Robert Ellis - The Dead Room

“What do your parents do?” Teddy asked.

“My father’s a lawyer and would probably have a shit fit if he knew you were here. My mother teaches at Temple University.”

They entered the room, the kid clearing a joystick off his desk and flipping on his computer. Once the machine booted up, he logged onto the Web, clicked a bookmark, and sat down.

“I couldn’t show you at school,” Moss said. “But I can show you here.”

Teddy leaned over the kid’s shoulder for a closer look. He saw an image of Darlene Lewis appear. He caught the sleepy smile and looked at her body. It was a porno site. She didn’t have any clothes on.

“We built the site together,” Moss said. “I didn’t think anything would happen. But then it did.”

Moss gave up his seat, moving to the bed and sitting down before the window. Teddy grabbed the mouse, clicking through the images. Darlene Lewis posing in a bra and panties, on her knees cupping her breasts in her hands, on her back with her legs spread open. The shots were crude and didn’t leave much to the imagination.

“She got a boob job,” the kid said. “She liked to show them off.”

Teddy wasn’t really listening. He was too busy clicking through the images. Toward the end, the photos switched to hard core. Darlene giving a guy without a face a hand job, then blowing him and fucking him. Moss glanced at the monitor and seemed to shrink. There were fifty thumbnail shots, and Teddy looked at every one of them. He could feel his heart beating in his chest.

“Are they real,” he said to the kid.

“I just told you she got a boob job.”

“Not her tits,” he said. “The tattoos. They’re in every shot. Are they real?”

The kid nodded, thrown by Teddy’s intensity.

Teddy paged back to the early photos of Darlene, enlarging a shot of the girl masturbating on a couch with her legs spread open. The lazy look in her eyes and the slow smile on her face were haunting. The pose all the more disturbing because it brought back memories of her lying dead on the dining room table-his response to seeing her corpse laid out on the gurney at the morgue.

Teddy winced as he studied her naked body. The tattoos were on her calf, just above her vagina, and on the underside of her inflated breasts.

He tried to keep cool. Tried not to think about why a girl who came from a family of means would do something like this. It was all about the murder, he told himself. The man who murdered Darlene Lewis had cut her skin away. But his approach hadn’t been haphazard. There was purpose in the act. Some horrific reason.

Teddy slid a disk into Nash’s computer, copied the file onto his hard drive and clicked on the image of Darlene Lewis masturbating on the couch. Nash found the black and white print of the girl’s corpse on the dining room table and held it up to the monitor. Teddy didn’t need to compare the images to know what the killer had done.

The patches of missing skin found on her body matched the placement of her tattoos perfectly. The killer had removed her tattoos with his knife and taken them.

Nash gazed at the nude photo for a long time. “The tattoo artist wasn’t very talented, was he?” he said. “I can’t say much for the photographer either.”

“Her boyfriend, Russell Moss.”

“Has he spoken with the police?” Nash asked.

“No. Not about this anyway. They came to the house and asked about his relationship with Lewis. He answered their questions, but that’s it.”

“How’s he doing?”

“When I left, he was tearing the Web site down.”

“I’m always fascinated by how people spend their free time,” Nash said as he finally looked away from the monitor. “What do you think this means?”

“That we’re on the right track,” Teddy said. “Darlene Lewis heard someone at the door. She thought it was Holmes, delivering the mail. But it was someone else. Someone who saw the tattoos on her body and rejected her.”

Nash swiveled his chair around to the window behind his desk. It was dusk, and the windows in the houses and buildings that made up West Philadelphia were glowing a deep yellow-red in the blue of early night. But Teddy knew the man wasn’t really looking at the view outside his window. The man’s eyes were turned inward again, and he appeared deep in thought.

“He came to her house,” Nash said quietly. “He saw the tattoos and took them away with him. It sounds like he got something in return to me. Why do you say he rejected her?”

“Because he didn’t take her. Valerie Kram was in good shape. When she went into the water and then washed up on shore, she wasn’t. The man kept her and did things to her. She may have been cut down the middle, but her skin was intact. I saw her body. She didn’t have any tattoos. I’ll bet it’s the same with those pictures on your wall. I’ll bet not one of them has a tattoo on their entire body. If they did, the bulletins would’ve said so.”

“Tell me about the wound you saw on Valerie Kram,” Nash said.

“You saw a picture of it just a few minutes ago.”

“Describe it for me anyway.”

Teddy wondered what Nash was up to. The photos Carolyn Powell had sent over in the manila envelope were lying on Nash’s desk beside the murder book.

“It was a single cut,” Teddy said. “The kind you’d make if you were gutting an animal in the field.”

“Have you gutted an animal in the field?”

“I’m not much of a hunter. I used to shoot though. I’ve seen it done before. It was the same cut they made at the autopsy.”

“From the ME’s initial report, it says Kram’s internal organs were accounted for. But they looked as if they had been handled, perhaps moved. Too much time had passed and the ME couldn’t be sure.”

“The time she spent in the water,” Teddy said. “He couldn’t make the call.”

“Her neck was broken as well.”

“Yes,” Teddy said. “Just the same as Darlene Lewis.”

“So if we know why the killer cut Lewis, that he wanted the tattoos, then what do you suppose he was thinking when he split Valerie Kram open?”

“That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it.”

Nash swiveled his chair around. He looked tired. Spent. Like whatever was preying on his mind had cost him something.

“What two things does Philadelphia grow best?” he said.

Teddy shrugged. He wasn’t sure where Nash was going with the riddle.

“I want you to read a book tonight,” Nash said. “ The Agony and the Ecstasy, by Irving Stone.”

Teddy found the idea of wasting the night reading a book more than disturbing. He was thinking about their search for Rosemary Gibb. If Nash had something, why wasn’t he just saying it so that they could move on? And what about the riddle? The two things the city grows best. What was that about?

“Time would seem to be of the essence,” Teddy said.

“It is,” Nash said, rising to his feet. “I hope you’re a fast reader. I’ve got an idea, Teddy, but I want you to confirm it. Call me as soon as you’re done.”

There was a bookstore two blocks from the office on Walnut Street. Teddy flipped open his cell phone, entering his office number and filling Jill in as he wove through traffic on his way downtown. She offered to help and agreed to pick up two copies of The Agony and the Ecstasy , along with a pizza. With two people reading the book, they could get through the copy in half the time.

Teddy cleared the call, pulled Detective Ferarro’s card out of his pocket, and punched in his number at the missing persons unit. The detective picked up the call at his desk and recognized Teddy’s voice from earlier that afternoon.