They Never Die Quietly (2010) (8 page)

"You'll never change, will you, Al?"

"I certainly hope not."

A peculiar hypocrisy existed in their relationship. Al's primary objective was to exploit the delicate feelings of vulnerable women who took one look at him and instantly fell in love. A rogue of sorts, a heartless manipulator, he would say and do anything to seduce a woman. Sami usually despised men like Al, yet he was her most intimate friend. Of course, much of what she knew about Al's sexual escapades was hearsay. In fact, of all the women Al supposedly dated, Sami had never met one. In spite of this, she believed that the sordid stories were mostly true.

Al, when he wasn't overtly conscious of his machismo, often conducted himself like a true gentleman. He opened the steel door and held it, allowing Sami to enter the facility first. They walked down a long corridor to the back of the building and entered the medical examiner's office. Immediately, Sami could smell that vile antiseptic odor. The air smelled clean yet as offensive as concentrated chlorine bleach. Her stomach, having been filled only with black coffee, protested vehemently.

There were four postmortem examination rooms, brightly lit sterile environments where cadavers, bloodless ash-colored figures, once vital human beings--mothers, wives, brothers, friends--were systematically dismantled with stainless steel instruments and a matter-of-fact attitude that might lead an onlooker to conclude that medical examiners had Freon coursing through their veins.

To Sami, the whole business of postmortem examinations, a necessary evil in the art of homicide investigation, was an act of unthinkable disrespect. The environment in the confines of the autopsy rooms was neither solemn nor mournful. It was almost like some bizarre recreation room where failed doctors got to work on patients they could no longer harm. Medical examiners approached autopsies with the casual indifference one might exhibit while carving a Thanksgiving turkey.

Al tapped Sami's shoulder. "Should have asked you earlier in the week, but if you're free tomorrow evening, my neighbor Rose is having her annual before-Christmas bash. Interested in joining me?"

"You mean Casanova himself doesn't have a date?"

"I don't date, Sami, I fornicate."

"Thank you for clarifying that." She hadn't planned to share this with Al. He often acted like an overprotective father. "Actually, I have to pass. Unlike you, my dear friend, I
do
have a date."

He looked at her with surprised eyes. "Anyone I know?"

"I doubt it. He's a gentleman."

"Aren't we the witty one." Al loosened his tie and unfastened his top button. "With all due respect to you and your heritage, please tell me he's not a greaseball."

"No, Al, he's not Mexican."

"Very funny. Is he the same breed as DiSalvo?

"He's Polish."

Al shook his head, giggling uncontrollably. "So when he takes it in the ass he thinks he's getting a prostate exam?"

"Did your mother wash out your mouth with soap when you were a kid?"

"When I was a kid we didn't have any soap."

David Sherwood, sixty-two-year-old medical examiner, retired from the Navy, stepped out of his office and approached the detectives. The slight man--merely five-foot-five--had a severely receded hairline. What hair remained was unruly and pure silver. He wore reading glasses low on his nose and looked over them when he spoke. He could easily pass for a mad professor.

"We have to stop meeting like this," Sherwood said. He smirked, obviously amused with his attempt at humor.

Sami had heard this canned line before. "Believe me, doctor, we'd rather be meeting you socially."

Without ceremony Sherwood turned his back on the detectives and led them to autopsy room three.

Al elbowed Sami in the side. "Socially?"

The first thing Sami noticed as she trailed behind Al and followed him into the room was the cold air, almost frigid enough for her to see her breath. Her eyes surveyed the twenty-by-twenty-foot room, which was brightly illuminated by rows of fluorescent fixtures. Gray ceramic tiles covered the floors and the walls up to the ceiling. In the center of the room sat a rectangular stainless steel table. A white sheet covered a human-shaped figure on the table. Bluish feet with painted toenails stuck out from under the sheet. Attached to the cadaver's big toe was a pale yellow tag. Adjacent to the autopsy table was another smaller table filled with instruments of the trade: scalpels, saws of various lengths and shapes, strange-looking hammers, multipurpose tweezers, an electric rotary saw, and other incidentals.

Sami gawked at what she knew was the lifeless body of Peggy McDonald and felt her knees buckle. She wasn't going to make it. She now knew that the moment Doctor Sherwood unveiled the woman's mutilated body, she would most certainly vomit. Regretting that she had not accepted Al's invitation to wait in the car, she grabbed his arm to help steady her unstable legs.

"You okay?" Al asked.

"Never been better."

The room was like an echo chamber. Every sound--footsteps, spoken words, any noise whatsoever--bounced around and contributed to the already-spooky setting. Sherwood slipped on rubber gloves and stood beside the autopsy table. His arms were poised in a position ready to expose the body, to begin cutting, slicing, and sawing. Al walked around to the other side of the table, facing Sherwood, and Sami stood in her partner's shadow, positioning her body behind him with her head peeking around his shoulder.

The medical examiner grasped the sheet covering her body. "Are we ready to begin?"

Such a melodramatic performance, Sami thought.

"Let's do it," Al said.

David Sherwood removed the sheet with the fluidity of a matador.

Sami stood stone still, hypnotized by a sickening image that defined a world in which the levels of human madness were infinite. Peggy's body was ash-colored with blotches of blue under her left eye, on both shoulders, under her left breast, and on the front of her right thigh. Sami's misty eyes quickly scanned the victim's body, then focused on her face.

"We will begin with a superficial examination," Sherwood said.

Sami took a deep breath, knowing that Sherwood wouldn't be using any of his shiny instruments. At least not for the moment.

"As you can see," Sherwood began, "unlike the other three victims, this woman's heart has not been excised."

So preoccupied with the grisly remains of a crucified body, Sami hadn't even noticed. She whispered in Al's ear, "His methods have changed."

Al pointed to the wrist and foot wounds. "Not all of them."

Sherwood examined her face. "There is a plum-size contusion under the victim's left eye, right at the temporal process, suggesting that her assailant struck her with his fist or maybe a blunt object."

Sami said, "None of the other victim's had injuries to their faces."

"Maybe she really pissed him off," Al said.

Sherwood lifted the woman's limp left arm and tilted his head back so he could view the bloodstained wrist with the benefit of his glasses. "The left wrist has been punctured with a sharp object between the ulna and radius bones of the forearm, just above the lunate bone in the proximal region. The wound is approximately one-and-one-half millimeters in diameter." He lifted her right arm. "This wound is almost identical in diameter and location."

Sherwood slipped his hand under the victim's right knee and slightly lifted the leg, so he could examine her foot. "The right foot has a wound approximately the same diameter as the wrist wounds. It is located at the transverse tarsal joint."

David Sherwood went through a series of observations, none of which resulted in findings dramatically different from those discovered during examination of the prior victims. Then the medical examiner began a thorough examination of Peggy's genitalia. The total lack of compassion exhibited by Sherwood as he manipulated Peggy's body in a position compatible with his visual objectives seemed almost obscene to Sami. The woman lay dead. But did this give Sherwood or anyone else the right to violate her in such a disrespectful manner? Surely, Sami thought, there must be a more dignified way to examine her.

As Sherwood poked and prodded, he kept mumbling expletives under his breath that could not be interpreted. The usually emotionless medical examiner seemed agitated.

"The assailant wasn't gentle with this one," Sherwood said. He swiped his arm across his sweaty forehead. "This woman has been savagely assaulted." He glanced at Sami. "And it appears that he raped her postmortem."

Sami squeezed Al's arm. "I'll be waiting in the car."

With his elbows planted on the kitchen table, Simon sat quietly with his chin perched on folded hands. His body shivered, dripping cold sweat. His mouth felt dry and tasted bitter. He wasn't sure how he had managed such a lighthearted conversation with Detective Rizzo. He sat staring at the faded black-and-white picture of his mother. The years had colored the photograph with a magenta hue. In the background Christian music softly played on the radio. Simon's mind was submerged in a whirlpool of drowning thoughts. Unlike in the past, when all his actions were calculated and strategic, every move well planned and tactical, Simon had lost his sense of self-preservation and been careless. He had delivered April to Peterson's Department Store at midday, amid a flurry of holiday shoppers. What had he been thinking? His ability to make prudent decisions had been dangerously impaired.

The heavy fog had finally lifted.

All the explicit details once securely hidden in Simon's subconscious, memories protecting a powerful need in him to preserve an angelic image of his mother, had been jarred loose by Peggy McDonald. Everything, all the sordid episodes sequestered in his mind since childhood, had suddenly assaulted his conscious thoughts like a hungry beast awakening from a long hibernation.

He lifted his mother's photograph. "Why, Mother, why?"

He never knew his father. One day, before Simon was born, only weeks after his conception, Mikolai Kwosokowski--black lunch pail tucked under his arm and a sweat-stained baseball cap covering his curly brown hair--left for his job at the foundry and never returned. What little Simon had learned about his father had come from his Aunt Ana. His mother never spoke of Mikolai, and the one time Simon had been foolish enough to ask about his father, Ida Kwosokowski burned his tongue with a hot butter knife she'd heated over the gas flame of the kitchen stove.

Until last night, when Peggy McDonald unwittingly triggered a switch in Simon's mind, illuminating dark caverns filled with ugly secrets from his childhood, he had always reveled in the false memory that his mother's actions epitomized her profound love for him. Wasn't it natural for a mother and son to touch each other? Didn't disobedient children, sinners who broke God's commandments, deserve to be harshly punished? All of his perceptions suddenly seemed invalid.

Recalling how many times he had been summoned to her bedroom, he fixed his stare on his mother's seductive smile. He could still see her dimly lit bedroom, the white canopy bed, the blond wood colored dresser, walls painted soft yellow, cold hardwood floors beneath his feet. How innocent he had been as a child. How totally naive as a young adult. Oh, how warm her body had been, pressed against his. The comfort. The security. Her skin so soft, like the satin fringe on an infant's blanket. The contours of her shapely body, her cream-colored skin, breasts so round and firm...His life was a lie.

He tried to suppress the memory, but the slow-motion video was already playing.

On the threshold of puberty, Simon had just celebrated his twelfth birthday. Still awake, lying in his bed, unable to fall asleep, his mother, wearing her powder-blue bathrobe, walked in the bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed.

"Give your mother a hug, sweet boy."

Simon sat up and she pulled him to her, squeezing him tightly, his face buried in her dirty-blonde hair. Her perfume smelled sweet. She loosened her grip and placed her hands on his shoulders.

"You are a young man now, Simon. A beautiful young man."

She unfastened the top button of his pajama tops.

His mouth hung open, but he couldn't speak.

She unfastened the second, then the third. She gently stroked the smooth skin on his hairless chest.

"Mother. Please."

"Be silent, my son." She forced him to lie on the pillow and pulled the comforter down. "Do you trust me, Simon?"

"Yes, Mother."

"Then close your eyes, my beautiful young man."

He had always feared his mother, but never quite like this. His body trembled and his mouth hung open in stunned surprise. When he felt her soft hand slip inside his pajama bottoms, he jumped. Then, as if under a spell, he lay motionless. His mind raced with furious thoughts. At first he felt certain this was only a dream, that he'd awaken and it would be over. But as he felt himself getting more excited than he'd ever been before, he knew for certain this was real. That he could enjoy such an incestuous event sickened him to the point of nausea. But in spite of his disgust, he lay there. Frozen.

She grasped his pajama bottoms by the elastic waistband and slid them to his ankles. Then she stood, loosened the cloth belt holding the robe closed, slipped the robe off her shoulders, and let it fall to the floor. He wanted so badly to hop off the bed and charge out of the room, but he felt hypnotized by her perfect body and lovely face.

Before he could even think about what she'd do next, she knelt on the bed and straddled his body. "Do you love me, Simon?"

He couldn't speak.

"Women are evil, my sweet boy. They will hurt you and deceive you. They will take your money and steal your love, and then they will leave you alone and miserable. One day soon, God will call upon you to be his special ambassador. You will have the honor of cleansing the doomed souls and impure hearts of unholy women. I will always be there for you, my wonderful son. My blood runs through your veins. Mother will guide you and nurture you and help you do God's work. I am the only woman in God's world who truly cares about you. Never forget that."