by Allan Folsom
By eleven thirty he’d stopped fuming and taken his clothes off and was about to step into the shower when the phone rang. Commander Noble of Scotland Yard was calling from his home in Chelsea.
“Hold on, McVey, will you?” Noble had said. “I’ve got Michaels, the Home Office pathologist, on the other line and I’ve got to figure out how to make this into a conference call without disconnecting everyone.”
Wrapping a towel around him, McVey sat down at the Formica-topped desk opposite his bed.
“McVey? you still there?”
“yes.”
“Doctor Michaels?”
McVey heard the young medical examiner’s voice join in. “Here,” he said.
“All right, then, tell our friend McVey what you’ve just told me.”
“It’s about the severed head.”
“You’ve identified who it is?” McVey brightened.
“Not yet. Perhaps what Doctor Michaels has to say will help explain why the identification is being so trouble some,” Noble said. “Go on, Doctor Michaels, please.”
“Yes, of course.” Michaels cleared his throat. “As you recall, Detective McVey, there was very little blood left in the severed head when found. In fact almost none. So it was very difficult to assess the clotting time in attempting to determine time of death. However, I thought that with a little more information I should be able to give you a reasonable time frame for when the chap was murdered. Well, it turns out, I couldn’t.”
“I don’t understand,” McVey said.
“After you left, I took the temperature of the head and selected some tissue samples, which I sent to the laboratory for analysis.”
“And—?” McVey yawned. It was getting late and he was beginning to think more of sleep than murder.
“The head had been frozen. Frozen and then thawed out before it was left in the alley.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I can’t say I haven’t seen it before,” McVey said. “But usually you can tell right away because the inner brain tissues take a long time to thaw out. The inside of the head is colder than the layers you find as you work outward toward the skull.”
“That wasn’t the case. It was thawed completely.”
“Finish what you have to say, Doctor Michaels,” Noble pressed.
“When laboratory tissue samples revealed the head had been frozen, I was still bothered by the fact that the facial skin moved under pressure from my fingers as it would under normal conditions had not the head been frozen.”
“What are you getting at?”
“I sent the entire head to a Doctor Stephen Richman, an expert in micropathology at the Royal College of Pathology, to see what he could make of the freezing. He called me as soon as he realized what had happened.”
“What did happen?” McVey was getting impatient.
“Our friend has a metal plate in his skull. Undoubtedly the result of some sort of brain surgery done years ago. The brain tissue would have revealed nothing, but the metal did. The head had been frozen, not just solid, but to a degree approaching absolute zero."
“I’m a little slow this time of night, Doctor. You’re over my head.”
“Absolute zero is a degree of cold unreachable in the science of freezing. In essence, it’s a hypothetical temperature characterized by the complete absence of heat. To even approach it requires’ extremely sophisticated laboratory techniques that employ either liquefied helium or magnetic cooling.”
“How cold is this absolute zero?” McVey had never heard of it.
“In technical terms?”
“In whatever terms.”
“Minus two hundred seventy-three point one five degrees Celsius or minus four hundred fifty-nine point six seven degrees Fahrenheit.”
“Jesus Christ, that’s almost five hundred degrees below zero!”
“Yes, quite.”
“What happens then, assuming you did reach absolute zero?’
“I just looked it up, McVey,” Noble interjected. “It means it’s a point at which mutual linear motions of all the molecules of a substance would cease.”
“Every atom of its structure would be absolutely motionless,” Michaels added.
Click.
This time McVey did look at the clock. It was 3:18 A.M. Friday, October 7.
Neither Commander Noble nor Dr. Michaels had had any idea why someone would freeze a head to that degree and then discard it. Nor had McVey, either. There was a possibility it had come from one of those cryonic freezing organizations that accept the bodies of the recently departed and deep-freeze them in the hope that at some future time, when there is a cure for whatever ailment killed them, the bodies could be unfrozen, worked on, then brought back to life. To every scientist in the world it was a pipe dream, but people bought into it and legitimate companies provided the service.
There were two such companies in Great Britain. One in London, the other in Edinburgh, and Scotland Yard would follow up on them first thing in the morning. Maybe their John Doe hadn’t been murdered, maybe his head had been severed after death and legitimately put away for some future time. Maybe it was his own investment. Maybe he’d put his life savings into the deep-freezing of his own head. People had done nuttier things.
McVey had gotten off the phone saying he was coming back to London tomorrow and requesting that the seven headless corpses be X-rayed to see if any of them had had surgery where metal might have been implanted into the skeleton. Replacement hip joints, screws that held broken bones in place—metal that could be analyzed, as the steel plate in John Doe’s head had been. And if any of them did have metal, the cadavers were to be immediately forwarded to Dr. Richman at the Royal College to determine if they too had been deep-frozen.
Maybe this was the break they were looking for, the kind of left-field “incidental,” usually right in front of an investigator’s nose but that at first, second, third or even tenth look still remained wholly unseen; the kind that almost always turned the tide in difficult homicide cases; that is, if the cop doing the investigating persevered long enough to go over it that one last time.
Click.
3:19 A.M.
Getting out of his chair, McVey pulled back the covers and plopped down on the bed. It already was tomorrow. He could barely remember Thursday. They didn’t pay him enough for these kind of hours. But then, they never paid any cop enough.
Maybe the frozen head would lead somewhere, probably it wouldn’t, any more than the business with Osborn had led anywhere. Osborn was a nice guy, troubled and in love. What a thing, come on a business trip and fall for the prime minister’s girlfriend.
McVey was about to turn out the light and get under the covers when he saw his muddy shoes drying under the table where he’d left them. With a sigh, he got out of bed, picked them up and carefully walked to the bathroom, where he put them on the floor.
Click.
3:24.
McVey slid under the sheets, rolled over and turned out the light, and then lay back against the pillow.
If Judy were still alive, she would have come on this trip. The only place they’d ever traveled together, besides the fishing trips to Big Bear, had been Hawaii. Two weeks in 1975. A European vacation they could never afford. Well, they would have afforded it this time. It wouldn’t have been First Class, but who cared; Interpol would have paid for it.
Click.
3:26.
“Mud!” McVey suddenly said out loud and sat up. Turning on the light, he tossed back the sheets and went into the bathroom. Bending down, he picked up one of his shoes and looked at it. Then picked up the other and did the same. The mud that caked them was gray, almost black. The mud on Osborn’s running shoes had been red.
29
* * *
MICHELE KANARACK looked up at the clock as the train pulled out of the Gare de Lyon for Marseilles. It was 6:54 in the morning. She’d brought no luggage, only a handbag. She’d taken a cab from their apar
tment fifteen minutes after she’d first seen Agnes Demblon’s Citroën waiting outside. At the station she bought a second-class ticket to Marseilles, then found a bench and sat down. The wait would be almost nine hours, but she didn’t care.
She wanted nothing from Henri, not even their child who’d been conceived in love less than eight weeks earlier. The suddenness of what had happened was overwhelming. All the more so since it seemed to have sprung from nowhere.
Once outside the station, the train picked up speed and Paris became a blur. Twenty-four hours earlier her world had been warm and alive. Each day her pregnancy filled pier with more joy than the day before, and that had been no different, and then Henri called to say he was going to Rouen with Monsieur Lebec to see about opening a new bakery there, perhaps, she even thought, with the promise of a managerial job. Then, with the wave of a hand, it was gone. All Of it. She’d been deceived and lied to. Not only that, but she was a fool. She should have known the power that bitch Agnes Demblon carried over her husband. Maybe she had known it all along and refused to accept it. For that she had only herself to blame. What wife would let her husband be picked up and driven to work day after day by an unmarried woman, no matter how unattractive she might be? But how many times had ; Henri reassured her—”Agnes is just an old friend, my love, a spinster. What interest could I possibly have in her?”
“My love.” She could still hear him say it, and it made her ill. The way she felt now she could kill them both without the slightest thought. Out the window the city faded to countryside. Another train roared past going to ward Paris. Michele Kanarack would never go to Paris again. Henri and everything about him was done. Finished, f Her sister would have to understand that and not try to talk her into going back.
What had he said? “Take back your family name.”
That she would do. Just as soon as she could get a job and afford a lawyer. Sitting back, she closed her eyes and listened to the sound of the train as it quickened down the track toward the south of France. Today was October 7. In exactly one month and two days she and Henri would ; have been married for eight years.
* * *
In Paris, Henri Kanarack was curled up fetally, asleep in an overstuffed chair in Agnes Demblon’s living room. At 4:45 he had driven Agnes to work and then returned to her apartment with the Citroën. His apartment at 175 avenue Verdier was empty. Anyone going there would find no one home, nor would they find any clue to where they had gone. The green plastic garbage bag containing his work clothes, underwear, shoes and socks had been tossed’ into the basement furnace and was vaporized in seconds Every last thing he’d been wearing during the murder of Jean Packard had, by now, filtered down through the night air and lay scattered microscopically across the landscape of Montrouge.
Ten miles away, across the Seine, Agnes Demblon sat at her desk on the second floor of the bakery billing the accounts receivable that always went out on the seventh of the month. Already she had alerted Monsieur Lebec and his employees that Henri Kanarack had been called out of town on a family matter and probably would not return to work for at least a week. By 6:30 she had posted handwritten notes over the telephone at the small switchboard and at the front counter directing any inquiries about M. Kanarack promptly to her.
At almost the same time, McVey was carefully walking the Pare Champ de Mars in front of the Eiffel Tower. A drizzly morning light revealed the same overturned rectangular garden he’d left the night before. Farther down, he could see more pathways turned over for landscaping. Beyond them were more pathways, not yet; turned over, that ran parallel to each other and crossed other pathways at about fifty-yard intervals. Walking the full length of the park on one side, he crossed over and came back down the other, studying the ground as he went. Nowhere did he see anything but the gray-black earth that again caked his shoes.
Stopping, he turned back to see if maybe he’d missed something. In doing so, he saw a groundskeeper coming toward him. The man spoke no English and McVey’s French was unpardonable. Still, he tried.
“Red dirt. You understand? Red dirt. Any around here?” McVey said, pointing at the ground.
“Reddert?” the man replied.
“No. Red! The color red. R-E-D.” McVey spelled it out.
“R-E-D,” the man repeated, then looked at him as if he were crazy.
It was too early in the morning for this. He’d get Lebrun, bring him here to ask the questions. “Pardon,” he said with the best accent he could and was about to leave when he saw a red handkerchief sticking out of the man’s back pocket. Pointing to it, he said, “Red.”
Realizing, the man jerked it out and offered it to McVey.
“No. No.” McVey waved him off. “The color.”
“Ah!” The man brightened. “La couleur!’
“La couleur!” McVey repeated, triumphantly.
“Rouge,” the man said.
“Rouge,” McVey repeated, trying to roll the sound off his tongue like the Parisian. Then, bending over, he scooped a handful of the gray mud into his hand. “Rouge?” he asked.
“La terrain?”
McVey nodded. “Rouge terrain? he said, sweeping his hand at the surrounding gardens.
The man stared at him, then swept his hand as McVey had. “Rouge terrain.”
“Oui!” McVey beamed.
“Non,” the man replied.
“No?”
“No!”
* * *
Back at his hotel, McVey called Lebrun and told him he was packing to go back to London and that he had the increasingly uncomfortable feeling Osborn might not be as kosher as he first thought, that it might pay to keep an eye on him until the next day when he was due to collect his passport and fly back to Los Angeles. “Oh yeah,” he added. “He’s got keys to a Peugeot.”
Thirty minutes later, at 8:05, an unmarked police car pulled up to the curb across from Paul Osborn’s hotel on avenue Kléber and parked. Inside, a plainclothes detective unhooked his seat belt and sat back to watch. If Osborn came out—leaving either by foot or waiting for his car to be brought around—the detective would see him. A phone call with an apology for ringing the wrong number had confirmed Osborn was still in his room. A check of rental-car companies had provided the year, color and license-plate number of Osborn’s rented Peugeot.
At 8:10, another unmarked police car picked McVey up at his hotel to take him to the airport, courtesy of Inspector Lebrun and the First Paris Préfecture of Police.
Fifteen minutes later they were still in traffic. By now McVey knew enough of Paris to realize his driver wasn’t taking the express route to the airport. He was right. In five minutes, they pulled into the garage at police headquarters.
At 8:45, still wearing the same rumpled gray suit that was unfortunately becoming his trademark, McVey sat across from Lebrun’s desk studying an eight-by-ten photograph of a fingerprint. The print was a full finger, clear image enhancement, made from a smudge on the piece of broken glass the homicide tech crew had found in Jean Packard’s apartment. The glass had been sent to the fingerprint lab at Interpol, Lyon, where a computer expert refined the smudge until it became a fully identifiable print. The print had then been scanned, enlarged, photographed and returned to Lebrun in Paris.
“You know Doctor Hugo Klass?” Lebrun said, lighting a cigarette and looking back at his empty computer screen.
“German fingerprint expert,” McVey said, putting the photo back into a file folder and closing it. “Why?”
“You were going to ask about the accuracy of the enhancement, correct?”
McVey nodded.
“Klass now operates out of Interpol headquarters. He worked with the computer artist on the original smudge until they had a legible ridge pattern. After that Rudolf Halder at Interpol, Vienna, did a confirmation test with a new kind of forensic optical comparator he and Klass had developed together. A smart bomb couldn’t be more precise.”
Lebrun looked back to his computer screen. He was waiting for a repl
y to an identification request made to Central File/Criminal Records data center Interpol, Lyon. His initial request had come back “not on file,” Europe. His second came back “not on file,” North America. A third request was for “automatic retrieval” and sent the computer scanning “previous data.”
McVey leaned over and picked up a cup of black coffee. No matter how hard he tried to be a contemporary cop and use the wide range of high-speed high-technologies available to him, he just couldn’t get the old school out of his system. To him you did your legwork until you had your man and the evidence to back it up. Then you went after him mano a mano until he cracked. Still, he knew that sooner or later he’d better come around and make life a little easier on himself. Getting up, he walked around behind Lebrun and glanced at the screen.
As he did, a “retrieve” file came up from Interpol, Washington. Seven seconds later, the screen scrolled up the name MERRIMAN, ALBERT JOHN: wanted for murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, extortion—Florida, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Massachusetts.
“Nice guy,” McVey said. Then the screen went blank, followed by a single scroll, DECEASED, NEW YORK CITY— DECEMBER22, 1967.
“Deceased?” Lebrun said.
“Your hotshot computer’s got a dead man murdering people in Paris. How you going to explain that to the media?” McVey deadpanned.
Lebrun took it as an affront. “Obviously Merriman faked his death and came up with a new identity.”
McVey smiled again. “Either that or Klass and Halder aren’t what they’re cracked up to be.”
“Do you dislike Europeans, McVey?” Lebrun was serious.
“Only when they talk in a language I don’t understand.” McVey walked off, looking up at the ceiling, then turned around and came back. “Suppose you, Klass and Halder are right and it is Merriman. Why would he come out of hiding after all these years to take out a private investigator?”