Death Notice (8 page)

Although Kat had never stepped foot inside the mill, it had haunted her imagination ever since she was a little girl. When she was growing up, her father would occasionally come home and announce that another accident had happened there. He never filled in the grisly details, which made Kat’s imagination spin madly. Late at night, hunkered down beneath her covers, she pictured a mill full of deformed men working the same saws that had snatched their limbs.

She had quickly grown out of that phase, thank God. But
now the horrors of her youthful imagination had come to life in adulthood. Only George Winnick’s murder was more disturbing than anything she could have come up with as a girl.

Kat shuddered as she drove past the area where she had found George’s body, still marked by a banner of police tape. Although the coffin and its grisly contents had been hauled away, she could still see them there, lying in the snow. She hoped the image would fade with time and that eventually she could drive Old Mill Road in peace. Yet she suspected the image would be like Perry Mill—always present, unchanging, and waiting to be revisited.

That afternoon, Nick drove to the county morgue. Cassie Lieberfarb rode with him, fiddling with the radio. Flitting from station to station, she found nothing to satisfy either of them.

“We’ve got country, country, Muzak, and more country.”

“No classic rock?” Nick asked.

“No, but if you’d like, I could sing ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ I learned it in the girls chorus at Temple Beth El.”

“As tempting as that sounds, I’ll pass.”

“Then instead of singing,” Cassie said, “how about you tell me why you lied about going to Florida on vacation.”

She was using her analyst’s voice, which contained no judgment, no amusement. It was a flat, neutral tone that Nick had heard hundreds of times. Although normally when he heard it, the voice was directed at suspects, not him.

“I didn’t lie,” Nick said.

“Did you go to Florida?”

Eventually he shook his head.

“And was it really a vacation?”

Another more reluctant shake.

“See,” Cassie said, “that means it’s a lie.”

Caught in her inquisitive gaze, Nick felt like a specimen beneath a microscope, wriggling and defenseless. He straightened his spine in a show of strength. It didn’t work.

“I was interviewing killers,” he said.

“Who?”

“Edgar Sewell. Mitchell Ramsey. Frank Paul Steel.”

Cassie processed the names a moment, matching them to the unspeakable crimes they had committed.

“Those cases are thirty years old,” she said. “Why were you talking to them?”

But she knew the answer. And Nick knew that she knew. But Cassie wasn’t going to let him off the hook. She thought it helped to talk about his past, that it was therapeutic. Nick disagreed, so he said nothing.

After a full minute of silent détente, Cassie declared defeat.

“We won’t talk about it anymore,” she said. “But you know how I feel about this. I understand it’s hard for you to deal with, but digging into your past like that won’t—”

Nick stopped her with an upraised hand. “I thought we weren’t talking about it.”

“We’re not,” Cassie said with a shrug. “We’re traveling in silence.”

Fortunately for Nick, they didn’t have to travel much farther. They had reached their destination.

Once they were parked, it took them no time to find the medical examiner. He was a squat and gray-faced man, having a cigarette outside the equally squat and gray-faced county morgue.

“Lieutenant Donnelly?” he asked, eyeing Nick through a haze of smoke.

“In the flesh.”

The medical examiner extended the hand that didn’t contain a Pall Mall. “I’m Wallace Noble. Any trouble getting here?”

Instead of waiting for an answer, Wallace Noble let out a hacking cough that emerged from deep within his chest.

“Goddamn these cigarettes,” he muttered before taking a hearty drag. “Things are going to kill me soon.”

“Why don’t you quit?” Cassie asked.

Wallace exhaled twin streams of smoke through his nostrils, like an angry bull in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. “I’ve spent almost forty years looking at dead folks and determining their cause of death. Frankly, it gives me comfort already knowing the cause of mine.”

With a half cough, half chuckle, he dropped the cigarette and ground it into the sidewalk with the toe of a wingtip.

“Now let’s go take a look at poor George.”

Nick and Cassie followed him inside, where they passed a small waiting area before entering a long hallway painted the same color as pea soup. At the end of the hall, they made a right and stopped at the door to the autopsy suite. There they wrangled into autopsy gowns and slipped shoe covers over their feet. Then it was into the autopsy suite itself.

George Winnick’s corpse was already out and lying uncovered on a stainless steel table in the center of the room. The halogen lamp hanging over it cast a wide halo of light onto the skin, turning it a shade of white so bright Nick had to look away until his eyes adjusted.

“Is there an obvious cause of death?” he asked.

“Nothing jumped out at me so far,” Wallace said. “When I cleaned him up a bit, I found marks on his arms, legs, and forehead.”

“What kind of marks?”

Wallace shrugged. “Off the top of my head, I’d say they were rope burns.”

Nick shot a sidelong glance to Cassie, who was already taking notes. Since killers who bind their victims are usually smart and organized, the rope burns suggested a high level of planning. Right away, both of them knew this murder wasn’t a spontaneous act.

“As for what killed George,” Wallace continued, “I don’t think we’ll know that until we open him up.”

He handed Nick and Cassie latex gloves before snapping a pair onto his own hands. “What are you guys looking for anyway?”

“The stitches,” Nick said as he put on the gloves and approached the table. “We need to see if it resembles the handiwork of another killer who sews up his victims.”

“The Betsy Ross Killer, right?”

“He’s the one.”

“Why does he sew them up?” Wallace asked, both fascinated and repelled at the same time.

“I’ll get back to you after I catch him and ask him.”

Wallace and Cassie joined him at the examination table.

“I only found stitches on two places,” the medical examiner said. “One’s at the neck. The other spot was the lips.”

Nick saw both areas. The lips had been sewn shut in a wide cross-stitch pattern. On the neck, the stitches were close together, sealing up a small gash.

“What do you think?” he asked Cassie.

She gingerly placed a finger at the wound and ran it along the thread.

“At first glance, it certainly looks like the work of our guy,” she said. “But the lips—that’s unusual.”

The Betsy Ross Killer had never gone for them before. Until Mr. Winnick, he had stayed away from the face entirely.

Nick reached into his jacket and removed a small digital camera. When he bought it, the clerk at Radio Shack told him about all the “awesome” vacation photos he’d be able to take with it. That was a year ago, and so far, corpses were the only things the camera’s lens had seen.

Leaning over George’s body, he took a picture of the lips, the flash from the camera filling the room in a quick burst. Nick took five more shots from various angles, as the medical examiner watched. Each flash of the camera caused him to flinch.

“What happened to his eyes?” Cassie asked.

Nick stopped taking pictures long enough to look at George Winnick’s eyes, where a small line of red circled each socket.

“That’s where the pennies were,” Wallace said. “Placed right over the eyes.”

“But why the red marks?”

“The coins were frozen to the skin. I had to use hot water to pry them off.”

“Do you still have them?” Cassie asked.

The medical examiner nodded. “They’re in my office. Tagged and bagged and ready to be examined.”

Nick raised his camera again and moved on to the neck. He crouched down next to the table and snapped off another five shots.

“I need you to remove the thread,” he told Wallace. “And save it. We’ll need to examine that, too.”

Wallace obliged by picking up a pair of suture scissors and carefully slicing through the thread, one stitch at a time. The gash widened, although no blood dripped out of it. The blood had all settled by that point.

“Here you go,” Wallace said, tugging the thread from the skin and dropping it into an evidence bag that Cassie had waiting for him.

He then moved out of the way, letting Nick and his partner
get an unobstructed view of the wound. It was a clean cut, smooth along the edges. There was no hesitation involved. The killer had done it in one careful slice.

“I’m thinking scalpel,” Cassie said. “That incision is too clean for a knife, no matter how sharp it is.”

“That’s a change,” Nick added. “The Betsy Ross victims had ragged wounds.”

Cassie nodded in agreement. “That’s because there was rage involved. He was angry when he did the cutting. But this wound is different. It’s clinical. Detached.”

Nick had a better word to describe the wound.
Precise.
Whoever had caused it chose that spot for a reason.

Free of the stitches, the incision widened like a toothless smile. Nick raised his camera and fired off a few shots. He zoomed in. On the camera’s display screen, the depths of the wound came into sudden, startling focus. Nick saw an artery—most likely the carotid—bulging just beyond the parted curtain of flesh and fat. Colored a pale purple, it was marred by tiny lines of black.

Nick lowered the camera.

“I think there’s more stitches.”

He backed away as Wallace Noble swooped in. Using a small hook, the medical examiner gently tugged the artery until it emerged from the open wound. In the harsh light of the examination room, it was clear that Nick was right. The artery had been sliced open as cleanly as George Winnick’s neck had been. And just like the neck, the wound had been sewn shut with tight loops of black thread.

“I’ll be damned,” Wallace said, shock setting off his smoker’s cough. “Now I know what killed poor old George.”

“George wasn’t a great man. But he was a good one. And he did right by me.”

Alma Winnick, a potato sack of a woman in a powder blue housedress, gave her stunted eulogy from an armchair covered in cat fur. Kat knew it was an act and that Alma mourned her husband. But the widow refused to show her grief while a stranger was in the house.

“I think he knew death was coming for him,” she said flatly.

“How so?”

“My brother died last month. Car accident. You probably read about it in the paper.”

“My condolences,” Kat said, feeling even more sorry for the woman sitting across from her. So much loss in such a short period. Kat’s own family had spread it out. Her father died suddenly when she was eighteen, killed by a heart attack. Her mother stuck around for two more decades, succumbing to cancer the previous summer. Losing them separately had been hard enough. Losing them both within a month of each other would have been too much to bear.