Signature Kill (12 page)
Authors: David Levien
“Behr. What the fuck is up?” Lisa Mistretta said back.
“It’s the fertilizer,” he says. “The smell will dissipate once I spread it.” Though he’s sitting at the kitchen table across from Margaret, his thoughts are elsewhere, out in his work space, where he’d just gotten started before she knocked to tell him that dinner was getting cold and to come inside.
“Fertilizer in the winter?” she asks, spooning the last of the green beans onto his plate. She’s been complaining about the smell around the outside of the house.
“Yes, in the winter. The nutrients go down into the soil. You want to do it
before
the spring,” he says.
“I don’t remember you doing it in the winter before—”
“Well, I have,” he says, and that is the end of it. He spent time on farms growing up, so she won’t debate him about things like that.
“Maybe I do remember, come to think of it,” she says.
They’d eaten the last of the flank steak, which was a little tough, stringy and flavorful, just the way he likes it. He doesn’t care for filet or other soft cuts of meat. If he is eating flesh, he wants to know it.
Margaret turns from the sink and takes a folded piece of paper from the bulletin board. He recognizes it.
“What’s this?” she asks as she unfolds it, crossing over to him. “I found it in your jacket pocket.”
It is a preliminary sketch of his installation in Northwestway Park.
“Nothing, just a doodle,” he says.
“Are those supposed to be limbs?” she asks, concerned. “And these resemble breasts …”
“No, no. I told you, it’s nothing.”
“It looks familiar somehow …” she muses.
“Maybe I saw it on TV, on the news,” he says. “That’s why I drew it.” Then he snatches the page away from her and crumples it up.
Margaret shrugs and clears the last of the plates. Her back is to him as she bends over the sink.
What does she know?
he wonders for the second time in the last little while.
Has she been in the garage?
he asks himself.
He stands up from the table, a wooden-handled steak knife in his palm, and considers her back as he walks toward her. He stands there for a long time, feeling the knife’s grip under his fingers, looking at her. Nothing could be easier, or clearer. But he isn’t really moved to it. Finally, he sighs and drops the knife into the sink to be washed with the remaining utensils, and then he moves off to the closet and finds what he is looking for.
“Where are you going with your camera?” Margaret asks, the dish towel over her shoulder.
“Out to shoot a project I’m working on.”
“I want to see one of your projects one of these days,” she says.
“We’ve done that, haven’t we?” he says, recalling a time many years ago, before they’d moved to this house, when she’d entered his darkroom unbidden, letting light in and exposing a batch of film he was processing. The utterly berserk way in which he’d reacted to that, the terror he’d seen in her, reminds him that going into his work space is not something she’ll ever do again. She wouldn’t dare. Even now he sees her gaze fall to her feet.
He pauses to straighten a portrait of the house that he’s taken, a gelatin silver print matted directly onto a block of wood. Occasionally he shoots buildings or landscapes to give credibility to his claim of being a shutterbug and provide the ostensible reason he needs all his equipment and supplies.
“They’re not very good anyway, just something I do,” he says. He is lying. His real projects are
very
good. They are amazing, unlike anything ever created by man.
“Wood or metal this time?” she asks.
“Well …” he says, when the phone rings.
“I’ll get that,” she says.
“Thanks,” he says, and continues out to the garage.
He works with total concentration, and skill built upon thousands of hours of contemplation and hundreds of hours of experience. He can’t stop and he can’t bring himself to go to bed. He loses all track of time. He works in a coat, the heater in the garage turned off, the winter cold outside chilling the air. He moves his hands over her velvet flesh, her still-pliant viscera. He has his saws and sharp knives. The textures and aromas are almost overwhelming. He positions the elements into the perfect composition and he shoots the whole thing with his camera placed in just the right position. It will soon be time to go out.
“Uh-oh, you’re getting the
look
,” Mistretta said, as Behr walked inside. This time he entered her house, not her office.
“What look is that?” Behr wondered.
“The zombified look of a zombie hunter,” she said, and raised a rocks glass full of clear liquid over ice. “Patrón Silver and a lime squeeze. Want one?”
“Sure,” he said.
She led him in across the small foyer, through the living room with the Mission furniture, and into a good-sized kitchen that had been recently renovated. Music was playing through both rooms.
“Is this …?” he asked and pointed to the ceiling speakers.
“Wilco,” she said.
He took a seat on a stool at the center island while she went to a stainless-steel fridge-freezer and started putting his drink together.
“Glad I wasn’t interrupting any important plans when I called,” he said.
“A whole lotta nothing on a Saturday night,” she said, turning around and sliding him his glass.
“Well, I’m outed on that front too,” Behr said.
“When’s the last time you slept?”
“A whole night? It’s been a while,” he allowed.
“ ’S what happens,” she said and raised her glass. “Why do you think I bailed?”
He raised his glass and they touched rims. They drank and the
tequila hit him with a burn. She was wearing a sweater dress over tight leggings and those shearling boots that had caught on a few years back and never really went away. Her black hair had a bit more curl to it than it had the last time he’d seen her, and only her eyes and lips were touched with makeup. He caught a mini-cyclone of perfume and liquor off of her as she sat on the stool next to him. It was said the only subjects that mattered were sex and death, and she seemed to have them both well covered.
“So what do you got for me?” she asked.
He opened a yellow envelope and brought out the papers. It was background on two suspects—a violent man named Jose Aldes, with a history of assaults on women, and a man thought to be a serial rapist named Cowen, who had supposedly moved away to Wyoming nine months back. Neither man had apparently bound, killed, or mutilated. Prilo’s records were also there beneath the rest. Behr wasn’t testing her as much as trying to reclaim some objectivity.
They finished their drinks as she read through the Aldes file and tapped the edge of her glass, sending him for refills. Halfway through the next round she was coming to the end of the Cowen report when she murmured to herself, “What is this shit?”
Behr waited as she moved on to the Prilo documents, and murmured, “Oh … okay …”
She kept reading for a few more minutes, until their glasses were empty, and then got up. This time she did the refills, throwing the Aldes and Cowen paperwork in the garbage on her way. “You don’t mind, do you?” she asked.
Behr just shrugged. She leaned across the center island countertop so their heads were close together, bent over the Prilo history.
“This guy is a full-on beast,” she said.
“I know,” Behr said.
“What was with those others?”
“A selection of one is no selection,” he said.
“Right,” she said, smiling. “But I saw your timeline notes on the Prilo pages. What about the kills when he was locked up? I don’t like it.”
“I didn’t like it either. But here …” He went back into the yellow envelope for the case files on the two murders in question. “Don’t you think there are enough elements outside the pattern that those two could’ve been committed by someone else? Then Prilo resumed his activities once he got released?”
She read silently for a moment. Both of the victims were white females in the early half of their twenties. One of them had been discovered in a sealed fifty-five-gallon drum. She had been a grad student from Ohio. The other was found buried in a shallow depression near an access road in Wayne County. That one had been missing a leg and had not been positively identified.
“Well,” Mistretta said. “Could be. They weren’t showcased as much as the others. The evidence of binding and torture is there. But why have the other bodies been so easily found and these hidden?” she wondered aloud.
“Hell if I know. Maybe he was trying some new form of presentation,” Behr posited. “Oh, and by the way, Mary Beth Watney was as blond as a wheat field.”
“Look, farmer Brown, I like them for the same guy as the others. And the guy you’re going with was in jail at the time, so I give him a loud buzzer.”
“Yeah, on paper,” Behr said. “But with Prilo we’ve got a restraintrage sex killer. Admitted and convicted. We’ve got mutilation. Operating in the same location. I mean, how many of these guys could there be in any given area?”
A dark look came to Mistretta’s eyes. “You’d be surprised. Also, you have to consider that maybe the guy isn’t from the area and travels in, or worse, he’s got no record.”
“Let’s not go down those roads for now—”
“Besides, where’s the DNA? Not a speck on these bodies. Prilo left DNA on Mary Beth Watney, which is why he confessed. Or vice versa.”
“There was no one else’s DNA on these two vics that would rule Prilo out. None at all. I’m just saying, I’m gonna like him until I don’t like him—” Behr stated.
This time she cut him off with the actual buzzer sound as she moved around the island next to him.
“No, no. Like him. A little,” Behr insisted.
She gave him the buzzer again. Louder.
“All right—”
Buzzer.
“You want to make a night of it, going back and forth like this?” Behr said, nearly laughing.
She shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the worst I’d spent in my life,” she said, and gave him a bit of a body check with her shoulder. “Whoa, didn’t move you an inch.”
“Little thing like you can’t move me,” he said.
“Okay, big man …” she said in a mocking voice.
Their shoulders remained touching. Behr felt the air in the room change and grow charged. Their faces met in the space between them, and they kissed. Her full lips pressed against his, and he tasted tequila on her aggressive, seeking tongue. He turned toward her, still seated on the tall stool, and she pressed into him. He felt her warm, full body in his arms. He wanted her, but even as he did he felt self-disgust at breaking promises that he had not spoken, but had made nonetheless. Stirring passion mixed with deep feelings of dread and guilt within him. After a moment he broke off and pulled back.
“Yeah, I’ve gotta stop. I’m in a thing,” he said.
“Ah, fuck me!” she said, her dark eyes sparkling like glitter. “That kiss said maybe you’re not so sure.”
“I’m sure. Sure I’m in it, maybe not so sure what it is. But I can’t do this now.” Even as he said it, he felt regret, both for being there and at the idea of leaving. He’d put himself in a situation where remorse was behind every door, including the one to her bedroom.
“All right, Behr,” she said after a moment. “I’ll give you a free pass this time—even though you did get me revved up.”
“That’s two of us who are revved,” he said.
Their breath returned to them, and the atmosphere in her kitchen lightened like that of a surfacing submarine.
“Can we still work this thing together?” Behr asked, gathering up his papers.
“Of course we can work it,” she said with a smile, “we’re not freshman lab partners, for fuck’s sake!”
“Good,” he said.
“Leave this with me,” she said, putting her hand on the Prilo pages. “I’m going to go back to the cases and next time we meet you’re gonna really see what I can do.”
It is done
.
Cinnamon is out of his life. She’s been given back. He has released her to the world, and it is beautiful.
The silence was complete that night. There wasn’t a frozen cricket chirping. He’d worked quickly and then he’d left the office park, stopping between pools of streetlights to pull strips of black tape off his license plate. Then he drove away into the darkness. There was nothing left in the space she had filled but relief. Everything inside him was like a well that had been pumped off, leaving a void, a soothing, relaxing void.
Drive straight home
, he tells himself.
But he can already feel new pressure seeping in. It will rise and get more turbulent with each passing day and it will soon be roiling again.
Drive straight home
, he tells himself again.
But he doesn’t.
Other
won’t allow it. Instead he drives to the wrong part of town, where the girls work late. He sees them out there on the corners as he passes by.
Are we already considering the next one?
He wonders at himself, and the thing that is inside him that seems to be pushing up and taking over. He thinks about that stupid hooker, and how that punch wasn’t nearly enough. He drives around for over half an hour looking for her. But he doesn’t see her. He only sees black girls out tonight and that isn’t going to work. So he finally drives home.
“We’ve got another one, a real meat puzzle.”
It was Breslau calling at 6:45
A.M.
Monday. Behr was awake. He’d already been out in the dark for his early-morning roadwork, in fact, trying to outrun the lingering memory of Mistretta’s tequila kiss.
“Like Northwestway. Even worse. We’re down at Donovan-Grant. It’s a complete fun house.”
“Can I come down?” Behr asked.
“Consider this your engraved invitation.” Breslau hung up. Behr dressed quickly and was almost out the door four minutes later when he remembered.
“Suze?” he said into his phone. “Did I wake you?”
“No, what’s up?”
“I was supposed to take Trev today, but I can’t. Something came up.”
“You’re really jamming me here, Frank, I told day care he wasn’t coming.”