The Assassins Gallery - [Dr Mikhal Lammeck 01]

by David L. Robbins

  Dag sipped the coffee and made a sour face. Lammeck shrugged, having done his duty. Dag pointed at the box.

  “No surprises in there, Professor. The pistol—”

  “—a .32 revolver, judging from the wound.”

  Dag paused, impressed.

  “And?”

  “The serial number has been filed off.”

  “Go on.”

  “The knife is probably just a big kitchen carver. No blood on the handle, only on the blade.”

  “Give the Professor a kewpie doll.”

  Dag set his mug on the counter. He reached in his coat for a pair of cotton gloves. He tossed them to the sofa. Lammeck put them on, then dug into the box.

  First, he lifted the pistol, a nickel-plated four-inch-barrel Smith & Wesson .32 revolver. The serial number had been obliterated. He broke out the emptied six-shot cylinder. Five unspent round-nose lead cartridges rolled in the bottom of the box.

  He set the pistol aside and took up the knife. It was nothing more than a kitchen blade, brand name Wüsthof, an old German cutler. Lammeck handled it carefully, to check the sharpness and study the rusty bloodstains on the steel. As he’d guessed, the handle was unblemished.

  He returned the knife to the cardboard box, then peeled off the gloves. “What else have you got to show me?”

  “I’m keeping the best for the end.”

  Lammeck grimaced. His peevishness returned. Dag must have spotted this, because he spoke quickly.

  “You did real good in there with the bodies, Professor. But don’t get cranky on me. I just want to see what you make of all the odds and ends first, before I show you the last piece. You’ve got the best mind I’ve ever seen for this sort of thing. You know, I’ve read every paper you ever published.”

  This disarmed Lammeck. “Really?”

  “I had to. And in three days. I had to convince my boss to let me go to Scotland to get you. I wrote a nice report on you, real flattering.”

  “Because you don’t think we have a run-of-the-mill domestic murder here in little nowhere Newburyport, do you? Husband-catches-wife-with-lover sort of thing. Kills self in despair and guilt.”

  “Nope.”

  “You believe we have an assassination attempt brewing. Starting on that beach.”

  “I do indeed.”

  “Who do you think is going to be assassinated?”

  Dag picked up the box. “Who do you think?” he challenged.

  Lammeck stood from the sofa. “I’ll meet you at the car. Let’s head back to the beach and I’ll show you.”

  * * * *

  LAMMECK STOPPED BESIDE THE rectangle of yellow stakes pinned in the sand that signified the pickup truck. The afternoon had worn on and the wind had picked up. Tonight would be frosty, maybe a front moving in. He looked to the slate sky. Dag, bundled up, stared at him in the freezing breeze. Knowing his ex-student was growing impatient, Lammeck watched low clouds scud on the northerly gusts.

  “Alright,” he said.

  “About time,” Dag grumbled.

  “Let’s take this in the order of events.”

  “Go.”

  Lammeck pointed to the sand, at the front seat of the make-believe pickup.

  “First, Bonny was in the truck alone.”

  He paused, expecting Dag to say something like “Check,” or “How do you know?” But Dag kept silent, rubbing his hands in the cold.

  Lammeck continued: “The slashes in her forearms tell us she was the one holding the crowbar, not Otto. If they’d been in the car together, if Arnold Chapman had come up to them threatening with a knife, Otto would have grabbed it, not Bonny. Those cuts were to make her drop the crowbar. Otto was up the beach somewhere, doing his job walking the shore. Bonny stayed behind. It doesn’t matter why.”

  Lammeck moved to the front of the yellow stakes.

  “She was surprised by an intruder. Someone she didn’t trust, so she grabbed the crowbar out of the truck and walked up here.”

  Dag added, “Someone she didn’t trust, or maybe didn’t recognize.”

  “Exactly. Bonny got out of the truck with the crowbar and moved in front of it. Here. Let’s assume that was because the headlamps were on. If it had been her husband coming up to the truck in the dark, I don’t think she would have grabbed a weapon before she got out to talk to him. Besides, if Arnold was planning on murdering her, I think he would have attacked her as soon as she got out of the truck, right here on the driver’s side. Or she might have run away. But Bonny had time and a reason to grab the crowbar and move in front of the headlights, to see who she was talking to. And it wasn’t Arnold.”

  Dag nodded.

  “Okay. So we can figure that whoever did kill Bonny, she saw him coming.” Again, Lammeck aimed his finger at the sand. “I’m going to guess this is where she got knifed, because this is where she dropped the crowbar. As far as we can tell, no one got hit with it, right?”

  Lammeck didn’t wait for an answer, but stalked to the next set of stakes, the ones depicting Bonny’s corpse, exposed by the receding tide. Dag followed.

  “Bonny takes off, cut bad, scared out of her wits. She’s bleeding, can barely defend herself. The killer catches her by the water, knocks her down, and strangles her.”

  “Where’s Otto?”

  “He shows up sometime during the fight with Bonny. Or the killer waited for him afterward, then ambushed him when he came back this way. My guess is Otto got back here during the fight, because of the cut on his Achilles tendon.”

  Lammeck left Bonny’s markers and trod over to Otto’s large yellow silhouette.

  “Otto pulled the killer off Bonny and knocked him over. Otto was a big guy. My guess is the killer lashed out while on the sand and brought Otto down with that slice on the leg. Then he finished him off with a stab to the chest.”

  Dag said, “Otto didn’t die right off.”

  “No. That’s another thing that tells us Otto got back before Bonny was killed. He tried to get up off his back to defend her.”

  “Tough guy,” Dag mused. “Fucking shame.”

  Lammeck shook his head. “He didn’t stand a chance. That’s why we know it wasn’t the husband.”

  “I’m with you all the way, Professor. Keep going.”

  “Did you see those wounds? Let’s do Bonny first. Come here.”

  Dag stepped up to Lammeck.

  “Make like you have a crowbar.”

  Dag lifted his hands in the manner of a baseball player gripping a bat.

  “Try to hit me.”

  Nimbly, Lammeck ducked Dag’s two-handed swing. With his right hand, he thrust the outer edge of his palm up against Dag’s forearm, then hacked downward. In a flash, he did the same to Dag’s other forearm passing overhead.

  Dag opened both hands, as though they’d been rendered useless.

  “That blade you showed me at the police station. That thing didn’t make those cuts on Bonny. That was a single-edged kitchen knife. What cut the insides of her arms was a two-sided dagger. Forehand, backhand. Instantly, before Bonny even knew what hit her. That’s why the crowbar was dropped in front of the truck.” Lammeck mimed the motion again for Dag, sweeping down once in the air, then, reversing direction, up and down again. “Just like that. Can’t do it with a kitchen blade.”

  Dag took this in. Lammeck didn’t slow.

  “Also, I find it hard to believe that little Arnold Chapman could make the move I just did. That was special, years of training. Kali, Escrima, Amis de Mano, maybe Balisong. I learned it from an old Brit named Fairbairn before the OSS grabbed him as a Weapons teacher.”

  “What are you telling me? This is some kind of ninja shit?”

  “I wouldn’t have put it in those terms, but yes, Dag. Ninja shit. Not the sort of thing you expect from little Arnold.”

  The look on Dag’s face told Lammeck that now he had left the trail Dag had sniffed out.

  “Now let’s take Otto’s wounds. The cut across the Achilles tendon was the perf
ect disabling blow. A jealous, crazy husband who’s just been knocked on his butt maybe hacks away in the air, cutting up the guy’s leg. Maybe he scrambles to his feet and keeps fighting. But he does not come up with one clean, specialized move to bring a larger opponent down. And he does not dispatch that opponent with a single drive deep into the heart. That kind of finish requires a brutal sort of calm, and that only comes from training. I assume Arnold was not a commando.”

  “No.”

  “Your killer was.”

  Dag chewed on this. Lammeck could see he agreed. Dag tossed out one more obstacle.

  “The husband. He shot himself, Professor. No doubt about it. And a big-ass knife was in his sink, with blood on it.”

  “I haven’t figured out how Arnold managed to pull the trigger. It’ll come to me. But the knife? Like I said, it was a single-edged Wüsthof, with blood only on the tang. My guess is the killer wiped it in Bonny’s and Otto’s wounds after the fact, then took it to Arnold’s house. If that knife was the actual murder weapon, there’d be blood on the haft as well. The murderer made four cuts in two people, all deep. In a hand-to-hand struggle, there would’ve been blood spraying everywhere, especially from Bonny getting strangled with deep gashes in both arms. The killer would certainly have gotten blood on his hands. If he took the time to clean the handle, he would have cleaned off the blade, too. Doesn’t make sense to do it any other way. And why choke Bonny instead of knife her and just finish her off? He’d already cut her twice.”

  “You tell me, Professor.”

  “Because the blade was still in Otto. But the cops didn’t find that kitchen knife stuck in Otto’s chest, did they?”

  “No.”

  “Then the kitchen knife is a plant.”

  “So you’re saying...”

  “Three things. One, our killer is extremely good. Trained. Smart. Fast. Two, he makes mistakes.”

  “And three?”

  “There’s a knife missing.”

  Dag grinned. Turning to walk from the beach, he jerked his chin for Lammeck to follow.

  “No there isn’t.”

  * * * *

  A FRESH POT OF coffee simmered on the hot plate. Lammeck tried another cup while he waited for Dag. This sample was no more palatable than the last.

  “I need sleep,” he mumbled, emptying the mug into the sink.

  He put his feet up on the police station sofa and lay back. Just as he dozed off, Dag entered, startling Lammeck awake by setting a box on his chest.

  “You can go to sleep that fast?” Dag asked.

  Lammeck sat up, grabbing the box so that it didn’t fall. Again the cardboard was labeled evidence: do not remove!

  “It’s a skill you learn as a teacher. I can do that and lecture.”

  “Stay awake long enough to figure this one out for me, will ya, Professor? Here.”

  Again Dag tossed Lammeck a pair of cotton gloves. Lammeck tugged them on.

  “Is this my surprise?”

  Dag poured himself more coffee. This time, Lammeck did not warn him off.

  “There are three reasons I brought you back from Scotland, Professor. To help me figure out the crime scenes on the beach and to confirm some ideas I had. Consider that halfway done. Arnold is still a mystery.”

  “It’ll come to me.”

  “I’m sure it will. What’s in this box is the second reason. You’re the only person I know who can untangle this one.”

  “The knife?”

  Dag waved his coffee at the box. “Take a look.”

  Lammeck peeled back the flaps. He caught his breath and realized he’d gasped loud enough for Dag to hear.

  He reached a gloved hand in to take up the knife. Lifting it into the light, he thrilled to the feel of it. Weight and balance, perfect. Even the blood dried on the blade and in the crevices of the handle made it ideal. He put both hands beneath the knife and held it across his white palms for Dag to see.

  “You don’t know what this is, do you?” he asked. Dag slurped the bad coffee, reflecting none of Lammeck’s awe.

  “Nope.”

  “This is an Assassin’s dagger.”

  Dag shrugged. “Well, I knew that. I mean, it’s got blood all over it.”

  “No, I mean with a capital A. Assassins. As in the twelfth-century Middle Eastern cult that fought the Templars in the Crusades. This is one of their knives.”

  The Secret Service man put his coffee on the counter and sat on the sofa next to Lammeck.

  “You’re kidding. How old is that thing?”

  Lammeck handled the dagger, shifting it to look closer.

  “I can’t be sure. But it’s an exact specimen. It could be a replica, though I doubt it. The tang looks like Damascus steel. Diamond-shaped in cross-section down to the point. Ornate brass cap and hilt. Engraved onyx grip. Absolutely perfect weight distribution. Someone who knows what they’re doing could throw this knife and bury it in your neck from thirty paces. I could.”

  Dag snorted, apparently thinking Lammeck was kidding.

  Whether it was eight hundred years old or just a remarkable reproduction, the knife contained a marvelous lethality. Lammeck was convinced an analysis of the brass and steel would prove it a bona fide antiquity. But authentication would have to come later. For now, this knife was evidence. It was going nowhere beyond a cardboard box and a police station storeroom. Holding the razor-sharp dagger, Lammeck in his imagination invested it with a millennium of intrigue and murder. The thing tingled in his hands.

  “Where’d the cops find this?”

  “You remember Otto, the big guy?”

  “Sure.”

  “He must’ve yanked this out of his chest just before he croaked. Probably he threw it away. Then...”

  “He crawled over it. He was lying on top of it.”

  “Yep. Ain’t that something?”

  Lammeck thought back to the pictures of the crime scene: Dying Otto had slithered backward across the sand. The killer went after Bonny next. He finished choking the woman by the water, then returned to Otto to retrieve the knife. But it had vanished.

  The tire tracks of the pickup showed the truck had been shimmied to the left, to shine headlights across the corpse. So the killer had gone to the truck to light up Otto’s body, looking.

  He hadn’t looked under Otto.

  History. Lammeck grinned. History does this when she’s displeased, little things to give an edge against the killers. Lammeck felt a thrill at this close brush with the forces he’d spent a lifetime studying.

  “What do the local cops make of it?”

  “Nothing. Arnold was a collector of stuff—stamps, comics, baseball cards and whatnot. They figure he had this antique knife because it was interesting and maybe valuable. Everyone knew Bonny hated his collections. They reckon Arnold used it on her out of spite, dropped it, then did Otto with the kitchen knife. Poor Arnold.”

  Lammeck did not pause for poor, unfairly blamed Arnold. They’d square his name later if they figured this mystery out.

  “Look here. Carved into the handle. This is onyx.”

  Lammeck put fingers gingerly beneath the blade, careful not to rub away any of Otto’s and Bonny’s blood.

  He pointed into the onyx grip, delicately carved with a bas-relief of little murders. Many of the tiny scenarios were scabbed by clots of dried blood, but the theme of the carvings was clear: One man drove a blade into another. In the center of the haft, with the cameos of stabbings surrounding it, was an emblem:

  Lammeck touched a gloved finger to the symbol. “This,” he said, eyeing Dag for a reaction, “is the key.”

  “What is it?”

  “The symbol of the Assassins. It’s an offshoot on the Freemasons’ emblem, sort of a compass and square piercing a heart.”

  Dag leaned to examine the knife more closely. Lammeck held it motionless, then told him, “Put it away, before it gets missed.”

  Dag disappeared with the box. Lammeck celebrated by pouring another cup of the a
wful coffee and making himself drink. The coffee helped buoy his flagging energy to match his excitement.