Hush (13 page)

Alex quickly skimmed the print, nothing
sinking into his brain, his thoughts being pulled in a completely
different direction.

To his article on the third page.

He'd been surprised to find that they'd
wanted it at all since he'd thrown it together just minutes before
the paper went to print. But they'd yanked a wire article and had a
spot they were looking to fill.

A lot of readers would probably have passed
by it the way they'd passed by his story about the police-
mentoring program, and the story he'd done on alcoholism in the
police force—an article that had been hidden deep in the body of
the paper. He wasn't very good with a camera. In fact, he rarely
took pictures. He left that to the photo department, which meant
he'd never had a story run with a photo. The photographers were
always too busy with bigger stories. But last night, for some
inexplicable reason, he'd grabbed a camera. It must have been a
five-star day, or the planets were all aligned, or something,
because when he got back to the photo lab with the roll of film
he'd taken at the homicide scene, he found he'd captured a
multitude of elements in one single click of a shutter.

The photo was of the woman with the short red
hair, the one who'd refused to talk to him. She was hurrying from
the apartment building, caught in mid- flight by the camera, one
foot on the top step, the other touching air. Her expression,
possibly undetectable to the human eye, captured in a fleeting one-
sixteenth of a second, spoke of everything she'd seen, and
everything she felt.

Horror.

Anger.

Sorrow.

It was all there, in one powerful image.

The caption wasn't bad either: "Dark At The
Top Of The Stairs."

In the early morning hours, an unidentified
woman leaves a homicide scene at a northwest- side apartment
complex where a mother and her infant son were found dead.

The article itself was one of his best, he
thought, something that might get the attention of his bosses. It
was nothing tike the fiction he'd put aside in order to keep food
in his belly, but it was possibly some of the best of his
nonfiction career.

The caption was further validated by the
article's opening sentence.

The killer among us. He preys on every
mother's deepest fear—the loss of her child. And if that isn't
tragedy enough, the loss of that child under the most horrific of
circumstances.

The recent double homicide is the second to
have occurred in the Chicago metro area in the last two weeks.
There are many questions, but so far no answers. Questions like,
Why aren't the police getting information to the public? If the
people had been informed, would the latest victims be alive right
now? The only thing we know for sure is this: The dark at the top
of the stairs is real.

At the paper, he felt like a star. Walking to
his desk, people praised him. "Great story, Alex."

"Nice going."

Maude caught him before he could sit down.
"Great stuff, Alex."

"You didn't think it was too—" He paused,
searching for the right word, and finally came up with,
"Dramatic?"

"Are you kidding? It was real. That's what we
want. Reality."

Superintendent Abraham Sinclair stared at the
Herald's black-and-white photo of Ivy Dunlap. She had a
fleeing-the-castle expression on her face, the kind you might have
seen on the cover of an old paperback.

"This is nothing but a bunch of overwritten,
sensationalized crap," Abraham told Max, who'd stopped by his
office to assess his reaction to the article. He tossed the paper
down on his desk. "You know what it looks like? It looks like an ad
for a horror movie, that's what it looks like."

Max picked up the paper. "At least it's on
page three, not page one."

Abraham walked to the window and stared down
at the traffic in the street below. Had he done the right thing in
bringing Ivy here? He normally didn't doubt himself, but when it
came to the Madonna Murderer, he doubted himself about
everything.

He was tired.

People were always asking him what he was
going to do when he retired, telling him he'd be bored out of his
mind. That wasn't going to happen.

But what if he couldn't shut off his mind?
What if he went to Florida to fish, and all he saw were murdered
babies, murdered mothers, floating just below the water's
surface?

The guilt. Abraham couldn't get away from the
guilt. Eighteen years ago, when the murders first started, he'd
been an Area Five detective just like Max. He'd been pretty
confident then, and he really thought he could catch the madman.
But he didn't catch him, he never caught him, and twelve mothers
and their babies had died.

That's why he'd worked so hard to help
Claudia Reynolds. To help her get a new identity, a new life in a
new country.

He was able to get her Canadian citizenship.
For some reason just as inexplicable as everything else they did,
serial killers rarely crossed borders. That didn't apply to
everyone, of course. There was Christopher Wilder, who killed
several people in Australia and then, when things got hot there,
moved to the U.S. where he continued his spree before he was
brought down by his own gun during an altercation with two
officers.

Abraham kept track of Ivy over the years. He
knew she'd spent time in a Canadian mental institute, but had come
out of that darkness to get a master's degree in criminal
psychology. She'd even published a book- length study on the mind
of the serial killer.

But the Madonna Murderer was never found.

After the killings stopped, Abraham fell into
a deep despair. He started drinking. Then he started taking pills.
Then he combined the two until he almost died. His wife couldn't
take it anymore and left him.

And now the killer had resurfaced.

Was there a God? That's what he wanted to
know. Because sometimes it sure as hell didn't seem like it.

"What about the FBI?" Abraham asked. "Any
news from them?"

"The Bureau is swamped, but they're pulling
two people off other cases and sending them down," Max told him.
"They should arrive this afternoon or evening."

Max and Ivy stood side by side in Autopsy
Suite Four of Cook County Morgue wearing face shields, yellow
disposable aprons, and white disposable rubber gloves. There would
be blood, there would be splatter, and in this age of AIDS, it was
best to take every precaution.

A half hour earlier Max had swung by Ivy's
apartment, possibly to gloat, possibly to see if she was still in
town after last night's initiation into the ugly, horrifying world
of senseless violence. When he'd buzzed her apartment, telling her
to come on down if she wanted to get in on the autopsy, he had to
wait less than five minutes.

He was reluctantly impressed.

It was common for rigor mortis to set in
three hours after death. It began in the muscles of the face and
eyelids, then spread slowly to the arms and legs, taking about
twelve hours to affect the whole body. In most cases, if the victim
hadn't been burned or poisoned, the process reversed itself after
thirty-six hours, until the body was soft and supple once
again.

Sometimes the medical examiner would wait
until rigor mortis was gone and the body was flexible once more.
But in such a serious homicide, it was best to move forward as
quickly as possible.

The sheet-covered body of the female victim
lay on a steel exam table that was concave and funneled to a drain.
The floor was concrete, the walls white tile. Almost all equipment
was made of stainless steel and would endure years of
sterilization. A fume vent hung overhead, with the exam table
itself equipped with down-draft ventilation.

Chief Medical Examiner Eileen Bernard clipped
a tiny microphone to her liquid-impermeable gown with hands that
were covered by the preferred thick surgical purple gloves that
offered more protection than the lighter ones. Under her left glove
she wore another of wire mesh.

Eileen Bernard had been Cook County Chief
Medical Examiner for nine years. Before that, she'd been an
assistant, and before that a professor of forensic pathology at the
University of Minnesota. Max figured she'd cut open more dead
bodies than almost any other person on the planet.

Stranger than that, she actually liked it and
didn't try to pretend otherwise. Which took Max to a question that
had lingered uncomfortably in the back of his mind for a number of
years: Did Eileen Bernard have something in common with serial
killers? Did she also have that obsessive need to cut people up, to
see what they looked like on the inside? Only, she was doing it
legally and getting paid a tidy sum in the process.

She turned on the tape recorder, operating it
with the foot switch so her hands could remain free. "This is Dr.
Eileen Bernard," she said into the microphone. That was followed by
the case number, victim's name, age, weight, length.

Even though Max had already seen the body at
the crime scene, he still felt a fresh jab of shock when Bernard
uncovered it completely, exposing it to the glare of the blinding
overhead spotlights.

The smell wasn't bad, certainly not like
other autopsies he'd been to where the victim hadn't been found for
days. But it was amazing how quickly the human body began to
decompose—just minutes after death, so that even now that
sweet-foul odor hung in the room, although the exhaust system
fought to suck the stink away. Soon it would creep into his
sinuses, cling to his hair. Back at Central, he'd shower and
change, but the smell would still be there, no matter how much soap
he used, or how hard he scrubbed.

He used to put Vicks up his nose, but after
four or five times, he began to associate the smell of menthol with
death and now it was just as bad as the real thing. Anytime anybody
came at him sucking on a cough drop, Max would recoil, the smell of
a half-rotten body gusting into his face. And no way would he ever
use it on Ethan when he was little. Instead, he would run a hot
shower and wait for the bathroom to steam up. Then he would sit
there on the closed toilet, holding Ethan until he stopped coughing
and finally fell into a peaceful sleep.

Bernard pulled close the tray containing the
tools of her trade—scalpels, forceps, chisels, and rubber mallets.
She was systematic and always followed the same procedure she'd
taught her students. Conform to routine and get everything the
first time. As far as Max knew, there had never been the need for
an exhumation on any of her cases—a testimony to her
thoroughness.

She began by examining the body from head to
toe, front to back, while her morgue assistant, a huge, sober-faced
man, silently and solemnly stepped in when needed. Normally, a
coroner used two assistants, but it was apparent this guy could
handle it by himself.

After the initial overview, Bernard numbered
the stab wounds with a black marker, her assistant helping to roll
the body. "The wounds are confined to the chest and abdomen." She
rechecked her count. "Twenty-two in all." She stood back while the
assistant climbed up on a short ladder to take photographs from
above.

She verbally cataloged every wound, its
location, depth. "These were all done with the same instrument. A
knife that was long and wide." She swung the flex- arm dissecting
lamp with its magnifying glass closer. "See this?" With a purple,
blood-smeared gloved finger, she pointed to ragged flesh.
"Serrated."

"Same as the other victim," Max stated.

"Yes."

"But bigger than, say, a steak knife."

"Yes."

"A heavy bread knife?" Ivy asked.

Her voice rang out hollowly in the room,
perhaps coming out louder than anticipated, as many voices did when
the owner struggled for bravery.

Max shot her a quick glance, wondering if
she'd had enough. Her eyes were focused on the victim. Instead of
the fear and revulsion he'd expected to see, he saw what looked
like sorrow.

"Sharper," Dr. Bernard said. "More like the
kind of knife used by a butcher in order to cut through bone."

She went on examining the body, pointing out
the red-and-purple ligature marks around the throat. The victim's
mouth was still taped into a wide grin. She peeled the tape away,
but rigor mortis kept the jaw from going slack. "Hard to tell, but
I'll bet she was a beautiful woman." She forced the mouth open and
peered inside, then inserted two gloved fingers. "Crushed
windpipe."

"Asphyxiation?" Max asked.

"I don't think so," she said slowly,
thoughtfully. "It looks to be postmortem. Just to make sure she was
dead. As if twenty-two stab wounds wouldn't have done the job."

With the aid of her assistant, Dr. Bernard
placed a rubber block beneath the victim's neck, stretching the
neck and the tissue of the upper chest. Then she reached for a
scalpel. Pausing below the collarbone, she glanced up.

Max Irving stood there, his face, behind the
clear acrylic shield, unreadable as always. Next to him, the woman
he'd introduced as Ivy Dunlap stared at the body, at the woman's
face, her lips parted, her breath creating little puffs of
condensation on her face shield.

Bernie hoped to hell she wasn't a fainter.
Irving hadn't said anything past the introduction, no explanation
as to why the woman was there. It was unusual to have a civilian at
an autopsy, but not unheard of. She'd had a couple of reporters
before, years ago when rules were a little less stringent. None of
them had lasted past the first incision, let alone the cutting open
of the skull with the bone saw in order to weigh the brain.

Opinions varied as to what was worse: the
smell of hot bone, the sound of the high-pitched whine of metal
against cranium, or the sight of a human skull being cracked open
like a nutshell.