The Surgeon

Nineteen

He took a walk around the block, and this time he scarcely noticed the heat, he was so chilled by the images on that videotape. He felt relieved just to be out of the conference room, which was now intimately associated with horror. Savannah itself, with its syrupy air and its soft green light, made him uneasy. The city of Boston had sharp edges and jarring voices, every building, every scowling face, in harsh focus. In Boston, you knew you were alive, if only because you were so irritated. Here, nothing seemed in focus. He saw Savannah as though through gauze, a city of genteel smiles and sleepy voices, and he wondered what darkness lay hidden from view.

When he returned to the squad room, he found Singer typing at a laptop. “Hold on,” said Singer, and he hit Spellcheck. God forbid there be any misspellings in his reports. Satisfied, he looked at Moore. “Yeah?”

“Did you ever find Capra’s address book?”

“What address book?”

“Most people keep a personal address book near their telephone. I didn’t see one in the video of his apartment, and I didn’t find one on your property list.”

“You’re talking over two years ago. If it wasn’t on our list, then he didn’t have one.”

“Or it was removed from his apartment before you got there.”

“What’re you fishing for? I thought you came to study Capra’s technique, not solve the case again.”

“I’m interested in Capra’s friends. Everyone who knew him well.”

“Hell, no one did. We interviewed the doctors and nurses he worked with. His landlady, the neighbors. I drove out to Atlanta to talk to his aunt. His only living relative.”

“Yes, I read the interviews.”

“Then you know he had ’em all fooled. I kept hearing the same comments: ‘Compassionate doctor! Such a polite young man!’ ” Singer snorted.

“They had no idea who Capra really was.”

Singer swiveled back to his laptop. “Hell, no one ever knows who the monsters are.”

Time to view the last videotape. Moore had put this one off till the very end, because he had not been ready to deal with the images. He had managed to watch the others with detachment, taking notes as he studied the bedrooms of Lisa Fox and Jennifer Torregrossa and Ruth Voorhees. He had viewed, again and again, the pattern of blood splatters, the knots in the nylon cord around the victims’ wrists, the glaze of death in their eyes. He could look at the tapes with a minimum of emotion because he did not know these women and he heard no echo of their voices in his memory. He was focused not on the victims but on the malevolent presence that had passed through their rooms. He ejected the tape of the Voorhees crime scene and set it on the table. Reluctantly he picked up the remaining tape. On the label was the date, the case number, and the words: “Catherine Cordell Residence.”

He thought about putting it off, waiting until tomorrow morning, when he’d be fresh. It was now nine o’clock, and he had been in this room all day. He held the tape, weighing what to do.

It was a moment before he realized Singer was standing in the doorway, watching him.

“Man. You’re still here,” said Singer.

“I’ve got a lot to go over.”

“You watched all the tapes?”

“All except this one.”

Singer glanced at the label. “Cordell.”

“Yeah.”

“Go ahead; play it. Maybe I can fill in a few details.”

Moore inserted it into the VCR slot and pressed Play.

They were looking at the front of Catherine’s house. Nighttime. The porch was lit up and the lights all on inside. On audio, he heard the videographer give the date and time—2:00 A.M. — and his name. Again, it was Spiro Pataki, who seemed to be everyone’s favorite cameraman. Moore heard a lot of background noise — voices, the fading wail of a siren. Pataki did his routine pan of the surroundings, and Moore saw a grim gathering of neighbors staring over crime scene tape, their faces illuminated by the lights of several police cruisers parked on the street. This surprised him, knowing the hour of night. It must have been a considerable disturbance to awaken so many neighbors.

Pataki turned back to the house and approached the front door.

“Gunshots,” said Singer. “That’s the initial report we got. The woman across the street heard the first shot, then a long pause, and then a second shot. She called nine-one-one. First officer on the scene was there in seven minutes. Ambulance was called two minutes later.”

Moore remembered the woman across the street, staring at him through her window.

“I read the neighbor’s statement,” said Moore. “She said she didn’t see anyone come out the front door of the house.”

“That’s right. Just heard the two shots. She got out of bed after the first one, looked out the window. Then, maybe five minutes later, she heard the second gunshot.”

Five minutes, thought Moore. What accounted for the gap?

On the screen, the camera entered the front door and was now just inside the house. Moore saw a closet, the door opened to reveal a few coats on hangers, an umbrella, a vacuum cleaner. The view shifted now, sweeping around to show the living room. On the coffee table next to the couch sat two drinking glasses, one of them still containing what looked like beer.

“Cordell invited him inside,” said Singer. “They had a few drinks. She went to the bathroom, came back, finished her beer. Within an hour the Rohypnol took effect.”

The couch was peach-colored, with a subtle floral design woven into the fabric. Moore did not see Catherine as a floral-fabric kind of woman, but there it was. Flowers on the curtains, on the cushions in the end chair. Color. In Savannah, she had lived with lots of color. He imagined her sitting on that couch with Andrew Capra, listening sympathetically to his concerns about work, as the Rohypnol slowly passed from her stomach into her bloodstream. As the drug’s molecules swirled their way toward her brain. As Capra’s voice began to fade away.

They were moving into the kitchen now, the camera making a sweep of the house, recording every room as they’d found it at two o’clock on that Saturday morning. In the kitchen sink sat a single water glass.

Suddenly Moore leaned forward. “That glass — you have DNA analysis on the saliva?”

“Why would we?”

“You don’t know who drank from it?”

“There were only two people in the house when the first officer responded. Capra and Cordell.”

“Two glasses were on the coffee table. Who drank from this third glass?”

“Hell, it could’ve been in that kitchen sink all day. It was not relevant to the situation we found.”

The cameraman finished his sweep of the kitchen and now turned up the hallway.

Moore grabbed the remote control and pressed Rewind. He backed up the tape to the beginning of the kitchen segment.

“What?” said Singer.

Moore didn’t answer. He leaned closer, watching the images play once again on the screen. The refrigerator, dotted with bright magnets in the shapes of fruits. The flour and sugar canisters on the kitchen counter. The sink, with the single water glass. Then the camera swept past the kitchen door, toward the hallway.

Moore hit Rewind again.

“What are you looking at?” Singer asked.

The tape was back at the water glass. The camera started its pan toward the hallway. Moore hit Pause. “This,” he said. “The kitchen door. Where does it lead?”

“Uh — the backyard. Opens to a lawn.”

“And what’s beyond that backyard?”

“Adjoining yard. Another row of houses.”

“Did you talk to the owner of that adjoining yard? Did he or she hear the gunshots?”

“What difference does it make?”

Moore rose and went to the monitor. “The kitchen door,” he said, tapping on the screen. “There’s a chain. It isn’t fastened.”

Singer paused. “But the door’s locked. See the position of the knob button?”

“Right. It’s the kind of button you can push on your way out, locking the door behind you.”

“And your point is?”

“Why would she push that button but not fasten the chain? People who lock up for the night do it all at once. They press in the button, slide in the chain. She left out that second step.”

“Maybe she just forgot.”

“There’d been three women murdered in Savannah. She was worried enough to keep a gun under her bed. I don’t think she’d forget.” He looked at Singer. “Maybe someone walked out that kitchen door.”

“There were only two people in that house. Cordell and Capra.”

Moore considered what he should say next. Whether he had more to gain or lose if he was perfectly forthright.

By now Singer knew where this conversation was headed. “You’re sayin’ Capra had a partner.”

“Yes.”

“That’s a mighty big conclusion to draw from one unlocked chain.”

Moore took a breath. “There’s more. The night Catherine Cordell was attacked, she heard another voice in her house. A man, speaking to Capra.”

“She never told me that.”

“It came out during a forensic hypnosis session.”

Singer burst out laughing. “Did you get a psychic to back that up? ’Cause then I’d really be convinced.”

“It explains why the Surgeon knows so much about Capra’s technique. The two men were partners. And the Surgeon is carrying on the legacy, to the point of stalking their only surviving victim.”

“The world’s full of women. Why focus on her?”

“Unfinished business.”

“Yeah, well, I got a better theory.” Singer rose from his chair. “Cordell forgot to lock the chain on her kitchen door. Your boy in Boston is copying what he read in the newspapers. And your forensic hypnotist pulled up a false memory.” Shaking his head, he started toward the door. Tossed back a sarcastic parting shot: “Let me know when you catch the real killer.”

Moore allowed the exchange to bother him only briefly. He knew Singer was defending his own work on the case, and he could not blame him for being skeptical. He was beginning to wonder about his own instincts. He had come all the way to Savannah to either prove or disprove the partner theory, and thus far he had nothing to back it up.

He focused his attention on the TV screen and pressed Play.

The camera left the kitchen, advanced up the hallway. A pause to look into the bathroom — pink towels, a shower curtain with multicolored fish. Moore’s hands were sweating. He dreaded watching what came next, but he could not tear his gaze from the screen. The camera turned from the bathroom and continued up the hallway, past a framed watercolor of pink peonies hanging on the wall. On the wood floor, bloody shoeprints had been smeared and tracked over by the first officers on the scene and later by frantic paramedics. What was left was a confusing abstract in red. A doorway loomed ahead, the view jiggling in an unsteady hand.

Now the camera moved into the bedroom.

Moore felt his stomach turn, not because what he was staring at was any more shocking than other crime scenes he had witnessed. No, this horror was deeply visceral because he knew, and cared deeply about, the woman who had suffered here. He had studied the still photos of this room, but they did not convey the same lurid quality as this video. Even though Catherine was not in the frame — by this time she had already been taken to the hospital — the evidence of her ordeal shouted at him from the TV screen. He saw the nylon cord, which had bound her wrists and ankles, still attached to the four bedposts. He saw surgical instruments — a scalpel and retractors — left on the nightstand. He saw all this and the impact was so powerful that he actually swayed back in his chair, as though shoved by a fist.

When the camera lens shifted, at last, to Andrew Capra’s body lying on the floor, he felt barely a twitch of emotion; he was already numbed by what he’d seen seconds earlier. Capra’s abdominal wound had bled profusely, and a large pool had collected beneath his torso. The second bullet, into his eye, had inflicted the fatal wound. He remembered the five-minute gap between the two gunshots. The image he saw reinforced that timeline. Judging by the amount of pooling, Capra had lain alive and bleeding for at least a few minutes.

The videotape came to an end.

He stared at the blank screen, then stirred from his paralysis and turned off the VCR. He felt too drained to rise from the chair. When at last he did, it was only to escape this place. He picked up the box containing the photocopied documents from the Atlanta investigation. Since these papers were not originals but copies of documents on file in Atlanta, he could review them elsewhere.

Back in his hotel, he showered, ate a room-service hamburger and fries. Gave himself an hour with the TV to decompress. But the whole time he sat flipping between channels, what his hand really itched to do was call Catherine. Watching the last crime scene video had brought home exactly what sort of monster now stalked her, and he could not rest easy.

Twice he picked up the phone and put it down again. He picked it up yet again, and this time his fingers moved of their own accord, punching in a number he knew so well. Four rings, and he got Catherine’s answering machine.

He hung up without leaving a message.

He stared at the phone, ashamed by how easily his resolve had crumbled. He had promised himself to hold fast, had agreed to Marquette’s demand that he maintain his distance from Catherine for the duration of the investigation. When all this is over, somehow I will make things right between us.

He looked at the stack of Atlanta documents on the desk. It was midnight and he had not even started. With a sigh, he opened the first file from the Atlanta box.

The case of Dora Ciccone, Andrew Capra’s first victim, did not make for appetizing reading. He already knew the general details; they’d been summarized in Singer’s final report. But Moore had not read the raw reports from Atlanta, and now he was going back in time, examining the earliest work of Andrew Capra. This was where it all started. In Atlanta.

He read the initial crime report, then progressed through files of interviews. He read statements from Ciccone’s neighbors, from the bartender in the local watering hole where she was last seen alive, and from the girlfriend who discovered the body. There was also a file with a list of suspects and their photographs; Capra was not among them.

Dora Ciccone was a twenty-two-year-old grad student at Emory. On the night of her death, she was last seen around midnight, sipping a Margarita at La Cantina. Forty hours later, her body was discovered in her home, nude and tied to the bed with nylon cord. Her uterus had been removed and her neck slashed.

He found the police timeline. It was only a rough sketch in barely legible writing, as though the Atlanta detective had put it together merely to satisfy some internal checklist. He could almost smell failure in these pages, could read it in the depressive droop of the detective’s handwriting. He himself had experienced that heavy feeling that builds in your chest as you pass the twenty-four-hour mark, then a week, then a month, and you still have no tangible leads. This was what the Atlanta detective had — nothing. Dora Ciccone’s killer remained an unknown subject.

He opened the autopsy report.

The butchery of Dora Ciccone had been neither as swift nor as skillful as Capra’s later killings. Incisional jags indicated Capra lacked the confidence to make a single clean cut across the lower abdomen. Instead he had hesitated, his blade backtracking, macerating the skin. Once through the skin layer, the procedure degenerated to amateurish hacking, the blade deeply nicking both bladder and bowel as he excavated his prize. On this, his first victim, no suture was used to tie off any arteries. The bleeding was profuse, and Capra would have been working blind, his anatomical landmarks submerged in an ever-deepening pool of crimson.

Only the coup de grace was performed with any skill. It had been done in one clean slash, left to right, as though, with his hunger now sated and the frenzy fading, he was finally in control and could finish the job with cold efficiency.

Moore set aside the autopsy report and confronted the remains of his dinner, sitting on a tray beside him. Suddenly queasy, he carried the tray to the door and set it outside in the hall. Then he returned to the desk and opened the next folder, which contained the crime lab reports.

The first sheet was a microscopic: Spermatozoa identified in swab from victim’s vaginal vault.

He knew that DNA analysis of this sperm later confirmed it was Capra’s. Prior to killing Dora Ciccone, he had raped her.

Moore turned to the next page and found a bundle of reports from Hair and Fiber. The victim’s pubic area had been combed and the hairs examined. Among the samples was a reddish-brown pubic hair that matched Capra’s. He flipped through the next few pages of Hair and Fiber reports, which examined various stray hairs found at the crime scene. Most of the samples were from the victim herself, either pubic or head hairs. There was also a short blond strand retrieved from the blanket, later identified as nonhuman, based on the complex structural pattern of the medulla. A handwritten addendum said: “Vic’s mother owns Golden Retriever. Similar hairs found on backseat of vic’s car.”

He turned to the last page from Hair and Fiber, and stopped. It was an analysis of yet another hair, this one human but never identified. It had been found on the pillow. In any home, a variety of stray hairs can be found. Humans shed dozens of hairs a day, and depending on how fastidious a housekeeper you are and how often you vacuum, blankets and carpets and couches accumulate a microscopic record of every visitor who has ever spent significant time in your home. This single hair, found on the pillow, could have come from a lover, a houseguest, a relative. It was not Andrew Capra’s.

Single human head hair, light brown, A0 (curved), shaft length: 5 centimeters. Telogen phase. Trichorrhexis invaginata noted. Unidentified origin.

Trichorrhexis invaginata. Bamboo hair.

The Surgeon was there.

He sat back, stunned. Earlier that day he had read the Savannah lab reports for Fox, Voorhees, Torregrossa, and Cordell. In none of those crime scenes had a hair with Trichorrhexis invaginata been found.

But Capra’s partner had been there all along. He had remained invisible, leaving no semen, no DNA, behind. The only evidence of his presence was this single strand of hair, and Catherine’s buried memory of his voice.

Their partnership began with the very first killing. In Atlanta.