Blood Relatives

1

She came running through the rain shoeless, neon signs and traffic signals splintering in liquid reflection beneath her flying feet. She fled like misjoined Siamese twins, feet touching mirrored feet on the slick black asphalt, puddles of red and green, orange and blue splashing up tintlessly to stain her legs with the gutter filth of the city.

She was bleeding.

She was bleeding from a gash on her right cheek, and she was bleeding from cuts on the palms and fingers of both hands. The front of her dress had been ripped, and she tried to hold the torn sides of the V closed over her brassiere as she ran through the rain. It had been raining since 10:00. The rain was neither cruel nor driving now; it had changed to a gentle drizzle that sent mist drifting up from the pavement. In the distance, the green globes of the 87th Precinct shone through the rain and through the mist.

The girl slipped, her feet skidded out from under her. There was a bone-jarring wrench as her hip collided with the pavement. She expelled her breath in pain, and then sat quite still on the sidewalk, her head bent, the rain gently pattering around her. There was blood on her slip, and on her brassiere, smears of blood on her nylon pantyhose. Blood seeped from the open wound on her cheek, blood flamed in the horizontal slashes that crossed her palms and fingers. A traffic light turned to red, suffusing her with color so intense that — for a moment only — it seemed the steady ooze of blood had entirely engulfed the girl. The light clicked into the emptiness of the street. The girl’s face, her dress, the cones of her brassiere, the rain-spattered pantyhose, the seething cuts on her hands, the gash on her cheek, all turned green. She struggled to her feet and began running toward the station house.

Detective Bert Kling was at the muster desk, booking a young man who spoke only Spanish. He had just pointed to the Spanish-language version of the warning-of-rights poster. The young man looked up at the sign, nodded, and was beginning to read it silently when the girl burst into the muster room. There were two glass-paneled inner doors behind the wooden doors at the front of the station house. The girl hit those doors with the palms of both hands. Kling heard the thud of her hands hitting the glass panels, and turned immediately. Bloody palm prints. He would always remember seeing first the bloody prints, one on each of the glass-paneled doors. And then the doors swinging open and the girl spilling into the room. Arms wide, hands imploring, cuts on the fingers and palms, open wound on the cheek, wet black hair hanging limply about a pale mascara-streaked face, blue dress torn open over white blood-smeared bra, she lurched toward the muster desk, beseeching Kling to help, for God’s sake, help.

Patrolman Shanahan had wet feet.

The rain had stopped some ten minutes ago, but he’d been sloshing around in it all day now (or at least since 3:45 this afternoon, when he’d relieved Donleavy on post), and his feet were wet and he was developing a chill, and he’d probably be home in bed for a week with the miseries. He was a large man, Shanahan, looking even bigger in the black raingear that billowed out from his massive shoulders like Batman’s cape, or maybe Count Dracula’s. He carried a nightstick in his right hand, and a flashlight in the other, and he walked along the deserted pavements of this section of his beat, thankful that the rain had stopped, and thankful that it was already 11:30, which meant he’d be relieved in fifteen minutes or so, but not too thankful for the wet feet or the squishy shoes.

He was surprised to see the hand.

The hand lay just outside the open doorway of an abandoned tenement. He could not see an arm attached to the hand, could not in fact see anything beyond the hand and the wrist, and he thought for a frightening moment that the hand had been severed from the rest of the body. But then he saw the faint outline of an arm, and beyond that, the shape of a body lying just inside and athwart the entrance to the building. He went up the wide flat steps of the front stoop to where the hand lay palm up on the top step, and he flashed his light onto the curled fingers and saw the cuts on the palm and the fingers and the wrist, and knew before he threw his light into the hallway that this was going to be a bad one.

He realized with a start that he was standing in blood, and recoiled from it in horror, as though it were capable of dissolving the soles of his shoes. As he backed away from the sticky puddle underfoot, the beam of his torch swung slightly higher, and he saw the body now and felt immediately sick to his stomach. He looked over his shoulder quickly, perhaps because death was so suddenly palpable in that narrow cubicle, perhaps because he was embarrassed by his reaction and wanted to make certain no one had seen it. The girl lay on her back in the blood. She was perhaps sixteen years old, and she had dark hair, and brown eyes that were open wide and staring up at the ceiling overhead. The ceiling was bloated with water that seemed ready to burst through the plaster and inundate the small entryway. The girl was wearing a pink dress that had been slashed to tatters. The knife had been relentless, cutting through fabric and flesh indiscriminately, gashes crossing and crisscrossing, overlapping in frenzy and fury, open angry trenches on her breasts and on her face — Shanahan turned away and vomited into his hand when he realized the girl’s nose was hanging from her face by a single sliver of skin.

Then he went to the box on the corner and called the precinct.

Monoghan without Monroe was like bagels without lox — Carella hardly recognized the man without his partner. In this city, the detective catching a homicide was responsible for the case from that moment on, but the Homicide Division nonetheless sent an obligatory team of detectives to the scene, presumably to lend their expertise to the investigation, or perhaps to guarantee a dignity appropriate to the seriousness of the crime. Monoghan and Monroe worked as a team out of Homicide, but tonight there was only Monoghan, and he sounded like a voice without an echo, looked like a body without a shadow. His partner was sick, he explained. The flu. More damn flu around this month. Wearing a black overcoat, white handkerchief in the breast pocket, black snap-brim fedora, black leather gloves, white silk muffler, black bowtie behind it, Monoghan seemed dressed for the Governor’s Ball, or at least the opera. He told Carella at once that he had been dragged away from an anniversary party, a golden anniversary no less, and hoped he could get back to it before long. He seemed to imply that Carella had personally caused the death of the young girl who lay in the hallway in her own blood.

“How old you suppose she is?” Monoghan asked. “Her age, I mean,” he added immediately, as though sorely missing Monroe and trying to supply in monologue the endlessly redundant dialogue that had become their trademark over the years.

“She looks sixteen or seventeen,” Carella said.

He was staring at the open wounds all over the girl’s body. He could never get used to it, would never get used to this senseless reduction of flesh to rubble. Ten minutes ago, a half-hour ago, the girl had been alive. She now lay in angular disarray in an alien hallway, her life juices spilled around her as carelessly as dirty water from a dish basin. He looked at her corpse and squinched his eyes in pain, and when Monoghan commented that the guy had probably raped her first, since her pantyhose were all ripped and bloody around the crotch, Carella said nothing.

In a little while the assistant medical examiner arrived. Like any other physician called out on a rainy night, he was grumpy. The fact that this was a Saturday, when people were supposed to be out having a good time instead of examining homicide victims, did little to enliven his spirits. “No rest for the weary,” he said, and put his black bag down beside the dead girl.

“Well, at least the rain’s stopped,” Monoghan said.

“You know what they do in England when it rains, don’t you?” the ME asked.

“No, what?”

“They let it rain,” the ME said, and both men burst out laughing.

“Rain brings out the bedbugs,” Monoghan said. “Had to be a bedbug did something like this.”

“A lunatic,” the ME said.

“A crazy person,” Monoghan said, and smiled. He had found a substitute for Monroe. Even on this damp Saturday night, criminal detection could proceed in an orderly Tweedledum and Tweedledee fashion. His mood perceptibly brightened. “Did a nice job on her,” he said conversationally.

“Yep. Cut the trachea, the carotid, and the jugular,” the ME said.

“Notice her hands?” Monoghan said.

“Getting to them,” the ME said.

To Carella, apparently feeling amplification was necessary, Monoghan said, “In some of these incised wound homicides, you get these defense cuts. Person puts up his arm to block the knife, he’ll get cut on the fingers someplace.”

“Or the wrist,” the ME said.

“Or the forearm.”

“Or the palm.”

“I hate knife wounds, don’t you?” Monoghan said. “You get a bullet wound, it’s neat. Knife wounds are messy.”

“I’ve seen messy bullet wounds, too,” the ME said.

“But not as messy as knife wounds. I hate knife wounds.”

“I hate blunt-force wounds,” the ME said. “But your bullet wounds can get pretty messy, too.”

“I’m not talking about your shotgun wounds now,” Monoghan said.

“No, I’m talking about your average exit wound from a .45-caliber slug, for example. Drive a subway train through that exit wound. That’s a messy wound.”

“Still, I hate knife wounds worse than anything else.”

“Well, to each his own,” the ME said, and shrugged, and snapped his bag shut. “She’s all yours,” he said, and rose from where he’d been crouching over the girl.

“Was she raped?” Monoghan asked.

“Can’t tell you that till we get her downtown,” the ME said.

In the girl’s handbag, they found a comb, a package of menthol cigarettes, a book of matches, $3 .40 in cash, and a Social Security card that told them her name was Muriel Stark.

At twenty minutes past midnight a woman named Lillian Lowery called the precinct and asked to talk to a detective. When Sergeant Murchison asked what it was in reference to, she told him she was worried about her daughter and her niece, who had gone to a party at 8:00 and who were not yet home. Murchison asked her to hold, and then put her through to Detective Meyer Meyer upstairs in the squadroom.

The woman immediately told Meyer that the girls were only fifteen and seventeen years old respectively, and that they had promised to be home by 11:00 at the very latest. When they had not arrived by 11:30, she had called the house where the party was still going on, and a boy who answered the phone told her they’d left at least an hour before that. It should have taken them no more than twenty minutes to get home. It was now almost 12:30 — which meant that nearly two hours had elapsed since they’d left the party. Meyer, who had a daughter himself, gently suggested to Mrs. Lowery that perhaps her daughter and niece had decided to take a walk with some of the boys who’d been at the party, but Mrs. Lowery insisted her daughter was very good about keeping her word; if, for example, she knew she was going to be late, she always called home to say so. Which is why Mrs. Lowery was worried. Meyer took down a description of the girls, and then asked for their full names. Mrs. Lowery said her daughter’s name was Patricia Lowery, and her niece’s name was Muriel Stark.

Meyer asked her to call him again if the girls showed up; if he did not hear from her by morning, he would pass the information on to the Missing Persons Bureau. In the meantime, he phoned down to the desk sergeant and asked him to put out a 10–69 to all the precinct’s radio motor patrol cars, specifying a non-crime alert for two dark-haired, brown-eyed, teenage girls, one wearing a blue, the other a pink dress, last seen in the vicinity of 1214 Harding, and presumably heading south toward their home at 648 St. John’s Road. Meyer gave the desk sergeant the girls’ names, of course, but neither of those names meant anything to him. He had come on duty shortly before midnight, and did not know that both Kling and Carella were actively investigating two separate cases involving two teenage girls. His ignorance wasn’t particularly uncommon; no one expected every detective on the squad to know what every other detective on the squad was doing at any given hour of the day. Kling, for example, did not know that Carella was at this moment in the hospital mortuary waiting for a necropsy report that would tell him whether or not Muriel Stark had been raped. And Carella did not know that Kling was on the eighth floor of that same hospital talking to an intern who said it would now be all right for him to interrogate the girl who had burst into the muster room two hours earlier. Kling hadn’t even known her name until the intern gave it to him.

At 12:33 A.M. Patricia Lowery put some of the pieces together for them.

The first thing she told Kling was that her cousin Muriel had been killed. She told Kling where the slaying had taken place, and Kling went immediately to the telephone at the nurse’s station in the corridor outside and called the precinct — only to learn that Carella had responded to the homicide an hour ago. The desk sergeant checked the log, in fact, and told Kling that Carella was at that moment in the hospital mortuary. Kling thanked him, and before going back into Patricia’s room, called down to the mortuary to tell Carella where he was and to advise him that he was about to interrogate an eyewitness to the crime. Carella told him to hold off for a minute, he’d be right upstairs.

They had washed her and dressed her wounds and given her a clean hospital gown. Her hair was neatly combed and her eyes were dry. A police stenographer sat by the bed, his pencil poised over his pad, ready to record every word. Carella and Kling asked their questions softly. Patricia answered in a clear, steady voice, recalling emotionlessly and without horror the events that had taken place after she and her cousin left the party.

CARELLA: That was at what time?

PATRICIA: We left at about ten-thirty.

KLING: Were you heading home?

PATRICIA: Yes.

KLING: Can you tell us what happened?

PATRICIA: It began raining again. It was raining on and off all night. It slowed down when we left, and then it began again. So we were running down the street, ducking in doorways and under awnings, like that. We weren’t wearing raincoats because when we went to the party it wasn’t raining. We were maybe two blocks from Paul’s house when it started raining.

CARELLA: Paul?

PATRICIA: Paul Gaddis. He’s the boy who had the party. It was his birthday. His eighteenth birthday.

CARELLA: How old are you, Patricia?

PATRICIA: Fifteen. I’ll be sixteen in December. December twelfth.

CARELLA: And your cousin was how old?

PATRICIA: Seventeen.

CARELLA: All right, go ahead. You were walking from Paul’s house—

PATRICIA: Yes.

KLING: On Harding was this?

PATRICIA: Yes. Where all the stores are. Near Harding and Sixteenth. It was raining very hard when we got to Sixteenth, so we stopped under an awning for a while, until it let up. Then we started walking down Harding again, toward Fourteenth. There’s construction going on around there, these buildings are being knocked down, they’re putting up a housing project. So when we got to Fourteenth, it began raining again, and Muriel and I ran into the hallway of this abandoned building. Just to get out of the rain. Till it let up a little. We were only three or four blocks from where we lived, we figured we’d wait a few minutes and then go home.

KLING: Did your cousin live with you, is that it?

PATRICIA: Yes. She came to live with us when I was thirteen. Her parents got killed in an automobile accident on the turnpike.

CARELLA: Do you have any brothers or sisters, Patricia?

PATRICIA: Yes, I have an older brother.

CARELLA: What’s his name?

PATRICIA: Andrew Lowery.

CARELLA: How old is he?

PATRICIA: Nineteen.

CARELLA: Does he still live at home?

PATRICIA: Yes.

CARELLA: Was he at the party tonight?

PATRICIA: No, he was working.

KLING: What kind of work does he do?

PATRICIA: Well, it’s only part-time. There’s this steak joint on the Stem, they call him when they need help, usually on a Saturday night. I guess if he hadn’t been working, he’d have come to the party with us. And then what happened wouldn’t have happened.

KLING: Do you want to tell us what happened now?

PATRICIA: Yes. We were standing in the hallway there, looking out at the rain. I didn’t think it would ever let up. I kept telling Muriel we should just make a run for it, you know, but she didn’t want to ruin her dress. It was coming down in sheets by then, I guess she was right. Still—

KLING: What time was this?

PATRICIA: It must’ve been close to eleven.

CARELLA: Go on.

PATRICIA: There was nobody on the street, everything was deserted because it was raining so hard. We must’ve stood in the hallway there for at least five minutes without even seeing a car go by. Then — I still don’t know how he got there, he must’ve been in the building all along, maybe, sleeping in one of the empty apartments or something — this man was suddenly there. He just stepped out of the shadows behind us, and he grabbed Muriel by the wrist, and she screamed, or at least she started to scream. But then she saw he had a knife and she shut up even before he told her to shut up. I guess my first reaction was to run, to get away from there. But he was holding the knife on Muriel, and I figured if I did anything like that, he might hurt her just out of spite. So I stood there. I guess you just figure, in a situation like that, that it isn’t going to get worse, it’s just going to work out someway, somebody’ll come to save you.

CARELLA: Did you recognize this man? Was he anyone you knew, or anyone you’d seen before?

PATRICIA: No. He was a perfect stranger.

CARELLA: Can you describe him to us?

PATRICIA: Yes. He was a tall man. About as tall as you, I would say. Six-two, or six-three.

CARELLA: That would make him taller than I am.

PATRICIA: Well, no, he was about your height. A little huskier, though.

CARELLA: Was he white or black?

PATRICIA: White.

CARELLA: Did you notice what color his hair was?

PATRICIA: Dark. Either brown or black, but very dark.

KLING: And his eyes?

PATRICIA: He had blue eyes.

KLING: Was he clean-shaven, or did he have a mustache or beard?

PATRICIA: Clean-shaven.

CARELLA: What was he wearing?

PATRICIA: A suit, I think. Or else slacks and a sports jacket, I’m not sure. If it was a sports jacket, it was a solid color. And dark.

CARELLA: Shirt and tie?

PATRICIA: No tie.

CARELLA: Would you recognize him if you saw him again?

PATRICIA: Yes. There wasn’t any light in the hallway, but there was light from the streetlamp. I’d recognize him. And I’d also recognize his voice.

KLING: You said he told your cousin to shut up—

PATRICIA: Yes, that was after she’d stopped screaming already. She screamed when he first came out of the darkness, and then she saw the knife and stopped screaming, but he told her to shut up, anyway.

KLING: What else did he say?

PATRICIA: That he wouldn’t hurt us if we did what he told us to do. He was holding Muriel by the wrist, and I was sort of against the opposite wall. He had the knife pointed at Muriel.

CARELLA: What kind of knife was it?

PATRICIA: What do you mean?

CARELLA: A switchblade or—?

PATRICIA: No, no, it was a regular knife. Like the kind of knife you see in a kitchen.

CARELLA: A long knife, or a short one?

PATRICIA: I guess the blade was about four inches long.

CARELLA: And when he came out of the darkness, he had the knife in his hand already?

PATRICIA: Yes.

CARELLA: From which direction did he come? The right of the entrance hall, or the left?

PATRICIA: The right, I think. Yes. Muriel was standing on the right, so that’s where he must have come from. Because it was Muriel he grabbed, you see.

KLING: What happened after he told Muriel to shut up?

PATRICIA: He made her get down on her knees in front of him. And then he told her she was going to do what he wanted her to do. He said go on, take it, I know you want it. I was watching them. I was standing against the wall, watching them. I thought after she did it, I thought that would be the end of it. But he suddenly started stabbing her, he was... it was terrible to watch, he just stabbed her again and again and I stood there watching what he was doing to her and I couldn’t believe this was happening, I couldn’t believe he was doing this to her, I almost couldn’t believe my own eyes. And I knew what would happen next, I knew he would force me to do the same thing, first promising he wouldn’t hurt me, but hurting me afterward, anyway. I realized I had to run, but somehow I couldn’t move, I just watched while he kept doing it to her. And then he—

CARELLA: Patricia, you don’t need to—

PATRICIA: I want to tell you, I want to tell you everything. He turned to me, and he said, You’re next, and I thought he meant he was going to force me the way he’d forced Muriel, but then I realized he was going to kill me, he was coming at me with the knife, he was moving the knife toward my face. I put out my hand to protect myself, I threw back my arm, you know, like this, to try to protect my face, and he cut me across the palm of my hand, I guess it was, and I threw up my other hand, and he kept forcing me back against the wall and slashing at my hands. He ripped open the front of my dress with the tip of the knife, and I remembered what he had done to Muriel’s breasts, and I began screaming at the top of my lungs, but no one heard me, there was nobody in the neighborhood, it’s a construction site, you see. That was when he cut me on the cheek, when I was screaming, here under the eye. I don’t know how I got away from him, I think I must have kicked him. I remember he was groaning on the floor when I ran out of the building, so I guess I must have kicked him. Then I heard him yelling behind me, and I heard him coming down the steps after me, and I knew if he caught me he would kill me the way he’d killed Muriel. I was thinking ahead by then. I was thinking if I ran home, he could catch me going up the stairs, we live on the third floor, he could catch me in the hallway. But if I ran to the police station, if I could just get to the police station, then there’d be cops all around, and he wouldn’t be able to hurt me. So that’s where I ran, to the police station.

KLING: Was he following you?

PATRICIA: I don’t know. I think so. But I slipped and fell when I was about two blocks from the station house, and I didn’t hear anybody behind me, so maybe he’d given up by then. Will you catch him?

In the mortuary downstairs, the coroner gave Carella and Kling a verbal necropsy report on Muriel Stark. Though she had suffered many wounds during the brutal assault, the coroner told them that the fatal wound had most likely been a gaping incision of the left shoulder and neck, six and one-half inches long, and one and one-quarter inches deep, which had completely severed the left common carotid artery and internal jugular vein, and extended through the left lobe of the thyroid and anterior portion of the trachea. Death, in the coroner’s opinion, had probably resulted from external hemorrhage, attended by inhalation of infused blood, and supervening pulmonary air embolism.

The coroner explained that in most homicides where rape was suspected, the examiner searched for injuries of the genital organs, blood and semen stains, and foreign hairs or other foreign substances. The coroner had found no traces of seminal fluid in the dead girl’s vaginal, rectal, or digestive tracts, and there had been no semen stains on her clothing. This did not eliminate the possibility of rape; it merely indicated that there had been no attendant ejaculation. Neither did he find foreign hairs or substances, but there was one wound that indicated the crime might have been sexually motivated, a wound that in itself had hemorrhaged severely enough to have been a possible cause of death. This wound had been the result of the tearing of the vaginal vault, the introduction into the pelvis of a sharp instrument, most probably the murder weapon, and the subsequent tearing of the left common iliac artery. At this point the coroner asked if he might introduce an opinion somewhat beyond the scope of pathology or toxicology, and then suggested to the detectives that perhaps they were dealing with a sadistic killer here, the murder having all the earmarks of so-called “lust” murders, in which the perpetrator’s libido could be satisfied only by slaying. The coroner mentioned again that he was not a psychiatrist, of course, and this was merely his opinion.

The detectives thanked him, and then went uptown again to the abandoned tenement on Fourteenth and Harding.