110th Street,” the man whimpered. “212 110th Street.”

Reardon's father released his grip on the man's hair and sent him sprawling with a shove of his knee. “Get up,” he said and without waiting for compliance reached down and yanked the man erect by his coat collar. “Now I know where you live,” he said, “and I'll tell you something. If I ever see you around this neighborhood again, I'm going to put your little prick in a door and slam it shut.” He flung the man away from him. “Now get out of here.”

When it was over, Reardon remembered, after the man had fled and the newsdealer had expressed his thanks, he and his father had crossed the street into a park, his father withdrawn and silent, as if troubled by his own outburst of temper. Inside the park they sat down on a bench and his father took his hand and held it.

“I said some pretty bad things back there, Johnny,” he said. “You'll have to forgive me. I was very mad.” He paused a moment, examining Reardon's face. “You know I'm a policeman, don't you, son?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“A policeman,” his father said, “guards the world against scum like you just seen try to rob a poor blind man.”

Reardon remembered how he had nodded solemnly, a child acknowledging the importance of something felt but not understood.

“Do you remember the story of Cain and Abel in the Bible?” his father asked.

“Yes, Papa.”

“Well, it says how Cain killed his brother, and that was the first murder. But they don't mention them poor guys that had to track Cain down and question him until he broke down and told the truth about what he did.” Reardon remembered how his father had looked intently into his eyes. “Leave the punishing to God,” he had said, “but they still have to be run down. They still have to be caught.”

“Yes, Papa.”

Yes, Papa. Yes, Papa. Reardon nodded into the rising steam, but even now he was not sure what he had agreed to.

Mathesson seemed surprised when Reardon returned to the cage of the fallow deer. The cage was crowded now with police photographers and lab crews of various kinds, and Mathesson had to push through them to finally reach Reardon at the entrance of the cage. “I didn't think you were coming back,” he said.

“I wanted to look around a little more,” Reardon said.

“Look around a little more? For what? We've got teams searching everywhere.”

“I just wanted to take another look.”

“Okay,” Mathesson said lightly. “I don't think you'll find much.”

“Probably not,” Reardon said. He stepped past Mathesson and into the cage of the fallow deer.

He walked to the middle of the cage and stopped. For a moment he stared straight ahead into the shed which had protected the deer from the weather, then slowly he turned to the right, his eyes scanning each side of the cage in turn, stopping occasionally to look out beyond the bars and toward the distant parts of the Children's Zoo.

His custom of revisiting the crime scene several times during the course of an investigation was not generally a search for physical evidence but for an atmosphere, a sense of how and under what conditions the violence had taken place. At times he would do no more than stare at the chalk outline of the body's position, or at a certain pattern of blood on the wall or the peculiarly savage rip of a curtain. Murder, he knew, lingered in a room like an odor, defiling and debasing everything, insisting that here within these walls something precious was unforgivably wasted. That sense of waste was murder's common legacy, and these moments were, for Reardon, part of a quest not so much for a particular murderer but for murder itself, for the murdering mind or the conditions that created it.

Finally he had made his full circle around the cage. His eyes once again rested on the shed.

“Well, find anything?” Mathesson asked, glancing up from his notebook.

“No,” Reardon replied quietly. “What time were they killed?”

“Between three and three-thirty this morning,” Mathesson said. “Two patrolmen named Burns and Fitzgerald answered the call, and they said that according to one of the workmen …” He quickly turned through his notebook. “Here it is. According to one of the workmen — a guy named Gilbert Noble — they had to have been killed between three and three-thirty this morning. He works on the night crew. He saw the deer alive at three, and he saw them dead at three-thirty. But he didn't see nothing in between.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing important. He said there were a few people in the park earlier in the evening, but that's all.”

“I want to talk to him anyway.”

“Okay,” Mathesson said. “I'll have him come in and you can talk to him.”

Reardon nodded toward the open shed. “Anybody check that place out?”

“Yeah. It's empty except for some dried leaves and deer shit. We rustled around in the leaves looking for the weapon, but there's nothing there. No bits of clothing or anything like that. It looks like the killing was done out here. Out in the open. The whole thing. There's not a drop of blood in that whole goddamn shed.”

“I'll take a quick look,” Reardon said. He turned and walked toward the shed.

It was constructed of cinder blocks and was roofed with a sheet of tin. The front was entirely open and faced out toward the bars. The entire structure was covered with graffiti.

“How did all that writing get in there?” Reardon asked, stopping at the entrance of the shed.

“I think it must have happened last summer,” Mathesson said. “I think Burns said the deer were taken someplace else and the bars were down for a while. They were doing some sort of maintenance work or something like that. Anyway, the bars were taken down, so the local artist community did its thing.” Mathesson grinned. “Let me know if you see any hot numbers. That's how I used to get most of my dates.”

A breeze suddenly skirted through the park, driving small, noisy waves of dried leaves across the cement floor of the cage. Reardon turned up the collar of his overcoat and stepped inside the shed.

Almost every square inch of the shed was covered with some kind of writing. Most prominent were the obscenities, references to various sexual acts or bodily functions. Interspersed with these were individual names, hundreds of them: Stanislas and Pedro, Betsie and Wilhelmina. There were also attempts at poetry, bits of personal philosophy and expressions of occult religions. But what grasped Reardon's attention was something else, something that stood out from the rest; most of the writing had been done with chalk or spray paint, but this one was written in a color Reardon had seen too often not to recognize.

“Mathesson!” he called. “Come in here a minute.”

Mathesson came in and glanced about the shed. “What is it?”

Reardon pointed to a rusty red scrawl on the ceiling of the shed. “Doesn't that look like it's written in dried blood?”

Mathesson squinted up at the ceiling. “Yeah, it does. It looks like it could be.”

“I think it is,” Reardon said. “It's a roman numeral two.”

“Yeah.”

“I want you to have that piece of tin cut out and sent down to the lab for an analysis. I think it's blood of some kind. It may have come from the deer.”

“A roman numeral two,” Mathesson said thoughtfully. “Jesus Christ. What the hell could that mean?”

“I don't know. Maybe nothing. Maybe it's just a tally.”

“A tally? What do you mean?”

“Just that it may be a tally and nothing else.” Reardon looked up at the roman numeral two. “You know, the number ‘two' for two dead deer.”

“Oh,” Mathesson said. “Yeah, maybe.” He looked at the number, then outside at the two tarpaulins lying heavily over the bodies of the fallow deer. He shook his head. “A tally.”

A tally, Reardon thought. Perhaps. But he was also thinking of another possibility. He had seen it more times than he liked to recall, and it had always begun with a terrible crime, one almost incomprehensible in its brutality: sex organs hanging from a doorknob or a severed finger floating placidly in a decanter of scotch or some other inhuman mutilation. And then that sudden, quiet, stunning touch of the human. The undeniable suggestion that even in the raving, animal cruelty of the crime, some touch of conscience remained. Sometimes it might be nothing more than a handkerchief too obviously left behind. Once, Reardon recalled, it was a telephone number tucked loosely under a doormat. But each time it had led to the killer, who had retained, even through the viciousness of the act, the certain knowledge that it was wrong and who was, therefore, determined to be caught.

Or perhaps it
was
a tally, and nothing more.

When Reardon got back to his desk in the precinct house, he found a note requesting him to telephone his son. He felt no desire to call but found himself dialing his son's law office, anyway.

“Mr. Reardon's office,” the secretary said.

“This is his father,” Reardon said.

“He's in conference at this time.”

“This is his father,” Reardon repeated. He had sat through too many conferences in his life to be awed by the word.