by Rob Rogers
So that was how she had used the opportunity of Argonaut’s dream. She’d fed the man a pack of lies and sent him after Dr. Cain Ducett.
Wherever he steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves will serve as a silent witness against him.
— Excerpted from Edmund Locard, author of E’enquete criminelle et les methodes scientifique, 1920
Chapter Thirty
Devil’s Cape, Louisiana
Eight days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders
6 p.m.
It took Cain days of searching, avoiding increasing scrutiny from Detective Cynthia Daigle and her team, to find Olena Zhdanov. He was more and more amazed at the acuity of his own senses and wondered if they had suddenly come into focus, or if they had always been this sharp, but he had been denying that to himself. A question, he had decided, for another day, though one not too far in the future.
He began with the aftershave, following its wafting trail through the halls of Holingbroke. Strangely enough, it led to the roof and then ended. There was no easy egress from the roof, and no clear reason for someone to have gone up there. But he spotted two of Olena Zhdanov’s hairs stuck against the mortar of the building’s brick façade. He left the hairs in place, but decided not to mention them to the detective.
As he went through the course of his workday, treating his patients, leading group and private therapy sessions, and dealing with the inevitable fallout of an escaped patient, he found himself thinking more and more about the roof of Holingbroke, about Zhdanov and whoever had arrived to break her free.
He’d made little progress with Zhdanov during their years of treatment together. Oh, they’d developed something of a rapport. They exchanged pleasantries through the thick glass wall that separated them, a necessity because of her abilities. She’d spoken to him about her childhood in Russia, her parents, her friends, her dreams of coming to America. She’d wept when discussing the day when her powers had manifested and when she’d “accidentally” killed Eisenberg and the others.
But almost everything she’d ever told him was a lie.
She’d told him elaborate stories about her childhood in Moscow. Her father, she said, was a police officer, her mother an administrative official with the Communist Party. She had an older brother, but she was her parents’ favorite, the jewel of the house. She’d wept when she’d discussed her brother’s death in Afghanistan.
Cain had checked into her background. She was from the Siberian city of Irkutsk, not Moscow. She had no brother. She was the middle of three sisters. Her father was a fisherman in Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world. Her mother died during an influenza outbreak. Zhdanov and her two sisters had all been involved in a boating accident during which her sisters had both drowned and Zhdanov had caught pneumonia.
He’d tried to lead her to tell him the truth, but she elaborated on her lies instead. He’d ultimately confronted her with the facts as he knew them about her family, and she’d exploded in rage, trying to break through the glass barrier between them with her fists, shouting at him in Russian, raging in anger, until she finally collapsed in tears, her fingernails torn and bleeding, three knuckles, as they’d later discover, cracked from the impact with the glass.
He taped their conversations as a matter of course, and he’d had her outburst translated. She’d been ranting and had called him a number of names, but interspersed with her tantrum were stark words where she seemed to confuse her rage against him with a deeply held resentment against her father: “I drowned Mavra and Sofiya,” she’d said, speaking of her sisters. “I suffocated Mother beneath a pillow. I made myself breathe the cold water so that I would grow sick. And you still never loved me.”
Cain never really heard truth from her again. After that incident, she returned to her stories of a Moscow life, a dead brother who never lived, a father who caught criminals instead of fish and who loved her.
He pitied Zhdanov, and he wanted to help her to face the truth about herself and the terrible things she had done. But now his first priority was making sure that she was locked away where she couldn’t kill anyone else.
Zhdanov had few ties to other people. Most of her family was dead, of course, and her father remained in Russia. She’d arrived in the United States a very short time before killing Todd Eisenberg, and she had been in Holingbroke for nearly three years. On the one hand, Cain could see little reason for anyone to break her out of the institute, especially this long after she’d first been admitted. On the other hand, despite the warnings all staff and even some fellow patients who came into contact with her received, she was an attractive, manipulative, seductive woman. It wouldn’t have been impossible for her to convince someone that she needed to be “rescued.”
He visited her room again after the police had cleared the scene. Most of her clothes were missing, as was a pillowcase that presumably had been used to carry them. But the few cosmetics she was allowed remained untouched in her bathroom. Even her winter clothes were missing from her chest of drawers, but the toiletries remained. It made him wonder. Had she been expecting to leave, would she really have packed winter clothing? He decided then that she hadn’t packed her things at all. Someone else had grabbed her clothing from her drawers and thrown them into her pillowcase. Whoever it was—the man with the aftershave, presumably—hadn’t thought to pack her toiletries. So this was a surprise for her. She’d been unready.
Cain had stood in her room, staring at her bookshelf, her remaining possessions, thinking about it. His eyes had flicked to the mirror in her bathroom, and he’d remembered Jazz, the monster he’d seen in the mirror, the yellowed tabloid he’d crammed into a desk drawer. And then he forced himself to return his thoughts to Zhdanov. It was safer to pursue an escaped psychopath, he thought wryly, than it was to think too hard about the other questions facing him.
The scent of the aftershave was fading even to his vivid senses. If Zhdanov hadn’t expected to leave, he thought, then that meant that concentrating on her might be a mistake. The police were undoubtedly concentrating on finding out where Zhdanov would be inclined to go. Would she flee back to Russia? Would she connect with old friends? Would she hide someplace she’d known well before she’d been locked away?
But what if she wasn’t running the show? What if the man with the aftershave was in charge? Then he would be the one to follow.
As a student, inspired by conversations with Detective Salazar Lorca, Cain had written a paper about Locard’s exchange principle, named for the French forensic scientist Edmund Locard. Conceptually, anytime two things came into contact, they exchanged something, leaving traces of their interaction. Dust. Hair. Threads. Tiny bits of skin.
Detective Daigle and the police technicians had searched Zhdanov’s room and the hallway thoroughly. But had they missed anything? Cain had spotted the mark on Thomas Dickerson’s head. He’d spotted Dickerson’s hair on the fire extinguisher. He’d smelled the aftershave. Could he discover something else that they had not? Some trace of the man who had helped Zhdanov escape—or abducted her? And if he did, could he sort it out from the mess of other things present in the room—traces of Zhdanov’s life there, of the cleaning crew, of the police doing their search, of Cain himself?
He doubted it.
The roof, though . . .
The police hadn’t searched the roof. They’d had little reason to do so. It wasn’t a reasonable escape route. Few people ever had reason to go up there. And yet he’d found Zhdanov’s hairs there. The man had taken her to the roof, or else she had led him there.
He’d searched the roof again. Thinking about dust and tiny bits of evidence, he’d scoured the rooftop, looked at the gravel that covered it.
Near Zhdanov’s hairs, he found tiny bits of tarpaper. The Holingbroke roof was covered with gravel in places, concrete in others—primarily the newer wings—and shingles in others. But not tarpaper.
It was summer in Devil’s Cape, which meant humidity, pollution, and pollen. The trees surr
ounding Holingbroke were heavy with pollen; he’d often had to treat his patients for aggravated allergies. Peering carefully around, he focused his eyes and could see that nearly everything up there was dusted with pollen. But not the tarpaper. It hadn’t been up there long.
Cain Ducett was a methodical man. He walked back down to Zhdanov’s room. Earlier, he’d been afraid that he couldn’t sort meaningful traces of evidence in the room from traces that the police themselves brought in. But now he was looking for something specific. He found it almost immediately, just inside the aluminum trim around the door. A tiny bit of tarpaper, scarcely thicker than a thread, near the doorway.
He returned once more to the roof. He could smell bougainvillea nearby, hear zydeco music and laughter from a party a few blocks away. Judging by where he’d found the tarpaper up there, by very faint smudges that he could now notice in the pollen, the man who had broken Zhdanov out of her confinement had actually been standing on the ledge on the north wall.
There was no clear reason to be on that northern ledge. The ledge overlooked a gentle hill covered with a mass of vegetation. There was no good place for a ladder there; it was just too high. There were no convenient trees to climb down, no place below where a vehicle might be parked. There wasn’t even a good place to tie a rope on the northern wall. It was as though the man had flown away.
Cain Ducett was a methodical man. He scoffed at the idea of the man flying. It could happen, of course—a number of superhumans had proven able to fly—but such things were rarities. So proceeding on the assumption that the man had stood on the ledge with Zhdanov, Cain proceeded to hypothesize every reason he could think of that didn’t involve flight, then test those hypotheses. But nothing made sense. The man couldn’t have jumped safely, and there were no impressions on the ground below. There was no evidence to suggest that he had remained on the roof and then reentered the building. Two of the other ledges were slightly more promising methods of exit than the northern one, but there was no sign that the man or Zhdanov had approached those ledges.
So he decided to test the flying hypothesis.
If the man had actually flown away carrying Zhdanov, Cain thought, he would have wanted to avoid being spotted. If flying was rare, then it was also incredibly conspicuous. That meant avoiding bright lights, avoiding crowds. The escape had happened early in the morning, shortly before dawn. If he’d flown for very long or very far, he would have found himself increasingly visible. And the man had presumably chosen that northern ledge as his takeoff point for a reason.
Half a mile north of the institution, across a river, there was a strip mall just off the Canal View Highway. If the man had parked a car there, he could have flown up to the edge of the parking lot with little risk of being seen. Much farther than that, and his risk of exposure increased astronomically.
Cain’s car was at a body shop, which was replacing his shattered window, and in the meantime, he was driving a small rental car. He steered it toward the strip mall, then paced around the parking lot looking for anything to support his guess.
It took him less than five minutes to find another of Zhdanov’s hairs.
From that point, it had been less difficult but more time-consuming. A convenience store had been open in the strip during the time the man would probably have approached, but the clerk who would have been on duty at the time wasn’t available. Cain returned eight hours later, during the clerk’s shift, and then discovered that the clerk did recall seeing a car, a red Mercedes, in the parking lot during the time in question. He even remembered the first three letters of the license plate because they happened to be his initials. A carefully worded phone call to Salazar Lorca had revealed that there was only one red Mercedes in Louisiana that had a license plate starting with those three letters. It was registered to the Devil’s Delights Food Distribution Company, which was located in Devil’s Cape’s warehouse district. It was also, Lorca had informed him warily, a suspected front for the Kalodimos crime family. “What the hell are you into, Cain?” he’d asked.
Talking on the phone to his old friend, Cain had rested his face on the palm of his hand. The scratches from the broken glass were gone now. He could see things that he knew were beyond the realm of human vision, hear whispered conversations held two stories away. His mind cast back to the time he’d held his mother and poor Mr. Marcus hostage, the way he’d heard Salazar coming to the door before he’d even gotten there, known that he was dealing with a plain-clothes cop instead of a uniformed one by the sound he made while walking—despite the space between them, despite Mr. Marcus’s panicked noises, despite his own panic. He thought of the reflection of the monster that he’d seen, the images of Jazz that had come to him. “I don’t know, Salazar,” he said quietly. “I just don’t know.”
He’d spent what free time he could watching the Devil’s Delights warehouse. The car was undoubtedly a company car, probably used by someone in the Kalodimos family or someone highly placed in the organization, but there was always the chance that the person might stop by the warehouse. And eventually he did. Even from a hundred feet away, Cain could smell the familiar aftershave. Orange blossom, coriander, cedar, and perhaps a hint of vanilla. The man was tan and muscular, his hair cropped curly and short, brown with blonde highlights. He had a moustache and goatee, also colored blonde, and was dressed casually but expensively—a designer label blue golf shirt over tan chinos and penny loafers with no socks, a Rolex watch on his wrist.
When the man left the warehouse, Cain followed.
A native of Devil’s Cape, Dr. Cain Ducett joined the Holingbroke staff in 1995 and has served with distinction in a variety of capacities. He is currently director of the Behavioral Health Unit, the first African American to hold a position of this level at this institution.
— From the Holingbroke Psychological Institute web site
Chapter Thirty-One
Devil’s Cape, Louisiana
Eight days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders
5:30 p.m.
Jason Kale didn’t like being led around by the nose. “There’s something I need you to do,” the woman in his dream had told him. And then, the breeze of the Aegean Sea blowing over both of them, the rhythmic sounds of the Argonauts at the oars echoing in their ears, she’d told him about Dr. Cain Ducett of the Holingbroke Psychological Institute. He was a monster, she told him. She’d visited his dreams and learned his evil desires. He had superhuman powers and had to be stopped before he killed someone. She had been urgent and eloquent and persistent.
And she’d been lying.
Even in that strange, disorienting dream state, Jason had known that the woman was real. But there was a desperation about her, too. The way her red eyes had flickered when she’d spoken, the timbre of her voice. She was certainly desperate to get Jason to chase after this doctor. What wasn’t clear was why she was so persistent about it.
Jason was an investigative reporter. Prophetic dreams or not, he did his research.
Dr. Cain Ducett was a respected psychiatrist specializing in treating the criminally insane. He was a director at the Holingbroke Institute and had risen to that level at a relatively young age. He had published several papers and was credited with improving the conditions and safety record of his area.
He was also, Jason learned after digging further, a former member of the Concrete Executioners. Jason thought of the boys he had fought in the street, the gunshots. He thought about the Troll. He rubbed unconsciously at his eye. Ducett’s juvenile records were sealed, but he clearly had a background of violence.
The escaped psychopath Rusalka—Olena Zhdanov—had been a patient of Ducett’s.
Jason had reluctantly phoned Sergeant Dustin Bilbray with a few questions, and Bilbray had been delighted to tell Jason, off the record, that Ducett was being looked at as a possible accomplice in her escape. Bilbray seemed very amused about that for some reason.
Cain Ducett was a dichotomy. Former gang member, respected psychiatrist, s
uspect in a murder investigation. Whether the dream woman had been lying to Jason or not, he decided to get a better look at the man.
Jason found Ducett just as he was leaving the institute one evening. Tall, muscular, and handsome, the psychiatrist was wearing an expensive gray suit and a pink and blue tie. Starting his own car, Jason followed him through the twisted streets of Devil’s Cape.
Jason was more than a little surprised when Ducett pulled up to his uncle’s Devil’s Delights Food Distribution Company and began to stake it out.
CEs. Bring it.
— A graffiti design on a brick tenement in Crabb’s Lament
Chapter Thirty-Two
Devil’s Cape, Louisiana
Eight days after the deaths of the Storm Raiders
7:30 p.m.
Julian Kalodimos stared at the black man in the gray suit who had just scaled the wall of the decrepit warehouse.
“Orange blossom, coriander, cedar,” the man said. “I believe that you are responsible for freeing my patient.”
The orange blossom bit sounded like gibberish to Julian, but the second part was clear enough. The man was looking for Rusalka.
“How the hell did you climb that wall?” Julian asked. “This building’s ready to fall down around our ears.”
The man shrugged. He flashed his white teeth again. He looked exhilarated, almost high. Julian had seen the look often enough, working alongside Uncle Costas’s men. The man was itching for a fight. The man brushed absently at a tear in his jacket. “I guess I have some underutilized talents,” he said. “Now where is Olena Zhdanov?” His eyes flicked to the shack. He knew perfectly well where she was.
