BLUE MERCY (29 page)

Kay stood and surveyed Hagen. Her right arm was pinned beneath her at an unnatural angle. And plastered on her hip, a flame-red maple leaf was brilliant against her colorless flesh.

Kay felt embarrassed for the woman—exposed, splayed out before everyone. There was no dignity in death. Certainly not in murder. Here, and then at the OCME, Hagen’s body would be laid out, picked apart, examined, and dissected with little regard for privacy. Kay always hoped she’d never die in Baltimore City, lying on a slab for Jonesy and her fellow detectives to see.

“He wasn’t worried about her being found.” She shuffled one duty-shoe in the dense leaves underfoot. “He could have covered her, and she wouldn’t have been found for months.”

Kay thought of Valley. And Beggs. He
was
trying to get their attention.

She pointed to the wounds on Hagen’s chest. “There’re more this time,” she said. “How many do you count?”

“Eighteen. Twenty, maybe.”

“Almost twice as many. Why?”

“She’s bigger than his last two. Stronger. Harder to subdue.”

“Not if the wounds are postmortem.” She pointed to the ligature marks circling Hagen’s outstretched left wrist. Similar marks scored her ankles. “He tied her. That’s a first.”

“I don’t get this, Kay.” Finn circled the body once, shaking his head. “If we’re looking at Bates for these murders, how the hell did he pull this one off under our noses?”

“Maybe he
did
get out the back.” Kay breathed in the damp forest air and watched ants trail lines across Hagen’s damp skin, marking routes over their new landscape. “Or maybe we
are
off base with Bates. This is someone smart, Finn. Someone who’s got it together, knows what he’s doing.”

“Like Arsenault?”

She let out a breath. What if her fleeting attraction to Arsenault
had
impaired her judgment? “I wish I knew. This just doesn’t make sense to me.”

On the road some thirty feet above them, the OCME’s white van pulled to the shoulder. The crowd had multiplied: joggers and dog walkers, drivers rubbernecking. A Mobile Crime Lab technician was making the treacherous descent into the ravine, her camera around her neck, as she gripped the guide rope patrol officers had strung around the rain-slick tree trunks.

Kay scanned the area and the slope cutting farther down to Dead Run, the river that snaked to Gwynns Falls. This was all too familiar. Last year, after she’d caught the Annie
Harris case, she’d come here, the Jane Doe long gone, the crime scene weeks old.

She turned several times now, gauging her bearings, then pointed west. “We passed a T-intersection back there, didn’t we?”

“Yeah. Lazear, I think. About a hundred yards back.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“What is it, Kay?”

“Varcoe’s Jane Doe. She was found right around here. Maybe a little farther down. It’s the same spot.”

“This guy dumped Hagen here just to fuck with us?”

“Either that or he’s fucking with Eales.” She nodded to Hagen’s body, stark and white amidst the leaves. “This guy might have been doing Eales a favor by killing Valley, but he’s just taken out Eales’s meal ticket.”

“Or maybe this is a favor too. Guess it depends on how Eales really felt about his inside-outside.”

“I don’t think Eales asked for this one, Finn.” Kay’s stomach clutched around the coffee and muffin she’d eaten on the way to the search-and-seizure at Bates’s. “This one makes things way more complicated.”

“I wanna talk to Arsenault.” Finn scanned the crowd above them as though he expected to find the Web designer there. “Even if this isn’t him, he’s responsible. Him and that goddamned site of his.
And
I want to know if good ol’ Jerry was really home last night.”

The Crime Lab technician was a hard-faced girl with a weak smile. She shuffled through the leaves, stopping several yards back from the body, and unhitched her camera. “Where do you want me to start?” she asked.

“Shoot her first, I guess.” Finn pointed to Hagen.

“No,” Kay interrupted. “She’s not going anywhere. Start with them.” She nodded at the spectators crowding the yellow tape. “You got a wide-angle or a zoom on that thing?”

“Of course.”

“Good. Get as many of them as you can before they start disappearing. I need to know if the son of a bitch is watching us.”

WHILE THE EYES
of the morbidly curious sought out Hagen’s body down in the ravine, Roach watched Delaney.

Seeing Patsy only reminded him of the frustration, of the need going unquenched. He had hoped for so much more from the cow.

Two nights ago when she’d knocked on his door, he’d been giddy with anticipation. Absolutely exhilarated when he’d nailed her in the thigh with the needle. She’d shoved him away, grappled uselessly as her glasses went spinning across the floor, and she blubbered profanities he’d never expected from Daddy’s good girl.

She’d gone down fast though.

He’d dragged her to the bathroom then and peeled off her clothes. And all the time, her eyes wide and gawking.

Only after he’d managed to get her into the tub did Roach allow himself a smile. Staring down at her blank gaze, her head slumped onto one shoulder and her white flesh pressing against the porcelain sides of the tub.

“Patsy. Earth to Patsy. Stay with me now,” he’d crooned.

A thin moan. Her eyelids fluttered. He slapped her cheek and wondered if he’d given her too much of the ketamine. Or maybe she was faking. He checked the bonds. Ankles. Wrists. Her flesh swelled around the knots as the end of the rope was secured to the old pipes under the basin sink. The last whore had taught him the importance
of ligatures; he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

He’d undressed and folded his clothes on the toilet seat. When he returned, the sour stench of her vomit hung in the air. It must have been the ketamine. He’d washed the puke off her, all the while worrying he wouldn’t be able to get it up after that.

Naked, he straddled her in the big tub. The AC blasted against his sweat-slicked skin, and he shivered as he looked into her half-lidded eyes, the irises barely pale rings around her dilated pupils.

“There you are. How you feeling, hmm, Patsy?”

When her eyes threatened to close again, he jostled her. “Come on, old girl. Don’t you wanna play with Roach?” He wondered if a shot of cold water might bring her around. He needed to see the realization fill her eyes. That’s what got him hard.

Planting himself over her ample hips, he took one breast in his hand and kneaded it between his fingers, pinching the stiffened nipple. When that didn’t rouse her, he squeezed harder.

Her eyes widened then, as the blood rose to her tit, revealing the imprint of his hand.

“Ah, you’re awake now, aren’t you?”

He twisted over her and reached for the lock-back knife on the sill. Showed her the gleaming blade. He’d worked on the Spyderco Police Model for an hour the night before, honing the small blade until he’d had to take his hard-on into the shower. But with Patsy for company, he wouldn’t be jacking-off solo. No, sir.

He leaned forward, his erection pressing against her belly. The heat of her body did nothing to excite him. Instead, it was the knife. The feel of the thin handle in his palm, the anticipation of its blade loving her. But the best
was always later, when she’d cooled. For now though, her fear would be his prize.

“How’re you doing, Patsy, hmm?” He caressed her cheek with the blade. This time her moan was louder, her paralyzed body shifted weakly under his, and if not for the pink panties he’d wadded into her mouth, he knew she’d be screeching.

Reaching up with the knife, he traced its tip from her wrist, down the inside of her arm, all the way to her pit. He lowered his face and inhaled. Just under her rose-scented deodorant, the smell of her sweat was intoxicating.

A couple days’ growth shadowed her armpit. He’d expected she’d have kept herself better. He brought the Spyderco’s blade to the pale mound of stubbled flesh.

The blade was sharp enough, and her deodorant acted as a lubricant. He stroked the knife across the porous skin and watched the small black hairs accumulate along its blade. The hunger grew. Its pressure boiled under his skull, snaked deep in his groin. And when she stiffened weakly beneath him, and he heard her gurgled moan, Roach figured Patsy would be one to remember.

In the end, though, she’d been a huge disappointment. Long after she was dead, after her flesh had started to cool, he’d tried to haul her upstairs to the bedroom, wanted to lie with her as he had with the hooker. But Patsy was heavier than he’d counted on.

To top it off, she’d been a pain in the ass to get rid of. It had been a long night. His muscles had burned as he’d dragged her to the new tarp in the hall. Only then, securely wrapped, had her dead weight slid more easily across the worn linoleum flooring to the back door.

The porch had been a challenge, and getting her into the trunk of the Park Avenue had really pissed him off.
Then, in Leakin Park at 2 a.m., as spikes of rain pelted his hooded jacket and drove past the glare of the headlights like shiny nails, he’d worked up a sweat getting her back out of the trunk. The nylon cord had cut his hands, and he’d cursed as he hauled her to the side of the embankment.

And there, in the dark silence of the forest, Roach had vented the enormity of his anger on Patsy. Over the drumming rain, he heard his own satisfied grunts as he brought his heel down hard and square onto what he imagined was her face under the tarp. It had felt good, and he’d done it again, and again, before—exhausted—he’d unfurled the tarp and let her body loose, listening to it tumble and come to rest somewhere in the blackness.

Still, in spite of the hassle, it was good Patsy was dead. Sooner or later she would’ve slipped up. Delaney and her partner had already talked to her. And even though Patsy wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, she might’ve figured everything out and pointed the finger.

So, it was business. He wondered if Bernard would understand.

Now, Roach watched Delaney as she stood over Patsy’s body. He wondered if her partner recognized the life force in her. Her determination and her will to live. Delaney’s drive for survival was high. He’d witnessed it himself the night Bernard had kicked the living shit out of her. Anyone else might not have survived it. Anyone else would not have hung on the way she did.

And he hoped, in his hands, she would show that determination again.

THEY GRABBED A COFFEE
on the way up to Overlea and found Alexander Hagen in his new Parkview Funeral Home. Amidst the ostentatious trappings of death, the man’s stoicism endured. It wasn’t until they’d taken him to the OCME—at his insistence—to view his daughter’s remains that he’d finally broken down.

Finn had intended to ask the old man for an alibi. But witnessing Hagen’s breakdown, Finn had refrained from asking. For now.

Supplying them with a spare key, Hagen had found his own way home, and by four o’clock Finn and Kay let themselves into Patricia Hagen’s Mt. Washington home.

“Well, he didn’t snatch her from here,” Finn said as they pushed their way past five yowling cats. “No forced entry. Nothing out of place.”

The air in the small stone house was stale and reeked of litter boxes. The flowers in the vases drooped, but there were no signs of foul play.

The cats followed them into Hagen’s office and Kay dumped a sixth off the chair at the computer. While Kay fired up the PC, Finn took stock of Patricia’s devotion to Eales.

“Jesus, will you look at all this?”

Corkboards mounted on either side of the office window boasted photos and Post-it notes, all painstakingly tacked up, perfectly spaced. Their content: Eales. Photos of Eales as a teenager, photos of him with what looked like his mother, his baby brother, and others Finn didn’t recognize. Several shots had captured him with his vintage
car. Finn recognized a few snaps from the website. But none were of Eales and Hagen as the happy couple.

“Welcome to the shrine of Bernard Eales.”

To the left of the photo wall, a bookcase was wedged into the corner. The spines of the texts reminded him of Arsenault’s condo, but Hagen’s collection lay predominantly within the realm of law. Finn imagined Eales’s girlfriend had become a major pain in Grogan’s ass as the trial loomed, no doubt grasping at angles to save a man she probably figured she owed her life to.

“We’re not going to get much from this,” Kay said from behind the computer’s monitor. “Her in- and out-boxes are practically empty. Her recycle bin has been deleted.”

“Any emails to Arsenault?”

“Several. The last one she wrote offers him a higher cut from the defense fund if he can arrange some national exposure.”

“So the bastard’s been getting a percentage all along.” Finn shook his head. “What about documents?” He waited as Kay perused the user files. Together they scanned the short list. Letters to Grogan mostly. Several love notes to Eales.

“Fucking nutcase,” Finn said, backing away from the computer. “I say we pack this up and take the whole mess in. Let the computer guys go over it. Maybe they can salvage some of the deleted shit.”

He ferreted through the letter trays on the desk. Articles and photocopies from law journals. Online pages printed from other sites developed for “innocents,” and letters to and from national organizations supporting the “wrongfully incarcerated.”

“And all this garbage too,” he said, indicating the stacks.

He scanned the desk again, and the red flashing digit
on the answering machine caught his eye. Finn hit the play button and heard the satisfying whir of tape rewinding. Old technology. Far more accessible than voice mail, and no need to subpoena the phone company for messages.