Where Monsters Dwell (5 page)

Vatten vaguely recalled thinking that Gunn Brita Dahle had read this book more thoroughly than most, and that she discovered something she didn’t want to disclose. But before he could question her in depth about this, she started talking about something else. She said it was sad that the two of them hadn’t gotten better acquainted, and that made her feel even worse that she was leaving.

As she talked, he drained the last drop of wine from the mug that said “World’s Best Mom.” Both of them concluded that he was tolerating the wine fairly well and that the experiment had been a success. To celebrate she divided the rest of the bottle between the two empty mugs. He managed to take just one more gulp before everything went black.

Afterward he remembered only fragments—unfocused glimpses of the hideous linoleum, something that could have been Gunn Brita’s blouse, and hands that were not where they should have been. A few glimpses of what might have been the inside of the book vault also surfaced, even though he hated confined spaces. Finally, there were some fuzzy images of a raised toilet seat and the acrid taste of vomit.

Otherwise there was only this dreadful headache.

He looked at the clock. It was almost eleven, and it was still Saturday. So it was nighttime, not morning. It took him an eternity to get up from the easy chair. When he was finally on his feet, he staggered, feeling nauseated. With a sense of anxiety bordering on panic he went to the elevator and took it down to the second floor. He went straight to the offices. To his great relief he found that everything looked normal. Someone, probably Gunn Brita, had removed the wine bottle and the mugs. Any spilled wine had also been cleaned up. He made sure that the book vault was closed and locked, but didn’t know if he should be relieved or worried. Unfortunately, he couldn’t open the vault to check, because that required two different pass codes, and he had only one of them. The second code was held by his boss, Hornemann, as well as by a trusted librarian. Gunn Brita had been that person until now. Since she was leaving, the plan was to change the code on Monday. All he could do was hope that everything was as it should be. Most of all, he hoped that his memory of being inside had nothing to do with reality.

Vatten began breathing a little easier. He went into his office and sat down in front of the computer, which was connected to the closed-circuit cameras. It was turned off. Next to the monitor was a DVD burner that had stored the images that had been taken. He removed the DVD and put in a new one. He put the old DVD in the pocket of his raincoat. There was even a surveillance camera in the book vault itself. He didn’t really want to know what had happened in there; this anxious sensation, like a tough coating on his skin, was bad enough.

He found his bike and rode off into the boisterous, drunken Saturday night. Hadn’t Gunn Brita promised to accompany him home? Wasn’t it a bit odd that she’d just evaporated? One of the last things he could recall from earlier in the evening was that she had been to the Poe Museum in Richmond. That wasn’t exactly a destination for Norwegian tourists. Perhaps it was the almost improbable nature of this coincidence that made him forget to tell her that he’d been to that very same museum last summer.

On the way across the old city bridge he stopped abruptly, took the DVD out of his pocket, and tossed it in the river. Then he rode his bike home to a neatly made bed.

6

Richmond, August 2010

Felicia Stone stared dully
at her new iPhone. She had bought it two days before, and already she hated it. Homicide investigators pretty much hated anything that woke them in the middle of the night, or like now, way too early in the morning. It usually meant only one thing: a new crime scene, a new stiff in the early stages of decomposition, a life destroyed, and a new hunt for yet another lost fucker. Luckily, before all that, there was time for coffee.

She slipped out of the bed where she always slept alone. She answered the phone on the way to the coffeemaker, which was on the counter that divided the kitchen from the living room. It was Patterson, and she expected to get the usual overlong report full of assumptions and observations that were totally beside the point. Not that it really mattered. She put the phone on speaker, spooned coffee into the filter, and filled the coffeemaker with water. Soon the familiar chuffing sound served as the background for Patterson’s narrative.

When he finished talking, she let the details sink in. This was something beyond the normal jealousy, greed, or drugs. Even though it was early, she was awake enough to realize that she had caught her first really big case since being assigned to the homicide division. It was a once-in-a-lifetime case, and she had no idea if she was ready for it.

Before she hung up, she made her only contribution to the conversation:

“I’ll be at the museum in twenty minutes.”

She went to the bathroom and splashed some water on her face. She’d recently passed thirty, but she still looked young. Early in the morning she could see incipient bags under her eyes, but they were so small that they didn’t bother her much. Her dark hair was still shiny, and she kept herself in shape. She put on her clothes from the day before: blouse, jacket, and loose, light slacks with her police badge on her belt. Formal and unsexy. That was how a female homicide inspector should dress, neater than a male inspector, but not too much. On the job she was sexless. Maybe not in private either, she sometimes thought. She fastened her shoulder holster and service weapon under her jacket. Then she left the cramped apartment without taking a shower or putting on any makeup.

In the car she thought of the lessons in poetry she’d had in high school. Her teacher had been a big fan of Edgar Allan Poe, so Felicia Stone knew more about him than most of the other poets she was familiar with. But she’d never imagined she’d have much use for this knowledge in her job as a police officer. At least not until today.

*   *   *

What fascinated her most about Poe was the mysterious way he died.

Edgar Allan Poe spent much of his childhood with foster parents in Richmond, Virginia. He then studied at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville for a while before he enlisted in the military. Oddly enough, it was in Richmond that he last enjoyed the full use of his mental faculties.

On September 27, 1849, he left Richmond, where he had given a speech. The peripatetic author was supposed to continue on to Philadelphia to edit the poetry collection
Wayside Flowers
, by the lesser known American poet Marguerite St. Leon Loud. After several years of adversity, which included a tremendous consumption of alcohol, Poe was reportedly in the midst of a good period, and no one had seen him take a drink in more than six months.

As Felicia Stone passed the Main Street Station, the elegant old railroad station in Richmond that was shut down in the 1970s and renovated in 2003, she tuned the radio to a classical music station. Music to think to. Listening to Beethoven, her mind went back to Poe.

After he got on the train to Philadelphia, almost a week went by before anyone saw him again. When he finally resurfaced, he was not in Philadelphia, but in Baltimore, Maryland. Poe was in terrible shape, and Dr. Joseph E. Snodgrass was summoned. He knew Poe and noticed that his clothes were not the right size. Taken to Washington College Hospital in Baltimore, Poe was delirious. He wasn’t clearheaded and alert long enough for him to give the slightest hint of what had happened to him. On his fourth night at the hospital he began shouting in a shrill voice for someone named Mr. Reynolds. Were these screams nothing more than the final convulsions of a feverish mind? Or was this person the key to understanding Poe’s condition? No one ever found out who Mr. Reynolds was. The police officer in Felicia Stone was convinced that he didn’t exist, but the poetry lover in her wasn’t so sure.

Early in the morning of the seventh of October Dr. Snodgrass heard Poe’s last prayer: “May the Lord have mercy on my miserable soul.” On the death certificate Dr. Snodgrass listed the cause of death as inflammation of the brain. Edgar Allan Poe, the father of the crime novel, was buried two days later without an autopsy.

*   *   *

In 1921, seventy years after Poe’s death, a small group of the author’s growing number of fans met in Richmond. The meeting took place in a garden behind the old Stone House, one of the city’s oldest buildings, though it had no direct connection to Poe. They named the garden The Enchanted Garden and dedicated a memorial to the author there.

When Felicia Stone entered this enchanted garden at 7:30
A.M.
for the first time in a professional capacity, it had existed for eighty-nine years. The garden belonged to what was now the Poe Museum, and it wouldn’t open for another hour and a half.

She had been here before in her free time and vividly remembered her last visit. Was it three years ago now? She was working in Narcotics back then. A girlfriend from her school days, Holly LeVold, had rented the garden for her wedding. Felicia could even remember what it said on the wedding invitation: “Everyone goes to the altar with a little anxiety in the pit of their stomach. We choose to make use of it! The master of the burlesque and macabre is the host for our wedding.” That was Holly’s sort of humor; nothing was sacred.

It had been a lovely wedding. The garden was in full bloom and the pastor had read Poe’s poem “To One in Paradise.” Felicia remembered that she had had to pee, so she hadn’t managed to concentrate on the words of the poem. From her English class in high school she remembered that Poe preferred short poems, because he thought literature should be taken in without being interrupted by impressions from the reader’s surroundings. But nature’s call takes precedence over art, doesn’t it? Before the reading was over she had run off to the bathroom. But the rest of the ceremony was beautiful, and she had almost—but only almost—felt like getting married herself. Still, she had known the way it would end for her friend. Holly was divorced after two years.

Felicia Stone said hello to Patterson. He was a big man, six foot four and as wide as a truck. She was surprised at how tired he looked, since he had described the killing to her less than an hour before. Her thoughts went back to Poe. The master of the burlesque and macabre strikes again, she thought grimly.

She asked Patterson, “Who’s here?”

“Morris is in charge. He was inside, but went back to the station,” Patterson replied. “Then there’s Reynolds; he went back with Morris. Laubach is here and has started work.”

“Laubach. That’s good to hear. We might need a technician of his caliber if it’s as bad as you said.”

“Come and see for yourself,” he said, lighting a cigarette.

They walked in silence to the end of the Enchanted Garden. Most of Felicia Stone’s colleagues had seen far more dead bodies than she had, but even though she’d spent seven years on active duty and two brief years as a homicide inspector, she had seen her share. However, the corpse that was tied to the bust of Edgar Allan Poe didn’t look like any she’d ever seen before. Usually there was something peaceful about people, even if they were dispatched by the most brutal methods. But this corpse seemed … what could she say? It sounded melodramatic, especially in these surroundings, but it didn’t seem that the corpse had found peace. Presumably this was because the corpse had no skin, or maybe it was because the body was standing upright without a head. She had a strange feeling of unreality, as if she were looking at a ghost. She was immediately nauseous, a feeling she thought she’d left behind over the course of her career. The feeling scared her, because below the nausea something darker and more dangerous was lurking. The monster she had fought with back when her childhood had come to an end. Somewhere deep in her stomach she noticed the sinking sensation that she wouldn’t allow herself to feel.

Laubach and a coroner whose name she couldn’t remember were preparing to untie the corpse from the pillar. They stopped working when she and Patterson came over to them.

“What have you found so far?” Stone asked, noticing that the churning in her stomach stopped as soon as she began talking shop. Laubach was confidence personified, and old enough to be her father. Tall, half African American, his well-groomed hair starting to go gray, he had a sense of calm about him that came from the Deep South, but his mind was still quick. This combination of outer calm and sharp thinking made him a fount of laconic remarks. But today he had put aside any witticisms.

“Well, I’ll tell you this—our friend here didn’t have a simple or quick death. He was tied to the pillar with steel wire around his arms, feet, and waist. He still has skin in some places. The marks from the steel wire show signs of swelling and bleeding, which tells us that he was alive when he was tied up.”

“So his throat was slit and he was flayed as he hung here?” she asked, trying not to let the images take shape in her head.

“Not exactly. Well, at least not in that order. All the skin on his upper torso between his neck, shoulders, and navel was removed, also on his back. It wouldn’t be possible to do that while he was hanging the way he is now. The skin was most likely taken off before he was tied up.”

“And you said that he was still alive when he was tied up there. So in other words, he was…”

“Skinned alive, yes,” said Laubach, completing her sentence.

“Jesus Christ!” said Patterson. “But his head was upstairs in the office. Wouldn’t it be more logical that the murderer killed him up there, flayed him, and then dragged him down here to tie him up?”

“There’s a good deal here that isn’t logical. His head was beaten severely before he died. There was blood and signs of a struggle in the office, but we don’t have a full picture yet. The cleaning woman made a mess up there, which makes our job even harder. We think he was knocked unconscious with a blunt instrument up in the office, but that he didn’t die from it. Then he was dragged down here and flayed, most likely on the lawn over there, where there’s quite a lot of blood.” Laubach pointed to a spot over by the fountain. “Then he was probably tied up and his throat cut, apparently with a small ax or a very heavy knife—possibly with more than one instrument. It took several hacks to get the head off. Finally he carried it back up to the office and put it in the wastebasket.”