FaceOff (21 page)

THE THING ABOUT BURGLARY WAS
, the careful burglar was rarely disturbed by the homeowner. It was always some snoopy neighbor who did him in.

Lucas sat on a darkened stoop across the street from Verlaine’s building, just watching and listening. The neighborhood was a tough one, not far from the East River, and not yet gentrifying; the buildings might be a little too rotten, a little too undistinguished, a little too far upriver. Verlaine’s building was a bit of a puzzle—only two stories tall, but wide and deep. Too large for a single inhabitant, Lucas thought. It had a shallow entrance above a wide one-step stoop, with bricked-up spaces on the bottom floor that were once windows. The place could have been a hardware store at one time, with walk-up apartments above it; in another neighborhood, farther downtown, it would have become a nightclub, or a restaurant. Here, it was just a derelict building, without a single light showing, either through the barred windows on the main door, or from the windows on the second floor. Was there somebody else in there? Verlaine himself, Lucas knew, was at a Midtown bar.

Nothing moving. And still Lucas waited.

He’d had a little heart-to-heart with Lincoln. When the women were gone, Lincoln said, “If you go to the black cabinet by the window, in the bottom section, the left side, there’s a drawer.”

Lucas went to the cabinet, opened a lower-level door, pulled out the drawer, and found an electric lock rake.

He took it out and pulled the trigger. Dead.

“An artifact from my former life. It’ll still work, but you’ll have to put some double-A batteries in it.”

“You want me to crack Verlaine’s apartment?”

“Lily said you occasionally used unconventional tactics.”

Lucas said, “I’ll take a look at it. Even if this thing works, there could be other problems. Might be other people around, locks have gotten better.”

“So then you don’t go in,” Lincoln said. “I just feel it would be useful if somebody could take a preliminary look. Can’t use it as evidence, of course.”

Lucas nodded. “Yeah. Once you
know,
everything else gets easier.”

Then he said, “Look, I know I pissed you off because I was having trouble dealing with your disability.”

“You did. Piss me off,” Lincoln said.

“Yeah, well,” Lucas scratched his neck. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you. It’s purely out of fear. This scar”—he touched his neck again—“a little girl shot me in the throat with a .22. Went through a coat collar, through my windpipe, got to my spine, but not into it. The kid should have killed me—she would have, but there was a doc right there, and she did a tracheotomy, and kept me breathing until we got to the hospital. But if the kid had had any other kind of gun, or if the slug hadn’t gone through the collar first, she would have either blown my spine out, and I would have been dead on the spot, or I would have been like you. It was a matter of a quarter inch or so, or any other caliber. I look at you and I see me.”

“Interesting,” Lincoln said.

“After the accident, did you think about suicide?”

“Yes. Quite considerably,” Lincoln said. “Sometimes, I’m not sure I made the right choice, staying alive. But my curiosity keeps me going; I always seem to have work.” He smiled. “God bless all the little criminals.”

“And then there’s Amelia,” Lucas said.

“Yes. Then there’s Amelia.”

“You’re a lucky man, Lincoln,” Lucas said.

Lincoln laughed and said, “It’s been a while since anyone told me that.”

·  ·  ·

After an hour on the stoop, Lucas decided that he’d either have to make a move on the building, or go away. He stood up, dusted off the seat of his jeans, and saw a man walking along the sidewalk toward him, alone. The man spit in the gutter and came on. When he got to Lucas, he stopped and said, “You got an extra twenty?”

“No.”

“I’m not really asking,” the man said.

“Take a close look at me,” Lucas said.

The man took a closer look, then said, “Fuck you,” and went on down the street. He looked back once, then turned the corner and was gone. Lucas waited another few minutes, to see if the man came back, then crossed the street and, using his cell phone as a flashlight, looked at the lock. An old one—a good one, when it was made, but now old. With a last look around, Lucas took the rake out of his pocket, slipped the pick-arm into the lock. The rake chattered for a moment, as Lucas kept the turning pressure on, and then the lock went.

He stepped inside, closed the door, and called, “Anybody home?”

He listened, got no response, except a scrabbling sound in the ceiling—a rat.

“Hey, anybody? Anybody here?”

Nobody answered. He took a flashlight from his pocket, turned it on. He was in a wide hallway, with steps going up to his right, and with a double door to the left. The hallway smelled of burned metal, as though somebody had been working with a welding torch. He was in the right place.

He tried the double door and found it open, with a bank of light switches on the wall to the left. He closed the door behind him and turned on the lights. He was in a wide-open studio with several two-foot-tall bronze sculptures sitting on heavy wooden tables, with a variety of metalworking tools—files, electric grinders, polishers, hand scribes. The air inside smelled of burned metal and polishing compound.

The sculptures were all on sadomasochistic themes: nude women being whipped, bound, beaten. Just what you need to add that extra spark to your living room, Lucas thought.

At the far edge of the studio was a low, wooden wall, perhaps ten feet high, which was two or three feet short of the ceiling. Behind it, Lucas found a queen-sized bed, a chest of drawers, a large closet stuffed with clothing, a bathroom, a second closet with an apartment-sized washer and dryer stacked one on top of the other, a kitchenette, and a small breakfast table with two chairs. A television was mounted on a swing arm at the foot of the bed. He poked through the living area for a moment, found nothing of particular interest, and continued his tour of the studio. And found, at the back, an internal door, sheathed in metal, that was set in a frame a step below the rest of the floor—a door that most likely led to a basement, Lucas thought. He looked at the lock, and realized that the rake wouldn’t work: the thing was probably a year old, a Medeco.

After the quick tour of the lower floor, he turned out the lights, stepped back in the hallway, and used the flashlight to climb the stairs to the second floor. The second floor was a trash heap: a line of single rooms that had apparently last been used as a flophouse, each with a wrecked cot or a stained mattress, various pieces of mostly broken furniture. More rats: he never saw one, but he could hear them.

Nothing for him there.

He went back down to the studio, closed the door, turned the lights on, went to look at the cellar door again. No way to open it: it was impossible. He pounded on it a few times and listened, heard nothing. What they really needed, he thought, was behind that door, and he had no way to get there.

He’d been inside for five or six minutes, and time was wearing on him.

He took a plastic bag out of his pocket, and from the bag, several more Ziploc-style bags, each with a white spongelike pad in it. Lincoln’s instructions had been simple enough: press the pad into anything you’d like to pick up, then put the pad back in the plastic bag, and seal it. Lucas worked his way through the studio, doing just that: sampling bronze filings from the floor, off a workbench, and out of the teeth of a metal file. Moving to the welding area, he found a selection of welding rods, and stuck one of each kind in his pocket, and, from a trash bin, several used rods.

He sampled several stains that might possibly have been blood, but there were enough stains around the place, oil and lubricants, that he had his doubts. He was taking a sample when he saw, in a small niche off the main working space, a half dozen crucifixes on neck chains, along with a necklace of cheap aqua-colored stones, a thin string of seed pearls, a ring on a chain, and three sets of earrings, all pinned to the wall with tacks. And he thought,
Trophies?
If
they were, there were twelve of them. There was nothing else like them in the room: he took a half dozen photos with his cell phone.

Time to leave. On his way out, he looked at each of the bronze sculptures, and a clay maquette for another, and noticed that each of the women portrayed in the sculptures was wearing a single piece of jewelry of some kind, apparently to emphasize her nakedness. Was it possible that the jewelry collection did not represent trophies, but was for use with models?

He was thinking about that when Lily called. “He’s moving.”

“And I’m gone,” Lucas said. And he thought,
Not for models. They were trophies, and there were twelve of them.

·  ·  ·

“You believe it?” Lucas Davenport said, walking into the town house. He held up the plastic bags. “This shit fell out the window when I was walking by Verlaine’s apartment.”

Lincoln spun the motorized wheelchair around, noting eagerly—almost hungrily—the evidence in the Minnesotan’s hand.

“Sometimes you catch a break. Anything obvious?”

“No piles of bones or bloody shackles. There’s a steel door leads somewhere—the cellar, I think. Love to see what’s behind that.” He explained that the lock rake wasn’t up to the task, though. They’d need a warrant and a sledgehammer.

Lincoln turned his attention to the evidence.

Lucas dropped down into one of the wicker chairs near one of the large high-definition monitors that glowed like a billboard in Times Square.

“Lucas?” Thom Reston, Lincoln’s aide, stood in the doorway. He was a slim, young man, dressed in a lavender shirt, dark tie, and beige slacks. “Tempt you? Beer? Anything else?”

“Later, thanks.”

Lincoln said, “Whiskey for me.”

“You’ve had two already,” Thom countered.

“I’m so pleased at your sterling memory. Could I have a whiskey? Please and thank you?”

“No.”

“Get me—” But he was speaking to an empty doorway. He grimaced. “All right. Let’s get to work. Mel, what’s in the haul?”

Mel Cooper looked like a geek, which he probably was since he was the Mr. Wizard of forensic science on the East Coast, if not the country. The man was pale and trim and had thin hair and Harry Potter glasses that invariably slid down his nose.

Pulling on gloves, a surgeon’s cap, and a disposable jacket, Cooper took the bag and set the contents out on an examination pad—large sheets of sterile newsprint.

“Good job,” he mused, looking at the carefully sealed bags. “You worked crime scene before?”

“Naw,” Lucas said. “But I lost a rape-murder conviction once ’cause some rookie tripped and dropped the perp’s shoe into Medicine Lake. It was the only evidence we had that would’ve nailed the prick and I had a very uncircumstantial-minded jury. The prick walked.”

“That hurts,” Lincoln said.

“Course, he went after another vic a month later. He didn’t pick well. She kept a five-five Redhawk under her mattress. Just a three fifty-seven, not a forty-four. But it did the trick.”

“Was there anything left of the guy?”

“Not much above the neck. Justice got done, but it would’ve been a whole lot cleaner if the CS kid had held on to the evidence. Taught me to treat it like gold.”

First, Cooper and Lincoln did a visual of the splinters and curlicues of bronze and other metals.

Using an optical microscope on low power, Lincoln compared them with the scraps found in the backs of the women victims. He was looking at the shape of the scraps, along with the indentations from the tools that had trimmed them off a large piece of metal—presumably one of the sculptures. “Tool marks look real close to me,” Lincoln said.

Lucas walked over to the high-def monitor plugged into the microscope via an HDMI cable. “Yeah, I agree.”

They next had to compare the chemical composition of the metal from the crime scenes with that of the scraps Lucas had found at the studio. Cooper went to work analyzing each one, using the glow discharge spectrometer, the gas chromatograph, and the scanning electron microscope.

“While we’re waiting,” Lucas said, pointing to a bag. “Possible blood stains. From the floor near his bedroom.”

Cooper tested with luminol and alternative light sources.

“Yep, we’ve got blood.”

A reagent test confirmed it was human, and the tech typed it. The sample, however, didn’t match the types of the women victims from the earlier scenes.

They tested concrete samples that Lucas had collected, too, and compared them with the concrete particles found in the women’s backs. “Close,” Cooper assessed. “No cigar.”

“Hell.” Lincoln then glanced at the doorway; he’d heard the nearly undetectable sound of the key in the lock. A moment later the female detectives walked into the parlor.

“How’d it go?” Lily asked Lucas.

He shrugged. “Some evidence fell off the truck.” He nodded to the equipment, merrily analyzing away. He glanced at Amelia’s outfit. “Damn, you need to go undercover more often.”

Lily hit him on the arm. “Behave.”

Lucas then asked the women, “What was Verlaine like?”

“Dangerous,” Amelia said.

Lily filled in, “He looks at you like you’re naked and he can’t decide what to lick first.”

“And then what to whip.”

“So the S&M hunch paid off?”

“Big-time. He’s the
S
all the way. Wants to be the hurter, not the hurtee.”

Lily explained about his personal Pinterest album. “Jesus, took all my willpower not to kick him in the balls. You should’ve seen what he did to some of those women.”

“He pressure you two lovely ladies to go home with him?” Lucas asked.

“Sure, but we had to postpone our threesome. Somehow his glass kept getting refilled. He was in no shape to tie anybody up after that much bourbon. I was tempted to let the asshole stagger home and hope some mugger beat the crap out of him. But Amelia was the mature one and we got him into a cab.”

Sachs glanced at the plastic bags. “What does the evidence say?”