The Soul Catcher - Alex Kava [81]
Maggie glanced at Racine, who seemed neither pleased nor angry with the assistant medical examiner. Instead, the detective came in closer, crossed her arms over her chest and waited, pointing the penlight, ready to peek inside. Suddenly moonlight streamed into the exit, just above the arch, and illuminating the woman’s whole face, making her eyes glitter.
“Jesus!” Racine said. “That’s pretty freaky.” She glanced back at Maggie, and Maggie tried to remember when there had been a full moon, or if it was still to come. And did it mean anything?
“What exactly are we looking for?” Prashard asked, ignoring Racine and the sudden moonlight as he continued to peel back the gray duct tape, inch by inch, taking care to not lift away any skin. Maggie grabbed a plastic evidence bag from Prashard’s case and held it open for him to put the tape in.
“Should be a capsule,” Racine answered. “Check the inside of her cheeks.”
“You mean like poison?”
“Just check, Prashard. Jesus!” The detective seemed a bit unnerved and impatient.
Prashard finally opened the woman’s mouth, but before he could insert a gloved finger, quarters came spilling out.
“What the hell?” Racine shone the penlight, so that even standing over Racine’s shoulder, Maggie could see quite clearly. The woman’s mouth looked like a black, decaying slot machine filled with shiny coins, spilling out like she’d just hit the jackpot.
CHAPTER 41
TUESDAY
November 26
Boston, Massachusetts
From his corner suite at the Ritz-Carlton, Ben Garrison could see the Boston Common in one direction and the Charles River in the other. The lush suite was a long-overdue reward to himself and hopefully a good-luck charm for more good things to come. Not that he was superstitious, but he did believe that attitude could be a powerful tool. There was no harm in a few rewards and props now and then to boost that attitude. It made all the crap he had to deal with worthwhile; crap like crank phone calls and cockroaches. Small stuff compared to what he had dealt with in the past.
He remembered several years ago living out of a leaky one-man tent in a smelly, rat-infested warehouse in Kampala, Uganda. It had taken him months to learn Swahili and gain the locals’ trust. But it paid off. In no time, he had enough explicit photographs to break the story about a mad scientist luring homeless people from the streets of Kampala for his radical experiments.
Ben still had several of those photos tacked up on the walls of his darkroom. In order to feed her family of five kids, one woman had allowed the so-called scientist to remove her perfectly healthy breast, leaving a scar that looked like the asshole had chopped it off with a machete. An old man had sold the use of his right ear, now mutilated beyond repair, for a carton of cigarettes.
Ben had chosen a slow-speed black-and-white film to bring out the textures and details with natural side lighting. When he developed the prints, he had used high-contrast-grade paper to accentuate the dramatic effect, making the blacks dense and silky and the whites blindingly bright. Through his magic, he had managed to transform those hideous scars into art.
He was a genius when it came to catching hopelessness, that flicker of despair that, if he waited long enough, would always reveal itself in his subjects’ eyes. All it took was patience. Yes, he was truly a master at capturing on film the whole spectrum of emotions, from terror to jealousy to fear and evil. After all, the eyes were the window to the soul, and Ben knew he could one day capture the image of the soul on film. Patience.
At the time, both Newsweek and Time had been working on the mad scientist story, but neither of them had photos, not ones like Ben’s. His reward to himself after selling those photos for a nice chunk of change had been a week on a yacht with some waitress whose name he couldn’t remember. He did, however, still remember the