Blood Trust - Eric van Lustbader [8]
“And then there’s the matter of your, uhm, diminutive size.”
“And yet these Metro yardbirds seem to think this little slip of a thing could kill a big, strong, healthy man and string him up upside down between two trees.”
The first detective, clearly of higher rank than Flatfoot, stepped into the circle. He had prematurely white hair, stooped shoulders, and a bad case of razor burn. His name was Willowicz and his partner was O’Banion. He beckoned her to follow him as he went around the body to the back. There, he switched on a flashlight, illuminating a kind of scaffold, roughly made of tree branches lashed together with twine, onto which Billy’s body had been strung. A rope, invisible from the front, was tied to the top of the scaffold. It rose straight up into the tree, where it had been looped around a thick branch. The other end hung down.
Willowicz took hold of the free end of the rope with a hand encased in a latex glove, and tugged. “You see how this works, Ms. Carson. The victim was attacked, his body was affixed to the scaffold as it lay on the ground. Clearly, the killer had prepared ahead of time. Looping the rope over the branch created a fulcrum which made it possible to hoist the corpse into the vertical position it’s in now.” He paused, a small smile creeping into his face. “Anyone could do it, I assure you, even you.”
“But then you already knew that,” O’Banion said.
“You’re grotesque,” Alli said, “you know that?”
His laugh was as grating as nails on a chalkboard.
Willowicz led her back around to the front. “As you can see, the victim has been stabbed, not once or twice, or even a half-dozen times, but repeatedly, beyond…” He turned back to her. “A preliminary count has taken us past fifty. I’m quite certain there are more.”
“That’s why he bled to death?”
“No.” Willowicz pointed. “The vast majority of the cuts are superficial, barely scoring the subcutaneous layers. But they were all near nerve ganglia.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Alli said, “You’re saying that Billy was tortured.”
She did not miss the sharp glance exchanged by the detective and Commander Fellows.
“Do you think he was tortured, Ms. Carson?” Willowicz said.
“Well, the evidence points to it, doesn’t it.” She paused, her terror, horror, and grief once again threatening to overwhelm her. At once, she was cast back into the nightmare of her weeklong imprisonment. Then she took a mental step back, as Jack had taught her to do, disengaging herself from the intimacy of emotions. It was imperative now for her to think clearly and reason the situation out, which she was unable to do when overcome with emotion. Billy was dead, she had to accept that. All death is terrible, but this was beyond comprehension. Why would anyone torture Billy, and then attempt to frame her? “However, that theory leaves one question unanswered.”
Willowicz put his hands behind his back. “And what might that be?”
“I don’t know,” Peter McKinsey, Naomi Wilde’s partner, said. “You seem awfully cool for someone whose lover of five months has been brutalized and killed.”
“If you’ve got nothing constructive to contribute, fuck off,” Alli said. Addressing Willowicz, she said, “You said he bled to death. None of these subcutaneous cuts, even en masse, would have done the trick.”
Again, that sharp look was exchanged by Willowicz and Fellows.
“So how did poor Billy die?” Alli said.
Willowicz beckoned with a crooked forefinger. Something about his demeanor reminded Alli of a Grimm’s fairy tale witch or ogre, anyway someone delighted to be up to no good. “Come closer.”
She walked over the uneven ground. The crunch of even her light weight pierced the paper-thin layer of ice, and with each step she seemed to sink farther into the boggy ground beneath.
A sickly smell enveloped Billy, of rotten meat, ice cream, and fecal matter. She gagged once, and then, because everyone’s attention was on her, caught hold of herself and fought down her rising gorge. Billy’s eyes were so swollen and bruised she had first thought they were