Текст книги "Two Graves"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 34 страниц)

22

D’AGOSTA HAD SEEN A LOT OF REALLY SICK SHIT IN HIS life—he’d never forget those two dismembered corpses up in Waldo Falls, Maine—but this took the cake. This was the goriest scene yet in a string of exceptionally gruesome murders. The young woman’s body had been stripped and splayed out on its back, dismembered limbs forming something like the face of a human clock, a corona of blood spread out like a sunburst beneath it all, various organs arrayed around the edges like a goddamn still life. Then there was the little toe—the extralittle toe—that had been lovingly placed on the victim’s forehead.

All this was capped by the message finger-painted onto her torso—TAG, YOU’RE IT!

The M.E., forensic units, crime-scene units, latents, and the photographer had all done their work, collected their evidence, and gone. That had taken hours. Now it was his turn—his and Gibbs. D’Agosta had to admit, Gibbs had been pretty good about the wait. He hadn’t flashed his shield and elbowed his way in, the way other feds of his experience had done. Over the years, the homicide division had tried to lay down guidelines about the brass intruding into crime scenes, interrupting the work of the specialists, and D’Agosta took those rules very seriously. He didn’t know how many times he’d seen a crime scene messed up by some honcho wanting a photo shoot, or showing his political friends around, or just pulling rank for the sake of it.

The room was hot from the bright lights and there was a bad smell in the air, the stench of blood, fecal matter, and death. D’Agosta took a turn around the corpse, his eye roving over every little detail, burning it into his memory, deconstructing and reconstructing the scene while keeping it free flowing. It was another meticulous killing, planned and executed with the precision of a military campaign. The scene exuded a feeling of self-confidence, even arrogance, on the part of the killer.

Indeed, as D’Agosta took it all in, he had a sense of déjà vu; there was something about this crime scene that reminded him of something else, and as he rolled that thought around in his mind he realized what it was. It had the look and feel of a museum diorama—everything highly crafted and set in its place, designed to create an impression, an illusion, a visual impact.

But of what? And why?

He glanced over at Gibbs, who was crouching on his heels, examining the writing on the torso. The arrayed lights cast his multiple shadows across the crime scene. “This time,” he said, “the perp used a glove.”

D’Agosta nodded. An interesting observation. His opinion of Gibbs went up another notch.

He was frankly more than a little dubious that Pendergast’s brother was behind this. He saw no connection whatsoever between the M.O. of this killer and what Diogenes had done in the past. As for motive, unlike Diogenes’s previous killing spree, this time he had no discernible motive to kill these randomly selected victims. The figure he had seen on the security tapes, while he was approximately the right height, weight, and build, did not move in that smooth fashion he recalled of Diogenes. The eyes were different. Diogenes did not strike him at all as the kind of psycho to start dismembering himself and leaving the parts at the crime scenes. Finally, there was the little matter of his alleged fall into a Sicilian volcano. The only witness to it was absolutely convinced he was dead. And she was a damn good witness—even if more than a little crazy herself.

Pendergast had refused to tell him why he believed the killer was his brother. All in all, D’Agosta felt this strange idea of Pendergast’s was a product of his deep depression over his wife’s murder, combined with an overdose of drugs. In retrospect, he was sorry he had tried to bring Pendergast into the case—and he felt damned relieved the special agent had not shown up at this crime scene.

Gibbs rose from his long assessment of the corpse. “Lieutenant, I’m beginning to think we might be dealing with two killers. Perhaps a Leopold and Loeb sort of partnership.”

“Really? We only have one person on videotape, one set of bloody footprints, one knife.”

“Quite right. But think about it. The three hotels all have extremely high security. They’re crawling with employees. In each case our killer has gotten himself in and out without being surprised, stopped, interrupted, or challenged. One way to explain that is if he had an accomplice—a spotter.”

D’Agosta nodded slowly.

“Our killer does the wet work. He’s the magnet of our scrutiny. He’s the guy waving at the camera saying, Hi, Ma, look at me!But there’s a partner out there, somewhere—who’s just the opposite. Who’s invisible, who fades into the woodwork, who sees and hears all. They have no contact during the commission of the crime, except that they are secretly and continuously in communication.”

“Via an earpiece or some similar device.”

“Exactly.”

D’Agosta liked the idea at once. “So we look for this guy. Because he’s got to be on our security tapes.”

“Probably. But of course he’ll be very, very carefully disguised.”

Suddenly a long shadow, emerging from the bedroom, fell across the corpse, startling D’Agosta. A moment later a tall figure in black emerged, backlit, his blond-white hair a bright halo around his shadowed face, making him look not like an angel but like some ghastly revenant, a specter of the night.

“Two killers, you say?” came the honeyed drawl.

“Pendergast!” said D’Agosta. “What the hell? How’d you get in here?”

“The same way you did, Vincent. I’ve just been examining the bedroom.”

His voice was not exactly friendly, but at least, thought D’Agosta, it had a steeliness behind it that had been lacking during their last encounter.

D’Agosta glanced at Gibbs, who was staring at Pendergast, failing to control the disapproval on his face.

Another step forward and the bright light fell athwart Pendergast’s face, raking it from the side, chiseling his features into marble-like perfection. The face turned. “Greetings, Agent Gibbs.”

“The same to you,” said Gibbs.

“I trust we have liaised to your satisfaction?”

A silence. “Since you mentioned it, no, I haven’t yet had confirmation of your role in the case.”

A tsk-tsksound from Pendergast. “Ah, that FBI bureaucracy, so very dependable.”

“But of course,” said Gibbs, hardly able to disguise his ill will, “I always welcome the assistance of a fellow agent.”

“Assistance,” Pendergast repeated. He suddenly was in motion, moving around the corpse, bending quickly, examining articles with a loupe, picking up something with tweezers that went into a test tube, more rapid, almost manic movement—and then he had completed the circuit and was face-to-face with Gibbs again.

“ Two, you say?”

Gibbs nodded. “A working hypothesis only,” he said. “We’re obviously not at the point where we can draw conclusions.”

“I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’m terribly interested.”

D’Agosta felt a certain uneasiness at Pendergast’s choice of words, but he kept silent.

“Well,” said Gibbs. “I don’t know if the lieutenant has shared with you our provisional report, but we see this as the work of an organized killer—or killers—who operate in a ritual fashion. I’ll get you the report, if you don’t have it.”

“Oh, I have it. But there’s nothing like hearing it—how does the quaint saying go? Straight from the horse’s mouth. And the motive?”

“These types of killers,” Gibbs continued evenly, “generally kill for reasons of libidinous gratification, which can be satisfied only by the exercise of extreme control and power over others.”

“And the extra body parts?”

“That is unique in our experience. The hypothesis our profilers are developing is that the aggressor is overwhelmed with feelings of self-loathing and worthlessness—perhaps due to childhood abuse—and is acting out a sort of slow-motion suicide. Our experts are working from that conjecture.”

“How fortunate for us. And the message, Tag, you’re it?”

“This type of killer often taunts law enforcement.”

“Your database has an answer for everything.”

Gibbs didn’t seem to know how to take this, and neither did D’Agosta. “It is a very good database, I’ll admit,” Gibbs went on. “As I’m sure you know, Agent Pendergast, the joint NCAVC/BSU profiling system includes tens of thousands of entries. It’s based on statistics, aggregates, and correlates. It doesn’t mean our killer necessarilyfits the pattern, but it does give us something to follow.”

“Yes, indeed. It gives you a trail to follow deep into the wilderness, at least.”

This rather strange metaphor dangled, D’Agosta trying to figure out exactly what it was Pendergast meant. A tense silence enveloped them as Pendergast continued gazing at Gibbs, his head slightly tilted, as if examining a specimen. Then he turned to D’Agosta and seized him by the hand. “Well, Vincent,” he said. “Here we are again, partners on a case. I want to thank you for—how should I put it?—helping save my life.”

And with that, he turned and strode out the door at a swift pace, black suit coat flapping crazily behind him.

23

LIEUTENANT D’AGOSTA SAT, SLUMPED FORWARD, IN VIDEO Lab C on the nineteenth floor of One Police Plaza. He’d left the scene of the third murder just an hour before, and he felt like he’d gone fifteen rounds with a prizefighter.

D’Agosta turned to the man working the video equipment, a skinny dweeb named Hong. “Fifteenth-floor feed. Back sixty seconds.”

Hong worked the keyboard, and the black-and-white image on the central monitor changed, going backward rapidly in reverse motion.

As he watched the screen, D’Agosta mentally went over how the crime had gone down. The killer had forced his way into the room—once again, based on the Royal Cheshire security tapes, he’d seemed to know just when the door was going to open—and dragged the unfortunate woman into the bedroom of the hotel suite. He’d killed her, then proceeded with his ghastly work. The whole thing took fewer than ten minutes.

But then the woman’s husband had returned to the suite. The killer had hidden in the bathroom. The man discovered the body of his wife, and his frantic cries were overheard by a hotel security officer, who entered the suite, saw the body, and called the police. The killer escaped in the resulting confusion. All this had been corroborated by the security tapes, as well as by the evidence found in the suite and by the statements of the husband and the detective.

It seemed straightforward enough. But the devil—the really weird shit, actually—was in the details. How, for example, did the killer know to hide in the bathroom? If he’d been disturbed in his bedroom work by the click of the front door lock, there was no way he could have made it to the bathroom in time without being seen by the husband. He must have hidden himself beforethe key card was swiped through the lock. He must have been alerted by some other cue.

Pretty damn clear the guy had an accomplice. But where?

“Start it right there,” D’Agosta told Hong.

He watched the corridor video for perhaps the tenth time as the husband entered the suite. Five seconds later, the front door opened again and the killer—wearing a fedora and a trench coat—stepped out. But then—against all logic—he ducked back inside the room a second time. A few moments later, the hotel dick rounded a corner and came into view.

“Stop it for a moment,” D’Agosta said.

The problem was, there was no accomplice in the hall to see the guy come. The hall was empty.

“Start it up again,” he said.

He watched morosely as the hotel detective disappeared into the room, alerted by the husband’s shouts. Almost immediately the killer stepped out again and headed for the elevator bank. He pressed the DOWN button, waited a minute, and then—as if changing his mind—walked the rest of the way down the hall, exiting through the stairwell door.

Moments later, the elevator doors opened and three men in suits stepped out.

“Stop,” D’Agosta said. “Let’s see the feed from the thirteenth floor. Begin at the same time index.”

“Sure thing, Loo,” said Hong.

They had already reviewed the tapes of the fourteenth floor—at that particular moment there had been several cleaning ladies at work, their carts blocking the corridor. Now D’Agosta watched as the killer emerged from the stairwell onto the thirteenth floor. He strode over to the elevator bank, pressed the DOWN button again, and waited. He let one elevator go by, then pressed the button again. This time, when the doors opened, he stepped inside.

“Stop,” D’Agosta said.

He had been through this again and again. Where was the accomplice? In several instances, there was nobody around to observe, and in other situations, where there were people who might be spotting, he could find no physical matches between them. Nobody could turn himself from an old, stooped gentleman of eighty into a fat Dominican cleaning lady in fifteen seconds. Unless the killer had half a dozen accomplices.

This was seriously, seriously weird.

“Lobby camera,” D’Agosta muttered. “Same time index.”

The image on the monitor jittered, then came into focus again, showing a bird’s-eye view of the hotel’s discreet and elegant lobby. The elevator doors opened, and the killer emerged—alone. He began to walk toward the main exit, then seemed to reconsider, turned, and sat down in a chair, hiding his face behind a newspaper. Seven seconds later a uniformed man—hotel security—went running past. Immediately afterward the killer got up, and—instead of heading for the main exit again—made for an unmarked door leading to the service areas. Just before he reached it, the door opened and a porter emerged. The killer slipped in as the door was closing again—he hadn’t even needed to extend an arm.

D’Agosta watched as the form was obscured by the closing door. Other cameras had shown him going out an exit in the hotel’s loading zone. Repeated viewings of the lobby and other video feeds again showed no sign of a possible partner in the murders.

Hong stopped the video of his own accord. “Anything else you’d like to see?”

“Yeah. Got any Three Stooges reruns?” And D’Agosta pushed himself wearily to his feet, feeling even older than when he’d first come in.

But as he was leaving, he was suddenly struck by an idea. The accomplice didn’t need to be in all those places. If he had access to the live video feeds, he would have seen everything D’Agosta had. And could have warned the killer accordingly. So he was either someone in the security department itself, or someone who had hacked into the CCTV system and was diverting a private feed for himself, in real time—perhaps, if those cameras were networked, even over the Internet. In that case, the accomplice might not even be in New York City.

With this brilliant stroke in mind, D’Agosta immediately began thinking about how to exploit it.

24

THE CABIN DIDN’T BELONG TO HER FATHER AND NEVER had. Jack Swanson wasn’t really the kind of person who actually owned things. He talked his way into borrowing them, took them over, and then over time acted as if they were his own. As was typical of Jack, he had somehow stumbled across the run-down tar-paper shack years ago, in timberland owned by Royal Paper on the New Jersey side of the Delaware Water Gap. The story Corrie heard was that he’d made friends with some Royal Paper executive he’d met on a fishing trip, who apparently agreed that if Jack wanted to fix the place up he could stay there whenever he wanted as long as he kept a low profile and didn’t make a nuisance of himself. Corrie was sure the transaction involved many beers and fishing stories, and a big dose of her father’s apparent charm. The cabin had no heat, water, or electricity; the windows were broken and the roof full of holes; and nobody seemed to mind that Jack went up there, slapdashed the shack into something barely habitable, installed himself as its proprietor, and used it as a base for occasional fishing trips to nearby Long Pine Lake.

Corrie had never seen the place, of course, but she knew it existed, because her mother complained bitterly when she discovered that his “fishing cabin on the lake in New Jersey” did not actually belong to him when it came time to divide up their (nonexistent) assets in the divorce.

The cabin, Corrie felt sure, was where her father had holed up. He didn’t own it, so officialdom couldn’t trace him there. And she was pretty sure news of his seamy little bank robbery would not likely have traveled very far from Allentown, certainly not up into the little hamlets about the Worthington State Forest of New Jersey.

How many Long Pine Lakes could there be in that area? According to Google Maps there was only one, and Corrie sure as hell hoped it was the right one as she got out of the horribly expensive cab she’d hired from the bus stop in East Stroudsburg, which had taken her to a country store known as Frank’s Place in Old Foundry, New Jersey, the closest commercial establishment she could find to Long Pine Lake.

Counting out a hundred and twenty bucks, she paid off the cabdriver, then sauntered into the store. It was just as she’d hoped, one of those cramped places selling fishing lures, bait, cheap rods, coolers, boating supplies, bundles of firewood, Coleman fuel, and—of course—beer. An entire wall of beer.

Just her father’s kind of joint.

As she walked up to the counter, a silence fell among the beer-guts hanging out around the cash register. No doubt it was her purple hair. She was tired, she was irritated, and she was not happy to have spent a hundred and twenty dollars on a cab ride. She really hoped these good old boys weren’t going to give her a hard time.

“I’m looking for Jack Swanson,” she said.

More silence. “Is that right?” came the eventual response from the apparent self-appointed clown of the group. “What… Jack knock you up or something?” The man guffawed and looked to his friends, left and right, for approval.

“I’m his daughter, you mentally defective asswipe,” she said in a very loud voice that reached to the farthest corners of the store and brought a sudden hush to the place.

Now the laugh came from the friends. Beer-Gut colored deeply, but there wasn’t much he could do. “She got you that time, Merv,” said one, a little less simian than the others, nudging his pal.

She waited, arms crossed, for an answer.

“So you’re the kid he’s always talking about,” the less simian one said, in a friendly tone.

This business about her father always talking about her surprised Corrie, but she didn’t show it. She didn’t even look at Merv, who was clearly hugely embarrassed. “So—you all know my father?”

“He’s probably up at his cabin,” the nicer one said.

Bingo, thought Corrie. She’d been right. She felt a huge relief this hadn’t been a wasted effort.

“Where’s that?”

The man gave her directions. It was about a mile up the road. “I’d be happy to give you a ride,” he said.

“No thanks.” She hefted the knapsack and turned to leave.

“Really, I’d be happy to. I’m a friend of your dad’s.”

She had to stop herself from asking him what he was like. That wouldn’t be the way to go about it—she had to find out for herself. She hesitated, gave the man a once-over. He looked sincere, it was freezing outside, and her knapsack weighed a ton. “All right. As long as Perv, I mean Merv, here doesn’t tag along.” She gestured at Beer-Gut Number One.

This elicited laughter.

“Come on, then.”

She had him drop her off at the spot where a shortcut trail to the cabin left the main road. It was just a steep track in the pinewoods, which started out in a big puddle of mud she had to skirt around. She had what looked like a half-mile walk to the cabin, and as she went along the track—now and again crossing one of the switchbacks of Long Pine Road—she felt herself start to unwind, to really relax, for the first time in ages. It was a typical early-December day: the sun was shining through the branches of the oaks and pines, dappling the ground around her, and a smell of resin and dead leaves hung in the air. If ever there was a great place to hide from the cops—or Nazis, for that matter—this was it.

But as she thought about her father, and what she would say to him, and he to her, her stomach began to tighten up again. She could hardly remember him physically, had no real idea of what he looked like—her mother had thrown away the scrapbook of pictures of them together. She had no idea what to expect. So, he was now a bank robber? God, he might be an alcoholic or a drug addict. He might be one of those criminals full of whining self-pity and justification, blaming everything on bad parents or bad luck. He might even be shacked up with some horrible sleazy bitch.

And what would happen if he were caught, and there she was living in the cabin with him? She had already looked up the federal statute on the web, 18 USC § 1071, which required them to prove she’d actually harbored or concealed him and had taken steps to prevent his discovery or arrest. Just living with him wasn’t enough. Still, how would it affect her future law enforcement career? It sure as hell wouldn’t look good.

In short, this was a stupid idea. She hadn’t really thought it through. She should have stayed back in his house where she was perfectly safe, and let him live his own life. She slowed, stopped, shrugged off the knapsack, and sat down. Why had she ever thought this was a good idea?

What she really should do now was turn around and go back to Allentown, or rather West Cuyahoga, and forget all about this bullshit. She rose, slung the knapsack back over her shoulder, and turned to leave. But then she hesitated.

She had come too far to run away. And she wanted to know– reallywanted to know—about those letters in the closet. The postmaster at Medicine Creek was about as dumb as they came… but she didn’t think he was thatdumb.

She turned around and trudged on. The shortcut trail left the road for good, went around a bend, and there, in front of her in a sunny clearing, was the shack, all by itself, no other buildings even remotely nearby. She stopped and stared.

It was not charming. Tar paper had been tacked on with irregular strips of wood. The two windows on either side of the door were curtained but broken. Behind and through the oaks she could see an outhouse. A rusted stovepipe poked up through the roof.

The yard in front, however, was neat, the grass trimmed. She could hear someone moving inside the house.

Oh, God, here we go.She walked up to the door and knocked. A sudden silence. Was he going to bolt out the back?

“Hello?” she called, hoping to forestall that.

More silence. And then a voice from inside. “Who is it?”

She took a deep breath. “Corrie. Your daughter. Corrie.”

Another long silence. And then suddenly the door burst open and a man tumbled out—she recognized him immediately—who enveloped her in his arms and just about crushed her.

“Corrie!” he cried, his voice choking up. “How many years have I prayed for this! I knew someday it would come! My God, I prayed for it—and now here it’s happened! My Corrie!” And then he dissolved into great hiccuping gusts of sobbing joy that would have embarrassed her if she hadn’t been so completely flabbergasted.