He did something like turning off his mind, and set to work with the knife.
“Use your hands,” his father said. “Both of ’em if you have to.”
Marty continued gripping slippery, sometimes still-warm internal organs, cutting them free and pulling them from the bloody cavity, dropping them to the saturated ground at his feet.
“Hollow him out good,” his father said encouragingly.
Marty worked harder and harder, not so much minding the blood now. What he wanted to do—what he had to do—was finish field dressing this deer so he had the approval of his father. Of his father’s father…
When the carcass was nearly hollowed out, he heard his father say, “Now rub the blood on yourself, Marty. All over yourself.”
And Marty, sobbing quietly from his stress and effort, did exactly that, painting himself with blood.
War paint. Like putting on war paint.
His father came to him, dipped a hand inside the deer, and rubbed more blood on Marty’s forehead. The tip of his forefinger moved with slow purpose above Marty’s closed eyes, tracing some kind of design, a symbol. Then he removed the knife from his son’s hand and stuck it into the deer. Still holding Marty’s hand, he led him down to the lake.
Marty washed in the icy water, rinsing the blood from his hair, splashing lake water coldly over his face. He was trying to shock himself back from what seemed like a dream.
Only he never made it all the way back. It hadn’t been a dream.
His father told him to run ahead and get dressed, and Marty, shivering, made his way back to where the deer was strung up. He got his clothes down from where he’d draped them over branches. Fumbling with frozen fingers, he managed to dress himself.
He was still cold, even with his boots and coat on. He tried not to, but he began to shiver.
“You’ll get used to field dressing game,” his father said. “The way I did after my father had me do the same thing you jus’ did.”
Marty could only nod, still trembling from the cold.
“Think of it as an initiation. A rite of passage. Can you?”
“I can,” Marty said. It didn’t seem like enough. “I do.”
His father gazed at the sky and pointed.
Marty looked and saw a large bird, maybe a hawk, circling high above. It was wheeling lazily, the way hawks do, as if they’re more concerned about rising than falling.
“You’re one of us now, son. A hunter.”
A sudden flush of pride warmed Marty so that he not only stopped trembling, he barely felt the cold.
“A hunter,” his father said again. But it didn’t seem like his father’s voice that time. Not exactly. It was almost like a third voice, inside Marty’s head.
30
New York, the present
Pearl and Fedderman were out reinterviewing witnesses. Quinn had assigned them that task mainly because Renz had wanted to meet with him alone.
They were in the sparse but efficient office on West Seventy-ninth Street. Quinn was seated at his desk. Renz was standing across from him, leaning back with his butt propped against the edge of Pearl’s desk, the way Pearl often stood. Quinn wondered if there was something about that spot, the way the two desks were arranged, that induced people to stand that way.
“The Hettie Davis murder,” Renz said. “Hell of a mess.”
“The job takes a strong stomach sometimes,” Quinn said.
“I don’t mean just that kind of mess,” Renz said. “The sort of butchery that was done on the victim, that’s usually not a one-time thing. The bastard treated her like she was some kind of animal he’d killed and was gonna make a rug out of, or something.” He absently toyed with a cellophane-wrapped tip of a cigar protruding with a clipped pen from the pocket of his white shirt. “How likely is it that we’ve got two major psychotic serial killers operating at the same time in the same city?”
“In this city,” Quinn said, “maybe not so unlikely. But whoever killed Hettie Davis might not be a serial killer.”
“We both know better than that,” Renz said. “By the way, she’d had sex, but some time before death. Impossible to know how long, but at least six hours. No sign of forcible entry. No semen, either, so no DNA. Traces of condom lubricant. Might have nothing to do with her murder and she was a random victim.”
“Or maybe it was a crime of passion.”
“Cold-blooded passion,” Renz said. Both men knew there was such a thing. “I had a records search done, and there’s nothing like that kind of killing happened here as far back as it went.”
“So it would be his first,” Quinn said. “At least in this city.”
“All that doesn’t change the fact that it’s the kind of gory, ritualistic murder serial killers commit.”
“But not always serial killers. Not even usually. Maybe she wasn’t a random victim. Maybe there’s something personal in this.”
“Personal?” Renz asked, as if people murdering people they knew were a new concept.
“Killer and victim could have known each other,” Quinn said, “could even have been lovers, and there was something between them that led up to the murder, maybe even over a period of years.”
“I got a good team on it, checking all that out. Vitali and Mishkin.”
Quinn knew both men, and they were top detectives. Sal Vitali was a pushy kind of guy, a hard driver. Harold Mishkin was almost timid, a deep thinker with a weak stomach. Together they got things done. “My guess is they’ll find the victim had a history with the killer,” Quinn said.
“Your guess and my hope. Two psycho freaks terrorizing the city at the same time’s a nightmare scenario.”
“We don’t have that,” Quinn reminded him, almost adding yet.
Renz seemed suddenly to become aware that he was fingering the cigar. “Okay to smoke in here?”
“Sure. Pearl’ll find out—she can smell tobacco smoke at a mile and a half—but that’s okay.”
Quinn waited until Renz had used a thin gold lighter to fire up his cigar, then got one of his Cubans from a desk drawer and lit it with a book match. When Pearl got hissy about the air quality, as she almost certainly would, he could truthfully blame it on Renz.
The two men enjoyed their smokes for a while, not saying anything. Then Renz said, “I’m the goddamn police commissioner and whenever I light up anywhere in this city I feel like I’m back smoking in the boys’ room in high school.”
“You get to be mayor, Harley, and you can change that.”
“Be at the top of my agenda,” Renz said. “Right after bustin’ balls in the NYPD so the murder rate drops. Between that and the smokers’ vote, I don’t see how I can’t get elected.”
Probably, Quinn thought, he was serious.
Renz tilted back his head and blew a series of imperfect smoke rings that created a white pall up near the ceiling. He laughed. “Pearl will be furious.”
“At somebody,” Quinn said.
He simply wasn’t getting it, so Prudence Langton patiently explained it again to the apartment building’s super, a grossly overweight man wearing a dirty gray uniform. He was sweating profusely, causing his dark chest hairs to glisten where the top two buttons of his shirt were unfastened. He was bald, smelled rancid, and wore what looked like a religious symbol on a silver chain around his thick neck. She didn’t consider him dating material.
Prudence had on a fashionable gray pantsuit with a ruffled white blouse. She was wearing her usual Blind Obsession dabbed behind her ears and at the top of her cleavage, but its delicate scent was easily overwhelmed by that of the super. “I was Vera’s roommate in college,” she said. “I knew I was coming to New York on business and wanted to see her. I’ve been calling for two weeks and getting her machine. And I’ve been here twice knocking on her door, and nobody answers.” She leaned toward him, trying not to breathe in. “You do know who I’m talking about?”