In the locker’s top compartment, two human arms were folded over each other, almost as if they had been patiently waiting for somebody to open the locker door and find them. Above the elbows, both arms were heavily smeared and spattered with congealing blood. Below the elbows, they were dusky-skinned, with sprinkles of tiny moles on them.
‘Would you look at that?’ said Charlie. ‘He didn’t even bother to take off her jewelry.’
Twisted around the left wrist was a silver Mexican bracelet with red-and-green flowers enameled on it; and on the third finger of the left hand there was a latticework silver ring. On the third finger of the right hand there was a ring with a single topaz in it. The nails of the right index finger and the right middle finger were both bitten right down, almost to the quick.
‘Look here,’ Walter told him. ‘More clowns.’
Scotch-taped to the back of the bent locker door there were dozens of photographs of Pierrots and augustes and saltimbanques, including three nearly-identical pictures of Mago Verde. There were a few other pictures, too — Emilio Zapata and Carlos Santana and Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico — but most of the pictures were of clowns.
One of the CSIs came rustling up to them in her blue Tyvek suit, a fortyish woman with a sallow face and unplucked eyebrows and very pale blue eyes, as if all the death and mutilation that she had seen during the course of her career had leached most of the color out of them.
‘Both arms were sawn off approximately eight centimeters below the shoulder,’ she told them. ‘We’ll have to take them back to the lab, of course, but I’d say that the perpetrator used a regular garden-variety handsaw.’
‘Any way of telling if she was still alive when he took her arms off?’
‘From the copious bloodstains on the upper part of the arms, I’d say yes. But with any luck she may have been sedated.’
Walter looked around. ‘Find any blood trails?’
‘Unh-hunh. Not a drop outside of this locker.’
‘Are we sure that this is Maria Fortales?’
‘We’ll be taking prints, of course, and DNA. But Ms Lipschitz ID’d her jewelry.’
‘Ms Lipschitz?’
The CSI nodded her head toward the opposite side of the corridor. Officer Skrolnik was talking to a stocky woman with cropped gray hair and circular spectacles and a thick plaid skirt. When he saw Walter and Charlie looking their way, he beckoned them over.
‘This is the co-director, Naomi Lipschitz,’ he said. ‘Ms Lipschitz — this is Detective Wisocky and this is Detective Hudson.’
‘We’re very sorry about what happened here, ma’am,’ said Walter. ‘It must have come as one heck of a shock.’
‘Who could have done such a thing?’ asked Ms Lipschitz. Tears were crowding her eyes and dribbling down her cheeks like the rain that was dribbling down the window. ‘Maria — she was such a vivacious young girl. And such a hard-working student. Everybody liked her.’
‘You’re absolutely sure that it’s her?’
Ms Lipschitz nodded. ‘The bracelet, and the rings, I don’t have any doubt. And I was always scolding her about biting her nails.’
‘You say that everybody liked her. Maybe you can think of somebody who didn’t like her quite as much as all the rest?’
‘No — nobody that I can think of. Our students are all very competitive, believe you me, but they’re far too busy to waste their time on personal feuds and petty animosities. All of the ground floor here — this is the Milton A. Kramer Law Clinic Center. The students here get involved in real-life court cases, so that they can gain practical experience, and their workload is highly demanding.’
‘Was Maria Fortales involved in any real-life court cases?’
‘Of course. Every student is given a caseload of several court actions at once. Maria Fortales was currently involved in three, so far as I know. One was an action for disability benefit; the second was a DUI; and the third was a case of domestic violence.’
‘OK,’ said Walter, ‘we’re going to need details of all of those. And every other case she’s ever been involved in, going right back to when she first enrolled. You never know — one of her clients may bear a grudge against her for some reason.’
‘I can’t imagine why any of them should. But, very well, detective, yes, I’ll make sure you get them.’
She started to turn her head to look behind her, but Walter laid a hand on her shoulder and restrained her. ‘Give it a couple of minutes, OK? You don’t want to see this.’ The CSIs had wrapped up Maria Fortales’ arms in clear polyethylene and were stowing them into a black zip-up body-parts bag, the type they usually used for torsos and severed heads. The arms looked to Walter as if they had been detached from a storefront mannequin.
‘Do you think she’s dead?’ Ms Lipschitz asked him.
Walter shrugged. ‘We can’t tell for sure, ma’am, but I think I hope so.’
‘How could anybody do anything so cruel? How could they?’
‘I don’t know the answer to that. I wish I did. Or then again, maybe I’m glad that I don’t.’
He turned to Charlie and said, ‘OK… what we need to do now is talk to all of Maria’s fellow students, and all of her professors, and most of all we need to find out who was the last person or persons to see her alive. We also need to discover if she had any boyfriends that nobody knew about.’
‘I think I should be running some background checks on Mago Verde,’ said Charlie.
‘Huh? What the hell for?’
‘I still have this very strong intuition that Mago Verde is the key to all of this.’
Walter tried his best to sound patient. ‘Charlie,’ he said, ‘listen to me. You’re not supposed to have intuitions.’
‘But you do. You have them all the time.’
‘I know I do. But that’s because I have a very short span of attention. You — you’re not supposed to have intuitions. You’re supposed to be procedural, get it? You’re supposed to collect all of the available evidence, and carefully analyze it, and then come to logical conclusions that will stand up in court. It’s not your style, jumping to conclusions and then screaming at people until they’re prepared to admit that they’re guilty, even if they’re not. That’s my job.’
‘I understand that, Walter. But Maria Fortales disappeared from a locked room, and that was just like some kind of conjuring trick, right? And she’s had her arms sawn off, which is just like another kind of conjuring trick. If anybody could pull this off, it’s a conjuror, which is exactly what Mago Verde is.’
Walter took a deep breath. ‘OK, then, what exactly do you propose to do, o intuitive one?’
‘First off, I think I ought to find out if any local clowns have been making themselves up as Mago Verde recently. I should check out any circuses or carnivals within a fifty-mile radius at least, and any children’s entertainment agencies. The yellow pages, too. If none of that gives me anything, I’ll need to check if Mago Verde appeared in any circuses or carnivals in Cleveland in the past thirty years at least; and if anybody ever got arrested for any kind of felony while wearing Mago Verde greasepaint, and what that felony was.’
Walter stared at him for a long time with heavy-lidded eyes. He looked like a lizard basking on a rock. Eventually, however, he tugged at the end of his nose and said, ‘OK, you win. I guess what you’re saying makes some kind of sense, although I don’t exactly know what. I’ll call the captain and have Burrows and Gysin come out to do the routine questioning.’
Charlie said, ‘Trust me, Walter. I know it sounds wacky but I genuinely think I’m on to something here. After I’ve checked out Mago Verde I’m going to do like you said and read all the way through Maria Fortales’ diary. I don’t believe that it was any kind of coincidence, Netta having the same nightmare that she did. I’m also going to try and work out what that rat-character was supposed to be saying.