establish whether the killer was left-handed or right-handed.
“Where’s the body?” Graham asked.
“I’m sorry, but they took it to the morgue ten minutes ago,” Detective
Preduski said, as if he felt responsible for some inexcusable breach of
manners. Graham wondered if Preduski’s entire life was an apologia. The
detective was quick to take the blame for everything and to find fault
with himself even when he behaved impeccably. He was a nondescript man
with a pale complexion and watery brown eyes. In spite of his
appearance and his apparent inferiority complex, he was a highly
respected member of the Manhattan homicide detail. More than one of the
detective’s associates had made it clear to Graham that he was working
with the best, that Ira Preduski was the top man in the department. “I
held the ambulance as long as I could.
You took so much time to get here. Of course I woke you in the dead of
night. I shouldn’t have done that. And then you probably had to call a
cab and wait around for it. I’m so sorry. Now I’ve probably ruined
everything for you. I should have tried to keep the body here just a
bit longer. I knew you’d want to see it where it was found.”
“That doesn’t matter,” Graham said. “In a sense, I’ve already had a
firsthand look at her.”
“Of course you have,” Preduski said. “I saw you on the Prine show
earlier.”
“Her eyes were green, weren’t they?”
“Just as you said.”
“She was found nude?”
“Yes.
“Stabbed many times?”
“Yes.”
“With a particularly brutal wound in the throat?”
“That’s right.”
“He mutilated her, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
Awful thing,” Preduski said. “I wish I didn’t have to tell you.
Nobody should have to hear it.” Preduski seemed about to wring his
hands. “He cut a plug of flesh out of her stomach. It’s almost like a
cork, with her navel in the center of it. Terrible.”
Graham closed his eyes and shuddered. “This …
cork . . .” He was beginning to perspire. He felt ill. He wasn’t
receiving a vision, just a strong sense of what had happened, a hunch
that was difficult to ignore. “He put this cork … in her right hand
and closed her fingers around it. That’s where you found it.”
“Yes.” The coroner turned away from the blood-spattered wall and stared
curiously at Graham.
Don’t look at me that way, Graham thought. I don’t want to know these
things.
He would have been delighted if his clairvoyance had allowed him to
predict sharp rises in the stock market rather than isolated pockets of
maniacal violence. He Would have preferred to see the names of winning
horses in races not yet run rather than the names of victims in murders
he’d never seen committed.
If he could have wished away his powers, he would have done that long
ago. But because that was impossible, he felt as if he had a
responsibility to develop and interpret his psychic talent. He
believed, perhaps irrationally, that by doing so he was compensating, at
least in part, for the cowardice that had overwhelmed him these past
five years.
“What do you make of the message he left us?” Preduski asked.
On the wall beside the vanity bench there were lines of poetry printed
in blood.
Rintah roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air; Hungry clouds
swag on the deep “Have any idea what it means?” Preduski asked.
“I’m afraid not.”
“Recognize the poet?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. ” Preduski shook his head sorrowfully.
“I’m not very well educated. I only had one year of college.
Couldn’t afford it. I read a lot, but there’s so much to read. if I
were educated, maybe I’d know whose poetry that is. I should know. If
the Butcher takes the time to write it down, it’s something important to
him. It’s a lead. What kind of detective am I if I can’t follow up a
lead as plain as that?” He shook his head again, clearly disgusted with
himself. “Not a good one. Not a very good one.”
“Maybe it’s his own poetry,” Graham said.
“The Butcher’s?”
“Maybe.”