Body of Lies

by Deirdre Savoy

  Alex squeezed her nose harder. “You know I can’t tell you anything.”

  “Your diagnosis is a matter of public record, Doctor. All I’m asking you to do is come in and tell me if you think Thorpe is capable of the crime we’re looking at him for.”

  Was this man insane? If he knew the case he had to know her judgment wasn’t the most reliable one they could go on. Her mind flashed to that morning’s paper. They couldn’t be trying to pin that on Walter. She might have been wrong about him once, but that she couldn’t believe. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Don’t think too long. Can we say one o’clock, Forty-first Precinct?” He rattled off an address she didn’t bother to take down. If she decided to go, she could always have Alice call and find out the details.

  McKay rang off with one additional plea, “We really need you, Doctor.”

  And she needed this like she needed another migraine. Why now, when her life was finally smooth and boring like she wanted it? She hung up the phone, then searched in her bag for a couple of ibuprofen and a Claritin. She downed them with a swig of the tepid coffee in her cup. Luckily, her first client wouldn’t be in until eight thirty. She’d have a few minutes to lie down in a dark room before the migraine’s full effect claimed her.

  She crossed to the doorway, flicked off the light and lay down, on the brown leather couch along one wall of the small room. A cold compress would have been nice, but having lots of options wasn’t her strong suit now.

  She knew she’d go to see McKay, if only to find out what was going on, what she was being dragged into. She didn’t have to tell him anything and she wouldn’t, regardless of what she’d gone on record about before.

  She closed her eyes, inhaling deeply. If she read things right, here it went all over again: another high-profile case, another media frenzy, another opportunity to be made a fool of.

  No wonder she hadn’t gotten much sleep last night. The second worst nightmare of her life was, in all likelihood, about to begin all over again.

  Two

  Alex paused at the door to the interrogation room she’d been escorted to by a uniformed officer she’d picked up at the front desk. After seeing her first few patients, Alex had gone home, changed into a power outfit from the old days, and driven here to the Forty-first Precinct servicing a section of the northeast Bronx. Her wardrobe selection, a winter-white wool suit, was intended to send McKay a subliminal message—she was one of the good guys. It wasn’t exactly a white hat, but it would have to do.

  Alex’s first sign that things were not as she suspected came when the young officer tapped on the door. “They’re waiting for you.”

  “They?” she wanted to ask, but before the question made it to her lips he pushed the door open revealing exactly who “they” were.

  The room was slightly bigger than the average interrogation room, but it was painted the same institutional green as every other wall she’d seen. The room was dominated by a long wood table surrounded by a host of chairs, most of which were occupied by grim-faced men in dark suits. Most of them stood as they were alerted to her presence, but only one stepped forward to greet her.

  Nearly six feet tall with short sandy hair and a fair complexion explained by his Irish heritage, John McKay extended a hand to her. “I’m glad to see you changed your mind, Doctor. I’m Sergeant McKay.”

  She’d already figured as much. Annoyance tightened her jaw. He’d led her to believe that they’d be meeting alone. Why he hadn’t mentioned that others would be present she couldn’t begin to guess. “I didn’t expect the whole cavalry to be here.”

  He shrugged, as if it made no difference. “Why don’t we get started?”

  He spent the next few minutes introducing her to the rest of the men, most of whom apparently worked out of the Forty-first, but there were others, representatives of special units like homicide and vice. For the most part, they greeted her with the enthusiasm with which one welcomes a cold germ into the room. To some degree she couldn’t blame them. There wasn’t a cop she knew who had much use for shrinks. But more than that, she surmised that if McKay knew her history these men did, too. She suspected there wasn’t a man here who didn’t blame her, at least in part, for those murders.

  McKay led her to one of the seats before taking his place at the head of the table. McKay puffed out his narrow chest as if he were a bird in search of a mate. “As you all know, we’ve been assembled to find the so-called Amazon Killer that has been working one end of the New England Thruway since June twelfth of last year. His victims, except the last one, have all been young working girls unfortunate enough to venture into his hunting area. This was the killer’s first victim, Shashana Bright, age fourteen.”

  McKay nodded to someone at the back of the room and the lights grew dim. A gruesome picture showed itself on the wall to Alex’s left—a head and torso shot of a young woman with nut-brown skin and short, dyed blond hair. Her face had been brutalized and among other indignities her right breast was missing, not excised, but appeared to have been hacked off in several motions, leaving open, jagged flesh.

  Alex swallowed reflexively, as McKay went on, cataloguing her injuries as if he were discussing cutting up a side of beef. The picture itself wasn’t as disturbing as McKay’s dispassionate droning. She didn’t expect the police to weep over every victim; they’d never get their job done that way. But if investigators were supposed to serve as the victim’s silenced voice, what sort of champion would McKay make?

  As McKay went on, flashing photos of the victims, citing other dates and names and circumstances, she wondered if he had another agenda besides finding out who’d killed all those girls. She doubted it was the thrill of the hunt with McKay, since he showed so little emotion. Perhaps he hoped being lead on this case would advance his career. That seemed a more likely assumption. Or maybe he was just a coldhearted son of a bitch.

  Alex tuned in again, hearing Ingrid Beltran’s name. Her photo was almost identical to every other.

  “Beltran was in the area, dressed for a night clubbing after she picked up her friends. We speculate the killer assumed she was a pro.” The photo on the wall remained, though dulled by the fluorescence of the overhead lights. “So, what do you think, Doctor? Could your guy have done this?”

  Alex blinked, trying to adjust her vision. She scanned the faces of the men staring back at her from around the conference table, before answering. She’d noticed that not one of them had made a sound during McKay’s presentation. No expressions of surprise or disgust or even any speculations or questions. This was either the most incurious bunch of cops she’d ever seen or they’d all seen this before. She’d wondered why McKay had bothered to drag her over here in the midst of his briefing, and she thought she knew why now. More than likely, this session had been designed as a public embarrassment, a graphic reminder of what her perceived incompetence had led to. Too bad for him she didn’t cower that easily. Not anymore.

  Perversely, a small smile formed at the corner of her mouth, as she focused on McKay. “So far you haven’t shown me anything to suggest Walter Thorpe had anything to do with these murders.”

  MacKay’s expression hardened. “Perhaps you weren’t paying attention, Dr. Waters,” he said.

  She recognized the man’s attempt to dress her down, but she wasn’t fazed by it. “Perhaps you weren’t, Detective.” She shifted in her seat to straighten her back and cast an icy glance around the room. Most of the men, the most experienced in their fields, looked away when her gaze settled on them. Only one man, an older grizzly cop she’d been told came from homicide, looked back at her with something close to admiration in his eyes.

  She sighed and fastened a glare on McKay. “Walter Thorpe was convicted of committing a series of push-in rapes in the Wakefield section of the Bronx. He didn’t murder anybody. His victims were all women in their early thirties, young mothers, not teenagers, and certainly not underage prostitutes. Thorpe didn’t even use a weapon.”

&nbs
p; She paused, inhaling. This was preposterous. Thorpe was so mild-mannered none of his victims had required medical attention for as much as an abrasion. The one woman who’d fended off one of his attacks had done so by merely screaming. How did such a man, without any apparent provocation, morph into a killer so vicious as to mutilate his victims while they were still alive?

  Then again, she hadn’t seen Walter since before his conviction. Prison changed a man, most often for the worse. Maybe she was only seeing what she wanted to see, but she suspected that these men around her hid something from her, making vision into this case more difficult.

  Whatever bombshell they possessed, she wished they’d hurry up and drop it already instead of playing head games designed to make her look bad. “What do you know that I don’t?”

  McKay smiled, a feral expression that didn’t surprise her, but unnerved her, as she supposed he intended. “Would you change your mind knowing that both the rear and side view mirrors were smashed on each of the vehicles in which the bodies were discovered?”

  She lifted one eyebrow. That was all the reaction she’d allow them to see. Thorpe had smashed the bedroom mirrors in each of his victim’s homes. When questioned why he committed the rapes, he answered that the mirror, not he, had committed the crimes. She supposed that beat out having little dogs or demons or pygmy statues telling you what to do. But it had been his semen found in one the women’s bodies, so that was that.

  A dislike of mirrors was hardly a unique phobia among criminals. A mirror could be another pair of eyes, watching, recording, judging. It could stand for truth or self-reflection. If the police had gone looking for a rapist with a similar m.o. they wouldn’t have had to go far. When Thorpe had been apprehended, the Daily News ran his picture on the front page under a misquoted caption: THE MIRROR MADE HIM DO IT.

  Still, she was certain McKay had something else. He didn’t wait long to prove he wouldn’t disappoint.

  “Your boy’s getting sloppy. We found his fingerprint on the seat-release button—a six-point match for his right middle finger.”

  Alex sat back, saying nothing. McKay’s admission confirmed a host of things, primarily that they had been looking at Thorpe before they ever found the fingerprint. But a six-point match wasn’t enough to conclusively prove anything. They needed more, which she supposed was where she came in. Given the fact that she hadn’t seen the man in more than six years, she doubted she could offer up much information.

  “If that’s true, what do you want from me?”

  “According to the super in his building, Walter Thorpe disappeared a week before the first girl turned up. He called your office three times in the month before he went missing. Each of the calls was less than a minute in duration.”

  Alex shook her head. She’d received no such calls that she was aware of. All calls were logged in by the secretary in the office where she worked. She didn’t miss McKay’s implication either. Calls of such a short duration implied that Thorpe had been leaving messages for her to call him. She wasn’t sure whether McKay believed she’d spoken to Thorpe or blown off his calls, but she suspected neither answer would suit him. In any event, he hadn’t called her, so she really couldn’t tell McKay anything.

  She opened her mouth to speak at the same time the door opened. The room’s focus shifted to the tall man who strode in. He wore a charcoal-gray suit molded to a muscular body. His sandy brown hair was cut close to his scalp. Alex drank in this information, but his eyes were what captivated her—a deep chocolate brown. Bedroom eyes, her mother would have called them. Though she hadn’t seen him in thirteen years, she immediately knew who he was. One word formed in her mind and took up residence: Zach.

  While the other men welcomed him into the room in a way that denoted both familiarity and respect, Alex sat back and tried to breathe. It hadn’t occurred to her before that moment that the one area of expertise missing from this little confab was someone from sex crimes, or what they now euphemistically called special victims.

  Despite what was wise, she’d followed his career. She knew he’d made a name for himself, solving some of the most notorious cases in the Bronx, the most infamous of which was Nigel Brooks, a man wanted in three states for molesting children. She should have known he’d turn up in this somehow, but she hadn’t expected it. Nor had she expected the flood of emotions that swept through her on seeing him. Anger, betrayal, shattered trust collided with the remnants of a humiliating case of puppy love she’d mistaken for the real thing. She’d been a week shy of her eighteenth birthday the day he walked out of her life. Emotionally, time might as well have stood still.

  Neither he nor the men in this room needed to know that, however. She was glad for the moment’s diversion for the opportunity to school her features back into some sort of normal expression. Neither McKay nor any of the other men saw fit to offer him an introduction to her, which suited her fine. He slid into one of the chairs, his eyes on her, but they bore no sign that he knew who she was. She almost wanted to laugh. He didn’t recognize her. In all her imaginings of what it might be like to see him again, she’d never figured on him not knowing her.

  “Getting back to what we were discussing—”

  Alex cut McKay off before he could ask the question. “To my knowledge Thorpe never called me. I can check the incoming logs if you like, but Alice, the receptionist, is very conscientious. If Thorpe had called, I would have known about it.”

  “You can’t think of any reason why Thorpe might have tried to contact you?”

  Alex ground her teeth together. Either this man was obtuse or he didn’t believe her. More than likely it was the latter. More than likely McKay believed that Thorpe had reached out to her for help before he did something tragic. If that were the case, she might have been able to stop him or at least notify the authorities that he was dangerous. But that hadn’t happened. At least she thought she had an explanation for some of McKay’s animus. He blamed her for not acting and allowing a killer to roam the streets free.

  She fastened a hard look on the detective. “You may not believe this, but if Thorpe had called, I would have spoken to him. I’m not in the habit of turning away clients, even those I’m no longer treating.”

  The homicide detective broke in again before McKay had a chance for a comeback. “Right now, we’re looking to pick up Thorpe. As you know he disappeared from his apartment. We know he’s got a sister living somewhere upstate. Is there any other information you can give us? Old haunts? Old habits?”

  Any information she had was more than six years old, but she nodded. Besides, any information she had, the police must have collected back before he was convicted. Why did they need it again now? She scrutinized the old cop’s face. He seemed to be offering her a way out and she was going to take it.

  She stood and slung her purse over her shoulder. “I’ve got an address on the sister. I can look through his file for what else I might have. If you gentlemen will excuse me, I have clients to get back to. If you need anything else, you know where to reach me.”

  For one brief second her gaze settled on Zach. He’d stood when she did, a testament to his upbringing. For the last few minutes, she’d felt his gaze on her. His face now bore the expression of a man who knew he knew someone but couldn’t figure out exactly who they were or how he knew them. Fine. Let him figure it out at his leisure. She was out of there. She strode to the door and let herself out.

  Once outside with the door shut behind her, she leaned her back against the wall and dragged in several long breaths. She did not need this, not any of it. Not now when she’d just gotten her life back on track. Not when she’d finally gotten rid of all the old hurt, the old guilt, the old self-doubt and self-recrimination. Finally, she was herself again after being part of the walking wounded for half her life. She didn’t need to see him again, nor did she deserve to have the men in the room believing she’d had the opportunity to influence a killer and passed it up. Even if she’d seen Thorpe, there was no gu
arantee she’d have been able to stop him. No therapist held that much power.

  She would check the logs as soon as she got back to her office, but she doubted Alice would have neglected to inform her Thorpe called. But the question that nagged at her was, if Thorpe hadn’t called her, who had?

  Three

  As the door closed, Zach settled back into his seat, dismissing from his mind the woman who’d just walked out. It had been a hell of a day already and it was only one o’clock in the afternoon. He’d been in court that morning, doing his damnedest to get some son of a bitch named Brady Anders locked up for trying to molest a kid, while the defense attorney tried with some success to prove that Zach had it in for his client.

  To some extent it was true. Anders had been picked up three times for preying on children in the area where he lived. Each time he’d been arrested, his lawyer had found a way to get him off—either he found some technicality to negate the evidence, or the kids were too scared to testify. Zach hadn’t intended for that to happen another time.

  As Zach saw it, Anders had made two mistakes in his life. The first was being a pedophile. The second had been moving into the Bronx neighborhood where Zach lived.

  One of Zach’s neighbors told him one of the kids in Haffen Park had been approached by some Rastadude looking for a lost puppy. The kid had been smart enough not to fall for the ruse. He’d run off to tell his mother, but before she could find him, Anders had run off.

  Given the boy’s description, it wasn’t hard to pick out Anders as the culprit. Anders was over six feet tall, had a jagged scar on his left cheek and sported waist-length dirty and matted dreadlocks. Anyone looking at him could tell his elevator stopped short of the top floor. That’s probably what earned him representation from some Let’s Feel Sorry for Sickos society in the first place, rather than some overworked soul out of the public defender’s office.