Chapter 3
Six months after the arrest of gangland killer, Steven Cooper, at the hotel, Max and Alan step out of the Court House having achieved a life sentence conviction. Max has a huge smile on his face, “So this is what it feels like.” Gathered media film their every move.
Alan seems content but doesn’t gloat as they walk on, “That’s right. But don’t let it go to your head. Sometimes even the best cases fall apart if the defence lawyer is good enough. They can find technicalities and abuse them or, I don’t know, any number of other things that produce enough doubt for the jury. It’s all about who can manipulate the legal system the best. Don’t think it’s always about justice.”
Max isn’t swayed, “But justice was done this time. And on my first case.” Max’s phone rings and he retrieves it as Alan says without real conviction, “Congratulations.” Max hears it and smiles at the older detective as he puts the phone to his ear.
“Hello?” Max listens. Alan can hear the voice on the other end of the phone but can’t make out what its saying. The voice goes quiet and Max responds, confused, “Um, OK. Sure. I’ll head in now. Cheers, bye.”
He hangs up, now in a completely different mood.
Alan asks, “What?”
“I have to see Will Chapman about something.”
“Private?”
“Business. Come with us.” Max and Alan head off to their car. Alan asks questions about Max’s phone call but no answers are forthcoming.
The cool and quiet of the sterile autopsy room is home to Dr Will Chapman. A man who has been cutting bodies open for the last twenty years. All shapes and sizes, all types of deaths, everything has come through his door. Often his work has helped put murderers away. Or vindicated the wrongly accused. Occasionally he's brought peace to surviving family members.
Death has fascinated Dr Will since childhood. A psychologist might suggest that since seeing his best friend hit by a car at the age of ten his fascination is an emotional response, his own way to deal with the mental trauma he refused to talk about through his younger years. In his teens he would actively search out photos of dead people. Library books about death became his subject of choice for extracurricular reading, much to his parents’ horror. But according to what psychologists now know, trauma is often healed by reliving the experience over and over. Perhaps he was healing himself with his interests without even realising.
In his teens he went to a hospital to visit his grandfather before he died only to have the skeletal old man in the next bed pass away right before his eyes. The doctors and nurses already had a Do Not Resuscitate request for the old man so as young Will and his family stood around his grandfather's bed the nurses simply pulled the curtain and covered the unknown old man with his blanket until they moved him to the morgue.
Young Will sat in quiet wonderment at what he witnessed and fought every temptation to peer through the curtain. What he would have given to lift the sheet.
With a quick glance at the old man’s shape under the bed sheet on their way out young Will knew he wanted to work in a hospital. While working his way through high school figuring out what he wanted to do exactly, he considered becoming a nurse but when his best friend laughed at him he moved on to doctor. Before graduating his final year and going to University he had decided studying the dead was what he really wanted - so pathology became his career choice.
So now, many years later, Dr Will Chapman, mid-forties, bald with a goatee and a frown frozen onto his face, stands over the body of an elderly man. In his eighties, now with deathly pale skin, the man lies perfectly still not feeling the biting cold of his metal bed on his bare skin. Will reads quietly through a file.
The peace and quiet of a room full of the dead is disrupted by Max's entrance as he allows the door behind him to slam shut. Alan enters with him.
“Hey,” Max says with no awareness of his disruption to Will's thought process. His voice echoes off the tiled walls and floor.
Will doesn't look up, “No one else is allowed in here so freely. Who did you sleep with for that privilege?”
“Not the antique on the front desk, that’s for sure. Someone her age shouldn't flirt like she does. What would her friends at the nursing home think?! They’d be mortified.”
Will drops the file beside the dead man as he covers him back up with the white sheet which had only been covering his lower half. Max and Alan join him beside the dead man, and Max asks, “I’m here. What was with your cryptic phone call?”
Will points at the dead man, “You recognise this guy?” He pulls the white sheet down just enough to uncover his face. Max looks at the face without any sense of recognition. There are chemical burns around his mouth which have eaten away at his flesh. Max shrugs. “Can’t say I do, why?”
Will maintains a degree of deathly seriousness, “He possibly knows you.” He grabs the sheet again and pulls it down further to reveal the old man’s lower abdomen. Just below his belly button and written upside down, cut into the man’s skin with a knife, are three words: DETECTIVE MAX MYER.
“Crap!” is all Max can say. He feels like his blood has just frozen in his veins. A muscle spasm in his back shoots through him and his stomach tightens until he feels like he’s about to throw up. Alan leans in for a closer look and turns back to Max for him to fill in the blanks. Max’s eyes remain fixed on his name written in flesh as he just shrugs at Alan.
Will hands Max the file he was reading, “Everything we’ve got so far.”
Alan asks, “How did he die?” as he grabs the file from Max and begins to flick through it.
“Murder. As you can see by the burns on his mouth it seems he’s ingested a poison before vomiting it back up.”
“Suicide?” Alan shrugs.
Will’s reply is simple, “Unlikely.”
Max continues to stare at his name cut into the old man as Alan asks, “His murderer cut Max’s name into his skin?”
Will responds. “I mean I literally took his shirt off five minutes before I called so I haven’t done much but someone wrote it. I can’t imagine it was the victim. I’ll be starting the autopsy when you head off.”
Max speaks up but his eyes still remain fixed and his stomach doesn’t let up with the nausea, “I’ll stick around.”
Will tries to lighten the mood, “Awesome. Did they tell you at detective school, you don't need to attend autopsies?”
Max shakes himself from his shock and joins the joke, “I like to take a holistic approach to my work.”
Will passes Max a scalpel. “I'll show you how it's done then.”
Max screws up his face in mock disgust and says, “Not that holistic.” He looks back at the dead man’s face to see if he can recall a memory of who he might be. Maybe they do know each other. “But he's so old. Who murders an old person?”
Will responds, “It happens all the time. But that's your job anyway. There’s also this.” Will grabs one of the pale and wrinkly hands and flips it palm up. “Look here.”
The old man's flesh has a burn across his palm from the base, at the wrist, to the end of each finger. The fresh blisters and peeling skin indicate that it’s recent.
Max looks at it, “It means what exactly?”
“There's a matching one on the other palm. They were made with a naked flame. May have just been a lighter or similar. It’s possibly nothing but they’re there and they’re new.”
“That wouldn't have killed him.”
“No, that was the poisoning. The chemical burns on his face and over his chin extend inside his mouth and while I haven't checked his stomach yet the burns stretch back along his tongue. No doubt I'll find the burns all the way down his oesophagus. They're running tests on the contents he vomited.”
“So what's with the hands?” Max asks.
“The burns are new. Plus they're familiar to me. You’ll want to check recent murders in your area. We’ve had a couple over the last few months. From memory they have these burns on their hands
, or similar.
Max is interested now. “A calling card? A serial killer? Alright, that's cool.”
Alan says sarcastically, “A serial killer inviting you to the party.”
Will says to Max, “Slow down there fella. Do some ‘detectiving’ first. I’ll keep going and let you know what’s what.” He emphasises his mispronunciation of ‘detecting’.
“I'm on it.” Max grabs the file from Alan and turns to head out. Alan calls him back, “Max, we’ll get the file off Will when he’s done.” Max sheepishly places the file back on the dead man.
Before they leave Will changes the subject, “Congrats on convicting that gang murderer bloke. What’s his name?”
Max smiles, “Steven Cooper. Cheers mate.” With that, Max and Alan are on their way, letting the bang of the slamming door behind them deafen Will and his company of deceased as they leave.
Max carries two newly collected files through his office space like a little boy carrying presents. The office is populated by the occasional uniformed police officer but most are plain clothed detectives along with some administration staff. He takes a seat at his barren desk which faces off with Alan's. The bland off-white walls and hard wearing blue carpet coupled with the wood of the mid-eighties era desks don't do anything good for the senses but become easy to ignore after a few months. The unpleasant atmospheric smell that seems to come from nowhere and never leaves, however, is hard to dismiss.
Alan is at his desk and deep in conversation on his phone. Max waits with files in hand for him to finish. Alan looks at him and gives a little shrug as his discussion, or more truthfully, argument, continues. He speaks into the phone, “Well don't fight with her about it. Just let her use it for a little while and then you can have a go.” He looks at Max again and rolls his eyes as he hears an earful from the phone. He voicelessly gestures his question about why Max is holding the files.
Max whispers, “These are the files Dr Will was talking about.” He takes the opportunity to open them on the desk. Both files contain a series of photos of burnt hands and faces with burns around the mouths where the victim vomited a cocktail of chemicals over themselves. Burns exactly like on the old man Dr Will showed them. To Alan, Max gives the photos the most focus.
Alan gives Max half his attention as he both scans the photos and listens to the phone, but the phone wins. After leaning forward to check the photos he leans back to continue his argument. With one hand stroking his grey beard, “I understand that but… alright, put her on.” A brief pause and the talking continues, “Honey, listen, you can use it for half an hour then your sister has a go.”
Max sits politely by as Alan debates what ‘fair’ actually means and whether equal use of something really constitutes what's fair. It doesn't take long for the older detective to resign from the debate and make his final demand to share what they're fighting over or no one gets to use it. He hangs up. “I didn't think I'd have to raise teenage girls at my age.”
Max taps a finger on the files as Alan gives him his full attention. Max says, “Photos of burns. Burns on palms of the hands. Palms of the hands of dead people. Unrelated dead people from what I can see. Poisoned exactly like the old man.”
“You want me to believe you have here evidence of a serial killer?”
“I think Will was on to something. In these files are two murders, not including the old guy Will’s working on, both in our area, both with burns.”
“So that makes three with one bearing your name as a scar.” Alan considers their options and after a musical number performed by his fingers on his desk he says, “Let's have a look, I guess.” Max wheels his chair around and side by side they read through the files.
An hour later, Alan breaks the silence. “OK. This doesn't make sense.”
Max interrupts before Alan can continue his thought, “It's someone going around murdering people. What's to make sense? But each murder has the burns and that’s enough to go on.”
“Who’s investigating these two cases?”
“Earl and Carl are on one and I don’t know the detectives on the other.”
“Is Barry in?”
Max points across the office space as Barry Fine walks his large belly out of his office. His business shirt is so tight around it the buttons protest under the strain. As far as personal hygiene is concerned, Barry shaves, and occasionally uses deodorant, that's about it, but he's friendly, if he likes you - and he’s extremely good at his job. He has a photographic memory and only needs to hear or read something once, then he’ll remember it and remind you of it later when you’ve forgotten.
Max calls to him, “Hey, Barry!”
Barry pretends not to see them, “Gents, my work day finished half an hour ago. If you both want to hang here and not spend time with your families that's your problem. I'm not staying with you.” He has a way of saying things deadly seriously but people still warm to his sense of humour.
“Just a quick one.” Alan says.
Barry shuffles over to them with a resigned groan, “What?”
Max's phone rings and he checks the caller ID before hitting the cancel button and turning back to the files, “Since when do you get to go home?”
“My wife gave me permission. With permission comes great responsibility and by responsibility I mean getting home on time or my wife will kill me. Plus if I'm late home my food will be cold and if my food is cold I won't sleep very well and if I don't sleep very well I'll be cranky when I come in tomorrow morning. If I'm cranky tomorrow morning because I had a cold meal, didn't sleep, and got in trouble by my wife for getting home late, who do you think I'll take it out on?”
Max considers the pretend question, “The new guy?” He says with a shrug.
“You've been around, what, nine months? You’re the new guy.”
“Max has something here, possibly.” Alan says.
“If it involves him taking off his pants again, I'm leaving.”
Max puts his hands up in protest, “I was drunk and my wife was there so it's OK. But look here, I've got one word for you.” Max pauses to see if he's sold Barry with the mystery. He hasn't. “Serial... Killer… Two words. Serial Killer.”
“My boy, if you're choosing a new career path that's not the one you run past people for feedback.”
Alan can't stand the performance and takes them all straight to the point, “What Max is trying to say is we've got a couple of open homicide cases which contain similarities.”
Barry rubs a hand on his belly which Max and Alan have come to know indicates he's thinking. It's a good sign. “OK, keep going and have a look at new cases coming through. What's the time span of the ones we have?”
“First one came in three months ago.” Alan says.
“How many?”
Max answers, “Three including the new one.”
“That’s the one with your name carved into him?”
Max looks at Alan then back at Barry, “You heard?”
Barry smiles. “Three months? So there's a good chance there's been more. I'll make a few calls when I’m in tomorrow but don't let anyone know what you’re doing. The Chief Commissioner doesn't need another opportunity to get his ugly face on TV.”
Before Barry can walk Alan points out, “One of the investigations is Earl’s.”
Barry doesn’t care, “If he complains tell him to shut up. Go home gentlemen.” Barry leaves without another word.