The detectives knelt down beside the naked victim. Riker guessed that rigor mortis had set in hours ago. The bound corpse was frozen in his hog-tied pose.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Ligature marks on wrists and ankles were crusted with old blood from a struggle to get free, and that had probably attracted the rats, though the abrasions showed signs of early healing. How long had this body been lying here? A piece of duct tape dangled from the dead man’s chin. Another piece clung to the side of the face, and rough threads from a burlap weave were caught between the lips.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!
Mallory looked up, and Riker followed the line of her gaze. His eyes were not so young, and he had to squint to make out the slack shape of green material hanging from a high bough of the tree, and there was a gaping hole at the bottom of this empty bag. Giving up the only vanity of his middle age, he donned a pair of bifocals to see twigs and branches bent and broken where they had slowed the progress of a falling body.
His partner leaned over the rigid corpse at their feet. With one gloved hand, she lightly touched straight lines of sticky residue where the tape had once covered the eyes and mouth. Here the skin was raw. ‘He rubbed his face against the burlap to get the tape off.’
And patches of dried-out skin had come off with it. How long had this poor bastard gone without food and water?
‘Okay, we got a real sick game here,’ said Riker. ‘Look at this.’ He pointed to a wad of wax that plugged an ear cavity. ‘Our freak’s into sensory deprivation. No sight, no hearing, just starvation and slow death.’
The detectives heard the buzz before they saw the insects that always came to lay their eggs in decomposing flesh. The first fly landed to crawl upon the dead man’s eyeball.
The corpse blinked – and then it screamed.
FOUR
Before they can grab me, I warn them that I have superpowers. I can run like a rabbit, shiver like a whippet, and I can scream like a little girl. The three of them look at me like – what the hell? This buys me a few seconds, and I jump into the slipstream of a passing teacher. At lunchtime, they come along every few minutes like taxicabs.
—Ernest Nadler
The victim had lost consciousness again as he lay at the foot of the hanging tree.
A tube connected the naked man to a bag of fluid held high by a paramedic, who used his free hand to swat bugs. His patient hovered between the status of a corpse and a live carry. ‘Starvation ain’t the problem,’ he said to Detective Mallory, ‘and those rat bites won’t kill him, but dehydration’s a bitch.’
‘Best guess,’ she said. ‘How long has he gone without water?’
The paramedic shrugged. ‘I’d say three days at the outside. Any longer than that and he’d be dead.’
Though the victim had been freed of bindings, his body was still frozen in the captive posture when he was lifted onto a stretcher and carried through the woods to a waiting ambulance.
Two patrolmen strung yellow crime-scene tape from tree to tree in a crude circle. One of them stopped to shout at a taxpayer, ‘We’re not selling tickets! Get lost!’
And the civilian yelled, ‘I’m from the Times!’ which made him a reporter and thus a legal kill in the codebook of the NYPD.
Mallory turned her eyes up to the high branches of the hanging tree and the remnants of the empty sack that had gone unnoticed by paramedics. She had no interest in what happened to the reporter as long as the carnage stayed on the other side of the yellow tape. Except for the Times interloper, panic had emptied the Ramble of people, and she still had hopes of keeping secret the detail of the burlap bag.
But then the man from the Times yelled, ‘You gotta come with me! There’s a bag in a tree – rats running in and out of it – bloody rats!’
‘Rats are climbing trees now?’ The patrolmen laughed.
The detectives did not. Together they walked toward the path, and Riker said, ‘Check out the bloodstains on the guy’s shirt.’
The man with red spots on his shoulders yelled, ‘I’m a photographer! I got pictures!’ He held out his cell phone to the approaching detectives and pointed to the image on the small screen. ‘See?’ There was only time enough for him to blink before his phone disappeared.
The civilian was staring down at the empty palm of his hand – while Mallory, the best of thieves, clicked through his pictures, a portrait of Coco among them, and she transmitted them to her own cell. While the man she had robbed was trying to find his voice and a suitable tone of outrage, she said, ‘This is an idiot-proof camera. How could you screw up these shots?’ Oh, and now they were all gone – erased. Well, accidents would happen. She saw a word forming on the man’s lips.
Before the civilian could call her a bitch, her partner stepped forward to say, ‘Careful, pal.’ Riker held out his hand. ‘Okay, let’s see your press card.’
‘He doesn’t have one.’ Mallory turned on the civilian. ‘You’re not a photographer, at least not a pro. And I know you don’t work for the Times.’ He backed up with every step she took toward him. ‘So you’re a reporter wannabe, right?’ She had him up against a tree. ‘Just a lousy stringer with no steady paycheck.’ She smiled and lightly tapped his chest with one long red fingernail. ‘I can change that.’
His grin was wide. All was forgiven.
He led them through the trees and across a small clearing, where a painter’s easel lay abandoned on the grass. This might be Tupelo Meadow, but Mallory was uncertain. In her childhood, the Ramble had been a dangerous place, home to every form of lowlife, the detritus of human waste and cast-off needles with the dregs of heroin and blood. In the wake of a real-estate boom on the Upper West Side, the squats of petty criminals had been sold as condos and co-ops, thus pricing junkies out of the neighborhood. These days, on any normal summer day, there should be tourists and local people here, taking in the sun, feeding squirrels and birds. But now, all that remained were their possessions dropped in flight – soda cans and sunglasses, a sandal and a child’s toy. This empty field supported the stringer’s claim of rats swarming here, too – lots of them.
The aspiring reporter nodded all the while as Mallory explained the rules of journalism: Truth was overrated; information was currency; and he would take whatever she gave him, word for word, and nothing more.
They entered the woods on the far side of the clearing to stand beneath the tree that had rained blood on his shirt, and the newspaper stringer was promoted to Mallory’s manservant. She inspected his hands to see if they were clean and then allowed him to hold her linen blazer. She jumped for a low bough and hoisted her body upward. Moving higher, limb by limb, she climbed close to the burlap bag. It hung at least twenty feet off the ground, held there by a rope tied off with a slipknot on a lower bough. The remainder of the rope was coiled in the fork of branch and tree. She unraveled it and let it drop to see the loose end form another coil on the ground below.
Long enough.
The stench from the bag told her that this second victim was not a fresh kill. The cloth had a hole chewed through it to give her a small ragged window on green-tinged flesh that had been gnawed. There was no blood in the wound. This had to be postmortem damage, though she could see fresh red splatters elsewhere on the skin. The rats must have chewed into some artery where blood still remained in a liquid state.