BLUE MERCY (19 page)

“You can buy anything on the streets. Illegal ketamine’s usually stolen from vet hospitals in its pharmaceutical
form. Users either inject it intramuscularly or cook it down into powder.”

Jonesy half-rolled Beggs’s body on the cutting table and pointed to a perfectly round bruise circling a puncture mark behind the prostitute’s left hip. “Given the injection site, it’s not likely she did it herself.”

“When you say short-acting, what are we talking about?” Kay asked as Jonesy let the body slide back.

“Depends on the dose. Full onset can take anywhere from one to four minutes, with the total trip lasting twenty or thirty. Residual effects can linger for an hour or more.”

“Trip? So people do this stuff recreationally?”

“Ever since the sixties. It was called Vitamin K back then. Resurfaced in the last few years on the rave scene as Special K.”

“And what does it do?”

“Blocks the nerve paths, impairing motor skills, often simulating paralysis, but without depressing pulmonary or circulatory function. It’s also used as a date-rape drug.”

“So you’re saying it paralyzes them?” Kay asked, her mind reeling at the possibilities.

“Depending on the dose, yes.”

“So how much did our girl have in her system?”

“Can’t say for sure. Not without a time of death. Putrefaction was likely delayed because of the blood loss. Blood provides a channel for the spread of putrefactive organisms within the body. Plus I think he kept her cool …”

But Kay was hearing Arsenault’s words now… .
he’s wanting to stall the decay.
So Arsenault had been right.

“But the ketamine didn’t kill her?” Finn asked.

“No.” Jonesy held up one of the girl’s slashed wrists. “Exsanguination. The radial artery was sliced. Very clean. He knew what he was doing. This girl bled out till there was nothing left.”

“So definitely not a suicide?”

“Not with the ketamine in her system. I doubt she could have held a knife.” Jonesy leaned back, surveying his morning’s work. Beggs had been opened and emptied, her individual organs examined, packaged in red plastic bags, and returned to the body’s cavity to be closed up again.

“What about the bruising?” Kay pointed to the marks on Beggs’s arms and legs. They were more noticeable this morning than yesterday. “How old are those?”

“Most, I’d guess, were sustained just prior to her death. These”—he pointed to the backs of Beggs’s wrists and arms—“these look like handprints. Like she’d been grabbed. The rest are random.”

“She struggled then?”

“I’d say yes.”

Kay looked again at the girl’s remains, willing them to provide her with the answers.
What did he do to you?

“She’s also been washed,” Jonesy said. “Some kind of industrial soap. There’s not much evidence on her. Trace or fiber.”

“Prints?”

“We fumed with cyanoacrylate and hit her with the lasers. Nothing.”

“What about inside her? Did you find anything?” Kay asked.

“Traces of spermicide. But no seminal fluids. She made sure her trick used a condom. But who knows if it was the same guy that killed her?”

“Nothing forcible?”

“Doesn’t look like.”

“Any way of knowing when she’d had intercourse last?”

“Hey, I’m a good cutter, Kay, but I’m not psychic.” Jonesy shot her a smile. It faded when she didn’t reciprocate.

“Any ideas why he’d bleed her?” she asked eventually.

“I’m not a forensic psychologist either.”

“Come on, Jonesy, you’ve seen a lot. Anything come to mind?”

“Bleeding a victim …I don’t know. Could be anthropophagy.”

“What’s that?” Finn asked.

“Vampirism. Drinking of blood. Or it could be a cult thing, or maybe he’s reenacting some scenario.”

“Funeral homes drain the blood from the bodies,” Kay said.

“Sure. But they use an embalming machine. A Porti-boy. Pumps a formaldehyde-based fluid in through the carotid while forcing the blood out the jugular. They don’t cut open the wrists.” Jonesy snapped off his latex gloves. “It would probably help if you knew what this guy’s goal was. The body or the blood.”

“There’re easier ways to get blood.” Finn began untying the paper gown he wore over his suit.

“Then maybe it’s the process he’s after.” Kay looked down at Beggs’s wrists, seeing the white glare of bone and tendons that lay beneath the muscle. Beggs’s life had pumped from those gashes while she’d lain unconscious.
Is that what you’re after? You want to see the life drain out of her?

“I wish I had more for you,” Jonesy said. “But given how clean she is, she’s not telling me much.”

They thanked him and left the cutting room. Out in the corridor they tossed the paper gowns in the bin.

“So you gonna tell me about the fat lip?” Finn asked again.

“Bar fight.” She caught his side glance. “It’s not what you think. I wasn’t drinking. I was with Arsenault.”

“Last night?”

Kay nodded and punched the up button of the elevator.
“He called me. On my way home from Wilkens last night. Wanted to talk, so I met him at The Cosmo.”

She saw Finn’s jaw tighten. “You could have come got me.”

“Yeah, but he wasn’t going to talk with you there.”

“He’s a suspect, Kay.”

She didn’t argue, even though she didn’t agree.

“It was a public place, Finn. I had the situation under control.” She thought of Arsenault leaning into her, her back pressed against the Lumina. “Nothing was going to happen.”

“Nothing except for that fat lip of yours.”

“It was an accident. Really. A couple drunk Neanderthals looking to pick a fight on a hot night.”

“Uh-huh.” He didn’t sound convinced. “So did you get anything from Arsenault?”

The doors opened to the lobby and Kay had to squint against the glare of the sun on the marble panels of the OCME’s foyer. “I don’t know how much stock to put in this, but he suggested a necrophilia angle.”

Finn shook his head as though considering and dismissing the theory in the same breath simply because it came from Arsenault. “The guy’s not right, Kay. Don’t let him fool you.”

“He’s not fooling me.” She sensed Finn’s possessiveness again, only this time she wasn’t sure if she should find it insulting or charming.

“He’s connected to all this, Kay. Somehow.”

“I agree, but the more I talk to him, the more I’m convinced it’s not him we should be looking at.” Still, Kay couldn’t forget the spontaneous rage she’d seen explode from Arsenault last night. She could still see the brute’s head snapped back in fear, the jagged edge of the martini glass’s stem jammed up against his stubbled throat, and the
thin line of blood that sprang from its point. And she could still feel the crawling suspicion she’d had last night when she’d actually contemplated the possibility of Scott Arsenault killing.

IT HAD BEEN A LONG DAY
of chasing down names and addresses and anything else connected to B. J. Beggs. Still, they wound up with nothing. Whoever had picked up the young prostitute three nights ago was not a Wilkens regular. No one recognized the late-model sedan, had noted even a partial tag number, or remembered seeing it before. Finn and Kay had hit a wall.

It was late when Finn pulled up to Kay’s front door, and he was surprised when she invited him up. Now, as he listened to her shower running down the hall, he wondered if the only reason she’d asked him up was to discuss the case.

“Maybe we need to rule out Scott Arsenault,” Kay shouted from the shower.

Finn made his way down the hall to the open doorway. He watched her blurred silhouette behind the tempered-glass stall doors, unable to avert his gaze. “How do we do that when the genius can’t even come up with a decent alibi?” he asked.

“What about prints? The Mobile Crime Lab came up with all kinds of latents from Eales’s house, right? What about running those against Arsenault’s?”

“You mean, from his rape file?”

“Exactly. The charges were dropped, but he’s probably still on Printrak. If there’s a match, then we can put him in Eales’s house.”

“And if there isn’t, that doesn’t exclude him from being there either.” Finn sipped the glass of Wink she’d poured him. The soda was flat. He pushed away from the doorframe and wandered to her office.

Kay’s monitor glared red and white. Finn recognized the Eales website message board. He didn’t doubt Kay read the messages every night, searching for anything that might resemble a lead.

“What about this website of his?” he asked, heading back to the bathroom. “How about subpoenaing the wiseass for a list of the dipshits on his chat group?”

“Sure, but it’s probably not going to help. When I dropped him off last night, I asked about getting a list. He said most of them use non-server-based addresses. Almost impossible to track,” she said over the pounding water. “He’s going to try though. I also asked him to remove a lot of the details on the site.”

“And?”

“And he agreed.”

“Guess you do have a way with him, huh?” he said, coming back to the bathroom door.

But if Kay heard his remark, or the jealousy in his voice, she chose to ignore it.

Through the textured glass and the steam, Finn watched her soap herself and wished he’d never come upstairs.

“The list I really want,” Kay said, tilting her head back to rinse, “is Hagen’s.”

Alexander Hagen hadn’t proven cooperative. They’d called the funeral director twice already for the list of employee names.

They’d also pulled the fifteen-year-old police reports corresponding with Eales’s accusations against the old man. It had been nothing but bullshit. No evidence. No other complainants. The case had been dropped within days by
the investigating officers. But Finn couldn’t escape the feeling that there was more behind Eales’s accusations than a simple case of a horny teenager being denied access to Hagen’s only daughter.

And then there was Kay’s theory, spawned by Arsenault. Necrophilia. The connections to the Parkview Funeral Home were too obvious to ignore.

“Well, if you ask me,” Finn said, still watching Kay, “Hagen’s got to have the mother of all hate-ons for Eales. First the accusations. I mean, something like that, if it had gone public, the old man would have been ruined. And then he’s got Eales pawing all over his daughter.”

“What are you thinking?”

“Just that if anyone actually wanted Eales locked up, it’d be old man Hagen.”

“You mean, set Eales up?” Kay turned off the water and Finn turned his back. “Look, Finn, I agree, there’s something wonky about the Hagens. And the old man’s definitely hiding something. But to set someone up as a serial killer … come on, it’s a bit of a stretch.”

“Yeah.” Finn left the doorway and wandered back down the hall. “I think we need to talk to Patsy again,” he called over his shoulder. “She’s too involved. I don’t for a second buy that she came to Eales’s rescue
after
his arrest. Nobody, I don’t care how fucked-up, does that. She’s probably been seeing him all along. And I’m sure she knows more than she’s letting on.”

“Like maybe if Eales had help.”

Kay had posed the theory earlier today, and Finn agreed it had merit.

When she came out of the bathroom, she was wrapped in a light terry robe, the sash snug around her small waist. “Patsy would know who his friends were at least. If someone helped Eales get rid of those bodies a year ago, maybe
the guy’s still keeping the fantasy alive. And maybe Hagen knows him.”

“Or …maybe we really
are
looking at a damn copycat,” Finn said, trying to get them back to the hard facts of the case, rather than on wild theories and hypotheticals. “I don’t see anything about Beggs’s murder that isn’t on Arsenault’s website. And the ketamine’s new too.”

Kay’s face was tight. She looked as overwhelmed by the rampant possibilities as he was. Fingering back her wet hair, she shook her head. “I need a drink.”

When she came back to the living room to join him on the couch, her beer was already half-drunk.

“Why did you ask me up here, Kay?” He needed to know.

She said nothing for a moment, then: “I didn’t want to be alone.”

Their silence then was uncomfortable. He wanted to say so many things but didn’t know how. As he stared at Kay, a year of waiting hit him. A year of sitting on the sidelines of her life, waiting for this day.

And now that it was here, Finn felt powerless.

Kay caught his stare.

“I worry about you,” he told her, admitting the truth at last.

“I don’t want you to.”

He washed down his laugh with the last of the bitter soda. “Trust me, it’s not something I can control. I’ve tried.”

“Finn, listen, you’re a good friend. The best I have. I—”

“You know something? I don’t want to be your goddamn friend.” He set his glass down on the coffee table a little too hard, and when he stood, he saw the surprise on her face. “I should go.”

“Finn, wait.” Kay caught him at the door.

He already had it open, one foot out.

“Damn it. Wait.” Her hand closed around his wrist.

But when he turned, she only stared, the rush of emotions behind her eyes too scattered for him to interpret.

“Don’t you need anything, Kay?” he asked finally. “Don’t you ever need
someone
in your life? Someone who gives a shit about you?”

She was struggling. Biting her lip. Searching for an answer. “Yes.” The word caught in her throat. “Yes. I do. Okay? I do. Now just close the door.”

Finn did.

“Listen, I’m sorry,” she said. “I should never have shut you out.”

She looked small then, standing there in her robe, the rawness of her emotions unraveling in her voice.