by Alex Kava
The fireworks show wasn’t finished, and yet, everything went black.
CHAPTER 24
Sunday, July 4
Interstate 95
They had been on the road for almost two hours when Maggie realized she and Racine were discussing the case without disagreement, with no cheap shots or competing theories. Racine had even allowed Harvey to come along, giving him the entire back seat of her Infiniti G35 without cringing or fussing about his huge paws on her immaculate leather.
At first Maggie thought it was all for show, a way to impress her, win her over. But Maggie wasn’t that easily impressed, and Racine wasn’t exactly patient or polite enough to ignore something that rubbed her the wrong way. And a Labrador retriever—even a sleeping one—in your forty-thousand-dollar car would be difficult to ignore.
“On your weirdo-meter, where would you say this guy falls?” Racine’s voice broke into Maggie’s thoughts.
“My weirdo-meter?”
“Hey, I know you’ve tracked down some major mother-fuckers—excuse my French. I’ve been trying to tone down what my dad refers to as my potty-mouth when I visit him.” Racine took a gulp of Diet Pepsi as if to wash it away. “You know what I mean. What category does this guy fall into? Is he a Simon Shelby or an Albert Stucky?”
Racine was referring to two very different serial killers Maggie had encountered in the last several years. Simon Shelby killed his victims to possess their imperfections, bottling brain tumors and sticking diseased hearts in jars to compensate for his own childhood illness. Shelby was sick, mentally, not physically. Albert Stucky, however, was simply evil, or at least that was Maggie’s explanation for why any madman would steal his victims’ organs, drop them into a take-out container and then leave them for someone to discover.
Despite what most people thought, profiling serial killers wasn’t as simple as putting each one into some category and predicting the next move, like some twisted or elaborate chess game. Instead, it required crawling inside the killer’s mind and looking into the dark corners without being sucked in.
“It’s not as simple as figuring out a category,” she finally told Racine.
“Oh, I know that. But try to give me an idea of what kind of brain drain strangles a woman and then chops off her head. Are we talking major loose screws or what? This goes beyond the search for the ultimate boner, doesn’t it?”
“I think this guy is more about rage than sexual gratification.”
“Rage, huh? So you don’t think he’s hanging on to the torsos for convenient boinking?”
“Boinking?”
“Yeah, you know sort of his own preserved blowup doll but without the hot air.”
Maggie smiled at Racine’s lingo and simplistic profile. She glanced at the detective with her hip Ray-Bans, spiky blond hair, pink Key West tank top and Ralph Lauren khakis. She couldn’t remember ever looking or feeling that chic, young and carefree. Only recently had Maggie started to splurge on designer things for herself, like a pair of expensive Cole Hahn leather flats that she let Gwen talk her into buying. Even her two-story Tudor in upscale Newburgh Heights just outside of the District—which had been bought with funds from a trust her father had left her—was decorated in what might be politely called traditional and practical.
She was logical and disciplined, stubborn and determined. She attributed it to the necessity of having to grow up too soon and too fast, of losing her father and becoming a caretaker of her alcoholic suicidal mother all at the young age of twelve. Whatever carefree spirit she may have possessed had easily been squelched sometime during those dark days of fighting off her mother’s drunken suitors or while trying to make sure the electric bill was paid or finding something to eat before getting herself off to school in the morning. She worked her way through college and even her ex-husband, Greg, had once been attracted to her mature and responsible sense of duty. Never mind that those were the same traits that ended up driving him away when she transferred them to her job as an FBI agent.
Racine had lost a parent as a child, too. One more thing they had in common. So it wasn’t as if she had had a fairy-tale or even a carefree life. The difference, however, was Luc Racine, a loving, doting father who made sure his little girl got to be a little girl. Ironic because here Julia Racine had been trying so hard to impress and emulate Maggie and as it turned out, Maggie actually envied Racine. Funny, Maggie thought, how life threw you curveballs just when you thought you had everything figured out. Just when you thought you could trust your judgment of people.
“Hey, earth to O’Dell. Are you still with me? Do you need to get out and stretch?”
Maggie realized she had tuned out Racine for too long.
“No, I’m fine,” she said, twisting around to check on Harvey. The dog was sprawled out and fast asleep.
“You sure you’re okay?”
“Just a little tired, I guess.”
“Another big night, huh?”
Racine gave her a look over her sunglasses and only then did Maggie remember Harvey’s slobberfest that Racine had overheard on Friday evening. She started laughing.
“Hey, it’s none of my business,” Racine said, waving a hand at her as if to say it was no big deal. “You don’t have to tell me anything.”
Maggie couldn’t help it. She kept laughing, harder now, and somehow she managed to say, “It was Harvey.”
“What?”
“It was Harvey you heard the other night.”
It took Racine a second to register. Maggie thought she saw a bit of a blush. It was difficult to tell with the sunglasses. Maggie started laughing again, and soon Racine was joining her.
CHAPTER 25
Omaha, Nebraska
Tommy Pakula knew he’d be making up for this one for months. It didn’t matter that it was a holiday. His wife, Clare, was used to him working plenty of holidays. However, he and Clare had agreed long ago that Sunday mornings would be family time. He had even signed up to be an usher at Saint Stan’s to prove to her how serious he was about keeping that pact. They’d all go to early Sunday mass, and then out for brunch. He actually looked forward to it every week.
There had been three times he had been called away on a Sunday morning in the last several years since the pact was made. But being called away could and had been forgiven easily. This time was a bit harder to forgive. He had tried to explain the urgency to Clare. When that didn’t work, he’d tried joking that he was missing mass for a private consultation with the monsignor.
Now as he looked down at Monsignor William O’Sullivan’s gray body laid out on the stainless-steel autopsy table, Pakula realized it wasn’t much of a joke. This was sort of a private consultation in which Pakula hoped the monsignor would tell him what happened in that airport bathroom.
Martha Stofko, Chief Medical Examiner for Douglas County, had already taken the external measurements and samples. Before she made the Y incision, she inspected the old priest’s chest, taking several pictures and now sticking a gloved finger into the wound.
“Tell me again why we’re doing this on a Sunday morning,” she asked, looking up at Pakula.
“You can thank Archbishop Armstrong. For some reason he’s got the chief convinced expediency equals respect.” Pakula wasn’t sure Stofko would understand. She was a transplant from somewhere in California—not a hometown kid. It took firsthand experience to realize the politics and power of the archbishop.
“So Chief Ramsey is Catholic?”
Maybe Stofko understood better than Pakula gave her credit for.
“Supposedly the monsignor’s sister wants him back home in Connecticut as soon as possible.” Pakula repeated the request, or rather the demand, word for word, just as Brother Sebastian had ordered over the phone.
However, this time Martha Stofko looked up at Pakula over half glasses that sat at the end of her nose.
Pakula simply shrugged. “You know me, Martha. I just do as I’m told.”
“Yeah, right. In that case,
come over and take a look at this.”
Pakula watched her poke at the wound, separating the flaps of skin.
“See how the wound is crisscrossed?”
“It looks like an X.”
“Or a cross. You usually get a cross-shaped appearance like this when the knife is twisted as it’s pulled out. It was a double-edged blade, thick in the center, but less than an inch wide. I should be able to tell you how long once I dissect and follow the path.”
Stofko stuck her index finger into the wound again, this time making her finger almost disappear.
“It was an upward thrust. I can be more definitive once I see the tract.”
“Right-handed or left?” Pakula asked.
“I’m not sure.”
Stofko started examining the monsignor’s hands, lifting each and checking all the way up the arms.
“There doesn’t appear to be any defensive wounds.”
“I noticed that,” Pakula said. “We found him by the sink. I think the killer came up behind him. Probably took him by surprise.”
“If that’s the case, I’d say the killer’s right-handed. He may have come up from behind on the monsignor’s right side, leaned around and stuck him up and under the rib cage.”
“Just lucky, or how hard is it to know where to stick so you don’t hit bone?”
“It’s a fifty-fifty chance,” Stofko replied. “Your guy used enough force to better his odds. Take a look at the bruising below the wound.” The two-inch mark was a straight, narrow purple line. “The hilt of the knife left quite an imprint, which means there was considerable force to the thrust.”
“Could that tell us anything about the size of this guy?”
“Not necessarily. It has more to do with rapid movement than bulk or strength. This whole area,” Stofko said, waving her gloved hand across the priest’s abdomen, “is fairly vulnerable. The skin is the body’s most resistant tissue. Once it’s penetrated it takes almost no additional force to penetrate the other tissue or organs, especially if the weapon doesn’t encounter any bones. Knowing that the hilt of the knife was pushed against the body will give me a better idea of how long it was, although with this kind of forcible thrust the depth of the wound usually exceeds the actual blade length. So I take that into consideration, too.”
“Any guess on what kind of knife?”
“It’s a wide hilt for such a long, narrow blade. I haven’t seen anything quite like it. My initial guess would be some kind of dagger. And you see this darker, larger bruise in the center of the hilt?” She pointed it out, and Pakula was surprised he hadn’t noticed it earlier.
“What the hell is it?”
“Again, it’s just another guess, but I’m thinking the hilt and the handle might be decorative. Which would make sense with a dagger or perhaps a fancy letter opener.”
Stofko made the Y incision on the Monsignor’s chest and began pulling back the layers of skin and fat, careful not to disturb the wound’s path until she was ready to dissect it.
Pakula hated the snap of cartilage, but he didn’t look away as Stofko took what looked like garden clippers to the rib cage and started snipping. He had gotten the information he needed, but he’d stay and keep her company for a few minutes before heading over to the Douglas County Crime Lab. Hopefully they had found something, anything that would shed some light on who the killer was.
Brother Sebastian and the archbishop seemed content with the monsignor being a victim of unfortunate random violence. They seemed more concerned about what happened to the leather portfolio than they did the monsignor. But Pakula’s gut told him there was nothing random about this murder. If that was true, then there were more secrets being kept than what was inside that missing portfolio.
“This is interesting,” Martha Stofko said, getting Pakula’s attention.
Stofko had been hunched over the chest cavity, but now stood back, scooping out a yellowish glob and placing it on the scale. “Fifteen hundred grams,” she mumbled, jotting down the information quickly then moving the glob to a dissection tray.
“Okay, what are we looking at?” Pakula asked, coming up beside her. Try as he might, Pakula still saw just a glob of tissue where M.E.’s saw tumors or nodules.
Stofko grabbed what looked like an ordinary butter knife and began slicing into and sectioning what resembled chicken fat.
“A healthy liver usually has the texture and color of calves’ livers. You’ve probably seen them in the supermarket.”
“This sure doesn’t look like a healthy liver.” Pakula grimaced at what looked more like a soft, yellow mush of tissue. “So what was wrong with Monsignor O’Sullivan?”
“I’d say the good monsignor liked to throw back a few. Actually, more than a few and over a very long period.”
“Oh, great, an alcoholic priest,” Pakula said as he wiped his hand over his shaved head. Just one more secret to add to the mess.
CHAPTER 26
Venezuela
Father Michael Keller folded the vestments and placed them in his special wooden box alongside the newspaper clippings. He was quite pleased with himself. The Sunday-morning mass had gone better than expected, despite his nausea. He only wished he could figure out what was making him ill.
By now he had grown accustomed to the heat and humidity. He had gained control over the insects, rarely sharing his home with them anymore. And although there was no end to the mosquitoes, he thought he had developed an immunity to their venom, unless…unless he had contracted malaria or West Nile Virus. Was that possible?
He felt his forehead again, wiping the dripping sweat off, then placing his palm flat against his hot brow. Definitely a fever. Perhaps he needed to fix himself another cup of tea. It certainly had soothed him earlier and gotten him not only through the mass but the meet-and-greet afterward.
He hated the meet-and-greet, smiling and nodding, pretending he understood their crude English. He had come up with the perfect response, one they all seemed pleased with, one that sent them away smiling and nodding—“I’ll keep you in my prayers.” It worked every time. Poor wretches needed to be in someone’s prayers. And after all, he was here to help them, to be a part of their miserable little community.
He had grown weary of picking up in the middle of the night and moving to a new location. And for that reason, this place was supposed to be different, though it wasn’t much different than any of the others. In fact, they all looked the same, the same weathered shacks and huts kept together by the grace of God. And the villagers were the same, too, apparently content with their rags for clothes and gruel for food, but so desperately needy for attention and praise, especially from God, and so of course, especially from him. He was, after all, the next best thing in their minds. And to some—the dying old women and the innocent little children—he was God.
Yes, he was tired of moving. He had come to that decision, even after hours of panic over the Halloween mask, that death mask from the past. He had convinced himself that it was someone’s idea of a bad joke. It had to be. There was no way anyone could have tracked him here. It was impossible. Besides, he wasn’t about to let anyone scare him into the night ever again.
The tea kettle began to hiss just as the rains started, again. He tried to remember how long it had been since he had seen the sun. It was beginning to take its toll. The familiar throbbing in his head was starting again, too. Maybe it was simply sinus problems, the humidity making it impossible to feel any relief. Could that be the reason for his fever? For the nausea? For the damn throbbing.
He poured the tea, inhaling its therapeutic aroma and already feeling better. It was times like this when he felt a bit vulnerable, that the tea reminded him of his mother, his dear saintly mother. Hot tea and cookies had been her one indulgence, which she hid from her husband lest he take that away from her, too. The day she shared it with him, treating him to the whole ritual—the entire experience, including the secrecy—he felt an eternal bond. It had been their special treat, the
ir special time with each other. Perhaps that’s why it was still such a comfort to him. It had become a way to conjure up those few good memories from his past.
He checked the time and brought his cup of tea to the wooden table with the laptop computer. The computer had been an enormous splurge, beyond a guilty pleasure, but also a godsend. It had become his connection to the outside world, to civilization, oftentimes restoring his sanity with a press of a button. And always, there was someone in the village who, no matter what cost or inconvenience or magical skills, was able to get an Internet connection for him as long as there was a phone line close by. However, the dial-up speed was slow and the time frame to access it annoyingly short.
He waited patiently for the computer to boot up and then for it to go through its tedious process of trying to locate and make the Internet connection. He sipped his tea and sat back, listening to the rain. The computer prompt asked for his password and he punched it in. Then he sat back again, expecting to wait some more. The connection came up immediately.
“YOU’VE GOT MAIL,” the computerized voice told him and it brought a sense of comfort almost as strong as the tea. His friend from the States, it had to be. It was the only person he had given out his e-mail address to. Although they had exchanged very little personal information about each other, they had shared some wonderful in-depth discussions on current events and moral quandaries. It was the closest to a friend that he had had in years…actually, maybe ever.
He clicked on New Mail. Yes, it was his friend, the clever e-mail tag always making him smile: [email protected].
There were never greetings, a detail he appreciated, not wanting to waste time on pleasantries that were no longer necessary. This message contained two separate links that looked like news articles. It was something they did quite frequently, drawing each other’s attention to particular events and starting a whole new discussion. At the end of the message his friend simply wrote: YOU MAY BE NEXT. Probably another attempt at humor; he liked his friend’s dry sense of humor, their occasional exchange of playful barbs.
