by David Wind
He felt the blood drain from his face.
“Ray?”
He didn’t answer: he couldn’t. He was in labor.
The embryo of his earlier thought broke through, its birth helped along by her words.
He turned and kissed her. “Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”
Chapter Thirty-six
Hyte looked out the window of Mason’s office. “You’ll have to bear with me on this,” he told Mason and launched into the theory Emma’s words had evoked. “The five remaining victims do not include Jonah Graham and the little girl, Lea Desmond. I’ve watched the tapes repeatedly. Everyone except Graham and Prestone said ‘Not me—someone else.’
“Lea Desmond never uttered a word. While it’s true she was a hostage, she wasn’t supposed to be one. She was in first class because of a whim on the pilot’s part.”
“Was Prestone a victim?”
“Absolutely! He was the reason for the 88 hijacking.”
“You’re saying it was Samael who killed him?”
“No! Samael hadn’t yet scheduled Prestone’s death. I think it was terrorists. It isn’t Samael’s way. Samael’s not just killing, he’s collecting the souls he believes outwitted death the first time. The ‘souls’ of the full-term hostages who survived the hijacking and Samael couldn’t ‘collect’ Prestone’s soul from a plane crash. No, Samael has to face the person.”
Mason waved his hand in the air. “You’ve confused me. If Graham isn’t a victim, and the girl isn’t either, and if my math is right, that leaves four surviving hostages, not five.”
“I know. That’s where I’m stuck,” Hyte admitted. “Did Samael pick the number eight because there were nine victims left at that point? Is there really one more victim or is it a con about who and how many victims there really are. According to the note, there were eight people to be collected. If Jonah Graham and Lea Desmond aren’t on the hit list, that means—”
“What that means,” Mason interrupted, “is that everything you’ve told me is speculation—you have no certainties.”
“Watch the fucking tapes again and tell me it’s guess work!”
“If we were handling the task force, you’d be roasted for this theory and you damn well know it.”
“Phil, I told you my theory because I need help. I want to plant at least three people on each hostage. We can’t afford to miss anything. Samael’s good, possibly the best the Department has ever come up against, and he kills on Fridays.”
“No extra men. You knew the ground rules when you accepted this assignment. Either you go it alone—the way the mayor wants—or walk away. I’m not supposed to be involved; I’m the middleman. Jesus, Ray, you’re conducting a covert investigation in direct opposition to the Chief Of Department’s task force.” Mason paused. “You’re the best deductive logistician I’ve ever known. Use that ability now, because it’s all the help you can expect on this case.”
Hyte stood abruptly. “I’ll keep you informed of events.”
“Just a second—you should know that the information about the poison will be leaked to the press today.
<><><>
“What’s it this time, Lieutenant?”
Hyte met Mofferty’s angry gaze. “Just some clarification.”
“I thought you’d been pulled off the task force.”
“That’s correct.”
“Then why are you bothering us? Don’t you think we’ve been through enough already?”
Mofferty’s words shattered Hyte’s calmness. “You’re alive, aren’t you? That’s more than six other hostages can say. Or is it that you’re glad they’re dead so there are six less people who saw what happened to you?”
Mofferty’s face went scarlet. “Goddamn you! What right do you have to accuse me?”
“I’m not accusing you. You’re doing it all by yourself. Have you ever watched the tapes of the hijacking?”
“Never!”
“Then do it. Live it again and look at everyone. They acted no different than you did! Maybe that will help you understand what happened to you and to your wife. Good God, what the hell kind of a shrink is Masters if he won’t confront you with the cause of your problem?”
“Dr. Masters has tried, Lieutenant. Jack won’t watch them,” Sonja Mofferty said, coming into the library through the outside doors.
“Then maybe it’s time he did,” Hyte said, again caught off guard by the woman’s beauty.
“Look, Hyte, you got no business here,” Mofferty said.
“You’re harassing us, and I won’t have it. I want you out!”
“In a moment,” Hyte said calmly. “For your own safety, I would recommend that you don’t leave this house from sundown on Friday night, until at least nine A.M. Saturday morning.”
“We always go to Dr. Masters’ house on Friday nights.”
“I’m asking you to break the pattern until we catch the killer. I’m sure Dr. Masters will reschedule the appointment for you.”
“I’ll discuss it with him,” Sonja Mofferty said for both of them. “Is there anything else?”
“Have either of you been to Asia since the hijacking?”
He watched Sonja’s eyes dart between him and her husband. “Jack won’t travel anymore. We don’t go anywhere.”
“I see,” Hyte said. Her answer felt wrong. He turned to Jack Mofferty. “Do you have many business dealings or clients in Asia?”
“No.”
“Do you import cars from there?”
Mofferty sneered. “Hardly. I sell Rolls, Mercedes, and Bentleys—not Nissans and Toyotas. Now, I think we’ve answered enough questions. Good day, Lieutenant!”
“I’ll show you out,” Sonja said, motioning Hyte toward the hallway.
Hyte hesitated. “One more question.”
Mofferty stiffened. “Get a warrant. Arrest me, and then ask all the questions you want. Now get out of my house!”
Hyte shrugged, and followed Sonja Mofferty out of the library. “Is it important, about having been to the Orient?” Sonja said at the doorway.
“It may be.”
She moistened her lips. “I... I wouldn’t want Jack to know.”
“Know what?” he asked, his eyes probing hard.
“About three months after the hijacking, I was offered a modeling job. High fashion accessories. The client wanted only me. And... I agreed. At that point, I didn’t know if I would have a marriage left. I needed some sort of security. The offer was substantial. When I discussed it with Franklin—Dr. Masters—he thought it would be good for me to travel. Get back on the horse I fell from, he said.”
“How could you keep that from your husband?”
“I told him I needed some time away. That I was going to a health spa Dr. Masters recommended. At that point, Jack hardly talked to me.”
“Where was this modeling assignment?”
“Hong Kong.”
“Who was the client?”
“I don’t know. The job was for an advertising agency. It’s not that unusual.”
“Which agency?” Hyte asked.
Sonja sighed. “It was seven months ago. I don’t remember the name. But my modeling agency should have the records of the job.”
“What magazines did the photographs appear in?”
“They were never used. The advertising people changed their mind about the campaign.” She shrugged. “It happens.”
“When was this, exactly?”
“Last September, around the middle of the month. Please, Lieutenant, you won’t say anything about it?”
“I can’t promise you that, but I hope it won’t prove necessary,” was all he would say.
<><><>
In his office, Hyte called Franklin Masters. “I’m sorry to bother you, Doctor,” Hyte said. “But I want to know about Sonja Mofferty’s trip to Hong Kong.”
“I thought it would be a good idea for her to go,” Masters said without hesitation, “but not for the reason she thought. She’s past her pr
ime as a high fashion model and I’d hoped that a trip in the company of younger women on the rise would show her that. I think it worked. When her photographs went unused, she took it well.”
“I see. Wasn’t it unusual for Sonja to be offered this job, if she was, as you said, past her prime?”
“I don’t think the job was on par with her previous work.”
“I see. Thank you for your time, Doctor.”
Hyte spent the rest of the day catching up on his precinct liaison paperwork and then, with Schwartz, went home to meet with O’Rourke and Cohen.
Cohen was the first to report.
“Ronald Bidding isn’t lying to us,” Cohen said. “I spoke with several of Bidding’s fellow employees. They were understandably upset that someone was investigating their friend and refused to answer any but the most general questions.
“When I met with Bidding, he answered all my questions. He confirmed his wife’s story, said he had asked her for a divorce. His girlfriend’s name is Sharon Henderson. He’s been seeing her for the last six months and plans to marry her. She’s a statistical analyst in Bidding’s department.
“I then interviewed Sharon Henderson. She backed Bidding up completely. She’s also four months pregnant.”
Hyte didn’t react to Cohen’s last words, except to erase Ronald Bidding’s name from the list of suspects. “Sally?”
“I spoke with the Trans Air psychologist, a Dr. Schmidt—Ph.D. He confirmed Joan Bidding had seen him for several months after the hijacking. He does not believe her capable of taking another person’s life—his words. When I asked about signs of paranoia, he said, and again I quote, ‘If someone had held a gun to your head for three hours, wouldn’t you be a little paranoid?’ He said that Joan’s main problem is two-fold. She has to learn to trust people again, and she must exorcise the idea that it was wrong to have shown fear to the hijackers.”
“Which doesn’t let her off the hook. Randy, what have you turned up with the phone number check?”
“The only familiar number dialed on a Friday night was from Jonah Graham’s phone in Westchester. It was a call to your office extension made on April ninth at eleven-forty P.M.”
“Yes. Emma called me the night of the Helenez killings. You gave me the message,” he reminded Schwartz. “So the phone check is a dead end.”
“We may still have a shot with the INS records,” O’Rourke said.
“With them or without them, we have something else.”
He told them his hunch about Jonah Graham, and the possibility that Samael was deceiving them about the number of victims.
“No!” Sally O’Rourke cut in.
He lifted his hands in a palms-up gesture. “Your floor.”
“Samael hasn’t followed any pattern common to a psychopath—which everyone agrees he’s not. He’s contacted us twice. Once by letter, once by phone. The note said that when the last eight were collected—the last eight, not passengers, not hostages, just the last eight—he would be gone. I have no reason to think there will be any less than eight.
“The Helenez killings brought the total down to six; Prestone’s death leaves five. According to your theory, Lea Desmond was never an intended victim. I agree with you about that. You’ve also excluded Jonah Graham. It’s that part of your theory with which I disagree. You’re excluding Graham because he didn’t say, ‘Not me— someone else’. A paranoid might reason differently. Samael could think Graham outwitted death by saying, ‘Kill me—not my wife.’ Therefore, there are five victims left, and the original hit list is accurate.”
Hyte thought over her idea. “We can theorize about every nuance of every word, but what we can’t afford to do is take a chance with any of the possible victims. And that includes Jonah Graham as well as Lea Desmond.”
“Which means?” Sy Cohen asked.
“We have to keep every possible suspect and victim covered. We don’t have to worry about Jonah Graham. He has a bodyguard. We also have plausible suspects in Sonja Mofferty and Joan Bidding. Mrs. Mofferty was in Hong Kong last September and Bidding spent two years working the Far East. She could have arranged to get the poison sent to her or brought in by one of her stewardesses. Both women’s personal lives are a mess. Add a heavy dollop of paranoia, and either woman could have been turned into our killer.”
Hyte looked at the faces regarding him with unasked questions. “Sally, you’re going to be Joan Bidding’s shadow. Sy, you’ll be the same for the Moffertys. I want to know every move they make, every person they speak to, and every place they go.”
Hyte weighed his next words carefully. “In two days, Samael will kill again. We have forty-eight hours left to save someone’s life.
<><><>
By late Thursday afternoon, Hyte still had the same two suspects: Joan Bidding and Sonja Mofferty. He wasn’t happy with either of them. The way suspicion seemed to settle on the two women was too convenient. It was as if the events were manufactured to point to them.
Hyte let the thought grow, but could find no answering response. He dropped that line of reasoning when he and Schwartz left his office at five-thirty and took a cab to his apartment. Neither Cohen nor O’Rourke had shown up yet. His answering machine contained one message from Emma.
When he called her back, she told him she was going to Westchester in the morning and would work there all day. “I can’t sit around the office or apartment knowing someone might kill my father.”
He agreed it would be for the best.
O’Rourke showed up a half hour later, reporting nothing more than that Joan Bidding went to work, stayed there, and went home. Cohen arrived fifteen minutes after O’Rourke and said the Moffertys stayed at home all day.
When he was alone, Hyte made dinner. Afterward, he returned to his study of the chalkboard. At eleven, he turned off all the lights, flicked on the stereo, and let his mind roam.
He fell asleep on the couch, listening to the Del Vikings, and dreamed about Samael singing ‘Come Go With Me’ as the shadowed figure shot flaming bolts into a group of airline passengers.
It wasn’t the dream that awakened him at six-thirty; it was the radio announcer’s excited voice.
“This just in from police headquarters. Chief William McPheerson has announced the apprehension of the Friday Night Killer following a midnight raid of a suspected terrorist support group. The alleged killer of six has been tentatively identified as Lester Smith-Henning, of London, England.
“Deputy Chief Inspector John Conner, second in command of the task force, said that a check is being made with English authorities to confirm the identity of Smith-Henning. Further updates as they come in.”
“Who in the hell is Lester Smith-Henning?” Hyte asked aloud.
Chapter Thirty-seven
Hyte pushed through the crowd of reporters at headquarters and went up to his office. Schwartz was there, waiting for him.
“The chief wants you to call him ASAP.”
He dialed Mason’s number. There was no answer.
“What have you heard?” he asked Schwartz.
“When I came in, everyone was in the coffee room talking about it. The word is that it’s a terrorist who was avenging the other terrorists’ deaths.”
“Horse shit!” Hyte snapped just as Phil Mason came in. Schwartz withdrew.
“McPheerson pulled it off,” Mason said.
“Who is this Smith-Henning?”
“That’s not his name. It’s Saad Mohamad, and he’s the half-brother of Rashid Mohamad.”
Hyte stared at Mason, working it out. “That explains the raid of the terrorist group. However, it doesn’t fit. Why would he kill and not publicize what he’s doing?”
“Give it up!” Mason growled. “We lost, McPheerson and Conner won. Three undercover cops from the subversive activities squad overheard the suspect call himself Allah’s Messenger of Death.”
“He’s not Samael!” Hyte shouted, his fist exploding on the desk.
“He said he was th
e messenger of death, sent to avenge his brother’s betrayal. There’s also firm evidence linking him with the Prestone bombing.”
“I want to see him.”
“Ray,” Mason said, shaking his head. “Where are they holding him?”
“In a security room. Don’t butt heads with McPheerson, no matter what you think, unless you want to spend the rest of your time working Bed-Sty.”
“I don’t give a fuck where he sends me as long as I get to speak to this man. I’ll know if he’s Samael after that.”
“You’re obsessed, Ray.”
“Did McPheerson find the crossbow and the poison? Of course not,” he said when Mason didn’t reply. “And they won’t be found either. Phil, we’re running a parallel investigation, authorized by the mayor and approved by the PC. We have an obligation to speak to the prisoner. And if he’s not Samael, we’ve still got a case.”
“Ray, it’s over.”
“Not yet! Not until I talk to him.” Then he smiled. “Coming?”
They found McPheerson sitting on the corner of a desk in Internal Affairs, holding court. Hyte let Mason take the lead.
“Chief McPheerson,” Mason said formally, “we would like to speak with the suspect.”
McPheerson looked at him suspiciously. “Why is that, Chief Mason?”
“There are questions that concern a parallel investigation involving terrorist groups. And, as that case is being coordinated by Lieutenant Hyte, I require his assistance.”
“Really?” McPheerson asked, turning to look at Hyte.
“Why is it that I’m unaware of this, ah, parallel investigation?”
Mason kept his face expressionless. “You are unaware because it’s the covert operation being run by my department, investigating the suspected kill-for-hire hit men that you approved the budget on. There have been eyes-only follow-ups.”
“Bullshit, Mason,” McPheerson barked. He turned to Hyte. “You don’t think he’s the killer, do you, Lieutenant?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to. I don’t like you, Hyte, and I don’t like the way you work.”
Hyte fought the dark rage McPheerson’s words set off.
