Loved by Mr. Night

Chapter 6

Smoke arose from the cigarettes and steam from the thermos mugs of green tea. The detectives of Section one sat around the meeting room wrapped in coats and wearing hats. Some even wore gloves. The heating had broken down again.

One wall was covered at with photographs taken at four crime scenes. Four young women strangled and savagely mutilated. Each one a lot worse than the last one. Sunshine slanted across the wall bringing very little light to the cold dark place. The mood in the room was somber as they listened to Detective Mishra outlining the details of the latest killing. Adriel watched him pensively. Mishra was one of the senior detectives now, but he was still in love with his image.

He always had a piece of gum in his mouth and a pair of sunglasses in his breast pocket that he would whip out and clamp on his face with a hand at the first blink of sunshine.

All the others always joked that his Indian genes were almost non-existent since he could not tolerate sun at all. He had been proudly sporting an upper lip growth now for years. And Mishra had been considerably chastened when his daughter had written ad brought home a school essay about her father.

“He is growing a moustache.”

To his credit he said the story against himself. His own personal uniform consisted of baseball boots and faded denims and short leather jacket. Mishra had been divorced for nearly five years and still he had the custody of his daughter. Adriel sighed at the thought of daughter and watched his junior as Mishra held up the photograph of the chewed up remains of a brown Russian cheroot still in its evidence bag.

“It is his calling card,” he told the room.” He leaves one of these at every scene. It is no accident at all. He knows we will find them. It is like he is saying, here’s my DNA. You got my code, but you will never get my number. This bastard is playing games with us.”

“Why would he that?” The question came from one of the youngest detectives in the department. Sam Chauvin was tall and wore dark trousers and black shoes and black jacket. He too had a penchant for American style shades. His thick black hair cut short and back, was long on top and swept back in a quaff. The other detectives called him Elvis behind his back.

“If we knew why he did any of it, Elvis, then we would be half way to nabbing this bastard,” said Mishra.

“Well, whatever motivates him is not sexual.” This came from Detective Brown.” He didn’t have s*x with any of them, did he now? There has been no trace of semen found at any of the scenes.”

“We don’t know that in this case,” said Mishra.” At least, not until we get the reports back from the autopsy and the lab. But anyways, who knows how he gets his kicks? He takes bits of them away with him…only a seriously f****d up one would do that.”

“Every serial killer has a penchant for keeping his own trophy. That is not something unusual,” said Adriel in a dry voice.

Leon Rover came in the room and quietly took a seat in the back. It was unusual for him to be late. But Adriel knew that if he was late then there must be some serious reason for that. He nodded in silent acknowledgement to his deputy. Rover was several years older than Adriel himself. Steady and reliable, he had been the first choice for becoming the Chief but Rover had said he was not suited for leadership role. He was more kind of better at running the place rather than giving instructions in the first place. And Adriel had been given the position. And he had been right. It was a partner ship that really worked well for the both of them.

The rest of the detectives were now actively engaged in a debate about the motivation, a topic of discussion which until recently would have been anathema. Traditional police work was based on painfully meticulous collection of data and evidence which would ultimately lead to the culprit and conviction. Only then the motivation would become apparent.

Unlike the West, where detectives considered the motive the starting point of an investigation. But like everything else in UK this too was changing. And Adriel had personally been part in altering them.

While he still believed that there was value in large group meetings attended by all detectives, talking through about the evidence and discussing everything about the case in the minutest detail, the time it took was now no longer a luxury that they could afford when such a killer was out lose.

The crime rate was soaring and the unemployment grew it was almost impossible to keep track of the floating population of the itinerant workers moving from city to city. They always had to find more ways to deal with crime more effectively and quickly.

Adriel looked at the photographs on the wall. A grotesque catalogue of inhuman behavior. And he could not help but wonder about the motivation. There was something very cold and controlled about these killings. Pathologist Wang had described the latest attack as frenzied. And yet the killer had taken time to arrange the pieces of intestine beside the body and carefully laid the entrails across the girl’s shoulder. In the previous case, he had taken the contents of the girl’s purse and arranged them on the ground around her feet.

It was bizarre behavior.

All the victims till now were prostitutes. They all had been murdered within the same square mile of the city’s area where a large population of the foreign embassy staff and five star tourist hotels attracted a slightly higher class of call girl. All had been strangled, although this was not the cause of death. And all of them had been killed on a weekend.

The first victim was twenty-three year old Dana Shelly, had been discovered behind the quiet cul-de-sac behind a gift store of the Santrast Avenue. Her face and head were so stolen from strangulation that identification by the relatives had become almost impossible. She had been stabbed thirty-nine times.

There was a gap of three weeks between the first and the second murders. The second was found on a building site, it was an active construction site by the labourers arriving for their early shift. They had pinned up a portrait picture of each girl on the wall to remind themselves that these were original people and not victims. It was only too easy to become desensitized, to start seeing corpses as dead meat rather than human beings.

The second victim, Vera Lee, had been an exceptionally pretty girl. In the photograph that her parents had given them she was smiling radiantly at the camera. It was a smile that haunted them all and reminded them of their failure. She had been strangled and then her throat had been slashed twice, left to right, one cut severing her carotid arteries, the windpipe, gullet and spinal cord.

Her killer had cut open the abdomen from the centre point beneath the ribs and under the pelvis to the left of the stomach and then stabbed her private parts with the tip of her knife. The pathologist had concluded that the attack had been savage and violent.

Just eight days later, the third murder shook the entire London. The victim, Linda Leyman was slightly older, nearly thirty and found in an alleyway behind the stalls where Russian traders sold furs in Ritan Road. Like the others, she had been strangled and had her throat severed. But for the first time in this case the murderer had removed the trophies.  The entire abdomen had been laid open, the intestines severed from their mesenteric attachments and placed by the victim’s shoulder. The uterus, the upper portion of the v****a and the posterior two-thirds of the bladder had been removed entirely, and no trace of them could be found in the vicinity of the crime scene. The only conclusion they could draw was that the killer had taken them away with him.

To compound the bizarre nature of the killing, they had found the purse laid on the ground around her feet. A comb, a pack of cigarettes,, a lighter, a torn envelope bearing a date stamp from just a few days before. Pathologist Wang had expressed the opinion that these items had not arrived there randomly or by chance. It was Adriel’s belief that the murderer had gone through the items of her purse and then had arranged them carefully in a grotesque display at the feet of the corpse.

But he could not offer up any explanation.

Nor could any of them understand why the killer left the unsmoked end of the Russian cheroot close to each body. Clearly he had smoked them before committing the crime. To linger for smoke later would have been an invitation for discovery. But he had and must have known that the police would find the butts. And if he was a man of education then he would also know that the DNA could be traced from the saliva.

It was like leaving a signature, an artist’s autograph on his work, so that there would be no room for doubt in identifying the author.

The detectives had moved their discussion from the motive to the modus operandi. Mishra was clear on the killer’s MO.

“He chokes them until they are unconscious,” he said ,” then he lays them on the ground, on their back and then kneels on their right side. He leans across the body and cuts their throats from left to right. Look at the pics…” He waved his ahnd towards the gallery of horrors which had been stuck up to the wall.

“You can see the blood always pulls around the left side of the head, neaver down the front of the body, which it would if they were still standing. In some cases the spatter patterns on the ground shows that the blood spurted from the left carotid artery. The victim was still alive after strangulation. The blood pressure was still there.”

He paused to light a cigarette briefly.” The point is he makes sure that he gets very little blood on himself as possible and when they are dead, he starts hacking them open..”

Adriel spoke for the first time since this entire discussion started.