"Shit!" Chris's professionally impassive look had given way to a mask of grief as he peered past the medical examiner at Joan Cunningham's tragic body lying crumpled on the ground.
"I'm so sorry, Chris." Gwen touched his elbow. It was the first time in their long working relationship she had physically touched him. It was also the first time she had heard him say "shit." "I know how much you liked her."
"That's what brought her to this." The three Homicide detectives and one FCSU constable were standing a few metres back to let the medical examiner complete his examination.
"Joan would have hated to be seen like this," murmured Gwen.
This elicited a sad smile from Chris. "I remember she once told me that she enjoyed sex. So somebody must have seen her naked like this while she was alive. At least, I hope so."
He turned his head to look at Patterson, who was making gagging noises in his throat. "You okay, Ken?"
"I'm okay," Patterson replied, swallowing hard. "I thought I had seen just about everything. But this ..." Clearing his throat, he repeated, "I'm okay."
"I guess there's no doubt TLC did this?" asked Gwen. "He didn't mutilate her the way he usually does."
"Maybe he figured the god of genetics had already done that for him." It was true the usual stigmata of the serial weren't present. Joan's flat, almost non-existent breasts were intact, the tiny half-moon nipples untouched, and no blood seeped between the twisted, rudimentary appendages that were her legs. Her club feet were turned inwards, and her short, unjointed arms were raised skyward as if in supplication to some malevolent deity.
Most significant of all, she hadn't been killed with a deep knife thrust to the heart as had the others. Instead, her head had been almost completely severed in a series of ragged knife cuts.
"Her face was so pretty, maybe he wanted to separate it from her body," suggested Gwen.
"I guess we can safely say VSA—vital signs absent," the medical examiner pronounced with dry irony. "She's all yours."
"Time of death?" asked Chris.
"Sometime early this morning." The M.E., tall, black hair ringing his shining bald scalp like a monk's tonsure, gazed up at the immaculate blue Alberta sky. "Rigor is well-established despite the heat. It's ten past eleven. Let's say three a.m., plus or minus a half-hour."
"What about the way her neck is cut?" asked Chris. "It doesn't look like what you would call surgical to me."
"It's not. Strictly a hack job without the right equipment. The guy must have gotten tired and given up. It's not all that easy to decapitate a person. He did manage to cut through the strap and skalenus muscles—the ones that support your head—and slice through the larynx and sever the carotid artery." The physician closed his bag with a click and walked away with a final doleful shake of his head.
At the mention of "strap" and "skalenus," Chris's neck was gripped in a brief, painful spasm. He had torn those same muscles in a spectacular spill over a triple-bar jump at the Toronto Royal Winter Fair. It had taken three months and a dozen acupuncture sessions before the stiffness in his neck went away.
As soon as the medical examiner turned over the crime scene, Gwen and the detective from FCSU moved in. The detective looked up as Chris, masked and gowned, slipped under the tape and joined them, then went back to photographing the victim. Later he would videotape the scene. Patterson, the colour gradually returning to his cheeks, remained behind the tape.
"Well, the location is right." Chris lifted his eyes from the tragically misshapen body and the almost severed head and gazed out on a panorama of green. The park, only recently opened to the public and as yet unnamed, waiting for a sponsor to come forward, was the last one to be searched since the discovery of Joan's abandoned mobile platform. It was located just west of the city and commanded a sweeping view of the Rockies. "I hope the son of a bitch was properly frustrated when he couldn't put his signature where he wanted."
Joan's birth defect had so deformed her left hand—the fingers clenched and folded into her palm—that the killer had been forced to carve his signature cross into her right hand, where the fingers were not so contracted. That gave Chris a fleeting sense of bitter satisfaction, until he recalled those same fingers holding his wrist in their affectionate grasp. The cross was the only wound the monster had inflicted, apart from slicing her throat so savagely. The lack of blood from the severed carotid artery showed that she had bled out somewhere else and that the park was the secondary crime scene.
"Oh my God. Look at this! It's her bird," Gwen exclaimed as she carefully lifted Joan's head, supporting it with both hands. The cockatiel's lifeless body was underneath, its neck snapped.
"She called him Nicki," Chris muttered. It was the final horror.
Chris armed himself with a stiff drink of Glenlivet, switched on the TV, and prepared to watch the late local news.
Joan's murder was the lead item. It was described as the latest in the wave of killings that was holding the city in the grip of terror. There was no overt criticism of the police. No need, Chris reflected bitterly. The string of unsolved murders spoke for itself. The newscaster was filling in some of Joan's background, the details of which Chris had learned for the first time that afternoon. Her full name was Joan Cunningham. She lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Inglewood. The apartment building was four storeys high and was equipped with an elevator. She was probably best known for her occasional appearances as a panhandler, almost always on the mall, accompanied by her pet parrot, which had been killed along with her. According to those who lived in the same low-rise building, she appeared to be comfortably off. She went shopping regularly, bringing home adequate supplies of foodstuffs, and her clothing was, according to one neighbour, high-end stuff. It was rumoured that she donated the proceeds of her panhandling to the Salvation Army, although this could not be confirmed as yet. There was talk that she had been working on a book. Apart from that, there was no apparent reason why the killer had chosen her for his next victim. She was radically different from the profile of his previous victims. Assuming, of course, that her demise was the work of the serial killer.
It was when the newscast began to zero in on the details of her death that things got a little sticky. "The victim was ..." Trying not to squint, the anchor leaned forward to peer at the teleprompter. "... born with ..." A deep breath. "... anthrogryposis congenita." He omitted the third word, and Chris couldn't blame him. That hurdle safely past, the newscaster continued with greater assurance to say that it was a debilitating disorder that prevents the fetus from developing normally and results in the unfortunate victim being born severely crippled. "Joan Cunningham was virtually decapitated, but her body was not mutilated in the same fashion as the other victims," he intoned with professional objectivity before moving on to the next item.
Adding a measured ounce of whisky to his drink, Chris went out on the terrace to watch the nightly display of fireworks from the Stampede grounds. As rockets exploded with booming percussions and showers of starry lights, he thought back on the newscast. It had concentrated on the horror of the vicious murder and had refrained from criticizing the police, but that would come. The columnists, especially Jim Letts, would pounce, and editorial writers would wonder why Calgary's finest couldn't bring the killer to justice. Chief Johnstone kept pointing out that Chris was in charge of the investigation, and he had been singled out by name as the primary in an overview piece on the killings that ran in the City & Region section of the Herald. And then of course, there was Dummett, goading TLC by predicting that he would soon be caught.
Surprisingly, there had been no more letters to the editor from Lambert. Maybe being interviewed by the police as a "person of interest" had cooled him out, although one would think it was more likely to have provided him with additional ammunition. Now with Joan's murder, the egotistical law professor surely wouldn't be able to resist the opportunity to renew his attack on the police. The prospect made Chris wince. Lambert's stuff was bound to be more telling, more damaging, than anything the other critics could come up with. Dummett could probably match him in the writing department, but Dummett was constrained by his own personal agenda to lure TLC out into the open. There was no doubt the professor knew how to wield a pen. His astonishment at the ineptness of the police was all the more effective for being understated, and his academic background lent credence to what he had to say. Joan's murder, so grotesque and appalling, was almost certain to bring on another stinging attack from him. It would also provide a sensational chapter for the book Lambert likely had in mind.
On second thought, a letter from him could turn out to be useful. Lambert had been mockingly uncooperative when he and Gwen interviewed him that time at the law school and had flatly refused to come up with an alibi. He obviously relished the role of being a suspect. That intellectual arrogance of his might lead him into coming out with something incriminating.
The news anchor had said that so far there was no explanation of why Joan had been killed. The media might not know why, but he sure as hell did. He was the reason. It was his friendship that had led to her death. That and that alone would account for TLC choosing her as a victim. She certainly didn't fit the pattern of his other victims. While he recoiled from the sick certainty of this, his detective instincts seized on the fact that the only contact he had ever had with Joan Cunningham was on the mall. Which meant that the serial must have witnessed at least one and probably more of their encounters. He could have learned of it some other way, of course, but the likelihood was that he had seen them talking to each other. Unfortunately, that did precisely nothing to narrow the field of possible suspects. The Stephen Avenue Mall was the main artery of pedestrian traffic in the downtown area and was crowded with thousands of people every day.
The newscaster had commented on the fact that she hadn't been carved up in the same way as the other victims. Chris was convinced that the serial must have been so shaken by her malformed body that he had been psychologically incapable of doing anything more and had left her torso untouched. But Joan's lifeless form would be under the knife right now. Her autopsy had been prioritized and the impersonal lights of the morgue would be glaring down on her pitiful body as she lay sprawled on a cold steel table.