DR. PENELOPE JENNIFER GRAY chose well when she selected soft-soled walking shoes that morning. Making her way over cobblestones on the Mississippi River levee, she placed her feet carefully. The early morning fog left a chilling film on her face. A degree or two less, and the cobblestones would be glazed with ice. She should be grateful for small things.
She’d gotten lost near Laclede’s Landing, and not for the first time. The Landing was a dining and shopping area of St. Louis with a boisterous after-hours life. At six on a Sunday morning, the club goers were cleared out and the daytime crowd was still tucked into bed. She left her car in a no parking zone on Lucas Street with a “Police Business” card shoved into the front window above the steering wheel. A little traffic noise filtered down from nearby Eads Bridge, but it was muffled.
PJ could hear Detective Leo Schultz before she could see him through the fog. The sound waves of his voice seemed to have some kind of selective resonance with the suspended water molecules in the air, so that his voice carried when other sounds didn’t. PJ honed in on his voice and came to a small knot of people gathered near a prone figure.
“About time you got here,” Schultz said. His voice reflected disapproval of those inconsiderate enough to sleep in on a Sunday morning, PJ among them. She didn’t take the bait. After a few seconds of posturing, he stepped aside to give her a view of the reason she’d been summoned from a warm bed.
A nude man lay only a few feet away on the cobblestones. Beyond him, the fog wiped the Mississippi from view. The man’s face, chest, and genitals were mutilated and bloody. His fingertips were sliced off, so that his hands appeared stubby. There was no large pool of blood underneath, but he was as pale as a vampire’s victim. Small waves lapped at the man’s feet, a watery caress for a man who was beyond comfort.
“ME’s come and gone,” Schultz said. “Basically we’re just standing here, freezing, waiting for you to show up.”
He wasn’t giving up. She challenged him with her eyes.
“Probably stopped to feed your cat,” he said.
“None of your business if I did,” PJ said.
Anita Collings’s voice cut in. “Hey, could we get on with it? There’s a dead guy over there and he’s the priority.”
PJ looked over at Anita, prepared to tell her off. The sight of her junior team member’s determined face, with well-defined dots of red on her cheeks and fog condensed on her eyelashes like drops of transparent paint on a brush, shifted PJ’s crankiness. After all, they had been out here longer. She forced her muscles to bring up the corners of her mouth. The result was as she expected: Dave and Anita immediately returned the smile, and Schultz gazed at the white wall of fog over the river.
Dave Whitmore flapped his arms in an exaggerated attempt to warm himself up. “Could we do this back at Headquarters?”
“Oh, come on, it’s not that cold.” PJ grew up in Iowa, where the snow started mounting up early, ended late, blizzards weren’t ice cream treats, and wind chills of minus thirty degrees weren’t uncommon. By this time, with Christmas less than three weeks away, Iowa would be covered with some serious white stuff. She thought St. Louisans were winter wimps.
PJ walked over to the body and knelt down for a closer look. The cobblestones were damp, and cold seeped through the knees of her jeans. The victim’s eyes, open and with the flat gaze of death, held no enlightenment, and his mangled mouth told her no stories. There were ligature marks on his wrists and ankles. The small abdominal stab done to measure liver temperature was a gentle intrusion compared to the devastation in his chest. A softball-sized chunk of skin and flesh had been removed from his chest, directly over his heart. The ends of ribs protruded on each side of the hole, like flattened bits of chalk writing a story of savagery. It would be up to the medical examiner to begin the process of reading that story.
Studying the rough stubble on what was left of his cheeks, she noted that it didn’t appear that he’d shaved in a while. She had the urge to take off her coat and put it over him, as if he needed more protection from the harsh elements than she did. The eyes drew her again, and she saw dried trails of tears that had leaked from the corners and flowed backward toward his temple.
Someone watched those tears with hatred or satisfaction.
PJ walked back to the group. “Who found the body?”
“Woman walking a dog. She had her dog off the leash—oughtta get a ticket for that—and the dog raised a ruckus. She called it in on her cell at half past five,” Dave said. “Still dark then, but she carries a flashlight about the size of a baseball bat. Grabbed her dog and ran. She said she didn’t get a really good look, but enough to know that the guy was dead. Officers Garcia and Leeds responded. Did you talk to them already? You probably passed them on your way down.”
“I don’t think I took the most direct route,” PJ said. Schultz grunted.
A clattering sound alerted PJ to the arrival of the body removal crew. They’d pushed a gurney down the cobblestones. Wouldn’t it have been easier to carry the body than to try to roll the gurney uphill, rattling and shaking? She pictured the corpse in its body bag sliding out of the straps on the gurney and bumping its way down the cobblestones, and that brought something else to mind.
“There’s not a lot of blood here, so this is probably a dump site instead of the murder scene. How’d the body get here?” she asked. “Did it wash in from the river?”
“The body hasn’t been submerged in the water,” Dave said. “Just ended up with the feet like that.”
“Okay, so he was either carried or dragged from a car up there,” she pointed uphill toward the road that serviced the levee, “or rolled down. Whichever way, that should mean evidence on the path down.”
“Ahead of you there,” Anita said. “Techs have a large area cordoned off where the body could’ve rolled or been dragged. They’re going to wait until the sun burns off this fog a little to do a better search. Tromping through there now might damage evidence. The photographer’s been grousing about condensation in his lenses, and he’s put everything away until the fog clears.”
“Do we wait around for that?” PJ said.
“One of us will, unless Mr. Big Time Detective says we can all leave,” Anita said, looking at Schultz. He glowered back at her. “I’ll interpret that as a no.”
PJ had a good view of the two men working to get the victim into a body bag. They’d sized up the job, put back the standard bag, and brought out a heavy-duty one. It had two zippers and a flap that closed like an envelope. The men handled the body with atypical reverence, and in silence. PJ could hear the zipper closing. They grasped the handles of the body bag, lifted it up to the gurney and strapped it on—securely, she was glad to see.
The gurney clacked its way up the levee. Conversation stopped until it reached the top, a spontaneous expression of respect for the dead.
“I don’t suppose there are any witnesses to the dumping,” PJ said.
“None so far,” Dave said. “But we can narrow the time the body was dropped. The security staff of the casino patrols this section of the levee a couple of times a day. As of 10:00 p.m. last night, this section of levee hadn’t sprouted any bodies.”
“Leaving us with a little after 10:00 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. There’s a tall hotel near here, isn’t there?” PJ said.
“Yeah, the Embassy Suites.”
“We need to get somebody over there and see if any guests saw anything from rooms that face this way.”
“I’ll do it,” Dave immediately said. “At least it’s indoors.”
“I think a couple of officers can handle that,” PJ said. “It’s a little too early to start knocking on hotel room doors anyway. No sense ruining their opportunity to sleep in.” She directed a glare at Schultz, but it slid off him like an egg off a non-stick pan.
“The way the chest is carved up, all that stuff with the heart, that’s our holdback,” Schultz said. “So don’t spread that around.” It was his first contribution other than a grunt since she’d offered the olive branch. “The ME said the time of death was six to nine in the evening based on rigor progression and body temperature, but the cold weather, nudity, lying on cold cobblestones, and muscular development were giving her fits. Said she had to suck the goo out of his eyeball to confirm it, only it sounded real professional when she said it.”
“Thanks. I needed that image.” PJ tried not to think about what the victim’s last hours were like.
“Nasty mutilations,” Schultz said, nodding in the direction of the corpse. “Regular chop job. Think it’s a homo thing?”
“Not necessarily,” PJ said. “There are lots of mutilation murders with heterosexual killers. Women target male genitals for a lot of reasons.”
“He’s got no mouth,” Schultz said. “Look at that face. I wouldn’t be surprised if the autopsy shows his asshole’s cut out, too. You know, the two places where a guy can take it. Fucking hard way to go.”
PJ sighed. Working with Schultz was something of a trial.
Living with him was even harder.
“Now can we go back to Headquarters?” Dave said.
“Yeah,” said Schultz. “Everybody but you. You’re staying with the techs.”
Dave shot a glance at PJ, and she could see that he was hoping to be rescued from the task. She waved goodbye, thoughts of hot coffee already simmering in her mind.
When she got back to her car, there was a parking ticket tucked under the windshield wiper.