The Gilded Madonna, Garrick Jones [best fiction novels txt] 📗

*****

Jack Lyme was not one to be perturbed by anything much, so when I entered his examination lab and saw he’d called in the senior medical examiner from the main city office, I was rather surprised.

Jack was a forensics specialist. He usually gave bodies a look over, submitted his report to go along with the cadaver when it went to either the local hospital, the coroner, or to the police specialists in the city. He introduced me to Doctor Halloran, but as I already knew him, I shook his hand and smiled. It was the furrow on Jack’s brow had me slightly puzzled.

“So, Detective, there’s a body on the slab covered in a sheet,” I said over my shoulder to Dioli. “What is it you wanted me to see?”

“Go ahead, show him,” Dioli said to the two doctors.

Halloran pulled the sheet down to the man’s waist. What I saw made me take a deep breath. The man’s throat was cut so deeply his head looked like it had almost been severed.

“If you tell me this man was found in the public toilet behind the grandstand of Coogee Oval opposite where I live, I might just need a chair,” I said.

As Dioli said nothing, and the other two men seemed to be waiting for me to speak, I guess my suspicions had been proven. I pulled the sheet down to the man’s knees.

“Jesus!” I said.

Above the man’s pubic bone was a deeply incised X, at its centre an embedded Catseye marble. I recognised it as the modus operandi of the Silent Cop killer, who we’d named after the concrete traffic domes set into the middle of intersections on the roadway. Five inches tall and set around the circumference with reflective glass marbles, they were painted yellow and used as a centre marker around which cars were supposed to make their turns at the intersection.

“The Silent Cop case was yours, I believe?” Dioli asked. I ignored him.

“Same as the others?” I asked Jack.

“Yes, Clyde. Same incision above the pubis, inserted Catseye, and throat cut by someone close up behind. Right-handed perpetrator, just like the others.”

I moved closer and crouched down behind the head of the torso. There it was. The unmistakable deep bite into the top of the man’s left shoulder. The killer’s signature, imprinted in flesh. I sighed and stood up. Jack patted my shoulder. Both he and I had run into so many dead ends trying to search dental charts. We’d spent hours pouring over the few records that only some dentists kept. Most didn’t bother. The tooth pattern was perfect; no missing teeth, no irregularities. Too perfect. Another thing that had kept me awake for hours at night.

Dioli had moved to the doorway and was leaning against the wall, his hands in his pockets, watching me with a slight smile hovering at the corner of his mouth. Had I been less generous, which I wasn’t, I could easily have interpreted it as a smirk. I ignored him and turned back to Jack.

“So I suppose—”

“Yes, ejaculate over the buttocks and upper thighs at the back.”

“I didn’t examine the last cases, Clyde,” Dr. Halloran informed me. “However, when Dr. Lyme called me early this morning, I pulled the medical reports from our central office and read through them in the taxi on my way here. I’d say the weapon was the same, and the man was killed in the same manner, with all the same telltale details.”

We’d had a spate of four killings, all in a relatively short period of time. Men’s throats sliced through to the spinal column from behind with a cut-throat razor, the X-shaped incision embedded with a Catseye marble, the bite mark on the left shoulder, and evidence of inter­course—withdrawal at the point of orgasm.

“You swab for other traces?”

“What do you take me for, Clyde,” Jack said with a smile. “Of course. However, there’s evidence the victim had ejaculated at the time of, or shortly before death. Traces of semen in the urethra, his pubic hair, and on his right hand.

“Sick bastards,” Dioli muttered from behind me and then added, “What?” as we three turned to stare at his inappropriate remark.

“If you’d like some advice, Detective Sergeant, I’d keep your comments about other people’s private lives to yourself,” the chief medical examiner said. Quinton Halloran’s icy stare had made me bite my tongue more than once when I’d unwittingly offered some thoughtless observation. “It’s not only unhelpful, but it’s unfitting for someone to make value judgements about the victim of a crime. Honestly, those sorts of remarks are more fitting for some lout in a public bar than for a new detective sergeant.”

Dioli blushed furiously red.

“Can I go now?” I said to him.

“What? Aren’t you going to—”

“It’s your case, Detective Sergeant. Besides, yesterday you made yourself pretty damned clear that I don’t work here anymore, and I should keep my nose out of your business.”

“But—”

“My notes are on file. Read those, do your forensics, investigate the victim’s background, and interview people who live in the area who might have seen something. All basic stuff, you should knock it over in a day or two. Once you’ve got your basics sorted, start planning your chain of investigation and get photos and notes pinned up on the case board in the detective’s office. For what it’s worth, start off by finding out who this man is and go from there.”

“We know who he is, Clyde,” Jack said as I was about to leave the room. “He’s a lance corporal at the army barracks down in High Street, behind the hospital.”

Army guy, trawling for blokes in public toilets late at night? Not all that uncommon, but risky. Poor bastard didn’t deserve to die like that.

“Can I have a word outside, Sergeant?” I said as I picked up my hat from the trolley on which I’d left it when I’d arrived. “Speak later, Jack. Nice to see you again, Quinton,” I added as I held the door open