Deluge (CSI: NY)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  She opened the refrigerator. No peanut butter.

  Keith Yunkin sat in the comfortable, new office swivel chair. He had unpacked and assembled it the day before. It was the only piece of furniture in the office. The floor was polished wood and the walls freshly painted in what was supposed to be a restful green.

  Other furniture would be moved in, possibly today. The office and the rest of the building, now that it was almost truly finished, would begin coming to life. Keith listened for the sound of movers and curious tenants. He would hear them coming down the hall when they started to come in. Now that the rain had begun to fall again they would almost certainly not be moving in today. Plenty of time to pick up his duffel bag, slide open the window and step out into the rain.

  On his lap was a paper towel he had taken from a diner bathroom. On top of the towel was a half-finished sandwich, peanut butter and jelly. He was hungry. There was another sandwich in his duffle, an egg salad on rye. He would probably eat that too.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about Ellen Janecek. He had to complete the cycle. Everyone in the group would have to pay for Adam’s death. He had chosen Sunderland’s group randomly. It was a place to start, a symbolic place, a statement. After he had killed her, he would call the Times, the Post, the local news. He would tell them what he had done. He would give them details. Molesters would learn about the murders and live in terror thinking they might be next. Even if he was caught, they would sit behind locked doors in fear of someone else doing as he had done.

  The boy that the blank-eyed pretty Ellen Janecek had seduced was almost two years younger than Adam when his brother died. Better to be seduced by a pretty young woman than raped by a bear-faced middle-aged man, if that could be considered a choice.

  It would have been better if he had been able to complete the ritual within the twenty-four hours of the anniversary of his brother’s death. But he could do it today. Lots of time today. He couldn’t wait too long. He couldn’t kill on his brother’s birthday. That wasn’t a day for revenge. It was a day to honor a short life.

  He had to kill Ellen Janecek. The police would be watching, but he had to do it. His task was unfinished. He couldn’t leave it that way. For the sake of Adam’s memory, he couldn’t leave it that way.

  He didn’t know what he would carve into her soft white flesh. He knew it would come to him at the moment he needed to know. He was inspired by his brother’s memory, his parents’ agony and his own rage. It would come to him, but first he had to find a way to get to Ellen Janecek.

  French green clay is used for external cosmetic treatments by practitioners of alternative medicine. French green clay belongs to a subcategory of clay minerals known as illite clays. Rock quarries in southern France had a monopoly on its production till deposits were identified in China, Montana and Wyoming. The clay is green because it comes from a combination of iron oxides and decomposed plant matter, mostly kelp seaweed and other algae. Other components include montmorillonite, dolomite, magnesium, calcium, potassium, manganese, phosphorus, zinc, aluminum, silicon, copper, selenium and cobalt. Water removed. Clay sun-dried. French green clay stimulates skin and removes impurities from epidermis. Clay absorbs impurities from the skin cells, causes dead cells to slough off and stimulates flow of blood to epidermis. As clay dries on skin, it causes pores to tighten.

  And that clay was what Lindsay found in one of the epidermal surface specimens taken from the people at the Wallen School.

  French green clay, easily and inexpensively purchased at most health food stores, supposedly has curative powers when ingested. It is simply one kind of processed dirt, but Lindsay knew that people all over the world ate dirt, believed it was even a staple for health. The practice went back at least to medieval times.

  In addition to being eaten, French green could be applied to the skin to bring up impurities. It might also bring up fragments of glass.

  Lindsay needed a volunteer to spray glass fragments on and into his skin and then see if French green clay would pull the fragments out. There was only one readily available volunteer: Lindsay Monroe.

  If it worked, she and Danny would have a suspect.

  Stella got the call just before noon. She recognized the voice.

  “I just talked to the arson investigator,” Devlin said. “He confirmed what you found. Professionally placed explosives.”

  “Good,” said Stella.

  She was wearing her lab coat and gloves and sitting in front of a microscope examining a minute fragment of debris from the bomb site. Hawkes had gone to the DNA lab. He was now standing in the doorway, motioning to Stella.

  She held up a hand, indicating that he should wait while she took the call.

  “There’s more,” Devlin said. “Our investigator checked on the insurance. Doohan had a two-hundred-thousand-dollar policy on Doohan’s. He could have sold the place for six times that much.”

  “Maybe he needed money fast,” she said.

  “An insurance company fast? He could have sold the bar today, cash, for four hundred thousand.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” she said.

  “No,” said Devlin. “It doesn’t. Unless your talkative man in with the broken ankle is lying to you.”

  Hawkes stood in the doorway, arms folded, looking at her.

  “I should be hearing this from your arson investigator,” Stella said.

  “I asked him if I could make the call,” said Devlin. “Ulterior motive. Dinner and a movie. You pick the movie. I pick the place we eat.”

  “When?” she asked.

  “Tuesday or Sunday,” he said. “My nights off.”

  “Two questions,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “Are you married?”

  “No. Never even been close. What else. My father was a fireman. So is my brother. I have a sister, lives in Teaneck, has three kids. I’m a practicing Catholic and will remain so till I get it right. I’ve been a fireman for seven years. Joined the day I finished college. NYU, pre-law. I’m a Yankees and Knicks fan. That’s it. Life story.”

  “That could have waited,” she said, looking at Hawkes who was yawning.

  “Saves time,” he said. “I don’t mean it saves time so we can—”

  “Understood,” said Stella. “Devlin, I’m older than you by at least four years.”

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  “I’m good at estimating ages. Part of my job, though I usually do it on dead people.”

  “It’s part of your intrigue,” he said with a laugh she liked. “I mean the age difference, not your working with the dead. I work with the dead a lot too. Gives us something in common.”

  “Dinner and morbid conversation?” she asked.

  “Your life story?”

  “Tuesday night maybe,” she said. “I’ll find a comedy, something with Will Ferrell or Owen Wilson.”

  “Sounds good. You like Greek food, right?”

  “I like to eat,” she said.

  “Give me an address and I’ll pick you up at seven.”

  “I’ll pick a place and meet you there,” she said.

  “Deal,” Devlin said.

  She hung up and walked over to Hawkes.

  “Houston,” he said. “We’ve got a problem.”

  That was all he said on the walk down the hall to the DNA lab where Jane Parsons was waiting for them.

  “Two of your building explosion victims are related,” Jane said. “Identical twins, as you know, are the only people who have the exact same DNA, but close relatives—siblings, parents, even first cousins—have enough markers to confirm a relationship.”

  “Enough to go to court with?” asked Stella.

  “We could,” said Jane, “but a decent defense attorney can always create doubt. So this is just for you.”

  “The cook, Malcom Cheswith,” said Hawkes. “He’s related to Connor Custus.”

  Jane nodded her agreement.

  Stella was too weary to be stunned, but not
too weary to be very curious.

  “It’s all relative,” said Stella.

  “What is?” asked Jane.

  “That’s what Custus said to me in the hospital. Said it three times. He was playing with me.”

  “Let’s go talk to Custus,” said Hawkes.

  “Let’s,” said Stella.

  As they headed for the door, deep thunder rolled outside and lightning cracked somewhere not far away and the rain came down.

  Stella was confident that she would come up with the right questions for Custus. What she wasn’t confident of was what she would wear on Tuesday night for her date with Devlin. That would depend on whether or not the rain stopped by then. Like so many others in the five boroughs, she was beginning to think that the deluge might not end for a long, long time.

  To say that the pain was great would be unfair to the pain that was monumental, epic, even awe inspiring. He had felt pain many times before, a few which came close to this moment as he got out of the hospital bed.

  The trick was to keep the weight, all weight, off his right ankle. No mean trick, but he was accustomed to performing tricks.

  A greater trick would be to find something to wear. He could hardly escape from the hospital hopping on one leg in a white and blue striped gown that tied in the back and showed his sunny backside.

  He had spun a tale, but the threads were thin and would no doubt be torn apart by the doctor named Hawkes and the detective named Stella.

  Had he not broken his ankle and fallen into the darkling maw of the fetid earth, he would not have had to create the identity of Connor Custus. He, Charles Roland Cheswith, could have simply wandered off into the rain having pressed a button on his phone and disposed of his brother and Doohan. But Doohan had seen him. Doohan had run into the rain to stop him. Doohan’s alibi wasn’t in place.

  Doohan’s dentist had canceled all appointments. Besides, Doohan had second and third thoughts about the whole thing. The man with the Irish accent who called himself Sean Hanlon had told him that he had set up an insurance policy with a Dutch company for Doohan’s. Payoff price: one million and two hundred thousand dollars. Doohan had bought the lie and signed his name to the policy, which Charles Roland Cheswith planned to let fall into the hands of the police. Poor Doohan had, they would conclude, bought the policy, blown up his tavern and died in the effort, especially when Cheswith called the police to confess that he had been hired by Doohan to blow up the bar.

  There should have been no connection made between Charles and his brother, Malcom, the cook who would cook no more, the brother who had parlayed salary, a small inheritance from a co-worker with no relatives and some remarkable luck and skill at sports betting, into almost two million dollars. The two million, of which Malcom had proudly written his brother, was to be a down payment on a very small restaurant in Soho.

  Cheswith, well stoked with pain relievers, managed to stand.

  Charles had learned his bomb-making skills before he was twenty in Dublin. He had not been particularly good at it. He had the scars to prove it.

  At the age of twenty-five, he had taken to the stage, had become an actor. Dinner theater in Texas, Alabama, Louisiana. A rare, small part in a television series episode, twice as a corpse. People would recognize him on the street but have no idea where they had seen him before. Perhaps the highlight of his long and unsuccessful career was his appearance on a network game show in which he won twenty-six thousand dollars.

  Connor Custus had been a rather good improv character, especially considering the pain he had been in and the great likelihood of impending doom under water of such filth as to best not be thought of.

  He had succeeded in his performance and failed in his plot. Now, to get away, Charles Cheswith would have to improvise as he never had before. He still had hopes. If he could get away, get back to Australia, wait to be contacted by lawyers about his brother’s estate, he would be fine.

  There was no police officer guarding his room. He was not a suicide threat and he could hardly move from his bed with a broken ankle and full of painkillers with nurses checking on him. But he would do it. The great disappointment would be that the performance he would now have to give might be seen by few and appreciated by none.

  He almost fell as he took his first hop toward the door. He steadied himself on the night table. The plastic water pitcher fell over. The table quaked. Charles did not fall.

  “Harder than playing Stanley Kowalski,” he said, biting his lower lip.

  Charles had never really played Kowalski. He had understudied the role in A Streetcar Named Desire when it was being played by a soap opera actor in a summer one-week run at a dinner theater in San Antonio.

  Charles had eight thousand dollars in cash in the hotel where he was staying. He had a passport with his real name on it, an Irish passport. It was enough to get him out of the country.

  Time for the next hop.

  Hand against the wall, Charles made his way toward the door.

  15

  FLACK FOUND A VETERAN DETECTIVE in the precinct near the Gun Hill Road subway station. The detective, Stuart Bain, had been a friend of Don Flack’s father.

  “Buildings being painted,” Bain said, standing outside the precinct under an eave where he could smoke without violating the law and getting wet from the rain. “How big a place we talkin’ about here?”

  “Don’t know,” said Flack.

  “We’ve got a list we watch,” said Bain. “Unoccupied places being built, remodeled. You wouldn’t believe what people’ll steal. One place they took new tile right off the floor at night while the glue was drying. I’ll get you the list. But you know it might not be on there.”

  “I know,” said Flack. “How’s Scott?”

  Bain finished his cigarette, fieldstripped it and said, “My son, Scott, is off fighting in Iraq. Was a time he considered becoming a rabbi. You know that?”

  “Don’t think so,” said Flack.

  “Now all he’s considering is coming back alive and in one piece,” said Bain. “Come on. I’ll get you the list. I’ll go with you. Check it out. Guy killed how many yesterday?”

  “Four,” said Flack.

  “Maybe some backup wouldn’t hurt,” Bain said.

  “Maybe it wouldn’t,” said Flack.

  “Ellen?”

  She wouldn’t have taken any chances, not after she had been fooled the night before. The voice of the caller last night, the man she knew as Adam, wasn’t really like Jeffrey’s, but she had deluded herself. Not again. She was no fool.

  “Jeffrey?”

  She was alone in the hotel room. The room wasn’t as nice as the one she had been in the night before. She had the feeling the police were punishing her for leading Adam to the hotel, for getting Paul killed.

  The police had asked her to give them her phone. She had refused, said she needed it to stay in touch with her parents because her father was very ill, that she would tell the man in the bathroom if anyone called.

  This call had come at the perfect moment. It was almost a sign. The officer, David McCord, had gone into the bathroom. The phone had rung. It was Jeffrey. No doubt. But she asked to be sure, to be reassured.

  “Jeffrey, you sound—”

  “I have to see you,” he said. “Now. Soon.”

  He sounded like the sixteen-year-old boy he was, not the fourteen-year-old man-child she had first known and loved and wanted and needed.

  “I’m sorry, Jeffrey. I can’t. Not for a few days. Then we’ll find a way to be together. I promise.”

  She had almost called him “baby.” He didn’t like that.

  “I’ve got to,” he said.

  She heard the toilet flushing. Not much time. Seconds.

  “I’ll kill myself if I don’t see you today,” Jeffrey said, his voice definitely trembling.

  “Gronten Hotel on Twenty-seventh Street,” she said. “Room eight-eleven. Say you’re my nephew. Tell them I told you to bring me something, a book. Pick up a bo
ok.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jeffrey said.

  “Don’t be,” she said.

  This time she called him “baby.”

  “That was fine,” said the limping man, taking the cell phone from the boy’s hand and closing it. “You don’t have to be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “What’re you showing me?” Danny asked.

  Lindsay sat in front of him, palms up. The palms were almost beet red.

  “Palms without glass fragments,” she said.

  He held out his hands and said, “Palms without glass fragments. What’s your point?”

  “I sprayed glass fragments into my palms,” she said.

  “Sounds like fun,” Danny said. He grimaced.

  “Then I applied French green clay like the clay I found on one of the palms of the people at Wallen we examined.”

  “And you found?”

  “The clay didn’t remove glass fragments. I had to pry them out.”

  “That had to hurt,” said Danny.

  “It didn’t feel good. The interesting thing is I got the glass out, but I didn’t get rid of all the green clay stain. Our killer did the same.”

  “So we have a suspect,” said Danny. “Someone with a slightly green palm, swollen like yours where the fragments were removed.”

  “We have a suspect,” Lindsay said with a smile.

  “Wrong, Montana,” Danny said. “We’ve got two suspects. I took another look at the videotape, sections that hadn’t been altered.”

  “And you found?”

  “I’ll show you,” he said.

  It was Danny’s turn to smile.

  They moved down the hall to where Danny had set up the videotape.

  “There,” he said. “Students in Havel’s ten o’clock class going into the lab.”

  He stopped the image on each of the four students.

  “Got it so far?” he asked.

  “Nothing to get yet,” she said, standing behind him.

  “Right,” he agreed. “But now we go forty minutes after the class ended. I’ve isolated images of all the students. Annette Heights.”