But now they had a name, and the Collector could begin his work.
Most smokers have an impaired sense of smell, as smoking damages the olfactory nerves in the back of the nose as well as the taste receptors in the mouth located on the tongue, the soft palate, the upper esophagus, and the epiglottis. The taste buds on the tongue sit on raised protrusions called papillae. Examined in a microscope, they resemble fungi and plants in some exotic garden.
The Collector had noticed some diminution in his capacity to taste in recent years, although since he ate sparingly and unostentatiously he regarded it as only a minor irritant. The ongoing damage to his ability to smell he found more troubling, but as he wandered through the wreckage of Barbara Kelly’s home, taking in the damage caused by fire and smoke and water, he was pleased to be able to discern among the conflicting odors the unmistakable porcine stink of roasted human flesh.
He stood in the ruins of the kitchen and lit a cigarette. He was not worried about being seen. The police were no longer concerned with personally securing the scene, contenting themselves with signs and tape to keep away the curious, and the house was sheltered by trees from its neighbors and the road. He twisted the head of his flashlight and commenced a slow and careful examination of each room, starting and ending with the kitchen, his worn but comfortable shoes splashing through puddles of dirty water. His fingers searched dresses and jackets stinking of smoke, underwear and stockings that would eventually be destroyed, towels and medicines and old magazines, all the detritus of a lost life. He found nothing of interest, but then he had expected as much. Still, one never knew.
He went outside. The woman’s car had been found fifty miles from her house, burned out. A second vehicle, a red SUV, was discovered closer to the house, also burned out, and with its plates missing. The chassis number revealed that it had been stolen from Newport two days earlier. Curious. It suggested that Barbara Kelly’s killer had arrived in one car and departed in another, perhaps because the first vehicle had broken down.
No signs of forced access, so she had invited her killer in. That suggested it might have been someone known to her. On the other hand, she must have been aware that by sending out the list she was taking a considerable chance. These were not ordinary individuals for whom she worked, and they were very, very careful. They were particularly adept at sniffing out betrayal. She would have been wary of any approaches, whether from strangers or known associates. The background check on Kelly had revealed her sexual orientation. Women in fear tended to be less wary of other women, a small psychological chink in their armor that Kelly’s lesbianism might have further compounded.
A woman, then? Perhaps. But then the situation had changed. At some point, Kelly had made a break for her car, but was pulled back inside. No,
He returned to the kitchen. The flames had scoured it of blood, but this was where she was tortured and left to die. The oven and range were electric. A pity: gas would have been so much more effective. Instead, her killer had been forced to use the contents of the liquor cabinet to start the fire. Messy. Amateurish. Whoever was responsible had planned for a different outcome.
The kitchen was surprisingly neat, especially given the damage to the rest of the house. The surfaces were marble, the cabinets polished steel, and all of the kitchen utensils appeared to have been hidden away behind their doors. He reconstructed it in his head, seeing it as it was while its owner was still alive: pristine, sterile, with nothing out of place; apt surroundings for a woman who had hidden so much about herself.
He squatted beside the sink. The coffee pot lay on its side, its glass blackened but unbroken, although the plastic on the rim had become fused to the kitchen tiles. Could the firemen have knocked it over? Possibly, but the fact that it was stuck to the floor suggested otherwise. He looked around. The larger knives were kept on a magnetized board by the oven, directly above the silverware drawer. No reason to be over there, unless you were preparing food.
How did you run? How did you escape, even temporarily? The Collector closed his eyes. He had a good imagination, but more importantly he had a finely honed understanding of the relationship between predator and prey in any range of given situations.
You couldn’t go for the knives: that would have been too obvious unless you were cooking, and there was no indication that this was the case. So what do you do? What would be normal behavior, even as your suspicions were perhaps becoming aroused?
You would offer a drink. It was cold and wet on the night that you died. You could have suggested liquor – brandy or whisky – but you would have wanted to stay alert, and liquor would have dulled your responses. The one who was planning to hurt you might have declined for the same reason. Something hot, then: in this case, coffee.
You go to the kitchen. Maybe you’re not yet worried – but, no, you probably are. You’ve made a mistake allowing a potential threat into your home, but you haven’t revealed your fear. You’re tamping it down because as soon as it’s sensed, action will be taken against you. You have to act normal until an opportunity presents itself to strike and defend yourself.
You make that opportunity.
Let’s say that you threw the contents of the coffee pot, and you must have hit your target because you bought yourself enough time to get to your car, but not enough to escape. Scalding coffee, probably to the face. Painful. Incapacitating. But you still didn’t manage to get away. Not just one attacker, then, but two or more. No, just two: if there were three, you would never have made it so far.
Eldritch & Associates had obtained a copy of the medical examiner’s report on Barbara Kelly. It revealed, in addition to the various cuts on her body, a wound to her cheek that appeared to be the result of a bite. Human flesh was a notoriously undependable substance for the recording of bite marks. The reliability of the bite mark record could be affected by the status of the tissue under analysis, the time elapsed between the bite and the creation of an impression, the condition of the skin damaged by the bite pressure and the reaction of the surrounding tissue to it, the size of the wound, and the clearness of the marks. The fact that Kelly’s face had been badly scorched by heat caused further difficulties, and meant that there was no possibility of obtaining DNA samples from saliva, or even of making a reasonable comparison based on dental analysis should a suspect be found. What was interesting, though, was the fact that the bite radius was comparatively small, with the first premolars and second premolars absent from both the upper and lower jaws.
Barbara Kelly, it seemed, had been bitten by a child shortly before she died.
The likelihood of a woman being present increased. Yes, it was possible that Kelly might have admitted a man with a young child, but why not take the next logical step and disarm her entirely with a woman and a child?
Why would a child bite a woman?
Because you threatened, or actively hurt, its mother.
That was how you got away, thought the Collector. You used something in the kitchen, in all likelihood the coffee pot, to attack the mother, then ran. It was the child that came after you, distracting you for long enough to allow the woman to recover and drag you back inside. Well done. You must have come close to surviving.
The Collector thought that he might have been quite interested to meet Barbara Kelly. Of course, his interest would have been both personal and professional. If, as he believed, she was responsible for the corruption of so many souls, then he would have been forced to take a blade to her, but he admired her for the battle that she had put up at the end of her life. He knew many people labored under the illusion that they would fight to stay alive under such circumstances, but he had ended too many lives himself to believe that such responses were not the rule, but the exception. Most went to their deaths without a struggle, frozen by shock and incomprehension.
He wondered what she had told them at the end. That was the other thing: nobody resisted torture. Everybody broke. It was nothing to be ashamed of. The difficulty for the torturer lay in figuring out the truth of what one was being told. Scourge a man for long enough, and if you ask him to tell you that the sky is pink and the moon is purple, that day is night and night is day, he will swear to it on the lives of his wife and children. The trick in the early stages was to cause just enough pain, and to ask questions to which the answers were already known, or were easily verifiable. Every study required a baseline.
So what did she have to tell? Well, she had promised in her letter that there were more names to be given, and she had more information to provide, but the kind of people who would inflict that level of pain on another human being and then leave her to burn were hardly on the side of the angels and were therefore unlikely to be sufficiently interested in the identities of those like themselves to kill for them. No, they would be more interested in
