Chapter 33: Snake 01
Albanino blinked.
Lingering at the tip of his nose was the mixed smell of disinfectant and bleach. Morning light had already shone through the curtains into the room, and the weather after the rain had cleared up, looking warm and hazy. The featureless ceiling before his eyes was enough to tell Albanino: he was now lying in a hospital.
He tried to move his fingers—or rather, he tried to wiggle with great effort across the stark white hospital bedsheet—and failed completely. The pain from his wounds made him hiss.
“Honestly,” he then heard Olga Moroz’s voice come from somewhere nearby, “I once thought that after this rain, the only victim we’d have to deal with was Hestal.”
Albanino struggled to look to the side and saw this heartwarming morning scene: an IV stand stood by the bed, its needle of course inserted into the back of his hand, and it probably contained something like saline for fluid replacement and blood pressure regulation after excessive blood loss; Olga sat in a chair beneath the IV stand, with astonishingly dark circles under her eyes, earnestly gnawing on a (at least three-layer) Burger King Whopper.
—Does anyone really eat something that greasy first thing in the morning?
Albanino said, with great creativity, “…Huh?”
“To put it simply: you were attacked last night, then strung up in the forensics bureau’s morgue in a rather classical pose; right now Bethes and the others are tearing your house apart, and Bart is probably questioning all your neighbors who might have witnessed what happened—though I’m guessing nobody actually knows what went down.” Olga said while licking sauce off her lips. “It’s your own fault for having a house with 3.7 acres of land attached to it. Your nearest neighbor’s house is almost a kilometer away.”
Then she paused indignantly and took another bite of her burger.
“I’m just a little curious,” Albanino asked kindly, aware that his voice was still hoarse, “is that how people normally talk to victims?”
“Of course not. Besides, Bart would scold me for this if he found out. Right now, in his eyes, you’re made of glass.” Olga held the burger wrapper with one hand and picked up the glass from the hospital bedside table with the other, letting Albanino take two sips through the straw in the glass.
Then she put the cup back and sized him up for two seconds, her voice softening a little: “Do I treat you like that?”
Albanino laughed, and that smile was somewhat pale: “No, please don’t. We both know what happened, don’t we?”
“Yes,” Olga said. She thoughtfully licked the sauce off her fingers, then let out a soft laugh. “We both know what happened.”
“It can’t be the Westland Pianist. The Pianist doesn’t sexually assault his victims, nor does he let his victims live,” McCard pointed out with a frown.
He was standing right in front of the desk. The smooth surface was covered with photographs that Bates had brought back from Albarino’s home: most showed bloody, mangled wounds, while a smaller portion explicitly captured swollen, pitiful orifices, with blood trickling down the victim’s thighs.
The problem was, this victim was—
Their friend was still in the hospital. Though there was no danger to his life, he had lost a considerable amount of blood and was covered in wounds. And now they could only stand here arguing. The feeling was truly unbearable.
Olga let out a scoff. She was huddled in the corner of the office, still clutching that “Keep Calm and Love Colin Firth” coffee mug. That mug was originally hers, kept in Hardy’s office—after all, as a WLPD consultant, she frequently visited Hardy’s office.
“He is indeed a sexually perverted psychopath,” she said in the calmest tone imaginable between the two of them.
“And he called himself the Westland Pianist,” Hardy said wearily, unsure which hit him harder—the Pianist changing his method of killing, or Albanino becoming a victim.
“But this doesn’t fit the profile,” McCade said. “Maybe it’s a copycat?”
“Or is it because if the Pianist attacked Al, it directly overturns that deduction you stood in my living room and spouted at me just a few hours ago?” Olga shot back. This man had said to her just hours earlier, “Is Albanino the Westland Pianist?” “You—”
“All right, all right, Olga.” Bates’s voice was full of a soothing tone. He held the camera used for securing evidence during forensics, pressing the buttons as if picking something out. “Why don’t you all come take a look at this? Perhaps it can confirm that the killer really is the Pianist.”
The others crowded over. On the camera’s display screen were close-ups of piano wire. Bates tapped the knots on the screen where the piano wire was joined: “The Westland Pianist often uses piano wire to bind corpses, and his way of tying knots in piano wire is specific: he generally uses a fisherman’s knot when connecting two strings, and ties a bowline when securing a loop. When other killers commit crimes—even if they’re copycats—this kind of fixed pattern rarely appears.”
Bates pressed a button. The next image was a close-up of Albanino’s arm, the piano wire sunk deep into the skin, making the scene look somewhat gruesome, but—
“The method of tying knots in the piano wire at this scene is consistent with the Pianist’s previous cases?” Olga asked.
“Completely identical.” Bates shrugged, his voice certain. “My colleagues took the piano wire from this case back to the crime lab for analysis. You all should know that different models of piano wire vary greatly in material, thickness, and so on. If the killer is the Pianist, then this wire shouldn’t be much different from before—but considering the way he tied the knots in the wire, I suggest you proceed on the assumption that he is indeed the Pianist.”
“How much of the whole thing do you still remember?” Olga asked. As she posed the question, she shifted in her seat, as if trying to convey “I don’t know how to properly ask this,” but Albanino suspected she didn’t actually have any such concern.
In fact, based on his understanding of Olga, the mere fact that she hadn’t eagerly pounced on him to demand details at this moment was already a remarkably restrained performance on her part.
They were silent for a moment, and then Olga added, “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but Bart and the others went to do door-to-door inquiries, and when he gets back he’ll definitely ask you too. And Bart… you know how he is.”
Albanino certainly understood what she meant: Bart was the one who always played the bad cop in the “good cop, bad cop” game. He was suited for fierce interrogation, not for gently questioning victims.
“Could you take my statement?” Albanino asked, and when he asked, there was actually a fragile look of expectation on his face—the expression a person who has been hurt would wear when seeking to avoid harm and pursue what benefits them. This expression did not suit Albanino’s face—it did not suit the Albanino they remembered, the one who was always smiling, but perhaps experiences can change a person.
“Perhaps that could work,” Olga mused. “I could record it, then submit the recording to Bart—that way, at least the first round would go more smoothly… Of course, as the case progresses, he’ll definitely keep asking you for details again and again.”
“Assuming the case can actually make any progress,” Albanino said. Everything about the Pianist case was still gathering dust in the archives; they really shouldn’t be expecting anything.
Olga shrugged, then she crumpled up the Whopper wrapper, tossed it back into the takeout paper bag, wiped the sauce off her hands with a napkin, and fished her phone out of her pocket.
“I am Olga Moroz, consultant for the WLPD. It is now October 30th, 8:27 AM.” Olga spoke into the phone with the recording app open. “I will now question Mr. Albanino Bax regarding his testimony on the serious assault case that occurred early this morning. Both parties are aware of and consent to this recording.”
Albanino propped himself up a little straighter against the bedsheets. His abdomen was wrapped entirely in bandages, making it completely impossible for him to see the mark the Pianist had left. Olga leaned in to adjust his pillow, making his sitting position a bit more comfortable.
“Then let’s start from the beginning,” Olga said after sitting back down in her chair. “Al, how did this happen?”
“Someone broke into my home,” Albanino’s voice sounded light and slow. He blinked, his fingers pressing against the bandage on his abdomen, as if trying to concentrate through it. “I was sitting in the living room drinking—because of what happened during the day, I had no desire to sleep. Then it was as if, all of a sudden… he came in.”
“What time was that?” Olga asked.
Albanino was silent for a moment, then said carefully, “Probably a little past one in the morning. I wasn’t paying much attention.”
“How did the killer get in? Did he pry the door open?” Olga asked.
“I didn’t hear the sound of the door being pried open… In fact, I don’t even remember whether I actually locked the door.” Albarino let out a bitter laugh, his fingers unconsciously tracing circles on his abdomen. “But I think my spare key is under the doormat by the entrance. It’s also possible he found the key.”
Olga nodded, then leaned forward slightly, staring intently at Albarino’s face.
She asked, “Did you see his face?”
In a haze, Albarino felt his hand being lifted slightly by the other person. Hestal tossed a towel onto the spot on his abdomen that was bleeding the most profusely, then pressed Albarino’s hand onto that towel.
Because the rough texture pressed against the surface of the wound, Albanino couldn’t help but let out a dazed hiss.
“Press down hard,” Hestal’s voice floated somewhere above his head, sounding unreal, as if submerged underwater. “You’d better not die of blood loss in the next few hours.”
Albanino very much wanted to point out that he knew how to press down on a wound—he had been to medical school, after all. In the end, he merely forced his heavy eyelids open and smiled hazily. “Worried about me?”
Hestal shot him a glance. “Not part of my plan.”
“Right, it doesn’t fit your profile. The Pianist doesn’t kill anyone other than criminals.” Albanino let out two vague laughs, but Hestal ignored him. He listened to the sound of the other walking to the far end of the room, and then—
A sharp crack of something hitting the ground, followed by the fruity aroma of wine drifting over.
“Fuck!” Albanino shouted hoarsely. “Did you knock over my bottle of wine? I’ve had less than half of it!”
“Do you really think two people wouldn’t knock that bottle over after getting into a fight?” Hestal retorted. “Don’t be naive.”
Albarino flailed wildly on the ground a couple of times, then stopped upon discovering that it hurt like hell and the blood was still flowing out continuously. His voice carried an inexplicable note of grievance: “You just smashed a bottle of wine that shares my name? Do you have any taste at all?”
The Westland Pianist had had so many victims, but the one before him might be the most hung up on a trivial matter concerning a bottle of wine.
“Isn’t it a rather clever metaphor?” Hestal sneered, unmoved.
“Just you wait, I’ll get my revenge on you,” Albarino warned him, but given that the former’s lips were deathly pale, the threat didn’t seem very convincing. “When it comes time to give my statement, I’ll say you were wearing an unbelievably hideous ski mask.”
“I didn’t see his face,” Albanino said slowly, frowning. “He was wearing a ski mask, but his height was about the same as mine—possibly taller and stronger.”
“What about the color of his eyes?” Olga pressed.
This time Albanino was silent for even longer, and then he said, “The light was very dim, I didn’t get a clear look… perhaps some light color, but definitely not black.”
Olga nodded and continued asking, “And then?”
“I didn’t react in time, and then he attacked me, threw a lot of punches.” Albanino said, pointing to the split on his lip and the swollen purple bruises on his cheekbones. He himself might not have known what a ghastly sight they had become, but they must have hurt terribly. “Then he slammed my head against the wall.”
“The Pianist must have grabbed him by the hair and slammed his head against the wall,” Hardy said, placing a photo on the table that had just been sent over from the forensics team: it was taken during Albanino’s surgery, showing a four-centimeter gash on the back of Albanino’s head, stitched up with several sutures.
When the doctor debrided the wound, he shaved off the hair around it, which made the gash look even more hideous and swollen.
“God, that explains it.” Bates murmured, pale-faced. “After we took those photos down, we saw some bloodstains on a section of the wallpaper. That blood must have gotten there during the struggle.”
“No trace of the Pianist’s blood?” McCade asked—though technically, he shouldn’t have been there. This wasn’t an interstate case. The FBI had no jurisdiction to intervene without a request from the WLPD, and the WLPD certainly hadn’t made one. McCade’s colleagues from the BAU had all flown back to Quantico by now. He was the only one still here.
“According to the current DNA test results, no.” Bates shook his head in frustration. “Not even under Al’s fingernails. The Pianist bound his hands during the attack—he didn’t even have a chance to scratch the other man.”
Hardy let out a sigh.
“At least he doesn’t have a concussion,” Olga offered consolingly, though under the circumstances, it was hardly any consolation at all.
“My head was spinning at the time, and the other man kept his hands around my throat,” Albanino said. “Then he straddled my waist and bound my wrists.”
The bruises left by the strangulation marks on Albanino’s neck had already turned purple. From the traces of the bruising, one could roughly deduce the killer’s height, but it could only be said that he was someone not short in stature—there was no real reference value to it. The marks clung tightly to his throat, looking like a ring of dark purple collar, a ferocious mark of shame.
“You truly have no idea who he is?” Olga couldn’t help but ask.
Albanino glanced at her, his gaze calm, but his voice did not sound the same: “I have some theories, Olga—he threw his punch with his left hand, he bound me with a piano wire. I can at least speculate—”
Olga reached out and covered the back of his hand with her own. Albanino suddenly drew in a sharp breath, then struggled to calm himself down.
“Sorry.” Albanino said in a low voice. He was silent for a long while before continuing, “…He cut my clothes to shreds with a knife, and then—”
Olga’s fingers, gripping his hand, tightened slightly.
“Did he look at your face the whole time?” Olga asked quietly.
“I was looking at his face too!” Albanino suddenly raised his voice, his last syllable trembling, “When he was fucking me while stabbing my abdomen with a knife! I couldn’t—I didn’t—”
“Shh,” Olga comforted him in a low voice, leaning in a little closer. “It’s over now, Al.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s really over,” Albanino let out a dry laugh. “Thankfully he was more than happy to choke me, so I passed out in the end—it was over, truly a mercy.”
He took a deep breath, his chest rising and falling, and his voice sounded like it was trembling. He didn’t ask Olga to move her hand, but instead sank deeper into the pillow. After a moment, he said softly, “I’m sorry, I don’t think my testimony will be of much use. I can’t provide any more evidence—except that my entire body is probably evidence.”
Olga looked at him for a while, then carefully asked, “…You don’t know what he did afterward, do you?”
“Why won’t your home’s Bluetooth connect?” Hestal shouted from the study. That tense voice was about the closest he ever got to an angry yell at a time like this.
“Are you kidding me?” Albanino shouted back, his voice barely a whisper. He could feel that his abdomen wasn’t bleeding much anymore—a very good sign. “You used the victim’s own computer and printer to print photos of the victim’s private parts, and now you’re asking the victim himself why the Bluetooth won’t connect?!”
Hestal said nothing. Albanino heard him let out a distinctly loud sigh.
“Fine, fine, just try a few more times, okay?” Albanino felt himself rolling his eyes at the ceiling, the sarcasm in his voice practically overflowing. “I’ll replace the equipment next time—if you’d ever deign to come back and rape me again.”
“…He took photos of me.” Albanino repeated slowly, his voice sounding incredulous.
“I’m afraid so, and then printed them in color using the printer you keep in your study.” Olga nodded, looking at his pale face with sympathy. “And honestly, we suspect he used your phone to take them.”
Albanino was silent for a moment, then probed tentatively: “Why? Did you find other fingerprints on my phone?”
Olga glanced at him, then gently shook her head: “That’s the conclusion the tech department reached after their examination. Your computer had been connected to your phone via Bluetooth, and that’s how he transferred the files to the computer—but we didn’t find your phone, and the location tracking turned up nothing either. It’s possible he removed the SIM card and took everything with him.”
Hestal had one hand bare, without a latex glove, and poked at Albanino’s phone screen, asking, “What’s the password?”
“Even if you’re a murderer, you’re an especially rude murderer.” The towel on Albanino’s abdomen was soaked through with red, his face was deathly pale, and he looked like he was about to pass out at any moment.
But even in this situation, he still had the energy to mock.
Hestal looked at him sternly: “Albanino.”
“Alright,” Albanino hummed, “it’s ‘0725.’”
He heard the other person unlocking the phone. Perhaps Hestal wanted to ask what this passcode meant to him—because it was obviously not Albanino’s birthday—but in the end, he didn’t ask.
The other person gestured for Albanino to move aside the blood-stained towel on the abdomen, then took several photos of the carved marks. Albanino could almost predict that this obsessive-compulsive would have to sift through those photos many times before picking one he liked—hopefully by then the victim wouldn’t have already bled to death.
“You, as a tasteless person who carves the word ‘bitch’ into someone’s body and plasters their nude photos all over a room, are really a bit too fixated on these details, aren’t you?” Albanino asked hoarsely.
“Facing you, even the Pianist can’t help but do something tasteless.” Hestal nodded, meaning he had finished filming, and told him to put the towel back. “Not to mention, legally speaking, you were the one who incited me.”
“Oh, I incited you to rape me. What clear logic.” Albarino said. He felt Hestal half-kneel beside him, placing a hand on his knee, fingers slowly tracing circles on his bare skin.
“Open your legs a bit more.” Hestal’s hand traveled all the way down, fingers pressing into the soft flesh of his thigh smeared with already-dried bloodstains, and he could still make such a demand while holding up his phone.
Albarino let out a hah, but in the end still complied.
“I still don’t really understand why he did it this way.” Albanino said softly. He looked as though he had barely mustered some energy; for someone who had just suffered such a calamity, he was truly very strong. “I don’t fit his logic for selecting victims, do I?”
“I don’t understand either, Al.” Olga replied quietly. They had already finished recording the statement. Olga sent the recording to Hardy, and now the two of them perked up and chatted about some other topics. “Besides, I’m not doing a profile for this case—you know stakeholders can’t participate in a case. The two of us are too close personally; Bart is worried it might affect my judgment.”
There was not much dissatisfaction in her voice, considerate as it was, though from what Albanino knew of her, she must have kicked up a huge fuss to fight for the right to investigate the Pianist’s case before Hardy managed to talk her down.
Of course Olga cared about her friends, but to her, the cases she encountered and the horrifying truths behind them were what mattered most.
Albanino asked, “Then the profile—”
“McCade will do it.” Olga let out a soft hum, clearly still somewhat displeased with Agent McCade. “But in the end, it’ll probably still be me attending the press conference to explain those profiles to the public—under the current procedures, the BAU shouldn’t be involved in investigating this case, and the WLPD hasn’t submitted a request to the FBI… Under these circumstances, if McCade steps forward, it’ll only bring trouble on himself.”
“But he still really wants to do this profile,” Albanino said with certainty. After the Johnny the Killer case, he had come to understand McCade’s character somewhat.
Olga let out a scoffing laugh. “He wants to bring the Westland Pianist, the Sunday Gardener, and every serial killer in the world to justice—there’s no doubt about that.”
“I will withdraw from the profiling for this case,” Olga suddenly said, and everyone in the room looked at her.
Hardy asked, not quite certain, “Olga?”
“I can’t concentrate well looking at these photos,” Olga said honestly, pointing at the photos on the table that CSI had retrieved from Albarino’s home—nothing but pale skin and blood-soaked wounds everywhere. “My relationship with Al is the closest among all of you—if this continues, I’m worried I’ll make mistakes, and you all know that the last thing I want is to make a mistake in a profile.”
Lavasa McCade gave Olga a sharp glance.
“If you’re willing, I’ll do everything I can to help with this case. But as for the profiling, I think an outsider might see things more clearly.” Olga sighed, took a big gulp from her coffee cup, then couldn’t help but stick out her tongue at the taste. “I think McCard has some ideas.”
“Really?” Hardy turned to McCard. “I haven’t figured anything out. The Pianist shouldn’t have chosen Al as a target.”
“Mr. Bax is special to the Pianist,” McCard said with a frown. “The most special of all the victims—different from those dead who were deemed guilty—that’s why he was sexually assaulted, and that’s why he didn’t die.”
By the time the analysis of the piano wire came out and confirmed that the killer was the Pianist, he too had no choice but to start considering the problem from that angle. Though Olga didn’t know whether, for McCard, having the deduction that “Albanino is the Pianist” overturned made him more displeased.
Bates nodded: “He didn’t want Al to die. We found a towel stained with Al’s blood in Al’s bathroom. We suspect the Pianist once used that towel to stop the bleeding from Al’s wound.”
McCade nodded: “That’s the point. The Pianist needs Dr. Bacchus alive to humiliate us.”
“Sorry?” Hardy asked with a frown, clearly not understanding.
“Those photos in Dr. Bacchus’s living room, those words carved into his abdomen—those were highly insulting gestures. The Pianist harbors a more personal grudge against him. This is different from how the Pianist killed his other victims—those victims died because they were guilty. Dr. Bacchus was attacked because the Pianist holds some… resentment toward him personally.” McCade said slowly.
Olga cut in, “He left an apple in Al’s pool of blood.”
“Yes,” McCard nodded. “If I remember correctly—Officer Hardy, which was the last Pianist case Dr. Bax was involved in?”
“It was Richard Norman’s case, the one where that mob boss was dressed up as a scarecrow. Because later, when Bob Landon was murdered, Al was on leave due to his imprisonment… Oh!” Hardy exclaimed, his eyes widening. “In that case, Richard Norman’s heart was replaced by an apple!”
A glint flashed through McCard’s eyes. “Exactly. Dr. Bax has always been the forensic pathologist responsible for autopsying the Pianist’s victims, hasn’t he.”
“Do you think the Pianist violated and humiliated him because he dissected those corpses?” Olga asked.
“Because he destroyed those—those works of art. In the Pianist’s deranged mind, those were his painstakingly crafted works of art. I can’t understand how someone like that thinks, but I’m afraid that’s exactly it.” McCard’s voice was low, filled with disapproval. “So he has to stay alive, because he needs to remember the mistake he made and learn his lesson. He was posed in the manner of Michelangelo’s *The Creation of Adam*. Here, Dr. Bacchus is Adam, the one being created, and the Westland Pianist is the God who controls it all.”
The others remained silent. Olga gave McCard a strange expression that was almost like a smile.
“This is his provocation against law enforcement,” McCard concluded.
Before lunchtime arrived, Hardy appeared in Albanino’s hospital room, looking both exhausted and irritated. This was not surprising; the strangest thing was that he was clutching a newspaper tightly in his hand, and by the time he came to a stop in front of the hospital bed, he looked almost restless.
“What is it?” Albanino was feeling a little more energetic by now. The doctor had come an hour earlier and told him there were no particularly deep wounds on his body—he had simply lost too much blood from going untreated for so long. The doctor promised that as long as the wounds didn’t become infected, Albanino would only need to stay in the hospital for three or four days, and then he would just need to come back when it was time to remove the stitches.
—That is, the words carved into his abdomen. He and Olga hadn’t discussed this in any particular detail, and clearly Olga didn’t seem to want to talk to him about it either—about the fact that some insulting word would scar over on his belly.
“You know… what happened, right?” Hardy asked hesitantly.
Albanino smiled gently. “Olga basically told me everything.”
“That’s right,” Hardy was clearly racking his brains for the right words. “This case is so unusual that it’s bound to cause a sensation. It’s naturally drawn the attention of reporters—”
The moment Hardy returned to the police station, he was completely surrounded by a swarm of reporters wielding cameras and microphones.
He had to raise a hand to shield himself from the flashbulbs, but there was no stopping the reporters who were frantically pushing forward. The one at the very front shouted in English tinged with an accent: “I’m Riohard Schheib, special correspondent for the *Westland Daily News*! Is it true that this case was the work of the Pianist, and that a staff member from the forensic bureau was a victim—?”
In the city of Westland, news always spreads like wildfire. Hardy was a good cop, but there were indeed quite a few dirty cops in the department—there were simply too many gangs in this city, especially on the narcotics side, where it had gotten to the point that you couldn’t survive without cutting some deals with the gangs. For some cops, as long as the money was good enough, they’d say anything.
Hardy could only be grateful that he was strict with his subordinates. At least up to now, Albanino’s name hadn’t gotten out.
He could only shout “No comment” as he forcibly pushed his way out through the sea of flashing lights.
Olga glared at Hardy, clearly having already understood. She said, “Oh no. Don’t.”
Albanino fell silent for a moment; he must have understood what Hardy meant as well. He glanced at the newspaper in Hardy’s hand and asked, “How much was leaked?”
Hardy swallowed dryly.
“They don’t know who the victim is yet, but either way, it’s obvious that someone in the police department or the forensics bureau…” He weakly extended his hand, pushing the newspaper forward. He let Albanino pull it from his fingers and unfold it.
And so, lying in his hands was a copy of the *Westland Daily News*, giving off that fresh ink smell of a paper that had just come off the presses.
The front-page headline featured a huge color image: it was an evidence photo that should have only circulated internally within the police department. Within the frame were a person’s bare chest and abdomen, the skin covered entirely in thin, elongated cuts. These thread-like knife wounds set off the large capital letters deeply carved into the person’s abdomen.
Thirteen cuts—Albanino thought indifferently.
The bold, black headline read sensationally: “The Westland Pianist Commits Rape! Victim Suspected to Be the Chief Forensic Examiner?”
Note:
3.7 acres is roughly fourteen thousand square meters.
Regarding knots:
Bowline knot ↓
Fisherman’s knot ↓