Текст книги "Two Graves"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 34 страниц)

After several minutes, she issued a low hmmmm. And then another, with a nod, a grunt, a mumble.

Pizzetti fell silent.

Ziewicz straightened up, turned to D’Agosta. “Lieutenant, do you recall, these many years ago, the museum murders?”

“How could I forget?” It was the first time he had encountered the formidable woman, back in the days before she’d been appointed chief M.E.

“I never thought I’d live to see a case as unusual as that one. Until now.” She turned to Pizzetti and said, “You’ve missed something.”

D’Agosta could see Pizzetti freeze. “Missed… something?”

A nod. “Something crucial. Indeed, the very thing that lifts this case into…” She gestured toward the sky with a plump hand. “The stratosphere.”

A long, panicked silence followed. Ziewicz turned to D’Agosta. “Lieutenant, I’m surprised at you.”

D’Agosta found himself more amused than challenged. “What, you glimpse a claw in there somewhere?”

Ziewicz tilted her head back and issued a musical laugh. “You are very funny.” She turned back to Pizzetti while everyone else in the room exchanged puzzled glances. “A good forensic pathologist goes into an autopsy with no preconceptions whatsoever.”

“Yes,” said Pizzetti.

“But you did come in here with a preconception.”

Pizzetti’s visible panic mounted. “I don’t believe I did. I had an open mind.”

“You tried, but you did not succeed. You see, Doctor, you assumedyou were dealing with something—a single corpse.”

“Respectfully, Dr. Ziewicz, I did not. I’ve examined each wound and I specifically looked for substituted body parts. But each part goes with the others. They all match up. None were switched with any other corpse.”

“Or so it seems. But you did not do a completeinventory.”

“An inventory?”

Ziewicz moved her ponderous bulk over to the second gurney, where pieces of the face had been rinsed and laid out. She pointed to a small piece of flesh. “What’s this?”

Pizzetti leaned forward, peering. “A piece of… the lip, is what I assumed.”

“Assumed.” Ziewicz reached out, selected a set of long tweezers from a tray, and picked up the piece with great delicacy. She placed it on the stage of a stereo zoom microscope, switched on the light, and stepped back, inviting Pizzetti to look.

“What do you see?” Ziewicz asked.

Pizzetti looked into the scope. “Again, it seems like a bit of lip.”

“Do you see cartilage?”

A pause. Pizzetti poked at the bit of flesh with the tweezers. “Yes, a tiny fragment.”

“So I ask again: what is it?”

“Not a lip then, but… an earlobe. It’s an earlobe.”

“Very good.”

Pizzetti straightened up, her face a mask of tension. Ziewicz seemed to expect more, however, and so after a moment Pizzetti stepped over to the gurney and examined the two ears lying like pale shells on the stainless steel.

“Um, I note that the ears are both present and undamaged. The lobes are not missing.” Pizzetti paused. After a moment, she went back to the stereo zoom and stared once more into the eyepieces, poking and prodding the earlobe with the tip of the tweezers. “I’m not sure this belonged to the perpetrator.”

“No?”

“This earlobe,” said Pizzetti, speaking carefully, “does not appear to have been torn or cut off in the process of struggle. Rather, it appears to have been removed surgically, with care, using a scalpel.”

D’Agosta remembered a small detail from the surveillance tapes he had spent hours watching, and it sent a shock through his system. He cleared his throat. “I will note for the record that the surveillance tapes indicate the perp had a small bandage over his left earlobe.”

“Oh, my God,” Pizzetti blurted into the stunned silence that followed this announcement. “You don’t think he cut off his own earlobeand left it at the scene of the crime?”

Ziewicz gave a wry smile. “An excellent question, Doctor.”

A long silence developed in the room, and finally Pizzetti said: “I’ll order up a full analysis on this earlobe, microscopics, tox tests, DNA, the works.”

Her smile broadening, Dr. Ziewicz peeled off her gloves and pulled down her mask, tossing them in the waste. “Very good, Dr. Pizzetti. You have redeemed yourself. A good day to you all, ladies and gentlemen.”

And she left.

4

DR. JOHN FELDER WALKED UP THE FRONT STEPS OF THE rambling gothic mansion. It was a brilliant late-autumn morning, the air crisp, the sky a cloudless blue. The mansion’s exterior had recently been given a thorough cleaning, and the aged bricks fairly shone in the sunlight. Even the black bars on the ornate windows had been polished. The only thing, it seemed, that had not been cleaned was a bronze plaque, screwed into the front façade: MOUNT MERCY HOSPITAL FOR THE CRIMINALLY INSANE.

Felder buzzed the front door and waited while it was unlocked from within. The door was opened by Dr. Ostrom himself—director of Mount Mercy. Felder ignored the chilly frown that gathered on Ostrom’s face. The man was not happy to see him.

Ostrom took a step back, allowing Felder to slip inside the building. Then he nodded to a waiting guard, who immediately relocked the door.

“Dr. Ostrom,” Felder said. “Thank you for allowing this visitation.”

“I did try to reach Pendergast in order to secure his approval,” Ostrom told him. “However, I’ve been unable to contact the man, and I could think of no sound reason to deny your request any longer, given your position—technically, anyway—as court-appointed psychiatrist.” He led Felder to a far side of the waiting area and lowered his voice. “However, there are some ground rules you must agree to abide by.”

“Of course.”

“You must limit your visit, and any future visits, to ten minutes.”

Felder nodded.

“You must not unduly excite the patient.”

“No, certainly not.”

“And there is to be no further talk of any extracurricular—”

“Doctor, please,” Felder interrupted, as if even the mention of such a subject was painful.

At this, Ostrom looked satisfied. “In that case, come with me. You’ll find that she occupies the same room as before, although we have elevated the level of security.”

Felder and Ostrom followed an orderly down a long corridor, lined on both sides by unmarked doors. As he walked, Felder felt a shiver run down his spine. Barely two weeks had passed since this very building had witnessed the greatest shame and humiliation of his professional life. Because of him, a patient had been allowed to escape Mount Mercy. No, not to escape, he reminded himself: to be kidnapped, by a man posing as a fellow psychiatrist. At the thought, Felder’s cheeks flamed afresh. He himself had bought the whole deception, hook, line, and sinker. If it hadn’t been for the patient’s quick restoration to Mount Mercy, his career would have been jeopardized. As it was, he’d been given a one-month mandatory leave of absence. It had been a near miss, an extremely near miss. Yet here he was, back again. What drew him to this patient like a moth to a flame?

They waited while the orderly unlocked a heavy steel door, then they proceeded down another endless, echoing passage, stopping finally before a door identical to all the others, save that a guard stood before it. Ostrom turned to Felder.

“Do you wish me to be in attendance?” he asked.

“Thank you, that won’t be necessary.”

“Very well. Remember: ten minutes.” Ostrom unlocked the door from a key on a heavy chain, then opened it.

Felder stepped inside, then waited as the door was shut and locked behind him, letting his eyes grow accustomed to the dim light. Slowly, the features of the room grew sharper: the bed, table, and chair, all bolted to the floor; the bookcase, now stuffed with old volumes, many leather-bound; the plastic flowerpot. And there, behind the table, sat Constance Greene. There was no book or notepaper before her; she was sitting up quite straight, composed and erect. Felder suspected she had perhaps been meditating. Whatever the case, there was no idle, daydreamy quality in the deep, cold eyes that met his gaze. Unconsciously, Felder caught his breath.

“Constance,” he said, standing before the table, hands clasped together like a schoolboy’s.

For a moment, the woman did not answer. Then she nodded slightly, her bobbed hair swaying. “Dr. Felder.”

Felder had been thinking about this moment for two weeks now. And yet just hearing that low, antique voice seemed to scatter his carefully prepared thoughts. “Listen, Constance. I just wanted to say… well, that I’m so very sorry. Sorry for everything.”

Constance looked at him with her disquieting eyes but did not reply.

“I know what pain and suffering—and mortification—I must have caused you, and I need you to understand something: that is the lastthing, the very last, I would ever want to inflict on a patient.” Especially a patient as unique as yourself, he thought.

“Your apology is accepted,” she said.

“In my eagerness to help you, I let down my guard. I allowed myself to be deceived. As, in fact, we all allowed ourselves to be deceived.”

This last bit of face-saving elicited no response.

He added a solicitous note to his voice. “Are you feeling well, Constance?”

“As well as could be expected.”

Felder winced inwardly. For a moment, silence settled over the small room as he considered what to say next.

“I made a mistake,” he said at last. “But I’ve learned from that mistake. Remembered something, actually. It’s a maxim we were taught in medical school: there are no shortcuts to effective treatment.”

Constance shifted slightly in the chair, moved her hands. For the first time, Felder noticed the bandage on her right thumb.

“It’s no secret that I’ve taken a particular interest in your case,” he went on. “In fact, I think I can safely say that no one is more sympathetic to or understanding of your condition than I am.”

At this, a brief, cold smile appeared. “ Condition,” she repeated.

“What I am asking you is whether we can pick up the treatment where we left off, start work again in the spirit of—”

“No,” Constance interrupted. Her voice was muted, but there was nevertheless such a ring of iron to it that Felder was immediately chilled.

He swallowed. “I’m sorry?”

She spoke quietly but firmly, without once taking her eyes from his. “How could you even think of continuing your so-called treatment? Because of your lack of judgment, I was abducted and assaulted. Because of your overwhelming eagerness to involve yourself professionally with a patient you perceived as exotic, I was held captive and nearly perished. Do not insult my intelligence by making me complicit in your failure. How could you expect me to ever trust you again—and isn’t trust the fundamental requirement for therapeutic treatment? That is, of course, assuming I need therapeutic treatment—an offensive presumption on your part.”

As quickly as the passion had come, it was gone. Felder opened his mouth, then closed it. There was nothing to be said.

Into the silence came a knock. “Dr. Felder?” Ostrom’s voice sounded from the other side of the door. “Your ten minutes is up.”

Felder tried to say good-bye but found he couldn’t even manage that. He inclined his head slightly, then turned toward the door.

“Dr. Felder,” came Constance’s quiet voice.

Felder turned back.

“It is possible I have spoken too harshly with you. You may visit me from time to time, if you wish. But you must come as an acquaintance only—not as a doctor.”

Felder felt a sudden, overwhelming relief—and gratitude. “Thank you,” he said, wondering at his own rush of feeling as he stepped out into the relative brightness of the hall.

5

D’AGOSTA HAD COMMANDEERED THE MAIN CONFERENCE room of the Detective Bureau at One Police Plaza. After the autopsy, he made the mistake of drinking three doppios and downing two crumb cakes at the Starbucks in the lobby, and now something was going on in his stomach that did not seem related to normal digestion.

Twelve fifty-five PM. Christ, it was going to be a long day. The problem was, despite the progress they’d made, he had a bad feeling about this case. A very bad feeling. Once again, he wondered where the hell Pendergast was. He’d love to just run the evidence by him, for an informal opinion. This case was right up his alley. Proctor, fresh out of the hospital and back at the Riverside Drive mansion, had heard nothing. Constance knew nothing. No one answered the phone at the Dakota apartment, and Pendergast’s cell phone was apparently still dead.

D’Agosta shook his head. No point in worrying—Pendergast often disappeared without notice.

Time to go. D’Agosta gathered up his file and laptop, rose from his desk, and left the office, heading for the conference room. Over thirty officers had been assigned to the case, which put it in the middling range of importance. The highest-profile cases might have more than double that number. But it was still a lot of damn people, many of whom would have something to say. So much for his afternoon. Still, such meetings had to happen: Everyone had to know what everyone else knew. And it was a fact of life that, no matter how much you cajoled or threatened, you just couldn’t make a cop sit down and read a report. It had to be a meeting.

He arrived at a few minutes past one and was glad to see everyone was already there. The room was restless, with a palpable sense of anticipation. As the rustling died away, D’Agosta heard an ominous growl in his gut. He strode up to the podium that stood on the stage beside a projection screen. They were flanked by wheeled whiteboards. As his eyes swept the room, he noticed Captain Singleton, the chief of detectives. He was sitting in the front row, next to the assistant chief for Manhattan and several other top brass.

His stomach lurched again. Laying his file on the podium, he waited a moment for silence, and then spoke the words he’d been rehearsing.

“As most of you know, I’m Lieutenant D’Agosta, squad commander.” He gave the group the briefest rundown on the homicide, then consulted the list of names he’d drawn up. “Kugelmeyer, Latents.”

Kugelmeyer strode to the podium, buttoning his hideous brown Walmart suit as he did so. D’Agosta placed a finger on his watch, gave it a subtle tap. He had threatened everyone with serious harm, even death, if they went over five minutes.

“We got an excellent series of latents from the corpse and the room,” Kugelmeyer said quickly. “Fulls and partials, right and left, and palms. We ran them through all the databases. Negative. The perp, it seems, has never been printed.”

That was it. Kugelmeyer sat down.

D’Agosta glanced around the room again. “Forman, hair and fiber?”

Another quick report. This was followed by a dozen others—blood spatter, footwear, microscopics, victimology—each following the other with military precision, much to D’Agosta’s satisfaction. He tried to avoid glancing at Singleton, despite being eager to gauge the man’s reaction.

One thing D’Agosta had learned about meetings like this was to create a little bit of drama by saving the best for last, knowing this would keep everyone awake and paying attention. And in this case, the best was Warsaw, the video geek from the forensic investigation division who specialized in analyzing security videos. While he was officially a detective, Warsaw looked more like a scruffy teenager, with his slept-on hair and pimples. Unlike the others, he didn’t wear a suit, even a bad one, but rather skinny black jeans and T-shirts with heavy-metal logos. He got away with it because he was so good.

He was also a bit of a show-off. He came bounding up to the podium with a remote in hand; the lights dimmed.

“Hello, everyone,” Warsaw began. “Welcome to the perp show gag reel.”

That got a laugh.

“The Marlborough Grand has the latest in digital security, and we got beautiful, and I mean beautiful, footage. We got the perp from the front, back, side, above, below—HD all the way. Here are the highlights, edited down to, ah, five minutes. Your folders have a selection of still shots taken from the footage, which is as we speak being shared with various other luxury hotels and—very soon—with the Times, Post, and Daily News.”

The movie began, and it was just as good as Warsaw promised. The excerpts showed the perp—his left ear bandaged—in the lobby; on the elevator; walking down the hall; walking up the hall; pushing into the victim’s room. And then it showed excerpts of the man leaving more or less the same way, unhurried, unruffled, unconcerned.

D’Agosta had seen the excerpts before, but they chilled him all over again. Most killers, he knew, could be divided into two broad groups, disorganized and organized. But this man was so cool, so methodical, that he almost deserved a category of his own. And once again D’Agosta felt deeply bothered by this. It just didn’t fit. Didn’t fit at all.

The clip ended, there was a smattering of applause. To D’Agosta’s mild annoyance, Warsaw hammed a bow and left.

D’Agosta returned to the podium. It was now two thirty. So far, everything had gone like clockwork. His stomach rumbled again—it was starting to feel like he’d swallowed a bottle of hydrochloric acid. He had saved the very last bit, the earlobe, for himself. Squad commander’s prerogative.

“We don’t have DNA yet on the extra body part recovered from the crime scene—the earlobe,” he began. “But we do have some prelims. It belongs to a male. The condition of the skin indicates an age under fifty—that’s as close as we can get. It’s almost certain that the presence of the earlobe was not a result of a struggle at the crime scene. Rather, it seems to have been carried to the crime scene and deliberately placed there. It also appears the earlobe was removed from its ear some hours prior to the time of the homicide—and it was removed not postmortem, but from a body still alive—no surprise, since as you can see from the video the perp is most definitely alive and kicking.

“We know what the perp looks like, and soon all of New York City will know. He’s striking, with his ginger hair, expensive suit, good looks, and Olympic-athlete physique. We got prints, hair, clothing fibers, and soon we’ll have his DNA. We’ve ID’d the Charvet tie, and we’re close to IDing his suit and shoes. Looks like we’re one step away from nailing the guy.”

D’Agosta paused, made a decision to say it.

“So—what’s wrong with this picture?”

It was a rhetorical question and nobody raised their hand.

“Is the guy really this stupid?”

He let the question hang for a long moment before continuing. “Look at the guy in the video. Can he really be the complete and total idiot he seems? I mean, there are simple steps he could have taken to disguise or alter his appearance, to evade the cameras at least in part. He didn’t have to stand stock-still in the middle of the lobby for five minutes while the entire staff noticed him and the cameras shot B-roll from four angles. He’s not a guy trying to blend in. We got psych working on it, figuring out what makes the guy tick, what motivates him, what the message on the body means, what the earlobe left at the scene means. Maybe he’s crazy and wants to be caught. But it strikes me the guy seems to know what he’s doing. And there’s no way he’s stupid. So let’s not assume this case is anywhere near being in the bag, despite all we’ve got.”

A silence. There was another thing bothering D’Agosta, but he chose not to mention it, because it might sound a little strange, and anyway he didn’t know quite how to articulate it. It had to do with the timing of the attack. The camera caught it all. The guy was strolling down the hall, and—just as he was about to pass the door of the victim’s room—she opened it to get the paper. The timing had been perfect.

… Coincidence?

6

KYOKO ISHIMURA WALKED SLOWLY DOWN THE HALLWAY, whisking the polished wooden floor ahead of her with a traditional hemp broom. The hall was spotlessly clean already but Miss Ishimura, out of long practice, swept it anyway, day in, day out. The apartment—three apartments, actually, which had been combined into one by the owner—was shrouded in a close, listening silence. The traffic noise from West Seventy-Second Street barely penetrated the thick stone walls here, five stories above the street.

Returning the broom to the nearby maid’s closet, she took a felt cloth, walked a few steps farther down the hallway, and passed into a small room with Tabriz and Isfahan carpets on the floor and an antique coffered ceiling above. The room was full of beautifully bound illuminated manuscripts and incunabula, stored within cases of mahogany and leaded glass. Miss Ishimura polished first the cases, then the glass, and then, with a separate special cloth, the volumes themselves, carefully passing it over the ribbed spines, the head caps, the gilded top edges. The books, too, were already clean, but she dusted each one nevertheless. It was not simply from mere force of habit: when Miss Ishimura was anxious about something, she found solace in the act of cleaning.

Ever since her employer had returned home four days ago, without warning, he had been acting strangely. He was already a strange man, but this new behavior was exceedingly disturbing to her. He spent his days in the sprawling apartment, clothed in silk pajamas and one of his English silk dressing gowns, never speaking, staring for hours at the marble waterfall in the public room, or sitting in his Zen garden for the better part of a day, in an apparent stupor, unmoving. He had stopped reading newspapers, stopped answering the telephone, and ceased communicating in any way, even with her.

And he ate nothing—nothing. She had tried to tempt him with his favorite dishes—mozuku, shiokara—but everything went untouched. More disturbingly, he had begun taking pills. She had surreptitiously noted the names on the bottles—Dilaudid and Levo-Dromoran—looked them up on the Internet and was horrified to find they were powerful narcotics, which he showed every evidence of abusing in larger and larger quantities.

At first, it had seemed to her that he was wrapped in a deep, almost unimaginable sorrow. But as the days passed, he seemed to physically collapse as well, his skin turning gray, his cheeks slack, his eyes dark and hollow. As he sank increasingly into silence and apathy, she felt that, rather than sorrow, there was no feeling left in him at all. It was as if some terrible experience had burned all emotion from him, hollowed him out, leaving him a dry, ashen husk.

A small blue LED began to flash beside the door. For Miss Ishimura, who was deaf and mute, this was the signal that the phone was ringing. She walked over to a corner table where a telephone sat and examined the caller ID. It was Lieutenant D’Agosta, the policeman. Calling again.

She stared at the ringing phone for perhaps five seconds. Then—on impulse—she picked it up, despite express orders to the contrary. She placed the receiver in one of the TTY machines she used and typed a message: You wait, please. I will call him.

She exited the room, then passed down the long hallway, turned when it doglegged, continued down a second hallway, then stopped and rapped quietly on a shoji—a rice-paper partition serving as a door—pulling it back after a moment and stepping inside.

The room beyond contained a large Japanese ofurobathtub built of blond hinoki wood. Agent Pendergast reclined within the tub, only his head and narrow shoulders rising above the steaming, high-walled surface. Bottles of pills and French mineral water were arrayed in lines, like sentinels, behind him. Naked, his appearance shocked her even more: his face dreadfully gaunt, and his pale eyes dark, almost bruised. A copy of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartetssat on the wide tub edge beside a heavy, gleaming straight razor. She had noticed him absently stropping the razor, sometimes for hours, in the bath, until its edge sparkled wickedly. The bathwater was tinged the palest rose—the bandage on his leg injury must be leaking again. He had done nothing about it, despite her urgent entreaties.

She handed him a note: Lieutenant D’Agosta.

Pendergast merely looked at her.

She held out the phone and mouthed a word. “Dozo.”

Still he said nothing.

“Do zo,” she mouthed again, with emphasis.

At last, he told her to engage the speakerphone in the wall. She did so, then stepped back deferentially. She could not hear, but she could read lips with complete perfection. And she had no intention of leaving.

“Hello?” came the voice, tinny and thin through the speakerphone. “Hello? Pendergast?”

“Vincent,” Pendergast replied, his voice low.

“Pendergast. My God, where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for days!”

Pendergast said nothing, merely reclining farther into the bath.

“What’s happened? Where’s Helen?”

“They killed Helen,” Pendergast replied in a flat, expressionless, terrible voice.

“ What?What do you mean? When?”

“In Mexico. I buried her. In the desert.”

There was an audible gasp, then a brief silence, before D’Agosta spoke again. “Oh, Jesus. Jesus. Who killed her?”

“The Nazis. A shot to the heart. Point-blank range.”

“Oh, my God. I’m so sorry, sosorry. Did you… get them?”

“One got away.”

“All right. We’re going to get the bastard. Bring him to justice—”

“Why?”

“Why? What do you mean, why?”

Agent Pendergast raised his eyes to Miss Ishimura, and with a small twirl of his right index finger indicated that she should hang up the phone. The housekeeper—who had been intently watching his lips during the brief exchange—came forward after a short hesitation, pressed the OFF button, stepped backward across the slate floor of the bath, and then very quietly shut the shoji, leaving Pendergast once again alone.

Now she knew what the problem was. But it did not help her at all. Not at all.