Precious Blood (25 page)

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“She’s not on the list?”

“No. I know I’m not crazy. She came in the morning . . .”

Jenner walked out of the office and stood near her.

She tapped the screen with one long fingernail. “This is where she should be, but she’s not. Instead, it reads Baer at nine a.m., then Baer again at nine thirty a.m.” She stood up, confident again. “Which I
know
is a mistake! If she’d needed a one-hour appointment, I’d have booked it as one solid block, instead of recording two half-hour blocks.

Someone’s messed with this list!”

Jenner looked at Garcia. Roggetti stepped forward and put a hand on her shoulder and said appreciatively, “Great work, Angie!”

She basked for a second, then sat bolt upright.

“Wait!”

She dashed out of the reception area, through the office, and into the exam room. There was a metallic clank, and she emerged waving a fistful of papers.

“I have it! The original list I print up for Dr. Green every day!”

She quickly looked through them, and then pulled out a single sheet with a flourish. The bright pink fingernail scratched across the page.

“Nine thirty a.m.,
Lucia Fiore
.” She slapped the page down on the desk in triumph.

“Can you get this record for us? It’s very important.”

“Of course, Doctor. It would be my pleasure.” She shot a look at Mrs. Calixte, who continued to concentrate on the monitor. “My pleasure.”

She held the schedule up and read out Lucia Fiore’s medical record number in her clearest voice to the clerk, who typed it in and then turned back to her. “No record.”

“Try it again! It’s right here! It has to be that.”

The second try was unsuccessful, too.

“This is
insane
! I know she’s got a chart!”

Jenner said, “Maybe the chart hasn’t been filed.”

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The receptionist flew to the stack of charts piled on a low table in the filing room. She rifled through them, pulling out folders randomly to gauge her position in the chronology.

Finally, she held up the folder. She slapped it down on Green’s desk, in front of the monitor where “No Such Record” was still prominently displayed.

“You see?!”

Rad dialed Lucia Fiore’s number on his cell; still no answer.

Jenner, in the backseat, said, “It’s on Elizabeth, should be just a little below Spring.”

Roggetti drove. At a red light on Spring and Mott, he gestured up the street and announced that Martin Scorsese was born on that block.

Jenner said he thought Scorsese was born on Elizabeth.

“Nope. Mott between Prince and Spring.”

Garcia sighed. “He was born in
Flushing
. He grew up on Elizabeth, that’s where his parents were born.”

He pointed ahead of them. “Joey, park on the far corner.

We’ll walk—here’s as good a place as any.”

Jenner handed the address to Rad.

It was a generic five-story apartment building in tan brick, with cheap white gauze curtains in the aluminum-framed windows. Two old women in matching tweed coats sat on a bench by the steps to the front door, in front of the display window of a new boutique. The mannequin in the window was silver, with a tiny bikini made out of what looked like silver dollars and Christmas tree icicles. The women watched Roggetti walk up and ring the doorbell.

No answer. He rang it a second time.

“Who you looking for?” said one of the white-haired women.

“Lucy Fiore. Two F. You seen her?”

“Oh, she doesn’t live here anymore! She moved a month or two ago. Somewhere in the neighborhood, I think—she’s
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still working over on Cleveland Place, at Caffe Vaporetto. I saw her yesterday.”

“Thanks. You know where we could find her new address?”

The woman shrugged. “Well, you could try the post office, maybe. Or the café.”

The second woman nodded in emphatic agreement. “The café.”

Roggetti thanked them and rejoined Garcia and Jenner. “I still say this is a waste of time. She didn’t answer her phone, she isn’t home.”

“Well, Joe, maybe she’s home now. Either way, we have to let her know.”

He was silent for a minute.

“So, Doc. How did Saint Lucy die, anyway?”

“Badly, Joey.”

“Oh. Okay. No problem.” He looked offended.

Jenner shook his head. “No, I’m sorry, Joey—I’m a bit preoccupied. Lucy was condemned to a brothel because she was a Christian. When the soldiers came to haul her away, they couldn’t move her. Her eyes were so beautiful that they tore them out to disfigure her, so now she’s the patron saint of the blind, and of eye doctors—in paintings, she’s usually carrying her eyes on a little plate. Anyway, after putting out her eyes, they doused her with oil and set her on fire, but she wouldn’t burn, so they killed her with a sword.”

After that, they walked in silence.

Spring Street was rapidly gentrifying, and on every visit, Jenner saw a new boutique or trendy bar. Caffe Vaporetto was a small restaurant on Cleveland Place—the lone Italian place on the block, wedged in with a French bistro, a Mexican cantina, and a gourmet cheesecake shop. The owner was a pretty blonde, and Roggetti stepped up his pace when the barman pointed her out in the gloom at the back of the restaurant.

He told her they were looking for Lucy Fiore, that they
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were concerned for her safety, and she quickly found a cell phone number and street address.

“I was actually wondering where she’d got to—she has a paycheck here, and I thought it was weird she didn’t show up this morning.”

Roggetti dialed the number; instantly, there was a high-pitched chirruping from behind the bar. The owner reached down and held up a pink cell phone with a yellow plastic Pikachu fob. She opened and closed the phone quickly, cutting off the ring tone, a look of concern on her face.

“It’s a five-minute walk to her place. She’s on Mulberry between Grand and Hester. And please—tell her to call me, okay?”

She followed them out to the sidewalk and watched anx-iously as they walked down Center Street. They were walking fast.

Rush hour was nearing, and traffic had slowed to a crawl.

They hurried east along Broome toward the heavier side of the sky. No one spoke.

Making the turn onto Mulberry, the three men broke into a run: ahead, on the far corner of Grand, people were coming out of the second apartment building down, coming out in a hurry.

They dodged traffic on Grand, Roggetti holding one palm up flat like a traffic cop, shield raised high in the other. As they hit the sidewalk of Lucy Fiore’s block, the sound of a fire truck siren starting up floated toward them.

They ran up the stairs, Jenner stopping to check the names on the mailboxes. The stairwell smelled of smoke, and on the third floor, the corridor lights were off, emergency lighting now bathing the hall in a glowering red.

“She’s 3G, Rad—make for 3G.”

Rad pounded on the door, then leaned back and kicked it hard. And again. Roggetti slammed it with his foot until the door smashed open.

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Smoke rushed into the hallway in a hot blast. They ran in, yelling her name.

Most of the apartment was burning, the flames spreading from the windows toward the doorway, across the floor, and along the cabinet fronts like a curtain. There was already more smoke than air. In the center of the room was the body of Lucy Fiore, twisting against a central column, engulfed in fire, the axis of the blaze.

Jenner, holding his coat up over his nose and mouth, ran to the sink and turned the water on full blast. He grabbed a coffeepot from the sink, filled it with water, turned, and threw it over her body. Then a second, and then a third, then Garcia and Roggetti were soaking her with saucepans from the sink, and there was a popping sound, then a whoosh as the overhead sprinklers kicked in and the smoke turned white, and she stopped burning.

There was a crashing sound as one of the windows smashed in. Two firemen appeared and one clambered through, dragging the hose, yelling, “Are you all right? Are you all right?”

He started to blast the burning wallpaper of the free wall, and Jenner stepped around to protect her body from the water, making a slashing gesture with his hand and shouting

“Don’t spray here!”

The fireman, initially confused, nodded, and gave a quick spray to the kitchen area. The ceiling sprinkler had doused much of the fire now; the hose had put out the major flames, and would now only damage evidence. He shouted something to his hose man, then passed the nozzle out through the window before beginning to open all the windows.

Jenner stood in front of the body.

He yelled into her face, “Lucy! Can you hear me?” He had to try.

There was no response.

Eyes burning, gasping for breath, he felt her neck for a pulse. As he lifted her chin up, the charred skin underneath
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fissured wide. There was no bleeding, and he knew she was dead.

She had been impaled, fastened to the pillar not only by loops of burned rope, but by a sword driven through her belly.

Rad grabbed Jenner and pushed him toward the windows, where Roggetti was already leaning out to gasp and retch into the fresh air. They were all three covered with soot, coughing up black phlegm, their eyes stinging and red-rimmed, their faces striped by tears.

The fireman signaled down to street level, where ambulances were arriving.

Jenner turned from the window; he had to see the body.

She was badly burned, her legs and lower body charred.

If she’d been wearing clothes, they were gone now. On the floor, a broad outline of charring flared across the floor in front of the body; Jenner could make out an archipelago of splash burns leading from the main char site—evidence of some kind of accelerant.

Her hair was badly singed, and there were scattered erosive burns on her forehead. Underneath, interrupted by the burns, covering her forehead, was a band of Coptic lettering.

There was one more thing. He knew the answer, but he had to see for himself, had to know for sure. He went to the sink and opened the cabinet underneath, looking for gloves.

“Jenner! We have to go down to the ambulances.”

Voice ragged, Jenner shouted back over the hissing sprinklers and sirens rising up from the street, “You go ahead, Rad. There’s something I’ve got to see.”

“Jenner! She’s dead! Leave her—you can come back.

Please, man.”

No gloves.

“In a second.”

He walked back to the girl’s body and, fingers trembling, reached out to her face. Very carefully, desperate not to split
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the skin, he lifted the girl’s eyelids. He stood in front of her, the tears now welling fast from his burning eyes as he looked into the empty sockets.

Behind the barricade across the street from the smoking building, the man watched with satisfaction as his creation played itself out.

He was calmer now. It had been several hours since she’d last been alive, during which time he’d worked on her—

crafting her basic structure, bestowing the text upon her face, finally completing the transformation by relieving her of her vision.

Finishing her was easy: he doused her with gas, and when the bottle was almost empty, set it at her feet open, then tossed a match.

After that, he had walked down the stairs and out the front door, strolled down the street, and onto Hester. There he cooled his heels, leaning against the wall of a Chinese seafood packaging company until he heard the commotion on Mulberry.

Jenner’s arrival with the detectives was a pleasant surprise.

Apparently they were getting closer to him; the thought pleased him. That there was a team out there, whose purpose was to track him and interrupt his work. A challenge!

He was grateful for this opportunity to watch his opponents in action.

He’d caught sight of them when he’d looked up Mulberry at the sound of the sirens. Jenner, of course, he knew; he was fascinated by the look of concern on the man’s face as he ran to the Saint. This was the closest look yet he’d got at the Hispanic, who looked middle-aged, flabby and out of shape.

But the younger one, the one he’d not seen before, Italian, maybe, was muscular enough to present a challenge, should it come to a confrontation.

When the time came, he’d do the Italian first.

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He watched, neck craning up, mouth slightly open, just like the rest of the sightseers behind the barricade. The ladder went up, and the window was smashed, and the hose was turned on, and when the smoke turned into steam, the crowd broke into applause. He joined in, pounding his hands until they stung. When the fireman made them all move farther back onto the sidewalk to make space for the ambulances, he leaned over to clap the man’s shoulder and say,

“You guys are great!”

He clapped even harder when the firemen led the two cops out of the door and down to the ambulances, clapped until he wept. Their faces were black, their eyes pink holes with little white rivulets from their tears; the older one actually looked quite ill. As people saw him stumble, the clapping faltered, and everyone looked grim; the man mimicked their looks of concern, then smiled with relief as the cop gave the thumbs-up.

Looking up at the apartment windows, he realized he’d done everything with the blinds up. Had he been sloppy, or was this perhaps his hidden intention?

He wondered how she looked now, the Saint. Would her writing still be visible? He’d tried to splash the gas on her lower face and trunk, but the flames had probably spread to consume her. Why hadn’t the sprinkler system come on sooner? There’d be more about that in the newspapers, no doubt.

Jenner appeared at the window, coughing. He hacked for a bit, and then spat black onto the ledge.