The Weeping Buddha

by Heather Dune Macadam

  Freesia poked her head into her own office and offered, “You want to get a cup of coffee with me in the break room?”

  Devon followed her down the hall and sat in one of the plastic prefab chairs allotted by the city for detectives to relax in. “This is harder than I thought, going back and looking at it all.”

  “It doesn’t solve the case, does it?” Freesia handed her a cup and pointed to the sugar and Coffeemate on the counter. “I don’t know how you like it.”

  “Black is fine, thanks.”

  “Back when I was new on the job, every once in a while I’d pull out my old cases and read through them. Picking scabs, that’s what I call it.”

  “Every New Year’s Eve Beka used to call and talk about Todd.”

  “And this year?”

  “I didn’t answer her call.”

  “That explains it.” Freesia stirred her coffee slowly.

  “Explains what?”

  “Why you’re really here.” Devon looked at her expectantly.“Picking the scab for her.” Freesia sipped her coffee and looked at the younger detective thoughtfully. “I get calls from downstairs all the time from parents and friends looking to see the unsolved case file of their loved ones. Beka was not unique. She just wanted closure, and no one could give it to her.”

  “Sam Daniels has gone on with his life. He hasn’t been here asking for the file.”

  “How do you know?” Freesia raised her eyebrows and tilted her head down toward Devon, waiting for her to ask. “Around Todd’s birthday. Anniversaries are hard on everybody, especially for family members, and his dad died last year.”

  “Death always brings it up again.”

  “Yep. Sam may be a psychologist who knows all about the range of feelings that go with the territory, but he was still here the week of Todd’s birthday, looking for answers. You know, we recommend his book, Unreconciled Grief, For Survivors of a Missing Person. Ever read it?”

  “I wasn’t even aware he had a book out.” Devon felt slightly embarrassed.

  “It’s an excellent resource …” As Freesia began to tell her about the stages of grief, Devon relaxed.

  “If you aren’t picking scabs, why is it that you have all the missing New Year’s files on your desk?” the younger detective asked.

  “Touché.” Freesia raised her Styrofoam cup. “I’m also looking for similarities.”

  “Are there any?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Well, they all disappeared on New Year’s Eve.”

  “After leaving a group of friends, or a party,” Freesia pointed out.

  “There’s no trace of them, ever again, except for the three who were floaters.”

  “And no sign of foul play. That is, except maybe for the last one.”

  “What was different about him?” Devon’s ears perked up.

  “He had some marks that could have been made by someone, or they could have been made by garbage. There’s lots of glass in the East River, especially on the bottom where he was rolling around for two months. But it was so cold that winter that he wasn’t as decayed as the other two we found, so we could still see abrasions.”

  “What makes you think they’re not random scrapings?”

  “Edilio Ferraro.” Freesia took a sip of her coffee, forcing a dramatic pause. It was Devon’s turn to say touché, but she kept her mouth shut. “Marders called me this morning. That’s what my meeting was about. The decay on last year’s body was advanced but there were superficial wounds on his chest. I’ve requested the autopsy reports on the other two as well, but his was the only one with any scarring.There were no bruisings or other premortem marks to indicate violence or foul play.”

  “Were they wet deaths?” Devon asked.

  “The fluid in the lungs in all three cases was consistent with the river.”

  “And there were no strangulation bruises or ligature marks?”

  Freesia nodded. “You see the problem. How do you drown someone, leave no bruises, and then carve them up after they’re dead?”

  “I don’t know,” Devon lied. Her mind leapt to one thought alone, Norflex, but she kept her revelations to herself. “Would you do me a favor?”

  “Another one?” The corner of Freesia’s mouth was upturned and Devon knew she was kidding with her.

  “I have to go up to the coroner’s anyway. Could you get me access to the photos from those three boys, Detective Free—”

  “Carol,” Freesia interrupted her, “call me Carol. What do you think you’ll find?” They were definitely on the same page.

  “Do you know what Kanji is?”

  “Rice soup in Chinatown?”

  “Actually, I’m referring to Japanese and Chinese characters,”

  Devon explained. “I’d like to see if the body you found last year has similar markings.”

  “You don’t think Beka killed Gabe.”

  “Never did.”

  “Marders thinks she killed all of them,” Freesia warned her.

  “Beka was a slut, not a black widow.”

  Carol laughed out loud, then stopped herself. “I’m sorry. I forgot she was your friend.”

  “That’s okay. She was a slut with a great sense of humor.” They smirked at each other and drank their coffee. “Beka had her own ghosts. She was haunted by Todd’s disappearance, her parents’deaths. She was very superstitious, but she was no murderer.”

  “Her parents died? How?”

  “Car accident.”

  “Maybe somebody should look into that.”

  “You trying to get into Homicide now?”

  “I’d settle for a free trip to Hawaii!”

  “Beka did not kill her parents.”

  “You sure about that?”

  Devon stood up quietly.

  “I’ll help you get copies of the autopsy reports and the corpses.But Devon, these are my boys. They’ve been missing for years and these families have no idea what happened to their sons and brothers.I want in on anything you find.”

  “Carol, you’re the one who’s kept their memories alive. You’ll be the first to know.”

  “Maybe it’s all just a coincidence.”

  “You know what Detective Brennen says? Too much coincidence means crime.” She looked down at the blinking message on her cellphone. “I’ll be at the coroner’s office in an hour.” Detective Freesia smiled and nodded.

  They shook hands and Devon handed her new colleague a Suffolk County business card. She headed down the corridor and stepped onto the escalator. She had ridden it down to the lobby all those years ago, when she’d left One Police Plaza for the first time, and she wanted to repeat the experience. She wasn’t sure why, but she had a feeling it had to do, like Freesia had said, with closure.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The practice of Zen is just like making a fine sword …

  —NANSHINKEN

  Lochwood was standing outside of Montebello’s building, tapping his foot and checking his watch, when her jeep pulled up to the curb.“You took long enough.” He sounded irritable.

  “Take a pill. It’s not even ten-thirty.” She rolled her eyes.

  “Gary faxed the photographs from the scene and I can’t make any sense of them.” He could be as impatient as a teenager.

  She thought about telling him what she and Detective Freesia were working on, but kept her mouth shut. He was too cranky.

  The photographs had been distorted by the fax resolution, but Devon thought she could make an accurate rendering and began to trace the lines on Gabe’s body. She outlined each mark, then went back to Gabe’s desk and began to paint the lines in thick ink strokes.She didn’t worry about getting the stroke positions wrong, she just let her wrist float above her hand loosely, the way she’d been taught to hold the paintbrush in school. “Don’t hold it like a hammer! It’s a feather, the wingtip of a bird, your lover’s hand!” Kermit McBride had yelled at them while they tried to relax and incorporate his instructions.

  Lochwo
od began to stride back and forth along the windows. It was taking longer than he wanted, she knew that, but she was not going be rushed. She ignored him with all of her powers of concentration until his constant pacing and the weight of his feet against the wood floor got the better of her.

  “You’re driving me crazy!” she yelled. He sat down on the couch and didn’t move. “I mean it, Loch. If you don’t get out of here right now, I’m going to stop what I’m doing.”

  He crept out of the room and down the stairs, but she didn’t resume her brush strokes until she heard a door slam. She shook her wrist again to ease the flow of blood to her left hand and began once more. When she was done, she knew for sure that she had seen one of the ideograms in Hans’s book at the zendo, but she couldn’t recall what it meant. The rest she didn’t recognize. She stuck the three sheets of paper into the fax machine and dialed Japan. Now it was her turn to pace.

  She went downstairs and sat on the stoop with Loch. “We’ve got time to kill. I have no idea what time it is in Japan right now. Why don’t we head up to the autopsy and stop back here on our way home? If I haven’t heard from him by then he can fax us at the office.”

  “I wish there was a quicker way to do this.”

  “There probably is, but there wasn’t at six this morning. Come on, let’s go.” She stood up and locked the front door. Fifteen minutes later they were at Bellevue, and the city mortuary.

  “You’re early.” Detective Marders was standing in front of them almost menacingly.

  Great, Devon thought, this will really improve Loch’s temper.

  “Didn’t want to miss anything,” Brennen told him.

  “Yeah, well, I knew you’d show up no matter what time I told you.”

  “You were right. Now, you gonna include us in this shindig or are we shut out?”

  “Your C.O. called my C.O.”

  “Fancy that.”

  Devon stepped away from them—Homicide detectives had complex personalities different from any other species. They could be egotistical but sensitive, observant yet tunnel-visioned; they were intelligent about human nature but idiots when it came to love; they were temperamental workaholics who could be intuitive, creative, and analytical, but she wasn’t sure they were human. They reminded her of artists, maybe that’s why she felt comfortable in both worlds.

  At the information desk she asked which way to take for archives and decided to wait until after the autopsy—she didn’t want Marders to know what she was up to yet. Detectives were sneaky, too.

  “So, you gonna tell us what you two came up with this morning?” Marders was asking Loch.

  “Just as soon as we hear what the M.E.’s got to say.” Lochwood wasn’t giving Marders any gifts. They went through the security scanners and headed down the hallway to the morgue elevator.

  “Detectives,” Ron Smithers, Chief Medical Examiner for the city of New York, began his autopsy formally, “what we have here looks like a strangulation accompanied by postmortem wounding.”

  “So it looks like torture but it wasn’t?” Marders asked.

  “You’re a regular whiz kid,” Loch quipped.

  “The cause of death is OD.”

  “What was the drug in his system?” Devon asked.

  “We had the lab run that, detective—” He paused.

  “Halsey,” she introduced herself.

  “Well, Detective Halsey, it was Norflex.”

  “That matches our m.o. in Suffolk,” Lochwood confirmed. “Both of our victims there were drugged, one was stabbed to death but the other died of cardiac arrest from an overdose—that victim also had slit wrists.”

  Even as he said the words, she heard the warning voice in her head, overkill. Both victims—all three, if one considered Beka a victim and not the perpetrator—were classic overkill scenarios, when a murderer bent by rage inflicts wounds after the victim is dead. It was a not-uncommon phenomenon but it usually occurred when a perpetrator knew the victim and wanted to make certain that the victim did not come back to life. She had seen it in domestic abuse cases as well as serial murders.

  She caught Loch’s eyes again. She knew he was putting it together the same way, but wondered if he saw that Beka had been killed twice as well, with an overdose and the slit wrists. Jo had pointed out that some suicides like to make sure of their success, but those cases were usually male suicide victims, not female.

  “The indentation of the springs in the flesh and the lack of bruising in those areas are consistent with postmortem additions to the body. The carving of the chest was done immediately after or upon death—the blood was still clotting. He had eaten prior to his death and had had a glass of wine.” The M.E. finished his commentary on Edilio’s wounds and concluded that he had been dead about one week.

  “Put that with Beka Imamura’s presence at Missing Persons last Tuesday and we’ve got our murderer all wrapped up and in a morgue already,” Marders announced.

  “Excuse me?” Devon was outraged.

  “It’s pretty self-explanatory,” Marders said as they left the autopsy room.

  Devon could not believe what she was hearing.

  “The person who murdered Edilio Ferraro had time, motive, and an agenda. That person had to own or live in the building in order to take the time to kill him in this way, since what we’ve just heard proves that it was not a random act. And Norflex takes time to work, three hours before coma and cardiac arrest. Furthermore, if what you’re saying about this Japanese stuff is true, we have m.o. and signature.It had to be Imamura.”

  “All you guys want to pin it on the Asian ‘chick’ because she’s convenient,” she fumed at him. “I knew her!”

  “Yeah, well, maybe you didn’t know her as well as you think!” Marders yelled back.

  Devon didn’t flinch. “What about the break-in?”

  Lochwood took a step back and let her go. Marders did not know how flawless her logic could be and Loch planned to enjoy the utter emasculation of his rival under Devon’s tirade.

  “You don’t know who it was any more than we do. It could have been a random act; someone who reads Newsday or the obits in the Times, someone who knows the building.”

  “Right. A random thief who stole only a Tyvek suit, when there were original paintings worth tens of thousands on the second floor?”

  she said frostily.

  “Hey, I like Imamura for the murders. You don’t? Prove it.”

  “Fine, we’ll need copies of the fingerprints you pulled.” She had him where she wanted him; now he had to hand her the prints without any delay.

  “And we’ll need the same from your scene to run against the prints we pulled last night.”

  “If you want to expedite things, I can take your prints with us and run them in Suffolk.” Devon knew he wouldn’t go for her idea, but couldn’t stop herself from trying.

  “I’m not letting you walk off with any prints. I don’t trust you,” Marders said, snarling.

  “That was unnecessary.” Loch stepped in to defend Devon.

  “I don’t care what you think, Brennen! She just told us her friend—the only suspect in my opinion—is innocent!”

  “You both have your own agendas for this case.”

  “Hey, I don’t even know what she’s doing on this case. You guys short-staffed or what?”

  Loch punched his forefinger into Marders’s chest. “Don’t put your own incompetence off on my detective, Marders, just because you think women should only be meter maids.”

  Marders stuck his own finger out at Brennen. “Just cause you’re boffing her doesn’t mean she gets special treatment in this county!”

  Loch grabbed him by the collar.

  “Good work, Marders.” Devon laughed as she slapped Lochwood on the back of the head. “Too bad you can’t figure out who the real murderer is. Now why don’t you two boys go piss on a few poles and get it over with!” She headed down the hall for the elevator.

  Lochwood was still steamed but his voice wa
s calm as he shoved a copy of the fax they had just received from Kyoto into Marders’s hand. “You really think she’d have figured out what the carving meant if she weren’t interested in finding the truth?”

  “Imamura still could have done it.”

  “She didn’t read or write Japanese.”

  “And Halsey does? Imamura could have copied them just like your sweetheart did.” Marders snorted at him and headed back toward the morgue.

  Devon was halfway down the hall and about to leave Loch behind. He followed her down a corridor and a back stairway, which led to a more-than-tomblike attachment to the county morgue—Archives. Freesia had done her part; all Devon had to do was sign for the receipt of the duplicates. Twenty minutes later they were sitting in Loch’s car and looking at photos from Eric Heron’s autopsy—the first sign that someone may have performed this kind of mutilation before Edilio and Gabe.

  “You know, Marders is aware of this report,” Loch sputtered.

  “Of course he is. But he thinks Beka did it and I know she didn’t.”

  “And why is that again?”

  “Because Beka hasn’t come into the city for New Year’s Eve since 1984.” She wiggled her finger at the ignition so he’d start the engine. “Let’s hurry up and get this to Japan.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  For eighteen years I could not return;

  Now I’ve forgotten the road by which I came.

  —ZEN PHRASE

  The fax pages were lying on the floor next to Gabe’s desk when Devon and Loch arrived back at the loft. But the Zen phrase Isshu Koga had quoted back to them was about as clear as any koan could be: “For eighteen years I could not return; Now I’ve forgotten the road by which I came.”

  “What the hell’s that mean?” Loch asked.

  “It’s been eighteen years since Todd disappeared. Think of the stab wounds, Loch. I was right …” She looked at the second sheet of fax paper but had to re-read what Isshu had written. “This all links back to Todd.” She handed the fax to Loch and sat down at Gabe’s desk one more time to begin tracing the photograph she had gotten from the city morgue’s archivist.