The late-night supper had been the first fabulous meal Jeremy had enjoyed in . . . years.
Where did he fit in the donut-hole continuum?
Observer, ever the diarist.
When he got to his office, a note from the Head of Oncology was in his box.
JC: Perused your chapter. Here are a few suggestions but all in all, fine. When can we look forward to a completed manuscript?
Also in the box was a cardboard box, stamped BOOK RATE, and postmarked locally.
Inside was a hardcover book bound in forest green cloth.
THE BLOOD RUNS COLD:
Serial Killers and Their Crimes
by
Colin Pugh
Twelve-year-old copyright, British publishing house, no jacket, no details on the author.
Inside the cover was a penciled price—$12.95—and black, rubber-stamped, Gothic lettering that read Renfrew’s Central Book Shop, Used & Antiquarian, followed by the defunct store’s address and phone number.
He’d never thought of the place as having a name, let alone a number—could never recall hearing a phone ring as he browsed. He dialed the seven digits, got a “disconnected” message, and felt comforted.
His name and hospital address were typed on the carton. He checked inside for a card or message, found none, flipped the book’s pages.
Nothing.
Turning to the first chapter, he began reading.
Fifteen chapters, fifteen killers. He’d heard of most of them—Vlad the Impaler, Bluebeard, the Boston Strangler, Ted Bundy, Son of Sam, Jack the Ripper (the chapter on the Whitehall fiend confirmed Jeremy’s graffiti recollection; the exact wording of the chalked scrawl had been: “The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing”). A few he hadn’t: Peter Kurten (“the Dusseldorf Monster”), Herman Mudge, Albert Fish, Carl Panzram.
He lapsed into skimming. Details of the outrages blurred and the perpetrators merged into one ghastly mass. For all their grisly work, murderous psychopaths were a boring bunch, creatures of morbid habit, forged from the same twisted mold.
The final chapter caught Jeremy’s eye.
Gerd Dergraav: the Laser Butcher.
Dergraav was a Norwegian-born physician, the son of a German diplomat father stationed in Oslo and a dentist mother who abandoned the family and moved to Africa. A brilliant student, young Gerd studied medicine and qualified as both an otolaryngolist and an ophthalmologist. Shifting interests, yet again, he served as a chief resident in obstetrics-gynecology at the Oslo Institute for Female Medicine. The war years were spent doing research in Norway. In 1946, he took an advanced fellowship in the treatment of obstetric tumors in Paris.
His father died in 1948. Fully certified in three subspecialties, Dergraav moved to his mother’s home city, Berlin, where he built a highly successful practice delivering babies and attending to the disorders of women. His patients adored him because of his sensitivity and his willingness to listen. All were unaware of the six hidden cameras in Dergraav’s examining room that allowed the doctor to amass a six-hundred-reel library of naked women.
Early details of Dergraav’s childhood were lacking, and author Pugh supplanted fact with Freudian speculation. One fact had been verified: Shortly after arriving in Germany, the urbane young doctor began picking up prostitutes and torturing them. Ample payments to the street women procured their silence. So did the absence of scars; Dergraav had a brute’s lust but a surgeon’s touch. Later interviews with the early victims revealed Dergraav’s penchant for humiliating his victims, and a secret cache of videotapes from the doctor’s later years showed him whipping, punching, biting, and jabbing with hypodermic needles over two hundred women. He also enjoyed plunging their hands into icy water and compressing their limbs with blood-pressure cuffs, then measuring time latency till pain sensation. Frequently, Dergraav filmed himself, as well, in close-up. Smiling subtly.
A handsome man, Pugh claimed, though no photo confirmation was offered.
During the late fifties, Dergraav married an upper-class woman, the daughter of a fellow physician, and fathered a child.
Shortly after, bodies of prostitutes began showing up in the slums of Berlin, cut into pieces.
Street gossip eventually led to attention being focused on Dr. Dergraav. Questioned in his office, the gynecologist professed surprise that the police would suspect him of anything sinister, and he evinced no anxiety or guilt. The detectives had trouble imagining the charming, soft-spoken surgeon as the demon behind the horrific mutilations they were encountering more and more frequently. Dergraav was filed as a low-probability suspect.
The prostitute butcherings continued on and off for nearly a decade. The killer’s disdain for his victims intensified, and he dehumanized them by mixing up body parts and combining them, so that limbs and organs from several different women came to be found bagged together in plastic sacks and left in trash bins. When forensic evidence from a victim in 1964 led the coroner to conclude that a laser had been used for dissection, the police reviewed their notes and discovered Dergraav traveled to Paris, yet again, to learn how to use the still-experimental instrument for eye surgery. This seemed curious, as Dergraav wasn’t an ophthalmologist, and they questioned him again. Dergraav apprised them of his ophthalmologic training, proved it with certificates, and claimed he was thinking of switching back to his former subspecialty because of the promise offered by lasers for corneal ablation.
The police asked if they could search his office.
The doctor’s consent was needed; no grounds for a warrant existed. Charmingly, smilingly, Dergraav declined. During the interview, he laughed and told the investigators they couldn’t be farther off the mark. His use of the laser was limited to academics, and the instrument was far too expensive for him to own. Furthermore, his gynecologic specialty was the surgical treatment of vulvodynia—vaginal pain. He was a physician, his mission in life was to alleviate agony, not cause it.
The police left. Three days later, Dergraav’s office suite and his home were emptied and padlocked and wiped clean of fingerprints. The doctor and his family were gone.
Dergraav’s wife surfaced a year later in England, then in New York, where she professed ignorance of her husband’s behavior and his whereabouts. She sought, and was granted a divorce from Dergraav, changed her name, and was never heard from again. Colin Pugh cited speculation that the doctor had been taken in by American officials as payback for wartime cooperation by Dergraav’s father. The Oslo-based diplomat had deceived his Nazi masters and passed crucial information to the Allies. However, this remained rumor, and subsequent sightings of Gerd Dergraav placed him far from the States: in Switzerland, Portugal, Morocco, Bahrain, Beirut, Syria, and Brazil.
The last two locales were verified. Some time during the early ’70s, Dergraav slipped into Rio de Janeiro using a Syrian passport issued in his own name and managed to obtain expedited Brazilian citizenship. Remarried, with a child, he lived openly in Rio, purchasing a villa above Ipanema Beach and volunteering his services to a human rights group that offered free medical service to the slum dwellers of the city’s fetid favillas.
Dergraav swam, sunbathed, ate well (Argentinian beefsteak was his favorite) and worked tirelessly without pay. Among the human rights workers and the favillitos, he came to be known as the White Angel—a tribute to both his pale coloring and his pure soul.
During his known residence in Rio, that city’s prostitutes began showing up dead and cut into pieces.
Degraav’s second reign of murder lasted another decade. In the end, he was snared by the most banal of circumstances. The screams of a prostitute he was attempting to asphyxiate attracted a gang of hoodlums from the neighboring slum, and Dergraav fled into the night. The thugs exploited the bound and gagged woman’s helplessness by gang-raping her, but they left her alive. After some indecision, she reported the doctor to the police.
Dergraav’s house was searched by Rio detectives, less concerned than their German cou
nterparts with due process. The cache of videotapes was found, including one in which the doctor reduced a woman’s body to forty chunks using a laser scalpel. In the film, Dergraav narrated as he mutilated, describing the procedure just as he would a bona fide surgery. Also retrieved was a suede box filled with women’s jewelry and a cache carved of rosewood, rattling with vertebrae, teeth, and knucklebones.
Imprisoned in Salvador de Bahia prison, Dergraav awaited trial for two years, ever the charmer. Jailers brought him international newspapers, literary magazines, and scientific journals. Catered food was delivered. Citing worries about his cholesterol, Dergraav ate less beef, more chicken.
Rumor had it that money would soon exchange hands, and the doctor would be deported under cover of night, back to the Middle East. Then German authorities learned of the arrest, requested and received permission to extradite. That process stretched on, and Dergraav could be seen sitting in the prison’s courtyard, relaxed, dressed in tropical whites, nuzzling with his wife, playing with his child.
Finally, the German authorities got their way. The day after the extradition certificate was drawn, Dergraav blocked the peephole in his cell with chewing gum, ripped up his jail-issue clothing, knotted the strips into a rope, and hung himself. He was nearly sixty, but had the appearance of a forty-year-old. The jailer who discovered him remarked on the healthy, peaceful appearance of the White Angel’s corpse.
Nearly seventeen years ago, to the day, Gerd Dergraav’s ashes had been strewn at sea.
40
Seventeen years ago jump-started Jeremy’s memory.
The first laser article had been published that very year.
Norwegian authors. Russians, an Englishman. He rechecked the names. No Dergraav.
It was the date he was supposed to notice. Origins in Oslo.
Seventeen years ago, a murderous doctor had hung himself.
Laser surgery, physician suicide.
Oslo, Paris, Damascus by way of Berlin.
Gerd Dergraav had been born and trained in the Norwegian capital, learned female surgery in France, settled and tortured and murdered in Berlin.
Escaped to Damascus.
Arthur and surrogates had traced the Laser Butcher’s bloody swath.
How long before a postcard of Rio arrived in the mail?
A pretty picture of Sugarloaf or the white sands of Ipanema or some other Brazilian panorama?
Dr. C,
Traveling and learning.
The cards had set up the pattern; the articles had filled in blanks. Laser surgery on the eyes, because Dergraav had begun as an ophthalmologist, before switching to ENT, the source of the envelopes.
Lasers for female surgery to match Dergraav’s final career switch: women’s doctor. Women’s killer.
Where did the English girls fit in? Dergraav was long dead by the time of their murders.
Why all this attention paid to someone whose ashes had dissolved in a warm, welcoming ocean seventeen years ago?
Then he remembered his night drinking with Arthur. Collegial time in the Excelsior bar that old man had been so intent on sharing. Telling that apparently pointless story. Predatory insects that burrowed under their victims’ skins in order to plant their parasitic spawn.
The moral he, himself, had drawn from the tale.
Sins of the fathers.
Arthur’s pet topic: the origins of very, very bad behavior.
When Gerd Dergraav fled Germany, his wife escaped to the States, changed her name, disappeared into the great American freedom.
Along with her son.
Dergraav.
Dirgrove.
Arthur laying it out for him. Wanting Jeremy to understand.
The son was here.
Now Jeremy knew that his initial instinct had been right: That day in the dining room, Arthur had been studying Dirgrove.
And, for some time, Dirgrove had been studying Jeremy. Watching, following. Jeremy and Angela. Such a sensitive guy, always there to listen to a needy resident. No doubt his patients loved him—a nice case of genetic charm. Merilee Saunders’s mother had been smitten, but Merilee hadn’t been taken in.
Freaky Dirgrove. Roboticon.
Now Merilee was dead.
Did Sensitive Ted have a camera hidden in his office? Today’s technology made that so much easier than in his father’s day, everything miniaturized, computerized.
Getting rid of the daughter, taking the mother.
The take was the core—Dirgrove had targeted Angela because she was already seeing another man.
Just as apes raided colonies of other apes, murdered the males, made off with the females, some humans did the same thing under cover of war or religion or whatever dogma was at hand.
Some humans needed no excuse.
A sickening realization hit Jeremy.
Sensitive Ted and Jocelyn.
Putting a face on his lover’s killer drove home the horror, and suddenly Jeremy was as wrenched and raw and overcome by weeping as the day he’d found out. A red film blanketed his vision, and he lost balance, had to struggle to remain on his feet.
He walked to the window, threw it open on stale air shaft fumes. Stood there, hearing the rattle of a generator, snippets of human speech, the wind. Heart tripping, breath raspy. Swallowing the scream.
Jocelyn, taken from him. Because of him.
Now, Dirgrove had turned his sights on Angela.
He forced himself to stay calm. Reasoned it out, still staring out at the air shaft.
Killing and dissecting was late-night supper for a monster. A nice girl like Jocelyn as the main course, street girls tossed in as snacks.
Angela as . . . dessert?
No, the banquet would never end unless the diner choked.
He thought about Dirgrove’s technique. Attracting Angela with his sensitivity. Being different than the other surgeons.
The same ploy his father had used. Charming Ted had been how old—late twenties—when his father hung himself. The barest progress from adolescence to manhood, an age of strong sexuality, strong impulses.
Well aware of his father’s impulses.
The origin of very, very bad behavior.
A bright man, a careful man. He’d set up the move on Angela with surgical precision. Inviting her over for a medical lesson, all the journals, bookmarked, laid out neatly on his desk.
Angela, ever the good student, begins reading, he steps behind her.
I can make you happy.
Had all that just been a setup—an appetizer—for his ultimate plan?
Had Dirgrove set Jocelyn up the same way? She’d never mentioned his name to Jeremy, but why would she? A surgeon conferring with a nurse was the essence of usual.
Would Dirgrove have had anything to do with Jocelyn’s neurology patients? If one of them had developed heart problems, sure.
Was it possible that he’d hit on Jocelyn, and she’d chosen not to tell Jeremy?
People talked about sharing, but . . .
Jocelyn had cared deeply about her patients. A doctor pretending to do the same would have impressed her, mightily.
Angela was a highly intelligent woman, and she’d been fooled.
Jocelyn, for all her street smarts, had been an innocent.
Easy pickings.
A surgeon showing up, late at night, in the nurses’ lot, waving, smiling wouldn’t have sparked any panic in Jocelyn. As always, she was overconfident, laughed off Jeremy’s suggestions that she not walk to her car alone.
A weary, white-coated warrior dragging his way toward her after a tough day on the wards would have evoked sympathy from Jocelyn.
He approaches her, they chat.
He takes her.
The more he reasoned it out, the more convinced he became that Dirgrove had toyed with him, too. Asking him to see Merilee Saunders but not telling Merilee. Knowing Jeremy would encounter anger, resistance, walk away feeling like a failure.
Taunting him by telling him he’d been a bi
g help.
Delivering the message through Angela.
The referral had been a sham.
Or something much worse? Was all Dirgrove’s talk about the risk of an autonomic spike simply laying the groundwork for what he knew would happen in the O.R?
Had Merilee been frightened about her surgery because she sensed something about the surgeon?
He’s a stiff . . . except when he wants to turn on the charm. My mom loves him.
Dirgrove hadn’t even bothered to inform Jeremy about the O.R. disaster. Had dropped the news in the cafeteria, after finishing a chat with Angela.
How had he managed it? The merest flick of his wrist after he’d flayed the chest, sawed through bone, exposed the pericardial sac, dipped lustily in to take hold of the pulsating plum—the skinless tomato—that nourished Merilee’s soul?
What’s the worst that can happen, I die?
Jeremy was due to see Doug Vilardi in five minutes. He took a detour to the ground floor of the office wing, entered the Attending Staff office, and asked the secretary for a look at his own curriculum vitae in the Academic Status File.
“Yours, Doctor?”
“I want to make sure you’ve got the most current version.” He was dry-mouthed, felt shaky, hoped he was coming across credible. Hoped she wouldn’t take the trouble to remove his CV from the looseleaf binder, but rather hand over the entire book.
“Here you go, Doctor.”
Yes!
He took the binder to a chair across the room, sat down, flipped to cardiothoracic surgery and when the secretary became involved in a personal phone call, tore out Theodore G. Dirgrove’s most current résumé, folded it hastily, and stuffed it in his pocket.
He hurried to the nearest men’s room and locked himself in a stall. The folded papers were burning a hole in his pocket, and he ripped them free.
Theodore Gerd Dirgrove. Born in Berlin, Germany, April 20, 1957.
A perfect match to Colin Pugh’s chronology of the Laser Butcher’s life: marriage to an upper-class woman, birth of a child, during the late fifties.
The Conspiracy Club Page 20