“Good day,” the boy said with a friendly smile, touching his forehead as if tipping his hat. Samir watched as he continued down the avenue, in his loose-limbed stride. There was something very odd about the young man, very odd indeed—and it was more than just the fact that he ordered his meat uncooked.
But he didn’t have long to ponder the encounter. A group of Catholic schoolchildren came bounding up the street in their blue and green plaid uniforms, dollar bills clutched in their hands, all clamoring for a soda or a bottle of water or an ice cream—and Samir had his hands full for a while.
But that night when he went home to Brooklyn he mentioned the odd fellow to his wife, Raina. “I just don’t know what it was,” he said over a plate of lamb stew and couscous in their cozy little kitchen. “But that boy was ... different.”
His wife plucked a piece of mint from the salad bowl and chewed on it thoughtfully. “How do you mean, different?”
“I don’t know,” Samir said, mopping up the rest of the stew in his bowl with a piece of pita bread. “Different. Odd. Maybe not right.”
Raina gave a little laugh and plucked a piece of lamb from between her teeth. “My dear, you are a man with such imagination. You should be a writer—you should write books about all the strange people you meet.”
Samir smiled. “It’s true—I do meet many odd people in my job. But this one sticks in my mind somehow. I can’t seem to forget him.”
Raina wiped her mouth with the pressed linen napkin and brushed crumbs from her long flowered skirt. “Come over here, you of the great imagination, and I will give you something that will make you forget about him.”
Samir chuckled and rose from the table. She was such a sly one, this wife of his, and he loved her for it. He bent over her and covered her neck with kisses, his fear fading away like late summer roses. She laughed and squirmed, and they both laughed and kissed with the dirty dishes still on the table. After a while they went up to the bedroom arm in arm, the aroma of lamb heavy in the air around them.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Elena Krieger smiled triumphantly, perching her curvaceous body on the front of Chuck Morton’s desk, arms folded over her impressive bosom. Chuck wasn’t going to like seeing her in his “spot,” Lee thought. He liked to lean against the front of his desk during sessions in his office. Lee wondered if she was taking the pose deliberately.
“So,” she said, “another interesting case. Difficult, but interesting.”
“Yes,” he said, running a hand through his curly black hair. His hair was getting shaggy again; he made a mental note to have it trimmed.
Krieger sucked in her cheeks and chewed on the inside of her mouth. On anyone else, it would look odd. On her, it was sexy. Her lips were large and symmetrical and painted red. He tried to think of something to say completely unrelated to sex.
“Do you know where Chuck is?” he said, sounding like a little boy waiting for teacher to return.
“I believe he is late from a meeting,” she said, studying her long red nails, which were exactly the same color as her lipstick. He wondered how she found the time to think about matching cosmetics.
He heard the sound of voices coming from the hall outside—loud, argumentative voices.
“We just got off a plane, for Christ’s sake!” a man’s voice said. There was an accent—European, he thought, but he wasn’t sure.
“Please tell us what’s going on,” a woman’s voice pleaded, with an edge of desperation just this side of panic.
The third voice was familiar. “Now, if you’ll both just calm down a minute, we’ll fill you in on everything, okay?” said Detective Leonard Butts. Lee could tell he was making an effort to be polite, but it was a strain. The detective hated dealing with the families of victims. Nobody enjoyed it, but Butts found it especially onerous.
The door to the office swung open and the detective stood there flanked by two very sunburned white people. The man was in the prime of vigorous middle age, with salty brown hair, a leathery neck creased from sun exposure, and a long, handsome Gallic face. He was only average height, but projected authority and intelligence—which was helped by the fact that he looked like a cross between François Truffaut and Charles Boyer. The woman was petite, elegant, and very pretty, her blond hair so sun-bleached it was almost white.
Skulking miserably along behind them, looking as if he longed to disappear, was Francois Nugent.
“Hello,” Lee said, offering his hand. “You must be Mr. and Mrs. Nugent.”
“The Doctors Nugent, yes,” the man said, gripping Lee’s hand with unnecessary firmness. His skin was the texture of alligator hide.
“Well, Doctors Nugent,” Butts said, brushing past them into the office, “this here is Doctor Lee Campbell, and—” He stopped, seeing Elena Krieger.
“Detective Elena Krieger,” she said, extending her hand first to Mrs. Nugent, who shook it, looking at Krieger in some amazement. She towered over the tiny Nugent, but there was no hint of condescension in the detective’s voice. She shook each of their hands in turn; when she got to Francois Nugent, the poor kid couldn’t stop staring at her. He swallowed hard and plopped down in one of the battered captain’s chairs in the corner of the small office.
“Nice to see you again, Detective Butts,” Krieger said smoothly, shaking his hand too.
“Likewise, I’m sure,” Butts replied. “When did you come on board?”
“Just today,” she said. “I got—”
“I’m sorry, but could you please tell us what’s going on here?” Mrs. Nugent broke in.
Lee and Butts exchanged glances. Butts’s expression was clear: You go ahead.
“I’m terribly sorry to have to tell you this, Mrs. Nugent,” Lee began, “but—”
“Call me Bridget,” she said, her voice shaking. “We already know that—that something happened to Candace, but—” She faltered and looked to her husband for help.
“We don’t have any details,” he said. “All we know is that she was—found.”
Francois shifted in his seat and stared at his shoelaces.
His mother glared at him. “She died in that—that place you took her to, didn’t she?”
He continued staring at his shoes.
“Mrs. Nugent,” Lee said, “her death may have been completely unrelated to the steampunk club she was last seen in.”
“Anyways, they closed it down today for safety violations,” Butts said.
“How did she die?” Mrs. Nugent cried, her voice almost a wail. “Was she—was she—?”
“There was no sign of sexual assault, ma’am,” Butts said gently.
“Then how did she—who would have—” She looked around the room as if the murderer were somehow lurking there.
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Lee said.
Mr. Nugent’s square jaw was rigid with tension. Lee noticed he did not put his arm around his wife. “What was the, uh—the cause of death?”
“I’m very sorry, but that’s something we are not releasing to the public at this time,” Butts said.
“Is that what we are—the public?” Mrs. Nugent bleated, her voice on the edge of hysteria.
Butts looked to Lee for help, but it was Elena Krieger who stepped in.
“You must both be exhausted from your journey—I believe you were in Africa?”
“Y-yes,” said Mrs. Nugent.
“A magical continent,” Krieger said. “I have spent some time there myself.”
This digression served to throw both of them off track. Fortunately, just then Chuck Morton arrived from his meeting.
“Well,” he said, gazing at all of them crowded together in the cramped office, “what’s going on here?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
It took all four of them to calm down Mr. and Mrs. Nugent, but they were finally able to persuade the parents that everything was being done to find their daughter’s killer. Meanwhile, Francois sat slumped in his chair, arms crossed, staring out the w
indow at a pair of pigeons eyeing each other as they strutted in circles on top of the air conditioner. He had already ID’d his sister’s body, but Mrs. Nugent insisted on seeing her daughter.
When Chuck Morton explained to her that an autopsy had been performed, she clenched her jaw and nodded curtly.
“I understand.”
“It’s routine in any homicide by unknown means,” he said.
“But why won’t you tell us how she died?” she asked in a voice so hollow and heartbroken that Lee had to look away.
“I already told them we weren’t releasing that information to the public,” Butts told Chuck. He turned back to Mrs. Nugent. “Did your daughter take any sedatives that you know of?”
She looked at her husband, who folded her in his arms. “Of course not!” he said angrily, his handsome face reddening under the tan.
“If she did, would you know about it?” Butts persisted.
“Of course we would!” he retorted, spit flying from his mouth. A tiny droplet hit Butts in the forehead, but he ignored it.
“Is that how she died?” Mrs. Nugent pleaded, her blue eyes wild with grief. “Was it an overdose?”
“I tell you what,” Detective Krieger said. “Why don’t I take you both down to the morgue so you can spend some time with your daughter?”
Lee looked at her, impressed. Elena Krieger was known for being temperamental—to put it mildly—but here she was handling the grief-stricken family with the tact of a professional grief counselor.
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Nugent. Leaning on her husband’s arm, she headed for the door.
Mr. Nugent turned to their son. “Francois, are you coming?”
Francois stared at the floor. “I’d rather not. I already—saw her.” His voice was almost a whisper.
“You can’t just stay here,” his father said impatiently.
Francois picked at something on the arm of his chair with his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t want to go home alone.”
“Well, you can’t just take up their time,” Mr. Nugent insisted, waving a hand at the Lee and the two detectives.
“Sure he can—at least for a while,” said Chuck. Poking his head into the hall, he called out, “Sergeant Ruggles!”
The ruddy-faced sergeant hurried in from the precinct lobby. “Yes, sir?”
“Would you show this young man around the precinct, please?” Chuck said, indicating Francois, who rose from his chair hopefully at the sight of Ruggles.
“Certainly, sir. Anything in particular, sir?”
“Whatever you want—just keep him occupied, will you? That is, if it won’t interfere with your duties.”
“No problem at all, sir—happy to do it,” Ruggles replied. “Now then,” he said to Francois, “why don’t we just see if we can find some handcuffs that might fit you?”
Francois smiled for the first time since Lee had met him.
“We’ll call you on your cell phone when we’re done,” his mother called after him as he followed Sergeant Ruggles into the lobby.
“Now then,” Elena Krieger said to the Nugents, “shall we go?”
Mr. and Mrs. Nugent followed meekly after her, leaving Chuck and Lee alone in the office. Chuck sat down at his desk with and rubbed his forehead.
“I hate that part of the job.”
“Yeah,” Lee agreed. “I think everyone does.”
“Right,” said Chuck. “You’d have to be a real bastard to enjoy it.” He picked up a folder containing crime scene photos and let them fall back onto the desk, then leaned back in his chair, stretching his long, trim body. He looked even leaner than he had been when they were roommates at Princeton. Chuck loved to eat, but if he gained an ounce, Lee had no doubt Susan would have him on a regimen of broccoli and beans. “What have we got here, Lee?” he said. “What kind of guy does this?”
“I guess it’s stating the obvious to say he’s deeply disturbed.”
“What’s his motive? Is it sexual?”
“That’s an element, certainly—but it’s more complicated than that.”
Chuck ran his fingers lightly over the glass butterfly paperweight on his desk. The insect’s golden wings, trapped in its glass prison, reflected pale in the early September light. “Isn’t it always?”
“But this time it’s really odd. There’s a disconnect between the bizarre nature of the crime and his level of organization.”
“What do you mean?”
Lee sat across from Chuck and leaned his elbows on the front of the desk. Outside the window, the male pigeon puffed up his grey and white feathers and arched his neck for the benefit of the female, but she remained unimpressed, pecking indolently at a crust of bread on the windowsill.
“To actually drain the blood from someone’s body is such an extreme act, the kind of thing you might expect from a full-fledged psychotic.”
“But—?”
“Psychotics don’t tend to be organized. The very nature of their condition makes it hard for them to function on a day-to-day level—let alone in extreme situations.”
“In other words, what makes him tick should prevent him from ticking quite so smoothly.”
“Exactly. To do what he did requires an amazing amount of planning, control, and organization—and yet who else but a delusional psychotic would have the impulse in the first place?”
Chuck stared out the window at the pigeons on the ledge. “Sometimes I wonder what the hell drives anybody to do what they do.”
Outside, the male pigeon closed in on the female. Seizing her by the back of the neck with his sharp beak, he pressed her against the surface of the air conditioner and forced his body against hers. With a rapid flurry of wings and feathers, the struggle was over in a matter of seconds.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The medical examiner’s office was housed in a sterile, utterly characterless institutional structure common in the 1960s, the kind of building that sucked the very idea of grace and style from the air surrounding it. Across the street was Bellevue, now a thriving teaching hospital, with numerous modern wings cobbled onto its venerable sides. The additions jutted out in a hodgepodge of architectural styles, sprouting like mushrooms from the main building, which was an impressive, solemn redbrick structure, dour and stern as a judge. To the north, on East Thirtieth Street, was the abandoned shell of the old Bellevue Hospital, now a homeless shelter.
Lee and Butts took the creaky elevator down to the toxicology lab—appropriately enough, it was in the basement. Riding in the scuffed elevator car, Lee could only guess at the number of bloated, bloody, bruised, or beaten bodies that lay in the freezers awaiting autopsy, for their livers, spleens, or stomachs to be removed, chopped, or blended before making their way to the pathologist, geneticist, or toxicologist, to be catalogued, boxed, and bottled, their last physical presence on earth to be a few grey, foul-smelling ounces of pulpy liquid in a plastic laboratory vial. The physical signs left behind by violence always struck him as sinister and mysterious, like a trail of bread crumbs leading to a witch’s hut deep in the woods.
The workers in the toxicology lab were a curious, nerdy bunch, quiet and mysterious as snails. Greasy of hair and narrow-shouldered, they wore thick, old-fashioned glasses and mismatched, stained clothing. He and Detective Butts stood watching as they moved among the humming, whirring machinery, their grubby, unmanicured fingers deftly manipulating the dials and buttons lining rows of mass spectrometers and liquid chromatographs.
Butts approached a pasty-faced man in a plaid sweater vest.
“We’re here to see Ivana Jankovic.”
The man stared at him through thick spectacles, then pointed to a small office at the far end of the lab.
“She stepped out. You’re welcome to wait in her office.”
Lee watched as a round-shouldered gnome of a woman of indeterminate age with flat, thinning brown hair transferred a beaker to a whirring mass spectrometer, adroitly navigating the maze of machines and racks of neatly labeled specim
en jars.
He imagined her spending the night within these walls, the grimy windows and faded walls as unglamorous as their inhabitants. She and her colleagues had hairless white skin, as though they had spent their entire lives underground.
Butts nudged his arm. “I’m getting tired of waiting—when did they say she’d be back?”
As if in answer to his question, Ivana Jankovic strode into the room. She was strikingly attractive, so unlike her colleagues that she seemed out of place. Her honey-brown hair was swept up in a chignon, and she wore an ankle-length brown knit sweater dress that hugged her ample curves, over long black leather boots. A yellow silk scarf circled her neck, as if flung there carelessly as an afterthought.
“Hello, I’m Dr. Jankovic,” she said, offering an exquisitely manicured hand. “What can I do for you?” Her accent was exotic—probably Eastern European.
“Detective Leonard Butts,” Butts said, shaking her hand. “This is Dr. Lee Campbell. We called earlier about the—”
“Ah, yes—the Van Cortlandt Vampire,” she said, leading them into her office. “I have the tox screen on my desk.”
“We appreciated you putting a rush on it,” Lee said as they entered the small but tidy room.
“I hope it doesn’t make us sound too callous,” she said, sitting at her desk. “But we’re all kind of amazed by it.”
Lee tried to imagine the mole-like creatures in the next room expressing emotion of any kind, but couldn’t manage it.
“We just had a few questions for you, if you don’t mind,” Butts said.
“So you’ve already seen the tox screen?”
“Yeah. We were just wondering about the level of sedatives in her system.”
She leaned back in her chair, arms folded over her rather luscious chest. “What about it?”
“Would it be enough to cause unconsciousness?”
“Oh, sure. That level of any benzodiazepine would render almost anyone unconsciousness—and she wasn’t very big, so I’d say definitely, in her case.”
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