She seemed to have trouble looking away from the picture. "Are they all like this?" she asked in a voice gone thin.
"Yes," Zerbrowski said. His voice was soft, too, as if he had made his point and wouldn't rub it in.
She looked up at me, and it looked like a physical effort to pull her gaze away from that photo. "You'll be the darling of the media again," but her voice was soft, like it didn't matter.
"Probably," I said, "but it's not because I want to be."
"You're just so damned photogenic," her voice had held a hint of her earlier scorn, then she frowned and glanced down at the photo again. She seemed to hear what she'd just said, and with that awful, hideous photo sitting in front of her, it seemed the wrong thing to say.
"I didn't mean…" She rallied, and put back on her angry face, but it seemed more like a mask to hide behind now.
"Don't worry, O'Brien," Zerbrowski said, and he had his teasing voice back. I knew enough to dread what would come out of his mouth next, but she didn't. "We know what you meant. Anita is just so damned cute."
She gave a weak smile. "Something like that, yes," she said. The smile vanished as if it had never existed. She was all business again. O'Brien never seemed to get very far from business. "Seeing that this doesn't happen to another woman is more important than who gets credit."
"Glad to hear we all agree," Zerbrowski said.
O'Brien stood up. She pushed the picture back towards Zerbrowski, doing her best not to look at it this time. "You can question Heinrick, and the other one, though he doesn't say much."
"Let's have a plan before we go in there," I said.
They both looked at me.
"We know that Van Anders is our guy, but we don't know for sure that he's our only guy."
"You think one of the men we have here helped Van Anders do this?" O'Brien motioned towards the picture that Zerbrowski was tucking away.
"I don't know." I glanced at Zerbrowski and wondered if he was thinking the same thing I was. The first message had read "we nailed this one, too." We. I wanted to make sure that Heinrick wasn't part of that 'we'. If he was, then he wasn't going anywhere, not if I could help it. I really didn't care who got credit for solving the case. I just wanted it solved. I just wanted to never, ever have to see anything else as bad as that bathroom, that bathtub, and its… contents. I use to think I helped the police out of a sense of justice, a desire to protect the innocent, maybe even a hero complex, but, lately, I'm beginning to understand that sometimes I want to solve the case for a much more selfish reason. So I don't ever have to walk through another crime scene as bad as the one I just saw.
57
Heinrick was sitting behind the small table, slumped back in the chair, which is actually harder than it looks in a straight-backed chair. His carefully cut blond hair was still neat, but he'd laid his glasses on the table, and his face looked younger without them. His file said he was closer to forty than thirty, but he didn't look it. He had an innocent face, and I knew that was a lie. Anyone who looks that innocent after thirty is either lying, or touched by the hand of God. Somehow I didn't think Leopold Heinrick was ever going to be a saint. Which left only one conclusion—he was lying. Lying about what? Now there was the question.
There was a Styrofoam cup with coffee in front of him. It had been sitting long enough that the cream had started to separate from the darker liquid, so that swirls of paleness decorated the top of the coffee.
He looked up when Zerbrowski and I entered. Something flickered through his pale eyes: interest, curiosity, worry? The look was gone before I could decipher it. He picked up his glasses, giving me a blank, innocent face. With his glasses back on, he came closer to looking his age. They broke up the line of his face, so that the frames were what you saw first.
"You want a fresh cup of coffee?" I asked him as I sat down. Zerbrowski leaned against the wall, near the door. We'd start out with me questioning Heinrick to see if I got anywhere. Zerbrowski made it clear that I was up to bat, but no one, including me, wanted me alone with Heinrick. He had been following me, and we still didn't know why. Agent Bradford had guessed that it was part of some plot to get me to raise the dead for some nefarious purpose. Bradford didn't know, not for sure. Until we knew for sure, caution was better. Hell, caution was probably always better.
"No," Heinrick said, "no more coffee."
I had a fresh cup of coffee in one hand and a stack of file folders in the other. I placed the coffee on the table and made a show of arranging the pile of folders neatly beside it. His gaze flicked to the folders, then settled serenely back on me.
"Had too much coffee?" I asked.
"No." His face was attentive, blank, with a touch of wariness. Something had him worried. Was it the files? Too large a stack. We'd intended it to be too large. There were files at the bottom that had nothing to do with Leopold Heinrick, Van Anders, or the nameless man that was sitting in another room just down the hall. It was impossible to have a military record with no name attached, but somehow the dark-haired American had managed it. His file was so full of blacked-out spaces that it was almost illegible. The fact that no one would give our John Doe a name, but they would acknowledge he was once a member of the armed forces was disturbing. It made me wonder what my government was up to.
"Would you like something else to drink?" I asked.
He shook his head.
"We may be in here a while."
"Talking is thirsty work," Zerbrowski said from the back.
Heinrick's eyes flicked to him, then back to me. "Silence is not thirsty work." His lips quirked, and it was almost a smile.
"If sometime during this interview you want to tell us exactly why you were following me, I'd love to hear it, but that's really secondary to why we're here."
He looked puzzled then. "When you first stopped us that seemed to be very important to you."
"It was, and I'd still like to know, but the priorities have changed."
He frowned at me. "You are playing games, Ms. Blake. I am tired of games."
There was no fear in him. He seemed tired, wary, and not happy, but he wasn't afraid. He wasn't afraid of the police, or me, or going to jail. There was none of that anxiety that most people have in a police interrogation. It was odd. Bradley had said that our government was going to just let Heinrick go. Did he suspect that—know that? If so, how? How did he know? Why wasn't he the least bit afraid of spending time in the St. Louis jail system?
I opened the first file. It held grainy copies of old crimes. Women Van Anders had slaughtered in foreign countries, far from here.
I laid the photos out in front of him, in a neat row of black and white carnage. In some of the photos the quality was so bad that if you hadn't known you were looking at human remains, you'd have never guessed. Van Anders had reduced his victims to Rorschach tests.
Heinrick looked bored now, almost disgusted. "Your Detective O'Brien has already shown me these. Already marched out her lies."
"What lies would those be?" I asked. I sipped my coffee, and it wasn't bad. It was fresh, at least. As I sipped, I watched his face.
He folded his arms across his chest. "That there are fresh murders here in your city like these old ones."
"What makes you think she's lying?"
He started to say something, then closed his mouth tight, his lips a thin angry line. He just glared at me, pale eyes bright with anger.
I opened the second folder and began laying out colored photos just above the old black and whites. I laid them out in a line of bright death, and watched all the color drain away from Heinrick's skin. He looked almost gray by the time I sat back down. I'd had to stand to reach the ends of the table, to lay out the photos.
"This woman was killed three days ago." I got another file out of the stack. I opened it, and fanned the photos on top of it, but didn't put them with the stack. I wasn't a hundred percent sure I'd be able to match the photos back to the right crime. They were supposed to be marked on the bac
k, but I hadn't marked them personally, so I didn't want to risk it. Once you get into court the lawyers get damned picky about evidence and stuff.
I pointed to the file pictures. "This woman was killed two days ago."
Zerbrowski stepped forward and handed me a plastic baggie with a handful of polaroids in it. I tossed the baggie across the table so that it slid by him, and he caught it automatically before it hit the floor. His eyes were very big when he saw the top print.
"Those women died last night. We think there were two victims, but truthfully we haven't finished putting together the pieces, so we're not a hundred percent certain. It could be more, or it could be just one woman, but that's an awful lot of blood for only one woman, don't you think?"
He laid the baggie of polaroids carefully on the table, so that they didn't touch any of the other photos. He stared at all the pictures, his face gone death white, his eyes huge. His voice squeezed out like it was an effort to breathe, let alone talk. "What do you wish to know?"
"We want to stop this from happening again," I said.
He was staring down at the pictures, as if he couldn't look away. "He promised he would not do it here. He swore that he could control himself."
"Who?" I asked, softly. Yeah, the government had given him a name, but that was the same government that wouldn't give our John Doe one.
"Van Anders," he whispered the name. He looked up, and there was surprise underneath the shock. "The other detective said you knew it was Van Anders."
Great. Nothing like giving your suspect more information than he's giving you.
I shrugged. "Without eyewitnesses it's hard to be certain."
Something like hope sparked in his eyes and he started regaining some of his color. "You think this might be someone else? Not Van Anders?"
I riffled through the files again, and Heinrick flinched. I found the thin folder with the picture of Van Anders and the two women. I flashed him the picture. "Van Anders with the victims from last night's slaughter."
He winced at the last word, and the color that had been seeping back into his face drained away again. His lips looked bloodless. For a second I thought he might faint. I'd never had a suspect faint on me before.
His voice was a hoarse whisper. "Then it is him." He laid his forehead on the table.
"Do you need some water, something stronger?" I asked. Though truthfully, black coffee was as strong as I could give him. There were rules about giving liquor to suspects.
He raised his head, slowly, but he looked awful. "I told them that he was crazy. I told them not to include him."
"Told who?" I asked.
He sat up a little straighter. "I agreed to come here against my better judgment. I knew the team was assembled too quickly. When you rush such a task, it ends badly."
"What task?" I asked.
"To recruit you for a mission."
"What mission?" I asked.
He shook his head. "It doesn't matter now. Some of our people got you on tape raising a man in a local cemetery. He did not look alive enough for what my employers wished. He looked like a zombie, and that is not good enough."
"Good enough for what?" I asked.
"To fool people in the country that their leader is still alive."
"What country?" I asked.
He shook his head, and a ghost of a smile crossed his lips. "I will not be here long, Ms. Blake. Those that employ me will see to it. They will either work to free me soon, with no charges, or they will have me killed."
"You seem calm about that," I said.
"I believe I will go free."
"But you're not sure," I said.
"Few things in life are certain."
"I know one thing that's certain," I said.
He just looked at me. I think he'd said more than he'd planned to say. So he was going to try not to say anything.
"Van Anders will kill someone else tonight."
His eyes were bleak when he said, "I had worked with him years ago, before I knew what he was. I should not have believed him that he was in control of his rage. I should have known."
"Are your employers just going to leave Van Anders here to butcher more women?"
He looked at me then. Again, I couldn't quite read his expression. Determination, guilt, something.
"I know where Van Anders is staying. I will give you that address. I know that my employers would wish him dead now. He has become a liability."
We got the address from him. I didn't hurry out after it, because unlike the movies, I knew I wouldn't be allowed in at the capture. Mobile Reserve, St. Louis's answer to SWAT, would be the ones running the show. When you have people that can go in with body armor and fully automatic weapons, the rest of us are just outclassed.
I opened one last file and showed him the man they'd crucified against the wall. "Why did you need Van Anders to do this? Not his kind of kill."
"I don't know what you are talking about."
He was going to deny it, fine. Even if we could have pinned it on him, I doubt we could have kept him long enough for a trial. "We know you and your team did this. We even know why." If Bradley was telling the truth, I did know.
"You know nothing." He sounded very sure of that.
"You were ordered to kill him because he ran. Ran away from people like you, and people like Van Anders."
He looked at me then, and he was worried. He was wondering how much I knew. Not much. But maybe it was enough. "Whose idea was it to crucify him?"
"Van Anders's." He looked like he'd swallowed something sour. Then he gave a small smile. "It won't matter, Ms. Blake, I'll never see trial."
"Maybe not, but I always like to know where the blame goes."
He nodded, then said, "Van Anders was so angry when we shot him first. He said what good is a crucifixion if the person isn't struggling." He looked at me with haunted eyes. "I should have known then what he meant to do."
"Whose idea were the runes?" I asked.
He shook his head. "You've gotten the last startled confession you shall get from me."
"There's still one thing I don't understand." Actually, there were lots of things I didn't understand, but it's never good to appear confused in front of the bad guys.
"I will not incriminate myself, Ms. Blake."
"If you knew what Van Anders was capable of, then why bring him along? Why make him part of the team, at all?"
"He is a werewolf, as you have learned from what he does to his victims. There were those who believed you were a shape-shifter, as well. We wanted someone that could manage you without risk of infection, if you fought us."
"You were planning on kidnapping me?"
"As a last resort," he said.
"But because Balfour and Canducci didn't like my zombie, the plan is off?"
"Those names will do for them, but yes. We had reports that you could raise zombies that thought they were still alive and could pass as human. My employers were very disappointed when they saw the tape."
I owed Marianne and her coven a thank-you note. If they hadn't gotten all witchier-than-thou on me, I'd have raised a fine, alive-looking zombie, and I might even now be kidnapped, and at the mercy of Van Anders. Maybe I should send Marianne flowers, a card just didn't seem to be enough.
I tried some more questions, but Leopold Heinrick had given out all the information he was going to give. He finally asked for a lawyer, and the interview was over.
I stepped out into the main area, and it was in chaos. People yelling, running. I caught the phrase, "officers down." I grabbed Detective Webster of the blond hair and bad coffee. "What's happened?"
O'Brien answered for him. "The Mobile Reserve Squad that went out to pick up Van Anders—he cut them up. At least one dead, maybe more."
"Shit," I said.
She had her jacket on and was digging her purse out of a drawer.
"Where's Zerbrowski?"
"He's gone already."
"Can I catch a ride?"
She
looked at me. "Where to? I'm going to the hospital."
"I think I need to be at the crime scene."
"I'll take you," Webster said.
O'Brien gave him a look.
"I'll be at the hospital later. I promise."
O'Brien shook her head and ran for the door. Everyone was leaving. Some would go to the hospital. Some would go to the crime scene and see if they could help there. Some would go sit with the families of the downed officers. But everyone would go. If you really wanted to commit a crime in any city, wait until there's an officer-down call, everyone drops everything.
I'd go to the scene of the crime. I'd try to help figure out what went wrong. Because something had gone very wrong if Van Anders had taken out an entire squad from the Mobile Reserve. They're trained to handle terrorists, hostage situations, drugs, gangs, biochemical hazards; pick your nastiness, and Mobile Reserve can handle it. Yes, something had gone terribly wrong. The question was, what?
58
I’d seen enough of Van Anders's handy work to be prepared for the worst. What I saw in the hallway wasn't even close to his worst. Compared to the other crime scenes, it was almost clean. There was a uniformed officer standing next to the window at the end of the hallway. The window was almost completely free of glass, as if something large had been thrown through it. I turned away from the thought of one of the city's finest plunging to his death. Other than the window, there wasn't much else.
A sprinkling of blood on the pale brown carpet in the hallway. Two blood smears on the wall looked almost artificial, overly dramatic on the off-white walls. That was all. Van Anders hadn't had time to enjoy himself. One officer was dead, maybe two, but he'd just had time to kill them. He hadn't had time to cut them up. I wondered if that made him angry? Did he feel cheated?
Anita Blake 11 - Cerulean Sins Page 47
