Secret of the Seventh Sons

by Cooper, Glenn

  The first scotch was to dull the unpleasantness of his afternoon in Queens interviewing the family of the hit-and-run victim, nice solid people who were still inconsolable. The second scotch was to blunt his frustration. The third was to fill some of his emptiness with maudlin remembrances, the fourth was for loneliness. The fifth…?

  In spite of his pounding head and hollow nausea, he stubbornly dragged himself into work by eight. In his book, if you made it to work on time, never drank on the job, and never touched a drop before happy hour, you didn’t have a booze problem. Still, he couldn’t ignore the searing headache, and as he rode the elevator he clutched an extra large coffee to his chest like a life preserver. He flinched at the memory of waking, fully clothed, at 6:00 A.M., a third of the mighty bottle empty. He had Advil in his office. He needed to get there.

  Doomsday files were stacked on his desk, his credenza, his bookcase, and all over the floor, stalagmites of notes, reports, research, computer printouts, and crime scene photos. He had carved himself walking corridors through the piles—from door to desk chair, chair to bookcase, chair to window, so he could adjust the blinds and keep the afternoon sun out of his eyes. He made his way through the obstacle course, landed hard on his chair, and hunted down the pain relievers, which he painfully swallowed with a gulp of hot coffee. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, and when he opened them Nancy was standing there, looking at him like a doctor.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look fine. You look sick.”

  “I’m fine.” He fumbled for a file at random and opened it. She was still there. “What?”

  “What’s the plan for today?” she asked.

  “The plan is for me to drink my coffee and for you to come back in an hour.”

  Dutifully, she reappeared in precisely one hour. His pain and nausea were subsiding but his thinking was still milky. “Okay,” he began, “what’s our schedule?”

  She opened the ubiquitous notebook. “Ten o’clock, telecon with Dr. Sofer from Johns Hopkins. Two o’clock, task force press conference. Four o’clock, uptown to see Helen Swisher. You look better.”

  He was curt. “I was good an hour ago and I’m good now.” She didn’t look convinced, and he wondered if she knew he was hung over. Then it dawned on him—she looked better. Her face was a little thinner, her body a little sleeker, her skirt didn’t pinch as much at the waist. They had been constant companions for ten days and he’d only just realized she was eating like a parakeet. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you on a diet or something?”

  She blushed instantly. “Sort of. I started jogging again too.”

  “Well, it looks good. Keep it up.”

  She lowered her eyes in embarrassment. “Thanks.”

  He quickly changed the subject. “Okay, let’s take a step back and try to see the big picture,” he said foggily. “We’re getting killed with details. Let’s go through these, one more time, focusing on connections.” He joined her at the conference table and moved the files onto other files to give them an uncluttered surface. He took a clean pad and wrote on it, Key Observations, and underlined the words twice. He willed his brain to work and loosened his tie to encourage blood flow.

  There had been three deaths on May 22, three on May 25, two on June 11, and none since. “What does that tell us?” he asked. She shook her head, so he answered his own question. “They’re all weekdays.”

  “Maybe the guy has a weekend job,” she offered.

  “Okay. Maybe.” He entered his first key observation: Weekdays. “Find the Swisher files. I think they’re on the bookcase.”

  Case #1: David Paul Swisher, thirty-six-year-old investment banker at HSBC. Park Avenue, wealthy, all-Ivy background. Married, nothing obvious on the side. No Enron skeletons in his closet as far as they knew. Took the family mutt for a predawn walk, found by a jogger just after 5:00 A.M. in a river of blood—watch, rings, and wallet missing, left carotid cleanly sliced. The body was still warm, about twenty feet out of range of the nearest CCTV camera located on the roof of a co-op on the south side of 82nd Street—twenty goddamned feet and they would’ve have had the killing on tape.

  However, they did have a glimpse of a person of interest, a nine-second sequence time-coded at 5:02:23–5:02:32, shot from a security camera on the roof of a ten-story building on the west side of Park Avenue between 81st and 82nd. It showed a male walking into the frame from 82nd turning south on Park, pivoting then running back the way he came and disappearing down 82nd again. The image was poor quality but FBI techs had blown it up and enhanced it. From the suspect’s hand coloration they determined he was black or Latino, and from reference calculations, they figured he was about five-ten and weighed 160 to 175 pounds. The hood of a gray sweatshirt obscured his face. The timing was promising since the 911 call came in at 5:07, but in the absence of witnesses they had no leads on his identity.

  If not for the postcard, this would have been a street mugging, plain and simple, but David Swisher got a postcard. David Swisher was Doomsday victim one.

  Will held up a photo of the hooded man and waved it at Nancy. “So is this our guy?”

  “He may be David’s killer but that doesn’t make him the Doomsday Killer,” she said.

  “Serial murder by proxy? That’d be a first.”

  She tried another tack. “Okay, maybe this was a contract murder.”

  “Possible. An investment banker is bound to have enemies,” Will said. “Every deal has a winner and a loser. But David was different from the other victims. He was the only one who wore a white collar to work. Who’s going to pay to murder any of the others?” Will flipped through one of the Swisher files. “Do we have a list of David’s clients?”

  “His bank hasn’t been helpful,” Nancy said. “Every request for info has to go through their legal department and be personally signed off by their general counsel. We haven’t gotten anything yet but I’m pushing.”

  “I’ve got a feeling he’s the key.” Will closed Swisher’s file and pushed it away. “The first victim in a string has a special significance to the killer, something symbolic. You said we’re seeing his wife today?”

  She nodded.

  “About time.”

  Case #2: Elizabeth Marie Kohler, thirty-seven-year-old manager at a Duane Reade drugstore in Queens. Shot to death in an apparent robbery, found by employees at the rear entrance when they got to work at 8:30 A.M. Police initially thought she’d been killed by an assailant who waited for her to arrive to steal narcotics. Something went wrong, he fired, she fell, he ran. The bullet was a .38 caliber, one shot to the temple at close range. No surveillance video, no useful forensics. It took police a couple of days to find the postcard at her apartment and connect her with the others.

  He looked up from her file and asked, “Okay, what’s the connection between a Wall Street banker and a drugstore manager?”

  “I don’t know,” Nancy said. “They were nearly the same age but their lives didn’t have any obvious points of intersection. He never shopped at her drugstore. There’s nothing.”

  “Where are we with her ex-husband, old boyfriends, coworkers?”

  “We’ve got most of them identified and accounted for,” she replied. “There’s one high school boyfriend we can’t find. His family moved out of state years ago. All her other exes—if they don’t have an alibi for her murder, they’ve got one for the other murders. She’s been divorced for five years. Her ex-husband was driving a bus for the Transit Authority the morning she was shot. She was an ordinary person. Her life wasn’t complicated. She didn’t have enemies.”

  “So, if it weren’t for the postcard, this would have been an open and shut case of an armed robbery gone bad.”

  “That’s what it looks like, on the surface,” she agreed.

  “Okay, action items,” he said. “See if she had any high school or college yearbooks and have
all the names entered into the database. Also, contact the landlord and get a list of all her present and former neighbors going back for five years. Throw them into the mix.”

  “Done. You want another coffee?” He did, badly.

  Case #3: Consuela Pilar Lopez, thirty-two-year-old illegal immigrant from the Dominican Republic, living in Staten Island, working as an office cleaner in Manhattan. Found just after 3:00 A.M. by a group of teenagers in a wooded area near the shore in Arthur Von Briesen Park, less than a mile from her house on Fingerboard Road. She’d been raped and repeatedly stabbed in the chest, head, and neck. She had taken the ten o’clock ferry from Manhattan that night, confirmed by CCTV. Her usual routine would have been to take the bus south toward Fort Wadsworth, but no one could place her at the bus station at the St. George Ferry Terminal or on the number 51 bus that ran down Bay Street to Fingerboard.

  The working hypothesis was that someone intercepted her at the terminal, offered her a ride, and took her to a dark corner of the island, where she met her end under the looming superstructure of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. There was no semen in or on her body—the killer apparently used a condom. There were gray fibers on her shirt, which appeared to have come from a sweatshirt type of fabric. At postmortem, her wounds were calibrated. The blade was four inches long, compatible with the one that killed David Swisher. Lopez lived in a two-family house with an extended group of siblings and cousins, some documented, some not. She was a religious lady who worshipped at St. Sylvester’s, where stunned parishioners had packed the church for a memorial mass. According to family and friends, she had no boyfriend, and the autopsy suggested that even though she was in her thirties she had been a virgin. All attempts to connect her with the other victims proved fruitless.

  Will had spent a disproportionate amount of time with this particular murder, studying the ferry and bus terminal, walking the crime scene, visiting her house and church. Sex crimes were his forte. It hadn’t been his career aspiration—no one in his right mind wrote on his Quantico application: One day I hope to specialize in sex crimes. But his first big cases had serious sexual angles, and that’s the way you got pigeon-holed in the Bureau. He did more than follow his nose, he burned hot with ambition and educated himself to expert grade. He studied the annals of sex crimes sedulously and became a walking encyclopedia of American serial perversion.

  He’d seen this kind of killer before, and the offender profile came to him quickly. The perp was a stalker, a planner, a circumspect loner who was careful about not leaving his DNA behind. He’d be familiar with the neighborhood, which meant he either currently lived or used to live on Staten Island. He knew the waterfront park like the back of his hand and calculated exactly where he could do his business with the least chance of being happened upon. There was an excellent chance he was Hispanic because he made his victim feel comfortable enough to get into his car and they were told that Maria’s English was limited. There was a reasonable chance she knew her killer at least by limited acquaintance.

  “Wait a minute,” Will said suddenly. “Here’s something. Consuela's killer almost definitely had a car. We ought to be looking for the same dark blue sedan that crushed Myles Drake.” He jotted: Blue Sedan. “What was the name of Consuela’s priest again?”

  She remembered his sad face and didn’t need to check her notes. “Father Rochas.”

  “We need to make up a flyer of different models of dark blue sedans and have Father Rochas pass them out to his parishioners to see if anyone knows anyone with a blue car. Also cross-run the list of parishioners with the DMV to get a printout of registered vehicles. Pay particular attention to Hispanic males.”

  She nodded and made notes.

  He stretched his arms over his head and yawned. “I’ve got to hit the john. Then we’ve got to call that guy.”

  The forensic pathologists at HQ had pointed them toward Gerald Sofer, the country’s leading expert in a truly bizarre affliction. It was a measure of their frustration in Clive Robertson’s death that they had sought his consultation.

  Will and Nancy had frantically administered CPR on Clive’s pulseless body for six minutes until the paramedics arrived. The following morning they hovered over the M.E.’s shoulder as the coroner laid Clive’s body open and started the search for a cause of death. Besides the crushed nasal bones there was no external trauma. His heavy brain, brimming so recently with music, was thin-sliced like a bread loaf. There were no signs of a stroke or hemorrhage. All his internal organs were normal for his age. His heart was slightly enlarged, the valves normal, the coronary arteries had a mild to moderate amount of atherosclerosis, especially the left anterior descending artery, which was seventy percent occluded. “I’ve probably got more blockage than this guy,” the veteran M.E. rasped. There was no evidence of a heart attack, though Will was advised that a microscopic exam would be determinative. “So far, I don’t have a diagnosis for you,” the pathologist said, peeling off his gloves.

  Will waited anxiously for the blood and tissue tests. He was hoping a poison or toxin would show up but was also interested in his HIV status since he’d done mouth-to-mouth on Clive’s bloody face. Within days he had the results. The good news: Clive was HIV and hepatitis negative. The bad: Everything was negative. The man had no reason for being dead.

  “Yes, I did have a chance to review Mr. Robertson’s autopsy report,” Dr. Sofer said. “It’s typical of the syndrome.”

  Will leaned toward the speakerphone. “How’s that?”

  “Well, his heart wasn’t all that bad, really. There were no critical coronary occlusions, no thrombosis, no histopatho-logical evidence of a myocardial infarction. This is perfectly consistent with the patients I’ve studied with stress-induced cardiomyopathy, also know as myocardial stunning syndrome.”

  Sudden emotional stress, fear, anger, grief, shock could cause sudden devastating heart failure, according to Sofer. Victims were people who were otherwise healthy, who experienced a sudden emotional jolt like the death of a loved one or a massive fright.

  “Doctor, this is Special Agent Lipinski,” Nancy said. “I read your paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. None of the patients with your syndrome died. What makes Mr. Robertson different?”

  “That’s an excellent question,” Sofer replied. “I believe the heart can be stunned into pump failure by a massive release of catecholamines, stress hormones like adrenaline that are secreted by the adrenal glands in response to a stress or a shock. This is a basic evolutionary survival tool, preparing the organism for fight or flight in the face of life-threatening danger. However, in some individuals the outpouring of these neurohormones is so profound that the heart can no longer pump efficiently. Cardiac output drops sharply and blood pressure falls. Unfortunately for Mr. Robertson, his pump failure combined with his moderate blockage in his left coronary artery probably led to poor perfusion of his left ventricle, which triggered a fatal arrhythmia, possibly ventricular fibrillation and sudden death. It’s rare to die from myocardial stunning but it can occur. Now as I understand it, Mr. Robertson was under some acute stress prior to his death.”

  “He had a postcard from the Doomsday Killer,” Will said.

  “Well, then I’d say, to use layman’s terms, your Mr. Robertson was literally scared to death.”

  “He didn’t look scared,” Will remarked.

  “Looks can be deceiving,” Sofer said.

  When they were done, Will hung up and drank the last of his fifth cup of coffee. “Clear as fucking mud,” he muttered. “The killer bets he’s going to kill the guy by scaring him to death? Gimme a break!” He threw his arms into the air, exasperated. “Okay, let’s keep going. He kills three people on May twenty-second and he takes a breather over the weekend. May twenty-fifth our unsub’s busy again.”

  Case #4: Myles Drake, twenty-four-year-old bicycle courier from Queens, working the financial district at 7:00 A.M. when an office worker on Broadway, the only eyewitness, is looking out her window and
notices him on the sidewalk of John Street slinging his backpack and mounting his bicycle just as a dark blue sedan jumps the curb, plows into him and keeps on going. She’s too high up to see the license plate or credibly identify the make and model. Drake succumbs instantly from a crushed liver and spleen. The car, which unquestionably sustained some front-end damage, remains unlocated, despite extensive canvassing of body shops in the tristate area. Myles lived with his older brother and was, by all accounts, a straight-arrow. Clean record, testimonials to his work ethic, etc. No known connections to any other victims either directly or indirectly, though no one could say for sure that he’d never been to Kohler’s Duane Reade on Queens Boulevard.

  “Nothing to link him with drugs?” Will asked.

  “Nothing, but I remember a case when I was in law school of bike couriers supplying cocaine to stockbrokers on the side.”

  “Not a bad thought—our drug theme.” He wrote: Test backpack for narcotics residue.

  Case #5: Milos Ivan Covic, eighty-two-year-old man from Park Slope, Brooklyn, middle of the afternoon, plunges out of his ninth floor apartment and makes an ungodly mess on Prospect Park West, near Grand Army Plaza. His bedroom window is wide open, apartment locked, no signs of a break-in or robbery. However, several framed black-and-white photos of a young Covic with others, family presumably, are found shattered on the floor by the window. There is no suicide note. The man, a Croatian immigrant who had worked for fifty years as a cobbler, had no living relatives and was so reclusive there was no one who could attest to his mental state. The apartment was covered in only one set of fingerprints: his.

  Will leafed through the stack of vintage photographs. “And there’s no ID on any of these people?”