The Ashes of an Oak (7 page)

Emmet waved him in. ‘What’s up, Milt? Thought you’d’ve been home and tucked up between the sheets by now.’

‘That some kind of office humour?’ Milt smiled. ‘That’ll cost you a drink. And don’t say you haven’t got any. It smells like a Virginia still in here.’

‘We all got colds,’ said Frank. He coughed. ‘Medicinal.’

Emmet poured a drink for Milt and indicated for him to sit down. ‘What’s up?’

Milt parked himself against the filing cabinets. He lit a cigarette. ‘I’m not sure. I’m going to tell you some things and it’s up to you what to do with them.’

‘Go ahead,’ said Frank.

‘Okay. Robinson Taylor wasn’t killed where you found him. He wasn’t killed far away, what with the blood and everything at the secondary scene, but he wasn’t killed there. We have more work to do, but I thought you should know.’

‘So he was driven there and dumped?’ asked Frank.

‘Yeah. Seems like it. Time of death was around seven a.m. He was found, or noticed at least, at about eight fifteen. Uniforms were on the scene by eight twenty-five. They covered him up with a blanket.’ He turned to Emmet. ‘I understand why, what with the crowd and all, but it contaminates the scene; fibres, stray hairs et cetera. See if you can get some sort of plastic covers to your men, would you, Em?’

‘Sure.’

‘If he was killed elsewhere and about an hour before he was found,’ said Steve, ‘how come there was so much blood on the scene? That blanket was like a washcloth.’

‘He was on anti-coagulants. His family doctor says he threw off some clots about a year ago. Not uncommon in people with his habits. Plus, there was one other thing,’ said Milt.

‘Okay,’ said Emmet. ‘What?’

‘His balls were missing.’

Emmet winced. ‘His balls?’

Steve groaned. ‘Jesus!’

‘Yeah,’ said Milt. ‘I can understand it wasn’t noticed at the scene. There was a lot of blood, plus his pants had been pulled back up. It wasn’t until we got him on the table that we noticed.’

‘How can a man pull up in a vehicle, drag a body from inside it and dump it on the sidewalk without somebody at least raising an eyebrow?’ asked Frank with irritation.

‘I don’t know,’ said Milt. ‘The streets are yours, the lab is mine. There is however a vehicle somewhere with seats that are now black with dry blood and a meeting place for the local Brotherhood of Flies.’

Frank sighed. The weeks seemed to be getting longer, the nights shorter. The days sloughed from the calendar like the skin of a slowly shedding snake. ‘Anything else?’

‘Yeah. The Dybek woman; she was dead when she hit the floor so, in theory, the first floor of her apartment building was also a secondary scene.’

‘So she was killed in her apartment?’ asked Steve.

‘Yep.’

‘How?’

‘She was suffocated. You wouldn’t have seen it among the mess yesterday.’

‘How?’

‘There were some fibres in her mouth, airway and lungs that match a bath towel at the apartment. She may have put up a brief struggle. There’s some bruising around the nose that suggests it was pinched closed. The more she struggled, the tighter the pinch. Could be he covered her mouth with the towel at the same time. Could be he held it over her face ‘til she stopped fighting. He had to be quite strong. Don’t be deceived by a little old lady. They can still put up a fight. Must’ve made him sweat a little though.’

‘What about the plate?’ asked Frank.

‘Clean as a whistle. The sink was also clean.’

‘Which means that we can only surmise.’ Frank puffed his cheeks out and helped himself to more whisky. He poured some for Steve, who took it gratefully. He caught Emmet staring at the bottle. ‘I’ll buy you some more, Em. Stop being such an old hen.’ He turned his attention back to the ME. ‘Nothing on the glass of milk either?’ Milt shook his head. ‘So the guy was either known to her or trusted by her for some reason and she gave him food and drink. Or he sat staring at her body while he had himself a snack and a refreshing glass of milk. That’s pretty stone cold.’

‘What about the guy in the furnace?’ asked Emmet.

‘Early days yet, Em. There was one thing however.’

‘Yeah?’ said Frank. ‘Only one?’

Milt looked wearily at Frank. ‘When I finally get to cut you open, Frank, I’m going to find acid instead of blood, you bitter old bastard.’

‘Yeah, yeah and a song in my heart! What else?’

‘Bear with me. Robinson Taylor had a ring missing from the third finger on his right hand.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I’m an expert, Frank. The place where the ring had been was still pitted, plus the skin was torn as if the ring had been tugged off in a hurry or had been a little tight and needed some forcing. He had a degree of heart failure, so his fingers might have been a mite swollen, making the ring tight. There was an effort made to get the thing off because the finger was dislocated.’ Milt paused to let that soak in.

‘Did Mrs Dybek have anything missing?’ asked Emmet. ‘She have any jewellery on?’

‘Engagement ring and wedding ring,’ said Steve.

The Captain got up and rubbed at his aching back. ‘Milt, are you saying there’s a connection between them?’

‘No. That’s for you to say, not me.’

Steve ran though the rooms of the apartment in his head. ‘I can’t think of anything missing. No gaps on shelves. Nothing out of place. Nothing obvious.’

‘Christ almighty!’ said Frank. He jumped up from his seat and slapped himself across the forehead. ‘Christ almighty! The shoe. The fucking shoe! What’s the matter with me?’

‘What shoe?’ asked Steve.

‘In her wardrobe. She had all these old clothes. They were all hung up, no gaps. They were old and worn, but she’d taken a pride, you know?’ The others nodded. ‘At the bottom of the wardrobe were three sets of shoes. Only there wasn’t. There was a set of shoes, a set of winter boots and a single shoe, one of those high-heeled things that women wear to big events. It was sort of nineteen-fifties in style. I assumed that she’d kept it as a keepsake, you know, one magical night sort of thing, that the other had got lost with the track of time. But it was on its side. She wouldn’t have left it on its side. She was too tidy. She was crazy clean.’ Frank looked around the room. ‘He took her shoe.’

Emmet asked the question that everybody wanted to ask but dared not. ‘And our man in the furnace? What about him? What was he missing?’

Milt’s mouth twisted as if he didn’t want to answer. ‘He was missing his heart, Emmet. He was missing his heart.’

Frank stood at the end of his street. The lights were on. They dropped a pale yellow haze through the trees which landed softly on the ground, as if the sun had left a part of itself behind.

He stood on the corner, his jacket over his shoulder, his hat tilted low over his eyes, his crumpled white shirt lazy on his tired body. His right hand hung at his side. A cigarette burned between the first two fingers, the smoke unwavering on the airless night. He would occasionally take a drag, then let the hand drop again. His thumb would flick absently at the filter and send ash and sparks to his feet.

He was looking for the man in the smart, sharp, dark grey suit.

When he’d left the precinct, his mind a mess of whys and wherefores, he had determined to stand here all night in case the man returned. Then he would shoot him and that would be an end of it. He would lie and say the man drew on him, that he tried to make a run for it, that he had confessed and pulled a knife. Then Mrs Dybek and Robinson Taylor and whoever the man in the furnace had been could let their spirits wander through the ether and into the light, to their rest.

They were dead, but he could feel their hands on his shoulders, pressing him down.

He left at half past midnight. He was too tired to stand around, his mouth too full of the stale taste of tobacco, his body reeking of the day’s sweat.

Despite the whys and wherefores, those four men in that small, smoky room had all come to the same unspoken conclusion: if there was a connection between the bodies, however tenuous, they had a serial killer out there.

Wednesday

Chapter 6

The car, a shit brown Ford Pinto, lay on wasteland among the rampant weeds and dead-eyed foundations on the outskirts of Brooklyn. Tumbledown concrete hives gawped blankly across the lunar landscape and lent it an other-worldly character, as if the freeway wasn’t two minutes away, as if humanity had come and gone, unable any more to breathe the air or stand the place that had succumbed to the fallout, the detritus, of their lives. We had come and we had gone and we had left behind our very own version of hell.

A forensics team were busy at work when they arrived. They roamed the car like silent, ghostly bees, occasionally stopping to sup the nectar and then move on.

Frank and Steve, minus their jackets, even now it was hot, walked up to the burned out shell of the car, the paint blistered and peeled, the tyres flat, ruptured by the heat, the windows blackened and bubbled into thick foggy lenses, and peered in.

‘Help you?’

A uniformed officer stood behind them. He was big and Irish and frankly didn’t give a damn if he could help them or not.

Frank took out his badge. ‘Frank Matto. This is Steve Wayt. We took a call about this car.’

Frank held out his hand. The Irishman took it.

‘Excuse me, sir. John Buckley. Sorry. We get a lot of sightseers. Grisly bastards.’

‘I understand,’ said Frank. ‘Tell me about the car.’

Buckley took out his notebook. ‘Firefighters were called out last night at about one am. When they got here the car was burning fiercely.’ He recited from his notes. Frank stuck his hands in his pockets and waited. ‘It took them about half an hour to get it under control. The fire had been reported to them by an anonymous caller who said that they had seen some boys set it alight.’ He closed the notebook and folded it away.

‘No name?’

‘No name,’ said Buckley.

‘Male?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Do people in this neighbourhood usually report fires on wasteland?’

‘No, they don’t. We usually stumble across them when we’re out on patrol and phone them in ourselves, otherwise they just burn out on their own. The fire department have better things to do and this place is far enough away from the population not to warrant any concern among the residents. It’s like New Year’s all the time round here.’

Frank peered through the fractured rear window. ‘So I’m guessing the large bloodstain on the back seat is why we’re here.’

‘And the fact that we just happen to be on the lookout for a vehicle with lots of blood in it,’ chipped in Steve.

‘Do you believe in coincidences, Steve?’ asked Frank.

‘Of course, Frank. Along with the Tooth Fairy and Bigfoot.’

Frank walked around the car. It stank. The air was rank with burned rubber and plastic. It lay in the nostrils and on the tongue. He felt like he could smell the years; the sweat that got buried deep in the spongy seats, the skin that built up on the steering wheel and the indicator and turned to dripping fat as the fire licked away at it, the dropped gum and fallen hairs, the spit, the semen, the waste. It all hit him with a ferocity that left him nauseated and dizzy and with the urge to run away.

Occasionally, the sun would spy something in the car unscarred by the fire and throw itself back at the world and Frank would have to turn away, unable to tolerate the brightness.

‘Do we know who owns it?’ he threw out to no one in particular.

He could feel sweat roll down his back. A moment of panic shrouded him, stopped his heart, as he thought it might be an insect, something that fed upon disaster, which picked at the bones in the hope of finding the juicy marrow within. He felt it slide down his spine, down each vertebra, to his coccyx and into the cleft of his buttocks. He shuddered and it disappeared.

‘Not yet,’ said Buckley.

Frank stood at the front of the Pinto. He recalled how the Japanese believed that everything had a spirit. That was why they didn’t make cars with grilles that frowned. But somehow, through the all-knowing eye of whatever wooden god that deigned to observe, to participate, to lay their harsh benevolence upon the world, the dead Pinto passed its utter sadness on.

Once upon a time this car had rolled off the line and shone and been the pride of someone’s life. They had washed and polished it and cared for it like they had given birth to it. Now, it was dead. It was sad. It had no spirit and, if it could speak, it would have a sadder tale to tell, about how the person who owned that car, who travelled the miles and shared his innermost thoughts with it, was now most likely himself in spirit.

‘Anything in the trunk?’

‘Spare tyre and tools. Some boxes with pens and paper and stuff in. Mostly melted or burned. That’s it,’ said Buckley.

‘Chassis number?’

Buckley took his notebook out again and tore out a page.

‘Good man,’ said Frank taking the paper.

Frank tilted his hat back. A flick of black hair fell forward over his right eye. ‘Okay. I’ve seen enough. Steve?’

Steve nodded.

‘Thanks, John. Give me a call at the precinct if you hear anything, okay?’

‘Sure, Detective.’

‘Frank. Call me Frank.’

‘Sure, Frank.’

Frank and Steve made their way back to the Plymouth. The sun was already high. In the open space, it beat down relentlessly and sucked the air from their lungs and the strength from their legs. It sapped at their will. The ground was hard and uneven. They stepped over rubble, the bleached bones of what once was alive and full of promise and was now nothing but a broken word.

‘You think it was him that phoned in?’ asked Steve.

‘It would make sense.’ Frank lit a cigarette. ‘The arrogant bastard! If he’s not staring at us from a distance, he’s teasing us with anonymous phone calls.’

‘That aren’t anonymous at all.’

‘You think he wants to get caught?’

‘I think he wants to show us how clever he is.’

Frank opened the door. ‘Son of a bitch. Let’s go find out who that car belongs to.’

‘Mrs Curtis?’

Mrs Curtis, a woman in her late forties with a cheerful ruddy complexion and kind eyes, who had begun the inexorable slide south that came with middle-age and comfortable living, that added a roll to her hips as she walked, regarded Frank and Steve with a friendly anxiety.

‘Yes.’ She stepped back a foot into the house and wiped her hands upon a white apron. She looked like she had been baking. Her hands were white, her ribboned hair slightly astray and flecked white with the constant fight to push it aside. She had a frosting of snow on her flat, black shoes.

Frank took his hat off and made an attempt to straighten his tie. He felt shabby all of a sudden.

‘Mrs Curtis, my name is Frank Matto and this is Steve Wayt.’ He held up his ID. ‘We’re with the NYPD. May we come in?’

Mrs Curtis hesitated. There was something crow-like about these two men, something which told her that they only appeared once there was carrion to be found. They hid in the long grass and waited for the scream. They had brought fear with them. She stepped back and lowered her eyes in consent.

‘Sit down,’ said Mrs Curtis.

Frank and Steve sat on the edge of a dark orange sofa. Mrs Curtis sat opposite them in an armchair. She had on a bright yellow dress, almost too bright for Frank to take in. He felt himself squint as he looked at her. She sat perched on the edge of her chair, as they were, only her back was rod straight and her hands were folded into her lap. She turned her wedding ring around as she waited.

‘Mrs Curtis, is your husband George Curtis?’ She nodded slowly as if afraid her head would detach. ‘Does he own a brown Pinto?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know where he is?’

She laughed nervously. ‘Of course. He’s working. He’s a salesman. He sells stationery, pens, things like that. Why do you ask?’

‘Do you have a picture of your husband, Mrs Curtis? That we could see?’

Mrs Curtis stood up and went to a sideboard. She rooted through a drawer and came back a moment later.

‘That’s me and George at the Grand Canyon on our Vegas trip last summer.’

Frank took the photo. His heart fell. It showed two happy middle-aged people against a backdrop of blue sky and brown rock. George had smiling eyes and straight teeth. He was clean-shaven and had on his head a white hat against the hot Nevada sun. He looked like a salesman, but not the kind you’d shut the door on.

He showed it to Steve, who remained impassive. There was no doubt it was the same man that had been pulled flyblown and pulpy from the furnace in that deserted factory.

‘Mrs Curtis, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but yesterday we found your husband’s body.’

Mrs Curtis let out a noise that sounded like a hiccup. An uncertain smile quivered upon her face and Frank saw the colour drain from her. It was like a bottle of rosé wine emptying before his eyes. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘He’s out working. He left about a week and a half ago. He’s due back this weekend. I’m baking cookies.’

Frank lowered his head and stared hard at the beige carpet. He took a deep breath and smelled the sweet doughiness of the baking cookies, the residue of odours that leaked from the fibres on the floor, from the sofa. He smelled the essence of these good, ordinary people embedded over time in the fabric of the house.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Curtis,’ he said. He raised his head and looked her in the eyes as much as he dared. ‘George isn’t coming home.’

Mrs Curtis had identified her husband. She had insisted. How would she know, she asked, if she didn’t see him, that he was truly gone? There would forever be that cruel glimmer of hope in her heart that one day he may walk through the door and say, quite casually, that he’d been for bread or cigarettes or a bottle of wine for them to sip at while they sat in a comfortable silence and watched their favourite film together.

She had stood with trembling dignity, uttered the affirmative that she was required to give and then allowed herself to be escorted from the building and driven home, to a house that she no longer recognised, because a person that she had never met had broken in to her life and stolen from her the one thing she held most dear.

She sat alone with her thoughts in her living room, upon their fat, comfortable, old yellow sofa and held George’s warm, brown, old woollen jumper to her nose.

The rhombus of golden light from the window crept slowly across the room, across the plain green carpet, over the chairs and the magazines and the newspapers and the empty slippers, until it reached the skirting, folded in upon itself and disappeared. The sky faded to grey. The jagged horizon vanished as the dusk brought an equipoise to night and day. The sounds of the city, the driven, animalistic, merciless roar of the day, gradually diminished to become the random, light-hearted, spontaneous interjections of a balmy summer night - the laughs of freedom, the hiss of bus doors, the clatter of high heels, the distant horns of taxis driving headlong into another lysergic trip through the unfocused, bleeding lights of civilisation. She could smell, almost taste, the food of a hundred thousand takeaways as their pungent odours gathered in the ersatz heat of pipes and wires and scantily-clad bodies and crept like tarantulas, up, up to her window. She could imagine the myriad lives intertwined by love and friendship, the gut churning excitement of adoration born and the gut shot pain of dying love. She could see the heart-breaking twists of fate that lurked around every corner, to ambush each unsuspecting soul that walked and breathed in happy ignorance in that city of eternal hope.

She drank nothing. She ate nothing. The longer she sat, as the long night crawled spider-like into the room and she had become no more than shadow herself, the more the blessed numbness faded until she could bear the pain no more.

At nine-thirty she rose from the sofa, her face set, her eyes focused upon destiny, her mouth set in the resolution of final despair.

She ran herself a hot bath and, with infinite care, slit her wrists.