All Cry Chaos

by Leonard Rosen

  The brutality of that question jolted Poincaré. The answer mattered, but he would have found his way to it later, more gently. Rainier wept at the suggestion she was a bitter, jilted lover bent on revenge. When she finally composed herself enough to speak, she ignored De Vries and addressed Poincaré: "You saw his body?"

  "I did."

  "Perhaps you need me to iden—"

  Poincaré declined. "There can be no mistake."

  He did not have the heart to add that only a forensics lab could at this point pin a name to that disaster. He leaned forward, hands clasped, and regarded the woman. It was time for another, patient foray; but Paolo was restless for answers and Poincaré could not maneuver to block a blundering question: "Have you ever worked with explosives, Miss Rainier?"

  The interview, barely begun, was over; but still Paolo continued: "We're searching for chemical residues," he said over a fresh paroxysm of tears. "We need your permission. So if there's nothing to hide . . ."

  Rainier waved a hand between sobs, as if to say Get on with your damned business and get out, then signed a document that De Vries placed before her. De Vries snapped on latex gloves and pulled metal tongs from her gym bag, along with a supply of thin cotton discs. Using the tongs, she took a succession of discs and wiped each across a different surface in the room, including Rainier's handbag and luggage. She then dropped the discs into separate evidence bags, carefully labeling each. Paolo, meanwhile, explored the apartment, stepping into and out of view as he searched the bedroom and bathroom.

  For the ten minutes they were occupied, Rainier had settled into a state of quiescent despair. Poincaré had seen some killers weep with remorse and some with relief at having finally done the deed. Others wept for not having killed sooner. At this point, he did not understand Rainier's grief, but it was real enough that he fought an urge to comfort her, an absurdity given the circumstance. If she had killed for love, as Paolo and Gisele suspected, then welcome, he thought, to the tangled history of the human heart. But Poincaré doubted the bombing could be explained so easily.

  "I'm done," De Vries announced. Ludovici emerged from the bedroom at the same moment, sliding an evidence bag into his jacket. As Poincaré stood to leave, he turned to Rainier, who looked at him from across the coffee table as if across a freshly dug grave.

  "I'm sorry to have delivered this news, Miss Rainier."

  Five seconds, ten, would have been a decent enough interval before a final, necessary question. De Vries did not grant even that courtesy because for her the jugular was simply another vein. "How long will you be in Amsterdam, Miss Rainier?"

  The woman's eyes wandered back to the curtains.

  "Your schedule," insisted Ludovici.

  "Tomorrow. I leave for Brussels tomorrow."

  "Stay the weekend," Paolo suggested, scribbling something into a notebook as casually as if he were writing a parking ticket. "We might have additional questions. If you have other plans, cancel them—with all due respect, of course."

  "What he means," Poincaré added quickly, "is that questions are all we have at this point, and we'd like to know where you—or anyone remotely connected to the case—can be found. It would be helpful."

  "I did not kill James."

  "No doubt the tests will confirm this. But someone did. We must do our job."

  Unexpectedly, she reached for a large leather bag at the end of the couch, prompting Ludovici to slide a hand inside his jacket. Poincaré saw these movements unfold as if the two moved across a dance floor toward the other, in slow motion. He prayed Rainier would not be so foolish. If Paolo was rash in many respects, in the matter of firearms he practiced the strictest discipline. From close quarters to a thousand meters, he was the finest marksman Poincaré knew. Paolo kept his hand hidden and watched closely. If she emerged with a gun, he would shoot and Rainier would lose a finger or a hand.

  She produced a calendar.

  "I can stay," she announced. "I'll rearrange a meeting. I want to help."

  Poincaré exhaled. Then, without explanation, Rainier turned to him and asked a question with her eyes as if she had lost something that only he could help her find. So frank, so unexpected was the query that she altogether froze him for an instant—one eye, behind those glasses, oddly larger than the other. Rainier studied him, and he studied her: the oval face and gray, almond eyes; the long, subtly sloping nose; the thin lips; the wisps of wheat-colored hair that framed so much turbulence. She was a slender ghost annihilated by exhaustion and some unspoken loss. She would not avert her gaze, and he looked more deeply.

  Poincaré did not see a killer, but he did wonder how Rainier had managed to talk with them at all. No one could speak to another's grief; but Fenster had once been her fiancé, the emotional pivot of her life. If her grief was real at the news of his death, her shock that he had been murdered was not. That shock had registered earlier, Poincaré sensed, before their arrival—which explained why, when she first opened the door, he felt as if he had stumbled into the closing act of a largely completed tragedy. Before Gisele had banged on that hotel door, before he had broached sad news and studied her reaction, the explosion at the Ambassade had already desolated this woman.

  In a moment it was over, this silent, puzzling interview of the interviewer. Rainier stood to see them leave, apparently having settled something for herself and having asked something of Poincaré— though what that might be he hadn't a clue.

  CHAPTER 6

  Paolo," he said, reaching for a splinter of brick that had blown across the canal. Dozens of windows on the Ravensplein side of the Herengracht had shattered in the explosion, and property damage would be in the millions—a nightmare of insurance claims. "A scissors sometimes works better than a hand grenade."

  Ludovici was just then tucking away his cell phone. "What's that, Henri?"

  Poincaré reconsidered. With the WTO conference beginning the next day, lessons on subtlety could wait. He did not suppose he would be working with De Vries again, so correcting her for laying open Rainier's throat made little sense. But Paolo would need to learn. This time his protégé's rush to judgment had merely compromised an interview. One day it might get him killed. "I said the residues will come back negative. She didn't kill Fenster."

  They approached a stone bridge that would deposit them a short distance from the Ambassade. Not one to mince words, Ludovici regarded the tree limbs swaying in the evening breeze and said, evenly: "And you deduced all this from her eyes? What brand of science went on back there?"

  "It wasn't science, Paolo."

  "Then tell me where to sign up for the course on reading souls. Jesus Christ, Henri—the woman knows more than she's saying. You deny that?"

  "I don't. But this doesn't make her a murderer."

  "We should arrest her."

  "If the tests come back positive, we will. Gisele, can we get the results tonight?"

  Across the canal, generators powered a bank of lamps positioned around the Ambassade, where workers swarmed over the remaining debris like beetles over a carcass. Poincaré watched them shovel shattered brick and glass onto a barge that would be floated down the canal and dumped in the North Sea. Tow trucks had already hauled away ruined cars, and the street would be cleared by the morning rush.

  "If the lab bumps our evidence to the head of the line, we'll get the results. A big if," she added.

  Ludovici produced two plastic bags from a pocket, one with a toothbrush and the other with strands of hair the color of ripened wheat. "While you're at it, ask them to run these."

  Poincaré stopped.

  "What?" said Paolo.

  "When did you start working for Joseph Stalin?"

  Paolo spun on his heels. "You're joking."

  "I'm not."

  "Did you see the woman?" With an exaggerated motion, he re-created the sweep of Rainier's arm that gave them permission to proceed with their search. "She clearly meant search it all, Henri, every room. She signed the paper."

  "Und
er duress."

  "Like hell. We could have ransacked the place and been legal."

  "The document limited our search to chemical residues, not DNA. Toss it."

  "What?"

  "I said toss it."

  Ludovici appealed to De Vries, who took a moment to unclip her hair before answering. "Settle it with pistols," she suggested. And then, to Ludovici: "He's right, you know. Rainier signed for a residue check. Your evidence won't stand in a Dutch court. Maybe North Korean. Why don't we petition for a change of venue?"

  Ludovici walked a short distance, bellowing to no one in particular: "Frigging literalists!" To Poincaré he said: "You know, this is the reason bad guys win—because scrupulous pricks like you play by the rules."

  Poincaré was having none of it. "This is not difficult, Paolo. You searched beneath her bed. And when you didn't see a box labeled ammonium perchlorate, big surprise, you collected her DNA. You went fishing."

  "Correct. I fish, then eat. Do you know of a better way to survive?"

  "I'm in the habit of establishing facts before arresting people. Or is this too old school for your tastes?"

  Ludovici grinned.

  "Very funny. Did you ever hear of Dmitri Kouric—maybe three or four years ago? He killed a dozen people in four countries with his bare hands, then ripped apart their bodies. A sociopath of the most twisted sort. Fingers, bits of intestines, what have you were showing up in random mailboxes. We built an airtight case and then watched him walk free because of tainted evidence. Because of an overzealous agent. That," said Poincaré, pointing, "is tainted evidence."

  "I remember the man. A month later a truck ran him down in Budapest. What a coincidence, Henri. I don't believe they ever found the driver."

  Poincaré said nothing.

  "I thought so. We . . . what's the word I want, we improvise to satisfy the demands of common sense. This is common sense. The woman knows something, and her DNA will prove useful later. Don't worry," he added. "I won't hesitate to say I told you so."

  "If you want her DNA, get a warrant."

  "Which takes time."

  "Which is why we agreed, you included, to interview her tonight. We went through this before we ever left for the Ravensplein. Remember—pros and cons, warrant, no warrant? We talked it through, Paolo, and still you went your own way. You pushed her too hard and blew the interview. Not even dogs piss where they sleep."

  "Fine!" Ludovici approached a trash barrel, holding the plastic bags away from his body in a grand gesture. He might as well have been carrying radioactive waste. "You're still angry about the coffee stain, aren't you? I said I'd pay for the dry cleaning."

  At the Ambassade, Poincaré looked up at what used to be a room, now ripped from the building as if with a pair of pliers. At his feet, an oblong tracing of chalk marked where one of Fenster's legs had landed. He saw that outline and knew he would take the case—a decision that had less to do with receiving an official assignment from Interpol than with certain tumblers clicking into place, privately. The formal requirements would have to be met, of course: a crime the commission of which and the solution to which crossed national frontiers. But no case began for Poincaré until its details moved him. He recalled his meeting with Banović that morning and, two years earlier, his visit to a killing field in Bosnia where the tumblers had also clicked. The burnt shell of a man met that standard, the murder an assault on decency itself.

  No one deserved to die bent over a sink.

  CHAPTER 7

  In the three days post-explosion, neither the Dutch police nor Poincaré's team had linked Fenster's death to the WTO meetings, reason enough for the Dutch to declare the conference a success. The trade ministers met behind closed doors without incident and emerged with policy initiatives wrapped in grand statements, the preamble to which made its way into a press release:

  The economic health of farmers in the Sudan is tied to the fate of weavers in Colombia, to computer programmers in India and the United States, and to consumers everywhere. Today the speed of communications, travel, and transport has created a single economic tide that will lift all or inundate all. With or without our guidance, the world economy is converging; and we, the representatives of both developed and developing nations, resolve to direct this convergence to our mutual benefit.

  Fenster merited no mention in the conference proceedings, his spot on the program taken at the last minute, unannounced, by a speaker from a local university who lectured on the impact of global warming on corporate profits. Almost before his eyes, Poincaré watched public memory of the bombing erased. The Ambassade received speedy satisfaction on an insurance claim and was opened for business after two intensive days of cleanup and a repair to its major systems. By the end of the conference, workmen had repainted the facade and begun building out the demolished room beneath a cover of heavy industrial sheeting. News coverage of the bombing quickly slipped from the front page to a middle section of the Amsterdam daily, by Sunday vanishing altogether. Within twenty-four hours the "bombing" had become, less ominously, an "explosion." For their part, the Dutch police had come to regard Fenster's death as an isolated case fomented by outside interests. An attack made on an obscure mathematician did not threaten the Netherlands proper, relieving the security services of any need to mount a serious inquiry. Poincaré understood. Fenster's killing worried local authorities less than would a purse-snatching ring that disrupted the tourist trade.

  By Sunday afternoon, the medical examiner had confirmed that the deceased was, indeed, the mathematician from Harvard. Annette Günter slid a pair of x-rays onto a wall screen and pointed. "Without question we're looking at the same mouth, Henri. Do you see the fillings at numbers 3, 11, and 14? And this root canal?" She used a grease pencil to mark areas of interest. "Notice also the boney protuberances on both sides of the mandibular jaw. Very distinctive. The image on the left was e-mailed to us by Fenster's dentists in Boston—I believe it was the school of dentistry at Harvard. Digital records. The whole field is moving in this direction, you know. These fillings were done by different people, some with finer technique than others. This second image I developed myself yesterday afternoon. I trust you appreciate the match."

  It was the first time Poincaré had met with the medical examiner away from the crime scene. Annette Günter was a matronly woman his age, built for endurance on a stocky, double-chinned and squarish frame that suggested Winston Churchill with curls. Had he not known her profession and met her at the counter of a cheese shop, or at a party, he would never have guessed she spent the better part of each day elbow deep in viscera. She was naturally too pleasant to have turned world-weary, a malady common to coroners. Günter impressed him as a sort of diligently pleasant neighbor who organizes blood drives and knits booties at birth announcements. By day she just happened to keep the company of corpses. "There can be no doubt about identification," she concluded. "Look at these." She held before him two images, a pairing of dark, vertical columns interrupted by bands of bright, horizontal strips.

  Even to Poincaré's untrained eye, the match was perfect.

  "The state crime lab in Massachusetts ran an analysis of dried urine from the rim of the commode in Fenster's apartment and an unwashed coffee cup from his office. Hair from a comb, with some follicles intact, rounded out the sample. Those three specimens had a single DNA signature, and as a unit they're identical to the analysis we ran off a sample of the victim's thigh bone. And then we have the fingerprints from Fenster's office and apartment in Boston, which match the prints we developed at the crime scene. He's your man," she said, pointing to a cardboard box in the corner of her office. The box was large enough to hold a soccer ball and was lined with heavy plastic sheeting folded over its top edges and covered firmly with a lid.

  It took Poincaré a moment to register her meaning. "You cremated him?"

  "He was three-quarters there anyway. We're shipping the remains tomorrow. And I'm going home because I promised my husband a pot roast. If I don
't get started within the hour . . ." She checked her watch, then reached into a desk drawer for a tin of peppermints.

  "By whose authority?"

  His question edged toward accusation, a mistake. Günter carefully placed two mints on the tip of her tongue and then slid the tin across her desk, where they sat untouched. "A woman named Madeleine Rainier."

  Poincaré adjusted his tie, the depths of his miscalculation clear. "She's a possible suspect," he said.

  Günter was not impressed. "You know, I once had a case in which three different parties made a claim on a suicide. One insisted on cremation. One demanded embalming. The other said, 'Let the bastard rot.' Which is to say it's a waste of my precious time standing between a corpse and people fighting over it. No one told me not to proceed as usual. This isn't a cemetery, you know. When I complete my work, I move the bodies out like that." She snapped her fingers. "But I see you're upset, so . . ." She grabbed a file from a stack on her desk and flipped through papers and photographs until she found a page and paused over it. She slid the entire file across the desk. "Fairly straightforward, I'd say. It's not as if we did anything illegal, Henri."