Chapter 35: Snake 03
Albanino stayed in the hospital for five days before he was finally released back to “home”—that is, the apartment Beatrix’s friend had found for him. His own house was now, as could be expected, thoroughly covered in fingerprint powder and other chemical reagents. As Hardy had said, it was best he not go back for the time being.
Although renting a place in the city temporarily was a rational decision made after weighing all the factors, it clearly didn’t stop half of Hardy’s team from looking at Albanino with the pitying gaze of “oh, the poor thing can’t go home, the moment he goes home he’ll definitely have a PTSD episode.” One of Hardy’s officers went back to Albanino’s house to gather some daily necessities for him, stuffed them into a huge leather bag, and handed it to him—so he had no choice but to move into his rented apartment just like that, bag in hand.
The paid leave from the Forensics Bureau was clearly trending toward being extended to Christmas. The forensics supervisor and a haggard-looking Hardy personally escorted him to the door of that apartment, telling him to rest well and not overthink anything, and that if he ran into reporters he should just call the police station, and so on—because the media’s enthusiasm for him had clearly not yet faded, and the case had once again reached a deadlock.
The Westland Pianist, as always, had left them nothing worth examining, and tracing the phone call he had made to Hardy had yielded no results either. Although Bates hadn’t mentioned it, Albanino was certain that the police department and CSI had gone through every trash can within a ten-kilometer radius of his home, hoping to find a condom left behind by the Pianist… but there was obviously no way he would have left one behind.
And after there was no further delaying it, Lavasa McCade also had to leave Westland and return to Quantico.
And just like that, this case was eighty percent likely to be tossed into the dusty archives of “cold cases,” while Bart was simply handling the Pianist case and the killer Johnny case together—he might really be on the verge of being crushed. This bunch of unlucky people had dropped Albanino off at home, and within minutes they were all dragging their feet back to work overtime, leaving Albanino alone in this apartment.
Bates’s friend had found him a comfortable old house, fully equipped indoors, though the furniture was somewhat old. Even with the windows properly shut, he could always hear the clamor from the endless river of vehicles flowing past outside—far noisier than living in the suburbs.
Albarino tossed his bag onto the rug beside the sofa. He had only been discharged from the hospital after dinner, and it was already past eight in the evening. Perhaps it would be a good idea to sort out his daily necessities tomorrow—he still needed to go out and buy supplies. God.
He felt there was no need to overestimate himself by admitting he was doing very well. Mainly, his entire body ached everywhere. Some bruises had faded to a grayish-blue, while others were still in their most terrifying dark purple stage, looking like livor mortis on a corpse. And the stitched wound on his abdomen still throbbed with a dull pain, making it difficult for him to even bend over.
Albarino stared at the bag on the rug for a while, unable to decide whether he should push himself to take out his pajamas or just lie down on the bed directly. But just at that moment, a knock came at the door.
Albarino had seen victims from certain cases whose paranoia after the incident was so severe that even a sudden knock at the door could make them burst into tears. But Albarino was clearly not that type. He dragged his feet over to open the door, and then saw Hestal Amaret standing at the entrance.
“You actually have time to follow me around? I thought you were busy with work.” That was all Albanino said.
Then he reflected on it, and realized that this didn’t seem like the proper attitude for a victim to have toward a rapist.
“Today is Friday,” Hestal answered, not addressing the question. Albanino barely managed to understand that what this sentence actually meant was, “I’m off tomorrow and I’m not working overtime today, so yeah, I do have time to follow you around.”
“Yes, it’s already the fourth today. You successfully made me spend Halloween Eve in the hospital—truly an unforgettable experience.” Albanino snorted through his nose, let Hestal in from the doorway, then casually closed the door behind him.
Hestal gave him a disapproving look. “At your age, are you still playing ‘trick or treat’?”
Albanino threw himself onto that exceptionally soft sofa without a care. The pain from the stitches in his abdomen had basically made him give up on standing any longer—who would have thought such a shallow wound could hurt this much?
“The place I live, no neighbor kids would ever come visiting, but carving jack-o’-lanterns is pretty fun too, isn’t it? And Halloween is also a day when you can openly go buy candy.” Albanino blinked, answering with evident enjoyment. “Ah, of course, should I not be discussing this with you either? ‘Mr. No Childhood’?”
Hestal’s reply was a dry sigh.
But he still sat down on the other end of the sofa, which might mean the conversation could still continue. Albanino tilted his head and studied the other man’s profile, then suddenly said, “Actually, I didn’t really celebrate Halloween much when I was a kid either—my parents were both surgeons, and you know how busy doctors are, so I spent most of my childhood at boarding school.”
Albanino fell silent for a moment, then broke into a smile. “That kind of school had all sorts of activities for Halloween, but…” He paused again and shrugged. “All in all, the kids hated it.”
“Are we really talking about this now?” Hestal asked sarcastically.
“Why not? Hiding under the sheets and swapping secrets—I thought we’d already reached that stage, hadn’t we?” Albanino said in an exaggerated tone.
Hestal clicked his tongue. They had clearly both done no small amount of investigating each other. As for those old matters concerning Kentucky, Hestal, from the bottom of his heart, did not want Albanino to know about them. But since the other party was taking a tacitly permissive attitude, he could only ask: “They loved each other very much, didn’t they?”
“Far too much in love—brimming with that kind of… wondrous romantic quality.” Albanino said slowly. “So I’m quite certain I was born as a result of improper contraception. They had originally planned to spend their whole lives as just the two of them.”
Hestal watched him, then suddenly asked, “How did your mother die?”
Albanino glanced at him. “You looked into it, didn’t you?”
“There were some vague fragments online and in old newspapers,” Hestal admitted.
Albanino paused almost imperceptibly. Both hands rested on the back of the sofa, his body language relaxed as he leaned there. When he recounted the past, there was actually no real nostalgia in his voice—it was like telling a story that had nothing to do with himself.
He said simply, “Drowning.”
“It still cannot be determined what the specific meaning is behind the victims’ bodies in this series of cases being displayed in public places on fixed dates, but in this series of cases, a large number of victims’ bodies were given the imagery of drowning, or displayed near rivers and lakes. This is likely related to some psychological trauma of the perpetrator.”
Herstal looked up the rest of the story himself, because Albanino’s father was indeed a very famous surgeon, and was clearly well known in Westland’s high society—after all, a doctor is a respectable profession. Not long after that “accident,” Albanino’s father unfortunately fell into depression, and within two years had taken his own life. Albanino quickly sold off their original house in the city center and bought a plot of land on the outskirts of the city.
“The news said you were nineteen when your father died,” Herstal said in a low voice.
Albanino looked at him intently, as if he wanted to smile: “Yes, what do you want to ask?”
“You had already graduated from university by then, because it’s said you skipped many grades during elementary school.” Hestal recited Albanino’s résumé, part of which he had heard from Olga. “What came next?”
“Four years of coursework at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania,” Albanino answered. He spread out five fingers, then slowly curled four of them, leaving his index finger extended, the corner of his mouth still holding a smile. “A year of traveling in Europe; then I returned to Westland and became a pathologist—just like the résumé of any forensic examiner.”
“You were twenty-four the year you returned to Westland,” Hestal said in a low voice.
“Yes,” Albanino said, the smile on his face unchanged.
“The Sunday Gardener has been committing crimes in Westland for ten years now. You’re thirty-four this year,” Hestal continued.
Albanino blinked, his voice sounding very light: “Almost thirty-five, if you’re calculating my age.”
But Hestal clearly wasn’t calculating his age. The other man simply stared at him, tracing Albanino’s temples and eyebrows with his gaze, as if he could find the answer to some question there. But they both knew he couldn’t—even the most outstanding profiler had yet to get an answer out of him.
Hestal said, “I understand.”
“No,” Albanino answered quietly, “you don’t.”
—Of course he didn’t understand. This was a topic that criminal psychologists had been obsessing over for years: namely, what exactly turns a person into a serial killer. Let Hestal ask himself: if he hadn’t had an alcoholic father and a mother who abandoned him in his infancy and ran away from home, would he have become the person he was now? Without that church in Kentucky, where would he have ended up?
Of course he didn’t know the answer to that question.
Another question he would never get an answer to was how Albanino Bax had become the person he was now. Olga Morozer insisted that the Sunday Gardener was the kind of person who was destined to become a serial killer from birth, the kind of guy whose genes were inscribed with “he is a monster.”
But even so, what kind of influence had his family had on him?
It was like the “drowning” that Albanino himself was unwilling to talk about—had his mother really died in an accident?
Hestal didn’t know whether to sigh at this moment. Sometimes he felt that if he had never met Albanino Bax, his life would have been much simpler. But then again…
“You have hidden beneath the mask of perfect rationality for far too long. When you live among the crowd, you cannot tell others what you truly think, nor can you demand their understanding; your madness is, for the most part, bound beneath the surface of rules—so much so that I have glimpsed the place beneath your mask where it teeters on the verge of collapse.”
Albanino was willing to call it—as Plato put it—”divine madness.”
“What are you thinking?” Albanino asked, his voice dropping so low it was almost a breath. The deep resonance of his throat evoked the ocean tides surging through a cave in the dead of night. “Why have you come today, Hestal?”
Hestal curved the corner of his mouth at him—it was almost a smile.
“Returning to the scene of the crime,” said the Westland Pianist, “I’ve come to inspect my work.”
“Been a long day?” asked the forensic supervisor sitting in the passenger seat.
“Far too long. Ever since Richard Norman’s case, we’ve barely had a moment’s rest.” Hardy let out a heavy sigh, his fingers tapping impatiently on the steering wheel. He still had to go back to work overtime—the paperwork for closing the killer Johnny’s case wasn’t finished yet. Why were there so many reports to write in this world? “Good God, my daughter’s about to forget what I look like. Even by Westland standards, this is too much.”
The forensic supervisor smiled wearily. His chief medical examiner was constantly getting into trouble, like a magnet for misfortune, and it clearly made life difficult for him too. “The active period of serial killers—the Sunday Gardener and the Westland Pianist have been committing an abnormal number of crimes lately.”
“I suspect they’re competing,” Hardy shook his head, staring at the traffic light ahead with dry eyes. The damn red light was still on. “I should have realized it when Olga told me the two of them noticed each other—they’re probably in some kind of killing competition.”
The forensic supervisor was silent for a moment, then asked in a tone devoid of any hope: “How is this going to end?”
“Maybe they’ll kill each other. That would be for the best.” Hardy guessed wildly. “Or maybe they’ll team up and cause some kind of goddamn massacre… No, I don’t know how this can end. I just want it to stop immediately.”
Herstal’s hand finally found its way under Albanino’s shirt.
This person never willingly wore layers upon layers of clothing; getting him to wear a tie was practically asking for his life. Underneath this shirt there was nothing else, only bandages wrapped around his abdomen, and this was, indeed, quite distracting.
Along the edges of the bandages, Hestal could feel the scabbed wounds. The depth of the knife’s penetration followed the force of the blade, going from shallow to deep, and when the knife was withdrawn, the upward flick of the tip left a small skin flap—Albanino, as a forensic pathologist, should be very familiar with this type of knife wound—the deepest parts of these unbandaged wounds had been sporadically stitched, exposed almost fearlessly.
Hestal’s fingertips brushed past many scabs. He still remembered how these wounds had looked like a vivid crimson web encircling the other’s skin; but now they were merely beneath his palm, rough and hard, making someone with a slight case of obsessive-compulsive disorder desperately want to pick at some of them with a fingernail, exposing the freshly healed crimson flesh beneath.
Albanino’s hand rested loosely on the velvet surface of the sofa—for someone facing a deranged serial killer, this posture was far too relaxed. The way he sized up the other person was reminiscent of those curious animals that would charge onto the highway without a care, never knowing death was imminent until they were smashed to pieces.
When he wore such an expression, it couldn’t help but make others wonder: even if someone were to truly pick off those scabs, or even make his blood flow once more, he wouldn’t voice any objection.
Hestal suspected that this was merely a deceptive mask, yet it was also quite fascinating.
He could only frown, his fingers digging into that flesh, pushing the other onto the armrest of the sofa.
When Albanino fell, he didn’t even try to struggle—he just lazily lay down like that, one hand braced on the sofa, his legs hanging uncomfortably over the edge. Hestal heard the unsuccessful thudding sounds as he clumsily tried to kick off his shoes.
Then, Albanino said, “Have we really reached this stage?”
“What?”
“Having many meals with impeccable manners, getting to know each other and each other’s families in depth, and finally reaching the stage where you can lie on an ugly-as-hell but pretty soft polka-dot sofa and talk—the normal course of falling in love, right?” Albanino pursed his lips. He had successfully kicked off his shoes this way, and Hestal heard the heavy thud of leather shoes hitting the floor.
“You call this love?” Hestal asked. As a lawyer, he felt the other’s way of drawing conclusions was somewhat illogical.
“It can be. For instance, one is a willful and capricious little Spanish princess who only wants to play games with someone who has no heart; and the other is a self-abasing, fragile little dwarf who thinks a beautiful white rose means love.” Albanino let out a ha. “By a certain standard, this counts as a love story.”
“I think you’re mocking yourself,” Hestal pointed out.
“At least self-deprecation counts as a virtue,” Albanino replied with a smiling, lazy drawl. “I think it’s far more humorous than the kind of serial killer who mocks every one of his victims, don’t you agree?”
Herstahl could only respond with a cold snort.
Even so, Herstahl’s hand still hadn’t withdrawn from beneath Albanino’s shirt. This forensic pathologist had well-toned muscles hidden under there—of course he did; just look at the sheer physical effort involved when he’d hung Thomas Norman upside down in the water.
Herstahl felt his way upward, his fingers tracing those knife scars as though following the veins of a leaf. He finally reached the other man’s nipple, hesitated for a few seconds, then reached out and gently rubbed it.
Albanino let out a low hiss.
“I suppose you’re still quite satisfied with your crime scene,” Albanino said, deliberately lowering his voice even further. “I know what’s turning over in that head of yours—just say it.”
Hestal gazed at Albanino, those green eyes somehow reminding one of the mottled scales of a venomous snake.
“I want to fuck you again,” he said.
Note:
[1] The example Albanino gave was Wilde’s “The Birthday of the Infanta.”
Even so, I still have to say: that is one hell of a love story!