Prodigal Son

CHAPTER 58

One block of the alleyway had been cordoned off to preserve as much evidence as possible for the CSI crew. Likewise the roof of the building and the freight elevator.

Carson climbed the stairs to Roy Pribeaux's apartment. The jake outside the door knew her; he let her into the loft.

She half expected to find Harker or Frye, or both. Neither was present. Another detective, Emery Framboise, had been in the area and had caught the call.

Carson liked Emery. The sight of him didn't raise a single hair on the back of her neck.

He was a young guy- thirty-four-who dressed the way certain older detectives had once dressed before they decided they looked like throwbacks to the lost South of the 1950s. Seersucker suits, white rayon shirts, string ties, a straw boater parked dead-flat on his head.

Somehow he made this retro look seem modern, perhaps because he himself was otherwise entirely of a modern sensibility.

Carson was surprised to see Kathy Burke, friend and shrink, with Emery in the kitchen. Primarily Kathy conducted mandatory counseling sessions with officers involved in shootings and in other traumatic situations, though she also wrote psychological profiles of elusive perpetrators like the Surgeon. She seldom visited crime scenes, at least not this early in the game.

Kathy and Emery were watching two CSI techs unload the contents of one of two freezers. Tupperware containers.

As Carson joined Kathy and Emery, one of the techs read a label on the lid of a container. "Left hand."

She would have understood the essence of the situation without hearing those two words, because the raised lid of the second freezer revealed the eyeless corpse of a young woman.

"Why aren't you home reading about swashbuckling heroines and flying dragons?" Carson needled.

"There's a different kind of dragon dead in the alleyway," Kathy said. "I wanted to see his lair, see if my profile of him holds any water."

"Right hand," a tech said, taking a container from the freezer.

Emery Framboise said, "Carson, looks like you've just been saved a ton of casework."

"I suppose it wasn't an accident he went off the roof?"

"Suicide. He left a note. Probably heard you and Michael were on his trail, figured he was a dead man walking."

"Do homicidal sociopaths commit suicide?" Carson wondered.

"Rarely," Kathy said. "But it's not unheard of."

"Ears," said one of the CSI techs, removing a small container from the freezer, and his partner read the label on another: "Lips."

"I disappointed my mother," Emery said. "She wanted me to be an airline pilot like my dad. At times like this, I think maybe I would be better off high in the night, up where the sky is clean, flying San Francisco to Tokyo."

"Yeah," Carson said, "but then what airline pilot is ever going to have stories like this to tell his grandkids when he tucks them into bed? Where's the suicide note?"

Kathy said, "I'll show you."

In the living room, a computer stood on a corner desk. White letters on a field of blue offered a peculiar farewell:

"The taunting tone is typical for a sociopath," Kathy said. "The suggestion that he's earned a princely place in Hell isn't unique, either, but usually if he's playing out a satanic fantasy, you find occult literature, posters. We haven't come across any of that yet."

Only half listening, chilled by a sense of deja vu, of having seen this message before, Carson stared at the screen, reading the words twice, three times, four.

As she read, she extracted a latex glove from a jacket pocket, pulled it on her right hand, and then keyed in a print request.

"There was a time," Kathy said, "if a suicide note wasn't handwritten, it was suspicious. But these days, they often use their computers. In some cases they e-mail suicide notes to friends and relatives just before offing themselves. Progress."

Stripping off the glove, waiting impatiently for the printer to produce a hard copy, Carson said, "Down there in the alley, is there enough left of his face to get a good photograph?"

"No," Kathy said. "But his bedroom's full of them."

Was it ever. On both nightstands and on the dresser were a dozen or more photos of Roy Pribeaux, mostly glamour shots by professional photographers, each in an expensive, ornamental silver frame.

"He doesn't seem to have been lacking in self-esteem," Kathy said drily.