Deluge (CSI: NY)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Come in,” Paul said calmly.

  Keith limped into the room, closing the door behind him. Could Paul lure him farther in, away from the door? If he could just get him away from the door, Paul could beat him into the corridor. Where the hell was the real cop, the cop who was supposed to be guarding him?

  “Let’s talk,” said Sunderland.

  “About what?”

  “You,” said Sunderland.

  “Nothing to say,” said Keith.

  They stood facing each other. Keith stood between Paul and the door.

  “I didn’t molest that boy,” said Sunderland.

  “You’re lying,” said Keith evenly.

  Sunderland shook his head and said, “No. The boy lied. That lie changed my life, almost ruined it.”

  “In the sessions, you said—” Keith began.

  “I needed the confidence of everyone in the group if I was going to help them. I needed your confidence. I never got it.”

  Keith Yunkin hesitated.

  “You’re lying to save your life,” he said.

  “No, I’m telling the truth.”

  Sunderland’s eyes met Keith’s. He was convincing. Paul Sunderland made his living by being convincing. Keith was not convinced. He took the knife out of his pocket and flipped it open.

  Sunderland played it out, eyes meeting Keith’s with sympathy he really felt and with fear, which he hid.

  Paul made his dash for the door. Paul didn’t make it.

  Mac got to the hotel lobby just before Flack arrived. When they got off the elevator on the sixth floor, they found Mike Danielson, the uniformed officer who had been guarding Paul Sunderland, kicking against the door of a linen closet in which he sat, hands tied behind his back. His head was a hood of blood.

  “Didn’t see him,” Danielson muttered as Mac pressed a gauze pad from his kit against the wound. “Did he…?”

  Flack untied Danielson quickly. Then he joined Mac, who was headed for Sunderland’s room. The door was closed but not locked.

  Paul Sunderland lay on the musty carpeting, pants and underwear pulled down, shoeless, head turned to his left, looking at nothing.

  “What do you see?” asked Flack.

  “Rage,” said Mac, wiping blood away from the dead man’s thigh. “And this.”

  Flack looked over the kneeling Mac’s shoulder, saw the letter M cut deeply into the flesh, checked his watch and said, “He got it done in one day, the anniversary of his brother’s death, A-D-A-M.”

  “One question left,” said Mac.

  “What?” asked Flack.

  “Is he done spelling?” asked Mac.

  13

  MORNING. THE MAN KNOWN as JIM PARK, whose name had been Jung Park before he legally changed it, was late for work. He had never been late, not in the six years he had worked for Sunstar Digital Service Laboratories. Damned subway. He would explain the situation to Walter Parasher, whose name before he legally changed it was Akram, which meant “most generous,” which Jim sincerely hoped would be his guiding principle when Jim walked tardily into the office.

  It would have helped if Jim were not considered to be the company comic. It would have helped if Jim’s efforts at jokes were appreciated or understood by his Indian bosses, particularly Walter. It did help that Jim was brilliant, though he often feared that his skill was not enough to save him in a downsizing. What he did came easily to Jim and so he doubted his value and assumed others could easily do what he did. They could not.

  Jim was an electrical engineer, a research engineer whose task was to use computer technology to chart patterns in the billions of stars around us, and to locate new stars and galaxies.

  Jim never looked through a telescope. Remote scanning devices around the world fed data into the company’s computer network and Jim, in his office in Manhattan, separated the noise and dirt of the universe from the objects of interest.

  Jim was thirty-nine, recently married to an Irish American woman named Sioban, who was already pregnant.

  Twenty minutes ago, he had stood on the platform in the damp for forty minutes, people jostling, coughing, bumping into him. Jim was a patient man, but he had to get to work.

  In his hurry, when he got off the train at Union Square, Jim had stepped onto a piece of cardboard in the gutter. His foot had gone through the soaked cardboard and into six inches of filthy water that now clung to his socks and squished inside his shoe.

  Inside the office building now, he recognized no one going for the elevator. None of the familiar faces. They must all have made it on time. How had they done it?

  The elevator doors closed. Only two others in the car. They knew each other, and seemed to be in no hurry. One was a pretty woman in her forties in a black dress and a very broad belt. The other, a man in his fifties, stocky, well dressed, his shoes and feet not wet and reeking of filth. Did they smell the mess on his pants, socks, inside his shoe?

  Jim was breathing hard. He had used his inhaler fifteen minutes after he got to the subway platform. It was a little too soon to use it again, but it was an emergency. He did not want to face Walter reeking and wheezing.

  He reached into his pocket for the inhaler and his cell phone to check for messages and found something else, something hard, metallic, something that had not been there an hour ago.

  Jim pulled the object out and held it before him, adjusting his glasses. There were brown spots on the otherwise gleaming metal. He looked at the other two people on the elevator to see if they were watching. Jim knew what he held. What he did not know and did not expect was that he had just touched something that flipped open the razor-sharp, blood-covered blade of the knife.

  The pretty woman saw the knife in his hand. She let out a sound, not quite a scream, more like an inflated balloon whose mouthpiece had been pulled tight. The man noticed now. He had a briefcase. He reached into it, fumbled for something.

  “No,” said Jim, knife in hand.

  The man took his hand out of the briefcase. He was holding a very small gun. The woman was behind the man.

  “I don’t—” Jim said.

  The man with the briefcase shot him.

  It wasn’t a fatal wound or even a very bad one. The small bullet entered his left shoulder and stayed there.

  Jim dropped the knife and slumped back against the elevator wall as the doors opened.

  “Don’t move,” said the man, his voice quavering. And then to the woman. “Get help.”

  It was just a little after ten-fifteen and already the worst day of Jim’s life.

  For some reason, the meaning of his Korean name, Jung, came to mind. Righteous. His name meant righteous. He felt not the least bit righteous at the moment.

  The silver and black metal box about the size of a small carry-on sat on the desk, its cover swung open. Lindsay plugged the black fiber-optic cable into the box. At the end of the cable was a switch and a 400-watt lamp. She set the dial in the box to one of the six wavelength settings. The wavelength she selected would reveal even minute fragments of glass when the light was on. Then she selected a pair of orange goggles.

  They were seated in a conference room connecting to both the corridor and the headmaster’s office at the Wallen School. Walnut table and twelve matching chairs. Portraits of Wallen’s four previous headmasters and one previous headmistress on the walls.

  Danny wasn’t impressed, which would have been a minor disappointment to the board of Wallen, which had spent almost ninety thousand dollars to make the room look impressive and a little intimidating.

  “And that will do what?” asked the headmaster, looking at the metal box on the table.

  Headmaster Marvin Brightman looked as if he had beaten out at least ten contenders for the role of headmaster in a movie about prep schools. He was perfect, lean, tailored suit and tie with blue and white stripes, a cloud of white hair, an intense, handsome dark face.

  “It’ll help us in our investigation,” said Danny.

  “Can you be a little m
ore specific?” Brightman asked. “They are going to ask.”

  “We’ll give them an answer,” said Danny.

  “It wasn’t easy to get permission from the parents,” Brightman said.

  “But you got it,” said Danny, sitting.

  “I told them, as you suggested, that it is in the best interest of Wallen, the students and the parents, to resolve this situation as soon as possible and eliminate their students of all suspicion.”

  “And they’ll all be here?” asked Lindsay.

  “They’ll all be here,” said Brightman.

  “They believed you,” said Danny.

  “They thought that I was giving them a line of total bullshit,” said Brightman. “These are not stupid people. But they didn’t have much choice other than to refuse to cooperate, which would make their children look guilty.”

  “So they aren’t happy with you right now?” asked Danny.

  Brightman shook his head and smiled.

  “Detective, you have a gift for understatement. The only people they are less happy with than me is the two of you. The difference is that you can live with their displeasure. I have to deal with it. My ass may well be on the line. Will you be done by eleven?”

  “Yes,” said Lindsay.

  “Good, we have an assembly scheduled at that time to honor Alvin Havel’s memory. It would be good if you had his killer in hand by then, not that I have any great expectations of that. I have a school full of frightened people.”

  “No guarantees,” said Danny.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Let’s get started,” said Lindsay.

  “Let’s,” said Brightman.

  Danny and Lindsay had arrived at nine and met with Bill Hexton, the Wallen security officer in the empty school lunchroom over coffee.

  “Who has access to the video room?” Danny had asked.

  “Me, Joe Feragmi and Liz Henning, both half-time security,” Hexton had said, shaking his head. “Joe’s retired NYPD. Liz was a deputy in the sheriff’s department in Westchester. She got married last year. Husband’s an architect.”

  “And that’s it?” asked Lindsay.

  “No,” said Hexton. “Joe and Liz can get in there with their pass key, but so can Mr. Brightman and whoever’s on the night cleaning crew.”

  “Who else?” asked Danny.

  “Everyone,” said Hexton, adjusting his tie. “We don’t lock the door during the day, just close it. A student, a teacher, a secretary could go in.”

  “So that narrows it down to everyone,” said Danny.

  “Yes,” said Hexton. “Sorry. We’ve never had any reason to—”

  “How long would they have?” asked Lindsay. “In the video room before someone saw them?”

  “Not long,” said Hexton. “Ten minutes max. Not enough time to doctor the tape and you couldn’t be sure one of my people didn’t show up, but…”

  “But?” said Danny, reaching for the coffee carafe.

  The coffee was good, but what would you expect at the Wallen School?

  “Yesterday was crazy,” said Hexton. “I was on alone when Mr. Havel was killed. I don’t think I was in the video room for more than half an hour all day.”

  “And the door was open?” asked Lindsay.

  “Unlocked,” said Hexton. “We’ve never had a problem with the video room before.”

  “You’ve got one now,” said Danny.

  “Big time,” Hexton agreed.

  “Any of the students in Havel’s class know enough tech to alter the tapes?” asked Lindsay.

  “All of them, probably,” said Hexton. “It’s not that hard. It just takes a little time.”

  “How much time?” asked Danny. “How long would it take someone to make those changes to the tape?”

  “I don’t know…. Maybe twenty minutes. Maybe fifteen.”

  “Anyone fooling with the tapes ran the risk of being caught in the act, right?” said Danny.

  “Not if there were two of them,” said Lindsay. “One to alter the tape, the other to watch for security to return.”

  The call from Mac came while Stella sat in a chair at Connor Custus’s bedside. She had more questions for Custus, who pretended to be asleep.

  Custus had seen a soft orange-red when Stella focused a light on his closed eyes. There was no rapid eye movement under the lids, no vibration to show that he was dreaming. What she did see was a slight occasional movement that told her that Custus was faking.

  She could have called him on his deception. She could have turned him over to the district attorney’s office, but she had questions and she knew she was unlikely to get anything from the man other than more games and lots of talk. Stella was patient, but she was also tired and the chair was not comfortable.

  When her cell phone rang, Stella quickly checked the charge in her battery. It had enough. She checked the caller ID and said, “Mac.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “A few loose ends,” she said.

  “Tie it up. I need you on the mutilation case.”

  He quickly brought her up-to-date. She listened, glancing at Custus who had turned his head almost imperceptibly so that he could better hear the conversation.

  Stella asked questions. Mac answered patiently. Custus listened.

  “I’ll be right in,” she said.

  “No,” said Mac. “Just go to the elevator. Take it up to six and go to room six-oh-three.”

  “What’s there?” she asked.

  “I am. We’ve got a possible lead. He was shot.”

  “The killer shot him?”

  “It’s more complicated than that. Come up and I’ll explain.

  “Hawkes?”

  “He’s back at the lab with a knife our wounded witness found in his pocket.”

  “His pocket? The killer put the knife in his pocket?”

  “He did,” said Mac. “And I’m hoping that it was a big mistake.”

  “I’ll be right up.”

  She clicked off her phone and Custus, eyes still closed, said, “I gather from your end of the conversation that you have one very sick whelp you’re trying to bring to ground.”

  “Yes,” said Stella.

  It happens sometimes. More often than Stella wished it. She would track down a murderer only to find that she felt sorry for him or her or even liked the person. Connor Custus, if that was really his name, was responsible for the death of four people and who knows how many before that. True, he had not meant to kill anyone in Doohan’s, but the law called it murder. Still, Custus was a charmer.

  “I’m somewhat of an expert on murder for revenge,” Custus said. “I’ve worked for and with organizations that exist for the sole purpose of vengeance. It’s all relative. They tend to be dull and mirthless fanatics and no fun at a pub or poker table.”

  “Your point?” asked Stella.

  “Murder weapon in the pocket of an unwary and randomly selected traveler. I’ve actually seen just that before. It’s all relative. Why this traveler’s pocket? Because he had a wide and open pocket? And why not just throw the weapon away? Why take a chance on being caught in the act of reverse pocket picking?”

  “Why?” asked Stella.

  “Because,” said Custus, “he wants to be caught. He has a message to deliver to the world about the wounds he has suffered and he will continue to send that message through his murders until you catch him and give him a martyr’s forum. He leaves messages, doesn’t he?”

  “Are you a psychologist, too?” she asked.

  “Oh, far better and worse than that,” he said with a smile, looking directly at her now. “But it’s all relative.”

  Hawkes had spent three hours in bed after showering, shaving and making himself a protein shake. He couldn’t down solid food, not yet. He hadn’t slept. Each time he started to fall asleep he had felt the sudden sensation of falling, rapidly falling backward into darkness, knowing that if he didn’t wake up he would keep falling until he was too deep to awak
en.

  He had sat up moist with sweat, hyperventilating.

  The phone had rung and Mac asked him if he were up to going to the lab and examining the knife he had recovered from James Park. Hawkes welcomed the excuse for getting up and out.

  He had showered again.

  He knew the symptoms. He knew what was wrong. He would continue to feel the urge to clean himself, try to get rid of the imagined and real darkness of the damp pit he had shared with Custus. He could prescribe something for himself, probably would but he knew he would also have to deal with that fear he did not want to face, the fear of being entombed in an avalanche of filthy water and sharp-edged heavy slabs of plastic, plaster, metal and dead rats.

  If he was not better in three days, he would seek help, short-term patch-up therapy. The department had good people, good therapists. The problem, he knew, was that he would know what they would say and what they would try. It was the curse of being a physician. In the long run, even with help, it would be a matter of physician heal thyself.

  The best thing to do was to lose himself in work and Mac had just offered him the opportunity.

  Hawkes finished dressing. He had a knife to examine.

  Waclaw handed the diary to his widowed daughter-in-law. The children, Thad and Clara, were playing video games in Thad’s room. They had been told that their father had died. They had been told that it was an accident. The trick would be to keep the truth from them, an impossible trick given the ready availability of the Internet, emails, television news, friends who found out, newspapers. They were young, but they would, when they were older, find out. She would have to talk to them about it but Anne didn’t know how or when.

  Her father-in-law was no help. He sat in front of her, his heavy lids drooped, his eyes moist. She understood no Polish and Alvin was no longer alive to translate for her.

  The diary was on her lap, a clothbound book with the word “Journal” in black letters on the cover. Men called it a journal. Women called it a diary.

  The word “Journal” was the only thing written in English. The rest of the journal was in Polish in Alvin’s no-nonsense, highly legible but incomprehensible block letters.