I Am Pilgrim (2 page)

rebellion.

I imagine the killer ’s hand on her breast, touching a jewelled nipple ring. The guy takes it between his fingers and yanks it, pulling her closer. She cries out, revved – everything is hypersensitive now, especially her nipples. But she doesn’t mind – if somebody wants it rough, it just means they must really like her. Perched on top of him, the headboard banging hard against the wall, she would have

been looking at the front door – locked and chained, for sure. In this neighbourhood, that’s the least you could do.

A diagram on the back shows an evacuation route – she is in a hotel, but any resemblance to the Ritz-Carlton pretty much ends there. It is called the Eastside Inn – home to itinerants, backpackers, the mentally lost and anybody else with twenty bucks a night. Stay as long as you like – a day, a month, the rest of your life – all you need is two IDs, one with a photo.

The guy who had moved into Room 89 had been here for a while – a six-pack sits on a bureau, along with four half-empty bottles of hard liquor and a couple of boxes of breakfast cereal. A stereo and a few CDs are on a night stand, and I glance through them. He had good taste in music, at least

you could say that. The closet, however, is empty – it seems like his clothes were about the only things he took with him when he walked out, leaving the body to liquefy in the bath. Lying at the back of the closet is a pile of trash: discarded newspapers, an empty can of roach killer, a coffee-stained wall calendar. I pick it up – every page features a black and white photo of an ancient ruin – the Colosseum, a Greek temple, the Library of Celsus at night. Very arty. But the pages are blank, not an appointment on any of them – except as a coffee mat, it seems like it’s never been used, and I throw it back.

I turn away and – without thinking, out of habit really – I run my hand across the night-stand. That’s strange: no dust. I do the same to the bureau, bedhead and stereo and get the identical result – the killer has wiped everything down to eliminate his prints. He gets no prizes for that, but as I catch the scent of something and raise my fingers to my nose, everything changes. The residue I can smell is from an

antiseptic spray they use in intensive-care wards to combat infection. Not only does it kill bacteria but as a side effect it also destroys DNA material – sweat, skin, hair. By spraying everything in the room and then dousing the carpet and walls, the killer was making sure that the NYPD needn’t bother with

their forensic vacuum cleaners.

With sudden clarity, I realize that this is anything but a by-the-book homicide for money or drugs

or sexual gratification. As a murder, this is something remarkable.

Chapter Two

NOT EVERYBODY KNOWS this – or cares probably – but the first law of forensic science is Locard’s Exchange Principle, and it says ‘Every contact between a perpetrator and a crime scene leaves a trace.’ As I stand in this room, surrounded by dozens of voices, I’m wondering if Professor Locard

had ever encountered anything quite like Room 89 – everything touched by the killer is now in a bath full of acid, wiped clean or drenched in industrial antiseptic. I’m certain there’s not a cell or follicle of him left behind.

A year ago, I wrote an obscure book on modern investigative technique. In a chapter called ‘New

Frontiers’, I said I had come across the use of an antibacterial spray only once in my life – and that was a high-level hit on an intelligence agent in the Czech Republic. That case doesn’t augur well – to this day, it remains unsolved. Whoever had been living in Room 89 clearly knew their business, and I start examining the room with the respect it deserves.

He wasn’t a tidy person and, among the other trash, I see an empty pizza box lying next to the bed.

I’m about to pass over it when I realize that’s where he would have had the knife: lying on top of the pizza box within easy reach, so
natural
Eleanor probably wouldn’t even have registered it.

I imagine her on the bed, reaching under the tangle of sheets for his crotch. She kisses his shoulder, his chest, going down. Maybe the guy knows what he’s in for, maybe not: one of the side effects of

GHB is that it suppresses the gag reflex. There’s no reason a person can’t swallow a seven-, eight-, ten-inch gun – that’s why one of the easiest places to buy it is in gay saunas. Or on porn shoots.

I think of his hands grabbing her – he flips her on to her back and puts his knees either side of her chest. She’s thinking he’s positioning himself for her mouth but, casually, his right hand would have dropped to the side of the bed. Unseen, the guy’s fingers find the top of the pizza box then touch what he’s looking for – cold and cheap but, because it’s new, more than sharp enough to do the job.

Anybody watching from behind would have seen her back arch, a sort of moan escape her lips –

they’d think he must have entered her mouth. He hasn’t. Her eyes, bright with drugs, are flooding with fear. His left hand has clamped tight over her mouth, forcing her head back, exposing her throat. She bucks and writhes, tries to use her arms, but he’s anticipated that. Straddling her breasts, his knees slam down, pinning her by the biceps. How do I know this? You can just make out the two bruises on

the body lying in the bath. She’s helpless. His right hand rises up into view – Eleanor sees it and tries to scream, convulsing wildly, fighting to get free. The serrated steel of the pizza knife flashes past her breast, towards her pale throat. It slashes hard—

Blood sprays across the bedside table. With one of the arteries which feed the brain completely cut, it would have been over in a moment. Eleanor crumples, gurgling, bleeding out. The last vestiges of

consciousness tell her she has just witnessed her own murder; all she ever was and hoped to be is gone. That’s how he did it – he wasn’t inside her at all. Once again, thank God for small mercies, I suppose.

The killer goes to prepare the acid bath and along the way pulls off the bloody white shirt he must

have been wearing – they just found pieces of it under Eleanor ’s body in the bath, along with the knife: four inches long, black plastic handle, made by the millions in some sweatshop in China.

I’m still reeling from the vivid imagining of it all, so I barely register a rough hand taking my shoulder. As soon as I do, I throw it off, about to break his arm instantly – an echo from an earlier life, I’m afraid. It is some guy who mumbles a terse apology, looking at me strangely, trying to move

me aside. He’s the leader of a forensic team – three guys and a woman – setting up the UV lamps and dishes of the Fast Blue B dye they’ll use to test the mattress for semen stains. They haven’t found out about the antiseptic yet and I don’t tell them – for all I know the killer missed a part of the bed. If he did, given the nature of the Eastside Inn, I figure they’ll get several thousand positive hits dating back to when hookers wore stockings.

I get out of their way, but I’m deeply distracted: I’m trying to close everything out because there is something about the room, the whole situation – I’m not exactly sure what – that is troubling me. A

part of the scenario is wrong, and I can’t tell why. I look around, taking another inventory of what I see, but I can’t find it – I have a sense it’s from earlier in the night. I go back, mentally rewinding the tape to when I first walked in.

What was it? I reach down into my subconscious, trying to recover my first impression – it was something detached from the violence, minor but with overriding significance.

If only I could touch it … a feeling … it’s like … it’s some
word
that is lying now on the other side of memory. I start thinking about how I wrote in my book that it is the assumptions, the unquestioned assumptions, that trip you up every time – and then it comes to me.

When I walked in, I saw the six-pack on the bureau, a carton of milk in the fridge, registered the

names of a few DVDs lying next to the TV, noted the liner in a trash can. And the impression – the

word – that first entered my head but didn’t touch my conscious mind was ‘female’. I got everything

right about what had happened in Room 89 – except for the biggest thing of all. It wasn’t a young guy who was staying here; it wasn’t a naked man who was having sex with Eleanor and cut her throat. It

wasn’t a clever prick who destroyed her features with acid and drenched the room with antiseptic spray.

It was a woman.

Chapter Three

I’VE KNOWN A lot of powerful people in my career, but i’ve only met one person with genuine natural

authority – the sort of guy who could shout you down with just a whisper. He is in the corridor now, coming towards me, telling the forensic team they’ll have to wait: the Fire Department wants to secure the acid before somebody gets burnt.

‘Keep your plastic gloves on, though,’ he advises. ‘You can give each other a free prostate exam

out in the hall.’ Everybody except the forensic guys laughs.

The man with the voice is Ben Bradley, the homicide lieutenant in charge of the crime scene. He’s

been down in the manager ’s office, trying to locate the scumbag who runs the joint. He’s a tall black man – Bradley, not the scumbag – in his early fifties with big hands and Industry jeans turned up at the cuff. His wife talked him into buying them recently in a forlorn attempt to update his image, instead of which – he says – they make him look like a character from a Steinbeck novel, a modern refugee from the dustbowl.

Like all the other regulars at these murder circuses, he has little affection for the forensic specialists. First, the work was outsourced a few years back and overpaid people like these started turning up in crisp white boiler suits with names like ‘Forensic Biological Services, Inc.’ on the back.

Second – and what really tipped it over the edge for him – were the two shows featuring forensic work that hit it big on TV and led to an insufferable outbreak of celebrityhood in the minds of its practitioners.

‘Jesus,’ he complained recently, ‘is there anybody in this country who isn’t dreaming of being on a

reality show?’

As he watches the would-be celebrities repack their labs-in-a-briefcase, he catches sight of me –

standing silently against the wall, just watching, like I seem to have spent half my life doing. He ignores the people demanding his attention and makes his way over. We don’t shake hands – I don’t

know why, it’s just never been our way. I’m not even sure if we’re friends – I’ve always been pretty much on the outside of any side you can find, so I’m probably not the one to judge. We respect each

other, though, if that helps.

‘Thanks for coming,’ he says.

I nod, looking at his turned-up Industries and black work boots, ideal for paddling through the blood and shit of a crime scene.

‘What did you come by – tractor?’ I ask. He doesn’t laugh; Ben hardly ever laughs, he’s about the

most deadpan guy you’ll ever meet. Which doesn’t mean he isn’t funny.

‘Had a chance to look around, Ramón?’ he says quietly.

My name is not Ramón, and he knows it. But he also knows that, until recently, I was a member of

one of our nation’s most secret intelligence agencies, so I figure he’s referring to Ramón García.

Ramón was an FBI agent who went to almost infinite trouble to conceal his identity as he sold our nation’s secrets to the Russians – then left his fingerprints all over the Hefty garbage bags he used to deliver the stolen documents. Ramón was almost certainly the most incompetent covert operator in history. Like I say, Ben is very funny.

‘Yeah, I’ve seen a bit,’ I tell him. ‘What you got on the person living in this dump? She’s the prime suspect, huh?’

Ben can hide many things, but his eyes can’t mask the look of surprise – a woman?!

Excellent, I think – Ramón strikes back. Still, Bradley’s a cool cop. ‘That’s interesting, Ramón,’ he says, trying to find out if I’m really on to something or whether I’ve just jumped the shark. ‘How’d you figure that?’

I point at the six-pack on the bureau, the milk in the fridge. ‘What guy does that? A guy keeps the

beer cold, lets the milk go bad. Look at the DVDs – romantic comedies, and not an action film among

them. Wanna take a walk?’ I continue. ‘Find out how many other guys in this dump use liners in their trash cans? That’s what a woman does – one who doesn’t belong here, no matter what part she’s acting.’

He weighs what I’ve said, holding my gaze, but it’s impossible to tell whether he’s buying what I’m

selling. Before I can ask, two young detectives – a woman and her partner – appear from behind the

Fire Department’s hazchem barrels. They scramble to a stop in front of Bradley.

‘We got something, Ben!’ the female cop says. ‘It’s about the occupant—’

Bradley nods calmly. ‘Yeah, it’s a woman – tell me something I don’t know. What about her?’

I guess he was buying it. The two cops stare, wondering how the hell he knew. By morning, the legend of their boss will have grown even greater. Me? I’m thinking the guy is shameless – he’s going to take the credit without even blinking? I start laughing.

Bradley glances at me and, momentarily, I think he’s going to laugh back, but it’s a forlorn hope.

His sleepy eyes seem to twinkle, though, as his attention reverts to the two cops. ‘How’d you know it was a woman?’ he asks them.

‘We got hold of the hotel register and all the room files,’ the male detective – name of Connor Norris – replies.

Bradley is suddenly alert. ‘From the manager? You found the scumbag – got him to unlock the office?’