Marked

THREE

She feels a little better the following morning. A little more hopeful. She even manages to force down a few spoonfuls of breakfast cereal.

And then Steve has to go and spoil it.

He spoils it with a book-sized rectangular package wrapped in bright-pink paper with pictures of balloons and cakes and all kinds of happy words on it. Words such as ‘Celebrate!’ and ‘Hooray!’ and ‘Yippee!’

‘Here,’ he says simply, and he accompanies it with a smile. As if that’ll work. As if that’ll make it all right.

And she puts down her spoon and stares into his face and says what shouldn’t need saying.

‘Steve, what are you doing? We agreed. No presents. Not yet.’

‘I know. It’s not from me. It’s from Megan. She asked me to get it for you and she wanted you to have it today. You know what she’s like. She hates the idea of belated presents.’

Nicole suddenly wants to bring all that cereal back up again. She looks at her husband in disbelief. She can see that he doesn’t know what he’s doing wrong, but that doesn’t make it any more right. He should have thought. He should have known. He can’t just pretend that carrying out Megan’s wishes puts her back in this room.

‘Take it away.’

‘Nicole. Please. She wanted you to-’

‘Then she can give it to me herself. Take it away. Don’t you understand? She needs to give it to me herself. Here, in person. From her hand to mine.’

‘Nicole, look, it’s just a-’

She picks it up then and throws it across the table at him. ‘Take the fucking thing away!’

‘Jesus Christ, Nicole!’ He looks at her in silence for a while, then he picks up the gift and leaves the room.

Doyle goes home while others continue the search. He wanted to carry on, but neither his body nor his boss would allow him. He goes home and he takes a fifteen-minute shower, finishing off a bottle of shower gel in a desperate attempt to eliminate any lingering odors. He shampoos his hair three times. The foam blocks his ears and stings his eyes. He wishes he could force it into his head. Brainwashing. A clean mind in a clean body. He needs to wipe it spotless and start all over again. There are too many dark thoughts in there.

The past is whispering to him. Calling to him. Reminding him of things he thought were over and done with. Avenues he believed were closed suddenly seem to be yawning wide open again, beckoning him to enter.

After his shower he lies on the bed and tries to sleep, but his subconscious keeps hurling out sporadic images and sounds that jolt him awake. He sees a girl. Sees what is being done to her. Sees a man. The ace of spades. The skull and crossbones. He hears the girl’s screams.

When sleep eventually claims him, it is short-lived and fitful. He tosses and turns for three hours, and when he drags himself off the bed again he does not feel refreshed.

He needs to get back into work.

He needs to find out whether this is what he thinks it is.

And if it is, he must find closure this time.

While Steve goes out for a jog, she puts on the television. The news channel. It’s the only thing on which she can properly focus her attention. She forces herself to watch it. Just in case.

There’s a story about a police search in the East Village. Nicole and Steve live in Forest Hills, which is in Queens, which is way over on the other side of the East River. So it can’t have anything to do with them.

The reporters conjecture that the police may be hunting for body parts, following the gruesome discovery of a severed head in a restaurant.

But it’s in the East Village. Megan wouldn’t have gone to the East Village. Not alone. So that’s all right, then. No news is good news, as they say.

She is aware of all kinds of synapses firing in her brain, trying to make connections, trying to posit various scenarios. She refuses to let them. This is nothing to do with their life. It’s a world away. Their life is a nice big white house in a tree-lined road in a friendly part of Forest Hills, Queens, where the neighbors have time to talk and smile and help each other out. That stuff on the TV is dirt and violence and crime and sadness. Megan would not visit that world.

She shuts the television off. It’s annoying her now. Why can’t they ever talk about nice things on the news? Good news. Happy news. Why does it always have to be about disaster and death and shock and war? Is that really what people want to hear? What if they created a channel that carried only good news? Surely there would be an audience for that? And surely it would make for a happier, more positive-thinking population?

When I’m president, she thinks. But she doesn’t smile.

She goes over to her chair at the front window. The chair never used to be there, but now she won’t allow Steve to return it to its four indentations in the rug. She spends a lot of time in that chair.

She sits at the window and she looks out at the leaden sky and she tells herself that it will rain soon. And that means that Megan will come home, because she hates the rain.

Nicole stares at that sky. It is a deep, oppressive gray. It looks bloated with moisture. It has no option but to relieve itself of the pressure it contains. It will unburden itself. And then Megan will come home.

It’ll be a phone call, thinks Nicole. She won’t just turn up at the door, because she’s worried that we’ll be angry with her. She’ll phone instead. She’ll say, ‘Mom,’ and her voice will be cracking and fearful, and then she will say, ‘I want to come home.’ That’s how it will be. That’s how the agony will end. And when they meet up, Megan will appear tired and hungry and not a little frightened by her experience, and there will be hugs and tears and a lot of emotional release, and everyone will say sorry and promise to do better and they will forgive but not forget and they will all be supremely grateful for the happy outcome.

That’s what will happen.

When it rains.

Doyle at his desk in the squadroom. On the phone to Norman Chin.

‘What can you tell us, Norm?’

‘I can tell you many things, oh seeker of wisdom. What I can’t tell you is cause of death. Not with just three body parts. She could have had her heart ripped out for all I know, but without a torso. .’

‘Yeah, I know, Norm. We did our best. So far, that’s all we got.’

‘No problem. With a genius like me on the case, who needs a body, right? So, we’re running a tox screen. Results aren’t back yet, but I’ll let you know.’

‘What about time of death?’

‘Again, not easy. I got no core temperature readings to work with, not much in the way of body fluids, the parts were tightly sealed in the garbage bags against infestation. .’

‘Best guess?’

‘Recent. No more than about twenty hours ago.’

Doyle checks his watch. It’s one-thirty in the afternoon now. That puts TOD at somewhere after 5.30 p.m. yesterday.

‘Anything else?’

‘Yeah. The body was cut up with a serrated blade. There’s no finesse about it. No evidence of any surgical expertise. She was basically sawn into pieces, probably just to make her easier to dispose of.’

‘What about the other wounds you mentioned, on her face?’

‘I was coming to that. They’re present on the other parts too. Numerous incisions made by a sharp blade — a razor blade or scalpel, probably. Burn marks. I don’t know what caused them, but I don’t think it was a cigarette. Then, on the buttocks in particular, there are many long raised welts. It looks as though somebody got their kicks by whipping the hell out of her. Sometimes they’ve ripped right through the skin.’

Doyle closes his eyes. The images return. A naked girl, terrified and screaming. A man standing over her. The whip he yields lashing at her flesh.

The feeling of déjà vu is nauseating.

‘Jesus,’ he says.

‘Yeah, and that’s not the worst of it. There is extensive damage to the anus, rectum and vagina, consistent with the insertion of sharp-edged implements. This poor girl was subject to intense and prolonged torture of the worst kind. This is one sick individual you’re looking for here, Doyle.’

Doyle finds himself nodding. His lips curl in disgust and fury at what this bastard did. He badly wants to get his hands on the twisted fuck.

‘Tell me about the tattoo,’ he says.

‘Sure. You ever had one?’

‘No.’

‘What, not even a little one somewhere? One that only your darling wife knows about?’

‘Not even that. Get on with it, Norm.’

‘All right. What you should know about tattoos is that they tend to fade over time. When they’re new, the colors are vivid. The colors on this girl’s tattoo are really bright. The other thing you need to know is that a tattoo isn’t like a painting. It’s an open wound to the skin. That means it has to heal. Because of that, fresh tattoos often scab over until the healing process is complete.’

‘And this one had scabs, right?’

‘Correct. It’s a very recent tattoo. Put there in the last few days.’

That’s all Doyle needed to hear. He didn’t need the explanation of the deductive process. He’s heard it all before. He knows a lot more about tattoos than he’s willing to reveal right now.

‘You said it’s a picture of an angel.’

‘Yeah. It’s good work. Very artistic. This is no backstreet hack job. Should make it easier to narrow down the list of people who could have put it there.’

Doyle already has a list in mind. If it were any narrower it would be squeezing the fuck out of the one person it contains. Something he would be perfectly content to watch.

‘How old was she?’

He waits for the evasive answer. Another rough estimate. Still, it could be helpful.

‘Sixteen. She’d have been seventeen on the third of next month.’

Doyle feels the surprise, takes a mental step back to determine what he would have been thinking if it hadn’t been a surprise.

‘You know who she is,’ he says.

‘Like I said, who needs a whole corpse when you got me on the team? I cross-checked with the Missing Persons records. Found a girl who disappeared last Saturday.’

Yesterday was Tuesday, thinks Doyle. That’s a lot of time she spent in the company of her torturer before he finished her off. Jesus.

‘You sure it’s her?’

‘Positive. Photographs match. Dental records match. Fingerprints match. I even found an old fracture to her thumb, done when she was nine. I’ve ordered a DNA test, which we’ll have to wait for, but I’m certain we have the right girl.’

‘Okay, Norm. Thanks. That’s great work. So who is she?’

‘Name’s Hamlyn. Megan Hamlyn.’

Nicole Hamlyn sits in her house in Forest Hills, which is light years away from the East Village, and stares out of her window again. The clouds are black now, and appear to be hovering just feet above the houses. She imagines a black balloon being filled with water, stretching and straining as it fills, becoming more pendulous every second, threatening to burst at any moment. The expectation, the tension, as she waits for the explosion.

And then it happens. One huge deep rumble of thunder. A roar of relief as the heavens relent and release their unbearable load.

The rain comes not in droplets but in globules. Massive spheres that crash into the ground and throw up huge splashes. Rain that looks as though it could hurt.

She pictures her Megan. Frightened. Running for cover. Pulling her coat over her head as she hurries through the downpour, looking for somewhere, anywhere, that will afford her protection from this onslaught. She pictures her huddled under an awning or in a doorway, shivering and wet.

But, above all, she imagines her wishing for her home. Her family. Warmth and dryness and love.

And then Nicole sees the car.

It’s a sedan. It cruises like a shark through the waters. It is long and sleek and dark. Too dark. This is not a bringer of happiness. It glides like a predator, and as it nears her house she wishes for it not to notice her, not to see this house or the woman watching from its window. She prays that it will continue on its deadly prowl, that it will seek out some other unfortunate victim.

But then it slows, and she feels the terror start to build inside. Wishes that this house was not so stark and white, that it could blend into the shadows and the grayness. Wishes that her outline was not so clear in the window. Wishes that she could run and hide and cover her ears and wait for the outsiders to go away again.

But she finds herself transfixed. She cannot move from that chair she has spent so many hours in lately. It is as if it has taken hold of her and is forcing her to play this out, this most dreaded of outcomes.

The car stops, and it is directly in front of her house. Not even slightly to one side, so that she might imagine they are going to see one of her neighbors. No, it is here, lined up with her front door. They are coming to see her. Even in this rain, they are coming.

She sees the car doors open. One either side. Driver and passenger. They always come in twos. She sees them glance up at the sky, as if they too cannot believe what a backdrop nature has created for them on this fateful day. She sees them turn up their collars and make a dash toward the house. Her house. The house where she is sitting and watching and waiting for Megan to come home. Because that is who is supposed to be coming up her path now. Megan.

And, in a way, she knows that that is what is happening. She knows that Megan is here, in the form of these two men. It is the story of the Monkey’s Paw. She has wished for the return of a loved one and that wish has been granted, but in a way that is more horrific than anything she could have imagined.

When the doorbell rings, and its usually joyful notes sound like the solemn doleful tolling of a church bell, she cannot move. She stays glued to her chair at the window and pretends it’s not happening, even though she can feel the tears already starting to build.

She hears a noise behind her, and she looks. Steve is moving to answer the door. He glances at her, and there are questions on his face because he knows she has seen the people who have come to darken their lives, and all she can do is shake her head slightly, even though it is not enough to stop him, not enough to prevent this happening.

She hears the door being opened. Hears the voices. Officious male voices. Voices dripping with the promise of unbearable sadness, which Steve doesn’t seem to notice because he is allowing them in. He doesn’t know what he is doing. He is letting them in and actually closing the door behind them.

And now they are all trapped here together.

Now it is too late.