Kill Again

by Neal Baer

  “The ‘bones’ cases,” Nick said. “Just wanted one more look at what you found.”

  “By the looks on your faces it wasn’t enough,” Aitken said.

  “What swamp were you walking around in?” asked Savarese, looking down at Aitken’s mud-covered boots.

  “Alley Pond Park,” said Aitken, referring to the easternmost park in Queens near the Nassau County border. “Just south of Northern Boulevard. Patrol in the One-Eleven responded to a nuisance call and found a dead guy right next to the dregs of Little Neck Bay.”

  “How’d he get dead?” asked Wilkes.

  “We think it’s a suicide,” Aitken replied. “But it’s a weird one. Guy cut himself open at the stomach and put a beach towel in to absorb the blood.”

  “Really?” asked Claire, her curiosity stoked.

  Aitken was surprised by her reaction. “Pardon me for saying so, Doc, but you sure have a peculiar fondness for the macabre.”

  “Did you just use the words peculiar and macabre in the same sentence?” asked Wilkes, only half joking.

  “Obviously you don’t know your serial killer history, Inspector,” Claire chided.

  “An entire subject I wish I knew less about,” Wilkes muttered.

  But Nick caught Claire’s spark. “You mean someone else tried that?” he asked.

  “Not as a suicide,” said Claire. “But back in the twenties, a sicko named William Edward Hickman kidnapped a little girl and dismembered her. After he cut her open and used a towel to soak up the blood.”

  She stopped, almost as if she was listening to a replay in her head of what she’d just said.

  “Jeez, Doc, what is that?” Wilkes asked. “Required reading for Gore-ensic Shrinkology 101?”

  When Claire looked at Aitken again, she was serious. “Are you sure it’s a suicide?” she asked.

  “Only footwear impressions in the mud are the victim’s,” Aitken said. “And he still had the knife in his hand.”

  “Wonder how rock bottom you must be to even consider doing yourself like that,” Savarese said, as if Aitken’s answer sealed it.

  But Claire was on a mission. “Anything else on the guy?” she asked.

  “No ID, if that’s what you’re asking. Just an almost empty pack of smokes and book of matches.”

  “And nothing else in the area?” Claire persisted.

  “No offense, Doc, but you’re beginning to make me feel like I missed something,” Aitken said.

  “Not at all, Detective,” Claire assured him.

  “What is it?” Nick asked Claire, wondering where she was going with this.

  “I guess I’m just grasping at straws,” Claire said to Nick, shrugging off her initial excitement. “Good luck with the case,” she then said to Aitken.

  “Thanks, but once we log in this evidence, I’m done until the trial, if there is one,” Aitken replied. “But you know, while I have you all here, anybody know what fornication cheeps means?”

  Wilkes laughed. “Sounds like a Craigslist ad for an illiterate hooker,” he said. “Why?”

  “Because my dead guy wrote that on the inside of his matchbook—”

  It was as far as Aitken got before Claire grabbed his arm.

  “That actually hurts, Doc,” the young detective said, “and now you’re creeping me out.”

  “Where’s the matchbook now?” she asked.

  “My partner Joey just brought it in the lab,” he said. “You wanna see it?”

  It took them all less than a minute to rush back into the lab. Aitken donned gloves and looked through his case’s evidence for the matchbook.

  “You’re thinking this is one of those anagrams,” Nick assumed.

  “Get me the receipt from Rosa’s crime scene,” was all she replied.

  “Anagrams? What the hell’s she talking about?” Wilkes asked Nick, who ran to retrieve the receipt as Aitken brought over the matchbook, open in his gloved hand. He turned to Claire. “What are you talking about, Doc?”

  Claire remembered Wilkes was unaware of her work on his dry-erase board a little more than an hour earlier. “Just go with me on this, Inspector,” Claire said as she and Wilkes eyed the words inside, “and it’ll explain itself.”

  “Fornication cheeps,” read Wilkes. “What in the holy hell could it mean?”

  “I don’t think it means anything,” she replied as Nick brought over the receipt in a clear evidence bag. “It’s what’s inside those words that may be important.”

  Wilkes was confused. “And what exactly does she mean by that?” he asked Nick.

  But he and Claire were too busy comparing the handwriting on the receipt with the scrawl on the matchbook to answer.

  “Hard to tell,” Nick said to Claire. “The writing on the matches looks like it was done in a hurry, but the receipt seems more deliberate. We’ll need Norma Rabin to take a look.”

  Claire’s mind was elsewhere. “Is there a computer I can use?” she asked.

  “Over here,” Aitken said, indicating the terminal the field units used to log in evidence. He typed in his own password to give her access. “What do you need?”

  “Just the Internet,” said Claire, hurrying over and sitting down when Aitken was finished. She typed the words anagram solver into Google, bringing up a host of Web site choices. By the time Nick and Wilkes reached her, she was typing fornication cheeps into the search engine of one of the sites.

  Nick looked over her shoulder, wanting to soften the blow he thought she might feel when this theory fell through. “There’s no evidence this is even a homicide,” he said. “It’s in another borough. The victim is male, not female.”

  Claire only had eyes for the results of her search—literally thousands of them. She realized she couldn’t do what she had to do sitting in the crime lab. There was something else that needed to be done first.

  “Can you call the medical examiner and ask if we can come over?”

  “Now?” asked Wilkes. “What for?”

  “So we can go over the bones from all of the cases. Together.”

  Nick was hesitant. “He’s gonna think we think he screwed up.”

  “Then tell him he couldn’t have screwed up what he wasn’t looking for,” Claire fired back.

  “What exactly are we looking for?” asked Wilkes.

  “I’m not sure yet. But something’s not right.”

  Wilkes wasn’t satisfied. “You’re gonna have to do better than that.”

  He never got to finish as Claire wheeled on him. “I’m sure you want to figure this out as much as I do, Inspector, maybe even more than I do. And if that’s the case, please call Doctor Ross. I think the answer is in those bones.”

  Those bones—all four sets representing the four victims—were laid out on separate tables in an unused and old but clean autopsy room by the time Nick and Claire arrived with Wilkes and Savarese. They caught Assistant Medical Examiner Ross pacing between them as if the keeper of a high-tech crypt for the twenty-first century.

  “This looks like the Spanish Inquisition,” Ross quipped.

  “This was her idea,” Savarese said, pointing to Claire.

  “Well, at least Doctor Waters and I speak the same language,” said Ross.

  “Don’t give me so much credit,” Claire warned him as she pulled on a pair of gloves. “I did my pathology rotation just like every other good little med student, but that doesn’t make me an expert. I’m going to need your help.”

  “Your wish is my command,” Ross said, sweeping his arm across his domain of death. “What are we looking for?”

  “Anything that’s different in these bones, from one set to the next. Did you do as I asked?”

  “I did indeed,” Ross answered. “You won’t know which ones are from which crime until I tell you.” He picked up two magnifying glasses, handed one to Claire. “Your glass, Holmes,” he said.

  The three cops stood back and watched as Claire pored over every bone from each skeleton. She shook her head after
the first one, went on to the second. Spent a few moments. Nothing. But shortly after she began poring over the third skeleton, she stopped abruptly at the left shoulder.

  “Here,” she called to Ross. “Take a look at this.”

  He hurried over, peered through her glass. “See? On the inside of the glenohumeral joint?”

  Ross moved over to the knee joint. “Here too. The same marks.”

  “You gonna let us in on the big doctor secret or make us stand here pissed off we were too dumb for med school?” asked Wilkes, as only he could.

  Ross pointed to the bones on the other tables. “Those three victims—the two women from seventy-seven and the Jane Doe from the fire in Brooklyn the other day—were dismembered identically. With almost surgical precision. Expertly done, in such a way to suggest the killer had a working knowledge of anatomy.”

  He then moved to the bones Claire continued examining. “Rosa Sanchez, however, was a different story. The bones in every joint have almost invisible chips and gouges. Compared to the others, it’s like Rosa was hacked apart by someone who didn’t have nearly the finesse or anatomical knowledge.”

  “Or someone with a lot of anger, maybe in a rush,” Nick said in an accusing tone, staring disapprovingly at Ross. “I wouldn’t rule out either possibility.”

  “Don’t put this one on me, Lawler,” Ross said.

  “He’s right, Nick,” agreed Claire. “Rosa’s bones have plenty of other marks on them, probably from being knocked around in the perp’s car. The mark I saw in the joint could easily have been mistaken for one of those.”

  She looked up at the men. “As for the perp being in a rush, Nick, I don’t agree,” she argued. “Rosa was dismembered in the middle of those woods on Staten Island. Nobody around literally for miles. Why would Palmer be in a rush out there?”

  “Maybe he thought someone saw him,” Savarese suggested. “He had to get out of there fast.”

  The wheels turned in Nick’s head. And the answer came to him in a flash.

  “Or it wasn’t Palmer,” he said.

  “I think that’s right,” Claire confirmed.

  Wilkes could’ve busted a gut right then. “You two built as bulletproof a circumstantial case against Palmer as I’ve ever seen. How could it not be him?”

  Claire put the magnifying glass down on the table. “Put yourself in Victor Palmer’s shoes,” she said. “Not a surgeon, but a chef, which means he knows how to expertly butcher a piece of meat. He’s proud of his work. He murders the two women in Brooklyn in seventy-seven, two bodies who were forgotten because there was no evidence and every cop in the city was looking for Son of Sam. Then, he moves to Costa Rica and continues his killing spree. Call the police down there, Inspector, and I’ll bet a week’s pay their medical examiner will confirm every one of the bones on those twenty-two victims are pristine. Not a chip, a scratch, or a mark on them.”

  Wilkes turned to Savarese. “Make the call,” he said, his eyes returning to Claire. “Go on, Doctor.”

  “Okay. Palmer murders his wife and moves back to New York. For all we know, he’s killed more women we haven’t found. But let’s say he hasn’t. And then, suddenly, he hears about an entire set of human bones found in a trash can three blocks from Yankee Stadium.”

  “Jesus, Doctor,” Wilkes interrupted. “You’re saying Palmer got all pissed off because he didn’t murder Rosa Sanchez? Because someone copied his work?”

  “That’s exactly what she’s saying,” replied Nick, a grin of vindication spreading across his face. “It makes sense because Rosa’s the only hack job here. Palmer took pride in his work. So he had to go out and murder Jane Doe here,” he said, indicating the bones of the fire victim from Brooklyn, “because he’s a perfectionist. Nobody does it like he does. He had to show everyone—”

  “Hold on,” Wilkes interjected, raising his hand. “There’s only one problem. Rosa Sanchez still hasn’t made the news. We kept the lid on it. How could Palmer know she was dead—?”

  He stopped in midsentence off a look from Nick, who realized about a second before the inspector himself came up with it the answer to his own question.

  “Palmer’s friend. The police commissioner,” Nick said in realization. “He must’ve told Palmer over dinner or something.”

  “That’s why he said he’d have to resign if Palmer was the killer,” Wilkes said. “Because if Palmer never knew about Rosa, Jane Doe might still be alive.”

  “Un-frickin’ believable,” said Ross.

  “You breathe not a word of this to anyone,” Wilkes said to Ross, “not even to your boss. We’ve got a few more questions to answer first.” His head swiveled to Claire. “Like how you got all this from that other body out in Queens.”

  “Which one?” Ross asked.

  “Bizarre suicide in Alley Pond Park,” Nick informed him.

  “You mean the guy who tried to cut himself in half?” Ross replied.

  “It’s most likely a homicide,” Claire said. “A copycat too, of a horrible murder of a little girl back in the twenties. The connection is the words on that victim’s matchbook and the receipt found with Rosa’s bones.”

  Wilkes was trying to wrap his head around all this. “So we’ve got a nut job going around copycatting obscure serial killers and playing word games with us? Why?”

  “Because, Inspector, like Palmer, our nut job is a perfectionist. And he wants to know if we’re as perfect as he is,” Claire answered.

  Nick got it. “He’s testing our collective IQs. To see if they’re as big as his.”

  “Correct,” said Claire. “And it’s time we showed him.”

  She sat in front of the computer in the squad room of the Major Case Squad, back on the Anagram Solver’s Web site. There was no longer a reason to sequester her in Wilkes’s office, sneak her in and out of the building. In a short time it would all be out in the open, including her involvement.

  Claire called Fairborn to fill her in, not wanting her to find out on the evening news, promising her it would all be over in a matter of days and asking her to please bear with her. Fairborn was circumspect, and Claire knew she was wearing her mentor’s patience thin. She also knew, when all was said and done, Fairborn would have reason to be proud of her.

  But Claire needed to be proud of herself too, and knowing the killer’s motive wasn’t enough. Nailing Victor Palmer wasn’t enough either. She had to know what the words meant. She had to know who killed Rosa.

  In the search engine she’d already typed fornication cheeps, bringing up hundreds of solutions. She pored over them, wondering when the obvious answer would pop out, when Nick appeared behind her, glancing over her shoulder. “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Slow,” said Claire. “How about on your end?”

  “It’s set. Seven o’clock tonight,” he said. “They want to mention your name.”

  “They can. I got permission from Doctor Fairborn.”

  “You swore her to secrecy too, I hope,” he said, pulling up a chair and sitting beside her.

  “Yes,” Claire replied, never taking her eyes off the screen. “And I didn’t tell her everything, anyway.”

  “Claire,” Nick said to her in a serious tone, getting her attention.

  She swiveled in her chair to face Nick. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “They want you up there with us too.”

  Claire was flabbergasted. “Please tell me you didn’t—”

  “I don’t have that kind of juice.”

  There was only one other possibility, and it stunned her. “Wilkes?”

  “He told the chief of Ds, the PC, and the mayor that none of this would’ve been possible without you on board. Far as he’s concerned, you’re one of us. He said he’d pin a gold shield on you himself if he could.”

  When Claire didn’t respond he realized she was lost in what was on the screen. “Did you hear a word I said?” he asked.

  “Perfection,” she said, staring at the screen. “It�
�s about perfection.”

  Nick followed her eyes. In the list of anagrams of fornication cheeps, Claire was now looking at combinations of three words beginning with the word perfection.

  “Perfection?”

  And suddenly she saw it. What she’d been looking for. She wrote on a yellow pad beside her: fornication cheeps = PERFECTION IN CHAOS

  “What the hell are you two doing?” asked Wilkes, hurrying over. “We’ve—”

  Then he saw what Claire had written on the yellow pad.

  “Are you sure about this?” he asked her.

  “As sure as I can be,” Claire said. “And here’s something else. I think he wants us to know who he is. Or at least who he thinks he is.”

  She wrote ANAGRAM THEIST on the yellow pad. “You said that theist means a belief in God. You still think this butcher believes in God?” asked Nick.

  “Maybe he thinks he is God,” Wilkes offered, only half joking.

  “Almost,” said Claire, rewriting the words anagram theist one more time. “If I take the first three letters of theist, that makes the word the. And if I take the last three letters, ist, and add them to the end of anagram . . . I get . . .”

  Claire wrote the two words in bold block letters.

  THE ANAGRAMIST.

  “That’s who he thinks he is,” Claire said.

  Wilkes shook his head in disbelief. “Maybe his friends Joker, Riddler, Penguin, or Catwoman can lead us to him,” he quipped. “This case is screwier than a comic book.”

  “We’ve got to change the script, Inspector,” Claire said. “Just a little.”

  “You wrote the damn thing,” replied Wilkes, checking his watch. “So go do it. You’ve got an hour until showtime.”

  “Thank you all for coming today,” said New York City mayor Mark Glassman into a forest of microphones atop the podium on the stage of the large first-floor auditorium at police headquarters. The room was packed with press and police brass as Hizzoner the Mayor said a few words, then introduced Police Commissioner Farrell, standing to his left, his suit and poker face perfect despite what he knew he had no choice but to do. Behind them stood Chief of Detectives Dolan and Inspector Wilkes and Claire, who was flanked by Nick and Tony Savarese, their shields hanging from the breast pockets of their suit jackets.