Precious Blood (9 page)

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But y’know what? Jimmy doesn’t even notice it. Because he’s staring straight into the eyes of the dead girl’s head, right there on the countertop . . .

“I tell you, guy was nearly hysterical. Jimmy’s so freaked out, what with the blood and the head and all, he doesn’t see the weirdest part of all: her head is sitting in a puddle of milk.”

“
Milk
?”

“Yeah. The coroner here—he’s not like New York, but he seems like an okay guy—he said they kill the girl, cut off her head, and a while later put it in the milk. You could tell he put it there on purpose because of the blood splatter in the milk—he had to lift it over and place it right there in the middle.”

Jenner was quiet.

“I tell you, Doc, it was the freakiest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. You walk into the kitchen, and
bang!
The head’s right there, in this puddle of rotting milk. Swear to God.

Jimmy’s still seriously fucked, nightmares, the works.”

“You said she was cut up?”

“Oh, yeah—big-time. Body’s lying on the floor nearby, hacked open. It looked like someone tried to do an autopsy on her.”

Jenner leaned back in his chair. “Any ideas on the perp?”

“We’ve got nothing. Zip. They brought in a special blood-splatter guy with the State Police criminalistics crew from near Pittsburgh, but they got nothing usable. I mean, they got some prints, but no matches in regional databases or through AFIS. I said at the time—and you know just how much I like working with the feds—they should call the FBI, but the coroner wasn’t having any of that, particularly from a new guy.”

“And where’s the investigation at now?”

“Nowhere. She was alone in the house, family out of the country, no one saw anything. We think she may have known the killer—there was snow, and it looks like he came
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right on up the front path and knocked on her front door. No tracks anywhere else, and the doors and locks and windows are fine.”

He paused, and in the silence Jenner could hear his grinding frustration.

“We really got nothing. The rest of the family is out of the country, and she had apparently lost touch with her local friends after she went off to college. Nothing looks to be stolen. This close to I-80, it could have been a random thing—y’know, some freakfest looking for kicks just takes a turn off the highway, and it’s Sunday Smith’s unlucky day.

VICAP showed up nothing, whatever that’s worth.”

“Sexual assault?”

“Don’t know. She was starting to go bad. The rape kit showed a questionable on semen, but the lab guys at Life-codes think the specimen may be too degraded to extract DNA. There’s nothing else to suggest rape. Really, we’re at a brick wall. And everything got put on the back burner last week after the school shooting. I got a bad feeling that this one is going to get away.”

Jenner said, “Bobby, we might be able to help each other.”

He briefly described the Delore killing, then asked if he could have a look at Dowling’s case file.

“Doc, that’d be great. Some of the bosses here are real arrogant pricks, but this one’s got to the stage where he’ll take all the help he can get, short of the feds. I’ll dupe the paperwork, and burn a CD of the crime scene and autopsy photos. Shoot me an e-mail with your address, and if I catch a slow night tonight, I’ll be able to get it to you tomorrow.

It’s only a two-hour drive, plus some of those mopes on the Ninth squad owe me a drink or two.”

As Dowling spelled his e-mail address, Jenner felt the hair on his arms prickling.

tuesday,

december 3

She was making Jenner breakfast. It felt good to do something, anything, rather than just sit around, slowly going insane. She felt guilty, being in his space. He didn’t like having her there; he was polite enough, but she clearly made him uncomfortable. He never said much, and she’d noticed that when she came into a room, he’d leave fairly soon afterward. Not immediately, but fairly soon.

Whatever. Even if the breakfast didn’t make him like her, it made
her
feel better.

Rad said it was best if she just stayed put until things had sorted themselves out. She agreed—it wasn’t as if she had anywhere else to go. And Joey Roggetti had stopped by her apartment and brought a suitcase of her clothes. Spending all her time at Jenner’s would be hard enough, even if he weren’t so withdrawn around her; she found she couldn’t focus enough to read or watch TV.

Jenner said she should call some friends and have them come over and hang out, but it felt too soon for that; she liked not having to
talk
. She’d lost her cell phone, and told herself it would be a pain to get their numbers. Although it wouldn’t, really. Anyway, she wasn’t sure he really meant it.

Busy work was good, though. She’d done laundry (his as well as hers), folded stuff. Putting it away, she discovered his secret: his apartment might be spare and modern, but behind the sliding slabs of dark wood that hid his closets, Jenner was as messy as any other bachelor. Any
straight
bachelor, at least. And there had been a bonus: when Jenner saw her putting his clean clothes into his closet, he’d blushed. That was kind of cute.

She smiled at the thought, standing at the range in one of his tattered gray sweatshirts. She cracked eggs into the skillet, and stole a glance over at the couch to see if Jenner was still asleep.

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He was handsome. Too old for her, sure, but definitely good-looking. Dark hair, green eyes. When he slept, he relaxed a little, and his face seemed younger. But sad: even in sleep, his face was sad. Rad said he’d had problems after 9/11, and warned her to tread gently around the topic; he hadn’t lost anyone or anything, he just had a bad time, apparently, with all the bodies. It was weird she could read it so plainly in him. Or maybe it was just that she knew he was messed up, and was projecting it onto him. But there was something around his eyes, shadowy, and in his look, the way his gaze would settle on her and quickly dart away.

She was still studying his face when his eyes opened.

She quickly looked away. “Hey. Sorry if I woke you. I wanted to have breakfast ready when you got up.”

Jenner rubbed his eyes. “Where did you get the bacon?”

“Jun picked it up for me at Dean & Deluca. Look—I made blood orange juice! Just the thing for a coroner, hah hah.”

Jenner made a face at the pun, but smiled as he took the glass.

She went back to the range and busied herself with the eggs, then cut thick slabs of bread and put them into the big steel toaster.

She kept her back to him. “Hey, Jenner? You allowed to talk to me about Andie?”

“I don’t know if I should. Do you need to talk about it?

Rad can get you a grief counselor.”

“A grief counselor? No, thanks. I’m okay.”

He sat up. “It would really be a good idea if you spoke with someone.”

“Okay, I will, I will.” She picked up the butter, still turned away. “So you can’t talk with me about Andie, I get it. But can you talk with me about me?” She paused. “Do you think I’m in danger?”

He got up and walked over to the table and sat, forcing the lie: “I don’t think there’s much risk. He’s probably long gone. But I think it’d be a good idea to take it easy, hide out
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here till your uncle gets back. Then maybe you could both go somewhere together.”

She turned to face him, eyes now red-rimmed, faking a smile to match his lie.

“Oh, we can talk about it later—I don’t want to spoil your breakfast! Eggs, bacon, toast, OJ. You have jam? I can make more toast if you want.”

She put everything onto the tray and carried it to the table, her feet sliding quietly across the dark wood floor.

She slipped the tray in front of him from behind, so he couldn’t see her tears.

The man tried again.

The cursor flickered tentatively on the screen, then the university splash page loaded in stuttering blocks.

He moved through the sequence of screens quickly, knowing his stolen phone signal could hang at any second. From the administration page, to admissions, to archived admissions.

He opened a separate Command Line Interface window, rattled off a few keystrokes, and then he was in, all the safe-guards and barriers bypassed.

He watched the choppy scroll of surnames, tapping the space bar to halt it when he reached
D
. He overshot and landed on delore_andrea; he stepped up one line, high-lighted de_jong_ana, and pulled up the record.

He remembered Ana’s admission photograph from months back, when he was first considering Andrea Delore; she peered into the camera like a little pixie, her hair short and spiky. Since that photo, she’d put on weight—what did they call it, the Freshman Fourteen?—but the curviness suited her; she had been too thin before. Her hair was longer.

The architects of the university’s Next Millennium Data Access project had created a system that allowed administrators, depending on their system privileges, access to
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every scrap of paper associated with a particular student, from first admissions inquiry through to the final alumni donation. The page linked to her active schedule, her grades, everything, even a scanned copy of her personal essay. He skimmed through it—trite crap about what she hoped to con-tribute to the school, to the world. How her sense of herself had changed after her parents died in a car crash, blah blah blah. That crash had been her lucky day, he figured: her SAT

scores were pretty average, and her personal essay had the same crap as all the others he’d read, so it pretty much had to be the crash that had nudged her onto the Accept pile.

He found that her tuition and extracurriculars were guar-anteed by a trust fund at a national bank, the trust based in Orlando. He moved on a page.

Now,
this
was more like it. The Contacts page listed two legal guardians; one was in Florida, but the other was right there in New York, on Crosby Street, barely a mile from Ana’s apartment.

He wrote down the name and address, then added the phone number, just because it was there—it wasn’t as if he was going to call. Then he copied the rest of her files onto his desktop and logged off. He beat a drumroll on the countertop with his hands, ending with an imaginary cymbal crash.

He snorted as he imagined what he and Ana would chat about if he called her up. He giggled, and realized he was aroused.

No, not now, later. “Kittens to drown, cats to skin!” as his father used to say when he had work to do.

True to his word, Bobby Dowling arrived just before noon with a sheaf of photocopied notes and not one but two CD-ROMs.

He wouldn’t stay for coffee. “Thanks again, Doc. On my way to see my boys in the Ninth. We got a deal—I give them
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photos and prints from my scene, they buy me breakfast. It’s the least they can do: I don’t even work here anymore, and I’m
still
saving their sorry asses.”

“Thanks, Bobby. I’ll call you. Good seeing you.” Jenner walked him to the door. Ana, who’d been in the TV room, slipped behind Jenner into the kitchen, ignoring them.

“Take care, Doc,” Dowling said, craning his neck to catch another glimpse; he looked at Jenner with admiration, nodding his head and mouthing the word
Nice!

“You too, Bobby,” Jenner said, closing the door without explanation. He waited to look at the files until Ana said she was going to watch a DVD. She shut herself in the TV room; when he heard the lilting theme of Fellini’s
Amarcord
, he got down to work.

He turned on his desk lamp and fanned out the file. Dowling had said that the area canvas was completely negative, so he went straight to the crime scene report, and then the autopsy report.

Jenner always started with the written report and diagrams, then checked the photographs for inconsistencies and omissions. This approach often taught him as much about the quality of the crime scene units handling the case as it did about the case itself; the Pittsburgh crew had clearly been brought in because they were very good indeed.

The kitchen was the large country type—reading the text, Jenner imagined a yellow linoleum floor, pale yellow walls, a cream porcelain sink the size of a New York City park bench, cheery white trim on the windowsills over the sink, which would face out onto the back lawn, or maybe fields. A bird feeder near the window.

The body—the torso—was near the doorway to the hall, the legs in an east/west direction. The criminalist had drawn her as a folded stick figure, knees bent, legs crossed, stick arms akimbo, the squared-off lines of the upper body ending in a truncated uptick representing the neck.

The head, a small open oval, was sketched in on the kitchen
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counter next to the torso. An amoeba-like pencil line surrounded it, and another fine line led to the word milk in the margin. Similar fine lines radiated from hatch marks along the walls, and irregular ovals on the floors and countertop, filling the margins, blood, blood, blood, blood. It reminded Jenner of a perspective drawing, the lines converging on a nightmarish vanishing point in the center of the kitchen.

He slipped the CD labeled scene into his laptop. The photographer had done a fair job of establishing and orienting shots, but the perspectives seemed arbitrary, and all the body shots were distorted by weird angles. The close-ups were sloppy—the shapes of blood smears on the wall were visible, but the markings on the rulers taped next to it for scale were illegible. Jenner suspected the Pittsburgh team had better images.

He skipped through the opening sequence of front door (no force marks), unremarkable living room perspective, unremarkable stairway perspective, unremarkable dining room perspective, tabbing quickly through the images until he reached the kitchen door.