Gray Matter (5 page)

The blue-gray carpet was plush and very responsive underfoot, like walking in thick, healthy grass. For a moment Schultz shut down his external senses and imagined wiggling his bare toes in it, and it would be cool and damp, with the scent of fresh clippings and the sun flashing on the creek behind the house and birdsong rippling, landing lightly on his ears…

Schultz grew up on a small family farm in rural Missouri. His boyhood was practically the stuff of dreams, free, linked only to nature and the rhythms of the seasons. Two sisters and his parents had died in the fire that destroyed their home, started when lightning struck the old oak in the front, the one that was hollowed out with a beehive in it. A burning branch had landed on the roof of the house, and the turn-of-the-century frame building had gone up in flames like the huge bonfire that Old Man Keeney started every Halloween. Leo and his brother George, ages nine and six and the time, went to live with their Aunt Lydia in St. Louis. She was a city woman through and through, the kind who would get upset if the boys brought in a jar of fireflies or a pocketful of frogs. The joys of his early life in the country gradually slipped away from Leo, but someplace inside that little boy still ran barefoot.

By the time Schultz refocused on the surroundings, he had gotten past the smell. It was something he knew from experience, that after three or four minutes of exposure, the effect diminished. His olfactory sense would be overloaded and would screen out the odor. If you kept going in and out to get fresh air, then your nose would suffer anew each time. It was the same principle as going into a house with pets. The dog or litter box odor might be obvious to the newcomer, but the residents simply—and truthfully—couldn’t smell it.

It was a trick of the trade he wasn’t ready to share with PJ. She hadn’t earned it yet.

Schultz also kept a change of clothing back at HQ, and he usually washed his hair after a scene visit by lathering his head with the watery pink stuff that passed for soap in the men’s room, rinsing with cold water, and drying with paper towels. Newcomers didn’t realize that they brought the smells with them, on their hair and clothing.

To the right of the door was a sofa and a couple of chairs, what interior design magazines would call a “conversational grouping,” and it contained the only sign of struggle: an overturned end table. Blood stained the carpet a few feet from the sofa, and among the stains was a kitchen chair. Small circles of the stained carpet had been excised by technicians. Schultz knew from the photographs that the victim’s headless body had been found tied to that chair. George Burton had spent his last moments alive sitting backward in a chair, his legs spread wide to straddle the chair back, his arms tied at the wrists and secured tightly to the ladder back wooden chair. His ankles were also tied, apparently to provide a steadier work surface. The work surface was the skin of the victim’s back. Schultz remembered the close-ups of the murderer’s knife work. Segments of skin had been stripped away on the victim’s left shoulder in a patch about eight inches square. Within the square, some segments were left intact, forming a pattern best seen from about four feet away. The pattern was the head of a dog, done in bas-relief so skillfully detailed that it was unmistakably a mutt.

Schultz stood for a moment, trying to imagine what it would feel like to be tied in a chair with your skin flayed open, inhaling the prospect of death along with the smell of your own blood with each painful breath. He imagined that Burton wondered what form death would take, and he hoped that the man never saw the stroke coming: his head was lopped off.

Just then PJ stepped in, her professional demeanor back in place like a mask. He had been perversely pleased by her reaction to the smell. It seemed to him a justification that civilian employees of the Department had no place homing in on his investigative work. He conveniently forgot that there had been a time more than a quarter of a century ago when he reacted in an even worse way, when Schultz the rookie cop had clamped his lips together long enough to get out of that alley, and then thrown up on the front seat of his squad car and Detective Ralph Owens. Owens rolled his eyes skyward and enriched Schultz’s already formidable vocabulary, but took it well, considering.

PJ paced around the living room for a few moments, then her eyes riveted on the stains and the chair. Schultz wondered if she would succumb to the urge to get some fresh air, but she stuck it out. He also wondered what would happen the first time she got to the scene before the body was removed. She said that she had seen the results of suicide, but suicide was merely a tragedy. Murder left behind a residue of hate or madness or both.

“Where are those copies of the detailed sketch?” she asked. Her voice was surprisingly under control.

“Right here in the folder. Are we going to use them as a basis for what you need?”

“Yes. We can mark right on them the type of data I want to collect.”

She began to circle the room, making comments which he jotted on the sketch. She also used a tape recorder. Occasionally, she asked him to measure a distance which was not already marked on the diagram. When they reached the area of the sofa, he cautioned her to avoid the indentations in the carpet. He didn’t want them scuffed up and lost.

“Is there a piece of furniture missing? Did the techs take something?” she asked.

“Now, that’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Something heavy made those dents,” Schultz said, bending over to peer at them, “and the pattern doesn’t match anything here.”

“So the killer brought a folding lawn chair? And maybe a picnic lunch?”

Schultz glared at her.

“That was a joke, Detective,” she said sarcastically.

“Actually, you could be right, for all I know. We don’t know what a wacko who carves up living skin like that considers important.”

At the mention of the mutilation, she turned quickly away. It seemed that her composure had a time limit; the longer she had to maintain it, the more slippery it got.

“I think I can finish up in here. I’ve got a good idea what you’re looking for now. Why don’t you start on the kitchen?” Schultz surprised himself. If he didn’t know better, he might think he was getting considerate.

PJ went into the kitchen gratefully. She was trying hard to be professional about the whole thing, but the plain truth was that she was upset. When she set foot in that living room, her objectivity went on vacation.

Being in the kitchen was much better. There was a door between it and the living room, and she swung it shut, then wondered if she was supposed to have touched the door, even with her gloved finger. She figured that Leo would give her hell for it regardless.

One of the first things PJ noticed about the kitchen was that it was not as orderly as the living room. It looked as though the room was off limits to the cleaning woman. There were familiar smells in the room, although it took her a few minutes to realize it as her nose flushed out one set of smells and registered another: kitty litter and canned cat food. Dishes with something dried on them, egg, she thought, were stacked in the sink. The countertop was cluttered with objects such as notes, coins, a wallet, and a watch, as though the owner emptied his pockets and dumped the contents on the nearest flat surface. Twist ties, plastic bags, a bunch of bananas in a cheap basket, already spotted and well on their way to becoming compost, and the requisite food processor rounded out the picture. A plain wooden table was shoved up against one wall, with ladder back chairs crowded around the three open sides. She knew where the fourth chair was, and that refreshed her memory of the scene in the living room.

Underneath the table was a jumble of boxes which took up the whole space. It would be impossible to pull up a chair and get your knees under the table. Not that you would want to, because the top of the table was piled high with boxes too. Apparently Burton ate out a lot or ate standing up. The kitchen was not large, and the appliances were old workhorses, avocado-colored and plainly showing their years of use. PJ realized that Burton undoubtedly kept the door closed when—or if—he ever had company. He would entertain guests out in the airy living room and hope that no one would offer to help in the kitchen.

Only a rough sketch had been made of the kitchen, so PJ set to work making notes and dictating her impressions. She had already formed an idea that the murderer might have obtained whatever it was he used to cut off the victim’s head right here in the kitchen. Since no fingerprints other than Burton’s and the cleaning woman’s had been found in the apartment, there was no way to tell which rooms the killer had entered. Leo had interviewed the cleaning woman last night, Thursday night, while PJ was driving to St. Louis. The cleaning woman had an evening job as a server with a catering company. She had been working at a party Wednesday night between seven pm and midnight. The murder occurred around nine pm.

He could have stood right here,
she thought.
The killer could have noticed that there was no knife block on the countertop
a
nd wondered which drawer they were in. Why did I automatically assume it was a he?

She eased some of the drawers open. The drawer next to the sink stuck a little, and she tugged harder. When it finally slipped open, she gasped. Inside she saw an assortment of butcher knives, paring knives, and an ominous looking old-fashioned meat cleaver. Looking closely, she noticed a dark smear on the edge of the cleaver. She made a note to ask Leo if the kitchen implements had already been considered when looking for the murder weapon. Then she thought that might be too obvious and that she would just further entrench Leo’s opinion of her as an incompetent teammate, and even worse, an incompetent boss, if she mentioned it. She knew she had a lot to prove to him, and wondered why it should matter so much to her.

She went over to the table and turned one of the chairs around. She intended to sit down—
what the hell. Leo’s already got me for touching the door—
and use her lap to hold the sketch. The chair leg brushed against one of the boxes under the table, knocking it over. She had assumed the boxes were full of something, but apparently they were empty and precariously balanced. Something gray and furry zipped from the overturned box into another one.

PJ did what most people would do. She yelped.

A moment later the door swung open hard enough to bang the doorknob into the wall. Leo rushed in and came up to her, his belly swaying a second after the rest of him stopped.

“What?” he said, his voice a bit too loud for the confined area.

“It’s nothing,” PJ said. The tips of her ears were hot, and she was glad that her hair covered them. “I knocked over a box and something ran out, a rat maybe. I just got spooked.”

“Oh, yeah, it was probably the cat. Burton had a cat, and I suppose it’s still in the apartment. Animal Control should have been here by now. They’ll probably come by this afternoon.”

PJ digested this, her ears returning to normal. “What will happen to it?”

“How the hell should I know? Whatever it is they do to strays, I guess. Burton’s got a sister, but she’s allergic. Can’t get within thirty feet of a cat, she says. Anyway, he wasn’t supposed to have a cat here. Landlord doesn’t like pets, tries to keep them out.”

PJ decided this was as good a time as any to ask about the kitchen knives. Leo couldn’t possibly think any worse of her than after she yelped like that at an ordinary cat.

“Detective, I noticed a whole drawer full of cutlery in the kitchen, serious looking stuff like butcher knives and a meat cleaver. Have you considered those?”

“As what?”

She thought he was deliberately provoking her. “One of them could be the murder weapon, of course,” she answered testily. “Let me show you the cleaver.”

“Let’s take a look. But I should tell you that in most cases of premeditated murder, the creep brings the murder weapon in with him and takes it out with him. Crimes of passion, impulse killings, that’s where the kitchen knife or gun from the bedroom comes in,” Schultz said. “It seems to me we’re talking premeditated here. With an impulse killing, if there’s mutilation, it’s fast and furious. Whatever you might think of this guy’s artistic ability, there’s no question that the skin carving took some time to do. Also, there’s nothing to indicate that the killer went into the kitchen.”

“What about the chair where the victim was seated? It matches these chairs at the kitchen table, and there are only three of them left in here. Usually there would be a set of four. That seems pretty conclusive to me. The killer came in here to get a chair and while he was here, he saw the drawer full of knives.” She noticed that Schultz automatically assumed a male killer, too.

“No go, Doc. The chair is close but it’s not a match. The scrollwork on the ladder back is different. It looks like Burton may have replaced a chair that broke with a similar one. Don’t blame you for missing that little detail, though—that blood in there is mighty distracting, it being the first time for you. The chair might have been anywhere in the apartment. In fact, there was a pile of clothes on the bathroom floor which looked like it could have been dumped off a chair.”

PJ held her ground. She opened the drawer and pointed out the cleaver with the dark smudge.

“Well, it looks like it could be blood,” Schultz said, “but it could also be a dozen other things. The search of the surrounding area, including the trash, didn’t turn up a weapon, though. Just the usual: dead animals and some stuff that the guy from the Medical Examiner’s office said was a human placenta. I’ll get a tech to come back out and bag up all the stuff in that drawer. Could be this creep decided to hide the murder weapon in plain sight.” Leo went back out to the living room.

Feeling a little smug, PJ sat down in the chair. In the back of her mind she had been wondering about the cat. She had a fair idea what would happen after Animal Control came, and it wasn’t good. Her ex-husband Steven had also been allergic to cats, like Burton’s sister, and so she, a cat person from birth and probably before, had been catless for years. It hadn’t occurred to her until this moment that being free of Steven, the first time she had actually thought of it as “free,” she could get a cat. She decided on the spot that she would do so, and that she wanted Burton’s cat, which she hadn’t even seen yet except as a frightened gray blur.