Green Magician. Part clown, part conjuror. And you heard that rat-person say “may go wordy”, right? “May go wordy” — that could be “Mago Verde”.’
‘Hey,’ said Netta. She was impressed. ‘That’s exactly what it sounded like, Mago Verde.’
Charlie said, ‘“Prennay guard”, you’re right, that’s French — “
‘How about “coop sign pianos”? What does that mean? And “gang up you start”?’
‘I don’t have a clue,’ Charlie admitted. ‘But give me some time, and I’ll work on it.’
Netta said, ‘Guess you think I’m losin’ my reason. It’s the stress, probably. My brother Kyle lost his job at the Brook Park engine factory last September and he and me have been strugglin’ to make ends meet ever since.’
Walter took hold of Netta’s piggy little hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘You’re probably right. Maybe you should talk to your pharmacist — ask him for something to help you sleep more heavy.’
When Netta went off to refill Walter’s soda glass, Walter leaned across the table and said, ‘How about that? Netta’s been having the same goddamned nightmares as Maria Fortales. The same — in every detail. How in hell’s name can
Charlie pulled a face. ‘It’s not totally unknown for strangers to share the same dream. Some psychologists think that dreams are like an alternate state of reality, rather than an alternate state of consciousness.’
‘Meaning exactly what, exactly?’
‘You know, like that Second Life thing you can do on the Internet — turning yourself into a sexy-looking avatar and leading a double life in some tropical fantasy world. And Carl Jung believed that the entire human race shares a collective unconscious.’
‘Oh, yeah? Carl Jung must have gone to see that last Mel Gibson movie. The whole audience was collectively unconscious, including me.’
Netta brought them their food. Walter immediately picked up his triple cheeseburger in both hands and took a large bite; but Charlie said, ‘Were you ever scared of clowns, Netta, when you were a kid?’
Netta shook her head. ‘Clowns? No, never. I
‘You never had a scary experience at a circus, or a carnival?’
‘I was sick as a dog once on the Tivoli Spin-out Ride at the Ohio State Fair. But then so was most everybody else. But I don’t know. Maybe somethin’ bad happened to me when I was a kid and I got some kind of horrible memory that’s just comin’ out only now.’
Walter flapped his hand at Charlie and said, with his mouth full, ‘Eat.’ At that moment, however, his cellphone rang. He picked it up and said, ‘What? I’m on my lunch break.’
But he listened, and then he said, ‘Where?’ and at the same time he slowly lowered his triple cheeseburger back on to his plate.
‘Something wrong?’ asked Charlie.
Walter nodded. ‘That was Skrolnik. He had a call from the School of Law where Maria Fortales was studying. There was blood dripping out from the bottom of her locker.’
‘Jesus. Did they open it?’
‘Of course. They thought that she might be locked up inside of it, and still alive.’
‘But she’s not?’
Walter turned to Netta and said, ‘Hey, sweet cheeks, the call of duty calls. Could you put this burger into a box for me, so that I can take it out?’
He waited until she had taken his plate back to the kitchen before he turned to Charlie and said, ‘They found her arms, that’s all.’
‘Only her arms?’ Charlie looked down at his hotdog and pushed his plate away.
‘Maybe that was the sawing noise that old man Yarber said he could hear.’
‘But there was no blood. How do you saw off a girl’s arms without spraying a whole lot of blood around?’
‘Search me, Charlie. Let’s go take a look for ourselves.’
It was raining even harder by the time they turned into the parking lot outside the George Gund Building, where the School of Law was housed. An ambulance was parked there already, its red lights flashing, as well as two squad cars and a black Grand Voyager from the Cuyahoga County coroner’s office.
Officer Skrolnik was waiting for them underneath the slabby concrete entrance.
‘Sorry about your lunch, detectives,’ he said, although he didn’t look sorry at all, only tired.
‘When did you get the call?’ asked Walter.
‘Only about forty-five minutes ago. One of Maria’s friends was trying to slip a note into her locker when she noticed that there was blood seeping out of the bottom of the door. She went to find the co-director. The co- director called nine-one-one and then she had the janitor cut off the padlock.’
‘OK. Lead on, MacSkrolnik.’
Officer Skrolnik ushered them into the shiny marble lobby area, which was arranged with pale turned-oak sculptures that looked like gigantic doorknobs and chess pieces. Then he led them along the corridor where the students’ gray steel lockers were lined up.
One of the locker doors was wide open, and bent almost double, and three police officers and two CSIs were gathered around it, as well as a paramedic and a bored-looking deputy coroner. Walter and Charlie joined them, with a few desultory ‘hi’s’ and ‘how’s it going’s?’ One of the CSIs was taking pictures, so that whenever his camera flashed, everybody appeared to jump two inches in the air.
Walter went up to the locker and looked inside. ‘Ah, shit,’ he said. ‘I had a feeling this was going to turn out bad.’
In the locker’s top compartment, two human arms were folded over each other, almost as if they had been patiently waiting for somebody to open the locker door and find them. Above the elbows, both arms were heavily smeared and spattered with congealing blood. Below the elbows, they were dusky-skinned, with sprinkles of tiny moles on them.
‘Would you look at that?’ said Charlie. ‘He didn’t even bother to take off her jewelry.’
Twisted around the left wrist was a silver Mexican bracelet with red-and-green flowers enameled on it; and on the third finger of the left hand there was a latticework silver ring. On the third finger of the right hand there was a ring with a single topaz in it. The nails of the right index finger and the right middle finger were both bitten right down, almost to the quick.
‘Look here,’ Walter told him. ‘More clowns.’
Scotch-taped to the back of the bent locker door there were dozens of photographs of Pierrots and augustes and saltimbanques, including three nearly-identical pictures of Mago Verde. There were a few other pictures, too — Emilio Zapata and Carlos Santana and Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico — but most of the pictures were of clowns.
One of the CSIs came rustling up to them in her blue Tyvek suit, a fortyish woman with a sallow face and unplucked eyebrows and very pale blue eyes, as if all the death and mutilation that she had seen during the course of her career had leached most of the color out of them.
‘Both arms were sawn off approximately eight centimeters below the shoulder,’ she told them. ‘We’ll have to take them back to the lab, of course, but I’d say that the perpetrator used a regular garden-variety handsaw.’
‘Any way of telling if she was still alive when he took her arms off?’
‘From the copious bloodstains on the upper part of the arms, I’d say yes. But with any luck she may have been sedated.’
Walter looked around. ‘Find any blood trails?’
‘Unh-hunh. Not a drop outside of this locker.’
‘Are we sure that this is Maria Fortales?’
‘We’ll be taking prints, of course, and DNA. But Ms Lipschitz ID’d her jewelry.’
‘Ms Lipschitz?’
The CSI nodded her head toward the opposite side of the corridor. Officer Skrolnik was talking to a stocky woman with cropped gray hair and circular spectacles and a thick plaid skirt. When he saw Walter and Charlie looking their way, he beckoned them over.
‘This is the co-director, Naomi Lipschitz,’ he said. ‘Ms Lipschitz — this is Detective Wisocky and this is
