Precious Blood (8 page)

Lost in his thoughts, he’d passed Pulaski Bridge. He had to concentrate; she was disturbing his focus, and he couldn’t let that happen. Wednesday night was fast approaching. Ana had interrupted him, stopped the Work before he had done much more than prepare the main elements. On Wednesday, he’d take his time. He was learning, getting better. On Wednesday, there’d be no interruptions, and he’d finish the Work properly. There were a few more elements he needed, a couple of errands to run, but he was almost ready to begin her transformation.

And she would be very beautiful indeed.

Roggetti had the radio in the Crown Vic on 1010 WINS; every twenty minutes the station was recycling its coverage of the murder. They were waiting while Rad and Ana met with Internal Affairs—it seemed kind of cloak-and-dagger to Jenner, the anonymous apartment in the nondescript housing projects on the edge of Chinatown, kept by the bureau for meetings with confidential informants.

He wondered how Ana was holding up. She’d been quiet on the ride down, gazing out at life on the lower Bowery—

jewelry stores filled with Chinese gold, lighting shops, fruit stalls, all bright and bustling under the winter drizzle. Rad had explained the process to her—IAB would show her mug shots as well as current NYPD ID photos. He told her again he didn’t think the guy was a cop.

“He was no cop,” Roggetti had declared. “Cop wouldn’t have let you get away.”

She’d leaned her head against the glass and hadn’t seen Garcia jab Roggetti in the ribs.

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She’d been in there for three hours now.

The car smelled of beef with broccoli and sweet and sour pork. Jenner gathered the white paper takeout containers, climbed out and dumped them into the trash at the corner, then got back in.

Roggetti was looking dopey and well-fed. He handed Jenner the case file, then folded his jacket into triangles, tucked it against the headrest, and tried to find a comfortable position for a nap.

Jenner looked at the Polaroids again, flipping through the fat stack slowly one by one. He’d never seen anything like it. He’d spent three months on a fellowship at the Behavioral Analysis Unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, endless hours in the serial killer archives, wired on coffee and horror. In all that time, in all those murders, he’d never come across anything so meticulously planned and executed, so
theatrical
, as the Delore killing. And if the killing itself was unprecedented, the body display was extraordinary; the bastard was rewriting the serial killer handbook.

Serial killer
. No question. He was looking at the girl hung on the wall; there was no way that a first-timer had created something so sophisticated, so
evolved
. Every element in the killing had profound meaning, from the way he’d killed her through to the way he’d displayed her body. He’d have killed before; maybe not as fully developed, probably not with the same level of content, but there’d be other victims out there.

He looked up to see Roggetti peering over the seat back.

“So, Doc—why do you think he did that? Turn that girl upside down and nail her to a wall?”

“I don’t know. Part of the problem is we don’t know what else he would have done to her if Ana hadn’t interrupted him.”

Roggetti looked disappointed, so Jenner said, “But we can speculate a bit, based on what we have here.” He held the photo up to show Roggetti. “She was upside down and vul-60

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nerable. It’s possible that this was a purely sexual display—

maybe he was showing off his ownership of the body, his complete power over it. Or maybe he had a particular fantasy image he was trying to create when he was disturbed.”

Roggetti muttered, “Well, the whole fucking thing looks pretty disturbed to me.”

Jenner nodded. “One thing that’s really interesting about this man: he has zero fear of being caught. None. His fingerprints are everywhere, he doesn’t run when he sees Ana getting away. Either he doesn’t care, or he believes that he won’t—or can’t—be caught.”

“So why did he pick Andie Delore?”

“That’s the ten-million-dollar question, Joey. We know that, we have motive, and once we have motive, well, then we’re on the first rung of the ladder.”

Jenner scooped up the photos. He’d found a headshot of the girl alive, among all of these images of her dead. She was pretty, but not strikingly so. Wealthy background, but money was a completely unlikely motive in a crime like this.

Boyfriend? Ana said that Andie hadn’t dated for at least six months, maybe more. Revenge—on her, on her lawyer dad?

That seemed absurd, given the extreme circumstances.

Yes. The ten-million-dollar question . . .

There was a tap on the window. He slid over, quickly slipping the photographs back into the thick brown folder as Ana squeezed in next to him.

She smiled at him and brushed the hair out of her eyes as she sat back and chatted animatedly about her meeting. She hadn’t seen the guy in any of the photos she’d looked at, not felons, not cops. And the IAB detective had made it clear to her just how unlikely it was to be a cop. The computer sketch artist had been to the Rhode Island School of Design, where she wanted to do a master’s in photography. Plus he was really cute! She laid her head against the window, still smiling, and tapped the glass with the back of her ring.

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*

*

*

Jenner knocked softly on the bathroom door.

“Ana?”

There was a soft slush of water; he heard her sliding up to sit in the big tub. The wet air trickling out into the hall was fragrant with lemongrass and aloe.

“Yes?”

“I have to go out for a little while. Will you be okay?”

She was silent a second, then asked where he was going.

“I just have to take care of a couple of things—I’ll be down in your uncle’s studio.”

“Will you be long?”

“A couple hours. Just call me if you need me—a friend of mine will be in the hall, in case you need anything. His name is Jun.”

She said, “Your neighbor, right? My uncle mentioned him.”

“Yes.”

She slushed back down. “Okay. Thanks.”

Across the way, Jun was leaning against the door frame, eating Lucky Charms from the box. He was wearing surfer shorts, his fake dreadlocks gathered under a big green wool tam.

“Need some coffee, Jenner?”

Jenner shook his head.

“How’s she doing? It’s all over the papers. You see the body?”

Jenner nodded.

“Sounded pretty bad.” He took another fistful of cereal.

“Yeah.” Jenner pulled the door shut behind him. “I’ll be a while. I need to make a few calls, and I don’t want Ana to hear.”

“Take your time. I have a stack of papers on raster graphics to grade, and they’ll all suck. These kids think if you’ve mastered
Donkey Kong
, you’re already nearly a video game designer.”

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Walking down the stairs, Jenner remembered the first time they’d met. Jun’s girlfriend at the time, an exquisite model from Hokkaido with a deep tan and an ocher sun-burst tattoo on the small of her back, had overdosed on methamphetamine. Jun had appeared in Jenner’s doorway, tapping lightly on the frame, explaining carefully that he’d heard about Jenner’s work, and wondered if Jenner would perhaps help him with a problem. The two had worked with the Japanese embassy to repatriate her body, and had been friends ever since.

Jenner knew Jun was involved in video game design, and was doing graduate work at New York University, but it wasn’t until Jun invited him to an open house at the school that he’d discovered his friend was a legend: apparently, while still an undergraduate at Keio University in Tokyo, Jun had written some sort of genius video game software—

not a complete game, but a software element so brilliant that the code was still in use today. It had made Jun rich enough to buy his loft in the Lightbulb Factory, and then open a Stüssy store in Aoyama, which promptly earned him a second fortune.

The door from the stairwell onto Pyke’s floor was in frosted glass, etched pyke: world image. Douggie owned the whole fourth floor, and had divided his space into living areas and a studio. The studio was as much an archive as a workspace; white enameled cube shelves covered two walls, packed with magazines and books that Douggie had either been published in or was collecting. There were dozens of photographs, everything from Pyke’s own work to photographs by John Wylie and Dennis Hopper. The single color photo was a twenty-by-twenty that had originally appeared on the cover of
ZOOM
—a self-portrait of Douggie in a bear suit with the Hong Kong supermodel Sarah San.

Jenner sat down at the big steel desk and booted up Pyke’s Mac: time to see if Whittaker had killed his data access privileges.

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Within minutes, Jenner knew that Whittaker had missed at least one opportunity to humiliate him. A few keystrokes took him onto the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program; his passwords to CODIS and AFIS and even some of the regional databases were still valid. He now had access to investigational records from the country’s most violent murders.

He began. For search parameters, he guessed at things about Andie that might have appealed to her killer—her age, her occupation, modality of homicide (here, Jenner went with the generic “asphyxia”), and location.

A three-year record search in VICAP only delivered a handful of consonant cases, homicides that, for all their viciousness, turned out to be disappointingly straightforward.

Worse, all seemed to have been closed by capture or death of the perpetrator. He printed out short case abstracts on all six anyway.

Maybe the last killing was too recent to show up in the database? Busy state police officers and detectives pissed and moaned about spending hours inputting data into a federal program they thought of mostly as a research tool for federal showboaters. Despite the Bureau’s offer to install a free, dedicated terminal in any office requesting one, compliance with VICAP was lax, and even in departments where the reports were submitted, the program had low priority. Ac-cordingly, many—maybe even most—murders never made it into the database at all, or if they did, it was often after a delay of months.

He would have to do it the old-fashioned way. He opened his small black address book and placed it flat on the desktop. As an ME, he had lectured frequently at regional and national meetings and at the NYPD Death School; he was happy talking casework with the cops, whether from big-city precincts or single-man squads in the ass end of nowhere, many of whom had terrible forensic backup. By the time he resigned, he’d almost filled the address book. Now
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he combed through it, culling the names and addresses of detectives, state troopers, criminalists, a cadaver dog trainer, even a couple of undertakers—anyone who’d know about any unusually violent deaths in their area.

It was close to 5:00 p.m. when he started calling; he’d missed the eight-to-four shift. Many of his contacts had already left, but Jenner found that introducing himself and the reason for his call was all the entrée he needed. Striking out in the five boroughs of New York City, he began calling farther afield.

By 9:00 p.m. he had burned through his numbers for southern New York and northern New Jersey and had nothing to show for it. He was now on eastern Pennsylvania; he decided he’d give up as soon as he got as far as the midpoint of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Danny Barton had retired from the Ninth Precinct a couple of years back and gone over to the Pennsylvania State Police.

He was stationed near Romen—halfway to Ohio. This would be his last call for the night.

No answer, no voice mail. Just as Jenner was hanging up, a state trooper picked up. Barton had left for the day, so Jenner left a message.

“Wait—Doc Jenner? From the New York ME’s office?”

“Yes?”

“Doc! It’s Bobby Dowling! I was in the Ninth with Danny, retired six months ago, Danny brought me on up. You remember me? We had that working girl who went out the window on East Fourth at A, the one who killed the bartender at that bar down the street from Spiral?”

Jenner did remember him—dark hair, average height, thinning hair, a little soft in the middle, a fast talker. They spoke for a few seconds about life in New York versus life in the country, then Jenner, his stomach starting to growl, said,

“Bobby, the reason I called, it’s a bit of a long shot, but I’m looking to see if you guys have caught any extremely violent murders recently, anything weird.”

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Dowling paused. “Doc, you didn’t know we got the Smith case?”

“The Smith case?”

“You don’t watch TV? Couple of weeks ago, in Romen, we had the girl who was decapitated.”

Jenner stopped tapping his pen.

“A homicide, Bobby?”

“Worst I ever seen. Girl named Sunday Smith. We’re running the investigation—Romen is like a one-stoplight town, maybe three cops in the whole county. Less, even. Good guys, but this is way out of their league. She wasn’t just decapitated: she was all hacked up. Happened maybe two weeks ago. I’m kinda surprised you never heard of it—it was on CNN!” He sounded a little aggrieved.

“I haven’t been watching the news very much. What did she look like, Bobby? Blond, brunette? How old?”

“Young. Dark hair. Not really from around here—she’s in her last year at some college in New York, took the semester off, moved home for a while. A tough break.”

Jenner asked which college.

“I wanna say NYU, but I don’t think that’s it. I can check.

But wait, there’s more.”

He paused, as much to savor the opportunity to tell the story one more time as to gather his thoughts.

“So Jimmy Barrett gets the call from a construction crew working on a barn nearby—door ajar in residence for maybe a couple of days. Not expecting anything, walks through the living room, nothing unusual, through the hall, nothing. He’s calling out ‘Hello? Anyone home?’ Goes upstairs, nothing. Goes back downstairs, walks into the dining room, nothing. Figures he’ll close up the house, call it in as nothing disturbed, family away. He’s just about to leave when he pushes through the swing door to the butler’s pantry, then notices blood on the door to the kitchen. So Jimmy pulls his gun and calls it in. Opens the kitchen door real slowly and
boom!
Blood everywhere—walls, floor, even the ceiling.