Even before entering the office, Kit knew what each woman would be wearing. Very heavy and shaped like a salmon croquette, Jolanda would be in a circular piece of fabric with a hole in the center for her head. Proud of being slim and perhaps wanting to flaunt that in front of Jolanda, Margaret would be cinched at the waist with a wide belt and would most likely have accessorized with a crystal pin depicting some kind of insect.
Kit’s prediction for Jolanda went unchallenged, for her desk was empty. Margaret, though, was working at her word processor. She’d come to see Margaret because of her interest in travel. A reformed smoker, Margaret no longer headed for a cigarette on her breaks, but stayed at her desk and planned future trips by studying a large world atlas she kept close by, often picking obscure destinations purely by the sound of the name.
“Margaret, can I bother you for a minute?”
She typed a few more words, then looked up, a smile of pleasant indifference on her lips.
“What can I do for you, Dr. Franklyn?” Today, her pin was a large crystal bee.
“Is there a town in Japan called Koje . . . K-o-j-e?”
She thought for a few seconds and said, “There’s a Kobe. I don’t know about the other.” She reached down and came up with her atlas, which she held out in both hands. “But you’re welcome to look for yourself.”
Kit thanked her and took the tome back to her own office, where she thumped it onto the desk and sat down. After checking the table of contents, she turned to the picture of Japan, which spread across facing pages like a large green amoeba. Even before beginning her search, she saw something promising. The picture was divided by a series of widely spaced horizontal lines—latitudes or longitudes, she guessed. Along the left margin, each line was identified by a two-digit number. This led to the hope that 6181 was a map coordinate. But 61 was not among the numbers on the margin. And when she checked the top of the map, the vertical lines were identified by three-digit numbers.
Unwilling to let go of this idea, she began at the lower-left corner and worked her way across Japan town by town, giving no thought to what it would mean if she did find a Koje but feeling good to be doing something.
Japan had no shortage of towns, and that meant lots of tiny names to read, so that when she ran out of land at the upper-right corner, without having seen a Koje, she found a kernel of pleasure in simply being finished.
She closed the book and let her hands rest on its slick green jacket. So Japan was not the way to the killer. Her exercise with the atlas got her to thinking about great distances and how one traversed them. This sent her again to the Yellow Pages, where she looked up airlines and began calling each one, asking if they had a flight 6181, thinking the killer might be a crewman on such a flight. But no airline used that number.
This was impossible. To solve the riddle, she would have to be able to read the killer’s mind, and she’d never taken a course where they teach you to do that. She should just pack it in. No one could blame her for giving up on such a hopeless thing as this—no one except herself and probably Broussard.
She went to the window and pulled the blinds. Looking out over the city, she thought about her attempts so far to solve the riddle, soon seeing that they had not come from any logical analysis but had been desperate leaps into the wind.
So, analyze. . . .
Teddy’s call had shown her she needed to keep in mind the total picture, not just zero in on one aspect, divorced from the whole. That’s how she’d forgotten there were numbers as well as letters on the Scrabble tiles.
What was there in the big picture that had become lost in her thinking? Put that way, the answer was obvious. In both murders, the tiles were sitting on a section of the Times-Picayune. Was that significant or was the paper merely something convenient to put the tiles on so they’d be easily seen?
To assume they meant so little would bring that line of thought to an end. She therefore decided to take the other position and assume the paper was important.
At the second scene, she’d noticed that the Scrabble tiles were on the front page from the previous Friday’s paper. Making a call to the police property room, she learned that the pages left at the first scene were from Friday’s Sports section. Papers came out every day. Why did he use Friday’s paper both times? Was it simply because the paper was already in his car from the first murder? No. That trivialized the paper, and she’d decided it wasn’t trivial. So it was important that the same day’s paper was used in both murders.
Friday . . .
She went to her desk and flipped her calendar back to Friday—February 14, Valentine’s Day. And he kills by amputating a part of the heart. Her own heart began to beat faster, for this seemed like progress. Hearts . . . Hearts . . . Love . . . The killer’s wife had left him for another man. He’s killing other men for revenge. Wrong. He wouldn’t kill other men; he’d kill the one who’d crossed him, and maybe his wife, too. And the killer isn’t striking out in anger. He’s calculating.
Loves to kill? Could be it. Doesn’t help find him, though. Sensing for the first time an empty feeling in her belly, she looked at her watch and found that it was way past lunch.
BROUSSARD BRIEFED LEO FLEMING on the salient features of the two murders as they walked from the Hyatt to Charity Hospital, finishing up as they entered Broussard’s office.
“How can I help?” Fleming asked.
“On the first victim, the knife went through only soft tissue,” Broussard said, closing the door. “But on the second, it severed one of the rib cartilages. I was hopin’ you’d take a look at the cut surfaces and see if you can tell us anything about the weapon. They’re over here.”
Fleming followed Broussard to the dissecting microscope on the long table against the right wall, where Broussard helped himself to a pair of disposable gloves from a box near the scope and gestured for Fleming to do the same. He sat down at the scope and opened a wide-mouth screw-top jar sitting nearby. With a long pair of forceps, he fished a pinkish white nodule out of the liquid in the jar and put it in the culture dish sitting on the microscope stage. He returned to the jar for the second nodule and placed it beside the first.
“See you’re still usin’ the same filin’ system,” Fleming said, looking at the piles of papers and journals stacked about the room.
Broussard was so absorbed in what he was doing, he didn’t answer. Dropping his glasses to his chest, he leaned into the eyepieces and fiddled with the nodules until he was satisfied with their placement. Then he got out of the chair and stepped away from it, gesturing for Fleming to take over.
“All yours. I’ve got ’em arranged so the two surfaces produced by the knife are facin’ up.”
While Fleming examined the nodules, Broussard paced the room.
Seeing Broussard’s shadow pass by the frosted glass pane on his office door and wondering if he’d found anything of significance in the autopsy of the second victim, Kit knocked and leaned inside.
“Kit, come on in,” Broussard said. “You should be here for this. On the second victim, the killer wasn’t as precise as before. This time, he cut a rib cartilage. Leo’s checkin’ the cut surfaces for tool marks.”
Fleming’s eyes were pressed against the microscope eyepieces, his attention totally on one of the cartilage nodules, which he held suspended between the index finger and thumb of both hands. Dissatisfied with the angle of illumination, he reached over and twisted the limber gooseneck on the light and began to tilt the nodule back and forth in the altered beam. He did the same with the second nodule then leaned back and stripped off his gloves. “They’re pretty faint,” he said, “but I can see rills.”
“Knicks in the blade or serrations?” Broussard asked.
“Serrations.”
“Any way to tell how many teeth per inch?”
“If it was a saw, I could. But the curve on the tip of a knife makes that impossible.”
Kit had no idea why that would be, but it seemed to make sense to Broussard.<
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“What’s going on?” Phil Gatlin said from the doorway. “Or am I being too nosy?”
Broussard introduced Gatlin and Fleming to each other and told Gatlin why he’d brought Fleming in and what Fleming had found.
“Always helps to know what we’re looking for in a murder weapon,” Gatlin said. “Appreciate the help.” He looked at Broussard. “Same internal injuries on this one?”
Broussard nodded.
There was a pause where Kit could have mentioned the relationship she’d found between the newspaper and the way the victims had died. But on reflection, she realized there was really nothing to tell.
Broussard would have been grateful for any discussion that would have kept Gatlin from asking him the question he knew was coming, for he was struggling with a situation quite unfamiliar to him—confusion. And it was about to become evident to everyone there.
6
“That new hair give us anything we don’t already know?” Gatlin asked.
Broussard took a deep breath. “I’ll show you,” he said, going to his desk. He picked up two Polaroid photographs and laid them side by side. “This is the first hair we found.”
Everyone moved in closer. Broussard’s chubby index finger went to the fat part of the hair. “This is the root, and this—” his finger slid along the length of the hair “—is the shaft. This darker central core in the shaft is the medulla. There are three significant features to this hair: It has a narrow spindle-shaped root, the shaft is naked, and there’s no medulla just above the root. That makes this a restin’-stage hair, the kind shed naturally every day.
“This new hair—” his fingers moved to the other picture “—has a large club-shaped root. This clear material surroundin’ the shaft is part of the follicle. And if you look close, you can see that the medulla extends all the way into the root.”
Kit had no trouble seeing the first two features, but the third eluded her even when she bent down for a better look. The expression on Gatlin’s face was one of tolerance rather than interest. He obviously would have preferred that Broussard give him the bottom line without all the buildup.
“This hair did not fall out naturally,” Broussard said. “It was forcibly removed.”
“Could be it’s a hair that got tangled in his hairbrush,” Gatlin said. “He cleaned the brush, the hair falls on his clothes, and later it drops onto the tape while he’s working on the letters.”
“Two things wrong with that idea,” Broussard countered. “One, it’s unlikely this hair is from the same person as the first one. The first hair is a gray hair that’s been colored with a black dye. The second is a red hair with no dye in it. Generally, you can’t determine from a single hair what color a head of hair is, because we all have several different colors of hair in our scalp, but someone who dyes their hair would most likely treat all of it to get a uniform color. If this red hair came from the same scalp as the first one, it should show some evidence of dye.”
“Maybe one’s a beard hair,” Gatlin said.
Broussard shook his head. “Don’t think so.”
Gatlin seemed about to suggest another explanation but then appeared to reconsider. “You said there were two reasons I was wrong about the second hair coming from the killer’s hairbrush. . . .”
Broussard picked up the picture of the second hair and held it so Gatlin wouldn’t miss his next point. “See this dark band across the shaft?” He pointed to a region a short distance above the root.
Gatlin nodded.
“It indicates a degenerative change in the poorly keratinized zone just below the skin surface.”
“So?”
“That means the hair comes from a corpse.”
There was a silence as they all grappled with this surprising revelation.
“How do you know the degeneration didn’t take place after the hair was plucked?” Gatlin said finally.
“Any degeneration after plucking would go all the way to the root. Bein’ in the scalp apparently protects the deeper region.”
“How long after death before this band shows up?” Gatlin asked.
“Been seen as early as eight hours. Usually, it’s typical of longer times.”
“Not likely then that it could have come from the second victim.”
“Or the first one, either,” Broussard said.
“So what are you saying?” Gatlin asked. “There’s a body we haven’t discovered yet?”
“Certainly would fit the facts.”
“A body he decided to move several hours or days after death?” Gatlin sucked his teeth in thought. Eventually, he said, “I don’t get it. The other bodies were in places where they’d be found. And with him leaving those letters, he obviously wanted them found. What is there about this other one that makes it different?”
Broussard had no answer, a fact that irritated him as much as the supposition he’d accepted as fact earlier and that he must now confess. “I should point out,” he said, “that if the second hair didn’t come from the killer, it’s possible the first one didn’t either.”
It was now clear to Kit and Gatlin that this had always been a possibility. Rather than blaming Broussard for the oversight, they each felt at least partially responsible for not seeing it themselves when the first hair was being discussed.
“On the way over here, I had the feeling we were gaining on this guy,” Gatlin said. “Now, I’m not so sure. I hope the fiber evidence holds up. It’s not much, but . . .”
Broussard’s expression reminded Gatlin that they had not spoken of fibers previously. “Guess I didn’t tell you. The lab found a few white fibers stuck to the first victim’s shirt in the bloodstain. They said it was something called viscose. It’s an absorbent material used in camper’s towels. The way I figure it, the killer had to make sure he didn’t get blood on him, so he wrapped his knife hand in a towel.”
With nothing further to discuss, the meeting broke up and Kit headed to Grandma O’s for a sandwich. Gatlin returned to Homicide to do some paperwork.
“You goin’ back to the hotel?” Fleming asked Broussard after the others left.
“I need to do a few things here. You mind walkin’ back alone?”
“Nope. Don’t forget tonight.”
“I’ll be there. Thanks for the consult.”
“Just make sure I have to testify.”
Left alone, Broussard sat behind his desk, got two lemon balls from the glass bowl, and put one in each cheek. He reached across the desk and pulled the picture of the red hair around to where he could look at it.
A long moment later, he pushed it away and picked up the white folder Crandall Brooks had given him. Leaning back, he opened the folder and stared at Susan Brooks’s picture.
So many friends and relatives gone now . . . lives whose time had passed. Was his time passing, as well? Is that why he felt so ill at ease and out of step with this case? Was that how it began—forgetting to be cautious, seeing only what you want to be there, spinning satisfying facts from smoke?
Feeling very much in need of some time off, he wedged the open white folder between his electric pencil sharpener and his beaker of pens and pencils. He then turned to a task he could delay no longer and that he had no real interest in— putting the final touches on his talk for the session tomorrow afternoon, where he would face hundreds of colleagues with an address entitled “New Orleans: Food, Fun, and Murder.”
KIT STEPPED ONTO THE street and cast her eyes skyward, where the odds of rain had gone from a long shot five hours earlier to a serious possibility. New Orleans is several feet below sea level, the highest terrain being Monkey Hill at the zoo, built so the children could see what a hill feels like. And it is surrounded by swamps. Like most New Orleanians, Kit rarely thought about any of this. But occasionally, like today, when the sky turned pewter and hugged the city, she could faintly catch the sweet vegetable odor of the wild environs and was reminded that were it not for the huge pumps scattered about the city, it might well
be a swamp itself. Close behind this thought was the realization she had no umbrella in her office.
She considered going somewhere close, but out of loyalty to Grandma O, she decided to risk the longer walk. In case she didn’t make it, she stopped at a vending machine and bought a USA Today to use as a rain hat.
There was only a handful of customers in Grandma O’s when Kit arrived. On the bar sat a stuffed pelican, its wings spread, mouth open. Bubba Oustellette, the proprietor’s grandson, was up on a ladder behind the bar, affixing a small shelf to the wall above the long one holding Grandma O’s collection of stuffed armadillos and nutrias. As usual, Bubba was dressed in blue cover-alls and was wearing a green baseball cap. He was only about five four but made up for his lack of size by a good heart and boundless resourcefulness. He ran the police vehicle-impoundment station and kept Broussard’s cars running. On occasion, he’d done Kit some very large favors and she liked him immensely.
“Didn’t think Ah was gonna see you today,” Grandma O said, coming her way with a big grin.
“I sort of lost track of time.”
“Then you mus’ be real hungry.”
Kit gestured toward the bar. “Nice pelican.”
“Foun’ it in a shop over on Royal. Paid way too much, but when you see a stuffed pelican, you better grab it ’fore somebody else does.”
Kit had the vague notion that it was illegal to possess a stuffed pelican but was too unsure of her facts to bring it up. In any event, it seemed like a real dust-catcher.
“C’mon back,” Grandma O said, moving toward Broussard’s table in the rear.
Kit detoured past the bar. “You make sure you get it straight now,” she said, looking up at Bubba.
“Hey, Doc Franklyn. You didn’t think Ah was gonna put it up crooked, did you?”
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