‘I don’t mind. I already figured you was gonna ask me.’
‘Great, but there’s a problem. We can’t leave here until someone shows up to take the body away.’
‘And that’s not gonna happen any time soon?’
‘Probably not, so what I want you to do is take a hike up to Broadway and get us some sodas and something to eat.’
‘You trust me to come back on my own,’ he said after a minute.
‘Clyde, it’s just like you said. Your running days are behind you.’
The first clouds made their appearance some four hours later. They came north from the harbor, long gray tendrils that swung back and forth like questing snakes. The clouds ushered in a gentle breeze, a breeze that became a wind as the clouds gradually took on the yellow-green color of a healing bruise. I led Clyde to the Crown Vic at that point. The air inside was stifling, but the clatter of hail on the roof forced me to keep the windows up.
The hail was followed by a deluge, as if somebody had run a knife across the underside of a water bed. For the next ten minutes, the lightning advanced on our position, until there was virtually no gap between the flashes and the resulting explosions. Clyde was sitting alongside me, his hands over his ears and his eyes squeezed shut. My own eyes were wide open. The hail and rain were pounding on the crime scene, destroying every bit of trace evidence. They pounded on the body of the victim as well, and what I wondered, as I struggled to draw oxygen from an atmosphere as thick as pudding, was whether her open gut would contain the water. Like a bath tub.
The rain stopped as abruptly as it had begun and the clouds receded to the north as if in fear of being left behind. Within minutes, the sun was out and the air again motionless. I exited the car, pausing for a minute to watch a thin mist rise from the hot cobblestones. Then I looked up at the bridge, my attention drawn by the silence. The helicopters were gone, the rescue workers as well, driven away by the weather no doubt. I wondered if there were any civilians still trapped in the subway cars, imagining their terror and the civil damages they would later seek. I was still pondering this question when a morgue wagon, closely followed by a city car bearing a death investigator, pulled up before the crime scene tape. The investigator rolled down the window a few inches. A short black man, he carefully scrutinized my sweat-soaked clothing, his distaste obvious.
‘You have a body for me, detective?’ he asked.
‘I have what’s left of a body after nine hours in the sun.’
‘Is that supposed to mean something?’ he said, staring me down. I turned away without answering.
FOUR
We were in the master bedroom of our Manhattan apartment, Adele Bentibi, my live-in lover, and I, enjoying a meal of hummus, tabbouleh salad, stuffed grape leaves and lamb shawarma. Adele was wearing a blue T-shirt and gym shorts, while I wore only a pair of faded cargo shorts. I freely admit that Adele was quite attractive in this outfit, not to mention erotic, but it wasn’t sex that brought us to the bedroom. The air conditioner in the window to our left was the only air conditioner in an apartment that received eight hours of direct sunlight on midsummer days. Although the unit was running full out, and had been for the past week, the room was still noticeably warm at ten o’clock in the evening.
Adele was propped up on one elbow, staring down at me. Nine months before, she’d been assaulted with an aluminium bat as she left her parked car. The blow had been meant to kill her, but had succeeded only in flattening the center of her rather prominent nose. Adele’s first instinct was to ignore the defect, no surprise as she was far too vain to admit to her own vanity. But then her breathing became impaired and she was more or less forced into an operating room. The result was a smaller, rounded nose that softened a thin face made thinner by sharp cheekbones and a pointed chin. Myself, I was indifferent to the change, but I remember catching Adele standing before the mirror in the bathroom one day, examining herself closely. Her dark eyes, when she finally acknowledged my existence, were filled with humor, her thin smile impish. Adele liked what she saw in the mirror, a guilt-free result that could only have come about through medical necessity.
‘Do you think,’ Adele asked as she cut through a stuffed grape leaf with the edge of her fork, ‘that Kelly will make a credible witness?’
‘Assuming I come up with somebody for him to ID, I think he will.’ Though Kelly had examined more than a thousand mug shots at the precinct, he’d failed to make even a tentative identification. ‘Especially if some defense lawyer is stupid enough to ask him why he didn’t report what he saw right away.’
We were analysing the case, our discussion continuing through dinner and while we did the few dishes. I wasn’t dealing, we agreed, with a street criminal who acted on impulse, as street criminals so often do. The effort to prepare the victim for disposal had been thorough and systematic. Nevertheless, there were flies in this ointment. The head wound, for example; blunt force trauma is usually inflicted in a moment of passion. And the pink lividity was another problem. If she’d inhaled enough carbon monoxide or cyanide to alter her blood chemistry, why crack her skull?
But the practical benefits of discussing the case with my former partner were beside the point. Nine months before, Adele had been my partner, working the case that put me on the outs with my peers. She’d taken a terrible beating, had come from an emergency ward to confront the man who’d beaten her. Detective Linus Potter had looked directly into Adele’s eyes, then surrendered peacefully, knowing that if he resisted, she would kill him.
Now Adele toiled as an investigator for the Queens District Attorney, Kenneth Alessio, and she was bored out of her mind. Mostly, her work consisted of re-interviewing witnesses who’d been carefully prepped by the detectives who’d uncovered them in the first place. Either that or making sure those same witnesses arrived in court on time and sober.
Though she was too proud to say so, Adele missed the streets. I understood this because, to a certain extent, I missed them as well. Literally the odd man out on a squad that was a detective short of full strength, I passed most of my working days without a partner, responding to burglary complaints, or comforting seniors who’d had their purses snatched.
But now I had a mystery on my hands, for the first time in almost a year, and Adele had always been drawn to mysteries. If she wanted to experience this one through my eyes, I wasn’t about to deny her. As for me, I was cheered by her interest. For some weeks, I’d felt Adele drifting away from me. Not toward some third party, I didn’t fear infidelity. No, Adele had a capacity for solitude, not to mention isolation, and now she seemed to be folding into herself. Only occasionally was I able to draw her out and only for brief periods. Worse still, there didn’t seem to be any reason for her withdrawal.
As for myself, I was in love with Adele Bentibi and my fear of losing her was compounded by the simple fact that there was nothing of Adele’s in the apartment we shared, not a stick of furniture, not a single picture on the walls, not even a knick-knack. She could be out of my life in the time it took to pack her clothes.
‘The taking of the victim’s organs, Corbin. You suggested three possibilities: that she was a drug mule; that her organs were harvested for sale; that she was the victim of a sadistic killer. Well, I can think of a fourth possibility.’
‘Which is?’
‘Which is that she was pregnant and her fetus was removed to prevent a DNA test for paternity.’
On that happy note, we retreated to our shared office in the apartment’s second bedroom. A few years before, in a moment of foolishness, I’d invested a week’s salary in a digital camera, a scanner and an ink jet printer. The camera went into permanent storage on a shelf in my closet after a photography class revealed that I was without artistic ability. But the other part of it, all those little tricks a computer can do with an image, continued to attract me. Not that I’m an expert, though I’ve spent many hundreds of hours working in Photoshop. But I’m not a hack, either.
I began my work by scanning the best of the photos I’d taken of the victim’s face into the computer. I used a filter called Unsharp Mask, which — despite the misnomer — sharpened the Polaroid photograph considerably. Still, the image that popped up on the monitor was marred by decay, by abrasions on the chin and the nose, and by a discharge of purge fluid that stained the mouth and chin.
Starting with the abrasions and the purge fluid, I patiently transferred skin tone from the victim’s cheeks to the affected areas until her chin and lips were virtually unmarred. Then I transferred copies of her eye sockets, nose
