by Allan Folsom
“There is very little blood, almost none. Hard to assess the clotting time, you know. I can tell you it had been where it was found for some time because its temperature is very nearly identical to the temperature in the alley.”
“No rigor mortis.”
Michaels stared at him. “No, sir. Doesn’t seem to be. As you know, Detective, rigor mortis usually commences within five to six hours, the upper part of the body is affected first, within about twelve hours, and the whole body within about eighteen.”
“We don’t have the whole body,” McVey said.
“No, sir. We do not.” Responsibility to duty aside, Michaels was beginning to wish he’d stayed home this night, thereby letting someone else have the pleasure of facing this irascible American homicide detective who had more gray in his hair than brown and who seemed to know the answers to his own questions even before he asked them.
“McVey,” Noble said with a straight face, “why don’t we wait for the lab results and let the poor doctor go home and finish his wedding night?”
“This is your wedding night?” McVey was dumb-founded. “Tonight?”
“Was,” Michaels said flatly.
“Why the hell did you answer your beeper? They didn’t get you they woulda got the next guy.” McVey wasn’t only sincere, he was incredulous. “What the hell did your wife say?”
“Not to answer the page.”
“I’m glad to see one of you knows which end to light the candle.”
“Sir. It’s my job, you know.”
Inside McVey smiled. Either the young pathologist was going to become a very good professional or a browbeaten civil servant. Which, was anybody’s guess.
“If we’re done, what do you want me to do with it?” Michaels said abruptly. “I’ve never done work for the Metropolitan Police before, or Interpol either for that matter.”
McVey shrugged and looked to Noble. “I’m with him,” he said. “I’ve never done work for the Metropolitan Police or Interpol before either. How and where do you file heads over here?”
“We file heads, McVey, like we file bodies, or pieces of bodies. Tagged, sealed in plastic and refrigerated.” It was much too late for Noble to be in the mood for humor.
“Fine,” McVey shrugged. He was more than willing to call it a night. At first light detectives would be starting in the alley, interviewing everyone and anyone who might have seen activity around the trash dumpster in the hours before the head had been found. In a day, two at most, they would have lab reports on tissue samples and scalp hair follicles. A forensic anthropologist would be brought in to determine the victim’s age.
Leaving Dr. Michaels to tag, seal in plastic and refrigerate the head in its own drawer, with a special addendum that henceforth the drawer was only to be opened in the presence of either Commander Noble or Detective McVey, the two detectives left, Noble, for his renovated four-story house in Chelsea; McVey, for his small hotel room in a deceptively small hotel on Half Moon Street across Green Park in Mayfair.
5
* * *
HE’D BEEN baptized William Patrick Cavan McVey in St. Mary’s Catholic Church, on what was then Leheigh Road in Rochester, New York, on a snowy day in February 1928. Growing up, from Cardinal Manning Parochial School through Don Bosco High, everybody knew him as Paddy McVey, Precinct Sergeant Murphy McVey’s first boy. But from the day he’d solved the “hillside torture murders” in Los Angeles twenty-nine years later, nobody called him anything but McVey—not the brass, not his fellow detectives, not the press, not even his wife.
A homicide detective for the LAPD since 1955, he’d buried two wives and put three kids through college. The day he turned sixty-five he tried to retire. It didn’t work. The phone kept ringing. “Call McVey, he knows every way there is to cut up a hooker.” “Get McVey, he’s got nothing to do, maybe he’ll come over take a look at it.” “I don’t know, call McVey.”
Finally he moved to the fishing cabin he’d built in the mountains near Big Bear Lake and had the phone taken out. But he’d barely stored his gear and had the cable TV hooked up when old detective pals started coming up to fish. And it wasn’t long before they got around to asking the same questions they asked over the phone. Finally he gave up, padlocked the cabin and went back to work full time.
He’d been at his old nicked steel desk, sitting in the same chair with the squeaky caster at robbery/homicide for less than two weeks, when Bill Woodward, the chief of detectives, came in and asked if he’d like a trip to Europe, all expenses paid. Any of the other six detectives in the squad room would have jumped for their Samsonite. McVey, on the other hand, shrugged and asked why and for how long. He wasn’t crazy about traveling and when he did it was usually to some place warm. It was early September. Europe would be getting cold and he hated cold.
“The ‘how long,’ I guess, is up to you. The ‘why’ is because Interpol has seven headless corpses they don’t know what to do about.” Woodward stuck a file under McVey’s nose and walked off.
McVey watched him go, glanced at the other detectives in the room, then picked up a cup of cold coffee and opened the file. On the upper righthand corner was a black tab, which, in Interpol circulation, indicated an unidentified dead body and asked for any possible help in identifying it. The tab was old. By now the corpses had been identified.
Of the seven bodies, two had been found in England, two in France, one in Belgium, one in Switzerland and one, washed ashore, near the West German port of Kiel. All were males and their ages ranged from twenty-two to fifty-six. All were white and all, apparently, had been drugged with some sort of barbiturate and then had their heads surgically removed at precisely the same place in the anatomy.
The killings had occurred from February to August and seemed completely random. Yet they were far too similar to be coincidental. But that was all, the rest was completely dissimilar. None of the victims were related or appeared to have known one another. None had criminal records or had lived violent lives. And all were from different economic backgrounds.
What made it even stickier were the statistics: more than fifty percent of the time a murder victim is identified, headless or not, the murderer is found. In these seven cases not a single bona fide suspect had been uncovered. All told, police experts of five countries, including Scotland Yard’s special murder investigations unit and Interpol, the international police organization, were batting an even zero, and the tabloid press was having a field day. Hence the call had come to the Los. Angeles Police Department for one of the best in the singular world of homicide investigation.
Initially, McVey had gone to Paris, where he’d met with Inspector Lieutenant Alex Lebrun of the First Section of the Paris Préfecture of Police, an impish rogue of a man, with a big grin and an always-present cigarette. Lebrun, in turn, had introduced him to Commander Noble of Scotland Yard and Captain Yves Cadoux, assignment director for Interpol. Together the foursome examined the crime scenes in France. The first was in Lyon, two hours south of Paris by Très Grande Vitesse, the TGV bullet train; and, ironically, less than a mile from Interpol headquarters. The second, in the Alpine ski resort of Chamonix. Later Cadoux and Noble escorted McVey to the murder scenes in Belgium, a small factory on the outskirts of Ostend; Switzerland, a luxury hotel overlooking Lake Geneva in Lausanne; and Germany, a rocky coastal inlet twenty minutes by car north of Kiel. Finally they went to England. First, to a small apartment across from Salisbury Cathedral, eighty miles southwest of London, and then to London itself and a private home on a square in the exclusive Kensington section.
Afterward, McVey spent ten days in a cold, third-floor office in Scotland Yard poring over the extensive police reports of each crime, more often than not finding it necessary to confer on one detail or another with Ian Noble, who had a much larger and warmer office on the first floor. Mercifully, McVey got a respite when he was called back to Los Angeles for a two-day testimony in the murder trial of a Vietnamese drug dealer McVey had arrested himself when
the man tried to kill a busboy in a restaurant where McVey was having lunch. Actually, McVey had done nothing more heroic than stick his .38 service revolver in the man’s ear and quietly suggest he relax a little bit.
After the trial, McVey was supposed to take two days for personal business and then return to London. But somehow he’d managed to squeeze in some wholly elective oral surgery and turned the two days into two weeks, most of which was spent on a golf course near the Rose Bowl where warm sun filtering through heavy smog helped him, between strokes, muse on the killings.
So far, the only thing the victims seemed to have in common, the only single connecting thread, was the surgical removal of their heads. Something that on first go-round appeared to have been done either by a surgeon or by someone with surgical capabilities who had access to the necessary instruments.
After that, nothing else fit. Three of the victims had been killed where they were found. The remaining four had been killed elsewhere, with three dumped by the roadside and the fourth tossed into Kiel Harbor. For all his years in homicide, this was as confounding and more curious than anything he’d ever encountered.
Then, golf clubs put away, and back in the damp of London, exhausted and disoriented from the long flight, he’d barely settled back on the thing the hotel passed off as a pillow and closed his eyes when the phone rang and Noble informed him he had a head to go with his bodies.
It was now quarter of four in the morning, London time, and McVey was sitting at a writing table in his closet of a room, two fingers of Famous Grouse scotch in a glass in front of him, on a conference call with Noble and Captain Cadoux on the Interpol line from Lyon.
Cadoux, an intense, stockily built man, with a huge handlebar mustache he could never seem to keep from rolling between his thumb and forefinger, had in front of him a fax of young medical examiner Michaels’ preliminary autopsy report, which described; among other things, the exact point at which the head had been removed from the body. It was precisely at this same point the seven bodies had been separated from their heads.
“We know that, Cadoux. But it’s not enough for us to say for certain that the murders are connected,” McVey said wearily.
“The age bracket is the same.”
“Still not enough.”
“McVey, I have to agree with Captain Cadoux,” Noble said genteelly, as if they were talking over four o’clock tea.
“If it’s not a connection, it’s too damn close to being one to ignore it,” Noble finished.
“Fine . . .,” McVey said and repeated the thought he’d had all along. “You gotta wonder who this lunatic is we got running around out there.” The minute McVey said it both Scotland Yard and Interpol reacted the same way.
“You think it’s one man?” they said together.
“I don’t know. Yeah—” McVey said. “Yeah. I think it’s one man.”
Begging off that jet lag was about to put him under and could they finish this later, McVey hung up. He could have asked for their opinion but didn’t. It was they who had asked for his help. Besides, if they felt he was wrong they would have said so. Anyway, it was just a hunch.
Picking up his glass, he looked out the window. Across the street was another hotel, small, like his own. Most of the windows were dark, but a dim light showed on the fourth floor. Someone was reading, or maybe had fallen asleep reading, or maybe left the light on when they went out and hadn’t come back yet. Or maybe there was a body in the room, waiting to be discovered in the morning. That was the thing about being a detective, the possibilities for almost anything were endless. It was only over time that you began to get a second sense about things, a feeling of what was in the room before you entered, what you might find when you did, what kind of person was there or had been there, and what they had been up to.
But with the severed head there had been no room with a dim light showing. If they got lucky, maybe that would come later. The room that would point to another room and finally to the space that held the killer. But before any of that, they had to identify the victim.
McVey finished the scotch, wiped his eyes and glanced at the note he’d made earlier and had already set into motion. HEAD/ARTIST/SKETCH/NEWSPAPER/I.D.
6
* * *
AT FIVE in the morning Paris streets were deserted. Métro service began at five thirty, so Henri Kanarack relied on Agnes Demblon, head bookkeeper at the bakery where he worked, for a ride to the shop. And dutifully, every day at four forty-five, she would arrive outside his apartment house in her white, five-year-old Citroën. And every day Michele Kanarack would watch out the bedroom window for her husband to come out onto the street, get into the Citroën and drive away with Agnes. Then she would pull her robe tight about her and go back to bed and lie awake thinking about Henri and Agnes. Agnes was a forty-nine-year-old spinster, an eyeglass-wearing bookkeeper, and by no one’s imagination attractive. What could Henri see in her that he didn’t in Michele? Michele was much younger, a dozen times better-looking, with a figure to match, and she made sure Henri got all the sex he needed, which of course was why she was finally pregnant.
What Michele had no way of knowing, and would never be told, was that it was Agnes who had gotten Henri the job at the bakery. Persuaded the owner to hire him even when he had no experience as a baker. The owner, a small, impatient man named Lebec, had had no interest in taking on a new man, especially when he would have to undergo the expense of training him, but changed his mind immediately when Agnes threatened to quit if he didn’t. Bookkeepers like Agnes were hard to find, especially ones who knew their way around the tax laws as she did. So, Henri Kanarack had been hired, had quickly learned his trade, was dependable and did not constantly press for raises like some of the others. In other words, he was an ideal employee and, as such, Lebec could have no quarrel with Agnes for bringing him on board. The only question Lebec had posed was why Agnes had been so willing to quit her job over so nondeseript and everyday a man as Henri Kanarack, and Agnes had answered that with a curt “Yes or no, Monsieur Lebec?” The rest was history.
Agnes slowed for a blinking light and glanced at Kanarack. She’d seen the bruises on his face when he’d climbed in, now in the dash lights they glowed even uglier.
“Drinking again,” Agnes’ voice was cold, bordering on cruel.
“Michele is pregnant,” he said, staring straight ahead, watching the yellow headlights cut the darkness.
“Did you get drunk out of joy or misery?”
“I didn’t get drunk. A man attacked me.”
“What man?” She looked at him.
“I never saw him before.”
“What did you do to him?”
“I ran away.” Kanarack’s eyes were fixed on the road ahead.
“Finally getting smart in your old age.”
“This was different—” Kanarack turned to look at her. “I was in the Brasserie Stella. The one on rue St.-Antoine. Reading the paper and having an espresso on the way home. For no reason at all a man flew at me, knocked me to the floor and started beating me. The waiters pulled him off and I ran away.”
“Why did he pick you?”
“Don’t know.” Kanarack looked back to the road again. Night was fading to day. Automatic timers were turning the streetlights off. “He followed me afterward. Across the Seine, down into the Métro. I managed to beat him out, get on a train before he could catch up. I—”
Agnes downshifted, slowing for a man walking his dog. Passing, she accelerated again. “You what?”
“I went to the train window. I saw the Métro police grab him.”
“So, he was a crazy. And the police are good for something.”
“Maybe not.”
Agnes looked over. There was something he was not telling her. “What is it?”
“He was an American.”
Paul Osborn got back to his hotel on avenue Kléber at ten minutes to one in the morning. Fifteen minutes later he was in his room and on the phone to L.A. His att
orney put him in touch with another attorney, who said he’d make a call and get back to him. At one twenty the phone rang. The caller was in Paris. His name was Jean Packard.
A little more than five and a half hours later, Jean Packard sat down opposite Paul Osborn in the hotel dining room. At forty-two, he was exceedingly fit. His hair was cut short and his suit hung loosely over a wiry frame. He wore no tie, and his shirt was open at the collar, perhaps to purposely reveal a ragged, three-inch scar that ran diagonally across his throat. Packard had been a Foreign Legionnaire, then a soldier of fortune in Angola, Thailand, and El Salvador. He was now an employee of Kolb International, billed as the world’s largest private investigation firm.
“We guarantee nothing, but we do our best, and for most clients that is usually sufficient,” Packard said with a smile that was surprising. A waiter brought steaming coffee and a small tray of croissants, then left. Jean Packard touched neither. Instead he looked at Osborn directly.
“Let me explain,” he continued. His English was heavily accented but understandable. “All investigators for Kolb International are thoroughly screened and have impeccable credentials. We operate, however, not as employees but as independent contractors. We take our assignments from the regional offices and share the billing with them. Other than that, they ask nothing. In effect, we are on our own unless we request otherwise. Client confidentiality is very nearly religion with us. Keeping matters one on one, investigator to client, assures that. Something I’m certain you can appreciate at a time in history when even the most privileged information is readily available to almost anyone willing to pay for it.”
Jean Packard put out a hand and stopped a passing waiter, asking in French for a glass of water. Then he turned back to Osborn and explained the rest of Kolb’s procedure.
When an investigation was completed, he said, all files containing written, copied or photographed work, negatives included, were returned to the client. The investigator then turned in a time and expense report to the Kolb regional office, which, in turn, billed the customer.