Two Graves

5

D’AGOSTA HAD COMMANDEERED THE MAIN CONFERENCE room of the Detective Bureau at One Police Plaza. After the autopsy, he made the mistake of drinking three doppios and downing two crumb cakes at the Starbucks in the lobby, and now something was going on in his stomach that did not seem related to normal digestion.

Twelve fifty-five PM. Christ, it was going to be a long day. The problem was, despite the progress they’d made, he had a bad feeling about this case. A very bad feeling. Once again, he wondered where the hell Pendergast was. He’d love to just run the evidence by him, for an informal opinion. This case was right up his alley. Proctor, fresh out of the hospital and back at the Riverside Drive mansion, had heard nothing. Constance knew nothing. No one answered the phone at the Dakota apartment, and Pendergast’s cell phone was apparently still dead.

D’Agosta shook his head. No point in worrying—Pendergast often disappeared without notice.

Time to go. D’Agosta gathered up his file and laptop, rose from his desk, and left the office, heading for the conference room. Over thirty officers had been assigned to the case, which put it in the middling range of importance. The highest-profile cases might have more than double that number. But it was still a lot of damn people, many of whom would have something to say. So much for his afternoon. Still, such meetings had to happen: Everyone had to know what everyone else knew. And it was a fact of life that, no matter how much you cajoled or threatened, you just couldn’t make a cop sit down and read a report. It had to be a meeting.

He arrived at a few minutes past one and was glad to see everyone was already there. The room was restless, with a palpable sense of anticipation. As the rustling died away, D’Agosta heard an ominous growl in his gut. He strode up to the podium that stood on the stage beside a projection screen. They were flanked by wheeled whiteboards. As his eyes swept the room, he noticed Captain Singleton, the chief of detectives. He was sitting in the front row, next to the assistant chief for Manhattan and several other top brass.

His stomach lurched again. Laying his file on the podium, he waited a moment for silence, and then spoke the words he’d been rehearsing.

“As most of you know, I’m Lieutenant D’Agosta, squad commander.” He gave the group the briefest rundown on the homicide, then consulted the list of names he’d drawn up. “Kugelmeyer, Latents.”

Kugelmeyer strode to the podium, buttoning his hideous brown Walmart suit as he did so. D’Agosta placed a finger on his watch, gave it a subtle tap. He had threatened everyone with serious harm, even death, if they went over five minutes.

“We got an excellent series of latents from the corpse and the room,” Kugelmeyer said quickly. “Fulls and partials, right and left, and palms. We ran them through all the databases. Negative. The perp, it seems, has never been printed.”

That was it. Kugelmeyer sat down.

D’Agosta glanced around the room again. “Forman, hair and fiber?”

Another quick report. This was followed by a dozen others—blood spatter, footwear, microscopics, victimology—each following the other with military precision, much to D’Agosta’s satisfaction. He tried to avoid glancing at Singleton, despite being eager to gauge the man’s reaction.

One thing D’Agosta had learned about meetings like this was to create a little bit of drama by saving the best for last, knowing this would keep everyone awake and paying attention. And in this case, the best was Warsaw, the video geek from the forensic investigation division who specialized in analyzing security videos. While he was officially a detective, Warsaw looked more like a scruffy teenager, with his slept-on hair and pimples. Unlike the others, he didn’t wear a suit, even a bad one, but rather skinny black jeans and T-shirts with heavy-metal logos. He got away with it because he was so good.

He was also a bit of a show-off. He came bounding up to the podium with a remote in hand; the lights dimmed.

“Hello, everyone,” Warsaw began. “Welcome to the perp show gag reel.”

That got a laugh.

“The Marlborough Grand has the latest in digital security, and we got beautiful, and I mean beautiful, footage. We got the perp from the front, back, side, above, below—HD all the way. Here are the highlights, edited down to, ah, five minutes. Your folders have a selection of still shots taken from the footage, which is as we speak being shared with various other luxury hotels and—very soon—with the Times, Post, and Daily News.”

The movie began, and it was just as good as Warsaw promised. The excerpts showed the perp—his left ear bandaged—in the lobby; on the elevator; walking down the hall; walking up the hall; pushing into the victim’s room. And then it showed excerpts of the man leaving more or less the same way, unhurried, unruffled, unconcerned.

D’Agosta had seen the excerpts before, but they chilled him all over again. Most killers, he knew, could be divided into two broad groups, disorganized and organized. But this man was so cool, so methodical, that he almost deserved a category of his own. And once again D’Agosta felt deeply bothered by this. It just didn’t fit. Didn’t fit at all.

The clip ended, there was a smattering of applause. To D’Agosta’s mild annoyance, Warsaw hammed a bow and left.

D’Agosta returned to the podium. It was now two thirty. So far, everything had gone like clockwork. His stomach rumbled again—it was starting to feel like he’d swallowed a bottle of hydrochloric acid. He had saved the very last bit, the earlobe, for himself. Squad commander’s prerogative.

“We don’t have DNA yet on the extra body part recovered from the crime scene—the earlobe,” he began. “But we do have some prelims. It belongs to a male. The condition of the skin indicates an age under fifty—that’s as close as we can get. It’s almost certain that the presence of the earlobe was not a result of a struggle at the crime scene. Rather, it seems to have been carried to the crime scene and deliberately placed there. It also appears the earlobe was removed from its ear some hours prior to the time of the homicide—and it was removed not postmortem, but from a body still alive—no surprise, since as you can see from the video the perp is most definitely alive and kicking.

“We know what the perp looks like, and soon all of New York City will know. He’s striking, with his ginger hair, expensive suit, good looks, and Olympic-athlete physique. We got prints, hair, clothing fibers, and soon we’ll have his DNA. We’ve ID’d the Charvet tie, and we’re close to IDing his suit and shoes. Looks like we’re one step away from nailing the guy.”

D’Agosta paused, made a decision to say it.

“So—what’s wrong with this picture?”

It was a rhetorical question and nobody raised their hand.

“Is the guy really this stupid?”

He let the question hang for a long moment before continuing. “Look at the guy in the video. Can he really be the complete and total idiot he seems? I mean, there are simple steps he could have taken to disguise or alter his appearance, to evade the cameras at least in part. He didn’t have to stand stock-still in the middle of the lobby for five minutes while the entire staff noticed him and the cameras shot B-roll from four angles. He’s not a guy trying to blend in. We got psych working on it, figuring out what makes the guy tick, what motivates him, what the message on the body means, what the earlobe left at the scene means. Maybe he’s crazy and wants to be caught. But it strikes me the guy seems to know what he’s doing. And there’s no way he’s stupid. So let’s not assume this case is anywhere near being in the bag, despite all we’ve got.”

A silence. There was another thing bothering D’Agosta, but he chose not to mention it, because it might sound a little strange, and anyway he didn’t know quite how to articulate it. It had to do with the timing of the attack. The camera caught it all. The guy was strolling down the hall, and—just as he was about to pass the door of the victim’s room—she opened it to get the paper. The timing had been perfect.

… Coincidence?