Serpents in the Cold (3 page)

 He pulled out his gun, raised it shoulder level, and kicked the door open. Ski dropped Dante to the floor and raised a hand in a silly gesture, as though it wasn't his fault Dante's face was turned inside out. Shaw smiled and sucked his teeth, but before he could speak, Cal made his move. He was a few inches under six feet, had the stocky build of a lightweight, slight bones compressed with muscle, but it was his trip-wire rage that gave him an edge. He charged the big Polish thug, who, stunned by the oncoming blur, tried to raise his hands to protect his face. The grip of Cal's gun opened up his temple; another quick crack on the nose and the big man stumbled, his knees going to jelly and his hip crashing against the radiator as he fell. His nose sprayed a bloody stream.

Cal ran a straight left arm into Shaw's chest, pushed him until his back slammed the wall. He pressed the barrel of the gun against his forehead. The redhead turned to alleviate the pressure, but Cal pushed harder. Shaw's heavy-lidded eyes momentarily shut and his lips pulled over his crooked teeth in pain.

“We're just collecting for Sully, Cal. You need to simmer down.”

“Fuck you I will.”

Shaw gave Cal's eyes a good reading.

“Just settle down, old friend,” he said, “we're all good.” The redhead sucked his teeth one final time, raised his accountant hands in the air as a sign of surrender. “He said he'd get us by the end of the week, and we trust him. We're like that. We take care of those from the Corner.”

“How much is he in for this time?”

“Not as much as the last time, but enough.”

Cal lowered his gun and turned. The big Polish boxer was back on his feet, his right hand clutching his broken nose. A darkening welt grew from the side of his head.

Dante rolled over, spit out a thick glob of blood and saliva.

Shoulders hunched, head lowered, Ski ambled by Cal and mumbled several curse words in Polish, flung open the bathroom door, and disappeared into the darkness of the hallway. But Shaw hung at the door for a moment.

“This is real stupid of you. Sully's in a real shit mood lately, and the last thing he's going to do is give that dirtbag another break.”

“Just get the fuck out of here, Shaughnessy.”

The door closed, and Cal reached down, grabbed Dante's hand, and pulled him to his feet. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “pull up your fucking pants.” He turned on the faucet and helped him rinse his face. The white porcelain swam pink. After a while he turned the cold water off.

Cal's anger didn't dissipate. When they entered the bar, he called out to the bartender, who suddenly appeared busy, wiping the bar down.

“Next time I'll do you before I do them, you prick.”

The bartender stared after them, waited until Cal and Dante were halfway out the door before shouting after them, “Fuck you, O'Brien!”

Outside, Cal grabbed at Dante's coat front, buttoned up the neck, yanked up the collar, and helped him up the five concrete steps to the sidewalk.

“Do you have your feet?” he asked.

Dante nodded, and Cal let go of him.

_________________________

INSIDE JOE AND
Nemo's it was warm and bright. Sudden blasts of wind pushed against the plate glass windows of the diner, startling customers at their meals. Nemo's brother was working the counter. He was a thin older man with wiry gray hair at his temples and a large swell of a belly, but his white pants and shirt looked immaculate. He might have been a banker if not for the location. No one liked him but he didn't much care. It never affected business. He glanced up as Dante and Cal sat at a booth and then went back to the sports page.

“Well, that was smart,” Dante said, wincing as he rubbed a hand across his lips. “Fucking up one of Sully's men like that.”

“You worry about yourself. I'm not the one owing money.”

Dante avoided Cal's eyes.

“So what was it this time? Horses? Numbers?”

“It doesn't matter. I'll pay them back.”

“With what?”

Dante shook his head, moved his hands to his pack of cigarettes, and pulled one out.

Cal glanced over the menu. The room smelled of boiling hot dogs, coffee, bacon, and stale grease. He realized he was hungry after not having eaten a thing since late yesterday afternoon.

“What are you having?”

Dante lifted the water glass and drank. When he put it back on the table, blood sank darkly in the glass.

“You need to eat something.”

Dante pointed to his face and he grinned. “Does it look like I'm hungry?”

“No, but you still need to eat."

“Eggs, then. And Tabasco sauce, lots and lots of Tabasco sauce.”

Cal stared over at the brother, stared at him till he lifted his eyes and made eye contact. “Can we get some coffee over here?” he called. The brother turned a page and went back to his reading.

A waitress scurried by them and Cal reached out an arm and grasped her by the elbow. She looked at his hand and then down at him. “Sorry to bother you, miss, but could we get some coffee here?”

The waitress glanced at Dante and went to move away, but Cal held her elbow. “Some coffee for me and my friend here.”

She hesitated for a moment, and then responded dully, “I'll see what I can do.”

In a moment, the waitress was back. “Only coffee. The boss says I can't serve you breakfast.” She gestured with her head toward Dante. “Not with him looking like that.”

“We'd die for some of that apple pie. Don't have to cook nothing, just wrap it all up and we'll be on our way.”

“I'll do it, honey, but then you have to go. Take your friend down to Burke's or Joey Glynn's. That's the place for you.”

Cal nodded, watched the waitress walk away. “They closed down Joey Glynn's a month ago. The wrecking ball will have it in a week or so. Half the Square is going.”

“Going to hell,” Dante said. He dabbed at his bloodied mouth with napkins he'd pulled from the dispenser.

Nemo's brother was looking up from his paper and staring at them. The waitress took the long way about the restaurant, checking in on her other tables before she went behind the counter, filled up two paper cups with coffee, and wrapped the pie. When she returned, Cal took the paper bag from her hand and left two quarters on the table.

THEY STEPPED INTO
the Peabody Street alley. Before them the recently excavated lot of Cassidy's Bar jutted out into the barren expanse toward Tremont Street, and a wind whipped down through the avenue with nothing to cut it.

“I need more than coffee,” Cal said, and Dante followed him across the street to Court Street Liquors. The lights were off inside, and the narrow aisles were dark in shadow and illuminated by meager slants of daylight poking through the ice-covered windows at the front of the store.

Cal's breath hung in the air. “Why's it so damn cold in here?” he asked. The old cashier wore a multitude of multicolored sweaters, one over the other. His emaciated wrists poked from their ragged cuffs as he reached up to a shelf and grabbed four nips of whiskey, and his hands shook when he handed Cal his change. A red wool cap was pulled tightly down over his ears. He chewed on his thick lips and sputtered when he spoke. “They turned the damn electric and heat off on me, the fuckers.”

Back outside, Cal and Dante poured the whiskey into their coffee as they rested against a brick wall and stared at the broken stone and mortar where Cassidy's had been. A crane with wide tracks and a wrecking ball sat immobile, covered with a dusting of snow from the previous night.

They hugged their coats about them as they drank, watched the low clouds churning over the city; traffic rumbled on distant streets, and navy frigates leaving the Charlestown locks blew their long, plaintive horns as they made their way out into the harbor.

“My cousin Owen called me this morning,” he said. “The Dorchester detective. You know the guy.”

Dante looked up from his stupor and stared at him. A hard wind blew icy crystals against their faces so that they squinted at each other. The bottoms of their overcoats whipped against their legs.

Cal finished the last of his coffee dregs, sucked the whiskey from them with his teeth. He turned against the wind and, with his head bowed, managed to light a cigarette. He exhaled, tried to smile, and then gave it up. “Sheila was found murdered this morning, Dante. I'm sorry.”

Dante cocked his head like a dog and smiled, his grotesque, deformed grin searching for the joke, and perhaps trying to make sense of what he'd just heard. Cal reached for his shoulder, put his hand there, and held it. “I'm sorry.”

Dante's mouth parted as if to say something. After a moment he looked out across the barren lot, gazed blankly at the traffic and the pedestrians passing hunched into themselves against the cold. Cal watched him, studied the damage to his face. He took him by the shoulder and moved him tenderly back onto the street toward the car he'd left parked opposite Epstein's Drug. “C'mon,” he said. “We need to go see the body.”

_________________________

Southern Mortuary, South End

THE ROOM, TWO
levels beneath Boston City Hospital's main floor, was as cold as an icebox. The windowless walls were scrubbed white tile, and beyond the tile Cal knew there lay old stone, many feet thick, that would be damp to the touch. He could sense the bay beneath them and around them, a subtle scent of moist decay, brine, loam, and shale, a smell that three hundred years and hundreds of thousands of tons of landfill couldn't affect or change. It was a place that somnambulists and creeps might haunt while the rest of the city slept, for even now, at three in the afternoon, it was night down here.

Large sheets of sheer plastic hung like soiled shower curtains on hooks separating gurneys upon which bodies lay, visible through the plastic. The coroner, Fierro, stood at the head of a stainless steel autopsy table smoking a cigarette. On the table, covered with a sheet, lay the body of Dante's sister-in-law, Sheila Anderson. The outline of her face pressed against the sheet; Cal stared at the dark contours of eyes and nose and mouth.

Fierro waited with a silent decorum that surprised Cal. When Cal nodded, he rolled down the sheet to just above her neck. Pale, blue-hued, and sleeping, as if she had not suffered at all. Fierro stared at them, squinting through his cigarette smoke, ready to show them the reason why she could never wake and rise ever again.

Cal placed his hat on the stainless steel worktable. “This isn't a formal identification. Owen already ID'd the body, right?”

“He did earlier, but I knew you'd come.”

Cal nodded. “Thanks.”

Fierro replaced the sheet, pressed at the edges about the stainless steel table as if he were making a bed. The lights above the steel tables flickered and buzzed, and a dull pressure throbbed behind Cal's eyes.

Dante stared at the sheet and looked as if he were somewhere else altogether, perhaps remembering how Margo had been examined, gutted, and stitched back up in this very same room. He'd aged since then. Cal suspected they both had. Only Fierro seemed untouched; his complexion gleamed, absent of wrinkles or age. Years before Cal had mistaken that look for serenity, a man who liked his job, who came home at the end of the day without any worries on his mind, but it was only later that Cal realized Fierro was simply indifferent. To Fierro these people were merely cadavers, and their waxy, soft, once volatile and industrious flesh something to be considered and inspected, then ordered and classified, and then filed away. Living bodies interested Fierro even less.

Dante cleared his throat. “I'd like to see the body.”

Cal looked at him.

Fierro put his hand to his mouth and coughed. “A lot of hate went into this. Whoever named him the Butcher wasn't too far off the mark.”

“The Butcher killed her?” Cal asked, surprised.

“Didn't Owen tell you that?”

“No,” Cal said.

Fierro stepped forward, took hold of the sheet that draped her body, and folded it precisely and efficiently down below her feet. She was naked, just as she'd been found, but the rigor that the police report had spoken of was gone. Now, nine hours later, after Fierro's autopsy, what blood was left in her body had pooled in her back and legs.

Cal stared down the length of Sheila's body. The gash across her neck had been sewn shut once the body had thawed—a violent cross-stitching like the lacing on a football. Cal realized he was no longer looking at Sheila but at something that had once been Sheila. He didn't want to think this way, to think like Fierro did, or to believe that such a thing as one's soul—the essence that made up a person even in death—could be so completely gone.

“Why'd you tag her as a Jane Doe?” Dante asked.

“Couldn't be sure anyone would claim her. I guess if it wasn't for Owen, she'd be lying in the potter's field at Fairview.”

“Then change the tag.”

Fierro, wearing a black rubber apron and yellow lab boots, kept touching and patting at Sheila's body to break up the pooling effect. “We'll get to it.”

Dante stared at Sheila's face, then down her purple bruised breasts and stomach to the thin fan of fair hair over her pubic mound. When he looked up, Cal's eyes were on him and he had to look at the ground. “Jesus, Cal,” he said. “She was twenty-three. Twenty-three.”

“What's the cause of death?” Cal asked.

Fierro looked up from his heavy massage of Sheila's thigh muscle, the ash of his cigarette powdering her leg. The skin across her lower stomach and hips trembled and shuddered. “Well,” he said, and eyed Cal as if he was teasing him, “that seems pretty obvious, doesn't it?”

Dante shuffled in his coat and stepped closer to the table. “She's family, not a fucking ashtray.” Fierro looked down at her leg, shook his head apologetically, and quickly rubbed at the ash.

Cal laid a hand on Dante's shoulder to keep him calm. Beneath the coat, he felt the tremors of anger. “She ain't a nobody,” Dante continued, muttering to himself. “She's family.” He turned and walked toward the back of the room, and Cal watched him trying to light a cigarette. Suddenly he was hacking into his fist, and Cal could tell that he was going to be sick. Dante scrambled to the heavy steel door, flung it open, and left. They listened to his footfalls clattering up the basement corridor, waited a moment in silence.

“What about sex?” Cal said. “Was there sexual assault?”

Fierro shrugged, smiled vacantly. “I can't tell. She was found naked and that usually suggests a sexual attack of some kind. All of his other victims have been violated, sodomized. We've found semen in some, but not all.”

“Why can't you tell if she'd been sexually assaulted?”

“There's no trauma and no semen. But that doesn't mean she wasn't sexually assaulted. With a body in this state, out in the elements for hours, and damage to the tissue from the cold—that destroys a lot of evidence, Cal. It's hard to know what happened.”

“Or she might have been stripped naked for other reasons, maybe to shame her or make a point, a statement.”

Cal walked around to the head of the dissecting table. “What about these,” he said, “the marks on her wrists?”

“They're ligature marks. Most likely from a rope.”

Fierro held his hands together above his head. “She would have been hanging from something as he tortured her.” He put down his hands and sighed. “It's the same as the other girls.”

“Did she die where they found her, or was she moved postmortem?”

“Well,” Fierro began, and with a gloved hand rubbed at the back of his thick neck, “I'm only the coroner, Cal, not the detective at the crime scene, but there's no sand on the body. Now, that may not be all that significant as the beach is under ice and snow, and the cold would have prevented anything clinging to her—once the epidermis had become frozen—but that there would be no sand at all, especially on her lower sections, is surprising.”

“I still don't get it. Why would the son of a bitch plant her in such a ritualistic way—what the hell does that mean?”

“You said it yourself. To shame her, to make an example of her.” Fierro shrugged and lit another cigarette from the butt of the one he'd just finished. “I think this guy, the Butcher, he gets off on it—making an example of the particular woman he kills.”

“The killer,” Cal said, “he's been murdering prostitutes, right?”

“So far, yes.”

“Sheila wasn't a prostitute.”

“Okay, but how long has it been since you saw her last?”

“What are you saying?”

“Maybe the guy has changed his MO or maybe you don't know this girl as well as you thought.”

Cal imagined how the killer held her from behind and drew the knife across her neck, how she struggled and bucked against him as the blade tore into the flesh, and how her blood gushed forth as he tore through the muscle and tendon and opened her fully from ear to ear. He saw Sheila's head lolling forward into the gluey pool of her own gore spilling down her breasts as the Butcher planted her in the ground and the temperatures in the bay froze and held her in final rigor, and her clouding pupils staring at the blinking lights of her old neighborhood and the Calf Pasture and the Edison plant beyond, with its dun smokestacks.

“Why Tenean Beach? Why'd he leave her at Tenean Beach?”

Fierro pulled the sheet up over the body, adjusted Sheila's head, fixing her hair before he covered her face. “Maybe it was easy.”

Cal scratched at his cheek. “Sheila lived in Dorchester. Isn't that a bit strange, the only victim to be left where she lives?”

“Might just be coincidence.”

“Yeah, or maybe not. Maybe she knew him.”

Fierro stamped out his cigarette and, coughing, began to light another. Cal stared at Sheila's toe, the last part of her that lay uncovered, and at the tag strung there declaring:
JANE DOE.
Fierro watched as Cal lifted the bottom of the sheet and covered her completely. When he was done, he cleared his throat, reached over, and picked up his hat off the worktable. “Thanks again,” he said, and turned away.

Fierro stamped out his cigarette, hurried between the examining tables. “Ahh, Cal?” he began, as he reached forward and touched Cal on the shoulder.

“Yeah?”

“Well, it's a terrible time and all and I hate to ask but—”

“What is it, Fierro?”

“Do you still have those Bruins tickets?”

CAL FOUND DANTE
in the hallway, back against the wall, his hat crumpled in one hand, and in the other a cigarette, which he tugged at in short, painful breaths. His face was pale and he looked as if at any moment he would rush back into the bathroom to get sick all over again. When he saw Cal he straightened, wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand.

“I keep seeing her,” Dante said. “I keep seeing what he did to her.”

“I know.”

“Will you help me?”

“Anything you need, Dante.”

“Good. Help me find the fuck who killed her.”

“Dante, slow down. The police are already on it. We should wait it out.”

“You know they won't do shit. You saw the tag on her. To them she's just a Jane Doe, a whore.” His bloodshot eyes blazed. “I can't do this by myself.”

“I run a security company. I'm a fucking bondsman. This is police work. You have to let them handle it.”

“I need your help. You knew her too.”

Cal gripped Dante's shoulder and squeezed. Desperation pulled at Dante's mouth. “She was family, Cal. I wouldn't ask you if I had a choice.”

A worker pushing a gurney banged past them, whistling, and Cal dropped his hand. The whistling continued down the dimly lit hallway with the rattle of wheels reverberating off the stone walls.

“Okay, then,” he said. “Okay. But first, let's get you home.”