Last Breath (3 page)

“Postmortem,” Sarandon said. “Like the other one.” There was no reddening of the skin around the design, as there would have been if the ink had been applied during life.

More whirs and clicks from the snapshot camera. The exhaust fans incorporated into the table hummed busily, while the more powerful fans installed in the ceiling droned in counterpart. As yet there were no odors for the fans to draw off. But not for long.

Before the corpse was replaced on the body block, Walsh took a close look at the tat. It was a maroon hourglass, three inches long, rendered by hand.

He had known it would be somewhere on her body. On Nikki Carter it had been engraved in her right buttock. Evidently the Hourglass Killer didn’t care where he made his mark.

“I’ve heard SID found a calling card,” Sarandon said, shifting the body into a supine position.

Walsh stiffened. “Who told you that?”

“Little birdie.”

“We don’t want that information getting out. It’s bad enough that the tattoo is public knowledge.”

“Hey,” Sarandon said, “you can tell me. I don’t leak.”

This was true, but Walsh cast a doubtful eye on Sarandon’s assistant.

Sarandon noted the glance. “Raul’s okay. Come on, Morris, you’re among friends here.”

Walsh thought of the bodies on gurneys and steel tables in every room and corridor in the morgue. Among friends? Among the dead, was more like it.

“Can you shut off the tape recorder for a minute?” Walsh asked.

Sarandon motioned to Raul, who killed the microphone.

“On both vics he left the same item,” Walsh said. “A three-by-five index card. Both times, the same words, printed by hand in block letters: WELCOME TO THE FOUR-H CLUB.”

Sarandon frowned. “Four-H Club?”

“Right.”

“Could mean anything, I guess. The Four-Homicide Club, maybe. Or the Four-Hooker Club.”

“Neither of the vics was a prostitute.”

“To a guy like this,
all
women might be prostitutes.”

“That’s not what it means.”

“No? Then you tell me.”

“It’s the Four-Hour Club,” Walsh said.

“Four hours?” Sarandon lifted an eyebrow. “Because of the hourglass, you think?”

“Partly. And then there’s the wristwatch.”

“What about it?”

“The dial was frozen at two-seventeen. That’s four hours to the minute after Nikki Carter’s abduction.”

“If the nightclub witnesses are reliable.”

“I think they are. Carter went into the rest room at approximately ten-fifteen and never came out.”

“Well, possibly. But there are a lot of ways for a Timex to get busted.” The ME began snipping Martha Eversol’s fingernails one at a time, placing each into a separate evidence envelope, which Raul neatly labeled. “Let’s say the killer messed up the ligatures, didn’t tie them tight enough. Carter gets free and struggles. He throws her to the floor, breaks her watch.”

“You didn’t find any defense wounds. Besides, letting her get loose would be a mistake on his part.”

“So?”

“I don’t think this guy makes mistakes.”

Sarandon glanced at him dubiously, then returned to his work. “You’re saying he smashed the watch on purpose, so the dial would freeze at exactly two-seventeen.”

“Which is when he killed her. Which is why she’s a member of the Four-Hour Club.” Walsh shrugged. “The stomach contents support the same timeline.”

“Come on, Morrie. Plenty of things can interfere with digestion. We can’t say for sure how long Carter was kept alive.”

“Your best estimate was six hours after her last meal, which would mean four hours after her abduction.”

“Key word there is
estimate
. I didn’t know you were going to take me so literally.”

“It all hangs together—the hourglass, the wristwatch, the Four-H reference.”

“And you think this one followed the same pattern?”

Walsh nodded. “Martha Eversol was snatched from a side street around eight-thirty on New Year’s Eve, on her way to a party. Someone rear-ended her, and she must’ve gotten out to exchange insurance info. I’m guessing she died at thirty minutes past midnight on the first day of the year.”

“Probably didn’t get a chance to keep her resolutions,” Sarandon said blandly.

Walsh was tired of the conversation. “So are you going to look at her windpipe or not?”

“I aim to please.”

The tape recorder was turned on again, and Sarandon resumed humming and set to work.

Walsh didn’t care that the ME was skeptical. MEs were supposed to be skeptical. They were trained to look at an elderly woman who died of heart failure and think
cyanide
. They took nothing for granted.

Walsh was willing to operate a little more on instinct, and his instincts told him that time mattered to this man he and his task force were hunting, this man who carved an hourglass tattoo into the dead flesh of each victim before dumping her body in some remote location where it would lie hidden for days or weeks. First, Nikki Carter, found inside a jumbo garbage bag in an auto graveyard in East LA. Now the second victim, Martha Eversol, deposited in the shell of a failed mini-mall, where she had lain undisturbed throughout January.

Well, she would be undisturbed no longer. Walsh thought about that as Sarandon made the Y incision with his bread knife, opening up Martha Eversol from the shoulders to the stomach, then down in a direct line to the pubic bone.

Decomposition was advanced, and the smell was bad. Walsh tried to suppress his gag reflex as the gassy stench wafted up into the overhead fans.

Sarandon scalpeled the skin and muscle off Martha’s chest wall, then bisected her ribs with a bone cutter. The chest plate came loose and was laid aside. He hummed something by Rachmaninoff—the Second Piano Concerto, Walsh thought. He knew these things. His mother had forced him to take piano lessons as a kid.

Body fluids began running in the gutters of the sloped table. Raul turned on a couple of spigots built into the table to wash the mess away. Sarandon switched to the theme from
Cabaret
. It sounded much too cheerful to be hummed as a dirge over Martha’s mortal remains.

What came next in the procedure was known in the coroners’ trade as the Rokitansky method. Another ME had once described it to Walsh as field-dressing a carcass. He had made it sound as if the deceased was just another trophy to be strapped to somebody’s hood.

The Rokitansky method entailed dissecting the corpse from the neck downward. Walsh would have to witness the entire process in case anything unexpected came up, but it was the neck that interested him.

He already knew the Hourglass Killer had strangled Martha Eversol. He just needed physical confirmation.

Sarandon carefully separated the larynx and esophagus from the pharynx, then stopped humming and took a close look.

“Fractures of the cricoid cartilage,” he reported.

“Strangled,” Walsh said, not bothering to phrase it as a question.

Sarandon nodded. “Manual strangulation, consistent with the first victim.”

Raul spoke up for the first time. “Was there ever any doubt?”

Walsh sighed. “Nope. No doubt at all.”

Sarandon began humming again. He worked the bread knife south of the collarbone, beginning the process of unpacking Martha’s vital organs, and Walsh stood silent, wishing he were somewhere else, far away from the autopsy and Sarandon’s musical accompaniment. On Zuma Beach, maybe, with his surf-fishing gear. That would be nice.

Sarandon hummed, and in his mind Walsh cast his line into the tide and let the surf carry it far from shore.

The spider hung in her web, inches from her prey.

Gavin Treat leaned closer, watching. This was the good part. She would feed.

Yesterday evening he had released a cricket into the five-gallon terrarium that occupied a corner of his bedroom. Last night the cricket, hopping frantically, became entangled in the funnel-shaped web. Though it struggled, its efforts had only lashed it more tightly to the gluey strands.

Now it lay still. It had given up. It faced its own end with the equanimity born of unrewarded suffering.

The spider began to prowl.

Treat watched the eight legs navigate the mesh of quivering threads. The spider moved lightly, in a calm, unhurried gait.

She was a western black widow,
Latrodectus hesperus
, and Treat loved her as much as he could love anything. He had raised her from a spiderling after finding her and others of her brood scurrying amid a drift of timber in the mountains near Malibu. He remembered the thrill of the discovery and the care with which he had gathered up a dozen of the small darting shapes, loading them into a plastic sandwich bag and sealing the flaps.

Most of the spiderlings had died before maturity, but this one and a single male one-quarter her size had both survived. The male, of course, had perished after mating, devoured by the female. A papery egg sack now hung on the web. Soon it would open, releasing hundreds of babies.

He had never named the spider. He did not think of her as a pet. She was an avatar of darkness, a creeping symbol of predatory death. He admired her sleek beauty—the glossy black orb of her abdomen, the balletic precision of her gliding legs, and the jaws with their embedded fangs.

The cricket twitched. The spider moved faster, spurred by the shiver of the web.

Treat pressed his face to the terrarium’s side panel. He had pulled down the shades of his bedroom windows to keep glare off the glass. The only light in the room was the glow of a forty-watt bulb in a gooseneck lamp overhanging the terrarium’s screen cover.

The widow reached her prey. Treat knew the procedure she must follow, having witnessed it countless times. She would blanket the cricket in a silken attack wrap, and then her fangs would poison the prey, paralyzing it. Those same fangs would pump out digestive juices, and the cricket would soften, the enzymes doing their work outside the spider’s body. Finally the victim’s gelatinous form would be sucked into the widow’s mouth.

He did not think it was an unpleasant death. Once immobilized by silk and venom, the cricket would know only the slow dissolution of its body in a bath of chemicals. It would simply fade away, its decomposition effected before death.

There were worse ways to die.

Treat knew all about that.

The spinning of the silk began. At some point during the ritual Treat remembered the sandwich in his hand. He had made it himself after coming home for his lunch hour. He had not guessed that it would be the widow’s lunch hour as well.

He took small, distracted bites of the sandwich—tomato slices, feta cheese, and bean sprouts between two slabs of date-raisin bread—feeding along with the widow.

He watched her, rapt, until the cricket was entirely gone. Idly he wondered where the cricket’s music went when it died. Perhaps the same place that women’s screams went.

He finished his sandwich, swallowing a last wedge of bread and bean sprouts, with a soft, precise smack of his lips.

The spider lay on her web, digesting her food, sated. From this angle Treat could clearly see the distinctive mark common to all black widow females—the maroon hourglass on the underside of her belly.

The hourglass, symbol of time. Wasn’t it Ovid who called time the devourer of all things?

They made an unholy trinity. Treat thought—time, the widow, and himself.

Life was funny. She could go for weeks, months, believing she had put her past to rest and finally moved on. And then it would all come back in a hot rush, and she would be ten years old again, huddled in the crawl space with a kitchen knife in her hands.

C.J. pushed the memories away. She wasn’t a little girl anymore; she was a woman of twenty-six, doing her job, and at the moment there was a crazy man with a gun to worry about.

The pathway at the rear of the house was narrow and bright under the midday sun. To her left was a chicken-wire fence protecting a vacant lot. To her right, the home’s stucco wall and the large, overflowing Dumpster that abutted it. Above the Dumpster was a casement window, an inch ajar to let in any breeze that stirred on a January afternoon in LA.

No movement in the window. It seemed likely that the back room of the house was unoccupied.

C.J. muted the radio clipped to her Sam Browne utility belt, then lifted herself onto the lid of the trash bin and peered through the window. She saw a cot piled with disarranged sheets, a pair of threadbare oval throw rugs on a concrete floor, a crib, bare walls. and a doorway that glowed with the flickering light of a TV set in the front room.

That was where he was. In the front of the house. If it could be called a house when it was only a wood-frame garage partitioned into a bedroom, living room, lavatory, and kitchenette. The bedroom had a view of a trash bin, and the living room, windowless, had no view at all.

Crouching on the Dumpster by the window, C.J. listened. There was no sound from the television; the volume must have been turned down. Now and then rose the squall of a baby.

She wondered if she could open the window fully without making a noise that would alert Ramon Sanchez, the crazy man with the gun in the other room.

Never know unless you try, she thought gamely, and she gave the casement window a cautious pull, bracing herself for a squeal of hinges.

The window opened silently.

She knew she was limber enough to wriggle through, even when encumbered by her vest and her belt.

Question was, did she want to
do
this?

Ramon was out of his mind—his wife, Maria, had been very clear on that point, expressing herself vigorously in both English and Spanish. He was drunk and angry and out of work, and when he got that way, no one could reason with him. She’d called 911 from a neighbor’s home, and the RTO had put it out over the air ten minutes ago.

“Any Newton Area unit, possible four-fifteen in progress at Fifty-fifth and Sloan.”

C.J., riding shotgun in an A-car, had listened to the crackle of static over the cheap speaker. She and her partner Walt Brasco had been on duty since 6:15 A.M., chasing the radio for most of that time. Now it was one o’clock, and they’d been thinking about taking a Code 7 for lunch.