The little girl’s mother was far too satisfying a target.
Lydia del Blanco is twenty-seven years old, an unlicensed hairdresser of moderate skill, a folk singer of unexplored talent, a slender young woman with clear amber eyes. But today her eyes are a muddied rust; her skin, a rough topography of distended, yellowing welts. Anthony del Blanco had taken a belt to her, one of his favorite weapons of intimidation.
To Lydia’s left sits her four-year-old daughter Fina, a slight, dark-haired bundle of worry who seems, for the moment at least, to have abandoned her circuitous route around the waiting room, her sobbing and her flopping- around in oversized blue rubber galoshes. Since she had been a toddler, Lydia had not been able to fool her daughter about the beatings, although they had come in decreasing frequency since Anthony had left the trailer and moved in with one of his never-ending parade of whores.
But Fina knows who her father is, and what he sometimes does to her mother. Still, she is far too young to hate him. She just wants the yelling to stop and her mom to be happy.
And so she cries…
When her name is called, Lydia rises slowly to her feet and approaches the frosted glass window. Amid the usual details, the usual lies, she tells the woman that her ex-husband is dead; which, in Lydia’s mind and heart, he is. But it is Anthony del Blanco’s violent act of rape eight months earlier that gave seed to this formerly restless child in her womb, this child Lydia del Blanco had alternately hated and loved, this child who had not kicked her for more than three hours.
As Lydia is helped to a wheelchair, her daughter begins to cry again, her tears now thin, meandering streams down her cheeks. She dutifully walks alongside her mother’s chair until they reach Examining Room One. Then, without tantrum, her utter exhaustion preventing such a display, she stops as they lift her mother onto a gurney and wheel her away.
A pleasant young candy striper named Constance Aguillar takes Fina’s hand and leads her over to the vending machines, where she buys her a Snickers and a Coke.
But before the little girl can take a single bite, she crawls onto one of the padded chairs and, within moments, falls fast asleep.
At the stroke of midnight, the moment when just about everyone living in the eastern standard time zone of the United States is popping champagne corks in celebration; the moment when Anthony del Blanco is taking carnal pleasure with a prostitute named Vickie Pomeroy in Room 511 of the TraveLodge on Cannon Road; the moment when four-year-old Fina is asleep and dreaming of a place where her father doesn’t raise his voice or his hand, Lydia screams in agony, just once, a long, solitary call of admonition to all those who would harm her or her family in the future.
And Lydia del Blanco has a baby boy. A healthy, seven-pound-five-ounce boy born of a brand new day, a brand new year.
A boy, Anthony del Blanco would one day discover, born of violence.
15
The dead woman’s name was Fayette Martin.
At the time of her murder she was thirty years old, never married, no children. A graduate of Mayfield High School on Cleveland’s far east side, a real computer buff when she wasn’t raising prize-winning orchids in her spare time; this according to a phone interview Paris had conducted with her brother, Edgar, a resident of Milwaukee, her only living relative.
She had been identified through the Department of Motor Vehicles. Her late-model red Chevy had been parked a few blocks from the Reginald Building, where her body was found. Prints taken at the scene matched prints found in the car, and the ID was made. She had worked at a florist shop in suburban Chesterland for the past twelve years.
The official cause of her demise would be recorded as “blood loss due to severe head trauma,” but that would tell only part of the story. What really happened to Fayette Martin was that someone took a very large, very sharp knife-a machete, perhaps, or a hefty steel saber-and sliced off the top of her head. One clean blow. The coroner found no serration on the woman’s skull, no evidence of sawing. And there is a good chance that the woman was engaged in intercourse at some point either before or during the bloody event, but not after. Reuben says during, but has decided to keep that opinion unofficial for the time being.
Paris finds small solace in the fact that, on top of all this, they are not chasing a necrophiliac.
Generally, when there is evidence connecting the methodology, if not the motive, of two murders, there is some similarity in the victims: college girls, prostitutes, insurance salesmen. But this time, the two deceased could not be more disparate:
A dead black man found in a room at the Dream-A-Dream, robbed and castrated.
A dead white woman found in the Reginald Building on East Fortieth Street, the top of her head lopped off, her brain removed from the scene.
What makes them kin, in death, is that both victims had a strange symbol of a bow and arrow carved somewhere on their bodies. A symbol as yet unidentified.
As of two days before Christmas, the official position of the Cleveland Police department is that these killings are not related.
Three photographs are taped to the chalkboard in the common room on the sixth floor of the Justice Center. Around the trash and file-strewn conference table sit three police officers: Detective Jack Paris, Detective Greg Ebersole, and Sergeant Carla Davis of the Sex Crimes Unit.
Carla Davis is black, thirty-five, a stunning six-one, with broad shoulders and dark green eyes flecked with gold. Even if she wasn’t married, most of the guys in the department would be far too intimidated by Carla to have the guts to make a move on her. She looks like a big sexy forward in the WNBA, a woman who took no shit when she worked vice-where she was the undisputed queen of the prostitution sting-and takes even less now as second in command of the Sex Crimes Unit.
The past twenty-four hours have yielded a forming of this task force, as well as a shifting of assignments.
All police officers believe that there is something special about being the very first investigator to physically step into a crime scene. The smells, the sounds, the very feel of the air, the position of the body, the possibility that, in many cases, the last person to have stepped out of the room is the killer.
And while it is true that, if another detective takes over the investigation, and ninety-nine percent of the evidence is conveyed through witness reports and affidavits and photographs and videotaped interviews, there is still that one percent held dear by detectives everywhere, and having a case yanked is never pleasant.
Although, this time, Paris is clearly getting the better deal, if there is a better deal to be had here. He wasn’t anxious to poke around in Willis Walker’s life, any more than he was anxious to poke around the man’s pants.
The trade is not lost on Greg Ebersole. Or his demeanor. Greg’s vast array of drug connections were working against him. He’d take over the Walker investigation for the time being. Paris got Fayette Martin. Carla Davis will liaison with Sex Crimes.
At eight-fifty, Captain Elliott enters the room and the task force meeting begins.
Paris at the chalkboard, notebook in hand. “We have a dead male black, one Willis James Walker, forty-eight, a resident of East Boulevard. Mr. Walker’s body was found in Room 116 of the Dream-A-Dream Motel on East Seventy-ninth Street and St. Clair Avenue. The coroner’s office says Mr. Walker was struck on the back of the head by a heavy, flat object, but that is not what killed him. Nor did the large quantity of Rohypnol and alcohol in his system. The cause of death has been ruled to be loss of blood resulting from the removal of Mr. Walker’s penis and testicles, none of which were recovered at the scene.
“What was found was an unlicensed twenty-five-caliber semi auto, discharged twice. Both slugs were recovered. There is no evidence that anything human was struck.
“We also have one female white DOA, a woman named Fayette Martin, thirty, formerly residing in the Marsol Towers in Mayfield Heights. Ms. Martin’s body was discovered in an abandoned building at the corner of East Fortieth and Central. The coroner believes Ms. Martin was partially beheaded by a large knife or machete-type
