The Fourth Figure

by Aspe, Pieter; Doyle, Brian;

  “Absolutely,” said Van In. “And she has a bad character. You know how I fall for women like that.”

  Jonathan sat quietly listening to the conversation, not having a clue what they were talking about.

  “Then I’d like to meet her,” Hannelore said. “What would the gentlemen think if I invited the black widow over for dinner this evening?” She gestured to her belly. “I’m not expected in court.”

  “If you do, I’ll spend the night with your mother.”

  “You … with my mother!”

  Van In related to his mother-in-law like Moses to the golden calf. If you left them alone together for even a moment, furious sparks were guaranteed to fly. Hannelore juddered with laughter, grabbed her belly with both hands, and ran off to the bathroom. “I can’t keep this up,” she said, her laughter now out of control. “I’ve got to pee.”

  Van In shrugged and lit another cigarette. He noticed the longing look in Jonathan’s eyes and slipped him the pack. The boy looked around skittishly then helped himself. Guido dutifully dusted the crumbs from the tablecloth and dropped them in the empty basket.

  “Now that I’m here, wouldn’t this be a good time to have a look at your new music center?”

  “Music center?”

  “In the den,” said Guido emphatically.

  Van In nodded. “Tell Hannelore we’re in the den?”

  Jonathan nodded. Van In closed the door behind him.

  “Okay, Guido, get on with it.”

  Guido told him about the telephone call from the police physician. “I didn’t want to say anything in front of Jonathan.”

  “Of course.” Van In collapsed onto the sofa and threw his legs onto a side table. “After everything Jonathan told us last night, I’m not really surprised.”

  “Anything interesting?”

  “This and that.”

  Guido sat next to Van In. “Tell!”

  “Trui Andries used to be a member of a satanic sect. She left three months ago along with Jonathan and Jasper Simons.”

  “The man who wrote the letter we found in Trui’s apartment?”

  Van In nodded.

  “And the sect wasn’t happy?” asked Guido.

  “The three of them have been getting threats ever since.”

  “From the sect leaders?”

  “I assume so, but they’ve been smart enough to keep it anonymous. Jasper Simons couldn’t handle all the intimidation and became very depressed. He’s on the mend, apparently, but no one knows how he’ll react to Trui’s death. Jasper and Trui were planning to get married soon. Jonathan told me at the station that Trui had been his girlfriend, but he later admitted the truth about Jasper and Trui’s relationship.”

  “And Jonathan?”

  “Jonathan’s a devout Catholic these days, Jasper the same. Jonathan turned his back on the Satan stuff and wants to be a monk. Trui supported him. … She was his rock.”

  Guido rubbed his mustache. The world was getting weirder by the day. There were extremists all over the place. What had happened to the happy medium, the golden mean? “I didn’t know monks-to-be were allowed marijuana.” He smirked. “But who am I to judge? If the police can do it, why not the monks too?”

  Van In sensed a dig. “I was trying to win his confidence, Guido.”

  “So you believe his crazy story.”

  Van In leaned back on the sofa and put his hands behind his neck. Guido may have been a little old-fashioned, but his capacity to relativize was up there with the best. Maybe he was right. Maybe Jonathan’s story was crazy. But why would Jonathan lie? He had no reason, and his sadness at Trui’s death was clearly genuine.

  “Stories like that have been doing the rounds quite a bit of late. It’s the turn of the century. Sects are popping up all over the place. The end of the world is nigh, Guido, and everyone is trying to deal with the thought of it in one way or another. Some choose sin; others strive to be holy.”

  “It’s because they read so much crap in the papers. If one of them publishes an article on UFOs, everyone and his mother has seen one the next day.”

  Van In sighed. “True or not, we now know for certain that Trui Andries was murdered, and that the murderer mixes in satanic circles.”

  “What are we waiting for? We have Jonathan, don’t we?”

  “That’s the problem. It took us all night to get precious little information out of him. The boy is a closed book. Every time we mentioned a name, he broke into a sweat and started to panic.”

  “Then let the shrinks take care of it,” said Guido, unable to muster much enthusiasm.

  “He doesn’t want a shrink.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Hannelore’s been confined to the house by the doctor.”

  After the lousy experience at the hospital, Hannelore had consulted her obstetrician and he had advised her to take time off and get some rest. She had accepted his judgment with stoic good spirits, something Van In found strange and out of character. She usually didn’t give in so easily.

  “She’s going to try to win him over, gain his confidence. Perhaps she’s the one to break down the wall he’s built around himself. She managed to get a shitload more out of him than I did, I can tell you that.”

  Van In scrambled to his feet and rubbed his face with both hands. Sleepless nights had left him with feet like clay and legs like lead. “I’m thinking we should contact the police physician and have a word or two with Jasper Simons.”

  “And what about the black widow?” asked Guido.

  “Ignore her, Guido.”

  “And if that doesn’t work?”

  “Then we move in with the federal boys. If we have to live with someone, then give me the feds over a dangerous spider any day.”

  “That means you’ll have to grow a mustache, Pieter. You know what the feds do with mustacheless men?”

  “I do,” said Van In. “They get to lick the colonel’s ass.”

  Forensic medicine had evolved by leaps and bounds in recent decades, and DNA technology had been responsible for most of the advances. These days, a couple of cells were enough to identify a criminal, and they didn’t always have to be skin cells. Blood, sperm, saliva, sweat, and tears also contained genetic material. Investigative techniques had made similarly spectacular advances. Ear and tooth prints, for example, were just as reliable as traditional fingerprints. Invisible footprints could now be made visible using new advanced photography, blurred video material could be digitally enhanced, and toxicologists were capable of detecting just about every poison on the planet. Van In tried to keep track of it all as far and as often as he could, which was why he was so surprised that the police physician was unable to answer his question.

  “So if I’m understanding you right, you haven’t been able to determine the cause of death?”

  “Not for the present, Commissioner. I was hoping the toxicologist’s report would fill in the gaps.”

  “You think she was poisoned?”

  The police physician had more than ten years’ experience, and this was the first time in his career that he’d been stumped. “All I know is what didn’t kill her.”

  The case clearly bothered him. He went on: There were no signs of external injury on Trui Andries’s body. She had no congenital defects, yet her heart had packed it in. The blood work had been equally inconclusive. The victim hadn’t been taking medication or drugs of any kind, and there were no signs of suffocation. Death by poisoning seemed the only remaining hypothesis, but the analysis had yielded nothing. All the tests were negative.

  “That’s why I asked Raf Geens to do some sniffing around for me,” he said.

  “Is that the guy who works for criminal investigations?” Van In asked.

  According to some rumors, Geens was a drunk who enjoyed the protection of a few people with influen
ce; others—a small minority, it has to be said—swore by all that was holy that the eccentric analyst was a genius.

  The police physician nodded. In spite of his professional pride, he belonged to the latter group.

  “So you think he’ll come up with something?”

  The police physician smiled. “Passion is a machine, and no one knows what it’s capable of. If you ask me, Geens worked through the night on the case. Shall I give him a call? He might have something for us.”

  “No need, Doctor. You’ve made me curious. It’s time we paid a visit to Mr. Geens.” Van In got to his feet and shook the police physician’s hand.

  The police physician accompanied them to the door. “One thing, Commissioner. Raf Geens is the sensitive type. He lives for his work. If I were you, I wouldn’t make any jokes about it.”

  “I wasn’t planning to,” said Van In, a little surprised. He let Guido lead the way and pulled the door closed behind him.

  The laboratory of the judicial police was located next door to the new courthouse, a modern building in which the chances of losing your way were close to 100 percent. The architect who’d designed the complex was clearly a Kafka fan and had deployed the labyrinth principle wherever he could. When he was interviewed by a journalist after the opening, he’d declared that giving concrete form to a concept like the administration of justice required a healthy dose of sarcasm. He had succeeded with honors. Lawyers could be found wandering lost in the courthouse corridors, only to plead without the least embarrassment that their cases had expired while they were searching for the courtroom.

  Van In and Guido were fortunate to find a helpful attendant who pointed the way to the kingdom of Raf Geens. A sign on the door to his laboratory read: i wish to be disturbed only by intelligent people.

  “That means you,” said Guido.

  Van In shrugged his shoulders and opened the door. What should have been a tidy, sterile space looked more like a dorm room than a laboratory. The walls were plastered with posters of the Rolling Stones, and a radio crackled from somewhere in the depths of the place. The center of the room had the usual laboratory island with cupboards and a work surface covered with Petri dishes, long-necked flasks, test tubes, Bunsen burners, a microscope, a centrifuge, and dozens of bottles containing a rainbow of colorful powders. The modern technical stuff was lined up on a table against the wall: a powerful computer, a spectrometer, an oscilloscope, and a string of devices Van In had never seen before.

  “He’s probably drinking coffee somewhere,” said Guido.

  “I don’t think so,” said Van In, nodding in the direction of a coffee machine on top of a filing cabinet. Its light was still on, and it was half full. Van In made his way to the other end of the laboratory. Suddenly he heard a sound that didn’t emanate from the radio. He gestured to Guido to come closer. Next to the window, and hidden from sight by the work island, a man slept on a rickety camp bed, gently snoring. Van In cautiously shook his shoulder. “Good morning, Mr. Geens. I hope we’re not disturbing you.”

  The sleeper opened his eyes, his lack of surprise suggesting that it wasn’t the first time someone had had to wake him like this.

  “I’m Commissioner Van In, and this is Sergeant Versavel. The police physician sent us. We’re investigating the Andries case.”

  Geens’s face brightened at the word Andries. He clambered to his feet, buttoned his white coat, and shook Van In’s hand. The man had a gray Vandyke and round glasses that made him look professorial, if a little shabby.

  “A magnificent case, Commissioner, and a once-in-a-lifetime experience, if you ask me. I almost missed it, to be honest. The police physician had no idea what to make of it, and pathology was at a complete loss.”

  Geens clearly didn’t suffer from morning moodiness. Van In could hardly believe that the man had been asleep only thirty seconds earlier. “I’m intrigued, Mr. Geens.”

  The spritely lab technician folded the camp bed and stored it in a large metal locker. “All in due course, Commissioner. Please, take a seat. Can I offer you something to drink? A wee nip of the hard stuff perhaps?”

  Geens rummaged between the distillation flasks and bottles of chemical solvent, one of which was labeled “hydrochloric acid.” “Homemade,” Geens said, giggling. “Seventy proof. You could fly an Airbus on it.”

  He grabbed a couple of beakers and filled them with a generous serving of his superfuel. Guido made a face and politely declined when Geens offered him a beaker. But the lab technician wasn’t taking no for an answer. His amiable smile vanished in an instant. “Come on, Sergeant. Every cop takes a drink now and then. And did you know that this little concoction of mine can kill more bacteria than a whole bucket of antibiotics?”

  Guido grunted. “I’m not sick.”

  It was an awkward moment. Van In didn’t want the man to put his guard up, so he quickly stuck out his hand and accepted the offer, doing his best to keep a straight face. No jokes, the police physician had said.

  “There are scandalmongers who claim that alcohol shouldn’t be consumed during the hours of daylight. Are you one of them, Commissioner?”

  “I always thought scandalmongering was a sin,” said Van In.

  Geens roared with laughter, producing enough decibels to make the glasswork in the laboratory jingle in unison. Guido had met plenty of weirdos in his long career, but Geens was lining up for a place of honor in his personal top ten. He peered knowingly in Van In’s direction, but his boss didn’t seem to be bothered.

  “Before we get down to business, let me first propose a toast to the man or woman who committed an almost perfect murder,” Geens proclaimed.

  Geens raised his beaker. Van In followed his host’s example and sipped at the concoction. The burning sensation that followed left him wondering if the bottle hadn’t contained hydrochloric acid after all. Geens, by contrast, tossed it back as if it were lemonade and refilled his beaker without taking a breath. “It was immediately evident from the absence of water in the victim’s lungs that she hadn’t died from drowning. There were, likewise, no traces of violence on the body. Miss Andries hadn’t suffered a heart attack or a drug overdose. In short, I was clueless. Some kind of poison seemed to be the only alternative, but when I subjected the blood samples to every test in the book and the results proved negative, I was close to desperation. And then, out of the blue, the words tetramethylammonium pyrosulphate flashed before my eyes. And why hadn’t I thought about tetramethylammonium pyrosulphate before?”

  Geens introduced a short dramatic pause, a triumphant smile forming on his lips. Showing off his knowledge was obviously something he enjoyed.

  “Because tetramethylammonium pyrosulphate is highly toxic, but if it’s properly and precisely administered, it’s impossible to trace. So you’ll understand my surprise when I found evidence of the substance in the victim’s blood.”

  “On what basis is the dose determined?” asked Van In.

  “A calculation based on body weight. I’ve heard it has to be on the button.”

  “So are you suggesting we should look for the killer in medical circles?”

  “Great minds think alike, Commissioner. But if it was a doctor, why didn’t he administer the correct, untraceable dose?”

  Van In was forced to agree. “Was the poison injected?”

  Geens shook his head. “I’m pretty certain it was ingested orally. The pathologist’s report is pretty clear. There were no needle signs on Trui Andries’s body.”

  Geens took a deep breath, stuck out his chest, and stretched his scrawny neck like the proudest peacock. “So what do you have to say, Commissioner?”

  Van In was speechless for a moment. What indeed did he have to say? He turned to Guido, who did nothing but blink.

  “That you deserve a promotion and a medal,” he blurted. Shit! He wasn’t supposed to joke with Geens.

  Geens n
odded. His Adam’s apple bounced up and down as if he was having trouble concealing his emotions. “If only, Commissioner.”

  He swigged at his homemade concoction and rinsed his mouth with it, as snobs are inclined to do when they’re tasting wine. “My future isn’t exactly rosy, Commissioner. They’re planning to close the lab in six months. The bigwigs in Brussels think it’s too old-fashioned. They offered me early retirement in April. After thirty years of faithful service.”

  Van In raised the beaker to his lips and emptied it in a single gulp. A question of courtesy. “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Geens.”

  The analyst sighed deeply. “One more for the road, Commissioner?” he said, reaching for the bottle.

  “No, thank you,” said Van In.

  Guido could hardly believe his ears. Either Van In was getting old or Geens’s concoction wasn’t intended for human consumption after all.

  “That’s the first time I’ve seen you refuse a drink,” said Guido as they climbed into the Golf a few minutes later. “Are you sick or what?”

  “I’ve hardly slept a wink for two nights in a row, Guido. Another sip and you’d have had to carry me outside.”

  Guido started the car and headed toward the beltway. “What now?”

  Van In didn’t respond immediately. He tried to order the bizarre events of the previous thirty-six hours in his head. The murder of Trui Andries was a pile of question marks. If someone had administered a poison thinking it wouldn’t be detectable, why did he or she then take the risk of dumping her in a ditch? Van In realized he had thought “he or she,” probably because of the murder weapon. Poison was mostly associated with women. A female satanist? Should they be looking for the killer in satanist circles? Did such circles exist? And what motive did they have to murder Trui? Because she had left them? But Jasper Simons and Jonathan had done the same, hadn’t they? Were their lives also in danger? Jonathan had refused to divulge the names of the sect members. He didn’t want to make false accusations, he said. Strange that someone preparing to enter a monastery was so afraid of the disciples of Satan. Or was Guido right and Van In had let the boy pull the wool over his eyes?