actions might make a kind of sense, raping women, slashing their throats, repositioning them, then leaving a trail of blood leading away from the scene. Like sure, of course, he must have seen his father beat his mother, then leave her in these exact positions on the living room floor, and he’d walked away bleeding from the scratch marks she’d given him, so now the grown-up boy, that poor, twisted son of a bitch, is compelled to re-enact endlessly those traumatic episodes, laying the dead women out like sacrificial offerings to his past.
Alex hated it, the way the forensic-psychology hotshots had taken over, explaining it all, giving every crime a cute Freudian cause and effect. She hated it because the explanations were always more than explanations. Behind each of their clever scenarios was the same suggestion – that there was logic to evil, a reasonable justification for every fucking horror under the sun.
The media wasn’t onto the weird arrangements yet, because so far, everyone working the case had been stonewalling, keeping the reporters beyond the crime-scene tape. If the killer was indeed hungry for newsprint, it wasn’t their job to feed him. And, of course, the second the word got out about those eerie poses, there’d be tabloid crews elbowing their way to the front of the pack, making good police work a hundred times harder.
Slowly, she began to work her way around the perimeter of the room, a full 360 degrees. The light was good. Dan had turned everything on, overhead, table lamps, fluorescent kitchen lights. She had to change film again. Marking it, slipping the used film into her waist pouch. Continuing around the edge of the room to get the complete perspective. Then zooming in for the victim. Pretty woman, athletic. That one-inch incision in her throat, a few quarts of her blood spreading into the beige carpet. Alexandra got close-ups of the wound, the stained carpet.
Across from the flowery couch was a leather wing-back chair, a matching ottoman. Something from a lawyer’s study. Two cheap oils on the walls, sad-eyed clowns and a pelican nesting on a piling – tourist shop trash. But behind the couch was a large black-and-white photograph, a misty Everglades glen cluttered with ferns and alligators lurking beneath the still waters. A guy’s work she’d admired for years. Clyde Butcher.
She’d read about him, how he slogged with his huge camera and a hundred pounds of equipment out into the middle of the soupy Glades. Then he set up his tripod, hefted the camera onto it. Two hours to set up for one shot – all so he could make these huge photographs full of intricate detail. Butcher did magical things with black and white. Made herons and ibises into angels. Put an enchanted sheen on the palm fronds and the saw grass that exposed the sinister grace of that river of grass. Its silence and danger, its holiness.
Nothing at all like the stuff she did – just one color shot after another, stark and standard. Keeping herself out of it. Keeping her mood, her values, her interpretation buried away.
She would snap somewhere around three hundred shots of that particular crime scene alone. Probably over a thousand photos before the night was done. And none of them would be art. That was the skill of the job. Keep it dull. Plain and simple and honest and straight. No spin, no subjectivity. Nothing for defense lawyers to argue about. That was what she did five nights a week. She kept herself out of it. Walked through these rooms with the scrupulous dispassion of a Buddhist priest. Not playing with shadows and perspectives, not stalking, like Clyde Butcher did, that perfect moment when sunlight and shadow and the ripples on the water’s surface were in perfect alignment.
Her job was the opposite of art. Pornographic reality. If she had a gift, it was a talent for watchful emptiness. Standing back, seeing, then getting it all down on her negative – the disinterested purity of fact.
‘You like that?’ Dan said from the doorway. ‘That photograph?’
‘I like it. Sure.’
‘So take it with you. I’ll help you get it down.’
She looked over at him.
‘Who’s going to know, Alex?’
‘What’re you, cracking up? I’m not taking that thing.’
‘Why not?’
Alexandra took another look at the photograph and heaved out a breath.
‘Well, for one thing, it wouldn’t fit in my place,’ she said. ‘It’s too beautiful. I’d have to take down all the other crap I got on my walls. Or else move to a better house.’
Standing in the doorway, he shook his head, stripped a stick of gum.
‘You know, Rafferty, I’m developing a new theory about this blood thing he does.’
‘I don’t like the jokes, okay? Not about this guy. Spare me.’
‘It’s not a joke,’ he said. ‘What I think is, cutting himself like he does is how the guy gets off. Like a sperm substitute.’
‘He doesn’t have any trouble ejaculating,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty of seminal fluid.’
‘Maybe this is like some kind of bigger, better orgasm. He blows his load, kills the woman, then slashes himself. And there’s blood flowing and sperm leaking out, and the goddamn freak is flying off into orbit. All the bells ringing, whistles shrieking, lights going full blast, the guy’s soaring out there into interplanetary nothingness.’
She stared at him.
‘Dan, maybe it is time for you to retire.’
‘Pathology boys are saying it’s glass he cuts them with, not a blade.’
‘Glass?’
‘Yeah, figure that out. Some kind of special glass.’
‘Special? How?’
The big man shrugged. ‘I haven’t read the report yet. Just glanced at it on the way over here.’
‘Let me get this straight. The guy holds a chunk of glass in his bare hand, and when he cuts their throats, he winds up slicing himself in the process. Like either he’s totally stupid or for some reason he enjoys the pain.’
Romano shrugged again. ‘Well, I think we can rule out stupid.’
‘Oh boy, the psychobabblers ought to have fun with that.’
She shot the sprinkling of blood on the beige carpet. Got close-ups of the woman’s throat. Just like the four others, a gash with a little wrist flick, like the letter C. But that was for the ME to figure out, the pathology guys, the blood-spatter techs. Alexandra was just a photographer – cold, neutral eyes.
They’d send the blood and sperm specimens, tissue samples, hair and fiber off to the FBI lab, the FDLE, have them run their blue-ribbon tests. And it would all be futile. This asshole wasn’t leaving behind anything he didn’t want them to find. They already knew his fingerprints weren’t on file in the AFIS database or with the FBI. The DNA was worthless unless they already had the guy in custody.
From the autopsies and blood-spatter patterns, they could tell the guy was highly organized, under strict control. The whole event had the feel of a finely tuned script, a lockstep ritual. Same white wine at every scene. Even the same amount of chardonnay left in the bottle each time.
No witnesses ever remembered seeing him arrive. No one saw him depart. Apparently, the guy was a charmer of lonely hearts. All the women he’d chosen
