“What about the cleaning lady?” Sorrel barked; Chapel flinched.
“She’s more like general help, sir. She cooked and—”
“Where’s her statement?”
“She won’t be back in town till the day after Christmas, sir.”
“You didn’t want to disturb her while she was on vacation. How sweet. You don’t even have a name for this woman, do you, Chapel?”
“Ah, no, sir. The neighbor on the west side never mentioned it. The hired woman didn’t take anything from the house, so I didn’t—”
“And the old lady who died? What about her family?” Sorrel held up the single, uncompleted page of the incident report. “There’s nothing here to say they were ever notified.”
“I thought the chief was going to take care of that, sir.”
“Charlie Croft says he told you to do it.”
“I guess he did, sir. But you see, her regular doctor was on vacation. So without—”
“Never mind, Chapel. Let’s get back to the hired woman. You think the neighbor knows where we can reach her?”
“No, sir. She takes her vacation the same time as the old mushroom lady. But she never says where—”
“The old what?”
“The dead woman, sir,” said Chapel, perhaps thinking he had messed up with the informality of a nickname.
“You said mushroom lady.”
“Well, the whole house was full of mushrooms, sir. Little statues, drawings. All those books with mushrooms on the covers.”
“Son, did you see an actual, edible mushroom?”
“No, sir, not a damn one.”
“How could you let my uncle go home?”
“Oh, now you’re concerned.” Myles Penny talked out of the side of his mouth, never looking up from the desk as his pencil moved across the open pages of his appointment calendar. “It wasn’t my decision to send him home. That was Mortimer’s call.” He pushed the papers to one side and tapped his pencil on the blotter, indicating that he had more pressing business to get on with, and that Ali Cray should get out of his office—this minute.
“Myles, the man just had a heart attack.”
“Well, no he didn’t. Your uncle had a massive anxiety attack. It all fits—the vision problems, the buzzing, the chest pain. Probably couldn’t catch his breath, and that brought on the blackout.” He shrugged his shoulders to say, Enough?
“When I saw him, he looked about two inches away from death.”
“Well, he’s not.” Myles was more irritable now, and she could guess why. Her worries would not ring true, not after her performance in the sickroom. The doctor was an excellent judge of character.
“After I talked to Dr. Lorimer, I got a second opinion—your uncle’s. Old Mortimer diagnosed his own symptoms. Nobody in town’s better qualified. He’ll live a good long while if he stays on the medication William prescribed.” And something in his eyes said, Not that you care.
“Can’t you reach William?”
“Wouldn’t know where to try, Ali. Now Dr. Lorimer’s a good man. He always covers William’s heart patients, and he hasn’t lost one yet. Trust me, the diagnosis is sound. He’ll be miles more comfortable at home—if you wanna be a good sport and not tell the cops where to find him. You don’t really think he’s involved in this, do you?”
“I don’t know what to think,” she lied. “I’m sorry about the way I acted.” Another lie.
“Ali, if there’s nothing else I can do for—”
“Doesn’t William’s service have a number where he can be reached?”
“I wish they did. Every time William leaves town, it’s hell around here. Every damn one of his patients knows the day he’s gonna leave town. And then the perverse little bastards start calling in every ache and pain you could imagine. Now I told you, Lorimer is a good—”
“I believe you, but I was thinking of something else. Maybe you can help me. There’s a question I forgot to ask William the last time I—”
“Is this about Susan Kendall?”
“Yes. I know it was a long time ago, but when he filled in for Howard Chainy—”
“You’re wondering why a top-ranked surgeon took on the job as acting medical examiner? He owed Howard a favor, Ali. They go back a long way.”
“No. I was thinking about the test for the monozygotic twins. He needed a blood sample from each child to prove that, didn’t he? Did the parents consent to—”
“No, my brother did not ask the parents if he could blood-suck their only remaining child.”
“So how did he manage the test?”
“No idea. Unless he kept a blood sample from the previous winter. William stitched Rouge’s finger back on after an accident. Now when was that? I guess the boy was nine years old.”
“I was there,” said Ali. “He took a fall on the ice, and another skater ran over his hand.”
“Well, the priest brought him straight here in a car. Smart man, even if he is a damn pervert. Didn’t wait for our crack ambulance crew that can’t find its way from one end of town to another. The boy’s finger was almost severed. Now William is one fine surgeon, no matter what part of the body he’s stitching. In fact, he was probably the only doctor for fifty miles who could’ve done an operation that delicate. The human hand is a major surgical challenge, tricky as hell. But afterwards, the boy’s finger had full mobility. A real nice job.”
“Did Susan come in with her brother?”
“Are you kidding? We couldn’t pry the twins apart. It was William’s idea to let Susan stay for the operation. Oh, I know, he comes off as a self-important twit. But he’s very sensitive to every kind of pain. He was planning emergency surgery with a local anesthetic, and I guess he figured one twin would calm the other.”
“You think that’s when William suspected they were monozygotic?”
“I’m sure they piqued his curiosity. Except for the haircuts, the Kendall kids were identical. I’ve seen a fair share of twins, but nothing like that pair. Let me tell you the eerie part. Susan was in pain too, and showing symptoms of shock. None of that psychosomatic bullshit. She was feeling pain. I gave Rouge the local anesthetic while we were prepping him for surgery. The nurse was gowning and masking Susan—so the little girl never saw that needle. But the anesthetic also worked on her. It was like treating one child with two bodies.”
Ali wondered if Rouge had felt pain while his sister was dying. Could he have known the moment when her neck was broken? Had the little boy experienced a sympathetic death?
Myles stood up, and this time there should be no misunderstanding that he meant to throw her out. Charm had never been his forte. She lifted one hand in a listless goodbye and left the room, pulling the door closed behind her.
She had told Arnie Pyle not to wait for her, but there he was, seated in the clinic reception area, half concealed by the fronds of a potted palm. His black eye was hidden by the spread pages of a newspaper, perhaps to dodge the queries of patients and visitors. Arnie had not volunteered any explanation for the dark bruise. She had decided it must be a sore point, something he took no macho pride in, and tactfully, she left it alone. But when he stood up and emerged from the palm fronds, she was startled anew.
There was something very wrong here.
The other day, she had thought nothing of the smirk; it fit so well with his sarcasm. But now he still smiled with only half his mouth. There had been several years of angry distance between them, and Ali truly could not remember if he had always smiled in this odd way. In a disturbing flight of fancy, she wondered if he could have picked up this mannerism during that year of living with her, as though this mirror image of her own twisted mouth might be the result of close association—a contagion of damage.
The smile evaporated quickly. Perhaps he was embarrassed —caught with a genuine emotion. The agent jammed his hands into his pants pockets and made his stand in the center of the room. “Gonna tell me what you and Dr. Penny talked about? I always share with you.”
“Sure you do.” She intended to walk past him, but he moved to block her way. “All right, Arnie. It was a consultation.”
“For the scar? Cool. So, it isn’t hereditary, is it? Like maybe you had a gigantic mole removed? I’m just thinking about our kids, Ali. But I guess we could always adopt.”
“Yeah, I’m trying to picture baby drunks staggering around the house and throwing up on the carpet.” Did that sound bitter? She hoped so.
His half smile was back. “I cleaned your carpet, Ali—on my hands and knees. You forget these little things.”
He moved toward her, and she took two steps back. It was the same old dance. “You’re right, Arnie. And the time you vomited on my shoes, you bought me new shoes.” To hell with tact. She pointed to his black eye. “How did you get that?”
He waved it off. “Oh, the usual thing.”
“A woman did that to you?”
“But she didn’t have your touch, Ali. And I never loved her. It was just a fling, a little meaningless brutality on the side.” He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. “Okay, fight’s over. You got anything solid on this sick bastard?”
“You’re breaking the law, Arnie. This is a public building.”
“What’ve you got? Speak up, or I’ll blow a smoke ring—right here, right now. And then I might get a little crazy and drop an ash on the rug.”
“But you don’t like my theories. You said as much in a room full of cops and feds. Why don’t you ask the team from Quantico?”
“You know I don’t let the witch doctors mess with my cases. If you’ve got something on this lunatic, I wanna hear it. Or I could go have a chat with your dear old uncle.” He was smiling again. “You really think he’s treating this pervert?”
“The pervert is a sadist. Concentrate on that.” She could not stop staring at his mouth. “He’d get off on sharing the kill with a psychiatrist. It would be a rush for him—immediate gratification.” Please stop smiling, Arnie. “It would extend the circle of victims beyond the child and her family. He could draw out the sadism as long as he liked—almost heaven.”
“So our perp tortures the shrink, and the shrink can only unload on a priest.”
“Right.” Or another psychiatrist. And now she stopped to wonder why Uncle Mortimer had not taken that route. However, this was not an idea to explore with Arnie Pyle. “But going to a psychiatrist doesn’t mean the pervert is insane, just smart and sadistic—much like yourself.”
“Thank you. But if you’re right about all those other cases, you gotta know this guy is royally screwed up.”
“Tell me if I’ve got this wrong, Arnie. You think he’s mentally incompetent because his fantasy revolves around a little princess. Are you crazy because you have wet dreams about a supermodel knocking on your door to ask you for sex?”
“So you’re saying he’s just more realistic?”
“It’s all about control.” She stared at the cigarette in his hand and avoided looking at his face again. “That’s why he favors a small target. He has absolute control over a child. In your fantasy, you’re all sweaty and grateful to the goddess. In his scenario, he’s a god.”
“Okay, twisted but sane. So how do you like the death penalty now, Ali?”
“My feelings haven’t changed.”
“Oh, come off it. You want this freak dead as bad as I do.”
“When the Russians increased the penalties for pedophilia, the freaks killed more of the children. Call me a fool, Arnie, but I think the parents would rather get the kids back alive.”
And now they realized there was someone standing close to them and listening to every word, quietly, politely waiting until they were done. It was Rouge Kendall, whose sister had not come back alive. He inclined his head to say hello to her. “The woman at the desk told me your uncle was released from the clinic.” He was pointedly ignoring Arnie Pyle.
What had Arnie done to antagonize this man?
“Rouge? Could you keep that to yourself for a while? Dr. Penny doesn’t think my uncle’s up to another interrogation.”
“Sure, no problem. But there’s one more thing—if you’ve got a minute.” The young investigator was speaking to her but looking at the FBI man. Arnie only smiled at him, pretending to be too obtuse to allow them any privacy.
Rouge was more graceful, only thinking the word asshole, only making this opinion clear with his expression, and thus refusing to engage in Arnie’s favorite game—Two Dogs Barking. The young cop turned to Ali. “Back in the hospital room, you said the pervert takes trophies. That wasn’t in the case notes you gave us.”
“Costello’s idea. He didn’t want the details of the trophies floating around in fifty printed copies.”
“So you have a list?”
Ali nodded. Slipping her arm through his, she led him to the far side of the room and away from the hearing of clinic visitors and the FBI agent. She looked back at Arnie. The command in her eyes said, Stay.
“Your man only takes very small items, Rouge. One was a ring. Another child was missing a tiny pin shaped like a flower. Other things—a religious medal, a fine gold chain with a single pearl. Always something delicate.”
“So this wouldn’t fit?” He pulled a piece of silver from his pocket and held it out to her. “This was used as evidence against the priest. It’s my sister’s bracelet.”
Ali accepted the proffered jewelry and turned it over in her hand. The circular opening was very small, but the silver was in a broad, flat design, and it was heavy in her hand. “I guess it’s possible. But this would be the largest thing he ever took. If this was all she had on her, but you—”
“I know. I read the list of Susan’s personal effects. There was a religious medal around her neck. So he should have taken that before he took the bracelet, right?”
Ali nodded. They both knew Susan was still wearing the medal when they found her body.
“There was something else,” said Rouge. “I gave Susan an ankle chain when I left for military school. She wore it every day, but under her sock, so no one else would know about it. That’s what she said in her letters—that’s the way she put it. The chain was thin, very fragile, with a small engraved oval of gold.”
“Then that’s the trophy. If you find the anklet, you’ll find the man who killed her.”
“You wouldn’t actually need the ankle chain to find him,” said Arnie Pyle. He had crept into their space.
Ali glared at the agent to say, Bad boy. “He’s right, Rouge. You only need to find a man who knew she wore it. Unless she told someone in the family ora—”
“Even my parents didn’t know. It was just between us.”
Ali imagined the delicate chain on the small ankle of a ten-year-old girl, a tiny secret beneath a white sock, gleaming warm against her skin, something her twin had given her with the sweet love of a child. She could see Susan’s murderer taking it out every night and using it to relive the violation and the murder. Perhaps he masturbated when he held it.
Buddy Sorrel parked his car by the access road. He walked down the long driveway to the lake house, looking to his right and left for signs of mushrooms. According to the tax assessor’s aerial photographs, there was no atrium on this property. The BCI investigator felt like a fool wasting his time here, but the captain had made him the official mushroom man, and all the details of fungus were now his province.
Maybe he should call out a patrol car to help him search the woods for a grower’s shed. The trees could hide such a structure from the tax office aerial photographs.
No, scratch that idea. The captain wouldn’t like it if he tipped this lead to one of the uniforms. And even with a hundred state troopers, he wouldn’t find the elusive truffle in a search above ground. That particular fungus would be hiding in the earth, possibly keeping company with a small corpse. However, oaks were plentiful along this private road, and Dr. Mortimer Cray, amateur botanist, had claimed the roots of these trees were vital to the growth of truffles.
Could a dog sniff them out? The Canine Corps could sniff out explosives—why not truffles?
What was he going to accomplish here? Probably nothing. Three local cops had searched the house, and evidence of two kids could not have escaped them. But the loose ends must be tied.
After clearing a bend of evergreen trees, he could see the entire ramble of the house, a sprawling bastard thing of wooden walls joining brick ones and linking to a common plane of rough stone four stories high. He hung back by the trees and stared up at the fourth floor. There was a bit of white material sticking out from the sash of a closed window, waving in the breeze like a nagging three-dimensional metaphor for the despicable, intolerable loose end.
He walked up the flagstone path to the back door. The property seal was fixed to the door frame. On closer inspection, he knew the adhesive material had been peeled back and replaced several times.
Well, that could be kids. In his younger days as a beat cop, he had spent a lot of nights routing teenagers out of the damndest places.
He reached up to the ledge over the door and found the key where the local police chief had left it. However, Chief Croft could not be sure that he had actually bothered to lock the door. According to the chief, some older residents of Makers Village didn’t even own keys to their original turn-of-the-century locks.
Sorrel ripped off the tape and tried the knob. The door opened with ease. He walked into the kitchen, which should have been on the other side of the house, for the back doors were usually lakeside. He looked around at the dust settling on stacks of mushroom cookbooks at the center of the kitchen table. And on the wall was a clock in the shape of a common toadstool. Too bad Costello had held this aspect back from the uniforms. He could have sent a trooper on this wild-goose chase.
Sorrel headed for the stairs, mindful of the shifting directions as he climbed a twisting route toward the fourth floor, where he had seen the white material sticking out at him like a tongue. When he entered the bedroom at the top of the stairs, he knew there was something wrong with the floor plan. Well, a lot was wrong with it, given the careless architecture of the house and all its add-ons. But one thing troubled him: there was no window where he expected to see one. He stepped back into the hall to get his bearings by the window at the end of the corridor. Odd. He returned to the corner bedroom. Only one of its walls had windows.
The Judas Child Page 27