They were sitting around a wooden table on the back porch, facing the apple orchard, which ended in a short strip of cleared grass and beyond the grass, the edge of the forest. Fireflies were just starting to twinkle as the evening shadows lengthened.
“Seriously?” Gary Kurtz squinted at something only he could see. “He’ll listen to all sides and pick the one that most closely agrees with his positions on the issues.”
“Yeah?”
Gary squinted at his son. “This isn’t Logan County. The Governor ran on a platform of rooting out corruption. So far, he seems to mean it.”
“A wonder he hasn’t been assassinated.”
Gary snorted. “Bite your tongue.”
“So, if you get it, what happens to the farm?”
“The place does alright. I can afford to hire a foreman.”
Lisa, who had left the table a minute or so before, returned with a cherry pie. “Whipped cream?” she asked.
“Sure,” Kurtz said.
Lisa served the pie. Crickets began to chirp. The moon overhead cast a golden glow. Pleasant, Kurtz thought. It would be too much to say that he missed all this, since truthfully, he had barely given the old place a thought in the years since he’d left, but now, he was amazed to feel a sudden sense of nostalgia creeping over him.
“We all have to grow up, sometime,” Gary said. He looked at Lisa. “It was time for a change.”
Two routine muggings. Three burglaries. One teenager chased into traffic by a couple of muggers and then hit by four different cars. DOA. The muggers, when apprehended, claimed that the victim had stolen one of their wallets. The supposed wallet was not found. Good luck with that one. It would be smarter to just admit it and claim a moment of insanity.
Crime had been dropping steadily in New York City since the early 1990’s. The reasons were not entirely clear but were generally attributed to the policy of ‘broken windows policing,’ which simply meant that no crime was too small to be pursued. Let the criminals know you’re serious about the little stuff and they’re more likely to toe the line on the big stuff.
Whatever, Barent was simply grateful. The job was still tough but it wasn’t as tough as it used to be. It was no longer uncommon for an entire day to go by without a single reported murder in any of the five boroughs.
Lew Barent sat back in his chair, feet up on his desk, a cup of coffee at his side, and idly flipped through this morning’s reports. Barent had an addiction to reading the crime reports from all over the city. Schadenfreude, it was called, the morbid satisfaction to be gained from contemplating the troubles of others. Most mornings, unless deeply involved in an active investigation himself, the first thing Barent did was fix a cup of coffee and peruse the prior day’s ledger of murders, rapes and assaults.
Now here was a sad one: a woman tried to hire an undercover cop to kill her boyfriend, who had just started an affair with the woman’s older sister. When the cop pulled out his badge and announced she was under arrest, the woman grabbed a knife from the kitchen counter and slit her own throat.
Strangled... Barent stopped, blinked and read this one again. He tapped his pencil on the desk and stared down at the page. Probably nothing. Almost undoubtedly nothing. Not that a fourteen year old dead hooker was nothing, not at all, but the coincidence between one case and another, the similarity between method and methodology…well, that was almost undoubtedly nothing. Almost…but, still…
“Shit,” Barent said.
What was that guy’s name again? He glanced at the bulletin. Oh, yeah. Bill Harris. Sighing, Barent picked up the phone.
Chapter 13
“New York?” Drew Hastings said.
Bill Harris tossed the folder to Drew. “See for yourself.”
The girl’s name was Lydia Gonzalez, fourteen years old. Drew Hastings flipped through the pictures: Lydia Gonzalez in kindergarten, Lydia Gonzalez on her twelfth birthday, cutting a cake and smiling at the camera, Lydia Gonzalez wearing a bikini at the beach, looking like a luscious, dark-eyed Salma Hayek, but thinner. The last one, Lydia Gonzalez with her tongue protruding from her mouth and her eyes bulging, dead on a slab in the morgue. Drew Hastings winced. “Beautiful girl.”
“Yup,” Bill Harris said.
The body had been discovered in a dumpster in an alley behind a pizza joint in Brooklyn, by a homeless guy scrounging for edible scraps. Drew Hastings shuddered. He could only imagine what the dumpster must smell like with a day’s worth of discarded cheese and tomato sauce fermenting in the sun, flies and wasps buzzing all around. And the body, of course.
“Surprising that he notified the cops.”
“He didn’t, not officially. Some people walking by heard him screaming. They notified the cops.”
“Ah…”
Let’s see…body discovered around 7:15 in the morning. Cops arrived on scene within twenty minutes. The area wasn’t a bad one, a couple of bars, a few restaurants, mostly residential. What time did the bars in New York close? Oh, 4:00 AM. It said so, right here. Even in the city that never sleeps, almost everybody is asleep between 4:00 AM and 7:15. The dumpster was half full, the body lying on top, presumably dumped only a couple of hours before. Condition of the body confirmed that. Five foot four, one hundred and five pounds, naked from the waist down, frilly lace top unbuttoned, B cup bra pushed up to just below the chin.
Cause of death seemed obvious; a concentric bruise encircled the neck, probably a leather belt. She had been killed within two hours at most of being dumped. Rigor mortis hadn’t set in by the time she was discovered, so probably around 5:00, maybe 6:00 AM.
Why this girl?
Drew Hastings shook his head. Lydia Gonzalez had never been arrested but acquaintances confirmed that she had been walking the streets for nearly two months. Her mother and little brother claimed not to have known but that was obviously bullshit. Hooking is mostly done at night and fourteen-year old girls are not innocently wandering the neighborhood at all hours. Momma might not want to admit it, but she must have known.
Plenty of flea ridden hourly hotels in Brooklyn. Most guys who pick up hookers prefer to take them out of the neighborhood, to someplace they consider safe, maybe a hotel or a blowjob in the back seat of the car or even their own home. Some few want to keep the sleazy business in the neighborhoods where it starts.
Drew flipped the pages. Must be nice to have a great, big department just sitting there for stuff like this. Made knocking on doors and interviewing witnesses and looking for suspects a lot easier. Drew Hastings had one full time deputy. On the other hand, his beat did not cover eight million people.
Anyway…the flop joints had been visited, the pimps interviewed, the local ladies of the night spoken to. A few of them knew her. She had her own little territory and she pulled in a lot more Johns than most, being fresh, beautiful and young. The local whores were shaken up but none were too surprised. Every once in awhile, one of them would vanish. Sometimes a body was discovered. Sometimes not.
The law in New York did not allow for the concept of consensual sex between a fourteen year old and an adult, so whether she had agreed to it or not, it was still, officially, rape, but regardless of whether or not she had cooperated, it did look like actual, violent rape, bruising around the vagina and a couple of bite marks around the nipples—definitely some recent sex but the guy (or guys) must have worn a condom. Maybe some random DNA would turn up but Drew Hastings wasn’t going to bet on it.
The shorts and panties were missing. If the guy liked to keep trophies, the shorts and panties might someday, somehow provide a clue, but first, they had to find them.
“Fourteen,” Drew Hastings said.
“Yeah.” Bill Harris nodded.
New York was far outside the guy’s normal stomping grounds, and maybe it wasn’t even him, but they had to assume it was. The age and sex of the victim, and most of all, the method, strangulation with what appeared to be a leather belt, were not likely to a coincidence. Unless, they were.
“New York,” Drew Hastings said.
Bill Harris frowned. “The word’s gone out. I got seven different calls about the case. The first was from that cop I spoke to before, Lew Barent, the friend of our Dr. Kurtz.”
“Kurtz again,” Drew Hastings said.
Bill Harris shrugged.
“Code Blue, OR 3!”
Kurtz groaned. He had just finished an incarcerated umbilical hernia in OR 2. The case had gone well and the patient was now woozy but awake in the Recovery Room. Kurtz rose to his feet and trotted down the hallway to OR 3. The room was already full. The patient, an elderly lady, lay on the OR table, at least temporarily dead, endotracheal tube connected to the ventilator of the anesthesia machine while a male OR tech pumped on her chest.
The surgeon, an ophthalmologist named Jack Burke, stood near the doorway while the anesthesiologist ran the code. The anesthesiologist knew his stuff. He gave all the right meds, shocked the old lady when appropriate, gave some more meds and after thirty minutes of futile activity, reluctantly called it.
Life’s a bitch and then you die, Kurtz thought. At least, she was old.
Joe Partledge looked as if he had aged ten years since the last time Kurtz had seen him. He sat in the cafeteria, toying with a full plate of bacon, hash browns and scrambled eggs.
“You okay?” Kurtz said.
Partledge shook his head. “I don’t know why I even care. It’s not as if I have so many happy memories of this God damn place, and all of us have privileges at the other hospitals in the area.” He frowned. “Except for the anesthesiologists. They could be in trouble.”
“Huh?”
Partledge gave a sad little smile. “That code, yesterday? It was the third unexpected death in the past two years. The Department of Health will be here by noon. We’ll be lucky if they don’t shut us down.”
At times like these, Kurtz thought, it paid to be grateful that Clinton Memorial’s problems were soon to be somebody else’s problems. He was out of here in four more weeks. Lew Barent had emailed him the night before, just to let him know what was going on, and then they had talked. Richard Kurtz wanted nothing to do with any serial killers but Lew had figured he should know about it.
Kurtz had hesitated about giving Dr. Georgia Philips a call but it wasn’t right that she would arrive to a situation in absolute chaos, so yesterday evening, after his conversation with Barent, he had picked up the phone and dialed her number.
Dr. Philips had not been pleased. “What do you mean, he can’t practice?”
Kurtz sighed. “Look, I’m sorry to have to tell you this. Hopefully, he’ll be fine, but right now, his privileges to perform surgery have been voluntarily suspended, pending the results of a full psychiatric and neurologic exam.”
There had been a long moment of silence. “Oh, that’s just great,” she said. “What if he can’t come back?”
“At a guess? You’ll wind up inheriting the practice about ten years before you thought you would.”
“I’m going to have to think about this.” She hesitated. “Thanks for letting me know,” she said, and hung up.
Yeah, Kurtz thought, his skull beginning to pound. It would be good to get home.
Chapter 14
Seamus Sullivan was beginning to get the itch. Seamus had been doing this for a long time. He knew when the heat was on and he knew when to lay low, but the best way to soothe a serial killer’s frayed nerves was to go out and kill somebody, preferably during a nice, prolonged orgasm, and that’s just what he couldn’t do, not around here and not now. The New York job had been pleasant, and the aftermath nearly sublime, but it had been over, to paraphrase Marlene Dietrich’s famous quote about her one afternoon affair with President John F. Kennedy, sweetly and all too soon.
And so, when the face appeared in the computer screen, he was relieved, and happy to comply.
The organization had provided Seamus Sullivan with a job as an executive with a restaurant distributorship, which allowed for a convenient excuse when his real job took him out of town. The distributorship was a legitimate business, one of many the organization owned and operated, and in fact provided food, tables, chairs, cutlery, linen and a broad range of supplies and equipment to food purveyors all over the United States.
It was perfect cover for a wandering assassin.
The putative company’s name was Commercial Restaurant Supply, Incorporated, the name of which was proudly displayed on the side of Seamus Sullivan’s van, a Ford Econoline, with the V8 engine and 6-speed automatic transmission. The back of the van was one large refrigerated compartment, perfect for transporting delicate fruits and vegetables, plus another, smaller, hidden compartment, even more perfect for transporting garrotes, knives, hand guns, assault rifles and bodies, both living and dead.
The job, once again, was in Charleston. Seamus Sullivan smiled. A local preacher with a large following had been railing against sin. No surprise there, that’s what preachers did, but the sin he was railing against was the sin of gambling. The organization liked gambling. The organization disliked people who tried to rally the public against it, particularly now, with the legislature almost ready to vote.
Seamus Sullivan was a non-denominational assassin, in that he was happy to kill anybody at all, particularly if he got paid for it, but he was looking forward to this one just a bit more than most, since Seamus held a particular disdain for men of the cloth. His own experiences as a pre-adolescent choir boy with a priest named Father O’Reilly ensured this.
And so, happily whistling, his white van gleaming in the sun, Seamus Sullivan pulled out onto the highway and headed off to the city.
The FBI had been amazingly cooperative, and Drew Hastings was grateful for their help. In addition to supplying Drew and Bill Harris with information regarding similar crimes across the United States, and the list of local sex offenders, they had also sent along a series of blown up aerial photos, covering a twenty-five-mile radius from the dump site, in exquisite detail. These photos were now assembled into one large map, covering an entire wall of Drew Hastings’ office. Each barely visible building where a violent crime of any sort had been committed during the previous ten years was clearly annotated on the map.
For a cop, the display was fascinating. Unfortunately, it had so far yielded nothing to shed light on their current problem.
George Rodriguez and his men had already visited every house and dwelling within three miles of the dump site. Thankfully, they knew and understood the local population, which meant that they approached slowly, made no threatening gestures and remained soft-spoken and polite.
Mountain folk tended to keep to themselves and mind their own business. There were a lot of guns in the mountains of West Virginia, and everybody knew how to use them.
Small pins had been placed on the map, green for houses that had been visited and whose occupants had been willing to talk, red for the ones that were empty and black for those who had told the agents to get lost.
Maybe sixty percent of the houses had so far resulted in an interview. Three men, out hunting, had seen other men who they did not recognize, also presumably hunting, in the woods. These men had acknowledged each other with a nod or a glower but had not otherwise interacted. The spots where these interactions had taken place, as closely as could be determined, were marked on the map with yellow pins.
Drew, sitting at his desk, nursing a cup of coffee, had already decided to keep the map once this case was over. He enjoyed looking at it. Whether it would ever turn out to be useful, was an entirely different matter.
The visiting team consisted of a surgeon, an internist and a nurse. What the Department of Health wanted, the Department of Health got. The staff had all been told to make themselves available as needed but luckily, they gave Joe Partledge and Ben Crane, the hospital CEO, their expected schedule, including the names of people they wanted to interview and the expected times. They told the rest to go back to work. Unfortunately, Richard Kurtz was on the list.
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br /> The team commandeered a small conference room in the administrative wing and spent the first morning going over the charts of the three patients who had died, all patients who had filed a professional liability suit during the previous five years and all patients flagged by hospital Risk Management as representing potential liability, meaning that something (usually something minor) had gone wrong, regardless of whether or not the patient had suffered harm.
They began the interviews after lunch. At 2:00 PM, Kurtz was ushered into the conference room. The team, plus a stenographer, rose to their feet and introduced themselves. The surgeon was a plump, bald guy named Harry Rivas. The internist, a short thin guy, with a sour expression, named Ned Lonigan, and the nurse, Sherry Cranston, was short and stout, with dyed red hair and sharp blue eyes. Nobody introduced the stenographer, a pretty, blonde woman, who wore a tan business suit and a lot of make-up. She smiled at Kurtz.
“So, Dr. Kurtz,” Rivas began. “Thank you for meeting with us.” Rivas exchanged a quick glance with Lonigan, who frowned down at a file in his lap.
Kurtz nodded.
“First, we realize that you’ve only recently arrived at Clinton and you’ll be leaving in a few weeks. We figured you’re about as objective an observer as we’re likely to find, so could you please give us your general impressions of the place?”
Fair enough. “The place is all right,” Kurtz said. “It’s small, but everybody I’ve met seems to know what they’re doing.”
Rivas glanced at Cranston, who looked unhappy. “Does that include Dr. Jerry Mandell?” she asked.
Oh. Him. Kurtz sighed. “I’m not sure what you’ve been told about Dr. Mandell. I only met him a couple of weeks ago. I’ve done half a dozen cases with him. He’s a good surgeon but from what the office staff tells me, he’s been forgetful lately. Dr. Mandell has agreed to have his cognitive abilities tested before resuming clinical work. So far as I am aware, no patients have ever been harmed by him.”
If a Tree Falls Page 9
