by Lena Bourne
Marisa picks it up. “He’s a good looking guy. But also very generic looking. It could pose a problem. I could find too many matches.”
She’s not wrong, and I was afraid of that. “Narrow it down to men between twenty-five and thirty and first name Russell,” I say. “Then widen the search if you get no hits.”
“OK, will do,” she says, somehow managing to perfectly convey the unspoken, sarcastic, Yes, thank you, I know what I’m doing.
Blackman reaches for the sketch and studies it, his lips a thin pink line, but his eyes bright. “Did the witness mention any distinguishing marks or tattoos? I am sure the man whose back is visible in the photos has a tattoo on his neck. Wings it looks like, or perhaps feathers.”
I shake my head. “She only saw him briefly twice and both times he was dressed in a large black down jacket against the cold. She only saw his face clearly. Those were her words.”
“Can you print me off a copy of the sketch too,” Blackman asks Marisa.
“This information can’t leave this room yet,” I tell them sternly. “It might be an active duty military member we’re searching for and I want to prevent word that we’re looking to reaching him before we find him. So do not share this information with anyone, is that clear?”
I spoke to Marisa who nods curtly. “Yes, sir.”
I hope Blackman understood that I meant him too. He folds up his copy of the sketch and puts it in his pocket like maybe he has before following me out of the office.
“Would you like to accompany me out in the field today?” I ask him as he closes the door to Marisa’s office behind him.
He shakes his head. “Not yet. I wish to go over all the evidence and reports here first. And I’d like to oversee the database searching, both for the DNA and this man.” He pats the pocket where he put the sketch. “It’s how I work best. And I think you’re right about keeping these findings under wraps for the time being. At least until we speak to this man.”
I’m relieved by that. I have no patience for sifting through the reports or sitting still for that matter.
“Very good job, by the way, Major,” he tells me. “I couldn’t have narrowed this one down any better.”
I’m sure he could’ve, but somehow I don’t feel patronized at all. I feel vaguely proud at being praised by him. It’s that radio announcer voice of his, I decide, it makes everything he says sound important and permanent.
“Thank you,” I say. “I’m just glad we’re finally making some inroads into this case.”
He nods slowly. “Yes, it’s hard to crack. But you’re on the right track.”
But as I leave the lab, I’m not so sure we are. More and more, it all seems too easy the way it’s falling into our laps after months and months of it being impossible to find a single solid lead. But I also recognize the voice telling me that. It’s the voice of fear and pessimism. The one that’ll never believe we caught the killer, even after I do.
20
Mark
Two days of searching revealed absolutely nothing new. Eva had been unable to locate Mirela anywhere, the Russian hadn’t been in contact, Marisa’s search for active-duty members in the area matching the sketch and description yielded over a thousand hits on the first round, and she’s still working on narrowing that down to a manageable number. I suggested she focus only on disgruntled personnel now, so hopefully, she’ll have someone for me to check out soon. The DNA search is still ongoing, but no hits yet. None of the glassmakers in the Venice region have any recollection of creating glass slippers, but they all said they would check their files. None got back to us yet.
I spent most of my time on the streets, helping canvas the areas where the victims were most likely taken from, but the merry snowfall turned to freezing cold, driving everyone into hiding. The snow stuck to the sidewalks and roads, turned to ice now, as cold as these damn leads have turned. After that short burst of sunshine, everything turned to ice again.
The only complete report I’ve received was Wanda’s Pocahontas write-up and even that held nothing that shone any kind of light in any new direction. Pocahontas was a Native American woman born in 1596. Her father was Powhatan, the paramount chief of an alliance of about thirty chiefdoms in Tidewater, Virginia. She was captured by Colonialists is 1613, converted to Christianity during her captivity, and christened Rebecca. She died of unknown causes when she was just twenty-one-years-old and was buried in England, the exact location of her grave unknown.
I showed the report to Eva when we had dinner last night, but nothing jumped out at her either.
She called me an hour ago, just as I was pulling in through the military base gates, asking if I want to have dinner again. I do. But I can’t. I have a meeting with Blackman and then I’m spending the rest of the night reviewing what the team here has found. Maybe my presence will make it move faster, though I don’t doubt that every one of them is doing their best.
And I’ll just sleep in my office, I also tell her, sitting in my car in the parking lot in front of the HQ building, looking at its many identical windows, many of which are dark. It’s nearly eight PM, so most of the people who work there have already gone home. The lab, where I know at least fifty people are working at any given time has no windows since it’s in the basement, but I bet all those lights are on right now.
Walking into the building feels like entering a mausoleum, the thick walls radiating cold and damp. Nothing’s going to be solved in this building, I know it. But there’s nothing to find in the freezing streets of Berlin either. I wish the Russian would at least give us the exact location of where that fight his men described happened so we can try and find a fresh lead from there, but so far all attempts to contact him have been a bust.
Blackman was assigned an office upstairs, but he spends all his time down in the lab and that’s where he wants to meet me. I find him in one of the glass-walled offices off the main room, which is empty. Marisa is shut away in her own office, barely visible behind her wall of computers.
Blackman has put two of the desks in the center of the room to make one long table and has all sorts of reports and photos and documents arranged on it in no order than I can decipher.
“You wanted to speak to me?” I say when he doesn’t notice me walk in, since his back is turned to the main room.
“Ah, yes, Novak,” he says as he turns, fixing the round glasses which had slid almost to the tip of his narrow nose. He catches sight of his reflection in the glass walls behind me and starts smoothing down his short hair. I bet he ruffled it running his hands through his hair.
I walk over to the desk.
“I’ve been immersing myself in the work of this killer,” he says. “And I have a hard time imagining he’s as young as the man in the sketch. All these scenes, they took so much planning and were all executed so meticulously, both those things speak to an older person. Then there’s the sophistication of the presentation. The bodies are arranged like works of art, if you will. This is not the work of someone just starting out. This took years and years of planning and figuring out. In all my studies I’ve come across two, maybe three similar murderers, and none of those operated in this kind of scope.”
I nod like I’m interested, but actually I’m just trying hard not to say what I’m really thinking. Namely, that he’s spent too much time with his books and his studies and not enough time out in the field these past fifteen years since he retired from CID.
“There is an element of childishness to these murders, though,” I say. “Fairy princesses, cartoon characters, the intimate way in which he knows them and is able to recreate them.”
Blackman reaches over and picks up a piece of paper. “Never in my career or my studies did I ever come across a serial killer with this level of sophistication on his first crime. Whichever one of the first two were his first, they were both staged as perfectly as the last four. I took the liberty of having Sargent Smith-Marisa-look up unsolved crimes similar to these in the area.” He hol
ds out the paper for me to take. “She found two. Young women, students, raped and killed with a strong mixture of sleeping pills, their bodies left in a forest as though they were just sleeping. These happened in 2007, about one year before the first princess was found.”
I take the paper and scan it, the words dancing before my eyes. He could be onto something.
“I’ll tell Detective Schmitt. They can start by checking the DNA from these cases against that found in ours,” I say.
“That’s a good start,” Blackman says and pulls the photos of both Cinderellas and Sleeping Beauties closer, laying them side by side. “Then there’s another thing that worries me. He’s creating several scenes with the same main character. Are we to assume he’s planning on retelling each of these fairytales in bodies? I think he might be.”
“I’m afraid he is too,” I say, voicing that fear for the first time since it gripped me when I saw Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty for the second time. “But he’s already overreaching and getting sloppy. We have to focus on following the breadcrumbs he’s accidentally leaving behind and do it fast. Then we have a chance of catching him.”
“He’s not sloppy,” Blackman says, his eyes laser-focused on mine, a typical reaction of an older man who’s one-hundred percent sure he’s right to being disagreed with. I didn’t come here to butt heads with him and I’m not sure how to diffuse it, since my mind’s too full of what I should be doing instead of this.
Like checking on DNA results, seeing if Marisa has had any luck…
“I think I found something, Sir…Sirs,” she says behind my back as though summoned by my thought.
I turn to find her clutching a relatively thick manila file and poking just her head through the door.
“Come in,” I tell her. “What is it?”
She enters, closing the door slowly. “Well, I did as you suggested and narrowed the search by discharged personnel, non-active duty members that is, and ones that might have a grudge.”
I nod impatiently for her to get on with it.
“I found these five guys,” she says, opening her folder with shaking hands and almost dropping the entire contents. “None of them are named Russell though, but there’s a Robert. Robert Greaves. And all of them were discharged dishonorably while serving here, this Robert most recently. About two years ago, following an incident where he was accused of rape by a cafe waitress Prenzlauer Berg.”
“I remember the case,” I say, taking the folder from her. It was going on right about the time I moved here, and while I wasn’t involved with it directly, I had heard of it. “He refused transfer back to the states, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” she says while I’m still scanning the write up on him she compiled.
His service photo shows a guy with vacant blue eyes, closely cropped blonde hair and a slightly crooked nose, like it’d been broken in the distant past and healed well. This guy isn’t as strikingly handsome as the guy in the sketch, but Mirela most likely exaggerated his features. This could be our guy.
“Do you have any last known addresses for these men?”
She shakes her head. “All of them except Greaves were transported stateside since all except him were officially discharged there. What also struck me is that, in reading his file, it seems he was a model soldier until he transferred to Berlin in 2004. Then he began making trouble. But I was thinking, the German police might have something on him. If he’s a rapist, I mean.” She looks up at me hopefully.
I nod. “I’ll check. Good work. But keep digging, and let me know as soon as you find anything.”
She assures me she will and leaves.
“This one would fit your rapist theory as well,” I say to Blackman once she’s gone, offering him the file. “I’m going to start with him.”
Blackman studies it, humming very quietly as he does. “Maybe,” he finally says. “He does look a lot like the sketch. But his file tells me he’s completely disorganized. He has several citations for insubordination and disorderly conduct prior to his discharge. I find it hard to believe he could be the mind behind these murders.”
“I’ll find him and we’ll see,” I say, as courteously as I can.
There’s a time and place for scholarly musings and this isn’t it. Although, as I take the file and leave him, I know that a large part of my agitation with him is stemming from the fact that I think he’s right. I’m about to go grasp at yet another very short straw, but I’m also convinced that we won’t find this guy by staying in the lab following only the evidence he wants us to find. The only way we’ll catch him is by following the mistakes he makes.
I had three missed calls from Schmitt when I took out my phone to call him on my way out of the lab. Everything else can wait for now, while we focus on tracking down this Robert Greaves.
“About time,” Schmitt snaps as he picks up. “The Russian is coming down to the station with one of the men who saw our guy, Russell. He should be here soon, so I suggest you hurry if you want to speak to him.”
I’m in the elevator and pump the button for Lobby as if that’s going to make it rise any faster. “I’m on my way. Don’t let them leave until I get there.”
“You got something?” Schmitt asks, an uncharacteristic tone of excitement in his otherwise clipped voice.
“Yes, I think I do,” I say and hang up since this isn’t something I can discuss while rushing down the hall of HQ to the exit.
Outside, I waste even more time scraping ice off my windshield, but I kind of, sort of feel my frozen fingers again by the time I reach the police station. A large, loud group of tourists, British soccer fans by the look of them, is crowded around the reception desk and I have to stand by the double doors leading upstairs, trying to get the attention of one of the officers behind the reception desk. I finally catch the eye of a female officer who was working the night the Russian first came here and wave at her to let me in. As I slip in, I spot a dwarf, possibly also the same one as the other night, rushing towards me though I could be wrong about that.
I never realized just how slow elevators in this building were, but eventually, after what feels like an eternity, it finally opens on the third floor. The hallway here is narrow and separated from the office space by a thin wall of metal and mottled glass. The room where we interviewed the Russian the first time is at the end of this hallway to the left of the elevators and I head there and knock just in case I’m wrong about them being there. Schmitt’s clipped, “Come in,” tells me I’m not.
Inside, Schmitt and the Russian Alexeyev are both sitting, Schmitt at the head of the oval table dominating the room and Alexeyev to his right. The chairs on the right side of the table have been pushed away to make room for a man in a wheelchair. A thick, padded bandage is wrapped around his head and his left eye, his right arm is in a sling, and his leg is in a cast that comes up to his hip. He doesn’t even notice me come in, his one clear blue eye open, but I doubt he sees anything much with it. I hope he’s going to be able to at least see the photo I want to show him.
I see Schmitt has already started the interview since the sketch is laying on the table in front of the injured man.
“He says this sketch looks like the man who took Nadia,” Schmitt says. But I’m still not convinced this man sees much or how much is left of his memory.
I take a chair and sit across from him so our eyes are level. “Can you tell me where this incident occurred?” I ask.
The expression in the man’s eyes barely changes, but his one good eye does flicker in Alexeyev’s direction.
“His German is very poor,” Alexeyev says. “I will translate.”
I shake my head and repeat the question in Russian. It’s similar to my grandparents’ native Slovenian, and that’s all I spoke when with them. That and Italian. I was fluent in three languages before I even started school, which might be why learning new languages comes so easily to me. It’s definitely a skill that comes in handy working in Europe.
The man’s eyes f
licker to Alexeyev again, who gives him a curt nod. The man starts speaking then, describing an abandoned industrial zone at the edge of the Friedrichshain district, and, more specifically, an abandoned bottling plant, where junkies and other squatters make their home. His speech is slurred, and the words came in fits and starts, but he sounds coherent enough. Could be he isn’t brain damaged from his injuries, but only on very strong pain medication. He certainly gave us enough information to find the abandoned plant and start searching for the guy there.
I open the folder I’m carrying, pull out the photo of Robert Greaves and show it to the witness. “Is this the man you fought?”
He squints at the photo with his good eye. “It could be. Yes…yes, I think it is.”
“You think it is or it is?” Alexeyev barks at the man. Both Schmitt and I give him a nearly identical warning look, but he’s not fazed at all and just keeps glaring at his man.
“Yes. It is. But his eyes aren’t as crazy as they were that night. The man’s eyes glowed with crazy,” the guy elaborates speaking as cohesively as I’ve yet heard him, which tells me he’s not lying. “His hair was longer too. Blond. Hanging down past his eyes.”
“Robert Greaves, is that his name?” Alexeyev says after glancing at the file which I’m holding open, with my finger marking the spot I took the photo from. Dumb.
I close the file and look at him. “I can’t answer this question at this time.”
“Have you found him yet?” Alexeyev asks, as though I haven’t spoken at all.
“This is an ongoing investigation, I can’t give you that information.”
Schmitt is glancing from me to him with ever-growing annoyance on his face.
“What’s going on?” he asks. “Did he ID the guy?”
“Yes,” I say and leave it at that since I don’t want to go into any more detail in front of Alexeyev.
“I think we’re done here,” I tell Alexeyev in German. “But please stay reachable. We might need your man to come back in soon to ID the man in person.”