Anthony del Blanco’s violent act of rape eight months earlier that gave seed to this formerly restless child in her womb, this child Lydia del Blanco had alternately hated and loved, this child who had not kicked her for more than three hours.
As Lydia is helped to a wheelchair, her daughter begins to cry again, her tears now thin, meandering streams down her cheeks. She dutifully walks alongside her mother’s chair until they reach Examining Room One. Then, without tantrum, her utter exhaustion preventing such a display, she stops as they lift her mother onto a gurney and wheel her away.
A pleasant young candy striper named Constance Aguillar takes Fina’s hand and leads her over to the vending machines, where she buys her a Snickers and a Coke.
But before the little girl can take a single bite, she crawls onto one of the padded chairs and, within moments, falls fast asleep.
At the stroke of midnight, the moment when just about everyone living in the eastern standard time zone of the United States is popping champagne corks in celebration; the moment when Anthony del Blanco is taking carnal pleasure with a prostitute named Vickie Pomeroy in Room 511 of the TraveLodge on Cannon Road; the moment when four-year-old Fina is asleep and dreaming of a place where her father doesn’t raise his voice or his hand, Lydia screams in agony, just once, a long, solitary call of admonition to all those who would harm her or her family in the future.
And Lydia del Blanco has a baby boy. A healthy, seven-pound-five-ounce boy born of a brand new day, a brand new year.
A boy, Anthony del Blanco would one day discover, born of violence.
15
The dead woman’s name was Fayette Martin.
At the time of her murder she was thirty years old, never married, no children. A graduate of Mayfield High School on Cleveland’s far east side, a real computer buff when she wasn’t raising prize-winning orchids in her spare time; this according to a phone interview Paris had conducted with her brother, Edgar, a resident of Milwaukee, her only living relative.
She had been identified through the Department of Motor Vehicles. Her late-model red Chevy had been parked a few blocks from the Reginald Building, where her body was found. Prints taken at the scene matched prints found in the car, and the ID was made. She had worked at a florist shop in suburban Chesterland for the past twelve years.
The official cause of her demise would be recorded as “blood loss due to severe head trauma,” but that would tell only part of the story. What really happened to Fayette Martin was that someone took a very large, very sharp knife—a machete, perhaps, or a hefty steel saber—and sliced off the top of her head. One clean blow. The coroner found no serration on the woman’s skull, no evidence of sawing. And there is a good chance that the woman was engaged in intercourse at some point either before or during the bloody event, but not after. Reuben says during, but has decided to keep that opinion unofficial for the time being.
Paris finds small solace in the fact that, on top of all this, they are not chasing a necrophiliac.
Generally, when there is evidence connecting the methodology, if not the motive, of two murders, there is some similarity in the victims: college girls, prostitutes, insurance salesmen. But this time, the two deceased could not be more disparate:
A dead black man found in a room at the Dream-A-Dream, robbed and castrated.
A dead white woman found in the Reginald Building on East Fortieth Street, the top of her head lopped off, her brain removed from the scene.
What makes them kin, in death, is that both victims had a strange symbol of a bow and arrow carved somewhere on their bodies. A symbol as yet unidentified.
As of two days before Christmas, the official position of the Cleveland Police department is that these killings are not related.
Three photographs are taped to the chalkboard in the common room on the sixth floor of the
As Lydia is helped to a wheelchair, her daughter begins to cry again, her tears now thin, meandering streams down her cheeks. She dutifully walks alongside her mother’s chair until they reach Examining Room One. Then, without tantrum, her utter exhaustion preventing such a display, she stops as they lift her mother onto a gurney and wheel her away.
A pleasant young candy striper named Constance Aguillar takes Fina’s hand and leads her over to the vending machines, where she buys her a Snickers and a Coke.
But before the little girl can take a single bite, she crawls onto one of the padded chairs and, within moments, falls fast asleep.
At the stroke of midnight, the moment when just about everyone living in the eastern standard time zone of the United States is popping champagne corks in celebration; the moment when Anthony del Blanco is taking carnal pleasure with a prostitute named Vickie Pomeroy in Room 511 of the TraveLodge on Cannon Road; the moment when four-year-old Fina is asleep and dreaming of a place where her father doesn’t raise his voice or his hand, Lydia screams in agony, just once, a long, solitary call of admonition to all those who would harm her or her family in the future.
And Lydia del Blanco has a baby boy. A healthy, seven-pound-five-ounce boy born of a brand new day, a brand new year.
A boy, Anthony del Blanco would one day discover, born of violence.
15
The dead woman’s name was Fayette Martin.
At the time of her murder she was thirty years old, never married, no children. A graduate of Mayfield High School on Cleveland’s far east side, a real computer buff when she wasn’t raising prize-winning orchids in her spare time; this according to a phone interview Paris had conducted with her brother, Edgar, a resident of Milwaukee, her only living relative.
She had been identified through the Department of Motor Vehicles. Her late-model red Chevy had been parked a few blocks from the Reginald Building, where her body was found. Prints taken at the scene matched prints found in the car, and the ID was made. She had worked at a florist shop in suburban Chesterland for the past twelve years.
The official cause of her demise would be recorded as “blood loss due to severe head trauma,” but that would tell only part of the story. What really happened to Fayette Martin was that someone took a very large, very sharp knife—a machete, perhaps, or a hefty steel saber—and sliced off the top of her head. One clean blow. The coroner found no serration on the woman’s skull, no evidence of sawing. And there is a good chance that the woman was engaged in intercourse at some point either before or during the bloody event, but not after. Reuben says during, but has decided to keep that opinion unofficial for the time being.
Paris finds small solace in the fact that, on top of all this, they are not chasing a necrophiliac.
Generally, when there is evidence connecting the methodology, if not the motive, of two murders, there is some similarity in the victims: college girls, prostitutes, insurance salesmen. But this time, the two deceased could not be more disparate:
A dead black man found in a room at the Dream-A-Dream, robbed and castrated.
A dead white woman found in the Reginald Building on East Fortieth Street, the top of her head lopped off, her brain removed from the scene.
What makes them kin, in death, is that both victims had a strange symbol of a bow and arrow carved somewhere on their bodies. A symbol as yet unidentified.
As of two days before Christmas, the official position of the Cleveland Police department is that these killings are not related.
Three photographs are taped to the chalkboard in the common room on the sixth floor of the
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