The crime-scene team still have work to do, but there isn’t a person in the place who doesn’t think Eleanor was killed during sex: the mattress half off the base, the tangled sheets, a brown spray of decaying arterial blood on a bedside table. In my head I start calling the victim Eleanor. The idea of a young woman without a face made me think of a Lennon/McCartney groove from long ago-it’s about Eleanor Rigby, a woman who wore a face that she kept in a jar by the door. In places like this, where you get a feeling evil still clings to the walls, your mind can veer into strange territory. Unless the forensic guys at the NYPD get lucky with a dental match, they’ll have a helluva time putting a name to this one. The acid has dissolved not only her fingerprints but almost the entire metacarpal structure underneath.

That was the plan I guess-whoever killed her had also weighed down her hands with telephone books. The young woman in the bath is unrecognizable-the three days she has spent in the acid have destroyed all her features. Even if a victim doesn’t know anyone in the world, it seems like there’s always someone sobbing at a scene like this. The place is in chaos, the noise deafening-police radios blaring, coroner’s assistants yelling for support, a Hispanic woman sobbing. I’ve always said it’s hard not to admire good planning. They’ve all got their price tags still attached and I see that, in order to avoid suspicion, whoever killed her bought them at twenty different stores. She is naked in the bathroom-her throat cut, floating facedown in a bathtub full of sulfuric acid, the active ingredient in a drain cleaner available at any supermarket.ĭozens of empty bottles of the cleaner-Drain Bomb, it’s called-lie scattered on the floor.

Like their owner, they don’t belong here. Lying next to the bed are a handbag, black panties the size of dental floss, and a pair of six-inch Jimmy Choos. There are places I’ll remember all my life-Red Square with a hot wind howling across it, my mother’s bedroom on the wrong side of Eight Mile, the endless gardens of a fancy foster home, a man waiting to kill me in a group of ruins known as the Theater of Death.īut nothing is burned deeper in my memory than a walk-up in New York-threadbare curtains, cheap furniture, a table loaded with tina and other party drugs.

I am pilgrim author