Tropic of Night (36 page)

A buzz greeted this statement. Mendés knuckle-rapped on the table and turned to the county medical examiner, John Cornell, a wizened veteran with a reputation, which he loved polishing, for being vinegary.

“Doc, what about it? Are the wounds on the two victims consistent with a stone knife?”

“They’re consistent with a sharp knife, a very sharp knife, around three inches long,” said Cornell. “There’s no way of telling what the knife was made of.”

“I meant, could you get a stone knife sharp enough to do that kind of cutting?”

“Oh, hell, yeah. It’s just glass, really. There’s a kind of eye surgery where surgeons routinely use glass knives. If you know what you’re doing, you can get a glass edge that’s essentially one molecule thick. You can’t get any sharper than that. The problem with glass knives is that they chip if you breathe on them wrong, and then you have to knap a new edge.”

“So this could have happened with this one, where we got that chip?”

“Well, I’ll tell you, Arnie,” said Cornell, “I wasn’t there when he did it, so I couldn’t say. Find me the knife and I’ll maybe testify as to its consistency with the wounds observed on the deceased.”

Mendés grinned, indicating he was charmed by the crusty old gent, and turned his attention to the sole stranger at the table. “Well, maybe it’s time to hear what the FBI has to say. As you all know, we asked Agent Robinette down from the behavioral sciences unit at Quantico when it became clear that we were dealing with a serial killer. So, Agent Robinette, if at this point in time you can tell us anything at all about the kind of man we’re looking for, we’re all ears.”

Robinette said, “Thank you, Captain,” and then brought a manila folder out of a briefcase and arranged it neatly in front of him, as if he were a schoolboy called on to read a report. He had something of the schoolboy’s look, too, although he must have been sixty: a round, smooth, face, with a button nose and a button chin and bright blue eyes, the skin on his face smooth and reddened as if he had just come from some outdoor sport. His hair was a gray buzz cut, like an astronaut’s.

After a brief summary of the principles of serial killer profiling, he said, “The good news, if you can call it that, is that we think we’ve seen this man’s work before?a case in a town on Long Island in New York State, a little under three years ago.” He took a sheaf of eight-by-ten glossy color photographs and passed them over to Dr. Cornell. The medical examiner looked through them, and passed them along. While this viewing proceeded, Robinette went on. “The victim’s name was Mariah Do, born Mary Elizabeth Doe. She was a fashion model and the daughter of a prominent family on the north shore of Long Island. Very old money. Because of their local influence, they were able to keep the crime extremely quiet. Hardly any press, except the bare news of the murder. No details got out, which in a case like this, as you know, is pretty rare, especially when the victim is well known. It probably wouldn’t have turned up in our system if the state cop who handled it hadn’t been through several of our training courses. We keep a file on cannibalistic acts, as part of the VICAP database, as I’m sure you’re all aware.”

Paz actually hadn’t been aware. These cases constituted his first contact with cannibalistic acts. When the photographs reached him he studied the woman carefully. She had been strikingly lovely. The cheekbones stood out like wedges in the harsh light of the crime-scene strobe, and the hair that spread out on either side of the dead face was silky and white-blond. The wounds appeared to be similar enough to the ones they had observed in real life, and it seemed in any case unbearable that there should be two guys independently doing these. He passed the sheaf to Barlow, who glanced through them quickly and asked, “This woman, the victim?did she have any connection with any kind of cult, African, Haitian … ?”

Robinette nodded, as if he had been expecting the question. “Not the woman as such, that anyone could determine. But her sister was an anthropologist, and had recently returned from Africa. She’d gotten sick over there and was recuperating at her family home. She apparently committed suicide right after her sister’s funeral.” This caused a little stir in the room. Robinette nodded. “Yeah, that would’ve been something to look into, but the locals didn’t go after it, or the state. This family, as I said, swings a lot of weight in those parts, and they’re Catholic, so the police were, let’s say, not encouraged to delve into the suicide aspects. The private opinion is, or I guess I should say, was, that the sister did it, because it looked so obviously like an inside job, a particularly awful domestic murder.” He shuffled through his file. “The victim’s sister and mother were in the house at the estimated time of the murder, but it’s a huge place, an old-fashioned Long Island mansion. Neither of them heard anything. Two servants in the house, too, ditto. The victim’s father and her husband, and the sister’s husband, who, by the way, was also recently returned from Africa, were about five miles away at the time of the crime, at an automobile show. All three said they were never out of each other’s sight the whole afternoon. Of course, that could’ve meant they all were in on it, but that’s something nobody up there wanted to push. When you people called us, we ran the description through VICAP and this one popped up, a perfect match. I don’t think there’s any question it’s either the same guy or a ritual cult killing with more than one operator following exactly the same procedure.”

More murmuring, which Barlow interrupted by saying, “I’d like to take a look at the names of those fellas at the car show.”

“You can have our whole file, Detective, for all the good it’ll do you. Like I said, it’s scanty. At first they were looking for a wandering maniac, but when the sister killed herself, the investigation sort of ran out of steam. Again, I guess they figured the sister went batty and did the murder and then killed herself out of remorse, a day or so after the funeral. There was some indication, which you’ll see in the file, that there was bad blood between the sisters, that the older sister was jealous that the younger one was having a baby. And she’d been sick, delirious, and apparently wasn’t too tightly wrapped to begin with. Now, of course …”

Of course. A mumbling interlude, stopped by Mendés rapping sharply upon the table. “Thank you, Agent Robinette. Based on this other case, and the two down here, do you have enough to give us some idea of what kind of guy we’re looking for?”

“Yes, we’ve been thinking about that long and hard, Captain, and I have to say that I don’t think our standard sort of profiling is going to do us much good here. I doubt very much that our unknown subject is a sexual psychopath.”

“What, you think a normal man did this kind of thing?” Mendés exclaimed.

“No, I said not a sexual psychopath. That’s not the same as normal. I think we’re looking at a very, very unusual man, but the signature of the crimes doesn’t indicate to me someone with a pathological rage against women. There’s no evidence of torture, for example. There’s no frenzy. There’s no posing of the body in unnatural or degrading positions. The women look like they died peacefully in their sleep, and if it wasn’t for the operation and the missing body parts, we might well have concluded that. I say ‘operation’ advisedly. Our unsub was able to drug his victims into unconsciousness, carefully and precisely remove the same specific organs or organ segments from each one, remove the brain from the still-living neonate, and excise a small sliver of tissue from the interior of the brain. This is not the work of a sexual psychopath, or if it is, it’s one unlike any we’ve ever encountered before. They once used to say that Jack the Ripper had to be a professional man, or at least know something about surgery, but we don’t think so anymore. It doesn’t take professional skill to split a woman open with a knife and rip out a kidney. It does take a lot of skill to excise the brain from a neonate, dissect away the cerebral hemispheres and cut out the thalamus and the pineal body.”

“I’d agree with that,” said Dr. Cornell. “I’d be looking for a brain surgeon. Most of ‘em are psychos of one kind or another anyway.”

Robinette flashed a tight smile. “I don’t know about that, but for sure I’d say we’d want to forget about the typical profile. This guy is educated, college, maybe some graduate work. Very smart. Knows how to use a research library. Not unsure of himself with women at all; in fact, a great talker, a charmer. He’s probably good looking, average height or taller, height and weight proportional, no disfiguring marks or speech defects. Age midthirties, probably self-employed in some profession. An American. He can talk his way into women’s homes, get them to take his drugs, and we’re not talking about young unsophisticated girls, either. Mariah Do was an international model?she’d probably heard every line there is from men in her time. Teresa Vargas was a college graduate, and used to traveling in the highest social circles. The Wallace woman, I grant you, was more vulnerable, but there may have been something in particular that attracted him to her. Obviously, he needs women who are ready to deliver babies, and he probably just picks them out on the street, or they come to him for some reason?fortune-telling, maybe. I heard some indication of that in both of the cases here. The guy is careful, precise, no witnesses, very little evidence left behind. I’d guess that he strips and puts his clothes in a bag before he operates. And he’s completely fearless about being discovered. So all that adds up to an anomalous situation. He’s not taking out his rage on these women. He’s got no more emotion than you or I would have going down to the Safeway to pick up some steaks for a barbecue. What I’m saying is, he’s not committing crimes of passion?he’s shopping .”

This got a stir. Robinette pressed on. “Second, we’re looking for someone with no automobile. He takes public transportation, or cabs, or, in one case, he rides a bike. That’s unusual in the extreme, for American men generally, and particularly for serial killers. Maybe his license to drive was revoked, or maybe he’s got some condition that precludes driving. That’s something else to check out anyway. Third thing?race. Serial killers are virtually all white males, and their victims are overwhelmingly white. You clearly want to know what race this guy is, and I have to confess that here I’m drawing a blank. He hits in a black neighborhood at night, where a white man would stand out like a flare in a cellar, and no one noticed him. And you have your witness saying the Wallace woman was seen talking to a black man, a stranger, who might look good for the unsub. But then he strikes in an upper-class neighborhood, where I don’t think it’s any secret that a lone African-American male at night would be noticed, and might even be the occasion for a call to the police, and the only witness you have maybe spots a white guy on a bicycle. I’m thinking master of disguise, which would make him almost certainly a white man, going black for the Wallace murder. I don’t think there’s a case in history where a black man has disguised himself as white to commit a crime.”

Robinette now started talking cult murders, which in his opinion these were not. There was no evidence of anyone else besides the unsub being involved. Cults implied membership. There was nothing traditionally cultlike at the murder scene?no candles, no incense, no mystical markings. The attempt of the unsub to pin the Wallace killing on Youghans was uncharacteristic of cult murders. Cult murders typically took place in specific locations, to which the victim was carried, clearly not the case here. And so on.

Paz was no longer listening closely. He thought profiling was a useful activity when you had a classic nutcase, which he already knew was not the situation here. They had no idea why this guy was doing it, although he liked what Robinette had said about going shopping. That felt right. The why of it was still completely obscure, however, and these further negatives were not clearing it up very much.

In any event, Paz had spent the last ten minutes studying the file on Mariah Do, in particular a certain photograph, the very last of the zillions of photographs taken of the victim. In this shot, Ms. Do was walking down a path flanked by two other people. It was summer in the photo; there were trees in leaf on either side of the path and dappled shadows on the path itself. The victim was pregnant, but gracefully so, like the gravid Madonna in a Renaissance painting. A glow seemed to rise from her, but whether that was real or part of the photographer’s art Paz couldn’t tell. She was certainly transcendently beautiful. To her left, and lagging a little behind, was another woman, a tall blonde, quite thin, with a pinched, worried face. She was looking at the victim with an expression Paz couldn’t read. Pain? Anger? Fear? One of the unhappy emotions in any case. On the victim’s other side was a happy man, smiling and gesturing broadly as at some joke. Could that be the reason for the Madonna smile on the victim and the worried look on the face of the other woman? Her sister, Jane Clare Doe, as the helpful label on the back established. The man was the victim’s brother-in-law, M. DeWitt Moore, husband of Jane Clare. A man who looked a good deal like Paz, it appeared.

Little thrill rockets were coursing through Paz’s gut, and it was agonizing to contain himself while the FBI agent lectured away. Paz had already looked like a jerk twice in this case, once with Youghans, and once with his disastrous effort to get Tanzi Franklin to generate a usable description of the killer. He was not going to chance it again. No, the question now was what to do with this theory. He confronted the eternal detective problem?do you or do you not take a strong suspicion to authority? If you do, you might get enough resources to really nail the guy, but you also might end up in the shit, if the suspicion proved false. But if you don’t send it up the chain, and it is the guy, someone else will pick up the credit eventually, or else the guy will walk away, or worse, do it again, and if it came out that you did have a strong suspicion and did nothing, you would sink even deeper in the shit.

The only smart thing to do was talk to Barlow. That was a Barlow rule, too. Talk to your partner. Barlow, as far as Paz knew, had always been completely open with Paz in the development of cases. On the other hand, Barlow’s suspicions were invariably right and Paz’s were occasionally wrong.