Body Language. James Hall

and I ask myself what it’s all added up to. And the answer keeps coming up the same. Not a hill of shit.’

      ‘What do you want, Dan? Want me to try to cheer you up?’

      He looked down at the sprinkle of blood near his feet.

      ‘It won’t work. I’m inconsolable.’ He cocked his head and smiled. ‘I pronounce that right? Inconsolable?’

      ‘Sounded right to me.’

      ‘I’m working on my vocabulary. One of my new hobbies, getting ready for retirement. Hell, I never needed a fucking vocabulary on this job.’

      ‘Well,’ Alex said. ‘Inconsolable seems like a pretty good place to start.’

      Dan tilted his head back, stared up at the sky, getting that look again.

      Alexandra stepped into the apartment.

      The sectional couch was shaped into a U and took up most of the room. It was a green-and-white tropical print. On the glass coffee table was the same bottle of Lucere, a Napa Valley chardonnay that had been at all the other scenes. A high-end grocery store wine, but not rare enough to be helpful.

      Sprawled on the beige rug in the center of the U was a pretty woman in her late twenties with short black hair. She was naked and her slender body had been rearranged. The killer had laid her out flat on her back with her arms hugging her belly as if she’d been kicked in the gut and was fighting for air.

      ‘Same as number one,’ Dan said from the door. ‘Like maybe he’s run out of poses and he’s starting the cycle again.’

      ‘Maybe.’

      There was a deep cut at her throat, like the others. She was slender and her eyes were open – dark and disconnected.

      ‘Landlord found her. A week late on her rent. He knocked, walked in. I’m guessing she’s been dead more than twenty-four, less than thirty-six.’

      ‘Seems about right,’ Alex said.

      The other four women had been naked, as well. All the bodies were laid out in different positions, each one portraying another violent drama. The homicide guys had given each a name. Number one, like this one, was known as ‘Gasper.’ Number two was found lying on her side bent at the waist with her hands covering her ears as if she were trying to shut out some gruesome noise. ‘Hear No Evil’ the detectives called her. Number three had given the namers the most trouble. Like two, she’d been placed on her left side with her legs forward, but this one’s arms had been extended in front of her, one at chest level, one arm stretching out from beneath her head, a flailing motion as if she were trying to fight off a swarm of bees. They called her ‘The Swatter.’ And then about a month ago, they’d found the fourth victim badly decomposed in her Little Havana apartment. Her nude body was lying face up with arms and legs spread as if she were floating tranquilly on the quiet surface of a lake. So ‘Floater’ it was.

      The FBI examined the photos and found no matches with any other signature killings around the country in the last ten years. Their profilers theorized the Bloody Rapist was creating particular scenarios from his past, trying to reconstruct moments of abuse he’d witnessed as a child – probably acts of violence against his mother he was helpless to prevent.

      But that was far too neat an explanation for Alexandra, too off-the-rack. Just as likely the killer had repositioned the women according to the twisted commandments of some crazed inner voice. But these days everyone wanted a formula, a nifty explanation for guys like this. As if his actions might make a kind of sense, raping women, slashing their throats, repositioning them, then leaving a trail of blood leading away from the scene. Like sure, of course, he must have seen his father beat his mother, then leave her in these exact positions on the living room floor, and he’d walked away bleeding from the scratch marks she’d given him, so now the grown-up boy, that poor, twisted son of a bitch, is compelled to re-enact endlessly those traumatic episodes, laying the dead women out like sacrificial offerings to his past.

      Alex hated it, the way the forensic-psychology hotshots had taken over, explaining it all, giving every crime a cute Freudian cause and effect. She hated it because the explanations were always more than explanations. Behind each of their clever scenarios was the same suggestion – that there was logic to evil, a reasonable justification for every fucking horror under the sun.

      The media wasn’t onto the weird arrangements yet, because so far, everyone working the case had been stonewalling, keeping the reporters beyond the crime-scene tape. If the killer was indeed hungry for newsprint, it wasn’t their job to feed him. And, of course, the second the word got out about those eerie poses, there’d be tabloid crews elbowing their way to the front of the pack, making good police work a hundred times harder.

      Slowly, she began to work her way around the perimeter of the room, a full 360 degrees. The light was good. Dan had turned everything on, overhead, table lamps, fluorescent kitchen lights. She had to change film again. Marking it, slipping the used film into her waist pouch. Continuing around the edge of the room to get the complete perspective. Then zooming in for the victim. Pretty woman, athletic. That one-inch incision in her throat, a few quarts of her blood spreading into the beige carpet. Alexandra got close-ups of the wound, the stained carpet.

      Across from the flowery couch was a leather wing-back chair, a matching ottoman. Something from a lawyer’s study. Two cheap oils on the walls, sad-eyed clowns and a pelican nesting on a piling – tourist shop trash. But behind the couch was a large black-and-white photograph, a misty Everglades glen cluttered with ferns and alligators lurking beneath the still waters. A guy’s work she’d admired for years. Clyde Butcher.

      She’d read about him, how he slogged with his huge camera and a hundred pounds of equipment out into the middle of the soupy Glades. Then he set up his tripod, hefted the camera onto it. Two hours to set up for one shot – all so he could make these huge photographs full of intricate detail. Butcher did magical things with black and white. Made herons and ibises into angels. Put an enchanted sheen on the palm fronds and the saw grass that exposed the sinister grace of that river of grass. Its silence and danger, its holiness.

      Nothing at all like the stuff she did – just one color shot after another, stark and standard. Keeping herself out of it. Keeping her mood, her values, her interpretation buried away.

      She would snap somewhere around three hundred shots of that particular crime scene alone. Probably over a thousand photos before the night was done. And none of them would be art. That was the skill of the job. Keep it dull. Plain and simple and honest and straight. No spin, no subjectivity. Nothing for defense lawyers to argue about. That was what she did five nights a week. She kept herself out of it. Walked through these rooms with the scrupulous dispassion of a Buddhist priest. Not playing with shadows and perspectives, not stalking, like Clyde Butcher did, that perfect moment when sunlight and shadow and the ripples on the water’s surface were in perfect alignment.

      Her job was the opposite of art. Pornographic reality. If she had a gift, it was a talent for watchful emptiness. Standing back, seeing, then getting it all down on her negative – the disinterested purity of fact.

      ‘You like that?’ Dan said from the doorway. ‘That photograph?’

      ‘I like it. Sure.’

      ‘So take it with you. I’ll help you get it down.’

      She looked over at him.

      ‘Who’s going to know, Alex?’

      ‘What’re you, cracking up? I’m not taking that thing.’

      ‘Why not?’

      Alexandra took another look at the photograph and heaved out a breath.

      ‘Well, for one thing, it wouldn’t fit in my place,’ she said. ‘It’s too beautiful. I’d have to take down all the other crap I got on my walls. Or else move to a better house.’

      Standing in the doorway, he shook his head, stripped a stick of gum.

      ‘You know, Rafferty,