Jessica sat in the Taurus, heater on full blast. She couldn’t get warm or dry. Someone had brought hot coffee, which, in the few minutes since she had opened the container, had gone tepid. She drank it anyway. She was just about to once more brave the elements when her cell phone rang. It was Dana Westbrook.
‘What’s going on, Sarge?’
‘How bad is it, Jess?’
Jessica glanced at the supine form of the woman through the trees. ‘As bad as it gets.’
‘I’m en route,’ Westbrook said. ‘I’ve got Inspector Mostow with me.’
Jessica hadn’t even considered the fallout until she heard that an inspector was coming to the scene. There was always a command presence at the scene of every homicide, but rarely did it reach this level. The truth was that a citizen had been abducted and brutally murdered right under the noses of two city detectives. It would be red meat for the local media.
Jessica said nothing.
‘There’s something else you should know,’ Westbrook added.
‘What is it?’
‘I just got a call from the supervisor in the 22nd. He’s on scene at that Brewerytown address.’
This did not make sense. If anyone was dispatched to that house it should’ve been divisional detectives. Either way, it would soon be considered a crime scene, and folded into the murder investigation of Joan Delacroix.
‘I don’t understand,’ Jessica said. ‘You’re talking about the house where Joan Delacroix lived?’
‘Yes.’
‘What about it?’
Jessica heard Dana Westbrook take a deep breath, release it. ‘It’s burning to the ground.’
TWO
21
1948 – Tallinn, Estonia
The predator watched the boy from across the square. The boy seemed a natural leader, taking charge midfield, kicking the ball to a teammate instead of reaching for glory each time he neared the goal. On the field he was surefooted, almost balletic in his movement.
Alas, when the game was over, the boy’s team lost 2 to 1.
The boy remained behind while his teammates congregated at the other end of the field. He sat on a bench, reading from a paperbound book.
The predator approached.
‘That was a very good game,’ he said.
The boy looked up. His eyes were brown, his hair a deep chestnut, his features delicate. ‘We lost.’
‘I know,’ the predator said. ‘This sometimes happens, despite our best efforts.’
The boy considered this. ‘Perhaps it was not my best effort, then.’
The predator smiled. ‘How old are you?’
‘I am nine.’
‘You are big for your age.’
The boy said nothing.
‘I used to play for the national team,’ the predator said. ‘When I was much younger, of course.’
The boy just listened.
‘I can teach you a few things. Particularly your first touch. It is probably the game’s most important, yet underrated, skill. Would you like to learn?’
‘Yes. Very much.’
The predator looked around. ‘We shouldn’t do it here.’ He pointed to the far end of the field. ‘The other boys will see, and then it will not be our secret.’
‘I know a place,’ the boy said. ‘It is very quiet there.’
They rose from the bench, crossed the avenue. It was mid-summer, and the breeze from the Gulf brought with it a welcome coolness.
They walked a narrow path through Lillepi Park. When they came to a small clearing they stopped. The boy reached into his bag, removed the soccer ball, placed it at the predator’s feet.
The predator put down his shoulder bag, took off his shirt. He now wore only a sleeveless tunic.
‘You look very strong,’ the boy said.
‘Would you like to see?’
The boy nodded.
The predator lifted the boy effortlessly into the air. When he put him back on the ground he brought him very close, close enough to smell the boy’s shampoo. It smelled of cinnamon. He ran a hand through the boy’s hair. The boy did not resist or pull away.
‘Show me things,’ the boy said. ‘There is a larger clearing, just over here.’
The predator looked around. The dell was a little too exposed for his liking. Still, the boy was beautiful. He followed.
‘What is your name?’ the predator asked.
‘Eduard.’
‘That is a wonderful name. Quite regal.’
They came to a small, sun-drenched glade. To the right, the predator saw something unexpected. There was a small burial site, with three crudely made cruciform. ‘Look at this,’ the predator said. ‘It seems someone has buried their pets in Lillepi Park.’
The predator stepped forward, bent over, and saw that there were names written on the markers. Dr Andrus Kross. Marta Kross. Kaisa Kross.
‘Dr Andrus Kross,’ the predator said. ‘I know this name. How odd that it would be —’
At first, the predator reacted to the cut as if he had merely caught the front of his clothing on a briar. When he looked down, and saw his tunic sliced side to side, and the blood begin to pour forth, he knew what had happened. The boy stood a few feet away, a razor-sharp bone-handle knife in hand.
The predator fell to the ground.
The boy, whose full name was Eduard Olev Kross – son of Andrus and Marta, brother to Kaisa – took a small cruet of the man’s blood. Before he stepped away he ran the knife once more along the wound. The predator’s intestines now glistened in the afternoon sun.
‘They say that stomach wounds are particularly painful,’ the boy said. He pulled up the three makeshift stakes, put them in his bag. His father and mother and sister were not buried here. They were, instead, in a mass grave in Võru, murdered by the hand of the man now bleeding out in front of him. ‘They say it can take a long time to die.’
The boy, who was twelve years old, not nine, slung his bag over his shoulder.
‘What will you think about in your last moments, Major Abendrof?’ the boy asked.
As he lay dying, the predator turned his head to see the boy standing in the dell. In the half-light of his passage the predator thought he saw something in the boy’s eyes he had never before seen in one so young, a malevolence that seemed to swirl within like a dark squall.
Ten minutes later, as storm clouds gathered over the Gulf of Finland, the predator was dead.
1977 – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
White Rita sat on the floor, her back to the wall, her legs splayed. The water pooled on the filthy linoleum beneath her. She was called White Rita because there were two other women named Rita in her ward. One of them was black, the other was mute. They were Black Rita and Silent Rita.
White Rita had managed to conceal her pregnancy from staff and fellow inpatients for all eight months. Many nights she tried to rewind her thoughts – this is how she thought of her mind, as a large tape recorder – to recall who the father might have been. She could not remember.
In the Long Hallway – which functioned, among other things, as a patient transport corridor – White Rita sat near the T-junction with the Echo Hallway. People always yelled in the Echo Hallway, just to hear the reverberation, so when White Rita screamed, no one paid her any mind. Hours later, it seemed – there were no windows in the Long Hallway, so it was impossible to tell if it was night or day – White Rita looked between her legs and saw a baby.
Someone had left a baby.
The night nurse was a man in his mid fifties, a former medic in the Army. He had served in the 12th Field Hospital in France, in the grime and chaos of the French Naval Hospital, which had first been overrun by the Germans, then the Allies in the liberation of Cherbourg.
When he gained employment at the hospital in Philadelphia, in the early 1950s, he encountered more than a few men he had helped patch up in Cherbourg, most of them in the contingent of POWs who were not transportable when the 68th Medical Group cleared out.
He often wondered, seeing these men in their near catatonic states, if it hadn’t been a mistake to save them.
When the intern brought the newborn baby to the clinic, the night nurse looked into the baby’s eyes, and felt something he had never felt before. Childless and unmarried, he had never considered what it would be like to care for a child.
He cleaned the newborn, swaddled it in gauze. The intern who had brought the baby said he had found it in the Long Hallway, near the entrance to the catacombs. This probably meant the baby belonged to one of the women who was a ward of the state.
The night nurse wondered: What kind of a future will this boy have? There was a good chance he would be raised in some filthy group home, end up in prison. Or, worse, come right back here to this hell on earth.
There were plenty of places to hide a baby in a complex the depth and breadth of the hospital: cubby holes, dumbwaiters, patient transfer hallways, eaves, attics. How hard could it be? There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men and women who were all but ghosts to the staff and administration. Many went unwashed, their open sores untreated for weeks.
He looked again at the baby’s eyes. He wondered what to call him. He was a firm believer that a person became the name they were given. His mother had been born in Norway and, although she mispronounced her only son’s name right up until the day she died – calling him Looter, a source of ridicule from the few childhood friends he’d had – he always loved his name, and it had served him well enough in his fifty-four years.
He decided right there and then that the baby would have his name.
He would be called Luther.
1982 – Northeastern Estonia
The two dead men lay at the bottom of the quarry, their pants around their ankles, their naked buttocks in blunt, pink relief to the blinding white of the limestone.
The killer stood at the top of the gorge. He did not hear the four men approach.
By the time he turned around, the largest of the men – a lumbering giant in an ill-fitting Soviet Army infantry uniform – raised the butt of his ancient Mosin Nagant rifle and slammed it into the killer’s chin. The killer sagged, but was prevented from tumbling into the pit by the two other soldiers.
The fourth man in the group, older than the soldiers by more than three decades, took a handkerchief from his pocket. He draped it over his right hand, put it beneath the killer’s chin. He turned the nearly unconscious man’s head, a man he had been pursuing for more than twenty years.
‘Hulkur,’ the man said, using the killer’s provincial appellation, an Estonian word meaning vagabond. ‘We meet at last.’
1990 – Jämejala, Estonia
In the eight years Eduard Kross had been in the storied mental hospital in rural Parsti Parish, he had not spoken a word. He was said to have committed more than one hundred murders in his decades-long spree. His path of evil stretched from the Gulf of Finland to the forests of Riga.
For thirty-four years – from the moment he had all but disemboweled the man he held responsible for the murders of his mother, father and sister – Eduard Kross was a wraith, moving at night, never seen by anyone who would live to tell of the man in the sack-cloth suit and floppy felt hat.
The doctor was young – young for this facility, where the average age of physicians seemed to be in the sixties.
His name was Dr Godehard Kirsch.
Among the mostly Estonian hospital staff there was little known about Kirsch, but there were many suppositions. One about which there was little doubt was that he was the sole heir of a very wealthy family – his late grandfather had made his millions with Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach, a Prussian who had the good fortune to marry into the Krupp family in 1906 – and the foresight to move his fortune into Swiss accounts before the war.
Among the other rumors was that months before his arrival in Estonia Dr Kirsch had ordered a series of therapies begun on Eduard Kross, therapies that included testing with various combinations of medications to artificially induce dreams.
‘This is he?’ Kirsch asked, looking through the mirrored-glass portal into Eduard Kross’s padded room.
‘Yes,’ the nurse administrator said. Riina was a sturdy, raw-boned woman in her late forties, by all benchmarks unattractive, with a broad forehead and a man’s jaw. In her time as nurse administrator of the clinic she had met a number of men like this Dr Kirsch, officious overeducated men practicing fringe science, lording their doctorates and wealth over staff like some Teutonic Hochmeister. Yes, he had the letters MD after his name, but this did not, nor had it ever, impressed Riina.
Because she was free from the strictures of games played between attractive women and the men with whom they dealt, she was able to speak her mind. As often as not it got her into trouble, which was probably why she did not work at one of the larger clinics in Tallinn or Parnu.
‘How long has he been here?’ Kirsch asked.
Riina knew that the doctor knew the answer to this question. She had for many years wondered why they played this game. She proffered a smile. ‘Just over eight years.’
‘And what has been his progress?’
Riina nearly laughed, but refrained. Laughing would be unprofessional. ‘There has been no progress, Doctor. We are not equipped or funded for rehabilitation or even the most basic regimen of behavioral therapy.’
‘Then what is it you do here, Lapsehoidja Riina?’
The title he gave her was an insult. It meant babysitter not nurse. Riina put her clipboard down on the desk, squared herself in front of the doctor. He was only an inch or so taller than she, but they were nearly eye to eye. She waited until the doctor turned his eyes to hers.
‘Dr Kirsch, we are a warehouse – a crumbling provincial warehouse at that – for the criminally insane. No more, no less. We bathe them, clean up their shit and vomit, intercede when their violent impulses outlast their medication, and bolt them down at night. What do you do, Dr Kirsch?’
The doctor proceeded, unfazed. ‘What is his protocol?’
Riina turned a page on her clipboard. ‘900 mg Lithium, thrice daily.’
The doctor pulled on his coat, slipped on his expensive leather gloves. He handed her a thin sheaf of documents. ‘I have accepted a position in the United States. Philadelphia, to be precise. Mr Kross will be coming with me. We have much to learn from him.’
Riina glanced at the form on top. ‘I’ve heard nothing of this.’
Without looking at her he produced another document, one that appeared to be a patient transfer to a yellow house in Novosibirsk, a gulag by any measure.
Riina knew what it meant.
‘It’s my understanding that he has not yet said a word,’ Kirsch said.
Riina filed the forms, like a good little lapsehoidja.
‘He talks,’ she said.
The doctor turned at the door, a look of surprise on his face. ‘He talks?’
‘Yes,’ Riina replied. She slammed shut the file cabinet drawer, sat on the edge of her desk, shook a cigarette from the pack, took her time lighting it.
Time was her only weapon.
Finally she said: ‘But only in his sleep.’
1990 – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
At the hospital, the one they called Cold River, Luther’s world was the catacombs that linked the buildings far below ground, miles of long stone corridors lighted by dim fixtures caged in steel. Luther gave each hallway a name, as if they were streets in the city above. The only time he saw other boys and girls his age – there were not supposed to be patients under eighteen, but Luther knew of many who were – was when there were the infrequent staff picnics, mostly in summer.
Luther didn’t like the sunshine.
The catacombs took him from patient wards to doctors’ quarters, from the nurses’ buildings to the cafeteria, where he ate the surplus food until he was fit to burst.
Before his death from stomach cancer three years earlier, Big Luther – the man who had clandestinely cared for Luther un
til the boy could wander the halls at Cold River without fear of discovery or expulsion – had taught him to read in the small inpatient library. Quite often Luther had to skip sections of the books due to the feces and food smeared on the pages.
From discarded correspondence and memos, Luther learned about all the different ailments treated in his hospital: the organic psychoses (senility and syphilis), the toxic psychoses (alcohol), the affective psychoses (manic depressives), even neurological conditions like hemiplegia and chorea.
Luther did not know which of these he had. Perhaps he had them all.
Luther was not the only child ever to be born inside the vast complex of Cold River. Not by far. With the many hundreds of patients who were wards of the county and state, many of whom suffered from a litany of psychological disorders, sexual assaults were commonplace. More than once Luther had tended to newborn babies he found discarded like so much refuse around the buildings and grounds, only to have them die from exposure, or, when discovered, be taken away and sent to the proper facility. In his years at Cold River, the number of babies for which he cared, even for as short a period as days, numbered in the dozens.
It was well known among both staff and patients that many male patients over the years had themselves committed to Cold River because of the availability of free food and sex.
When Luther was twelve, one of the patients, a bipolar named Hubert Tilton, was kept by a wall in the Long Hallway for a full year, his arms and feet restrained, his food and waste travelling through tubes, looking much the same to Luther. Luther watched him from the unused nurse’s station nearby, every week making a drawing of the man as he wasted away. Sometimes Luther would read to the man at night. Hubert never responded, but Luther could tell that the old man liked the adventure tales of Jack London.
One day Luther showed up at the usual time, only to find Hubert and his bed gone. He went back to his room, a storage room off the Echo Hallway, but not before stealing a stapler from the reception desk outside the Chief Steward’s office.
The Stolen Ones Page 11
