Cruel & Unusual Read online

  “This neighborhood used to be all white,” Marino said. “I remember when I first came to Richmond this was a good area to live. Lots of decent, hardworking folks who kept their yards real nice and went to church on Sunday. Times change. Me, I wouldn't let any kid of mine walk around out here after dark. But when you live in a place, you get comfortable. Eddie was comfortable walking around, delivering his papers, and running errands for his mother.

  “The night it happened he came out the front door of his crib, cut through to Azalea, then took a right like we're doing as I speak. There's Lucky's on our left, next to the gas station.”

  He pointed out a convenience store with a green horseshoe on the lighted sign. “That corner right over there is a popular hangout for drug drones. They trade crack for cash and fade. We catch the cockroaches, and two days later they're on another corner doing the same thing.”

  “A possibility Eddie was involved in drugs?”

  My question would have been somewhat farfetched back in the days when I began my career, but no longer. Juveniles now comprised approximately ten percent of all narcotics trafficking arrests in Virginia.

  “No indication of it so far. My gut tells me he wasn't,” Marino said.

  He pulled into the convenience store's parking lot, and we sat gazing out at advertisements taped to plate glass and lights shining garishly through fog. Customers formed a long line by the counter as the harried clerk worked the cash register without looking up. A young black man in high tops and a leather coat stared insolently at our car as he sauntered out with a quart of beer and dropped change in a pay phone near the front door. A man, red-faced and in paint-spattered jeans, peeled cellophane off a pack of cigarettes as he trotted to his truck.

  “I'm betting this is where he met up with his assailant,” Marino said.

  “How?” I said.

  “I think it went down simple as hell. I think he came out of the store and this animal came right up to him and fed him a line to gain his confidence. He said something and Eddie went with him and got in the car.”

  “His physical findings would certainly support that,” I said. “He had no defense injuries, nothing to indicate a struggle. No one inside the convenience store saw him with anyone?”

  “No one I've talked to so far. But you see how busy this joint is, and it was dark out. If anybody saw anything, it was probably a customer coming in or returning to his car. I plan to get the media to run something so we can appeal to anyone who might have stopped here between five and six that night. And Crime Stoppers is going to do a segment on it, too.”

  “Was Eddie streetwise?”

  “You get a squirrel who's smooth and even kids who know better can fall for it. I had a case back in New York where a ten-year-old girl walked to the local store to buy a pound of sugar. As she's leaving, this pedophile approaches her and says her father's sent him. He says her mom's just been rushed to the hospital and he's supposed to pick the girl up and take her there. She gets in his car and ends up a statistic.”

  He glanced over at me. “All right, white or black?”

  “In which case?”

  “Eddie Heath's.”

  “Based on what you've said, the assailant is white.”

  Marino backed up and waited for a break in traffic. “No question the MO fits for white. Eddies old man don't like blacks and Eddie didn't trust them, either, so it's unlikely a black guy gained Eddies confidence. And if people notice a white boy walking with a white man even if the boy looks unhappy - they think big brother and little brother or father and son.”

  He turned right, heading west. “Keep going; Doc. What else?”

  Marino loved this game. It gave him just as much pleasure when I echoed his thoughts as it did when he believed I was flat-out wrong.

  “If the assailant is white, then the next conclusion I'd make is he's not from the projects, despite their close proximity.”

  “Race aside, why else might you conclude that the peril's not from the projects?”

  “The MO again,” I said simply. “Shooting someone in the head - even a thirteen-year-old - would not be unheard of in a street killing, but aside from that, nothing fits. Eddie was shot with a twenty-two, not with a nine or ten millimeter of large-caliber revolver. He was nude and he was mutilated, suggesting the violence was sexually motivated. As far as we know, he had nothing worth stealing and did not appear to have a life-style that put him at risk.”

  It was raining hard now, and streets were treacherous with cars moving at imprudent rates of speed with their headlights on. I supposed many people were headed to shopping malls, and it occurred to me that I had done little to prepare for Christmas.

  The grocery store on Patterson Avenue was just ahead on our left. I could not remember its former name, and signs had been removed, leaving nothing but a bare brick shell with a number of windows boarded up. The space it occupied was poorly lit, and I suspected the police would not have bothered to check behind the building at all were there not a row of businesses to the left of it. I counted five of them: pharmacy, shoe repair, dry cleaner, hardware store, and Italian restaurant, all closed and deserted the night Eddie Heath was driven here and left for dead.

  “Do you recall why this grocery store went out of business?” I asked.

  “About the same time a bunch of other places did. When the war started in the Persian Gulf,” Marino said.

  He cut through an alleyway, the high beams of his headlights licking brick walls and rocking when the unpaved ground got rough. Behind the store a chainlink fence separated an apron of cracked asphalt from a wooded area stirring darkly in the wind. Through the limbs of bare trees I could see streetlights in the distance and the illuminated sign for a Burger King.

  Marino parked, headlights boring into a brown Dumpster cancerous with blistered paint and rust, beads of water running down its sides. Raindrops smacked against glass and drummed the roof, and dispatchers were busy dispatching cars to the scenes of accidents.

  Marino pushed his hands against the steering wheel and hunched his shoulders. He massaged the back of his neck. “Christ, I'm getting old,” he complained. “I got a rain slicker in the trunk.”

  “You need it more than I do. I won't melt,” I said, opening my door.

  Marino fetched his navy blue police raincoat and I turned my collar up to my ears. The rain stung my face and coldly tapped the top of my head. Almost instantly, my ears started getting numb. The Dumpster was near the fence, at the outer limits of the pavement, perhaps twenty yards from the back of the grocery store. I noted that the Dumpster opened from the top, not the side.

  “Was the door to the Dumpster open or shut when the police got here?” I asked Marino.

  “Shut.”

  The hood of his raincoat made it difficult for him to look at me without turning his upper body. “You notice there's nothing to step up on.”

  He shone a flashlight around the Dumpster. “Also, it was empty. Not a damn thing in it except rust and the carcass of a rat big enough to saddle up and ride.”

  “Can you lift the door?”

  “Only a couple inches. Most of the ones made like this have a latch on either side. If you're tall enough, you can lift the lid a couple inches and slide your hand down along the edge, continuing to raise the lid by bumping the latches in place a little at a time. Eventually you can get it open far enough to stuff a bag of trash inside. Problem is, the latches on this one don't catch. You'd have to open the lid all the way and let it flop over on the other side, and no way you're going to do that unless you climb up on something.”

  “You're what? Six-one or two?”

  “Yeah. If I can't open the Dumpster, he couldn't either. The favorite theory at the moment is he carried the body out of the car and leaned it up against the Dumpster while he tried to open the door - the same way you put a bag of garbage down for a minute to free your hands. When he can't get the door open, he hauls ass, leaving the kid and his crap right here on the pavement.”


  “He could have dragged him back there in the woods.”

  “There's a fence.”

  “It's not very high, maybe five feet high,” I pointed out. “At the very least, he could have left the body behind the Dumpster. As it was, if you drove back here, the body was in plain sight.”

  Marino looked around in silence, shining the flashlight through the chain-link fence. Raindrops streaked through the narrow beam like a million small nails driven down from heaven. I could barely bend my fingers. My hair was soaked and icy water was trickling down my neck. We returned to the car and he switched the heater up high.

  “Trent and his guys are all hung up on the Dumpster theory, the location of its door and so on,” he said. “My personal opinion is the Dumpster's only role in this is it was a damn easel for the squirrel to prop his work of art against.”

  I looked out through the rain.

  “The point is,” he went on in a hard voice, “he didn't bring the kid back here to conceal the body but to make sure it was found. But the guys with Henrico just don't see it. I not only see it, I feel it like something breathing down the back of my neck.”

  I continued staring out at the Dumpster, the image of Eddie Heath's small body propped against it so vivid it was as if I had been present when he was found. The realization struck me suddenly and hard.

  “When was the last time you went through the Robyn Naismith case?” I asked.

  “It doesn't matter. I remember everything about it,” Marino said, staring straight ahead. “I was waiting to see if it would cross your mind. It hit me the first time I came out here.”

  3

  That night I built a fire and ate vegetable soup in front of it as freezing rain mixed with snow. I had switched off lamps and drawn draperies back from the sliding glass doors. Grass was frosted white, rhododendron leaves curled tight, winter-bare trees backlit by the moon.

  The day had drained me, as if a greedy, dark force had sucked the light right out of my being. I felt the invasive hands of a prison guard named Helen, and smelled the stale stench of hovels that once had housed remorseless, hateful men. I remembered holding slides up to lamplight in a hotel bar in New Orleans at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences' annual meeting. Robyn Naismith's homicide was then unsolved, and to discuss what had been done to her as Mardi Gras revelers loudly drifted past had somehow seemed ghastly.

  She had been beaten and bullied, and stabbed to death, it was believed, in her living room. But it was Waddell's postmortem acts that had shocked people most, his uncommon and creepy ritual. After she was dead, he undressed her. If he raped her, there was no evidence of it. His preference, it seemed, was to bite and repeatedly penetrate the fleshier parts of her body with a knife. When her friend from work stopped by to check on her, she found Robyn's battered body propped against the television, head drooping forward, arms by her sides, legs straight out, and clothing piled nearby. She looked like a bloody, life-size doll returned to its place after a session of make-believe and play that had turned into a horror.

  The court testimony of a psychiatrist was that after Waddell had murdered her, he was overcome by remorse and had sat talking to her body for perhaps hours. A forensic psychologist for the Commonwealth speculated quite the opposite, that Waddell knew Robyn was a television personality and his act of propping her body against the television set was symbolic. He was watching her on TV again and fantasizing. He was returning her to the medium that had brought about their introduction, and this, of course, implied premeditation. The nuances and twists in the endless analyses got only more complicated with time.

  The grotesque display of that twenty-seven-Year-old anchorwoman's body was Waddell's special signature. Now a little boy was dead ten years later and someone had signed his work - on the eve of Waddell's execution - the same way.

  I made coffee, poured it into a thermos, and carried it into my study. Sitting at my desk, I booted up my computer and dialed into the one downtown. I had yet to see the printout of the search Margaret had conducted for me, though I suspected it was one of the reports in the depressingly large stack of paperwork that had been in my box late Friday afternoon. The output file, however, would still be on the hard disk.

  At the UNIX log-in I typed my user name and password and was greeted by the flashing word mail. Margaret, my computer analyst, had sent me a message.

  “Check flesh file,” it read “That's really awful,” I muttered, as if Margaret could hear.

  Changing to the directory called Chief, where Margaret routinely directed output and copied files I had requested, I brought up the file she had named Flesh.

  It was quite large because Margaret had selected from all manners of death and then merged the data with what she had generated from the Trauma Registry. Unsurprisingly, most of the cases the computer had picked up were accidents in which limbs and tissue had been lost in vehicular crashes and misadventures with machines. Four cases were homicides in which the bodies bore bite marks. Two of those victims had been stabbed, the other two strangled. One of the victims was an adult male, two were adult females, and one was a female only six years old. I jotted down case numbers and ICD-9 codes.

  Next I began scanning screen after screen of the Trauma Registry's records of victims who had survived long enough to be admitted to a hospital. I expected the information to be a problem, and it was. Hospitals released patient data only after it had been as sterilized and depersonalized as operating rooms. For purposes of confidentiality, names. Social Security numbers, and other identifiers were stripped away. There was no common link as the person traveled through the paperwork labyrinth of rescue squads, emergency rooms, various police departments, and other agencies. The sorry end of the story was that data about a victim might reside in six different agency data bases and never be matched, especially if there had been any entry errors along the way. It was possible, therefore, for me to discover a case that aroused my interest without having much hope of figuring out who the patient was or if he or she had eventually died.

  Making a note of Trauma Registry records that might prove interesting, I exited the file. Finally, I ran a list command to see what old data reports, memos, or notes in my directory I could remove to free up space on the hard disk. That was when I spotted a file I did not understand.

  The name of it was tty07. It was only sixteen bytes in size and the date and time were December 16, this past Thursday, at 4:26 in the afternoon. The file's contents was one alarming sentence:

  I can't find it.

  Reaching for the phone, I started to call Margaret at home and then stopped. The directory Chief and its files were secure. Though anyone could change to my directory, unless he logged in with my user name and password, he should not be able to list the files in Chief or read them. Margaret should be the only person besides me who knew my password. If she had gone into my directory, what was it she could not find and who was she saying this to? Margaret wouldn't, I thought, staring intensely at that one brief sentence on the screen.

  Yet I was unsure, and I thought of my niece. Perhaps Lucy knew UNDO. I glanced at my watch. It was past eight on a Saturday night and in a way I was going to be heartbroken if I found Lucy at home. She should be out on a date or with friends. She wasn't.

  “Hi, Aunt Kay.” She sounded surprised, reminding me that I had not called in a while.

  “How's my favorite niece?”

  “I'm your only niece. I'm fine.”

  “What are you doing at home on a Saturday night?” I asked.

  “Finishing a term paper. What are you doing at home on a Saturday night?”

  For an instant, I did not know what to say. My seventeen-year-old niece was more adept at putting me in my place than anyone I knew.

  “I'm mulling over a computer problem,” I finally said.

  “Then you've certainty called the right department,” said Lucy, who was not given to fits of modesty. “Hold on. Let me move these books and stuff out of the way so I can get
to my keyboard.”

  “It's not a PC problem,” I said. “I don't guess you know anything about the operating system called UNIX, do you?”

  'I wouldn't call UNIX an operating system, Aunt Kay. It's like calling it the weather when it's really the environment, which is comprised of the weather and all the elements and the edifices. Are you using A-T an' T?”

  “Good God, Lucy. I don't know.”

  “Well, what are you running it on?”

  “An NCR mini.` “Then it's A-T an' T.”

  “I think someone might have broken security,” I said.

  “It happens. But what makes you think it?”

  “I found a strange file in my directory, Lucy. My directory and its files are secure - you shouldn't be able to read anything unless you have my password.”

  “Wrong. If you have root privileges, you're the super user and can do anything you want and read anything you want.”