The Keepsake

Then a pale ripple caught her eye, a faint white fluttering in the darkness. She strained to make out what it was, but it refused to take shape, refused to reveal itself. She pulled the flashlight from her kitchen drawer and shone it into the night. The beam landed on the Japanese pear tree that she’d planted two summers ago at the far corner of the yard. Suspended from one of its branches was something white and pendulous, something that was now swaying languorously in the wind.

Her doorbell rang.

She spun around, lungs heaving in fright. Hurrying into the hallway, she saw the electric blue of a cruiser’s rack lights pulsing through her living room window. She opened the front door to see two Newton patrolmen.

“Everything okay, Dr. Isles?” one of the officers asked. “We got a report of a possible intruder at this address.”

“I’m fine.” She released a deep breath. “But I need you to come with me. To check something.”

“What?”

“It’s in my backyard.”

The patrolmen followed her up the hall and into her kitchen. There she paused, suddenly wondering if she was about to make herself look ridiculous. The hysterical single woman, imagining ghosts dangling from pear trees. Now that she had two cops standing beside her, her fear had faded and more practical concerns came to mind. If the killer really had left something in her backyard, she had to approach the object as a professional.

“Wait here just a minute,” she said, and ran back to the hall closet, where she kept the box of latex gloves.

“Do you mind telling us what’s going on?” the officer called out.

She returned to the kitchen carrying the box of gloves and handed gloves to both of them. “Just in case,” she said.

“What are these for?”

“Evidence.” She grabbed the flashlight and opened the kitchen door. Outside, the summer night was fragrant with the scent of pine bark mulch and damp grass. Slowly, she walked across the yard, her flashlight beam sweeping the patio, the vegetable plot, the lawn, searching for any other surprises she’d been meant to find. The only thing that did not belong was what now hung fluttering in the shadows ahead. She came to a halt in front of the pear tree and aimed her flashlight at the object dangling from the branch.

“This thing?” said the cop. “It’s just a grocery sack.”

With something inside it.She thought of all the horrors that might fit inside that plastic sack, all the gruesome keepsakes that a killer might harvest from a victim, and suddenly she did not want to look inside it. Leave it for Jane, she thought. Let someone else be the first to see it.

“Is that what’s bothering you?” the cop said.

“He left it here. He came into my yard and hung it on that tree.”

The cop pulled on the gloves. “Well geez, let’s just see what it is.”

“No. Wait-”

But he’d already pulled the sack off the branch. He shone his flashlight at the contents, and even in the darkness she saw him grimace.

“What?” she asked.

“Looks like some kind of animal.” He held the sack open for her to look inside.

At first glimpse, what she saw did indeed appear to be a mass of dark fur. But when she realized what it really was, her hands chilled to ice inside the latex gloves.

She looked up at the cop. “It’s hair,” she said softly. “I think it’s human.”

TWENTY-NINE

“It’s Josephine’s,” said Jane.

Maura sat at her kitchen table, staring down at the evidence bag containing a thick mass of black hair. “We don’t know that,” she said.

“It’s the right color. The right length.” Jane pointed to the envelope that had contained the note. “He practically tells us he’s the one who sent it.”

Through the kitchen window, Maura saw the flashlights of the CSU team that had spent the last hour combing her backyard. And on the street three police cruisers were parked, rack lights flashing, and her neighbors were probably peering out their windows at the spectacle. I’m the woman you don’t want in your neighborhood, she thought. My house is where police cruisers and crime scene units and news vans regularly turn up. Her privacy had been stripped away, her home exposed to those TV cameras, and she wanted to fling open the front door and scream at the reporters to get off her street and leave her alone. She imagined how that would play out on the late-night news, the enraged medical examiner shrieking like a madwoman.

The true object of her fury was not those cameras, however, but the man who had drawn them here. The man who had written the note and had left that souvenir hanging on her pear tree. She looked up at Jane. “Why the hell did he send this to me? I’m just a medical examiner. I’m peripheral to your investigation.”

“You’ve also been present at almost every death scene. In fact, you were the very first person on this case, starting with the CT scan of Madam X. Your face has been on the news.”

“So has yours, Jane. He could have mailed that souvenir to Boston PD. Why come to my house? Why leave it in my backyard?”

Jane sat down and faced her across the table. “If that hair had been mailed to Boston PD, we would have handled it internally and quietly. Instead cruisers were dispatched and now you’ve got criminalists tramping around your property. Our boy has turned this into a public spectacle.” She paused. “Which may be the point.”

“He likes the attention,” said Maura.

“And he’s certainly getting that attention.”

Outside, the CSU team had wrapped up their search. Maura heard the closing thud of van doors, the fading growl of departing vehicles.

“You asked a question earlier,” said Jane. “You asked, Why me? Why would the killer leave the souvenir at your house, instead of sending it to Boston PD?”

“We just agreed it’s because he wants attention.”

“You know, there’s another reason I can think of. And you’re not going to like this one.” Jane turned on the laptop computer that she’d brought in from her car, and navigated to the Boston Globe website. “You remember reading this story about Madam X?”

On the monitor was an archived Globe article:MYSTERY MUMMY’S SECRETS SOON TO BE REVEALED. Accompanying the article was a color photo of Nicholas Robinson and Josephine Pulcillo, flanking Madam X in her crate.

“Yes, I read it,” said Maura.

“This piece was picked up by the wire services. It ran in a lot of newspapers. If our killer spotted this story, then he’d know Lorraine Edgerton’s body had just been found. And that there’d be excitement to come after the CT scan. Now look at this.”

Jane clicked on a saved file on her computer, and an image appeared on the screen. It was a head shot of a young woman with long black hair and delicately arching brows. This was not a candid shot but a formal pose in front of a professional backdrop, a photo that might have been taken for a college yearbook.

“Who is she?” asked Maura.

“Her name was Kelsey Thacker. She was a college student who was last seen twenty-six years ago, walking home from a neighborhood bar. In Indio, California.”

“Indio?” said Maura. And she thought of the crumpled newspaper that she had pulled from the head of the tsantsa -a newspaper that had been printed twenty-six years ago.

“We reviewed the missing persons reports for every woman who vanished from the Indio area that year. Kelsey Thacker’s name popped front and center. And when I saw her photo, I was sure of it.” She pointed to the image. “I think this is what Kelsey looked like before a killer cut off her head. Before he peeled off her face and scalp. Before he shrank it down and hung it on a string like a fucking Christmas ornament.” Jane took an agitated breath.

“Without a skull, we have no way of matching her dental records. But I’m positive this is her.”

Maura’s gaze was still fixed on the woman’s face. Softly she said, “She looks like Lorraine Edgerton.”