The Day After Tomorrow

5

HE’D BEEN baptized William Patrick Cavan McVey in St. Mary’s Catholic Church, on what was then Leheigh Road in Rochester, New York, on a snowy day in February 1928. Growing up, from Cardinal Manning Parochial School through Don Bosco High, everybody knew him as Paddy McVey, Precinct Sergeant Murphy McVey’s first boy. But from the day he’d solved the “hillside torture murders” in Los Angeles twenty-nine years later, nobody called him anything but McVey—not the brass, not his fellow detectives, not the press, not even his wife.

A homicide detective for the LAPD since 1955, he’d buried two wives and put three kids through college. The day he turned sixty-five he tried to retire. It didn’t work. The phone kept ringing. “Call McVey, he knows every way there is to cut up a hooker.” “Get McVey, he’s got nothing to do, maybe he’ll come over take a look at it.” “I don’t know, call McVey.”

Finally he moved to the fishing cabin he’d built in the mountains near Big Bear Lake and had the phone taken out. But he’d barely stored his gear and had the cable TV hooked up when old detective pals started coming up to fish. And it wasn’t long before they got around to asking the same questions they asked over the phone. Finally he gave up, padlocked the cabin and went back to work full time.

He’d been at his old nicked steel desk, sitting in the same chair with the squeaky caster at robbery/homicide for less than two weeks, when Bill Woodward, the chief of detectives, came in and asked if he’d like a trip to Europe, all expenses paid. Any of the other six detectives in the squad room would have jumped for their Samsonite. McVey, on the other hand, shrugged and asked why and for how long. He wasn’t crazy about traveling and when he did it was usually to some place warm. It was early September. Europe would be getting cold and he hated cold.

“The ‘how long,’ I guess, is up to you. The ‘why’ is because Interpol has seven headless corpses they don’t know what to do about.” Woodward stuck a file under McVey’s nose and walked off.

McVey watched him go, glanced at the other detectives in the room, then picked up a cup of cold coffee and opened the file. On the upper righthand corner was a black tab, which, in Interpol circulation, indicated an unidentified dead body and asked for any possible help in identifying it. The tab was old. By now the corpses had been identified.

Of the seven bodies, two had been found in England, two in France, one in Belgium, one in Switzerland and one, washed ashore, near the West German port of Kiel. All were males and their ages ranged from twenty-two to fifty-six. All were white and all, apparently, had been drugged with some sort of barbiturate and then had their heads surgically removed at precisely the same place in the anatomy.

The killings had occurred from February to August and seemed completely random. Yet they were far too similar to be coincidental. But that was all, the rest was completely dissimilar. None of the victims were related or appeared to have known one another. None had criminal records or had lived violent lives. And all were from different economic backgrounds.

What made it even stickier were the statistics: more than fifty percent of the time a murder victim is identified, headless or not, the murderer is found. In these seven cases not a single bona fide suspect had been uncovered. All told, police experts of five countries, including Scotland Yard’s special murder investigations unit and Interpol, the international police organization, were batting an even zero, and the tabloid press was having a field day. Hence the call had come to the Los. Angeles Police Department for one of the best in the singular world of homicide investigation.

Initially, McVey had gone to Paris, where he’d met with Inspector Lieutenant Alex Lebrun of the First Section of the Paris Préfecture of Police, an impish rogue of a man, with a big grin and an always-present cigarette. Lebrun, in turn, had introduced him to Commander Noble of Scotland Yard and Captain Yves Cadoux, assignment director for Interpol. Together the foursome examined the crime scenes in France. The first was in Lyon, two hours south of Paris by Très Grande Vitesse, the TGV bullet train; and, ironically, less than a mile from Interpol headquarters. The second, in the Alpine ski resort of Chamonix. Later Cadoux and Noble escorted McVey to the murder scenes in Belgium, a small factory on the outskirts of Ostend; Switzerland, a luxury hotel overlooking Lake Geneva in Lausanne; and Germany, a rocky coastal inlet twenty minutes by car north of Kiel. Finally they went to England. First, to a small apartment across from Salisbury Cathedral, eighty miles southwest of London, and then to London itself and a private home on a square in the exclusive Kensington section.

Afterward, McVey spent ten days in a cold, third-floor office in Scotland Yard poring over the extensive police reports of each crime, more often than not finding it necessary to confer on one detail or another with Ian Noble, who had a much larger and warmer office on the first floor. Mercifully, McVey got a respite when he was called back to Los Angeles for a two-day testimony in the murder trial of a Vietnamese drug dealer McVey had arrested himself when the man tried to kill a busboy in a restaurant where McVey was having lunch. Actually, McVey had done nothing more heroic than stick his .38 service revolver in the man’s ear and quietly suggest he relax a little bit.

After the trial, McVey was supposed to take two days for personal business and then return to London. But somehow he’d managed to squeeze in some wholly elective oral surgery and turned the two days into two weeks, most of which was spent on a golf course near the Rose Bowl where warm sun filtering through heavy smog helped him, between strokes, muse on the killings.

So far, the only thing the victims seemed to have in common, the only single connecting thread, was the surgical removal of their heads. Something that on first go-round appeared to have been done either by a surgeon or by someone with surgical capabilities who had access to the necessary instruments.

After that, nothing else fit. Three of the victims had been killed where they were found. The remaining four had been killed elsewhere, with three dumped by the roadside and the fourth tossed into Kiel Harbor. For all his years in homicide, this was as confounding and more curious than anything he’d ever encountered.

Then, golf clubs put away, and back in the damp of London, exhausted and disoriented from the long flight, he’d barely settled back on the thing the hotel passed off as a pillow and closed his eyes when the phone rang and Noble informed him he had a head to go with his bodies.

It was now quarter of four in the morning, London time, and McVey was sitting at a writing table in his closet of a room, two fingers of Famous Grouse scotch in a glass in front of him, on a conference call with Noble and Captain Cadoux on the Interpol line from Lyon.

Cadoux, an intense, stockily built man, with a huge handlebar mustache he could never seem to keep from rolling between his thumb and forefinger, had in front of him a fax of young medical examiner Michaels’ preliminary autopsy report, which described; among other things, the exact point at which the head had been removed from the body. It was precisely at this same point the seven bodies had been separated from their heads.

“We know that, Cadoux. But it’s not enough for us to say for certain that the murders are connected,” McVey said wearily.

“The age bracket is the same.”

“Still not enough.”

“McVey, I have to agree with Captain Cadoux,” Noble said genteelly, as if they were talking over four o’clock tea.

“If it’s not a connection, it’s too damn close to being one to ignore it,” Noble finished.

“Fine . . .,” McVey said and repeated the thought he’d had all along. “You gotta wonder who this lunatic is we got running around out there.” The minute McVey said it both Scotland Yard and Interpol reacted the same way.

“You think it’s one man?” they said together.

“I don’t know. Yeah—” McVey said. “Yeah. I think it’s one man.”

Begging off that jet lag was about to put him under and could they finish this later, McVey hung up. He could have asked for their opinion but didn’t. It was they who had asked for his help. Besides, if they felt he was wrong they would have said so. Anyway, it was just a hunch.

Picking up his glass, he looked out the window. Across the street was another hotel, small, like his own. Most of the windows were dark, but a dim light showed on the fourth floor. Someone was reading, or maybe had fallen asleep reading, or maybe left the light on when they went out and hadn’t come back yet. Or maybe there was a body in the room, waiting to be discovered in the morning. That was the thing about being a detective, the possibilities for almost anything were endless. It was only over time that you began to get a second sense about things, a feeling of what was in the room before you entered, what you might find when you did, what kind of person was there or had been there, and what they had been up to.

But with the severed head there had been no room with a dim light showing. If they got lucky, maybe that would come later. The room that would point to another room and finally to the space that held the killer. But before any of that, they had to identify the victim.

McVey finished the scotch, wiped his eyes and glanced at the note he’d made earlier and had already set into motion. HEAD/ARTIST/SKETCH/NEWSPAPER/I.D.