Pattern of Wounds

by J. Bertrand

  “Midnight,” he repeats.

  “He broke into my place at four thirty in the morning, and I doubt he took that chance without scouting around first.”

  “Here’s what I don’t understand,” he says, leading me back down the hall into Oliszewski’s tastefully decorated living room. “This should have satisfied him, right? He gets his thrill from murdering the girl. So when he’s finished, why go to your place at all? What would prompt him to do something like that? Did something go wrong here to set him off?”

  “That’s a good question,” I say. “I don’t know.”

  “See if you can find out.” He pats me on the shoulder. “I take it Charlotte’s doing all right? I feel bad keeping you on this when you should be with your wife.”

  “She might feel safer if I catch the guy.”

  “Sure,” he says, heading for the exit.

  For a moment there, the captain seemed like himself again. At the door, though, he pauses to straighten his tie, and I can see the lights of news cameras out on the street. Hedges makes a beeline for them.

  Still, he raised a valid point. Why wasn’t killing one woman enough? What drove him to kick down my door just a few hours later?

  Bascombe comes through the entrance, glancing over his shoulder in the captain’s direction. He frowns at the furniture, symmetrically arranged around the perimeter of an ivory rug, then draws close to me with a conspiratorial nod.

  “He’s really pushing for that promotion,” I say.

  “Seems like. Are we close on this thing or what?”

  I bring him up to speed as quickly as possible, showing him the bedroom just as the lights are flipped back on. We walk as far as the back door, where Bascombe watches the coroner’s people withdrawing the nude body from the now-tranquil water, then return to where we started. In one corner of the living room, a headless dress form stands, half draped in fabric. There are more swatches on the worktable, next to a white sewing machine. From the looks of it, Oliszewski wasn’t just working in the dress shop for kicks. She had ambitions in that direction, ambitions that now will never be realized.

  “The captain’s right,” Bascombe says. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense him leaving here and heading to your place.”

  “He did, though. The blood on the knife recovered in my bedroom is what led us here in the first place.”

  “The question is, why?”

  Eric Castro enters from the bedroom, though I hadn’t noticed him there before. He holds an evidence envelope in one hand.

  “Take a look at this,” he says.

  Bascombe intercepts the bag, inspecting the contents, then hands it to me.

  “Maybe that’s what provoked him.”

  Inside the bag, one of my business cards rests, a slight crease running down the center. A splash of dried blood hides part of my name. I flip it over and see my mobile number written in ballpoint ink.

  “Where did you find this?” I ask Castro.

  “It was on her nightstand. Tucked under the base of the lamp.”

  “When did you give it to her?” Bascombe asks.

  “I didn’t.”

  I look at the card again.

  “But I think I might know who did.”

  We may bust you. But we won’t judge you.

  —martin amis, night train

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 15 — 8:30 A.M.

  Early morning briefing. On side-by-side whiteboards, a projection screen, and a jumble of printed and handwritten pages, everything we know about Agnieszka Oliszewski spreads before me. All the detectives present at last night’s scene sit bleary-eyed around the table, joined by a couple of CSU supervisors and Quincy Hanford, who summarizes in far too much detail the contents of Oliszewski’s hard drive. Since the computer was a heavy desktop model, our killer decided to leave it—either that, or the discovery of my business card interrupted his flow.

  “Let’s move on,” Bascombe says, presiding from the front of the room. “Unless you have anything tangible?”

  Hanford starts distributing some stapled sheets. “I output the contacts on her computer so we’d have a starting point for the interviews.”

  “Excellent.” He turns to me. “Now, what about the timeline?”

  “We’ve painstakingly reconstructed her movements over the past forty-eight hours. She clocked out of the Times Boulevard boutique where she works at about six on Saturday, went for drinks with co-workers, went home. She left the next day around noon—a neighbor witnessed this—and a couple of hours later visited Dr. Joy Hill.”

  “Really?” Bascombe says.

  I nod. “Dr. Hill is coming in to give a statement.”

  “Okay. Can you get Bridger on the line for a preliminary report?”

  I punch some buttons on the speakerphone. Bridger must have been expecting us. When he picks up, he’s ready to go.

  “Just as in Simone Walker’s case,” he says, “the fatal blow came first—a single stab wound to the heart—followed by the six-puncture semicircular mutilations that cover her torso. The knife recovered at Detective March’s house appears to be the murder weapon. That’s no surprise, considering her blood and prints were on it.”

  Bascombe leans over the speakerphone, resting one big hand on either side. “Her prints on the handle . . . what do you make of that?”

  “Maybe she got the knife away from him at some point.”

  I shake my head. I’ve been thinking about the question for hours, and there’s only one thing that makes sense to me.

  “At the Walker scene, he came up behind her, held his hand over her mouth, and brought the knife down. With Oliszewski he choked her out first. So he could have reenacted the same process, only this time he puts the knife in her hand and guides it in. So she’s the one stabbing herself and not him.”

  “Could be,” Bridger says. “You’ll need a psychiatrist to comment on the significance of that.”

  Bascombe rolls his eyes. “What we need is a buyer’s name on that knife.”

  “I’ve got another call in to Sam Dearborn, the dealer. He was supposed to get back to me yesterday. I guess I’ll have to pay him a visit.”

  As the briefing breaks up, Jerry Lorenz pokes his head in. He scans the room, waiting for a few departing detectives to pass through the door. He raises his eyebrows at me.

  “That professor showed up,” he says. “I stuck her in Interview Two.”

  “Dr. Hill?” Bascombe asks. “Did you really have to drag her down here?”

  “I got tired of making house calls. Since the election’s over, I figured I could bring her in. Did I do wrong?”

  He gives me a hard look, then dismisses me with a jerk of the head.

  “Can I smoke in here?”

  The gravelly voice has lost all its charm. Dr. Joy Hill slouches in her chair, an elbow hitched on the seat back, one leg dangling over the other. She waves a red pack of Dunhills at me. I shake my head. She rolls her eyes—what is the world coming to?—and tucks the cigarettes back into her purse.

  “When I heard about Agnieszka, I was devastated.”

  “Really?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I thought you’d be thrilled. Agnieszka seduced your husband, after all.”

  “Detective,” she laughs. “Anyone could have managed that. And I already told you there were no hard feelings. If there had been, she wouldn’t have come to me Sunday.”

  “Why did she visit you?”

  “She’d gone to lunch with some girlfriends, and one of them brought up Simone’s death. It was the first she’d heard, and the news really shook her up. Over the phone she started asking me all sorts of questions—what had happened, what did the police think—and thanks to your unannounced visit that morning, I told her you probably suspected me. That confused her and I said, ‘Look, just come over and we’ll talk.’ So she did.”

  “How long was she there?”

  “Not long. Ten or fifteen minutes, tops. The conversation was awkward. Agnie
szka seemed preoccupied, so she’d ask questions, but when I answered it was like she wasn’t listening. I told her about the man who said Simone was pregnant with his child, thinking that would get her attention. All she did was blink.”

  “Maybe she knew about that already.”

  She shakes her head. “I didn’t get the impression they’d kept in touch. Agnieszka knew Simone casually, and recommended her when I was looking for a tenant. But they weren’t girlfriends or anything.”

  “But she seemed very upset about Simone’s death?”

  Another nod. “She pushed past me and went out to the pool. She knelt by the edge of the water. She started to cry. I decided to leave her alone for a while, thinking she just needed to say her goodbyes. But her mood passed pretty quick. When I poked my head out, she was already on the phone.”

  “Did you hear what was said?”

  “Not much.” She lifts her head slightly, like she’s hearing the conversation now. “ ‘I should have stayed.’ She said that. And then she was quiet awhile, listening. She said ‘I was a fool to believe that,’ or maybe ‘It was foolish to believe that.’ With her accent it’s hard to tell sometimes.”

  “I assume you don’t know who she was talking to.”

  “No idea,” she says. “You’ll just have to trace the call.”

  After thanking Dr. Hill for her cooperation and escorting her out, I walk a billing statement from Agnieszka’s phone down to the same non-sworn officer who helped me with Simone’s phone records, asking her to find out who the girl called on Saturday afternoon.

  “Leave it with me,” she says, adding my scrap of paper to the growing pile beside her keyboard. “I’ll get to it ASAP.”

  From the opposite side of a barred glass door, Sam Dearborn of Dearborn Gun and Blade inspects my badge a bit too long to be polite, then cranks the key, unbolting the lock with a dull thunk. Bells chime overhead as I enter. He’s a portly black-haired man with a goatee and dark hair on his forearms, who wears a gold Rolex, a gold neck chain, and a thin copper bracelet around his wrist. He smells of hair spray and musky cologne.

  “You didn’t call me back, so here I am.”

  “Come on in,” he says, beckoning me deeper into his shop. “You want some coffee? I was just making a pot.”

  “What I want is the name of your buyer.”

  “Ah.” He raises a finger, then goes around a glass counter where a stack of papers and receipts is spread out. “Hold on just a second and I’ll find what you need. I was just looking.”

  “You said you’d get this for me last night.”

  “Yeah,” he says, running a thick finger down a column of figures without looking up. “Sorry about that. I had the best of intentions, but something came up. I wasn’t in the office when you called.”

  I’m tempted to let him have it, but I’d rather save the energy. The quicker I can get a name, the quicker I can get out of here.

  “Just look it up, okay?”

  Through the back office door I can hear a coffee machine burbling, the smell wafting through the air. The small shop reminds me of my uncle’s, the same glass cases, the same racks along the back walls for long arms. But instead of blued, workmanlike weapons—tools of metal and wood—Dearborn presides over an Aladdin’s Cave of collectibles: ornate flame-bladed knives with exotic handles, even a few impractical-looking swords, along with high-end custom handguns and coveted black tactical rifles. There are no price tags on display, but I imagine most anything in the shop would be too expensive for actual use. He told me as much over the phone. His clientele collects weapons; they don’t use them.

  “Yep,” Dearborn says, tapping his finger on the glass. “I was afraid of this.”

  “Of what?” I ask. “Was it a cash transaction?”

  “That’s not it.” He shakes his head thoughtfully, then hands me a credit card slip. “The knife you’re looking for was part of a lot I sold to a local collector. I know for a fact he’s been divesting himself of some nice pieces, because I bought some things off him just last month.”

  I study the receipt. The customer’s name is printed DAVID R. BAYARD, with an address I recognize as a downtown office building.

  “Tell me about this guy,” I say.

  “Dave’s some kind of oil consultant. I don’t know exactly what he does, but he travels a lot to Africa and Scandinavia, places like that. Brings back some interesting stuff, too. I’ve been doing business with him maybe ten years. He collects blades. I’ve tried to get him into firearms, but he’s not interested.”

  “You said he’s been selling things?”

  “I bought a couple off him for less than he paid, including a couple of Scharfs—but not the one you’re looking for. And I know for a fact he gave some things to another dealer on consignment for sale on the Internet. I can give you that guy’s card.” He goes into the back office and returns with a pair of cards, one for Bayard and another for the consignment seller. “You sure you don’t want any coffee?”

  “I’ll be in touch if I need anything else. And next time a homicide detective asks for a favor, don’t let anything distract you.”

  “My apologies,” he says. “If it makes any difference, there was a woman involved.”

  “It doesn’t.” The door jingles as I exit.

  Outside, I can still smell Dearborn’s cologne on my clothes.

  From a distance, the skyscrapers of downtown Houston look like so many glass needles aimed at the clouds. Reflecting the sky above and one another, they seem weightless and ethereal. Down on the street, though, walking the long stretch of sidewalk from the brainchild of one famous architect to the next, passing one, two, three abstract sculptures nestled in among the corporate logos, I feel like an ant in a redwood forest, awed by the imbalance of scale.

  I badge my way through security in the lobby of Bayard’s building, riding a mirrored elevator up to the twenty-third floor to the offices of something called ENERGY SOLUTIONS GROUP. Waiting in the lobby for Bayard, I browse through the corporate literature, learning that whatever these people do—the particulars are vague—they do it synergistically and on a global scale, innovating on behalf of a bright tomorrow.

  A smartly dressed and unattractive woman in her early thirties clicks across the glossy floor, showing off chalk stripes and a lot of eye shadow. She blinks her very white, very black-rimmed eyes at me several times, like maybe I’ll disappear if she keeps it up.

  “You’re here to see David?” she says finally. “I’m his personal assistant.”

  I rise from my chair and introduce myself.

  “I’m afraid he’s not in the office.”

  “Where can I reach him, then?”

  “I don’t know that you can.”

  Behind her, a flax-haired middle-aged man in shirt-sleeves walks up, adjusting his metal-framed glasses like they haven’t refocused from whatever fine print he was reading a few moments before. His button-down collar bulges out at the sides. He introduces himself as ESG’s corporate attorney.

  “I already told this gentleman that Mr. Bayard isn’t here,” the assistant says.

  “Detective, you have to understand—”

  “If Bayard isn’t here,” I say, “then where can I find him?”

  He clears his throat. “I’m afraid Dave is still in Nigeria. Lagos.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since . . .” His eyes search the ceiling. “Last week. Monday the seventh.”

  The Monday after Simone’s murder.

  “And how do you get in touch with him?” I ask.

  “We don’t. Excuse me, Detective, but . . . Could you come into my office please?”

  The lawyer guides me down a hallway into a small room with a breathtaking view of the opposite skyscraper, inviting me to sit in one of his guest chairs. He pulls the door shut behind us. There’s a low hum in the room, probably ventilation or electricity, but gazing over the cityscape, the sound reinforces the feeling of flight.

  We sit across fr
om each other. He studies the lines in his palm.

  “The thing is,” he says, “I’m afraid that ESG recently ended its relationship with Dave. This hasn’t been made public yet, which is why your questions are a bit awkward for us. We’re not intentionally giving you the runaround, it’s just—”

  “I need to speak to Mr. Bayard in connection with a murder investigation.”

  A pause. “I can appreciate that. Unfortunately, I’m not sure we can be of much help. We haven’t been in touch with Dave for a number of days, not since the termination.”

  “So let me get this straight. The man’s somewhere in Africa—”

  “Lagos,” he says. “That’s in Nigeria.”

  “You said that already.” Something clicks in my mind. He’s not the first person to mention Nigeria to me. “He’s in Africa,” I say, “and that’s when you decide to fire him?”

  “To be frank, I’m not sure how much latitude I have in discussing the matter. I think I can say that this situation goes back several months. There was a reorganization, which Dave chose to interpret as a demotion. There may have been some financial trouble at home.”

  “Not surprising these days,” I say. “So you canned him for being unhappy?”

  “We canned him for moonlighting on a side venture with one of ESG’s competitors. The Nigeria trip was planned months in advance, and the feeling was that it might be best to take action while he was in the field. There were security concerns—and that’s as much as I can say about the matter.”

  “Security as in the threat of violence?”

  “No, no,” he says. “Nothing like that. But Dave had access to a great deal of sensitive information. We needed to ensure he couldn’t destroy anything. Or share it.”