And that was the way I made my living, as a police consultant: Pete Conklin, sin-seer par excellence.
But here was the conundrum: the sins were always there. I could see them clearly, clinging and crawling like tiny glassine worms on everyone. On me, on Detective Henderson, on everybody, living or dead. We were all human beings, after all, and sin naturally went along with that condition. Some folks had more of them, some less-but they were always there.
"No, Henderson, I haven't lost it," I said. "You want me to tell you about your latest sins? One of them is sitting on your left shoulder as we speak." I watched him shiver and start to raise his hand, then abruptly catch himself.
"Don't do that to me, Pete. Just don't do it. I believe you."
Isolating and extracting the sins of dead people could never, of course, provide names and places. Sins were mute. But sometimes, simply identifying and cataloguing them by their phenotype could lead to motives, and once in a rare while that would crack a crime like this one, when there was little else to go on.
I stripped off my latex gloves and tucked them into a plastic bag inside the satchel containing the tools of my trade: collecting vials and chemical fixatives, a few customized extraction tools, and a thick field identification guidebook. "I can only conclude that he's been intentionally wiped clean. It might be that the killer didn't want us to know about one or more of the dead guy's sins. And that implies the perp had sin-sensing capabilities. Or that an accomplice did."
"That's interesting, but it doesn't do us a whole lot of good," Henderson said. "It's not like we have a list of all you cootie-spotters back at the office." He frowned and added, "Unless, of course, you'd care to provide us with one."
I looked Henderson in the eye and shook my head. "You know I won't do that. You also know better than to ask me."
"Can't fault me for trying. I know you've got lots of contacts within that . . . whatcha call it, that marshal-filly crowd."
"Hamartiaphily." I'd corrected him at least a dozen times before about the craft name, derived from the Greek, meaning "love of sin." "Yes, I personally know quite a few sin collectors out there. But I can vouch that none of them are murderers."
Henderson only huffed in response. He knew the legal line as well as I did.
"There's just one thing I don't understand," I said, waving an arm toward the corpse on the floor. "It would have taken a lot of time to do a full wipe. Especially if the victim was so heavily riddled with sins, as you claimed. Why go to all that effort, if only one target sin was the prey?"
Henderson shrugged his shoulders. "Maybe the cootie-snatcher could see 'em, but wasn't experienced enough to type 'em. So he just grabbed 'em all, figuring that the target one was in the bunch. I dunno. Just guessing." He scratched his forehead. "And going along with that, I suppose he didn't want to take the easier route, which would have been to remove the body as it was and dispose of it where we couldn't find it. Too much risk of discovery in that. But sitting here in this dive, he had all the time in the world."
"Makes as much sense as anything else," I said. "Look, Henderson, I have to get out of this place before I blow my breakfast all over your shoes. The stink of blood is really getting to me. Are you done with me?"
Henderson tilted his head toward the door, and I wasted no time leaving the murder scene.
****
I hate it when things don't add up right-and they certainly didn't in this case.
Another scenario had entered my mind at the crime scene, one which I hadn't floated to Henderson. What if the murder had been committed by an overzealous sin collector, for no other reason than to glom onto a harvest of goodies that he could then sell to other hamartiaphiles on the open market? In other words, some sort of sick, psychopathic sin reaper?
But that didn't ring right. The victim may have had a lot of resident sins, true-and they were all worth something. But not much. The sins you'd get off any typical two-bit hoodlum like Manny simply weren't that much in demand in this limited market. They wouldn't appeal to any discriminating collector. It wouldn't have been worth murder to obtain the small amount they'd bring.
Now instead, if you were marketing a juicy sin of, say, Adolf Hitler, one with a good provenance? That could bring a tidy sum-on up into six figures. Sins of notorious historical characters were always in big demand. I'd recently seen an old Pol Pot mass murder sell at auction for close to a quarter million dollars. But it would be hard to conceive how anything gathered from a local thug would be worth much to anyone.
I poured myself another glass of scotch and shook my head. No, the more likely explanation was the one Henderson was already running with. Still . . .
When all else fails, I thought, read the manual. I walked to my bookshelves and fingered the thick edges of the ten-volume compendium published by the Hamartiaphily Collector's Guild. It held the definitive description of every known type of human sin that had been isolated and identified to date, close to fourteen thousand of them, catalogued in the Linnaean taxonomic scheme that governed the system: family, genus, species, subspecies. The volumes were printed on quality stock, with four-color glossy illustrations of the obverse and reverse sides of the best known collected examples. My eyes drifted to the even larger array of HCG supplements and updates that sat on the shelf below, many of the more recent ones as thick as the main volumes themselves.
The study of human sin was complicated and ever evolving. Where to begin?
I picked a volume off the shelf at random and flipped it open to a page showing HCG 14-54-13-230: family "murder," genus "familial," species "premeditated," subspecies "sanctioned." The illustrated example was a sin extracted from a Pakistani father who, with community approbation, had killed his unmarried daughter because of her promiscuous sexual behavior. It displayed as a brownish-mauve color, and because the collected example was quite "pure"-that is, the man had felt no sense of remorse after committing the sin-its shape was symmetrical and regular. Specifically, in this case it took the form of a stellated hexecontahedron.
A very attractive specimen, to be sure. It would certainly complement any serious hamartiaphile's collection. But this was not going to get me anywhere. I closed the volume, re-shelved it and went online to check the hamartiaphily forum sites. Maybe something new had shown up there, something that might relate to last night's crime.
It didn't take me long to turn up an interesting post.
****
Every apprentice has a master, and mine was a rich old Dutch sin-seer and collector named Gerd Vanderhout. He'd taught me everything I knew about hamartiaphily, and had developed my youthful incipient talent for seeing what few others could see. I owed him everything.
In truth, he was more a father figure to me than anything else-which was easy to understand, since I didn't even know who my real father was.
I drove to Gerd's manor house, which was ensconced within a guarded residential enclave on the wealthy side of town. He appeared at his front door in response to my knock, a little bit stooped but still taller than me.
"Peter! How nice to see you! But . . . it is not our normal chess day-is it? Or perhaps this old man's brain is getting addled. No matter: Welkom, come inside out of the rain."
I entered the foyer, sat my soggy umbrella in the stand by the door and removed my raincoat. "Please excuse my unannounced visit, Gerd. No, it's not Tuesday. But I have a problem, one that I hope you can help me with."
"Ah!" Vanderhout raised one bushy, gray eyebrow. "Another titillating crime mystery, yes? Here, come into the library and let us have a glass of schnapps to take the night's chill away. And you can also be the first to see my latest acquisition!"