cold bitch.” He pressed his fingertips against her shoulder blades, propelling her forward. “Here is William Warren.” He came after her, like a hunter with the fox in his sights. “You knew him, oh, yeah, you did.” His laugh was like the braying of a mule. “You and he did what together behind that big old tree?”
TWO
COMMANDER FELLOWS took a deep breath, let it out slowly. “It’s a beautiful night.” He cocked his head. “That’s a nightingale singing, very peaceful, very romantic.” He turned to her. “This is the spot, isn’t it?”
“What spot?”
The detective’s voice grew quills. “You know what spot, Ms. Carson. This is the trysting spot where you and the victim—”
“William,” Alli said. “He has a name.”
Commander Fellows appeared to have difficulty pulling himself together. He cleared his throat, but said nothing.
Alli was studying the ground at her feet. “Won’t someone have the decency to at least cover him up?”
“This is a crime scene,” one of the Metro detectives said in a weary voice. “Premeditated murder. A
“The ME isn’t here yet,” said Flatfoot. “Nothing gets touched until he’s done his thing.”
Alli could see the lie on his bulldog face as surely as if it were a new scar livid on his cheek. More likely the ME had been ordered to hold off until they could get her here to see the atrocity in all its grisly panoply. Why? Ordered by whom? She racked her brains for answers, but the buzzing inside her head, caused by the pulsing of adrenaline, kept her from thinking clearly.
In the end, she turned to Naomi. “You know me, tell them I couldn’t have committed such a horrible crime.”
Naomi’s partner, a square man with a mole on his chin, said, “We aren’t authorized to get involved.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I was assigned to the FLOTUS and to Alli,” Naomi said. “I have a personal stake in the matter.”
Fellows cleared his throat. “Ms. Carson, I want you to know that I think highly of you—very highly, despite your … despite the traumatic experiences of your … your recent past.”
Fellows was gripping his hands in a link-fingered ball, flexing the fingers back and forth in a rhythm that reminded Alli of crazy Captain Queeq and his stainless steel balls.
“We’ve had a hotly contested internal debate regarding your, er, psychological break. A number of prominent board members feel strongly that the pressures you have been subjected to are a cause for concern and, I must admit, review.”
“What?” Alli said. “I’m acing all my courses. Ask any instructor.”
“And then there’s the matter of your, uhm, diminutive size.”
“And yet these Metro yardbirds seem to think this little slip of a thing could kill a big, strong, healthy man and string him up upside down between two trees.”
The first detective, clearly of higher rank than Flatfoot, stepped into the circle. He had prematurely white hair, stooped shoulders, and a bad case of razor burn. His name was Willowicz and his partner was O’Banion. He beckoned her to follow him as he went around the body to the back. There, he switched on a flashlight, illuminating a kind of scaffold, roughly made of tree branches lashed together with twine, onto which Billy’s body had been strung. A rope, invisible from the front, was tied to the top of the scaffold. It rose straight up into the tree, where it had been looped around a thick branch. The other end hung down.
Willowicz took hold of the free end of the rope with a hand encased in a latex glove, and tugged. “You see how this works, Ms. Carson. The victim was attacked, his body was affixed to the scaffold as it lay on the ground. Clearly, the killer had prepared ahead of time. Looping the rope over the branch created a fulcrum which made it possible to hoist the corpse into the vertical position it’s in now.” He paused, a small smile creeping into his face. “Anyone could do it, I assure you, even you.”
“But then you already knew that,” O’Banion said.
“You’re grotesque,” Alli said, “you know that?”
His laugh was as grating as nails on a chalkboard.
Willowicz led her back around to the front. “As you can see, the victim has been stabbed, not once or twice, or even a half-dozen times, but repeatedly, beyond…” He turned back to her. “A preliminary count has taken us past fifty. I’m quite certain there are more.”
“That’s why he bled to death?”
“No.” Willowicz pointed. “The vast majority of the cuts are superficial, barely scoring the subcutaneous layers. But they were all near nerve ganglia.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Alli said, “You’re saying that Billy was tortured.”
She did not miss the sharp glance exchanged by the detective and Commander Fellows.
“Do you think he was tortured, Ms. Carson?” Willowicz said.
“Well, the evidence points to it, doesn’t it.” She paused, her terror, horror, and grief once again threatening to overwhelm her. At once, she was cast back into the nightmare of her weeklong imprisonment. Then she took a mental step back, as Jack had taught her to do, disengaging herself from the intimacy of emotions. It was imperative now for her to think clearly and reason the situation out, which she was unable to do when overcome with emotion. Billy was dead, she had to accept that. All death is terrible, but this was beyond comprehension. Why would anyone torture Billy, and then attempt to frame her? “However, that theory leaves one question unanswered.”
Willowicz put his hands behind his back. “And what might that be?”
“I don’t know,” Peter McKinsey, Naomi Wilde’s partner, said. “You seem awfully cool for someone whose lover of five months has been brutalized and killed.”
“If you’ve got nothing constructive to contribute, fuck off,” Alli said. Addressing Willowicz, she said, “You said he bled to death. None of these subcutaneous cuts, even en masse, would have done the trick.”
Again, that sharp look was exchanged by Willowicz and Fellows.
“So how did poor Billy die?” Alli said.
Willowicz beckoned with a crooked forefinger. Something about his demeanor reminded Alli of a Grimm’s fairy tale witch or ogre, anyway someone delighted to be up to no good. “Come closer.”
She walked over the uneven ground. The crunch of even her light weight pierced the paper-thin layer of ice, and with each step she seemed to sink farther into the boggy ground beneath.
A sickly smell enveloped Billy, of rotten meat, ice cream, and fecal matter. She gagged once, and then, because everyone’s attention was on her, caught hold of herself and fought down her rising gorge. Billy’s eyes were so swollen and bruised she had first thought they were covered in flies. Deep contusions showed around the spiderweb of cuts like dark clouds gathering around the heart of a storm. His face was so distorted that, close up, she scarcely recognized him. There could be only one reason why he had been slowly and systematically taken apart.
“What did he know?”
“Well, that’s certainly one way to look at it,” O’Banion said. “The other is that there was a single killer. A crime of passion.”
“You’re still at this angle,” Alli said.
“We go by the odds,” said Willowicz. “In these cases, the person closest to the vic is the perpetrator.”
“Not this time.”
Both detectives regarded her stonily.
Naomi Wilde, never far from her since she had stumbled, said, “We thought you might be able to shed some light on what happened here.”
Alli said nothing, but delivered an Et tu, Brutus glower. Then, she turned to the corpse and looked into Billy’s face, trying to stare past the terrible beating he had sustained, into the mind of the boy she had known, briefly but wildly. Even before she had been traumatized by her kidnapping and brainwashing two years ago, she had had difficulty with intimacy. She was embarrassed and ashamed of her body, which was small and immature. Now,
