by Lis Wiehl
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“What?”
“You can’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Mix different cereals in the same bowl,” he said. “General Mills would have you court-martialed.”
“Why?”
“Who does that?”
“Lots of people.”
“Name one.”
She had to think. “Angela Merkel,” she said. “Former president of Germany.”
“You’re bluffing,” he challenged. “How do you know that’s true?”
“How do you know it isn’t?” she argued. “The Germans are surprisingly creative where breakfast cereals are concerned.”
For a moment Tommy felt as if they were an old married couple, comfortable with each other in a way he hadn’t known before. He’d known plenty of women who were impressed by the things about him that didn’t matter, his looks or his money or his celebrity. With Dani, none of that made the slightest difference.
He had to ask.
“Do you ever think about what happened?” Tommy said. “Something happened in high school. At the homecoming dance. You felt it too, right?”
“I did.”
“Have you thought about it?”
“I hadn’t for a while,” she said. “But I have since running into you again.”
“So what do you think it was?”
She hesitated.
“We were eighteen,” she said.
“I was nineteen,” he reminded her. “You were like … I don’t know, thirty.”
“That’s a good thing?” she said. “I certainly wouldn’t have thought so then.”
“That came out wrong,” he said. “I just mean, you’ve always been so … functional.”
“You sure know how to turn a girl’s head,” she said, smiling. “First you yell at me for the way I eat cereal, and then you tell me I’m old but functional.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” he said. “You’ve just always been this person who gets things done and gives 110 percent. You always knew what you wanted, way before the rest of us did.”
“I overfunction,” she said. “I’m overcompensating. Because I’m constantly thinking I’m not good enough. It’s childhood trauma–related.”
“What childhood trauma?” he asked. He wanted to know everything about her, but he didn’t want her to think he was prying. “Unless you don’t want to tell me.”
“My parents left me at a highway rest stop.” Dani laughed. “No, seriously. They did. We were on vacation when I was seven and Beth was five, and we flew to Las Vegas and rented an RV, but my mother wanted to have a car too. We were in Monument Valley somewhere, and I had to go to the bathroom, but the bathroom in the RV didn’t work, so we stopped at a tourist trap. I went to the bathroom while my parents were bickering. When they left, my mom thought I was in the RV, but my dad thought I was with my mom. This was before cell phones. So it took almost an hour for them to realize I was missing. I was certain they’d left me behind because I’d caused all the trouble in the first place.”
“That must have been terrifying,” Tommy said.
She yawned and finished the last of her orange juice. He took the dishes to the sink, then walked her to the bottom of the stairs. He thought to offer to walk her to her room, but didn’t. He asked her to remind him in the morning to go back to The Pub and pay their tab.
“Sweet dreams,” he said. “Or at least meaningful ones.”
“Let’s hope,” she said. “I was thinking tonight I’m going to intentionally try to dream about my folks. Just to see what they have to tell me. And by the way, don’t think the irony is lost on me. They abandoned me at the tourist trap, so I abandoned them at the airport in Africa. Subconscious payback. That’s the guilty secret I have to live with.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” Tommy said. “Aren’t dreams the way we work through the stuff we can’t talk about when we’re awake?”
“Something like that,” Dani said. “Do you realize how smart you are?”
“Smarter than the average bear,” he said.
“Good night,” she said.
The next morning she told Tommy that she was disappointed. She didn’t dream about her parents. She’d hoped they’d have something to tell her. Instead, her dreams had been empty, vague, useless, devoid of meaning.
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Tommy said, offering her a cup of coffee.
“Why?”
“Maybe the dreams didn’t mean anything,” Tommy said. “But look at what you’re feeling right now. You’re angry, right?”
“A little,” she said. “Which is pretty stupid.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “You’re angry because your parents let you down. You wanted them to help you in a dream, and they didn’t.”
“And?”
“Just like you’re angry with them in real life,” Tommy said. “You don’t feel guilty because you abandoned them. You’re angry because they abandoned you. They died. They left you behind. You’re mad at them.”
She nodded in agreement. As obvious as it was, it was something she hadn’t thought of before. Kara Leonard had been angry at her sister. It was one of the predictable stages of grieving.
“Physician, heal thyself,” she said. “Now you know why I went into psychiatry. You never stop learning. Particularly from your mistakes.”
She told him she had a big day ahead of her, one that included a briefing that afternoon from Baldev Banerjee, the medical examiner. Tommy walked her to her car and watched as she drove away, but after she was gone, he thought about what she’d said about learning from one’s mistakes.
Acting on the premise that that was true, he went to his computer and navigated to YouTube, where he searched for “Gunderson” + “Sykes,” which brought him to the video clip of the accident, which he had never viewed until now. It all came flooding back. He saw the offense break from the huddle, approach the line and set, and he watched the defense react. He watched the opposing quarterback call an audible, and he could remember precisely what the quarterback had said. He saw himself gesticulating as he called out a defensive audible. He saw the play take shape. He saw Dwight Sykes slicing across the middle. He saw the ball leave the quarterback’s hand. He saw himself make contact, just as the ball reached the receiver …
He clicked on the Pause icon to freeze the frame.
He studied the picture, the other players in the frame, their expressions, the referee positioning himself to make the call. What was there to learn from his mistake? He decided to search the frame the way one might search a crime scene, dividing it into grids and taking it apart one grid at a time. Even then, he almost missed it.
He noticed a digital readout of the time left on the clock in the upper right-hand corner, not part of the action on the field at all.
The clock read 2:13.
Tommy wondered, as he stripped the bed she’d slept on to change the sheets, what Dani would have to say about the time left on the game clock.
What he found under her pillow was equally inexplicable—a twelve-inch carving knife from his kitchen. Apparently she’d sleepwalked again, though when he replayed the interior events log from his security system, none of the motion sensors had triggered.
When he ran the troubleshooter program on his security system, he was informed that both his hardware and his software were in perfect working order. That ruled out any temporary technological failure.
To be thorough, even though the doors and windows to the house had been locked and secured, he decided to check his outside cameras as well. His exterior motion sensors would have tripped the floodlights had anything approached the house. A quick scan of his exterior events log was negative as well, as was a quick scan of his thermal imaging files.
Something had moved the knife. What?
Or maybe the more appropriate question to ask was when?
He clicked on the Begin Scan box and typed in 2:10 AM an
d then watched his thermal images. He saw nothing. When the chronograph in the lower right-hand corner reached 2:12:30, he rolled forward in his desk chair and paid closer attention, his pulse quickening noticeably as he counted down, waiting to see the telltale bright red or orange image that would tell him he’d had an intruder. He watched straight through to 2:15.
Nothing.
Nothing was not a good enough answer.
He rewound to 2:12:55 and directed the computer to scan the file at 2X slow motion.
This time, exactly as the clock turned to 2:13, he saw a flicker.
Rerunning it at 10X slow motion, the flicker appeared more like a blur.
The slowest he could scan at was 30X. He began at 2:12:59 and watched. Now he saw a shape approaching the house, about the size and shape of a human, but not defined enough to say for certain that the nebulous image was of a person. More terrifying, Tommy realized, was that rather than presenting a yellow, orange, or red silhouette, signifying heat, what he observed was something deep blue, verging on purple and beyond purple into the ultraviolet spectrum, indicating cold.
He watched as, at two hours, thirteen minutes, and 2.09746 seconds after midnight, the blue form approached his house and passed through the wall of his living room. At two hours, thirteen minutes, and 3.00176 seconds after midnight, less than a tenth of a second later, the same vaguely defined cold blue shape passed back through the wall, exited his house, crossed the yard, and disappeared into the darkness.
Tommy stood up and pushed away from the desk, almost knocking over his chair as he felt behind him for the wall. His heart was pounding. What was that? He took as many deep, slow breaths as he could to calm himself.
Of one thing he was certain: it was not a technical glitch or digital aberration.
He watched the sequence three more times to make sure he’d seen what he thought he’d seen, still astonished but less startled with each viewing. The temptation, one he knew better than to concede to, was to erase the file and pretend he hadn’t seen it. Instead, he marked and cropped the segment, then made two safety copies on separate SD cards, saved a third copy to the cloud on his backup service, and emailed a fourth safety copy to Carl. He put one of the SD cards in his safe, even though whatever had passed through the wall of his house to move the knife could probably pass into the safe, and put the second SD card in his pocket.
He didn’t know exactly what he had, but whatever it was was physical, verifiable proof of something. Without going so far as to say what it proved, though he had a theory, it was the kind of thing Dani would want to see.
THURSDAY,
OCTOBER 21
36.
Dani had sat in on briefings by the medical examiner for Westchester County before, but always as John Foley’s assistant. Today she was on her own. The office was housed in an annex to the New York Medical College’s expansive Valhalla Campus (Stuart had dubbed the campus “a symphony in cement”), in a flat-roofed two-story building on Dana Road across from the police academy. The building always reminded Dani of an elementary school. In a field across from where she parked, a flock of geese rooted in the grass. The sky was overcast. She heard, in the distance, traffic on the Sprain Parkway. A gust of wind blew the door closed behind her as she entered the building.
Dr. Baldev Banerjee was a British expatriate of Indian descent whom Dani had had the pleasure of sitting next to at a dinner party at Stuart’s house. Banerjee had originally come to America to be a dentist after realizing he’d never make much money if he stayed in England. He’d changed his mind about being a dentist and trained himself in forensic pathology from a need to be of public service. He had polished British manners and a sense of humor verging on black, which perhaps came with the territory. But he was also good at what he did and aware of how good he was.
He was in his late forties, tall, with dark skin, heavy eyebrows, and penetratingly brown eyes. He was wearing khaki pants and a blue button-down oxford shirt with a black silk tie. The reading glasses he wore on a chain around his neck made him seem older than he was. The wedding ring on his left hand glowed brightly against his black skin.
His office was large, with a wall of windows looking out at the overcast sky, and felt like a classroom, with workstations and empty tabletops. Banerjee’s computer was connected to a projector on the ceiling that projected an HD image against the blank white wall behind his desk.
He closed the curtains to darken the room before beginning his presentation. In four office chairs forming the front row of the classroom sat Dani, Phil, Stuart, and then Irene. The ME sat behind his desk, facing them.
“All right then, let us begin,” Banerjee said, clicking on a photograph of the victim’s face, or what was left of it. His accent was 90 percent British and 10 percent Hindi, his speech and mannerisms gentle and refined. “Julie Rene Leonard. Age seventeen. Time of death, 0200 hours, plus or minus fifteen minutes in either direction.”
Dani quickly calculated that 2:13 fell within those parameters.
“Cause of death,” Banerjee continued, “exsanguination due to the severing of the right common carotid artery, the superior thyroidal, lingual, occipital, et cetera, by a wound inflicted by a sharp and heavy instrument. Instrument as yet unidentified.”
“A hatchet?” Dani asked. She recalled what Ed Stanley had told her about Amos. “Or an ax?”
“Thinner, sharper blade,” Banerjee said. “I think probably one of those big Chinese meat cleavers. Though I can’t really say it was Chinese. The action was either a series of right-handed blows coming from someone on her left, by the angle of attack, or by a left-handed person sitting to her right. She was in a prone position, lying down, when she was killed.”
“On the location where she was found?” Irene asked.
“Nothing suggests otherwise. Now as to her secondary wounds,” Banerjee continued, “we have third-degree burns in the superior orbital fissures, supraorbital and infraorbital foramens …”
You could know the names of everything in a person, right down to the subcellular level, Dani thought, and still not know what could make a person do what had been done to Julie Leonard.
“My opinion,” Banerjee said, “is that the heart was not beating at the time she suffered her burns. Also that the wounds were exit rather than entry burns, as might be accomplished by something like a blowtorch or a hot iron or something like that, because …”
He clicked to the next screen and continued.
“You can see here that we also find scorching in the esophagus, the stomach lining, a bit on the liver, and the duodenum.”
“And this is possible how?” Phil asked.
“I believe it was something she ate,” Banerjee said. “But to explain it better for you, I’ve prepared a demonstration.”
He placed on the table a stainless steel pan, two shot glasses, three packets of table salt from McDonald’s, a bottle of Poland Springs water, and a pair of test tubes, each containing some kind of white powder.
“Most of these materials you’re already familiar with,” he said, tearing open the salt packets and dumping the contents into one of the shot glasses. He opened the bottle of water and filled the second shot glass halfway. “Over here, sodium chloride, or common salt, NaCl, and here, water. Plain water. H2O. This”—he held up one of the test tubes—“is ammonium nitrate. NH4NO3.”
“Used in fertilizer bombs,” Phil said.
“Correct.” Banerjee dumped some of the white powder into the first shot glass with the salt. “And finally, this is the common element zinc. Atomic number 30. The twenty-fourth most common element on earth. Most of it comes from Australia. Also relatively easy to obtain.”
He mixed a measure of zinc with the salt and the ammonium nitrate.
“Now watch what happens when this is combined with water.”
Dani looked on as he put the second shot glass into the stainless steel pan, then poured the powder mixture into it, causing it to burst into flames. Banerjee allowed it
to burn, then placed the empty shot glass upside down atop of the flames to smother the reaction.
“Fire from water,” he said. “Though you also need oxygen. I found traces of zinc and ammonium nitrate in the girl’s eyes and in her chest and stomach wounds. The scorch pattern indicates that the killer poured the compound into her eyes, where it reacted with the water from her tears to create combustion.
“As for the thoracic wounds,” the ME continued, “I believe the girl swallowed some sort of container filled with the mixture of compounds, and then the killer pierced the chest cavity with something, maybe an ice pick or a filleting knife, something long and thin and sharp, to let the air in to create combustion and to pierce the container.”
“But Julie was gone before any of this occurred?” Dani asked.
“I can say with a high degree of certainty that the poor child was gone well before any of this happened and did not feel a thing,” Banerjee said softly.
“What about serology?” Irene asked. “You said complicated?”
“Quite,” the ME said. “Because we had blood from eight different people. Type A, type B, type O, all sorts of conflicting markers. I’m speaking only of the blood used to draw the symbol on the victim’s stomach. Separating the DNA took time. The symbol was drawn in blood from eight people, all four of the girls, including Julie, and all of the boys except the one who I gather had gone home early …”
“Amos,” Dani said.
“Yes,” Banerjee said, “though we’ve yet to obtain a DNA sample from him, correct?”
“Correct,” Phil said.
“And we don’t have one from Logan Gansevoort because he’s fled the country. Do we know where he went?” Dani asked.
“Not yet,” Irene said. “My guess is Nevis/St. Kitts, where the Gansevoorts have a home and dual citizenship. Unfortunately, we can’t extradite because the treaty Nevis/St. Kitts signed protects its citizens.”
“Actually, we do have a sample from Mr. Gansevoort,” Banerjee said. “Don’t we? I’m confused.”
