Thomas Cook - Blood Innocents

Reardon’s father slammed him against the newsstand wall again. “Where do you live?”

When the man didn’t answer, Reardon’s father suddenly released him and backhanded him across the face. Caught unprepared, the man staggered and went down on one knee, and Reardon’s father seized him by the hair and, placing a knee in the small of his back, yanked his head back.

“Tell me where you live,” he said contemptuously.

“110th Street,” the man whimpered. “212 110th Street.”

Reardon’s father released his grip on the man’s hair and sent him sprawling with a shove of his knee. “Get up,” he said and without waiting for compliance reached down and yanked the man erect by his coat collar. “Now I know where you live,” he said, “and I’ll tell you something. If I ever see you around this neighborhood again, I’m going to put your little prick in a door and slam it shut.” He flung the man away from him. “Now get out of here.”

When it was over, Reardon remembered, after the man had fled and the newsdealer had expressed his thanks, he and his father had crossed the street into a park, his father withdrawn and silent, as if troubled by his own outburst of temper. Inside the park they sat down on a bench and his father took his hand and held it.

“I said some pretty bad things back there, Johnny,” he said. “You’ll have to forgive me. I was very mad.” He paused a moment, examining Reardon’s face. “You know I’m a policeman, don’t you, son?”

“Yes, Papa.”

“A policeman,” his father said, “guards the world against scum like you just seen try to rob a poor blind man.”

Reardon remembered how he had nodded solemnly, a child acknowledging the importance of something felt but not understood.

“Do you remember the story of Cain and Abel in the Bible?” his father asked.

“Yes, Papa.”

“Well, it says how Cain killed his brother, and that was the first murder. But they don’t mention them poor guys that had to track Cain down and question him until he broke down and told the truth about what he did.” Reardon remembered how his father had looked intently into his eyes. “Leave the punishing to God,” he had said, “but they still have to be run down. They still have to be caught.”

“Yes, Papa.”

Yes, Papa. Yes, Papa. Reardon nodded into the rising steam, but even now he was not sure what he had agreed to.

Mathesson seemed surprised when Reardon returned to the cage of the fallow deer. The cage was crowded now with police photographers and lab crews of various kinds, and Mathesson had to push through them to finally reach Reardon at the entrance of the cage. “I didn’t think you were coming back,” he said.

“I wanted to look around a little more,” Reardon said.

“Look around a little more? For what? We’ve got teams searching everywhere.”

“I just wanted to take another look.”

“Okay,” Mathesson said lightly. “I don’t think you’ll find much.”

“Probably not,” Reardon said. He stepped past Mathesson and into the cage of the fallow deer.

He walked to the middle of the cage and stopped. For a moment he stared straight ahead into the shed which had protected the deer from the weather, then slowly he turned to the right, his eyes scanning each side of the cage in turn, stopping occasionally to look out beyond the bars and toward the distant parts of the Children’s Zoo.

His custom of revisiting the crime scene several times during the course of an investigation was not generally a search for physical evidence but for an atmosphere, a sense of how and under what conditions the violence had taken place. At times he would do no more than stare at the chalk outline of the body’s position, or at a certain pattern of blood on the wall or the peculiarly savage rip of a curtain. Murder, he knew, lingered in a room like an odor, defiling and debasing everything, insisting that here within these walls something precious was unforgivably wasted. That sense of waste was murder’s common legacy, and these moments were, for Reardon, part of a quest not so much for a particular murderer but for murder itself, for the murdering mind or the conditions that created it.

Finally he had made his full circle around the cage. His eyes once again rested on the shed.

“Well, find anything?” Mathesson asked, glancing up from his notebook.

“No,” Reardon replied quietly. “What time were they killed?”

“Between three and three-thirty this morning,” Mathesson said. “Two patrolmen named Burns and Fitzgerald answered the call, and they said that according to one of the workmen…” He quickly turned through his notebook. “Here it is. According to one of the workmen – a guy named Gilbert Noble – they had to have been killed between three and three-thirty this morning. He works on the night crew. He saw the deer alive at three, and he saw them dead at three-thirty. But he didn’t see nothing in between.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing important. He said there were a few people in the park earlier in the evening, but that’s all.”

“I want to talk to him anyway.”

“Okay,” Mathesson said. “I’ll have him come in and you can talk to him.”

Reardon nodded toward the open shed. “Anybody check that place out?”

“Yeah. It’s empty except for some dried leaves and deer shit. We rustled around in the leaves looking for the weapon, but there’s nothing there. No bits of clothing or anything like that. It looks like the killing was done out here. Out in the open. The whole thing. There’s not a drop of blood in that whole goddamn shed.”

“I’ll take a quick look,” Reardon said. He turned and walked toward the shed.

It was constructed of cinder blocks and was roofed with a sheet of tin. The front was entirely open and faced out toward the bars. The entire structure was covered with graffiti.

“How did all that writing get in there?” Reardon asked, stopping at the entrance of the shed.

“I think it must have happened last summer,” Mathesson said. “I think Burns said the deer were taken someplace else and the bars were down for a while. They were doing some sort of maintenance work or something like that. Anyway, the bars were taken down, so the local artist community did its thing.” Mathesson grinned. “Let me know if you see any hot numbers. That’s how I used to get most of my dates.”

A breeze suddenly skirted through the park, driving small, noisy waves of dried leaves across the cement floor of the cage. Reardon turned up the collar of his overcoat and stepped inside the shed.

Almost every square inch of the shed was covered with some kind of writing. Most prominent were the obscenities, references to various sexual acts or bodily functions. Interspersed with these were individual names, hundreds of them: Stanislas and Pedro, Betsie and Wilhelmina. There were also attempts at poetry, bits of personal philosophy and expressions of occult religions. But what grasped Reardon’s attention was something else, something that stood out from the rest; most of the writing had been done with chalk or spray paint, but this one was written in a color Reardon had seen too often not to recognize.

“Mathesson!” he called. “Come in here a minute.”

Mathesson came in and glanced about the shed. “What is it?”

Reardon pointed to a rusty red scrawl on the ceiling of the shed. “Doesn’t that look like it’s written in dried blood?”

Mathesson squinted up at the ceiling. “Yeah, it does. It looks like it could be.”

“I think it is,” Reardon said. “It’s a roman numeral two.”

“Yeah.”

“I want you to have that piece of tin cut out and sent down to the lab for an analysis. I think it’s blood of some kind. It may have come from the deer.”