Kiss and Die

Chapter 33

Mann stepped back from the doorway and allowed Daniel Lu through. He had already got the hotel to erect a barrier on that side of the landing and to stop allowing guests back up to the floor. As the first officer on scene it was his job to secure it, stop it getting contaminated. Daniel handed him a protective forensic suit. ‘Put this on. You can help me till the rest of the team arrive. This is the only point of entry, in and out. Perp must have touched it. Dust the door for me.’

Daniel Lu was the best CSI investigator there was. He was tireless, he was meticulous. He had been the one to first examine Helen’s body when it had been found dumped in a bin bag at a reservoir in the New Territories. He’d never lost that look of sympathy and awkwardness whenever they met. It had been a hell of a day, a hell of a time.

Tom Sheng arrived straight after Daniel. ‘Who found the body?’ He didn’t bother with pleasantries. There was little love lost between Daniel and Sheng. It wasn’t just that they had Mia between them, they were opposite types.

‘I did,’ answered Mann.

‘You had a tip-off?’ He signalled to the two detectives with him to stay where they were outside the tape.

‘No. I was coming up to give him his wallet. I took it off one of the girls. He didn’t answer the door so I let myself in and found him.’

‘Who is the woman who gave you the wallet?’

‘Michelle. She’s a singer in the lounge bar.’

Sheng shouted out to one of the officers outside. ‘Go and pull in one of the singers, Michelle, have her taken to the station.’

Daniel had stopped in the centre of the room. His head turned methodically, taking in the whole scene. He stood over the corpse and looked up to the ceiling at the arcs of blood. He moved his position, looked up again. He started drawing a plan of the scene in a notebook. Daniel’s mind worked on many planes, he was clever on so many levels. He was sharp and cynical and driven but the one thing that Mann recognized in Daniel was that he was unhappy.

‘Do you know him?’ asked Sheng, in the process of putting on a forensic suit.

‘No. I’ve never seen him before. A man named Max Kosmos is registered to the room, I’m guessing this must be him.’

Daniel Lu walked around to the far side of the bed; he lifted the corpse’s shoulder and checked beneath. ‘The blood’s settled. He’s been dead approximately fifteen to eighteen hours. He was killed here.’

‘That would make it in the early hours of yesterday morning.’ Tom Sheng looked around at the room. ‘Nothing knocked over, no obvious signs of a fight. Motive?’

‘Not robbery,’ Mann answered. ‘The safe is locked and he’s still wearing his watch.’

He looked over the desk. ‘His laptop’s still here, and a briefcase.’

Daniel moved around the body and dictated into a machine as he went.

‘Deep lacerations to his torso and legs, cut right through to the bone. The flesh has been scraped away. They cut his hamstrings, his knee ligaments, anterior and interior, his elbow joints, all severed to prevent movement. Whoever it was, they must have done this before. It’s messy but it’s accurate.’

‘Cause of death?’ Sheng was busy opening the safe with the hotel combination.

Daniel looked up from where he was busy measuring the depth of the wounds on the victim’s chest. ‘Leave that,’ he said to Sheng. ‘They might have tried to open it. It’s an obvious place for prints.’ Sheng stepped back, muttering under his breath. Daniel began photographing the injuries. ‘The chest trauma is what killed him. The blood is pooled here…but not before the perp had their fun.’

Daniel Lu looked behind him at the brocade curtains, ‘The splatter pattern around the room means that all these injuries were inflicted whilst he was still alive. And this was a lengthy, prolonged torture. Perp took their time.’ He took a gloved hand and hovered over Max Kosmos’s chest. ‘These are strange wounds, really deep. He was lying down when these were inflicted.’ He traced the wounds with his finger. ‘They extend all the way across. Something literally scooped his flesh out in long strokes.’ He looked up at the ceiling where the three trails of blood and flesh had dried to brown sprays across the ceiling. ‘I don’t know what weapon made these. But someone definitely used our friend here for target practice.’ He went back to his position at the end of the bed. ‘They were standing here and used a downward action. They are about five foot three or four, I would guess. Right-handed.’

‘If not robbery then some kind of revenge, retribution? This man wasn’t just murdered, he was punished,’ said Mann.

‘It looks sexual,’ Sheng said.

‘Maybe,’ answered Daniel. ‘They cut off his penis but waited until after death to do it, unlike the amputation of his testicles which, judging by the amount of blood, was done when he was still breathing. Not a complete job though.’ Daniel Lu lifted the scrotum. ‘Sheng, make yourself useful, come over here and hold this up, I need to take a photo of the injury. ’

For a second Sheng looked as if he was about to pass on the honour of helping Daniel but then thought better of it.

‘Sure.’ He lifted the scrotum to reveal that it was cut through by a wire which was still embedded in the wound.

‘I’ve never seen anything like this done to a man,’ said Sheng, wincing a little. ‘I’ve seen girls left tied to the bedpost, serious injuries from sadistic role-playing. I’ve never seen torture on this scale and in such a public place. Perp took a hell of a risk.’

‘It could have been accidental,’ said Mann, busy dusting for prints around the safe deposit box and the minibar. ‘Cock humiliation, servant-mistress stuff. Some people get off on pain, maybe Max Kosmos was one of them, maybe the game went too far.’

‘It’s not a game I can see me playing any time soon,’ said Daniel.

‘He bought her a rose, whoever she was,’ said Sheng, looking at a single red rose lying on its side by the champagne bottle. ‘Where do people get those on an evening? A restaurant, a bar?’

Mann picked it up. ‘Nobody buys his girlfriend fake flowers.’

‘Perp left it?’

‘Yeah, I don’t think it belongs here.’ Mann took the camera from Daniel and photographed the rose before bagging and labelling it.

Daniel Lu placed the family photo flat between two pieces of absorbent paper and inside a plastic sleeve. ‘Whoever did this was sat on him whilst they delivered the final wound. My guess is they used a butcher’s knife to cut off his head. It must have taken a while. Judging by the saturation of blood here on the pillow I would say they tipped his head forward and cut from behind first. Then I think this print here,’ Daniel examined an oval blood stain on the sheet, ‘is from the perp’s knee. I think the killer knelt on his chest and used their weight to put pressure onto the knife and sever the spine between vertebrae three and four.’ Daniel pointed to the handprints in blood on either side of Max Kosmos’s chest ‘We should get some good results from these.’

‘There are more prints in the bathroom,’ said Mann. ‘Perp cleaned up before they left.’

‘Take what you need from the box and make a start,’ said Daniel, tying bags around the victim’s hands to preserve any evidence trapped beneath the nails.

Mann went into the bathroom. He lifted the bloodied towels from behind the sink and hung them over the wire across the bath – if they got put into an airtight bag they would be ruined. He looked at the lipstick stain on the mirror. A perfect pink pout. He took out some of Daniel’s fingerprint tape and pressed it over then peeled it off in one sharp, exact move. When he was sure it was as good a print as he was going to get, he wrote on the edge and then filed it in an envelope before leaning forwards and breathing on the glass to frost it. A heart appeared. Mann breathed again to see it clearly. He stood back from it, staring. The writing was smudged; all Mann could make out was

Roses are red… written underneath

Sheng appeared beside him and reached past him and sprayed the mirror with a fixative spray. ‘If it was so much trouble to get the head off, why did the killer bother?’

Mann stared at the misty heart in the mirror.

‘And where is it now?’