Shadow Dancers (3 page)

As a younger man he’d enjoyed working there late at night. Mostly it was the solitude he loved, the sense of proprietorship he felt when only he was there. King of the Underworld. Lord Chancellor of the Necropolis sort of thing. When he worked late into the night now, it was scarcely out of love for the job or devotion to duty. Now it was more out of a fear of having to go home, to face the infinitely more terrifying silences of the big old Norman Tudor, with its turrets and arches and towers, planted like a stone fortress high above the banks of the Hudson.

Built by a charming, megalomaniacal broker in the twenties, who went out the window in the thirties, it was later purchased by Konig for a song and a down payment borrowed from his father-in-law, then paid back to the penny in one year’s time at 4 percent, considered regal in those days.

He had little heart for it now — to prowl from floor to unlit floor through the far reaches of the night, with nothing but a grail of moonlight illuminating the empty halls and rooms, left precisely as they were when those who’d formerly occupied them were still in residence.

The chairs and beds and settees were all still there, untouched, unused, still breathing some aura of their former occupants. The drawers and wardrobes were still hung with garments not worn for seven years. An air of strange expectancy clung to them as though they awaited some corporeal presence to reanimate them.

In the conservatory, Ida’s piano, massive in its shadowed corner, still bore on its stand the music she played in those final, pain-racked days when she could neither sleep nor even lie comfortably in bed. Nights there had been since, when he imagined that fingers swept over the keyboard and he could hear the ghostly plangencies of some sad old Chopin mazurka.

Not far down the corridor was Lolly’s room, with the desk where, as a child, she had labored over geometry and Latin. The bookshelves still sagged with every book she’d ever owned — the Babars and Madeleines, cheek by jowl with the Dostoyevskys and Gides, no order or method to any of it; just a joyous tumult of things. Just as she was in life, with that exasperating, endearing air of cheery, whirlwind chaos.

“Christ,” Konig muttered and pushed his chair back. Wobbling to his feet, he rocked from one foot to the other as though trying to restore circulation there. He brushed a trail of old cigar ash from his vest and rubbed his eyes where the thin crescent imprint of his glasses rimmed the bottom of the sockets. Reaching back, he started to pour another cup of coffee from the pot on the Bunsen burner. All that it yielded was a tepid trickle of dregs.

“Christ.” He yanked his trenchcoat from the hanger and blundered into it like a man fending off an imaginary assailant. Even as he went, barging down the empty halls, something tugged at him, some nagging sense of incompletion. It was no mystery to him, yet try as he did to resist, the strong, familiar undertow drew him down the narrow, winding spiral stair into the basement of the building.

If it had been quiet above, it was virtually cryptlike below, the sort of silence born of cold, municipal green tile and overheated laboratory machinery now stilled and cooling for the night.

A mere several hours before, these same narrow aisles had teemed with humanity — pathologists and students, police reporters and dieners. Gurneys spattered with gore clogged the aisles, waiting to be rolled up to the tables; people shouted at the top of their lungs, outraged at one another, pleading for assistance where none was readily available.

Now, only a single light bathed the scene in an eerie bluish glow. The smell of formalin was suffocating. The still tables were all empty and scrubbed. Stored in the two big purring refrigerated lockers was the daily harvest of man-made carnage, the carcasses of the hapless and itinerant, the criminal and mad, and those whose only blame was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The refrigerators hummed softly. Like a bank of mailboxes, each carried on its face a small white identification card bearing the name of the present occupant — a brief, hand-scribbled epitaph: “Dankworth, Charles. Caucasian. Age 32.” “Lenz, Mildred. Caucasian. Female. Age 71.” “Carver, Thomas. Black. Male. Age 2.” “Guzman, Jesus. Male Hispanic. Age 17.”

Konig’s eyes swept down the white ID tags until at last they fastened on what he’d been seeking. “Female. Caucasian. Identity unknown. Age approx. 22-25 years.”

The drawer wheeled out beneath a slight exertion of his fingers, gliding smoothly over rollers. It was the hair he saw first. Thick, luxuriant, chestnut. The motion of the rollers caused it to shift from her face. In life, no doubt, it had descended to a point well below the shoulders, doubtless one of her most striking features. In death it was mud-streaked, plastered hard in stiff clots against the skull from having lain partially submerged in cistern water for several days.

Next came the face. The eyes not fully closed, a glint of irides showing beneath the bruised lids, the young woman appeared to be wincing as if in fretful sleep, the murderous image of her own destroyer still implanted on the retina. A pretty face, Konig thought. Even somewhat more than pretty. The sort of face that is noted and remarked upon where people gather. The features were framed within a soft oval; the nose a thin blade, the cheeks high; the chin tapering to a graceful cleft. There was an icy, rather patrician air about those features, flawed only by a mouth a bit too sumptuous and full. Possibly even a bit coarse.

Lying there in the cold impersonality of that drawer, she seemed to him smaller than she had several hours before at the bottom of the drain. Diminutive and doll-like, she was a child tucked in safely for the night.

Konig’s practiced eye quickly picked out the purplish lividity creeping outward from beneath the shoulders and back where the still, unpumped blood had succumbed to the pull of gravity. The inexorability of nature’s laws triumphed over all. Air pressure, fluid pressure, pounds per square inch will have their way. Only some persistent fiction of man himself still bothers to deny that simple autonomy, still pretending he can manipulate the basic physics to his own advantage. The gods know better.

To the large white toe, looking grotesque and a trifle comical, another white tag was affixed. This one was typed in square black capital letters bearing the words
IDENTITY UNKNOWN
. Tomorrow, when she’d be wheeled into one of the suites and hoisted onto the table, the sheets unceremoniously withdrawn to reveal the frail, battered nakedness below, they would know more. With several deft strokes, the scalpel would rise to flay the body open. In that moment, whatever semblance of a living, sentient being once inhabitating that fragile shell would quickly vanish. Something else would appear in its place. An abstraction reduced to the cold scrutiny of parts and mere function. The terminology of an auto shop.

Scanning the cadaver, Konig’s eye quite unexpectedly picked up something it had missed during the initial examination. In the sewer it had been dark and he’d missed the thick clot of dried gore in the vicinity of the right temple. But where the hair had displaced itself with the sliding motion of the opening drawer, the ear now stood exposed. The whole lower half of it had been neatly scissored off.

March 17, 1986. Crider, Dale, 33. Stabbed to death in her Richmond Hills home on Village Drive. Was studying flower arrangement. Killed approximately 2
A.M.
Bite marks on breasts, abdomen, and inner thighs. Numbers and pornographic doodles scrawled on walls. Sizable amount of cash and jewelry taken. Dark-haired youth, medium height, medium weight, age early twenties, seen fleeing site. Murder weapon not recovered.

April 18, 1986. Pillari, Mario, 64, and wife, Maxine, 59. Both found dead in their semi-detached home on Case Street, Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Pillari, retired investment counselor. Liked to garden. Wife was an attorney. Sang in a choir. Bite marks on breasts and buttocks. Pornographic drawings and numbers found on walls. Murder weapon, knife. Probably six-inch blade, serrated. Not recovered. Cash and silver service taken. No witnesses.

May 19, 1986. Katz, William, 52. Wife, Marilyn, 49. Stabbed to death at their home on Stevens Street, Forest Hills Gardens. He was a retired sales manager. She worked for a bank. Drawings and number series scrawled on walls. Died between 4 and 5
A.M.
Bite marks on breasts and inner thighs of wife. Cash and various hi-fi and computer equipment taken. No weapon recovered. Dark-haired youth, approximate age 22-25, seen loitering about earlier in evening.

June 1, 1986. Bell, Mabel, 52. Widow. Lived alone in her home on Kappock Street, Riverdale section of Bronx. Knife wounds found about the body. Death attributed to strangulation by ligature. Usual pornographic doodles and numbers. Bite marks found at usual sites. Jewelry and cash taken. Robbery apparent motive, preceded by sexual attack. No weapon recovered. No eyewitnesses.

June 30, 1986. Wheatley, Gail, 32. Special education teacher for the retarded. Found dead from slashed throat in her home on Dell Place, Manhasset. Attack occurred between midnight and two
A.M.
Sexual attack preceded killing. Small child of approximately two years old also found dead in home. Personal computer, digital tapes, and VCR taken. Usual drawings and numbers. Usual bite marks. No weapon recovered. No eyewitnesses.

Mooney’s eyes grew heavy. His cramped, aching legs stretched beneath the sheets. He glanced down at the drowsy figure lying there beside him, a warm emanation of soap and skin, the scent of moisturizers rising all about her. It was near midnight. Unable to sleep, he’d whiled away the restless hours reading from the small ringed notebook he used to record pertinent data for all the cases in which he was involved. The one he was presently engrossed in appeared under the single heading
SHADOW DANCER
, actually his sole preoccupation these days, since the case during the past six months had been elevated to priority status.

What followed was a chronology of capsule descriptions for a series of particularly grisly crimes. All had been committed over a period of the last nine months and showed little sign of abating.

The police believed that these murders were the work of two different men — one the original architect of the crime spree, the other a copycat who went about assiduously aping him. But the police were by no means certain. Initially, they’d believed just as firmly that this was the work of a single individual, working alone, and with slight variations creeping in from time to time to his basic M.O.

Because of the unmistakably imitative aspect apparent in these brutal acts, the police had come to identify them by the operation code name Shadow Dancer. The name seemed particularly apt since the reality of a single murderer was self-evident, while the reality of the other was somewhat more moot. But over the past months as the body count continued to rise, the copycat two-man theory assumed a position of clear ascendency over the notion of a single operative. The biggest problem detectives faced, however, was the fact that the type of outrages committed by these two individuals merged so closely in appearance and style that the police were often uncertain which was the work of the original and which that of the pretender to the throne.

August 10, 1986. Greeley, Joyce, 31. Divorcee. Production line worker in a bottling plant. Stabbed to death at her home, Springfield Gardens, Queens. Died between 2:45 and 6
A.M.
Sexual attack preceded killing. Usual pornographic doodles but no number series. No weapon recovered. No evidence of anything taken. Motive apparently sexual. Fair-haired young man, early twenties, medium height and size, seen fleeing murder site.

September 9, 1986. Weldon, Max, 43, and wife, Leila, 41. Both killed at their home on Brady Avenue, Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx. Mr. Weldon, a service station operator, was a deacon of the Allerton Avenue Seventh Day Adventist Church. Mrs. W. worked as a security guard at Macy’s Parkchester. Usual doodles and numbers. Usual bite marks on wife. Jewelry, electronic equipment, and other valuables taken. Signs of mutilation on body. Tip of right index finger apparently missing. No weapon recovered. No eyewitnesses.

October 9, 1986. Mukherjee, Samkid, 27. Sexually assaulted but survived beating in her home in Bayside, Queens. Bite marks on right cheek, throat, and buttocks. Usual wall scribblings. Attacker fled with an estimated $30,000 in money and jewels. Mrs. Mukherjee’s husband, Chainarang, an importer, was traveling in Far East at the time. She described dark-haired young man, early twenties, average weight and height, crooked, off-center smile, as her assailant.

November 5, 1986. Winton, Elias, 35, stabbed to death in his Orchard Beach home in the Bronx. His 28-year-old wife, Darlene, was raped and her throat slashed during the 3
A.M.
attack. Silverware and jewelry taken. Usual drawings and numbers. Bite marks at usual sites: No weapon recovered but wounds consistent with six-inch serrated blade seen in other attacks. No eyewitnesses.

December 11, 1986. Buchwald, Francine, 39. Recent divorcée. Lived alone in detached brownstone, 580 West 101st Street. Innumerable knife wounds, but death attributed to strangulation. Sexually assaulted before she died. One eye gouged out during attack. Usual pornographic doodles, but no numbers. Nothing taken. Motive apparently sexual. Fair-haired young man, early twenties, average height and weight, seen loitering in the area just prior to assault.

“When are you going to turn off the lights?” Fritzi’s voice mumbled from beneath the counterpane.

“I’ve just got a couple more pages to go.”

“You said that an hour ago.”

“Go to sleep.”

“I can’t with the lights on.”

“Can I read you something?”

“Sure. Go ahead.” Fritzi turned on her side to face him, snoring faintly into her pillow.

Mooney adjusted the eyeglasses on his nose and proceeded to read aloud the M.O. ‘s for each of the attacks he had scribbled into his pad.

“Sounds like Cousin Merwin,” Fritzi mumbled after he’d finished.

“Occasionally mutilates his victim. Takes a digit of a finger or an ear. Gouges an eye …”