Near Death (11 page)

“Same for my nights,” Cyrus said, closing his binder. He turned to the IT manager. “Is there any way of doing a sort, say for the past six months, to see if pulling all-nighters is unusual for him?”

“Sure, I can do that. Give me a couple of days.”

Cyrus had a thought. “Is it possible to sneak out of the building without going past the security desk?”

“I wouldn’t know,” the young man answered. “Never been over there. I hang out in a server room miles away.”

“What about CCTV over in his building?” Avakian wondered.

“The quadrangle’s covered pretty well, but inside the buildings, not so much. I think it’s in next year’s budget but I could be wrong.”

That was it. They had no more on Weller than at the start. Cyrus pressed the elevator Down button.

“What next?” Avakian asked.

“I’ve got a real interest in attending a salon next weekend.”

“A salon?” the big man asked, screwing up his face. “You want to go to a beauty parlor?”

“Nope. It’s the kind of place where eggheads slap themselves on the back and drink white wine.”

“You’re on your own, partner,” Avakian said, stepping heavily onto the elevator cab. “My weekends are for football.”

Thirteen

There wasn’t enough, not nearly enough.

Alex had thought there’d be plenty of pumpkin girl’s fluid to do the necessary structural studies but he was wrong.

He was making progress—undeniably. The mystery peak at 854.73
m/z
was slowly yielding to the brute force of his science. Structural analysis of unknown compounds wasn’t his field but he couldn’t very well blithely hand out samples from a murder victim to academic collaborators. So he taught himself the techniques and borrowed time on machines he didn’t already possess within his own lab.

This much he had learned, and this much was certain: the fraction was a peptide, a shortish chain of amino acids—but which ones, and what was their sequence and configuration? He’d need more of the mystery peak, more precious liquid to carry on.

And beyond the incumbent needs for analytical chemistry he
wanted
more for other reasons that burned inside him like molten metal, unquenchable fiery ingots impossible to ignore.

So, as if captive to a restless dream, he found himself once again riding around the dark empty streets of
the city during one of the first sustained flurries of the season.

The girl’s hair and shoulders were sprinkled in snowflakes. They melted one by one when she climbed into his heated car. He didn’t really get a good look at her until he’d driven a block. She was the prettiest yet and disconcertingly similar in appearance to his Jessie. If her hair had been red he probably would have been tempted to let her out at the next light with twenty bucks for her trouble. But her hair was brown. And she was young. No more than twenty, he thought.

She was a chatty one—a self-described motormouth—who kept up a stream of nervous banter until he’d parked inside his Cambridge garage, closed the door and sat back beside her. She made it clear she wasn’t going to play along with his desire to talk first. She didn’t like the setup and let him know she wanted to get on with it. As he sputtered, she took matters into her own hands, unzipped his fly, peeled down his shorts and started to go down on him.

He didn’t want any of his DNA inside her mouth!

As her lips were about to encircle his soft cock he panicked and pushed her shoulders hard, ramming her against the passenger-side door.

“Hey!” she shouted in alarm and pain. “What’s your goddamn problem?”

He couldn’t think of anything to say.

Instead, his big hands shot out like projectiles but she was too far away for a surprise attack and he failed to get a good purchase on her neck. She wriggled free and unleashed a verbal and physical counterattack that bewildered him with its ferocity. Arms, hands and fingernails moved in eggbeater frenzy. High-pitched screams pierced his ears, an untidy torrent of profanities and animalistic noises.

“Quiet, quiet, quiet,” he implored blindly, his eyes tightly closed to protect his corneas from her razor-sharp nails. He was leaning over the console, pushing off against the driver’s side door for leverage until his hands found their mark again, this time firmly. He felt the flat planes of throat cartilage, hard and satisfying under his thumbs, and began to squeeze. This one would get no narrative to send her off. She was too feisty and determined. No lullabies for—

He didn’t know her name.

Suddenly, the flailing stopped and so did the punches. He tasted warm blood, his own blood. It would be over soon.
Then he’d check his watch for time zero and get about his business.

He finally opened his eyes to see what she looked like at the last moments of consciousness. That much he owed her.

She was staring back with hatred.

The burning!

All at once he was enveloped in a cloud of hissing, searing pain.

His eyes smoldered so caustically he had to let her go to rub his stinging eyes.

Through the lachrymose haze he caught something in her fist, an object like a black lipstick.

Mace!

The girl was scrambling for her freedom and before he could react she’d slid over the console onto the rear seat with the alacrity of a big cat slipping its cage.

Coughing and spluttering, he lunged for her. His left hand grabbed onto her bejeweled low-slung belt that had been part of her seductive gear and was now only a liability. The leather held fast over her hips and allowed him to tug her away from the door handle.

He held onto the belt for dear life and used it to pull himself into the backseat where he wiggled his way on
top of her. In doing so, his jeans and undershorts curled down to his thighs and if someone had come upon them, the first impression would be of an overheated couple about to make love, doggy-style.

But this wasn’t love.

Alex managed to push his right arm around her neck far enough to get the crook of his elbow into position, surrendering to some primitive part of his brain that instinctively knew how to kill.

He pulled her neck into hyperextension and her screams became guttural. The upward force drove his face into the soft fabric of her jacket and he took advantage of the cloth to blot his stinging eyes.

She began to buck like an angry mare trying to unseat him. It didn’t feel like he was killing her. Too much vitality was coursing through her strong body.

He arched his back to give himself better anchorage. With his free hand he reached over the top of her head and inched his fingers over her forehead, her nose, her clenched mouth until he got to her chin, which was nestled on his elbow. Three of his fingers managed to hook onto the hollow beneath her mandible and pulling with all his might, the combined energy of both arms working in unison set her neck at an unsustainable angle.

There wasn’t so much of a snap as a dull giving way of ligaments. Her body went into spasm. There was a gush of warm urine against his thighs.

He let go and she was still.

His coughing and gagging picked up steam as his arm and shoulder muscles relaxed. He rubbed his eyes again on her jacket then stopped, wondering whether tears carried DNA—and suddenly aghast at being bare-bottomed, he hurriedly pulled his pants up.

He rose to his knees and exhaled hard, wheezy breaths until at last he had the presence to look at his watch.

How many seconds had passed?

Thirty?

He was shaking violently.

There were only two and a half minutes to get his drill from the shelf and collect his samples.

He wanted to vomit, to throw himself into a cleansing shower. He wanted to be far, far away from the backseat of the car.

He closed his eyes for a moment.

Come on, Alex, gather yourself, man!

If you don’t, this girl would have died for nothing
.

Fourteen

It was hard to imagine a more beautiful morning.

The air was crisp, frosty and vitalizing. A frozen crust had formed overnight atop several inches of unblemished snow and sunlight made it shimmer as if thousands of gemstones had been carelessly scattered about. Down a slope, the still pond water perfectly reflected bare trees from the surrounding wood. A hawk soared forlornly overhead, resisting migration to warmer climes.

Cyrus was only half watching the forensics team from the New Hampshire State Lab. Mostly he moodily imagined what it would be like to follow a trail beyond them into the thicket, and to wander alone among defoliated stands of birch, maple and oak.

He thought of the Robert Frost poem,
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
, and he became sad.

Tara would never know the joy and sorrow of poetry.

She’d never be kissed by a boy, never ride a horse; never dip her toes in the warm green waters of the Caribbean.

The crime scene crew signaled they were done and started packing their equipment and unrolling a body bag. Cyrus removed his glove and extended a hand to help Ivan
Himmel up the snowy grade. The old man started to slip anyway and Avakian jumped down into the ditch to push while Cyrus pulled.

“It’s not age,” Himmel offered when he was on level ground. “I was clumsy even when I was young. Can we go back to my car to talk? My feet are cold.”

“So is she or isn’t she?” Avakian demanded.

“She is. Nice little bore hole like the others.”

“Strangulation?” Cyrus asked.

“This one looks like a broken neck. I’d say an extension avulsion at C2 but I’ll let you know when she’s on the table. She was a very attractive young lady, by the way.”

“How long’s she been out here?” Cyrus asked.

“She’s good and frozen,” Himmel answered, trudging toward the highway. “I’ll need to thaw her out first before I can do any calculations—but she wasn’t walking the streets last night, that’s for damn sure. Oh, and her fake fingernails were clearly cut off, not artistically. She was probably a scratcher but we’ll still look for his DNA.”

They were about to step over the police tape and brush past the chattering fishermen who’d found the girl but a man called up from the ditch, summoning them back. “Hey, look at this!” When they lifted the prone body a sheet of
snow and ice fell away from her waist-length jacket. A large square of cloth had been neatly excised.

“He contaminated her and cut away the evidence,” Cyrus said, looking down, shielding his eyes from the glare. “That, the fingernails … he’s a careful bastard.”

“We’ll get him eventually,” Avakian said soothingly.

His partner’s benign remark irritated him. It smacked of impotence. He thought of Alex Weller smugly reclining with his feet up on his desk. He had no proof, nothing but his gut, but that was sufficient for now. He felt a terrible urgency to solve the case.

Why—to prevent another hooker from winding up discarded by the side of the road?

Tara’s sweet little face replaced Weller’s in his mind. It revolted him that this man had examined, had touched, his baby.

It dawned on him. He wanted to be able to tell her, “Daddy caught a very bad man today and put him in jail.” He would never tell her it was her doctor, the one with a ponytail. She didn’t need to know that; but he wanted to see her face light up and hear her giggle with delight at her daddy’s cleverness. He wanted to tell her before it was too late.

“No, we’ll get him soon,” Cyrus snapped back.

There was no need to linger. They had the victim’s identity because the killer was good enough to dump her with her shoulder bag in place, complete with wallet and a spent canister of mace. The cut-away cloth, the clipped nails, the lack of attempt to conceal the body, spoke volumes about the killer’s confidence. As was the case with the others, they weren’t expecting the body to yield anything about him.

“This one fought back,” Avakian noted as they crossed the state line into Massachusetts.

“I hope it hurt like hell,” Cyrus replied. “I hope she got him in the eyes and scratched the shit out of him.”

“You still think it’s Weller?”

“You know I do. I want to see what his face looks like.”

“Can you believe he dumped her back at Pinnacle Pond, what, a hundred feet from the last vic?”

Cyrus ran his tongue over chapped lips. “Killing this girl took him out of his comfort zone. She didn’t go down easily. Maybe he was rushed. Maybe he was exhausted or hurt. Maybe he was scared. He knew the layout up here: path of least resistance, a comfortable place in an uncomfortable night.”

Avakian grunted his acceptance of Cyrus’s theory and turned on his sports station for the remainder of the southbound ride, leaving Cyrus to stare fitfully at the cold white landscape.

There was something therapeutic about the standard British ringtone:
beh beh, beh beh, beh beh
. It was expectant, not urgent, familiar and welcoming. It tasted of milky tea, smelled of battered cod, sounded like bleating goats on a grassy hill.

Alex heard the tone replaced by a husky voice saying, “This is Joe.”

“Hey, Joe.”

“Unfucking believable! Baby brother!”

“You’re back, eh?”

“With all me fingers and toes and all the dangly bits as well.”

“When’d you get home?”

“A week and a bit.”

“I left you a message.”

“Yeah. I’m not good about returning things. Still have a library book from when I was twelve.”

“How long till they send you over again?”

“I’m out. I told them to shove it. Six bloody tours, man! I’m too old for this shit.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“You’d better. No more third-world shit holes for me. Closest I’ll get to one is Luton.”

“Jesus, it’s good to hear your voice,” Alex said wistfully.

“You okay, Alex? You don’t sound good.”

“I’m fine.”

“Still with what’s her name?”

“Jessie. Yeah, she’s hanging in there.”

“She must be mentally deficient.”

“Come to Boston,” Alex said suddenly.

“Why?”

“Why not? Stay with us. You haven’t been for a dog’s age. You’ve never seen my house.”

“Like I said, I’m just back. I’ve got a lot of sorting out to do.”