Chapter 25
AND NOW, MY DEAR CHAMBERS, let us revisit the database—now that we have concrete evidence to look for.”
“Concrete?” Chambers echoed. Another afternoon, and he was back at Penumbra Plantation, in the sweltering computer room.
“I believe,” said Pendergast, taking a turn around the room, “that these tiny injuries to the top of the right shoulder may well be the key we’ve been searching for.”
“If so, it makes no sense,” said Chambers. “Given the mauling, the slashing, even the amputations—what’s the purpose of those tiny marks?”
“It may be…” said Pendergast slowly, “… a sort of test.”
“What kind? To see if the meat’s tender enough?”
Pendergast fixed him with his silvery eyes, and the laugh that was rising in Chambers’s throat quickly died away.
“Precisely.”
“You think the man’s one of those serial-killer cannibals, then?”
Pendergast did not answer. He simply sat down at the large desk and turned his attention to the nearest PC.
Chambers looked at his own computer, trying to think of a correct search term. If pinpricks had been noted—which might have been rarely—it would have likely been by the coroner or medical examiner. What would a doctor have called pricks to the skin? MEs always had a fancy name for something.
He tried “pinprick” and got no hits. “Incisions” came up with too many. “Tiny puncture wounds” brought up another sea of hits.
He heard an exclamation from Pendergast. “Remarkable,” he said. “Truly remarkable.”
Chambers got up and went over to stare at Pendergast’s screen.
“I asked for the association of ‘petechiae’ with ‘puncture’ and ‘cluster’ as noted in the ME’s report, for all criminal incidents within a one-hundred-mile radius. Here are the, ah, ripostes.”
“Ripostes? You mean, hits?”
“Yes, thank you. Hits.”
Chambers stared at the list. “Pendergast, some of these aren’t homicides. You’ve got car accidents, falls, drug overdoses, and the Lord knows what else.”
“As we determined earlier, our man is sui generis, which means we must avoid assumptions—including the assumption his activities inevitably resulted in a homicide.”
This sounded like gibberish, but Chambers said nothing.
“Now,” said Pendergast, “you take half these hits, and I’ll take the other half, and let us see what we come up with.”
Chambers downloaded his portion of the list onto a three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk and once again sat at his computer.
He sighed deeply, then began paging through a mass of autopsy reports, medical records, and criminal incidents.
He’d never heard the word petechiae before, but he quickly learned it referred to a tiny spot of bleeding under the skin—in this case, due to pricking or shallow jabbing.
It was easy to dismiss most of the hits, but there were a number consistent with the kind of cluster they were looking for.
In each case, the ME had noted an anomalous cluster of shallow pricks made with what appeared to be the tip of a scalpel.
In a few cases the arm had been cut off beneath the shoulder, but in other cases the arm was still intact—slashed or not.
And when an especially alert ME had actually bothered to note the number of pinpricks, they always amounted to eleven—and the shapes of these clusters were always the same.
“It seems,” Pendergast said, as if reading his thoughts, “that we can in fact rule out accidents, falls, and overdoses unless the precise signature shows up.”
This was fine with Chambers—so far, the only signatures he’d found had shown up on obvious homicides.
He continued winnowing down the files. As he was wrapping up, he came across one that he was about to dismiss—a criminal complaint against a funeral home for abuse of a corpse—when he was stopped by a photo that showed the corpse missing an arm, with an unmistakable cluster of pinpricks on its shoulder.
He enlarged the photo, counted the marks—eleven.
But for the first time, this was not a homicide—the file included a death certificate indicating the individual had died from accidental trauma.
“How are you doing, Chambers?” Pendergast asked.
“Just finished.”
“Excellent! Let us print out our results and compare them in the drawing room.”
Chambers followed Pendergast across the central hall into another section of the mansion.
The drawing room was very grand, with polished oak floors covered in Persian rugs, tall windows with velvet drapes, an elaborate marble fireplace, a sideboard brimming with crystal and silver decanters, and numerous portraits in gilded frames adorning the walls.
Pendergast took a seat at a small mahogany side table with four chairs, placed his files upon the table, and motioned for Chambers to take the seat opposite.
Almost instantly the butler—what was his name, Maurice?—came floating in like a ghost. “May I offer the gentlemen a refreshment?”
“Yes, indeed, Maurice. A sherry, if you please.” He turned to Chambers. “And you?”
“Um,” said Chambers. He needed something cold—very cold. “An Abita beer, if you have one on ice?”
Maurice bowed and left, returning almost immediately with a silver tray on which stood a glass of sherry—along with an Abita beer, still weeping chips of ice.
Now, this is service, thought Chambers. It was the first drink he’d had in a week and, damn, it was good.
“I received six ‘hits,’” said Pendergast, laying out his files.
“In each case, the medical examiner noted a cluster of tiny pricks, always numbering eleven, always in the same spot above the acromioclavicular ligament, and always of a similar shape or design. It appears our man has been busy longer than we supposed.”
“And I’ve got five. Plus a weird incident at a graveyard.” When Pendergast looked at him inquiringly, he said, “It’s the only one I found in which marks were evident on someone who died of natural causes.”
“Most interesting. Let us exchange files.” Pendergast downed his sherry and turned to Maurice, hovering in the background. “Another Abita for Agent Chambers and another sherry for me, if you please.”
Chambers went through Pendergast’s files, astonished at how similar each set of pricks was to the ones he’d found—in the same place, always numbering eleven.
There were ten murders in total, plus the death by apparently natural causes, stretching back five years.
Pendergast was right: their killer had been very busy.
In some instances, he had severed the right arm; in some he’d merely slashed it; in others he simply left it alone.
In several cases it appeared he’d tried to disguise his MO by dressing up the killing to look like the work of gangsters.
But there were always those eleven tiny pricks.
“Our man is clever,” said Pendergast. “He’s been careful to vary the killings just enough to cloud the modi operandi, to prevent connections from being made—unlikely in any case, as we’ve learned with difficulty.
But always—always—he ‘tests’ the shoulder in that exact spot.
” He paused. “Pity the Drakos body was too torn up for those marks to be evident.”
“Jesus Christ,” said Chambers. “It feels like we’ve just discovered Louisiana’s own Jack the Ripper.
If you count the ones we started with, there are at least twelve or thirteen killings here—and I’ll bet there are a lot more that passed under the radar.
” He shook his head. “It feels like we’re starting all over again. Where in hell do we begin?”
“Tomorrow, we shall begin at the beginning.”
“Which is?”
Pendergast held up a slender file. “Your incident in a graveyard.”
“That wasn’t even a murder. The guy died a natural death—I mean, it’s all there on the death certificate. He fell off a girder and bashed his head in.”
“Yes. But it is the first, and a great deal can be deduced by studying a serial killer’s initial victim—even a serial killer as unique as this.” He drained his glass. “And it would appear he began his spree with a corpse, victimized postmortem.”