Hanging Time (27 page)

April moved toward the smell.

“You going to be okay, Detective?” Braun asked.

“Yessir,” April replied. Lot of them didn’t know it, but after about three minutes in a very bad smell the olfactory nerves went numb. All those people who kept running in and out of horrendous crime-scene stenches for fresh air got hit with the same blast of nausea each time they returned. Anybody who lived with the pungent pickling and drying rotting smells of the Orient knew that.

But when she looked through the open door, she could not control a spasm of revulsion. This was worse than Maggie Wheeler. Clearly, it had been hot in there. The girl’s body was not in good condition. It had already begun to swell from the gases forming inside. Decomposition works from the inside out.

Aware of Braun behind her, gauging her reaction, April pinched her nose and breathed through her mouth, her internal camera continuing to click. What was she seeing here? What was the story? On the grimy bathroom floor under the hanging body there appeared to be some congealed blood along with the other fluids that had leaked out of her orifices after death. April looked for an open wound that would have bled. She didn’t see one. Several two-to-three-inch patches of blistered skin were visible on the dead girl’s neck and shoulders, but April had seen that before and knew they were post-mortem artifacts. Bacteria was eating away the tissues under the skin.

April noted that the rope the girl was hanging by appeared to be the same kind used in the Wheeler murder. Obviously the huge black evening gown on the small body, and the tinges of blue and red makeup, partially dissolved and further distorted by feeding beetles, told the same twisted tale that was understood only by the teller. Little girl dressed up as a big girl. Strangled. But what if it were a little boy dressed up as a big girl?

She remembered Ducci’s suggestion that they were looking for a transvestite. But transvestites didn’t kill. So, who was it? Where did this put them with McLellan now? As April wondered if anyone had bothered to call Ducci, the cop pushed into the space, stomach first.

“Hello, pretty one. How’s it going?”

She shook her head, backing out so he could take her place.

“Clasp your hands behind your back,” Igor admonished from the front of the store, where he’d begun dusting for fingerprints.

“Oh, fuck off,” the Duke told him.

“Nice talk.” Braun turned to Sanchez, who was busy taking notes. “Well?”

“Looks similar. No marks on the door. No signs of struggle in the store. Similar rope, not tied correctly for a suicide. Although, if the other hadn’t come first, this might have the appearance of a suicide.”

“Yeah?” Braun moved toward the door, hot-footed it outside. Sanchez followed him.

“She could have jumped off the toilet,” Sanchez said.

“Sure, and dressed herself up like that first.”

“I wonder where McLellan was Saturday night.”

April watched Ducci take in the scene. They were honored. His workload was too heavy for him to get out much anymore. For a half hour he worked with Igor and Mako, collecting and labeling, putting items in paper bags and then cardboard boxes. Like April, Ducci seemed puzzled about the blood on the floor. But, not to worry, blood wasn’t his business.

After the body had been sketched and photographed, Ducci lifted the black silk skirt, looking for a wound. All he could see was an irregular semicircle of small marks on the corpse’s right ankle.

“Looks like a bite,” he remarked loud enough to be heard in Jersey.

April looked where he pointed. From the showroom she could hear the sound of Sanchez’s derisive laugh at this outrageous speculation. “Oh, sure, oh, sure. Four days later on a decomposed body he can identify a bite mark.”

“Looks like the work of insects,” April said.

Ducci straightened and pointed to the mottled hands. “That’s insects. Just a mess with no particular pattern wounds. Here, there’s a distinct pattern.”

April nodded, though she had her doubts. Ducci was a
trace man. It was up to the M.E. to tell them what happened to the body. Where the blood on the floor came from and what made the marks on the hands, the shoulders, and the ankle.

Sanchez called her from the street. “The Lieutenant wants us to go home now.”

April took one last look around and closed her notebook.

J
ason sat in his swivel desk chair. Milicia was opposite him in the chair he used with patients who liked to lie on his leather sofa. Her face was very pale. He could see a muscle twitch in her cheek. She was wearing a conservative suit and very little makeup. The sensitive skin under her eyes was dark and bruised-looking. She’d lost a few pounds. The stress in her face, and what appeared to be sleep deprivation, made her look vulnerable and seriously frightened. Jason could feel his body stiffen in defense against any sympathy that would work against his being able to help her.

“What is your real concern, Milicia?” he asked, getting to the core of the matter right at the start.

“I told you I was afraid Camille would hurt somebody, and now I know she has.” Her words were angry. She spat them out at him, showing him how furious she still was at his being out of town when she needed him. She regarded him accusingly, as if it were his fault that it had taken twenty-four hours to make contact. He knew it was the time lapse she would count, not the attempts he made to reach her when she was out.

Milicia had insisted that she needed to see him Tuesday, his first day back in the office. There was no putting her off. In order to work it out, he’d had to reschedule his appointment with Jenny, the woman who did his secretarial work and bookkeeping.

He was used to hearing his patients accuse him of everything
under the sun. He was concerned by the way Milicia looked, but unmoved by her rage.

“You think … Camille … has hurt someone?” he said flatly, careful to keep the disbelief out of his voice.

“Killed
someone, Jason. Don’t you listen to the news?”

He nodded. Of course he did. “So?”

She stared at him as if he were retarded, or worse. “There’s been another boutique murder.”

“Oh?” Her face was flushed. He could see she had begun to sweat.

“Just like the one last week,” she prompted. “Right here on Columbus. Don’t you remember?”

He nodded. “Salesgirl in a boutique, wasn’t it?” He’d read about it.

“I had a feeling then. I had this really creepy feeling.” Milicia covered her face with her fingers so he couldn’t see her. “I just had a feeling Camille had something to do with it. And now there’s been another one. The truth is, I’m terrified, and I feel responsible.”

She dropped her hands and confronted him, green eyes flashing. “I came to you for help. I told you all about Camille, and you let this happen.”

Jason didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath until he let it out. He glanced at the clock on the table. He didn’t have much time to calm her down.

“Milicia, let’s go back a little. You didn’t tell me when we met the first two times that you thought your sister was a murderer.”

“How could I? You didn’t even believe that she was sick.”

Had he missed something here? Jason thought back to his notes, quickly reviewed them in his mind, shook his head. Milicia had been vague. She said she came to him because she wanted her sister to get treatment, wanted her removed from her boyfriend’s influence and taken care of in a safe environment. But she had not been able to give any convincing reasons for intervention. And certainly no legal ones. It was very hard to put people away. You couldn’t do it just because they were inconvenient.

At the time of Milicia’s visits, Jason had a feeling her
assessment of her sister’s violent tendencies was an afterthought. Milicia hadn’t known what constituted symptoms of potential violence. Certainly, she didn’t mention the homicide in the neighborhood as part of her concern. If she was really worried about the boutique murder, why didn’t she tell him about that right away?

“Milicia, I must confess. I was away this weekend, and I read the papers only briefly this morning. I didn’t see any article about another—”

“It was on the news a little while ago. I heard it in the office,” Milicia said. Defiantly, she crossed her legs the other way, showing a lot of thigh in the process.

“It happened today?” Jason frowned. But Milicia had called him on Sunday, starting very early in the morning. How could she have known if it happened today? “But you called me on Sunday.”

“I called you on Sunday because she disappeared on Sunday. I told you she’s been acting very strange lately. So when I couldn’t reach her, I was concerned. In fact, I was frantic. Camille is autistic, catatonic—I don’t know what you call it. Sometimes she can’t move at all. She just sits like a stone with no reflexes.… She calls it soul death. And then she goes kind of wild afterward.”

What was going on here? Jason’s face was perfectly still, like Camille’s in soul death. He was trying to figure it out. The scene wasn’t playing for him. He didn’t know where it was wrong.

“Have you located her since?” he asked.

“Yes. She’s come back. She won’t tell me where she was. I’m so scared.” She looked scared.

Jason drew a breath. “What makes you think Camille is responsible for these—murders?”

“I just do, just the whole picture, the sort of killings they are. She liked to hang our dolls. In a row. Sometimes she put my clothes on the dolls and then hung them. I told you that, didn’t I? Dressed them up and hung them by their necks.”

Jason’s head had begun to throb, but he didn’t move.

“She’s obsessed with death, and with hanging. She says she feels like she’s choking. Often she can’t eat anything because she thinks she’ll choke on the food. Sometimes she
chews one bite for an hour. It’s disgusting to watch.” Milicia’s agitation became extreme as she described it.

“Look, Milicia,” Jason said gently. “I can understand that all of this is disturbing. But murder is going a very long way. The two, uh, murders you’ve told me about happen to coincide with your own anxiety about your sister. It’s an unfortunate coincidence. In any case, all the studies have shown that most murders are committed by men. Only a tiny percentage of murders are committed by women, and they’re almost never stranger murders. Look, I’m not a detective, but I haven’t heard any compelling evidence—”

“But I
know—”

“What do you know?”

“I know Camille. You don’t. Sometimes you just
know
things.” Milicia thrust out her chin. The twitch had moved up to her temple.

He watched it jump. It was true that he didn’t know Camille, and his not knowing Camille made it even more important that he be extremely careful with this. Milicia had her own agenda. He decided to try something else. He’d float an interpretation. If he was right, she’d calm down. If he was wrong, she’d dismiss it out of hand. Then he’d know what to do.

“You’ve told me Camille is angry,” he said gently. “What she does is experience her emotions as murderous and dangerous. But that is very far from acting on those impulses. You’ve also told me that Camille’s angry feelings incapacitate her. She’s overwhelmed and becomes immobile. People like that are not capable of any action at all, much less very complicated and stressful acts of violence. Having murderous feelings is kind of like having fantasies—watching movies of oneself killing someone, smashing a car, setting a building on fire. They’re wishes about committing violent acts. Wishes are not reality.”

Yet as he spoke, Milicia shook her head. “You’re wrong about this. You’re talking theory. You’re telling me what you’ve read in studies. I’ve seen you do this before. You push yourself away from what you don’t want to hear. The bottom line,
Doctor
Frank, is if my sister is killing people,
and if you don’t do something about it, you’re responsible for murder.”

The woman was very smart. A door in Jason’s mind closed, and another one opened. He’d made his judgment. He would no longer try to manage the patient. He’d manage the situation. Abruptly his manner altered. His warmth was gone.

“I think we can change the subject just a bit, Milicia. You’ve been trying to persuade me that your sister has actually committed murder. Let’s presume that what you say is true. In that case, I must notify the police immediately.”

“If I wanted to go to the police, I would have gone to the police in the first place,” Milicia retorted, but the tension in her face began to ease. Her color slowly returned.

“I didn’t want this to happen,” she murmured. “Is there no other way?”

“In a matter like this it’s not a judgment call,” Jason said firmly. He wasn’t going to negotiate. “I’m not questioning whether we should go to the police. You want me to accept your suspicions. All right, I do. Where life is at stake, I have absolutely no choice but to go to the authorities.”

“You mean it, don’t you?” Milicia’s cheeks were red now.

“Yes, I do.”

“Well then, it’s out of my hands.” She sat back, soothed in an instant.

Jason could feel something like a sigh of relief escape her, and suddenly her abstract design came into crisp focus for him.

“I don’t want Camille to suffer,” Milicia was saying, completely in control again. “I had hoped we could just take care of her quietly. But now …” She made a gesture of helplessness. “You say we have no choice. Calling the police is the only thing to do.”

Jason thought of April Woo and said nothing. He had every confidence the police would get to the bottom of this, and a whole lot faster than he could. He couldn’t talk to Milicia’s sister unless she came in to see him. The police had instant access to anyone. He watched Milicia’s face. Now he got it. This was what Milicia had wanted all along.

Milicia had wanted police involvement, but she couldn’t get it on her own. She felt she needed an authority figure behind her. But what was the pathology? Was Milicia a variation on the kind of people who confess to crimes they didn’t commit out of guilt for unrelated acts of their own? And because they crave attention. Did she crave attention? Was the twist here that she wanted to turn her sister in to the police for something the sister most likely did not do in order to punish the sister? Or did Milicia figure this kind of stunt was the route she needed to take to draw attention to the illness of a sibling she couldn’t control?