3 Great Thrillers

by Churton, Alex; Churton, Toby; Locke, John; Lustbader, Eric van; van Lustbader, Eric

  Jack reflexively blocked that advice by going on the offensive. “So what is faith, exactly, Egon? I’ve never quite been able to get a handle on it.”

  Schiltz rolled ash into a cut-glass ashtray. “If you insist on reducing it to its basic elements, it’s the sure and simple knowledge that there’s something more out there, something greater than yourself, than mankind: a grand plan, a design that can’t be comprehended by you or by any other human being, because it is numinous, it is God’s design, something only He can fathom.”

  “What about the angels? Can they fathom God’s plan?”

  Schiltz expelled a cloud of highly aromatic smoke. “You see how logic binds you to the earth, Jack? It ensures you dismiss with a joke anything you can’t understand.”

  “Like angels on unicycles, for instance.”

  “Yes, Jack.” Egon refused to rise to the joke. “Just like angels on unicycles.”

  “Then Emma, up in heaven, must know God’s plan for her.”

  “Certainly.”

  “She’s content then.”

  Schiltz’s eyes narrowed slightly behind the aromatic blue smoke. “All who are in heaven are content.”

  “Says who?”

  “We have the Word of God.”

  “In a book written by men.”

  Egon gave Jack a look he might have reserved for the devil. “I suppose there’s only one way to get rid of you tonight,” he sighed.

  “What do you want me to tell you about the hand?”

  “Whether or not it belongs to Alli Carson.”

  That got Schiltz’s attention. His white eyebrows shot up, cartoonstyle. “The president-elect’s daughter?”

  “The same.”

  Jack and Schiltz faced each other in the autopsy room, lights low to cut down on the glare from all the stainless steel and tile.

  Schiltz snapped on rubber gloves, placed a magnifying lens over his right eye. Then he adjusted a spotlight, the beam illuminating the hand. He bent over, his shoulders rolled forward, a hunchback in his ill-lit garret beside the stone belfry. “Waterlogged as hell,” he said gloomily, “so you can forget about anything like DNA testing.” His fingertips moved the hand. “Interesting.”

  “What is?” Jack prompted.

  “The hand was sawn off, expertly.”

  “With a chain saw?”

  “That would be a logical assumption.” Was there a touch of irony in his voice? He held up the hand, stump first. “But the markings indicate otherwise. Something rotary, certainly. But delicate.” He shrugged. “My best guess would be a medical saw.”

  Jack leaned in. The stench of formaldehyde and acetone was nauseating. “We looking at a surgeon as the perp?”

  “Possibly.”

  “Well, that narrows it down to a couple hundred million.”

  “Amusing.” Schiltz glanced up. “Here’s what I do know: This was done with a sure hand, no remorse in the cut, no hesitation whatsoever. Plus, the immersion in water has made the pruning permanent. He’s betting we won’t be able to get fingerprints to make an ID.”

  “So—what?—the perp’s done this sort of thing before?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Jack held up the gold-and-platinum ring in its plastic evidence bag. “I took this off the third finger. It belongs to Alli Carson.”

  “Which doesn’t speak to her state of health.” Seeing Jack blanch, he hastened to add, “All it means is your perp has access to her.” Schiltz used a dental pick to scrape under and around the nails, one at a time. “Look.” Holding aloft the implement so that the working end was directly in the light, he said, “What do you see here?”

  “Something pink,” Jack said.

  “And shiny.” Schiltz put the end of the pick close to his eye. “This is undoubtedly nail polish. Plus, the nails are newly cut, so my guess is that for whatever reason—”

  “The perp cut this girl’s nails and removed the polish,” Jack finished for him. He stood up. “Alli Carson never wore polish; her nails were square-cut, like a boy’s. This isn’t her hand.”

  “You may be sure, Jack, but I’m a forensic pathologist. I need proof before I say yea or nay.” He went to a sink, filled a pan with warm water. Immersing the hand in it, he gently loosened the skin, worked it off, starting at the wrist. The gray, amorphous jellyfish swam in the water. With the care of a lepidopterist working on a butterfly’s wing, Schiltz unrolled the translucent material.

  “Ami!” he called.

  A moment later, the AME poked her head into the room. “Yes, sir.”

  “Got a fingerprint job for you.”

  Ami nodded, took a place beside him.

  “Left hand,” he said.

  Ami put her left hand into the water. Schiltz rolled the skin over her hand like a glove. Ami air-dried the skin by holding her left hand aloft. Then he fingerprinted the human glove.

  “You see,” he said, rolling each finger on the ink pad, “wearing the skin smooths out the pruning.” He held up the fingerprint card, nodded to Ami, who removed the skin, took the card, and went away. “We’ll soon know whether or not this hand belongs to Alli Carson.”

  He took the severed hand out of its warm-water bath, laid it back on the metal examining tray, studying it once again. “Care to make a bet?” he said dryly.

  “I know it’s not hers,” Jack said.

  Several moments later, Ami popped back into the room. “No match in any system for the Jane Doe,” she said. “One thing is certain, she isn’t Alli Carson.”

  Jack breathed a huge sigh of relief, dialed Nina’s cell, told her the good news. Pocketing his cell, he tapped a forefinger against his lips. “Alli’s ring, the nails cut to Alli’s length, the water pruning of the fingertips—clearly, someone wants us to believe this is her hand. Why play this grisly game? Why go to all the trouble?” Why had he taken her? What did Alli’s abductor want? “What sick mind has maimed a girl Alli’s age just to play a trick on us?”

  “A very sick mind, indeed, Jack.” Schiltz turned the hand over. “He cut the hand off while the girl was still alive.”

  Rain made a stage set of the parking lot, beaded silver curtains slid down the beams of the arc lights. Jack walked through the glimmer of the near-deserted asphalt. After jerking open the car door, he slid in behind the wheel, fired the ignition. But he didn’t pull out. The events of this morning overran him. His head pounded; every muscle in his body seemed to be screaming at once. Leaning over, he opened the glove box, shook out four ibuprofen, crunched down on them, wincing at the harsh, acidic taste.

  He thought about the girl’s hand. The abductor had immersed it in water so they wouldn’t be able to ID her through fingerprints. But Egon had used it to prove that the hand didn’t belong to Alli Carson. And yet the abductor had sawn the hand off while the girl was still alive? Why had he done that? Everything else that Jack had seen led him to believe that this man was methodical, not maniacal. What if he wanted them to know that Alli was still alive? He’d made certain of that by cutting off the hand of a living girl. But he hadn’t cut Alli’s hand off. Why not? Jack’s thoughts chased each other like flashes of lightning. He rubbed his forehead with the heels of his hands.

  Beyond the lot, out on the interstate, an unending Morse code of lights flashed across his face, strobed against his eyes, doubling his headache. Neon signs flashed pink and green like bioluminescent creatures deep in the ocean’s heart. A horn blared, carrying the diminishing sound behind it like a tail. The rhythmic thrash of the windshield wipers was like his father’s admonishing finger. With a convulsive lunge of his hand, he turned off the ignition, watched the rain slalom down the glass.

  Alli, he thought, where the hell are you? What’s happening to you?

  He was powerless to stop his thoughts moving toward Emma. His longing to talk with his daughter, so that she could spread the balm of forgiveness over him, brought tears to his eyes. His hands shook.

  It’s time to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Schiltz’s
advice came back to him like an echo in a cave. He knew his friend was right, but God forgive him, he couldn’t stop. He was like an alcoholic with a bottle to his mouth. Every fiber in his being ached for the chance to say he was sorry, to tell Emma how much he loved her. Why was it, he asked himself despairingly, that he could acknowledge his love for her only now, when it was too late? He slammed his fist against the steering wheel, making the car shiver around him like Jell-O.

  He looked up, unsure whether it was the rain or his tears he was seeing. He felt, rather than saw, a shimmer, as if the shadowy air at the corners of his vision rippled like the surface of Bear Creek Lake. Startled, he looked around and smelled Emma’s scent. Was that her face he saw staring back at him in the rearview mirror? He whirled around, but his nose was filled with the cloying stench of hot metal, stripped rubber, and burnt flesh.

  Gasping, he wrenched open the door, stumbled to his knees on the asphalt, head hanging down. The rain fell on him with an indifference that made him pound his fist against the car door. Pulling himself up on the door handle, he peered through the rain-beaded window. The backseat was empty. As he rested his forehead against the glass, his mind whirled backwards, into the dark whirlpool of the past.

  He had taken Emma, Egon, and Molly to Cumberland State Forest to hike and fish in Bear Creek Lake. The girls were ten. He had bought Emma a Daisy air rifle. One afternoon she had come running back to camp, her eyes streaming with tears. She had aimed her rifle at a bluebird sitting on the branch of a pine and pulled the trigger. She’d never believed she would hit the bird, let alone kill it, but that’s precisely what had happened.

  She was heartsick, beyond consoling. Jack suggested that they have a funeral and burial. The physical preparations seemed to calm her. But she’d cried all over again when Jack shoveled the dirt over the pathetic fallen bird. Then Emma took the air rifle, hurled it with all her strength into the lake. It sank like a stone, ripples spiraled out from its grave.

  That was the last time Jack could remember really being with his daughter. After that, what happened? She grew up too fast? They grew apart too quickly? He was at a loss to understand where the time had gone or how Emma had changed. It was as if he had fallen asleep on a speeding train. He might never have woken up if it hadn’t been for the crash.

  Schiltz opened the door in response to Jack’s pounding. His rubber gloves were slick with unspeakable substances.

  He moved away from the door so Jack could come in. “You look like roadkill. What happened to you downstairs?”

  Jack, immersed in the horror of his own personal prison, almost told Schiltz about his ghostly visitations, but he had a conviction that they weren’t visitations at all, merely wishful thinking, as if he could wish Emma back to life, or some transparent semblance of life. On the other hand, who but Egon, seeing God’s hand in the incredible, the unexplainable, might understand. Nevertheless, Jack chose to keep silent on the matter. It was too personal, too humiliating—he’d seem like a child lost in a ghost story.

  “I ran into something that disagreed with me.” Sharon constantly accused him of hiding his true feelings behind sarcasm. What did she know?

  The offices were shadowed, hushed. Carpeted and wood-paneled, they were a jarring contrast with the banks of stainless steel deathbeds, sluicing hoses, giant floor drains, vats of chemicals, rows of microscopes, tiers of body blocks used to elevate the cadavers’ chests for easier entry, drawers filled with the forensic implements of morphology and pathology: bone saws, bread knives, enterotomes, hammers, rib cutters, skull chisels, Striker saws, scalpels, and Hagedorn needles to sew up the bodies when work was done. Jack and Egon skirted the X-ray room and the toxicology lab, went through the standards room, as refined as a Swiss watchmaker’s, as blunt as a butcher shop, where cadavers as well as their major organs were weighed and measured. Even in the short corridor they felt the icy breath of the cold room, dim, blued, impersonal as a terminal, hushed as a library.

  “So what brings you back? Nowhere else to go on a rainy December night?” Schiltz gestured at the wall of cadaver containers. “Since I’m not full up, I could give you an overnight berth in my Japanese hotel. It’s quiet as the grave and a gourmet continental breakfast is served in the autopsy room starting at eight. Would you like an upper or a lower berth?”

  Jack laughed. Egon had the uncanny ability to dislodge his depressions.

  “I’m interested in whichever berths the two Secret Service men are in.”

  “Ah, yes,” Egon said. “The men in black.”

  Having a sense of humor—the darker the better—was essential for an ME, Egon once told Jack. “Professional detachment only gets you so far, because eventually someone gets under your skin,” his friend had once told him. “After that, it’s every macabre jokester for himself.”

  Schiltz moved Jack along the rows of gleaming stainless steel containers, opened two side by side at waist height. “In my fascination with your floating island, I forgot all about them. Maybe it’s because I didn’t do the original autopsies. The law now mandates that in cases of deaths of federal officials, pathologists from the Army Forces Institute of Pathology do the work.” He shrugged. “Idiotic, if you ask me, but that’s the government for you.”

  The two cadavers lay on their backs, even features waxy, doll-like, their chests cut and sewn back up in the autopsy T-scar that went from just beneath the collarbone to the lower intestine. “The pathology is yesterday’s paper so far as your new compadres are concerned. They came, they saw, they were dead-ended.”

  “Nothing at all?” Jack said.

  “I performed my own autopsies just to make certain. Not so much as a partial print, a stray hair, a scrap of skin, paint or dirt under the nails. No hint of anything that might lead you to ID the perps.” Schiltz shrugged again. “Not much to see, either. One stab apiece—hard, direct, no hesitation whatsoever—interstitial, between the third and fourth dorsal ribs, straight into the heart.” He paused. “Well, sort of.”

  Jack’s own heart had begun a furious tattoo. “What d’you mean?”

  Schiltz turned the first cadaver onto one side, shoved it to the far side of the deathbed, turned it on its stomach. As he performed the same procedure with the second body, Jack peered at the entry wound.

  “See here. I peeled back the muscle so I could get a closer look at the interior wounds. Smooth as silk, so the assailant didn’t use a serrated blade, but there was a slight curve to them. I can’t quite make out what sort of blade would leave that signature.”

  But I can, Jack thought. He’d seen that odd, slightly arced wound before, once, twenty-five years ago. His subsequent investigation, all on his own, both dangerous and difficult, had unearthed the murder weapon: a thin-bladed knife, known as a paletta. It was used by professional bakers to spread batter or apply frosting. The truly odd part was this: A paletta had a rounded end. It was totally useless for a stabbing attack. This one, however, was unique among palettas: the murderer had ground the end into a mercilessly sharp point.

  “You okay?” Schiltz peered into Jack’s frozen face.

  “You bet,” Jack said in a strangled voice.

  “Stole up behind them and bingo! No fuss, no muss.” Schiltz’s slightly bored tone indicated he’d been over this terrain numerous times in the past twenty-four hours. “Most professional, not to say impressive, especially in light of the victims’ training. In fact, I would venture to say the stabs were surgical in their precision. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t have done a better job of it myself.”

  Jack hardly heard his friend’s last sentence. He was frozen, bent over in the space between the deathbeds, his gaze flickering back and forth between the two wounds. His galloping heart seemed to have come to an abrupt and terrifying halt inside his chest.

  It’s absolutely stone-cold impossible, he told himself. I shot Cyril Tolkan while he was trying to escape over the rooftop where I’d trapped him. He’s dead, I know he is.

  And yet, the ev
idence of his own eyes was irrefutable. These stabs were the hallmark of a killer Jack had gone after twenty-five years ago, after a murder that had left him devastated, sick with despair.

  Part 2

  10

  Jack, at fifteen, often cannot sleep. It might be a form of insomnia, but most likely not. He has good reason to stay awake. He lives in a slope-shouldered row house so close to the border of Maryland, it seems as if the District wants it exiled. At night, bedeviled by a fog of anxious stirrings, he lies in bed, staring at the traffic light at the junction of New Hampshire and Eastern Avenues. He lives, eats, and breathes by the rhythm of its changing from red to green. Outside his window, at the eastern border of the District, the city roars, barks, whines, squeals, growls like a pack of feral dogs, glassy-eyed with hunger. Inside the row house, the darkness is filled with dread. It seems to grip his head like a vise squeezed tighter and tighter until he gasps, shoots up in a fountain of bedclothes. This moment is crucial. If the light is green, everything will be okay. But if it’s red … His heart pounds; the roaring in his ears dizzies him. Disaster.

  When he could bear to look back on those nights, he understood that the color of the traffic light didn’t matter. The reliance on the pattern set by unknown city workers is an illusion of control over the parts of his life he dreads. But like all children, he relies on illusion to keep his terrors in Pandora’s box.

  Between the hours of one and three in the morning, his ears are attuned to the heavy tread of his father’s footsteps as he returns from work. This particular night is no different. It is June and stifling, not even the smallest squares of laundry stir on the line. A dog lies wheezing asthmatically in the ashy buttocks of the empty lot next to the auto chop shop. An old man wheezes, coughs so long and hard, Jack is afraid he’ll hawk up a lung.

  The sounds creep in, as if the apartment itself is protesting his father’s weight. Every one of the tiny but separate noises that mark his father’s slow progress through it sends a squirt of blood into Jack’s temples, causing him to wince in pain.