The Butcher and the Wren(34)
New Orleans burials have always been steeped in lore. The city’s unfortunate placement on a water table makes the ground one of the most inhospitable places for a freshly dead body. Caskets buried underground fill with water and eventually push themselves to the surface with even the slightest flooding. Attempts by early gravediggers to weigh the dead down almost always succumbed to rising water pressure eventually. When the caskets began floating down the New Orleans streets, it became clear that there was a need for a new solution. Now, the dearly departed are laid to rest above the ground. The labyrinthian constellation of tombs create an eerie atmosphere, earning it the moniker the City of the Dead. Fittingly, famed voodoo queen Marie Laveau calls this place home. Visitors have spent years marking the stone that surrounds her body with three Xs in the hope that she will make their most unattainable dreams come true.
Now they don’t allow just anyone into this burial ground. The Archdiocese of New Orleans created strict rules after vandals took to the crumbling tombs. These decaying graves are beautiful in their own way, but shining a light into one of them can put a macabre peep show on full display, with disarticulated skeletons scantily covered by remnants of fabric from eras long past. The city rushed to protect the sanctity of the dead.
Yet Jeremy entered this forbidden world by simply jumping the fence.
He remembers how, the last time he was here at this hour, he had to break the security camera pointed in this direction before dragging his victim through the gate, working fast to get her into the ground. He had done his research. He knew this spot was the site of an old, belowground burial, and once safely inside of the cemetery walls, dug the shallow grave in the moist earth easily. He remembers prying open the lid of the decrepit, splintering vessel and moving the disintegrated bones to one side of the casket to place his fresh addition inside. But most of all he remembers the delicious feeling of carefully taking a bracelet out of his pocket, small and fragile-looking, and slipping it onto the woman’s left wrist before interring her in the stolen grave.
Jeremy remembers the old cliché about killers returning to the scenes of their crimes and finds a small bit of humor in it despite the disappointment of the last hours. He’d much rather be a walking cliché here, in the grotesque and stately beauty of the cemetery, than ever return to the venue of the jazz festival.
He thinks back to the swirl of people who raucously drank, ate, and laughed around him. How the air was heavy and thick, but with a slight breeze that drew even the most heat-sensitive away from the synthetic comfort of their air conditioners for the afternoon. He had felt secure and confident as the sickly-sweet smell of putrefying flesh mixed with the rank smells of carnival food. He remembers the pleasure of seeing the realization on a few faces in the crowd, the pungent aroma of two-day-old decomp overwhelming the more pleasant aroma of sugar-dusted beignets and the world’s finest gumbo. They couldn’t see her just then, but her smell betrayed her hiding place. She reached out from under that stage—an enduring vexation even after her screams were silenced. The anticipation was intoxicating.
Jeremy closes his eyes, and he can see her. He sees her wide, terrified eyes, her last bit of hope snuffed out in that dark bayou. Now those eyes have had the light drained from them, their heavy-hooded lids hanging low in a sleepy half stare. The thin, tight line that stretched across her lips, now a slack and lazy one. It’s like she wants to say something but can’t. The voices of dead are forever silenced. They’re shells of clinically relevant tissue with no method of communicating what they truly experienced before ending up in a crime scene or on an autopsy table. No one can know the utter loneliness that precedes death until it comes for them. Physiologically, they can accurately explain what happens when a heart stops beating, but not the anguish that pours from someone’s soul the moment they realize their life is being snuffed out by another.
Pacing the rows of the empty cemetery, Jeremy holds tight to these memories to ground himself in the wake of everything that’s gone awry since he first laid out his careful plans. He reminds himself of his larger mission, the one he started almost seven years ago, and one he won’t lose sight of again. There can be no more mistakes.
CHAPTER 24
THE CALL CAME MERE HOURS after they left the hospital. The victim went into respiratory distress and eventually suffocated. The doctors and nurses on call had attempted lifesaving ventilation procedures, but her body simply gave out. Her death report revealed that a stab wound severed the spinal roots in her C6 spinal region. She had been paralyzed from the waist down. Wren instinctively shook her leg when she learned this information.
The doctors also reported that the killer had tended to the wound he created, as Wren had already suspected. The blood loss was not as significant as it would have been if left untreated, making it unlikely as the final cause of death. The blood test results provided an even clearer picture of the victim’s fate. Her system showed moderate quantities of poison hemlock, likely administered intravenously before she was placed into her living tomb. The hemlock finished the job that her killer had started. Wren had lingered on this detail when she first read it. It is a literary poison, and she wondered what it said about the killer who wielded it in this way.
With the body now lying lifeless and cold on her table in the autopsy suite, Wren can’t help but think of the parents’ faces at the hospital. Their tear-stained cheeks and their tired eyes burned in her memory. She can’t even imagine the grief they’ll feel when they discover the extent of the horror their daughter endured, what she saw and felt and suffered through. This killer’s crimes are like an airborne virus, infecting everyone along the way to its primary target. It’s all collateral damage to him, but to the real people involved, it consumes their every cell. For just a moment they had their daughter back and alive, only to have their hopes dashed. Though sometimes death is the only real mercy.