Serial Intent

by Steve Bradshaw

  A paramedic’s head leaned in and checked Hutson’s IV and pulse. When he finished he gave a thumbs-up and passed a water bottle to Wolfe. “Mrs. Sorensen is doing fine, almost like she just woke up from an afternoon nap. We’re gonna run her in and let a doctor check her out. Oh, and she knows her husband’s dead.”

  “I’ll get Detective Hutson to the hospital,” Wolfe said.

  “That will be fine.” The paramedic left them alone.

  “How does she know her husband’s dead?” Wolfe asked. “Paramedics don’t tell patients anything. How would she know that, Joe?”

  “I don’t know,” Hutson said. “When we spoke this morning, she seemed not much concerned about it. I was operating under the impression he disappeared on occasion. I was checking off the boxes trying to track him down.”

  “Who told her he was dead, Joe?” Wolfe turned to the living room and caught the old lady staring in their direction. Surrounded by paramedics, her gaze seemed out of place. The intensity in the eyes did not fit a feeble old woman. She looked away.

  “I did not know until I read this text, Wolfe.”

  “Okay. Just tell me what you remember.”

  Hutson grabbed the water bottle and unscrewed the cap with a trembling hand. After a few swallows he took a deep breath and blinked like he had just surfaced from a deep dive. “I was in a chair in the living room, my back to the hallway and this closet. I saw something move in the mirror on the mantle—fleeting. I got up and turned. I blacked out.”

  “Can you describe the man who hit you?” Wolfe asked.

  “In the mirror, he looked big like you and me.”

  “That’s it?” Wolfe pressed.

  “Dark brown hair like ours. He was angry.”

  “That’s all you got?”

  Hutson rubbed his wrist. “A dark face.”

  “Do you mean poor lighting or a brown-skinned guy?”

  “I mean evil,” Hutson said.

  “Evil? That’s a strange description.”

  “The eyes were scary. He was snarling like an animal.”

  The paramedics rolled Mrs. Sorensen into the hall and paused at the opened closet door. “We’re taking her to the hospital now.” Wolfe and Hutson nodded. Mrs. Sorensen raised her hand and patted Hutson’s shoulder. The gurney rolled down the hall and out of the brownstone.

  Holding up a small tattered leather book, Wolfe turned back to Hutson. Like an old bible, the book was two inches thick with tissue pages. The edges of the pages were stained from age and handling. “Did you see this, Joe?” Wolfe asked as he watched for a reaction.

  “No. Looks like a diary,” Hutson said.

  “Whose diary do you think?” Wolfe asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  “It belongs to your dead man, Joe. Belongs to Dr. Jacques Sorensen.”

  “Really? I’ve not seen it.”

  “It was sitting on the kitchen table under the newspaper. Looks like someone forgot it, Joe. Some pages have folded corners. To be precise—seven. I counted them.”

  “Anything important?” Joe asked looking at his wrists.

  “Come with me.” Wolfe picked up Hutson’s IV bag and helped him to his feet. They moved to the living room by the dying fire. Wolfe draped the IV bag over the back of Hutson’s chair and threw a log on the fire. They both stared waiting for it to ignite. Wolfe watched Hutson struggle with his experience. What are you not telling me?

  “While the paramedics were checking on you, I called Landers from the kitchen,” Wolfe said. “He and Crowley were on their way out here. They were worried about you, Joe. They realized you were missing. They gave up on your dead cell phone. You probably have a dozen messages.”

  “I was tied up,” he mumbled staring at the dancing flame.

  “Yeah, tied up.” A kid could have gotten loose. “Well, FYI they got stuck in the snow. I told ’em you’re okay. They’re gonna meet us at the hospital, if they can get there. Snow’s getting bad. Been coming down steady. They’re on the other side of town.”

  “I’ve always liked the snow,” Hutson said under his breath.

  “Joe, we gotta talk about this diary.”

  “Okay. I’m listening.”

  “It’s bad, Joe.”

  “What do you mean, bad?”

  Wolfe held it up. “This appears to be Dr. Sorensen’s handwriting. We will confirm that later. For now, I believe we are looking at his life as recorded by him. It goes back forty years. I looked at the seven pages with corners folded.”

  “What did you find?” Hutson asked.

  “Dr. Sorensen—in his own words—was not a very nice man, Joe. He talks about how he killed some of his patients.”

  “This cannot be,” Hutson muttered.

  What’s wrong with you? Wolfe thought. That’s an odd reaction. “He took the time to chronical selected events in his personal diary. It must have had some kind of therapeutic value, like washing away one’s sins. The man puts down names, dates, locations, and how he killed each of these poor people. Of course we will check out all of it.

  “Dr. Sorensen says he had no choice but to terminate certain patients he could not help. He rationalized each presented an unacceptable danger to society—homicidal tendencies. He rants on about how he provided an important service, one few could understand.”

  “How long has he been doing this?” Hutson asked.

  “Looks like he killed his first patient forty years ago.”

  “How?”

  “He hypnotized them, or gave them a sedative and made it look like suicide. He talks about hypnotically planting conditioned responses for a specific set of circumstances. When those conditions presented, the patient responded automatically. Through the power of suggestion, Dr. Sorensen put patients in situations where they essentially killed themselves. He also talks about sedating patients and rolling them off a cliff or into a pond. The sedative would dissipate and the death would appear to be an accident or suicide.”

  “I find all of this hard to believe,” Hutson said.

  Wolfe ran his finger down the dog-eared pages. “Says here that one of his patients jumped off a balcony. He lived on the twenty-third floor, an apartment building downtown. A glass of red wine and a metal railing triggered the conditioned response to jump.”

  “I didn’t think a hypnotist could get you to hurt yourself.”

  “Maybe true for the stage acts, but I bet a psychiatrist has a lot more skills and control.” Wolfe flipped several more pages to reach the next folded corner. “God! This patient put a shotgun in his mouth. Sorensen says the subconscious triggers were an empty house and the thought to brush teeth before going to bed. Those combined factors led his patient to get his shotgun, load it, put it in his mouth, and pull the trigger.”

  “This is crazy,” Hutson said. “No one can make you do that stuff. I think the diary is no more than the wild rants and crazy imagination of an old and troubled psychiatrist.”

  Wolfe went to the next folded page. “This patient was instructed to drive her car into a brick wall when she was alone and her speedometer needle touched 60 mph.”

  “I can’t handle hearing this right now,” Hutson said. “I’m getting sick.”

  “Landers said they found Dr. Sorensen dead in the cabin in Algonquin. The good doctor was lying on the floor by the opened door. He was frozen solid. His back had been snapped like a twig, Joe—snapped backward. Whoever did that to him had to be very strong.”

  “It’s possible he slipped on the ice and landed awkwardly,” Hutson said.

  “There was a chair in the center of the room, Joe. There were broken ropes on the floor next to it.” He watched a drop of sweat roll down Hutson’s face. The room was cold.

  “You think he had a patient with him?” Huston asked.

  “It appears that way,” Wolfe said. “But this one broke the ropes and killed Sorensen. This one left the broken man to freeze, and to be dragged away by wild animals.”

  “Maybe Dr. Sorensen had
no intention of hurting this patient,” Hutson said. “Maybe this patient controlled everything. Maybe he did not intend to hurt the doctor.”

  That’s bizarre rationale, Wolfe thought. Why would you take the other side? What’s the matter with you?

  “They found something else up there,” Wolfe said. “They found a syringe on a windowsill. It had a full barrel and was uncapped—the needle ready to go. The syringe was probably filled with a sedative or poison. CSI is looking at it now. We’ll know in the morning. If you ask me, looks like Sorensen had plans to kill whoever was tied up in that chair, Joe.”

  Huston closed his good eye. His head throbbed and arm stung. He wanted to go home.

  “We need to find Dario. Maybe that’s who you met this morning,” Wolfe said.

  “Dario? Where did that name come from?”

  “He’s mentioned in the diary, the page it was opened to on the kitchen table. Maybe he was the one tied to the chair, Joe. Maybe he brought the diary to Mrs. Sorensen. It looks like you came here at the wrong time.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Dario may believe he did the world a great service killing Dr. Sorensen—a serial killer of the worst kind. Dario may have come here to deliver the diary to Mrs. Sorensen. Maybe he felt compelled to reveal the doctor’s heinous acts. Maybe that’s why she fainted.”

  “They’ve been married fifty years. If Dr. Sorensen was the monster you say don’t you think Mrs. Sorensen would already know?”

  “Can’t answer that, Joe,” Wolfe said as he closed the diary and slid it into his coat.

  “This is my case. I need that diary,” Joe said.

  “No. You’re a victim going to the hospital. I will take care of it.”

  “This Dario person did not kill us today, Wolfe. Why? It may mean he’s not the bad person you paint him to be. Maybe he was defending himself. Maybe he killed the doctor in self-defense. Maybe he didn’t kill anyone. This is all supposition.”

  Hutson’s nervous effort to defend a potential killer was odd. Wolfe would give him the benefit of the doubt. It was time to get the shaken detective to a hospital.

  “Are you gonna say anything,” Joe said grabbing Wolfe’s arms.

  “This Dario character probably killed Dr. Sorensen, Joe. I think he brought the diary to Mrs. Sorensen for a reason, and you got in the way. It is very likely this sick guy believes he escaped death. He likely believes he killed a very bad man. Dario might be feeling good right now, but we need to find him before he starts feeling bad again.”

  Twelve

  “The feathered cigar flew through the air like an injured sparrow.”

  * * *

  The bent old man with a cane poked along the edges of the tall marble buildings, his dark woolen coat dragging in the snow. Bundled beyond recognition he moved alone at a steady pace down East Washington. When a police car crawled by pushing a new trail in the deep snow, he turned slowly to keep his heavy backpack out of direct view. Through dark sunglasses he watched the cruiser disappear north onto Dearborn and smiled. It was something Norman Levitt rarely did when he was working, but the weather could not have been more perfect for an execution.

  He stopped at the edge of the Kimpton Burnham Hotel. Out of view, and after looking both ways, he straightened to his six-two stature. His coat lifted a foot above the snow. Norman collapsed his cane and slid the precision metal pipe in its designated compartment inside his one-of-a-kind coat. He converted his bulky backpack into a squared satchel with handles—another expensive piece designed for certain occasions. Norman left on his sunglasses to deflect the glare off the white snow as he reshaped his hat into a more appropriate cosmo look. He put it on with a tilt and slid the Wall Street Journal under an arm. He left his limp outside. With a proper stride and at swift pace, he stared at his watch as he crossed the hotel lobby to the waiting elevator. No one would bother a successful businessman on a timeline.

  When the elevator doors closed, Norman pressed fourteen and rubbed his thumb on his programed keycard inside his warm pocket. It pleased him most when the elements of his plans came together, like making sure the southwest corner room was out of service—unavailable to guests and not to be disturbed by management or maintenance personnel. That alone was not enough. Norman had to be certain its availability fit his schedule and that the conditions he created would assure him a twenty-four-hour window of privacy.

  Gaining access to the room in advance was not the challenge. Breaking the Italian Verona Marble bathroom sink was. It had to appear the fault of the Verona artisan. The crushing pressure had to be applied in a precise manner to cause an internal fracture along the interface of the rare multi-red onyx and Inca-gold mosaic inlay. The unfortunate imperfection in craftsmanship had to then leak enough water to seep through the ceiling into the room below to insure discovery on Norman’s timeline. His due diligence had already confirmed a replacement sink from Verona would not reach the Kimpton Burnham Hotel in less than three days. The corner room on the fourteenth floor was closed. The ideal location with a balcony and access to the roof had been secured. Norman’s target would be in his scope at 1900 hours.

  The Chase Tower, a sixty-story premier skyscraper and the eleventh tallest building in Chicago, reached for the heavens two blocks southwest of the Burnham Hotel. The meeting room secured by the CEO of the Babcock Boyle & Brayden Law Firm—Eldon Babcock—was more than adequate. Eldon had no intentions of sharing his newest client with the office staff. Holding the meeting at BB&B in the Willis Tower would have generated too many questions and attracted the attention of law enforcement and news media—something Eldon did not need. Fortunately his long-time personal accountant had offered the use of a boardroom at the Chase Tower. Available on Eldon’s date, the meeting room met all the requirements—secured enough for a presidential visit, and veiled from building personnel and the general public.

  The Cambridge Financial Accounting Firm owned the twelfth floor of the Chase Tower. Their boardroom on the northeast corner was strategically isolated from the accounting offices and had its own elevator. Eldon’s list of attendees would be screened by an elite security staff and kept out of view in the underground parking garage. They then would be escorted to the private elevator and depart to the only stop—the boardroom.

  Norman Levitt knew every square foot of the Chase Tower; he had obtained proprietary architectural drawings the day he confirmed the meeting had been set and his targets would be present. Norman knew the details of the underground garage, the twelfth floor, and everything in between. He knew the concrete, steel, and design specifications—the labyrinth of crawl spaces and ductwork, and the infinite conduits delivering electricity and security. Although he would only use a tiny percentage of this knowledge, he knew from experience any single piece of information could be pivotal if conditions changed.

  Norman also knew the materials used in the construction of the Chase Tower. He took special interest in the walls and windows that surrounded his targets—the shell of protection. He researched composition, thickness, and the angles of installation for each of the enormous panes of window glass. He studied the temperature changes and the wind patterns around the building, usual behavior and ranges of fluctuation. Each variable would affect trajectory of his projectiles. A single millimeter diversion at any point along the half-mile trek from the Burnham Hotel could produce several inches of deviation. Norman was an expert. He never missed. He would have each target in his crosshairs starting at 1900 hours.

  * * *

  “Thank you for braving the weather, gentlemen,” Babcock said as the last of the three private investigators sat down at the long conference table on the twelfth floor. Each held their favorite alcoholic beverage, a selection they had made upon arrival from the well-stocked bar.

  “Where’s Marcantonio,” Fitz asked, the owner and operator of Fitz & Menara Investigations. His red bulbous cheeks and pursed lips looked to be the result of sucking a lemon for a day. “I thought he’d be here. Based on wh
at I uncovered, I wouldn’t miss this get together.” Fitz flashed a two-tooth smile like a beaver. His small eyes darted to each at the table, but they ignored the irritating man they had known for years.

  “Mr. Marcantonio will be here,” Babcock said as eyes around the table found him. “I thought it best the four of us talk first. We need to validate our findings. It’s important I have a unified view before making recommendations.”

  Fitz sipped his vodka and leaned back already bored and hungry. Mark Cranston of Cranston-Peters LLC and Bert Michaels of BLM-Investigations could be brothers. Their lean stature, wispy gray hair, and fake tans nursed drinks like little girls at a cookout. Both nodded at Babcock with no emotion. For them the money was enough to waste a day or two. They were two of the top private investigators in the country with plenty of people working for them. When Babcock called them, and quoted the retainer fee, they both cleared their calendars.

  “I’ve reviewed your reports, gentlemen. Let me begin by thanking you for your participation. I know you had to make adjustments to accommodate my urgent request. I appreciate the speed and quality of your work—I did not expect anything less.

  “First, we will talk about the most significant findings, those shared,” Babcock said. “Then we can look at the outliers. Each of you will have an opportunity to amplify, correct, and/or to make additional recommendations. We have some time before Mr. Marcantonio and his team arrives. I expect them to step off that elevator at 7:00 p.m. sharp. That gives us twenty-seven minutes, gentlemen.”

  The sun set on the other side of the Chase Tower with little fanfare—the bland winter sky slowly dimmed above the foot of snow that carpeted the region. From the boardroom of Cambridge Financial, the string of red lights crawled north on Dearborn and white lights crawled west on Madison. Sparse pedestrian traffic dotted the sidewalks twelve stories down. When the office window blowers churned on, Babcock pressed a button on the built-in console at his end of the conference table. The large monitor dropped from the ceiling and the first graphic popped on the screen. The three adjusted their chairs and read in silence.