by Anne Frasier
She was saved from reply by the sound of the delivery door being opened. Dr. Bernard's assistant stuck his head out. "We're getting ready to start on the baby." It was the first words the man had spoken.
"Wait here," Irving said, getting to his feet. "This shouldn't take as long."
"I'm going in."
"Nausea is a cumulative thing. It'll happen again."
"I won't let it."
He shook his head, but didn't argue.
Five minutes later, they were back in the autopsy room, dressed in their precautionary gowns and shields. Once again they stood near the stainless-steel exam table, the mother's body replaced by that of her infant son. The table seemed enormous in comparison to the baby's tiny body, a body that looked heart- breakingly small and alone.
Dr. Bernard began the initial cursory exam in much the same way as before, going over the infant, but this time with a softer, gentler voice. The reverent mood broke when she discovered what looked like an injection site on the infant's scalp.
"Could he have been given an IV at the hospital?" Irving asked.
"This is more recent than that. Very little bruising, and what there is hasn't turned."
"What do you think it is?" Ivy asked.
Dr. Bernard looked up at her with impatience. "I don't waste my time on suppositions," she said harshly, then softened her words by adding, "which is one reason I would have made a damn lousy detective."
"If you ask Bernie the color of a car," Irving said conversationally, "she'll tell you what color it is on the side she can see, but you won't get anything more out of her unless she walks around the whole damn thing."
Dr. Bernard grunted. "We'll get a tox screen."
"He's making doubly sure the victims don't survive," Ivy said with conviction. "First there was the mother's crushed trachea, and now the baby injected with something."
"Changing his MO," Max stated.
"Escalating," Ivy replied. "That's not uncommon."
"No, he's perfecting his skills."
She looked at him through her mask. "Getting smarter and more cunning with each victim."
He nodded grimly.
It seemed they could finally agree on something.
Chapter 16
The ringing of the telephone dragged Ivy from a semi-slumber—the only kind of sleep she'd been getting lately.
It was Max Irving, calling to tell her that he'd scheduled a task-force meeting for 10:00 A.M. Would she be there? he wanted to know.
In the background, she heard music, loud music. Suddenly it stopped, and a youthful male voice said, "I'm ready, Dad."
The trajectory of Max's voice changed, his words directed away from the phone, toward the world he lived in, a world Ivy was subconsciously trying to piece together in her head. "I'm on the phone," he said to the owner of the youthful male voice.
Dad. His son. Max Irving's son.
"I could have slept another fifteen minutes," the boy's voice lamented in the background.
Sleep . . . She remembered that kind of sleep, the kind that came so easily to the young . . .
"You'll live," Max said, humor in his tone. Then back into the mouthpiece, apparently recalling Ivy on the other end of the line, "Task-force meeting," he repeated. "You going?" Why didn't he just say what he thought? She had no patience for these games. "Don't you mean, Have I had enough after yesterday?"
"Did I say that?"
"Indirectly. Don't treat me like an idiot."
"I didn't call you to start a fight." He sounded annoyed, impatient.
"Who are you talking to?" she heard his son ask, plainly curious to know who had evoked his father's irritation so early in the morning.
"Nobody."
"Thanks," Ivy said dryly.
"Damn. I mean—"
"Don't apologize for finally saying what you think."
"You're reading more into this than is there. I just called to tell you about the task-force meeting. Will you be there?"
As Jinx circled her legs, raising his back with each pass, Ivy assured Irving that she'd be there, then hung up as Jinx continued his curling motion, the yellow hair on his back smooth under her palm. She smiled a little. Call her sick, call her twisted, but she actually enjoyed getting under Irving's skin.
The orange-handled scissors cut out the newspaper article, his hands moving with precision as he turned the clipping first one way, then the other, the scissors making a clean rasping sound that he liked. Finished, he followed with the accompanying photo that had been taken of an unidentified woman leaving the crime scene. He liked the caption, "Dark At The Top Of The Stairs," and he made a mental note of the reporter's name.
He felt a nagging at the back of his mind. Even though he could identify the cause of his anxiety, that knowledge didn't make the nagging go away. Everybody had a name. Everybody had to have a name— and he didn't know if he could add the photo to his collection without knowing the name of the unidentified woman.
He pulled out a scrapbook from under his bed. This scrapbook was different than the other one. This one contained all the newspaper articles written about the Madonna Murderer. It contained photos of the people who had worked on the case.
Most of it was filled with yellowed clippings. There was Abraham Sinclair, looking thirty years younger and fifty pounds lighter than he did now. His face had been circled with Magic Marker, his name printed in large capital letters in the margin. Back then, Sinclair had been a run-of-the-mill detective. Now he was Superintendent. Head of everything. It made him feel very clever to know he'd outsmarted the Superintendent of the whole Chicago Police Department.
"Poor Abraham," he said, staring almost wistfully at the photo. They shared a lot of history, the two of them.
There were several pages dedicated to Abraham. Small cutout articles about his wife and his children. The kids had been very active in school sports and area theater, so it had been easy to keep up with them. Much later, after getting out of the mental institute, he'd followed Abraham's daughter, anxious for her to get pregnant and have children of her own. But the daughter had given birth to a girl rather than a boy. It would have been thrilling to have killed the mother and son. He'd imagined Abraham showing up at the crime scene to find his dead daughter and grandson. He'd imagined reading about it in the paper, imagined the grief on poor Abraham's face.
He'd fantasized about killing the mother and son for so long that he'd almost killed the mother and daughter out of sheer disappointment. But the medication he'd been on at the time had a powerful, mind- controlling quality, and it hadn't allowed him to act on the impulse. Killing a female infant would have been murder for the sake of murder. Murder with no purpose. He was above that. Better than that. Killing Abraham's grandchild would have put him on the same level as every other murdering idiot out there, and the last thing he wanted was to be like everybody else. Anyway, the numbers hadn't been right. Not then. And the daughter was married. Unfortunately.
The girl—Kiki was her name—had just turned six and would grow up to be a whore like the rest of them. But she was almost a niece to him, and he'd sent her a birthday card with the picture of a puppy on it.
He turned to a fresh page at the back of the scrapbook. He lifted the clear film, then positioned the photo and article on the heavy white paper. In the margin, with black waterproof Magic Marker, he carefully printed the name of the reporter: ALEX MARTIN. All caps. Then, next to the photo of the woman, he added a question mark. This was done in pencil, so that he could later add the name with permanent ink.
On the opposite page, was a photo of Detective Max Irving along with the copy of an article that had been in the paper a week ago, taken at the press conference held after the first new murder.
"Detective Irving has been put in charge of the case," Sinclair was quoted as saying. "And I have every confidence he'll find the killer."
There had been no accompanying photo of Irving. But that had been easily rectified by a visit to the Police Department'
s Web site. Irving himself didn't have a page, but basic information was supplied in the overview.
Every name had a face. Every face had a name.
Under the photo of Detective Irving was another one—this of a sweaty, blond-haired young man in a hockey jersey. Number thirty-two. A good number. A nice, round number that rolled off his tongue.
ETHAN IRVING.
The boy was a rising star on his high school's hockey team.
Hockey.
A rough sport. A sport that took an enormous amount of skill.
The high school where Ethan played was called Cascade Hills.
Even though he didn't like hockey, didn't like sports of any kind, he thought he might go watch a game sometime.
There would be a lot of people there, and he didn't relish the thought of putting on his social mask to mingle with the masses. But if Ethan were playing, it would be worth it. If Detective Irving were watching, it would be interesting.
It would be fun.
From upstairs came the sound of his mother banging her wooden cane against the floor—her signal for him to get his ass up there.
His heart hiccupped, then began to thud so loudly that the sound filled his head. Calm down. It's okay. It's only the bitch upstairs. Only your mother.
"I'm coming!" he shouted.
Now that she'd broken her leg, she was bedridden— which meant he had to personally attend to her every need. Luckily she'd been prescribed heavy-duty painkillers and sleeping pills, and he'd discovered that if he increased her dosage, she'd sleep for six or seven hours straight. If only he could make her sleep forever . . .
Chapter 17
Sachi Anderson and her infant son had been dead two days when the task force convened for the first time.
A room on the second floor of Headquarters was now home base for everyone involved in the case, and it would remain home until the killer was caught or spending was cut, whichever came first.
Grand Central Station, so named by schoolchildren because it was at the junction of Grand and Central, replaced the old Shakespeare building that had been so old it was said to have horse stalls at ground level. The new building had gone up in the eighties. At that time, standard design and construction dictated small, high windows made of Plexiglas. If you were to combine a flat-roofed grade school and a fortress, you'd come up with Grand Central. It seemed to Ivy that a building couldn't have been any more nondescript.
Chicago could be a dark place, and even on a sunny day the two small windows in the task-force room didn't do much to dispel the gloom. That was taken care of by artificial fluorescent strip lighting.
A room that had been empty at the beginning of the day now contained four desks complete with phones, headsets, and computers. Chicago metro maps hung from the walls. Couches and chairs had been brought in, along with a small refrigerator and coffeemaker.
Home away from home.
Ivy looked at the room with a combined feeling of dread and relief. Dread, because she knew the couches symbolized a future of sleepless nights and more killings; relief because the seriousness of these mother- child homicides had been realized and funds had been allocated—not always an easy thing to pull together so quickly. She suspected Abraham of doing a lot of talking and dancing over the last few days.
Members attending the preliminary task-force meeting began to filter in, their somber faces reflecting the brutality of the crimes they would be dealing with. Two people, a man and a woman in business suits, introduced themselves as FBI agents from the National Center for Analysis of Violent Crime or NCAVC.
"We'll only be here a couple of days," the woman, Mary Cantrell, told Ivy, shaking her hand. "Mainly to leave you with proactive suggestions. You'll be free to use them or disregard them as you see fit."
The words were spoken in a way that implied her and her partner's "suggestions" weren't always received with open arms, or, more important, an open mind.
Accompanying them was a man named David Scott, who turned out to be one of Chicago's local FBI agents. He had the weary, rumpled, out-of-shape look of someone who had spent too many years behind a desk eating unhealthy food and drinking brackish coffee.
He cast a furtive glance at Special Agent Anthony Spence, who so far hadn't spoken a word. Spence's demeanor fit that of the stereotypical FBI agent— those frozen-faced men in black suits and shades, except that this agent had no glasses and wore an impeccable gray suit that enhanced the gunmetal of his bloodshot eyes. It occurred to Ivy that the rigid Spence would make Irving look like a stand-up comic.
Looking at him, his feeling of inferiority obvious, Chicago Field Office Agent Scott fiddled with his short, wide, striped, outdated and wrinkled tie, then dropped it to run his hand around the waistband of his beige pants, as if to check and see if everything was in place.
Two police officers joined the growing group, the smell of fryer grease emanating from a bag balanced on a cardboard tray. One of the new arrivals was Ronny Ramirez, the young officer who'd given Ivy a ride back to her apartment the night of the Anderson murders. The other she recognized as the female officer who'd been stationed at the door of the apartment that same night.
The female officer told everybody hello and pointed to her badge. "Regina Hastings," she said, pulling out a chair, plopping down, and digging into her breakfast sack.
"I never knew a woman who could put away so much meat," Ramirez said in what seemed half amazement, half admiration.
Hastings swiped at her mouth with a big napkin. "Yeah, and I like my meat cooked and on bread." She took another bite of her sandwich, big white teeth sinking into the English muffin, while Ramirez made a choking sound. If his skin wasn't so dark, everybody would be able to see him blush.
Hastings laughed and opened the plastic lid of her Styrofoam container. The smell of coffee wafted upward, galvanizing the group to action as they moved toward the coffee machine where a full carafe was brewed and ready.
Anthony Spence took his black, with a palmful of orange-coated tablets.
"Headache?" Ivy asked, beginning to feel the sympathy she always felt whenever a person took on human attributes.
"Migraine," came the brusque, reluctant admission. He tossed back the pills, following with scalding coffee. Jumping and cussing, he spilled dark liquid on the lapel of his suit and the floor in front of Ivy.
So much for cool.
"He's not used to stimulants," Mary Cantrell said dryly, grabbing a napkin from the table and dabbing it at the stain on his suit. "Depressants are more his thing," she explained, her gaze catching Ivy's with a you-know-what-I-mean look.
No, Ivy didn't know what she meant. That he was an alcoholic? He wouldn't be the first FBI agent to succumb to self-medication. Ivy would guess that almost every person in the Behavioral Science Unit and NCAVC had had a drinking problem at one time or another.
Ivy was sensing an undercurrent between the two agents, a latent hostility or rivalry. These two didn't like each other. That was the only thing Ivy got.
Why did people have to be so damn . . . human? Always fighting. Always backbiting. When Jane Goodall first began her studies of chimpanzees, she thought they were our gentle, more compassionate brothers and sisters. Then years into her research, she sorrowfully discovered they were just like us. Animals plagued by jealousy and hatred. They were gentle, yes.
But they were also capable of horrible atrocities such as violent acts of murder and cannibalism. They too were guilty of crimes against their own kind.
Spence dropped a napkin on the floor, pushed it around with the toe of a black dress shoe until the spilled coffee was soaked up, then bent and retrieved the soiled napkin with a wince.
So, he cleaned up after himself.
Five minutes later, Detective Irving made his appearance, along with Superintendent Sinclair and another man about Abraham's age whom he introduced as a toxicologist.
It was unusual for the Superintendent to personally involve himself in an investigation and Abraham e
xplained that he would only be joining them for the initial meeting. Some in the room may not have known of his responsibility for the case when he was a detective, and it was strange to think that Hastings and Ramirez would have been kids when the Madonna Murderer had first terrorized Chicago.
The initial meeting didn't include the entire task force. Once a plan was mapped out, recruits would be brought in and briefed, those officers consisting of foot cops, beat cops, rovers, fact checkers, information gatherers— people who would be neck deep in the tedious business of records, reports, interviews, and statistics.
Irving passed out folders to everyone present. Inside were abbreviated versions of the original Madonna Murders case file, combined with the two new homicides.
"No one else is to see these files," Irving instructed. "Not your wife, or husband, not any officer outside of this room."
Introductions were made once more, then everybody pulled up a chair and got down to business.
"Okay," Irving said, "this is where we are. No fingerprints found other than those belonging to members of the family and the victim. No DNA found that belonged to anyone other than family members or victims. No saliva from the drinking glass that could be connected to anyone else."
"The bite wound?" Abraham asked.
"Our killer is apparently not a secretor."
Ivy knew that eighty percent of the population were secretors—meaning they left DNA in other bodily fluids. Some criminals would get a drink, leave something on a glass. Use the toilet, not flush, or it didn't flush completely. And some—many—bit their victims. There had been a few cases over the years where bite marks themselves had been as incriminating as a fingerprint—Ted Bundy, for one. But more often, unless the perpetrator had some unusual dental work, saliva was the better way to go.
"What about degraded-DNA tests?" asked Agent Scott.
"The lab is also running tests on evidence pulled from the Cold File—evidence collected from the original Madonna Murder crime scenes," Irving said.
"Testing methods have advanced over the last sixteen years, and we're hoping to find something we didn't have the resources to find before. Unfortunately, the DQA1 involves minute amounts of secretions, and there are very few lab technicians trained to run these tests. They're backed up and haven't even started on our samples."