Blood Music (32 page)

The man—Pat—was down. The woman—Zelly—was standing directly in front of him with her hand held up—protecting, supplicating—and there was blood on the front of her shirt. He saw what she was holding—scissors—saw that the scissors were covered with blood and her arm was bloody too and her eyes were enormous. John's eyes met them for an instant and then he was bent over the body, stabbing, stabbing, and with each terrified thrust all he thought was,
Don't get up, Don't get up,
and he might have been saying it, and it seemed like he'd never be sure, could never be sure, the man would get up—Pat would get up—he couldn't be dead it was too easy, and the feeling, creeping like a numbness up his pumping arm
he's dead he's dead he's dead
the image of Madeleine the image of Cheryl—dead—he was pumping his arm up and down and he couldn't stop and then there was a hand on his arm and he dropped the knife and it was Madeleine but his hand was shaking, the woman was just looking at him and his hand was shaking.

Zelly's face was very calm. She could have been looking at what was in front of her or she could have been looking at something far away. There was some sort of odd light over everything, odd shining light—and every line and every hair was clear. Pat's face where he lay on the carpet was very clear in that light; one eye was visible, it looked at the carpet and there was blood at his nose, and along his cheek there was a long, thin line of blood. The blood seemed to eat up the light.

John was panting, and he felt nothing. He turned to face Madeleine. Somewhere, incongruously, a baby was crying. The sound mingled in his head with another, high-pitched, keening sound, and both seemed to be coming from a long way away, and coming closer, and he looked at Madeleine with his bloody hand held out, and listened without comprehension to the sound of the baby crying and the approaching sirens.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my dear friend Jane Cushman; I will always be glad I sent it to Jane. Also my friend and editor Susan Kamil, whom I fought every step of the way: I'm happy you won. And my husband, David Bayer, without whom I would not have this life. Also David Doty, for his invaluable help with research. And, finally, Kobe Japanese restaurant and Le Royal de Paris, where much of this book was written.

If you loved BLOOD MUSIC, check out these other Witness titles. Read on for excerpts from

THE GREEN MUSE
by Jessie Prichard Hunter

and

THE SILENT GIRLS
by Eric Rickstad

The Green Muse

Chapter 1

Edouard

T
HIS MORNING
I was called upon to photograph the dead again.

The messenger boy came at five-thirty. His name is Martin. I gave him a few sous: Martin works hard for his sous, running errands all over Paris for the Prefecture of Police.

I sent the lad off and packed up my camera and plates; I took the omnibus to the rue Mazarine, in the Ninth Arrondissement. The building, number 21, proved to be a dreary four-story tenement. Police Captain Bezier was there; he led me around to the back courtyard. The morning sky with its huge racing clouds seemed far away. The windows no longer went up in straight lines but listed as though the whole building were a rocking ship. There was an empty wheelbarrow; there was a tunnel leading to the front of the building; there were two dirty awnings; there was offal on the ground.

Of course a crime scene cannot be photographed at night, but the dead can wait till morning. It is all the same to them. I change nothing, other than to cover a naked body. We must preserve the setting quite exactly as we find it but a sheet disturbs nothing, and I cannot bear that the dead be subjected to indignity.

Capt. Bezier motioned me to a patch of darkness under one of the awnings. Night had not left it yet. A woman lay there.

I checked the camera's register to see if the magazine was full: eighteen plates. It was just a habit, a necessary part of the ritual; I have never gone out on a job with an unloaded camera. The night before, I had treated cotton papers with albumen and sodium chloride, dried them, and dipped them in a solution part silver nitrate, part water, to render the paper sensitive; I had again dried the paper, then fixed it carefully against the glass plates that it might be ready for my camera when I awoke. There is always a stack of newly treated plates in my darkroom, as I never know when I may be called upon. I am naturally in need of but little sleep; sometimes I think that the city wakes me early, like a lover, because she knows that there is so much each day to be seen and experienced together. And sometimes I awaken so refreshed, so eager, that I almost feel I might indeed have been kissed awake by this city I love so much.

But now I readied myself to kneel in foul semidarkness and see the unbearable.

“Have you questioned the tenants?” I asked the captain.

“No,” said Capt. Bezier. “There will be time for that. It's not likely to be someone from the building, anyway. Why leave her here to be found?”

The captain is something of an ass.

I ran my right hand up and down the pebble-grained leather of the side of my camera box, once, as I raised it to my eye: another facet of the ritual. I walked around the body, looking at the corpse through my lens. Through the round aperture,everything recedes except sight, and you are alone with the image before you.

And yet the image is made distant, merely a collection of lines and angles of light. This distance is necessary if I am not to be overwhelmed by pity, anger, and disgust. For my day-to-day existence I work part-time in a fashionable studio where tintypes are turned out as though they were loaves of bread. I also make sentimental portraits of those who die in their beds, either peacefully or after long illnesses. Sometimes I photograph them before they die, that the family might having a living subject for their memento instead of a dead one. For the police I record the scenes of murders. Sometimes, if the victim is unknown or well-known, my photographs are put up on flyers all over the city. More commonly they are filed with the police and used later, as a tool to incriminate the murderer.

I stooped to capture the image before me.

The woman was young; she was lying on her back with her hands folded over her heart, and her head was turned away from my camera. She was wearing a black bolero jacket and a sky-blue silk waist; her skirt was dove-gray. Her shoes were of leather too soft for these streets. It is difficult not to put a story to the posture, clothing, and obvious social standing of the dead: This woman did not belong here.

I took a shot; then I lifted the back of the camera and held it at the proper angle to let the exposed slide drop down from the magazine so that the next slide would be before the lens. I do not always like my job. The simple, mechanical tasks associated with it soothe me and enable me to maintain both composure and a seeming objectivity in even the most hideous of circumstances. I moved slowly around the side of the body. The woman's hair was loosed from its pins and flowed in a yellow cascade across the dirty ground. There was blood in it.

“The identity of the victim gives us the identity of the killer,” Capt. Bezier said. He said that every time.

There was blood on her dress, on her folded hands. I did not want to see her face. I knelt by her side and focused my lens on her neck, which had been severed. The blood there was dull and clotted, and the wound looked like nothing more than a cut of meat.

“—not a gentlewoman,” Capt. Bezier was saying. “A midinette, a shopgirl. A night of drinking, an argument with her boyfriend. It is always the same story.”

My hand trembled, but I kept my silence. Her long, curved fingers were not marred by the stings of the sewing needle or the calluses of the shopkeeper. She was not as thin as the midinettes, who have only a snack instead of a full midi lunch. She was not a member of the upper classes, that much was clear by her manner of dress and by the short lavender glove I noticed beneath her left hip and pointed out to the captain. Ladies of the upper classes wear gloves that reach to the elbow and are almost always of white kid.

I prepared myself to see her face. Her dress was neither rich nor poor; perhaps she could afford a maid, and that is why her hands were unmarred; perhaps she had children at home even now.

Capt. Bezier picked up the glove and spanked it against his thigh to dust it off.

“Very fashionable,” he said shortly. He brings his prejudices to his job. He does not approve of fashionable women unless they are of the upper classes; he will make assumptions about their morals from the cut of their gloves.

I stepped around the blood that had gathered at her neck. She had not been dead when her killer brought her here. I knelt again. I moved her hair away from her face. She had been beautiful in life; she was not beautiful in death. Her features were very fine, indicating a lively temperament; her forehead high and white, a sign of firm yet maidenly intelligence; the space between her nose and mouth was somewhat large, and the dint was so faint as to be nonexistent—the —angels had not touched her there with their fingers that she forget heaven—what —visions had she had while she was alive? She did not look as though she were seeing heaven now. Her eyes were wide with evident horror, her mouth contorted with fear. But from behind my lens I was reassured. Her agony was spurious, nothing more than the effects of rigor mortis. It was death that had contorted her pretty features into a grotesque mask. There was no way to tell what had been on her face at the moment of her death—fear, —resignation, fury? In a few more hours her hands, which lay so prayerlike now, would be trying to claw their way into her heart. And within less than thirty-six hours all of these effects would soften and disappear, leaving her once again unembattled.

The Silent Girls

Chapter 2

O
CTOBER 22, 2011

T
HE BLOOD ON
Frank Rath's hands steamed in the cold October air as he slung one end of a rope over the barn's crossbeam, tied the other end to the center of the tomato stake skewered through the gutted carcass's legs, and yanked.

Pain erupted in his lower back as if he'd been struck with an axe. He dropped to his knees, the dead deer sagging back in a puddle of its own sad blood on the frozen dirt.

Rath remained still, breathing slowly through his nose, counting backward from ten.
Erector spinae.
He'd learned the Latin from studying the anatomy model while whiling away his autumn in Doc Rankin's office.

Rath's cell phone vibrated in his shirt pocket. Rachel, he hoped. For seven weeks now, she'd been away for her first semester at Johnson State, and in that time, loneliness had nested in Rath's heart. The house felt lifeless, no hum of Rachel's hair dryer in the morning, no insistent burble of incoming texts when she left her cell phone idle for even a second on the kitchen table.

Rath reached for his cell phone, but the skewering pain insisted he lower himself onto his back, where he performed an inept pelvic tilt. Doc Rankin had sent him to a whack-job physical therapist, who'd prescribed a contortionist's regimen of humiliating stretches that made Rath feel as though he were about to shit himself: stretches better suited to rich housewives who performed them in steamy rooms while listening to didgeridoo music than to a man whose idea of stretching was reaching in the top cupboard for his Lagavulin 16 and chocolate Pop Tarts. Rath gained his feet with a groan.

What worried him wasn't the pain but that the pain seemed to have no source. He'd simply awoken one morning as if someone had punched a hole in his back and ripped the
erector spinae
from his spine.

He looked down at the deer. He had to get it hung. First the deer. Then a beer. Or three.

Rath's cell phone buzzed: Harland Grout.

The lone, lead detective on the anemic Canaan police force, Grout was as green as the back of a wet frog. He was also a dart player in Rath's dart league. Most importantly, he had a strong young back good for lifting a dead deer.

Rath answered. “Grout. I'm trying to hang a deer here. Maybe you'd like to earn a six-pack and lend your—”

“There's a car. Out on Route fifteen,” Grout said.

“That sort of specificity and twenty bucks Canadian will buy you a lap dance at The Dirty Girl over the border in Richelieu.”

“Yeah,” Grout said, and Rath noted a barb of severity in his voice that made him regret his initial glibness.

“What?” Rath said, and wandered out of the barn to lean against the fender of the '74 International Scout it seemed he'd been restoring since Lincoln was a Whig.

“The car appears abandoned.” Grout paused to wait for the static of the weak signal to pass. Up here, near the border, there wasn't one cell tower within five thousand miles. God bless Vermont. Or not. “The car belongs to my wife's cousin's daughter.”

“Shit,” Rath said, not even trying to untangle that snarl of family-tree branches.

“She's sixteen.”

“Shit.” Rath slumped against the Scout. “You think something happened?”

Something happened.
What euphemistic bullshit for the images—none pretty—that leapt into Rath's mind the instant he heard of a girl gone missing.

“It's hard telling,” Grout said. “I just got the call on the car. When I called her mom, she was worried. Hasn't heard from her in days and asked me to look into it.”

“Why call me? She's a minor, you can investigate it straightaway as an MP.”

“She's emancipated.”

“Shit,” Rath said again. His repertoire of blue language needed work.

Unless foul play was clearly evident, seventy-two hours had to pass before an official investigation could begin on a missing adult. And, by Vermont law, an emancipated girl, sixteen or not, was an adult. It made no sense. Sixteen was a
child
, and any adult who looked at a girl that young and saw anything
but
a child was deluded or a pervert.