Door 13:  Finally, the Inspector’s office

Come in, come in, yes, please. You’re just in time. You haven’t missed a thing. We were just about to begin, and, besides, we’re all acquainted by now, all accomplices (wink-wink).

Sex crimes, you see, are complex. And all crimes, in one way or another, are sex crimes, the seeming limitless variety of criminal activity nothing less than a subset parallel to the sexual fetishes—foot, lingerie, bondage, urine, etc.—that’s what I’ve concluded, anyway, with some merit, too, I hasten to add without false modesty, after a lifetime in the field. 

It may interest you to know at this point that a body was never found, her body, specifically, the corpse of the woman it’s been our pleasure to call “Xie,” or simply “X” for short.

“How can that be?” you might well ask, and getting no actual answer, just a lot of gobbledygook and rigmarole, go on to ask, “Well, what then does that mean? Is she not really dead, after all?”

Think about it, please, for a few moments, if you will. One of the great joys of this profession is the moment—orgasmic, in a cerebral sense, naturally—when one “gets it,” all at once, unaided.

His body is found, the lover, the killer’s corpse. That we do find, just as described in the bathroom of a rundown rooming house in East St. Louis, 21 April, 2007.

Okay, you say, so the body of the unfortunate woman, murdered, you’ve no doubt of that, hasn’t been found. So what? It’s been hashed up in some typically grisly psychopathic fashion familiar from all the comic books. Come on now, we’ve all read the same books, seen the same movies and TV cop shows, no need for long descriptions: hacksaw, woodchipper, tarp, and stewpot, it’s all been done before. Concrete, rocks, rope, and anchors. She’s sitting in six black plastic trash bags in a wooded lot somewhere, rolled up in a carpet tossed in a turnpike swamp, carried away claw by claw by crabs at the bottom of some inlet, lagoon, or cistern.

Some day someone out for an early spring hike will find a femur or ulna or brain pan poking out of the sludge of last year’s foliage, no hurry, she isn’t going anywhere, case closed, right?

Right—nine times out of ten, perhaps, but there’s the tenth time, truth is stranger than you think, all the stranger since it’s seldom ever told.

She’s alive this time, this Xie, this X, this unknown feminine quantity, alive and well, even married, perhaps, not quite, but certainly intricately engaged with another lover, two or three lovers removed from the dead man behind door twelve, living a normal life she is, dinners out, movies on Saturday night, vacations at the shore.

It’s true, although we try to let go after a certain point, close cases, observe the fine line between investigation and obsession, observation and invasion of privacy. Fact is, a lot of our conclusion is based on speculation, informed by what guesswork (we guess) would come as a shock to the general public, but then, what isn’t a shot in the dark when all is said and done?

You might ask, for instance, was love really a motive in this case, a crime of passion, maybe, but could it really have been love? Well, what is love, specifically, if not a variety of crime itself, the ultimate crime. Well, certainly a point on a spectrum leading to total insanity. Is anyone guilty then, after all, and likewise, the same question, asked a slightly different way: aren’t we all guilty?

Yes, this is where, stereotypically, everything gets explained, squared away, revealed—where all the loose ends are tied together, and I’m supposed to be the one to do it.  And so they are, the loose ends, the loose ends, I mean, tied together here, well, at least as best I can do it, fashioned into another kind of knot, perhaps, one even more complicated than the knot we had at the start.

If so, so be it, this is life we’re talking about, not some locked door mystery all wrapped up in sixty minutes with time out for commercial breaks.

Let me tell you a secret. No crime is ever really solved, not a single one, it is only explained. I should know.

I’ll let Xie herself have the last word. I read from the unfinished suicide note she left behind: 

“I don’t want to hear any more of your explanations.”

I’m tempted, I’ll admit it, tempted to explain it all again one last time, to open another door and call it door 14 and continue on into the labyrinth, but I shouldn’t, and, besides, I can do no better than I’ve already done.