Warrior in the Shadows (3 page)

"I'm on it," Charley said. "I'll be there in about ten minutes. Can you tell me anything?"

"It's ugly and it's going to be press intensive."

Charley's face went through a subtle metamorphosis, enough for Jill to look at him twice. Charley caught that and he smoothed out the lines in his face with a good approximation of his habitual expression of wry amusement.

"I'll be there," he said. "Sorry for missing the page."

"Whatever, see you now."

Charley handed the phone back to Jill, who replaced it in the charging cradle. "Thanks, hon," he said. "I'll see you all later."

"Bye, Charley," Jill said.

Neil just waved as Charley went out the door and then button-hooked right and into the doorway next door. He opened the door and squeezed up the narrow stairwell to the short line of apartment doors and went into his. He scooped up his camera bag and went to the corner of his kitchenette. He opened the icebox and took out a plastic-wrapped brick of high-speed color film and dropped it into the Domke bag. He took out his power winder and flash unit and replaced the AA batteries with fresh ones taken from a multipack in the icebox so that all his battery-powered equipment had fresh batteries.

He went to the bedside and opened the drawer, lifted the handkerchief and looked at the Glock 30 for a moment, then replaced the handkerchief and went out the door, pulling it closed behind him.

He was ready to shoot.

1.3

Detective Sergeant Bobby Lee Martaine never just worked a crime scene; he prowled a crime scene, sniffing at the evidence technicians, pawing at the detritus of a room set awry by violence, staring at the witnesses and suspects like a big alley cat. He was quiet and intense, and the low growl of his voice made the guilty feel guiltier and the innocent scared to death. He was short and stocky and dark-haired and dark-eyed, with a five o'clock shadow that never seemed to go away despite his shaving twice a day. He hated ties and sport coats and suits and cultivated the look of the old football player who'd played the detective Hunter on the television series: Levi's, cowboy boots, a plain oxford shirt with the tie knotted but pulled loose under a plain sport coat, the sport coat worn a size too large to conceal the battered old Smith & Wesson Model 645 .45 automatic pistol he carried. Bobby Lee liked his battered old pistol and ignored the jibes he got from fellow officers. He had lots of experience in gunplay, and while he knew that as a detective he had little likelihood of getting in a gunfight, he liked to be well armed in case one came his way. He stayed ready for it, and a part of him occasionally longed for it, much as it had when he was a young soldier.

Bobby Lee took off his jacket and draped it over a chair, rolled up his sleeves and pulled on a pair of rubber surgical gloves. He nodded to the uniformed officers securing the scene and went in to talk to the forensics team working the gruesome mess that was the entertainment room of one Madison Simmons, a prominent bank officer with First World Bank. Bobby Lee stood back and let the evidence technicians work while he took in the whole of the scene with a careful detective's eye. While he did so, he unconsciously rubbed the faded master parachutist wing tattoo on his left forearm.

The first thing that struck him was the blood. Blood everywhere. But there were no arterial sprays. The blood was puddled and splashed. So the victim's heart had stopped before the main action took place. And that action had taken place in and around the leather recliner chair, so soaked and coated in blood it looked as though another layer of leather had been painted onto it.

"Detective Martaine?" one of the uniformed officers said. "The photographer is outside… dowe sign him in as a department member or what?"

"Sign him in as a contract civilian attached to forensics," Bobby Lee said without looking at the patrolman. "Tell him to come here before he starts shooting anything else."

"Right, Sarge," the uniform said. He left and a moment later ushered in Charley, who had one Nikon poised in his hands, flash unit in place.

"Jesus Christ," Charley said.

"You could throw in all the saints, too," Bobby Lee said, "I don't think any of them ever saw anything like this."

"How do you want me to shoot?" Charley said.

"I'll point and talk," Bobby Lee said. "That way you can collate the photos to my tape. Once I'm done, you take the photos that Nord-strand over there needs you to take. I don't care about any overlap… just make sure we get everything. We'll work this room the most, then we'll go outside and work what we found out there. Which isn't much."

"Roger that," Charley said. "You on point, me on slack."

One of the other uniforms listening snorted and said to the officer who'd brought Charley in, "Who's that guy? Press ain't supposed to be in here."

"He's not press," the other said. "He's a contract photographer the sarge brought in to work on high-profile cases. Some kind of shit-hot photographer, knew the sarge in the war."

"Which war?"

"Gulf War."

"Fucking press."

"Hey, the sarge says he's okay. They're friends."

"Must be a cozy job. Wonder what he makes."

"Why don't you ask him, you want to know so much?"

Bobby Lee said, "I want an overview shot first, from the doorway, then from that other door that leads into the living room. Use wide angle and get the big picture."

Charley stepped back and changed the lens on his Nikon to a 24mm. He began to snap a series of rapid photos catching the disarray in the room: the chair spilled backward in a sea of clotted blood, smears of blood on the wall, a drawing of some kind in blood on the wall, the body hanging from one ankle held by an electrical wire that sprouted from the ceiling where a chandelier light fixture had been pulled out.

"Close up on chair, first for the setting, then close in on the seat and arms," Bobby Lee said.

The strobe light of Charley's flash brightened, then dimmed, brightened, then dimmed.

"This son of a bitch must have killed him first," Bobby Lee said. "Then propped him in the recliner while he worked on him. Cut him open there, opened the whole body cavity with a very sharp knife. See those ragged cuts? Get those. Knife had some serration on the blade. Takes out the viscera and set it aside there, on the floor. Everything but the kidneys, he sets those over here. This is what's really peculiar… you see how the abdominal fat was carved out in long strips? Just like bacon. Did you look in the kitchen when you came in?"

"No," Charley said. His words were muffled by his hand as he maneuvered the camera to get a better shot of Madison Simmons's body cavity. The body was suspended upside down. The left ankle had a heavy electric cable knotted around it. The cable led into the ceiling where the chandelier light fixture had been yanked out. The right ankle was tied to the left knee, making a figure four shape with the legs. The abdominal cavity was laid completely open, and bits of entrails and body fat had flowed with the blood and bodily juices down over the purple and distorted face of Madison Simmons. The dead man's eyes bulged and were a deep dark color from hemorrhages in his eyes. His arms dangled down, rigid with rigor, fingers trailing in the puddles of hardened blood beneath him.

"What's in the kitchen?" Charley asked.

"Some of the body fat and the kidneys. Part of them anyway. This guy carved it out and fried it up in the kitchen. Ate one kidney and took a few bites out of the other, left it in there," Bobby Lee said.

Charley lowered the camera and looked at his friend. "This is the sickest shit I've ever seen."

Bobby Lee mouthed a smile with no humor in it. "It's one for the books. We'll get to the kitchen later. Work the body from all the angles… just make sure you don't get into the blood pool."

Charley shot and shot, stopped to reload his camera with more film and replace the 35–70 lens. After a while he switched to the other camera slung round his neck and began to shoot with a 80–200 lens for close-ups.

"This is the capper, though," Bobby Lee said, waving Charley closer. They stood in front of the wall where a large painting had been hung. The painting had been taken down and carefully set to one side, as though the killer hadn't wanted to damage it. That puzzled Bobby Lee— the violence of the butchery and cannibalism done here, yet the scene was in its own way orderly, with strange things like this.

Drawn on the wall with blood and bodily juices was a figure carefully outlined in the dark red of arterial blood. There was a rounded cylinder laid sideways where the head would be, attached with no neck to a squared-off body, the edges slightly rounded. The legs angled upward as though they were to be tucked beneath the armpits. The arms were raised above the head, rounded, with four fingers to each hand. Dangling between the legs was a long penis with a thick bulbous head. After the figure had been carefully outlined, the inside had been smeared white with some substance mixed with body fat from Madison Simmons. Then carefully drawn over that with some powdery red substance was a series of interlocked squares.

"What the hell is that supposed to be?" Charley said.

"I think you'd have to go to hell to find that out," Bobby Lee said in a low voice. "I have no idea." He reached out, then drew his hand back. "The lab team thinks that's some kind of paint or stain mixed with human blood."

Charley lowered his camera and looked long at the figure. "That's a painting," he said. "Somebody took their time with it. That's too carefully done to be a spur-of-the-moment thing. Who the hell is this guy?"

"The vic is a big-time banker," Bobby Lee said. "Lots of money, if you couldn't tell by the real estate. Good security system, gated house, closed circuit TV on the power gate to the garage and the front walk-in pedestrian gate— and nothing on either tape."

"Who would do something like this?" Charley said. "This isn't a contract hit, this is a goddam psychopath."

"No shit, Sherlock? You think so?" Bobby Lee said in tired amusement. He tugged at his tie. "C'mon, I got to have a smoke."

He led Charley outside, carefully stepping around the technicians working on the side door.

"Some blood there, too," Bobby Lee said. "Cut the head off a squirrel and threw it against the door."

Charley bent and took a quick photograph.

"You can come back to that," Bobby Lee said. "What do you think of that painting?"

Bobby Lee took his time lighting a cigarette, then held his light for Charley to light his. Charley inhaled greedily.

"I hate the smell of blood," Charley said.

"I don't want to talk to Max about this," Bobby Lee said. "This is one I don't want to take home. See the press over there?" he said, lifting his chin at the television news vans with their camera booms extended.

"She'll probably have the whole story off the news before you get home. I'll come over, you guys can feed me and I'll keep her amused with Charley Payne stories."

"Nicky will like that."

"How's my boy?"

"Growing like a weed. Wish you'd quit giving him those throw-away cameras. We're going broke getting them processed. An eight-year-old can find a lot of things in a short time to take pictures of."

"Be good to that boy or I'll steal him from you. He's got a good eye. He'll end up supporting you with those pictures someday."

Bobby Lee took a drag on his smoke that added a quarter inch of ash to his cigarette. He blew the smoke out hard, as though by creating that small cloud he could block out the vision of the scene inside.

"This is not how I want to spend a fall day, bud," Bobby Lee said. "I want to go get a cup of coffee at Java Jack's and sit down by the lake and watch pretty girls run by. We haven't had anything like this in a long time."

Charley studied his friend as he always did, taking in the gestalt of his words, his mannerisms, his stance to take in the meaning underneath his words.

"Yeah," Charley said. "You don't get many of these. But you've never had one, and this is something you're going to enjoy fighting."

He grinned and busied himself with his cigarette, watching his friend from the corner of his eye.

"Nothing funny about this, Charley," Bobby Lee said. "Nothing funny about this nut-job. We are going to find him. We are definitely going to find him."

"I hope it's a one off."

"Yeah."

Charley turned and looked speculatively up at the beige walls of the house. He stroked his cheek with one finger as he took a final drag off his cigarette, then dropped it, still smoldering into the driveway's gravel.

"I'll work that picture hard," he said. "There's something familiar about it. I've seen something like that before. And I'll get the rest up, too."

"Get me the prints before you start researching it. I don't need to tell you to keep it close, right?"

"I are educated, Boss Man Bobby."

"In what, I don't know. Let's go to work."

1.4

Charley lay back in the bed and stared up at the patterns on the spackled ceiling. This bed, this room, this woman… this was so different from the rest of his life. The bed was thick and lush, with a sheepskin pad beneath pastel-patterned flannel sheets, covered with a down comforter he found too warm most nights. The bed was the centerpiece of the room, with track lighting above it and a headboard that held a remote control to adjust the lighting or the expensive stereo and television set past the foot of the bed. There was even a small chiller that would hold a bottle of champagne and two glasses.

Every inch of the walls was covered: hanging rugs, shawls and scarves, postcards from foreign countries, modern paintings, photographs— some of them Charley's, collages professionally assembled with photos cut out from magazines, even the doors were covered with inexpensive posters and small advertising bills, the kind you saw stapled up on telephone poles in a student or artist's neighborhood.

That was appropriate, since this was an artist's quarters, Charley thought. And that led him to considering the woman he lay beside. Mara Steinway was long and sleek and blond and a brilliant artist— primarily a painter but she did wonderful work in collage and sculpture as well— and she was twenty-five years old, which made her eighteen years younger than Charley, young enough to be his daughter with no great stretch of the imagination.

He rolled on his side and propped his head on one hand. Her face was turned toward him, relaxed in sleep as she lay on her back, her large breasts lolling erotically across her thin chest, the sheet bunched at her waist, one hand clutching the sheet, the other thrown up in apparent abandon at her shoulder. The brilliant green of her eyes was hidden by long lashes over closed eyes in a heart-shaped face, with disheveled blond hair cut short in a pixie cut that brought out the full erotic length of her thin neck.

For no reason at all, he thought of when he'd been training in the desert a long time ago, in a class on stress reduction when the instructor, with a good old boy grin and laugh, had announced with mock seriousness that sex was the best stress reducer there was. Charley had laughed long and hard at that, as had the other young men— some of whom were dead now— but he'd known that for a truth as soon as he'd heard it.

Release of tension and the simple desire for a warm body to lie against in the night had brought him to Mara's condo apartment in Uptown after he dropped off the prints of the shots he'd taken for Bobby Lee. He'd kept a set for himself, tucked away into the battered canvas camera bag.

When she had answered the door, she was wearing an antique Japanese kimono and no shoes. She smiled, a turning up of her lips that seemed perfectly shaped in the sweet flesh of her face, stood on tiptoe to kiss him, and without a word tugged him inside.

She stood and solemnly studied his face, watching his eyes for the nuances of expression she had begun to know.

"Are you hungry?" she said.

"Yeah."

"For food, I mean."

"Maybe later."

"Do you ever think that I might have someone here?"

"No, not really."

"I might, someday. You know?"

"Let's worry about that on that day. Get naked. I want you."

Her solemn look vanished beneath her smile. She held open her kimono.

"I already am."

It was always so intense with her. Charley couldn't remember if there had ever been a time when they hadn't had sex at least three times. She never seemed to tire of him, and the taut contours of her young body always kept him aroused. He had to laugh out loud sometimes at the thought of him, solidly middle-aged, with this young and beautiful woman who seemed quite happy with him and found him just as desirable as he did her.

He'd done some of the best portraiture he'd ever done with her in a series she'd encouraged him to take. She was completely uninhibited as a model, nude or otherwise. She told him that she'd made extra money during art school both as a nude model and as a dancer at an upscale strip club. She said that she was still sometimes asked to do private shows— either to check his reaction or, as was her style, to be completely honest about herself without opening wide the doors to her private life.

The two of them led separate lives that intersected in the bed they shared, mostly hers but occasionally his, with sometime dinners at the tiny hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurants they both favored, or brief excursions as each other's companion into the floating nightlife of the Minneapolis art world. Charley had found, much to his surprise, that he enjoyed the brief visits to art openings at the galleries in the Warehouse District and the little parties at the Loring Bar or the Walker Art Museum. Since he'd thrown away the need for secrecy that had dictated his social doings for so many years, he enjoyed playing the man of mystery in Mara's life when the two of them were among her artist friends.

"Who is he, Mara? Do tell," her friend pled. "He seems as though he might be dangerous."

"He was a war photographer," Mara said. "He doesn't like to talk about it."

And while that wasn't exactly accurate, Charley let it stand.

Charley had met Mara at a Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective, a traveling exhibit of the wonderful photographs the old master had done, which was showing at the Walker. They met, they talked, they went to bed.

And sometime after that they had been at the Loring Bar, having drinks after seeing a private show of local artists in which Mara had a painting. It was late in the evening, and several people were noticeably drunk, including one yuppie professional in his early thirties in an expensive suit and a handmade Italian silk tie. Charley noticed things like that, not just with a photographer's eye, but because the remnants of a previous professional life required him to note every significant and telling detail and interpret it so as to give him insight into the individual.

The insight he got was young professional, single, drunk, and horny.

The drunk came up to Mara and said, "Was that your painting, the big red one?"

"Yes," she said, holding her wineglass in front of her face to disguise her slight smile.

"Seems kind of sexy."

"That's an interesting interpretation."

"I can be interesting," he said.

Mara smiled openly at Charley, who smiled back and winked.

"Is this your boyfriend?" the drunk said.

"He's my date, yes," Mara said.

"Lucky man."

"Yeah, I think so," Charley said.

"Think what?" the drunk said.

"That I'm lucky."

"No shit you're lucky," the drunk said. He smiled in the nasty fashion of those who imagine they have power, an oily sliding of the lips past the teeth. "Why don't you share a little bit of luck with me? I'd be willing to pay."

Several of Mara's friends, who'd turned to watch the play, froze.

Charley just smiled. "Time for you to go, buddy," he said. "You're boring everyone, and that's inexcusable."

"Why don't you just…" the drunk began.

Charley positioned himself with his left foot forward putting his body at a forty-five degree angle to the drunken man. He flicked his left hand at the man's eyes. His body position blocked the view of his right hand slipping the Emerson CQC-7 out of his right pocket of his black Levi's, but the click was audible and the knife could be seen by the gasping onlookers behind him. The drunk's hands went to his face to protect his eyes from Charley's flick. Charley brought his left hand back, low, and gripped the bottom of the expensive tie. The razor edge of the CQC-7 sliced through the tie like a fresh scalpel in the hand of an impatient surgeon, and suddenly the drunk was stumbling back, his eyes wide with fear, both hands out in front of him so as to ward off Charley, who stood with the tie in one hand and the knife in the other.

"Learn some manners," Charley said in an even voice. "Get out of here." He threw the scrap of tie on the floor. "Now."

The drunk man, his face pale, turned and walked out of the bar. Through the big plate-glass windows, everyone could see him pause between two parked cars and vomit into the street.

That gave Mara's friends all sorts of things to talk about.

And their sex that night was spectacular.

Charley slid carefully from beneath the sheets and tangled comforter. The slight chill of the room raised goose bumps on his flesh. He left his shorts on the floor and slid into his Levi's, put on his socks and his flannel shirt against the cold, and went into the kitchen. The glowing Mickey Mouse figure on the clock showed 1:30 in the morning. Charley opened the refrigerator, the front covered with magnet letters spelling out poems and messages, and took out a pint carton of half and half and some roast coffee from the freezer. He ran water into a pot and prepared the Melitta drip carafe that Mara favored.

He was used to waking up in the middle of the night. After he had quit his contract operator position with the Central Intelligence Agency's elite Special Activities Staff, he'd woken up every night for three months at three in the morning, reaching for his pistol, his ears straining for the sound of footsteps or someone trying his door. His small apartment in Fairfax, Virginia, seemed to close in around him, but he stayed there because he couldn't think of anywhere else to go.

The call from Bobby Lee had saved him from going down a dark road into depression or death. Bobby had never known what Charley was doing in Virginia, and he didn't know about Charley's dramatic exit from the program. But somehow, in the strange and near psychic fashion that best friends have, especially those who have huddled together in combat, he knew that Charley needed help. And the help he came up with was an offer of a contract forensic photographer position with the Minneapolis Police Department.

And that was exactly what Charley needed.

Charley sold what little furniture he had, packed up his books, his guns, his knives, his clothes, his cameras, and his precious negatives, and drove across the country in the beat-up station wagon he'd bought for himself.

He grinned as he looked for a filter cone for the Melitta drip, thinking how he must appear to other people who didn't know his history, which was everyone in Minneapolis. He looked like a marginally employed artistic photographer working to establish a name for himself, and he fit in as a fringe dweller on the edge of the Twin Cities art world. He held his own feeling of being a hawk among sparrows closely, even though it felt as though his thoughts leaked around his cover like light around the edges of a closed door.

Mara said from close behind him, "What is it that you like to say? Chemicals, chemicals, you need chemicals?"

Charley took down another mug without looking behind him. "I was saying I need more Mara."

"You can have that anytime. But you're making a mess of that coffee. Let me do that for you."

She brushed close by him, the smells of her washing over him: clean sweat, perfume, the bleachy hint of semen, the dry smell of her kimono. She put a fresh filter cone into the carafe, carefully measured the French roast into the cone, and then poured boiling water slowly into the paper cone so that the grounds rose evenly along the lip of the carafe.

"Like this," she said. "Slowly."

Charley slipped his hands around her thin waist. "Slowly?"

"Yes," she said, leaning back against him. "Slowly."

Afterward, he went back to the kitchen and retrieved the coffee mugs and poured the still hot coffee into them.

"That wasn't so slow," Mara said.

"Are you complaining?"

"No," she said, reaching for her coffee mug, then wrapping both thin hands around it. "Thank you."

Charley got back beneath the covers with her, his own mug in his hand, and propped himself up with the pillow doubled over and braced against the headboard. Stray light from the streetlamps outside the window filtered around the edges of the thick curtains into the dark room.

"You're thoughtful and tense tonight," Mara said. "What are you thinking about?"

Charley sipped his coffee, hissing when it burnt a raw spot on the inside of his lip where Mara had chewed him.

"Are you all right?" she said.

"Just thinking," he said.

"About?"

"Did you do primitive art when you were in school?"

"I experimented with it…"

"I mean classes in art history on cave art, native arts, that sort of thing."

"Yes. When I was doing textile art I studied Japanese art, but that's not really primitive at all. I did take a class in African art, body adornments, that sort of thing… fascinating. I have a few books on it… why?"

"We respect each other's privacy, right?"

"That's why we stay together, Charley."

"You've never told me that."

"It's one reason."

"I want to show you something but I don't want you to speak to anyone else about it."

"I can do that," Mara said. She drew her knees to her chest and retucked the sheet around her. "Does this have something to do with your police job?"

"Yeah."