Ah, now she could hear – but she could not see, nor could she speak.
A lone hand touched her throat, and fingers pressed down hard. A woman called out, ‘I got a pulse!’
‘No, don’t touch that tape,’ said a man. ‘If she’s dehydrated like the others, you’ll peel the skin off her face.’
Others?
‘Wait for the paramedics!’
‘Here they come!’
Sirens. She heard sirens, running feet, and a new voice said, ‘Oh, sweet Jesus.’
One arm was pricked with a needle.
‘Nod if you can hear me,’ said a woman close by.
And Willy Fallon nodded.
‘Lady, I’m gonna cut a small hole in that tape across your mouth. Then I can insert a tube with water, okay?’
Willy nodded again. Oh, yes. Yes! Her mouth was flooded with a thin stream of cool water, and she swallowed, greedy for it, choking on it. She was alive.
Heller had always resented his promotion to commander of Crime Scene Unit – a damn desk job – and so he was a common sight in the field, observing his people at work. He stood beneath the newly discovered hanging tree, and he was pleased, but not because the latest victim had survived. This was the only pristine crime scene for the Hunger Artist. He turned to the man beside him. ‘Did you notify Mallory and Riker?’
‘Yeah,’ said the park ranger. ‘They didn’t even ask where the tree was. They just wanted the name of the hospital.’
‘Good.’ His technicians would have ample time to work the scene without those two underfoot, though the detectives could have done nothing to ruin his good mood. On the contrary, he planned to dampen their day. When he explained the mechanics of the crime, it was going to drive them both nuts. This thought put Heller in such rare high spirits he nearly smiled.
Like the other hanging trees, this one also had two screw holes drilled into the trunk just above the roots. He looked up into the thick leaves as he spoke to a veteran CSI. ‘What about marks on the branch?’
‘No rope burns on this one,’ said the woman. ‘John got pictures.’
‘Okay,’ said Heller, ‘cut out the screw holes.’
An appalled park ranger watched the CSU team cut a circular core sample from the tree trunk. ‘Why such a big chunk? That’s a lot of damage.’
Heller could have explained that he needed both screw holes in one piece of wood for tests and court evidence. Instead, he brushed his face, as if a bug had landed there, and the ranger took his meaning. There were no more protests from the tree lover when the team decided to saw off a branch as well.
Over the next hour, more equipment arrived. With a nod to the techs combing the ground around the tree, Heller made his way across a clearing to the site of an experiment. There he found his new CSI, John Pollard, a corn-fed boy from Ohio, experienced and solid on science. The only flaw in the youngster’s résumé was the civilian status; he was a tourist in cop culture. Pollard had finished the last of three test runs, and now he loaded his equipment onto a hand truck outfitted with two oddball tires, a brand of inflatables to match tread marks found yesterday – one of the few bits of evidence they had not read about in the Times.
‘How’d it go, John?’
‘Very smooth, sir. But God knows there’s gotta be easier ways to kill people.’
One eyelid was pulled back, and Wilhelmina Fallon stared into a brilliant white light. She heard a small mechanical click, and darkness followed. As she drifted in and out of sleep, words were caught in snatches at first, and now whole sentences floated back and forth across her bed. She recognized the doctor’s voice when he said, ‘The sedative’s wearing off. Don’t expect much. She was hit on the back of the skull. The concussion wiped ten or fifteen minutes of memory.’
‘That’s three for three,’ said the voice of a woman.
And the doctor said, ‘Pardon?’
Another stranger, this one a man, said, ‘Three bop-and-drops. Blows to the back of the head.’
‘Gotta go. Don’t stay long, okay?’ A door closed on the departing doctor.
The strangers’ voices remained in the room. The door opened again, and feet walked in. There was no need to open her eyes. By their conversation, Willy knew all three of them were cops. She could even sort out the ranks by the deference the new voice paid to the other two. She ignored them, slowly waking to an inventory of soreness and pain from shoulders to ankles.
Now she recognized the new voice. After the tape had been removed from her eyes and mouth, this policeman had taken her statement in the emergency room. He was answering a question for the other two cops, saying, ‘Naw, she’s fine. That tube in her arm isn’t feeding her meds. It’s for vitamins.’
‘Christ,’ said the other man. ‘It looks like she’s been starved for a week.’
And this one must be a detective.
‘No, sir,’ said the man with lower rank. ‘More like twenty-four hours, give or take. She could remember a TV show from yesterday. Must’ve been on the skinny side before she got strung up in the Ramble. Starvation chic. That’s what the ER doc called it. Your vic was naked when they cut her down. No ID yet.’
And the female detective said, ‘You didn’t get a name while she was conscious?’
‘No, ma’am. She started screaming. That went on for a while before they sedated her.’
‘So the lady was in a lot of pain?’ asked the other detective.
‘No, sir. I think the doc knocked her out for being a bitch. It was that kind of screaming.’
Willy repressed a smile. Just above her, she could smell stale tobacco trapped in clothing when the male detective leaned over her and said, ‘Hey, Mallory, didn’t this woman used to be somebody?’
Bastard.
‘Society pages,’ said the one called Mallory, moving closer. On the other side of the bed, a discreet trace of very good perfume warred with the tobacco smell of the man. ‘But mostly tabloids.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ said the other detective. ‘Willy Fallon, party girl and queen of drug rehab. Doesn’t look so good now, does she?’
Oh, really? Willy’s eyes opened by slits, and one hand snaked out from beneath the sheet to grab the man’s crotch. With his soft parts firmly in hand, she administered a light, threatening squeeze, a warning not to move – not to breathe. Her voice was hoarse when she asked, ‘What’s your name?’
He looked so surprised. They always did. This one had the classic frozen stance for hostage testicles. ‘Lady, don’t do it.’
‘He’s a cop,’ said the woman. ‘Let go of him. Now!’
Willy turned her head on the pillow to see a tall green-eyed blonde. She glared at the woman’s linen blazer. ‘Either you stole that from my closet . . . or we have the same tailor.’ Oh, shit. It looked better on the cop.
And now – another surprise.
The blonde snatched up Willy’s free hand and bent back the fingers to bring on sudden pain, the kind that came with bright points of light, with shock and awe and the patient’s agonized scream of ‘You fucking bitch!’ The man’s testicles were freed as the blonde’s silently implied condition of ending the torture. But Willy was still yelling obscenities after her wounded hand had been released.