Carol O’Connell - Killing Critics

She moved the watch ahead, and knelt down beside the body that was not there. She began to cut away at Peter Ariel with the imaginary axe, a few sure blows for each of the hands and feet, a bit more work for the head. The axe blade was dulling with every cut. The meat was splaying out instead of the clean sever. It was harder work to sever the torso into two parts, to hack through the spinal column and the meat. She would need to rest periodically.

The minute hand of the watch swept several times around the dial, allowing for the rest period. Before the mutilation was half done, her watch said it was time to bring on the dancer.

Mallory looked toward the main entrance and created a vision of Aubry Gilette. She brought the dancer through the door with slow grace.

“Hold it, kid.”

She stopped the action in her mind and listened to another voice.

“ Naw, that’s all wrong, Kathy,”‘ said Markowitz. Though he was dead and in the ground, he sat beside her in the dust on the floor. “ This is a critical moment. What’s Aubry thinking and feeling as she comes through that door ?”

“I don’t know,” Mallory whispered to the dead Markowitz. “I can’t go where the ballerina goes.”

“You can do this, baby. Hell, a bright chimp could work it out. Now think. Aubry’s a young kid in a strange neighborhood after dark. She doesn’t carry a gun like you - she’s got no defenses at all. So you bring her in cautious, all tense, all eyes. She thinks something’s wrong. The message said it was an emergency, right? So she’s moving faster. Her face is all worried - she’s looking for bad news .

Mallory turned her watch back for the next try. Now the twenty-year-old dancer came through the door with more tension and energy. If Madame Burnstien told the truth, this would be a strange place to her-she would be wary. Mallory brought young Aubry across the small reception area and into the main room. Mallory rose and moved toward her, holding the axe high. The phantom Aubry turned and ran.

“ Stop !” Markowitz called time out. And Mallory stopped the watch.

She’s looking at a body hacked up in pieces and someone standing over it still hacking. Give her time to take it in, to be sure it’s not her uncle. Then give her credit for world-class reflexes and adrenaline, pure fear feeding her veins, giving her speed.

Mallory set the watch back thirty seconds. She made another whack in Ariel’s torso and looked up to Aubry, allowing time for the shock to set in, then the fear. Mallory had already taken up the chase as the dancer was turning. Mallory ran fast, but not fast enough to overtake a dancer at physical peak and with a head start of at least twenty feet. No, Aubry would be out the door and into the street by now.

Mallory turned back her watch. This time, when she ran at Aubry, she created a companion phantom with no face. She placed this figure near the door. As Aubry recovered her wits and turned to run, the shadowy phantom reached for her and dragged her farther into the room. The body of Peter Ariel was thirty feet from the first spill of Aubry’s blood. Mallory was halfway across the room now, swinging the axe high over her head and bringing it down on the dancer’s neck.

Aubry would be screaming, so Mallory aimed the next blow at the front of the neck. This would have been the blow that flooded Aubry’s throat with blood, making breath near impossible. The dancer was down, rising on one arm to lock eyes with Mallory. Aubry’s young face was gone to shock and wild panic, not believing that this could be happening to her. Her hands flew up to ward off the next blow to create the defensive wounds found on her corpse.

Mallory swung again, and again. Aubry was crawling now, clawing her way back toward the door, as the axe came down again, and again. Mallory followed her victim the length of the floor, bringing the axe down with a rhythm as she walked.

How had Aubry managed that? She was choking on her own blood, every wound was a mortal wound.

“Why don’t you die?” Mallory said, as she raised the axe again.

“ She thinks help is on the way,” said Markowitz, standing off to the side of her mind, watching his own child hacking up the dancer as though he were supervising Mallory’s school homework assignment.

Mallory brought down the axe to strike the blow to Aubry’s head. Bits of the dancer’s brains leaked to the floor, near the door where the skull fragments were found.

At last, Aubry stopped her struggles and lay dead. Mallory reached down and picked up the phantom dancer under the arms and dragged her body along the floor as though the imaginary Aubry had real weight. When she reached the body parts of Peter Ariel, she set down Aubry’s body a few feet away, where the second set of slices still marred the floor.

Here she inflicted one last stroke to the dead body of Aubry, the only assault wound made after death. It was a listless stroke, only a drag of the axe across the body as a final token wound. And this might be more evidence of a conspirator in the room, a more withdrawn, not at all enraged conspirator.

Then she began the work of cutting up the dancer’s body in a more businesslike fashion, the same sure strokes, the same rest periods. She pulled off the ripped clothing. The shreds came away easily, so she allotted only a small amount of time to this task.

Now she was ready to create the sculpture of body parts. She skewered the severed head of Peter Ariel on one of the rusted upright rods. The crushed car was the level of a bench. She seated the lower male torso on the metal and bound it to the long spike with the wire which had been taken from the gallery’s storeroom. She completed this torso with the upper half of Aubry’s body, carefully binding it in place to create one body of the male’s head spiked above female breasts, and a penis below. It was close to the old Egyptian model of a god.

She moved on to the work of the second mismatched torso, skewering Aubry’s head to the second rod. The male chest was set above the female nether regions. She mismatched the legs which required no wire, but only needed to be settled in place on the bench and then intertwined. The feet of Peter were set below the bloody stumps of Aubry’s well-muscled legs. Her dancer’s feet now supported the hairy legs of the artist. The arms were more difficult, placing them into bloody proximity of open wound sockets and forcing them to intertwine, then reinforcing positions with wire, which cut into the bloody skin. At last, she bound the woman’s hands to the man’s arms, and his to hers. Their heads faced forward, eyes open, staring at the artist turned spectator, Mallory.

She stepped back in her mind to admire her artwork, the ghastly embrace of two crimes against nature. It was a hundredfold more intimate than sexual intercourse. Blood was everywhere, and she layered the stench of mingling body fluids and feces over this.

It was sensational, the crime of crimes, the mother of all horrors. And yes, there was dark genius here. Koozeman might as well have signed it.

Her next thought was that this was the kind of thing guaranteed to sell a million newspapers. Publicity savvy was Koozeman’s other signature.

She looked down at her watch. Quinn would have shown up at the gallery to discover the murder an hour ago. So the time frame didn’t work, unless two people were working on the bodies. One person working alone could not have done it all in time. She turned around to look at the shadowy faceless one who had dragged Aubry back into the gallery. Now this one took the form and face of Dean Starr.

She allowed time for another pair of helping hands, and turned back her watch, leaving time to clean up and get behind the door in the wall. The time was still tight. Could there have been more than two of them? She looked back to the door. Time for Quinn to show up.