“ Everything strictly by the book, Big.”
“ Yeah, sure… follow rule number one: don't touch a goddamned thing, and then proceed to rule number two-”
“ Don't touch a goddamned thing,” Alex said, finishing the old cop wisdom for him, quietly laughing at the line, realizing just how unworkable it was.
Alex knew it was impossible to follow the rules here, especially since it was his job to search for any conceivable sign of evidence as well as identification of the victim. They'd found signs of someone's having dragged the body to this isolated, dark and remote location. Someone had less than tenderly covered the body with shrubbery cut from nearby, possibly using the same blade that had felled the victim, since bloodstains had been found on the palmetto stems.
The victim was yet another young, well-tanned, soft-featured male, hardly more than a boy in age, nineteen at the most, more likely seventeen.
They'd found scattered bits of clothing and footprints belonging to a heavyset killer who wore flat, wide sneakers that had made an interesting pattern in the mud, something for the forensics guys to make a cast of along with some fresh tire marks. But neither Alex nor Ben held out much hope of either cast ever being of any particular use. They'd found signs of animal leavings about the body, defecation to mark the kill in the wild. There was some evidence the corpse had been ripped apart a bit further by animals, but since the insect activity was not too terribly far along yet, the corpse was marked as having come to rest here some twelve to twenty-four hours before a group of blue-haired, retired ladies and gents on a bird watchers' safari had ingloriously discovered the body, reporting it to the local precinct Crimes Against Persons office. The precinct police had put it on the wire, and since it smelled like another Queen of Hearts murder, Sincebaugh had been given a wake-up call and pulled from his vacation.
When Alex responded to the call, he drove a few miles north of downtown New Orleans and just north of Lakefront Airport, along an unnamed artery off Hayne Boulevard, almost at its terminus, where Hayne became Paris Road. It had already been decided for him that he would take charge of the body and the subsequent investigation and paperwork. It certainly looked related to Sincebaugh's ongoing investigation.
Everything at the scene had been happily turned over to him by a detective out of the local precinct, a guy Sincebaugh knew and disliked named Lyle Kellerman. Kellerman's parting shot was: “You can have all my fag meat cases, Sincebaugh. It ain't my kinda case. Don't even wanna be in the morgue with it.”
“ This meat, as you call the kid, had a name, a history, a past, emotions, a family, Kellerman,” Alex had replied as the other man backed off with a pugnacious grin marring his otherwise handsome features.
“ Some things you never had or ever will have, Kellerman,” Ben had added for good measure.
The discovery was sometime after twilight, the bird watchers, having done their damnedest to log the large-necked, white-ribboned loon here, getting ready to bag all expectations and return home empty-handed. Now it was day watch, definitely the wrong time for Alex and Ben. Alex would have to break Ben's heart; he'd have to put them in for the night shift if they were ever to learn more about this plague of dead boys. Four now that they knew of for certain, and a fifth that Alex clung to as a possible which had occurred over a year before.
They'd been told by Captain Landry that it had been an otherwise dull rotation, only eleven deaths had come on the evening watch, and only a handful were violent deaths, the bulk of them alcohol-related motor-vehicle accidents.
“ You'd think Kellerman would've been pleased to get a murder investigation after a night like the one he just had,” said Ben, returning to the body now. “What's he afraid of, AIDS?”
“ Kellerman's afraid of gays.”
“ Maybe he's got some latent tendencies toward that direction?” Ben laughed to hear himself say it aloud. “Or maybe he's just got good reason, Alex. Maybe he picked one of those Bourbon Street cross-dressers up once, and he didn't find it too amusing when he got her-him-into bed.” Ben chuckled even louder, pleased with himself.
“ Maybe. Then again, maybe he's just ignorant.”
They worked by the book, the tight-fitting surgical gloves masking their palms. Ben watched his partner's painstaking, careful work. Sincebaugh was officer in charge of the investigation the press had dubbed variously as the “Have-a-Heart,” the “Heartthrob” and the “Queen of Hearts” murders. The first two victims had lived in the French Quarter, in the heart of New Orleans, just around the corner from Bourbon Street. An earlier homicide, nearly a year old now, might possibly be linked with the same killer, since the victim too had been a male with a decidedly homosexual lifestyle. No heart had been found in the boy's chest there either, but as the decomposition of the body had progressed and maggots had gotten into the open chest cavity, the illustrious Dr. Frank Wardlaw had proclaimed that the heart had been devoured by maggots. Alex no longer thought so.
The first two acknowledged Hearts victims had actually known one another, and this newest soft-skinned youth looked like the others in all salient features: long, unkempt, blond to sandy hair, big eyes, powdery flecks of freckles about the cheeks, small-boned, perhaps five-nine or ten, weighing in at a mere 130 or 135 pounds. Not much of a match for the assailant, Alex was sure.
Bruises about the face and forearms and lacerations to the same areas spoke of a beating and a knifing, defensive wounds everywhere. The awful carnage had come clear when they'd rolled the body onto its back. The private parts had been butchered. The chest was splayed open, carved up surgically, and missing from the cavity was the boy's heart, replaced by an unusual diamond-shaped playing card made of a lacy material. Even blood-soaked, the card looked like something found only in a world long gone, at a time when people made lace doilies and lace trinkets, very Old World, European-looking workmanship in the weaving of it. The queen's ornate costume and lurid features would be found stitched in a rainbow of colorful twine after the thing was soaked and cleaned of impurities, marking it as the same as those before it. Nowhere, not even in New Orleans, had either detective seen anything like it. The killer's “calling card,” had been wedged below the ribs. As before, the bold single eye of the queen of hearts stared back at them.
Was the card a message or a plea? If the bastard wanted to send a message, why didn't he use Western Union? If a message, what message was the son of a bitch sending? That hearts were meant to be broken? That gay men had no right to life, no right to their own heartbeats? That their being gay gave the killer a genuine rationale, that he was somehow warranted in stealing the warm hearts from other human beings? That he had a justifiable right to be heartless? And why the queen of hearts? Queen suggested that the killer himself might well be gay-a drag queen-and that he hated himself for the hand fate had dealt him, and so he was striking out at other gay men in rage and uncontrolled fury. Certainly, enough rage was played out on the bodies to warrant this theory, as well as half a dozen other “hate crime” scenarios, such as perhaps that the killer was a neo-Nazi who hated gay men so much that he had to vent his anger.
Then again, if leaving the playing card was some sort of plea and not a message, what was the killer pleading for? What did he want Alex-or the NOPD in general-to know? What significance did the queen of hearts hold for the bastard? And just how damned arcane could he remain and for how goddamned long?
After photoing close ups on the grisly wounds-bodily sites of destruction-and the blood-spattered playing card, both familiar and unusual at once, Sincebaugh carefully lifted the killer's notice-or was it a receipt? — with tweezers. He held the drooping card up to his perplexed eyes for a silent moment, Ben looking on, frowning, no doubt wondering what was going on behind Alex's eyes.