Brides Of The Impaler (10 page)

Father Rollin chuckled. “If they can afford condos in
this
area, you’d think they could cough up the loot for some better security bars.”

The priest’s callow choice of words made Cristina smile. “How long have you been the pastor across the street?”

“Decades.” He glanced up the building’s entire rear wall as if unconsciously. “But I don’t have a congregation anymore.
They all went to Blessed Sacrament and Holy Trin ity now—for the air-conditioning.”

“Then why…”

“Why am I still the pastor?” Another chuckle. “It’s the diocese’s way of not quite retiring me. You don’t get pink slips in this business. We still use the church for ordinations, baptisms, and diocesan meetings. I guess they think I’m too old now to pound the pulpit, and maybe…too old-school.”

“I’m sure that’s an exaggeration,” Cristina offered.

“I hope so! But they keep me around to look after the place. It’s quite a historical building. The church needs money like anyone else, so they sell off old properties that can no longer be used for clerical purposes, like the annex house, for instance. I’m sure once I give up the goat, they’ll sell St. Amano’s, too. Someone’ll probably turn it into a Starbucks.”

Cristina couldn’t help but be amused by the priest’s flippancy.

“I’ll be on my way now, Cristina,” he said. “It’s been delightful making your acquaintance.”

“Nice meeting you as well, Father.”
Isn’t he at least going
to Holy Roll me a little?
she wondered. “Stop by any evening. I’d love for you to meet Paul.”

Father Rollin maintained the warm smile. “I will. Go with God,” he said, then turned and walked away.

Go with God
, she repeated.
I’ll try
…

By the row of dented garbage cans, she stopped, noticing the ragged hole in the brick wall she’d seen the other day. Several magic markers lay on the stained asphalt along with an empty anchovy can.
The closed Banana Republic
…Could someone actually be living in there? She recalled the homeless girl who’d asked her for money.

Cristina got down on one knee and looked into the one-foot-diameter hole and then felt assured that no squatters could be within. The hole was blocked off by chunks of broken cement.

On the street she tuned out the city’s noise and motion. Most of the drove of passersby looked stone-faced, preoccupied. People-watching could be fun but then there was always the chance of making accidental eye contact. As much as moving here made her feel less isolated, she still preferred to maintain a sense of tunnel vision while out in public.
I just want to have a leisurely walk
…She mailed the letters at the main post office off of Broadway, then headed down past Lincoln Square and Dante Park. The West End YMCA loomed, people of all classes coming and going. Several ragtag-looking women left excitedly, hyperactive as children. Their heads were wet, hair hanging in damp strings.
Poor people
, Cristina presumed.
They let them
take showers there
. One girl in grubby pink sweatpants and sopping wet black hair chased out after them.

That’s the girl I saw in the alley
, Cristina realized.

Her cohorts all looked similar as they hustled down the steps. Old, dirty clothes, dim eyes, malnourished.

All at once, it seemed, the gaggle of broken-down women stopped.

And looked directly at Cristina.

She froze in her tracks.
Are they really looking…at ME?
Now two were whispering, one with large glasses, to another one with jeans and no shoes. Were they giggling?

Cristina didn’t like the feeling she got.
Please tell me
I’m not being mocked by a bunch of homeless women
…She was insecure enough; the notion was the last thing she needed.
I’m just overreacting
. There was no reason for them to be laughing at her. She felt a little better when the girl in pink sweatpants waved to her. Then they all scampered away.

Strange
.

Cristina knew she was imagining it.
So what. I’m a little
paranoid
.
All artists are
. She tried to laugh it off.

She wandered around, considered maybe lying around Sheep Meadow or Strawberry Field to brainstorm, or maybe
throwing a coin for good luck into the Bethesda Fountain.
I need to think more on the next figures in the line
, she knew.
Details, to make them more unique and…creepier
…Central Park was a great place to summon her muse. She was about to head that way but ducked into a CVS first. She had some paper in her purse for notes and sketches but had forgotten a pen.

Drugstores here sure are different
. She was still getting used to that. Aisles stood higher and more narrow, and there never seemed to be enough employees working the register. She shouldered around till she found the school supplies. But at the end of the aisle…

Them again
.

The four homeless girls all congregated at the area where the pens hung. Cristina thought one of them said:

“It’s her again…”

Four sets of eyes widened on her, and four broken-toothed grins. Then one of them grabbed something off the hooks, and they all disappeared around the end. A wave of giggles followed in their wake, which sounded childlike even though some of them might have been middle-aged for all Cristina knew.

This is ridiculous
, she thought, her nerves fraying. Were they stalking her?
Of course not. Why would they do that?

She shook it off with a frown, grabbed a Scripto fine-point roller, and went to the register.

But before she got there—

“You girls! Hey! Stop!” a man shouted.

A younger man at a register said, “Those bum girls again. Want me to call the cops?”

Cristina only had time to see the four homeless girls bang the front door open and race out of the store. An obese manager ran after them.

A woman in line sputtered, “Someone should do something about all the bums in this town.”

“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with ’em,” a hard hat said. “They
just don’t wanna work. Would rather steal and beg and take drugs.”

Cristina’s eyes narrowed at the oddity. “What happened?” she asked no one in particular.

A young, lanky clerk said, “They ripped something off. Bums and rummies and crackheads. Stealing stuff. We get ’em all day long.”

“We ought to deport all these bums and criminals and welfare trash,” the hard hat not surprisingly suggested. “Just air-drop ’em all into the middle of friggin’ Africa. Let ’em eat snakes and tree bark. And they sure as hell won’t be shoplifting ’cos there ain’t no stores!”

God
, Cristina thought.

The manager came back in, huffing and red-faced. “The dirty buggers got away. Don’t bother with the cops. What’s the point?”

The clerk got back to ringing up customers. “Any idea what they pinched?”

“No. Didn’t see.”

Then a woman in line said, “It looked like one of them had several packs of magic markers in her hand…”

“Fleming, Virginia, K.,” Slouch read off the printout when he walked into the morgue in the basement of the Metropolitan Hospital Center. “No Jane Doe here. Thank God for DNA profiles.”

But would there be much difference?
Vernon had already detached from the morbid spectacle they’d discovered behind the brewery. It usually only took a second after the initial glance; this time it took all afternoon.
I’ve never
seen a 64 like this in my whole time as a cop
…His eyes scrutinized the thin, humanish form beneath the white sheet. “Fleming, Virginia, K.,” he repeated. “Where’d you get it?”

“Downtown at Evidence Section. When the D.C. heard it was an
impalement
, he put a rush on.”

“Good. What’s her story? She
must
have a rap sheet.”

“Longer than my ex-wife’s divorce demands,” Slouch said. He sat down and slouched, looking stark in his drab dark clothes against the room’s clean white tiles. “Thirty-six years old, no registered place of residence since 1995. Pasco County, Florida. Rap sheet goes back to joovie stuff in the mid-eighties. Shoplifting, possession, accessory GTA. Since ’98 she’s been collared on two counts of prostitution, couple possession busts for crack and heroin. All downhill from there. Just more homeless drug flotsam. Fell off the People Radar completely three years ago.”

Flotsam
. Vernon felt bad that they had to think in such
terms, but there was really no other way. “Her tox screen was positive for opiates but that was no stretch.”
Another
one bites the dust
, he thought. “The prelim’s already done. Her next stop is the autopsy suite.”

“What’s the cause of death?” Slouch asked with a short laugh. “I mean, besides ‘Death by big motherfuckin’ pole sharpened at one end and rammed from snatch to mouth?’”

Vernon huffed a sigh, then turned as the door swooshed open in dead silence. “Officers,” greeted a stunningly attractive blonde in the proverbial white lab coat. “I’m Dr. Anda Burg. I’m the deputy duty M.E.—I’ll be doing the post.”

Vernon frowned when he noticed Slouch’s eyes plastered to the medical examiner’s bosom.

“And to answer your question,” she continued without looking at either of them, “the official C.O.D as of now is multiple organ lacerations and dramatic perforations of viscera, trans-hemothoracic hemorrhage and pericarditis via acumenated wooden object, which entered the body at the vaginal egress and made its exit out the oral cavity. The victim weighed ninety-one pounds and was dehydrated; blood levels indicate low albumin, typical amongst the homeless. STD screen showed positive for HPV, HIV, chlamydia, and secondary syphilis. Radio-immune assay of hair root cells is consistent with that of a typified multiple drug user.”

“That’s what I call an answer,” Slouch chuckled. “A hype and crackwhore who was already at the bottom of the barrel.”

Dr. Burg rolled her eyes as she marked off boxes on a clipboard. “Any idea what this means, Doctor?” Vernon asked and pulled out a lab reading of his own. He paused a moment to wince, when he found himself, like Slouch, eyeing the attractive blonde doctor’s figure.
How can a
woman that good-
looking cut up corpses for a living?
He cleared his throat and went on. “We found a magic marker at the crime scene—”

Dr. Burg looked up. “That’s what the lab said had been used to make the lines up and down her body.”

“Right. And there were some prints on it but Latent Section said they were too smeared to run. Then the O.A. lab said there was evidence of”—Vernon donned his glasses to read the sheet—“‘undue accretion of sebaceous eccrine lipids via the dactyl dermal papillae.’ What’s that mean?”

“It means the perpetrator was dirty.”

Vernon stared. “Dirty as in unwashed? Like, say, a street person?”

“Precisely. Dirty hands, in other words. That lab summation means that the print smeared due to an excess of body oils and amino residuum that passed through the fingerprint ridges with sebaceous perspiration. Had the hands been washed more recently, the print probably wouldn’t have smeared.”

“Crime doesn’t pay,” Slouch said, “unless you don’t wash.”

“That seems to be a common denominator lately,” Vernon said. “Street people. Homeless addicts.”

“What’s that, Inspector?” Dr. Burg questioned.

Vernon shrugged but said nothing. Slouch gave him the eye.

Next, Dr. Burg uncovered the corpus like someone yanking a sheet off a piece of furniture.

“Yeah,” Slouch said. “That’s the bottom of the barrel. No wonder her solicitation busts stopped several years ago.”

Vernon grit his teeth when he saw that one of the woman’s ears was gone. “I didn’t notice the missing ear earlier.”

“Missing auricula, with keloid formation. It’s several years old,” Burg noted.

The thin corpse shined pallidly beneath the harsh overhead fluorescents. Webworks of blue veins could be seen beneath parchmentlike skin but over that remained the ghosts of the weavy lines of black, green, and red magic marker.

Burg studied the image. “My techs put her in the Kwell station for cleaning and delousing—she had a lot of lice—but the magic marker didn’t come off all the way.”

“When they say
permanent
marker, they mean business,” Slouch remarked.

“Some kind of drug-turf thing?” Burg asked Vernon.

“I guess,” he said. “We’re not sure.”

“Never seen anything like it before,” Slouch added. “But then…we’ve never seen an
impaled
homicide victim before, either.”

Pelvic bones jutted, the belly stretched tight. Vernon detected a rash of small scabs in various areas, common among long-time addicts, not to mention needle marks at the elbows and insides of the thighs. The marks looked like lines of fresh-cracked pepper. Several more track marks traced along the veins around the nipples. Vernon entertained the morbid query:
I wonder what they…did
with the…pole
…

“This one’s off to autopsy now, gentlemen,” the attractive pathologist announced. “You’re more than welcome to attend.”

Slouch laughed. “Thanks for the invite, Doc, but we’ll have to take a rain check. I was planning on a corn dog for lunch. You know, with that stick going down the middle?”

“Shut up, Slouch,” Vernon griped. “Thanks for your time, Doctor.”

Burg began to push the gurney away. “I’ll let you know if I find anything more.”

Slouch couldn’t keep quiet. “You mean anything more than ‘Death by big motherfuckin’ pole sharpened at one end and rammed from snatch to mouth?’”

Dr. Burg made a tolerant smile. “Yes. Have a nice day, gentlemen.” And then she and her dead charge disappeared through two swinging doors.

Vernon and Slouch traded cryptic glances.

“All right, How,” Slouch began. “You and me? We’ve been giving each other that funky-look thing since five this morning, haven’t we?”

Vernon nodded.

“But so far neither of us has said what’s on our mind.”

“No, we haven’t.” Vernon anxiously fingered an unlit cigarette. “So let ’er rip.”

“We’re both thinking the same thing, aren’t we? Last winter a bunch of whacked-out homeless chicks rip off
Christmas tree stands
from a fuckin’ hardware store and today we find a whacked-out homeless chick impaled on a pole mounted in a fuckin’
Christmas tree stand
—”

“Less than twenty-four hours after a bunch of whacked-out homeless chicks rip off
whittling knives
from the same hardware store,” Vernon tacked on.

Slouch finished, “And the end of the pole looked
whittled
to a point. Recently. We on the same page?”

“Yeah, but I’m glad you said it first so
I
don’t feel like the idiot.”

Slouch laughed. “Thanks, boss!”

“It’s got to all be connected, no matter how far-fetched it sounds.”

“Um-hmm. No other angles to go on, so we might as well go on that one.”

Vernon nodded. He rubbed his face, suddenly uneasy beneath the chilly morgue lights. “Let’s get out of here. This place gives me the willies. It reminds me that one day
I
might be the one on the gurney going through those doors.”

Slouch straggled up, jesting. “And can you believe that brick shit-house M.E.? I could look at her legs all day but…can you imagine being married to her?”

“I’m not following you, Slouch, but that’s pretty much par for the course.”

“No, serious, man. Just try to imagine being the guy who’s getting it on with her and you
know
that those same hands were pulling livers out of corpses all day long.”

Vernon stared. “Shut up, Slouch.”

“Sure thing.”

They waited for the elevator at the end of the restricted hall, but when it opened a uniformed cop walked out. “You the guys with the impalement 64?”

Vernon showed his badge and ID. “Yeah. Vernon. Twentieth Precinct.”

The cop gave Vernon a manila envelope marked EVIDENCE - CLEARED BY TSD. “The lab wanted me to give this to you.”

“What is it?”

“Don’t know, sir. Something from the crime scene, said they found it inside the victim’s clothes.”

Vernon’s eyes widened. “Were there any—”

“No usable latents. Sorry.”

“Thanks.” Vernon opened the envelope as the cop walked away.

Slouch hovered. “The mystery continues?”

From the envelope Vernon withdrew a plastic bag. Inside the bag was—

Slouch squinted. “The hell’s that? A doll?”

Vernon squinted as well. It was a bizarre figurine of some kind, painted to great detail. About four inches high, plastic: a grinning cherubic little man, naked with blue-white skin and a belly that looked exploded. “Yeah, some kind of novelty doll.”

“Looks pretty oddball to me,” Slouch offered. “Sort of like one of those old Kewpie dolls when we were kids but with…”

“A shotgunned belly, I guess…” Vernon turned the figure
over, read the tiny lettering beneath the base. CADAVERETTES #7 - GUTSHOT GLEN.

“Yes, it was right after Britt left,” Cristina was saying as they sat down at a plush corner booth of Café D’Amato. A card on the table read RESERVED. Paul seated himself after Cristina did. “I was going to mail those letters.”

“The damn AmEx bill. Can’t believe I forgot about it. Lately I’m so busy at the office with Jess, I forget the simple stuff. So, anyway, this priest was doing
what?
”

“His name’s Father Rollin, and he was looking at those security bars over the basement windows behind the house, in the alley. Said it slipped his mind, since he did it every day when he was the custodian. He’s kind of old.”

“Those window treatments are brand-new and cost a fortune,” Paul pointed out. “There wasn’t anything wrong with them, was there?”

“No, no, but that’s just how I met him. It was kind of strange. He said that when he used to look after the place, sometimes squatters would break in through those windows, and come to think of it, lately I’ve been seeing this group of homeless girls in the area.”

“Welcome to New York,” Paul said. “No way around that. Just be careful walking around. Even in broad daylight. I don’t care if this
is
the Upper West Side. There’s screwed-up people everywhere.”

A sad refrain but Cristina knew it was true. “Anyway, Father Rollin said he’d come by for coffee sometime. He’d like to meet you. He even knew your name.”

Paul scanned the upscale dining room, nodding to a few people he knew. “I’ll bet he does. Probably shit a brick when they told him I’m the guy who bought the house for
a million bucks.” Something about the topic seemed to bother him. He looked at his watch, distracted. “So where is this Bruno fellow?”

“Oh, he’ll be here,” Cristina assured. “He’s a little off-the-wall but you’ll like him. Oh, and thanks for getting the reservation.”

“It pays to know big wheels.” Paul smiled. “You look great, by the way.”

Cristina almost blushed. She’d vowed to take Britt’s advice and start dressing like New York but if anything she felt awkward in the veily black wrap dress and Pierre Hardy sandals. She asked for a soda water when the waitress skimmed by for their drink order.

“And you, sir?”

Paul hesitated. “Uh, just a Sprite.”

He’s trying
, Cristina thought. He wasn’t an alcoholic but sometimes he did overimbibe, which often jaded his demeanor. Cristina rarely said anything but she could tell that he knew. She appreciated his effort to cut down.

“Ah, there she is,” a loudish voice boomed as a wide shadow crossed the table. Cristina rose to greet Bruno von Blanc, her toy contractor. He stood large, round, and gregarious, and had a large Burl Ives face. The deep-rust, shawl-collared jacket and yellow Ralph Lauren dress shirt was louder than his voice. “The market’s top secret weapon.”

“Hi, Bruno,” she said after a gushing kiss on the cheek. “This is my fiancé, Paul Nasher.”

The ebullient face turned as the man pumped Paul’s hand. “Great to finally meet you, Paul. I hope you realize that your wife-to-be is a macabre genius.”

“Oh, yeah,” Paul said, trying not to raise a brow at Bruno’s bad hair dye, which did nothing to disguise the fact that he was pushing sixty. The handlebar mustache and Vandyke didn’t help. “I don’t really know much about this novelty figurine business but after seeing Cristina’s
royalty statement last quarter I’d say that you guys have really got it going on.”

“It’s all her, Paul, all her.” Bruno slid cumbersomely in next to Cristina. “Miss?” He flagged the waitress. “Grey Goose martini, please.” Then he turned back to Paul. “Honestly, the diversity of Cristina’s Cadaverette line turned the entire market on its ear.”

“He always exaggerates,” Cristina said, antsy by the compliments.
But I wonder if that’s really true
…

“Nonsense—” Bruno paused, looking around the crowded restaurant in awe. “And how did you
ever
get a reservation on such short notice?”

“Paul has some influence here,” Cristina giggled.

Paul shrugged. “My firm bailed the restaurant out of a huge sexual harassment claim. Bunch of waitresses made up a pile of BS. You’ve heard the story.”