The Rook

by Steven James

  “Hmm. I know you don’t typically venture into motive, but has Agent Jiang plumbed your arsonist’s motivation for the previous fires?”

  “Ralph assigned one of the field agents to look into the arsonist’s bank records, and she found that the man had made a twenty-five-thousand-dollar deposit within a few days of each of the previous fires. So, if you’re looking for motive, it appears that he did it for the money.”

  “Yes, but the money from whom?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “And regardless, that’s not what the abductors wanted from him in the end.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Obviously, you’ll need to follow up with your elusive Dr.

  O.”

  “He’s still out of town. It’s on my list for later today.”

  “Yes, of course. And Shade, what do you know of this Shade character?”

  “Not much. He might be the man we took into custody, but I doubt it. Shade told me on the phone that he was at the rendezvous point and it seems unlikely that would have been the warehouse.

  Whoever Shade is, he knows how to mask his GPS location and he knows me. He positively identified me during our brief phone conversation so I’m afraid he might be someone from a previous case, or maybe even a personal acquaintance.”

  “Quite so.” Calvin walked in silent repose beside me for a few minutes and then said, “It’s an intricate case to be sure, but I’m confident you’ll be able to unravel it, my boy. I’ll certainly consider all that you’ve told me, and if I have any additional investigative recommendations, I’ll contact you promptly. One word of advice …” Then he began speaking to me as if I was still a doctoral student at Simon Fraser University, and he was still my professor. “Patrick, remember, the devil is not in the details, but in how the details relate to each other. Sometimes you need to stop looking at the facts and start looking at the spaces between them. One cannot adequately understand the movement of the planets through a solar system until one has identified what they all orbit around.”

  I was reflecting on his comments when he added, “And now for the personal matter you were reticent to mention on the phone.”

  I knew he would be able to tell if I were hiding anything from him, so I didn’t even try. “Calvin, at times my job really eats away at me. The human potential for evil is, well … it’s staggering.”

  He read between the lines. “But it’s your personal potential for evil that troubles you most.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re all capable of the unthinkable, Patrick.”

  “I know. Maybe I know that too well.”

  We paused in the shadow of a thick palm tree, and Calvin said,

  “I believe the more acutely aware we are of our human frailty, the less vulnerable we are to our base instincts.”

  “It’s those base instincts that frighten me the most—not just the inclination we have toward evil, but—”

  “The subtle enjoyment of it.”

  “Yes.”

  He contemplated my words for a few moments. “So, to put it in mountaineer’s terms, how do we know we’re not going to slip off the escarpment when we’re all living on the edge of the cliff?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And how do we know we’re not going to push someone else off the arete?”We stepped back into the bright day and continued along the trail.

  “The simple answer, Patrick, as you’ve already deduced, is that we don’t. We can never be sure we won’t jump or push someone else.

  But that’s not a satisfactory answer because we all want to think that we’re different, that we would never do those things—and yet the edge is within reach of all of us. Nietzsche wrote, ‘Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.’ You have looked long into the abyss, my boy. And you’ve seen how alluring it is.”

  I thought for a moment. “You’re right, Calvin, except I don’t fight monsters and neither do you. We track offenders who are just as human as we are. Killers, rapists, pedophiles—they do monstrous things and their actions make them more guilty than others, but not less human. The more you search for what makes ‘them’ different from ‘us,’ the more you find that, at the core, we’re all the same.

  Offenders aren’t monsters any more than we are.”

  “Then, perhaps,” Calvin said with disturbing resignation, “we are all monsters.”

  Just what I needed to hear. “It’s such an encouragement talking to you, Calvin. If Dr. Phil ever retires, you ought to apply for his job.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  Tessa was waiting for us across the parking lot from the Museum of the Living Artist, in the Casa del Rey Moro Garden. “What took you two so long?”

  “I’m afraid we’re still a bit befuddled by this case,” Calvin said.

  “I thought it was almost solved?”

  “A few remaining conundrums, as it were,” he replied.“Well, I think your problem is, you two need to start thinking more like Dupin.”

  “Dupin?” I said.

  And then Tessa taught Dr. Werjonic and me how to investigate a crime that, by all appearances, could not possibly have occurred.

  67

  “Dupin,” Tessa repeated. “Haven’t you ever read The Murders in the Rue Morgue?”

  “Probably … A long time ago,” I said. “Maybe when I was your age.”

  “That would be a long time ago,” she muttered.

  The truth was, I did remember reading some of Poe’s writings when I was younger, but I’d never been that interested in him. Now, I suspected I would regret that. “Tessa,” I said, “who is Dupin?”

  “Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin. Poe created him. Wrote three stories about him. In the first one, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, there’s these two people who get killed—a woman and her daughter. But they’re not in a morgue, though. It’s the name of a street.

  Anyway, the detective is this guy named Dupin, but he’s not really a detective exactly, more like a profiler or something.”

  “Hmm, a profiler,” Calvin muttered.

  “Yeah,” she said. “And he ends up solving the crime.”

  “Well, there you go,” I said. “You can already tell it’s fiction.”

  Tessa gave me a headshake. “If Lien-hua were here, she’d drop-kick you for saying that.”

  “Quite so,” remarked Calvin, who had chosen to lead us north along the path that led past the Botanical Building. “But I’m sad to say, my dear, this Dupin fellow, he seems to be a pale apograph of the inimitable Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Holmes?” Tessa recoiled. “Do not even go there with me. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, if I can even call him ‘sir,’ totally cripped Poe.The Rue Morgue was written in 1841, Doyle wasn’t even born until 1859. And then, in 1885 when Doyle decides to start writing detective stories, he makes Holmes a complete carbon copy of Dupin.

  Holmes thinks like Dupin. Acts like him. Talks like him. Relates to the local police in the exact same way. And Watson is totally based on the guy who narrates Dupin’s cases.” She was getting really riled up. Passion looked good on her. “And then, despite all that, in the first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, Doyle has the effrontery to have his pseudo-creation Sherlock Holmes dis Dupin by calling him ‘a very inferior fellow.’ Doyle is lame. Poe rocks.”

  Calvin, a connoisseur of detective stories from the other side of the Atlantic, cleared his throat slightly. “Did you just say ‘effrontery,’ my dear?”

  “You’ll get used to it,” I told him. Then I faced Tessa. “Not that I don’t find all this very interesting, but how does this relate to us solving this case?”

  “Hold on. I’m getting to that. So, here’s what Dupin does in The Rue Morgue …” She counted on her fingers all of Dupin’s investigative techniques, one at a time. “He looks over the facts, collects physical evidence, studies the wound patterns, analyzes hair samples, do
es a preliminary autopsy, evaluates the statements from witnesses, interrogates a suspect, and then gets a sailor to confess his involvement in the incident.”

  “Sounds like you, Patrick,” said Calvin, “on one of your better days.”

  A jogger passed us, pounding up the trail, palm trees on his right, cacti on his left.

  “Actually,” Tessa said, looking at me, “Dupin was kind of like you.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He visited the scene—that was a big deal to him—and he studied how the killer got into and out of the room.”

  “Nice,” I said. “Entrance and exit routes.”“He called them ingress and egress, but whatever. And he also managed to get on the nerves of the local authorities.”

  “Sounds like my kind of guy.” The trail began its long circuitous loop back to the Alcazar Garden by curving around the outer fringes of the San Diego Zoo. Inside I could hear the chatter of birds and the roar of some large jungle cat.

  “The whole entrance/exit thing is actually what helped him solve the case. See, it looks like a robbery, but Dupin, he considers other options. Instead of just looking at the evidence that supports his theory, like the police do, he tries out different ideas that don’t even seem to make sense.”

  “The mark of a true investigator,” said Calvin.

  “That’s not even all of it. So then, Dupin thinks about the size, body type, and special skills of the killer—who could do this crime, right? And then he uses that to help narrow down the suspects ‘cause he knows the killer has to be really strong, extraordinarily strong, to cause the kind of injuries the victims had, but also, the killer’s gotta be very agile.”

  As she spoke, Tessa became more and more animated, like a natural-born storyteller. I’d never seen her this excited about anything, and I didn’t want to stop her. It might have been her way of showing me that I wasn’t so innovative after all, since Poe created Dupin nearly a hundred and fifty years before I was even born, but whatever her reasons, it was good to see her so enthusiastic about something. I let her keep going.

  “And as Dupin studied the wound on the dead girl’s neck, he even built, like, this tube to see how big someone’s hand would have to be to make the bruises.”

  “Crime reconstruction,” mumbled Calvin. “This chap should teach at Scotland Yard.”

  Tessa wavered her finger against the air in front of her. “But, here’s the thing, the wound wasn’t caused by a human hand.”

  I suspected Poe had created some type of fictional monster to commit the crimes. An easy solution to the problem. “So, what caused the bruises?”

  “Well, instead of just looking at what happened, Dupin, see, he focused on what happened that was unique to that specific case.”

  “The more unique a crime, the easier it is to solve,” I mumbled, quoting a maxim I often shared at my seminars. I used to think I’d made it up. Maybe Poe did.

  “But this wasn’t a crime,” said Tessa.

  “I thought two people were murdered?”

  “No, two people were killed.”

  “Just a moment, my dear,” said Calvin. “I believe you have yet to explain the bruises.”

  “The killer gave them to her.”

  I still didn’t get it. “OK, wait. So the sailor did it?”

  “No, the ape did.”

  “The ape?” Calvin and I both exclaimed.

  “Yes, an orangutan from Borneo who was trying to shave the people and accidentally nearly sliced their heads off with a straight razor.” She shook her head slightly. “That part of the story’s not quite as good.”

  “What about the sailor?” asked Calvin.

  “He owned the orangutan. It escaped.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” I said. “An orangutan who was trying to shave the victims?” I didn’t remember ever reading that.

  “Hey, you gotta cut Poe some slack. FYI: The Murders in the Rue Morgue was the first detective story ever printed, the first locked room mystery, the first crime fiction story, and the first example of criminal profiling to appear in literature. With just one short story, Poe created four genres of literature that are still around today. Still popular today.”

  “Well, in that case,” Calvin said, “consider the slack cut.”

  Tessa stepped over a clutter of tumbleweed that had blown into the path. “That,” she said, “and the cool thing is, Dupin actually used the fact that it seemed so unsolvable to solve the case. As impossible as it seemed, it did occur, so it must have been possible.

  But the police made the mistake of de nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas. But Dupin didn’t.”

  I stared at her. “You can’t be serious. When did you start speaking French?”

  She looked defensive. Shy. Embarrassed. “I’m just learning. Why?

  Did I pronounce something wrong?”

  “No,” Calvin said. “I don’t believe so.”

  I sighed. “Can you translate for me? My French is a little rusty.”

  “De nier ce qui est, et d’expliquer ce qui n’est pas,” she said again. “‘Ignoring what is and explaining what is not.’ The cops saw a robbery and two murders in a locked room. But in the end, there was no robbery, no murders, no crime, no motive, and the room wasn’t locked.”

  I’d never seen Calvin as confused as I did now. “My dear, I’m afraid you’re going to have to walk me through that.”

  “The ape didn’t steal anything, so no robbery; he didn’t have a motive, unless you count trying to shave someone; and he didn’t murder the people—killed them, sure, but he wasn’t human, so it wasn’t a murder, and that’s also why there wasn’t any crime. And the room wasn’t locked when the ape climbed in, it’s just that the window latched itself shut when he bumped into it while egressing—that’s actually a word, by the way, but I don’t remember if Poe actually uses it. Anyway, there you go.”

  Calvin beamed at her with admiration. “Well done, my dear.

  Well done, indeed.”

  “Nothing was as it appeared to be,” I said softly.

  “Right,” she said. “And at the very end of the story, Dupin is talking about the idiotic police detective and says, ‘I am satisfied with having defeated him in his own castle.’ I like that part.”“Defeating him in his own castle …” Calvin mumbled. “I’ll have to remember that. It might make a good title for my next book.”

  As we approached the Alcazar Garden, I could see that Calvin’s cab had returned and was already waiting for him. He gazed at his watch and announced, “I do need to be getting on my way. Tessa, my dear, it’s been a pleasure. I look forward to my next lesson in American literature.”

  “Read more Poe,” she said. “The Mystery of Marie Roget and The Purloined Letter, the other Dupin stories. You’ll like ‘em.”

  He patted her shoulder, then gripped my elbow in his hand.

  “Good luck with this case, my boy. Remember: trust the evidence wherever it takes you. Keep disproving your theories until you uncover the truth.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “It was great to see you.”

  Then, we said our hurried good-byes, Calvin left, and I realized it was time to confront Tessa about her tattoo.

  Lien-hua watched Margaret Wellington pace stiffly back and forth across the conference room floor. Thirty minutes ago, Margaret had asked her to brief her about the case, share her preliminary profile of the abductors, and explain how her foot happened to land in the suspect’s abdomen last night in the warehouse while he was still standing up. It was in light of Lien-hua’s explanation that Margaret had started pacing.

  The silence in the room was finally broken when Ralph stepped through the door and announced that the criminalists were processing the warehouse and the suspect’s condo. “Guy’s name is Neville Lewis. Police still haven’t gotten a word out of him. His record comes up clean, but so far we haven’t been able to find any actual people who can vouch for him.”

  “Did you run his prints through A
FIS?” Margaret asked.

  Ralph nodded. “We got nothin’. As far as I can tell he never even jaywalked or cheated on his taxes.”“Wait,” said Lien-hua. “A man who built his own torture chamber and was involved in this sophisticated of a kidnapping has no priors?”

  “Doesn’t fly, does it?”

  Lien-hua shook her head.

  “Well,” said Margaret, “I tend to trust the Automated Fingerprint Identification System over your intuition, Agent Jiang. AFIS

  doesn’t lie.”

  Lien-hua considered that. “Let’s say his records were falsified.

  How good would someone have to be to pull off an electronic identity package like that, good enough to fool AFIS?”

  “Good,” said Ralph. “Really good.”

  “What about witness protection?” Lien-hua glanced back and forth from Ralph to Margaret. “Is it possible Mr. Lewis might be in the program?”

  Ralph deferred to Margaret with a shrug.

  “Well,” she said. “I doubt it, but I will look into it. Meanwhile, Agent Hawkins, find out from the navy if they’ve located any additional evidence from the site of last night’s fire. If you run into any trouble, just tell them you’re working directly for me.”

  “I won’t run into any trouble.”

  “And Agent Jiang—” Margaret gave her an innocuous-looking smile—”I would like you to go over the events of last night one more time. Just for the record.”

  68

  After Tessa and I left Balboa Park we returned to the hotel, and I invited her to take a short walk with me along the beach. Obviously she wasn’t going to bring up her tattoo, so I would have to. The day was sunny, but my mood had turned overcast.

  “So Tessa, tell me about your afternoon yesterday, after we left the aquarium.”

  “I don’t know. I walked around for a while. I visited some shops and stuff.”

  “I thought you hate shopping?”

  “Well, I do, but I was just curious, you know, exploring stuff downtown.”

  I gave her a chance to say more, but she didn’t take it. “What about last night? Where’d you have supper?”