Dark Harbor (7 page)
Hallelujah!
Salvation and glory and power belong to our God,
for true and just are His judgments.
He has condemned the great prostitute
who corrupted the earth by her adulteries.
He has avenged on her the blood of His servants …
H
E REPEATED THE WORDS
over and over out loud. He no longer even realized he was doing it. It was one of his favorite passages, but there were so many others of equal power, and he could recall them all with such ease. They were the reason for his existence, and his existence would give rise to a new age of damnation for all but the chosen. That he was one of the chosen had been made clear to him years before, and now he’d been called to help clear the way for the plagues and the locusts and the great lake of fire. It made him important.
No one suspected. How could they? There was nothing to suggest the truth. And even if there were something, only the righteous would see it; and the truly righteous would understand, and would rejoice with him.
The house was unassuming; a small, freestanding wood-frame structure on the edge of the commercial district that spread between downtown and South Boston. His parents had left it to him. Their passing had been a painful blow, but in time it had given him clarity, and he knew they were watching him from their graves with pride, and waiting for judgment day to rise again.
The interior was sparse but clean, almost puritanical by bachelor standards. A few religious artifacts were spread around the rooms as the only decoration, but they weren’t so prevalent as to draw attention—just enough to suggest a healthy respect for his religion and his God. He was deliberate about that, so that there would be nothing on the first two floors of the little house that would suggest the truth.
The basement was a different story. Concrete, white paint, and bright lights had transformed the space into an odd sort of medical bunker. Against one wall, stainless steel shelves held a wide assortment of medical tools, supplies, and bottles. In the center of the room, underneath a halogen light, a metal gurney was bolted to the floor, the mattress removed and replaced by a flat steel platform. It was less comfortable, but easier to clean, and he’d learned from experience that the latter was more important.
He was down there now, standing in front of the glass case at the far end of the room. It was his shrine. Six jars, lined up neatly, each filled with formaldehyde. This was his sanctuary, where he drew his strength and prepared to continue His work so that he’d be united with his parents again; so that they could all stand together among the trumpets in their white robes with the lamb of God as the others burned in an ocean of sulfur and acid.
Give her as much torture and grief
as the glory and luxury she gave herself.
In her heart she boasts
,
“I sit as queen; I am not a widow
,
and I will never mourn.”
Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her:
death, mourning, and famine.
She will be consumed by fire,
for mighty is the Lord God who judges her.
It was another favorite passage, and he repeated it for nearly thirty minutes before he pulled himself away from the glass case and locked the basement up tight.
“R
OUGHLY TWELVE HOURS
,” Farmalant said.
“Are you sure?” Flaherty asked. “As sure as I can be. One thing is absolutely clear—the Caldwell woman was dead for a long time before her heart was removed. She was strangled to death, and then her heart was taken out later. I could be an hour off, give or take, but not more than that. You can be sure it wasn’t near the time of her death.”
“Shit,” Flaherty muttered.
She was back in Farmalant’s posh office. He’d called her earlier in the morning with the news that the autopsy was finally finished. “Why won’t you just send the report over?” she’d asked. He’d been clear that she should come to his office.
“There are some things in here you’re going to want to discuss,” he’d said. At first she thought it was just a ploy to flirt with her again, but something in his voice told her there
were
things he really needed to explain in person. This was clearly one of them.
“You told me the other six had their hearts removed within a few minutes of their death, right?” she asked.
Farmalant nodded. “That’s what I told you, but we’ve gone back and run some more tests on the blood of the other victims, and I may have been wrong,
sort of
.”
“What do you mean by ‘sort of’? How long were they dead?”
“They weren’t. At least not all of them. And the ones that were dead were only killed a moment or two before their hearts were removed.”
“How can that be?”
“According to the results of the most recent tests, in each of the earlier victims, there was a mixture of muscle relaxants and local anesthetics. These were mixed pretty skillfully, so that Little Jack could actually operate on the victims while they were still alive. As a result, death didn’t occur until the aorta was severed.”
“Why would he do that?”
“You don’t want to know,” Farmalant said. When she scowled at him, he shrugged. “It looks like he was getting better and better at mixing the drugs. In the last three or four victims, prior to the Caldwell girl, the mixture was so professional that the victims could actually have been conscious while he was cutting them.”
Flaherty felt sick. “You can’t be serious. They were conscious?”
“Yeah, it’s pretty twisted, isn’t it? It looks like at least some of these women got to watch while this sicko reached into their chests and literally cut out their hearts.”
Flaherty was glad Natalie Caldwell hadn’t endured the horror of being sliced open while she was still conscious. At the same time, it was a significant departure from Little Jack’s MO, and inconsistencies in method made the investigation harder. It also meant they had to consider again the possibility that this was a copycat killing.
“Anything else?” Flaherty asked.
Farmalant nodded. “I’m afraid so. We found semen inside the body.”
“You mean she was raped?”
“Well, there’s no way to be sure. She could have had consensual sex before she was killed—either with the killer or with someone else. We found some light bruising around her wrists that could be consistent with her having been bound, but the test wasn’t conclusive. The circumstances of her death obviously suggest rape as a possibility, but there’s no way to tell for sure.”
“None of the others were sexually assaulted, were they?”
“Not a single one,” Farmalant confirmed. “It’s starting to look more and more like this is a different guy, isn’t it?”
“Well, we still don’t know. It may just be he was in a hurry, or something threw him off this time.” Flaherty was rationalizing, and she knew it. The possibility that the killer had raped Natalie created particular problems. Murder motivated by or combined with a sexual impulse was a very different crime, psychologically speaking, from a ritualized serial killing. The absence of a sexual component in the first six killings, combined with the highly sophisticated manner in which the victims were dispatched, suggested a very distinct personality type: intellectual, patient, and controlled. The introduction of a sexual element was at odds with this particular profile. It suggested a lack of control and an absence of patience, and, like it or not, it seemed to support Farmalant’s suspicion that they were dealing with a different killer.
On the other hand, Flaherty thought, there was no way to tell whether the penetration had occurred before Natalie Caldwell encountered her killer or after. If she had sex with some other person before Little Jack got to her, it would explain the state in which her body was found without being inconsistent with the method of Little Jack’s prior murders. Still, Flaherty knew, it would only explain the crime’s sexual element; it wouldn’t explain the victim’s being strangled to death before her heart was removed, or the difference in the skill with which the heart had been taken.
“Anything else?” Flaherty asked.
“That’s not enough?”
“It’s plenty, but I need to know if there’s more.”
“Nothing else startling. But these issues—” Farmalant cut himself short when he saw the look on Flaherty’s face. “I just thought you should know.”
“I appreciate it,” she said, sighing. She got up from the plush leather chair and headed for the door. She paused when she got there, and turned around to face Farmalant. “What’s your gut feeling?” she asked. “Is it him, or someone else?”
“You don’t really want to hear my answer, do you?”
“Might as well. I don’t have to agree with it.”
“Fine.” Farmalant took a deep breath. “In my opinion we’re dealing with two different killers.”
Flaherty nodded, and then turned and walked out the door.
F
INN LOOKED ACROSS THE TABLE
at Antonio Patrick McGuire, the president of Huron Security. He looked slightly more like an Antonio than a McGuire, but having both Irish and Italian blood never hurt in Boston. Despite the facade of liberal politics that covered the city, its heart was still ruled by racial and ethnic divisions as old as the Freedom Trail. His dark hair was receding rapidly, revealing a flat, sloping forehead that ran down to a prominent brow above small, wide-set eyes. The eyes possessed intelligence; not the studied, cultivated intelligence Finn was used to seeing from in his lily-white, milk-fed clients, but something closer to cunning.
Finn was excited to be tasked with the responsibility of defending McGuire’s deposition. It was a job that could easily have been taken by one of the partners on the case, but Preston was tied up in court, and Nick Williams was preoccupied with his analysis of the documents, so the responsibility fell to Finn.
“Have you ever been deposed before?” he asked McGuire.
There was a long pause before McGuire answered. “A couple of times. My divorce got messy when the shysters got involved, so I was deposed for that. Then I got sued by a tenant in a building I own and I was deposed again.”
“What was the tenant lawsuit about?” Finn asked.
“Nothing worth talking about. I convinced the guy to drop it.” McGuire said it with such finality that it foreclosed further probing. He was, after all, a client of the firm. As president of Huron Security, Inc., he ran one of the fastest-growing companies in Massachusetts. The growth was due largely to the contracts the company had secured from the state. Word had it that McGuire was a close friend of the governor’s and that his inside track had won him the contract to staff the Transportation Safety Commission guards. It seemed odd to Finn. McGuire didn’t look like someone who hobnobbed with the blue-blooded pillars of Massachusetts society. He looked like he’d be more comfortable in a pub in Charlestown or Southie.
“Well, at least you know the basic ground rules. We’ll be in a conference room at the plaintiffs’ attorney’s office. There will be a court reporter and probably a few lawyers for the plaintiff who’ll be asking you questions. You’ll be under oath, so you have to answer truthfully. You should remember, though, that there’s a big difference between answering questions truthfully and being useful. Your goal in this deposition is not to be helpful to the other side.”
McGuire twirled a cigarette lighter around on the oak conference table. “I’m not sure I get what you’re saying. Aren’t you going to tell me exactly what to say? I mean, I don’t want to screw this thing up. If you tell me what to say, I’ll just say that and we can be done with it.”
Finn sighed. He was dismayed at the regularity with which clients and witnesses expressed their willingness to be led to the “right truth.” It wasn’t that they were eager to lie, but they wanted to avoid saying anything wrong, and they were willing to bend the truth as much as necessary so as not to hurt the case. In the modern legal world, few people felt that being under oath really compelled them to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Clients paying five or six hundred dollars an hour in legal fees expected to be told what to say so they’d win the case.
Finn had never crossed that line, and he didn’t plan to. He’d walk the tightrope and play his games in the gray areas of the law, but feeding testimony to a witness was too much a betrayal of a system in which, despite his cynicism, he still believed.
“I can’t tell you what to say, you have to tell the truth. I can simply tell you that there are ways you can tell the truth and still not be helpful.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, for example, listen carefully to the question, and don’t answer anything that isn’t asked. If they ask you, ‘What do you do for a living?’ you should give them the title of your position at Huron, not a full description of what it is that you actually do in that position. If they ask you, ‘Do you have a direct superior?’ you should simply answer yes and make them follow up with a question about what the name of your superior is. Remember, the less talking you do, the better off the company is.”
McGuire smiled conspiratorially. “I can do that.” Finn wasn’t surprised. McGuire didn’t look like someone who parted with information easily or made a habit of being helpful.
“Good. Also, don’t guess. If they ask you a question and you’re not absolutely sure what the answer is, tell them that you don’t know. The worst thing you can do is start guessing. We can always supply them with the answers to the questions later, once the information has been vetted.”
McGuire smiled again, more broadly this time. “There’s a lot I’m not
absolutely
sure about.”
“That’s all the better. Hopefully it means you’ll get out of this deposition quickly without giving them anything useful. Just keep reminding yourself that the less information, the better.”
McGuire nodded. Then he leaned back in his chair and folded his hands together, putting them back over his head. He had huge knuckles, Finn noticed. The kind of knuckles that grow with continued use on docks, at warehouses, on construction jobs. Knuckles like that were only found around hard work requiring strength and indifference to pain and fatigue.
“Let me ask you something, Counselor.” He drew the last word out into a slur, letting his contempt show. “What are these plaintiffs’ lawyers looking for? The feds have already concluded no amount of security would have been able to stop this fuckin’ towelhead. Even if we did screw something up in our procedures, the attack still would have taken place. Doesn’t that mean these guys have no case?”
“It ought to, and it’s likely we
will
ultimately win this thing for just that reason. But you’ve got to remember, this is a high-profile case, so the judge may want to let a jury decide it, and a jury has a lot of leeway in how it decides. Who do you think the jury is going to be more sympathetic to, the widow of one of the victims or the big security company hired by the state?”
“So we’re screwed.”
“If you weren’t at least a little screwed, your company would never be paying the fees we charge.”