Styx (3 page)

He turned away quickly, and looked back at the nude torso propped into a semi-standing position on the beach. A long dotted line ran from throat to hip. On closer inspection, the dotted line revealed itself to be some kind of stitching, either a thick plastic thread or possibly ordinary fishing line.

“When did the report come in?”

“Half an hour ago,” Delacroix replied. “Victim's name is Madeleine Bohy. She's thirty-four years old and employed at a nursing home here in the area.”

“Quick work,” said Styx. “How did you get all that so fast?”

“Her purse is in the hole,” said Delacroix, “complete with identity card.”

Styx stared through the spot where Madeleine Bohy's head ought to be, focusing on the sea twenty yards behind her.

“The Stuffer?”

“Certainly looks like it,” said Delacroix. He came up beside Styx
and nodded at the naked body. “Third victim, third woman, and the third time the vic's been put on display in a public place.”

“First time she's been stripped naked and cut into pieces, though.”

“Yes, he really did a number on this one.”

Styx bent over and tried to ignore the pain in his hip. He ran a palm across his mouth as if he were deep in thought, but in fact was hiding a grimace. He examined the card that had been left propped against the torso.

“Another sick pun,” he said.

“Too bad he doesn't sign them,” Delacroix said, and waved over the fingerprint tech, Dirk Niemegeers.

Barely glancing up from his clipboard, Niemegeers said, “It's useless. There's nothing on the card and you can't get prints off sand. At least he left the last one out on the street.”

“You didn't come up with anything then,” said Styx.

“He's a careful bastard. We haven't found a thing. The body was washed clean of any traces. The bucket's full of DNA, but it's the victim's.”

Styx moved around behind the dead woman and peered into the bucket that helped hold her upright: a dense mass of dark-red and brown gunk that stank to holy hell.

“Her organs,” Niemegeers said.

“I take it he used his shovel again?”

“We haven't had time to check it yet, but we're assuming that this one's also been scooped out and refilled with sand.”

“Shit,” said Styx. “How much fucking sand does it take to fill up a human body?”

Niemegeers looked up at last. “We haven't weighed it,” he said. “We do, you'll be the first person I tell.”

And with that, he wandered off. Styx nodded at one of the other officers, and the man brought over a thin bedsheet. It fluttered like
a white flag in the early morning, until two men draped it over the body and tucked in the ends. Now, shrouded in white, Madeleine Bohy looked even more like a statue—the Venus of Ostend—ready to be unveiled by the mayor in a public ceremony.

“How'd we get the word?” Styx asked.

“Tip was phoned in,” said Delacroix. “This time
not
by some tourist who thought it was a real artwork and took a picture of it.”

Delacroix was referring to the murder of Elisa Wouters, the Stuffer's second victim. That time, the serial killer had left the body intact, in the middle of the night and the middle of the Kapellestraat, Ostend's busiest shopping street. He'd posed the dead woman on the steps to the dike, as if she were begging for spare change, with a handprinted note on an otherwise innocuous greeting card in the pocket of her skirt reading
#2 IN A SERIES: TAKING STEPS TO CREATE A MORE BEAUTIFUL OSTEND
.

It had taken until midmorning before any of the passing tourists or locals realized that something wasn't quite right about the picture. How many people had walked past her, on their way to a little sun and fun, a little casual shopping?

Styx hadn't gotten much sleep that night, not from the pain in his hip or even the memory of the horrible thing on the steps, but from simple bewilderment. How could dozens, probably hundreds of people have marched up and down those steps past a dead body without noticing it?

“Details?” asked Styx.

“I told you: she's—”

“Not the victim. The guy who called it in.
Was
it a guy? Did you get a name? A phone number? An address?”

Delacroix took out his notebook. In this day of iPhones and tablets, he was apparently a traditionalist, probably did it to make himself seem more serious and reliable.

“The call came in at five twenty-four. A male voice. He said his name was Spilliaert.”

“Spilliaert,” Styx repeated. The name seemed familiar, but he wasn't sure why.

“He said he goes out for a swim early every morning.”

“And?”

“And he found her here on the beach. The number he was calling from turns out to be a landline. We were able to identify the location. It's right here in Ostend.”

“Excellent,” said Styx. “The address?”

“Hofstraat 24. It's a side street off the Promenade. The call came from an apartment on the fifth floor.”

“And where is this early swimmer now? Halfway across the Channel?”

Delacroix ignored the chief inspector's attempt at humor. “No, he said he's working an early shift this week and didn't want to be late.”

“Jesus,” said Styx, “the guy finds a decapitated body on the beach, calls it in, and then just heads off to work?”

“We tried to keep him on the line, but he hung up.”

“So what? You had his number.”

“We called back, but he didn't pick up.”

“And you don't know where he works?”

“He didn't give us a chance to ask,” said Delacroix. “I sent two men to talk with the neighbors, but nobody seems to know anything about him.”

“So this is either a guy who loves his job and doesn't want to miss a minute, or else he's fucking with us. How could you let him just hang up on you?”

“How was I supposed to stop him? All we can do now is pick him up when he gets home from work.”

“
I'll
decide what we can do now,” Styx snarled.

He wanted to smack the rookie in his smug face. But he knew Delacroix hadn't really done anything wrong. It was lucky the murder had been called in so early. Still, it was weird: man goes out for an early swim, sees a dead body next to the breakwater, calls the cops . . . and then just takes off.

“Any footprints?”

“Lots,” said Delacroix. “Too many. Look around: half of Ostend must have been out here yesterday.”

“Anything else?”

“Not yet. We'll compare the fishing line with the line from the other two victims. But we still don't know where any of it was bought.”

“We don't know much, do we?” Styx said bitterly, with a last look at the white-shrouded torso.

“Could be worse,” said the rookie. “We're lucky the bastard didn't leave the head sitting on a table at a sidewalk café.”

“Yeah, very lucky,” Styx glumly agreed.

But he didn't say what he was thinking:
If he had, how long would it have taken before anybody noticed?

Raphael Styx spent the rest of that day at his desk in the Alfons Pieterslaan police station. For years now, the Ostend Police Department had been planning a move to a more modern facililty near the central train station, but construction had been repeatedly delayed.

A bulletin board on one wall was crowded with documents Styx had collected over the past few months, all concerning the latest serial killer. After the second victim—Elisa Wouters, thirty-one, a hairdresser—had been discovered, the newspapers began referring to the murderer as “the Stuffer,” and the police adopted the nickname.

Styx leaned back in his chair as comfortably as his hip would allow and stared at the information tacked to the board. At the moment, the man who'd identified himself as Spilliaert was their only lead. It had been three weeks since the Stuffer's last killing. All they'd concluded
about the murderer so far was that he was probably a man—slicing open a human body, filling it with sand, and sewing it shut again required a lot of strength. For the same reason, they assumed that the perpetrator was somewhere between twenty and sixty years old, and his familiarity with Ostend suggested that he was likely a local.

Background reports on the murdered women were in a drawer of Styx's desk, but it was a drawer he preferred not to open. He was after the killer; he didn't need to keep looking at the faces of the dead. Those images only distracted him, and distractions weakened him. Styx didn't have time for that—that way lay failure.

During the course of the afternoon, John Crevits stopped by Styx's office and sagged into his visitor's chair.

“No news?” the commissioner said.

“We're waiting for Spilliaert to get back from work.”

“And you don't know
where
he works?”

“No. We've got a man staking out his apartment.”

“At least that's something to grab onto. Why so gloomy?”

“I'd rather
not
have something to grab onto and skip the third murder.”

“I know,” sighed Crevits.

The commissioner had survived two heart surgeries, weighed 260 pounds and counting, and was a habitual sigher. A year ago, he'd developed adult-onset diabetes, which was a constant concern. Styx didn't want to think about the insulin injections his superior needed on a regular basis.

“What's your impression of Delacroix?” Crevits asked, his voice taking on a confidential tone.

“What impression would you like?”

Crevits chuckled. Even that sounded like a sigh. “I know you don't like him, but I think the kid's got potential.”

“Let's agree to disagree,” said Styx.

“Why?”

“He let a tipster slip right through his fingers, John.”

“You know there was nothing he could do about that. And it's not like Spilliaert actually
saw
anything. He just discovered the body.”

“I wouldn't have let him get away.”

“No? What would you have done, reached through the phone and grabbed him?”

“Something like that.”

“You're a tough guy, Styx, but you're different from Delacroix. You came up from the streets.”

“Where'd
he
come from? He's just the umpteenth pretty boy Brussels has fobbed off on us.”

Crevits held up his hands, annoyed. Styx thrived on conflict. If there wasn't one handy, he'd invent one. Now he had it in for Delacroix.

More and more, Styx felt he was being discriminated against: at work, in his hometown, within his own family. When he screwed up—which seemed to be happening more often lately—no one cut him any slack. His years of experience were baggage. He'd set a high bar for himself, and now he was expected to give 110 percent all the time.

All he wanted was to sit quietly at his desk and eat the chicken curry sandwich he'd picked up at Knapp, his favorite takeaway shop in the Zandvoordestraat. He unwrapped the sandwich and took a bite, hoping to distract himself from the pain in his creaking joints. A drop of curry sauce stained his chin yellow-green, like a festering sore leaking pus.

“Whether you like it or not, we need new blood like him, Styx,” Crevits sighed.

“What do you mean?”

“You and I won't last forever. The new generation's getting ready to take over.”

“I just turned forty, John.”

“I can see that.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Let me ask you something: Can you pick up that piece of paper on the floor there with your toes?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I'm not a monkey. A man uses his hands.”

“Sure, but then you'd have to bend down to the floor.”

“What do you need the paper for, John?”

“The question is what
you
need.”

“I don't need anything.”

“I hear you need a new hip. Don't be so macho. You said it yourself: you're forty. Doesn't mean you have to have a midlife crisis. You're just starting the next phase of your life. But I'm warning you, you have to take care of yourself. You don't treat your body right, you'll never make it to retirement.”

Styx muttered a protest, but Crevits wasn't finished:

“What are you worried about? I've been under the knife twice. You think you're immortal? We're all gonna wind up bionic, the way things are going. You, me, everybody. These days, there's nothing to it. They give you a little shot, you go beddy-bye, and when you wake up you've got a brand-new hip that makes you the center of attention every time you walk through a metal detector. What are you afraid of? You know I can give you three months' sick leave.”

“The surgery doesn't scare me,” said Styx.

“What, then?”

“It's not the hip. I know they can fix it. My orthopedist, Dr. Vrancken, says the prostheses work better than the original factory equipment. But I can't handle the anesthetic.”