by Blake Banner
“No. Especially if he has a big kind of Mexican mustache.”
“Now are you done?”
“No. And hairy armpits. I think that could be damaging to the inner harmony of our inner relationship.”
“Now?”
“Yeah.”
“Is there anything you are not sharing with me besides your inner asshole?”
“No, seriously, Dehan. I don’t think this is a serial killer, but I do think that we should cover that base and explore the possibility of other decapitated bodies.”
“Why?”
I chuckled. “You mean what do I hope to find?”
“Yes, OK, the more closed question. What do you hope to find in such a search?”
I grinned at her. “Decapitated bodies.”
“You are such a pain…”
“Do you mean, what would prompt me to search for further decapitated bodies?”
She didn’t answer. She just stared out the window at the passing landscape. Neither of us spoke for about half an hour. Then she suddenly said, “Yes! Fine! That’s what I meant! What would prompt you to search for further decapitated bodies?”
I offered her my most innocent face and shook my head. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. Call it a hunch.” Then I sighed and shrugged. “There are a couple of things I don’t get, Dehan. None of the suspects is quite satisfactory. There is always something that is not quite right. If Alornerk was so driven and so passionate about Helena that he was prepared to set up this elaborate murder, and not leave a trace, why the hell did he then give up on her without a fight? And the same goes for Lenny. It takes huge motivation do commit a murder like this. Yet, immediately after the killing, our murderer vanishes into thin air.”
“OK, I get that, but how does that lead you to more bodies?”
“It doesn’t, exactly, but, to use your terminology, I have a feeling I can’t shake of an observer. It may well be somebody we have already spoken to, one of our suspects, or somebody else. All I know is that this murder was put together in a very conscious way, and once it was done, the killer just seems to have vanished, walked away. That doesn’t make sense. To my mind, the killer should either have made an attempt to take Helena for himself, or herself, or he should have killed again. So I want to look for…” I searched for the word. “I want to look for the killer’s footprints, some evidence of their presence. It may be a wild goose chase, but it is one more thing we can do to try and find evidence of his or her presence.”
She nodded. “OK, I hear you, that does actually make sense.”
“It’s like, you know you read in books that somebody is walking along a dark road and they can feel somebody’s eyes watching them. It’s fanciful, stupid, but I can feel this person’s presence, as though they are watching us conducting this investigation, and I keep going through our suspects, looking at each one, examining them in my mind, and each time I think, ‘No, not him,’ or ‘No, not her,’ I get this feeling that I have missed something.”
“I never heard you talk like that before.”
“Maybe you’re rubbing off on me.”
“You could do worse.”
“No argument from me. I’d lay money though, Dehan, that the killer is right there, among our group, watching us.”
“Don’t forget we still have the list of other pupils, Stone. We have to go through them.”
I nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I know.”
ELEVEN
Next morning the deputy inspector agreed to give us a couple of officers to work methodically through murders reported in Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut and New York during the period 2014 to 2016, in which the victim was badly mutilated and in particular where decapitation was involved.
While they set to on their task, we got hold of the telephone records for Penelope, Connors Communication and Grant Shaw, for the month of October, 2014. As it turned out, we did not need to request them because the original investigating detective had already done that and they were in the file.
I sighed at the discovery and shook my head at Dehan. “When are you going to start thoroughly digesting the file before we start our investigation, Dehan?”
“When you start setting good examples for me, Sensei.”
She made a second copy at the photocopier, dropped a wad of papers in front of me and we set about examining them.
The first thing we looked for was the call Jack received on Thursday, October 7th, at around one PM. It wasn’t there on his office phone, but it was there on his cell. It came through at twelve fifty. The only problem was, it wasn’t Penelope’s number. It was a number I was not familiar with.
I looked at Dehan across the desk. “He got the call on his cell at ten minutes before one, but it wasn’t from her.”
She nodded. “I’m looking at it, but go back a bit. This number calls him on a regular basis. The previous evening at six PM. The previous morning at eleven and then again at one. The day before that it called him… one, two… four times. And the day before…” She leafed through several pages. “Every damn day.”
I turned over a couple of pages to Sunday and Saturday. “Weekends too.”
We stared at each other a moment. She said, “He can’t have had two women going at that level of intensity…”
I was shaking my head, reading her thoughts. “But it’s not two, because, where are her calls?”
I reached for her records and Dehan did the same. “Son of a gun.”
I nodded. “It’s her. She changed her damned number after he was killed.”
Dehan was on her phone. I stood and went to look out the window, trying to think. I could hear Dehan’s voice behind me. “…Detective Carmen Dehan, NYPD, I have an inquiry… No it doesn’t require a court order. I just need to know about a number…” She recited Penelope’s current number. “It’s registered to a Penelope Peach. I need to know when she acquired the number…” She waited a moment, then said, “Thanks,” and hung up.
I turned to face her.
“Friday, October 8th. Whatever else she is, she ain’t smart.”
“You got that right. Listen, I’m going to talk to her. I want to know why she lied about calling him, what they talked about and what happened after she called. I might bring her in…”
She was frowning at me. “Stone, this is very incriminating. We need to interrogate her.”
“I know, but let me talk to her first, Dehan. Trust me, we are still missing something here.”
Her eyes narrowed to slits. “And what am I doing while you’re not interrogating Penelope Peach?”
“Look for the body—the bodies.”
“That’s stupid. I should go with you.”
“Will you trust me? I’ll be back in an hour and half, two at the most.”
She turned away. “Of course I trust you. I just think you’re wrong.”
“That’s fine. I’ll see you in a while.”
I took a small detour to St Lawrence Avenue before taking the Bronx River Parkway north to pick up the I-95 as far as the George Washington Bridge, before turning south, down along the Hudson as far as Penelope’s apartment on Riverside Drive, opposite the tennis courts.
All the way, I was running Dehan’s theory through my head. She would drive over first, be waiting for him, then call him, insist he comes down. He would get in the car, they would drive to her apartment. Then, according to Dehan’s theory, she would induce him to get into the bath, no doubt with a bottle of champagne, and that was where it began to unravel.
There was, at every step of this case, something that was missing. The presence of ketamine in his blood confused me too. To be instantly effective, it would have to be applied with a hypodermic, and however hard I tried, I could not visualize the scene where the ketamine was applied that way. It just didn’t ring true with Penelope or what I knew of Jack.
I parked on West 97th, made my way through the dappled shade to her apartment block and showed the guy on the desk my badge.
“
Is Ms. Peach at home?”
“Yes, Detective. She hasn’t come down yet today. Shall I announce you?”
I shook my head. “No.”
I rode the elevator to the ninth floor, examining the star-shaped patterns of inlaid wood on the floor, and myself in the mirror, wondering if I was getting my first gray hairs on my temples. The jury was still out when the elevator stopped and the doors slid back.
I stepped out into a red-carpeted passage that ran right to left, with brass lamps bolted to the walls. Two other passages branched off at right angles, one on my right and one on my left. Through them, sunlight made angular patterns on the floors and the walls. The apartment doors were walnut with walnut frames. I found her halfway down on the left and rang the bell.
There was a long silence. I was about to ring again when the door opened and Penelope stood staring up at me.
“John… What are you doing here? Where is Carmen?”
“Are you alone?”
“I…” She frowned. “Yes, I am. Why?”
“Can I come in?”
She paused, then nodded. “Of course.” She stood back.
I stepped in and she closed the door. She smiled without feeling and touched her hair, which was uncombed. She was wearing a white satin robe. She should have looked stunning, but her skin was pale and pasty and I wondered if she was hung over.
“I’m not long up,” she said, as though answering a question I hadn’t asked. “I’m making coffee. You want some?”
“Sure.”
I followed her through a modern, comfortable living room to a bright, spacious kitchen with a breakfast bar. There she had a glass jug that was slowly filling with thin coffee from a filter. She took two cups from a cupboard. Her smile was nervous.
“Is this a social call? Should I go and put make up on?”
“No. I’d prefer to see the real you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means I need you to stop lying.” She filled a cup and handed it to me. I took it but I didn’t drink from it. “My partner is mad at me. She thought we should just come and haul your ass into the station and charge you.”
Her pallor became waxy. “Why?”
“That’s what tends to happen when you lie to the cops, Penelope.”
“What lie…?”
I smiled. “You mean there is more than one?”
“No, I mean…” She shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. And I’ll go further. You have been involved in a pattern of deception since before Jack was killed. Now, my partner thinks that is powerful circumstantial evidence that you killed Jack. I think she may be right, but there are still things I don’t understand. So you need to start persuading me that it wasn’t you who killed him. You can do that by telling the truth.”
“That’s insane.”
“Is it?” I sipped the coffee. It was weak and unsatisfying. “Why did you change your telephone number the day after he was killed?”
She closed her eyes, swore under her breath and ran her fingers through her hair. She walked away from me. I followed her back through the living room and out onto a terrace overlooking the gardens along the river. She had a table out there and a couple of chairs. She put her cup there and sat. I put mine opposite.
“Don’t start dreaming up more lies, Penelope. You’re a bad liar and the more you lie, the more you confirm our suspicions about you. You need to start coming clean and you need to start now.”
“I was in a panic. I had just discovered that Jack was dead. Nobody knew about our affair and I wanted to distance myself from him. I changed my number and my phone company and demanded that my old company destroy my phone records. They said they couldn’t, but I kicked up a fuss and said I’d sue them, but I think they just humored me.” She put her hands over her face and sighed noisily. “I just didn’t want our affair to become public knowledge.”
“Was that all? Penny, if you are putting two and two together, it must have dawned on you by now.”
She turned to look at me and I could see she had not put two and two together and it had not dawned on her. I said:
“Your last phone call to him, Penny. You lied to us. You said you’d been out with Shaw, you were hung over and you did not call Jack until the Friday. But that was another lie. You called him minutes before he disappeared. That is a very serious lie. You must see how that makes you look.”
She dropped her hands into her lap and looked out over the rooftops. She had tears in her eyes. “You know I didn’t kill him, John.”
“No.”
“But you said…”
“I said there were things I didn’t understand.”
“What? I’ll explain anything you want. I’ll do anything you want. I can’t go to prison, John. I can’t…”
“Stop. What did you call him for?”
“I…” She hesitated. “I wanted to talk to him about Stephen. He was taking it badly that…”
“You’re lying. You really need to understand, Penelope. Every time you lie, you get one step closer to spending the rest of your life in prison.”
“No!”
“If I ask Stephen when you met him, what is he going to tell me?”
She sat bolt upright. “No! You must not talk to Stephen.”
“Wrong again. I agreed to keep him out of it as long as you cooperated. And all you have done so far is lie to me. Is that your idea of cooperation? Penelope, you don’t seem to realize just how hard I can make life for you, or how close you are to being charged with murder. Now get smart and start cooperating with me, because I am the only thing right now standing between you and a murder charge.”
“You’re not serious…”
“Wake up, Penelope! You were the last person to speak to him! Minutes before he died! And you lied about it! Wake up!”
“Oh, Jesus…”
“What did you call him for?”
“We…” Her lips moved but she couldn’t form the words.
“I spoke to Shaw. I know it wasn’t Stephen you were planning to marry. He told me what you told him. You believed you were going to marry Jack.”
She folded up, curled up into her own lap, with her face buried in her hands. She didn’t sob or shake, but after a moment I realized she was crying.
“Did you kill him?”
“No, of course not!” She sat up, wiping her eyes with her sleeves. “I loved him. I adored him!”
“That’s why people kill each other, Penelope.” It came out with more bitterness than I intended. “Because they adore each other!”
“Don’t be facetious. You have no idea how much I loved that man. It wasn’t possessive ownership. I just worshipped the ground he trod on. He was….”
She ran out of words. She spread her hands, shrugged and let them drop in her lap again. “He was a jerk, arrogant and obstinate. He knew it all and had all the answers. But nine-tenths of the time he was right, and when I had him alone with me, the barriers came down and the human being came out: funny, vulnerable, tender, thoughtful! My god, that man could be thoughtful. He was a bossy organizer, but driving that bossy organizer was a human being who wanted people to be happy.”
“He was cheating on his wife and lying to her, Penny.”
She stared me straight in the face. “Yeah, and that was wrong. But he was human, and fallible, and Jesus! You’ve met her. She is the cold fish to end all cold fish. She gave him nothing, and I gave him everything. He was happy when he was with me. He used to laugh. I have seen him on that couch in there, wiping his eyes, helpless with laughter. Nobody has seen that. He told me: with me, he learned to laugh. With me, he learned that there was more to life than achieving in business and making your workers happy.”
“So why didn’t he leave his wife?”
Again the direct, unwavering stare. “He did.”
“What?”
“That’s why I dumped Grant. You
think I’d be stupid enough to leave Grant without knowing that Jack had left Helena? A couple of days earlier, he told me he had spoken to Helena, that they were finished and that they were going to discuss a divorce settlement that was fair and would cause minimal disruption. He said she had taken it very well—no great surprise there, right?”
I scowled at her. “And your reaction to this was to go and screw the boyfriend you were breaking up with? You sneer at Helena for keeping her cool, while you go and cheat on your future husband before you’ve even married him? You’re mighty free with those rocks you keep hurling, Penelope, but I’d take care where you throw them.”
Her cheeks flushed red and her eyes were bright, but she looked away and said, “I deserve that. But I’m afraid that was another lie. I asked Grant to lie for me and he agreed. He was very good about it. With him, it was only ever really the sex. When Jack was killed, he was good to me and agreed to give me an alibi.”
“He didn’t do a great job.”
“I guess not.”
“So now you’re telling me you didn’t have break-up sex.”
“No, we didn’t. We spoke, I explained we were finished and I was marrying Jack, and I went home. Then I called Jack and told him it was done, I had broken up with Grant. He said he’d meet me for lunch, and that was the last I ever heard from him.”
“Where were you?”
“At home. When he never turned up, and it turned out he’d been killed, I panicked, put together an alibi with Grant, changed my phone and just tried to put as much distance between us as possible. But I was devastated. It took me a long time to recover. I had never loved anyone the way I grew to love him. Never… never loved anyone like that since.”
“So the white van was an invention too? A red herring to send the cops off chasing a ghost?”
She was already shaking her head before I had finished. “No, no that was all true. I did have the feeling I was being watched and I did see a white van a couple of times. That is absolutely true and I will swear to that.”
“Any reason I should believe you? All you’ve done since the first time we spoke to you is lie.”
She didn’t meet my eye this time. She just shook her head and said, “No, there is no reason you should believe me. But it’s the truth.”
