BLUE MERCY Read online

  “And that’s why he drugs them?”

  Constance nodded. “And the stun gun you mentioned with this burned victim. And the use of heroin with the first three victims. It’s all about maintaining control so the fantasy can unfold as accurately as possible. Fantasy and ritual dominate the organized offender’s way of working. You often see obsessive-compulsive behavior in these individuals and in their crime-scene patterns.”

  Kay’s mind flashed to Scott Arsenault’s medicine cabinet. The OCD prescriptions lining the shelves. Was it possible she was wrong about Scott?

  “In the case studies I’ve read,” Kay said, “it’s usually the disorganized offender who keeps his victims’ bodies.” Wackos stashing body parts in their freezer, keeping them for years. Some even burying their victims, only to dig up body parts after the spring thaw to have sex with them.

  “Your guy’s different,” Constance said. “He keeps them under controlled conditions, otherwise you’d see more advanced putrefaction. He uses them after they’re dead but gets rid of them before they start decomposing.”

  “So we might be looking at a necrophilia angle?”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “And the cuts to the chest?”

  “If they were made postmortem, I’d say they were mutilation as a substitute for sex or as a way to demonstrate his control over them. Or maybe they’re the result of a deep-seated anger that’s playing into his fantasy. Were there any foreign objects found in any of these women? Inserted into their body cavities? Any mutilation of the genitalia?”

  “No. So you’re saying these murders are sexual?”

  “Definitely. Control and sex.”

  “Even though we found no indicators of rape?” Kay asked.

  “Just because there’s no penetration doesn’t mean you don’t have a sexual act. He could be masturbating. The homicide triggers a sexual reaction or fantasy, and if he has a history of solo sex or has difficulty with interpersonal relationships, he’ll revert to masturbation rather than penetration.”

  “Even when the victim’s dead.”

  “Especially when they’re dead. That’s when he has the ultimate control over them, when he feels the most empowered.”

  “And then he washes them because he’s ejaculated on them?”

  “That’s one possibility. He’s getting rid of evidence. Maybe he’s educated himself on forensics. He knows about trace evidence, fibers, prints, DNA coming back to him.” Constance gestured to the photos. “These are all secondary crime scenes. Even if you had the primary scene, I doubt you’d find much evidence. This guy’s probably a clean freak.”

  Kay had more questions but the session timer went off, its muted click marking the end of her fifty-minute hour with Constance.

  Kay gathered the photos. “So, based on all this,” she asked, “on the fact that he’s just leaving them to be found, do you get the impression this guy wants to get caught?”

  “Eventually most serial murderers do,” Constance said. “I’d say this killer’s actions certainly point to a desire to be discovered, especially with the last one left in the trash. At the same time, I wouldn’t say he appears to be in any hurry to get caught.”

  33

  “JUST WHEN I THINK all the killable people in Baltimore are either dead or locked up, we get another murder.” Over the phone Kay heard Vicki snap open a can of soda and imagined her sitting behind the towers of files that generally occupied her desk over at the State’s Attorney’s Office.

  “They just keep falling,” Vicki went on, exhaustion in her voice. “All the little drug boys on their corners. Barely scrape one up off the pavement and another takes his place.”

  “Is Finn still over at the courthouse?” Kay asked.

  “Last I saw. Judge Reager hadn’t adjourned by the time I left my trial.”

  Kay leaned back in her chair and looked through the sixth-floor windows of Headquarters to where traffic downtown began to congest. While Finn was in court on another case, she’d spent most of the afternoon at her desk, reviewing reports and compiling the Beggs file.

  “So, you’re calling for an update?” she asked Vicki.

  “No. I caught up with Finn already, warming the bench outside Reager’s courtroom. He told me about the comparison you had Latents run on this Arsenault guy’s prints against Eales’s house. Seemed a little pissed that there were no matches. Finn really does have a thing for this guy. Just itching to get into his condo. What’s your take on him?”

  “I’m not sure yet.”

  “Well, like I told Finn, until you guys get me some probable cause, I can’t help you with a warrant.”

  “I know.”

  “Listen, if you want to get together earlier on Saturday, before the symphony, we can chew over some of this stuff. Maybe come up with a new angle to get this guy.”

  “Sure, Vick.” But Kay knew that if there was any way for Finn to have gotten into Arsenault’s condo, he would have found it by now.

  As Kay hung up, she wondered if she should talk to Arsenault again, this time with Finn. Based on the informal profile Constance had given her today, Kay wondered if she was wrong about the Web designer. Or maybe her doubt came from a different place.

  Kay’s gaze dropped to the photo propped on the windowsill. She’d never gotten around to framing the snapshot, and now a film of construction dust dulled its colors. A technician had taken it of her and Spence—at Spence’s request—on the scene of her first arrest in Homicide. She looked dour, half-shaken and half-victorious after the Quick Response Team had busted down several doors to flush out her suspect. But Spence smiled, still pumped with adrenaline in his Kevlar vest and backward Orioles cap.

  This one’s for you, Spence. I’m getting this son of a bitch for you.

  But what the hell was she missing?

  Kay looked again at Jonesy’s autopsy reports, studying the injection site, the bruises, the cuts to Beggs’s sternum.

  What was she not seeing?

  A good investigation had direction. Focus. They had neither.

  In a perfect world, a good investigation was linear. Cause and effect. One witness leading to the next, until a suspect emerged.

  And a good investigation flushed out a suspect quickly, then focused on the accumulation of enough solid evidence to nail the bastard when it went to trial. But here … they had no direction. No answers.

  Just trees, Kay thought. Too many trees to see the goddamned forest. Scott Arsenault. The website. Patricia Hagen. Alex Hagen. The funeral home. Bernard Eales’s accusations of necrophilia.

  Kay closed her eyes and mentally pushed everything aside. When a case got this messy, Spencer would have told her to go back to the beginning. Back to that first crime scene. To where it all started.

  Eales’s house.

  Three women had died there. That was indisputable. Of course, he’d never confessed to the murders, regardless of the evidence against him. Kay recalled the transcripts of Eales’s interview five days after the beatdown, after he’d already been grilled by Gunderson and Sergeant Lutz on Spencer’s shooting.

  Varcoe and Holewinski had worked as a tag team, running Eales in circles over the prostitute murders. Around and around, trying to trip him up. Fourteen hours and he’d given them nothing incriminating. In the end, the evidence would have to convince the jury.

  Throughout the interview Eales had maintained he suffered from alcoholic blackouts. Didn’t remember how the women had died in his house. He remembered nothing between the time he brought the women home to when he found them dead.

  He’d always maintained the women must have slashed their wrists themselves, even though he couldn’t explain the coincidence of all three of them committing suicide in his house. No, he didn’t wash them, he said. He’d found them in his tub. Guessed they’d taken a bath. All he did wrong was dump their bodies because he didn’t want a bunch of cops ripping through his house.

  Yes, the house.

  Pushing aside th
e reports, Kay flipped through her case notebook, looking for the number. Then, after dialing, she listened to the hollow rings bleed out across the long-distance line until Billy Coombs answered. His voice sounded thin and thready.

  “You want what exactly?” he asked after she explained the reason for her call.

  “Permission to enter your brother’s house,” she said. “We could get a warrant, Mr. Coombs, but it’s a lot of paperwork and signatures. I was hoping you might save me the labor. I’m assuming the house is in your name?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “All I’m after is a quick look around. I promise nothing will be removed or disturbed.”

  In the background she heard a voice over a PA system. Guessed she’d caught Coombs at his car dealership. When he didn’t answer her right away, she debated lying, telling him whatever it took to get permission. But she didn’t have to.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said. “I don’t see why not. I don’t know if anyone’s been in the house since Bernard’s arrest. In fact, maybe you can let me know if there’s been any damage or vandalism?”

  “Certainly.”

  “I guess I really should sell the thing. I just haven’t had the time to go down there and clean the place up. You don’t happen to know of any companies that do that sort of thing, do you, Detective? Clean up …you know, houses where—”

  “Actually, yes, there is a place I can put you in touch with.” She searched her Rolodex for the number of the crime-scene detail company in Forest Hill that often came in after they’d finished with a scene. But only seconds after giving Coombs the number, Kay regretted the decision. Maybe it was too soon to have the house emptied. After all, there were still stones obviously left unturned.

  “You’ll want to talk to Jerry Bates,” Coombs said then.

  “That’s your brother’s neighbor, right?” Kay remembered the man’s name from the file.

  “Yeah. He lives a couple doors down. I’m sorry I don’t know the number. I think he’s got a key. He can let you in. That way you won’t have to break any locks.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Coombs. By the way, how well do you know Mr. Bates?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Do you know if he and your brother are close?”

  “They’re neighbors. That’s all I know.”

  Neighbors. But it was from Bates’s house that Eales had finally surrendered to police after the beatdown. Maybe Bates and Eales were more than neighbors.

  She should have thought of Jerry Bates sooner. If they were looking for someone who might have helped Bernard …

  “Just let me know if there’s anything else I can help with, Detective,” Coombs said as the echo of the PA system blurted behind him again.

  “Actually, have you had any contact from the press, Mr. Coombs?” she asked before he could hang up.

  “Pardon me?” The connection crackled.

  “The press,” Kay repeated. “I’m just wondering if they’ve tried to reach you at all.”

  “No. Why? Have there been more developments?”

  “No,” Kay lied. “I was just checking, since you said you’d had a problem in the past.” But she wondered how long it would be before the media started connecting the dots and rang Coombs’s doorbell again.

  “Before you hang up, Detective.” There was a hesitation over the line. “Have you seen Bernard?”

  “I have.”

  “How is he?”

  How did she answer that? “He’s fine, I guess. The preliminary motions of his trial start next week. If you wanted the court dates—”

  “That’s all right, thanks.”

  “Is there a message you’d like me to get to him?”

  A pause. “No. I have nothing to say to Bernard.”

  Kay sensed a sadness in his voice. Or maybe it was resignation.

  “No,” he said again. “I guess, as far as I’m concerned, Detective, I really don’t have a brother anymore.”

  34

  ANY SUSPICION KAY might have had of Bernard Eales’s neighbor assisting him with the meticulous disposals of his victims’ bodies was dashed the second Jerry Bates answered his door.

  Bernard Eales’s friend was on the verge of being what the guys on the job called a skel—a long-term heroin addict so strung out he resembled a skeleton. Bates’s hair was a grown-out buzz cut that stood up and back, making him look as if he stood in a perpetual gale. His narrow chest was hairless and paper white, and his ribs shot out from beneath his translucent skin as he scurried through the hot, cluttered row house. From the stained sofa he snatched a wrinkled T-shirt sporting a peeling Harley-Davidson decal and pulled it on.

  The living room smelled sour. Past it, on the kitchen table, along with a stack of empties, Kay spotted drug paraphernalia. Getting high was clearly Bates’s life calling, not murder. Kay doubted Bates had enough sobriety to take out the trash, never mind the bodies Eales had found himself stuck with.

  Bates’s movements were twitchy and spastic as he searched for Eales’s key. Kay guessed there was deceiving strength in those pale, thin arms. It was always the small, wiry ones, she thought, the ones who looked as if they’d never win an arm-wrestle with their own mamas, who gave you the biggest fight out on the street, their unpredictable strength exploding from those lean junkie frames.

  When he finally handed her the key, Bates informed her he’d been looking after the place and no one had been inside except him. He wanted the key back, he told her with a degree of claim that made Kay wonder if Bates used the place himself somehow.

  Down the street, Eales’s two-story corner row house looked different in the daylight—tall and tapered, with a sagging front porch. Built in the early 1900s for dockworkers and cannery employees, the old Formstone row homes had seen better days.

  Kay paused at the head of the walkway, unable to set foot on the cracked cement path that had led to her personal hell over a year ago. She felt Bates watching her from down the street and closed her grip over the key. The wire twist-tie looped through it bit into her palm.

  Get a grip, Delaney. It’s just a house.

  But a part of her wished Finn had come along. She’d reached him on his cell phone, still pacing the hall outside Reager’s courtroom, and he’d agreed she should take a walk through the house herself. “I don’t need to see that dump again,” he’d told her when she’d asked if he wanted to come. “If you give me an hour though, I can meet you there.”

  But it was better this way. She didn’t need her hand held. Besides, going alone would give her a better feel for the place, for what had gone on behind those walls.

  Drawing a fortifying breath, Kay took the walk and climbed the steps to the narrow, cluttered porch. It was even tighter than she’d remembered. In the daytime, she would never have drawn her weapon here. No room to extend her shooting arm, to distance herself from anyone coming out the door. In the daytime, she would have gauged reasonably and taken a step back.

  Only it hadn’t been daytime.

  The key was dry in the lock. Flyers had banked against the door. She rolled one into a tube and used it to brush away the cobwebs that crossed the frame. The door was snug, and she drove her shoulder into it twice before it opened.

  The smell hit her before the heat did. Mothballs and a sweet staleness, like the stench of beer bottles left out in the sun.

  It was dark in the foyer. Even darker up the staircase. Kay swiped her hand over the light-switch plate. Nothing. She should have known the power would be cut.

  Leaving the door ajar, she sidestepped a mound of junk mail. The house felt dead. She could almost taste the long absence of life, of air, movement, and sound. The heat washed over her, and she wondered how many showers she’d need to scrub away the sensation that slid across her skin.

  In the living room, she pulled aside the yellowed sheet hanging over the window. She coughed against a rain of dust as several slow cluster flies beat themselves against the gray panes. Dozens more lay dead on the sill.

&nb
sp; Dust motes danced in the light as she turned several times in the center of the room. Taking it in. Everything was as she remembered from the case photos: the threadbare sofa with its sagging cushions, the green Naugahyde recliner, the veneered coffee table, the grimy banister and railing. All of it covered in black smudges of Magna fingerprinting powder. Magazines flowed from a shelf in the corner: vintage cars, hot-rodding, and porn.

  At the back of the house was the kitchen. Light streamed through the warped slats of an acrylic blind. More carbon dust here. The sink was jammed with crusted dishes, and when she neared it, there was a sudden burst of scurrying. Cockroaches. Kay shuddered, wondering how many generations had lived here with no human contact.

  Over the wall phone, a calendar from a South Baltimore garage featured antique cars and big-busted blondes. It still hung on last July. Kay looked at the empty box of the twenty-first, as though there should be something there, some indication of the horror of that night. There was nothing. The only entries on the calendar were pay dates every second week and the word roach scrawled on the twentieth. Given the state of the kitchen, she wasn’t surprised Eales had had a pest-control problem prior to his incarceration.

  “The guy’s probably a clean freak,” Constance had said.

  It didn’t fit.

  Kay headed upstairs. The back bedroom had been used for storage. Car parts, dash gauges, even a couple of old vinyl-covered seats. In the corner sat a twin-size bed with an unmade mattress.

  Taking a final survey of the room, she crossed the hall to the bathroom. The blind there had come off one bracket. This room was relatively clean. Still, the linoleum was scarred and lifting in places, the enamel of the tub and sink dull. The toilet seat was up, the bowl dry and ring-stained. Most of the evidence had been documented from this room. But nothing spoke to Kay.

  The second bedroom to her left was larger. And darker. Kay discerned the outline of the low bed, a chair, and a dresser along the east wall. She crossed to the window overlooking the street. The heavy roller blind spun up slowly, the vinyl cracked, the springs gone slack. It stopped partway up.