Finally in my hotel room, a third-floor double dressed in somber monochrome – black, gray, gray-white – I showered, then snapped on a muted CNN to add color and distraction to my world. I unwrapped my new dress shirts and rinsed them in the sink to remove the creases and factory starch, squeezing them as dry as possible. In the cool and arid air conditioning they’d be set to iron in the morning. I did the same to the tees.
The phone rang, the desk advising me a package had just been delivered. A small Hispanic gentleman brought an envelope to my room, NYPD stamped on top left corner, the information Waltz had promised. As he had noted, it was spare, the investigation barely off the launching pad.
The prelims from the forensic teams in Vangie’s room featured all the No’s: No signs of struggle, No blood or body fluids visible, No seeming thefts, No signs of a search. I noted the mention of a closet with casual-type wear that seemed good for a week’s stay. It appeared she had packed for a normal visit to NYC.
Yet before this particular visit, Vangie Prowse turned on a video camera, noted my experience with serial killers, then proclaimed she’d made a strange decision, and was “doing things that make little sense. But I needed a serious –”
She’d had to hang up before finishing the sentence. Needed a serious what? Doing what things that made little sense? As if that wasn’t cryptic enough, she’d looked into the camera and apologized.
“Carson, I’m so sorry.”
What the hell had Vangie done?
I lay on the bed and studied the ceiling and ran that question in front of my eyes a hundred times until I drifted into a sweaty, twitchy sleep.
A ringing phone at the bedside awakened me. I dropped it, picked it up by the cord and bobbled it to my ear.
“Hmmp?”
Waltz. “We’ve got a dead woman, Detective Ryder. It’s a bad one.”
“Do I know her?” I mumbled from between two worlds.
“Jesus, wake up, Detective. You don’t know her. God, I hope not. I’m on scene and sending you a car. Be out front.”
“Waltz, um, wait. Let me get myself toget—”
The phone clicked dead. The clock said it was 8.10 p.m. I’d slept for two hours. My washed shirts were soggy. All I had was the one I’d worn through the day, reeking of sweat and despair. Holding my breath, I pulled it on and headed outside.
Day was failing fast, oblique light soaking the sky with an amber hue. City noise echoed down the man-made canyons, giving the sounds a reverberant depth. A police cruiser waited on the sidewalk, almost to the hotel steps. I was barely inside before the cruiser roared into traffic. I looked at the driver: Koslowski. He wrinkled his nose at my used clothes, shot me a glance, and rolled his window down.
“Where’s the scene?” I yelled over the siren. The traffic was mainly taxis. Koslowski kept his foot deep in the pedal, expecting cabs to open a path by the time he got there, and somehow they did.
“SoHo. If I don’t get you there in five minutes, Waltz is going to chew my ass.”
“I can’t imagine Waltz chewing ass.”
“He does it without words. It’s worse that way.”
“He’s an interesting guy,” I said, fishing for more info about the sad-eyed detective. “What’s your take on him?”
Instead of answering, Koslowski pulled to a brick Italianate duplex, a FOR SALE sign in the tiny front yard. I saw one cruiser by the curb, and a battered SUV with NYPD TECHNICAL DIVISION stenciled on the door. Beside it was a van from the Medical Examiner’s office. A blue-and-white was sideways across two lanes to keep gawkers distant, its light bar painting the street in shaking, multihued bursts. I jumped out and hustled toward the house.
“Hey, Dixie,” Koslowski called.
I spun. “What?”
“You asked me what I thought about Shelly Waltz.” He jammed the cruiser in gear. “When it’s nighttime for the whole world, and everyone is asleep, Shelly Waltz flies through the sky on a silver unicorn.”
“What?”
But Koslowski’s taillights were already flowing away. Shaking my head, I entered the house. A man and woman from the Medical Examiner’s office stood inside the door, opening a case of equipment. They looked shaken, ashen. They directed me down a hall to a bedroom. I smelled blood and my stomach shifted sideways.
I entered the room. Like the front rooms, it was devoid of furniture. Shelly was alone, standing above a draped figure in the center of the floor. The white cover was turning red as I watched. Waltz was rubbing his eyes with his palms.
“What is it, Shelly?”
He shook his head, lifted the cover. A woman’s nude body. Her eyes stared wide from the center of her own belly. Blood and fascia and yellow fatty tissue surrounded the head, having squirted out when the head was jammed into the wound. I let it all register for a five count, then closed my eyes.
“We’ve got a bad problem,” Waltz said.
“Bad as it gets,” I affirmed.
Waltz let the cover fall back over the corpse. When it fell it puffed out air, swirling hairs on the floor, the same amalgam I’d seen at Vangie’s crime scene: hairs of various colors and textures. Looking closer, I saw them scattered everywhere. On the tile floor, laying atop congealing pools of blood, on the window sill.
We turned to a thunder of footsteps approaching down the hall followed by Folger’s bray.
“Waltz? Are you back there?”
The footsteps turned into three agitated faces, Lieutenant Folger and Tweedledum and -dee from this morning – the hulking Bullard and Abel Cluff, a smaller and older guy with bulging eyes and the forward-pointing facial structure of a stoat. Cluff was wheezing, like he’d run a dozen flights instead of walking up a five-step stoop out front. Both men were in dark suits and white shirts, Bullard’s plank-thick wrists hanging two inches from his sleeves, like he’d grown since he’d bought the suit.
The trio moved past, stepping around the blood pools and smears. Cluff bent and lifted the cover from the corpse. His eyes showed neither surprise nor emotion and I figured being an older detective with the NYPD, he’d seen every possible permutation of horror.
“Oh Christ,” Folger moaned when she saw the body. “Tell me I’m dreaming, we don’t have a mad butcher out there.”
“Removing the head could be an attempt at depersonalization,” I ventured, trying to be helpful. “But inserting it in the abdomen could be a show of control: Behold my power. Or it might –”
Folger snapped her face to me. “What the hell are you doing here?” She sniffed, wafting her hand past her nose at my scent. “Jesus, they don’t have soap or deodorant where you’re from?”
Waltz said, “I invited Detective Ryder, Lieutenant. Given his experience with disturbed minds, I thought he might –”
“He’s not needed,” she said. “Stick him on a bus and aim it south.”
Bullard pinched his nose and gurgled a laugh. “You may want to spray him with something first.”
“Have you seen all you need, Detective?” Waltz asked. He shot me a look that said he knew I hadn’t, but it was time to let the Lieutenant win one. I nodded yes for the sake of harmony, and we retreated outside. There were now three cruisers on scene, one ambulance, an ME vehicle, a forensic vehicle, a large command vehicle and Waltz’s dinged-up blue Chevy Impala. The area was cordoned