Abdul pulled a folder from a squeaky drawer. “Your vic bled to death.” He held the folder out for me to take, but I had coffee in my left! Put the coffee down first; take the folder with your left-that’ll look strange…quick snatch with my right? Take the folder.
Maggie took the folder. I’m off the hook.
I set my coffee down.
Maggie said, “What am I thinking? You should probably look at this first, Juno. I can look at it when you’re done.” She passed the file to me.
What just happened? She knew about my hand, and she was covering for me. That was what happened. She thought I was trying to hide my hand from Abdul, when it was her I was hiding it from; Abdul already knew. I wrenched my mind off the horror of Maggie knowing about my hand and forced my attention onto the horror of the crime.
Abdul said, “The throat wounds did the trick. He hardly lost any blood through the stab wounds. He was well on his way to dead by then. The recovered maggots were eighth generation since the wounds were opened. That puts the time of attack at twenty-two minutes after midnight. Time of death about two minutes after that.”
“How about the murder weapon?” I wanted to know.
“I won’t be able to help you much there. The perp used a regular butcher knife. We only have one company on Lagarto that makes them. The problem is they sell thousands of them every year. This one was definitely not new or recently sharpened. Even if you find the exact one the killer used, I won’t be able to give you a positive match with the wounds; the maggots did too much damage to the flesh around the openings. You better find prints on the handle and your lieutenant’s blood on the blade.”
“How about the perp?”
“Based on the incision angles on the throat, I can determine that your killer is right-handed. The killer was strong, almost certainly a male. He put the vic in a headlock and cut his throat. That means he’s tall. Now, Lieutenant Vlotsky was slightly shorter than average, so put the killer at above average height.”
“Do you think it could be the work of a first-time killer?”
“It’s possible, but I don’t think so. I can see a first-time killer sticking the body fourteen times…make sure he’s dead, maybe a fit of rage. What I can’t see is a first-time killer mutilating the face that way. He took his time cutting off the lips. He did some delicate cutting. That’s hard to do with a butcher knife. Even with a lase-blade, it would’ve taken a steady hand. I really don’t think a first-time killer is going to have that kind of patience. He’d be too worked up. I think this guy had practice.”
An image flashed in my head of six dead POWs, lying in the jungle with lipless smiles.
Maggie decided to push the point. “What if he used a butcher knife for the stabbings then used a scalpel for the face?”
“Nope. He used the butcher knife on the face. I found small pieces of the vic’s liver in the face wounds. He used the same knife for everything. Any ideas on why he took the lips?”
Maggie answered, “I’ve been thinking a lot about that, but everything I come up with sounds harebrained.”
“Like what?” asked Abdul.
“The killer is clearly fixated on the lips, and lips are for kissing, right? Maybe his mother never kissed him, and this is some twisted reaction to that. Or it could be that he was seriously verbally abused as a child, and he takes the lips as a way to own his victim’s mouth. It’s a control thing. The lips are in his possession where they can’t hurt him anymore.”
Abdul nodded agreement. “Doesn’t sound harebrained at all, Maggie.”
I stayed out of this one. Since my conversation with Paul, I’d been operating on the theory that the lip cutting was just a ruse. Whoever killed Vlotsky just wanted it to look like a serial. “Can you give us anything else to go on, Abdul?”
“I’m afraid not. Your killer was careful…he must have been dressed head to toe. Lieutenant Vlotsky had to have been kicking and scratching, but there’s no skin under his nails. You might ask yourselves how the killer got home. He would have been covered in blood. Oh, and the Orbital returned the results on the porn mag fingerprints. They also returned DNA results from some…ah…stains on the page. No matches in the system. Looks like he doesn’t have a record.”
“Actually, Abdul, the magazine isn’t the killer’s. It belongs to a potential witness.”
“You have a witness?”
“ Potential witness, and since there’s no matches in the system, we don’t even have that.”
Abdul sighed. “That’s all I have for you, Juno. How’s your arm?”
Maggie turned to look at me. She definitely knew.
I said, “It’s okay, Abdul. Just a little stiff.”
Abdul confided to Maggie. “He took a nasty spill a while back and broke his arm. I fixed it up for him.”
Maggie said, “Oh. How did that happen, Juno?” Her expression was pure devil.
I’d never broken my arm. All cops would go through tests every five years to prove you were fit for duty. When mine came up, I passed all the written tests but knew I would never make it through the marksmanship test since this hand started shaking a few years ago. I talked Abdul into putting a cast on it and fooled KOP into waiving the shooting portion. I wore that damn cast for weeks.
I could have gone to Paul. He would have fudged the shooting test for me, but I didn’t want him to know about my hand. I didn’t want him thinking his old enforcer was a weak old man. Now here was Maggie asking how I broke my arm. She’d seen my hand, and she was onto the charade. She was messing with me, wanting to see me squirm my way through this one.
I deadpanned, “I broke it backhanding a surly partner.”
Maggie restrained a smile.
I pulled up a chair for Maggie, and we sat at my desk. We decided to finish canvassing our list of johns from the Lotus. I was still hopeful one of them might have seen something in the alley. After an hour, we succeeded in cutting the original list of thirty-three down to just eight that we still hadn’t talked to. So far, nobody had seen a damn thing.
Maggie looked worn. “You hungry?”
It had been hours since the cafe in Loja. “Yeah…I buy, you fly?”
“Deal.”
I handed her some bills. She took them without pause, like my hand was a normal hand. I tuned into the way her fingers brushed mine. “I’ll get the drinks downstairs,” I said. Then I watched her go, jazzing to the wag of her hips. Now that she’d gone, the vice squad room felt graveyard quiet. Vice was always dead calm during the day-all the action was at night. I stood up. My neck ached from sitting too long. I left the office empty and headed downstairs to the newsstand to buy a couple bottles of soda.
I came back through the lobby. The water-stained ceiling flaked plaster to the floor. Musty flags hung like rags from poles by the door. I passed by Yuan Kim who was hanging with a young officer in uniform. “Hey, Juno. How’s that murder case going?”
I didn’t want to talk to this hump. “Slow,” I said.
He shoved his glasses up to the bridge of his nose. “Got any good leads?”
“Naw, you know how it is.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. Me and Josephs are hitting dead ends at every turn, too. It’s probably just as good that you took that Army case. We’ve got fucking MPs coming out our asses. Two new ones since the last time I saw you and that’s only been what-since yesterday.” MPs: missing persons.
I gave him the kind of uh-huh that said, “Stop talking to me because I don’t care.”
He rolled on, oblivious. “We just got back from Tenttown. There’s a fourteen-year-old girl that’s been missing for two weeks. It doesn’t take a genius to figure this one out. A fourteen-year-old girl from Tenttown, you know she’s a runaway. Only her mother is so grief stricken that she calls the police. When we ask her if her daughter was upset about anything before she disappeared, she said, ‘No, she’s a very happy child.’ I’m thinking, ‘Gimme a break. Nobody’s happy in Tenttown, especially a teenager;’ am I right? You know what kind of hole that place is.”