The Chemistry of Death

Chapter 30

Joe stumbled down the tunnels. Hot pain shot up his leg with each step. He’d struggled to ignore it on the way to the lipstick room, but he was tired now, and the anger and hope that had driven him to the room were gone. He was one step behind this killer, and a woman had died on the tracks because of it. If he didn’t figure this out soon, another innocent would die, and the only lead he had was the name of a janitor who was probably not involved.

“Do you need a hand, Mr. Tesla?” Vivian asked.

“I got it.” He tried to limp a little faster. The pain made him nauseous, and he hoped he wouldn’t throw up in front of her.

Vivian didn’t say anything, but when they passed an underground scrap pile, she rooted around in it. He leaned against the wall, not asking what she was doing, just grateful to have a short break. Edison leaned against him. Joe’s foot throbbed with each heartbeat.

Vivian seemed to have found what she was looking for, and came over carrying a long broom. She handed it to him. “Crutch.”

A woman of few words, but always practical.

“Thanks.” Joe fitted the wood under his armpit. It was too long, but it helped to bear some of his weight, and it made the going easier.

They pushed on until they reached his security door. He entered the old code first, remembered that he’d changed it, and entered the new one. He looked up to where the camera had been installed. Just bare rock, so the bastard hadn’t come back yet. Good.

The security system disarmed, he unlocked the door, and they went inside.

The chamber was barely lit. The ceiling glowed dark indigo to mimic the night sky above. The air smelled of plants and clean water, so much better than what he’d been smelling for the past few hours — rat urine, mold, engine oil, bleach, and blood.

He drew in a deep breath of home. He was tempted to throw himself down on the green plants and not move for a long time, but he kept moving. Once he sat down, he wasn’t going to stand up for a while.

“Nice plants,” said Vivian.

“They’re new,” he told her.

He trudged across to the stairs, unlocked his front door, and gestured for her to go in first.

“Where to?” she asked.

“Kitchen,” he answered. He was too dirty to sit in the parlor, and too tired to go upstairs.

She went in ahead of him, checking each room in the downstairs to make sure it was empty. He didn’t expect her to find anyone. The man had killed tonight. He was probably at home, gloating.

Joe used the surge of anger to propel him to the kitchen. He collapsed on a chair. Edison put his head in Joe’s lap.

“You’re a good dog,” Joe said. Though Edison hadn’t been limping during their walk back, Joe felt his silky legs and checked the pads of his feet. Luckily, Edison was unharmed. But filthy. Joe usually washed the dog himself, but he didn’t think his foot would allow it.

“Andres can take you to a groomer tomorrow. Get you a bath.”

Edison’s tail stopped wagging. He’d recognized the word. He didn’t like baths.

“You’ll feel better after,” Joe told him.

Edison looked unconvinced.

Vivian headed upstairs, and he heard her moving from room to room. She was making sure the house was empty. Admirable thoroughness.

Joe took out the last treat in his pocket and gave it to Edison. “Tough day, huh, buddy?”

Edison gulped it down and put his head back in Joe’s lap.

Joe stroked the dog’s warm ears and closed his eyes, immediately seeing the woman on the tracks, her blue eyes looking into his, her voice pleading that he remember her. As if he could ever forget.

“A doctor should look at that foot.” Vivian spoke from near his shoulder.

He jumped. She could move like a ghost when she wanted to. She crossed the kitchen, plugged in his copper tea kettle, and rummaged in his cupboards for cups and tea. She’d been here often enough that she assembled everything with no trouble.

“A man broke in yesterday,” Joe said.

“You should file a police report.” She poured hot water over the tea. “But there’s no one here now. I checked.”

Edison would have warned them if someone else was in the house. Joe eased his shoe off, biting his lips so he wouldn’t make a sound. She already knew he was injured, no point in being a baby about it. He took off his sock and examined his injury.

His ankle was swollen to twice its normal size, the skin dark with bruises, and it throbbed all the way to his toes. The ankle hurt like hell when he tried to rotate it.

“See a doctor about that,” Vivian repeated.

“If it were broken, I couldn’t have walked as far as I did,” he said. “It’s just a sprain.”

Vivian looked skeptical, and he didn’t blame her.

“How about I get the office tech to do an MRI on it tomorrow instead?” he asked.

“That’ll do.” She dragged over another kitchen chair and put it next to him. “Elevation.”

He propped the foot on the chair. Better late than never.

She opened the ice box and pulled out his ice cube tray. It was geeky, and the ice cubes looked like Tetris blocks. She put the shapes into a tea towel and smashed it against the sink. She handed him the makeshift ice pack.

When he held the pack to his foot, he drew in a quick breath. His foot hurt worse than ever, but he couldn’t wimp out in front of Vivian.

She set his tea on the old scarred table. “Do you have any pain killers? Ace bandages?”

“Upstairs bathroom,” he said between clenched teeth. Sure, icing was supposed to help a sprain, but right now, it was making it hurt more, which he hadn’t thought possible.

Half an hour later, the pain had retreated a little. He’d taken a handful of the ibuprofen Vivian gave him, and she’d wrapped the foot and ankle with an elastic bandage. She’d raided Leandro’s liquor cabinet, and he’d drunk a couple shots of whiskey, changed into clean clothes, and transitioned to the parlor. Even with the whiskey, he was too keyed up to consider sleep.

Vivian was drinking tea, not whiskey, and re-reading the reports she’d sent him about the women. She’d already forwarded them on to Dirk.

Joe’s laptop sat in his lap, and he was doing his own research, trying to match up the images from the surveillance video with his law enforcement test databases. The man’s fedora had obscured his face in every shot. No matter what kind of software Joe used, he wasn’t able to turn the fuzzy pictures into an identification.

He’d tracked the man’s movements in Grand Central Terminal, from the moment he and the woman arrived in a taxi until he walked off the platform and into the darkness. Not a single frame of the footage was useful. The man must have known where each camera was positioned because he was always looking away, hat pulled low on his face, collar turned up.

Gait recognition proved just as useless. The man walked with a slight limp, but it didn’t look like it came from an injury. Joe slowed the film down to watch how he lifted each foot, swung it forward, landed it on the ground, rolled, and stepped again. His left leg had a normal stride — easy, athletic, probably a young man. The right foot was different. It moved well, but whenever it landed, it hesitated a fraction of a second. Something was wrong with his foot.

That should have been useful, and Joe entered the information into his search. The gait recognition database was much smaller than the one for facial recognition, and he got a quick response. This man’s gait didn’t match anything in there. That didn’t mean much, since the database contained samples from only a handful of criminals and terrorists, plus the odd Pellucid employee.

Joe studied the man’s walk again and again. Then it hit him. The man’s gait looked odd because he didn’t have a real limp. His movements weren’t consistent with a hip injury, a knee injury, or an ankle injury. Joe was willing to bet that the man had a pebble in his shoe. He’d either gotten lucky and the stone had fallen in, and he hadn’t wanted to stop his walk with the girl to take it out, or he’d put it in there deliberately to confuse anyone who might be watching. A watcher would remember the limp and, once he took the stone out, the man wouldn’t have a limp anymore.

Based on what he’d seen, Joe knew better than to underestimate the man. He’d lured intelligent women into the tunnels, sophisticated New York women no less. Then he’d convinced them to stand in the way of an oncoming train and die. After that, he’d left without being suspected of a crime.

Joe watched the man walk down the platform again and again, the woman on his arm leaning against him, never knowing that these were the last minutes of her life. He tried not to look at her, tried to look at the man who led her to her death. Something felt familiar about his long-legged stride, the confident set of his shoulders, but the comparison flew away when he reached the short hitching limp at the end of each step.

He gave up and looked into Salvatore Blue. That man was a ghost, too. He didn’t show up in any of the databases where he should, and he wasn’t in any criminal databases either. Unlike just about everyone else these days, he didn’t have an online profile — no Facebook, no twitter, no pictures posted by drunken friends. Blue sounded like a made-up last name, but the MTA must do background checks, so it probably wasn’t.

His cell phone rang from its position on the ottoman. Celeste’s face appeared on the screen. His heart lightened. She was calling him. It was far too late for an ordinary call, so she must have heard what had happened.

Vivian handed him the phone. “I’m going upstairs to wash the dog.”

He knew she was leaving to give him privacy.

“Thanks,” he mouthed silently.

She clucked her tongue at Edison, and he followed her obediently out of the room, tail down in his I-don’t-want-a-bath position. He knew the word wash as well as well as he knew the word bath.

“Hey,” Joe said into the phone.

“I heard what happened to the A train,” Celeste said.

He’d missed her breathy voice. “Is it in the papers?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Did you get my flowers?”

“I particularly liked the ones where you said I was the sun god,” she said. “How are you?”

“A little drunk.”

“That bad?”

“She died right in front of me.” He didn’t want to talk about that. “Remember that room with the lipsticks I told you about?”

“I’m probably not up to date.”

He told her about the room and the investigation so far, glad to be sharing it with her, glad that she was pretending that nothing had happened between them.

“So,” he finished, “how did he get the key? Do you know if anyone else has copies?”

“That would be illegal.” A non-answer, since Joe himself had made a set of duplicates. “The keys were usually hanging on a peg on the wall when we were kids. I never made copies, but I’ll ask Leandro tomorrow when he comes back. He might have, or my dad or the servants, or Leandro’s friends that go to the parties down there. We weren’t careful with the keys.”

“Did you guys spend a lot of time down here?”

“Not really.” She breathed quietly into the phone. “It was pretty dangerous down there before the September eleven attacks. Lots of homeless people moving around the tunnels before the security sweeps started. Leandro used to throw an underground party every year or so before you moved in, but that was it.”

Joe had seen the security at Leandro’s parties. Anyone could have taken the keys and copied them. Theoretically, then, anyone could have the key that led to the recently scoured room.

Even if the killer hadn’t gotten the key from the Gallos, a locksmith could have made a key. It might be difficult to convince a locksmith to go down into the tunnels, but with enough money, anything was possible.

He took a deep breath and asked his most difficult question. “Are we OK?”

“If you don’t push me.”

“Your terms, your timing.” He sure as hell wasn’t going to say anything else any time soon.

“Good,” she said. “I have to go sleep now. You should sleep, too.”

“I will.”

“And be careful out there,” she said. “I’d hate to outlive you.”

“That wouldn’t be so bad,” he said.

Celeste ended the connection, and he stared at the artificial flames until Edison padded into the room, smelling of shampoo. He licked Joe’s hand, then curled up in front of the fire. Soon the room would smell like wet dog.

Vivian came in after him, rolling down her sleeves.

“Thanks for staying with me,” he told Vivian. “You can go home if you want.”

“I’m staying till morning.”

“I’m safe here in the house.” He hoped that was true.

His surveillance program beeped. A quick glance at his laptop reassured him that the latest tunnel trespassers were a group of four track workers heading home at the end of a long shift. Until he’d set up the program, he’d had no idea so many people ventured off the platforms and into the tunnels. He’d always thought he was mostly alone down here.

Clearly, he wasn’t.

Not that the surveillance footage was good for much else. He’d already sent the footage he’d collected of the killer to Dirk, but he knew the police wouldn’t be able to do much with it either. Vivian had sent him her notes and reports, which were hopefully more useful than Joe’s contribution. They couldn’t do anything more tonight, but his thoughts kept returning to the dead woman on the tracks. “Remember,” she had said looking up at him. “Remember.”

“You should get some sleep,” Vivian said. “Do you need help up the stairs?”

“I can manage. Will you be OK going home in the tunnels on your own?” Grand Central Terminal was closed for the night, so she’d have to leave via the tunnels.

“I’m staying through morning,” she repeated.

He wanted to argue with her, but her set expression told him that he would lose, and he couldn’t deny that her presence reassured him.