A Mourning in Autumn Read online

  Sakura was silent. Half the game was enduring Linsky’s barbs. The ME’s sarcasms carried far more sting with detectives he considered incompetent.

  The respect went both ways, and Sakura was pleased that McCauley had agreed to forward his request that Linsky perform this procedure. A Linsky autopsy was pure Zen. Never a motion wasted. Each movement completely in the moment. Even with the inevitable backlog, the ME never rushed, no matter how routine a death might appear. He could be trusted to see beyond the obvious.

  “I’ve reviewed Dr. Bossier’s report on Helena Grady, the woman whose body was found at the recycling center,” Linsky was saying now. “I take it we’re assuming that the same person killed both these women.”

  “The bodies were wrapped the same,” Sakura answered. “Both were dumped with commercial trash. The autopsy may show up something different.”

  “We’ll certainly see,” Linsky said. He snapped on latex gloves. “Flunitrazepam was found in Grady’s system. You probably know it as Rohypnol.”

  “The date rape drug.”

  “Yes.”

  “Anything else?” Sakura asked.

  “MDMA . . . Ecstasy.”

  “What was cause of death?”

  “There was nothing definitive, but given a sexual assault situation, asphyxiation was a high probability. Dr. Bossier concluded that Helena Grady was most likely smothered with a dry cleaning bag.”

  “That’s getting pretty specific, isn’t it?”

  “There was forensic evidence—or rather a lack of it—to support the supposition,” Linsky said.

  “Which was?”

  “No marks on the victim’s neck. The thin plastic of a dry cleaning bag clings to the mouth and nostrils, occluding the airways without the need to secure the bag at the throat. And neither were there petechiae, something one might expect to see with other forms of asphyxiation.”

  “You mentioned sexual assault,” Sakura noted. “I take it there was evidence of rape.”

  “Helena Grady had abrasions in both the vaginal and anal areas. Some of which were possibly postmortem.”

  “Semen?”

  “None.”

  “The killer must have worn a condom if there was penile penetration.”

  “That is the most likely explanation.” Linsky had finished preparing his slides, and now he looked at the clock. “Keyes is late.”

  Sakura was content to wait for the technician. Howard Keyes was the best at lifting fingerprints from skin. But Linsky seemed determined to begin the procedure on time.

  “We can at least open this.” The ME picked up a scalpel and cut lengthwise through the plastic shroud.

  The odor was distinctly unpleasant, but stepping forward Sakura was struck first by the image that clocked in and stuck in his brain. “It looks like . . .”

  “. . . he’s been here before us.” The ME, completing his thought, was staring down at the neat Y of metal staples that tracked down the torso. “This was also in Bossier’s report.” Linsky looked up at him. “I think you can be certain, now, that you’re dealing with the same man.”

  Hours later the vision still haunted.

  Sitting behind the desk in his eleventh-floor office, Sakura was only a short distance from his home, but the apartment on Water Street seemed a world away. He hoped that Hanae was already asleep, exhausted by the twelve-hour flight. He could not go home, not yet, with the stink of tonight’s autopsy still clinging to his clothes. Its horrors still clinging in his mind.

  He’s been here before us. He was remembering Linsky’s words and the image of that metal Y of staples like a trackroad in the flesh. The persistent vision like an invitation, a token to ride whatever dark fantasy had inspired such a death—a fantasy that seemed to include some parody of autopsy.

  His mind had raced with questions that had had to be delayed till Keyes had come and finished fingerprinting the entire surface of skin. But there had been no prints to find. The killer had been as meticulous in removing physical evidence as he had been in closing the body.

  Inside had been a different matter. Dr. Linsky had removed the staples to reveal the carnage within the cavity. Every major organ had been cut out of the body, and then replaced.

  It had looked at first glance like a bloody jumble, but Linsky had a different perspective.

  “Dr. Bossier noted that Helena Grady’s organs had been . . . scrambled,” the doctor had said. “I don’t think it’s that random, at least not in this case. It’s a fairly crude job of reassembly, but it appears to me that the natural arrangement of the organs has been inverted.”

  Sakura had looked more closely then, and had seen. The reposition of the heart, with its apex tipped toward the right side of the chest. The stomach, liver, and spleen, all reversed. Held together . . . suspended in a silver web of nearly invisible wire.

  The phone buzzed on his desk. “Sakura,” he answered it.

  “I thought you might be there, Lieutenant.”

  Linsky’s voice surprised him. The autopsy had been finished when he’d left the morgue.

  “I came back to have another look at the body,” the ME was saying.

  “Why was that?”

  “A purplish mark on the victim’s right arm,” Linsky explained. “It appeared to be livor mortis, but its position seemed inconsistent. It turned out to be a birthmark. I’ll highlight it for you in the photographs. It should help you to identify your victim.”

  “I see.”

  “You sound disappointed, James. This isn’t television, where the medical examiner solves the crime.”

  A joke. The use of his given name. It must be later than he thought. “No . . . Thanks,” he said. “I look forward to getting those photos.”

  “You’ll have at least some of them tomorrow, and as many of the lab results as I can push through.”

  “Thank you,” he said again, but the doctor had hung up.

  He had been sitting in the dark, having switched off the overhead fluorescents. Now he flipped on the desk lamp, settling back in his chair. Was there another kind of mark from birth, he wondered, that made of one a victim, one a killer? Was that not what his friend, Dr. Willie French, believed, that a serial killer must be born before he could be made? Might that not be the very expression of karma, the misdeeds of past lifetimes encoded like a heritable characteristic within the DNA?

  He remembered the Four Imponderables, those principles which the Buddha warned were not to be examined. To do so was to invite vexation, even madness. The third of the four was the admonition against seeking the result of karma. One should never seek to find a detailed link between a volitional act and its effect. Nor should one set oneself up as a judge between good and evil, for to do so would lead only to the intellectual snare of duality, and the suffering which must follow that delusion.

  His job was not to judge, but to restore the balance of the law. Only in finding the killer was human justice possible. There was another warning that he remembered, which he would do well to heed—perceiving danger where there is none, and not perceiving danger where there is.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Dr. Wilhelmina French stood in the huge window of her Upper West Side office looking down on the busy street. Hard to believe she was actually here in Manhattan, that she had already started seeing patients.

  So much had happened so quickly after her father’s death. As if despite her escape from Edmond’s house so many years ago, he had after all been holding her life in suspension. So much had seemed at an end when her brother had called with news of her father’s final illness. She had taken her leave of Quantico to return to New Orleans. Had already left behind, or so she believed, what she had started here in New York.

  Now she was back with a vengeance. Her grant might be in limbo—who knew if the government would ever get off its collective ass when it came to LSD research—but official indifference didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone interested in her theories. Quite a lot of people, it turned out,
wanted to hear what Dr. Wilhelmina French had to say about serial killers and the possibility of early childhood detection and intervention. She’d become a bit of a celebrity since her part in the Death Angel case.

  Still, the book contract would not have brought her back to New York. She could have written anywhere. She had worked on the outline in her own private limbo, fighting her childhood demons as she waited for Edmond to die. And then Michael had shown up at her father’s funeral.

  She had not been sure that she would ever see Michael Darius again. But there he was, with no warning, at the cathedral. He had sat with her in the family pew, had left no doubt that he, at least, considered them a couple. She could still laugh out loud, remembering her brother’s face. She’d been holding out on him.

  It was true. She might not phone Mason often, but her brother did expect to be kept informed. Growing up, she’d been the one he could turn to with the vicissitudes of his secret affairs, and in a kind of reverse fairness she’d felt an obligation to confide in him. She had learned that it was good to have his sympathetic ear, that her brother was more to be trusted than any of her friends.

  Mason had liked Michael. And Michael seemed to like him. The four of them had ambled about amiably enough that week in the big house. She and Michael in her bedroom every night making up for the months apart, and what had not been said. Mason making plans with his partner Zack. It was the closest thing to happiness the old place had seen since the years when her mother had been alive.

  She’d learned to accept happiness in these last few months. She had not learned to trust that it would last.

  She answered the ringing phone.

  “Willie?” Jimmy’s voice.

  She smiled. “I’m glad it’s you. I’ve been wondering if it was okay to call Hanae. I don’t want to disturb her if she’s still resting from the flight.”

  “I’m surprised she hasn’t called you yet. I know she’s anxious to see you.”

  “How is she, Jimmy?”

  “She seems fine. I think she’s glad to be home.”

  “I’m sure that she is.”

  “Did Michael say anything about yesterday?” He had changed the subject.

  “Are we talking about the body in the Dumpster?”

  “I wondered,” he said, “if you’d be interested in taking a look at some photos?”

  She let him hear her laugh. “Thought you’d never ask, Lieutenant Sakura.”

  Margot Redmond watched from a distance the rolling yellow text from the vertical LED sign flicker in twin images upon the lenses of his dark glasses. I am awake in the place where women die. Inside the cavernous space the man appeared taller and thinner than possible. The contrast between his fair skin and dark hair heightened in the interplay of paint box colors and tomblike blackness. When his arm shifted inside the crisp white of his shirt, exposing a bit of pale wrist, it was to withdraw one of the small bones laid out in rows on the long table. He seemed to smile, but she was uncertain.

  “Mr. St. Cyr. David St. Cyr . . .” She walked up to him.

  “Jenny Holzer likes to link ideological statements with the forms and meanings of architecture.” He spoke with a slight accent, neither looking up nor acknowledging his name. “Holzer was trying to make sense out of the chaos of death—spreading these bones out in neat tight lines.” He turned then so that only one lens trapped the LED script: Hair is stuck inside me.

  This time she was sure he did smile. He returned the bone to the table, adjusted its position.

  “I don’t think I’m late. . . .” She checked her watch, conscious of reflections of moving text pooling at her feet.

  “I’m early. I wanted to see the Holzer exhibit. I missed it the last time. Lustmord.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “German . . . for sexual murder.” He smiled again, glancing over his shoulder, the arc of his arm indicating eight panels of electric signboards broadcasting script in red, yellow, and green. The words, in upper-case letters, scrolled downward at varying speeds. “The voices of the participants—perpetrator, victim, observer.”

  She glanced down at the table. Saw that some of the bones had little silver bracelets around them. “Are these . . .”

  “Human? Yes. I guess you could call them the forensic evidence. Quite a striking statement, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know what I think.” She looked away.

  “Such happy insistent colors.” Fresh red letters burned across his lenses.

  “The message is anything but happy.” She saw the words I hook her spine pulse down one of the columns.

  “Ms. Holzer does what every good artist should. Forces the viewer to look at what he only pretends to reject.”

  She could feel his eyes through the barrier of the dark glasses.

  “Perhaps the sexual murderer is not a monster, but everyman,” he said.

  She stole another glance at one of the LED signs. She smiles at me because she imagines I can help her.

  “Come,” he said, “let’s talk.” He moved out of the room, through the annex, toward the main towers of the Guggenheim Museum. She watched him walk, something close to a swagger, with his dark designer jacket opened, his cashmere topcoat casually thrown over his left arm. She could have easily been misled, assumed that everything about him came without effort. But that would have been a false impression. She suspected that he was keenly conscious of every aspect about himself, and that there was exacting deliberateness in everything he did.

  “I like this building,” he said, gazing up at the glass rotunda. “Wright’s giant spiderweb.”

  In the light she saw that he was young and quite handsome. An anemic aristocratic kind of handsome. In the manner of English gentry and some homosexuals. She couldn’t remember if Patrice had mentioned he was gay.

  “Frank Gehry did the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain.” He was talking again. “But I still haven’t decided if I like his design. Part of me sees brilliant undulating energy, a steely Daliesque landscape. Another part is reminded of a titanium beast humping its mate.” He laughed.

  “You don’t do commercial?”

  “No, I leave the public monuments to guys like Gehry and Koolhaas.”

  “My husband loved what you did for Brad and Patrice.”

  He shook his head. “I’m glad they’re happy. There are some things I might have done differently. But then, I’m never satisfied.”

  “A perfectionist?” she asked.

  He removed his glasses, and she saw that one of his eyes was blue, the other green. “Is that bad?”

  “No, except . . .”

  “Perfection is elusive.” His bicolored eyes fixed on her.

  Unaccountably, she wondered if he thought she was attractive. “Reese and I are happy you’ve decided to take us on as clients.”

  “That sounds ominous. You and your husband aren’t going to be difficult?”

  “No, of course not. We understand how you work.”

  “Good. Then we shall get along famously.”

  Hanae sat upon a cushion on the floor of the bedroom. Eyes closed, she counted the strokes of the brush through her shoulder-length hair. She had almost gotten used to the length of the stroke, shorter now, more staccatoed than when she had had hair she could sit upon. Before he had cut it. Inside her head she still carried the memory of sitting naked and cold as he’d clicked the steely scissors in a mad dance around her head, her hair cascading, fluttering in pieces to the floor like small wounded bats.

  But the man had done more than cut her hair. He had cut into her heart, had cut into her sense of who she was. Had almost severed her marriage to Jimmy. And most painfully, had caused their unborn child to flood from her belly. A living thing no more, but so much blood and water running between her thighs. She had lost almost everything in that house in the woods. Had almost lost her life.

  She had retreated to her parents’ home in Kyoto after that time. To heal, to allow herself to feel again, to trust her truer self, to rek
indle the light inside her head so that no longer would she fear the instincts of her heart. And most surely she had fled to find Jimmy again.

  She had first begun to trust her art again in Kyoto. Sculpting on the small table her father had made for her. In the beginning her fingers would not move, trapped in the clay, dead as dry twigs pruned from a tree. Then slowly they had begun to come to life, finding once again in the clay the contours of what her mind saw. Small objects grew under her fingers. A tiny temple, a likeness of Mama’s cat, a bird with a long tail. A whole shelf of miniature sculptures, small steps in the slow journey to reclaim herself.

  And then there had been the bust of her father. He had fussed and made much of having his image made. Yet he had sat for her in the small garden at the rear of her childhood home. Sat in his kimono, letting her fingers explore and reexplore the planes of his stern Japanese face. But in the end, it had been his smile rising to crinkles at the corners of his eyes that she had found in the clay.

  Then there had come the day when she had heard her mother and father whispering. Forgetting the keenness of her hearing, they could not keep from her the horror that had flooded the whole of Kyoto. A four-year-old boy had been taken as he rode his bike in the park, rode beyond the vision of his mother, who chattered innocently with friends, speaking of shopping and the prices of things. It should have been safe for the boy to ride his new bike down the short path, for his mother to speak idly of the best market at which to buy vegetables. Should have been safe, but for a monster in the park that afternoon.

  On the fifth day of his disappearance, she had her own blind image of the boy’s face floating beneath the water of a pond. Water lily pads spread like a costume hat round his small head, and fat koi nibbled at his ear. He giggled at their touch, bubbles exploding from his mouth in a stream. The image burned behind her eyes steadily throughout the long day. And though the picture she glimpsed inside her was happy, her heart knew that the truth was closer to tragedy. She could no longer remember if it had been the radio or television that had said the boy’s severed head had been found in a nearby reservoir, one ear missing due to animal activity.