Thomas Cook - Blood Innocents

Quickly Reardon turned through the report on Karen Ortovsky. She had been stabbed only once.

The pathologist’s report made the MO complete. Lee McDonald and Karen Ortovsky had been slaughtered exactly like the fallow deer.

Reardon walked back over to Jake’s desk and handed him the report. “I’d like to see the bodies,” he said.

“Didn’t you see them down in the Village?” Jake asked.

“Yeah, but I want to check something.”

“Sure you just don’t have a taste for dead flesh?” Jake asked with a grin.

“Where are they?” Reardon said sharply.

Jake stood up. “Feeling kind of humorless today, huh? They caught one of them in Brooklyn, you know. Somebody in the morgue, I mean. Fucking a dead body.”

“Where are they?” Reardon repeated.

Jake’s face turned sour. “Follow me.” He led Reardon into the morgue room and pointed down the corridor. “In there. Units 87 and 88. I’ll be out at the desk if you need anything. ”

Reardon slowly made his way into the morgue room. It seemed unearthly, fastidiously clean, all scrubbed tile and stainless steel, not at all like a murder room. The bodies were kept in refrigerated vaults that hazily reflected the fluorescent lighting overhead. Unit 87 bore a single identification, a small printed label inserted in a square of aluminum on the door:

City of New York

Office of the Chief Medical Examiner

MORTUARY COMPARTMENT CARD

Compartment Number… 87

Name… Patricia Lee McDonald

Age… 25 Color… White

Date of Death… 11/20/77

Received from… New York City Police Dept

Date Received… 11/20/77

Place of Death… 12 W. 12th St.

Reardon placed his hand on the steel handle of the freezer, but he did not open it. He did not want to open it. In all his years on the force he had visited the morgue only once before. Visiting the dead here, in their cold, awesome vulnerability, had always seemed to him like an intolerable violation of that final right to dignity.

The one other time he had been here, five years ago, he had come to see the only human being he had ever put here. He had come late at night and been ushered into the same bright room with its antiseptic smell and garish lighting. His eyes had searched out a different number and a different name:

City of New York

Office of the Chief Medical Examiner

MORTUARY COMPARTMENT CARD

Compartment Number… 93

Name… Thomas Frederick Wilson

Age… 29 Color… White

Date of Death… 7/22/72

Received from… New York City Police Dept

Date received… 7/22/72

Place of Death… 274 E. 4th St.

When he had died at twenty-nine, Thomas Frederick Wilson had already assembled a long criminal record. He had turned relatively late to murder. But when he had, Reardon remembered, it was with abandon, killing five people in as many months. His plan had been to leave no witnesses to his robberies.

Wilson had had two problems, Reardon recalled. He had a big mouth and a buddy who liked to listen. In the end Wilson’s friend had gone to the local precinct house and told Reardon everything.

That afternoon he and Mathesson had let themselves into Wilson’s apartment and were in the midst of searching it when they heard footsteps on the stairs. Reardon retreated behind some of the clothes hanging in the closet and Mathesson ducked behind the sofa. Silently they listened as the sound of footsteps grew more distinct.

When the door opened and Wilson stepped into the apartment, Reardon saw that he was carrying a pistol in his right hand. For a moment Wilson did not move.

Then Mathesson shot up from behind the sofa. “Police!” he shouted. “Don’t move!”

Over the barrel of his own gun Reardon saw Wilson level his pistol toward Mathesson and fire and Mathesson’s body jerk to the left, tumbling across the edge of the bureau to the floor.

Then Reardon had fired. And for every day of the rest of his life he had recalled the thunderousness of his gun’s report, which had seemed to deafen everything, plunging the world into a heavy, mourning silence. Wilson’s chest had seemed to explode from below his skin, a bloom of crimson opening across his chest like the petals of a rose. He staggered backward, his face frozen in a look of childlike amazement, and it was the look on that face that had haunted Reardon forever afterward; he had never been able to describe it to anyone, not even to Millie, but he knew it would stay in his mind, like an unanswerable riddle, until the day he died.

It was the chill of the handle on his fingers that brought Reardon’s mind back now. He looked at the nameplate on the door. Patricia Lee McDonald. He released the handle and slid his hand deep into the pocket of his overcoat. Patricia Lee McDonald had been violated enough for one life, he thought, and the fallow deer too, and all the others. He turned and left the morgue.

On Saturday morning Mathesson telephoned Reardon to tell him he had not been able to dig anything up on Lee McDonald. Mathesson said that on Friday he had gone to the law firm where she had worked for the last five years, but that no one knew very much about her. She had no friends at the firm and did not seem to have confided anything about her private life to anyone.

“I talked to just about everybody in the office,” Mathesson said, “except for some high rollers off on a junket to Las Vegas.”

“And you got nothing at all?”

“Nothing.”

“All right,” Reardon said. “See you Monday.”

There was still another possibility and late in the weekend Reardon tried it.

On Sunday afternoon funeral services for Patricia Lee McDonald were held at Saint Jude’s Catholic Church in Brooklyn. Reardon went. He sat in the back of the church, his hat resting on his lap, his overcoat neatly folded beside him, and listened to the drone of the Mass, the old beseechments for the forgiveness of Lee McDonald’s sins and the salvation of her soul. At the front of the church he could see the coffin, closed, unadorned by flowers, resting before the altar. For a moment he imagined the body inside, chill, pallid, bloodless, the pathologist’s incisions sewed up with thick black thread.

Besides Reardon and the priest, there were only three other people in the church. Reardon remembered his father’s funeral. It had been a crowded affair, cops and their families squeezing together in the pews, and the people from the neighborhood decked out in their Sunday best. His mother had told him at the time it was the kind of funeral that happened only “when a good man dies.”

This funeral was different. When the services were over, Reardon made his way to the front of the church. An older couple he assumed to be Lee McDonald’s parents were getting into a car behind the hearse. A younger man stood silently beside a red Volkswagen, waiting for the hearse to leave for the cemetery.

Reardon stood on the church steps beside the priest until the funeral procession had pulled away. Then he took out his gold shield and wordlessly displayed it to the priest.

The priest looked at him. “I see,” he said quietly.

“I wonder if I might have a moment of your time, Father?”

“I have to be on my way to the cemetery shortly,” the priest said.

“I know,” Reardon said. “It won’t take long.”

“Go ahead then.” The priest put out his hand. “I’m Father Perry.” He was an old man, but the skin of his face was still tightly drawn across high cheekbones. He had once been a handsome man, Reardon surmised, which, in itself, must have been an almost irresistible occasion for sin. His hair was close-cropped and very white, which gave him the appearance of a retired military officer. He stood erect, but Reardon could detect a certain weakness in his legs, as if they were aging more rapidly than the body they supported.