“You do?” Lucas began to slowly accept another reality of the secret society he had chosen to join.
“We do,” I said. “All the same, I’ll put it differently: our consulting detective is a gold mine.”
“Damned straight!” Lucas declared, pointing triumphantly at the fuselage ceiling.
I shook my head. “ ‘Today’s Tom Sawyer,’ ” I chuckled toward Mike, getting a look from Lucas that, perhaps surprisingly, exuded both recognition and pride.
“Hey, I know that song,” he said. “PYX-106 Albany, classic rock, I listen to it all the time. That’s Rush, who are awesome. So if you were trying to talk shit, it didn’t work.”
I shook my head with a grin. “There is no end to his wisdom…All right, then—” After tacking my sheet of notes onto the fuselage wall below the information about Shelby that we already had from Pete, I turned to my partner. “Now, Michael—suppose you continue relating your discoveries, in light of this new intelligence.”
“It fits, all right,” he said, growing quietly excited. “Like a damned glove, it fits. You remember, L.T., that we couldn’t find any physical evidence on the body that indicated heavy meth use? Or any meth use? Well, Pete e-mailed the coroner’s report this afternoon, while you were down taking your afternoon stroll with Marcianna—” Mike grabbed at some sheets of paper on top of a large pile on one of his desks, which turned out to be several copies of the report that he’d run off. He handed one to me and kept two, one for our files; but Lucas dashed over, his hand out, to receive what he assumed would be his copy. Mike held the document back, however, looking genuinely concerned. “Easy, Lucas. There’s a couple of photos in here. Color ones. You ever looked at an actual autopsy picture? It’s not like what you see on TV.”
“Really?” Lucas questioned anxiously. “Then hells, yeah, I want to look!” he decided, with the kind of prurient enthusiasm that I had often observed in the uninitiated.
I turned to Mike. “Well? He’s going to find out, eventually.”
“Your call, boss,” Mike answered. “You’re the one who brought him on board.”
“And you’re the one who agreed to his being brought on board, Michael,” I replied. “We are partners, correct, in this as in all important decisions?”
Mike considered that one for a moment, rubbing a hand through the thick black shock on the top of his head so that it eventually stood up like a brush. Then he nodded, slapped the papers in his one hand with the other, and turned to Lucas. “Okay, Mr. Consulting Detective. Trust me, though, when I tell you that this isn’t the Hollywood version. Those people spend as much time dolling up those phony stiffs as they do on the actors. You say you’re ready, but remember—this is somebody you used to know, even if only a little. It can be a shock.”
“Mike,” Lucas said, as if he were talking to an idiot, “I’ve been on Facebook for two years, for shit’s sake—last week I watched some Indonesian dude chop his wife’s head off! And I seen plenty of other real shit like that, but I ain’t been scarred for life. I don’t think. So will you two please stop acting like the school nurse—who isn’t even a real nurse, for fuck’s sake, and never even saw that my sister had a problem, when she got sick!—and lemme see the damned report?”
With one more doubtful glance my way, Mike handed the third copy of the report to Lucas.
It is entirely possible that, in the end, I took the glaring photo that I encountered harder than Lucas did. Not that his face didn’t initially sink, both with recognition of the girl and at the way in which she was displayed: in the harsh white light of a typical hospital pathology lab, with none of Hollywood’s shadowy, colored effects or wondrous surroundings. Her skin was fully revealed as having gone beyond pale, so that almost every major blood vessel, now turned dark blue, showed in harsh relief, as did the similarly colored lips and drawn cheeks. Then there were the various parts of her skin that had been cut open and roughly sewn back up, almost like a burlap sack, revealing the areas that had been of first standard and then special interest to the pathologist. Yet Lucas recovered from all these sights with a speed that was, to say the least, surprising; whereas I, who thought I had seen such a searching question in Shelby’s azure gaze when we first came upon her body, was now faced with the dull resignation of her closed, dead eyes, and felt her for the first time to be truly gone. Such a reaction may seem strange, to some. But it was one that I had experienced many times, regarding the deaths of children: ever since I had been a boy even younger than Lucas, in fact, and had begun to endure the long and ultimately fruitless effort to save my left leg, an effort that had inevitably entailed witnessing the deaths of fellow patients who had often become close friends during our long weeks of treatment.
I gave Lucas a few more minutes to study this last picture that would ever be taken of Shelby Capamagio, perhaps hoping that his reaction to it might deepen; but it didn’t. Why this should have shocked or disappointed me, I don’t know. I tried to remind myself that Lucas was, at that moment, just another kid who had spent far too much time looking at terrible things on the Internet, things that no boy his age should ever have seen, much less seen over and over again. He had already reminded us, for instance, that, thanks to Facebook, along with other social media culprits like Twitter, it had become possible for children as young as thirteen to watch beheadings and other incredibly graphic acts of violence from around the world; and while such might have seemed a bizarre and terrible new reality for people like Mike and myself, for Lucas, it was simply the world into which he’d tumbled from the womb. Thus there was really no reason at all for me either to be surprised at his quick recovery from the sight of Shelby’s autopsy photo, or to be startled by his simple, strangely detached spoken reaction:
“Wow—poor Shelby. Fucked up…”
“Yeah,” Mike said, himself fairly mystified at Lucas’ reaction. “Fucked up, all right. And now that we’re clear on that, and since you seem ready to move on, Lucas, you’re going to want to pay particular attention to the bruises on her neck, and to the part of the report that explains them.”
Lucas did as he was told, and I followed suit. We both found that there were indeed two distinctly separate yet similar markings on Shelby’s neck, one on the side and one at the back: one left, I knew, by the knot of the rope Mike and I had seen. But the other had been the one that, consistent with Mike’s X-ray, snapped her neck and crushed her hyoid bone. It was centered, just as Mike had thought, at the back of the neck, and had been covered by Shelby’s hair when we had examined her: hair that was now pulled to one side and partially shaved to reveal the fatal injury. The report agreed with this conclusion, declaring the cause of death to have been hanging in a manner and by a person or persons unknown.
“But that isn’t the interesting part,” Mike declared.
“It isn’t?” Lucas said, finally surprised. “Well, you’d better tell me the interesting part, then, because that’s pretty interesting.”
“Maybe, but not as interesting as this: you remember that discoloration at the base of Shelby’s back, L.T., that Curtis thought was a bruise, but we saw was in fact lividity disguised by her tattoo?”
“You mean her slag tag?” Lucas threw in with a small smile.
Mike paused, shook his head hard, then answered, “Yeah, Lucas. That’s just what I mean. Well, that lividity proves that she wasn’t left hanging, that in fact she was cut down fairly quickly, then put into a position on her back where the blood could pool there. Only several hours later was she strung back up in the trailer.”
“Unh-hunh,” I noised, nodding and starting to pace the plane, my own brain beginning to fire on all eight cylinders.
“And there’s more,” Mike went on, flipping to the next page of the document. “The toxicology report. Which matches the traces of the drug I found on Shelby’s clothing. There was, in fact, no meth in her system—but there was a small amount of cocaine.”
“Whaat?” Lucas droned, in what I was learning was his cha
racteristic reaction to unexpected information that he doubted. “Shelby didn’t have money for no coke.”
“Which doesn’t mean that someone didn’t have the money to buy it for her,” I mused quietly. “Now shut up, Lucas, and let Mike finish, please.”
Lucas was wise enough not to protest at that, and Mike went on: “Not just cocaine, but good cocaine. Very good. What we would once have called Peruvian Flake, although it’s now Andean from any number of countries. And startlingly pure—not the kind of thing you would find in Burgoyne County too readily. Which got me thinking about those clothes of hers.” He picked up another notepad and pulled up several windows of what looked like various shopping sites. “I enlarged the pictures of her things, enhanced any identifying marks like maker’s labels, and tried to match what I saw against stuff that I could find online—and sure enough, those clothes weren’t just some average kid’s fancy summer duds. No, each piece—especially the lingerie and shoes, which I found exact matches for—was something that cost real bucks. Take the bra and panties: you figure, okay, for a girl like her, Victoria’s Secret is going to be hot enough shit. But they’re Bordelle, the most expensive lingerie in the world. The damned panties alone could have cost seven hundred bucks.”
“Fuck you!” Lucas erupted, in a moment of astonished disbelief; then, considering his choice of words, he added, “I mean—that’s impossible! Where’d she get that kind of money?”
“You tell me, Lucas,” Mike said. “You’re supposed to be the expert on what she was up to.”
“Not on her underwear, for shit’s sake.” Lucas’ tone became more thoughtful. “Although—maybe Ambyr might know…”
“Maybe,” Mike replied. “And we’re going to want to ask her, if that’s the case. Then we come to those biker sneakers—Betsey Johnson, more than three hundred bucks. But the capper? The gladiator sandals: Prada, almost a grand.”
“Get the fuck outta town!” Lucas fired off again. “There is no God damned way!”
“There is a God damned way, Lucas, and it’s called facts,” Mike said. “And it also fits: designer clothes that she could not find in Fraser, or even in Albany, and certainly not in the shithole parts of the Southwest that she was supposed to have traveled to, if the rumors about where her parents went and her following them are true. Tie in a variety of cocaine that has a very limited clientele, and it all points in one direction.”
I sat down in the chair at my desk, not a little stunned and, if my bitter heart be truly known, perversely pleased by the conclusion: “South,” I murmured.
Mike nodded. “Our hometown. Rearing the ugliest and wealthiest of its heads.”
“What?” Lucas asked. “New York City?”
“Indeed, Consulting Detective Kurtz,” I said quietly. “New York City…”
“But…” Lucas was now having real trouble with it all: a girl he knew principally as the source of a sordid local scandal hanged in an unknown manner, and at that moment dead on a slab, cut apart and stitched back up, yet somehow, before all that, having made her way to New York City and made some very fancy friends in the process. “Damn,” the kid pronounced at length. “Fucking Shelby. She did it up, all right.”
“And died in the process,” I said, still softly, as I rose to pace again.
Several silent moments passed before Lucas gave voice to his continuing struggle with the idea: “But I still don’t get it—if she got all the way to New York City, and had money, why would she come back to West Briarwood, the asshole of the state? Man…If I got that far and had those kinda bucks, I’d kill myself before I’d come back here.”
I halted in my tracks and glanced at the kid, slightly disbelieving of the statement he’d made, which mirrored my own thoughts precisely. “Yes, Lucas,” I murmured, staring away into space blankly. “That might be just what you might do…”
A few more seconds went by without any words exchanged; then I heard Lucas whisper to Mike, “What—what’s the matter with him?”
“The whole ‘Sorcerer of Death’ thing, like I told you,” Mike mumbled in answer. “Don’t worry, he’ll snap out of it—though not before he creeps the shit out of you.”
“Shut up, Mike,” I said, again in a near-whisper.
“Well, I’m sorry, Trajan,” he answered. “But it is—”
“No, just shut up. Lucas is right. These supposed murders—they may very well not be murders at all.” I turned to them, my gaze becoming more focused. “They’re suicides.”
Mike immediately shook his head. “L.T.—we already said that suicide was unlikely, even though it is the thing that staged hanging is most often used to cover.”
“True,” I answered, still perfecting the notion in my head. “That’s what we said. But we also said that we couldn’t find any sensible explanation. Now we can.”
“Because of what the kid said?” Mike asked incredulously.
“Because of what he said, and because we now know so much more. Just consider it, Mike: Shelby leaves her hometown, and somehow hooks up with somebody with real money down south. That person buys her serious clothes, and introduces her to serious drugs, although it stays recreational—you said they only found a small amount of the coke in her blood, right? So, then—she gets to enjoy that life for a while; but then that somebody we’re talking about, the person—or, who knows, maybe people—with money, get tired of her; or they just get tired of the risk of horsing around with a minor. For whatever reason, they dump her back up here.”
“But I don’t get it,” Lucas said in frustration. “So how the hell does she end up back in her family’s trailer, stark naked and stuck in a closet in a fake hanging?”
“She doesn’t end up at home, Lucas.” I stared at him, and I have to admit, he did look a little unsettled by whatever expression of discovery was on my face. “This is the heart of our method of investigation—Mike’s and my own. Question everything as soon as it comes up: every theory, every supposed fact, every assumption. And law enforcement’s assumption here has been that she went home to die, picked up a stranger or someone who just wasn’t happy to see her, along the way, and was killed in or, given the pathology report, near the trailer. But what if she wasn’t? What if she came home and stayed with friends, but, while staying with those friends, became so depressed about losing the high life that she did just what you stated—killed herself?”
“But Shelby wasn’t suicidal, for shit’s sake!” Lucas protested. “And neither was Kyle.”
“No,” I agreed, looking at each victim’s picture. “Neither was the Kozersky girl. At least, before she ran away from home. But each one had some interest that gave them great ambition: Shelby, the classic gold digger; Kyle, the scholar who kept his books with him even when he couldn’t go to school, or even home; and Kelsey, whose great passion was…horses, if I remember, Mike?” He nodded to me, and I went on. “These are not lost souls, wandering the streets and highways listening to Goth metal or hip-hop or staying in their rooms playing video games. They were motivated, they had ambition—and, I would be willing to bet, each one of them ended up meeting someone in New York City who seemed to offer them a way to fulfill those dreams—then snatched that dream back away, crushing them. Yes, Mike—suicides. And the description of Shelby’s lividity, and the condition of her things, matches perfectly: she hanged herself, but was soon cut down and laid someplace where the blood could pool—like a soft bed. Would that be about right?” Mike signaled agreement again. “But then whoever cut her down realized that they might be implicated in her death; so they took her home and created what they thought was a convincing murder scene. And, left to law enforcement, it would have been. But the clothes—what kind of brutal murderer goes to such trouble to carefully arrange her clothes?”
“Could be a serial killer,” Mike said. “With a fetish about the clothes.”
“Could be,” I said with a nod. “But if it’s a fetish, wouldn’t he take the clothes, both as trophies and to make sure his ass was covered?”<
br />
Mike had one more line of doubt: “And what about that stuff you said in the trailer? About our being in some kind of ‘dialogue’ with the killer?”
“I never said with the killer,” I answered. “I said with whoever is behind it all. And I still believe it. In very large part because, again, while it’s unusual, nothing else makes sense at all.”
Mike considered that, finally conceding, “Yeah, it fits, L.T.; and goes good with the fact that the pathologist couldn’t find any trace of sexual violation. But what about proof?”
“Aren’t all the things you’ve just listed, along with the pathology report, along with what we now know about these kids, at least the beginnings of proof? Isn’t—” I was suddenly interrupted, and we all jumped a bit, when what sounded at that moment like a firehouse alarm went off: but it was only the bell of the old wall-mounted telephone that my great-grandfather had installed on the cockpit bulkhead years ago. The phone had originally been an extension of the line in the main house, put in when it had become clear even to the old man that, after a career of adventure flying in the JU-52 around the States and Canada following the plane’s long and perilous journey to reach this country, the old girl would fly no more, without the kind of overhaul that the Second World War had made impossible. But when Mike and I had set up our headquarters, I had convinced my great-aunt that it would be better if she allowed me to have the phone company make the plane’s a separate line, so that she would not be disturbed every time our SUNY-Albany employers or students needed to contact us. Of course, the phone also served as a secure way for Mike and me to do business with Steve Spinetti’s office; and such was the purpose it was evidently serving now.
Mike immediately leapt to his feet, shot toward the bulkhead, and shouted, “I got it, it’s for me!” He grinned with anticipation as he said, “I had Pete send over the FIC’s report on some hair fibers found on the second victim, the Kozersky girl, along with any photos they took; and I’ve asked if we can have a look at some things relating to the Howard case, too…” He snatched the old black Bakelite plastic receiver out of its worn silver cradle; but the conversation that followed did not, apparently, convey what he wished: “Yeah, Pete,” Mike said, still smiling. “You got that bag for us? Good, what time will you be—” His face suddenly filled with concern as he listened to Pete Steinbrecher’s news. “Hunh?…Aw, no….When…And where…Wait, what? What the…Who?…But how the hell did they find out…And they want us there?” Another long pause, during which both Lucas and I could hear the vague sound of Pete’s voice reverberating out of the earpiece of the receiver, and then Mike said simply, “Okay, Pete. Thanks….Yeah, if you bring the bag there, I’ll get it when no one’s looking. And we owe you one, Deputy…” With that, Mike slowly set the receiver back into its cradle and turned to me. “The rest of your theory will have to wait, L.T.—we have an appointment.”