The Chairmen

by Robert I. Katz

  Chapter 26

  The night was clear and cloudless, with no moon. Even though they stood in the middle of perhaps the busiest city on Earth, the Northwest corner of Central Park was still dark. A soft hum of traffic could be heard, which was not a bad thing. Hopefully, it would mask their approach. The tent was pitched against one lichen covered stone wall of the Blockhouse, providing shelter from the wind as well as limiting access to anyone who might choose to sneak up on its occupant. It also, of course, limited McDonald’s escape options. He had a small campfire with a grill perched above the flames, on which he was cooking what appeared to be a couple of hotdogs.

  Kurtz, Barent, Moran and Patrick O’Brien stood on the top of a small hill and watched through night vision goggles as the SWAT team, clad in black body armor and armed with assault rifles, crept through the woods surrounding a small clearing in front of the building. McDonald wore a parka, boots and dark jeans. He squatted back on his heels, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings, as he cooked his meal.

  The team seemed to flit from tree to tree, silently, as they closed in. Kurtz counted eight of them, but he knew that more were spaced strategically around the entire building and even more were stationed further away in case the suspect attempted to run and somehow managed to break through the first line. Barent pursed his lips. Moran silently nodded. He liked the way the team was working. McDonald was surrounded with his back to a wall. He was trapped, though he didn’t yet know it.

  One of the team members raised his hand. The others halted. Cautiously, silently, the first man inched forward. He seemed to hesitate, gingerly used his toe to push aside a small pile of leaves, which proved to be nothing more than what it appeared. He nodded to the others, all of whom resumed their stealthy slide forward.

  An immense clatter of tin cans knocking together came from an oak tree. McDonald raised his head and without hesitation, rolled to the side, came up with a long rifle and began firing.

  Policemen do not like to be fired upon. When fired upon, they fire back.

  “Christ,” Barent muttered. He, Moran, Kurtz and O’Brien calmly stepped behind a series of trees. When bullets fly, they are apt to fly anywhere, and direct sight of the action meant direct flight of a bullet. They waited for perhaps fifteen seconds, until all the bullets had stopped, then they stepped out. James McDonald lay on his back, dead or unconscious. One officer shook his head, frowned and gingerly prodded the body with his toe. Two others stood aside, their weapons held steady. One was speaking on his radio, no doubt calling for an ambulance.

  “Tripwires,” Moran said. “That was pretty smart, actually.” He shook his head and gave a small, tight smile. “But then, firing on the police is pretty stupid.” He shrugged and they all walked down the hill.

  McDonald had a bullet in his abdomen and two in each leg. Two others had grazed his head. Remarkably, he was alive. He was taken to Bellevue and rushed into surgery.

  Kurtz, with nothing else left to do, went home, where Lenore was waiting for him. “Well,” he said, “I guess that’s that.”

  Christina Pirelli walked out of the hospital at 4:30 PM after her usual busy day. Christina was feeling pretty good. First Harry Moran and then Richard Kurtz had called to update her on the situation. The schmuck was still unconscious in intensive care but had a good chance of recovering. From a purely humanistic standpoint, that was nice, but on a deeper, more personal level, she couldn’t have cared less. Christina Pirelli resented people who sent threatening letters, made nasty phone calls and made actual assaults on people and property. Fuck the son-of-a-bitch. But he would probably recover, so her relief at finally being free from persecution was also free from any residual regret that she might have felt (well, probably wouldn’t have felt…) over the poor sad end of poor James McDonald’s idiotic criminal career.

  The parking garage was five stories high. Since Christina usually arrived before 7:30 AM she rarely had trouble finding a spot on the first floor but today, she had slept in and arrived after eight. She took the elevator to the fourth floor and walked down the aisle toward her almost new Lexus. As usual, the place was pretty much deserted. She barely noticed a man, tall, with brown hair, fumbling at the lock of his car a couple of aisles over. She pulled out her key, pressed the button and heard the lock snick but before she could open the door she realized that the man was standing in front of her. She looked at him and felt the blood drain from her face. “You,” she said.

  He smiled. “Hi, Chris,” he said. His smile grew wider as he raised something that might have been a gun and pointed it at her chest. She barely heard the soft pop that it made as he pulled the trigger. She felt a stinging pain in her chest, felt her legs growing suddenly weak and then everything swirled around her and went black.

  “Why?” James McDonald asked. “What did I ever do to you?”

  Moran looked at Kurtz and frowned. This was not going as any of them had expected. McDonald’s vital signs had stabilized over the night. He was off vasopressors. There seemed no reason not to wake him up and get the breathing tube out, which the ICU staff had done after rounds in the morning. Lew Barent was back at the station house. Moran, Kurtz and Patrick O’Brien had arrived in the ICU for what they all assumed would be a routine interview involving some perfunctory protestations of innocence, followed, once the evidence was laid out, by a grudging confession, followed by fervent protestations of remorse and regret. Moran had read him his rights. McDonald had shrugged and stated that he didn’t need a lawyer since he had done nothing wrong.

  As the interview went on, Kurtz’ worry increased. Seemingly honest bewilderment was not supposed to be a part of the scenario. Of course, maybe the guy was just a good actor. So many sociopaths were, after all, but somehow, Kurtz didn’t think so. McDonald wasn’t acting calm and contrite. He wasn’t pretending that it was all just a sad, silly misunderstanding. No. He was pissed off, and if this was an act, it was not an act likely to endear himself to the forces of justice.

  “So, let me get this straight,” Moran said. “You’ve never seen either of these cards before?” He held both ID cards under McDonald’s nose, one for Dr. Richard Lester, the other for Dr. Benjamin Abbott, both displaying James McDonald’s smiling face in the upper left corner.

  McDonald gave Moran an angry look. “No. Somebody is framing me.”

  Moran raised a brow at Kurtz and Patrick O’Brien, both of whom gave silent shrugs. “And this?” Moran said. He showed McDonald the paper saying:

  Wondering what I’ll do next? Keep on wondering. You’ll never see me coming.

  “Never saw this either?”

  “No,” McDonald said.

  “You didn’t show up to work yesterday. Where were you?”

  “Hiding out. What did you think I was doing?”

  This was not an answer that Moran had expected. He frowned. “And why were you hiding out?”

  “Because you assholes are setting me up to take a fall. The letters, the security guy following me around, and then somebody breaks into my apartment. I don’t know who and I don’t know why, but I recognize a set-up when I see it.”

  Moran puffed up his cheeks and gave McDonald a moody look. “When did somebody break into your apartment?”

  “The other night. He left a note on the kitchen counter. It was just like all the rest, some crap about the past not being forgotten.”

  “Anything damaged?”

  “No.” McDonald shook his head. “Just the note.”

  Moran sighed. He shook his head. He looked honestly regretful. Kurtz suppressed a smile. Moran was good at his job. He knew how to convey a message, which in this case was sad amazement at McDonald’s stubborn insistence mixed with an unvoiced contempt at his supposed stupidity in denying the obvious, but all them except maybe McDonald knew that it was just an act. Moran was as bewildered as the rest of them.

  “Christina Pirelli has identified you as the man who followed her in the park and attempted to assault her. Drs. Kevin Kucera and Jerr
y Hernandez have both identified you as the supposed ‘anesthesiologist’ who vandalized the OR at Staunton yesterday afternoon.” Not true, of course. All three physicians had looked at the photo of James McDonald and said it might be the guy. None of them were prepared to make a positive identification.

  McDonald’s face grew red. He suddenly lunged forward, which didn’t get him very far since both wrists were handcuffed to the railings. “You fucking asshole! You won’t get away with this!”

  “You know, James,” Moran said with a sigh. “You’re not helping your cause, here. We’ve got you six ways from Sunday. If you admit it, we can work with you. If you don’t, it’s gonna be jail time.”

  McDonald shook his head. “Fuck you,” he said. “I’ve had it. Get me my lawyer and get lost.”

  Moran shrugged and walked away. Kurtz and Patrick O’Brien followed. Neither said a word until they were seated in Patrick’s office. Kurtz poured a cup of coffee, looked at Patrick and Moran. Patrick shook his head. “Not for me, thanks,” Moran said. He leaned back in his chair. “Not exactly what I expected.”

  Kurtz rubbed at his eyes. He could feel a headache coming on. “So, let’s assume for just a moment that he’s not putting us on. He says he’s being framed. He says somebody broke into his apartment and left a note on the counter. Okay, maybe he is being framed. Where does that leave us?”

  “Exactly where we were before,” Patrick O’Brien said. “Being played for a bunch of fools.”

  “Oh,” Moran snapped his fingers. “Right. I should have remembered that.”

  “‘The past is not forgotten,’” Kurtz said. “‘The past is not forgotten. It isn’t even past.’”

  “Huh?” Moran said.

  “What he said, ‘The past is not forgotten.’ It’s a quote from William Faulkner.”

  Dimly, Kurtz felt an idea trying to percolate through his brain. There was something about this situation that seemed to hover, just out of his reach. He grimaced and rubbed at his temples.

  Just then, the phone on Patrick O’Brien’s desk rang. He gave it a sour look and picked it up. He listened, said nothing for a long moment, then cleared his throat and said, “Thanks for letting me know.” Carefully, he placed the phone back down in its cradle and turned to the other two men. “Christina Pirelli seems to be missing,” he said. “She was scheduled to be in surgery this morning and she hasn’t shown up. She’s not answering her pager and she’s not answering her cell phone. She’s vanished.”

  Chapter 27

  They found Christina Pirelli’s Lexus still sitting in the parking garage, its engine cool. One of the officers who had accompanied Moran, Kurtz and Patrick O’Brien noticed something glittering on the ground. He hesitated, put on rubber gloves and picked it up. He pursed his lips and gave Moran a worried look. “It’s a dart,” he said, “from a tranquilizer gun.”

  The parking garage contained surveillance cameras, the lenses of which had been sprayed with black paint. A review of the recorded tape showed all the cameras going dark, one by one, starting at 3:17 PM on the previous day.

  John Crane’s thinning hair was disheveled, his face grim. He sat at the kitchen table of Christina Pirelli’s apartment, along with Barent, Moran, Kurtz and Patrick O’Brien. Christina’s apartment was larger than Crane’s. Christina had given him a key and they had talked about him moving in but he had not yet done so. Officially, Crane was a suspect, but he had no obvious motive and he had answered all of Barent and Moran’s questions without hesitation. He had last seen Christina when she left for work the day before. Neither threatening letters nor any suspicious phone calls had been received in the past few days, and all prior letters had been turned over to the police. Crane had called Christina’s daughter to let her know that Christina was missing. She was coming home from college and would arrive by evening.

  “This is unbelievable,” Crane said.

  Moran frowned at him. Moran had been a cop for a long time and he liked to think that he knew what he was doing. He did not enjoy trying and failing to figure out a psychopath. Kurtz sympathized. “You know, we’ve been thinking of this guy as an idiot,” Kurtz said. “Crazy, but basically an idiot.”

  “That’s because he’s been doing idiotic things,” Barent said.

  “But he’s not doing them in an idiotic way. He’s doing them in a really smart way.”

  Moran shook his head. Patrick O’Brien grunted.

  John Crane winced and hung his head. “This is really unbelievable,” he said again.

  “And it’s obvious, really,” Kurtz said. His voice sounded far away. He barely even realized that he had been speaking.

  “What?” Moran said. “What’s obvious?”

  Kurtz shook his head, “Playing us for fools,” he whispered. “Of course.” He shook his head again and seemed to see them all for the first time. “The past is not forgotten and the guy who’s doing this is not an idiot. He’s been enjoying this. He’s smart. He likes being in charge. He knows his way around a hospital; he knows his way around a medical school, and he knows his way around an OR.”

  Kurtz grinned. “I have another idea.”

  “You’ve had a lot of ideas,” Patrick said doubtfully. “So far, they’ve gotten us nowhere.”

  Kurtz looked at him and grinned even wider. “Trust me,” he said. “What have you got to lose?”

  Moran frowned. “God knows, I don’t have any ideas.” He shrugged. “So, tell us, what’s the big idea this time?”

  Kurtz said to Crane, “Do you have Elizabeth Reisman’s number?”

  “Christina’s sister? Sure. She has an emergency contact list taped to the refrigerator.”

  “Could you get it?”

  Crane rose to his feet, walked into the kitchen and came back a few seconds later with a sheet of paper, which he handed to Kurtz.

  “Excellent,” Kurtz said. He opened his cell phone and dialed, listened for a moment and then said, “Elizabeth? Yes, this is Richard Kurtz. Remember me? We met when you were in New York. I have a question for you: what is the name of Christina’s ex-husband, the neurosurgeon?”

  “You see, Chris, you were supposed to be my wife.”

  Christina Pirelli did not answer, as her brain was still fogged by the ketamine she had been injected with earlier. He was speaking as much to himself as to his captive, who was tied up in an easy chair, her head lolling backward, staring at the lights flickering across the ceiling in her drug fevered brain.

  “A wife is supposed to stand by her man. She’s supposed to consider his needs as equal to her own, make a few compromises when it’s necessary for the sake of the partnership. Go where he goes, cleave to him and no other. Love, honor and obey.”

  Christina Pirelli groaned. Her head lolled back and she shuddered as the hallucinations and the words mingled together into an incomprehensible total. He looked at her as his breath came fast and his lips thinned back in a snarl. “God damn it,” he said. “I needed you.” And he wiped a tear from the corner of his eye with a trembling hand.

  His name was Alan Lane, an upper middle-class kid from Scarsdale, New York, who had been the apple of his parents’ eye and the pride and joy of Scarsdale High: Captain of the track team, solid A average, President of the debating society, respected member of the film club, the chess club and the woodwind ensemble, followed by four years at Princeton before medical school at Duke and then residency at Chapel Hill, where he met a young OB resident named Christina Pirelli. His parents had initially disapproved of the relationship since Christina was a divorcee, a mother and a Catholic, but Alan Lane had been entranced by Christina’s lush figure, ready laugh, no bullshit outlook on life and boundless energy in bed. Besides, she was a doctor. The way he figured it, a neurosurgeon and an obstetrician together should be able to satisfy all of their reasonable, and most of their unreasonable desires.

  And what had happened to all that, anyway? After all these years, he still couldn’t figure it out. He hadn’t kicked her. He hadn’t hit her. H
e hadn’t abused her in any way. He was ‘too controlling’ she had said. He gave her no space. No space. What the hell did that even mean, anyway? He asked her what she wanted to do on the rare weekends that they both had off. He asked her what she wanted for dinner. They discussed the apartment they would move into and the furniture they would buy for it and where they would go on vacation. They even discussed how many kids they wanted to have. It was a mystery.

  He clenched his hand into a fist, except that the fist didn’t work as well as it used to and the hand trembled and that, more than any of the rest of it, had been the last straw. The very last straw.

  “Wake up, you bitch,” he whispered.

  She moaned and she moved her head back and forth and blinked her eyes. He frowned and sat down and picked up a glass of Scotch with trembling hands and sipped it as he prepared to wait.

  Three hours later, Christina was dimly aware of her surroundings, though if she let her attention wander, the lights and the sounds that assaulted her brain could easily be overwhelming, but they were not as overwhelming as they had been. Vaguely, through the fog and the confusion, she realized that it would not be a good idea to let Alan Lane know that the effects of the drug were beginning to wear off.

  He had gotten up to make a sandwich, which he had eaten at the counter, all the while staring out at a dock and a small boat floating in the water at the end of a sloping, grassy yard. Dimly, through the fog in her brain, she noticed that his hair was just as blond, his eyes just as blue as they had been when she had first met him, all those years ago, the golden boy of the Department of Neurosurgery.

  When he was done, he stacked the dishes on the counter, then sank back down on a couch across from the easy chair where Christina lay sprawled. They appeared to be in a den, with large windows facing the back, a large flat screen TV on one wall, a series of book cases on the adjacent wall and two doors into the room, both of which were closed. A cigar smoldered in an ashtray. Sitting next to the ashtray was what appeared to be a large aluminum can.