Night bait, page 17
At that moment, an orange and white ambulance from D.C. General rumbled up and stopped. Two attendants, both fat and dressed in disheveled blue uniforms, hopped out of the boxlike compartment on the back and slogged to where the body lay, each hoisting one end of an aluminum stretcher with wheels. Neither of the men seemed to notice the rain.
"Follow 'em down," Dignazio said. "Find out who she is if you can, and call me at headquarters. I'm getting out of this fucking rain."
Elliot nodded awkwardly in his hood, and Dignazio waded back to his car. There was no reason to run; by then, the rain had seeped through his suit to his skin. He felt like he was standing in the shower fully clothed. There was a squishing sound when he sat down in the driver's seat. Looking in the rearview mirror, he saw that the rain had washed his hair straight down on all sides, bringing out his bald spot to a ludicrous degree, and making his head look like a white croquet ball with a black band around it. There didn't seem to be a square inch of his body that wasn't sopped. Over the car radio, the weather forecaster said that heavy showers would continue throughout the afternoon.
An instant later, the rain stopped.
"I'm not going with you anymore," Vickie said when Chet came to pick her up at five o'clock on Friday afternoon. "I quit."
Chet's eyes cut into hers. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong. Just go away."
Chet walked into the middle of the living room, looking up at the ceiling. "You're upset about something, Vickie. Tell me."
"All right," Vickie blurted, and stormed around the room, shaking her head up and down, "I'll tell you. Last night when I came in, my fiancee was waiting for me. He didn't know where I was, so he went to the police to report me missing. One of your assholes dug up my records and told Steve I used to be a hooker. And since I was still dressed up in my whore's costume, he thought that I was still hustling. So he walked out on me and said that he never wanted to see me again. He said that I was a used rubber."
Chet sighed with difficulty. "I'm very sorry to hear that, Vickie, but that's no reason to quit the case."
"No reason! If I hadn't been on this fuckin' case, none of it would've happened. It's all your fault."
Chet didn't raise his voice. "This case has nothing to do with your boyfriend leaving you. He left because he found out about your past, something that you should have told him a long time ago. He left because you didn't tell him the truth. Don't blame it on me."
"If I had been here last night, instead of standing around on the goddamn block helping you, he never would've known, and he would still love me."
"If he really loved you, he wouldn't have left in the first place. Unless I'm mistaken, love means devotion, and you don't walk out on a girl you're devoted to because of mistakes of her past. That's not love."
Vickie slumped down on the couch. Her rage turned into tears. "It doesn't matter. I don't want to listen to your shit. Just get out of here and leave me alone."
"No," he said. "I won't leave. Not until you come with me. We have a job to do."
"Fuck you. Go away."
Chet folded his arms in front of him. "You know, they found another body this morning. The seventh."
"I don't give a shit. It's not my fault there's a nut in town. It's not my duty to help stop murderers."
"The hell it isn't. It's your duty as a human being, just like it is mine. You could help save a lot of people from dying, but you don't want to 'cause your boyfriend left. That makes good sense, Vickie. You're a real loser, aren't you? When something doesn't go your way, you just pack it up, huh? What a cop-out. Instead of getting off your ass and doing something for society, you're just going to mope around and brood and feel sorry for yourself."
"Prick!" she yelled through her sobs. She picked up the glass ashtray on the coffee table and threw it at him. He ducked, and it smacked into the wall. "Get out! Leave me alone!"
Chet stooped in front of her and put his hands on her shoulders, shaking her around. "Listen to me. This is no joke. A lot of money's been put into this operation, and a lot of people are depending on you. Without you, we don't stand a chance. We need you, and the next girl on The Electrocutionist's list needs you. When the going gets tough, you just don't quit. If everybody did that, then there'd be no world. You have to take your licks, Vickie; you have to face up to your problems or else they'll knock you over. You can't let the little things get to you."
"It's not a little thing," she sobbed and pouted like a little girl. "The only person who ever loved me is gone."
"I know it must seem like the end of the world for you right now, and I'm truly sorry. But there is no comparison between losing a lover and tracking a sex killer. You'll get over losing your fiance, but there are seven girls who will never get over The Electrocutionist. One of them was your roommate. And there's going to be a lot more if something isn't done fast. You're the only one who can make our plan work, and you made a commitment to us. If you cop out now, why, I just might slap the shit out of you."
She looked up at him, half-defiant, half scared.
"Would-would you really hit me?"
He sighed. "No, of course not."
A long, muted silence fell over them. Vickie gaped at him, pouting and sniffling, but she couldn't speak. Chet took his hands off her and gently wiped the tears from her cheeks with his fingers. Before she knew it, she was hugging him, her face buried in his shoulder. She held onto him desperately, clinging to him as if she were dangling off a tightrope with no net underneath.
"I'm sorry I spoke to you so harshly," he whispered.
"I'm sorry I threw the ashtray at you. I was aiming for your head."
"You put a hole in the wall."
"I know."
"Go get your stuff on. We have to go."
The tumultuous rainstorm had stopped hours ago, but the streets were still wet. It was just getting dark now; the damp asphalt of New York Avenue glimmered with orange ripples under the light of the dying sun. Chet diverted from the usual route to the block. He turned the station wagon onto New Jersey Avenue, merged into Massachusetts Avenue, and passed 14th Street entirely. There was someplace else to go first.
"Where do we have to meet Dignazio?" Vickie asked, now wearing her black slacks and pink blouse.
"At the deli."
"What? He wants us to meet him at a delicatessen?"
Chet chuckled. "I keep forgetting, you're not familiar with cop jargon. There are many names for the place we're going: the deli, the ice cream parlor, the meat bin, cold storage, the ice box, the slab room, the fridge, the body shop—they're all nicknames for the morgue."
"Oh. Why do we have to go there?"
Captain Dignazio wants to talk to us for one thing. I think he might've found a clue. It could be important, so I guess we can sacrifice some time away from the block."
"We may be wasting our time altogether tonight. If it rains again, the block'll be dead. Nobody hustles much in the rain anymore."
"But that's good. If The Electrocutionist is hungry, he's going to go looking whether it's raining or not. And the fewer hookers there are on the street, the better our chances are of him trying to pick you up."
"Yeah, but wouldn't it be easier to just put a lot of boys in blue out around the block. That would drive The Electrocutionist away."
Chet raised his eyebrows. "Sure, and it would drive him somewhere else, probably back to Georgetown where a lot of important people hang out. The brass doesn't want any sign of police protection anywhere near 14th Street. If the killer's going to keep striking, they want him to keep striking there. Make it as easy for him as possible. That way, he'll be less inclined to go to the better sections of town where he might knock off another Congressman's kid or something."
Chet's implications made Vickie scowl. It seemed so obscene. "In other words, let him take all the hookers he wants, just as long as he stays away from the rich kids."
"That pretty much hits it on the head," he agreed, "I'm sorry to say. But there's more to it than that—it works out to our advantage. If we keep the killer coming to the block, we're bound to get him sooner or later. But if we keep him moving, there's no telling how many girls he'll get. He likes the block; we want him to think he can get away with it there. So far, five of the seven victims he's picked up on the block. All we have to do is keep cool, keep the uniform branch out of sight, and let The Electrocutionist walk right into our trap. He's smart, whoever he is, but he's overdue for a mistake. And it only takes one."
They drove halfway around Lincoln Square, delayed by the traffic lights at each corner, then continued straight up Massachusetts Avenue until they arrived at the huge tract of land which housed D.C. General Hospital. The main building appeared to be an awkward Η-shaped structure, but Chet drove past that and continued along the narrow, swerving access road, which wove a path all the way to the far corner of the property to a small red brick building with a flat roof. Vickie couldn't make out many details in the darkness, but the facility seemed to have no windows. There was a port of some kind off to the side, where a big ambulance had been parked, and in front of the building there was a dinky parking lot of crushed gravel. Chet pulled the station wagon alongside of two other cars, both white. She could tell they were police cars even though they contained no markings or lights.
"Wait here," Chet said. "I won't be long."
"No, I want to come. I've never been in a morgue."
"Suit yourself; it's not a nice place."
They both walked up the path which led to the entrance. The wet grass of the lawn sparkled like crystal spikes. She could see the Anacostia River through the gaps between the trees at her right-hand side. For some reason, the grossly polluted bend of water looked spectacular with the moon reflecting off its slow-moving surface. It was almost serene.
She stayed a few steps behind Chet when they entered the morgue. The speculation of what she was about to see made her scared and anxious at the same moment. "It's a big metal room with a lot of drawers in it, right?"
"Nope. Only in the movies. All they do here are autopsies. The bodies aren't stored very long before they go into the ground."
The lobby, if it could be called that, was small and very dark. Vickie had to hold onto the tail of Chet's fatigue jacket in order to keep her bearings as he guided her down an unlit corridor. Suddenly, a block of light fell onto her. Chet opened a door at the end of the hallway and showed her into a roomy office. Dignazio, Elliot, and a thin man in a white doctor's apron were seated around an executive-sized desk. They all looked up, as if startled, when Vickie and Chet came in.
"Seen the latest?" Dignazio asked Chet, and held up Friday's edition of the Star. "I tried like hell to keep this one out of the papers for a while. Someone leaked."
Chet glanced at the headline; he had seen it earlier. NUMBER SEVEN FOR THE ELECTROCUTIONIST. "It's news, isn't it?" Chet said. "Why keep it out of the newspapers?"
"You tell me."
Without a word, they all got up from the desk at the same time. The skinny man, a pathologist named Dr. Green, also known as Doc Skivy, led the way to an immense black door in the corner of the office. Dr. Green puckered his face and tugged on the doorhandle as though it were jammed. The gritty, grating sound that ensued when he pulled it open made Vickie wince like when someone raked fingernails across a chalkboard.
"Hi, Vickie," Dignazio said, just then noticing her. David Elliot smiled curtly at her while polishing his ugly, black glasses with a Kleenex. She nodded to them with a strained smile, shocked by the plain expressions on their faces. It seemed that walking into a room full of dead people meant no more to them than walking into the bathroom. She stood behind Chet as if he were a shield, and at that moment, she began to have second thoughts about going into this place. She didn't want to look at dead people. God, she thought, it's like opening a grave.
Dr. Green disappeared into the black entrance of the room. There was a white flash, a pause, then the lights came on with a snap. The men strode in single file, but Vickie remained outside for several seconds, her mouth suddenly as dry as beach sand. From where she stood, she caught a glimpse of some odd, misshapen shadows on the concrete floor. She walked into the room.
The autopsy room consisted of four off-white walls, three of which were lined with medicine cabinets. Off to her right, she saw another large door, only this one was made of shiny, brushed metal, and it had a handle like the door of a walk-in freezer. Next to the door hung a sink the size of an oven. A long, curved faucet sprouted from the wall behind it, dripping slowly. Below the sink, she saw another faucet with one end of a roll of green garden hose screwed into its nozzle. There was a drain in the middle of the floor.
Vickie didn't pay much attention to the superficial details of the room; she was too distracted by the things in the center of the room to care much about anything else. Four stainless steel tables stood directly in front of her, each one waist-high and about six feet long. Branching off the head of each table were trays which contained instruments common to autopsy rooms: scalpels, scissors, probes, forceps, and a scaled-down circular saw complete with the Black and Decker brand name.
The two end tables were empty; a cadaver rested on each of the middle tables. She at least expected the bodies to be covered with sheets like on TV. But this was not TV; this was for real. Both of the corpses had been girls, and they were each totally naked and uncovered. Chet and the others had gathered around the second table, but Vickie stood and stared at the stiff form on the table to her right. The body appeared to be untouched, the skin as white as paper, the lips and the nipples of her bare chest light blue. The eyes seemed to have sunken into her skull. One was opened to a tiny slit, while the other was completely closed. The skin of the eyelids was very dark, as if smeared with the charcoal-life stuff football players use to reduce sunglare. The cadaver was thin, and the small cupped breast sat on her chest like two mounds of hand-molded white clay. Light brown hair lay spread under her girl's head and shoulders like a Japanese fan. Vickie had never seen anything so still in her life. It struck her as the pinnacle of all obcenity; not only was this girl dead, but naked, exposed, vulnerable in her death, like some sad product of ugliness, degraded and exploited beyond measure, spread out for display. Vickie continued to gape at it, wanting to turn away, but unable to, as if entranced by morbid captivation. Then a profane vision of revulsion flashed through her mind; a shudder coursed up her spine, and she turned quickly away, her eyes wide open in dread, and her fingers pressed against her mouth.
For one hovering second, the corpse reminded Vickie of herself.
But at least the first corpse still retained its human likeness. The thing which lay on the other table did not. Like the first girl, this one possessed a pallor of undiluted white. The legs branched out straight, forming a colorless V, and the heels rested in bowl-like indentations at the end of the table. Drainage ruts ran along each side of the platform like tin rain gutters on a house, and the girl's right arm lolled in one of them. Vickie could see an ugly purple patch on the exposed underside of the arm, denoting junkie. Nothing more remained of the human qualities. For instance, Vickie couldn't tell the size of the girl's breasts—she didn't have any. The skin of the chest had been cut up and peeled back, like the perforated flaps of a single-serving-size cereal box. A grotesque, flesh-flayed cage which were the girl's ribs had been pulled away from the middle of the chest in a crude Y-shape, as if they were double doors. All in all, the girl's upper torso looked like it had been ravaged by a lawnmower.
"Who is she?" Chet asked.
"Mary Elizabeth Baker," Elliot read off a slip of paper. "Hooker, junkie. We did some asking around and found out that she worked in one of the massage parlors on 13th Street. She wasn't a street hustler like the others. More than likely, the killer picked her up shortly after she got off work. She left the massage parlor at two on the nose; time of death was between three and four. The only thing that ..."
Elliot kept on talking, but Vickie didn't hear him anymore. She was numb, her eyes fixed on the cold face of Mary Elizabeth Baker. It was no longer the face of a girl, but rather a death-distorted rictus of agony in its most monstrous deviation, a mask of dead white flesh depicting horror beyond civilized comprehension. The corpse stared back at Vickie with eyes open so wide that the lids weren't visible. And the whites of the eyes weren't white anymore—they were tomato-juice red from the hemorrhages caused by the sudden charge of electric current. The jawbone had been pried back as far as it would go—probably farther—and light blue lips twisted into an irregular opening. Some of the skin around the mouth and cheeks had been torn away from where Dr. Green had removed the tape which had kept the gag in place. Wiry strands of bleached blonde hair ruffled every which way around her face, the shorter lengths of her bangs pasted onto her forehead with dried perspiration. For the second time, Vickie found that she was unable to turn her eyes away until she had taken a long, cold-staring look at the corpse, as if something in her spirit were forcing her to look. With torturous slowness, her gaze moved down the length of the body, over the ragged wreckage of the chest cavity, along the bump of the pelvic bone and the sparse crop of matted pubic hair, the legs like thin pillars of stone, then finally to the feet which protruded up from the metal wells of the table. The girl's toenails had been painted black, and they looked up at her like ten enameled eyes. The ugliest part of all was how the underside of the girl's body had taken on a blue, almost black, hue from where the blood had settled to the low points. The folds of the vagina had been ripped up; smudges of dried blood caked the insides of the thighs.
Chet nudged Vickie out of her horrified daze. "Listen," he whispered. "This could be important."
Dr. Green was talking now... "but I think you're being hasty in assuming that The Electrocutionist is any smarter than the typical sex killer. First of all, he doped the girls—the first six, that is—with sodium pentothal. It's a fast-acting drug, but it's also dangerous as hell. Pentothal works on different people in different ways, according to their body weight and metabolism. If the dosage isn't exactly right, he could easily kill the girl the minute he administers the drug. Next, there's the problem with the gags. I can't think of a more effective gag in the world than a tennis ball, but when using something that large, he's risking blockage of the breathing passage. I'm surprised that some of these girls haven't come back dead from strangulation. But I guess those examples don't mean much; after all, he's going to kill the girls anyway, but it just goes to prove that the killer isn't really using his head. However, he's making one mistake which concerns him directly, and which leads me to believe that he's being careless if not plain stupid. We're sure that he's electrocuting the girls in a bathtub or some large container full of water. Using electrical current anywhere near water can be deadly. It only takes fifty volts to kill a human being. He could easily wind up killing himself."
