Secret of the Seventh Son (9 page)

The dealer flipped his hole card, revealing a king, and drew a nine.

Bust.

Amidst her squeals, Sam paid out the table, shoving seven grand in chips her way.

Peter hastily excused himself and started for the men's room in turmoil. His mind was grinding. What am I thinking? he said to himself. This is none of my business! Let it go!

But he couldn't. He was overwhelmed with moral outrage--if
he
didn't take advantage, why should they?

He pivoted, went back toward the cluster of blackjack tables and made eye contact with the pit boss, who nodded and smiled at him. Peter sidled up and said, "Hey, how're you doing?"

"Just fine, sir. How can I help you this evening?"

"You see that kid at the table over there and the girl?"

"Yes, sir."

"They're counting."

The corner of the pit boss's mouth twitched. He'd seen a lot but he'd never seen one player turn in another. What was the angle? "You sure about this?"

"I'm positive. The kid's counting and signaling her."

"Thank you, sir. I'll handle it."

The pit boss used his two-way to call the floor manager, who in turn got security to play back the tape of the table's last couple of hands. In retrospect the blonde's stepped-up bet did look suspicious.

Peter had returned to the table just as a phalanx of uniformed security men arrived and laid hands on the kid's shoulders.

"Hey, what the fuck!" the kid shouted.

Players at other tables stopped and stared.

"You two know each other?" the pit boss asked.

"I never saw her in my life! That's the goddamn truth!" the kid wailed.

The blonde said nothing. She just picked up her pocketbook, gathered her chips, and tossed a $500 tip to Sam.

"See you, fellows," she said as she was led away.

The pit boss made a hand signal and Sam was replaced by another dealer.

The doc and the insurance guy looked at Peter with glazed astonishment. "What the hell just happened here?" the insurance man asked.

"They were counting," Peter said simply. "I turned them in."

"No you did not!" the insurance guy howled.

"Yeah, I did. It ticked me off."

The doc asked, "How'd you know?"

"I knew." He felt uncomfortable with the attention he was getting. He wanted to scram.

"I'll be damned," the insurance guy said, shaking his head. "I'm going to buy you a drink, friend. I'll be damned." His blue eyes sparkled as he reached into his wallet and pulled out a business card. "Here, take my card. My business runs on computers. If you need any work, just call me up, all right?"

Peter took the card:
NELSON G. ELDER, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, DESERT LIFE INSURANCE COMPANY.

"That's very nice of you, but I have a job," Peter muttered, his voice barely audible above the repetitive melodies and clanging of the slots.

"Well, if things change, you've got my number."

The pit boss approached the table. "Look everyone, I apologize for what happened here. Mr. Elder, how are you tonight, sir? All of you are eating and drinking on the house tonight and I got tickets to any show you want. Okay? Again, I'm very sorry."

"Sorry enough to reverse my losses tonight, Frankie?" Elder asked.

"I wish I could, Mr. Elder, but that I cannot do."

"Oh, well," Elder told the table, "you don't ask, you don't get."

The pit boss tapped Peter on the shoulder and whispered, "The manager wants to meet you." Peter blanched. "Don't worry, it's all good."

Gil Flores, the floor manager of the Constellation, was sleek and urbane, and in his presence Peter felt scruffy and self-conscious. His armpits were damp, he wanted to leave. The manager's office was utilitarian, equipped with multiple flat-screen panels getting live feeds from the tables and slots.

Flores was drilling down, trying to figure out the hows and the whys. How did a civilian spot something his guys didn't and why did he turn them in? "What am I missing here?" Flores asked the timid man.

Peter took a sip of water. "I knew the count," Peter admitted.

"You were counting too?"

"Yes."

"You're a counter? You're admitting to me you're a counter?" Flores's voice was rising.

"I count, but I'm not a counter."

Flores's polish rubbed off. "What the fuck does that mean?"

"I keep the count--it's kind of a habit, but I don't use it."

"You expect me to believe that?"

Peter shrugged. "I'm sorry but it's the truth. I've been coming here for two years and I've never varied my bets. I make a little, lose a little, you know."

"Unbelievable. So you knew the count when this shithead does what?"

"He said he was hexed. The count was thirteen, you know, a code word for thirteen. She joined the table when the count was high. I think he dropped a swizzle stick to signal her."

"So he counts and decoys, the chick bets and collects."

"They probably have a code word for every count, like 'chair' for four, 'sweet' for sixteen."

The phone rang and Flores answered it and listened before saying, "Yes, sir."

"Well, Peter Benedict, it's your lucky day," Flores announced. "Victor Kemp wants to see you up in the penthouse."

The view from the penthouse was dazzling, the entire Strip snaking toward the dark horizon like a flaming tail. Victor Kemp came in and extended his hand, and Peter felt his chunky gold rings when their fingers entwined. He had black wavy hair, a deep tan and gleaming teeth--the sleek, easy looks of a headliner at the best club in town. His suit was a shimmery blue that caught the light and played with it, a fabric that seemed unearthly. He sat Peter down in his cavernous living room and offered him a drink. While a maid fetched a beer, Peter noticed that one of the wall monitors at the far end of the room had a shot of Gil's office. Cameras everywhere.

Peter took the beer and considered doffing his cap but kept it on--damned if he did, damned if he didn't.

"An honest man is the noblest work of God," Kemp said suddenly. "Alexander Pope wrote that. Cheers!" Kemp clinked his wineglass against Peter's beer flute. "You have lifted my spirits, Mr. Benedict, and for that, I thank you."

"You're welcome," Peter said cautiously.

"You seem like a very clever guy. May I ask what you do for a living?"

"I work with computers."

"Why am I not surprised to hear that! You spotted something an army of trained professionals missed, so on one hand I'm pleased you are an honest man but on another I am displeased at my own people. Have you ever considered working in casino security, Mr. Benedict?"

Peter shook his head but said, "That's the second job offer I've had tonight."

"Who else?"

"A guy at my blackjack table, the CEO of an insurance company."

"Silver hair, slim fella in his fifties?"

"Yes."

"That would be Nelson Elder, a very good guy. You're having quite a night. But, if you're happy with your job, I've got to find some other way to thank you."

"Oh. No. That's not necessary, sir."

"Don't sir me! You call me Victor and I will reciprocate by calling you Peter. So, Peter, this is like you just found a genie in a bottle but because this isn't a fairy tale you only get one wish and it's got to be, you know, realistic. So what's it going to be, you want a girl, you want a credit line, some movie star you'd like to meet?"

Peter's brain was capable of processing a tremendous amount of information swiftly. In a few seconds of thought he worked through various scenarios and outcomes and out popped a proposition that, for him, was high impact.

"Do you know any Hollywood agents?" he asked, his voice quavering.

Kemp laughed. "Sure I do, they all come here! You're a writer?"

"I wrote a script," he said sheepishly.

"Then I'm gonna set you up with Bernie Schwartz, who's one of the biggest guys at ATI. Will that work for you, Peter? Does that float your boat?"

Joy-soaked, he exulted, "Oh yeah! That would be unbelievable!"

"Okay, then. I can't promise you he'll like your script, Peter, but I will promise you that he'll read it and meet with you. Done deal."

They shook hands again. On his way out, Kemp put his hand on Peter's shoulder in a fatherly way. "And don't be counting cards on me now, Peter, you hear? You're on the side of righteousness."

"Isn't that interesting," Bernie said. "Victor Kemp
is
Las Vegas. He's a prince of a man."

"So what about my script?" Peter asked, then stopped breathing to await the answer.

Crunch time.

"Actually, Peter, the script, as good as it is, needs a bit of polishing before I could send it out. But here's the bigger thing. This is a big budget film, you got here. You got a train blowing up and a lot of special effects. These kind of action films are getting harder and harder to make unless they've got a built-in audience or franchise potential. And you've got a terrorism angle which is the real killer. Nine/eleven changed everything. I can tell you that very few of my projects that got cancelled back in '01 have been resurrected. Nobody wants to make a terrorism picture anymore. I can't sell it. I'm sorry, the world has changed."

Exhale
. He felt light-headed.

Roz came in. "Mr. Schwartz, your next appointment is here."

"Where's the time gone!" Bernie sprang to his feet, which made Peter levitate too. "Now, you go and write me a script about high-stakes gambling and card counters and throw in some sex and laughs and I promise I'll read that. I'm so happy we were able to meet, Peter. You give my regards to Mr. Kemp. And listen, I'm glad you drove. Personally, I won't fly anymore, at least commercial."

When Peter got back to his small ranch house in Spring Valley that night there was an envelope sticking out from under his welcome mat. He tore it open and read the handwritten letter under the porch light.

Peter was tired and dispirited but it was a Friday night and he had the weekend to recover.

The check-in desk at the Constellation had a room key waiting for him and he went straight up. It was a big two-bedroom suite with a great view. The coffee table in the living room sported a fruit basket and a bottle of iced Perrier-Jouet. And another envelope. There were two cards inside, one a voucher for $1,000 of merchandise in the Constellation shopping plaza and the other a $5,000 line at the casino.

He sat down on the sofa, stunned, and looked down onto the neon landscape.

There was a knock at the door.

"Come in!" he called out.

A female voice: "I don't have a key!"

"Oh, sorry," Peter said, sprinting for the door, "I thought it was housekeeping."

She was gorgeous. And young, almost girlish. A brunette with an open, fresh face, firm ivory flesh pouring out of a clingy black cocktail dress.

"You must be Peter," she said, shutting the door behind her. "Mr. Kemp sent me to say hello." Like many in Vegas, she was from somewhere else--her accent had a hillbilly twang, dainty and musical.

He blushed so brightly his skin looked like it was made of red plastic. "Oh!"

She slowly walked toward him, backing him up toward the sofa. "My name is Lydia. Am I okay?"

"Okay?"

"If you'd prefer a guy, that's cool. Didn't know for sure." She had a charming ditziness about her.

His voice got squeaky from laryngeal constriction. "I don't like guys! I mean, I like girls!"

"Well, good! 'Cause I'm a girl," she purred with practiced artifice. "Why don't you sit yourself down and open that bottle of champagne, Peter, while we figure out the kind of games you'd like to play."

He reached the sofa as his knees were buckling and went down hard on his rump. His brain was swimming in a sea of juices--fear, lust, embarrassment--he'd never done anything like this before. It seemed so silly, yet...

Then, "Hey, I've seen you before!" Now Lydia was genuinely excited. "Yeah, I've seen you tons of times! It just hit me!"

"Where? At the casino?"

"No silly! You probably don't recognize me because I'm not in that stupid uniform. My day job is at the reception desk at McCarran Airport, you know--the E.G. and G terminal."

The rouge drained from his face.

This day was too much for him. Too much.

"Your name's not Peter! It's Mark something. Mark Shackleton. I'm good with names."

"Well, you know how names are," he said shakily.

"I get it! Hey, none of my beeswax! What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, honey. If you want to know the truth, my name's not Lydia."

He was speechless as he watched her strip off her black dress, showing all her black lacy gear underneath, talking a mile a minute as she went. "That is so cool! I've always wanted to speak to one of you guys! I mean how crazy must it be to commute to Area 51 every day. I mean it's like so top secret it basically makes me hot!"

His mouth fell open a little.

"I mean I know you're not allowed to talk about it but please, just nod if we've really got UFOs we're studying out there cause that's what everybody says!"

He tried to keep his head still.

"Was that a nod?" she asked. "Were you nodding?"

He composed himself enough to say, "I can't say anything about what goes on there. Please!"

She looked bummed then brightened up and started to work again. "Okay! That's cool. Tell you what,
Peter
," she said, swinging her hips, slowly approaching the sofa, "I'll be your personal UFO tonight--unidentified fucking object. How would that be?"

W
ill had a devastating hangover, the kind that felt like a weasel had woken up warm and cozy inside his skull then panicked at its confinement and tried to scratch and bite its way out through his eyes.

The evening had begun benignly enough. On his way home he stopped at his local dive, a yeasty smelling cave called Dunigan's, and downed a couple of pops on an empty stomach. Next up, the Pantheon Diner, where he grunted at the heavily stubbled waiter who grunted back at him and without exchanging any fully formed phrases brought him the same dish he ate two to three days a week--lamb kebabs and rice, washed down, of course, with a couple of beers. Then before decamping to his place for the night he paid his wobbly respects to his friendly package store and picked up a fresh half gallon of Black Label, pretty much the only luxury item to adorn his life.

The apartment was small and spartan, and stripped of Jennifer's feminizing touches, a truly bleak uninteresting piece of real estate--two sparse white-walled rooms with shiny parquet floors, meager views of the building across the street, and a few thousand dollars' worth of generic furniture and rugs. Truth be told, the apartment was almost too small for him. The living room was fourteen by seventeen, the bedroom ten by twelve, the kitchen and bathroom each the size of a good closet. Some of the criminals he had put away for life wouldn't see the place as a major upgrade. How had he put up with sharing the flat with Jennifer for four months? Whose bright idea was that?

He hadn't intended to drink himself stupid but the heavy full bottle seemed to hold so much promise. He twisted off the top, cracking its seal, then hoisted it by its built-in handle and glugged a half tumbler of scotch into his favorite whiskey glass. With the TV droning in the background he sofa-drank, steadily sinking into a deep dark hole as he thought about his effing day, his effing case, his effing life.

Notwithstanding his reluctance to take on the Doomsday case, the first few days had been, in fact, rejuvenating. Clive Robertson was killed right under his nose and the audacity and perplexity of the crime electrified him. It reminded him of the way big cases used to make him feel, and the kicky pulses of adrenaline agreed with him.

He'd immersed himself in the tangle of facts, and though he knew that epiphanous moments were the stuff of fiction, had a powerful urge to drill down and discover something that had been missed, the overlooked link that would tie together two murders, then a third, then another, until the case was cracked.

The distraction of important work had been as soothing as butter on a burn. He started by running hot, pounding the files, pushing Nancy, exhausting both of them in a marathon of days bleeding into nights bleeding into days. For a while he actually took Sue Sanchez's words to heart: Okay, this would be his last big case. Let's ride this sucker out and retire with a big old bang.

Crescendo.

Decrescendo.

Within a week he'd been burnt out, spent and dispirited. Robertson's autopsy and toxicology reports made no sense to him. The seven other cases made no sense to him. He couldn't get any feeling for who the killer was or what gratification he was getting from the murders. None of his initial ideas were panning out. All he could fathom was a tableau of randomness, and that was something he had never seen in a serial killer.

The first scotch was to dull the unpleasantness of his afternoon in Queens interviewing the family of the hit-and-run victim, nice solid people who were still inconsolable. The second scotch was to blunt his frustration. The third was to fill some of his emptiness with maudlin remembrances, the fourth was for loneliness. The fifth...?

In spite of his pounding head and hollow nausea, he stubbornly dragged himself into work by eight. In his book, if you made it to work on time, never drank on the job, and never touched a drop before happy hour, you didn't have a booze problem. Still, he couldn't ignore the searing headache, and as he rode the elevator he clutched an extra large coffee to his chest like a life preserver. He flinched at the memory of waking, fully clothed, at 6:00
A.M.
, a third of the mighty bottle empty. He had Advil in his office. He needed to get there.

Doomsday files were stacked on his desk, his credenza, his bookcase, and all over the floor, stalagmites of notes, reports, research, computer printouts, and crime scene photos. He had carved himself walking corridors through the piles--from door to desk chair, chair to bookcase, chair to window, so he could adjust the blinds and keep the afternoon sun out of his eyes. He made his way through the obstacle course, landed hard on his chair, and hunted down the pain relievers, which he painfully swallowed with a gulp of hot coffee. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, and when he opened them Nancy was standing there, looking at him like a doctor.

"Are you all right?"

"I'm fine."

"You don't look fine. You look sick."

"I'm fine." He fumbled for a file at random and opened it. She was still there. "What?"

"What's the plan for today?" she asked.

"The plan is for me to drink my coffee and for you to come back in an hour."

Dutifully, she reappeared in precisely one hour. His pain and nausea were subsiding but his thinking was still milky. "Okay," he began, "what's our schedule?"

She opened the ubiquitous notebook. "Ten o'clock, telecon with Dr. Sofer from Johns Hopkins. Two o'clock, task force press conference. Four o'clock, uptown to see Helen Swisher. You look better."

He was curt. "I was good an hour ago and I'm good now." She didn't look convinced, and he wondered if she knew he was hung over. Then it dawned on him--
she
looked better. Her face was a little thinner, her body a little sleeker, her skirt didn't pinch as much at the waist. They had been constant companions for ten days and he'd only just realized she was eating like a parakeet. "Can I ask
you
a question?"

"Sure."

"Are you on a diet or something?"

She blushed instantly. "Sort of. I started jogging again too."

"Well, it looks good. Keep it up."

She lowered her eyes in embarrassment. "Thanks."

He quickly changed the subject. "Okay, let's take a step back and try to see the big picture," he said foggily. "We're getting killed with details. Let's go through these, one more time, focusing on connections." He joined her at the conference table and moved the files onto other files to give them an uncluttered surface. He took a clean pad and wrote on it,
Key Observations,
and underlined the words twice. He willed his brain to work and loosened his tie to encourage blood flow.

There had been three deaths on May 22, three on May 25, two on June 11, and none since. "What does that tell us?" he asked. She shook her head, so he answered his own question. "They're all weekdays."

"Maybe the guy has a weekend job," she offered.

"Okay. Maybe." He entered his first key observation:
Weekdays.
"Find the Swisher files. I think they're on the bookcase."

Case #1: David Paul Swisher, thirty-six-year-old investment banker at HSBC. Park Avenue, wealthy, all-Ivy background. Married, nothing obvious on the side. No Enron skeletons in his closet as far as they knew. Took the family mutt for a predawn walk, found by a jogger just after 5:00
A.M.
in a river of blood--watch, rings, and wallet missing, left carotid cleanly sliced. The body was still warm, about twenty feet out of range of the nearest CCTV camera located on the roof of a co-op on the south side of 82nd Street--twenty goddamned feet and they would've have had the killing on tape.

However, they did have a glimpse of a person of interest, a nine-second sequence time-coded at 5:02:23-5:02:32, shot from a security camera on the roof of a ten-story building on the west side of Park Avenue between 81st and 82nd. It showed a male walking into the frame from 82nd turning south on Park, pivoting then running back the way he came and disappearing down 82nd again. The image was poor quality but FBI techs had blown it up and enhanced it. From the suspect's hand coloration they determined he was black or Latino, and from reference calculations, they figured he was about five-ten and weighed 160 to 175 pounds. The hood of a gray sweatshirt obscured his face. The timing was promising since the 911 call came in at 5:07, but in the absence of witnesses they had no leads on his identity.

If not for the postcard, this would have been a street mugging, plain and simple, but David Swisher got a postcard. David Swisher was Doomsday victim one.

Will held up a photo of the hooded man and waved it at Nancy. "So is this our guy?"

"He may be David's killer but that doesn't make him the Doomsday Killer," she said.

"Serial murder by proxy? That'd be a first."

She tried another tack. "Okay, maybe this was a contract murder."

"Possible. An investment banker is bound to have enemies," Will said. "Every deal has a winner and a loser. But David was different from the other victims. He was the only one who wore a white collar to work. Who's going to pay to murder any of the others?" Will flipped through one of the Swisher files. "Do we have a list of David's clients?"

"His bank hasn't been helpful," Nancy said. "Every request for info has to go through their legal department and be personally signed off by their general counsel. We haven't gotten anything yet but I'm pushing."

"I've got a feeling he's the key." Will closed Swisher's file and pushed it away. "The first victim in a string has a special significance to the killer, something symbolic. You said we're seeing his wife today?"

She nodded.

"About time."

Case #2: Elizabeth Marie Kohler, thirty-seven-year-old manager at a Duane Reade drugstore in Queens. Shot to death in an apparent robbery, found by employees at the rear entrance when they got to work at 8:30
A.M.
Police initially thought she'd been killed by an assailant who waited for her to arrive to steal narcotics. Something went wrong, he fired, she fell, he ran. The bullet was a .38 caliber, one shot to the temple at close range. No surveillance video, no useful forensics. It took police a couple of days to find the postcard at her apartment and connect her with the others.

He looked up from her file and asked, "Okay, what's the connection between a Wall Street banker and a drugstore manager?"

"I don't know," Nancy said. "They were nearly the same age but their lives didn't have any obvious points of intersection. He never shopped at her drugstore. There's nothing."

"Where are we with her ex-husband, old boyfriends, coworkers?"

"We've got most of them identified and accounted for," she replied. "There's one high school boyfriend we can't find. His family moved out of state years ago. All her other exes--if they don't have an alibi for her murder, they've got one for the other murders. She's been divorced for five years. Her ex-husband was driving a bus for the Transit Authority the morning she was shot. She was an ordinary person. Her life wasn't complicated. She didn't have enemies."

"So, if it weren't for the postcard, this would have been an open and shut case of an armed robbery gone bad."

"That's what it looks like, on the surface," she agreed.

"Okay, action items," he said. "See if she had any high school or college yearbooks and have all the names entered into the database. Also, contact the landlord and get a list of all her present and former neighbors going back for five years. Throw them into the mix."

"Done. You want another coffee?" He did, badly.

Case #3: Consuela Pilar Lopez, thirty-two-year-old illegal immigrant from the Dominican Republic, living in Staten Island, working as an office cleaner in Manhattan. Found just after 3:00
A.M.
by a group of teenagers in a wooded area near the shore in Arthur Von Briesen Park, less than a mile from her house on Fingerboard Road. She'd been raped and repeatedly stabbed in the chest, head, and neck. She had taken the ten o'clock ferry from Manhattan that night, confirmed by CCTV. Her usual routine would have been to take the bus south toward Fort Wadsworth, but no one could place her at the bus station at the St. George Ferry Terminal or on the number 51 bus that ran down Bay Street to Fingerboard.

The working hypothesis was that someone intercepted her at the terminal, offered her a ride, and took her to a dark corner of the island, where she met her end under the looming superstructure of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. There was no semen in or on her body--the killer apparently used a condom. There were gray fibers on her shirt, which appeared to have come from a sweatshirt type of fabric. At postmortem, her wounds were calibrated. The blade was four inches long, compatible with the one that killed David Swisher. Lopez lived in a two-family house with an extended group of siblings and cousins, some documented, some not. She was a religious lady who worshipped at St. Sylvester's, where stunned parishioners had packed the church for a memorial mass. According to family and friends, she had no boyfriend, and the autopsy suggested that even though she was in her thirties she had been a virgin. All attempts to connect her with the other victims proved fruitless.

Will had spent a disproportionate amount of time with this particular murder, studying the ferry and bus terminal, walking the crime scene, visiting her house and church. Sex crimes were his forte. It hadn't been his career aspiration--no one in his right mind wrote on his Quantico application:
One day I hope to specialize in sex crimes.
But his first big cases had serious sexual angles, and that's the way you got pigeon-holed in the Bureau. He did more than follow his nose, he burned hot with ambition and educated himself to expert grade. He studied the annals of sex crimes sedulously and became a walking encyclopedia of American serial perversion.

He'd seen this kind of killer before, and the offender profile came to him quickly. The perp was a stalker, a planner, a circumspect loner who was careful about not leaving his DNA behind. He'd be familiar with the neighborhood, which meant he either currently lived or used to live on Staten Island. He knew the waterfront park like the back of his hand and calculated exactly where he could do his business with the least chance of being happened upon. There was an excellent chance he was Hispanic because he made his victim feel comfortable enough to get into his car and they were told that Maria's English was limited. There was a reasonable chance she knew her killer at least by limited acquaintance.