Blonde Ice

by R. G. Belsky

  * * *

  The editor of the alumni newsletter went through his back files for us and found the pictures from the night of the fund-raiser.

  “There’s maybe a couple hundred of them,” the editor said, clicking on a computer file that opened up to rows and rows of pictures.

  “Why so many?” I asked.

  “We just like to have a lot of choices. We only use a few in the alumni newsletter. But the others are all here in this file, if you want to go through them.”

  “President Dowling says she was talking to the woman we’re looking for at one point.”

  “Okay, that helps.”

  “Would you have taken a picture of everyone I talked to that night?” Dowling asked.

  “Maybe not everyone, but most of them.”

  “So the woman should be in here?”

  “Hopefully.”

  As it turned out, there was no picture of Dr. Kate Lyon talking to President Dowling. We went through pictures of Dowling talking to a lot of people. Faculty members. Alumni. College officials. Students. None of them was the woman we were looking for.

  But her picture did turn out to be there.

  Dowling spotted it. She pointed to a blonde woman standing in the background of one of the shots. The woman was next to the refreshments table. Alone. There was a man not far from her. Eying her up. I could almost imagine the man approaching her, trying to hit on the attractive guest. Probably got shot down. If so, he didn’t know how lucky he was.

  The woman was staring out at the crowd of people. Icily. Coldly. I wondered what the hell she was thinking at that moment.

  “That’s the woman I know as Dr. Kate Lyon,” Dowling said.

  The editor clicked the zoom button on the computer we were viewing to get a closer look at her. The face jumped into clearer focus now. Blonde. Sexy. A real fox. Just like Melissa Ross used to be. Even more so . . . if that was possible.

  I felt a sense of exhilaration. The feeling I got on a story whenever I made a big breakthrough. This was one of those times. I’d finally found out who we were really looking for.

  I didn’t know her name.

  And I didn’t know anything more about her yet.

  But I had a face for Blonde Ice now.

  CHAPTER 41

  I WENT to see Susan at the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in Foley Square.

  “This is a surprise,” Susan said when I sat down in front of her desk. “The last time we were together, you ran out in the middle of our date to find two more murder victims.”

  “The pursuit of justice is a relentless task,” I said.

  I showed her the picture from the college reception and told her all about it.

  “Didn’t you tell me once there was some sophisticated computer technology now that can use a picture of someone’s face to identify that person?”

  “Face recognition pattern,” she said. “The computer identifies characteristics and features in the picture and matches them up against similar characteristics and features in a criminal database. Of course, the person you’re looking for has to be in the database. But most criminals are. Have you shown this picture to the police?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Because you want to find out who she is and break the story yourself. Only you need my help to do that.”

  “C’mon, Susan, it would be fun. You and I working together to find out who this woman is. Solving the case and all that. Kind of romantic too. We’d be this cool couple of crime-solvers like Nick and Nora Charles from The Thin Man.”

  “Before my time.”

  “Okay, Hart to Hart then. Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers. Solving crimes, kissing and making out between cases. I actually think I look a bit like Robert Wagner. The younger version, of course. And to tell you the truth, I’ve always really had this thing for Stefanie Powers. What do you think?”

  “I think Remington Steele would be a better example of what you want us to do here. I do the investigative work and then this big handsome hunk gets all the credit. Although, just for the record, I don’t think you really look at all like Pierce Brosnan.”

  I laughed. It was good to be able to banter with Susan like this. It felt so comfortable, so natural. She looked really good too. Her hair hung long again, the way she used to wear it. She was wearing a dark blue pantsuit, with a pink blouse, that made her look both businesslike and sexy at the same time. And when I handed her the picture, I smelled a slight whiff of her perfume—the same perfume she always wore back when we were together. I wondered again to myself how I had ever managed to let her get away. But, of course, I knew the answer to that. I screwed up, just like I had screwed up a lot of things in my life. But now I was getting a second chance with Susan, just like I’d gotten a second chance with my newspaper reporting career. I couldn’t screw either of them up again.

  “Will you help me?” I asked Susan.

  She looked down at the picture, then back at me.

  “Yeah, I’m in,” she sighed.

  * * *

  She took me to a guy named Danny Jamieson at a technology lab they worked with. Jamieson would try to match the photo of Dr. Lyon to someone in the criminal database.

  “We don’t usually allow non–law enforcement personnel in here to observe the investigative process,” Jamieson said to me.

  “I can vouch for Gil, Danny,” Susan said.

  “Have you known him long?”

  “He’s an old friend.”

  “Actually, we used to be married,” I said.

  “And you’re still friends?” Jamieson asked.

  “It’s kind of a fluid situation,” I told him.

  Jamieson explained how the facial recognition technology worked.

  “In some ways, it’s as simple as it sounds. It analyzes all of the basic visual features of the person and comes out with a list of people from a data bank with similar characteristics. Even ranks them by percentage of matches. Anything from a small percentage of similarity to an ultimate 100 percent perfect score.”

  He said that the best thing about it was that the computer wasn’t confused or distracted by efforts from a suspect to change his or her identity. Hair color, mustaches, beards, even plastic surgery wouldn’t hide the basics of that person’s identity from the computer.

  The technology had been around for a while, even though now it was much more sophisticated.

  “One of the first uses of this was for war criminals. Nazis who fled, changed their identity, etc. The Israelis, human rights groups, and all sorts of others who tried to track them down found all these SS officers, concentration camp guards, and the like who had created new lives for themselves. Looked different, different names, sometimes they had remained undetected for years and years. No one suspected that the old man living next to them had been a Nazi butcher as a youth. But there are some things you can’t change about your identity. A picture of the person as a young Nazi in Germany is submitted to this computer. It compares it to a present day picture of the person suspected of being the Nazi. A lot of war criminals were finally tracked down this way.

  “Then there’s the casinos. Las Vegas. Atlantic City. Whenever they used to try to bar someone who had been cheating—a con man or a card counter or anyone else who had a system to make big money there illegally—it was very difficult to enforce. These people frequently could slip back into the Taj or the Borgata or the Sands, even if they were on this casino blacklist. All they had to do was change the way they looked enough to get past any security that had a picture of them. Not anymore. There’s a spy in the sky camera in every casino that watches everyone in the place. The casino security people have files of the blackballed people fed into the computer for that—and it automatically checks if any of the gamblers have any of the telltale characteristics of the people that have been barred. It’s pretty amazing really, when you think about it.

  “All of this is somewhat basic, though, compared to what we do here. This data we have takes in every
one who has ever been in the criminal justice system for whatever reason. Anything from armed robbery to DUI to a simple arrest at a protest. It will go through them all to find a potential match for the person you’re looking for. If she’s in there, we’ll find her. No matter how hard she’s tried to hide her old identity.”

  “What if she’s never been in the criminal justice system?”

  “Then you’re screwed.”

  “But if she is . . . ?”

  “This will find her for you.”

  The time it took to complete the process varied, Jamieson explained. Depending on the number of possible similarities and matches the machine needed to detect and check out between this picture and all of the endless data it was comparing it with in the system. The computer first came up with a large number of possible matches, then gradually whittled them down to a smaller number as it compared the matching characteristics against one another. I listened to it all from Jamieson, nodded like I ­understood—but really just wanted to get on with it and hoped the damn thing worked.

  It took about a half hour to get something. Several candidates popped up as possibilities, but nothing for sure. Finally, though, Jamieson looked down at the screen and smiled broadly.

  “We struck pay dirt, my friends,” he said. “We’ve got a match.”

  There was a photo on the screen of a young blonde girl. She looked like a teenager. Susan and I looked down at the name below the picture.

  Claudia Borrell.

  “Who is Claudia Borrell?” I asked.

  “Arrested on suspicion of murder in Belleville, Illinois, in 2000,” Jamieson said, reading from the screen.

  “Who was she suspected of murdering?” Susan wanted to know.

  Jamieson looked through the rest of the data.

  “Jesus Christ!” he said.

  “What?”

  “She killed her whole family.”

  CHAPTER 42

  CLAUDIA Borrell was fifteen years old when it happened,” Danny Jamieson told Susan and me after he’d gone back and accumulated more information on the woman we’d identified in the picture. “Lived with her family in Belleville, Illinois. Two brothers, one was twelve and the other was a baby that had just been born ten months earlier. Father was a doctor, a highly regarded heart specialist; mother was a business executive. A grandmother, the father’s mother, lived with them too. Expensive place called Carlton Street Estates. Sounds like Claudia Borrell’s family was living the American dream. Until they wound up dead. All of them except for Claudia.”

  Jamieson called up a newspaper front page on a computer screen. The date was June 12, 2000. The headline said: FIVE DEAD IN FAMILY MASSACRE; DAUGHTER MISSING.

  “When the mother and father didn’t show up for work, the cops eventually went to the house to investigate,” he said. “They found her father and mother dead in their bedroom. Their throats had been cut while they slept. The twelve-year-old’s throat was cut too. The baby had been suffocated with a pillow. The worst was the grandmother. The killer had beaten her to death with some kind of a blunt object. Turned out to be one of the father’s golf clubs. They found the bloody club in his golf bag, where it had apparently been returned by the killer after the fatal deed was done.”

  “What about the fifteen-year-old girl?” Susan asked.

  “At first, the cops assumed she’d been kidnapped. The killer—or killers—had wiped out the family for some reason, and then taken their pretty teenage daughter. A missing person alert was sent out for her. But it soon became apparent to the authorities there that she wasn’t missing at all, she was on the run.”

  Jamieson clicked to bring up another newspaper clipping. This headline said: MISSING TEEN IN MASSACRE HAD TALKED OF KILLING.

  It described Claudia Borrell as a brilliant but troubled student. She had gotten straight A’s and won every academic honor possible in school. Her IQ had been measured at a phenomenal 181, which made her a genius almost on the Einstein level. She had even been accepted for early college enrollment for a pre-med course at Stanford University the following semester. And she was gorgeous, people said. A beautiful girl. Claudia Borrell seemed to have it all.

  But there were problems, everyone who knew her said. Big problems. She was a loner, seemed to have no friends. And there was a lot of anger there. A violent side of this girl who seemed to have everything, but never looked or acted happy. The school, and her family, had forced her to undergo counseling. But it didn’t seem to help. In fact, at the last session she had with the school counselor, she said she hated her family and that every day she thought about how much she “wanted to kill them all.”

  Also, there was no sign of any forced entry into the house. No fingerprints or other evidence of anyone except the victims and their fifteen-year-old daughter anywhere, including the bloody golf club and the pillow used to suffocate the baby. Eventually, the police realized that the unthinkable had happened. This pretty, brilliant fifteen-year-old girl was the cold-blooded mass murderer they were looking for.

  “So when did they arrest her?” I asked Jamieson.

  “A couple of days later. She just walked into the police station and confessed to the murders. Confessed to killing her family. Confessed to another death too.”

  “Who?”

  “A teenage boy she went to school with. Kid named Bobby Jenkins. Jenkins had been found dead in his family’s swimming pool a week or so earlier. No sign of any violence. The police had ruled it an accidental drowning. But the girl said she did it. Said she’d flirted with the Jenkins kid, got him to invite her over to his house when his parents were away, and brought some beer for them to drink. She’d worn a skimpy bikini to keep him distracted, and then drowned him in the pool when she got the chance.”

  “Why did she kill him?”

  “That’s the scary thing. There was no reason. She said she did it ‘just to see what it felt like.’ She wanted to kill someone, to experience that feeling of power—and she chose him. She said it was everything she’d hoped for and more.”

  I looked down at the screen where he’d now called up a picture of fifteen-year-old Claudia Borrell that the newspaper had run with the article. It was from a professional photo shoot of some sort. She looked beautiful, all dressed up for the occasion. Blonde hair, gorgeous face, beautiful eyes—even as a teenager she’d been a real fox.

  “She sure doesn’t look like a killer,” I said. “But I guess that’s the most dangerous kind of killer. The one who doesn’t look like a killer at all to anyone until it’s too late.”

  “The police psychologist who interviewed her after she was in custody diagnosed her as a cold-blooded, emotionless murderer,” Jamieson said. “Someone who just enjoyed watching people die. And reveling in the power of life and death she held over them. A murderer who killed for no other reason than the satisfaction she got out of it. A true thrill killer. There’s not a whole lot of them. And certainly not many of them who are fifteen-year-old girls. She was brilliant, everyone said. A brilliant killer who was barely in her teens.”

  “If she was so smart, how come she just walked in and confessed to everything?” Susan asked.

  “She wanted the police to know what she did. That was part of the satisfaction she got out of the murders, she told them. She wanted them to know what she did, how she did it, why she did it—but not be able to do anything about it.”

  “But you said she was arrested and charged with murder?”

  “She escaped. Flirted with one of the guards who was supposed to be watching her in her holding cell. No one is sure exactly what happened after that. But they found him dead in the cell, with his keys missing along with his security ID badge that would’ve let him in and out. No one ever saw Claudia Borrell again.”

  “Until she turned up now as Dr. Kate Lyon,” Susan said.

  “How long do you think she’s been Kate Lyon?” Jamieson asked.

  “Not clear,” I said. “I checked on Lyon’s background. People who knew her in Phil
adelphia describe her as the plain-looking woman I saw in that first photo, not the one that was operating out of Central Park West and the college here. But she had a blonde woman assistant working for her. A very attractive blonde woman. I’m betting it was Claudia Borrell. Then Borrell must have assumed the Kate Lyon identity soon after moving to New York City.”

  “That leaves lots of missing time between 2000 and now,” Susan pointed out.

  “Yes, it does.”

  “She probably was using someone else’s identity then.”

  “Maybe more than one identity,” I said. “Maybe she switched around who she was every few years—or even more than that—in order to make sure that no one ever figured out who she really was.”

  Susan looked down at the picture of the fifteen-year-old Claudia Borrell from the old newspaper. Then she said the words we were both thinking at the same time.

  “All those years,” she said, “you figure there were more murders?”

  “Don’t you?” I said.

  * * *

  Wohlers was as mad as I’d ever seen him. I’d brought along a corned beef sandwich from his favorite deli to try to placate him. But I hadn’t even had a chance to give it to him yet because he was too busy yelling at me.

  “You should have come to me with that picture from the college as soon as you found it,” he screamed at me. “But instead you run off on your own with it because you wanted to get a big exclusive.”

  “It’s called freedom of the press, Lieutenant.”

  “I could have you thrown in jail, Malloy.”

  “On what charges?”

  “Uh, well . . . obstruction of justice, tampering with evidence, and . . . oh, just being an all-around jerk in general.”

  “I’m pretty sure I can beat those first two raps,” I said.

  “I’m not fooling around, Malloy.”

  “Well, I’ve got a pretty lawyer on my side.”

  “You mean that high-powered woman from the DA’s office you somehow got to go in on this with you?”