Текст книги "The Butcher's Theatre"

Автор книги: Jonathan Kellerman

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Текущая страница: 31 (всего у книги 41 страниц)

"The big problem is going to be between Jew and Jew-the black-coats and everyone else. They're fanatics, don't recognize the state, want to tear down everything we've fought for, turn it into another Iran run by Jewish ayatollahs. Think of it: no cinema, no cafes, no museums or concert halls, fanatics telling us to hang mezuzahs on every door and daven three times a day or be flogged in Zion Square. And they're breeding heavily-nine, ten kids a family. Thousands of them emigrating from ghettos in America in order to build ghettos here. They huddle in their yeshivas all day, live off the dole-not one of them does a day of army service. Thousands of enemies of the state and future enemies-and dangerous because they're repressed-sexually, emotionally. You know how violent they can get, the bus burnings we had every Saturday night in Mea She'arim. Even the soccer field we built them didn't drain off all the aggression."

The mayor relit his cigar.

"Violent," he repeated. "Which is why the religious implications of the note didn't sound all that implausible to me-those blackies are capable of doing violence to anyone who offends them. However, you inform me there's no evidence of any particular group at work."

"Malkovsky," Daniel reminded him.

The mayor's expression said the whole issue was trivial.

"Malkovsky's'rebbe-the Prostnitzer-is a potential asset, someone definitely to be reckoned with. He's a cousin of the Satmar rebbe, broke off from the Satmar three years ago because of some dispute about the line of succession. That, of course, is no big deal-they're always fighting with each other. But as part of establishing his own identity, the Prostnitzer adopted a pro-state stance. Think of it: your basic ultrafanatic type-black hat, side curls, fur hats, leggings-and he's coming out saying righteous Jews should support the state."

"Agudah's been doing that for years."

"Agudah's of no importance. All they want to do is build kosher hotels and get rich. This Prostnitzer is a man with stature. Charisma. When he tells his Hassidim the '67 victory is a sign from Messiah, it carries weight."

"I never heard him say that," said Daniel.

"He's said it in private, to me. He's waiting for the right time to go public. The Malkovsky thing has pushed the date up a bit, but he's made a commitment, requested only a few favors in return. Small favors, which I'm more happy to grant him because the stakes are high. Exposing one of his followers as a pervert would only be destructive. Think of it: an inroad to the fanatics, a first wedge driven into their intransigent ranks. They're followers by nature. Conformists. One begins; other follow suit; pretty soon you've introduced ambiguity into their belief system-creative tension. Lack of absolutes weakens fanaticism. The battle lines become obscured, strengthening the vitality of our pluralism."

"Ants crawling from hole to hole?" asked Daniel.

The mayor looked at his watch and stood.

"It's late. I've spent too much time on theoreticals. I expect Mark Wilbur to be released immediately, with no further harassment. You're obviously an intelligent fellow. If you wish to discuss ant holes further, feel free to call me at the office or at home-both numbers are listed. We'll set up an evening, break out the schnapps, open a few philosophy books. But not yet. After you clear up this Butcher nonsense."

Alone, Daniel read the tour file. The university had provided lists of participants in nine field studies in the general vicinity of the murder cave, three expeditions a year for the past three years. Exploration had been going on since '67, but older lists hadn't turned up. ("D: You should see their files, what a mess," Shmeltzer had noted. "Professors.")

The most recent trip had taken place last summer, a surface dig one and a half kilometers north of the cave, sponsored by the Department of Archaeology. The others were a pair of water-retention surveys conducted by Geology. Participants were faculty members, students, and visiting scholars. Only the names of the professors were listed, the same half-dozen over and over. Two were out of the country; Shmeltzer had interviewed the other four, three of them women, coming up with no leads and an incomplete list of student names gleaned from cluttered academic memories. The students were all Israelis, with the exception of one Nigerian who'd returned to Africa six months before the first murder. They had yet to be questioned.

None of the private tour companies visited that part of the desert, which wasn't surprising-nothing flashy down there. When the tourists asked for desert, they were shown the camel market in Beersheva, Massada, Ein Gedi, the Dead Sea mud spas.

The Nature Conservancy had taken a single group of hikers into the area six months ago, a lecture tour on annual desert flora. The guide was a woman named Nurit Blau, now married to a member of Kibbutz Sa'ad. Shmeltzer had called her; she had a new baby, sounded fatigued, remembered nothing about the tour other than that a freak rain shower had ended it prematurely. No, none of the participants was memorable. Some of them might have been foreigners, she really didn't remember-how could one be expected to remember that far back?

A check at the Conservancy office turned up no names; reservation lists weren't kept past the day of the hike. The lists were incomplete, anyway. Most hikers never bothered to reserve, simply showed up at a designated location the morning of the hike, paid cash, and tagged along.

Sum total: skimpy. Besides, lists didn't prove anything; anyone could take a walk in the desert. Still, procedure was procedure. It wasn't as if they were deluged with leads. He'd have Cohen and the Chinaman interview the students, try to obtain the names of the missing ones, check them out too.

At eight twenty-five he went down the hall, made a couple of turns, and ended up at the unlabeled locked door of Amos Harel's office. He knocked, waited several moments for it to open, and found himself staring into the undercover man's gray eyes.

Harel held a smoldering Gauloise in one hand, a felt-tip pen in the other. He wore a T-shirt and jeans. The full white beard he'd worn on his last assignment was gone, revealing a pale, lean face, the jawline marred by shaving nicks.

"Morning, Dani."

"Morning."

Harel didn't invite him in, simply stood there waiting for him to speak. Though ten years Daniel's senior and a rav pakad, he never pulled rank, just concentrated on the job. The toughest of the tough guys, though to look at him you'd never know it-the narrow shoulders, the bent back that housed three splinters of shrapnel, courtesy Anwar Sadat. He had an emotional barometer that never seemed to register and a bloodhound's nose for subtle irregularities and suspicious parcels.

"Morning, Amos. Is your man still watching Wilbur's mailbox?"

"He checked in two hours ago-nothing happening."

"Wilbur's out of jail-string-pulling from way up. You may get a request to end the surveillance. Do me a favor and take your time about pulling out."

"String-pulling." Harel frowned. "How much time do you need?"

"A day or so, maybe a day and a half until I get one of my own men ready for it. Shouldn't be any problem for you to conceal the delay."

"No," said the Latam chief. "No problem at all."

Thanking him would have been superfluous; Daniel turned on his heel and walked away. Back in his own office, he phoned Shmeltzer at the Russian Compound jail, wanting to know the status of Mossad's search for Red Amira Nasser. The older detective wasn't at the lockup, and he considered contacting Mossad himself. But those guys were touchy about improvisation. Better to stick to the official liaison routine.

"Connect me with Subinspector Lee," he told the jail desk officer.

A minute later the Chinaman came on and Daniel told him about his morning visitor.

"Snoozy himself, huh? What's he like?"

"Charming. He sees the world in insect terms. Anyway, Yossi, if you have any more questions for Wilbur, ask them now. He'll be walking soon."

"He already walked. Two tight-assed guys just slow-waltzed him out. Can I help Avi finish the papers? Kid's sweating buckets."

"Sure. Get anything more from Wilbur?"

"Not a thing. We fed him, gave him coffee. The guy broke down-not much substance to him at all. But all he gave us was bullshit. The last hour or so he did nothing but talk about his childhood. Seems he had a mean daddy, big-shot lawyer, wanted him to be a lawyer, too, never thought much of scribblers." The Chinaman yawned into the phone.

"Where's Nahum?"

"After he'd called Wilbur shmuck for the hundredth time, he stomped out-said something about interviewing students."

"Names from the university desert tour list. Try to reach him and help him with those interviews. Tell him, also, that I want an update on the Amira Nasser search. Take Cohen with you to speed things up but let him off by two. He's replacing Latam on the mailbox watch. Tell him to go to Hamashbir, buy some new clothes-nothing fancy, something a kibbutznik would wear. Also, he has to shave off his beard, get a short haircut and nonprescription eyeglasses."

"Mistreatment of the troops," laughed the Chinaman. "I'll catch his tears in a bottle, save it as evidence for the Review Board. Listen, Aviva called-she's got a morning off. Okay with you if I go home and get some breakfast?"

Daniel thought about it. The student hikers could wait. "Get in touch with Nahum, first. Then all of you go have breakfast."

"Last-meal time for Cohen," said the Chinaman, still chuckling.

At eight-forty, Daniel called his own wife.

"I love you," he said. "Sorry I had to rush out. Guess who was waiting for me in my office?"

"The Prime Minister?"

"More powerful."

"You're serious."

"Very."

"Who, Daniel?"

"The mayor."

"In your office?"

"I opened the door, there he was, dozing away."

"I always thought that sleep stuff was for the benefit of the media."

"This morning it was for my benefit."

"What did he want?"

"To have the American reporter released and check me out in the process."

"I'm sure he was favorably impressed."

"He'd be more impressed if I could solve the murders, which he sees as a civic nuisance."

Laura said nothing for a moment, then: "Pressure."

"Nothing unexpected."

"Listen, before I forget, Gene called about fifteen minutes ago, said he tried phoning you at the office but had trouble getting through."

"Is he at the Laromme?"

"I think so. You know they're due to leave this Sunday for Rome."

"Already?"

"It's been four weeks, honey."

Daniel sighed.

"There'll be other opportunities," said Laura. "Luanne's already talking about coming back next year. Anyway, they're coming over for Shabbat dinner, tonight. Will you be able to make it home by three?"

"Sure."

"Good. There's wine and pastries to pick up at Lieber-man's. The other woman in your life's got a new dress she wants you to approve before she wears it."

"Tell her I love her. Tell all of them."

He phoned Gene at the Laromme.

The black man picked up on the first ring, said, "I was hoping that was you. Been having a devil of a time getting through your switchboard. What is it, security?"

"Bad lines, more likely. What's new?"

"McGuire phoned me with the computer data. I think I've got something juicy for you. Got a pen and paper?"

"Now I do. Go ahead."

"They've got five hundred and eighty-seven unsolveds that fit into possible serial patterns. Two hundred and ninety-seven involve some use of knives. Out of those, the machine spat out ninety-one cases with wound patterns similar to yours over the last fifteen years-the data bank goes back longer than I thought, but stuff from the last five years is relatively sketchy."

"Ninety-one," said Daniel, visualizing heaps of mutilated corpses.

"Not that many, considering your wounds were darn-near generic," said Gene. "But most of them differ from yours in terms of mixed modus: knife and gun, knife and strangulation. And victim demographics: males, kids, old ladies, couples. In my opinion, that doesn't eliminate them-some of these monsters get pretty indiscriminate about who they kill and how they do it. But there's no use tackling something that huge. Thing to do is start breaking into subsets."

"Young females," said Daniel.

"Exactly. Fifty-eight in the seventeen– to twenty-seven-year-old range. By playing statistical games with it, the FBI broke that down into seven groupings that appear to be the work of the same killer or killers, though there's overlap. The cutoffs aren't perfectly clean. But when you plug in dark complexion, multiple blades, and drug OD, it narrows way down and starts to get real interesting: seven cases, none of them strangled, which in itself is unusual. One additional case that matches everything, except no mention is made of multiple blades. The first is an L.A. case: girl found cut up fourteen years ago, March 1971, in a cave-how do you like that?"

"There are caves in Los Angeles?" asked Daniel, gripping the edge of his desk.

"Plenty of them in the surrounding mountain areas. This particular one was in Griffith Park-big place just north of Hollywood, thousands of acres. There's a zoo and a planetarium there, but mostly it's wilderness."

"Was she killed in the cave?"

"FBI says yes."

"What was the physical layout of the cave?"

"They don't have that kind of detail programmed yet. Hold on a second-there's something else I want you to hear: Victim's name was Lilah Shehadeh; she's listed as a twenty-three-year-old female Caucasian, black hair, brown eyes. But Shehadeh's an Arab name, isn't?"

"Yes," said Daniel, feeling the excitement grow within him. "Go on."

"Multiple stab wounds from several different weapons, death from exsanguination-poor gal bled to death. Heroin overdose to the point of general anesthesia, severed jugular, decimation of the genitals, no trace evidence other than residue of Ivory soap-sounds like she was washed."

"At the cave?"

"Printout didn't say that either. There are streams in Griffith Park-in March they could still be full from the rains. Let me see what else I've got… Shehadeh was an addict and prostitute. I racked my brains to see if I could remember her case but I couldn't. I was working Southwest Division back then, clear across town. To be honest, a single hooker-cutting wouldn't get much notice. I just got off the phone with a buddy in Hollywood Division, asked him to dig up the file, call me back and dictate the details."

"Thank you, Lieutenant Brooker."

"Onward: Number two occurred over two years later, July of '73, in New Orleans. Another prostitute, named Angelique Breau, drugged out-this time with Demerol-and cut identically to Shehadeh. Traces of soap and shampoo: Dial and Prell-he's not strict about his brands. The body was killed somewhere else, but found in a crypt in the St. Louis cemetery-which is kind of cavelike, wouldn't you say? And she and Shehadeh fit your genital destruction-removal sequence-Shehadeh's vaginal vault was cut up; Breau's ovaries were removed. She's listed as a female Cauc, black and brown, nineteen years old, but New Orleans is famous for race-mixing. If you put Caucasian on your driver's license application, no one's going to argue with you. Name like Breau she could be lily-white Parisian, swamp-rat Cajun, Creole mulatto, or any mixture thereof."

"Dark. Mediterranean-looking," said Daniel.

"Good chance of it."

"She could have been an Arab, too, Gene. Some of them-Moroccans, Algerians-have French names."

"Hmm. Maybe. But the next two are definitely not Arab, so it appears the killer's going after a certain look, not nationality."

Dark women, thought Daniel. The streets of any Levantine, Mediterranean, or Latin American city were teeming with them. Yet the killer-if it was the killer-had come to Jerusalem.

It had to be more than a look that he was after

"The third one took place April of '75, twenty-one months after Breau," said Gene. "Northeast Arizona, desert area outside of Phoenix. Victim's name: Shawnee Scoggins, female Native American-Indian. Eighteen years, black and brown. Ovaries and kidneys removed. Murdered somewhere else, but the body was found off the highway near one of the Indian reservations. Reservation police handled the case. Girl had a history of delinquency, drug problems. Fresh needle marks in her arm, heroin OD, no fiber traces, no mention of soap. But this is the one that doesn't list multiple weapons either, so we could be talking about a failure on the part of the locals to report all the facts, poor investigatory procedure, or a slipshod autopsy. Everything else fits. I'd suggest you include her."

"All right."

"After Scoggins there's a thirty-two-month lapse until December of '77. Back in California again, but up north near San Francisco. This one I remember: nude dancer named Maria Mendoza, twenty-one, black and brown, history of prostitution and narcotics convictions. What was left of her was discovered near a cave up in Mount Tamalpais."

"Not in the cave?"

"I asked McGuire about that. Printout said near-didn't say how near. Hard to understand why they put some data in, leave other stuff out."

"Was she killed up there?"

"No. Somewhere else, site unidentified. This one was very messy, Danny. All the internal organs were removed-she was literally skin and bones. San Francisco police had been dealing with a bunch of unsolved homicides attributed to some crazy who wrote letters to the papers calling himself Zodiac. The last suspected Zodiac killing was in October of '75, farther east, in Sacramento. San Francisco thought he'd come back to haunt them. Reason I remember the case is that one of the primary Zodiac suspects moved down to L. A. shortly after Mendoza's body was found, and we were alerted. We watched him-it came to nothing."

"What was his name?"

"Karl Witik. Weirdo biology student. White guy but rented a house in Watts, had squirrels and mice running wild inside the place. But don't worry-he's not your man. He blew his brains out in early '78. Two more possible Zodiacs went down in '79 and '81, so he probably wasn't San Francisco's man either."

"Eight," said Daniel, looking at his notes. "Four more."

"Four more," said Gene. "And they keep getting nastier. Mendoza's the last intact body on the list. The rest are all dismemberments: August 1978 in Miami, Florida; July 1980, Sun Valley, Idaho; March '82, Crater Lake, Oregon; January '84, Hana, Hawaii. Young, dark women, no fiber or prints, soap traces, heroin residue in the tissue, bone rills indicating multiple knives, body parts tossed in wooded or desert areas. Three of the victims have never been identified, including one whose head was never recovered. The one from Crater Lake was ID'd as Sherry Blumenthal, seventeen-year-old runaway from Seattle. Same old song: drug history, prostitution busts. 'Remains found in state of advanced decomposition on the north bank of the lake.'"

Gene paused. "Sounds like your guy, doesn't it?"

"The modus is identical," said Daniel. His sweaty hands made wet marks on the desk. "A traveling killer."

"Beast of the highway," said Gene. "The more we coordinate our interstate records, the more we keep turning up. Looks like this one traveled far."

Daniel scanned his notes again. "Two murders took place in California. Perhaps that's his home base."

"Same state, but L. A. and San Francisco are four hundred miles apart," said Gene. "Maybe he just likes the weather."

Daniel examined the list of murder sites again. "All these places have good weather, don't they?"

"Hmm, let me see: Oregon, Louisiana-you get your rain and chill there, but yes, generally they're mild."

"Places to visit on holiday?"

"I suppose so. Why?"

"The time lapse between the murders averages almost two years," said Daniel. "Perhaps the killer lives normally for a while, goes out on holiday to murder."

"Let me take a look at the dates," said Gene. He grew silent for several moments, then: "No, I don't think so. January in Hawaii is the off-season, cloudy and rainy. New Orleans and Miami are hot and sticky in July-folks fly down there in the winter. Anyway, there are plenty of guys who don't need a vacation to travel: drifters, truckers-anyone with a job that puts him on the road. And don't depend too much on the time lapse. He may have killed plenty of others in between-FBI estimates six undiscovered victims for every one in the file."

Five hundred eighty-seven by six. "Over three thousand undiscovered murders," said Daniel. "How can that be?"

"Runaways, throwaways, orphans, missing persons who remain missing. Big country, big mess-it's not like over here, Danny."

Daniel put the numbers out of his head, returned to his notes. "The first murder was fourteen years ago, which tells us something about his age. The youngest he could have been at the time would be, what-fourteen?"

"I've heard of sex murders committed by kids," said Gene, "but they're usually a lot more impulsive-looking. Sloppy. From the care taken on these-cleaning up the evidence, using dope to knock them out-my guess is they were committed by an adult. Eighteen, nineteen at the youngest, probably early twenties."

"Okay, let's be cautious and say sixteen," said Daniel. "That would make him at least thirty today, most likely older."

"If Shehadeh was his first."

"If she wasn't, he could be much older. But not much younger."

"I can buy that," said Gene.

"Thirties or older"-Daniel thought out loud-"an American, or one who travels to America frequently." Thinking to himself: if he's not an American, all those trips to the U.S. will show up on his passport.

"Hundred to one, he's American," said Gene. "He knew the terrain, knew where to kill, where to dump. Some of those dump spots are out of the way. Americans are suspicious of foreigners. If one was lurking around, you'd expect it to surface in at least some of the investigations. Unless," he added, "you've got Interpol suggesting otherwise."

"No, I'm still waiting for Interpol. A question, Gene: In America, he's a traveling killer, goes from city to city. Here, he stays in Jerusalem. Why didn't he murder one girl-in Jerusalem, another in Tel Aviv, move on to Haifa?"

"Maybe Jerusalem's got some special meaning for him. Defiling the holiness or something."

"Maybe," said Daniel. But his mind was racing:

Defiling the holiness of three faiths. Defiling women. Dark women. Arabs. A Mexican stripper. An Indian girl. Maybe a Louisiana mixed-blood. Maybe a Jew-the Blumen-thal girl from Oregon could be Jewish.

Every identified victim a member of a racial or ethnic minority.

But here, only Arabs. The main ethnic minority.

A racist killer?

A Jewish killer? Kaganism justified by the Bible and carried to bloody extreme?

Or blood libel, as Shmeltzer insisted. Someone blaming it on the Jews?

Whoever had sent that note to Wilbur had defiled the Bible, too. Cutting the text out and pasting it up like some ransom note. What observant Jew would do that, when the sentences could just as easily be copied?

Unless you didn't know Hebrew.

Addressing the envelope in English block letters.

He didn't know Hebrew. A foreigner.

An outsider.

Fomenting hatred, setting Jew against Arab? Semite against Semite?

A genuine anti-Semite.

A racist American maniac. Amira Nasser's story about the crazy-eyed foreigner was sounding better and better: crazy eyes, strange smile… Dammit, where were the Mossad hotshots when you needed them?

"… still only general, we need specifics," Gene was saying. "Best thing is to take a look at the original police files, or at least get the important details over the phone. I can help you with San Francisco and New Orleans. The rest I've got no personal contacts with but they may cooperate, one American cop to another."

"You've done more than enough, my friend. I'll call them myself. Do you have the addresses and phone numbers?"

Gene dictated them, then said, "It's no problem my calling them, Danny. It'll go faster, believe me."

"You've only got four days left in Jerusalem, Gene. I don't want to take up the remainder of your holiday."

The line went silent.

"Listen," said Gene, "if you need me, I can postpone leaving."

"Gene, Rome is a beautiful-"

"Danny, Rome is more churches. Bigger ones. Shrines and murals. Murals on ceilings always give me a stiff neck."

Daniel laughed.

"However," said the black man, "I think there're still a few holy places around here that Lu hasn't seen. Just this morning she was complaining about a missing a lecture series on ancient pottery whosits or something. So there's a chance I can persuade her to modify our itinerary if you need me. Have to know soon, though, or we run into problems with changing the tickets."

"I need you, Gene."

"Nice to hear. You can tell me again at dinner tonight. Meantime, let me get going on those calls. Bye."

Daniel put the phone down, thought more about the traveling killer.

America to Israel.

Europe in between?

He phoned Friedman in Bonn, knowing it was barely morning in Germany and not caring if the Interpol man got yanked out of sweet dreams.

The same detached secretary's voice came on the line. Reciting a recorded message.

He slammed the phone down, studied his notes, let his mind run with the facts, expand them. Kept returning to one thought:

A racist killer.

Calculating. Careful.

Manipulative.

He remembered the phrase that had come to him while reading the books and monographs on psychopathic killers:

Street-corner Mengeles.

He thought, again, of the disgusting paperbacks in Ben David's office. The Black Book of Fascist Horror.

Read the chapter on "Murder for Profit," the psychologist had said. The surgical experiments.

I found myself thinking about them in Nazi terms

You see, you don't need me. Your unconscious is guiding you in the right direction.

His unconscious. It had been languishing, sick with frustration, withering from disuse. But the data on the FBI list-the link-had breathed new life into it. Now, an image of the killer had been sculpted in his mind-a soft sculpture, to be sure, a wax outline, gross features melting in the glare of uncertainty. But an image nonetheless.

He was certain he was right.

The killer was no Jew, no Arab.

An American with strange eyes, a diseased mind, and a racist scheme. A beast of the highway stalking the herd.

Americans, thousands of them living and visiting here, but the only ones under surveillance were Roselli and Wilbur. Not very promising; The reporter was unethical, but no killer; the monk's big secret was that he wanted to be a Jew.

Which made him intriguing, but no suspect.

Unless he had more than one big secret.

From what Daoud had overheard, the monk knew he was under suspicion. Was the move to the yeshiva a means of covering something up?

Daniel had instructed Daoud to stay on Roselli. The Arab's "Yes, Pakad" had been reflexive but strained. Poor guy was probably cross-eyed with boredom by now. If nothing came up soon, Daniel resolved to put his talents to better use. Any further observation of Roselli could be carried out by one of Harel's Latam boys, wrapped in robes and kafftyah.

He thought about Roselli again. From monk to yeshiva student.

A spiritual quest? Or just another impulsive shift for an unbalanced mind?

Another crazy American. With crazy eyes?

Thousands of Americans walking the streets of Jerusalem-find the one with the crazy eyes. Like sifting granules of gold for a single speck of dross.

Big mess, but small country. An outsider couldn't submerge himself indefinitely.

He took pen in hand, outlined his plan.

Airline cross-checks, page-by-page reviews of tens of thousands of uncomputerized passport records-the tedium the Chinaman had dreaded out loud but which was the surest way to fine-carve the sculpture. Canvasses of hotels, pensiones, hostels, dormitories, housing agents and automobile rental firms, travel and tour companies, kibbutzim and moshavim that took on foreign volunteers.

The evil bastard couldn't hide deep enough. He'd root him out, put an end to the defilement.

For the first time in a long time he felt lightened with hope. The mastery of the hunter.

His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door.

"Yes?"

The door opened a crack and a uniform stuck his head in. Young, gawky, with a peach-fuzz face, he had to be barely out of the training course. He blinked rapidly, bobbed his head, looking everywhere but at Daniel.

"Pakad Sharavi?"

"Yes? Come in."

The patrolman's body remained in the corridor; only his head bobbed around inside the office, jumpy and vigilant, like a chicken watching out for the shohel's knife.

"What is it?"

The uniform bit his lip and chewed air. When he finally got the words moving, they tumbled out in a rush:

"Pakad, a dead body, they said to call you, you'd know all about it. In Talpiyot, along the industrial stretch. Not far from the lot where we tow the parking violators."

BOOK THREE

Dr. Levi's promptness was commendable. Within hours of the removal of the body to Abu Kabir, the necropsy findings were phoned to Daniel.

But the pathologist might just as well have taken his time. The wounds on number three were identical to Fatma's and Juliet's, save for one bit of information that Daniel had anticipated: The killer had removed Shahin Barakat's ovaries and her kidneys.

Just as he'd done, ten years ago, to his third American victim. The Indian girl, Shawnee Scoggins.

Shahin's body had been found, dumped like garbage in a stand of eucalyptus, reeking of encroaching decay and menthol. Only meters from the police tow yard.

Thumbing his nose at us.

Shahin. Another pretty face preserved intact above the gaping neck wound. Nineteen years old, black hair lustrous, thick, and wavy. Dainty pierced ears, the earrings missing.

But, unlike the other, married. The husband had been hanging around the Kishle substation for days, dogging the uniforms, begging them to find his wife.

"Ex-wife." Patrolman Mustafa Habiba had been quick to clarify, the moment Daniel entered the substation, telling his side of the story, then rushing off to fetch the Pakad an unrequested cup of Turkish coffee and a piece of baklava wrapped in wax paper. The Arab policeman was a leftover from the days of Jordanian occupation, unschooled, nearing sixty, and waiting for his pension from the Jews. Allowed to remain on the force because of his familiarity with the black alleys and their denizens, the desire by the brass to maintain the illusion of continuity.