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Part III: Picasso

Damn. It was just gruesome, he thought.

"Guess we know the cause of death," Detective Nicholas D. Wolfwood mumbled around the bent cigarette that dangled from his mouth. He was having another one of those days: the kind where he felt himself cringing frequently at the idea of his schedule torn asunder and his inability to do a thing about it. Only it was worse than that. Much worse. Today had brought him more pressing concerns. One in particular...

He had to crouch low over the body to see the girl's face; her head was turned the wrong way. The smell of decay lingered about her, stronger than the perfume he could still barely smell. He twisted this way and that, careful of the chalk line, and took in every detail from the strange blue tint of her skin, to the slinky outfit she wore, and the scuffing on the bottoms of her shoes.

A bum had found her about an hour ago, lying in an alley, twisted beyond the ability of a human body, neck snapped, body contorted. It was just past nine o'clock but ten seemed years away. Something about these crimes always messed with time, made him feel like a hamster on a wheel, running and running and getting nowhere.

"Picasso," he whispered as he stood hurriedly to get away from the mutilated girl. He backed away and stared down at her as if willing her to sit up and explain what had happened. Just behind the telltale yellow tape that read, "Police Line Do Not Cross," spectators ducked and bounced to catch sight of her, while efficient, blue-clad officers struggled to stop them. Why they wanted to see was beyond him. He'd never understood spectators.

Wolfwood was beginning to hate the summer. For the past four years, when the weather got warm, the bodies appeared with alarming regularity. No witnesses, no leads. And always this--the horrific remains of the killer's work: a body stripped of dignity, left to rot.

He glanced to the left and winced at the look on his partner's face. Vash wasn't equipped to handle things like this. His pale green eyes were wide and stricken. The tall blonde didn't understand cruelty and simply couldn't bear to see it. How he had come to be a cop at all was still a mystery to Wolfwood. But how he had come to be his partner was a pestering memory at the back of his brain. He regretted it most at times like this.

"Listen, why don't you go get started on the report, write down what we know. 'Kay?"

Wolfwood moved to stand next to his lanky partner and gave what he hoped was a comforting slap on the back.

Vash nodded, but didn't move; he stood transfixed by the horror of it all. A girl who used to be alive who had been murdered in the most inhumane way and left for the rats to eat and for a bum to find her. Vash's body gave the first trembling hint that he was going to be ill. He raised his hand to his mouth.

"Vash, go file the report," Wolfwood repeated, this time with a firmer voice. He punctuated it with a push to his partner's shoulder. That did the trick.

Vash closed his eyes to block the sight of her, nodded again and then turned swiftly to leave. His trench coat fluttered behind him from the speed of his retreat. Wolfwood gritted his teeth at the knowledge that Vash would probably spend the rest of the afternoon in the bathroom, vomiting and crying.

"Your partner should pick a different beat. He's not cut out for handling the Picasso case."

Wolfwood turned to face the silky voice of Midvalley, just a regular cop trying to earn a paycheck. It wasn't what Wolfwood wanted to hear right now. Mainly because Midvalley had a point.

"I know. He's a bit soft," Wolfwood shrugged and hoped Midvalley would let it drop. He had been thinking the exact same thing for over a year now but knew how badly Vash wanted to prove himself. Whenever he mentioned Vash moving on to something less violent, less gruesome, Vash defended his ability to cope, and repeated 'I'm okay' so many times that Wolfwood's head would spin. It felt like a betrayal to go above him, to go to the Chief and ask for Vash to be moved.

Sadly, it was the one betrayal that he simply couldn't commit. He owed Vash a lot, after all. And if the idiot said he wanted to play detective, Wolfwood was obligated to let him.

"Soft?" Midvalley repeated, drawing Wolfwood back from his thoughts.

"Yeah, a bit."

"He's more than a bit soft," Midvalley snapped and it almost sounded like he was scolding Wolfwood. "He can't handle this. Every time I look at him at a scene like this it makes me feel sick and I've been doin' this for years. Take my advice: get him off this beat, get yourself a new partner who knows the ropes and stop trying to play the nice guy. You're no good at it."

Wolfwood only sighed and extinguished his cigarette on the bottom on his shoes. This was a lousy day. Rotten. It dragged along with excruciating slowness--overlarge feet scraping the pavement--as Wolfwood made sure everything was sent where it needed to be, asked all the right people the right questions, handed out assignments like candy at Halloween and realized that despite it all, his work was nowhere near finished.

He left the rookies behind to clean up the scene and get the body shipped to Old Man Cain for examination then hopped into his car, heading to the station to get back to work and to check on Vash. Some of the other guys on the force joked that Wolfwood treated his car better than they treated their wives. But it had cost him quite a lot of money and he had no intention of letting it fall into disrepair. He kept it waxed, washed, polished, and under cover whenever possible.

Sliding into the cool leather seat was a pleasure every time.

He adjusted his mirrors, turned on his CD player and hit play. Bach floated through the interior of his car. That was better. Tension fell away from him like rain off a roof. His mind cleared, his senses sharpened. Only then did he pull into traffic. Lulled by the music, Wolfwood was able to recall the details of this newest crime and wrestle with everything he had seen and heard in his year and a half on the Picasso case.

Young and cocky, he had taken it on with all the confidence of a prize-winning bull, unaware of the full history of the case and the bad luck that followed investigators and officers assigned to work it.

Picasso had been at large for three years before Wolfwood and his new partner, Vash, joined the team working to catch him. Just new to this force, having transferred from the east, Wolfwood hadn't known what he was up against. One look at the case folder and he realized that he had bitten off more than he could chew: four detectives before him had already come and gone and next to no progress had been made on solving anything.

It was to such dark thoughts that Wolfwood pulled into the parking garage and parked in the spot reserved for him. Inside, the station was a frenzy of activity, the noise enough to cause headaches.

Cops shouted back and forth to each other, men and women from all walks of life, handcuffs clinking together, were wrestled through the building. One started flailing wildly and injured two officers before he was finally subdued.

Wolfwood was too used to it all to pay it much attention, but the noise was...bothersome.

A quick word with one of the paper jockeys told him that his partner was indeed losing his breakfast and lunch in the bathroom. With thanks tossed over his shoulder, Wolfwood navigated his way through the cluster of desks, officers and criminals before he reached his own office. His sanctuary. Closing the door against the noise was like inventing his own Utopia daily. Everything here, at least, was under his control. The paperwork lined up evenly with the left corner of his desk, his mail delivered to a shelf on the far right, and his coffee mug sitting at just the perfect angle atop his coaster.

He settled into his chair, his gaze drifting, as it always did, to the wall ahead of him covered in photos and newspaper clippings arranged in chronological order.

Each victim was a freakish monument to cruelty and the sick warped mind of the killer. Human form and shape was stripped away leaving the broken sculptures that earned the murderer the nickname "Picasso." It was the only parallel they could find: Picasso the artist had painted the human form in the most abstract way, breaking the figure into simple, overlapping shapes. And this murderer, this butcher, he broke his victims into unrecognizable versions of bodies and left them to be found, his masterpieces.

Wolfwood added this victim to the growing list. Yet another one they couldn't help, another one they couldn't save. At least doing paperwork would make him feel like he had some value since he obviously wasn't much of a detective. He sat forward in his chair, pulled out one of over a dozen identical pens and got to work.

It was hours before Old Man Cain sent up his initial report. Her name was Kelly Morgan and the cause of death was quite unusual considering how obvious it had seemed with her head facing the wrong way: her heart had burst inside her chest. The blue tint to her skin was quite simply lack of oxygen and the pooled blood in her limbs.

There were no incisions, no punctures, no signs of intrusion at all. And no drugs in her system that could cause this type of violent reaction. Kelly Morgan's heart had simply decided to explode. He flipped through the hastily written report and closed it with a frown. If it weren't for the odd placement of her head in relation to the rest of her body, Wolfwood would doubt Picasso's involvement entirely. She was hardly the worse example of what he could do.

Wolfwood stood to examine the other photos on the wall more closely. The first murder in their files was a woman named Elise Carter. They had found her in the parking lot of her apartment. Her legs had been tied together and her head shoved between them, making her look something like a human pretzel. They had attributed the final cause of death to internal bleeding. Wolfwood cringed, remembering his phone conversation with that first coroner. Internal Bleeding, they had said with a shudder. Which meant that she had been alive when her legs were broken, had felt it, or most of it until she passed out. He couldn't imagine what it would be like, how it would feel to have your legs broken in dozens of places so that they could tie together like thick, fleshy ribbons.

Why was Kelly Morgan's death so simple? In comparison to the times when they had found hands trapped inside bodies and necks stretched until heads met backs, Kelly Morgan seemed like a whisper next to a waterfall.

What was most infuriating was that the victims were textbook similar: single females living alone, all of them with regular, predictable habits. From interviewing their friends and family, he knew you could set your watch by them. Or could have, anyway. They should have been able to predict Picasso's movements and strategy based on that alone, to figure his next mark. But they hadn't.

He was sure that Kelly Morgan would have a near identical profile to the other women. How many warnings could they issue through the news and the papers before people started to alter their behavior?

Wolfwood sat down heavily and sighed. It was wrong to blame the victims--he knew that. Perhaps it wouldn't have mattered if they had heeded the warnings and taken precautions. If they had stopped taking the same way home everyday, stopped shopping at the same store every Wednesday. They may have ended up just as dead despite it all. With someone like Picasso, it was difficult to say anything for certain.

They knew nothing about him. The information he had gotten from the previous detectives would fit on a half sheet of paper. Most of it was a psychological profile assembled by their Profiler downstairs and Wolfwood knew that no matter how good a shrink was, when it came to figuring out the brain of someone you'd never met before, there were too many ways to get it wrong. Which left him back at square one with a trail of bodies forming the perimeter.

If Picasso had fingerprints, he didn't leave them behind. If he had hair, he kept it shaved or in a cap of some kind so that they never found any. No traces of skin, no fingernails, no torn bits of fabric. He was disgustingly meticulous.

Still, Wolfwood got the feeling that he was missing something simple. Or perhaps he was waiting: waiting for Picasso to make a mistake. Perhaps one day he'd pick the wrong victim. Maybe he'd pick a fighter, someone who would live, get away, or leave some kind of clue. One day, Picasso might just slip up. And then, he'd get the bastard.

To Be Continued...