Anybody watching from behind would have seen her back arch, a sort of moan escape her lips – they’d think he must have entered her mouth. He hasn’t. Her eyes, bright with drugs, are flooding with fear. His left hand has clamped tight over her mouth, forcing her head back, exposing her throat. She bucks and writhes, tries to use her arms, but he’s anticipated that. Straddling her breasts, his knees slam down, pinning her by the biceps. How do I know this? You can just make out the two bruises on the body lying in the bath. She’s helpless. His right hand rises up into view – Eleanor sees it and tries to scream, convulsing wildly, fighting to get free. The serrated steel of the pizza knife flashes past her breast, towards her pale throat. It slashes hard—
Blood sprays across the bedside table. With one of the arteries which feed the brain completely cut, it would have been over in a moment. Eleanor crumples, gurgling, bleeding out. The last vestiges of consciousness tell her she has just witnessed her own murder; all she ever was and hoped to be is gone. That’s how he did it – he wasn’t inside her at all. Once again, thank God for small mercies, I suppose.
The killer goes to prepare the acid bath and along the way pulls off the bloody white shirt he must have been wearing – they just found pieces of it under Eleanor’s body in the bath, along with the knife: four inches long, black plastic handle, made by the millions in some sweatshop in China.
I’m still reeling from the vivid imagining of it all, so I barely register a rough hand taking my shoulder. As soon as I do, I throw it off, about to break his arm instantly – an echo from an earlier life, I’m afraid. It is some guy who mumbles a terse apology, looking at me strangely, trying to move me aside. He’s the leader of a forensic team – three guys and a woman – setting up the UV lamps and dishes of the Fast Blue B dye they’ll use to test the mattress for semen stains. They haven’t found out about the antiseptic yet and I don’t tell them – for all I know the killer missed a part of the bed. If he did, given the nature of the Eastside Inn, I figure they’ll get several thousand positive hits dating back to when hookers wore stockings.
I get out of their way, but I’m deeply distracted: I’m trying to close everything out because there is something about the room, the whole situation – I’m not exactly sure what – that is troubling me. A part of the scenario is wrong, and I can’t tell why. I look around, taking another inventory of what I see, but I can’t find it – I have a sense it’s from earlier in the night. I go back, mentally rewinding the tape to when I first walked in.
What was it? I reach down into my subconscious, trying to recover my first impression – it was something detached from the violence, minor but with overriding significance.
If only I could touch it … a feeling … it’s like … it’s some word that is lying now on the other side of memory. I start thinking about how I wrote in my book that it is the assumptions, the unquestioned assumptions, that trip you up every time – and then it comes to me.
When I walked in, I saw the six-pack on the bureau, a carton of milk in the fridge, registered the names of a few DVDs lying next to the TV, noted the liner in a trash can. And the impression – the word – that first entered my head but didn’t touch my conscious mind was ‘female’. I got everything right about what had happened in Room 89 – except for the biggest thing of all. It wasn’t a young guy who was staying here; it wasn’t a naked man who was having sex with Eleanor and cut her throat. It wasn’t a clever prick who destroyed her features with acid and drenched the room with antiseptic spray.
It was a woman.
Chapter Three
I’VE KNOWN A lot of powerful people in my career, but i’ve only met one person with genuine natural authority – the sort of guy who could shout you down with just a whisper. He is in the corridor now, coming towards me, telling the forensic team they’ll have to wait: the Fire Department wants to secure the acid before somebody gets burnt.
‘Keep your plastic gloves on, though,’ he advises. ‘You can give each other a free prostate exam out in the hall.’ Everybody except the forensic guys laughs.
The man with the voice is Ben Bradley, the homicide lieutenant in charge of the crime scene. He’s been down in the manager’s office, trying to locate the scumbag who runs the joint. He’s a tall black man – Bradley, not the scumbag – in his early fifties with big hands and Industry jeans turned up at the cuff. His wife talked him into buying them recently in a forlorn attempt to update his image, instead of which – he says – they make him look like a character from a Steinbeck novel, a modern refugee from the dustbowl.