Private Demon

Jema wished she could tell Meryl about her secret life. I work for the coroner's office, Mother. I process crime scenes at night. I collect and identify unusual truce evidence. I make reports to the police. In a way, I help them catch the killers.

Meryl's reaction would certainly be swift, negative, and inescapable. You're a Shaw. Shaws do not work for anyone.

Feeling disgusted with herself, Jema drove downtown to the crime scene, a private courtyard park maintained for the residents of an exclusive condominium. Showing her ID helped her past the uniformed officers securing the perimeter, but it didn't impress the homicide detective supervising the forensics team.

''Shaw? You took your sweet time getting here." Detective Stephen Newberry held out a hand for her ID. His bland face and spare, narrow frame might have belonged to an English teacher, but the hard blue eyes were all cop. "Get caught in rush hour?"

"'I just got home from my day job, Detective," she said, handing him the badge issued to her by the coroner's office. He studied it with an insulting thoroughness. "I came here as soon as I received and confirmed the page." After an internal debate of no more than ten or fifteen minutes, she amended silently.

"We've been waiting twenty minutes for you," Newberry told her. His short, copper hair drained the color from his pale face, while the deeply etched lines around his eyes and mouth added ten years to his age. "Maybe you could drive a little faster next time. I'll mention it to your boss."

"I'm an independent consultant contracted by the coroner's office, Detective, not a county employee," Jema said as she put on protective shoe covers and the plastic garment shroud that would keep her from depositing fibers near the body. "If you want to get me in trouble, you'll have to speak with the owner of Shaw Museum. Would you like my mother's telephone number?"

"That's okay. I've got too much foot in my mouth right now." Newberry escorted her through the gauntlet of forensic techs and crime scene investigators until they reached the body. "You already worked a few of these, right?"

"Yes." Jema smiled a little. "I was initially consulted by the Chicago coroner's office when an importer was found murdered. The killer had stabbed him to death with what appeared to be an ancient Spartan dagger. I identified the weapon as a fake, but I also found an archaic Greek symbol traced in the blood near the body. That led to the arrest of a well-known collector. Apparently the importer sold him several fakes."

"Being able to identify old blades doesn't get you a job with the coroner's office," Newberry said.

"'No, but having a degree in forensic science and being willing to work part-time at night does." She stopped as she saw the victim.

The nude body of a man lay facedown on the brown grass. The back of the head bore a depression wound so severe it had distorted the entire skull, and the rest of the body showed signs of an extended, ruthless beating.

Jema dealt with death on a daily basis while cataloging artifacts, many of which were funerary objects found in graves and tombs. Yet the dried, brittle femur of a nobleman's household retainer, ritually sacrificed a thousand years before the birth of Christ, did not in any way compare to seeing the brutalized body of a man who had been alive only a few hours ago.

It was real. It was hideous. It could not be reasoned away.

"I'm told constant exposure eventually enables one to maintain an emotional distance," she said, clenching her hands in her pockets. "How long does that take?"

"About fifty years, give or take a couple of decades," Newberry said, his mouth tight. "It helps if you drink."

Jema pulled on a pair of latex gloves and removed a paper evidence bag from her packet. The detective stayed back as she first walked around the body, and then paused and looked intently at the grass and soil. "There isn't enough blood. He probably wasn't killed here."

"That was our take." Newberry gestured toward a number of small evidence flags planted in a patch of soil three feet from the body. "No footprints from the tire tracks. Maybe dumped from the back of a pickup truck that came through the maintenance entrance." He sounded vaguely surprised, as if he hadn't expected her observation.

"Did he work or live near here?" Jema knew murders were often committed close to or inside the victim's place of employment or home.

''He managed a convenience store six blocks over." New-berry came closer. "His night-shift clerk was the last one to see him alive, two days ago. He left the store at ten p.m. and never made it home."

"The body landed faceup; it was turned over." Jema pointed to patches of soil on the back and legs. "They wanted him facedown for some reason." She crouched and used a pair of tweezers to extract a minute amount of short brown hair from the tangle of grass near the still right foot. "This could be animal hair. Anyone walking a dog through here tonight?"

'"No. The building doesn't allow pets. We'll double-check when we canvass the building, see if anyone's been breaking the rules." Newberry took the evidence bag from her, marked it, and handed it off to a waiting tech, to whom he said, "If the photographer's through, let's get some guys over here to lift and bag him."

Jema eyed the arrangement of the limbs, the condition of the fingernails, and the patches of scalp showing through the thick dark hair. "He fought back while he could, but he was tied up at some point. The marks on his wrists indicate they used rope or cord." As the technicians flipped him, Jema looked at the victim's face. It was Asian, young, and badly swollen and lacerated. "Dear God."

A knife had been used to carve a swastika into the victim's face. The cuts were so deep that bone showed through.

Light flashed as the scene photographer snapped several stills of the victim's facial wounds. Newberry got on his cell phone and began to pace as he reported to his superiors. Jema concentrated on inspecting the front of the body, but her eyes kept straying to the terrible symbol that had been cut across the young man's face.

"You finished?" the detective asked her after finishing his call.

"Almost." She found bits of tissue in the grass and carefully retrieved them to give to one of the techs. "I'd check it against the wounds on the inside of his mouth."

Now Newberry looked dumbfounded. "How do you know that?"

"The teeth marks present on the outer lip. He bit it repeatedly, and probably did the same to his tongue and the sides of his cheeks. He was trying not to scream." She bent down and removed a few more hairs from the front of the man's battered chest. "These match what I found in the grass, but they aren't dog or cat hair; they're too coarse and thick, almost like wool."

"We'll send them to the FBI labs," Newberry said, although he didn't sound happy about it. "They should tell us something in a week or two."

"I know a local anthropologist who specializes in identifying faunal remains. She can compare these to her database and determine what species they are, as well as run DNA," Jema offered. "The turnaround would be a day, maybe two."

The detective looked at the body. "I'll clear it with my captain first. If we use your expert, we'll need copies of all the reports, and the samples will have to be returned to the SOC unit." Detective Newberry handed her a clipboard with a form, which she signed, showing that she had been present at the crime scene. "You said he tore up his mouth, trying not to scream. Why?"

She'd said too much, "it's only an observation, and I could be wrong."

"But?"

"I worked with a number of Asian college students on summer internships at the museum. One dropped the end of a heavy crate on his foot and broke three toes, and yet he didn't make a sound." She watched the morgue orderlies lower the victim into an open body bag. "Some Asian cultures consider a show of pain demeaning."

"They beat him to death, but he bites through his lip to keep from crying out, because that's worse?" Newberry sounded incredulous.

Jema tried not to flinch as the morgue body bag was zipped shut. "If you knew you were going to die. Detective, wouldn't you hold on to whatever pride you could?"

"I'd rather shout and get someone's attention, so I didn't have to die. Not like this." Detective Newberry gave her a narrow look. "You talk about death like you've got some kind of personal experience."

She would, soon enough. "The dead are my business."

Chapter 3

Thierry Durand knew he was mad. His derangement didn't frighten him. It made a place in the world for him, and gave him purpose. No battle was ever won by wholly sane men. Every great family had a bat or two in the attics; every village had an idiot. He. had never been defeated by anything, not the Saracens, not the Brethren, not the crazy woman he had loved. He would not surrender to mad ness.

Surviving it…

Me thrust a hand under the shredded remains of his shirt. Blood no longer oozed from the wounds in his belly and ribs, but they were not closing. They were too many and too close together. If he did not wish his insides to spill out and drag along the street, he would have to hunt.

Hunt, when he was the hunted.

He had put enough distance between hint and the dead thief to feel relatively safer, but he could not roam this part of the city covered in blood and garbage. The whirling red and blue lights of police ears had sent him into the shadows of this alley to hide, and within a few moments there were more. That was when he discovered the alley had no exit, and he was trapped. As he braced himself against one wall, prepared to defend himself, the police sped past. It took a moment for him to understand that he was not their object.

Once the street cleared, Thierry edged down the wall to have a look. The black-and-white cars, lights still Hashing, had congregated outside one of the tall, elegant buildings on the opposite end of the street. It had to be a serious crime for so many to come, but they were not here for him. Some of the patrolmen were setting up barricades, others walking up and down the street to speak to the humans who were coming out of other buildings.