The Deepest Cut Page 6

  I walked back through the molten heat, climbed into the Daemon then headed back through the mid-morning traffic toward Church Street as heavy drops of rain began to fall.

  When I got there, there was a Harley parked outside my block on the meter. I felt a slow burn of anger in my belly and told myself to take it easy. I rode the elevator, trying to think about Dr. Juliet Loss, but knowing what I was going to find when I opened the door.

  I could hear her laughter from the landing as I stepped out of the elevator. He was clearly a funny guy. Maybe I should be ashamed that I unlocked the door and slipped in silently, but ashamed isn’t something I do real easy. They didn’t hear me step into the drawing room. She was leaning back on the sofa, laughing with her eyes screwed shut. Steve the biker was sitting too close to her on the sofa. For a moment, I thought I recognized him, but I dismissed the thought. His knee was touching her thigh and he was telling some gas of a story that had her in stitches, leaning forward with his hands up like claws, pulling a face.

  “Und zis guy is coming to me like a monster, und saying, Stefan! Stefan…und he is going to grab me like so!’

  He was about to grab her, and, maybe if I’d been smart, I would have waited to see what happened next, but I didn’t want him to grab her and maybe I didn’t want to know what would have happened next.

  So, I cut across him and said, “Am I interrupting?”

  He jumped, but she just turned, looked at me and smiled.

  Then she was on her feet, coming around the sofa to me. “Hi, honey!” She gave me a peck on the mouth. Any other time it would have felt normal. Right then it felt cold. “This is Steve. He dropped in to say hello.”

  He was on his feet, doing a weird dance with his knees, like he was trying to adjust himself into his pants. He had those chiseled features people from the Pacific often have and dark brown eyes, with lots of hair swept back. Women probably found him gorgeous. I guessed he was twenty, seven years younger than Maria.

  I said, “Hello, Steve.”

  He was still dancing. Now he shrugged a couple of times, too, and said, “Yuh, hi… So. Maybe I should go.”

  I tried to hold his eye, but he was scanning everywhere.

  I said, “Don’t let me scare you away.”

  He looked straight at Maria, who was smiling at him. “So, I see you again, yuh?”

  I said, “You not going to see me again, Stephan?”

  He shrugged a couple more times and said, “Yuh, sure,” and to Maria, “You see me out.” It wasn’t a question.

  She said, “Sure.”

  And they walked into the hall. He closed the door behind him and I heard their voices drop to a mutter. I stepped over and put my hand on the handle. I heard him, low, almost urgent, “I see you again, yuh?”

  And Maria, “Sure.”

  “Just you and me…wizout…”

  I counted four seconds of silence. Four seconds can be a hell of a long time. Then the fire in my belly got too hot and I pulled open the door. They weren’t kissing, but he was leaning close to her and he had his hand on her arm. They both stared at me in silence, like I was interrupting. I held Steve’s eye till he turned away. Then I looked at Maria.

  I said, “There’s a real bad smell. You mind if we keep this door open?”

  Steve said, “I go!” He opened the door and left.

  I watched her but she wouldn’t meet my eye. She went to the sofa and dropped back into the place she’d been before. I went to sit on the windowsill and pulled out a cigarette.

  I said, “You want to tell me what that was about?”

  She seemed exasperated and spread her hands, her eyes dancing up, left, right. “About? It wasn’t ‘about’ anything. He just popped in for a visit.”

  I was turning the cigarette over in my fingers. I examined it. It wasn’t lit yet. I spoke to the cigarette, not looking at her. “How stupid do you think I am, Maria?” I raised my eyes and saw that she was watching me. “When I walked in, he was about to pounce on you.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!”

  “Is this going to be a problem? Because we talked this through yesterday and I thought we’d resolved it. Then I come home today and I find you on the sofa with a guy who is about to jump on you. So, you tell me now, Maria. Have we got a problem?”

  She stared at me awhile, chewing her lip. Then she said, “He was not about to jump on me.”

  “How do you know?”

  She screwed up her face. “What?”

  I lit the Camel and exhaled the smoke. “How do you know he wasn’t going to jump on you?” I pointed at the sofa. “You were lying back and you had your eyes closed.” She flushed and I saw the muscle in her jaw begin to dance. I went on. “I walked in and you were lying back, laughing, with your eyes closed, and he was leaning over you, with his hands like claws, and he was saying, ‘Und zis guy is coming to me like a monster, und saying, Stefan! Stefan…und he is going to grab me like so!’”

  I saw her suppressing a smile at my imitation of his accent, but I didn’t feel like smiling back.

  She shrugged. “He’s very funny…”

  I kept my voice level. “If I hadn’t spoken up in that moment, he would have jumped on you.”

  She sighed and rolled her eyes.

  I said, “If he had, what would you have done?”

  Now her eyes flashed at me. It was hard to read her expression. She might have been mad or she might have been worried. She stared at me but she didn’t answer.

  I said, “You need to think about it?”

  She said, “Liam, stop it!”

  “You are telling me to stop it?”

  She drew breath. The doorbell rang before she could speak. I held her eye and, after a moment, I went and opened the door. There was a messenger with a crash helmet and a large manila envelope.

  He said, “Liam Murdoch?”

  “Yeah,”

  “Sign, please.”

  I signed and took the envelope inside. Maria was watching me. I opened it. It was the forensic report. I dropped it on the table and turned to her. I felt angry but, above all, I felt sad and a desolation like I was losing her and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  Finally, I said, “There are two things that destroy a relationship, Maria. The first is jealousy. The second is stupidly making your partner jealous. You need to decide if you are serious about us or if you’re just here to play games.”

  Her cheeks flushed. She said, “And you need to ask me that?”

  “Apparently, I do.”

  After a moment, she got up and left. I heard the front door close. It didn’t slam. It just clicked, but it sounded final.

  Chapter Five

  I watched from the window. A twist of anxiety knotted my gut. I had a feeling there was a wave of madness overtaking us and I knew I had to do something to stop it. I took my phone from my pocket and hit her speed-dial. I watched her stop on the sidewalk below and pull out her phone. She looked at the screen a moment. Then there was the imperceptible movement of her thumb and the ringing stopped. I felt sick and watched her walk away, down the hill toward High Street Ken, till she was eventually swallowed up by the crowd.

  There was nothing I could do. I wanted to run after her, grab her, shake her, hold her and kiss her, but it would be pointless. If she came back—when she came back—it would be because she wanted to, not because I’d made her.

  I dropped into a chair at the table and stared at the forensics report. I had to focus on it. Maria had to get this out of her system. She had to make her choices, and I had to give her space to do that—whatever the outcome. Right now, I had to focus on Eva and her killer.

  I spilled the papers onto the table and began to read. At first, the abstract had no surprises. Death was by exsanguination. There were numerous injuries to the body, including severe bruising to the neck, consistent with strangulation, also to the thorax and arms, consistent with having been beaten and thrown about. However, none of these injuries had proved fa
tal.

  The heart had been penetrated by a large, Sabatier kitchen knife, but this had not caused the exsanguination. This wound had been inflicted postmortem. There was no internal bleeding from the knife wound. According to the report, the body had already been completely drained of blood before the stabbing. This was also true of the rose. The cuts made by the thorns had caused no bleeding, either.

  The exsanguination had been the result of violent ripping out of the organs, including the intestines, from the victim’s abdomen. Rip and tear marks on the skin, ribs and vertebrae suggested this had been done in three separate stages.

  I turned to the paragraph that dealt with the bruising to her neck. The killer had been wearing gloves, but the size of the bruises suggested a male of average-to-low height, with powerful hands. Pressure seemed to be more or less equal in both hands.

  The knife had little to reveal. There were obviously no prints. The knife was razor-sharp and had been driven in with minor force.

  In the paragraph about the abdominal wounds, the examiner was so shocked by what she had seen that she had been moved to comment. In thirty years of practice, she had never seen anything remotely similar. She estimated there had been three massive blows of enormous strength. First from right to left, suggesting the killer might be right-handed. This first blow had partially disemboweled the victim, but was of such force that it had fractured two of the vertebra in her lower spine. The next blow had been from left to right. By now, the victim was on her back, certainly unconscious but possibly dead. The third attack was not so much a blow as a process of ripping, by which the abdominal cavity had been stripped virtually bare of organs and entrails.

  She could only speculate about how this process of disemboweling had been performed. It may have been with a particularly savage weapon, designed to imitate claws—though, if that were the case, the man wielding it would have to be of enormous strength. In her opinion, the attack was consistent with a large, predatory animal. The ripping and tearing were most consistent with the claws and jaws of a Komodo dragon.

  I rubbed my face, poured myself a Bushmills and lit up a Camel. Two killers—an average-to-small guy with his pet Komodo dragon.

  I took my drink, my cigarette and the report over to the sofa. I stretched out and started reading through it again, absorbing the minute details. As I had assumed, Eva had not been killed at the park. She had been killed somewhere else and had been taken there to be positioned and found. Whatever they say on TV crime dramas, it is impossible to tell time of death from body temperature or anything else, but I knew she had last been seen at about half past eleven. Allow a minimum of half an hour to get the body to where it had been found and another half for her to get where she had been killed. Time of death had been between twelve and three.

  I picked up my cell and dialed Dr. Juliet Loss. It rang for fifteen seconds then went to voice mail. I hung up and tried again with the same result. I took another slug of whiskey. The room was warm and my eyes were getting heavy. I forced myself to focus on the report, trying to read over the dialogue that was going around and around in my head, where I was explaining to Maria that we had a good thing that was worth fighting for.

  An examination of Eva’s clothes showed massive saturation with blood, which all seemed to be her own. This was consistent with having been suddenly and violently disemboweled. Nothing else of interest had shown up except some fibers on the back of her coat, which might have become attached when she had been hurled to the floor. These were reddish-purple woolen fibers. The wool was Turkish in origin and the dye was Tyrian purple, a rare dye that was a mucous extracted from the hypobranchial gland of a medium-sized predatory sea snail found in the eastern Mediterranean. This suggested she had been thrown down onto a Persian rug, probably an expensive one.

  The Albert Hall. Knightsbridge. It was nighttime and Eva was getting off the bus. Knightsbridge was expensive. There were a lot of expensive apartments there that might have Persian rugs. I could see Eva walking, the million lights—the headlights, the street, the shop-window lights, the blaze of lights from the Harrods superstore—doing nothing but accentuating the night. She was small and vulnerable, walking beside a guy who carried the darkness with him and inside him—a nervous guy, a guy with shifting eyes and anxious hands. A guy who was terrified of his own blackened lust.

  But it wasn’t Eva. It was Maria, and I was struggling, wading through the crowd, trying to reach her, and the lights, instead of illuminating a path toward her, blinded my eyes until all I could see were coats—big, woolen coats—blocking my path, obstructing my way, making it hard to breathe. I began to hit out, punch and kick. It was what I had always done. It was the only way I knew. I grabbed at the coats—pulled, yanked, pushed—battling my way, trying to find her, knowing that with every second, she was more completely lost in the darkness.

  Then I broke through. She was there, lying on the tarmac. A circle of people stood around her, staring. Staring, not at her, but at me. She was wearing a coat. A Sabatier knife protruded from her breast. Her eyes were closed and a breeze softly moved her black hair across her brow. She looked beautiful. Peaceful. Dead.

  A great black and bloody hole gaped where her belly should have been.

  I said, “That was her womb.”

  Then I saw it. A crocodile, or a Komodo dragon, straddling her, chewing at her belly, but watching me—the crowd and the dragon watching me. I could hear it grunting and breathing as it chewed.

  It was the breathing that woke me. It was a matter of a fraction of a second. At first, I thought it was the breeze on my face. The same breeze that was moving the hair across Maria’s brow—gentle, peaceful. Then I realized it was rhythmic, and there was a soft blowing, a grunting to it. I opened my eyes. It was still night. A faint, luminous square was the window, open. Traffic outside. A large bulk obscured the square. A grunt, a snuffle, breath on my face. A knot of hot fear twisted my gut. A powerful sense that the black bulk was close. Another low grunt and breath brushed my face.

  It was smelling me.

  I scrambled backward and fell off the sofa in a heap. I was yelling. I could hear a wild, thrashing movement. I stumbled to my feet, bellowing like a madman and saw the black shape move swiftly across the luminous square of the window. My hand was already on the switch. It snapped on and the room was filled with light. There was nothing there. I could hear my own breathing, ragged in the silence. I moved quickly to the window and looked out. It was dark—one made more obscure and confusing by the moving headlamps and the diffuse streetlights. I thought I saw a shadow move along the façade of the building, but it could have been my imagination. I turned back and stared at the room. Nothing was overturned, nothing broken. Everything was normal. A dream. A night terror.

  How long had I been asleep? I looked at my watch. It was gone ten. I’d been asleep five or six hours. I rubbed my face and ran my hands through my hair. Then I heard the key in the lock.

  I stood frozen against the window as I heard the door close. Four seconds pulsed then the drawing room door opened. Maria stood in the doorway, one hand on the handle, looking at me. Her eyes were sad, regretful, but there was a smile there. I struggled to remember what had happened.

  Finally, I said, “Where were you?”

  She closed the door behind her and took two steps toward me. “I went to see a friend. Liam. I…”

  “What friend?”

  She sighed and closed her eyes. “Not Steve. Not a man. A woman friend.”

  “Who?”

  “Liam, please, listen. That isn’t important now. Will you listen to me?”

  I watched her. I didn’t say anything.

  After a moment, she went on. “I’m sorry. You have been driving me nuts…but that doesn’t excuse me behaving like a silly adolescent bitch, trying to make you jealous. Will you forgive me?” She took another step forward, then faltered. “Liam?”

  I was scanning her skin, her hair, her eyes. My heart was still pounding. I said, “How lo
ng have you been here?”

  She frowned and gestured at the door. “I just came in. Liam, are you okay?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I had a nightmare. It was vivid. I thought there was somebody here.”

  Her bottom lip curled in and her eyes flooded with tears. Next, she was rushing to me, wrapping her arms around me, burying her face in my chest, sobbing out her words. “Liam! What’s happening to us? Hold me. Tell me we’re going to be okay.”

  I put my arms around her, kissing her head and smelling her hair, knowing it was her, feeling my terror at losing her dissolve with her tears. I took her face in my hands, kissing her mouth and her cheeks and the salt tears from her eyes.

  I kept telling her over and over, “It’s going to be okay, baby. Everything is going to be okay.”

  We kissed for a long time. Eventually, she pulled away, looking up at me. I kissed her eyes gently, one after the other, and stroked her hair, wet from her tears, away from her face.

  She said, “I went to see a friend. You don’t know her, Liam, but she’s somebody I met recently. She’s really kind and sweet and wise. I told her what was happening.” She glanced away, out of the window—not seeing the street but her own thoughts? “She made me see that I was lying to myself. You were right. It was stupid. I was using Steve to claim your attention.” She looked up into my eyes, smiling, then giggled. “I don’t even like him. I think he’s a pain in the ass.”

  We both laughed with relief.

  I kissed her again and she said, “Make us a drink, will you? I could really use one. I’m just going for a pee.” She made a little knock-kneed dance. “I’ll be right back,” and she disappeared into the bedroom, to the en-suite bathroom.

  I rubbed my face and shook my head to try to clear it. I could use a drink myself. I went to the drinks tray and mixed her a Martini, extra dry, and poured myself a stiff Bushmills. I heard the toilet flush and a moment later the bedroom door open. I turned, a drink in each hand and she was coming toward me, smiling. I handed her the Martini. We held each other’s eyes as we toasted and sipped.