Where Monsters Dwell (8 page)

This had been Morris’s main point at the so-called war council in a stuffy meeting room with bad air-conditioning, where Patterson, Laubach, and Stone were present.

“We can handle this,” he’d said. “We can’t get sidetracked by all the blood and butchery in this case. This is a homicide like any other, and we know how to investigate homicides.”

Morris was a tall, middle-aged man. His hair was close-cropped to camouflage the deep inroads in his hairline. He had a big furrow in his forehead that never went away, not even on calm days, when he could doze off in his desk chair. He was a sensible man, a practical man, somebody who didn’t lose his head even if the murder victim did. After talking for fifteen minutes he had managed to convince the others that the Poe murder, as the media had begun calling it, was a case that could be solved, and that the solution would presumably be found where it usually was—somewhere in the life of the victim.

“It would definitely surprise me,” Morris said, “if the perp hadn’t been in contact with Efrahim Bond somehow. As in all homicide cases, first we have to look at the immediate family, then at any love affairs and colleagues.”

After this speech by Morris, the investigative work almost felt routine. Felicia Stone now stood next to the autopsy table waiting to get a verbal and very preliminary report. She’d done this several times before, and she knew exactly what to ask.

First things first. The deceased had been hit on the head with a blunt instrument, possibly a crowbar or a metal pipe. He had survived these blows but was probably knocked unconscious. Then the killer had flayed the skin off his torso before tying him to the Poe monument and cutting off his head. This sequence of events was fairly certain. Death occurred sometime during the night.

“Can you say anything about the decapitation?” she asked the coroner, thinking she might have gazed too long into his blue eyes. She wondered how she would have felt about him if he weren’t always standing next to a corpse when she talked to him. Imagine if he were the kind of man she had once hoped to meet? Someone who could hold her so that it felt good all over her body, even in the pit of her stomach.

“This is not a model decapitation, if you can say that,” he replied.

“Amateurish, in other words.”

“Yes, I might say that, but there aren’t many professional decapitators left nowadays, are there?” Again that sardonic smile.

“You know what I mean,” she said, not amused. “Has he done it before?”

“It’s hard to say, but if you force me to give an opinion, I’d say no. If his intention was to separate the head from the body quickly and efficiently, then this killer didn’t know what he was doing. He used the wrong tool—an ax that was much too small, I think, and a very sharp knife that still wasn’t sharp enough. He also used the wrong technique. It looks like he used the knife to hack at the neck instead of slicing.”

“So the killer had no idea how to decapitate a person before he arrived at the scene. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Either that, or he wanted to take a long time cutting off the head. There’s a certain pattern to all the cuts and chops. As if he were enjoying it.”

“But what about the flaying?”

“There was nothing precise about that either. He probably used the same knife he used for the neck. In many places he cut a little too deeply into the flesh. But the fact that he managed to flay a man’s torso while leaving the skin on the arms and legs indicates that he must have had some sort of experience. Maybe we’re dealing with a hunter, or someone who worked as a butcher. A doctor is also a possibility.”

“So in general you don’t think he got this experience from earlier murders?”

“I’ll leave that sort of conclusion to you experts.”

Stone nodded.

“Can you put a rush on the autopsy report?” she asked.

“Today I’m eating lunch in the office,” he replied. “But promise me that you won’t tell anybody.” He did a rather good imitation of a mad scientist, both in voice and expression. He looked like a character in an old horror movie.

She laughed. And it struck her that it was probably the first time she had laughed in that room.

On the way out the door she also remembered his name. Knut Jensen. Scandinavian, she surmised. A rarity in the South.

*   *   *

The press conference was over, the first interviews of the staff at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum were finished, and the crime scene investigation was well under way. The verbal autopsy report told them nothing new. Even though the city news desks were jumping, the Internet was overflowing with sensational reports, and her stomach was churning with an inexplicable nausea that came and went, things were getting back to normal at the police station. It was time for a lengthier, more in-depth meeting. They needed to map out the long-term plans for an investigation that could potentially become extensive. Besides Stone, Morris, Reynolds, Laubach, and Patterson were at the meeting. The five of them made up a special investigative team. For the time being this case would be handled locally, and Morris would wait to seek reinforcements from the FBI, at least until something new turned up. Stone knew that meant it wouldn’t happen anytime soon. Morris didn’t like outsiders.

The meeting started where the last one ended, with one important change: A janitor had finally fixed the air-conditioning, so now it was possible to think without sweat running down their temples. Morris had already touched on the important issues. They would start with the assumption that the victim was not chosen at random. There had to be some sort of connection between Efrahim Bond and his killer; it was crucial to find out what that connection might be.

“I don’t really think it’s any of the museum staff,” said Morris. “What do the rest of you think?”

“Nobody stands out as a hyperviolent killer among the ladies on staff,” said Reynolds. True to form he didn’t look directly at anyone, and he chewed gum as he spoke. Reynolds was a methodical guy, indispensable because of his precision, but not a great thinker. The big breakthroughs in a case seldom came as a result of anything he had deduced, although they might emerge from the basic work he had laid down. It was Reynolds who’d been assigned to talk to the people at the museum this morning. By “the ladies” Reynolds was referring to the fact that all the museum employees except for Efrahim Bond and one external conservator were women between the ages of twenty-four and sixty-three. He had spoken with all of them. There weren’t that many: two ticket sellers, who worked alternate shifts; one person who worked in the gift shop; three docents (all master’s students in English, who worked there part-time); Bond’s secretary; and the curator, who actually worked at the University of Richmond but came in one morning a month to tend to the collection of books, furniture, and rarities.

“But doesn’t it tell us something about Bond, that he hired only women?” said Stone, keeping her tone neutral.

“Sure, it shows he was a man,” said Patterson with a laugh. “And that he had business sense,” he added a moment later. He tilted his chair back and gave her a boyish grin.

“Naturally I asked all of them what sort of relationship they had with Bond,” Reynolds went on, “and the whole bunch said that it was good, but professional. It seems like he was a fair and knowledgeable boss, but slightly reserved. Of course, one of them could be covering something up. There might have been some other type of relationship going on. But I don’t think all of them would lie, and he wasn’t exactly the Casanova type. In fact, one of the employees … I think it was the one who works in the gift shop,” said Reynolds, as he paged through a notebook. “Yes, it was Julia Wilde. She claimed that Bond seemed to have no further interest in women after he and his wife were divorced years ago.”

“No interest in women? If you ask me, that just raises suspicion that he was hiding something,” Patterson sneered.

It irritated Stone that he felt it necessary to behave like a jerk. But she did think he might be on to something. As a rule, a controlled exterior concealed something underneath.

“I believe we can make more progress by starting close to the bone,” said Morris. This was one of those rather oracular statements he came up with from time to time.

“You mean closer to the victim than his workplace?” Stone asked.

“Precisely. The man had a family. It’s the natural place to start.”

“The problem is that everybody I’ve talked with so far claims that Efrahim Bond no longer had any contact with his family. His parents are dead, he had no siblings, and his kids all live in other parts of the country and didn’t visit him even on Thanksgiving. His ex-wife moved out of state long ago to live closer to her grandchildren up north somewhere.”

“So we have to do some digging. No man can completely escape his family,” said Morris.

Stone groaned. Everyone in the room looked at her as if she had something important on her mind.

“We’re starting with a rather empty slate here,” she said. Then she turned to Reynolds. “Didn’t anything concrete come out of your morning at the museum? Has anything special happened in the past few days?”

“Zip. Things have been absolutely normal. The only thing is that the secretary and the cleaning woman both thought that Bond was a tad more introverted than usual. The cleaning woman described him as secretive. And there could be something else. Bond’s secretary got a message to send a piece of leather from one of the book bindings to the university for examination. I didn’t write down which book. He wanted to know what sort of animal the leather came from. I think she found it a rather strange request, and that’s probably why she mentioned it. But I have no idea if it has to do with our case.”

“I’ll look into it,” Stone said, casting a glance at Morris. She would do anything to get out of flying north for a series of depressing interviews with long-lost relatives. She also had a hunch. From the beginning she thought that this murder had some connection to the museum: not necessarily to the people who worked there, but to the museum itself, to the objects it contained, or to Poe’s work. She didn’t know whether it was odd to take samples from a book binding to determine what sort of animal the leather came from, but since the secretary had bothered mentioning it, she felt it shouldn’t be ignored. It might be important.

“Okay,” said Morris. “We’ll concentrate on the family first. Reynolds and Patterson will track down the whole clan, make contact with the police where they live, and prepare to take some trips. Stone, you follow up on what we have locally. Ask the museum people for more details. Find out what you can about that piece of leather. Laubach, before we adjourn, can we have a report from you and your team?”

“At present we’re still gathering information. The murder scene was spread over a relatively wide area, and it’ll take time to comb through all of it. Three sets of fingerprints were found in Bond’s office, but I’d bet anything they belong to the secretary, the cleaning woman, and Bond himself. We haven’t received the final analyses yet. Otherwise, plenty of people have touched the marble bust of Poe, which is a sort of relic for the most faithful fans. There are no complete sets of prints on it. I doubt that the perp would have left any. I think we’re dealing with a very careful man.”

“Why do you say ‘man’?” asked Stone suddenly. “Don’t you think it could have been a woman?”

“Sure, technically it could have been. The killer wouldn’t need to have more than average strength. After he, and I’ll continue to say he, struck the first blow, Bond would have been out cold and offering no resistance. But this murder is about as far from arsenic in the tea as you could get.”

“That’s overkill, but it’s a man,” Patterson interjected.

Stone saw no reason to argue with them.

“There are plenty of organic traces. Lots of blood and bodily fluids. We’ve started the analyses, but nothing has been nailed down yet. I’m guessing most of it came from the victim. You’ll get a report when we have something more,” Laubach concluded.

“Don’t forget the book,” said Stone.

“The book?” Laubach asked.

“If leather from a book binding was sent for analysis, there must be a book missing a piece.”

“That’s certainly logical,” said Laubach with a smile. “We’ll track it down.”

11

Richmond, September 2010

The homicide division of
the Richmond Police Department was housed in a massive brick building painted a cement gray. It was oppressive, and Felicia Stone often felt that she had to get out of there to be able to think clearly. She was now standing in the Jefferson Street parking lot across from the imposing structure, wondering whether it had been designed by some criminal mastermind, to make the detectives locked inside sluggish in their thinking. A huge metallic head hung on the bulky gray surface of the wall facing the parking lot where she was leaning against a patrol car and sucking on her first cigarette since New Year’s Eve. It was supposed to be a man wearing a police cap. A blue band ran down the center of the face. In order to emphasize the feeling that this whole building had been erected to mock the police, the officer in the sculpture had two big holes where the eyes should have been. Underneath the sculpture was a narrow door leading to the offices that were the domain of the city’s detectives. “The dungeon of the blind detectives,” she called it. Only Laubach got the joke. All the others were proud of their workplace and were offended whenever she criticized it. That’s why she’d stopped making the snide remarks aloud.

She tossed away the butt, which had tasted worse than she’d hoped, but still not half bad. It hadn’t helped her nausea any; she was afraid there was only one cure for that. A cure she’d tried once before, that hellish summer after high school, one she could never try again. Felicia Stone got into the patrol car she’d been leaning against. There
is
one other cure, she thought. They could solve this fucking case. That would relax her.

Felicia took a right up West Grace Street. She started thinking about serial killers. More precisely, she started to consider why she was thinking about serial killers. About a follow-up course she’d taken in Oslo, mostly because she’d wanted a break from the job. The instructor had said something she couldn’t forget. As a child, a serial killer may have been a bed wetter, an animal torturer, or a pyromaniac. But this is far from always the case. He doesn’t even need to have been a very difficult child or subjected to any sort of abuse. There’s really only one thing that all serial killers have in common: As children they had a rich fantasy world, a world they could retreat into when reality proved too much for them. And gradually this fantasy world became a dark and dismal place, with violence, oppression, and bestial deeds. But it would always remain a place where they were in control. When these children later develop into serial killers, it’s their attempt to realize these fantasies that leads to the act of murder.