by Harker Moore
It was all allegory, of course, for concepts beyond human terms. But close enough. Though what his grandfather’s books had not explained was the true nature of the punishment for such an unnatural desire—a karmic justice to fit the crime. The Fallen had been granted their wish for human bodies … forever. Barred from Heaven, they remained trapped eternally in human flesh, in body bags, prisoners of the cycle of death and rebirth.
But one … he … Gadriel … had cheated God. He had not died, to be reborn with the memory of who he was, lost or fading in an infant’s brain. Paramedics had arrived at the scene and resuscitated his body. He had returned to Earth awakened.
In the long months of rehabilitation, he had had time to reflect on the hopelessness of his condition and to think of what might be done to free himself and the other Fallen. And he discovered that he could identify the others of his kind by the auras that shone about them, an essence that human flesh could not contain.
At last he had begun to plan. He would find and awaken the most powerful of the Fallen, duplicating for them his own awakening experience. Armed before death with the knowledge of their true identities, they would be prepared to fight reincarnation. Resisting the pull of Earth, they could remain instead in the place between, gathering in strength, till enough of them had assembled to destroy the barrier and regain what had been lost.
He let his hands drop. Sat in the dark with his breathing, waiting for the clearing of his vision. After a moment he got up and threw on a robe. He walked into the familiar red glare of the darkroom and lifted one of the prints from the developing tray. This one had been taken before the moment of awakening, and the eyes of what had still been William Kerry stared back at him in horror.
CHAPTER
10
The room was bright, expensive, perfect. The charcoal letters, an offense. Nearly a foot high, they crawled brokenly on the wall above the bed. Rumel was what the letters spelled out, and Sakura spoke the name aloud. He had read the passages in The Book of Enoch, the ones that mentioned the fallen angels. The first four names that the killer had written had been listed as leaders of the rebellion against God. He figured the name Rumel would also be among them.
In the harsh morning light, Dr. William Kerry didn’t look like an angel. He looked like a man who’d gotten used to being dead. The wings were obscene. The drawing on his chest a primitive horror. Circles, lines. It still meant nothing to Sakura.
Like most of the rooms in the house, the bedroom had floor-to-ceiling glass. From where he stood near the bed, Sakura could watch members of the task force working with borough detectives in a grid search of the grounds.
“You about through in here?” McCauley had appeared in the doorway.
He turned. “Almost. Has Crime Scene finished with the rest of the house?”
“Yeah.” The chief came in, following the path of least disturbance. “SOB disabled the alarm before cutting the glass in the kitchen. He was wearing gloves as usual.” McCauley had moved to look at the body. “Poor bastard.”
He turned back to Sakura. “You saw the press out there,” he said. “Fucking vultures. They sure as hell made you, Lieutenant. Got to figure this one is connected with the others. It’s no longer just some psycho offing gays in the city,” he growled. “A doctor with a wife and kids murdered in Forest Hills. You can guess what kind of shit they’ll be printing now.”
“Dr. Kerry’s practice was in Manhattan,” Sakura said. “It’s probable he was targeted there.” He looked at the chief of detectives. “The killer is precise with a scalpel. He’s comfortable injecting drugs.”
“The clinic …?”
“It’s a possibility,” he said. “We’ll start interviewing the staff immediately.” He took the handkerchief out of his pocket and picked up a framed family photograph that was sitting on the desk—William Kerry and his family. “Mrs. Kerry is on her way home,” he said to McCauley, “but it’s his nurse I want to talk to.”
“You thinking the nurse might know the doctor better than the wife?” The chief was watching him.
Sakura set the picture back in place. “I think it would be a mistake to assume that the killer has completely broken his pattern.”
Diana Tierney’s prettiness was blurred by the tears she had been shedding. Her cornflower blue eyes were red, her face puffy. She’d been torturing the same Kleenex between her fingers for the last ten minutes. She looked down now, noticed her hands, and placed the overworked tissue on a nearby table.
“I’m sorry to have to ask you these questions now.” Detective Johnson’s voice sounded too soft for such a large woman.
“I’m sorry I’m not handling this better….” Tierney’s voice trailed off.
“Why did you decide to drive out to Dr. Kerry’s home?” Johnson began the questioning.
“He couldn’t be reached….” For a moment the nurse seemed ready to say something more.
“Why were you trying to contact Dr. Kerry?”
“He was on call and there was an emergency. When the hospital couldn’t reach him, they called me.”
“So why did you decide to drive out to Forest Hills?”
She hesitated. “I thought it was odd that he didn’t at least answer his pager. I knew he had a paper to write and was planning to work at the house. I got a little worried.”
“What happened when you got to the house?”
“I rang the bell, but no one answered.”
“What did you do next?” Johnson asked.
“I had a key. Dr. Kerry had given me one when I kept the children one weekend.”
“Was the front door locked?”
“Yes, but I opened it. I thought it strange the alarm system was down. I called out.”
“And …?” Johnson pressed.
“He … he didn’t answer.” The composure Tierney had tried to regain began to slip away.
“What did you do then?”
“I … I thought the house was too quiet.”
“But you went in anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Then what happened, Ms. Tierney?” Johnson was pulling her along slowly.
Tierney took a deep breath. “I looked around downstairs. Everything seemed okay. I didn’t notice the broken glass in the kitchen.”
“Then …”
“I went upstairs. I could see the doors to all the rooms were open … except the one at the end of the hall.”
“The master bedroom?”
Tierney nodded.
“You entered the bedroom?”
She nodded, fresh tears forming in her voice. “I didn’t even know what I was looking at.”
Johnson waited a moment. “Did you touch anything in the room?”
“No. God, no.” Her chest jumped with a ragged breath.
Johnson waited. “What did you do then?”
“I ran.”
“To the neighbors?”
She was crying again, quieter this time. “Yes.”
Sakura came forward. “How long have you been Dr. Kerry’s nurse, Ms. Tierney?”
She looked up. The sound of his voice seemed to distract her. “Three years.”
“Were you friends?”
“We liked each other.” Tierney smiled and some of the prettiness returned to her face.
“Did he confide in you?” Sakura asked.
“What?”
“Did he discuss anything personal with you, Ms. Tierney?”
She looked down at her hands, then up to meet his eyes.
“Sometimes,” she answered softly.
“What did you talk about?”
“About Lylah and the kids mostly.”
“Lylah is Mrs. Kerry?”
“Yes.” She moved in her chair.
“Were the doctor and Mrs. Kerry having problems?”
“No.” The denial was quick.
Sakura walked away.
Tierney turned to Johnson. “I—” she stopped for a moment, rephrasing. “… Did the same person wh
o killed Luis Carrera kill Dr. Kerry?”
Sakura walked back. He stood directly in front of her again. “What do you mean?”
Diana Tierney’s face was still swollen, but the play of emotions was becoming easier to read. “Luis Carrera was Dr. Kerry’s patient,” she said. “He’d been treated for lumbar compression about a year ago. It was a shock when we heard he’d been murdered.”
Sakura almost smiled. At last there was a connection between victims. “Was Mr. Carrera still seeing Dr. Kerry?” he asked.
“No, he’d been discharged.”
He nodded, turning slightly away from her. “Yes, we believe the same person who killed Mr. Carrera also killed Dr. Kerry. Of course, there are some differences.” He closed in on her again. “All the other victims were murdered in the city. Dr. Kerry was murdered in Queens.” Sakura paused. “The others were homosexuals,” he said. “And Dr. Kerry …”
He left it incomplete, his eyes fixing on hers. He imagined he appeared rather forbidding, his tall, angular body outfitted in a dark suit like a cleric, his Asian features set unforgivingly in his too thin face. For a moment there was no reaction. Then slowly there was a kind of easing of her body, a relaxing of her features, as though at long last peace had settled in, and Diana Tierney seemed no longer willing to be a keeper of secrets.
Having lunched at her favorite nearby restaurant, Hanae entered Central Park at Fifth Avenue and Sixtieth Street through Grand Army Plaza. She could hear voices of children coming from the ice rink as she and Taiko moved along the path. Sometimes her walks took her as far as the Shakespeare Garden, but today she would just cross the Mall and go as far as Bethesda Terrace. She loved to listen to the fountain, Angel of Waters.
Despite the exhilaration she usually felt in the cold, she was uncomfortable today in the park. She shivered as the wind blew through the tight weave of her red coat, through to her thick dress and stockinged legs, until it found her bareness beneath. Perhaps it had not been such a good idea to come today.
“I am becoming a foolish woman,” she said aloud to Taiko, who sat at her feet next to the bench where she had stopped and huddled. In Japan she had depended on relatives to accompany her, but now, here in New York, Taiko had given her a freedom she had never known in Kyoto.
“Hanae …”
His voice had startled her. She hadn’t heard his approach.
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to see you here,” he said.
Adrian Lovett sat down next to her, his voice changing level as he bent to pet Taiko. “Hi, boy,” he was saying, “you’re sure better equipped than we are for this weather.” She knew his hand was moving in the dog’s fur. “You have a good Thanksgiving?” He had turned to her.
“Very good. We had friends for dinner.”
“You fix turkey?”
“Yes. And dressing. I have learned to cook American.” She smiled.
“No class tomorrow,” he said now. And she had the sudden impression that he might have come to the park seeking her, since they would not see each other tomorrow with Ms. Nguyen still away. A conceited thought. But she guessed that perhaps it was true. She sensed he was lonely, missing having his family together at the holiday.
As if on cue his cell phone rang.
“Sorry,” he said to her. She could hear him moving next to her, retrieving the phone.
“Hello,” he said. “Oh, hi.” His voice softened. “No, I’m in the park … with a beautiful lady.” He laughed. “It’s my son,” the words directed at her. “He doesn’t believe me…. Yes,” he said into the phone again, “it is very cold. But I am in the park. And I’m sitting with Hanae Sakura on a bench. Here, tell her hi….” He had put the phone into her hand.
“I …”
“His name is Christopher,” he reminded her.
She lifted the phone obediently to her ear. “Hello, Christopher,” she said.
“Hi,” the child’s voice said.
She offered the phone back to Adrian.
“See,” he was saying to his son, “you should know better than to doubt your old man.”
“Do you have children?” he asked when finally he’d hung up.
“No,” she answered too quickly, making it sound like a lie. “I’m pregnant,” she heard herself confessing.
“That’s wonderful.”
Joy from the mouth of this stranger. She had told him before she had told anyone else. Before she had told her husband. The wrongness of it cut her like a knife. But it could not be taken back.
“It really is cold today,” he said. He had seen her shiver.
“Yes. I had better get home.”
“Me too.” He stood up.
She hoped he would not offer to walk with her.
“Will I see you in class next week?” he asked instead.
“Yes, next week.” She smiled again and got up. She could feel his eyes watching as she and Taiko walked away.
Sakura looked around the Manhattan apartment. There was an instant impression that no one lived here. No pictures, no books, no little collections of anything cluttering the surfaces of tables. No traces of anyone’s life.
It had been relatively easy getting Diana Tierney to confess that the first call she had made in her effort to locate Kerry had been to this apartment. After all, she was probably the only person other than a succession of lovers who even knew of the apartment’s existence.
For the first year after she’d begun working as Kerry’s nurse, she had been completely ignorant of his double life. Not even after Kerry told her about the midtown apartment did she suspect. If she thought anything, she imagined he was having an affair with a woman. She had never guessed the reality, until one of his lovers did the unspeakable and showed up at the clinic.
What had happened next, she’d said, she would always remember. Kerry had coolly asked not to be disturbed as he ushered the man into his private office. And he could have left it at that. But after the man had gone, he called her. She never understood why, but he told her everything. She believed he needed to confess to someone, and she was convenient. He had smiled after, saying he felt better that she knew, and hoped … She had stopped him then, reassuring him that he didn’t have to ask for her loyalty. He had it.
She just felt he was carrying around enough baggage. She didn’t want to add to his burden the possibility of whether or not his nurse was going to expose him. Besides, she liked Bill Kerry.
Sakura moved into the kitchen. The cabinets were bare and the refrigerator was empty, except for some wine and bottled water. A single roll of paper towels stood near the spotless sink.
In the bedroom the chest of drawers held only a sweat suit, socks, and underwear. In the closet were shoes and a single change of dress clothes. A box of Kleenex was on the bedside table near a phone. He picked up and listened for the hum of the dial tone. Replacing the receiver, he snapped the edge of one of the latex gloves he was wearing. The sound seemed unnecessarily loud in the small space.
Kerry fit the pattern. Despite the wife and kids, the doctor was a homosexual, or at least bisexual. And despite the fact that he was murdered in Forest Hills, he had likely been targeted in Manhattan. The doctor must have been tailed from the city and watched. How else would the killer have known that Lylah Kerry and the children would not be home? Except for the forced entry, the killer was still running true to form.
And now at last they had gotten a break—a connection between two of the victims. And Milne? Hadn’t he had crippling arthritis? Could he also have been one of Kerry’s patients? He would need to press hard on the staff interviews and background checks. And they’d need a list of Kerry’s patients and a printout of his appointment schedule for the weeks prior to his death. The clinic seemed to be the nexus.
Sakura found Willie still working in her assigned cubicle, a glass-fronted box smaller than his own office at the periphery of the Major Case squad room. She was reading the latest DD-5 interviews with the clinic staff and eating pizza that the tas
k force detectives had ordered in. She wiped her hands on a paper napkin as he walked into the office.
“Hi, Jimmy,” she greeted him. “Want some? It’s pepperoni.” She indicated the cardboard box on her desk.
“No thanks.” He sat down.
“You got any leads on the lover?” she asked. His visit today to Kerry’s Manhattan apartment had been followed by a canvass of the building and surrounding neighborhood.
“An elderly woman on Kerry’s floor claims to have seen ‘a nice-looking young man’ going into the apartment once or twice,” he said. “Her description was pretty vague. White. Average height and weight. Twenties or thirties. Brunet. Doesn’t sound like the bartender’s composite.”
“What about the wife?”
“Lylah Kerry claims complete shock at her husband’s double life. I’m inclined to believe her.”
“Well,” she said, “we did get one significant piece of information from the nurse. Kerry treated Carrera. That’s a solid link between two victims. The killer may be connected to the clinic.”
“Maybe. But the administration is fighting us on patient information. They were adamant that none of the other victims, including David Milne, had ever been treated there.”
She looked down at the reports she’d been reading. “Nobody from the clinic staff stands out so far,” she said. “But I’m going to have the Bureau run checks on all the names. See if anything shakes out.”
“Good.” He knew he didn’t sound hopeful.
“I know it’s not likely since we’re dealing with orthopedics,” she said, “but I’d like to see if any of the clinic staff has ever worked in a psychiatric area.”
“You’re thinking about the LSD.”
“Yes. Except that there’s a problem with that, Jimmy. The kind of therapy that I told you about has been illegal in this country for decades. That’s why I did my graduate work overseas.”
“Couldn’t some doctor be using the drug anyway?”