The Death Sculptor

Twenty-Nine

There must’ve been at least a dozen police vehicles parked around the lot behind the New World Cinema building in Marina Harbor. The curious crowd that had gathered was now substantial, and the number of news vans and reporters had doubled in the last hour.

‘Excuse me,’ a young woman in her mid-twenties asked the mechanic, who was standing towards the back of the crowd, leisurely observing the police and media circus unfold. ‘Do you know what happened here?’ She spoke with a Midwestern accent. Maybe Missouri or Wisconsin. ‘Has a boat been stolen?’

The mechanic chuckled at the woman’s naivety and turned to face her.

‘I don’t think you’d get this many cops and TV vans around here just for a stolen boat. Not even in Los Angeles.’

The woman’s eyes widened a fraction. ‘Someone was murdered?’ Her voice lifted with excitement.

The mechanic held the suspense for a moment and then nodded. ‘Yeah. Inside that last boat right at the end of the dock.’

The woman went on tiptoe in an effort to catch a glimpse of the boat. She saw nothing other than the backs of the heads of fellow curious onlookers. ‘Have they brought the body out yet?’ she asked, moving from side to side, still trying to see something.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Have you been here long?’

The mechanic nodded. ‘I guess you could say that.’

‘Gee, I wonder what happened.’

The mechanic had read somewhere once that most people were fascinated with death. The more vicious and gruesome, the more they wanted to know about it and the more they wanted to see. Some scientists attributed it to a violent primal instinct – dormant in some, but very active in many. Some psychologists believed it was related to the obsession humans have with trying to understand death and what happens afterwards.

‘I heard he was decapitated,’ the mechanic said, testing the woman’s morbid curiosity.

‘No way.’ She got more agitated, going up on the tips of her toes and craning her neck like a meerkat as she tried to see beyond the crowd.

‘That’s what I heard,’ the mechanic continued. ‘And that the whole boat was washed with blood. Pretty sick, apparently.’

‘Mother of God,’ the woman said, bringing a hand to her mouth.

‘Yeah, welcome to LA.’

She looked disgusted for a couple of seconds, until her eyes caught a glimpse of a police officer just ahead of them. She then bounced on her toes with enthusiasm like a kid who’d just been told she’d be going to Disneyworld for the first time. ‘Oh, there’s a cop, let’s go ask him.’

‘No, I’m OK. My work here is done. I’ve got to go anyway.’

‘I can’t believe you’re not curious.’

‘I don’t think there’s anything that cop can tell me that I don’t already know.’

The woman frowned at the words but seemed too excited to give them much thought. ‘Well, I’ll ask him anyway. I wanna know.’

The mechanic nodded and stepped back into the crowd.

The woman pushed through and approached the officer.

Neither she, the officer, nor anyone else in the crowd noticed the tiny bloodstains on the mechanic’s trouser hems.