* * * *
POSTAGE AND FEES PAID
GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION
PERMIT NO. RL-5704
OFFICIAL BUSINESS
PENALTY FOR PRIVATE USE, $300
TO BE OPENED BY ADDRESSEE ONLY, UNDER PENALTY OF LAW
PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT
The FBI investigates theft and misuse of government property.
* * * *
He was starting to wonder whether the murder of Ernest Pyzegger might be linked in some way to the conspicuous involvement of his firm in contract work for the federal government.
"That Doppler,” said Jitzi Swa. “Use by doctor to see if blood move."
"How do you know that's what it is?"
She took it from him and hefted it in her hand. “I know,” was all she said as she replaced it with demure authority on the cart.
Five more workers were now taking their lunch breaks. Auburn asked Ms. Swa to call the others to the dining area so that he could talk to them all together.
"I'm sure you know that Mr. Pyzegger was killed here last night,” he told them. “If any of you have any idea who killed him, or if you know anything at all that might help us find out, please let me know.” They listened with polite attention and, he hoped, with understanding, but none of them volunteered any information. Neither did any of them give tokens of mourning their late boss.
It was established with a minimum of discussion that the entire staff, including Ms. Swa, had been out of the building by a few minutes past five on the previous evening, only Mr. Pyzegger having remained behind. As Auburn had foreseen, they all alibied each other in the most matter-of-fact way imaginable. If some or all of them had conspired to torture, rob, and murder Pyzegger, it was going to be the devil of a chore to prove it.
Auburn left four of his cards on the nearest table and gave another to Jitzi Swa.
When he heard the buzzer again he went to open the door himself. If Kestrel had to interrupt his work to admit his perennial bete noire, Nick Stamaty of the coroner's office, the two of them would be at each other's throats in two minutes. Although Stamaty was normally a model of patience and restraint, Kestrel had the unique ability to get his goat by his rigidly doctrinaire methods and compulsive needling about trivial details.
When the two of them had finished independently mapping and photographing the death scene, they and Auburn went through the dead man's pockets. They found only the usual personal articles, including a wallet containing about a hundred dollars in cash. In turning the body on its side they uncovered a shiny steel implement that had lain concealed under Pyzegger's left shoulder.
"That's what they tortured him with,” said Stamaty. “Some kind of nippers."
"Diagonal plier,” Kestrel corrected him. “Don't touch it.” He might have been talking to a chance bystander, aged about ten.
Auburn summoned Jitzi Swa to the office and asked her if the tool belonged on the premises. Her answer was an immediate and categorical negative.
"How can you be so sure?"
"I know,” she said simply. “I foreman, work here twelve year."
Auburn let her go back to work while Kestrel sealed the plier into a specimen bag and meticulously labeled it.
"Okay, Nick,” said Auburn, “here's the puzzle. The people here say there was nothing in the safe but records. Not even petty cash. Then why did they torture him into opening it? And why did they kill him afterward?"
Stamaty had once been a police officer himself and Auburn valued his insights. He was a big man who always dressed in quiet good taste and had an unfailing fund of common sense and criminologic savvy. “Assuming the open safe isn't just a smoke screen to cover up murder in the first by a personal enemy,” he said, “I think our late friend was probably into something he didn't want the rest of the folks here to know about."
"Such as?"
"Maybe stealing or diverting some of the electronic devices the company worked on. Our beloved Uncle Sam has always been a sitting duck for theft and fraud. Maybe some of these gadgets have classified information stored on them."
"That's not something I want to hear,” said Auburn. “If there's any question of theft of government property or a breach of security, I'm going to have to call in the federal authorities."
"Wait a minute, Cy. Turn your head to the left again."
"What's the matter?"
"Oh, nothing. I thought I saw a gray hair."
Kestrel, who never theorized, was working his way around the office with fingerprint powder and lifting tape, his sharklike jaws clamped firmly shut.
Auburn looked at the dingy furniture and the dead man's worn outfit. “Whatever he was into,” he said, “it doesn't seem to have been doing him a whole lot of good."
"True,” conceded Stamaty. “But appearances can be deceiving. And maybe he only drifted into some illegal operation because his legitimate business wasn't doing him a whole lot of good."
"So you're thinking maybe he got on the wrong side of the people he was working with, and they cleaned out whatever he had stowed in the safe and then snuffed him? They would have to have known he'd be here alone at that hour, which normally wouldn't have been the case."
The walls of the office suddenly began vibrating with a noisy clatter as if a heavy truck had pulled into the court outside. Kestrel dropped his equipment and tore off in the direction of the entrance. “I need to go through that dumpster before they haul it away,” he wailed to nobody in particular.
Stamaty looked at his watch. “That's the mortuary crew,” he said. “As the boy investigator will soon find out."
He and Kestrel were both wrong. The buzzer resounded through the building as Auburn and Stamaty left the office in Kestrel's wake. By the time they reached the central wing, Jitzi Swa had admitted two Postal Service workers, each of whom was using a handtruck to deliver a bulky canvas sack the color of week-old meringue. Once the sacks had been deposited on a long counter in the work area, they were exchanged for two others filled with outgoing mail.
The low ceilings in the building, the total absence of natural lighting, and the pervasive chemical fumes created an oppressive sense of confinement, which Auburn felt all the more keenly when he caught a fleeting glimpse of daylight through the open door. Since he was holding Pyzegger's ring of keys in his hand, a search of the dead man's car suggested itself with irresistible logic.
He didn't mention this to Kestrel, who had gone back to work in Pyzegger's office, because Kestrel would have wanted to turn the operation into a full-scale archaeologic expedition. Auburn and Stamaty put on rubber gloves and gave the car a quick but thorough inspection, finding absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Kestrel could collect the dirt from the ashtrays and examine the distributor cap for alien fingerprints at his leisure.
In the work zone, Jitzi Swa was supervising the transfer of parcels from the newly arrived postal sacks to an empty cart. Six of the staff were now at lunch. They dined in almost total silence, as might have been expected of relatives who spent not only their workday but their time at home together.
Auburn turned over Pyzegger's car keys to Kestrel. Then he went to Yarst's office, now vacant, and placed a call to the dead man's widow at her work number. Sylvia Pyzegger was assistant personnel director at Quintilian Corporation. Auburn's call was answered by a secretary. “Was this about a job application, sir?"
Auburn smiled faintly, reading her mind as plainly as a poster on a fence. Her gracious manner, including the “sir,” told him that she had sensed from his speech that he was African American. Quintilian, a major manufacturing firm and a force in the community, had been getting increasing flak lately from the press and private interest groups who claimed it didn't hire ethnic minorities in key positions.
"No, this is a private call."
"All right. Ms. Pyzegger isn't at her desk right now. Would you like to leave her a voice-mail message?"
"No, thanks. I have her home phone number."
<
br /> At that number he got an answering machine and chose not to leave a message there either. Although, to the best of his knowledge, Pyzegger had lived alone since being separated from his wife, he placed a call to his home address on the off chance of finding someone there. Again he got only an answering machine.
Stamaty, who couldn't leave the premises until the crew removed Pyzegger's remains to the mortuary, had lingered outside in the raw, misty air rather than return to the tomblike interior of the building.
"Nick, I'm going to go have a look around Pyzegger's place. With your permission."
Under county law the dead man's personal property, including his house and its contents and the keys thereto, remained in the custody of the coroner pending a ruling on the cause and circumstances of his death.
"And leave me stuck here with the King of the Hill?"
Kestrel had just climbed into the waste receptacle in front of the door and was now wading among the rubbish it contained, including probably hundreds of empty green mailers.
"Come on over after your guys get here. You've got the address."
Auburn found a car in the driveway of Pyzegger's very modest place on Audubon Drive and most of the windows wide open to the March wind. His ring at the door was answered by a woman eating an apple. A large and noisy Irish setter thrashed and postured behind her.
Auburn showed identification. The woman was Sylvia Pyzegger.
"When I heard Ernest hadn't been home all night,” she said, oddly avoiding any mention of Pyzegger's death, “I came over to feed the dog. I mean, he's my dog too. And this is my house, as far as that goes. We were never legally separated."
Sylvia Pyzegger was the archetypal big blonde—exuberantly upholstered, flushed with health (or maybe a little overdone at the tanning salon), forever moving but seemingly never quite able to catch up with her chin. There was no trace of grief in her appearance or demeanor. She shut the dog in the garage and they sat down to talk while she finished her apple in a bleak and dusty living room where a frigid breeze rattled bric-a-brac and plucked at the curtains.
Auburn gave her an outline of the facts and asked the obvious questions. She knew nothing and in telling him so she managed to heap opprobrium on Pyzegger's memory.
"Friends? He didn't have any. Icebergs don't make friends, and neither do robots. He was the most egotistical, dogmatic, contrary person that God ever made."
"He was tortured before he was murdered,” remarked Auburn.
"No.” She contradicted him in so positive a fashion as to make it evident that she was just as stubborn and dogmatic as Pyzegger had been.
"That's the way it looks. Apparently to get him to open the safe in his office. Do you know of anything in that safe that the killers might have been after?"
"No. I probably haven't set foot in that office in the last ten years. But I don't remember that he ever kept much of anything in the safe except records. And maybe his lunch."
"When was the last time you saw him?"
"Probably right after New Year's. Every now and then he made tactical visits to my place to try to get me to come back, and that was the last time."
"Where were you last night—just for my report?"
"At my apartment watching TV all evening."
"By yourself?"
"By myself. Just for your report. I certainly wasn't at the office torturing and shooting my estranged husband."
And then the inevitable happened. Without an instant's warning, Sylvia Pyzegger collapsed in a heap on the couch, writhing convulsively and sobbing uncontrollably. And in the next moment, right on cue, Nick Stamaty rang the doorbell and entered the scene to administer copious rations of sympathy with a professional hand. Which was Auburn's signal for a graceful withdrawal.
Even allowing for the possibility that her display of grief was pure histrionics, he abandoned any plans he might have had to look over the house. Since he had no warrant, a search would have required her consent, which presumably would be forthcoming only if she had already disposed of any evidence of illegal activity.
Next morning he found his desk blanketed with preliminary reports on the case. The Pyzeggers, Ernest and Sylvia, and the Yarsts, Gaylan and Rosalind, had no history of criminal or even disreputable behavior, and their credit ratings were satisfactory. The Records division had done itself proud in sorting out the jawbreaker names and tangled relationships of the technical staff. He was stunned to learn that Jitzi Swa, whom he had thought to be in her early thirties, was forty-six. Her original surname had nine syllables, of which she and her husband had eliminated all but the first one on immigrating to the U.S. One of the technicians at Andover, who was Ms. Swa's sister-in-law, retained the full name. None of the technicians had criminal records.
An autopsy performed at seven p.m. the previous evening by Dr. Valentine, the forensic pathologist, had yielded no surprises. Pyzegger had been shot once through the heart at point-blank range with a .32 caliber firearm. The lead slug, extracted with difficulty from the spine where it had imbedded itself, was badly deformed and of doubtful use for comparison studies. Two pairs of linear lesions on opposite skin surfaces, one pair measuring 18 mm at the free margin of the left earlobe and the other measuring 16 mm on the right thumb web, were “grossly compatible with antemortem subcutaneous ecchymosis due to pinch-type trauma.” Results of microscopic examination of tissue samples and toxicology screens on blood and body fluids would take one to two weeks.
The report that Kestrel, the evidence technician, had already filed early this morning ran to several pages. Surely, reflected Auburn, it was only by a skillful use of templates and other digital aids that Kestrel could produce these voluminous but generally vapid documents so swiftly. A precisely labeled scale drawing of Pyzegger's office told Auburn nothing he didn't already know. An inventory of the contents of the safe was equally uninformative, and Kestrel had found no latent prints anywhere on the premises—or even, presumably, in the trash receptacle or the car—that didn't belong there.
Three full pages of the report were devoted to the tool found under Pyzegger's body. The presence of microscopic traces of blood on the jaws of the instrument seemed to confirm that it had been the instrument of torture. Kestrel identified it as a tungsten carbide steel wire cutter, actually a surgical instrument used to cut orthopedic pins and wires, manufactured by a Swedish firm named Borg. Not only did he give its precise dimensions and (quoting promotional material accessed on the Internet) its Rockwell hardness number (83) and its retail price, but he went on to state that this particular instrument was flawed and had most likely been marketed as a factory second.
Since the wire cutter was thus far their one and only clue to the identity of the murderers, that bit of information seemed to warrant a trip to the forensic lab on the top floor. Auburn found Kestrel sorting through prints of the photographs he'd taken yesterday on Floodgate Lane.
"Why did you say that wire cutter was flawed?” he asked.
Instead of answering, Kestrel stalked away while fishing the key to the evidence room out of his pocket. Auburn followed. Kestrel slipped the instrument out of its plastic bag and held it up to the window with the gray morning sky as a background.
"If you read the report,” he said, in a tone implying considerable doubt as to Auburn's ability to read at all, “you saw that this arm on my right is only about three-fourths the size of the left one in cross section. Obviously a question of the mold not filling properly. This could never have passed inspection—not at that factory. They're one of the premier manufacturers of orthopedic instruments in the world."
"So how did it end up here?"
"Probably it was sold as a factory second—part of a lot.” Kestrel put the wire cutter back into its bag and locked it away again. “There's a huge market for that kind of stuff among low-budget outfits that can't afford the high-quality articles."
"What kind of low-budget outfits? You mean hospitals?"
"Sure, in Third World countries. But tha
t instrument could be used for lots of things besides cutting surgical wire. Manufacturing jewelry, making fishing flies, stringing a piano..."
"How would you go about buying a thing like that? As a factory second?"
"I wouldn't,” replied Kestrel with a superior smirk. “But you can always find cheap junk like that being retailed on the Internet and at flea markets and trading posts and discount malls."
"Such as Lotus?"
Anyone else would have said, “You took the word right out of my mouth.” Kestrel said, “Precisely."
* * * *
Auburn returned to his desk and resumed the task of assembling facts on the Pyzegger murder. By the time he ran out of material to incorporate in his computer file on the case, the call of Lotus Flea Market and Antique Mall had grown too shrill to be ignored. The mall was open from eight to eight on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and today was Friday.
The Lotus occupied a former furniture store whose vinyl tile floors and cinder block walls showed the dirt and wear of decades of neglect. The place was drafty and full of cigarette smoke, noise, and promenading people. The cast of characters this morning was truly heterogeneous and colorful, ranging from punks and punkettes in black leather and stainless steel to perpetual hippies now retired and on Medicare. The vendors were no less variegated, many of them Middle Easterners or Asians.
Food stands were already dispensing corn dogs (scrawny wieners on sticks, their bulk meretriciously augmented by a layer of cornmeal batter) and indigestible concoctions of raw onions, sautéed peppers, and scorched meat. The booths that lined the walls, most of them ramshackle affairs thrown together with waferboard or pegboard nailed to two-by-fours, offered the full gamut of rubbish generally found in such places.
Probably none of them contained any real antiques, and the only second-hand articles in sight were videocassettes and paperback romances. The favored types of merchandise seemed to be craft items, leather goods, household decorative pieces of gold-painted plastic, automotive parts and tools made in China, caps and T-shirts bearing obscene messages—and surgical instruments.
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