The Ambitious City (11 page)

MacNeice turned the heavy Chevy into the coroner’s parking lot and backed into a spot near the basement entrance. He was about to shut down the engine when he refastened his seatbelt and drove out of the lot, turning east on Barton, then right on Wentworth. It was starting to rain, and he switched on the wipers.

At the top of the hill he stopped on the shoulder where he’d parked the day before. There was a cruiser off to the side ahead of
him and yellow tape still marked the crime scene. The mountain stairs remained closed to the public. He could see the uniform in the car turning to check him out, and nodded to him as he walked by. He heard the car door open behind him.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“DS MacNeice. No. Get back in your unit and out of the rain.”

“Ah, sir, you’re going to get soaked. I’ll get you my slicker from the trunk.”

“Don’t bother, I’m fine.” The tone of his voice caused the officer to snap the car door shut.

MacNeice walked out and stood in the middle of the road. Within seconds, two cars and a minivan had passed on either side of him.

The cop flicked on his wipers to get a clearer look. “Jesus H, this fucker’s going to get smacked.”

MacNeice seemed to be looking back and forth from where the body was found to the stairs. A pickup truck came around the bend and swerved to avoid the guy in the dark blue suit standing in the middle of the road. The suit was getting darker by the second.

The cop couldn’t stand it anymore and reached for the radio. “Vittelli, it’s Rankin. I got a situation here. Over.”

“Define ‘situation.’ Over.”

“I’m up on the Wentworth hill where the woman got whacked yesterday.”

“I know. What’s the situation?”

“I got a Detective Superintendent MacNeice—you know the guy? Over.”

“Yeah, he’s God. Don’t fuck with him, Rankin. Over.”

“Tell me about it. But he’s standin’ out in the middle of Wentworth, just staring at the hill, the crime scene. It’s pissing rain and people are swerving to avoid him. What do I do? Over.”

“If this guy is standing in the rain, assume there’s a good reason. Over.”

“Roger that. Bat-crazy. But roger that. Over and out.”

Wiping the rain away from his mouth and eyes, MacNeice ran over the scenario again in his mind. She had been waiting for her mother to descend the stairs from the top of the mountain; it was a weekly ritual and her habit was to look up, not down. The killer had approached quietly from below or was waiting under the stairs. To the right was a six-foot drop onto jagged rocks, to the left, a three-foot drop down to rocks, weeds and gravel. The traffic was intermittent and the houses across the street looked deserted, so she had fled to the railing on the left and jumped to the ground, where she broke off her heel. She was now on the run and, like a terror-stricken animal, she had no thought other than to flee—tragically, in the wrong direction.

A car coming down the hill narrowly missed MacNeice. The water from its tires slashed across his shins and he heard the driver shout through the rain, “Asshole!”

She was trying to make it to the north side of the tracks, hoping to flag someone down, when he caught up to her on the edge of a dirt path obscured from the road by the railway hut. His head and shoulders might have been seen, but between the brush and the hut, she wouldn’t have been seen at all. She was trapped. MacNeice followed the solid white line around the curve as a schoolbus came down the mountain towards him.

In the cruiser, Rankin closed his eyes and waited for the impact, wondering how the hell he was going to explain why he had sat there while a schoolbus took out the finest homicide cop in the city. Hearing nothing, he opened his eyes again. The bus had stopped to let MacNeice cross; the driver even flipped out his little stop sign to halt traffic in both directions. MacNeice gave a little
wave of thanks when he made it to the mountain side of the road.

Rankin was breathing so heavily his windscreen had fogged up. He turned on the defroster but couldn’t find MacNeice again in the downpour. He took the napkin from his muffin and wiped a clear spot in the fog; MacNeice was now standing on the side of the road, staring directly at a house across the street from him. Without looking either way, he walked across the road and stood staring down at the driveway. “He may be God, but he’s totally nuts,” Rankin muttered. MacNeice was squatting now, the rain coming down so hard it was zipping up all around him, but Rankin could see him touching the ground and then smelling his fingers.

He stood up, looked about and turned to stare back across the road. Rankin rubbed a larger hole in the fog. Again without looking for traffic, MacNeice made his way back down the hill. The water was running in streams along the side of the road, but he splashed through the puddles as if they weren’t there. As he approached the cruiser on the driver’s side, Rankin rolled down the window. “Find what you wanted, sir?” MacNeice was soaked, his hair shining black and stuck to his forehead. He had a big smile on his face.

“I did, Officer—”

“Rankin, sir. Stephen Rankin.”

“Rankin, this was local talent.”

“Sir?”

“Homegrown.” He tapped the roof of the cruiser, smiled down at Rankin and added, “You take care now.”

Rankin looked in his rear-view mirror, trying to spot where this crazy man had gone, but the back window was so fogged up he couldn’t see anything. He lowered his window to check the side mirror and, sure enough, as MacNeice began his U-turn, Rankin could see he was still smiling.

Rankin’s radio burped into life. “Rankin, Vittelli here. He still on the road? Over.”

“Ah, nope, he’s just turning down the hill. Happy as a loon. Wet as one too. Over.”

“You just met a genius. Over.”

“Scared the shit outta me. Over.” The radio rattled with Vittelli’s laughter.

A
S HE SWUNG
the metal door open and entered the lab, MacNeice stopped in his tracks. Junior was slamming what looked like a kitchen knife into a doubled-over foam mattress while Mary Richardson leaned against the autopsy table on which a white plastic sheet covered, he assumed, the remains of Taaraa Ghosh. Richardson was wearing a dark grey suit and a pale blue blouse under her white lab coat, and she appeared amused by whatever her young assistant was doing.

Glancing MacNeice’s way, she said, “Ah, Detective. I was expecting you earlier.”

“I’m sorry. I got caught in the rain up at the mountain and had to go home and change.”

With a wry smile she looked down at the clipboard she held. “Ah, the ‘mountain,’ yes. I prefer the term escarpment, but then, I’ve seen real mountains.” She pushed herself away from the table, causing the body beneath the sheet to shake slightly. “Well, this young woman may have been unique for someone her age, someone so pretty …”

The violent thumping and grunting from the assistant in the corner distracted them both. Junior appeared, at least to MacNeice, as if he was coming unstuck. The foam innards of the mattress flew up and around him.

“Unique in what respect?” He asked, looking back at her.

“She was a virgin.”

Thump, thump
, grunt,
thump, thump
.

“Does he have to do that, whatever it is?” MacNeice asked.

“He’s testing a theory. But not to worry, he’s almost exhausted. Are you surprised by her virginity, Detective?”

“She seems to have been a singularly focused young woman. No, I’m not surprised.”

Thump
, grunt,
thump, thump, thump
.

Richardson decided to explain. “Junior’s fascinated by the wounds to her abdomen. He believes they’re not random, and he’s been trying to recreate them with the mattress—so far unsuccessfully.”

“There were four in a square.”

“More of a diamond, the centre of which was—fairly precisely—her navel, though there isn’t any indication that he knew that. Judging by the blood pattern, her dress remained in place throughout the attack.”

“Can I see them?” MacNeice asked. Richardson stood away from the table and was about to pull back the sheet when he quickly corrected himself. “I mean, have you a photograph of them?”

“Junior, come here and show Detective MacNeice the printout.”

Sweating, Junior came over with the photo and handed it to MacNeice. “The hard part is that you’ve got two cuts going one way and two the other,” he said. “Doing it quickly is almost impossible. I’ve come close but I haven’t nailed it.” He demonstrated with the knife to show that the assailant would have to
change his arm direction to match the angles of the entry points.

“The question is, why bother? She’s already dead,” Richardson said. “If this is a final
coup de grâce
, why worry about precision? His escape should have been of paramount concern at that point.”

MacNeice looked down at the photo in his hand and the hair on the back of his neck stood up. “Can I borrow your pen, Doctor, and your clipboard?”

Richardson handed them over. “We’ve been studying these wounds for more than two hours, MacNeice, so if you see something we’ve not seen, I’ll be very disappointed.”

MacNeice clipped the print in place and put the pen on one of the entry points. He swiftly connected the four wounds, then handed it to Richardson. She said softly, “My Lord.”

Richardson handed the clipboard to Junior, who looked at MacNeice and said, “No way!” After studying it again, he handed back the near-perfect drawing of a swastika.

“It’s open to another interpretation, but I can’t think of one,” MacNeice said, retrieving the print.

“But what about the precision, and the opposing directions?” Junior asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s ambidextrous and switched hands or shifted his body to get the angle right.”

Turning to Richardson, he said, “Tell me about the neck wound. I’m interested in the angle of the cut—I’m trying to establish the killer’s height.”

MacNeice winced as Richardson folded back the plastic sheet to reveal Taaraa Ghosh’s face, neck and upper chest. Her eyes had been closed, mercifully, but her neck, absent of blood, looked even more horrific than it had on the hill. Her mouth was open slightly, as if she were about to say something.

Richardson reached for her scalpel and, leaning over, opened the
wound a little. “You see the slightly downward angle? It’s so deep that you can make it out clearly. Assuming they were both standing on level ground—” She looked over her glasses at MacNeice.

“Yes, they were more or less level.”

“Then you’ve got a man roughly six feet tall, perhaps slightly taller. He’s right-handed and used a slicing uppercut.”

Junior mimicked the swing with his kitchen knife, smiling at MacNeice. As if practising his stroke, he did it again.

“Enough, Junior.”

Richardson pulled the sheet over the dead girl’s head and put her scalpel in a shallow tray alongside several other instruments. She looked directly at MacNeice, her greying hair cut stylishly short, accenting her long, narrow face and aristocratic nose. Her skin had lost none of its peaches-and-cream colour. MacNeice wondered if his own had gone suddenly pale, because she appeared to be looking at him with concern.

As Junior walked away, still practising his backhand, Richardson raised an eyebrow at MacNeice. “One last thing, Mac, the arc of that cut, the precision of those wounds to her abdomen—the man you’re looking for is very comfortable with that blade. There’s no hesitation whatsoever in any of these wounds. If you get close to apprehending him, I would give him a wide berth.”

“Can you describe the blade?”

“It’s a hunting or military type. The blade is three-sixteenths of an inch thick and at its widest, judging by those wounds to her abdomen, it’s one and three-quarters. As for the length, I can’t say precisely, but since two of the thrusts exited her back, I’d guess somewhere between five and six inches. In other words, extremely nasty.”

“Are you going to do a full autopsy?”

“I think not. We know exactly what killed this young woman. There’s no need to put the family through any more anguish.”

Richardson touched the plastic-covered shoulder and held it for a moment.

MacNeice had one last question. “Were there any bruises or marks that would indicate he held her or struck her with something other than the knife?”

“No. There was faint bruising around the abdominal entry wounds, but that would have been caused by the impact of the hilt. He didn’t touch her except to wipe the blade on her dress when he’d finished.”

MacNeice thanked Richardson and nodded to Junior, who was wrestling the foam mattress into a roll. He looked about the large, bright room. It took a clean efficiency to study death—all fluorescent lighting, white tile and stainless steel, except for the red-tiled floor. Even the smell spoke to the purpose of the place—a slightly acrid mix of several chemicals masking the rancid smell of human decay. Richardson’s office, with its oriental carpet and low incandescent lighting, appeared to be a refuge from the clinical brightness her business demanded.

In the tiled corridor he felt the rage boiling up again, and practised deep breathing until he got behind the wheel of his car. Looking at his sketch of the swastika, MacNeice tried to imagine what else it might be. “What the hell are we into here?”

Driving uptown along King Street, he thought about the killer. If he was right about him, he was certain it wouldn’t end with one death. But he couldn’t shake the notion that the four punctures were more about graphic design than fascism.

B
EFORE HE’D MADE
it back to Division, MacNeice received two phone calls, one from the mayor and the other from DC Wallace. Wallace had just finished a press conference about the violent death of a young woman at the foot of the mountain stairs, and the task force, under the leadership of Detective Superintendent MacNeice, that was hard at work finding her killer. The call was to find out if indeed that was true, and, if so, how quickly MacNeice thought he’d have some good news.

Bob Maybank was calling because the unions were getting overheated about not having access to the eastern wharf. They had begun pushing about when their crews could resume the work they had been hired to do. In the senior ranks of the trade unions there was currently a high degree of cooperation with and respect for the mayor. But this was tethered by piano wire to Maybank’s ability to find the funds for the waterfront project. Should anything jeopardize that initiative, they would shut the city down.