The boy tapped a forefinger to his left temple. “I eat a dozen carrots a day. I have twenty-twenty vision and I can see in the dark.”
“You’re in the wrong field,” Dick Braidy said. “You should be in diplomacy.”
“See you,” the boy said.
“See you.” Dick Braidy closed the door and slid the bolt. Feeling just a little pleased with himself, he had himself a long, slow-motion shower and shampoo. He dried himself, gave his hair a quick once-over with the hairdryer provided by Bodies-PLUS, slipped back into his street clothes.
As he crossed the entrance vestibule, his journalist’s eye scanned the Bodies-PLUS bulletin board. Four square feet of corkboard overflowed with ads for Bodies-PLUS vitamin supplements and unpasteurized, caffeine-free bee pollen.
Two New York Police Department flyers had been push-pinned to the bottom of the board. Both were sketches, apparently drawn by the same robot—one of a full-lipped, pouting black woman, the other of a generic male Hispanic. Both carried the same text: WANTED FOR QUESTIONING IN CONNECTION WITH HOMICIDE. With a start Dick Braidy realized that the male was the same Identi-Kit that Lieutenant Cardozo had showed him that afternoon.
Such an ordinary face, Dick Braidy thought. You see a hundred a day of them. Suppressing a shudder, he hurried into the hallway and pressed the elevator button.
TWENTY-THREE
Wednesday, May 22
“TELL ME.” LOU STEIN’S face was ruddy above a cotton work shirt. “Why is it the stuff you find in a Park Avenue trash basket looks exactly the same as the stuff you find in a Times Square trash basket? Same newspapers, same hot-dog wrappers, same condoms, same unidentifiable objects.”
“I guess,” Cardozo said, “all neighborhoods are trashy in the same way.”
They were standing in Lou’s lab, gloved, reviewing the contents of the trash basket from the southwest corner of Sixty-seventh and Park. Lou’s gloved fingers smoothed a newspaper clipping down on the steel tabletop. He nudged his glasses lower on his nose and read aloud: “Talk of le tout Park Avenue is the scrumptious dinner Annie MacAdam is serving chez elle tonight. Annie’s eight-room duplex—”
“Thanks, Lou, I know it by heart.”
“This column was clipped,” Lou said, “not torn.” His tweezers tapped the faintly jagged edge of the paper. “In fact, the serrations on this column are compatible with the serrations on the first column.”
“Only compatible? Don’t they match?”
“Let’s be grateful for what we’ve got. They don’t not match. The same rinky-dink, loose-screwed, two-inch five-and-dime scissors could have cut them both out. And look what else the tooth fairy brought.” Lou was holding up a three-inch length of white candle, a half inch in diameter, with a blackened wick. “This is a Saffire-brand Shabbes—and it’s a kissing cousin of the candle we found in Oona Aldrich’s changing room. Available in any New York supermarket. Not only the same brand, the same box. Saffire Shabbes comes in cardboard packs. Whoever stacked them on the shelf dented this box. There’s a groove running along the underside of candle one.” Lou held up another candle. “There’s a groove on the underside of candle two.” He held up the two candles together. “They’re the same groove. And, dollars to doughnuts, it’ll be on the underside of candle three.”
“I appreciate your optimism. How long did candle two burn?”
“A little under two minutes. That’s lab conditions.”
“Was the candle put out, or did it go out by itself?”
“Impossible to determine.” Lou peeled off his gloves and moved to the desk. He picked up a lab report. “Bad news from Lifeways Lab. They haven’t been able to recover usable DNA from the semen and hair in Oona Aldrich’s mouth.”
“How do the hair samples from Avalon Gardner’s mouth match up with the Aldrich hairs?”
“Our equipment’s a little behind state-of-the-art, but my microscope says they’re identical.”
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Cardozo stood just inside the entrance of the Dominion Club.
“A what?” the porter said.
“A small candle,” Cardozo repeated patiently.
The porter pulled back his head and bulged his eyes. “Christ, no. People don’t use candles on the street.”
Two minutes later the doorman at the co-op across the street shook his head.
“No, I didn’t see any candle.”
MARTY WILKES, the psychologist, frowned at the photographs that had been paper-clipped to Avalon Gardner’s autopsy report. “Have you been able to establish the sequence of these cuts?”
“The first two cuts are to the throat,” Cardozo said. “Then there’s a series of horizontal slashes descending across the abdomen and then punctures over the liver.” He sat clicking the push-button of his ballpoint pen. “What we’re not sure of is whether he has sex first or kills them first. If he has sex first, what’s to keep the victim from screaming? Or fighting him off? Or getting away?”
“Is there any sign that either victim was gagged?”
“None.”
“Then he wounds them first.”
“And has sex with a dying person?”
“Or a dead person. It could be a payback.”
“For what?”
“I’ll hazard a guess. As a child he was forced to have oral sex with an adult. And he feared for his life. Possibly this person was a woman, but the overwhelming probability is that it was a man.”
Cardozo aimed a glance toward the desktop computer. “This is your database talking?”
Wilkes nodded. “According to BSU files, over eighty percent of serial killers were abused as children.”
“Tell me if this is in your files.” Cardozo sat forward in his chair. “Both times there’s been body tissue missing.”
Wilkes was silent. His arms crossed in front of his chest, erecting a tight little wall. “Are we talking body parts? Fingers? Nipples?”
“He’s ripped off tissue around the cuts.”
“How much tissue?”
“Just enough so you can’t suture the wounds back together.”
Wilkes nodded, somber. Behind him, the Levolors in the window had been angled to filter the late-afternoon sun down to a soft shimmer. “Look, it’s repulsive, but it’s not uncommon. The sex instinct in children is oral—you see male infants having erections at their mother’s breast. For the infant, biting, chewing, even eating and devouring are sexualized. And this is the instinctual level where the serial killer is fixated.”
“You’re saying he’s eating the tissue?”
“Maybe not on the spot, but there are instances in the database.”
“And he has an orgasm while he eats it?”
“Very possibly.”
Cardozo rose and moved to the window. He stood with his back to Marty Wilkes. “Let’s say Delancey killed Oona in a rage. And now to cover up he’s creating the appearance of a serial killing. Would he—could he go this far?”
“You’re coming back to an old question. If a man kills to create the appearance of serial killing, is he a serial killer?”
Cardozo turned. “Well—is he?”
“Once he goes random he fits the definition.”
“Would you say Avalon Gardner was selected randomly?”
“Random within the parameters. So far I see two critical marks in the killer’s choice of victim. He’s violating upper-class sanctums. And he’s going for women.”
Cardozo stared a moment at the face staring back at him. “Avalon Gardner was a man.”
Wilkes conceded as much with a nod. “A man dressed in such a way that he could be mistaken for a woman.”
“And you think the killer mistook him?”
“I believe so. Serial killing, overwhelmingly, is something men do to women.”
Cardozo frowned. “I don’t see Avalon as random. He’s linked to Oona. They knew each other. They used to socialize.”
“The killer is aiming at a small social class—the extremely conspicuous, self-p
ublicizing people who monopolize the New York gossip columns. The link you’re seeing may be one he’s completely unaware of.”
For a moment neither of them spoke.
“And,” Wilkes said, “he may not be Jim Delancey. He could be the man with the boom box. Or someone you don’t even have a lead to yet. But let’s say he’s the boom-box man. According to your witnesses the youngest this man could be is eighteen. So, figure that he could have been assaulted as young as six years of age—we’re looking into cases at least twelve years old. And let’s make a statistically based cutoff, our killer is under thirty, so we’re looking no further back than twenty-four years.”
Cardozo’s eye went to the Harvard Med School diploma on the wall.
“There’s a sixty-percent probability that he’s illegitimate. Most of these fellows never had a decent relationship with any father figure, never knew their real father, and one way or another were rejected by their mothers. What I recommend you do, Vince, is search the records. Look for an illegitimate Caucasian Catholic Hispanic who was raised by a female relative and sexually assaulted by an older male relative.”
Cardozo grimaced at the thought of sifting through twelve years of uncomputerized records. “Marty, how long is he going to give us before the next killing?”
“The second was eleven days after the first, so he’s on a minimax cycle. If he keeps to the statistical mainstream, no sooner than next Thursday would be a good guess.”
CARDOZO DIDN’T SEE Sam Richards in the squad room.
He went to the TV room. Richards was standing by the coffee maker, waiting for the coffee to finish dripping through.
“Sam, how are you coming with the gyms and sports outlets?”
“Just about wound up. There’s a gym on Staten Island I want to visit, and there are two near the Path station in Newark.”
“When you get back from Newark, could you go down to Family Court on Lafayette?”
Richards looked at Cardozo with frank curiosity.
“I’d like you to look at the records from twenty-four to twelve years back,” Cardozo said. “Pull any cases of Catholic Hispanic boys sexually assaulted by an older male relative.”
Richards gave him a look. “Yeah. Right.”
TWENTY-FOUR
“WHAT ABOUT GIVING SOME SPACE to the other side of the story?” Nancy Guardella said.
“I wasn’t aware,” Zack Morrow said, “that we were giving space to either side.”
They were coming to the end of their lunch at Le Cercle. Lunch, today, had been on Senator Guardella. She loved lunch at Le Cercle. She loved the cuisine and the pointedly snooty staff and the celebrities who fought for the right to crowd the sumptuous red plush banquettes. She loved the fact that reservations for lunch required phoning two weeks ahead, and the fact that she could get in on forty-five-minutes’ notice.
“Come on,” she said. “Dizey Duke is openly crusading to lynch the boy.”
Zack Morrow lowered his eyes. “I have no input into Dizey’s column.”
A scowl slowly flattened Nancy Guardella’s face. “You publish her.”
“If I altered just one of her columns,” Zack said, “censored just one word, she’d have the right to leave me. And I can’t afford the circulation drop.”
“Dizey Duke? She’s not that powerful.”
“If she’s not that powerful,” Tori Sandberg said, “why do you care what she writes?”
Nancy Guardella lifted her cappuccino and sipped. “Principle. Innocent till proven guilty. Ever hear of it?”
Tori set her lips in a thin line of impatience. “That principle binds the law. Not the press.”
“And as a U.S. senator,” Nancy Guardella said, “it binds me. It binds me to stand up for you, Tori, and for you, Zack, which is easy because I love you both. And it binds me to stand up for people nobody loves, like Jim Delancey. He’s getting a raw deal in the media.”
Tori drew in a long breath. “He got a pretty soft deal from the justice system. Maybe he’s earned a raw deal in the media.”
In Nancy Guardella’s eyes was a mingled expression of sadness and indignation. “Tori, don’t you believe in fairness for all? Or do you just believe in fairness for some of the people?”
“I hope I believe in fairness for all.”
Senator Guardella gave Tori Sandberg a slow glance. Just a glance. “If you truly believe in fairness, you’ll have Matrix Magazine interview Xenia Delancey. She’s a great subject. She’s a mother, she’s fighting for her kid, she’s battling public opinion. Women will identify.”
Tori’s eyes betrayed a moment’s unguarded shock. “Sorry. She’s the wrong mother for me, and he’s the wrong kid. I’m too good a friend of Leigh Baker’s, and too many bad things have happened between her and Jim Delancey.”
“That’s history,” Nancy Guardella said.
Tori shook her head. “Leigh feels they’re still happening.”
“Oh?”
“She thinks Delancey is making harassing phone calls.”
A glaze of pure annoyance came over Nancy Guardella’s face. “The kid is out of prison by the skin of his teeth. He’s not going to risk his freedom just to needle Leigh Baker.”
Tori smiled coolly. “Unless he’s unbalanced.”
Nancy Guardella’s face was rigid. She gripped the armrests of her chair and was up on her feet. “Would you both excuse me a moment?”
She moved past tables of socialites and celebrities, spraying air kisses and eye contact, striding just quickly enough that waiters and table-hoppers got out of her way. She crossed the restaurant to the table where Kristi Blackwell, pale and slim in one of Gloria Spahn’s raspberry sheaths, was having lunch with her husband. Today her husband looked sober.
Nancy Guardella thrust out a hand. Thirty carats flashed. Kristi looked up, quickly found a smile, and took the hand.
“One of my constituents has an interesting problem.” Nancy Guardella took the unoccupied chair. “Fanfare might consider doing a piece.”
Kristi speared a chunk of lobster, dipped it in green mayonnaise, and raised it to her mouth. “All ears.”
“She’s a working mother. Her son was convicted of a felony. He served his time and he’s out of prison. But he’s being set up by the press and the police to close an unrelated murder case.”
Silence. Eye contact. Kristi Blackwell smiled.
“Nice try, Nancy, but I’m not going to touch Jim Delancey or the Society Sam killings. We have a three-week press lag, and we stay away from current cases. They’re much too volatile.”
Nancy Guardella raised her eyes toward Kristi. “You didn’t stay away from the Nita Kohler killing.”
“That was different. The case was going to trial and the issues were clear.”
Wystan Blackwell gazed out of bloodshot eyes at Senator Guardella. His expression was slack and bored and sour. “I should think Kristi’s readers have had more than enough of Jim Delancey for one lifetime.”
Nancy Guardella gave Wystan Blackwell a look, and the look said, Stay out of this. “Doesn’t anyone in this city care that the cops and the press are walking all over the boy’s rights?”
“If it turns out he’s guilty again,” Kristi Blackwell said, “people will want to know why they didn’t walk over his rights a lot harder and a lot sooner.”
LEIGH CAME BACK from the half-day’s shooting in a good mood. Afternoon sun reflected off the town houses across the garden, and her bedroom walls glowed like a sky full of pale pink kites. She dropped her pocketbook and her jacket on the bed. Something cooed softly, and it took her a moment to realize that the telephone was ringing.
By the time she reached the receiver, the answering machine had clicked on.
She shouted over the outgoing message. “Just a minute, let me kill this thing.”
She pushed buttons and finally got her recorded voice to shut up. “Hello?” she said.
No answer.
“Hello?”
She heard somethi
ng—it wasn’t quite breathing and it wasn’t quite knocking. It wasn’t quite anything she’d ever heard on a telephone before.
“Who is this?”
The breathing-knocking went on.
“Same to you.” She slammed the receiver down.
Now she was angry.
She stripped down to her underwear. She spread a towel on the rug and pushed herself through a half hour of stretching exercises. It was a punishing ritual performed for reasons that only her body knew. When she’d had enough and her nerves had calmed down, she took a twenty-minute shower.
And then she spread two bath towels on the bed and lay down and shut her eyes.
A long while later, in her dream, a man’s voice was telling her that a receiver seemed to be off the hook. “Please check your extensions.”
She opened her eyes and sat up. The voice didn’t stop.
She looked at the phone and saw that the receiver had landed crooked. The green light on the answering machine was still lit, which meant the machine was still recording.
She replaced the receiver, correctly this time. The voice stopped. She pressed buttons and finally brought the answering machine to a halt. The tape had recorded practically to the end, and it took almost ten minutes to rewind it.
She pressed the Replay button. For the next forty-five minutes she gave the machine her undivided attention.
“HAVE YOU SEEN MY APARTMENT since I enlarged it?” Sorry Chappell said. Her name was actually Sorella, but since she was one of the giddiest people in New York, the nickname Sorry—so amusingly wrong for a rich, plump, brassy blond—had stuck. “No, I haven’t,” Leigh said.
“I knocked a hole into the building next door.” As one of New York’s top interior designers, Sorry was famous for the holes she had knocked into Manhattan’s most prestigious co-ops. “You’ve got to come look. Now, have you been to any good auctions lately?”
Leigh shook her head. “None.”
They had met for dessert in the garden of a new French bakery on East Eighty-first. Leigh had suggested meeting, Sorry had suggested dessert.
“I’ve been haunting the estate sales at Sotheby’s,” Sorry said, “hoping some dark ruby parures will come up—something for late-afternoon wear.”
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