Chapter 2

 

To her credit, Solomon didn’t question me further—though it was clear she was dying to. As soon as she was out of sight, I continued into the darkness.

As I got closer to the end of the pier, I could see that the single column of flickering yellow light was in fact four columns of flickering yellow light. I took my camera from its case and took another step. I was eight or nine feet away now. The stench was unmistakable—something I’d smelled for the first time when I’d topped a hillside in Kosovo two years before with two other U.S. reporters, on a diplomatic mission that went to hell before our eyes.

It’s not a smell you forget.

The light came from four votive candles—there had been five initially, but one had gone out. I got closer, and finally stopped when I was no more than a yard away. The veggie burger and beers I’d had earlier at Manny’s climbed my gorge. I pushed them back down, and trained the flashlight on the body at my feet.

The woman lay on the concrete, her body arranged carefully. She was nude; legs splayed, arms outstretched. She was black, not more than mid-twenties, tall and lean. Her thick dark hair had been hacked short. I paused, stomach rolling. In my line of work, I’d seen bad things before: people killed in heinous ways for despicable reasons, or for no reason at all. I’d never seen anything like this, though. I turned away and breathed through my mouth, forcing back the bile that climbed my throat.

Then, I turned around again and forced myself to look. To bear witness—the only thing we reporters are really good for, anyway.

The woman’s eyes had been plucked from her face, leaving bloodied black holes that stared back at me. Despite everything that had been done to her, I thought she looked familiar—I just couldn’t tell from where. Her throat had been slit, the wound grinning at me in the darkness. Another wound laid her open from sternum to pubis, deep enough to expose her innards. The heart was missing; by the look of things, it wasn’t the only organ that had been taken. The candles had been placed with one in each hand, one at each foot. The fifth had been set inside the cavern of her opened belly, the flame flickering close enough to singe her flesh.

I stepped away when I couldn’t keep the burger and beer down any longer and vomited into the harbor, stopping only when my stomach was empty. When I got up, my hand was already curled around my camera.

On autopilot now, I began photographing the scene. The camera’s flash exploded in the night, the photos coming fast enough to create a strobe effect. I focused on the shots, not the body—taking care to get pictures of the ligature marks at the wrists and ankles; the clean incision that had sliced her open. I thought of the phone call Lisette had gotten in the bar. The look on her face when she’d come running toward me in the darkness. What was her connection to this woman?

Something beside the body caught my attention when I snapped another picture.

I took a step closer and knelt on the concrete. Beside the woman’s left hand was a figure carved in wood, about the size of my thumb. The totem caught me, resonating somewhere deeper than this emptied body had. A young girl stared back at me, startlingly lifelike, her head tipped back and her mouth open—laughing. My stomach clenched again. I took a picture of the wooden girl, straightened, and stepped away.

Before I could raise my camera again, I heard footsteps behind me.

“I thought I told you to stay with Manny in the bar,” I said.

There was no response. Fear ran icy fingers up my spine. “Sol?”

I turned with the flashlight in hand. A tall black man—four or five inches above my six feet, easily—stared back at me. A scar ran across the left side of his face, the skin sewn closed where an eye should have been. He held a knife in one hand.

“Get away from her,” he said. He nodded toward the dead woman. I took a step sideways. He advanced regardless. “You took pictures of her like this? Her body like this?”

He had a thick accent—Eastern African, I thought, rough and difficult to understand.

“I’m a reporter,” I said. “I saw the body and—” Before I could say anything more, another set of footsteps sounded in the stillness. Solomon emerged from the fog just as I was warning her back.

The man with the knife moved with the speed of a ghost, in front of me one second and behind me the next. He wrapped his arm around my throat, the knife digging in just below my ribs.

“Stay back,” I said to Solomon.

She froze. I’d dropped my own flashlight when the man jumped me, but Solomon pointed hers directly in my eyes. I blinked in the glare.

“What’s—”

“Why would you take photographs of this?” the man demanded, cutting her off. He smelled of sweat and earth, his arm damp against my skin. “Do you understand what was done here? Do you see—”

“I called the police,” Solomon interrupted. Her voice shook with those first words. When she spoke again, though, she was steadier. “They’ll be here soon. Whatever the reason you did this—”

The arm tightened around my throat. I felt the blade pierce my side and dig in.

“I did not do this,” the man insisted. “She was a good woman. A strong woman, brave—I do not hurt women. Not any longer. They are after the girl. You understand?”

I didn’t understand—not by a long shot. When I didn’t say anything, he dug the blade in deeper. I felt blood trickle down my side, warm and wet.

“Yeah,” I ground out. “Okay—we get it. So why don’t you go before the cops get here. I’m thinking the fact that you’ve got somebody in a death lock with a knife carving into his ribs won’t do a lot to plead your case.”

“Lisette. She was here—I saw her come here,” he said, ignoring me.

“She was,” Solomon said. “She took off. Let him go and I’ll draw you a map to her doorstep, though.”

“Tell Lisette he has come,” the man said. “More of us will die—no one bearing the mark is safe. There is too much power there—too much at stake. But she must save the girl. You understand? Tell her that, for me.”

Sirens were getting closer now. The brownout ended abruptly, so that suddenly the scene was bathed in the yellow-white glow of the streetlights around us.

“You tell her,” the man said. He released me just as I saw blue lights a couple of streets over. I went to my knees. The blood had soaked through the side of my t-shirt, flowing thicker now. Solomon met me on the ground. Her hand fell to my side instantly, but I pushed her away. We didn’t have much time.

“Take the film from my camera, and run,” I said.

“What?”

Still on my knees on the pavement, I grabbed my camera. I opened the film compartment, took out the film, and shoved it into a plastic container I’d had in my pocket. I took the roll that had been in the container and shoved it down my pants.

Two cop cars, sirens screaming, tore around the corner onto Custom House Wharf. Solomon looked almost comically baffled.

“Go, damn it!” I said. “They’ll arrest me, patch me up, whatever. Any way you slice it, though, they’re taking my film. Take it and go. And call Buzz.”

“Right,” she said. She finally grabbed the film and took off a split second before headlights would have caught her in their glare. I stayed on my knees, watching her go, and raised my hands weakly when one of the cops stepped out of his cruiser.

Solomon was already long gone.