Tropic of Night

by Unknown

  “What, you think a normal man did this kind of thing?” Mendés exclaimed.

  “No, I said not a sexual psychopath. That’s not the same as normal. I think we’re looking at a very, very unusual man, but the signature of the crimes doesn’t indicate to me someone with a pathological rage against women. There’s no evidence of torture, for example. There’s no frenzy. There’s no posing of the body in unnatural or degrading positions. The women look like they died peacefully in their sleep, and if it wasn’t for the operation and the missing body parts, we might well have concluded that. I say ‘operation’ advisedly. Our unsub was able to drug his victims into unconsciousness, carefully and precisely remove the same specific organs or organ segments from each one, remove the brain from the still-living neonate, and excise a small sliver of tissue from the interior of the brain. This is not the work of a sexual psychopath, or if it is, it’s one unlike any we’ve ever encountered before. They once used to say that Jack the Ripper had to be a professional man, or at least know something about surgery, but we don’t think so anymore. It doesn’t take professional skill to split a woman open with a knife and rip out a kidney. It does take a lot of skill to excise the brain from a neonate, dissect away the cerebral hemispheres and cut out the thalamus and the pineal body.”

  “I’d agree with that,” said Dr. Cornell. “I’d be looking for a brain surgeon. Most of ‘em are psychos of one kind or another anyway.”

  Robinette flashed a tight smile. “I don’t know about that, but for sure I’d say we’d want to forget about the typical profile. This guy is educated, college, maybe some graduate work. Very smart. Knows how to use a research library. Not unsure of himself with women at all; in fact, a great talker, a charmer. He’s probably good looking, average height or taller, height and weight proportional, no disfiguring marks or speech defects. Age midthirties, probably self-employed in some profession. An American. He can talk his way into women’s homes, get them to take his drugs, and we’re not talking about young unsophisticated girls, either. Mariah Do was an international model?she’d probably heard every line there is from men in her time. Teresa Vargas was a college graduate, and used to traveling in the highest social circles. The Wallace woman, I grant you, was more vulnerable, but there may have been something in particular that attracted him to her. Obviously, he needs women who are ready to deliver babies, and he probably just picks them out on the street, or they come to him for some reason?fortune-telling, maybe. I heard some indication of that in both of the cases here. The guy is careful, precise, no witnesses, very little evidence left behind. I’d guess that he strips and puts his clothes in a bag before he operates. And he’s completely fearless about being discovered. So all that adds up to an anomalous situation. He’s not taking out his rage on these women. He’s got no more emotion than you or I would have going down to the Safeway to pick up some steaks for a barbecue. What I’m saying is, he’s not committing crimes of passion?he’s shopping .”

  This got a stir. Robinette pressed on. “Second, we’re looking for someone with no automobile. He takes public transportation, or cabs, or, in one case, he rides a bike. That’s unusual in the extreme, for American men generally, and particularly for serial killers. Maybe his license to drive was revoked, or maybe he’s got some condition that precludes driving. That’s something else to check out anyway. Third thing?race. Serial killers are virtually all white males, and their victims are overwhelmingly white. You clearly want to know what race this guy is, and I have to confess that here I’m drawing a blank. He hits in a black neighborhood at night, where a white man would stand out like a flare in a cellar, and no one noticed him. And you have your witness saying the Wallace woman was seen talking to a black man, a stranger, who might look good for the unsub. But then he strikes in an upper-class neighborhood, where I don’t think it’s any secret that a lone African-American male at night would be noticed, and might even be the occasion for a call to the police, and the only witness you have maybe spots a white guy on a bicycle. I’m thinking master of disguise, which would make him almost certainly a white man, going black for the Wallace murder. I don’t think there’s a case in history where a black man has disguised himself as white to commit a crime.”

  Robinette now started talking cult murders, which in his opinion these were not. There was no evidence of anyone else besides the unsub being involved. Cults implied membership. There was nothing traditionally cultlike at the murder scene?no candles, no incense, no mystical markings. The attempt of the unsub to pin the Wallace killing on Youghans was uncharacteristic of cult murders. Cult murders typically took place in specific locations, to which the victim was carried, clearly not the case here. And so on.

  Paz was no longer listening closely. He thought profiling was a useful activity when you had a classic nutcase, which he already knew was not the situation here. They had no idea why this guy was doing it, although he liked what Robinette had said about going shopping. That felt right. The why of it was still completely obscure, however, and these further negatives were not clearing it up very much.

  In any event, Paz had spent the last ten minutes studying the file on Mariah Do, in particular a certain photograph, the very last of the zillions of photographs taken of the victim. In this shot, Ms. Do was walking down a path flanked by two other people. It was summer in the photo; there were trees in leaf on either side of the path and dappled shadows on the path itself. The victim was pregnant, but gracefully so, like the gravid Madonna in a Renaissance painting. A glow seemed to rise from her, but whether that was real or part of the photographer’s art Paz couldn’t tell. She was certainly transcendently beautiful. To her left, and lagging a little behind, was another woman, a tall blonde, quite thin, with a pinched, worried face. She was looking at the victim with an expression Paz couldn’t read. Pain? Anger? Fear? One of the unhappy emotions in any case. On the victim’s other side was a happy man, smiling and gesturing broadly as at some joke. Could that be the reason for the Madonna smile on the victim and the worried look on the face of the other woman? Her sister, Jane Clare Doe, as the helpful label on the back established. The man was the victim’s brother-in-law, M. DeWitt Moore, husband of Jane Clare. A man who looked a good deal like Paz, it appeared.

  Little thrill rockets were coursing through Paz’s gut, and it was agonizing to contain himself while the FBI agent lectured away. Paz had already looked like a jerk twice in this case, once with Youghans, and once with his disastrous effort to get Tanzi Franklin to generate a usable description of the killer. He was not going to chance it again. No, the question now was what to do with this theory. He confronted the eternal detective problem?do you or do you not take a strong suspicion to authority? If you do, you might get enough resources to really nail the guy, but you also might end up in the shit, if the suspicion proved false. But if you don’t send it up the chain, and it is the guy, someone else will pick up the credit eventually, or else the guy will walk away, or worse, do it again, and if it came out that you did have a strong suspicion and did nothing, you would sink even deeper in the shit.

  The only smart thing to do was talk to Barlow. That was a Barlow rule, too. Talk to your partner. Barlow, as far as Paz knew, had always been completely open with Paz in the development of cases. On the other hand, Barlow’s suspicions were invariably right and Paz’s were occasionally wrong.

  Agent Robinette’s presentation wound to a close. A couple of people asked questions, and a discussion started about whether active steps to forestall or trap the unsub were possible. The cops around the table didn’t like the FBI theory. They wanted a cult, a black Cuban or Haitian cult, maybe with some white adherents. Miami was cult city?did it make sense that someone would breeze in from out of town and pursue some mad scientist enterprise? It did not. And where was he getting these exotic drugs? From the botanicas, from root doctors, brujos, curanderos …

  These interesting speculations were arrested by a rumble from the head of the table. Neville D. Horton had not
spoken substantively yet, but now he did, and everyone fell silent to hear what he had to say, not only because he was chief of police, but because he was an imposing man, six four and well over three hundred pounds, all of it the color of baker’s chocolate except for a fringe of feltlike prematurely gray hair. The rumble said, “People, in about two hours I am going to see the mayor and the city manager. Shortly after that I am going to stand up with those two fine gentlemen in front of the TV and tell the folks out there that we are hot on the trail of this fiend, that we got the FBI practically giving us his address and phone number, and that it’s only a matter of time before he’s a cooked chicken. I am not going to get up there in front of God and everyone and say that we’re looking for a black white mad scientist on a fucking bicycle. Get serious, people! If we got to put an armed guard with every nine-months-pregnant woman in the city of Miami, then that’s what we got to do. This can’t happen again. Arnie, you’re in charge. In fact, now that I think of it, you should be on the TV, too, so folks’ll know who to blame.” He smiled at this, a broad one, to show that he was kidding, or wasn’t.

  “Meanwhile, I need talking points and a plan. You got an hour. People, thank you for your good work. Good luck to you, and God help all of us if we fuck this up.” He rose above the table like a broaching whale and strode out of the room, followed by his aides.

  After that, Mendés took charge, snapping out orders to the assembled brass, who resnapped the orders to their underlings as the meeting broke up. Mendés motioned Barlow, Paz, and Robinette to his own office. Mendés was angry, suspecting that he was being set up, in his turn, for the same fall he had outlined so vividly to Paz. He stared balefully at the three others. “Well? What do we tell the public?”

  Robinette said, “Captain, it might be time for a strategic misstatement.”

  Mendés snorted. “I love the phrase. Meaning?”

  “This guy must be feeling pretty pleased with himself. He’s outsmarted the cops so far. He’s probably following the press reportage pretty closely, and laughing his ass off. What if we issue a profile to the press, not the real one but a phony construct suggesting that the perpetrator is an inadequate individual with a load of sexual hang-ups, impotent, working at a menial blue-collar job. It might put stress on him, get him to contact the press, maybe a talk show. At worst, he might think we’re so off base that it makes him careless. It’s worked before. And we could have the chief say that we’re providing security for pregnant women in certain spots, see if he’ll be arrogant enough to challenge you.”

  Mendés grinned maliciously. “Oh, yeah, the boss is going to love that one, using the pregnant ladies as bait. Something happens, we’ll all be lucky to get jobs parking cars at the Orange Bowl. How many are there in the city do you think?”

  “The U.S. birthrate is fourteen per thousand,” answered Robinette, “figure a million women in the Miami SMSA, so fourteen thousand per year, figure one-twelfth of those are in their last month this month, so eleven hundred sixty, give or take.”

  “Hm. Well, that’s at least doable, if it comes to it,” said Mendés. “They can all stay out at your ranch, Cletis.”

  “Glad to have them,” said Barlow. “I’ll tell Erma to start boiling water right now.”

  Paz said, “Chief, meanwhile I think we should go to New York, see the cops up there and talk to people at the murder scene, the dead girl’s father and so on.”

  “And why is that?” asked Mendés. This was the moment to bring up the photo from the Long Island case file and the speculations arising from it, but when he looked into his chief’s eyes and assessed their expression, which was cynical, ready to mock, patronizing, he chickened out. It would keep for a while, until he had it nailed, until Mendés would have to eat it whole and like it. So he said, “Because the guy was there. He did his thing there. He left some trace, somebody remembered him. You heard Agent Robinette here say they did a half-assed investigation because they figured it was a domestic and the killer killed herself after. Now we know that’s not true. People will have bits, threads they never followed up on because they closed the file too early. Someone the dead girl knew, or maybe she was in a cult of some kind, and they didn’t want to bring it up if they didn’t have to. Maybe one of those threads leads to Miami. Someone who was there then is here now?like that.”

  “Okay, go,” said Mendés after a moment. “There and right back. Cletis, you go, too.”

  Paz made a couple of calls to insure that the people they wanted to see in New York would be available, and another call to the manager of the Coconut Grove Playhouse, where he got the answer he expected. As they left, the homicide unit secretary waved him over and handed him a manila envelope. A lady had brought it by during the meeting. She had said it was important, about the murders. Paz shoved it into his briefcase. They boarded a USAir flight at one-ten from Miami International to La Guardia. Barlow took his seat, said, “The wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein. Isaiah 35:8,” went to sleep immediately after takeoff, and remained out. He awoke when the wheels touched down, stretched, and grinned at Paz. He said, “Nothing like being paid to sleep. You look like a wet hen, boy. How many of them little tiny drinks you have?”

  “Seventy-three,” said Paz, sourly.

  “I better drive our car, then.”

  Paz got into their white Taurus and dropped off immediately, and awoke when he felt the car slow, then stop. He shook himself awake, straightened his tie, tasted the inside of his mouth, wished for a cigar, settled for a stick of spearmint gum, and looked out the window. They were in a parking lot in front of a low gray modern building with a neat circle of lawn in front of it and a flagpole in the middle of that. It could have been a minor electronics firm, but it was the Hicksville barracks of the New York State Police.

  Detective Captain Jerry Heinrich, the man who had led the investigation into the killing of Mary Elizabeth Doe, had a large, modern office, with the usual featureless furnishings and a wall full of award plaques and photographs. There was a big stuffed bluefish on the wall, too. He was a comfortable slow-speaking sort, with curly brown hair graying at the sides, and the perfectly ordinary look of a high-school teacher or an appliance salesman. He seemed reasonably open and glad to help.

  After the usual preliminaries, Heinrich said, “If you got the FBI file, you’ve got all we set down on paper. Obviously, we put out the max on this one. We had gubernatorial interest and a totally clear field. The county boys and the locals let us handle it completely. You know about this family?”

  “We heard they were local big shots,” said Paz.

  “You could say that. More like an institution in this part of the world. Money? It doesn’t mean anything to them anymore. Churches, charities, hospitals. Hell, they sent half the bright kids on the north shore through college, and they’ve been doing it since forever. And they’re related to everybody who’s been here longer than the Nixon administration. So it wasn’t like they had to make any angry phone calls. People just pitched in to do anything they could, which was why the press was kind of frozen out of it, and believe you me, they were swarming for a while, the victim being such a big model and all. But no one would talk. And the isolation helped. You been there yet? Sionnet?”

  Barlow said, “Is that how you say it? No, we haven’t. We’re going out after we finish here. We thought we’d talk to Mr. Doe and any of his people who were around then.”

  “Yeah, well good luck. Boy, I’ll tell you, we had every detective on the Island talking to people, and some from upstate, too, and we got zip. Four people in the house when the thing went down, the butler, guy named Rudolf, been with the family since Pluto was a pup. Well, in this case we’re pretty damn sure the butler didn’t do it. Then a girl who worked for the family, cooking, slept in, was in the kitchen all the time, working on dinner. Then the mother, in her bedroom, sleeping, she said, and I tend to believe it.”

  “Why?” asked Paz.

  Heinrich lifted his hand to his mou
th, cupped. “All the time. And pills, too. A damned shame. Besides, hell, a thing like that, you don’t usually figure Mom for involvement. And there was Jane, the other daughter. She was out on the north terrace facing the water, for most of the afternoon. She said. But it turned out no one recalled seeing her there at the time of. Near as we can figure it, it was done between three and four in the afternoon. And I was saying about Sionnet, it’s isolated, out on a neck, maybe a hundred fifty acres, but to get to it you have to go through Sionnet village, and there’s nothing at all past the village but the estate. There’s a big sign saying private road and a little turnaround for tourists who get lost. On a busy day in the summer you might get six cars going that way through the village, people working at the estate and so on. This particular day was September sixteenth, a Saturday. People recalled Mr. Doe driving out with his two sons-in-law to see that car show in Huntington, about one, and then driving back around four-thirty. Hell of a thing to come home to, huh? Anyway, no strange cars at all during the critical times. And you’re going to ask about boats. They would’ve heard a boat for sure. There were people working on the place, down by the dock, and the daughter said she was down there, too. Yeah, sure, some commando could’ve landed a dinghy and snuck in there, but …” He gestured to show how unlikely he thought that was.

  Barlow asked, “You were in charge from the get-go?”

  “Yep. Lucky me.” He described his involvement in the case, and what they had found, which was pretty much what Barlow and Paz had found, and Heinrich expressed the same anger, sadness, bitterness, and frustration that they both felt.

  “They buried the mother and baby in the same casket,” he told them. “They got their own cemetery, right there on the property. There was just the extended family and a few close friends at the ceremony, a couple of dozen folks. Mr. Doe was like a rock. Mary’s husband was leaning on him, crying, that German photographer. The mother?hell, she didn’t know where she was. And the sister, Jane. I never saw anyone so scared in my life.”