by Robb T White
Wöissell’s upstairs room was next to his father’s bedroom. On his last trip, he had boxed up everything from his past except for a few books and items of clothing that still fit. His collection of notebooks from prep school filled up one plastic tote. All of it, his juvenilia comprising his scribblings of a half-formed philosophy was meant for the garbage along with the rest of what he didn’t want left behind. Nothing to survive him. Fred would have his ‘accident’. He expected to die on the road someday, anonymously, and disappear from life.
As soon as he saw his brother leave the house, Fred went upstairs to Charley’s old room to rummage through his belongings, something he did routinely whenever Charles returned from his wanderings.
He had sifted through the pockets of his clothes and used a silver letter opener to slit the bindings of his notebook to see if he secreted anything of interest there. Of the writing, Fred perused them once and found them full of teenaged angst, nothing of interest. The prickling of his neck hairs warned him that there was more to his brother and that playing Cain to his Abel could backfire. His brother, he knew, had lethal skills, as if thousands of hours of jiu-jitsu could offset the chances of winding up a babbling wreck like their father.
If there was a biblical comparison of siblings that appealed to Fred more than the murderer and murderee, it was Jacob and Esau, twins who struggled in their mother’s womb. Jacob deceiving his brother with a mess of pottage for a birthright to inheritance and that was damned well worth emulating. He had to find a way to get past Charles’s hatred of him after that ‘episode,’ as he referred to the near-murder of his brother, and he thought he knew how. The metaphorical stew was his grandfather’s split inheritance.
First, Franny had to get on board. He needed her to abet the swindle. If he could convince her, he’d have the satisfaction of seeing his favored brother forced to drive that stupid food truck to make a living.
Charles, for his recent eccentric behavior, was once a gifted athlete. He overheard his father bragging to a lawyer once about it. Charles’s extraordinary muscular condition—the word was sthenic—was freakishly strong, well beyond his normal-sized physique. He was tested at borderline genius as a child, whereas Fred himself had never managed anything better than a gentleman’s C, and if it weren’t for the fact he belonged to the despised one-per centers of the American privileged class, he’d probably have flunked out of his first school. Money calls to money, however. He stayed in grad school long enough to pick up an MBA and then added a CPA certificate to it just to avoid having to find work. Fortunately, his father was succumbing to brain damage and his thoughts turned inward to follow a crazy logic of their own, which left Fred free to do what wanted.
But to walk away from three universities as Charles had done while making the Dean’s List every semester baffled him. The wording of their grandfather’s will stipulated that a baccalaureate degree must precede the inheritance being distributed among beneficiaries. Violation of will, number one, right there, Fred thought. More important, legally speaking, was Charles’s failure to live up to the letter and spirit of his grandfather’s legacy. A freezing injunction could be applied because of his choice of career, a sandwich and coffee peddler, which, to Fred, fell legally within the definition of giving away property.
Fred planned to enlist Franny’s husband behind the scenes, file the lawsuit while Charles was off on one of his jaunts, and clobber him in absentia with an irrefutable judgment. The downside was to lose; he’d be responsible for both the defendant’s and plaintiff’s costs. Still, he could no longer languish in this purgatory of a half-loaf existence. Later, he reasoned, he might try to pry Franny’s share loose with a little judicious blackmail. His brother-in-law Gerald was a vain peacock who couldn’t pass a mirror without an admiring glance. Maybe something down the road could be engineered with a willing young lady of his acquaintance. Fred had no idea whether Gerald was more afraid of Franny getting wind of something untoward or the fear that she could rip his face off in a divorce settlement. Fun, either way.
Fred’s enmity with his brother went beyond his sneak attack at the skating rink. Fred towered over his younger brother at 6’ 3’, but that advantage disappeared in a big hurry in his first year of college when he attacked Charles one night. For a reason he no longer recalled, a molten rage bubbled over and he hit him while he was asleep; the shillelagh he bought in Boston during a drinking binge smashed him across the back. Before Fred knew what happened, he was gasping for breath in a chokehold that could have crushed his windpipe. Charles, the sadistic bastard, eased up a little to let him breathe again and then, like an anaconda tightening its coil around a capybara, choked him to the point of blackout—breathe, gasp, shock, breathe, gasp, choke. Charles whispered in his ear: Not now, but later. Someday …
Freddie never forgot what that feeling was like. It was like waking in hell with a demon on top of you. He never made that mistake again. Later that week, he knew something else his weird brother possessed besides a talent for judo: an absolute lack of emotion. Charles never mentioned it to their parents. Fred deemed his brother either a sociopath or a psychopath, however the shrinks wanted to define the terms.
Fred checked his watch. Franny and her husband would be coming to dinner. He needed an extra hour to rehearse how he wanted to play it out. Fred was good at parties and known for an engaging wit and getting people to talk at the table. He wore his manners like a gentleman to the manor born, which was how he saw himself—yet beneath the genial manners was anxiety chewing at his innards like a family of sewer rats. He was getting old. His hair was receding, his debts were piling up, and the word was out among the few marriageable women of his set that hadn’t been worked over by nature’s ugly stick that charming, handsome Freddie Parnell Wöissell was after your money, period. Like his once firm body, time was no longer his friend.
Charles, if it’s the last thing I do, I’ll see you ruined, you crazy bastard …
Chapter 13
‘YOU TAKING A PUDDLE-JUMPER or a big jet?’ Pete asked her.
‘Look,’ she said, and showed him her ticket from Fayetteville to Pittsburgh on Frontier Airlines. ‘A real live jet.’
‘That’s good. No connecting flight to St. Louis then. That’s why Gilker wouldn’t approve me going with you,’ he said. He made the motion for money with his fingers.
‘I’m surprised he approved me,’ she said.
‘He still doesn’t know whether you’re a rent-a-goon or somebody the ADIC sent to spy from headquarters.’
Rent-a-goon, Bureau slang for agents on loan.
‘What do you think, Pete?’
‘I think you’re the kind of agent the Bureau needs more of and fewer of the kind it gets.’
‘What kind’s that, Peter? I mean, the not-me kind.’
‘The ass-covering kind, the ones who come running like hogs to the swill trough when it’s time for taking credit or garnering promotions. The climbers, the future politicians who think a stint in the FBI looks good on the old résumé.’
The flattery embedded in the critique like a pearl in an oyster pleased her.
‘I try not to judge people,’ she said but it sounded pompous.
Pete said, ‘Hard not to when you see what’s going on all the time.’
‘Sometimes tunnel vision is a good thing.’
‘I suppose.’
She didn’t know what to make of this new Pete—the somber, reflective partner of the last few days. She thought a crisis of conscience was entirely her domain of late. She hoped it wasn’t something to do with them—or his marriage.
‘You’ll be heading into the sanctum sanctorum of the great man of pathology,’ Pete said, referring to an M.E. who had a national reputation and appeared at many sensational trials. The airport was small, not much development out here—small businesses, a diner, lots of acreage with cattle pastures and barbed-wire fences.
‘Peaspanen said he left the M.E. office in 2006 but they’re still top-notch at Alleg
heny County, and if there’s anything to find, they’ll nail it.’
Pete flashed a big smile. ‘That’s what our beloved supervisor said when he refused your request to let Peaspanen tag along with you. Who’s meeting you at the airport?’
‘Someone from the Pittsburgh office,’ Jade said.
Pete swung around to the front of the one-storey building and popped the trunk.
‘Don’t get out,’ she said. ‘I’m good.’
‘Call me when your flight back gets in,’ Pete said. ‘Any time.’
‘You know it, cowboy.’
She loved flying. It really didn’t make logical sense to be ripping through the atmosphere twenty miles up at 400 miles an hour in a silver tube sardinepacked with 150 other people, everyone breathing in the same recirculated air and expelling carbon dioxide at the same rate; it was a suitable environment for a petri dish experiment.
Special Agent Celeste Shaughnessy met her in baggage by holding up a sign with her name misspelled ‘Hue’ on it. She stared right through her scanning the crowd until Jade announced herself. She was used to people not picking her out as the FBI agent in the crowd.
‘It’s Celeste but call me Cee. Did I get your name right, by the way?’
‘It’s more like French ‘oui’ than the American ‘whee,’ but no harm done,’ Jade said.
Some professional women dressed with a masculine emphasis to blend in or be taken seriously; some, like Shaughnessy, dressed in the au courant gay women fashion because they were not embarrassed or confused about their identities.
Shaughnessy handed her a pair of manila file folders in the SUV.
‘Here’s a copy of McDuffy’s rap sheet—he’s the victim and everything from the profile Behavioral Sciences ginned up on and the pathology report.’
Jade said, ‘I’ll look them over on the way if you don’t mind.’
Marquel ‘Crime Wave’ McDuffy, murder victim, had been busy in his short life. Priors for armed robbery, aggravated menacing, assault, and assault with a deadly weapon. A slew of drug charges from possession to possessing with intent. Someone penciled sealed juvie record at the top of the file.
‘He picked a great time to die,’ Shaughnessy said. ‘Five people were shot at a backyard barbecue by two unsubs that weekend. One of them was eight months pregnant. One lined them up and the other chopped them up with an AK. Welcome to Pittsburgh.’
The M.E.’s report listed cerebral hypoxia as the immediate cause of death, a homicide resulting from a smashed thorax. The head trauma caused by the fall to the sidewalk was a contributing cause.
‘He choked on his own blood,’ Jade commented, reading through the jargon. The eye removal and the broken nose were listed as non-fatal, ancillary premortem injuries.
‘I attended the autopsy at your SAC’s request,’ Shaughnessy said. “Crime Wave’ was no choirboy, for sure. His torso looked like a road map of violence—tattoos, bullet scars, knife, and razor slashes. He didn’t have a lot of friends, apparently.’
‘What did the M.E. say about the eye?’ Jade asked. They had just crossed the bridge over the Monongahela.
‘Said it more like “plucked” than actually “gouged,”’ Shaughnessy told her. ‘The pathologist is good, by the way. McDuffy was probably unconscious, a good thing for him. Imagine what that would have felt like, having your eyeball snatched out of your head.’
Jade asked to see the M.E. and the body as soon as possible.
‘I’ve arranged a meeting at the morgue with Doctor Tillotson tomorrow, nine a.m.,’ Cee said. ‘Let me get you settled into a motel and we can see about some dinner, if that’s all right, Agent Hui?’
‘That sounds fine, and please call me Jade,’ she replied.
She was impatient to check out a connection between McDuffy and Burchess, but hurry-up-and-wait was every paramilitary organization’s curse.
‘Any preferences?’ Shaughnessy asked her.
‘Any place will do,’ Jade said.
‘You’re easy to please.’
Not really, Jade thought. That’s my problem.
Shaughnessy’s cell buzzed. She spoke few words but it sounded urgent.
‘Looks like you’ll have to dine on motel vending machine fare,’ said Shaughnessy, sounding irritated. ‘I have to be somewhere. I’ll pick you up at eight. How’s that? Then we can meet the lead investigator right after.’
Cee was five minutes early. Jade stood outside the lobby re-reading the profiler’s report.
‘Did McDuffy run with a gang?’ Jade asked as soon as she settled into the vehicle.
‘He came from a part of Pittsburgh called the Hill,’ Shaughnessy said. ‘That’s Crips, call themselves Souljaz of Everybody, according to the Pittsburgh gang unit. But you can’t really say gangs as if this is Compton. The projects have their own turf wars and holidays like the Silky Man Day or the E-Skee Day in the Hillside Apartments to celebrate dead bangers. But they don’t beef with each other like out in L.A.’
Dr. Tillotson met them in his office adjacent to the autopsy room where all the tables were busy. His handshake was firm. She was used to men shaking her hand as if she’d break. A handshake told a great deal—for example, some studies involving men and women suggest that hand-strength can be a predictor of age and future health. More specifically, it can be used to analyze mortality, disability, cognitive decline, a person’s ability to recover from a hospital stay and even can be correlated with the educational level a person attained.
‘Doctor,’ Jade began, ‘I know this is difficult to answer with any precision, but it’s the one question I have to ask you. In what manner, how exactly, was the eyeball removed?’
‘I’m sorry if you came here for that specific answer, Agent Hui. Why don’t we have a look at the body and I’ll explain there?’
Tillotson led them through the autopsy room to the cold storage chamber where the remains of Marquel McDuffy and other recent Pittsburgh dead were housed.
On the way, she asked him if decomposition affected any conclusion he might draw. Summers in Pittsburgh were cooler than where she’d just come from but the entire Midwest and South were suffering, a vast unmoving heat dome had settled over the region.
‘No,’ Tillotson said, ‘simple unattended deaths go right to the mortuary, but if forensics is involved, we keep the bodies below freezing and all decomposition stops.’
Tillotson nodded to the autopsy technician trotting behind them and he stepped forward to pull open the drawer Tillotson gestured to. The body in its thick black bag slid out on the castors. The tech unzipped the bag and stepped back, a magician’s assistant in the house of the dead.
‘See here?’
Tillotson used the tip of his pencil to point as he spoke. ‘Normally for enucleation of the eyeball in cases of tumor removal, the entire eye is extracted but the muscles surrounding the eyeball are left intact. Nothing I see suggests an instrument was used. However, the ruptures you see here … and here … make it impossible for me to rule out some kind of weapon, for lack of a better word. Are you familiar with the term oedipism?’
‘From Oedipus Rex, the play by Sophocles?’
‘Correct. Just a simpler way of saying auto-enucleation. Persons suffering psychotic delusions have been known to rip out their own eyes believing Martians are communicating through their eyes. It’s uncommon but it isn’t unknown as a form of self-mutilation.’
‘Have you seen many cases like this, Doctor?’
‘Once, close enough,’ Tillotson said. ‘Once I found a middle-aged, freshly deceased male on my table. A heavy drinker. When I lifted his eyelids, I saw both eyes had been removed. One located in his mouth, the other was lodged in his throat—cause of death.’
‘Did they catch the killer?’
‘Hmm, oh yes. It was a slam dunk, the police call it. The woman who called 911—a 95-pound female and a heavy drinker herself—was the culprit. At some point my subject tried to entice her into having sex. She wasn’t interested. Her way of
showing displeasure was to remove his eyes with her two little hands—very neatly done, as I recall.’
‘Doctor, I’m interested in someone who would do this to a victim he had incapacitated or made helpless in some way and then with a calm and deliberate method, took out the eyes of his victim.’
‘That,’ Tillotson, ‘is another can of worms altogether and you would be taking me out of my depth. Some kinds of cutaneous cancers can result in a removal of the contents of the eye socket, including the eyeball, fat, muscles, and other adjacent structures of the eye. In cases where an unrelenting infection of the eyeball occurs, for example, an ocular surgeon will do an exenteration with a maxillectomy.’
Jade pointed to McDuffy’s face with its frozen death leer. ‘Is it possible for you to draw any conclusions based on a comparison of the photos of the Fayetteville case with this one?’
‘They’re obviously similar,’ Tillotson acknowledged. ‘But no, it isn’t possible to be definitive with wound channels.’
In the corridor, Shaughnessy offered her own conclusion. ‘I would say the odds of those being unrelated are the same as the odds of my arthritic mother climbing El Capitan by her fingernails.’
‘We’ll need a copy of his final report,’ Jade said.
‘I just called Detective Nolan,’ Shaughnessy said. ‘He’s lead on the McDuffy case for McKees Rocks PD.’
They were crossing the Monongahela over the Smithfield Street Bridge to the central station where the cop would meet them.
Jade thumbed through the Quantico profiler’s report. The agent who wrote it was unknown to her; he wanted the case agent to know that it was rough and very preliminary to any future discoveries given the sparse data she had supplied.
‘Any help there?’ Shaughnessy asked.
‘No, not much,’ Jade said. ‘This guy—’
‘You sure it’s a man?’ Shaughnessy interrupted. ‘Aren’t women known for clawing and biting?’
‘No, it’s a male,’ Jade said. ‘Only men kill like this.’ She resumed her reading.