“Death,” Lopez said.
Cutter exchanged glances with the female detective, then asked, “What did they find in there?”
Sturgis said, “On the third floor, where the residence began, three bodies. Two middle-aged adults, in their late fifties, and a woman about forty. Battered to death and then dismembered.”
Janet gasped.
Cutter asked, “Dismembered for disposal?”
The local chief shook his head. “No, the body parts were all there, scattered around willy nilly. It was more a random, savage display — somebody attacking the dead bodies after making them that way, maybe because killing them had simply not been enough. Because his rage was not fully spent.”
“My God,” Janet said.
Lopez said, “We identified the dead as Efram Lee and his wife Rosemary, and a practical nurse named Loretta Dornan — unlicensed and with a wretched record.”
Sturgis flipped a hand toward the building in question. “We can go in and take a look... oh, it’s pretty well aired out, and the deceased carted away. We can provide crime scene photos if you want the full effect.”
“I should have those,” Cutter said, damn near shuddering. “But for now, we better take the tour.”
The first two floors were empty of anything but dirt, dust and detritus. The second floor, of course, had the gaping, sunlight-bleeding hole a slip of the wrecking ball had created. An old service elevator at the rear was not functioning, not that anyone had been tempted to use it; stairs at the back took them up a flight to where a musty odor of murder awaited.
The stench of death may have been gone but the bouquet lingered. Janet covered her face with a handkerchief, and Cutter was tempted to do the same. But something made him want to embrace the sense that death was still in the air. He had seen things on the job in NYC that would haunt him forever — every cop working in that city, in that job, did.
But somehow he already knew he hadn’t seen anything yet...
The living room furnishings had been expensive once, early American and really high-end maybe twenty years ago, not surprising considering these living quarters were atop what had been a furniture store and its warehouse. Yet the upholstery was threadbare, the wood nicked and gouged, much of it knocked over. Framed family portraits of long-gone Lees hung askew as if offended by what they saw, a large one apparently of a mutton-chopped Zachariah Lee himself ruled sternly from over a fireplace. Perhaps some of these pricey if neglected furnishings could have still been salvaged, but Cutter saw them as representative of a pervasive decay running throughout this entire structure.
This was where the attack had taken place.
Chalk outlines were everywhere on a parquet wood floor that had once been lovely and now was now scuffed and nicked and home to a bizarre jigsaw puzzle in the shape of body parts. Torsos with ragged joints and truncated necks were the closest these came to actual chalk body outlines, and big ameba-like brown bloodstains were splashed not just on the floor but on the wallpapered walls and even the ceiling.
Scattered here and there were weapons of a barbaric variety — an ax, a club, a butcher knife, stained with blood turned brown and even black.
Janet said into her hanky, “It’s a slaughterhouse.”
“Yes,” Cutter said. “And this is the killing floor.”
The other rooms on this level lacked the macabre melodrama of the space ironically designated a living room — no sign of anything suggestive in the kitchen except the open drawer where the butcher knife had been acquired. The appliances were relatively modern, again dating perhaps twenty years ago. Time had stopped here. Among other things.
The bedrooms were on the second residence level, rather austere but nothing remarkable or sinister about them. Faded framed landscapes and more family photos lent a haunted house effect. The closet of one bedroom belonged to a man, the closet of the other a woman. That husband and wife had no longer slept together was no surprise — Cutter hardly saw this domicile as consistent with enduring romance.
Another room on that floor was a home office with a roll-top desk and a row of wooden file cabinets; also a wall of legal books. The aura of this space was decades out of date. Another was a TV room with a couch and several chairs and a low-slung color TV console with a large screen, 24-inches anyway, and a built-in stereo for records and radio. Here was, apparently, where this little group allowed themselves some entertainment.
The top floor was something different. Half of it was storage, boxes and trunks and so on, and like the other two floors there was a bathroom, though this was not as nice or spacious as those below.
But the rest was divided between the nurse’s quarters and that of her charge.
The nurse had a nicely appointed, cozy space with her own radio, television, refrigerator, hot plate, sink with running water, space heater, and a bookcase with popular novels. A doctor’s bag on her dresser was filled with bottles of drugs and several hypodermic needles.
Janet checked the drug vials and reported to Cutter: “Sedatives.”
Across from the quarters of the live-in help was a steel reinforced door that had been knocked off its hinges, powerful dents left behind. Sturgis led Cutter and Janet into the room with Lopez trailing after.
These apparently had been the quarters of the nurse’s sole patient, though “cell” would describe it better. The dominant piece of furniture was a sagging metal-frame bed with a bare mattress where a heavy weight had lain night after night, an outline suggesting perhaps a heavy flat stone had rested there... again, if “rested” is the word. The bed was affixed with chained shackles arranged for the wrists to be held in place, at about shoulder-level. Chains led to shackles attached to the framework at the foot of the bed, apparently to reach ankles that were a distance away.
This room lacked the smell of death, but it retained the terrible perfume of excrement. Even now, a bucket in the corner buzzed with flies. The only window was bricked up. A pile of children’s clothes, clean — XL labels on shirts, 4T on pants — were on the floor by a wall. Whether the patient could change into these or, after sedation perhaps, would get changed into them by his keeper remained a mystery.
But then so much did.
Sturgis said, “Somebody was kept in here, probably for years. That nurse was looking after the... well, prisoner... What else would you call him?”
“I’d call him,” Cutter said, “somebody who finally got loose.”
Lopez agreed. “I’d call him a captive who tore through that door, got downstairs, and ripped apart the monsters who made him a monster.”
Janet, knowing the attacker at the Ryan compound was powerful but small, asked, “Wouldn’t what happened downstairs take a big, brawny individual?”
“Brawny, yes,” Sturgis said. “Not necessarily big. Take a look at the impression on that mattress — I make him three and a half feet and maybe a hundred-and-fifty pounds.”
Lopez said to Cutter, “Take a look at this,” and knelt at a place on the floor mid-room. Cutter wondered what that was about until the officer plucked out a fat knothole.
Cutter dropped to a knee and had a look. The view was onto the TV room. From here a slanted view of the screen could be had and certainly the sound easily heard. Any talk between the people below would carry as well.
“Imagine,” Lopez said, “getting an education through a knothole — imagine listening and seeing and learning all about modern life on a TV tube, knowing what you are and who was keeping you that way...”