Charisma (11 page)

“Important?”

“Crap.”

“Keep them for a while. Who do we have on the Cavello/Damien House?”

There was a rustle of paper, Andrea going through the duty book. “Markham and Halt,” she said finally. “I think they’re down in the pen.”

“Did you tell them I wanted a morgue report?”

“Of course I did. I even talked to them myself.”

“Did you tell them I wanted a back check?”

“I just told you I—”

“I know, I know,” Pat closed his eyes. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t bring up the faces of Markham and Halt. That meant they weren’t very good or very bad. He knew all the good ones by name, and he thought he had enough on the bad ones to keep them in line. It was just too bad he wasn’t political. If he had been, he could have had the bad ones transferred out. He thought about Dbro and shook his head.

On the other end of the line, Andrea was getting restless. “Pat?” she said.

“I’m still here,” he said. “I’m just trying to think of what to do.”

“I’ll get Markham and Halt up here for you if you want.”

“Maybe that would be a good idea.” No it wouldn’t. He sighed. “Never mind. Did anybody tell you anything about this thing? About Cavello?”

“Was there something they shouldn’t have told me?”

“No.”

“The word around here is that she was marked. Not just cut but marked. With some kind of Devil worship symbol or something.”

Pat looked at the statue on his desk—a six-inch-high porcelain of Saint Michael the Archangel, patron of policemen, sent to him by his sister the nun—and stifled a laugh. “Well,” he said, “she was marked with something. Are you sure Markham and Halt are in the pen?”

“They were the last time I looked.”

“What about Anton Klemmer? Is he on duty today?”

“Anton Klemmer is always on duty. He sleeps in one of his cold drawers.”

“He sleeps with his children’s nanny. She’s twenty-two years old and from Sweden. Call Anton and tell him I’m coming down. I want to talk to him.”

“All right.”

“Call Markham and Halt and tell them to meet me there?”

“All right again.” A pause. A cough. A paper shuffled. “What about you?” she said.

“I’m fine.”

“Maybe. But you just got in and you’re going out again.”

“I’m feeling restless,” he told her.

“I know that.” Another cough. Another shuffle. Another pause. “Forget I mentioned it,” she said. He heard her nails click against the intercom button as the line went dead.

Outside, the weather that had been getting better was getting worse again. Pat stood up, put on his jacket, and went to the window to look at it. The sky was jammed shut with clouds again, and big snowflakes were drifting down, round white mats as big as drinks coasters. He ran his hand through his hair. He really was restless. He couldn’t stand the thought of not moving something.

Andrea was sixty-three and fat as Oliver Hardy, the prototypical secretary of a man with a jealous wife. But he didn’t have a wife. He’d never had one. His brothers and sisters had all gone on to build families like the one they’d come from, but for some reason he’d never been able to connect. Even his lovers never lasted long. Women drifted in and out of his life like cases, rearranged his furniture, then disappeared. He couldn’t remember having wanted one to stay.

He couldn’t remember what had started him on this train of thought, either. Like the memory of his mother, it had just hit him.

He zipped his jacket shut and headed for the door. Once he got to work, he would be all right. He told himself to think about Theresa Cavello and Billy Hare.

What he thought about instead was Dan Murphy’s sister, her black hair and the serious attentiveness of her face, the tense watchful stillness that surrounded her like a halo. Nuns were always like that, and they never stopped being nuns. It got into their skin and stained them.

Stained them.

He hated to admit it, but he was burning out.

The problem with the New Haven morgue was that it wasn’t in a basement. Part of it was. Most of it—the offices, the tech rooms, the computers, and the files—was on a first floor of broad hallways and wide plate-glass windows. It didn’t even have the virtue of being dark. Walking down to Anton Klemmer’s office was like wandering through a particularly peppy grammar school.

Anton Klemmer didn’t do much for Pat’s prejudices, either. By tradition, he should have been an old man with an immigrant’s accent, puttering around a shade-darkened room and cackling over skulls. In reality, he was young, and very American. His name was a sop his mother had thrown to her husband’s father. It had worked. Anton had grown up on Noble Street in West Haven, gone to a local public school and the University of Connecticut at Storrs. He’d led a perfectly normal life until medical school, when he’d marched into Johns Hopkins without a single loan to his name. His grandfather hadn’t left him much, but he’d left him enough.

When Pat came in, Anton was sitting in a gray swivel chair, his feet up on his desk, his nose buried in a book whose cover read:
Microscopic Spectography in Investigative Analysis.
As always when he wasn’t doing an autopsy, he was dressed in part of a three-piece suit. The pants and vest were there, although the vest was unbuttoned and hanging open over his white shirt. The jacket was nowhere in evidence.

Pat closed the door to the hallway, and Anton closed his book, not bothering to mark his place.

“My secretary got a call from your secretary,” he said. “We should be in the Fortune 500.”

“What’s the book for?” Pat asked him.

Anton shrugged. “They send them to me. They want me to write blurbs. I never write blurbs, but sometimes I read the things.”

“Is it any good?”

“The guy who wrote it knows as much about criminal investigation as I do about cooking.” Anton threw the book on the desk. “So, what’s this all about? I gave you everything I had on Billy Hare, but you know how that kind of thing is. Nothing makes any difference.”

“This isn’t about Billy Hare. I came about Theresa Cavello,” he said. “I got your note.”

“Ah,” Anton said. “Did you understand my note?”

“Maybe.” Pat leaned over and took a pen and a piece of paper off Anton’s desk. There were plenty of both. Anton seemed to live in a sea of Southworth and Bic. Pat put the paper on his knee and drew carefully. “She was marked. With this. And you’re upset about it.”

Pat threw the paper back onto the desk. Anton picked it up and let it flutter in the air. It said this:

Anton let the paper drop. “Very good,” he said. “Do you want to see the mark?”

“I’ve seen it,” Pat said.

“I suppose you would have. You knew her.”

“I knew her very well. She’d been at Damien House since the place opened.”

“Yes,” Anton said. “Well. I knew there had to be something. You wouldn’t have asked for information otherwise. Do you know what was strange about this mark?”

“It’s a Catholic mark,” Pat said. “A Church mark. The symbol for the Eucharist. It’s also the second one we’ve had.”

“So?” Anton shrugged. “She was a Catholic nun—excuse me, ex-nun—living in a Catholic religious house. Everybody in the neighborhood knew that. As to her being the second one—well, the second of two women who live not a mile from each other and spend their time helping the poor. Find somebody they both knew. On crack.”

“If you believed that, you wouldn’t have written me that note.”

“You’re right.” Anton took his feet off the desk. “I’ll tell you what I found strange about this mark. In the first place, it was on her forehead, just about where you’d have put ashes if you were a priest and this was Ash Wednesday.”

“Not so strange,” Pat said.

“No, it’s not. But now consider this. First, it was the only mark on her.”

“I knew that.”

“And second, it was neat.”

“What do you mean, neat?”

“Neat,” Anton insisted. “Have you ever watched a crackhead move? They jerk. They shudder. If they’re high enough they bounce off the ceiling. They don’t carve Eucharistic symbols into nearly live flesh so
neatly
they could have been making an etching for a lot of Benedictine nuns. Just a minute.” He got out of his chair, went to his files, and pulled out a folder. On his way back to his desk, he dropped the folder in Pat’s lap. “Read that. He used a knife, not a razor blade. We know that from the width of the cuts. But he used the knife well. He didn’t snag the skin. He didn’t tear her. He made perfectly straight lines except for the curve of the P. Then he made a perfectly symmetrical curve. What does that sound like to you?”

“Psychopath,” Pat said, and then realized with a shock that he hadn’t been expecting it. Even with the McVann death nagging at his memory, he hadn’t been expecting it. When he’d read Anton’s note, he’d thought he was going to get a crime of passion, religious for once instead of sexual. He’d thought he was going to find that one of the people at Damien House had cut her, for reasons that were now obscure but would someday be clear. Now he was being presented with a death that might have had no reason for happening at all.

The Jug Killer. The Church Street Slasher. Serial killers were every police department’s ultimate nightmare. Pat felt a little sick.

“Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Wait,” Anton told him. “You’re going to feel worse. I feel so bad I can hardly look myself in the mirror.”

“What do you mean?”

Anton got up again. This time he didn’t bother to walk over to his file cabinet. The folder he needed was right on his desk. He could have reached it sitting down. Apparently he hadn’t wanted to.

He dropped the folder into Pat’s lap, on top of the one on Theresa Cavello. “That’s the file on Margaret Mary McVann. Her body was found in her apartment over on Dee Street the day before Theresa Cavello died.”

“I know.” Pat squirmed. Serial killers had cycles. First there was a long time between each kill, then a shorter time, then a shorter time still. What did they have if this guy was killing one a day?

Anton reassured him. A little. “She wasn’t killed the day before Theresa Cavello died. She was found. She’d been dead about a week.”

“That can’t be right, Anton. I’ve seen the file. There wasn’t that kind of mess.”

“Look at the folder. There was a broken window. Temp down below twenty-five. It was a refrigerator in there.”

Pat looked. The picture Anton wanted him to see was right on top, probably because Anton had been looking at it himself, frequently. It showed a middle-aged woman with her hair fanned out behind her, lying on a rug. Her neck was broken. Her forehead was marked with the
, carved into her flesh as neatly as if it had been stenciled on.

Pat put both folders back on Anton’s desk and took a deep breath. “Shit,” he said. “Bruises here, no bruises on Terry—what do we have?”

“Don’t start swearing yet,” Anton said. “You don’t have anything to swear about yet. Wait till you hear the kicker.”

“What kicker?”

“We don’t have the body.”

Pat stared. This is impossible. In a case of violent death, morgues kept bodies for weeks. Sometimes for months. Even with a loving family clamoring around for a chance to hold a funeral, the body should have been kept for seven days.

“You have to have the body,” he told Anton.

“We ought to have it,” Anton said, “but we don’t. In fact, we don’t have a number of bodies we ought to have. We had a new girl in processing last weekend.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s supposed to mean she mistook the overtime drawers for the holding drawers and shipped the wrong set out for cremation. By the time anybody knew what had happened, it was Monday morning. All we have are ashes.”

“Shit,” Pat said again. He wondered if he was getting angry. Listening to Anton this morning had been like taking body blows. He was punchy, and he couldn’t get through that to what he actually felt. God, it was incredible. First life looked like it couldn’t get any worse, and then it did.

“Shit,” he said for the third time. “Anton—”

The phone on Anton’s desk rang, tinkling like a bicycle bell. Anton picked it up and waved him quiet.

“Bitching about it isn’t going to change anything,” he said. “It’s my ass we’re talking about here, not yours.”