The Maze

by Catherine Coulter

She was stiff, her eyes colder than the ice frozen over her windshield the previous winter. It was what Douglas had said to her, what her father had said: “It’s none of your business.”

  “I suppose your family has told you it isn’t very healthy.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “I imagine you couldn’t bear it, that you couldn’t bear to let your sister go, not the way she was removed, like the pawn in a game that she had to lose.”

  She swallowed. “Yes, that’s close enough.”

  “There’s more, isn’t there? A whole lot more.”

  She was very pale, her fingers clutched around the paper coffee cup. “No, there’s nothing more.”

  “You’re lying. I wish you wouldn’t, but you’ve lied for a very long time, haven’t you?”

  “There’s nothing more. Please, stop.”

  “All right. Do you want to shoot this guy once we nab him? You want to put your gun to his head and pull the trigger? Do you want to tell him who you are before you kill him? Do you think killing him will free you?”

  “Yes. But that’s unlikely to happen. If I can’t shoot him then I want him to go to the gas chamber, not be committed the way Russell Bent will be. At least that’s what my brother-in-law, Douglas Madigan, told me.”

  “No one knows yet if Russell Bent will be judged incompetent to stand trial. Don’t jump the gun. Life imprisonment without parole isn’t good enough?”

  “No. I want him dead. I don’t want to worry about him escaping and killing more women. I don’t want to worry that he might be committed to an institution, then fool the shrinks and be let loose. I don’t want him still breathing after he killed seven—no, eight—people. He doesn’t deserve to breathe my air. He doesn’t deserve to breathe any air.”

  “I’ve heard the opinion that since killing a murderer doesn’t bring back the victim, then as a society we shouldn’t impose the death penalty, that it brings us down to the murderer’s level, that it’s nothing but institutional revenge and destructive to our values.”

  “No, of course it doesn’t bring the victim back. It’s a ridiculous argument. It makes no sense at all. It should be very straightforward: If you take another human life, you don’t deserve to go on living. It’s society’s punishment, it’s society’s revenge against a person who rips apart society’s rules, who tries himself to destroy who we are and what we are. What sort of values do we have if we don’t value a life enough to eradicate the one who wantonly takes it?”

  “We do condemn, we do imprison, we just don’t necessarily believe in killing the killer.”

  “We should. It’s justice for the victim and revenge as well. Both are necessary to protect a society from predators.”

  “What about the argument that capital punishment isn’t a deterrent at all, thus why have it?”

  “It certainly wouldn’t be a deterrent to me, the way the appeals process works now. The condemned murderer spends the taxpayer’s money keeping himself alive for at least another thirteen years—our money, can you begin to imagine?—no, I wouldn’t be deterred. That monster, Richard Allen Davis, in California who killed Polly Klaas and was sentenced to death. You can bet you and I will be spending big bucks to keep him alive for a good dozen more years while they play the appeals game. Someone could save him during any appeal in those years. Tell me, if you knew that if you were caught and convicted of killing someone you’d be put to death within say two years maximum, wouldn’t it make you think about the consequences of killing? Wouldn’t that be something of a deterrent?”

  “Yes. And I agree that more than a decade of appeals is absurd. Our paying for all the appeals is nuts. But revenge, Sherlock, just plain old revenge. Wouldn’t you have to say that the committed pursuit of it is deadening?”

  That’s what he’d wanted to say all along. She was very still, looking out the small window down at the scattered towns in New England. “No,” she said finally, “I don’t think it is. Once it’s over you see, once there’s justice, there can be a final good-bye to the victim. Then there’s life waiting, life without fear, life without guilt, life without shame. It’s all those things that are deadening.” She said nothing more.

  He pulled a computer magazine out of his briefcase and began reading. He wondered what else had happened to her. Something had, something bad. He wondered if the something bad had happened to her around the time her sister had been killed. It made sense. What the hell was it?

  • • •

  Homicide Detective Ralph Budnack was a cop’s cop. He was tall, with a runner’s body, a crooked nose that had seen a good half dozen fights, intelligent, a stickler for detail, and didn’t ever give up. His front teeth lapped over, making him look mischievous when he smiled. He met them at the District 6 Station and took them in to see his captain, John Dougherty, a man with bags under his tired eyes, bald and overweight, a man who looked like he wanted to retire yesterday.

  They reviewed all that they knew, viewed the body in the morgue, and met with the medical examiner. There had been twenty stab wounds in Hillary Ramsgate’s body: seven in the chest, thirteen in the abdomen. No sexual assault. Her tongue had been cut out, really very neatly, and there was a bump on her head from the blow to render her unconscious.

  “Ralph tells me the guy’s on a seven-year cycle and we lucked out that he just happened to be here when the seven years were up. That kind of luck can kill a person.” Captain Dougherty chewed on his unlighted cigar. “The mayor called just before you came. The governor is next. I sure hope you guys can catch this guy.”

  “There are many meanings and contexts to the number seven,” Savich said, looking up from the autopsy report he was reviewing again. “I don’t know if we’ll get much out of this, but just as soon as we’ve inputted all the information from Ms. Ramsgate’s murder into the program, I’m going to correlate it to any instances of the number seven as working behavior in numerology.” He looked over at Lacey, who was staring blankly at him. “Hey, it’s worth a try. There just might be something, it just might be that our guy buys into all that stuff, that it will give us some clues about him.”

  “Hell,” said Captain Dougherty, “use a psychic if you think it might help. A trained cat, if you’ve got one.”

  Savich laughed, not at all insulted. “I know it sounds weird, but you know as well as I do that people can be loonier than the Mad Hatter.”

  “I didn’t catch your name,” Ralph Budnack said, staring at Lacey, “but I’ve seen you before. Now I’ve got it. You came in here claiming to be related to the victim.” He turned to Savich, his jaw working. “You want to tell me what the hell is going on here?”

  “Calm down, Ralph. It’s all very understandable. Her sister was killed seven years ago in San Francisco by this guy. That’s why she realized so fast that he’d struck again. That’s why she came up here. Thanks to her, we’re on to him immediately. Now, you don’t have to worry about her. She works for me. I’ll have her under control.”

  Captain Dougherty was staring at her, chewing harder on the unlit cigar. “I don’t want any vigilante stuff here, Agent Sherlock. You got that? You even tiptoe outside the boundaries and I’ll bust you hard. I don’t care if you’re FBI. I wouldn’t care if you were Hoover himself. It appears to me that Savich would bust you too. I wouldn’t want to go in the ring with him.”

  “I understand, sir.” Why did Dillon have to tell them the truth? She could have lied her way out of it. She caught his eye and realized he knew exactly what she was thinking. He didn’t want her to lie anymore. Well, bully for him. It hadn’t been his sister who’d been butchered; it hadn’t been him to have nightmares horrible enough to wake you up wheezing, knowing that you were dying, that someone was close, really close, nearly close enough to kill you. She wanted to throw him through the window, although it looked as though it had been painted shut.

  Now Budnack would tell the other cops who she was and what she’d done, and no one would trust her as far as the corne
r.

  “I hope we’ll find out something about this seven-year thing,” Savich said. “It also occurred to me that he knows how to build sets and props. Not just build them, but he has to transport them to the buildings where he intends to commit the murders. They must be constructed to fold pretty small to fit in a car trunk or in a van. That means he has to be proficient at least at minimal construction.

  “Also, surely a truck would have been remarked upon. And he must do it in the middle of the night to cut way down on the chance of being seen. It’s possible that the seven business will correlate to building things. Who knows?”

  “Like a propman in the theater,” Lacey said slowly, hope soaring.

  “Could be,” Savich said. “Let’s get the rest of the goodies in the program, then see what we come up with. He stood. “Gentlemen, anything else?”

  “Yes,” Ralph Budnack said. “I want to help you input into this magic program of yours.”

  “You got it,” Savich said and shook his hand.

  The three of them took turns until late in the afternoon. Savich said, “There, that about takes care of it. Now let me tell MAX to stretch his brain and see what he can find for us. I inputted every instance of the number seven I could find. For example, two of the murders were committed on the seventh day of the week. Another murder was committed in the seventh month of the year. Sounds pretty far-out, but we’ll see. The real key is the seven-year cycle and the fact that he killed seven women. MAX has more to work with here than he’s ever had before. Also I gave MAX another bone—the construction angle.” His fingers moved quickly over the keys. Then he grinned up at Lacey, and pressed ENTER.

  “That computer your kid?” Ralph Budnack asked.

  “You’d think so,” Savich said. “But no, MAX is a partner, and by no means a silent one.” He patted the keyboard very lightly. “Nope, I’ll have some real kids one of these days.”

  “You married?”

  “No. Ah, here we go. MAX’s first effort. Let me print it out.”

  There were only two pages.

  Savich grinned at them. “Take a look, guys.”

  13

  “THE PLEIADES?”

  Ralph Budnack looked ready to cry. “We spent four hours inputting stuff and we get the Pleiades? What the hell are the Pleiades?”

  “The seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione,” Lacey read. “They’re a group of stars, put in the sky by Zeus. Orion is behind them, chasing them.”

  “This is nuts,” Ralph said.

  “Keep reading,” Savich said. “Just keep reading.”

  Lacey looked up, her face shining. “He’s an astronomer, he’s got to be. That or he’s an astrologer or into numerology, with astronomy as a hobby.”

  Ralph Budnack said, “Maybe he’s a college professor, teaching mythology. He builds furniture on the side, as a hobby.”

  “At least there appears to be something in the seven scenario,” Savich said, laying down page two. “We’ve got some leads. I’ve got a couple of other ideas, but Ralph, you and your guys can start checking this all out. Chances are, according to the Profilers, that the guy has been here at least six months, but less than a year. Enough time, in other words, for him to scout out all the places he’s going to take his victims.”

  “Good point,” Budnack said, rubbing his hands together. “My other team members are interviewing everyone they can scrape up from the Congress Street area. I’ll pull them off to do this.”

  When Lacey and Savich were alone, she said, “You’re having a problem with all this, aren’t you?”

  “This whole business with the seven sisters of the Pleiades, it just seems too easy, too obvious.”

  “Why? It took MAX to come up with it. The SFPD didn’t come up with it. The Profilers didn’t either. Also, it’s a seven-year interval between killings. He kills seven women at each cycle. Two sevens is a goodly number of sevens.”

  Savich stood up and stretched, then he scratched his stomach. “You’re probably right. I’m just dragged down because MAX got it and we didn’t. But you know, I’ve got this itch in my belly. Whenever I’ve gotten this itch in the past, there’s been something I’ve missed.

  “I need to go to the gym. Working out clears my brain. You want to come along? I won’t tromp you this time. In fact, I’ll start work on your deltoids.”

  “I didn’t bring any workout stuff. Besides, I plan to protect my deltoids with my life.”

  The cops tracked down four possible suspects within the next twenty-four hours—two of them astrologers who’d come to Boston during the past year, two of them numerologists. Both the numerologists had come during the past year from southern California. They didn’t arrest any of them. Budnack, Savich, and Lacey met later that day in Captain Dougherty’s office.

  “No big deal about that,” Ralph Budnack said, frowning. “All the nuts come from southern California.”

  “So does Julia Roberts,” Savich said.

  “Point taken,” Budnack said and grinned. “So what do you think, Savich? It just doesn’t feel right with any of these guys. Plus two of them have pretty good alibis. We found a homeless guy, Mr. Rick, he’s called, who said he saw a guy going in and out of the warehouse on Congress. He said he was all bundled up and he wondered about that since it was really warm that night, said it was so warm he didn’t even have to sleep in his box. Said he hadn’t seen him before.”

  “Any more specifics about the man?” Lacey asked. “Anything about what he looked like?”

  “Just that he looked kind of scrawny, a direct quote from Mr. Rick. Whatever that means. Mr. Rick is pretty big. Scrawny just might mean anything smaller than six foot. I might add that only one of the four guys we picked up could be called scrawny, and he’s got the strongest alibi.”

  Savich had wandered away. He was pacing, head down, seemingly staring at the linoleum floor.

  “He’s thinking,” she said in answer to Captain Dougherty’s unasked question.

  “Your sister was really offed by this guy?”

  “Yes. It’s been seven years. But you never forget.”

  “Is that why you got into the FBI?”

  “I didn’t know what else to do. I went to school and learned a bit about all the areas in forensics, then I focused on how the criminal mind works. Actually I’d planned to be a Profiler, but I couldn’t live what they do every day. So here I am. Thank God for Savich’s new unit.”

  “You even learn about blood-spattering patterns?”

  “Yeah, some of the examples of that were pretty gruesome. I’m not an expert, but at least I learned enough so that I’d know what to do, where to find out more, who to contact.”

  Captain Dougherty said, “Everyone thinks profiling is so sexy. Remember that show on TV about a Profiler?”

  “Yeah, the one with ESP. Now that was something, wasn’t it? Why bother with profiling? A waste of time. Just tune in to the guy and you’ve got him.”

  He grinned and she distracted him with another question about one of the men they’d hauled in for questioning.

  It was at midnight when Savich sat up in bed, drew a very deep breath, and said softly, “I’ve got you, you son of a bitch.”

  He worked at the computer until three o’clock in the morning. He called Ralph Budnack at seven A.M. and told him what he needed.

  “You got something, Savich?”

  “I just might,” he said slowly. “I just might. On the other hand, I might be off plucking daisies in that big flower market in the sky. Keep doing what you’re doing.” He then called Lacey’s room.

  “I need you,” he said. “Come to my room and we’ll order room service.”

  The fax was humming out page after page from Budnack. “Yeah,” Savich was saying, “this will help.”

  “You won’t tell me what you’re homing in on?”

  “Nope, not until I know there’s a slight chance I’m on the right track.”

  “I was thinking far into the night,” she said, and al
though it wasn’t at all cold in the room, she was rubbing her hands over her arms. She looked tired, pinched. “I couldn’t get this seven business out of my mind.” She drew a deep breath. “We banked everything on seven, and so we got the Pleiades and all that numerology stuff. But what if it doesn’t have anything to do with seven at all? What if there was just the one instance of seven and that was merely the time lag before he started killing again? What if he killed more than seven women? Eight women or even nine?” She looked nearly desperate, standing there, rubbing her arms. “Not much of a big lead there. I think you’re right, it’s just too pat, and too confining. But if there’s nothing there, then what else is there?”

  “You’re perfectly right. You’ve got a good brain, Sherlock. My brain was working in tandem with yours—”

  She laughed, some of the tension easing out of her. “Which means that you’ve got a good brain too.”

  “Me and MAX together have a top-drawer brain. All right, let me tell you where I’m heading and if you think I’m off the wall, then you can haul me back. I’ve been thinking that we’ve gotten too fancy here, exactly what you said—it’s too complicated out there. It assumes our killer is a really deep profound fellow with lots of esoteric literary or astrological underpinnings. That he probably builds designer furniture on the side. I woke up at midnight and thought: Give me a break. This is nothing but a headache theory. It’s time to get back to basics.

  “I knew then that our guy isn’t any of those things. I think the answer just might lie with the obvious. I’ve been asking MAX to come up with other alternatives or new options based on new factoring data I’ve put in.” He drew a deep breath. “Remember, Sherlock, this still might not lead anywhere.”

  “What’s obvious?”

  “A psychopath who knows how to build props, make them fold up small, and make them portable. I know that they checked into this in San Francisco—they went to all the theaters, interviewed a dozen prop designers and builders. I went back in to see exactly what they did find—and where they’d looked, what kind of suspects they’d turned up.