Precious Blood Read online

  PR ECIOU S

  BLOOD

  JONAT

  JONA HAN

  HAYES

  To Cricket Coleman

  No matter whether I’m getting it right or screwing things up, she’s always an unstoppable force of love Violence and the sacred are inseparable.

  —René Girard (from La V

  , 1972)

  iolence et le Sacré

  Contents

  Epigraph iii

  Sunday, December 1

  Steve Whittaker, MD, deputy chief medical examiner for the City…

  1

  Monday, December 2

  Jenner had had nightmares for months after 9/11, but they…

  51

  Tuesday, December 3

  She was making Jenner breakfast. It felt good to do…

  69

  Wednesday, December 4

  When Jenner woke, the sun was glaring through intermittent drizzle…

  85

  Thursday, December 5

  Exhilarated, he drove well over the speed limit most

  of…

  107

  Friday, December 6

  Jenner found Ana making faces at herself in the

  bathroom…

  119

  Saturday, December 7

  Jenner cut down East Thirtieth toward the river.

  The

  southern…

  131

  Sunday, December 8

  Jenner winced as he poured the champagne into the orange…

  147

  Monday, December 9

  They met in the stairwell at 10:00 a.m., before Jenner…

  153

  Tuesday, December 10

  A little after 1:00 p.m., they broke for lunch, gathering…

  165

  Wednesday, December 11

  Ana lay across his bed, watching him dress.

  179

  Thursday, December 12

  Ana told Jenner she’d take just a minute to put… 201

  Friday, December 13

  Jenner and Father Sheehan sat at Green’s desk with

  Angie…

  229

  Saturday, December 14

  Garcia, Roggetti, and Jenner met in the mid-afternoon on the…

  245

  Sunday, December 15

  He woke early and alone; Ana had slept on the… 255

  Monday, December 16

  He’d been asleep for only a few minutes when

  she…

  263

  Tuesday, December 17

  She came in just before dawn. Jenner heard her

  let…

  275

  Wednesday, December 18

  ALHR. 289

  Thursday, December 19

  The chest X-ray was fine, his lung fully expanded.

  They…

  305

  Friday, December 20

  Dr. Khan squinted at the grid of CT images on… 313

  Saturday, December 21

  He woke at 6:00 a.m., and soaked in the bath…

  319

  Sunday, December 22

  They smoke at breakfast at the Gap Weekender Motel,

  just…

  335

  Monday, December 23

  Jenner had left one of the windows open in his… 361

  Tuesday, December 24

  Farrar walked briskly down Greenpoint Avenue, the length of plastic…

  377

  Wednesday, December 25

  Jenner knew the building as soon as he stepped

  into…

  425

  Acknowledgments 435

  About the Author

  Praise

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  sunday,

  december 1

  Steve Whittaker, MD, deputy chief medical examiner for the City of New York, finished his crime scene notes and signed his name with a flourish. Pushing back from his desk, he saw that the mosaic of diplomas that covered his office wall was out of kilter. He stood, frowning. Harry must have knocked his med school diploma, the largest of them, as he was emptying the bins. Squinting, arm stretched, Whittaker tipped the frame until it was even, the harvard university neatly aligned with the johns hopkins on his pathology diploma. On the lower row, his New York license, the testimonial from his forensic fellowship, and his board qualifications were more modestly framed, but one glance at the wall was enough for anyone to see they were dealing with a world-class forensic pathologist.

  He hadn’t earned his position by good academic creden-tials alone: Whittaker was a political animal, and proud of it. He’d risen to the top of both national forensic pathology associations, been treasurer of the National Association of Medical Examiners, and run the Path-Bio section of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. It was widely thought he’d be AAFS president within the next couple of years.

  At meetings, after any cocktail party or plenary session, he’d slip back to his hotel room and write down anything useful he’d gleaned. Not about residue patterns for new gun-powders or techniques for developing friction ridge imprints from well-preserved bodies, but rather the little details that could lubricate his further ascent: whose drinking problem had taken a turn for the worse, whose wife had just been diagnosed with leukemia. He saw his talent for recognizing and exploiting the weaknesses of others as a necessary evil, a Darwinian trait that let him prosper as weaker men failed.

  He knew that it irked people; it still stung that when Julie 4

  j o n at h a n h ay e s

  left him, she’d sent him Machiavelli’s Prince. It was a petty gesture, and betrayed her lack of understanding of how life was played, a fact underscored by her having left him for Jenner.

  The thought of Jenner irritated him, and he was still scowling when the phone rang. District Attorney Klein. It was their second conversation in less than three hours, and Whittaker tried to strike a tone somewhere between professional and collegial. He started to detail his observations from the scene, but Klein cut him off, wanting only the gist—typical Klein.

  Whittaker reluctantly summarized his findings, smoothly assuring Klein that he would conduct the autopsy personally.

  “Actually, you won’t be performing the autopsy yourself: you’ll have company. Girl’s father has hired some local forensic pathologist, guy named Jennings. I tell you, Whittier, I’m sick of every asshole with a law degree calling in favors and making demands. I feel sorry for the guy, really I do, but would it have killed him to call at a decent hour?”

  Whittaker pressed the phone against his ear, struggling for words. “Jennings? Do you mean Jenner, Mr. Klein? Dr.

  Edward Jenner?”

  “Jennings, Jenner, something like that. Is he any good?”

  “He was formerly with this office. I fired him last year.”

  “Jesus. Incompetence?”

  Whittaker was silent for a second. “He’s not so much in-competent as . . . emotionally ill-equipped for the work. The post–9/11 recovery work was a bit too much for him.”

  Klein snorted. “Then you’re probably better off without him. Either way, he’s their pathologist, he’s probably at the scene right now, and he’ll be joining you for the autopsy.

  Give him any help he needs, and leave me the hell out of it.

  Understood, Whittier?”

  Whittaker felt it best not to correct him. “Understood, sir.”

  Precious Blood

  5

  *

  *

  *

  They had found her in the East Village, nailed to the wall of a railroad flat in a town house on Tompkins Square Park.

  Jenner waited on a bench in the park, a six-block expanse of grass, trees,
walkways, and basketball courts. Despite the cold, a few Brazilians were kicking a soccer ball around on the paved area in front of him.

  The park was much better kept than it used to be. Although his loft was barely fifteen minutes’ walk away, he hadn’t been here in ages, and he was surprised by how polished the neighborhood had become since he’d been out of circulation.

  Back when he’d first started at the medical examiner’s office, another murder in the Ninth Precinct would have raised few eyebrows, but everything was changing so quickly.

  The punks and neo-hippies had been shoehorned out of their squats, replaced by a cheery wave of young families, students, models, and trendy Japanese kids who, like everyone else in the East Village, had escaped to New York to reinvent themselves. The punks and neo-hippies now pan-handled sullenly on the edges of the park, usually with a bandanna’d half-pit-bull puppy at their feet to amp up compassion. Occasionally a grimy anarchist, unable to accept that his territory had long since been overrun by McLaren strollers and yoga mats, would provoke a “confrontation”

  with a patrol cop, and a mini-demonstration would erupt among the street kids, only to fall casualty to sunshine, talls of St. Ides malt liquor, and general ambivalence.

  Across the street, a young officer, beefy in Kevlar vest and winter coat, stood by the yellow crime scene tape in front of the town house, talking with a woman holding a laundry bag. Lieutenant Rad Garcia of the Manhattan South Homicide squad stuck his head out of the front door, spoke to the officer, then motioned Jenner over.

  Jenner stood and stretched stiffly. The ball bounced toward him; he trapped it neatly, then kicked it to one of the 6

  j o n at h a n h ay e s

  Brazilians—rudimentary soccer skills, one of the vestiges of a junior year at the University of London. He crossed Seventh to the town house. The officer nodded at him, lifting the tape to let him in.

  Three seventy-seven East Seventh Street was one of the nicer buildings, a two-family brick town house with blue window boxes and a low front wall separating the small concrete front yard from the sidewalk.

  Andrea Delore lived—had lived—in the top floor-through.

  Walking up the steps, Jenner noticed a dark brown smear just below the knob of the front door; he was struck by how blood always stood out. Above the buzzer was a small rectangular frame, with the words delore/jong written in neat capitals.

  Broad smudges of black fingerprint powder bloomed around the buzzer and door frame; pushing the door open, Jenner saw that the smudging carried over onto the inside frame.

  The hallway air was stiflingly hot and thick, almost sticky with the smell of death. He paused in the open doorway and looked back down the front steps. Behind him, the cop was waving back the first of the sightseers. Jenner watched him return to chatting up the woman with the laundry, and then realized he was stalling, avoiding going in.

  The stairwell was long and narrow, the yellowing floor a honeycomb mosaic of small cream and black tiles, black wainscoting on the walls. The stairwell had been decorated with arty, black-framed photographs, black and white, some close-ups of tribal-style tattoos, some female nudes, and some female nudes with tribal-style tattoos. On the first landing he saw a Russian-looking religious triptych in a gilt frame that looked as if it had been stolen from a church.

  Lieutenant Garcia was waiting for him, leaning on the balustrade on the third-floor landing. Black hair slicked back, mustache neatly trimmed, the smell of Aramis rising off him in waves, Garcia looked sleeker and better groomed than Jenner remembered; the homicide squad was suiting him nicely. Garcia had always been a popular cop, a man Precious Blood

  7

  who could drink with the uniforms, flirt with the support staff, and joke with the bosses. He’d quickly risen from detective to sergeant and now lieutenant, borne aloft on the post–9/11 retirements.

  He straightened, and they shook hands warmly. “Hey, Jenner. Good to see you.” He gestured behind him. “Joey Roggetti from the Ninth is the lead—bit of a hotshot, but he’s basically an okay guy. Crime Scene’s nearly finished.

  Whittaker left the body up.”

  He paused for a second, then put a hand on Jenner’s shoulder and looked him in the eye. “Listen: it’s pretty ugly in there. You don’t need to go in—I can just bring the scene photos by. You sure you want to do this?”

  Jenner flushed. “Her family isn’t paying me to sit around looking at pictures. Besides, it’s not like I haven’t done this before—I’m fine, Rad.”

  He looked down the hall, past Garcia. Two crime scene detectives were dusting for latent prints. The older one, Mike Seeley, saw Jenner’s reflection in the oval stand mirror he was processing, turned, and gestured with a nod of his head.

  “Hey, Doc. She’s in there.”

  The directions were unnecessary; dazzling white light flooded the hall from the room just ahead to his right, and Jenner could hear the repeated click of a camera shutter.

  The room was large, enormous for the neighborhood, with high ceilings. The broad archway of the entrance reminded Jenner of a music-hall stage, the theatrical feel enhanced by two high-wattage stand lamps set up by Crime Scene.

  At first, he couldn’t see her body through all the cops. A meaty guy in his thirties in a dark olive suit, tie limp around his thick neck, was talking with two criminalists and a uniformed cop. Joey Roggetti, Jenner assumed. They were standing in an arc in front of the body, intensely lit by the Crime Scene lamps; it reminded Jenner a bit of one of those life-size nativity scenes. They parted as he walked toward them, and Jenner saw the girl’s body.

  8

  j o n at h a n h ay e s

  He could feel Garcia watching him as he walked toward her, the tension filling his chest with every step, the smell of her blood thickening in his nostrils. It had been a long time.

  But as he drew close, he felt no difference, no dramatic change. There was no blood rushing in his ears, his heart didn’t shudder in his chest the way it did in a panic attack.

  Did this mean he was finally all right? He’d been gone almost a year, months on the couch, waiting to feel normal again, watching Jerry Springer as his cat nudged at the ice cream container on his chest. And now he was right back there, and he hadn’t changed at all. The smell of blood, the smoke of burning dust rising from the lamps, Christ, even the way he’d just walked up and been ushered into the fucking building, it was all the same.

  And when he saw the body, the little wash of revulsion that passed through him wasn’t about the girl at all: it was about him. He felt himself encysting, like some kind of para-site secreting a protective shell around itself as it burrowed deep into the flesh. The girl didn’t make him feel anything; it was just another body, not a girl anymore. A case.

  The man had nailed her to the wall, and then rearranged the lamps in the room to illuminate her as she hung there. A white couch had been dragged opposite her, a comfortable place for him to sit and admire his handiwork; the fabric had smeared blood from where he’d sat.

  And there was something odd, too: in front of her pinned, outstretched left arm, a muted TV set pumped a barrage of fast-cut images, the MTV logo floating in the corner. Had he put her up and then just sat down and watched TV?

  Jenner looked at her, hanging like a horror-show waxwork, naked, spread-eagled, upside down, her body a pale X caked with blood. Hardware-store-shiny bolts nailed her feet to the wall. Red wheals crisscrossed her body, the skin broken along curving lines.

  He needed to take her down, get her down fast. She’d hung there long enough, stared at, exposed, vulnerable. Dead.

  Precious Blood

  9

  He turned to Detective Roggetti, muttered an introduction, and asked for gloves.

  “Sorry, Doc. I could ask the uniforms outside, they probably do.”

  Detective Seeley called, “We got some, Doc. Large do you?”

  Jenner nodded, then caught the packet Seeley tossed his way. He looked for somewhere to put
his overcoat; Roggetti said, “Just give it here, I’ll hold it for you.”

  Jenner, now in shirtsleeves, tore open the packet and put on the gloves: thick rubber gloves, size nine and a half, textured fingers, kitchen-bright sink’n’dishes yellow. No matter how many times he’d gone through this ritual, the gloves always seemed out of place, a jolt of cheery normality inside the charnel house.

  He looked at her again, unaware that the detectives were watching him. She’d bled heavily from her nose and mouth, but there was no obvious lethal injury. The body was threatening to slide from the wall, the head and neck kinked against the floor. Flicked across the white wall by her legs and trunk were twisting and curving spatters of drying blood, spatter cast off from whatever he’d used to whip her.

  Two bolts pinned her left foot to the wall, and another pierced the right, just by a small ankh tattoo.

  Jenner turned. “Hey, Mikey—any trash bags over there?”

  Seeley rummaged under the kitchen sink, pulled out a large black leaf bag, and handed it to him. Jenner briefly scanned the floor, trying to catch patterns in the bloodstaining. He could make out nothing but pooling, fluid purge from her nose and mouth, worse because he’d nailed her up upside down.

  “You guys finished processing here?”

  Seeley nodded. “Photographed, swabbed, a once-over for trace—the white-glove treatment, Doc. Whittaker was bitching because we weren’t done by the time he got here. He didn’t want to wait for us to take her down. She’s all yours.”

  10

  j o n at h a n h ay e s

  Jenner nodded, then unfolded the plastic bag and laid it on the floor in front of the girl to protect himself from any invisible blood soaked into the carpet. He knelt on the bag and began. He worked without effort, almost without thought, experienced hands moving fluidly, sliding methodically over her trunk, feeling for broken ribs, carefully moving the breasts to rule out hidden wounds.