The Weeping Buddha

by Heather Dune Macadam

  “That means the killer had to be about my height, Loch.”

  “Good point.”

  “Godywn has to be six foot one and black as ink—Sam probably around five-ten and blond, like me. Josh is the shortest of the guys and he’s got dark hair.”

  “What about the girls?”

  “We’re all about the same height except for Maddie—she’s a Smurf—five foot one or two.”

  “And they were all in the city yesterday afternoon when you were alone in Gabe’s studio.”

  “But why kill Edilio first?” She had to ask the question—it was one of those sticky wickets that just did not fit, and yet to the murderer it must have made perfect sense. “If we’re talking about an experienced killer there would be no need to practice, which is what Edilio’s murder looked like, a practice run.”

  “You think we have two killers?”

  The traffic had begun to breathe again; it had only been a traffic fart, much to Devon’s relief.

  “The New Year’s boys seem to create a pattern—it’s too perfect not to be planned. But are our victims connected? I don’t know.”

  “There’s something else, Loch.” She paused before continuing. “God just threatened me.”

  “That’s it. We’re tracking these people down so they can feel the heat of a real murder investigation, not just some Missing Persons chat.” Loch paused. “We need to have a team meeting as soon as we get back to the precinct. If Beka’s not a killer, someone has murdered three people in five days, and we may not have much time before he strikes again. I’m going to call Gary and get him to set up a room for us. Think we can be there in fifteen minutes?”

  She was about to say no, but he had already hung up and put the siren on the roof of his car. Cars darted out of his way and some came dangerously close to accidents as they decreased their acceleration from eighty miles an hour to fifty-five. Loch loved creating havoc and then leaving it in his wake. He roared off.

  She sped after him like a water-skier clinging to the towrope of a crazy man. So strong was her pull toward him that she almost felt as if she could shut her tired eyes and let him carry her back to HQ. Fatigue was lurking around the fringes of her consciousness. It didn’t make sense yet, and she wasn’t sure she was going to be happy with the outcome, but at least they were moving in the right direction—she could feel it, with all the dread and hesitation that facing the truth brings.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  My brothers, since the beginning of the summer I have done a lot of talking. Look, have I any eyebrows left?

  —SUIGAN

  At the precinct, Devon left Loch and headed for her own department to pick up Frank. He had been there all day, despite the fact that it was their day off, and he smiled ruefully at her as she walked through the door. “My wife can’t wait for me to retire. She says next year she wants me home and all to herself. I don’t know what she wants to do with me but if I mysteriously die next New Year’s you’ll know it’s her.”

  Devon sympathized with him, but Frank was one of the few detectives who had not gotten divorced and she thought Louise was a gem to put up with Frank’s hours. “Takes a lot of patience to be a cop’s wife.”

  “Or husband,” Frank reminded her, and held up the cast he had built. “I got the negative mold pieced together. We’re just waiting for the plaster inside to dry.”

  She looked at his handiwork but couldn’t tell a thing from it.“What about the prints we brought?” She flipped through the photographs and read Frank’s notes, adding extra details before they went upstairs. She got stuck looking at the photo of Beka’s body. She had not taken in all the details, and now was her chance to scrutinize the scene from a physical distance, even if it was through the lens of Frank’s camera.

  Loch and Gary set up Homicide’s break room, a double entendre if there ever was one, so the team could meet to discuss the latest developments on the case and the more confusing elements of the crimes. Frank and Devon laid out the photographs in sequence, Edilio’s murder scene first.

  Gary pulled out the dry-eraser set and drew a timeline on the board, leaving space under each murder for specific details that might tie the murders together. They stood over the photos on the table silently for a moment, then Lochwood began the meeting.“Okay gang, this is what we’re looking at. From what Detective Freesia says there have been a number of disappearances on New Year’s Eve in the past eighteen years. And while these disappearances started with Todd Daniels, it wasn’t until last year that any marks were found on a body that might indicate foul play.” He picked up Gabe’s photograph.“Has Gabe been stalking young men and popping them off one by one over the years?” He let his premise sink in, then added, “And if that is the case, why is Beka dead? This is the problem. We don’t have any proof that this was Gabe’s m.o., enticing young men to his lair by using Beka as bait, but it is possible.”

  “Beka couldn’t have known,” Devon told him.

  “But if that scenario is true, then we are most likely looking at Beka’s death as a suicide.”

  Devon did not agree with him, but she kept her mouth shut. He knew where she stood and she knew she needed to follow his train of thought.

  “Perhaps Beka figured out what was happening and couldn’t take it—the shame, the betrayal.” Devon raised her hand again. Loch shook his head. “Let me finish. The problem is there are only eight people who knew there was a signature on these bodies. Four of them are in this room right now, three others are with NYPD—the eighth is our murderer. There is no way Beka Imamura could have known Gabe carved his bodies unless she was a part of it, and that means seeing the bodies after they were carved, and being able to decipher the ideograms, which even our guy in Japan has had trouble reading. I think we all find that scenario hard to believe.There have been plenty of wives in the past who were semi-aware of their husband’s indiscretions, but she should have known, on some level, that the bones in the backyard belonged to his victims. But for Beka to know this would have made her an accomplice because of the detail of the koans. She had to know what he wrote, in order to copycat him.” He paused and looked at his team. By the glint in their eyes he knew they were following his every word. There was no need to go back over any detail or explain the obvious.

  “Therefore, we very likely have a murderer who has planned this out to make it look like Gabe is the guilty party, and make Beka out as kind enough to rid the world of his menace—despite the fact that she could have called her best friend, told her what he’d done, and received our full protection.”

  “What if Gabe was guilty?” Gary asked. “Could this be a revenge killing? Take Beka out like Gabe took out Todd?”

  “Doesn’t play. Beka died after Gabe,” Loch challenged him one more time.

  “Why kill Edilio? What’s the motive?” Frank wondered.

  “Maybe Gabe and Edilio were a team. Beka the bait.” Gary was good at presenting possible solutions to a problem; Loch, good at shooting holes in them.

  Devon sighed deeply.

  Frank looked over at her. “Is this bothering you?”

  “I’m just trying to put together what Gary is suggesting with what I found in the Missing Persons report,” she assured him. “I think it’s possible.”

  “If these kids were targets of a sick mind, I think Detective Freesia is right in thinking that these young men were marked for a reason,” Loch said. “This murderer likes taking his victims unaware, and isn’t looking for a struggle. Then a few years ago, the desire to leave a mark, a trace on the victims, began to influence the killings.”

  “What about that sculpture?” Gary asked, pointing to the photograph of Having Hand.

  “We don’t know yet,” Frank answered him. “But we’re working on it. Thanks to Todd Daniel’s application for the Peace Corps, his prints were on a government database, and Detective Freesia got them for us. Todd’s hands were fourth on the sculpture, Beka’s prints are the second pair of hands, and Edilio’s are the la
st. Gabe’s hands are first.Because of the way some of the molds were welded together, not every set is complete. There are about thirty pairs of hands in the piece that are still a mystery.”

  “That’s the first order of business, to get the prints run from that piece. I’m sorry I couldn’t bring it with me, but New York City isn’t our jurisdiction. I hope I was thorough enough.”

  Frank chuckled, “I’d like to see you do anything half-assed, Brennen.”

  “I think he cast the hands of his lovers, his conquests,” Devon suggested.

  “What’s Todd doing there then?”

  “What if Gabe came on to him?” Devon began to think about that possibility. In her mind it played something like “Ode to Billy Joe.” Had Todd jumped into the Hudson River, like Billy Joe McAllister had leapt into the Tallahatchie after being forced to have sex with a dirty old man? Of course, Gabe was not an old man.

  She wished she had that damn videotape so she could see if Gabe had spoken to Todd at all during the party in 1984. If Gabe had made a pass at Todd, it probably would have freaked him out.He might have taken off. But she had been dancing with Gabe just before Todd went on his walk. Hadn’t Gabe gone out for cigars soon after that? Broadway Bob had been smoking a cigar. What if Gabe had given it to him? She remembered Beka asking Bob if he’d seen Todd on the street. Broadway Bob had pointed upward, or so it had seemed at the time, but what if he had actually been pointing to Gabe’s building? Could they have gone back there? What if the whole time they had been looking for Todd he was in Gabe’s studio? She shivered. Her mind raced in fast-forward, but there were no answers in her memory—the answers were locked away in the past or on the videotape that was, hopefully, on its way via FedEx.

  She retraced her thoughts back to the idea of Todd and Gabe.What if Todd had turned Gabe down? What if he had fled Gabe’s loft? Was Gabe the alien, or was there someone else with him who fit that description? What if he ran into someone who comforted him, made him feel like a man again? He would have been so vulnerable …

  “Loch, we’ve discussed the possibility of a male killer, but what if your profile was applied to a woman? Would anything change?” she asked.

  “There are very few female serials.”

  “Amuse me.”

  “We’d be looking at a woman who had a deep-seated resentment toward men. She would toy with them, act willing to please, and then strike. In her mind, she would be innocent—it would be their fault.”

  “What would she be like in the beginning, before she got in the practice of killing?”

  “She might act out, be promiscuous, volatile, and temperamental.”

  “Sounds like every girl I ever dated,” Gary mumbled.

  “Then she’d lose it one night. Get out of control and voilá, an impulse killing. The fear mixed with the power would be intoxicating and could set up a desire to repeat the pattern—this is the same pattern we see with male serials. We don’t have much information on female serials. They’re not common. The only one we’ve really had information on is that chick in Florida who popped off truckers who picked her up. In her case, which might fit ours, she enticed men into sex, then killed them for raping her because she had no way, psychologically, of discerning between the act of consensual sex and rape.”

  “Was Beka ever raped?” They all looked at Devon.

  “She was attacked when she was in junior high, that’s why her uncles sent her to a private girl’s school on the mainland.”

  “All serial killers spend a great deal of time fantasizing about ways to kill. Over time, the fantasy takes control and becomes a subconscious way of planning a murder, so when the opportunity presents itself—i.e., the first murder—it occurs almost involuntarily, but it also starts the cycle so the fantasy has to be repeated.”

  “Every New Year’s Eve?”

  “Or every other,” Gary suggested. “Maybe the numbers are divisible by something meaningful. I think the dates of these murders, if we’re right in this assumption, are deliberate.”

  “An anniversary of some sort,” Frank suggested.

  “Perhaps a celebration of that first murder. We may be looking for someone who lost someone dear to them, or someone they hated, on New Year’s Eve.” Loch continued, “After that, if our perp got away with the initial murder, the pattern and lust for power and control over another’s life would satisfy him or her more than sex or love.He or she would begin to act out more and more regularly and then want to leave a trace or mark that he or she had been there—proof that these accidental deaths or disappearances weren’t haphazard as the police presupposed. He or she would enjoy getting away with it at first, then begin requiring credit for such brilliance, something more than mementos, trophies. That’s when the decompensating begins and our perp gets sloppy.”

  “So at this current stage of development, psychologically, there wouldn’t be much difference between a male or female.”

  “The justification might be different, but that’s all I can say for now. I really don’t know much about female serials. No one does.” Lochwood smiled. “Frank, you’re on the prints. Devon, you’re on Isshu—find out if he was able to discern anything from that last fax and let me know as soon as you hear from him. Gary, you’re with me.We’ve got a few loftmates to interview.”

  Everyone stood up and made ready to clear the room. Frank and Devon were putting the photographs in order as Gary erased the words bait under Beka’s name and Serial Couple? under Edilio’s and Gabe’s. Slowly the other suspects’ names were also erased: Alex, Maddie, Godwyn, Josh, and Sam …

  “I was just thinking,” Devon said hesitantly, “what if Having Hand was a collection of Beka’s conquests, not Gabe’s?”

  “Beka’s a serial killer?”

  “I didn’t say that.” But she was thinking it, again. She couldn’t help herself.

  They walked down to the Crime Scene lab where Frank’s mold was finished setting and watched as he peeled back the Alginate from the cast.

  “Is that Todd?” Loch asked.

  Devon knelt down and ran her hands over the plaster-smooth skin of a face she had only seen once before, in a photograph earlier that day. “No. It’s Eric Heron,” she whispered. The boy who had gone to watch the ball drop in Times Square on New Year’s Eve two years ago and wasn’t seen again until spring thaw. “There are no holes to breathe through at the nose.”

  “Call Japan!” Lochwood ordered. “I want to find out what those cuts on his chest mean. Now!”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Today’s students are like blind men who have thrown away their staffs, calling them useless baggage.

  —ZEN PHRASE

  The farm fields just past Bridgehampton looked fallow in the winter light and bordered “closed for the season” farmstands that barely looked as if their presence were justified. Each stand offered different specialties: one had silver-queen corn and homemade bread, another, pick-your-own-strawberries or watermelon; in the fall there were pumpkins. Sunflowers would tilt their heads skyward and lines of traffic would clot Highway 27 once summer started and the locals began their harvest of tourists. Gary and Loch passed Poxabogue Golf Course and turned right on Sayres Path. “We’re looking for Osborne Farm Lane.” Gary jerked his partner out of what looked to be a stupor, but was really quiet reflection of the countryside around them and a constant review behind that of all that had happened. “What area is this?” Gary asked, as he opened up the Suffolk County road map he kept in the backseat and tried to read it while driving down the treed lane.

  “Wainscott,” Loch grumbled, and took the map out of Gary’s hand so he could figure out where Alexandra Parnel lived before his partner wrapped them around one of the oak trees he seemed so in awe of.

  Rows of shake-shingled houses were nestled behind the mature trees shading the street in the summer, but looked remarkably stark and bare now against the steel-gray of the sky. “Quaint little houses,” Gary observed.

  “Yeah, one million …
quaint.” Lochwood felt as surly as he sounded; he was not sure why he’d suddenly launched into such a bad mood.

  “No way!”

  “No joke.” He traced his finger down the line of Sayres Path. “Take the next right. We’re not far from where Devon’s parents live. How convenient.” They pulled up the drive of a rather new house that faced farm fields of winter rye and went up to Alexandra Parnel’s door.

  She was not what he expected—hair cropped close to her head and two black-rimmed coke bottles with an aluminum-bar bridge for eyeglasses. She was dressed in head-to-toe black linen and looked un-ironed but extremely comfortable. Behind her a large-screen TV glared at them in bright blue with the white word “Pause” in the bottom left-hand corner.

  “Lochwood Brennen!” She sounded overly pleased to see him. “I’ve been hoping to meet you, but Devon seems to be hiding you from the rest of us. Or maybe you’re just shy.” She stood back to allow them inside. “I suppose this is your partner?” She held out her hand.

  “You act as if you were expecting us,” Gary observed.

  “I do? Let’s just say I hoped you’d come by. It makes me feel important after yesterday.”

  “What happened yesterday?” Lochwood was positive Devon had not spoken about Edilio Ferraro to anyone, and was curious how Alexandra could know about the crime all the way out on the East End already.

  “Don’t you read the Post?” She flipped to page six and showed it to the detectives.

  The main photograph showed Edilio Ferraro’s body being removed from the Mercer Street building. The headline read, “BLACK WIDOW STRIKES AGAIN.”

  “Why the hell didn’t we hear about this sooner?” Now Lochwood was in a really bad mood.

  “I didn’t know about it,” Gary answered.

  “Somebody at the precinct must have.”

  “Why’s it a problem?” she asked.

  He was not about to tell her, but found it the height of unprofessionalism. Somebody must have gotten the story from NYPD, but he did not recall seeing any reporters at the scene last night. Lochwood’s first inclination was to call Marders and ream him a new asshole. No wonder he was so distrustful earlier, and Loch had thought it was just bad manners. Someone had tipped off the Post, but who? He turned to Gary. “I want you to call and find out who took that picture.”