Nora Roberts - Sacred Sins

He didn’t want her there. Doctor or no doctor, he didn’t want her to be a part of the hopeless ugliness of this part of his job. She could share in the paperwork, the fitting together of the puzzle, the step-by-step logic of an investigation, but she shouldn’t be here.

She had to be here, Tess thought. It was time to face the results, and maybe, just maybe, get a better understanding of the motivation. She was a doctor. It was irrelevant that she wasn’t the kind of doctor who prodded fingers in the human body. She was trained, she was capable, and she understood death.

Tess saw the blue and red lights of the first police car and began to school her breathing to long inhales, slow exhales.

The alley and several feet on all sides were roped off, though there was no one on the predawn streets. Cruisers sat with their lights blinking and their radios on. A community of workers was already inside the official area.

Ben pulled up to the curb. “You stay with me,” he told Tess, but still didn’t look at her. “We have a policy against civilians wandering around homicide scenes.”

“I don’t intend to get in your way. I intend to do my job. You’ll find I’m as good at it as you are at yours.” She pushed open her door and nearly collided with Ed.

“Sorry, Dr. Court.” Her hands were icy. He patted them without thinking. “You’re going to want your gloves.” He stuck his own in his pockets as he looked at Ben.

“What have we got?”

“Lab boys are in there now. Sly’s getting pictures. Coroner’s en route.” His breath came out in a white puffy steam. The tips of his ears were already red from the cold, but he’d forgotten to button his coat. “Some kid stumbled across her about four-thirty. Uniforms haven’t got much out of him yet. He’s been pretty busy whooshing up about a half case of beer.” He glanced at Tess again. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” Ben said briefly. “She’ll remind you she’s a doctor.”

“Captain’s coming in on this.”

“Terrific.” Ben shot the butt of his cigarette into the street. “Let’s get to work.”

They started toward the alley, passed a cruiser where someone sat in the backseat sobbing. Tess glanced over, pulled toward the sound of despair. Then her arm brushed Ben’s and she continued toward the alley. A small man with horn-rimmed glasses and a camera stepped out. He took out a blue bandanna and rubbed it over his nose.

“It’s all yours. Get him, for Christ’s sake. I don’t want to photograph any more dead blondes. A man’s got to have a little variety in his work.”

“You’re a riot, Sly.” Ben brushed by him, leaving the photographer sneezing into the bandanna.

They’d taken only a few steps into the alley when the scent of death rose up. They all recognized it, that bitter, fetid stench which was both offensive and eerily compelling to the living.

Her body had emptied itself. Her blood had settled. Her arms had been folded neatly across her body, but she didn’t look at peace. Sightless, her eyes were locked open. There was a smear of dried blood on her chin. Her own, Tess thought. Sometime during the struggle to live, she had sawed her teeth through her bottom lip.

She’d worn a long, serviceable wool coat in olive drab. The white silk amice stood out starkly against it. It had been taken from around her neck, where bruises had already formed, and smoothed over her breasts.

The note was pinned there, the message the same.

Her sins are forgiven her.

But this time the letters weren’t printed neatly. They were wavery, and the paper was crumpled a bit, as though his hands had mashed it. The word sins was printed larger than the rest, the markings darker, almost going through the paper. Tess crouched down beside the body for a closer look.

A cry for help? she wondered. Was it a plea for someone to stop him from sinning again? The shaky handwriting was a deviation, however slight, from his routine. It meant, to Tess, that he was losing his hold, perhaps doubting himself even as he fulfilled his mission.

He hadn’t been so sure this time, she decided. His mind was becoming a logjam of thoughts, memories, and voices. He must be terrified, she thought, and almost certainly physically ill by now.

Her coat had been left open rather than neatly arranged. There wasn’t enough of a breeze in the alley to have flapped it open. So he hadn’t tidied it as he had the clothing of the others. Perhaps he hadn’t been able to.

Then she saw the lapel pin against the green wool, a gold heart with the name Anne scrolled inside. She had been Anne. A wave of pity washed over her, for Anne, and for the man who had been driven to kill her.

Ben saw the way she studied the body, clinically, dispassionately, without revulsion. He’d wanted to shield her from the reality of death, but also wanted to press her face into it until she’d wept and ran the other way.

“If you’ve gotten yourself a good look, Dr. Court, why don’t you back off and let us do our job?”

She looked up at Ben, then rose slowly to her feet. “He’s nearly finished. I don’t think he’s going to be able to take much more.”

“Tell that to her.”

“Kid puked all over the place,” Ed said lightly, and breathed through his mouth to try to combat the stench. With a pencil he flipped open the woman’s wallet, which had spilled out of her purse. “Anne Reasoner,” he said, reading her driver’s license. “Twenty-seven. Lives about a block up on M.”

A block up, Tess thought. A block closer to her own apartment. She pressed her lips together and looked out of the alley until the fear passed. “It’s a ritual,” she said clearly enough. “From everything I’ve read, ritual, rites, traditions, are an intricate part of the Catholic

Church. He’s performing his own ritual here, saving them then absolving them and leaving them with this.“ She indicated the amice. ”The symbol of that salvation and absolution. He folds the amice exactly the same way each time. He positions their bodies exactly the same way. But this time he didn’t tidy her clothes.“

“Playing detective?”

Tess balled her hands in her pockets, fighting to overlook Ben’s sarcasm. “This is devotion, blind devotion to the Church, obsession with ritual. But the handwriting shows that he’s beginning to question what he’s doing, what he’s driven to do.”

“That’s fine.” Unreasonable anger rushed into him at her lack of emotional response. Ben turned his back to her and bent over the body. “Why don’t you go out to the car and write that up? We’ll be sure to pass on your professional opinion to her family.”

He didn’t see her face, the quick hurt then the slow anger that came into her eyes. But he heard her walk away.

“Little rough on her, weren’t you?”

Ben didn’t look at his partner either, but at the woman who had been Anne. She stared back at him. Serve and protect. No one had protected Anne Reasoner.

“She doesn’t belong here,” he murmured, and thought as much of Anne Reasoner as of Tess. He shook his head, still studying the almost saintlike pose of the body. “What was she doing in an alley in the middle of the night?” An alley that was close, too damn close, to Tess’s apartment.

“Maybe she wasn’t.”

Drawing his brows together, Ben lifted up one of her feet. She’d worn loafers. The kind that last through college, your first marriage and divorce. The leather fit her feet like gloves and was well polished. The back of the heel was freshly scraped and scarred.

“So he killed her on the street and dragged her in.” Ben looked over at Ed as his partner crouched and examined the other shoe. “He strangled her out on the fucking street. We got streetlights about every ten goddamn feet in this neighborhood. We got black and whites cruising every thirty minutes, and he kills her on the street.” He looked at her hands. Her nails were medium length and well shaped.