Blood of Angels Page 7

  'I see,' she said. Raynor's Wood curled around the north side of the town. A flat stream ran through the middle of it and much of the ground on either side was prone to bogginess, settling out into still pools above which clouds of midges hung. The body had been found half-in and half-out of one of these, a few yards to the side of an odd hump in the ground. A stand of bushes had obscured it from the path down by the stream, and Nina dutifully stood and observed this conjunction for a moment. 'Still—not a major attempt to hide the body.'

  'No. And this is a popular walk.' Reidel pointed up the rise to where the wood thinned. There was a small parking lot at the top. 'They don't actually call it "Lovers' Lane", but that's what it's for.'

  'Though it's actually not as nice as all that.'

  'It's a small town. I guess you work with what you've got.'

  'Still no sign of the guy's clothes? No blood?'

  'Nope.' The detective indicated around. 'It's a tough scene because of the leaves and twigs and general forest crapola, but I'm pretty sure it was undisturbed before our scene-of-crime techs got on it. The couple who found the body kept well clear.'

  'Forensics on the stab wounds in the chest and stomach indicate the victim was dressed at the time of death?'

  'Very likely. Fibre traces in several of them. Though there are two in the groin area which are notably clean. So maybe…'

  '…a sex act was under way when the attack started. Right.'

  Nina reached into the envelope under her arm and pulled out two of the pictures of the victim in situ. The first was a general view, largely replicating, she supposed, the sight the discovering couple had come upon. A body, in a wood at twilight. It was large and pale and just lying there. It was so incongruous that at first you barely registered its sex, though the body was completely naked. It was lying on its back, legs out sturdily straight. There were cut marks over its belly and chest. It was a male chest.

  The second picture was from closer in. It showed that the victim's head was partly under water, only the chin and nose breaking the surface. The eyes were open under the surface, and the mouth too. The photo was sharply focused and you could see how the hairless parts of the body had a clammy-looking texture, like a piece of raw meat which had been lying on the counter too long. The body's left arm was out to the side, as if in sleep. The right was cocked upwards slightly, breaking the water like a fallen branch. There was nothing at the end of it.

  'No sign of the hand yet?'

  Reidel shook his head ponderously. He did not have the air of a man who was going to wander off anytime soon.

  'Clean, too,' Nina said. 'Seventeen stab wounds, plus the amputation. Yet the body is not smeared with blood. And no rain the night before, or during the day until it was found.'

  'Which suggests the victim was murdered elsewhere, stripped and mutilated, and then brought here. Maybe.'

  'Time of death sometime the night before last?'

  'Correct. Body dumped then too, the pathologist thinks, determined by the relative density of bugs and micro-organisms on it. And the amputation was postmortem. Which helps with the lack of blood. Leave it until the guy's dead to cut off his hand, it's a lot less messy.'

  'Though still hard work,' Nina said. She flicked through the notes once more. Hand removed with two or three chops from something heavy and sharp, rather than a sawing action. Still waiting for a full blood workup to come back. 'And the nearest place you can park is that lot up the slope, correct? Long way to carry a two-hundred-pound body. Especially for a woman.'

  'The body has some cuts and general contusions on the back. The theory is it was dragged down.'

  'Still. I wouldn't want to pull it that far, and I work out. Used to, anyhow.'

  'This has sex all over it and the victim wasn't homosexual. He's a forty-six-year-old married man with two kids.'

  'Married men are sometimes homosexual. Or don't you see much of that down south?'

  The man smiled. 'Ma'am, I was born up in DC. You can see pretty much anything you want there, if you know where to look. But the victim is a man to whom local gossip ascribes pawing hands—on female behinds. Who was also an occasional customer at local bars—never left with a woman that anyone can testify to yet, but spent time talking to them. Including the ones behind the bar, one of whom went so far as to describe him as a "pussy-hound". We'll be talking to the night shifts later. None of which proves he wasn't gay, of course, but in terms of direct evidence the ball's in your court. And while you're at it, you'll be wanting to explain the trace of lipstick found on the victim's neck.'

  'I'll try to find some evidence this is a serial killer, too, rather than just a one-off homicide. Which right now is all it is.'

  'You're the expert.' Reidel pinched out the end of his cigarette, and replaced the butt carefully in the pack. 'Guess I'll leave you to your thoughts, Agent Baynam. Let me know if ya'll need anything.'

  He wandered off down the slope to where the other guys were. After a few moments Nina heard a laugh float up.

  She turned away. Spent a few moments considering the slope.

  •••

  Nina and Monroe went alone to talk to Julia Gulicks and Mark Kroeger. Both lived in Thornton but worked together in Owensville, the nearest sizable town. Their walk in Raynor's Wood had come in the evening of their fifth date. They had not yet slept together. They were taking it real slow, evidently wondering if this might be the one. They were two kids, really, and yet they were not actually kids at all. Twenty-nine and twenty-five.

  They were interviewed in the meeting room of the company they worked for. Neither seemed comfortable, but Nina supposed that wasn't surprising. After three weeks of covertly meeting after work at a bar a hundred yards down the street, their nascent affair was now presumably the talk of the water cooler. Nina believed she detected in Gulicks a species of considered privacy that was not unlike her own. Over the age of twenty, this stuff is not a game, and it's most definitely not a spectator sport.

  Monroe was leading the questions. 'You stayed in the bar until what time?'

  'Around nine,' Kroeger said. He had a soft voice and a few early grey hairs around his temples. 'A little later than we usually do, because, well, recently we'd gotten in the habit of going on to the Italian Kitchen. It's a couple of blocks further.'

  'How come you didn't go there last Thursday?'

  Kroeger seemed to colour, glanced across at Gulicks and then down at the floor.

  'Well,' Gulicks said. Her hair was a striking red, her skin pale but tawny with freckles. 'We've kind of been through this?'

  'I know,' Monroe said. 'But please.'

  Nina tried not to smile, and tuned out. It was in the notes, teased out of them by Reidel in the previous day's interviews. Most of it had come from Kroeger. Thursday night had been the Night. He had known it. He thought Gulicks had known it too. This unspoken factor had conferred a formality to the evening, conversation stilted by the dark matter of the thing not being said. They met after work, going to the bar on Union as usual. Their first two semi-dates had taken place here, and for the next two they had gone on to the Italian. The staff were cheerful and good at treating people like couples. Dates two to four inclusive had featured kissing of an increasingly fervent nature. Date five stepped up to the plate knowing it was time for a big swing of the bat. Neither person was sure if this evening would involve food. Neither wanted to ask. Nina was willing to bet there had been two apartments back in Thornton in states of unusual tidiness that night. Hers probably even had clean sheets on the bed. He wouldn't have gone quite that far (not even realizing, perhaps, that it was an option) but it would have been recently made, at least. Both fridges would have held a single cold bottle of very decent wine—no more, as both were declared light drinkers. Sofas had been straightened, bookshelves arranged with the brainiest books centre stage. And yet neither had felt equal to saying 'Hey, why don't we go to my place?' Neither suggested moving on to the Italian, either, because it tended to leave you feelin
g kind of full and heavy, which is not conducive to, well, you know.

  So they sat closer. They kissed, a little, but not too much because it wasn't the right kind of place and also there was a twenty-five minute car journey to get back to Thornton, and you didn't want to peak too early. Gradually the conversation began to turn from general matters of the day and to the season, how the weather was actually kind of nice, and now perhaps—well that's an idea: why didn't they go for a walk? Might not be too many more evenings they could still do that. And so he settled their tab, and they walked down the street a while, but there wasn't a great deal to look at in Owensville if the truth be told and they got to his car pretty soon. Then the drive back to Thornton, both of them thinking it might still be a little early yet. And so as they passed the turn-off, just a half mile out of the town, Julia had a brainwave and suggested…

  'Why don't we park up and go for a walk?'

  Monroe nodded. 'Is this a walk with which you're acquainted?'

  'No,' Gulicks said. 'Well, yes. I know the wood, everyone does round here. There's a lot of families go there during the day. But I've never…gone there at night before.'

  'Me neither,' Kroeger said.

  Aw, sweet, Nina thought.

  'But it is used that way by local residents on a regular basis.'

  Gulicks and Kroeger nodded together.

  'And you walked a little way, and stopped, and that's when Mr Kroeger spotted something behind the bushes.'

  Kroeger dutifully described how they had walked about a hundred yards down from the lot, and then along the stream for a while. He had looked up, his arms around Ms Gulicks, to see something pale lying with an arm outstretched. The two had gotten closer, seen what it was they'd found, and then used a cellular phone to call the police.

  Four hours later they got back to their own apartments, alone. Thursday had not been the Night after all. Nina reckoned it might now be postponed a little while. The image of a corpse is not easy to erase from the inner eye. Kroeger still looked queasy at the thought.

  'The victim has been identified,' Nina said. A local man called Larry Widmar. Either of you know him?'

  Both shook their heads, and that was the end of that.

  •••

  Monroe drove back to Thornton. Nina had been in a car with him many times before, and noted that his preferred speed had decreased by a good ten per cent. Being shot seemed to have affected his willingness to take risks, as if his body was feeding him signals of caution. He looked older, too. Nina understood how that could be. She had been shot herself, almost a year before, soon after meeting Ward. It had happened at a place called the Halls, up in the mountains near Yellowstone. One of the men involved in the murder of Ward's parents had tagged her in the chest, just under the collar bone. For a while afterwards she'd felt old too, as if cold winds had a way to blow straight through her. Now she felt…she wasn't sure what she felt. It was strange to be back in the world again, to be doing her job. Insubstantial, unreal. She had a headache, too.

  Locals cops would be working bars this evening, trying to find someone who'd seen Widmar on Wednesday night or any prior occasion. More would be on hand in Raynor's Wood to scare the hell out of any couple who decided that tonight was their night. Monroe and Nina were on their way to the final task of the day, interviewing the other person who could be said to be involved.

  'What did Reidel say about me?'

  'When?'

  'You know when. When he came back down to the stream after bugging me while I was trying to think.'

  'That you seemed invested in this not being a female killer. Which he felt was odd, given you seemed capable of cutting a man's balls off without thinking twice.'

  'And you laughed at that?'

  'Not me, Nina.'

  'You know how dumb it is, assuming this has to be a woman.'

  'Women kill people, Nina.'

  'Not like that.'

  'I can think of several who have been convicted for it.'

  'Convicted isn't always guilty.'

  'Actually, it is. That's how it works.'

  Conversation petered out soon afterwards, which gave Nina a chance to look at the town as they drove back in. This was not something she particularly relished. She couldn't put her finger on why, but she didn't like Thornton. Objectively it seemed nice enough. It was in the south-west corner of the state, thirty minutes from Smith Lake and an hour from Blue Ridge National Park. The main road from Owensville brought you painlessly into a small commercial district. You could get a burger from a Renee's, get lubed, store things or ship them, buy a lawnmower or stay in a chain hotel. You could keep going straight out the other side, too, and miss the older part of town altogether. But if you took a left by the Ponderosa, the road wound you over a hill, past a big old church and a high school. This was a collection of big buildings of mildly Gothic flavour, poised confidently behind an open space of lawn and trees. Across the street was a smaller building housing the Sleepyheadz kindergarten. After this the road took you down into a pleasantly tree-lined old town district, a couple of streets with a Starbucks and restaurants and places you could get things nicely framed. Nothing was more than two storeys high, all wood-fronted, and the leaf-strewn pavements were of herringboned red brick. People strolled hither and yon, carrying the local newspaper under their arm. Nice young moms with trim figures and a toddler stopped to spend the time of day with each other. A UPS van purred up and down, delivering goodies. This area slipped downmarket for a few blocks and then the streets thinned out into larger plots holding wooden houses clinging to pretensions of grandeur. Soon afterwards, open countryside again, a third of the town surrounded by Raynor's Wood, which spread for quite some miles to the north.

  It was the kind of place that every year fails by a narrow margin to make it into somebody's compendium of America's Most Charming Little Towns. And yet she'd been here less than twenty-four hours and just didn't like it.

  She tried to allow for the fact that she'd first heard of the place as a murder scene, which lent a flavour to an environment, the knowledge that however nice it might appear, this town had placed two individuals in murderous opposition. How did these people come to interact in this way? Was the town not in some way implicated in what happened within its boundaries? You expect people to kill each other in cities: in our hearts we know they're too big and place strangers too close together and without explicable contracts of moral exchange. But small towns…surely they were supposed to provide support, to embody an epitome of community that stopped this kind of thing from happening?

  Nina had been doing the job for too long to entertain naive ideas about local community or rural idylls, however, and she knew that while urban centres turned in the big numbers of fatality, the smaller towns often contributed the baroque.

  No, there was just something about Thornton. Something not quite right.

  •••

  The Widmar house was a mid-sized Queen Anne with a covered brick porch in front. Gayle Widmar was in her late forties, spruce, and had expensive-looking hair even after thirty-six hours of grief. Her children were with her sister forty minutes away and Gayle would be joining them just as soon as this interview was over. An overnight bag was ready in the hallway. The house had the baffled silence of a domicile in which everything had changed.

  Mrs Widmar sat in a high-backed chair in the middle of a large sitting room, while Nina confirmed background. Gayle's husband Lawrence—she never once called him 'Larry'—had owned 'a chain' of dry-cleaning establishments (the chain numbered two, as Nina already knew) and a part-interest in a thriving pizza place in the historic district. He was on the school board. They lived in this neighbourhood, though they could have afforded something more expensive, because it was where they had both grown up. They had been married twenty years.

  Mrs Widmar's manner was clipped and strained, as is often the case with spouses of the violently deceased. They need support but are distrustful of the world. They feel obscurely
accused. They believe people are thinking that if they had been better in some way, then this awful thing would not have happened to their partner. Five per cent of the blame for every murder rubs off on those closest to the victim, and they are unconsciously furious at the dead for putting them in this position: especially for having to deal with it without them, as a terribly out-of-practice single individual. They are also attempting to come up to speed with the realization that murder is not some fictional conceit, imagined for the purposes of entertainment, but actually happens: and afterwards no credits roll, and life has to continue to be lived even if you have absolutely no idea where the deeds to the house are kept, or who services the lawnmower. It is never comfortable to discover that reality and fiction are closer than you realized. You wonder what could happen next. Might aliens exist also, or ghosts?

  As Monroe led Mrs Widmar through confirmation of her husband's last known movements—on Wednesday night he had gone for dinner with his pizza partner, not returned, and she had reported him missing at 7 a.m. the following morning—Nina looked at the pictures on the mantelpiece. In them Lawrence Widmar looked so average as to be almost remarkable. Off-the-rack smile, bouffant greying hair, a pillar-of-the-community-sized gut. You could picture him standing in a bank. You could picture him making a solid contribution to a PTA meeting and rigorously supporting the school team. You could picture him in a bar, too, pulling his stool a little closer and asking what the lady will have. Unfair, perhaps, but death leaves such a big question behind it that almost any answer can seem like it might fit.

  'Your husband's partner says they went their ways around ten thirty,' Nina said. 'Do you have any idea of where Lawrence might have gone after that?'