The Day After Tomorrow

13

MCVEY SHIVERED and poured hot water into a big ceramic mug with a British flag on it. Outside a cold rain was falling and a light fog lifted off the Thames. Barges were moving up and down the waterway, and traffic was heavy along the river road beside it.

Looking around, he found a small plastic spoon lying on a stained paper towel and added two scoops of Taster’s Choice decaf and a teaspoon of sugar to the steaming water. The Taster’s Choice he’d found in a small grocery around the corner from Scotland Yard. Warming his hands on the cup, he took a sip of the decaf and glanced again at the folder open in front of him—an Interpol printout of known or suspected multiple murderers in continental Europe, Great Britain and Northern Ireland. There were probably two hundred in all. Some had served time for lesser crimes and been released, others were in jail, a handful were still at large. Each would be checked out. Not by McVey but by homicide detectives in the respective countries. Transcripts of their reports would be faxed to him immediately as they were completed.

Abruptly McVey set the list aside, got up and crossed the room, his left hand balled up into a loose fist, and began absently to twick his thumb with his little finger. What was troubling him was what had troubled him from the beginning, a gut sense that whoever was surgically removing heads from bodies was not someone with a criminal record. McVey’s mind stopped. Why did it have to be a man? Why couldn’t it as easily be a woman? These days women had the same access to medical training as men. In some cases, maybe more. And with the current emphasis on fitness, many women were in excellent physical condition.

McVey’s first hunch had been that it was one person committing the crimes. If he was right, it narrowed the field from possibly as many as eight killers to one. But his second speculation, or speculations—that the murderer had some degree of medical schooling and access to surgical tools and could be of either gender and with perhaps no criminal record at all—tore the odds to hell.

He had no statistics at his fingertips, but if one totaled up all the doctors, nurses, paramedics, medical students, former medical students, coroners, medical technicians and university professors with some measure of expertise in surgery, to say nothing of the men and women who received some medical training serving in the armed forces, even if they stuck to Great Britain and the Continent alone, the figures had to be staggering. This was no haystack they were poking around in. It was more like a sea of grain blowing in the wind, and Interpol had no vast army of harvesters to separate the grain from the chaff until they finally uncovered their murderer.

The odds had to be narrowed and it was up to McVey to narrow them before he said anything to anybody. To do that he needed more information than he had. His first thought was that maybe somewhere he had missed a connective link between the first killing and the last. If so, the only way to find out would be to go back and start again with the most definitive facts at hand: the autopsy reports on the head and the seven headless bodies.

He was reaching for the phone to request them when it rang.

“McVey,” he said, automatically, as he picked it up.

“Oui, McVey! Lebrun, at your service!” It was Inspector Lieutenant Lebrun of the First Section of the Paris Préfecture of Police, the diminutive, cigarette-smoking detective who’d greeted him with a hug and a kiss the first time he’d set his size-twelve wing tips on French soil.

“I don’t know what it means, if it means anything at all,” he said in English. “But in going over the daily reports of my detectives I came across a complaint of simple assault. It was violent and quite vicious but simple assault nonetheless, in that no weapon was used. However, that is beside the point. What caught my attention is that the perpetrator is an orthopedic surgeon, an American, who happened to be in London the same day your man in the alley lost his head. I know he was in England because I have his passport in my hand. He arrived at Gatwick at three twenty-five Saturday afternoon, October first. Your man seems to have been killed sometime late on the first or early on the second. Correct?”

“Correct,” McVey said. “But how do we know he was still in England for the next two days? I don’t remember French Immigration stamping my passport when I landed in Paris. This guy could’ve left England and come into France the same day.”

“McVey, would I disturb as prominent a policeman as you without doing a little further checking?”

McVey felt the needle and gave it back. “I don’t know, would you?” He smiled.

“McVey, I am trying to assist you. Do you wish to be serious or should I hang up?”

“Hey, Lebrun, don’t hang up. I need all the help I can get.” McVey took a deep breath. “Forgive me.” On the other end he could hear Lebrun ask for a file in French.

“His name is Paul Osborn, M.D.,” Lebrun said a moment later. “He gives his home address as Pacific Palisades, California. You know where that is?”

“Yeah. I can’t afford it. What else?”

“Attached to the arrest sheet is a list of personal belongings he was carrying with him at the time he was taken into custody. The first are two ticket stubs from the Ambassadors Theatre, dated Saturday, October first. Another is a credit card receipt from the Connaught Hotel in the Mayfair district dated October third, the morning he checked out. Then we have—”

“Hold on—” McVey leaned forward to a stack of manila folders on the desk and pulled one from it. “Go ahead—”

“A boarding pass on a British Airways London-to-Paris shuttle dated the same.”

While Lebrun talked, McVey scanned several pages of computer printouts provided by the Public Carriage Office, which had answered a police request asking for the names of drivers delivering or picking up fares from the theater district Saturday night, October 1, into Sunday morning, October 2.

“Hardly makes him a criminal.” McVey turned one page, then another until he found a cross listing for the Connaught Hotel, then slowly ran his finger down it. He was looking for something specific.

“No, but he was evasive. He didn’t want to talk about what he was doing in London. He claimed he became ill and stayed in his room.”

McVey heard himself groan. With murder, nothing was ever easy. “From when to when?” he asked with as much enthusiasm as he could muster and put his feet up on the desk.

“Late Saturday evening until Monday morning when he checked out.”

“Anybody see him there?” McVey glanced at his shoes and decided they needed to be reheeled.

“Not that he wants to talk about.”

“Did you press him?”

“At the time there was no reason, besides he was beginning to yell for a solicitor.” Lebrun paused and McVey could hear him light a cigarette, then exhale. Then he finished. “Would you like us to pick him up for further interrogation?”

Suddenly McVey found what he was looking for. Saturday, 1 October, 23:11. Two passengers picked up at Leicester Square. Delivered Connaught Hotel, 23:33. The driver was listed as Mike Fisher. Leicester Square was in the heart of the theater district and less than two blocks from the alley where the head was found.

“You mean he’s free?” McVey took his feet off the desk. Could Lebrun have, just out of sheer luck, stumbled onto the head-cutter, then let him go?

“McVey, I’m trying to be nice to you. So don’t put that sound in your voice. We had no grounds to hold him and so far the victim hasn’t come forth to press charges. But we have his passport and we know where he’s staying in Paris. He’ll be here until the end of the week when he goes back to Los Angeles.”

Lebrun was a nice guy doing his job. He probably didn’t relish the assignment as Paris Préfecture of Police liaison to Interpol or working under its coldly efficient assignment director, Captain Cadoux, arid he probably wasn’t crazy about dealing with a Hollywood cop from LaLa Land, or even having to speak English for that matter, but these were the kind of things you did as a civil servant, which McVey knew only too well.

“Lebrun,” McVey said measuredly. “Fax me his booking photos and then stand by. Please . . .”

An hour and ten minutes later, Metropolitan police had found Mike Fisher and delivered the bewildered taxi driver to McVey. Whereupon McVey asked him to verify that he had picked up a fare from Leicester Square late Saturday night and delivered said fare to the Connaught Hotel.

“Right, sir. A man and a woman. Amorous bats they were, too; thought I didn’t know what they were doing back there. But I did.” Fisher grinned.

“Is this the man?” McVey showed him Osborn’s French police booking photos.

“Right, sir. That’s him, no doubt at all.”

Three minutes later the phone rang in Lebrun’s office.

“You want us to pick him up?” Lebrun asked.

“No, don’t do anything. I’m coming over,” McVey said.