“Police! We’ve got a warrant!” Kovac called and then ducked inside and to the left, back to the wall, gun out in front of him. Taylor followed.
The apartment was dark and still. And cold, Kovac realized. He could feel a breeze from the windows on the other side of the room. The cheap curtains and moonlight fluttered inward.
As his eyes adjusted to the lack of light, it became clear that Diana’s apartment, a mess to begin with, was in an even greater state of disarray than he remembered. Chairs had been overturned. Trash littered the floor. The sofa and heavy armchair had been cut and disemboweled in much the same manner as Charlie’s furniture had been.
Holding his gun in one hand, Kovac pulled his phone out of his coat pocket and turned on the flashlight. As he began to shine it around the room, a couple of drunken partygoers stumbled into the apartment, laughing. Taylor wheeled on them, gun first, and barked, “Get the fuck out! Police business!”
Their eyes bugged out comically, and they backpedaled, tripping each other and falling into the hall. Taylor shut the door and turned the deadbolt.
Kovac moved toward the lone bedroom. The door was closed but not latched. He stood to the side and pushed it open with his foot. Nothing happened. No one shouted. No shots were fired. The room held the same cold, eerie feeling of stillness, save for the curtains and moonlight drifting inward. The breeze pushed the scent of blood and feces toward them. A figure lay motionless on the bed.
He shone his light on the body that lay spread-eagle among the tangled sheets, naked and painted in blood, drenched in blood, so much blood no skin was visible at a glance.
The victim was a male of medium stature. He had been eviscerated and castrated. The intestines spilled out of the body cavity and onto the sheets.
“Holy God,” Taylor murmured, lowering his weapon.
“I think we might have just found Charlie,” Kovac said, though it was merely speculation on his part.
The victim’s head was nowhere to be seen.
41
“Holy ninja, Batman,” Steve Culbertson said as he stood over the body. “Someone cut off this man’s giblets with a Ginsu knife!”
“That would appear to be the least of his problems,” Kovac said.
They stood around Diana Chamberlain’s bedroom in Tyvek jumpsuits so as not to contaminate—or be contaminated by—the gruesome scene. The lights were on now—the shitty overhead light and a couple of utility lights on tripods brought in by the ME’s investigator. The scene was only more horrific in the harsh light, the victim’s intestines gleaming wet as they spilled to either side of the body, the blood a vibrant dark red as it soaked the white sheets.
“Is the head lying around here somewhere?” Culbertson asked as he examined the abdominal wounds.
“Nope,” Kovac said. “Head and genitalia are MIA.”
He had seen more decapitated bodies than most people, yet it always amazed him how his brain wanted immediately to reject the image as not being real. The sight so went against nature that the brain would try to come up with an alternate explanation, no matter how far-fetched, rather than accept the terrible truth. He had often heard people say, about finding dead bodies in general, that they had thought it was a mannequin in the ditch, in the river, wherever it had been found, as if random mannequins littering the landscape were a common occurrence.
It certainly wasn’t natural to see a death like this one. As hardened as all the people in this room were, this wasn’t normal even to them. Each would react and cope with it in his or her own way, which might sound callous or disrespectful or inappropriate to regular citizens, but it was how they learned to cope with the horrors they had to deal with on a daily basis. They all understood that, even their proper lieutenant.
“Decapitated first or eviscerated first?” Mascherino asked.
Kovac had alerted her to what they had found. He hadn’t expected her to show up. She had crossed herself upon seeing the body, but hadn’t turned a hair at the brutality of the scene. He gave her a gold star for being tougher than he had given her credit for.
“Eviscerated first is my guess,” Culbertson said. “But he must have been unconscious. There are no ligature marks on the wrists or ankles, no defensive knife wounds on the hands or arms that I can see. Nobody’s going to just lie down and take this. I mean, Mel Gibson in Braveheart, but in real life? No.
“It looks like the blade went in here about three inches to the right of the navel,” he said, tracing the path in the air above the body, “and was pulled across to the left. Then inserted in the middle and pulled up toward the sternum.”
“Seppuku,” Taylor said.
Everyone looked at him.
“Seppuku,” he said again. “The ritual suicide of the samurai. They disemboweled themselves.”
“And they cut off their own heads?” Kovac asked. “That’s a special trick.”
“No. Somebody else did that for them.”