Bateman- Dismembering

  “There were only body parts.” He unclasped his hands, opening them, revealing his palms. My eyes were drawn to Kimball’s fingernails. He bit them. “It was a woman.” He kept sighing. “I’ve been busy all day with this, and I didn’t want to bother you about it because the crime deviated from the theory we had.”

  “Meaning . . .”

  “It wasn’t in the book,” he said. “The homicides we investigated in Midland County starting this past summer—we thought—were ultimately connected to the book and, well, this one . . . wasn’t.” He looked over my shoulder and out the window. “This was a serious deviation.”
...

  The crime scene—the murder that shattered the pattern—at the Orsic Motel, just off the interstate in Stoneboat, was insanely elaborate. There were ropes and body parts positioned in front of mirrors; the head and the hands were missing, and the walls were splashed with blood; there was evidence that a blowtorch had been used at one point, and the bones in both arms had been broken before the skin had been peeled off, and a woman’s torso was found in the shower stall, and a huge drawing—in the victim’s blood—of a face adorned the wall above the gutted bed with the words—I’M BACK—also dripping in blood, scrawled below it. There were, again, no prints. “No one even knows how the room became occupied . . . The maid . . . she . . .” Kimball’s voice was fading.
...

  Though the crime scene had not been contaminated, the print man could not even come up with smudges or smears, and technicians found no signs of footprints or fibers, and serologists inspecting the spatter trajectories and the defensive wounds had found no blood samples other than the victim’s, which was exceedingly rare considering the brutality of the murder. The neighborhood had already been canvassed, and a psychic was now being consulted. And crushing everything was the fact that this crime did not exist in my book.

Lunar Park, chapter 16