The chuco did not help. I could not sleep.
I was not sure what bothered me more. There certainly was a growing list. I was brand new to the force and working on my first case. Not only was my first case a homicide that had been poorly masked as a suicide, it was a murder left with the marking of a serial killer. Detective Jerry Wilson, once Nashville’s Man of the Hour, now had to face the world with the possibility that he had put the wrong man in jail. It was a sure thing that—for doing my duty—I was placed high on his mental shit list.
And now I was getting phone calls from a drug runner who had the hots for me.
“How did he get my phone number?” I asked myself aloud while rising out of bed. My private number, like that of most homicide detectives, was unlisted for security reasons. It wouldn’t have taken a CIA agent to figure it out. Still, he had to go to some trouble to find it. “I wonder if he’s got somebody on the take inside,” which made me think about what he said to me when we had coffee—his reference to buying me.
“That prick.” Yet though I called him that, my thoughts continued to call up his face. His smile. The copy of Cien años de soledad next to his coffee. He also wore a nice cologne.
But what did he and my mother talk about for an hour? I put my hope in their love of literature. Perhaps they only chatted about Márquez. I thought about that awhile, studying the tiny crack in the ceiling of my bedroom.
“If you’re not going to sleep, then make yourself useful.” With that, I tried to swat away his images.
Mamá always saved the daily newspapers in a pile down in the basement. Why, I do not know. She said she wanted to have them recycled, but that’s one thing she never got around to putting in the recycling bin. She believed firmly in recycling; she just never remembered to fill the bin up and put it out on the sidewalk for the collectors to gather it on Wednesday mornings. It was kind of like me being Catholic but only going to Christmas and Easter mass. The papers sat on the cement floor in a perfect pile, just underneath the stairwell. Put a gallon of gasoline next to them, and you would have had the perfect picture for a “Home Safety” book, showing how to torch your house properly.
Though I had gotten on her for stacking them so high, I now was thankful for her inability to become accustomed to the ways of the environmentally conscious. I lifted up a large chunk of the pile and carried it upstairs.
They were in almost perfect order (I had to give Mamá credit for that). They dated back four months. I didn’t need that much. I needed only to go back two months, when the first victim, Dr. Lawrence Hatcher, was found dead.
Hatcher, a white southerner from Atlanta, Georgia, who had graduated from Emory University twenty years earlier, had been practicing family health for almost two decades in the Nashville area. He shared a practice with three other doctors in the Hillsborough District. He was known for his concern for the poor and his activism with nonprofit groups, having gone on medical delegations to Nicaragua in the eighties as well as refugee camps outside of Bosnia in the early nineties. Hatcher had recently been developing the People’s Health Institute, a nonprofit clinic that would offer first-rate medical services to the rural poor surrounding the Nashville area.
The first clinic was built just outside of Nashville, in the town of Shelbyville. Hatcher had received some criticism for spearheading this project, as he had decided to focus the clinic upon the rural poor rather than the urban. Critics said that a clinic would be able to reach more people if founded within the city limits. Hatcher had disagreed, saying that Nashville offered enough services to the indigent. The countryside was in need of a response to the growing population of poor people.
No one criticized Hatcher once he was found dead on the morning of October seventh in Percy Warner Park, where he always did his early-morning jog. His neck was slit on both sides, cutting right through both sets of carotid and jugular arteries. A superfluous bullet had been lodged behind his heart, entering the body through the lower thorax and cutting through the cardiac organ before stopping right on top of the vertebrae. There was no mention in the article of a jade pyramid, though I and the rest of Nashville now knew that the first jewel had been found on the doctor’s tongue.
The articles did not say much else, except to state that Hatcher’s death left a forty-seven-year-old widow with three grown children as survivors, as well as a few quotes from investigators (the main one being Jerry Wilson) saying that they were following up on all possible leads.
According to the paper of October sixteenth, Ms. Pamela Kim was a Californian of Korean descent who had moved to the Nashville area two years ago. Twenty-nine years old and single, Kim was a registered nurse who worked at Vanderbilt University Hospital. The article showed a fairly large picture of her. The shoulders of two other people, perhaps friends who posed with her, could be seen on the edges of the photo. She was lovely, with a ready smile and long black hair that fell over both shoulders. Though not much was known about her, the article did state some perspectives her colleagues had on her. She was a devoted Catholic who had, six months earlier, made a trip to Lourdes to visit the site where supposedly the Virgin Mother Mary had appeared. Kim was also known to work one night a week at a local soup kitchen. Though she was a newcomer to Nashville, the article on her was actually longer than the one on Hatcher, due to the fact that she was killed in the same fashion and was found with her killer clinging to her like a lover.
To the opposite side of the article was a picture of Benny Bitan, a thirty-eight-year-old white male originally from Newport, Tennessee, who had been living in homeless shelters for the past three years. It was not a flattering photo. Benny’s mouth was open, slackjawed. His eyes bulged as if he had not slept in a week. His black, thinning hair was matted either by sweat or by the thick, heavy dew in which they had found him and the body. The article itself told the whole story, how Detective Wilson had followed Bitan from a bar to the body. It was on the east end of town, off of Old Hickory Boulevard. Wilson had to follow Bitan for a good hour before the derelict finally lowered into the shadows underneath the old railroad bridge and snuggled up to Kim’s two-hour-dead body. Though the newspaper alluded to Wilson’s bravery, I read into it a certain level of either machismo or stupidity. To arrest the suspect, Wilson had gone under that bridge alone without backup. That was a good thing to know about my new partner.
Later articles reported on Bitan’s life and how it no doubt helped to create a killing machine in him. Both his parents dead, he had been raised in several foster homes. He had a history of alcohol and drug abuse. He had been known to start fights in the homeless shelters, once pulling a knife on another man. Though no weapons were found on him, in his drugged stupor he had muttered something to Wilson about having dropped both the knife and the gun in the Cumberland River after killing Pamela Kim. Though they dragged the river, they found neither (I wrote a mental note to myself, right underneath the question about the weapons in the river, “Get a Nashville map”). A few hours later Doc Callahan had found the green jewel on top of Pamela Kim’s tongue.
The article talked of Wilson’s triumph over finding the serial killer. Though it was a tragedy that two people had died, there was also some consolation in the fact that he had been stopped before creating any more havoc. This I knew to be true, if it was true that Bitan was the killer; some of the most notorious serial killers in the country had left a trail years’ long and littered with literally hundreds of bodies. They were also known to change their killing methods. If the two medical professionals’ deaths were Bitan’s work, then he had been stopped very early in his career.
Then, of course, there was an obvious note of difference between the first two killings and Sáenz’s death: Diego Sáenz was not a medical professional. He was a reporter. “If Bitan is innocent, maybe the killer’s not only changing his M.O., but also his type of victim,” I muttered, writing that down as well.
There were other responsibilities, ones that I did not really care to do, for they meant reopening the Hatcher and Kim cases. One, obviously, was to visit Benny Bitan in prison. But another was to interview once again the people who knew the doctor and the nurse. This meant visiting Hatcher’s family and stopping by places to get to know more about Kim’s life, such as making a visit to the soup kitchen where she volunteered. I also had to visit the Evidence Department and study the two jade pyramids found on Hatcher and Kim, and see if they matched up to or differed somewhat from the pyramid I found next to Sáenz’s chalk line.
I looked up from my kitchen table. It was past midnight. “God, girl, you better get to bed.” I dragged away, turned off the light, and walked down the hall.
I crawled into bed without even brushing my teeth. I was just about to fall asleep when I heard a sound at the bottom of my bed. It thumped away at the baseboard. I jumped. The stories from the newspapers whipped around my head. Then I knew. “Hijo, what are you doing up?”
Sergio did not say anything, too sleepy to respond. From the nightlight I could see him rubbing his face with one fist. Usually I would have taken him and led him back to bed, or carried him back when he was too asleep to make the trek himself. But not tonight. Though I tried to brush away the articles that I had just spent the past hour with, they still pricked at my skull. The thought of Diego Sáenz’s bloody head also kept me awake. “Veníte, mi corazón,” I said, asking him, my little heart, to come to me. He crawled up in bed and lay his head upon my bicep. I pulled the covers over both of us, then pushed my nose a couple of times through his thick black hair. It was perfect; he helped me move toward dreams.