Blood Of Angels (14 page)

While Lee cleaned the car he found himself looking at his phone every few minutes. It had been three hours now and Hernandez still hadn't called.

I don't know how you'd describe it. It wasn't forest, it wasn't open land. It was at the north-west extremity of Raynor's Wood. It was basically nothing, acres and acres of it, spread thinly with trees and bushes and criss-crossed with watery channels like the lines on a very old face. Apparently there was a small town half a mile away, but you wouldn't know it. It wasn't an area that was of use to anyone except bugs and birds and the small, furry wildlife who fed on them. I'd seen something like it in New Jersey once and they called it the barrens. I don't know how local parlance had it, but that seemed as good a name as any, especially under a cold grey moon.

I had followed Monroe and Nina out into the parking lot and got in the back of their car. There was some heated discussion over this but Monroe wanted to get moving and evidently decided not to get into a fight over it. He drove through town and out the other side and for a further ten minutes until he saw a local police car by the side of the road with its flasher going. Monroe pulled in behind this and followed as he was led down a series of roads to nowhere and finally onto one that cruised in a long straight line. The leading car eventually pulled over onto gravel. There were two other vehicles parked a little way up the road, and what looked like a scene-of-crime truck.

Two cops got out of the car, one in uniform and one in a suit. The second looked like the guy I'd seen with Nina and Monroe at the hotel earlier.

'Who's he?' this one said, when we walked up to them.

'A colleague,' Nina said. 'Problem?'

'No, ma'am. Call your mom. Get her to bring us a picnic'

'Leave it, Reidel,' Monroe said. 'Just take us there.'

The guy called Reidel looked at me. I looked at him back. Then he turned and started walking off along a track by the side of the road. We followed.

A couple of hundred yards down it we began to see flashes and glints of torchlight in the distance. The ground was getting wetter. It was a sodden obstacle course of bracken and sudden ankle-deep squelches.

'So who found this one?' Nina asked. 'I don't believe anyone's desperate enough to come here to make out.'

'Local old guy out walking, collecting wood. He carves fallen branches into snakes, apparently, sells them at the craft fair. He actually found it early evening, but he's had some mental health issues and got freaked out and wasn't sure he'd actually seen what he thought he'd seen. Took him a few hours to build up to calling. He's kind of relieved right now.'

'Who would want a wooden snake?' I asked.

'You got me, sir.'

The line of incident tape was a little further on. On the other side was a shallow channel of water, maybe three feet wide, though rushes either side made the difference between water and boggy ground hard to call. The water stretched out left and right, curving around, creating an indistinct island about forty yards across. There was something on the far side of it, but the main focus of attention was nearer the front. A small knot of men stood around something on the ground. A heavy-duty lamp had been set up on a stand, throwing white light on their heads and shoulders.

Riedel went under the tape and led us towards a place where two wide boards had been laid across the water.

'One at a time,' he said.

We walked out across a makeshift bridge, which bent markedly in the middle and seemed unlikely to last the night. A couple of wet steps and then the ground was more solid.

The scene-of-crime people stood back as we approached. Already you could tell that something bad was in prospect. In the still air, the odour had a keening, unavoidable quality to it.

'Good timing,' one of the techs said. 'We're just about to move it. Him, I mean.' He stood by and shone a flashlight steadily on what we'd come to see, adding a second set of shadows.

Monroe caught sight of it first. 'Jesus,' he said, calmly.

On the ground was a man, lying on his right side with one arm trapped underneath. He looked like he'd been dropped from a height. He was wearing blue jeans and a dark green checked shirt, both extensively stained. His head was twisted around awkwardly, as if he'd been trying to glimpse the moon through the trees. His eyes were open and he was probably about thirty-five, though it's not always easy to tell with corpses. Sometimes death seems to smooth away a few years of care, along with a portion of character. Some small animal had also made it away with part of one of the man's cheeks.

The harshness of the lighting made the whole thing seem like a photograph, emotionally flat, until you remembered what your nose was trying to tell you and realized this thing was real, right there in front of you. Monroe's reaction was not to any of this, however, but to what the positioning of the left sleeve of the shirt revealed. It had been rolled up to just above the elbow, and it was clear that the arm was missing most of its flesh. Not through decomposition, though that had definitely played a part — the smell was really not good, at once both acrid and wet — but through someone removing large portions of it, taking much of the arm back to the bone. Once you'd seen this, you realized that the rest of the body under the clothes also looked reduced. The face was that of a man of medium build, maybe a little heavier. The way the clothes hung over the body, and the dark, dry stains, suggested that what you could see on the arm would be mirrored over the rest of the corpse. Could be the work of animals, but why burrow under the clothes and yet leave most of the face?

I turned away, and was glad to see I had not been the first. Nina was looking over at the far side of the island.

'What's that?'

'Come see.'

Riedel led us across the uneven surface. At first it was hard to make out what the object was, just that it seemed to be picked out by the moonlight. When you got closer it suddenly folded into comprehension.

What I'd noticed when we first got there turned out to be a white shirt. It was clean and not too large and it had been arranged over three thin upright branches of a bush, to look a little as if it was hanging on a line. The bush was close to one of the island's five trees.

Nina, Monroe and Riedel stood and looked at this for a few moments, and then grunted more or less in unison.

Perhaps even more than the body, it had that effect on you. I wondered whether the snake-carving guy had noticed this first, and if it was this which had actually freaked him out the most.

There was a muffled sound from over at the body, and one of the techs swore. He lifted his head and called over.

'Guys — you'll want to see this.'

We dutifully traipsed back over to the body, which had been carefully turned onto its back. This had revealed the right arm, which was in exactly the same condition as the left. Sleeve rolled up, flesh mainly removed. There was one notable difference, however.

The hand was missing.

'Okay,' Reidel said quietly, after a moment.
'Now
can we call this a serial killer investigation?'

===OO=OOO=OO===

'At least four, five days,' the coroner said, watching the body being loaded onto a stretcher. Some gunk he'd smeared under his nostrils to combat the smell made him look like he had the world's worst cold. 'Could be a week, though the removal of the flesh and organs makes it harder to tell. I'll be more precise when he's back at the lab, but I still won't be able to nail it to the clock. This is not a good environment to be dead in.'

He was right. Even with the midnight blue of the sky beginning to soften, this was no place you wanted to be. Four long hours had passed since we'd left the hotel, and I was wide-eyed and running out of cigarettes. I had kept quiet and out of the way in case one of the grown-ups remembered I was there and sent me up to bed.

I watched as the remains were carried precariously off across the narrow bridge. The island seemed different immediately, as if someone had turned off an inaudible soundtrack. There is a glamour about a dead body. It confers something extraordinary on a place, claims it for our kind. You can observe many aspects of reality — streams, animals, trees, the sun — but the thing that makes the biggest difference (that between a loved one and a dead body) is not tangible. A corpse must have been the first thing that made us realize how powerful and important things could exist which were yet not visible. This opens the way to an abstract universe: without corpses there would be no viruses, radio waves or quarks. It introduces powerlessness into the human world, too. Ritual and its condensates — gods — are merely a wrapper around this emptiness, this thing we cannot grasp. I wondered who the dead man was, and in whose life he was going to leave the biggest hole. I was glad it wasn't mine, and I felt for a moment abject and alone. However far I walked on this planet, I would never find my parents waiting. Bobby would never buy me another beer. A year after the fact, I didn't seem to have made much progress internalizing any of this. I forgot it all, for hours and sometimes days at a time: but when I remembered it didn't seem to have become any more explicable. I was never able to think 'Oh, right, they're
dead.
Of course. Okay. Got it.' Maybe I never would. Perhaps the death of the loved one simply cannot be apprehended. Maybe you just have to think about something else, forever.

I lit one of my remaining cigarettes and listened to other people saying things.

Monroe was still making notes. 'You're sure the de-fleshing didn't take place after the body was dumped here?'

'Yes. There's been a little, the face for example — definite teeth marks, rodent of some kind — but the majority was hacked off,' he said. 'A big knife, cleaver, something of that nature. There were cut marks across the humerus. And a scrape along the tibia. Probably see a lot more when the clothes come off. Heavy and sharp. The same instrument used to remove the hand, I'd guess.'

Nina nodded. 'I'm surprised there wasn't more animal damage after that long.'

'After how long?'

'Five to seven days. What you just said.'

'Ah,' he smiled, holding up a finger. 'Not what I said. He's been dead for that long. But not on this sorry piece of real estate. I'd say he's been out here twenty-four hours at most.'

Nina looked at him silently. I knew the look. It meant, 'Give me the information without making me ask for it, or you'll be sorry.'

The coroner was wearing a wedding band. He knew the look too. 'The flesh on his back is relatively intact,' he said. 'And there's evidence of pooling on the dorsal surfaces — blood settling to the lowest point of the body after death. It's consistent across the back and remains of the buttocks and calves, whereas the body…'

'Was found here lying on its side.'

'Exactly. So it was somewhere else for a period immediately post-mortem, laid out flat on its back.'

'The question is, where?' Reidel said. 'Guess you don't have any clues for us on that?'

The coroner shook his head. 'See what forensics scrape up. But I wouldn't hold your breath. The hope would be there'd be something distinctive about where he was lying, dust, debris, earth. But if he was naked there then much of any evidence would have been cut off or brushed away when the clothes were put back on.'

Monroe nodded. 'So the removal of the flesh could be an attempt to hide where the body was stored.'

'Could be.'

'Or not,' I said. I was looking out across the island again, struck by a sudden thought.

'What, Hopkins?'

'What do you think that shirt's about?'

'I have no idea at the present time. It may not be relevant.'

'Of course it is,' I said. 'Dead body and an article of clothing out here, with nothing else for miles around? I'd say there's a pretty clear line of relevance.'

'Perhaps whoever brought the body here just discarded it as they left,' Reidel said. 'Which could give us a direction of departure.'

'I don't buy that either,' I said. 'Discarded why? It's clean. No blood, nothing. Looks like it just came out of the packet.'

Nina was looking at me. 'So what do you think?'

'Come and look,' I said.

I started walking. After a beat, they followed.

When I got to the shirt a tech had just finished taking photographs of it and was about to remove it from the bush.

'Wait a second,' I said. I motioned for Nina to go stand behind the shirt. 'Notice anything?'

She looked down at the shirt, shook her head.

'Not the shirt itself. Stand with your shoulders parallel to it. Look straight ahead. Tell me what you see.'

She moved slightly. Looked ahead. 'The lamp.'

'Right. Where the body was, in other words. The shirt's been posed,' I said. 'It's standing in for someone. It's a witness.'

The three of them stood and looked back and forth for a few moments. 'Okay, maybe,' Nina said, nodding.

Monroe looked only semi-convinced. 'But how does that speak to whether the removal of the flesh was about removing evidence of where it had been stored?'

I shrugged. 'It may not,' I said. 'But if someone's gone to the trouble to put that shirt there, they're making a point. Creating a tableau, or a scene. Maybe even recreating one. You've got to have a reason for bringing the body all the way out here. They previously had it somewhere they could hack the flesh off without being discovered. Somewhere safe, in other words. But then they chose to bring it all the way out here, where someone's going to find it. So the positioning has to be important. Maybe the removal of the flesh was to make the body lighter.'

Three people were frowning at me. They looked like a row of question marks.

'You guys must be tired,' I said. 'The
lighter
the body is, the easier it will be to carry. Someone wanted to do this, and do it here specifically. But they knew they weren't strong enough to carry the whole thing. So they hacked off as much weight as they could without compromising the overall integrity of the body.'

'So it's someone who knew they wouldn't be able to carry it all this way, and took steps to make it feasible,' Reidel said. He paused. 'Like a woman, perhaps.'