by John Case
His hands came up into the air, then fluttered down like leaves. He pressed them together. ‘Cho. There no blood left in little boy. They dead, maybe one hour – then fire.’
Lassiter stared.
‘What about guy?’ Truong asked. ‘Husband?’
‘What guy?’
‘I’m hearing,’ Truong said, ‘third person in you sister house. He coming out window, on fire. Since you sister dying like that, I’m thinking maybe he . . .’ He shrugged.
‘Where is this guy?’
‘Burn ward.’
‘Which hospital?’
Truong shrugged again. ‘Maybe Fair Oaks. Maybe Fairfax.’
8
AN HOUR LATER, when Lassiter caught up with Riordan, the detective was sitting at a borrowed desk in a doctor’s office at Fair Oaks Hospital. A nurse showed him in, and as he entered, Riordan turned around and then stood – a little stiffly, as though trying to hide something behind him. He didn’t look happy.
‘You don’t listen, do you?’
‘You didn’t tell me you had a suspect.’
‘He wasn’t a suspect until the M.E.’s report came in,’ Riordan said defensively. ‘Up to then, he’s just another victim.’
‘Some guy comes flying out the front window of my sister’s house – on fire – two people dead – and you don’t even mention it?! And you think he’s a victim?’
‘He was a victim! He was burnt to shit.’
‘Yeah. Well, that just means he’s incompetent. Who is he?’
‘“John Doe.”’
‘What do you mean, John Doe?’
‘Well, he wasn’t exactly reciting name-rank-and-serial-number when he came in. And he didn’t have any ID on him, either.’
Lassiter fell silent for a moment, and then: ‘Car keys?’
‘No. He didn’t have any keys, he didn’t have any ID, he didn’t have any money. He didn’t have shit.’
‘So, I guess that means – what? That he parachuted in! Is that your theory?’
‘Ohhh, come on –’
‘Did you check the cars?’
‘What cars?’
‘Parked cars! The cars in the neighborhood – did you check them?’
Riordan hesitated. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘The cars are being checked.’
‘Now? It’s –’ Suddenly, Lassiter felt exhausted. A seam of fatigue opened in his mind as he tried to do the simple math. The 911 call had come in around midnight. And now it was two o’clock in the afternoon. So fourteen hours had passed, and from Riordan’s look, no one had thought to go through the neighborhood, writing down license numbers. Unless ‘John Doe’ was working alone, it was too late now.
‘There’s no clothes, either,’ Riordan said. ‘As I’m sure you were about to ask. They were full of blood, they had to cut them off the guy, and the nurses got rid of them. Biohazard. I tried to chase it down, but they’re gone. The only thing we can do is wait till the doctors say I can talk to him. When that happens, I’ll ask him the same questions you would, and then I’ll take a set of prints. We’ll run the prints, and if we’re lucky, we’ll find out who he is. So why don’t you go home and let me do my job?’
‘What’s that?’
‘What?’
‘The thing you’re hiding.’
Riordan exhaled mightily, glanced at the ceiling, and stepped to the side so Lassiter could see what was on the desk: a nurse’s medicine tray. There were two items in it, and one of them was a knife, about seven inches long. It was a big knife, a hunting knife, the kind you’d use to field-dress a deer. Lassiter looked closer. Actually . . . it was a military knife.
‘K-Bar.’
‘What?’
‘It’s a K-Bar knife,’ Riordan said. ‘Ranger stuff. You see ’em at Quantico, Bragg – places like that.’
‘So maybe he’s a soldier.’
Riordan shrugged. ‘Maybe. But the important thing is: he brings this into the house with him. It’s not like he breaks in, there’s a struggle in the kitchen, someone grabs a knife. . . . This guy comes into the house with a combat knife – it isn’t a bread knife, it’s a combat knife –’
‘So what you’re saying: the murders were premeditated?’
‘Yeah. He knew what he was doin’.’
Lassiter looked more closely at the knife. There was a gummy, brownish substance where the blade fit into the haft. It looked like blood. And a few hairs clinging to it. Wispy, blond, very fine. Baby hair. Brandon’s hair. And Tom Truong’s voice in the back of his mind: No blood left in little boy.
The second item in the tray was a bottle, a small one about the size of a miniature liquor bottle. It was very unusual, made of heavy glass, and it looked antique. It closed with a dark metal cap, made in the shape of a crown, with a tiny cross at the very top. Inside the bottle was a half inch of clear liquid.
‘The nurses and orderlies had their mitts all over these, of course,’ Riordan said. ‘Help me out, would you?’ He handed Lassiter a small plastic bag with a printed label stuck to it:
JOHN DOE
MPD–3601
11–02–95
Lassiter held the bag open while Riordan used a pencil to tease the items into the bag without touching them.
‘Where is he?’
Riordan didn’t answer him. ‘When I get back, I’ll tag these into evidence. We’ll get whatever prints we can, cross-check ’em with the nurses’ and orderlies’, and run ’em through the Bureau. After that, I’ll see what I can find out about the bottle. We’ll get the liquid tested, and there’ll be a full court press on whatever we got on the knife.’ He paused. ‘Look – for what it’s worth – whoever this guy is, your sister took a swing at him. The examiner found some tissue, tissue and blood, under her nails – right hand. So I’ll ask for DNA tests, and we’ll do a comparison.’ He paused again. ‘Now, maybe you’d please go home.’
Lassiter followed Riordan out the door. The detective carried the bag in front of him, pinching the top between his fingers. And then he stopped and put his free hand on Lassiter’s arm. ‘You know – I shouldn’t be talking to you like this. Letting you see the evidence. I mean . . .’ Riordan looked at his feet. ‘What I’m saying is – technically, you’re a suspect.’
‘Really.’
‘Really!’
‘What are you talking about, Jim?’
Riordan shrugged. ‘What if your sister left you all her money? What if it turns out you hated her guts? I mean – you know?’
‘That’s bullshit.’
‘Sure it’s bullshit,’ Riordan said stolidly. ‘I’m just saying how it looks. We get memos – you know? We have meetings. All the time. And one of the things they pound us about is “the appearance of impropriety.”’
‘“Impropriety.”’
‘No! The appearance of impropriety. It’s different. No one has to do anything wrong. It just has to look wrong – like showing you this.’ Riordan nodded at the bag in his hand. ‘It could be misinterpreted.’
Lassiter shook his head, but he didn’t say anything. He was feeling too burnt out to be angry. Besides, Riordan didn’t mean anything by it. And technically – he was right.
‘Anyways,’ the detective said, starting to walk again, ‘you got people to call. Arrangements to make. The press is all over this thing, and once they find out it wasn’t just a fire . . .’ His voice trailed away.
Riordan’s common sense was like a splash of cold water. Lassiter realized he’d been in a tunnel, his mind so caught up in trying to make sense of things, that he’d forgotten about the ordinary responsibilities of ‘calling kin.’ Suddenly, the practicalities of handling a death in the family flooded his head. Riordan was right. Of course he had calls to make. Kathy was his only sibling and their parents were dead, but there was Kathy’s ex-husband, her friends, her coworkers down at the radio station. Aunt Lillian. And Brandon. Brandon didn’t have a father, but there were godparents. There were so many people to call, so many people who shouldn’t learn abou
t this from television or a newspaper. The list grew in his mind as he stumbled along beside Riordan. Arrangements. He would have to put together some kind of service. Pick out caskets. Headstones. Cemetery plots.
There was so much to do, but he couldn’t stop thinking about Brandon – the knife and the blood and the hair. Why would – how could – anyone cut the throat of a three-year-old kid?
‘I’ll speak to Tommy Truong,’ Riordan said. ‘I’ll find out when the bodies can be released and –’
‘What’s his condition?’ Lassiter asked.
‘Who?’
Lassiter just looked at him.
‘Oh – you mean, John Doe? He’s serious, but stable. They say he’s gonna live. You glad about that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Me, too.’
Riordan watched Lassiter walk down the corridor until he turned the corner. Lassiter was a big guy, he thought, tall and wide-shouldered, athletic-looking. And irritating. Even today, even here, he walked as if he owned the place.
Riordan was thinking that maybe, because of his connection to Lassiter, he ought to take himself off the case. Shift it to someone else. But that was a chickenshit way of looking at things because, all modesty aside, he was the best fucking homicide detective on the force – and he just couldn’t live with himself if he passed on a case because it might screw up a job opportunity.
Yeah, Lassiter was going to be a problem. No question about that. But he’d just have to treat Lassiter like anyone else, and if that blew his chances with the guy’s company . . . well, that’s the way it goes sometimes.
Not that the case was complicated. They had a suspect, and a murder weapon. And they’d get a lot more – Riordan was sure of that. Things tended to fill themselves in. People came forward. And even if they didn’t, the Commonwealth’s attorney would be filing charges any day. They didn’t know the guy’s name, and they didn’t know his motive – but that didn’t matter because they could prove what he’d done. The prisons might be filled with John Does who’d killed people for reasons no one could understand.
Besides, they might get lucky. Maybe Mr. Doe was a toon. Maybe a dog told him to do it. Maybe there was life insurance. An ex-husband. A boyfriend.
He hoped it would be something simple or Lassiter would be all over him – despite the little warning back there – urging him to do this, do that, check this out, run that down. No. It was worse than that. The way Riordan saw it, if he were Joe Lassiter, and he owned a big investigative agency, and it was his sister, and his nephew who’d been killed . . . he’d run his own investigation and throw every fucking thing he had at it. And the cop on the case, the selfsame Jimmy Riordan, would be tripping over Lassiter’s tracks everywhere he went.
The guy had a dozen people he could put on the case – a couple of dozen! Guys who’d worked for the FBI, DEA, CIA, Washington Post – you name it, they had desks at Lassiter Associates. So he could put more people – and, let’s face it, better people – on the case than the county could, that was for sure. And he had more money to spend, too. Which meant that Jimmy Riordan was going to end up talking to witnesses that Lassiter had already questioned. He’d make connections that Lassiter had made a few days before, and he’d follow leads that Lassiter had already run to ground – but which he would still have to pursue.
It made him tired just to think of it. And in fact he was tired. He’d been called in the middle of the night and had been going ever since – most of the time on his feet. And now his feet hurt. His adrenaline was spent, and there were cobwebs between his ears. He needed a cup of coffee, but first he should call the station.
Because Lassiter was right about one thing, and that was John Doe’s car. He’d have a squad car cruise Keswick Lane and the surrounding streets, checking the license plates. They’d run the numbers through the DMV, and if they found a car that didn’t belong in the neighborhood, they’d go door-to-door looking for the owner. If he wasn’t around, they’d boot the car and go to the address where the vehicle was registered. If the owner wasn’t there, they’d find out where he or she worked, check it out. Rentals? They’d boot those right on the spot.
Riordan made the call, then waited at the nurse’s station for the supervisor to show up. Finally, he saw her, steaming down the hall, a huge woman with enormous breasts. The breasts made a kind of shelf on her chest, and her glasses, which hung from one of those little chain things, were perched on the shelf. He tried not to stare, but it was hard. (That was another memo. Excessive visual contact is a form of sexual harassment.) He wrote down her name, the date, and the time. He told her his own name and said that he was taking possession of John Doe’s personal items. She made him sign something. He made her sign something.
He took the bag out to his car, locked it in the trunk, and returned to the hospital. He wanted to speak with the nurse who had removed the items from John Doe’s pockets and put them in the bag. He wanted to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s because, after O.J., you couldn’t be too careful.
The E.R. nurse was on break, but he found her anyway, sitting in the cafeteria by the Bunn-O-Matic, reading a Harlequin romance. He only had a few questions for her, and after she’d answered them, he bought himself a cup of coffee and sat down with his notebook.
It was one of a hundred that he had, a new one for each major case, and each of them was identical. They were black, four by seven, six-ring notebooks with narrow-ruled paper inserts. On the first page of each of the books, Riordan had written the victim’s name, the case number, and the number of the statute that had been violated. The handwriting was meticulous – elegant, even. (Say what you want about Jimmy Riordan, Riordan thought, the man’s penmanship will not quit! Thank you, Sister Theresa!)
There wasn’t much in this particular notebook, though Riordan knew that eventually it would be filled. And like the others, once the details were recorded on official department forms, it would take its place on the bookshelf in the little room that he used as an office in his home. Riordan sipped his coffee and thought about the case. John Doe. The only thing he knew about the man, apart from what he’d done, was that one of the residents said he’d been mumbling in Italian.
That could be interesting. Then again, that could be a problem. Riordan stirred a packet of creamer into his coffee, barely changing the color. Maybe John Doe was Gianni Doe. Riordan hoped not. He’d had some cases where foreign nationals were involved, and because Fairfax was so close to Washington, the embassies sometimes got in on things. And they weren’t helpful.
Besides, Riordan thought, what if this guy’s a real foreigner? What if he works for an embassy? What if he’s got diplomatic immunity?
He took another sip of coffee.
The second sip was never as good as the first.
Joe Lassiter hadn’t left the hospital. He was two floors above the cafeteria, following a painted green line that zigzagged down the floor of one corridor and up another. There were arrangements that he had to make, lots of them, but before he did any of that, he wanted to see the man who’d butchered Kathy and Brandon. An orderly said that the green line would take him to the burn ward, and so he was following it.
Unless you were color-blind, colors were a surrogate for literacy. You didn’t need to speak English to follow a painted line. You didn’t even need to be sane. You could be sick, stoned, flipped-out, or monolingual in Tagalog, and the colors would take you where you wanted to go.
Lassiter had been to the CIA once or twice and they had the same system there, although the purpose was different. Everyone in headquarters had a laminated tag pinned to his suit jacket. The tag read VISITOR, STAFF, or SECURITY, and it came with a colored stripe that didn’t tell you where to go, but determined where you couldn’t. If you were walking down a corridor with a red line down the middle, and you had a green stripe on your tag, everyone knew you were out of place. Excuse me! You sure you belong here?
He went through a pair of double doors, keeping his eye on the floor, fo
llowing the green line single-mindedly. Like a preschooler. Like Brandon. An image of the boy came into Lassiter’s mind: the intensity of the kid’s concentration when he wrote his name in what were, after all, huge, shaky crayon letters. And another image: Brandon, sleeping, a smile on his face, and his throat slit like a slaughtered animal.
And Kathy. And Tom Truong’s voice in his head: . . . little cuts on both her hands . . . These are the definite defensive wounds, you know . . .
Kathy. In the dark. Asleep. Hearing something. Not knowing what was happening. A knife slashing down, her hands coming forward in a blind reflex . . .
He walked past a nurse’s station, but nobody seemed to notice him. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do when he got to the end of the green line. Maybe just look at the guy.
And then – he was there. There wasn’t much to see. John Doe was visible through a large rectangular window – at least, he assumed it was Doe: he was the only patient that Lassiter could see, so he figured it must be him. He was hooked up to all kinds of tubes, and the parts of him that were not wrapped in white bandages – and this included most of his head – were smeared with a thick white ointment. Lassiter had burned his hand once, and the name of the white stuff popped into his mind. Silvadene.
As far as Lassiter could tell, nobody had seen the guy before his face went up in flames. So he was really and truly a John Doe. No name. No description. No description possible. Who was he? Why did he do it? What was he thinking about right now?
Was he even conscious? Lassiter couldn’t tell. But if he was, maybe he could answer a couple of questions. Simple questions. Lassiter was reaching for the doorknob when a man dressed in a paper gown leaned out from behind a privacy screen and, with an angry yelp, charged into the corridor.