She smiled and took her hand away. “Good,” she said. “So, um, have you found anything that’s, you know. Something that might help?”
In fact, the only thing I had found was a fondness for having her hand on my shoulder, and for some reason that was tremendously irritating. After all, I had gone my entire life without feeling even a small zephyr from the hurricane winds of human lust—why should I start now, with an unobtainable golden-haired goddess? And seriously, I had much more important things to do, many of them involving duct tape and fillet knives. But I fought down my rising crankiness and, in the spirit of cooperation mandated by Captain Matthews, I gave her an answer.
“In the first place,” I said, “you’re supposed to say, ‘What have you got?’ Not, ‘Um, have you found anything?’ ”
Jackie smiled again. “Okay,” she said, and added, “What have you got?”
“Don’t look so happy,” I said. “It’s kind of a casual, short-tempered snarl. Like this.” I set my face in my very best imitation of Deborah’s Cop Face and said, “What have you got.”
Jackie laughed. It was such an infectiously cheerful sound that for a moment I forgot we were standing by a mutilated corpse dumped on a heap of garbage. “Okay,” she said. “So you’re not just a forensics geek; you’re an acting coach, too, huh? All right. How’s this?” And she twisted her face into a cranky-fish mask that actually looked a lot like Deborah’s expression. “What have you got,” she deadpanned. Then she chuckled again, and I felt an answering smile creeping onto my face.
Deborah, however, did not seem to share our good spirits. She scowled even more, and said, “If you two Twinkies are done clow
ning around, we still got a chopped-up body here.”
“Oh,” Jackie said, immediately looking serious again. “I’m sorry, Sergeant. Of course you’re right.”
Although I couldn’t help thinking that Debs was a little bit of a buzz-kill, I also knew she was right. And in any case, I didn’t like the bizarre human feelings that Jackie was causing in me. So I gave them both a short, very professional nod, and went back to work.
I had only been working at it for a very short time when I heard someone gag and say, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, my God,” and since I was fairly certain Robert had not come back for another peek at the party, I turned to look at Vince to see what had caused that kind of reaction in someone who was usually so unflappable, even in the face of the most extreme carnage.
Vince had dragged a box over to the Dumpster. He was standing on it and very carefully examining the body, but something had frozen him in place, absolutely motionless, half bent into the Dumpster, and I felt a new hiss of interest from the Passenger.
“What is it,” I asked him, fighting to keep the eagerness out of my voice.
“Oh, holy fuck,” he said. “I can’t believe this.”
“Believe what?” I said, more than a little irritated at the way he had to emote his way through a long dramatic buildup instead of simply answering my question.
“Semen,” he said, shaking his head and turning to face me with a look of complete disgust. “There’s semen in the eye socket.”
I blinked; I have to admit that seemed extreme, even to me. “The eye socket? Are you sure?” I said, and it is an indication of how shocked I was that I said something that stupid.
“I’m sure,” he said, turning back to look at the body once more. “It’s actually in the fucking eye socket, which means— Oh, Jesus Fucking Christ.”
I stepped over beside him and looked again at the shattered remains of the young woman. She was still dead. Vince had turned her head slightly so the far side of her face was now visible, and although it was just as damaged, her other eye had not been torn out. It was wide-open, staring straight ahead at the improbable death that had come for her. I wondered what she had done to bring this kind of monstrous end to her life. Not that I am parroting the Homicidal Rapist Party Line of, She deserved it; she had it coming for dressing like that, and so on. I was quite sure that whoever this young woman had been, she had done nothing to deliberately provoke anything like this.
But there is always something the victim does unconsciously, some special trigger that brings a Passenger up out of the shadows and into the driver’s seat. Every Monster has his own specific flash point that ignites the Need, and it is almost always different.
And every Monster reacts in his own distinctive way, following a program that provides unique satisfaction, a series of rituals that makes sense only to him and ends in the way it absolutely must, no matter how bewildering it may seem to the casual human witness. And when the press and an outraged public recoil in horror and demand a reason, and wail their baffled chorus of, “Why would someone do that?” those of us in the know can only smile and say, Because. It will never make sense to you, or to anyone else, and it doesn’t need to. It only has to satisfy Me, fulfill My special fantasy. It is an E ticket to a ride with only one seat, Mine, and no one else will ever get to feel this Me-Only roller-coaster thrill, the one thing that provides just Me with the ultimate in satisfaction, and whether it is slowly and joyously slicing up a carefully selected playmate, or butchering a young woman and filling her empty eye socket with semen, it is always the same solo act with the same conclusion of release, satisfaction, fulfillment.
But this—
I know very well that we all feel sexual urges, to one degree or another, even those of us in the Dark Brotherhood. It may be the most basic and pervasive piece of the human clock; we all tick toward sex. But the hands move at different speeds for all of us, and the thing that sets off the chimes is almost always unique. Even so, this was well outside the range even of my understanding. I could not remember seeing something quite this uniquely lustful.
Semen in the eye socket: a release that was actual as well as metaphorical. What did that mean? Because it always means something. It is always a fundamental symbol in a world of personal meaning, a basic key to understanding who had done this. Semen left on dead bodies is actually very common, and the specific place where it is found is always important. It indicates a desire to control, degrade, conquer that particular spot. So it was quite possible that the killer had some very special issues with vision, or watching—or it could just as easily be a problem with blue eyes, or contact lenses, or someone winking.
Still, it was a starting point for someone with my special skills—the professional ones—and I pondered it as I worked. It was, after all, an area of real personal interest to me. And additionally, if this had been Deborah’s case, she would almost certainly have demanded some kind of special insight from Sick and Twisted Me. So I thought about it, and although I came up with nothing helpful, at least it passed the time.
Because we had arrived at the Dumpster so late in the day, after lunch, it was well past quitting time when we finally wrapped it up at the scene. I packed up my samples, grabbed my bag, and turned to go. Chase was standing at the yellow perimeter tape, chatting with a couple of uniformed officers. He was apparently no longer fighting to hold down his lunch; in fact, he seemed to be in the middle of some spellbinding narration, and the officers were following his every word with awestruck interest. Not really wanting to interrupt such a chummy little scene, I gave them a wide berth.
But Chase appeared at my elbow the moment I was under the tape. “What did you find?” he asked me. “Is it a serial killer?”
To be honest, I was getting a little bit annoyed at his obsession with serial killers. Why does everyone assume that Miami is overrun with serial killers? Besides, Robert made them sound like oddities, freaks, some kind of savage, ravening, subhuman beast, and as I could have told him, they really aren’t. They’re perfectly normal. I mean, most of the time.
But honesty is not always the best policy, no matter what the Boy Scouts may tell you. So I just shook my head at his inane question. “Too soon to tell,” I said.
He stayed with me all the way back to headquarters, asking questions that could easily have been answered directly if only he had watched me work: what had I done at the scene, what had I found, what kind of samples did I take, why did I want that, what would I do with it, what happened next. It was all extremely annoying and I couldn’t help thinking that Jackie Forrest would almost certainly have asked more intelligent questions—and looked a great deal better asking them, too.