Fifty-Nine
The detectives spent the afternoon examining the photographs that Betsy Young had received that morning. Every detail of these new shots matched up to all the previous ones. Five portfolios of brutally graphic images of five men who had been defiled and killed.
How?
That remained a mystery.
Why?
They didn’t have a single clue. In fact, the list of the unknowns was one hundred times longer than the list of things they knew.
Louis Fenester was, like the others, laid out on a hospital gurney. The light source hit him evenly so that there were few harsh shadows, but that did nothing to soften the hard edges of the man’s angular physique.
He had been thin enough to start with-his girlfriend had delivered photographs of him eight days ago when he hadn’t come home after going to the gym. Now his ribs were protruding, his cheekbones arched over deep hollows in his face. He looked as if an overeager sculptor had gouged out too much of the marble with his chisel. Fenester no longer looked human; he could have been a stone effigy on top of a sarcophagus. His skin was like white marble, without the luminosity.
Around the man’s wrists and ankles were the same rings of green-and-blue-and-purple bruises that all the men had exhibited.
Like the four others before him, plus Paul Lessor, Fenester had the identifying tattoo on his right foot. But what did that mean? Lessor had steadfastly refused to tell them anything about the mark.
Fenester lay in what seemed to be the same room with the same dull gray backdrop behind him that had been in all the other shots. Nothing revealed the nature of the chamber of horrors beyond that sweep of even, toneless color.
The pallor of death had overtaken Fenester’s body so that although it was a color photograph, there was none in the man’s skin. The only vividness in the shot were the number 5s on the man’s feet. Bright red. The same hue as the leaves that were decorating the park and the city streets that time of year. What did Young call the color in all her articles?
Jordain tried to remember.
She never just said red, she was more specific.
Yes, scarlet.
When Officer Butler came in, both detectives looked up. She had a satisfied smile on her face. After the deep disappointment of the day’s events-of having to release Lessor, of knowing that Young wasn’t looking like a suspect, either, of having to inform Fenester’s girlfriend and family of his grisly murder, of dealing with the fury of their boss that they were back to square one-Butler’s expression buoyed them.
“You have something?” Jordain asked. “What is it?”
She nodded as she approached the table, littered with photographs of the dead man, and put down a computer printout that had squiggles of blue ink all over it.
“We got Fenester’s phone book keyed into our ever-growing database and we have one number that is showing up in all six.”
“The restaurant?”
She nodded. “It’s called S’s in one. Shel’s in one. It’s in Lessor’s phone book but he had it listed in the P’s and identified as ‘Pete’s friend’s place.’ Now, in Fenester’s PDA, it’s listed under S. No notation. Just the number.”
“So you checked it out?” Jordain asked, leaning forward, fingers frozen on the desk, body rigid, waiting.
“It’s a cell phone. Listed to Pine Realty. We’re working on getting the billing information.”
“Give me the number.”
Jordain punched the speaker button on his phone and dialed.
The three of them listened to the hollow sound of the phone ringing twice and then they heard a click. Butler’s sharp intake of breath was audible in the split second between the phone being picked up and the announcement starting.
“There’s no one here right now, but please leave your name and number and someone will get right back to you. Appointments and schedules of events can also be found online.”
Jordain hit the button to end the call.
“Appointments I can understand from a realty company. But events? What kind of events?” Perez asked.
“Open houses for other real estate agents?” Butler offered.
“Neither of you actually think that is a real estate office, do you?” Jordain asked.
“How long will it take to get the name and address of whoever pays the bills?” Perez asked Butler.
“About an hour. If we are lucky.”
“Well, let’s not bet on that. We haven’t been lucky so far. Not with one damn thing,” Jordain complained. “We have had five corpses, no idea of where they are hidden, a man with a mental disorder whose glee at the killings makes my blood run cold and who refuses to help us with one piece of information. Oh, I almost forgot, we have a red tattoo that links everybody up to one another.” Jordain got up, walked to the window and opened it. He leaned out, pressing the palms of his hands into the rough surface of the brick sill.
Horns honked, people shouted, cars roared by. The afternoon traffic was at its peak. Even though the air was tainted with the city smells, it was fresher than what was inside the office. He breathed in. Deeply. The end of October was usually colder than this. Or was it just that the air wasn’t even close to being cold as compared to the case?
Ice.
He was not used to coming up short. But he couldn’t think of a single case he’d ever worked on without a body or a crime scene. That was where leads came from. The body and the place the body was found.
Once you dealt with the concept that the victim was a man or woman who had a job, a family, a spouse, sibling or child who would be bereft, whose life would from this day forward never be the same, once you swallowed hard a few times-even though you’d been through this so many times you should be inured to it-you dealt with the clues. The hair and fibers. The skin trapped under the fingernails. The weapon. The blood on the floor. Or the sheets. The bullet casings. The contents of the victim’s stomach. The note in his pocket. The torn picture in her purse.
You could get somewhere with just one find. And you had a hundred places to make it.
But this insanity? Photographs and hair in sanitized plastic bags that mothers slipped sandwiches in, that were sold in every damn supermarket in the whole United States? Manila envelopes that couldn’t be traced because every office supply store in the damn country sold them?
“Hey, look at this,” Butler said, interrupting Jordain ’s thoughts. She was leaning over and examining one of the shots of Fenester’s midsection that had been enlarged.
“What is it?”
“He’s got some kind of shadow on the underside of his left thigh. Or is it a shadow? Whatever it is-this is something I haven’t seen before.”
Jordain went back to the table, bent over her shoulder and looked down at what she was pointing to.
It didn’t look like anything in any of the other shots. One deviation from the exactness, but, just to make sure, he picked it up and carried it the length of the photo-papered room, holding it up and comparing it to the other shots taken from the same angle.
To him, the collage of death-scene shots didn’t look macabre-he was used to it. But to anyone who might have walked in who wasn’t with the department, the wall would be something they would never forget. There were hundreds of photos of male body parts. The same section in a dozen different magnifications. Some recognizable, others enlarged to the point of abstraction.
“No, nothing like this on any of the other men’s legs.”
Returning to Butler, he put the photograph down and pointed at the oblong irregular pattern she’d noticed.
“I don’t think it looks like a bruise. But it sure does look strange. What’s wrong with it? What is that splotch?”
Jordain picked up two other shots at random, turned them over, and used the blank white paper to create a frame around the area so that there was nothing distracting them from it.