by Allan Folsom
The girl behind the counter wore a tight short skirt and high heels, and had long, shapely legs covered with black net stockings. Her hair was pulled tight in a knot at the top of her head and she wore big loop earrings and enough mascara and eye shadow for three. She was the kind of half-girl, half-woman who spent most of her day waiting for night. A job behind a bakery counter was not high on her list of turn-ons, it just helped with the bills until a better arrangement could be found.
“Bonjour,” Jean Packard said with a smile.
“Bonjour,” she replied, and smiled back. Flirting, it seemed, came naturally to her.
Ten minutes later Jean Packard left with a half-dozen croissants and a list of the people who worked there. He’d told her he was opening a nightclub in the area and wanted to make certain the local merchants and their employees got first-night invitations. It was good public relations.
13
* * *
MCVEY SHIVERED and poured hot water into a big ceramic mug with a British flag on it. Outside a cold rain was falling and a light fog lifted off the Thames. Barges were moving up and down the waterway, and traffic was heavy along the river road beside it.
Looking around, he found a small plastic spoon lying on a stained paper towel and added two scoops of Taster’s Choice decaf and a teaspoon of sugar to the steaming water. The Taster’s Choice he’d found in a small grocery around the corner from Scotland Yard. Warming his hands on the cup, he took a sip of the decaf and glanced again at the folder open in front of him—an Interpol printout of known or suspected multiple murderers in continental Europe, Great Britain and Northern Ireland. There were probably two hundred in all. Some had served time for lesser crimes and been released, others were in jail, a handful were still at large. Each would be checked out. Not by McVey but by homicide detectives in the respective countries. Transcripts of their reports would be faxed to him immediately as they were completed.
Abruptly McVey set the list aside, got up and crossed the room, his left hand balled up into a loose fist, and began absently to twick his thumb with his little finger. What was troubling him was what had troubled him from the beginning, a gut sense that whoever was surgically removing heads from bodies was not someone with a criminal record. McVey’s mind stopped. Why did it have to be a man? Why couldn’t it as easily be a woman? These days women had the same access to medical training as men. In some cases, maybe more. And with the current emphasis on fitness, many women were in excellent physical condition.
McVey’s first hunch had been that it was one person committing the crimes. If he was right, it narrowed the field from possibly as many as eight killers to one. But his second speculation, or speculations—that the murderer had some degree of medical schooling and access to surgical tools and could be of either gender and with perhaps no criminal record at all—tore the odds to hell.
He had no statistics at his fingertips, but if one totaled up all the doctors, nurses, paramedics, medical students, former medical students, coroners, medical technicians and university professors with some measure of expertise in surgery, to say nothing of the men and women who received some medical training serving in the armed forces, even if they stuck to Great Britain and the Continent alone, the figures had to be staggering. This was no haystack they were poking around in. It was more like a sea of grain blowing in the wind, and Interpol had no vast army of harvesters to separate the grain from the chaff until they finally uncovered their murderer.
The odds had to be narrowed and it was up to McVey to narrow them before he said anything to anybody. To do that he needed more information than he had. His first thought was that maybe somewhere he had missed a connective link between the first killing and the last. If so, the only way to find out would be to go back and start again with the most definitive facts at hand: the autopsy reports on the head and the seven headless bodies.
He was reaching for the phone to request them when it rang.
“McVey,” he said, automatically, as he picked it up.
“Oui, McVey! Lebrun, at your service!” It was Inspector Lieutenant Lebrun of the First Section of the Paris Préfecture of Police, the diminutive, cigarette-smoking detective who’d greeted him with a hug and a kiss the first time he’d set his size-twelve wing tips on French soil.
“I don’t know what it means, if it means anything at all,” he said in English. “But in going over the daily reports of my detectives I came across a complaint of simple assault. It was violent and quite vicious but simple assault nonetheless, in that no weapon was used. However, that is beside the point. What caught my attention is that the perpetrator is an orthopedic surgeon, an American, who happened to be in London the same day your man in the alley lost his head. I know he was in England because I have his passport in my hand. He arrived at Gatwick at three twenty-five Saturday afternoon, October first. Your man seems to have been killed sometime late on the first or early on the second. Correct?”
“Correct,” McVey said. “But how do we know he was still in England for the next two days? I don’t remember French Immigration stamping my passport when I landed in Paris. This guy could’ve left England and come into France the same day.”
“McVey, would I disturb as prominent a policeman as you without doing a little further checking?”
McVey felt the needle and gave it back. “I don’t know, would you?” He smiled.
“McVey, I am trying to assist you. Do you wish to be serious or should I hang up?”
“Hey, Lebrun, don’t hang up. I need all the help I can get.” McVey took a deep breath. “Forgive me.” On the other end he could hear Lebrun ask for a file in French.
“His name is Paul Osborn, M.D.,” Lebrun said a moment later. “He gives his home address as Pacific Palisades, California. You know where that is?”
“Yeah. I can’t afford it. What else?”
“Attached to the arrest sheet is a list of personal belongings he was carrying with him at the time he was taken into custody. The first are two ticket stubs from the Ambassadors Theatre, dated Saturday, October first. Another is a credit card receipt from the Connaught Hotel in the Mayfair district dated October third, the morning he checked out. Then we have—”
“Hold on—” McVey leaned forward to a stack of manila folders on the desk and pulled one from it. “Go ahead—”
“A boarding pass on a British Airways London-to-Paris shuttle dated the same.”
While Lebrun talked, McVey scanned several pages of computer printouts provided by the Public Carriage Office, which had answered a police request asking for the names of drivers delivering or picking up fares from the theater district Saturday night, October 1, into Sunday morning, October 2.
“Hardly makes him a criminal.” McVey turned one page, then another until he found a cross listing for the Connaught Hotel, then slowly ran his finger down it. He was looking for something specific.
“No, but he was evasive. He didn’t want to talk about what he was doing in London. He claimed he became ill and stayed in his room.”
McVey heard himself groan. With murder, nothing was ever easy. “From when to when?” he asked with as much enthusiasm as he could muster and put his feet up on the desk.
“Late Saturday evening until Monday morning when he checked out.”
“Anybody see him there?” McVey glanced at his shoes and decided they needed to be reheeled.
“Not that he wants to talk about.”
“Did you press him?”
“At the time there was no reason, besides he was beginning to yell for a solicitor.” Lebrun paused and McVey could hear him light a cigarette, then exhale. Then he finished. “Would you like us to pick him up for further interrogation?”
Suddenly McVey found what he was looking for. Saturday, 1 October, 23:11. Two passengers picked up at Leicester Square. Delivered Connaught Hotel, 23:33. The driver was listed as Mike Fisher. Leicester Square was in the heart of the theater district and less than two blocks from the alley where the hea
d was found.
“You mean he’s free?” McVey took his feet off the desk. Could Lebrun have, just out of sheer luck, stumbled onto the head-cutter, then let him go?
“McVey, I’m trying to be nice to you. So don’t put that sound in your voice. We had no grounds to hold him and so far the victim hasn’t come forth to press charges. But we have his passport and we know where he’s staying in Paris. He’ll be here until the end of the week when he goes back to Los Angeles.”
Lebrun was a nice guy doing his job. He probably didn’t relish the assignment as Paris Préfecture of Police liaison to Interpol or working under its coldly efficient assignment director, Captain Cadoux, arid he probably wasn’t crazy about dealing with a Hollywood cop from LaLa Land, or even having to speak English for that matter, but these were the kind of things you did as a civil servant, which McVey knew only too well.
“Lebrun,” McVey said measuredly. “Fax me his booking photos and then stand by. Please . . .”
An hour and ten minutes later, Metropolitan police had found Mike Fisher and delivered the bewildered taxi driver to McVey. Whereupon McVey asked him to verify that he had picked up a fare from Leicester Square late Saturday night and delivered said fare to the Connaught Hotel.
“Right, sir. A man and a woman. Amorous bats they were, too; thought I didn’t know what they were doing back there. But I did.” Fisher grinned.
“Is this the man?” McVey showed him Osborn’s French police booking photos.
“Right, sir. That’s him, no doubt at all.”
Three minutes later the phone rang in Lebrun’s office.
“You want us to pick him up?” Lebrun asked.
“No, don’t do anything. I’m coming over,” McVey said.
14
* * *
BY THE time his Fokker jetliner touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport three hours later, McVey knew where Paul Osborn lived, where he worked, what professional licenses he carried, what his driving record was, and that he’d been divorced twice in the State of California. He also knew that he’d been “detained” and later released by Beverly Hills Police for attacking a parking attendant who had demolished the right front fender of Osborn’s new BMW in a restaurant lot. It was clear Paul Osborn had a temper. It was equally true to McVey that the man or woman he was looking for was not severing heads out of passion. Still, a hot head was not passionate twenty-four hours a day. There was adequate time between rages to kill a man, remove his head from his body, and leave the remains in an alley, beside a road, floating in an ocean or tucked up neatly on a couch in a cold, one-room apartment. And Paul Osborn was a trained surgeon, wholly capable of removing a head from a body.
The downside of the situation was that, according to the entry stamps in his passport, Paul Osborn had been neither in Great Britain nor on the Continent when the other murders were committed That could mean any number of things: that he was innocent; that he was not who he said he was, and could have more than one passport; even that he could have done the head in the alley but not the others, which, if that were the case, meant McVey was wrong with his lone killer theory.
So, at this point, he was little more than a stick figure suspect connected to the latest crime only by the coincidences of time, place and profession.
Still, it was more than they had before. Because, so far, they had nothing.
For a moment Paul Osborn stared off, then his eyes flashed back to Jean Packard. They were sitting in the front terrace room of La Coupole, a chatteringly alive gathering place on boulevard du Montparnasse on the Left Bank. Hemingway used to drink here, so did a host of literary others. A waiter passed, and Osborn ordered two glasses of White Bordeaux. Jean Packard shook his head and called the waiter back. Jean Packard did not touch alcohol. He ordered tomato juice instead.
Osborn watched the man walk off, then looked again at the cocktail napkin Jean Packard had scribbled on and put in his hand. On it was a name and an address—M. Henri Kanarack, 175 avenue Verdier, apartment 6, Montrouge.
The waiter brought their drinks, and left. Again Osborn glanced at the napkin, then, folding it carefully, put it in his jacket pocket.
“You’re sure,” he said, looking up at the Frenchman.
“Yes,” Jean Packard replied. Sitting back, he crossed one leg over the other and stared at Paul Osborn. Packard was tough, very thorough and very experienced and Osborn wondered what he’d say if he queried him about it. He was only a doctor and his first attempt to kill Kanarack, albeit on the spur of the moment and in the heat of rage, had failed. But Jean Packard was a professional. He’d said as much when they first met. Was a killer by trade, as a soldier of fortune against a political or military enemy in a Third World country, any different from a killer for hire in a major cosmopolitan city? The glamour of it might be different, but other than that he doubted it. The act was the same, wasn’t it? The payoff, too. You killed; you collected for it. So how could there be any real difference?
“I wonder,” Osborn said carefully, “if you sometimes work on your own.”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, do you sometimes freelance? Accept assignments outside your company?”
“It would depend on the assignment.”
“But you would consider it.”
“Why are you asking me?”
“Then you know what it is . . .” Osborn could feel the sweat on his palms. Delicately he set his glass down, picked up the napkin it had been sitting on and ran it between his hands.
“I think, Doctor Osborn, that what was promised has been delivered. Billing will be completed through the company. It was a pleasure to meet you and I wish you every good luck.”
Putting down a twenty-franc note for the drinks, Jean Packard stood. “Au revoir,” he said, then, stepping around a young man at the next table, he left.
Paul Osborn watched him go out, saw him pass in front of the large windows overlooking the sidewalk and disappear in the early evening crowd. Absently he ran a hand through his hair. He’d just asked one man to murder another and had been turned down. What was he doing, what had he done? For an instant he wished he’d never come to Paris, never seen the man he now knew as Henri Kanarack.
Closing his eyes he tried to think of something else, to blot it all out. Instead he saw his father’s grave alongside that of his mother. In the same vision he saw himself standing in the window of the headmaster’s office at Hartwick, watching as his aunt Dorothy, an old raccoon coat pulled around her, got into a taxi and drove away in a blinding snowstorm. The awful aloneness was unbearable. Was still unbearable. The jagged pain as brutal now as it had been then.
Pulling himself out of it, he looked up. All around him people were laughing and drinking, relaxing after work or before dinner. Across from him a handsome woman in a maroon business suit had her hand on a gentleman’s knee and was looking into his eyes as she talked. A clamor of laughter from another table caused him to turn his head. Immediately there was knocking at the window in front of him. He looked and saw a young woman standing on the sidewalk, peering in, smiling. For a moment Osborn thought she was looking at him, then a young man at the next table jumped up, waved and ran outside to meet her.
When he was ten a man had cut out his heart. Now he knew who that man was and where he lived. There would be no turning back. Not now, not ever.
It was for his father, for his mother, for himself.
15
* * *
SUCCINYLCHOLINE: AN ultrashort-acting depolarizing muscle relaxant. Neuromuscular transmission is inhibited so long as an adequate concentration of succinylcholine remains at the receptor site. Paralysis following an intra-muscular injection may vary from seventy-five seconds to three minutes, with general relaxation occurring within one minute.
A kind of synthetic curare, succinylcholine has no effect on consciousness or pain threshold. It works as a simple muscle relaxant beginning with the levator muscles of the eyelids, muscles of the jaw, limb muscles, abdom
inal muscles, muscles of the diaphragm, other skeletal muscles, and those controlling the lungs.
It is used during operations to relax the skeletal muscles, making it possible to administer lighter doses of more sensitive anesthetics.
A continuous IV drip of succinylcholine keeps the level of paralysis constant over the duration of an operation. A Single injection of .03 to 1.1 milligrams (dosage variety among individuals), while having the same effect, last only four to six minutes. Immediately afterward the drug breaks down in the body without causing harm or being pathologically apparent because succinylcholine’s break down products—succinic acid and choline—are normally present in the body.
Hence, a carefully measured dose of succinylcholine administered by injection would cause temporary paralysis—just long enough, say, for the subject to drown—and then fade, undetected, into the body’s own system.
And a medical examiner, unless he went over the entire body of the deceased with a magnifying glass, hoping to find a minute puncture wound caused by a syringe, would have little choice but to rule the drowning accidental.
From the beginning, in his first year of residency when he’d seen the drug used and had observed its effects in the operating room, Osborn’s fantasy of what to do should the day ever come and the murderer, by some miracle, suddenly materialize before him had begun to grow. He’d experimented with injections on laboratory mice, and later on himself. By the time he’d opened his practice he knew the exact dosage it would take to inject a man with succinylcholine and immobilize him for six to seven minutes. And with no control over skeletal or respiratory muscles, six to seven minutes in sufficiently deep water was more than enough time for that same man to drown.