by John Case
Inside, Lassiter found Riordan sitting in a booth with a baleful Czech in a leather trench coat. Dressed in his regulation suit and tie, Riordan looked like the cop he was, while his companion projected the image of an out-of-work rock musician, a tubercular genius whose long and greasy black hair hung down to his shoulders. A packet of Trumfs lay on the table, surrounded by empty bottles of Pilsner Urquell. Lassiter dropped his overnight bag to the floor and slid into the booth. ‘This better be good.’
Riordan did a double take. ‘Heyyyyy, Joe! Say hello to Franz –’
‘Hello, Franz.’
‘Joe Lassiter, Franz Janacek.’
They shook hands. The Czech had a strong grip and hooded eyes, bad skin and a low, almost subterranean voice that glittered when he spoke – a gold tooth at the side of his mouth.
‘A pleasure,’ Janacek said.
‘Franz is . . . what are you, anyway? Minister of the Interior?’
Janacek grinned. ‘Not yet.’ He pulled a business card from inside his coat and dropped it in a pool of moisture. Lassiter glanced at it with surprise. Janacek was chief of detectives for the Prague police.
Riordan grinned. ‘Is this a great country, or what? I love this place! Lemme get a round,’ he said, and waved at the waiter as if his chair were a cruise ship pulling out of port and his family was standing on the dock, in tears.
The bar was crowded with middle-aged men in dark suits. They stood in groups of three and four, talking animatedly in what sounded like half a dozen languages. They all seemed to be smoking, and the air was heavy with the fumes of cheap tobacco and expensive liquor.
Riordan nodded at them. ‘Everybody’s here! FBI, Secret Service, KGB – even the fuckin’ Mounties. Do you believe it? The Mounties! Scotland Yard. The gendarmes – I never met a gendarme before.’
‘Pig heaven,’ Janacek said, lighting a cigarette.
Riordan laughed. ‘Franz is a hippie.’
The beers arrived and Lassiter took a sip. It was delicious, but it stung the cut in his lip and he winced. Janacek grinned. ‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘I fell down.’
Riordan grimaced. ‘Seriously.’
‘A guy broke into my room.’
‘Then what?’
‘He resisted arrest.’
‘And did he get away?’ Janacek asked.
‘So far.’
‘Too bad,’ Riordan said. ‘But enough about you. You’re probably wondering why I called you here.’
Lassiter laughed. ‘You’re drunk, aren’t you?’
‘Technically, I’m a little past the dew point. So what? The point is, Franz and I are co-panelists.’
‘On what?’ Lassiter asked.
‘Cold cases.’
Lassiter shook his head. ‘What’s that?’
‘Unsolved crime. A homicide or major felony we can’t close,’ Janacek said.
‘Because there’s no evidence –’ Riordan added.
‘Or worse than that,’ Janacek put in, ‘no motive.’
‘It’s a big problem,’ Riordan said. ‘What do you do with a cold case? I mean, besides hoping that someday, somehow, it’ll solve itself? Whattaya do?’
‘I don’t know,’ Lassiter replied. ‘What do you do?’
Riordan shrugged. ‘That’s why we got a panel. Basically, you go back to the well. Again and again. You reinterview people, and hope for a confession. Or you pray for new technology – like DNA testing. But, mostly, a cold case is a cold case. It’s depressing.’
Lassiter shook his head, as if to clear it, and Janacek’s mouth broke into a lupine grin. ‘So,’ Lassiter said, ‘you talked about my sister’s case, and . . .’
‘Actually,’ Riordan replied, ‘we didn’t. Because that case is solved. We just have to find the guy.’ Riordan lowered his chin and quietly burped. ‘Again,’ he added.
‘So why am I here?’ Lassiter asked. Riordan was beginning to irritate him.
‘I’m getting there, but – all right, what happens is . . . at the panel someone asks a question about serial killers.’
‘This is actually a good question,’ Janacek said, ‘because, often, in these cases, we have a body – and no obvious motive.’
‘Right. Because the killer does what he does – just to do it,’ Riordan explained.
‘He’s “a pure scientist,”’ Janacek added. ‘I think many cold cases are like this.’
‘So, the guy in the audience – the one who asked the question – wants an example. And Janacek . . . go ahead, tell him.’
The Czech leaned forward. ‘The example I use happened three, four months ago. August. A family near Stromovka Park. Nice neighborhood. Crime is arson, murder. Two dead.’
‘Now, get this,’ Riordan said, ‘the victims are a little boy, two, two and a half, and his mother. It’s night, they’re sleeping, it’s arson. The house is burned to shit.’
‘They use accelerants, so nothing is left,’ Janacek said. ‘Some bones. Teeth. We suspect the husband, but . . . no.’
‘There’s no other woman, no other man, no insurance,’ Riordan added.
Janacek nodded. ‘No debts. Nothing.’
‘Happy family,’ Riordan said.
‘Where was the husband?’ Lassiter asked.
Janacek waved his hand as if rubbing out a spot in the air. ‘At a Sparta game – out of town.’
Riordan rocked back in his chair. ‘Sound familiar?’
‘Yeah,’ Lassiter replied, ‘it does. When did this happen?’
‘September one.’
Lassiter frowned. He tried to remember Grimaldi’s passport details.
‘I checked,’ Riordan said. ‘He entered the Czech Republic a few days earlier.’
The three of them fell silent and sipped their beers. Finally, Lassiter looked up: ‘It could be a coincidence.’
Riordan nodded. ‘Absolutely.’
‘It could be one of those things.’
‘You think so?’ Janacek asked in a neutral voice.
‘No,’ Lassiter said.
Janacek nodded, as much to himself as to his companions.
They were all silent for a moment, and then Lassiter said, ‘Could I speak with the husband? Would that be possible?’
Janacek frowned. ‘Jiri Reiner? He doesn’t speak English.’
‘Well, with your help, of course.’
Janacek thought about it. ‘And what purpose would this serve?’
‘Well, for beginners . . . I’d want to know if his wife had anything to do with my sister. Or the children? Any point of connection.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know.’
Janacek shrugged. ‘Jiri – he’s still very . . . disturbed. The doctor – he gives him drugs. Sedation. They still worry he might kill himself. And why not?’ His pale eyes swiveled over toward Lassiter. ‘Anyone might. In one night, he loses –’ Janacek slapped his hands together. ‘– everything. His wife, his son, his home.’ He stared gloomily at the floor.
‘Well,’ Lassiter said, ‘just a thought.’
Janacek drew some air in through his teeth and wagged his head. ‘Also, Jiri – he is –’ Janacek opened and closed his hand several times as if he could catch the right word out of the air. ‘– he doesn’t communicate so well, you know? Most of the time, he won’t talk at all.’
Lassiter nodded.
‘Still . . .’ Janacek said, drawing the word out, ‘since the cases are so similar . . . perhaps we could help each other. Do you think I could obtain a copy of the Italian’s passport?’
Lassiter and Riordan exchanged a glance. ‘I’m sure the detective could arrange that,’ Lassiter said.
‘And a photo?’
Riordan nodded. ‘Sure. No problem.’
Janacek drained his beer and stood up. ‘Okay. I do this. I put the question to Jiri himself, and also his doctor.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe . . .’ He stuck out his hand, and both Lassiter and Riordan shook it. ‘We talk in the morning.’
‘Thanks,’ Lassiter said.
The Czech nodded solemnly, began to leave, and turned around. ‘You know, to have a case that goes from one country to another . . . this is actually very unusual. And this . . . from one continent to another . . . I don’t know of any other case like this, except terrorism. And we know this is not terrorism.’
‘We do?’ Riordan asked.
‘Of course.’
‘And how do we know that?’
‘Because,’ Lassiter interjected, ‘there’s no publicity, and no politics.’
Janacek nodded and turned to Riordan. ‘I’ve got to go.’ He tapped his head. ‘When you get back to the States, maybe you can approach your FBI and see if they have anything to match these crimes.’
‘Absolutely,’ Riordan said. ‘I’ll call my FBI. See what they have.’
The next day, the last session of the conference, both Janacek and Riordan were busy until late in the afternoon. There was a breakfast meeting, followed by discussions, panels, workshops, and a final assembly. In the evening there would be a banquet.
Janacek called to say he was trying to set up the meeting with Reiner. They’d squeeze it in somehow; he’d be in touch.
Which left Lassiter with the day to fill. There were things he wanted to do, but the most important of them was to go for a run along the waterfront and through the streets of the old town. Though it was an understatement to say his ribs were sensitive to the touch, he could still do the miles – so long as he took them slow and easy. The idea was not to bump into anyone, and not to run out of breath. The last thing he wanted to do was gasp for air.
Breaking into a slow jog outside the Intercon, he could taste the pollution in the air. It was cold, and the smoky, metallic taste set his teeth on edge. Prague’s legacy from the Communist emphasis on heavy industry – combined with its site in a river valley – had created a serious air pollution problem, especially in the winter.
Still, the heart of the city was ancient and beautiful, spared both the bomb damage and urban renewal that scarred most of Europe’s capitals. As he crossed the famous Charles Bridge it began to snow. He loped past one time-blackened statue after another, a phalanx of corroded saints, one after another, every ten, fifteen yards, gazing down from the parapets at the hurrying pedestrians. A few vendors – postcards, photographs, Christmas ornaments, artwork – huddled in front of tiny charcoal fires. An icy wind gusted off the river. On the street corners, bundled-up women stood over plastic tubs full of live carp. He’d been warned about this Christmas custom by Riordan, who’d been standing too close as a patron selected his choice. It was hooked by the gill, laid on a board, and decapitated with a chop that splattered Riordan’s best pants with fish guts.
By the time Lassiter had done a couple of miles and turned around to head back across the bridge, the vendors were gone. The wind had dropped and wet snow was beginning to accumulate on the outstretched hands, the bare feet, the sightless eyes of the saintly figures. Before long the sidewalk was awash in slush. Afraid of slipping, he walked the last two blocks back to the hotel. He took short breaths, but it still hurt.
A message waited for him at the front desk, from Janacek: the meeting with Jiri Reiner had been arranged for eight that evening.
After he showered, Lassiter dug out the adapter from his overnight bag, plugged in his laptop computer, and hooked it up to the telephone line. He wanted to run a Nexis search for news stories about arson/homicides similar to the ones that killed Kathy and Brandon, and Jiri Reiner’s wife and son. He tapped out the international access number for AT&T and booted the computer into the Nexis/Lexis service. He could have had someone in the office do it, but he found online research an intuitive process – especially when you were trolling for something that didn’t really have a name.
Nexis was an expensive database that contained newspaper and magazine articles from literally hundreds of publications, newsletters, and wire services around the world. It was not comprehensive, but it was broad and deep. The search engine was fast, and once you’d defined the terms, it was a simple matter to locate the story or stories you were searching for – whether it was a 1980 bulletin from the Reuters bureau in Sofia, an article about serotonin research in the Journal of Endocrinology, or a column about wadlopen in last week’s Het Parool.
The database worked by using logical operators – inclusive terms such as and/or, and restrictive ones such as not – in conjunction with the key words that defined the story. Lassiter typed: arson and homicide and child.
The computer screen glowed quietly for a few seconds, and then a message appeared, saying that more than a thousand cities had been found, and so the search had been halted. Lassiter thought for a moment, and then he narrowed the search by adding: and 1995.
Within seconds the service reported 214 cities – almost all of which were irrelevant. Most of them were compilations of crime reports, where the arson in question had no relation to either the child or homicide that came later. Redefining his search, Lassiter typed: Kathleen Lassiter and arson and 1995.
There were nineteen stories in various editions of the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the Fairfax Journal, and the Associated Press. The reports fell into two groups: there were eight articles in the first three days after the murders, a couple of pieces about the grave robbery, and a spate of stories about ‘John Doe’s escape’ and the policeman’s murder. Since then, nothing.
Scanning the articles was a depressing process, in part because it pumped new life into the horror of his sister’s murder, and in part because it made him realize the inadequacy of the net he was casting. While he could certainly configure the search in such a way as to obtain everything about his sister’s death that might be found on Nexis, the search terms were too broad to locate similar cases in an effective way. There were dozens of synonyms for child, arson, and homicide. If he used them all, he’d have to wade through thousands and thousands of stories.
It was also discouraging that the coverage was as short-lived and superficial as it was. Kathy and Brandon’s deaths were ‘a news event’ in the Metro section, and the coverage did not persist long enough for any one story to make it clear that the crime was as deliberate and vicious as it was. Neither had anyone in the media paused to consider the implications of Brandon’s disinterment, or the possibility that John Doe had an accomplice. The events were reported, but unconsidered.
Lassiter supposed that it was the same in almost any large metropolitan area, where Saturday’s double homicide gave way to Sunday’s drive-by shooting. Kathy’s case had been especially horrible, but even so, the coverage was short-lived and brief.
He ran: Reiner and arson and Prague. And came up with nothing at all. Frustrated, he returned to his original search and used a browsing feature that went directly to the key words in each of the relevant stories. In the end there was only a single story that might be relevant. It was a short piece in a small daily published in Bressingham, British Columbia, a hundred miles north of Vancouver. The story told how Brian and Marion Kerr and their three-year-old son, Barry, had perished in a fire that local police said was of ‘suspicious origin.’
Although it wasn’t just a woman and a child, as in his sister’s case and the Reiners’, he ran another search: Kerr and Bressingham and fire or arson.
Since the deaths had occurred in a small town, the story was probably big news. It was. He found eight subsequent articles about the same event, and read them all. Two days after the fire was first reported, police confirmed that it was arson. The blaze had started in three different places, and lab analyses indicated that accelerants had been used. Witnesses reported seeing a man running from the house shortly before the blaze broke out.
The first thing that occurred to Lassiter was that all of the children were boys – at least, thus far. There was Brandon. And the Reiners’ son. And now the Kerrs’.
On the other hand, the Kerrs didn’t really fit. Lassiter would have remembered if Grimaldi’s passpor
t had included a Canadian visa – he was sure it had not. More to the point was the story’s dateline: November 14. Grimaldi was still in the hospital on that day. In fact, it was only a few days after Kathy and Brandon’s funerals. With a groan, he shut off the computer and called Judy at his office in Washington.
‘Hey! Where are ya?’
‘Prague.’
‘Gimme your number; you’re supposed to stay in touch!’
He did.
She winced. ‘Anything new on Bepi?’
Lassiter was silent for a moment. Finally, he said, ‘No.’
‘So . . . maybe it had something to do with you,’ Judy replied, ‘and maybe it didn’t.’
‘It had everything to do with . . . this case. No question. Everything.’
‘Then I’d say it’s “flaps up.” Get out of there!’
‘I’m not “there.” I’m in Prague. Anyway – not yet.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because there are things I have to do – and a couple of things I want you to do. For starters, I want Bepi’s family taken care of. Some kind of income. Enough for his kid and whoever’s responsible. You know what I’m talking about – enough to handle things.’
‘For how long?’
‘For as long as it takes.’
‘That could run into a lot of money.’
‘Judy: I have a lot of money.’
‘Done. What else?’
‘AmEx.’
‘What about it?’
‘You tell me.’
‘They want to know what role you’ll play – after the sale.’
‘None.’
‘That’s not what they want.’
‘I don’t care what they want.’
‘In that case, they’ve put an offer on the table for twelve five, plus options that oughta be worth another three million. Catch is: you can’t exercise the options for five years. Also, they want a noncompetitive agreement.’
‘No problem.’ They didn’t want him to go into business for himself.
‘The acquisitions guy says: You stay on as CEO, they’ll go a lot higher.’
‘They’ll go higher anyway. And tell them I’m not interested in options. I want the money.’