Chapter 11: A Confession Dedicated to Persephone 05
The following week passed more or less smoothly for Hestal.
“More or less” was a rather vague way of putting it. When within the previous seven days you had experienced two of your biggest clients being murdered one after the other, gotten caught up in a shooting incident, and then wrestled around in an abandoned factory with a tasteless kidnapper and extortionist, even the daily routine of a gang lawyer could be considered warm and smooth.
Officer Hardy and his “Task Force for Handling Serial Murder Cases Detrimental to Law Enforcement Personnel’s Mental Health” might have genuinely been very worried about Hestal’s situation, because as he limped to work at A&H Law Firm every day, Olga and Albanino really did take turns appearing in his line of sight every single day—there was even one time when CSI’s Bates Schwandner awkwardly dropped by his office for a visit.
Albanino usually showed up with his glass lunchbox at every lunchtime. This forensic examiner said nothing about what inappropriate remarks he had made on the night of the Jones case, nor about what accusations he had circuitously leveled at Hestal. He simply had the ability to innocently reduce everything to intentions like “Ah, I really was just trying to flirt with you.”
Hestal didn’t know what to say. In fact, why he hadn’t added this guy to the list of rejected visitors was itself an unsolved mystery. He refused to admit that he had almost grown accustomed to hearing that frivolous laughter as the other man chatted and joked with Emma at the door just as he was heading out at noon, and he refused to admit that the look in the other man’s eyes as he knelt on the ground did indeed make his fingers itch.
Meanwhile, Miss Olga Moroz, who taught at Westland State University, came at more irregular times. She would pick days when she had no classes to teach at the university, and occasionally she would share lunch or dinner with Hestal.
Unlike Albanino, she tended to take Hestal to lunch at the shops near the A&H Law Firm, with prices that ricocheted back and forth between unacceptably cheap and unacceptably expensive.
On Friday night, Albanino was said to be working overtime at the Forensics Bureau, while Olga abandoned her own bar night plans and stubbornly dragged Hestal to an outrageously expensive French restaurant.
Rather, it could be said that in the first half of his life, Hestal had never encountered people like Albarino and Olga. He rarely had any personal dealings with colleagues or clients, and aside from banquets he could not avoid attending, he almost never went out to eat with others. Over the past week, the number of times he had eaten with others was nearly equal to the total number of evening banquets he had attended in an entire year before.
Albarino Bacchus clearly had absolutely no sense of control when it came to managing distance… Hestal almost suspected this was some innate personality defect, or else the only explanation was that Albarino existed solely to torment him.
Olga, on the other hand, was a completely different type altogether, just like the restaurant she had chosen now: all around them sat awkward young couples, flirting adulterers, and businessmen with smiles hiding daggers. After many people entered a restaurant of this caliber, the word “dinner” had already taken on the unavoidable color of a social obligation.
But Hestal was certain that the only reason Olga would bring him to this place was that she thought the food here was good. Sitting here, they would be mistaken for a couple by every customer and waiter, yet the person before him looked at him with a gaze that was utterly pure and devoid of personal feeling.
When Olga watched others, that expression would always involuntarily spill from her eyes: as if she were watching cats or lions locked in a cage—she had no interest whatsoever in what species they were, only quietly waiting to see what movements they would make; she had no intention of raising them, nor would she reach out to stroke their heads, only observing the moment their sharp teeth bit into another’s neck.
“So,” during dessert time, Hestal’s thoughts flowed past all of the above like water, while what came out of his mouth remained the topic they were currently discussing, “the Westland Pianist and the Sunday Gardener—which one do you think is more dangerous?”
—Of course they had nothing else to talk about. To put it plainly, these people took turns appearing by Hestal’s side only because Hardy was worried the Sunday Gardener had set his sights on him. When they met, they could only awkwardly discuss their own work. Fortunately, Olga’s work was actually quite interesting.
Olga absentmindedly poked at a small piece of dacquoise in front of her with a fork—the thing looked sickeningly sweet just from appearance alone. She was silent for a moment, then said: “Most people would think the Pianist is more terrifying, because he’s more… violent, insane—that’s what people would think.”
“That’s what people would think?” Hestal pointed out, having caught the implication in her words.
Olga glanced at him, but it seemed she wasn’t entirely looking at him—her gaze drifted lightly across some unfocused, unanchored place. Half her mind was tethered to the dacquoise before her, while the other half wandered somewhere unknown.
“What drives him to kill is the desire within,” Olga cut off a small piece of cake and put it in her mouth, chewing slowly, her other hand propping up her chin in a slovenly manner. “Either he submits to his fate and slaughters them, or he is completely devoured by his own desire—for the Pianist, there is no choice. But the Sunday Gardener is not like that.”
“You mean the Sunday Gardener has a choice? I thought from a pathological standpoint they were both mentally ill.” Hestal raised an eyebrow.
“Pathologically speaking, yes; but they are different types.” Olga took another small piece of cake, eating like a chick pecking at rice. “The Gardener… how should I put it, he knows that what he does is a crime in the legal sense, and he can also choose to do it or not. There’s no childhood trauma driving him to do anything, nor is he like some patients who are pushed to the brink by their completely collapsed mental landscape.”
She paused, then placed her fork on the plate and looked up.
“If you ask me, the Sunday Gardener is fully capable of stopping his killings, but he simply doesn’t want to choose that.” Olga revealed a light, airy smile. “He just doesn’t care—can you imagine that?
“To that kind of psychopath, whether those victims live or die holds no particular meaning, and there’s no essential difference in which of us could become his victim; to him, we are not human, or at least not creatures equal to him—we are tools and objects available for him to choose from. He doesn’t select his victims according to some obsessive-compulsive psychology, which is why Hardy and the others can’t grasp the pattern behind his victim selection: precisely because he has no pattern, he is completely arbitrary.”
“So why did he have to kill those people, decorate them, and then put them on display? Isn’t that a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder, just like most serial killers who leave a traceable pattern?” Hestal asked.
Olga looked at him as if he had asked a very interesting question. Then she smiled: “Because he thinks it’s beautiful, because he wants to do it, because he can do it—that’s all.”
“That’s really… a very impressive statement.” Hestal answered cautiously.
He thought of the corpse suspended upside down in the water, the bloody flowers in the hollow of that person’s chest. Abel, a response to the Westland Pianist’s work, a provocation, an opportunity: the Gardener had absolutely no need to do that, they had never even come into contact.
Just because he wanted to.
“That’s the problem: because he’s still very young. And I’m guessing that perhaps there’s room for his interests to change.” Olga continued, though she didn’t seem very worried. “Maybe one day he’ll suddenly find it interesting to create themes similar to the Pianist’s, and then we might find that he suddenly starts choosing criminals as his murder targets; or maybe he’ll decide that arranging flowers on living people is a good choice, and then next time he might not kill his victims… Most serial killers follow fixed patterns. He may have a pattern to follow now, but I suspect it won’t last.”
“Because you said he doesn’t select victims based on obsessive-compulsive psychology,” Hestal said softly.
“Exactly. So he might suddenly transform into a sadistic killer next time, or something else—as long as he wants to, as long as he thinks it’s interesting enough. It’s generally believed that the Sunday Gardener has been committing crimes for ten years, but there’s another possibility: perhaps ten years ago he was simply a serial killer under a different name; for him, it just depends on which way his interests are developing.” Olga shrugged. “And people’s interests are very changeable. That’s why Bart is so worried.”
Hestal gave her a sharp look: “Because of me?”
“Because of you.” Olga agreed, sizing up Hestal with the kind of gaze one might use to observe a feline on the hunt. “Recently, there have been some changes in his pattern, and they’re happening around you. Precisely because we can’t easily predict him, we don’t know what these changes mean.”
“Maybe he just wants to plant larkspur in my eye sockets.” Hestal’s lips curved coldly as he joked.
“That’s the best idea, really.” Olga laughed, picking up her fork again. The silverware flashed a gleam between her fingers, as if she were holding a blade capable of taking a life.
Then, the profiler said in a tone purely meant to intimidate: “Or perhaps his tastes have changed, and he plans to kidnap you and slice you apart piece by piece and eat you, staging a real-life version of *The Silence of the Lambs* right before our eyes—as I said, anything is possible, as long as he wants it, as long as he can do it.”
Hestal responded to the other with a polite smile: “I’ll be waiting.”
Sunday.
When people looked back on it later, the insurance companies of Westland could very well have launched a new product called “Sunday Insurance,” to soothe the souls of every officer in the Westland Police Department tormented by the Sunday Gardener—and at the top of that list would undoubtedly be Bart Hardy.
It was hard for the average person to imagine the kind of pressure Officer Hardy was under: his team was solely responsible for all the serial murder cases committed by the Westland Pianist and the Sunday Gardener, which was essentially being sent to fight a battle doomed to be lost. When Albanino Bacchus once again appeared at the entrance of the A&H Law Firm, this general—glorious in defeat—stood outside the police tape with a weary expression.
—The firm’s office was cordoned off with police tape, sealed tight. For the second time in a week. What the hell.
Standing beside Officer Hardy was a plump man who always wore a smile on his face—though he wasn’t smiling now. Instead, he was dabbing the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, his hand trembling. This was Hestal’s partner, Mr. Holmes.
“How did this happen,” Albanino heard Mr. Holmes saying as he walked over carrying his forensic investigation kit. “I only went to Europe on a business trip? How did this happen—just a few days ago Amarette called me about the Davis matter. I thought once that kidnapper was dealt with, everything would be fine. At this rate, can we even keep doing business?”
This was probably the question everyone at the firm wanted to ask. Albanino walked over, completely ignoring the woebegone good sir, and asked Hardy directly: “The gardener?”
Hardy looked at him with a terrifyingly ashen face, his lips twitching once.
“Amarait came to the office to work overtime today, and then he saw—of course he called the police immediately. It was horrifying!” Mr. Holmes said, speaking for Hardy with great dramatic flair.
“Go in and see for yourself,” Officer Hardy said to Albanino, his voice hoarse, bitter as though he’d just swum across the Pacific. “…Damn it, I shouldn’t be too surprised. This is exactly the kind of thing he would do.”
But obviously he was still very surprised—surprised and furious. Albanino gave Officer Hardy a useless, comforting pat on the shoulder, leaving him behind along with that business partner who could do nothing but keep saying “What do we do?”, then nimbly lifted the police tape and ducked under it.
He walked with practiced ease toward Hestal’s office. The scene was still the familiar one: CSI personnel in blue protective suits, yellow evidence markers, the flash of cameras in officers’ hands, Bates and Olga.
And of course, Hestal Amalette, coldly dressed in a fully buttoned-up iron-gray three-piece suit, a blue neckerchief that complemented his eyes decorating his pocket, his hair neatly combed, his level of solemnity somewhere between working at a law firm and attending an international conference.
And these people were standing in front of Hestal’s desk, forming a solemn semicircle: that thing was placed right on Hestal’s desk.
—”That thing” was a skull, placed upside down on the table with the frontal bone facing downward, maintaining a delicate balance as it stood motionless on the clean, spotless tabletop. Lacking the lower jawbone, the skull’s incisors appeared grotesquely protruding and uneven, and the hollow cavity was adorned with flowers.
The skull looked unnaturally white, possibly bleached by some special means. The lower rims of the eye sockets, the sharp edges of the canine teeth, and certain areas of the external auditory canal and mastoid process were all decorated with scattered specks of gold foil, appearing careless yet orderly.
Looking through the eye sockets of the skull, one could see the entire cranium was filled with red granules, ferociously overflowing from the eye sockets as though they were rushing blood—neat rows of red insect eggs. But the bouquet inserted into the skull was entirely pure white—they were bleached white wheat stalks and pure white narcissus flowers.
Apart from the blood-red seeping from the skull’s eye sockets, the cranium and flowers were all flawless white. Those artistically arranged white wheat awns resembled the spread downy feathers of a bird, while the yellow stamens of the narcissus and scattered specks of gold foil adorned the chaotic expanse of snowy white.
—Clearly, this was a gift for Hestal.
As Albanino’s approaching footsteps sounded, Hestal turned back and gave him a deep look. His lips appeared ruthless yet soft, as if about to utter many words, but strangely, he remained silent.
Olga stood only slightly closer than Hestal, leaving enough space for the forensic pathologist and the trace evidence examiners. Albanino greeted them, set down his field kit, and began putting on latex gloves.
“I don’t see much room for me to contribute here,” Albanino said, carefully examining the skull. “The skull looks like it’s been cleaned very thoroughly—there’s no way to determine the time of death. With only this part, we can’t tell the sex either. Our best hope is still to find matching dental records through the dental mold.”
Male, around forty years old, died this Monday, the night Hestal went to confront the kidnapper Martin Jones. The Sunday Gardener slit his throat from behind. When they were in that abandoned factory, the corpse was lying in the trunk of a Chevrolet outside the factory.
At that time, Officer Bart Hardy was no more than five meters away from the corpse, but he would never know it.
“Or hoping the DNA can match in the police department’s gene database.” The person on whose desk a skull bouquet had been placed said calmly. The degree of his calm was absolutely worthy of admiration from a large portion of the world’s people, and utter boredom from the other portion.
“The Sunday Gardener has started killing criminals too?” Albanino gazed at Hestal and asked with a smile in return.
When Hestal met his gaze, his eyes were still ice-cold. Either he had never recovered from the incident that had occurred after Monday’s kidnapping case, or he was even angrier because of something else—something like the skull on his desk. At times, that gaze made it seem as though he had seen through everything: “His interests will change—because he’s not a man of lasting affection, is he?”
Albanino smiled and said nothing more.
By then Bates had finished taking photographs and carefully removed the flowers. They were flawless white from head to toe, like a handful of weightless snow.
Bates’s voice was quite certain, clearly confident: “Although we don’t know what the killer used to bleach the skull, overall, the method of bleaching and decorating with gold leaf is very similar to the Sunday Gardener’s ‘Bride Ship’ case—though further testing hasn’t been done yet, I’d say this is the Sunday Gardener’s work.”
He spent several nights applying that gold foil, making sure it was perfectly smooth and the edges flowed seamlessly. He had always kept this part of his private life strictly separate from his work, never cutting into his daytime overtime because of it. After several dizzying late-night drives, he was starting to regret it.
On those nights, the wilderness beyond the house was almost silent. He owned the house and several acres of land outside, where nothing had been deliberately planted. After nightfall, foxes and coyotes roamed here, those wild beasts howling in the darkness, the gold foil glittering like starlight between his fingers, while other beasts lurked within Hestal Amalite’s blue eyes.
He wanted to get close—to touch that beast’s fur, tear open his flesh, and drink deeply of his blood.
He loved things that were challenging and beautiful.
Bates carefully took out the flowers and set them aside. The skull still contained a half-full mass of red material inside. Albanino reached out, gripped the skull, and shook it. With a few dull thuds of collision, several small red granules fell from the eye sockets of the skull, landing on the table like drops of blood.
“Pomegranate,” he said.
And Olga said at the same time: “Persephone.”
The others all looked at her, more or less bewildered. Olga let out a triumphant hum and pointed at the things Bates had taken out: “Wheat—Persephone is the goddess of grain in Greek mythology; narcissus—the Theogony writes that after Persephone picked the narcissus, she was abducted by Hades and became his queen of the underworld; and the pomegranate, as everyone knows—”
“Persephone ate the six pomegranate seeds Hades gave her,” Albanino said softly. Hestal looked at him, and he gazed into those blue eyes as if a hunter’s crosshairs were aimed at a deer wandering through the forest. “And so she was bound to remain in the underworld for six months of every year.”
Hestal gave him a sharp smile, then turned his gaze away.
“So,” he said mockingly, “I’m now trapped in some perverse metaphor about the Queen of the Underworld? And this is while the Sunday Gardener narcissistically casts himself as Hades?”
“More precisely, the innocent maiden abducted by Hades—Bernini’s *The Rape of Proserpina*. Everyone can picture that scene, can’t they?” Olga let out a snort. For some reason, she sounded gleeful, as if they weren’t discussing a deranged serial killer. “Though if you ate that many pomegranate seeds, you’d probably be stuck in the underworld for the rest of your life with no way back.”
“Olga!” Bates warned—the only one among them with a conscience, and the only one who still remembered to pull the discussion back on track. “So, was Mr. Armalight courted by the Sunday Gardener?”
They were quiet for a few seconds, like elementary school students fidgeting when the teacher asks a question, none of them willing to say the answer that everyone knew full well.
Albanino observed Hestal. The other stood calmly in place, brows tightly furrowed, but that was all; for someone dragged into a topic of this magnitude, he was a bit too composed.
“‘Courted’ is a bit heavy a word,” Olga mused, her gaze wandering between the plants and pomegranate seeds on the tabletop. “Although this gift before us is also quite exquisite—may the deceased rest in peace, of course—but I can’t help feeling that if things had escalated to the level of ‘love’ for the Sunday Gardener, he would have made the scene more extravagant.”
Hestal said dryly, “…Sorry?”
“What it means is that he might have killed every judge who ruled against you, piled a massive heap of bones on your desk, and then planted cornflowers and larkspurs as blue as your eyes between their ribs.” Albanino said with a smile, the words flowing from between his lips without hesitation, as though he had been thinking about it for a long time.
“Stop it, that’s disgusting.” Bates groaned.
Olga said without changing expression, “We’re talking about love.”
“Alright, then. The fact that you don’t think this is a courtship is genuinely quite a relief to me.” Hestal concluded in that sardonic tone of his—he simply never learned how to speak properly.
Olga shook her head gravely.
“Not to burst your bubble, but I don’t think this is as simple as you’re making it out to be,” she said quietly, slowly tugging at her own hair. “This is a Greek mythological metaphor, and we all know that in the myth, Hades forcibly abducted Demeter’s daughter and forced her to become his queen. So rather than anything else, I’d say the metaphor the Sunday Gardener used is very… disrespectful. But that might be exactly what he intended.”
Hestal let out a cold grunt, as if he had already understood something. Albarino lowered his eyes to the few pomegranate seeds scattered on the tabletop, suppressing the smile at the corner of his mouth.
“This isn’t love. He didn’t send you roses. If we didn’t know why the Sunday Gardener specifically reached out to you when Thomas Norman died, now we can probably see the pattern: he was toying with you.”
That was how Olga ended this bizarre conversation.
“Herstal, just think of it as the Sunday Gardener giving you a pat on the ass.”