Listening to the scratchy recording of the bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson singing “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” through her iPod, Kathryn Dance stared at her suitcase, bulging open, refusing to close.
All I bought was two pairs of shoes, a few Christmas presents . . . okay, three pairs of shoes, but one was pumps. They don’t count. Oh, but then the sweater. The sweater was the problem.
She pulled it out. And tried again. The clasps got to within a few inches of each other and stopped.
Possessed . . .
I’ll go for the elegant look. She found the plastic valet laundry bag and offloaded jeans, a suit, hair curlers, stockings and the offending, and bulky, sweater. She tried the suitcase again.
Click.
No exorcist was necessary.
Her hotel room phone rang and the front desk announced she had a visitor.
Right on time.
“Send ’em up,” Dance said and five minutes later Lucy Richter was sitting on the small couch in Dance’s room.
“You want something to drink?”
“No, thanks. I can’t stay long.”
Dance nodded at a small fridge. “Whoever thought up minibars is evil. Candy bars and chips. My downfall. Well, everything’s pretty much my downfall. And to add insult to injury the salsa costs ten dollars.”
Lucy, who looked like she’d never had to count a calorie or gram of fat in her life, laughed. Then she said, “I heard they caught him. The officer guarding my house told me. But he didn’t have any details.”
The agent explained about Gerald Duncan, how he was innocent all along, and about the corruption scandal at an NYPD precinct.
Lucy shook her head at the news. Then she was looking around the small room. She made some pointless comments about framed prints and the view out the window. Soot, snow and an air shaft were the essential elements of the landscape. “I just came by to say thanks.”
No, you didn’t, thought Dance. But she said, “You don’t need to thank me. It’s our job.”
She observed that Lucy’s arms were uncrossed and the woman was sitting comfortably now, slightly back, shoulders relaxed, but not slumped. A confession, of some sort, was coming.
Dance let the silence unravel. Lucy said, “Are you a counselor?”
“No. Just a cop.”
During her interviews, though, it wasn’t unusual for suspects to keep right on going after the confession, sharing stories of other moral lapses, hated parents, jealousy of siblings, cheating wives and husbands, anger, joy, hopes. Confiding, seeking advice. No, she wasn’t a counselor. But she was a cop and a mother and a kinesics expert, and all three of those roles required her to be an expert at the largely forgotten art of listening.
“Well, you’re real easy to talk to. I thought maybe I could ask your opinion about something.”
“Go on,” Dance encouraged.
The soldier said, “I don’t know what to do. I’m getting this commendation today, the one I was telling you about. But there’s a problem.” She explained more about her job overseas, running fuel and supply trucks.
Dance opened the minibar, extracted two $6 bottles of Perrier. Lifted an eyebrow.
The soldier hesitated. “Oh, sure.”
She opened them and handed one to Lucy. Keeping hands busy frees up the mind to think and the voice to speak.
“Okay, this corporal was on my team, Pete. A reservist from South Dakota. Funny guy. Very funny. Coached soccer back home, worked in construction. He was a big help when I first got there. One day, about a month ago, he and I had to do an inventory of damaged vehicles. Some of them get shipped back to Fort Hood for repairs, some we can fix ourselves, some just are scrapped.
“I was in the office and he’d gone to the mess hall. I was going to pick him up at thirteen hundred hours and we were going to drive to the bone lot. I went to get him in a Humvee. I saw Petey there, waiting for me. Just then an IED went off. That’s a bomb.”
Dance knew this, of course.
“I was about thirty, forty feet away when it blew. Petey was waving and then there was this flash and the whole scene changed. It was like you blinked and the square became a different place.” She looked out the window. “The front of the mess hall was gone, palm trees—they just vanished. Some soldiers and a couple of civilians who’d been standing there . . . One instant there, then they were gone.”
Her voice was eerily calm. Dance recognized the tone; she heard it often in witnesses who’d lost loved ones in crimes. (The hardest interviews to do, worse than sitting across from the most amoral killer.)
“Petey’s body was shattered. That’s the only way to describe it.” Her voice caught. “He was all red and black, broken. . . . I’ve seen a lot over there. But this was so terrible.” She sipped the water and then clutched the bottle like a child with a doll.
Dance offered no words of sympathy—they’d be useless. She nodded for the woman to continue. A deep breath. Lucy’s fingers intertwined tightly. In her work, Dance characterized this gesture—a common one—of trying to strangle the unbearable tension arising from guilt or pain or shame.
“The thing is . . . I was late. I was in the office. I looked up at the clock. It was about twelve fifty-five but I had a half cup of soda left. I thought about throwing it out and leaving—it’d take five minutes to get to the mess hall—but I wanted to finish the soda. I just wanted to sit and finish it. I was late getting to the mess hall. If I’d been on time he wouldn’t’ve died. I would’ve picked him up and we’d have been a half mile away when the IED blew.”
“Were you injured?”
“A little.” She pulled up her sleeve and displayed a large leathery scar on her forearm. “Nothing serious.” She stared at the scar and then drank more water. Her eyes were hollow. “Even if I’d been just one minute late at least he’d’ve been in the vehicle. He probably would have survived. Sixty seconds . . . That would’ve made the difference between him living and dying. And all because of a soda. All I wanted was to finish my goddamn soda.” A sad laugh escaped her dry lips. “And then who shows up and tries to kill me? Somebody calling himself the Watchmaker, leaving a big-ass clock in my bathroom. For weeks all I can think about is how a single minute, one way or the other, makes the difference between life and death. And here’s this freak throwing it in my face.”
Dance asked, “What else? There’s something more, isn’t there?”
A faint laugh. “Yep, here’s the problem. See, my tour was scheduled to be up next month. But I felt so guilty about Pete that I told my CO I’d reenlist.”
Dance was nodding.
“That’s what this ceremony’s about. It’s not about getting wounded. We’re wounded every day. It’s about reenlisting. The army’s having a tough time getting new recruits. They’re going to use the reenlisters as poster children for the new army. We like it so much we want to go back. That sort of thing.”
“And you’re having second thoughts?”
She nodded. “It’s driving me crazy. I can’t sleep. I can’t make love to my husband. I can’t do anything. . . . I’m lonely, I’m afraid. I miss my family. But I also know we’re doing something important over there, something good for a lot of people. I can’t decide. I simply can’t decide.”
“What would happen if you told them you changed your mind?”
“I don’t know. They’d be pissed probably. But we’re not talking court-martial. It’s more my problem. I’d be disappointing people. I’d be backing down from something. Which I’ve never done in my life. I’d be breaking a promise.”
Dance thought for a moment, sipping the water. “I can’t tell you what to do. But I will say one thing: My job is finding the truth. Most everybody I deal with are perps—criminals. They know the truth and they’re lying to save their butts. But there’re also a lot of people I come across who lie to themselves. And usually they don’t even know it.
“But whether you’re deceptive to the cops or your mother or husband or friends or y
ourself, the symptoms’re always the same. You’re stressed, angry, depressed. Lies turn people ugly. The truth does the opposite. . . . Of course, sometimes it seems like the truth is the last thing we want. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten a suspect to confess and he gives me this look, it’s like pure relief in his face. The weirdest thing: Sometimes they even say thanks.”
“You’re saying I know the truth?”
“Oh, yeah. You do. It’s there. Covered up real good. And you might not like it when you find it. But it’s there.”
“How do I find it? Interrogate myself?”
“You know, that’s a great way to put it. Sure, what you do is look for the same things I look for: anger, depression, denial, excuses, rationalization. When do you feel that way and why? What’s behind this feeling or that one? And don’t let yourself get away with anything. Keep at it. You’ll find out what you really want.”
Lucy Richter leaned forward and hugged Dance—something very few subjects ever did.
The soldier smiled. “Hey, got an idea. Let’s write a self-help book. The Girl’s Guide to Self-Interrogation. It’ll be a best seller.”
“In all our free time.” Dance laughed.
They tapped the water bottles together with a ring.
Fifteen minutes later they were halfway through the blueberry muffins and coffee that they’d ordered from room service when the agent’s mobile phone chirped. She looked at the number on caller ID. Kathryn Dance shook her head and gave a laugh.
The doorbell of Rhyme’s town house rang. Thom arrived in the lab a moment later, accompanying Kathryn Dance. Her hair was loose, not in the taut braid of earlier, and the iPod headsets dangled around her neck. She took off a thin overcoat and greeted Sachs and Mel Cooper, who’d just arrived.
Dance bent down and petted Jackson, the dog.
Thom said, “Hmm, how’d you like a going-away present?” Nodding at the Havanese.
She laughed. “He’s adorable but I’m about at my livestock limit at home—both the two- and four-legged variety.”
It had been Rhyme on the phone, asking her, please, could she help them out once more?
“I promise it’s the last time,” he now said as she sat beside him.
She asked, “So what’s up?”
“There’s a glitch in the case. And I need your help.”
“What can I do?”
“I remember you told me about the Hanson case in California—looking over the transcript of his statement gave you some insights into what he was up to.”
She nodded.
“I’d like you to do the same thing for us.”
Rhyme now explained to her about the murder of Gerald Duncan’s friend, Andrew Culbert, which set Duncan on the path of bringing down Baker and Wallace.
“But we found some curious things in the file. Culbert had a PDA but no cell phone. That was odd. Everybody in business nowadays has a cell phone. And he had a pad of paper with two notes on it. One was ‘Chardonnay.’ Which might mean that he’d written it to remind himself to buy some wine. But the other was ‘Men’s room.’ Why would somebody write that? I thought about it for a bit and it occurred to me that it was the sort of thing that somebody’d write if they had a speech or hearing problem. Ordering wine in a restaurant, then asking where the rest rooms were. And no cell phone, either. I wondered if maybe he was deaf.”
“So,” Dance said, “Duncan’s friend was killed because the mugger lost his temper when the victim couldn’t understand him or didn’t hand over the wallet fast enough. He thought that Baker killed his friend but it was just a coincidence.”
Sachs said, “It gets trickier.”
Rhyme said, “I tracked down Culbert’s widow in Duluth. She told me he’d been deaf and mute since birth.”
Sachs added, “But Duncan said that Culbert had saved his life in the army. If he was deaf he wouldn’t’ve been in the service.”
Rhyme said, “I think Duncan just read about a mugging victim and claimed he was his friend—to give some credibility to his plan to implicate Baker.” The criminalist shrugged. “It might not be a problem. After all, we collared a corrupt cop. But it leaves a few questions. Can you look at Duncan’s interview tape and tell us what you think?”
“Of course.”
Cooper typed on his keyboard.
A moment later a wide-angle video of Gerald Duncan came on the monitor. He was sitting comfortably in an interview room downtown as Lon Sellitto’s voice was giving the details: who he was, the date and the case. Then the statement proper began. Duncan recited essentially the same facts that he’d told Rhyme while sitting on the curb outside the last “serial killer” scene.
Dance watched, nodding slowly as she listened to the details of his plan.
When it was finished Cooper hit PAUSE, freeze-framing Duncan’s face.
Dance turned to Rhyme. “That’s all of it?”
“Yes.” He noticed her face had gone still. The criminalist asked, “What do you think?”
She hesitated and then said, “I have to say . . . My feeling is that it’s not just the story about his friend getting killed that’s a problem. I think virtually everything he’s telling you on that tape is a complete lie.”
Silence in Rhyme’s town house.
Total silence.
Finally Rhyme looked up from the image of Gerald Duncan, motionless on the screen, and said, “Go on.”
“I got his baseline when he was mentioning the details of his plan to get Baker arrested. We know certain aspects of that are true. So when the stress levels change I assume he’s being deceptive. I saw major deviations when he’s talking about the supposed friend. And I don’t think his name’s Duncan. Or he lives in the Midwest. Oh, and he couldn’t care less about Dennis Baker. He has no emotional interest in the man’s arrest. And there’s something else.”
She glanced at the screen. “Can you cue to the middle? There’s a place where he touches his cheek.”
Cooper ran the video in reverse.
“There. Play that.”
“I’d never hurt anybody. I couldn’t do that. I might bend the law a bit. . . .”
Dance shook her head, frowning.
“What?” Sachs asked.
“His eyes . . .” Dance whispered. “Oh, this’s a problem.”
“Why?”
“I’m thinking he’s dangerous, very dangerous. I spent months studying the interview tapes of Ted Bundy, the serial killer. He was a pure sociopath, meaning he could deceive with virtually no outward signs whatsoever. But the one thing I could detect in Bundy was a faint reaction in his eyes when he claimed he’d never killed anyone. The reaction wasn’t a typical deception response; it revealed disappointment and betrayal. He was denying something central to his being.” She nodded to the screen. “Exactly what Duncan just did.”
“Are you sure?” Sachs asked.
“Not positive, no. But I think we’ve got to ask him some more questions.”
“Whatever he’s up to, we better have him moved to level-three detention until we can figure it out.”
Since he’d been arrested for only minor, nonviolent crimes Gerald Duncan would be in a low-security holding tank down on Centre Street. Escape from there was unlikely but not impossible. Rhyme ordered his phone to call the supervisor of Detention in downtown Manhattan.
He identified himself and gave instructions to move Duncan to a more secure cell.
The jailer said nothing. Rhyme assumed this was because he didn’t want to take orders from a civilian.
The tedium of politics . . .
He grimaced then glanced at Sachs, meaning that she should authorize the transfer. It was then that the real reason for the supervisor’s silence became clear. “Well, Detective Rhyme,” the man said uneasily, “he was only here for a few minutes. We never even booked him.”
“What?”
“The prosecutor, he cut some deal or another, and released Duncan last night. I thought you knew.”
/> Chapter 35
Lon Sellitto was back in Rhyme’s lab, pacing angrily.
Duncan’s lawyer, it seemed, had met with the assistant district attorney and in exchange for an affidavit admitting guilt, the payment of $100,000 for misuse of police and fire resources, and a written guarantee to testify against Baker, all the criminal charges were dropped, subject to being reinstated if he reneged on the appearance in court as a witness against Baker. He’d never even been printed or booked.
The big, rumpled detective stared at the speakerphone, glowering, hands on his hips, as if the unit itself were the incompetent fool who’d released a potential killer.
The defensiveness in the prosecutor’s voice was clear. “It was the only way he’d cooperate,” the man said. “He was represented by a lawyer from Reed, Prince. He surrendered his passport. It was all legit. He’s agreed not to leave the jurisdiction until Baker’s trial. I’ve got him in a hotel in the city, with an officer guarding him. He’s not going anywhere. What’s the big deal? I’ve done this a hundred times.”
“What about Westchester?” Rhyme called into the speakerphone. “The stolen corpse?”
“They agreed not to prosecute. I said we’d help them out on a few other cases they needed our cooperation for.”
The prosecutor would see this as a gold ring in his career; bringing down a gang of corrupt cops would catapult him to stardom.
Rhyme shook his head, livid. Incompetence and selfish ambition infuriated him. It’s hard enough to do this job without interference from politicians. Why the hell hadn’t anybody called him first, before releasing Duncan? Even before Kathryn Dance’s opinion about the interview tape, there were too many unanswered questions to release the man.
Sellitto barked, “Where is he?”
“Anyway, what proof—?”
“Where the fuck is he?” Sellitto raged.
The prosecutor hesitated and gave them the name of a hotel in Midtown and the mobile number of the officer guarding him.
“I’m on it.” Cooper dialed the number.
Sellitto continued. “And who was his lawyer?”
The assistant district attorney gave them this name too. The nervous voice said, “I really don’t see what all the fuss—”
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