Gray Matter (22 page)

Her apartment number was 2-A. That should put her on the second floor, left hand corner. She had three windows facing the street and two more on the side of the building. All of them had shades tightly pulled down. Evidently, she liked privacy. Some fight leaked out around two of the shades.

He had a large thermos of black coffee to help him stay awake, and a bag of nacho chips he had picked up when he put some gas in the Pacer. He stretched out his aching legs as much as he could in the driver’s seat, set up a pattern for his eyes to roam, and let his thoughts drift. They homed in immediately on what had just happened at home.

Schultz’s life had been turned upside-down.

On his way home from the office, he had decided that he was going to be firm with both Julia and his son Rick. It was time to let Rick face the consequences of his behavior and, if necessary, serve his time. He wasn’t going to rescue the boy—the man, after all, at twenty-five—and if his wife didn’t like it, she could pack her bags and move out.

Much to his amazement, she did just that.

It happened so swiftly that it hadn’t really sunk in yet. He was still numb, with a little blossom of heartache starting to open somewhere inside. All that night, as he chugged down coffee, shoved handfuls of chips into his mouth, and watched Armor’s apartment, he wondered where he had gone wrong.

No one entered or left the building after he arrived. He knew that there were a lot of elderly residents in the area, and they generally didn’t go out after dark or have company late at night. Around midnight, one of the lights in Armor’s windows went off. The other went off an hour later. Apparently she was tucked in for the night.

Dawn sneaked up on him. He needed to go to the bathroom. He was out of coffee, out of chips, out of excuses in his marriage, and apparently out of Julia’s life. Later, he checked his watch. Tenants were starting to come out of the building, a few on their way to work, some just out to walk the dog. It was past seven-thirty. Hadn’t Armor’s phone message said that she had a tennis date at seven? He sat up abruptly, banging his knee on the steering wheel. She should have left practically an hour ago.

He got out, brushed the crumbs off his clothes, stretched his stiff legs, and felt his left knee pop painfully. He entered the building and knocked on the door of 2-A. No answer. He went downstairs, found the superintendent, flashed his badge, and pulled him away from breakfast to open the door.

Schultz was the first one in. He saw that Armor was home, but in no condition to answer the door. He stepped back out quickly, but not before the smell of blood, coppery and abundant, had filled his nostrils.

He used the super’s phone to call in the homicide and waited for the blue-and-whites and the ETU to arrive. He was certain no one had gone in the front door, and equally certain, because of the layout in the back with the blind alley that butted up against other buildings, that no one had gone up the fire escape. His mind caught and held a single thought: he had held a vigil for a woman who was almost certainly dead even before he arrived, a woman who was killed while he, the professional detective, the protector of the public, was home arguing with his wife.

The technicians had been in the apartment almost an hour before Schultz worked up the nerve to call PJ. In the meantime he had determined that the reassuring lights he had seen from his car going off in two different rooms were lamps controlled by plug-in timers. He had been taken in, lulled, by something that probably wouldn’t have deterred a second-rate burglar.

He didn’t meet PJ’s accusing gaze when she arrived. This time she couldn’t stay in the room while the body was still there. He helped her out and left her sitting on the stairs while he went mechanically through the scene analysis.

That afternoon, in the middle of relating the last twenty-four hours’ events to an incredulous Lieutenant Wall, he hit bottom. He got up, held up both hands in a warding gesture, and left the room. He sat in the stall with the only working toilet in the men’s room, ignoring increasingly urgent requests to finish up.

PJ found out from Barnesworth where Schultz was and barged into the men’s room without knocking. A patrolman about to unzip in front of a urinal thought better of it and left. She pounded on the closed stall door.

“Come out of there, you worm! If I have to, I’ll crawl under the door so I can hear your excuses face-to-face. And you know I’ll do it, too!”

All the fight had leached out of Schultz. He opened the stall door.

“That’s better,” PJ said icily. “I’d like to know why a woman who sat in my office and told me she was in danger is now dead. How could you mess up so monumentally?”

“I fucked up,” he said sullenly, “and Armor paid for it. I’m sorry.”

“That’s just fine, Detective. You’re sorry. A woman is dead, and that’s all you’ve got to say?”

“What else can I say?”

“You can start by telling me exactly what happened.”

The door opened, and Lieutenant Wall stuck his head in. “Schultz…” he said.

“Not now!” PJ practically shouted. “Go away!”

Wall obediently vanished.

“Come on, let’s go back to my office,” she said. “This is no place to talk. It stinks in here.”

She shoved Schultz angrily. Then, without thinking, she drew her hand back and slapped him across the face.

He took the blow without reacting, then led the way across the hall. She slammed her office door when they were both inside.

“I’ve got to congratulate you, Detective. I’ve never slapped anyone before. You’re the first one to get under my skin enough.”

“I deserved it, Doc. If it’ll make you feel any better, you can do it again.”

PJ dropped into her chair and threw one leg over the burnished arm. “Damn it, Schultz, tell me what happened.”

“I didn’t promise I’d make it over there. I was skeptical, but I decided to go myself. I wish to God I could go back and make that decision over, send Dave or Anita. I just wasn’t on top of things. Some family problems came up after work yesterday. Not that that’s an excuse, but I was late getting over to Armor’s place. She was offed before I even got there. I spent the night guarding her corpse. Shit!”

PJ composed herself. Her professional concern asserted itself in spite of her anger and grief. “What sort of family problems?”

“Nothing that should have interfered with my work.”

PJ waited him out.

“My son Rick got arrested yesterday. Pushing drugs. Julia wanted me to fix things and spring him. I said no, let the jerk swing in the breeze. We had a big fight about it. She left.”

“You separated from your wife?”

“That’s what I said, didn’t I? She’s gone. Split. Thirty years down the tubes, and the only thing I’ve got to show for it is a son in the slammer.”

PJ felt again the emotional heat of her own discovery of Steven’s infidelity, his leaving, their divorce, his marriage to Carla.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, and meant it.

“Yeah, well, I feel rotten about what happened. My home life shouldn’t screw up my work. Lieutenant Wall certainly knows that, and he hasn’t exactly been reluctant this morning to tell me about it. Christ, my voice was on her answering machine. I look like an idiot.”

“You’re human, aren’t you?” she said softly, her anger starting to fade. She hadn’t forgiven him for his costly lapse, but at least she understood it. She had made blunders before in her professional life. There was that time when she hadn’t taken a suicide threat seriously, turned off her pager, and gone out for an anniversary celebration with Steven. Her judgment had been dead wrong, and she knew what it was like to live with that.

She was about to reach out and pat his hand, but he sensed it and pulled away.

“Don’t get mushy, Doc. Or is that just professional technique?”

“A little of both, I think. I’m not sorry I slapped you, though.”

Schultz nodded. He finally raised his eyes to meet hers, and they held the connection, a very human connection, sharing their grief.

“Sometimes things happen that shove everything else in your life aside,” she said quietly. “I call it the steamroller effect.”

“I don’t buy that, Doc. The Armor woman should be alive today.”

PJ put aside her recriminations, because she wanted, now more than ever, to solve this case. The stakes had just gone sky-high. “Do you still want to catch the killer and hang him up by his thumbs and cut his balls off?”

“That’s a damn silly question. Of course I do.”

“Then I’ve got some news about the case,” PJ said. “You’ve been so busy sitting in the toilet that you haven’t heard the latest. There’s been a break.”

Schultz didn’t react.

“Snap out of it, Detective! I need your skills now. I need your experience to get that killer off the street.”

“Maybe what you need is somebody else. Somebody competent.”

There. It was out,
PJ thought to herself.

“I’ve already spoken to Lieutenant Wall,” she said. “I made it clear that I wanted you to stay on this case. On the CHIP team.” She didn’t mention that Wall had pressured her to accept a replacement, and that she had threatened to leave if he pulled Schultz out.

“What the hell for?”

PJ hesitated. That was a good question. Would it be better to work with someone else? Where was her relationship with Schultz going? Did she still trust him? She studied his face and held his challenging gaze. She knew from her own experience with the patient who committed suicide that he would be living with his mistake for a long time. She decided that she probably would never forgive him for letting Armor’s life slip through his fingers, but that she could trust him not to do anything like that again. As soon as it was made, the decision settled in and got comfortable.

“Because I don’t want to break in a new person,” she said. “I’m tired of explaining what virtual reality is.”

“I guess I can understand that,” Schultz said. His face softened a little, but his eyes were hard with resolve. He cleared his throat. “Did you say something about a break in the case?”

“Yes. Sheila’s head,” she said with a catch in her voice, “has been recovered. From a fishing pond in”—she glanced down at the notes on her desk—“Busch Wildlife Area. The story I got was that the pond had become shallow, nearly filled with silt. There was a lot of runoff during the spring rains from a parking lot that was being built nearby. So the pond was closed to fishing and scheduled for restoration. The dredging crew made the discovery at seven-thirty this morning. It’s already been matched to Sheila’s dental records.”

“So it was found while I was still sitting there in my fucking orange car with my thumb up my ass.” He shook his head. “Why would the killer toss the head in a shallow pond?”

“The pond was posted for restoration, but the sign was small. I guess he missed it in the dark.”

“Maybe he’s beginning to screw up. They all do.”

“That’s not what my research shows. I’ve been digging into the literature on serial killers. It’s my impression that the majority are never caught. They’re careful, compulsively so. The ones who make mistakes are the ones who have something driving them to it, making them sloppy. A deeply-buried wish to get caught, to be stopped. The true sociopaths, the ones who have no conscience, no remorse, believe they can kill with impunity, and a lot of the time they get away with it.”

“Not this creep,” said Schultz, shaking his head. “I don’t give a flying fuck about whether he’s remorseful or not. He’s not getting away. He’s got a little devil sitting on his shoulder, whispering in his ear and getting him to make mistakes. That little devil is me. After all, I’m a real pro at screwing up, myself.”

“You may not be far wrong, Detective,” PJ said. There was something there, something in what he said. A piece of the puzzle, but where did it fit? Then she noticed the crestfallen look on Schultz’s face, and realized that he thought she was agreeing with his self-criticism about being a pro at screwing up. “Not about messing up. Something else…”

“Was there anything distinctive about the condition of the head?” Schultz said.

His question pulled her mind back into a painful track. “Yes, there was. The skull was cracked open and the brain cavity was empty.”

“Christ,” he said, shaking his head again. “Any chance the little fishies did it?”

“Not in that amount of time. It was submerged for maybe only eight to ten hours. Not with the way the bones of the skull were cut. The medical examiner doesn’t want to be pinned down just yet, but she thinks it was a chisel.”

PJ noticed that she had a terrible headache. The desk lamp was angled toward her. She imagined its light stabbing into her eyes, racing over her optic nerve to her brain, casting shadows on its undulating surface. She reached out and tilted the shade away.

“So the freak took the head with him, cut open the skull, took out the brain, and disposed of the shell.”

“The meat of the walnut,” PJ said softly.

“You saying this guy ate the brain?” Schultz rose and began pacing. Evidently he couldn’t take the concept sitting down.

“Maybe, maybe not. From the remains, there’s no way we can tell exactly what he did with the brain, only that he removed it for some reason. Personally, I think there’s a good chance we’re dealing with anthropophagy. An excellent chance.”

“English, Doc. In English.”

“Cannibalism.”

“Christ. This is new territory for me,” Schultz said.

“Consider it an opportunity for professional growth.”

A
T LUNCH SCHULTZ EYED
his food with suspicion, as though Millie had plopped a slab of raw human brain on his plate rather than the grilled cheese with bacon he had ordered. He was still having difficulty taking in what PJ had told him. His own theory to account for the missing heads had been that the killer was taking grisly souvenirs. The new information put a different spin on things.

He waved at Millie, pointed at his coffee cup.

PJ was sitting at the counter next to him. She had a large bowl of salad in front of her, but she had barely picked at it. Schultz speculated that PJ was the only customer since Millie opened her doors who had ever ordered the Chef’s Special Three-Greens Salad. It came with sliced hard-boiled egg on top. Millie’s trademark flag toothpick, jammed into the white of the egg, presided over the bowl. Schultz wondered what Millie would do if she ever ran out of them.