Precious Blood (10 page)

With the door shut, there was little hint of the carnage within—no wonder that the responding officer had almost called it in as nothing. There was a small spot of blood at knee level on the kitchen door, but there was no blood on the frame, nor on the paneling on the side of the stairway, nor on the wall or the big plate cabinet on either side of the hallway.

He flicked back to the shot of the inside of the front door, also clean. Then forward into the kitchen.

Her body was naked, belly down, arms splayed, legs half crossed. There was an arc of blood spatter low on the counter cabinet near the trunk, and the upper torso lay in a large puddle of maroon to brown blood that spread across the floor. There were thinner smears around the floor, ugly little skids in dry brown clot.

In the closer shots, the backs of her legs were clean, with some smeared blood on the posterior torso, probably from
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when he’d undressed her. It was likely that he’d killed her in that position, been on her back as he cut her throat from behind, like sacrificing an animal, arterial blood spurting sideways from the left carotid, bleeding out forward onto the floor underneath her.

He would have stayed behind her to sever the head, lifting her up and back with his palm under her chin as he worked on separating it.

Jenner could see no ligature marks on legs or arms.

He moved forward in the sequence. There was a surprising amount of blood on the walls, not large droplets but fine spatter, almost mist. Dowling had said he’d cut her up: there must be injuries on the front of the body. A ceiling shot showed some more of the blood mist on the low pendant lampshade, actually inside the shade.

And then the head, on the island in a coagulating lake of yellow/cream milk, with a few small dark clouds of blood.

The face was expressionless, eyes half closed, lips berry dark and dry, matted long dark hair settling into the curdled milk. The photos were blurred, as if the photographer was having difficulty focusing on his subject.

The haphazard images made it hard to tell the precise positioning of the head. It took him a couple of minutes to confirm his suspicion: her head faced the hallway entrance, so that the face would be the first thing seen by anyone who walked in.

The photo sequence stopped after the head; Jenner wondered whether the photographer just couldn’t take it. Whoever it was hadn’t covered the front of the body, at least in this series; of course, the coroner’s pathologist and the crime scene unit would have photographs.

He created a folder on his computer desktop, copied the images from the kitchen into it, then set them playing as a slide show, five seconds per image. He watched them cycle in sequence for a few minutes, then turned to the autopsy report.

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It was mediocre, the work of a hospital pathologist out of his depth, some part-timer with rudimentary forensic training who pitched in when qualified personnel were unavailable.

He tried to tease out meaning from the poorly organized report; making a quick sketch of the front and back of a woman, he went through the document, isolating injuries and diagramming them on his body chart.

The wound pattern began to emerge. Two major injuries: decapitation, and a complex penetrating injury of the chest.

The torso wound was truly bizarre, an X-shaped gash across the trunk, almost like crossed sword slashes, but with some kind of patterned detail. The prosector’s description was awful; Jenner needed the autopsy photographs.

He was flicking through the papers, trying to find the pathologist’s body diagram, when he heard a soft “Oh.”

The image onscreen changed and there was another, even softer, “Oh.”

He turned to see Ana standing behind his chair, staring at the computer screen, at that point filled with Sunday Smith’s head, mouth slightly open, the background clumping yellow milk fat and brown blood.

He stood, calling after her as she turned and walked quickly to the bathroom, closing the door behind her.

He shut the laptop and followed her. He could hear her sobbing inside.

“Ana.”

“Did he do that, too? Did he kill that girl, too?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible.”

“You think he did, don’t you?”

“I think maybe he did.”

“He cut off her head? Is that what he did to Andie?”

“No!” This was all spinning out of control. “No, it’s not.

But you know I can’t talk about that.”

She opened the taps in the tub to full, the water blasting out.

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He tried to speak above the roar of the water. “Ana, I’m sorry you saw that, but I can’t miss anything that might help us get him.”

She shut off the taps. Jenner leaned his head against the bath enclosure.

“When did he do it?”

“About two weeks ago.”

“Here? In New York?”

“Pennsylvania.”

She was silent for a while.

“How many has he killed?”

“I don’t know. But the police have his fingerprints. He’ll be caught soon, I promise.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep. How can you promise that, Jenner?”

“Look, he may not even be in New York anymore. We know he’s moving around.”

“Fuck you, Jenner. You don’t know anything about him that I haven’t told you. Joey said fingerprints are no use until you have a match—do you have a match? No, you don’t—

you’d have told me if you did. You’ve got nothing.”

He wanted her to stop. She turned the water back on, and again he tried to speak over the sound.

“We’re learning more about him. It takes time. And you’re safe here.”

He waited for a reply, but there was none. She turned the taps down, and then off.

“How’s your hand?”

“Leave me alone.”

He didn’t want to look at the photos anymore; they made him sick. He didn’t want to look at the autopsy protocol anymore, didn’t want to be part of it anymore.

He went back to the desk, sat down, and began working on it all again.

*

*

*

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Happy to be back in Brooklyn for his last run of the day, Meng Shunxi hurried down the street toward the river, the large paper bag of feathers clutched to his chest in an awkward bear hug. Li Ha Wei had taken his MetroCard, so Shunxi had walked up the Bowery and across the Williamsburg Bridge, pocketing the two dollars they gave him for subway fare. His thriftiness had made him a little late, but it was the pre-Christmas rush, and there’d be workers at Fujian Feather and Display of Williamsburg late into the night. Even so, he didn’t like being down by the waterfront after dark.

He’d had a busy day, starting with an early delivery of four dozen peacocks to a fussy designer in SoHo, who’d bitched about the lack of ostrich tail feathers. What did he expect Shunxi to say? In recent years, South African ostrich farms had cut their feather shipments by almost 80 percent. It wasn’t his fault—the man had been lucky to get even peacock feathers. If there was a problem, take it up with Mr. Tan!

Next he’d taken a case of birds of paradise novelty figures to a florist’s on the Upper East Side, then two boxes of pheas-ant and coque to a Lower East Side milliner before stopping to eat with Wei on Doyers Street in Chinatown. Then back to the factory in Williamsburg, where he’d spent most of the afternoon boxing marabou boas in red and purple-blue for shipment, then packaging smaller red feathers for hat decoration. Fujian Feather was known mostly for their peacock, but this year red feathers of all kinds had been huge; Mr. Tan said this was because of a strange group of older American women who always wore red hats.

Mr. Tan was a good man, and a hero to Shunxi. Like Shunxi, Tan was
ren she
—a “snake person,” a Fujianese who’d been smuggled into the country. Mr. Tan had won asylum, and had opened a tiny workshop, making small birds from feathers, which he sold on the street in Chinatown. Little more than a decade later, he owned a factory and warehouse in Williamsburg, and a national business
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as a wholesale distributor of feathers and feather novelties, everything built on the labor of a constantly changing staff of Fujianese illegals. Mr. Tan had been good to him; Tan was from Fuzhou, and often teased Shunxi, who was born in Xiamen, about his “incomprehensible monkey dialect.”

Feeling the cold, Shunxi pulled the feathers tighter to him.

It was his last run, carrying overstock—six dozen peacock feathers and a dozen crimson boas—from the Manhattan store back to the warehouse. Since most of the deliveries were small, he could manage them easily and cheaply on the subway, saving Mr. Tan money and solving the problem of Shunxi not having a driver’s license.

He looked around him, staring into the empty shadows.

This part of Brooklyn was getting better, but nearer the water, away from all the houses and apartment buildings, the streets were still dangerous. The delivery men were prey for youths from the nearby projects; two years earlier, Wei had almost been beaten to death by a group of teenagers not two blocks from where he was now walking. Wei told Shunxi later that while they were hitting him, he didn’t cry out: if the police had caught him, he’d have been deported.

The project kids hunted them specifically for that reason.

Shunxi walked a little faster.

Ten more minutes, and his day would be done. Tonight he would meet up with Wei and Mr. Zia from down the hall, and they would gamble and drink.

He heard footsteps behind him. He kept walking. Six more blocks.

After passing a streetlamp, he glanced back. The man behind him was a white man in a peacoat and a New York Fire Department baseball cap. A white man: Shunxi breathed a little easier. He crossed the street anyway.

The man stayed on the other side, but soon caught up; he tensed, but the man passed him as they neared the low bridge. Shunxi felt a little sheepish as his anxiety dissolved.

Like an old woman, he thought.

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A half block before the bridge, the man stopped to tie his shoe. Shunxi’s sheepishness was instantly replaced by wariness. Ahead he could see the small floodlights on the factory’s sign; just two more blocks.

The man called to him. “Hey.”

Staring fixedly forward, Shunxi broke into a slow jog.

Nearing the shadow of the bridge, he looked back quickly and saw the man sprinting soundlessly toward him across the street, a clublike object in his fist. Shunxi ran as fast as he could, holding the bag even tighter in his panic.

He got barely ten paces before something slammed his ankle out from underneath him. He crashed forward, sprawling, scarlet feathers spilling onto the dark asphalt.

Stunned for a second, Shunxi regained his focus, and struggled to pull himself to his hands and knees, his ankle tendon cut, his foot flapping obscenely from a pant leg gleaming with dark blood. The man stood in front of him, a small ax in his hand, absently tapping the back of the ax head against his palm as he looked down at the deliveryman, wreathed in fluffy boas.

Shunxi lifted his open palm to the man and stammered out, “Please! No money! No have money!” Ignoring him, the man was examining the feathers.

This wasn’t about money.

Weeping and gasping in pain and terror, Shunxi began to crawl, pulling his mangled foot. The man stood, stepped quickly over the feathers, and came up behind Shunxi as he scrambled toward the light of the intersection.

The man had no intention of letting him go. He kicked Shunxi’s good leg out from underneath him, sending him facedown into the gutter. Coming to his senses, Shunxi opened his mouth to scream, but the man stomped one foot down onto his back, then smashed the hatchet blade into the back of Shunxi’s head. He held it in place for a short while, riding the rhythmic shudders; when the convulsions slowed, he pressed the head down into the gutter with his
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foot, stepped back, and gave a quick twist to free the blade from the skull.

He walked back to the bag and squatted. He tore the rest of the scarlet marabou feathers out of the bag, scattering them in the street, then looked through the bagged peacock feathers with care. Some of the feathers had been bloodied, and in others the vanes were clumped together from damp and grime, but the deeper feathers were pristine. He selected two packages, each with a dozen perfect plumes of iridescent emerald green and royal blue, then walked on down toward the East River.

Jenner woke to his name, the blanket tangled around his chest, his legs bare and chilly. She was standing next to the couch, wearing a T-shirt.

“Jenner,” she said again.

“Are you okay?”

“Please come and sleep in the bed with me.”

His head sank back into the pillow.

“Please, Jenner. For me. I can’t sleep.”

He stood, and followed her to the bed. She slid over, all the way over to the far edge of the bed, and held the sheets open.

When he hesitated, she patted the empty space next to her.

He climbed in; as he reached for the lamp, he saw an almost empty highball glass of whisky on the bedside table.

He turned off the light, then turned back to her. He looked at her, lying there looking at him; in the dark, her hair was edged with silver. He turned away, and she pressed up against him, a slender arm over his chest. She fell asleep before him, and as she did, he realized he was stroking her wrist and the back of her hand.

wednesday,

december 4

When Jenner woke, the sun was glaring through intermittent drizzle, glinting off the wet streets toward the East River.

He needed to see the crime scene photographs from the Pittsburgh crew. The autopsy photos were sloppy Polaroids shot in some local hospital morgue or funeral parlor, the wider shots showing too little, the close-ups hopelessly out of focus. He waited until 9:00 a.m. to call, which was a mistake—Dowling had already been summoned to a four-car pileup on I-81.