City of Fire (19 page)

“He was probably hurt,” Bernhardt said. “He was probably wounded in some way or faced a severe emotional trauma he couldn’t deal with or understand.”

He glanced at Lena for a moment, then turned back to his notes.

Dr. Andy Bernhardt was a large, vigorous man with clear gray eyes, a short-cropped beard, and a tanned skull. They had met after her brother’s murder when her supervisor sent her down to the psychiatrist’s office for what he called a
tune-up.
A routine checkup. A chance to chase the blues away without the pressure of having to work. But no matter what anyone called it, Lena knew that it had gone down as an ISL in her records.

Involuntary stress leave.

She played the words back in her head as she thought it over.

Unfortunately, Dr. Bernhardt had wanted to know more about her than how she might be experiencing the loss of her brother. He wanted a complete picture for his psychological evaluation. The entire list of bumps and bruises and dark spots.

The sessions lasted for six weeks. Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon for one hour at his office in Chinatown. Lena resisted for as long as she could, then shut down. Not
because there was anything wrong with Dr. Bernhardt. In spite of his size, he was a gentle, soft-spoken man whom she actually grew to admire. It was the fact that he worked for the department that concerned her. That his role as a psychiatrist often meant working closely with the Professional Standards Bureau, which she didn’t trust. The idea that anything she said would be written down and placed in a file that might be used against her in the future.

While Dr. Bernhardt tried to assure her that her personal file was indeed personal, and therefore private, Lena noticed that his filing cabinets were as old as the furniture at Parker Center and didn’t include locks. Besides, she told the psychiatrist, everyone who’s anyone gets at least one
existential moment
along the way. She could get through this just as she always had in the past. Getting back to work would keep her mind off things and speed up the process. In the end, Dr. Bernhardt agreed, they found middle ground, and their last two weeks of meetings actually proved beneficial.

She heard Novak speak up and the memory vanished. Her partner was asking the psychiatrist why he thought the MOs differed between Teresa Lopez and Nikki Brant.

“His method is changing because he’s growing,” Bernhardt said. “He’s evolving.”

“Into what?” Novak asked.

“Into someone who can’t stop himself, Detective.”

“What about the missing toe?”

Dr. Bernhardt shook his head. “He likes what he’s doing. He’s thinking about it. Learning as he goes along. The problem is that he can’t control his hunger. His behavior is a reaction to his primal urge. I think he sees the toe as a trophy or keepsake.”

Lena thought about the press. When she’d checked
The Times
this morning, the reporter working the crime beat was still playing with the idea that maybe Brant murdered his wife.

“What about when the story breaks?” she asked.

“I’m split on that,” Bernhardt said. “I think the perpetrator could go either way. Either he’s going to like it because
he’s finally been noticed. Suddenly, he’s king of the jungle. He’s famous, and he’s holding his identity a secret over everybody else. Or it goes the other way and he gets pissed off because part of his secret is out of the bag and he likes working in the dark. I’m split because of the letters you mentioned, and Teresa Lopez’s journal. But also because of the way the bodies were posed.”

“The intimacy,” Sanchez said. “The shock value.”

Bernhardt nodded. “Either way, I’m afraid there’s a chance that going public may accelerate his behavior.”

Lieutenant Barrera interrupted with an announcement. “Everybody checks their mail before they open it. If you don’t recognize the return address, open the envelope carefully and use gloves.”

“I agree,” the psychiatrist said. “There’s reason to expect some degree of contact.”

Rhodes dropped his pen on the table and started rubbing his temples. Like the deputy chief, he hadn’t said a word since entering the room.

“I realize we don’t have much information,” he said finally. “But I’ve got two questions. Two problems I can’t get past, so I’m throwing them on the table. I don’t understand why he’s hanging around. I don’t think it’s just so that he can go through the victim’s journal entries. And if it turns out that he’s into porn, why look at it there? Why not limit his risk and go home?”

“I’m troubled by that, too,” Bernhardt said. “All I can say is that it probably adds to the thrill. But it also points to a certain degree of arrogance on his part. What else is on your mind, Detective?”

“He tried to wipe his semen away,” Rhodes said. “All of this was shaky enough when we were looking at Brant. But now it doesn’t make any sense at all. If he’s cleaning up after himself, why not wear a condom? If he’s smart enough to delete files on a computer, then he’s got to know that he couldn’t possibly clean up the body well enough to erase his NA.”

Rhodes had thrown them out on the table. Two questions
with jagged edges. Dr. Bernhardt appeared uncomfortable and took a moment to consider them before speaking.

“I would answer your second question the same way,” he said finally. “There’s no condom because it’s all about the thrill. Perhaps he thinks it’s possible to degrade the DNA. But the more likely scenario is that he’s so arrogant he doesn’t give a shit. He thinks he can beat you and not get caught, so he leaves a piece of himself behind. What’s important for you to understand is that the man you’re looking for is a world-class monster. Someone who’s so consumed by his own anger that he no longer resembles a human being. If we were to draw an analogy from nature, I’d say he works something like a shark in a feeding frenzy. Romeo kills to live just as much as he lives to kill. When he’s full, he drifts to the bottom fantasizing about the day he can swim back to shore and do it all over again.”

Lena heard a noise. A chair moving.

She turned and watched Deputy Chief Albert Ramsey march toward the door. She could hear him breathing as he passed behind her back, the sound of his heels digging into the thin blue carpet. Somehow his white hair looked a shade whiter than an hour ago, his jaw more square. He left the room, closing the door without making any sound. Lena imagined that it was time for Ramsey to report to the new chief. Time to tell him that Romeo was a lover and a motherfucker and the case wasn’t going well.

HE could smell her vagina. He was trying to concentrate on his work, but he could smell it. He was sure he could. The odor was hidden in the recesses of her perfume. Lost but not forgotten in the attempt by the perfume designer to replicate the scent of lavender flowers hovering over a garden and wafting through crisp morning air to the end of his nose.

Martin Fellows liked the smell of lavender.

He looked up from his notebook. Harriet Wilson smiled at him from the other side of the lab table. He smiled back the way he usually did. At least he tried to duplicate the gesture even though he understood that everything was different now.

Everything changed the moment he found out who she really was.

Even worse, he had been the last to know. The last one in the entire company to find out, so the revelation stabbed at him, keeping him awake at night and feeding on his frenzied soul. Ever since gaining this knowledge, he’d become aware of people sneering at him and making a joke of it whenever he entered the offices on the second floor. Upon his exit, he could hear them giggling behind his back.

Martin Fellows was in love with a whore. And he felt like a fool.

His eyes drifted about the lab, searching for No. 3 in as casual a manner as he could muster. He could feel his heart racing. In spite of the change, his jealousy reawakened with new fervor, triggered by the fear that maybe No. 3 could smell Harriet’s vagina, too.

Fortunately, the man was working on an experiment at the far end of the room. His back was turned and he appeared to be diligent in his approach, a rare quality for a minority. Actually, Martin Fellows wasn’t sure how to classify No. 3. His name had an Asian ring to it, not Hispanic or Eastern European, and No. 3 had that mixed-breed look just like the people Fellows saw wandering about the mall. None of them carrying packages, he observed. None of them buying anything at all. Just taking up space like alien drones and making the shopping experience more difficult for people who still spoke English and could afford to buy what they wanted.

Fellows didn’t like No. 3 and he never would.

He didn’t like the good-natured smile the biologist continually wore, the naïve way he looked at the world with both eyes open, or No. 3’s incessant attempts at camaraderie. It was a small lab, just the three of them working here, when Fellows was certain that two would have done just as well. He didn’t want to be No. 3’s chum, nor did he want to play with the heathen on the company’s stupid softball team.

Fellows wished that management would spend less time thinking about the company’s idiotic softball team. Then maybe they would see it the way he did and demote No. 3 to the lab down the hall. But management wouldn’t listen. No matter how many times Fellows made the suggestion as lab supervisor, they dismissed his proposals as if they’d forgotten who he was or failed to read his résumé all the way through. The last time he broached the subject, the response remained cordial but seemed unnecessarily curt.

Forget it, Marty. Tommy Tee’s a long-ball hitter.

Fellows wasn’t exactly sure what that meant but thought it might be a veiled reference to the size of No. 3’s anatomy. While the man who said it may have been the team coach, Fellows had always suspected that he was a homosexual, still locked up in the proverbial closet despite the times.

He kept his eyes on No. 3 for another long moment. Satisfied that the long-ball hitter wasn’t watching him or sneaking peeks his way, he turned back to Harriet Wilson for a more careful look.

She was a whore, but she was also the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. So striking that he could see her face whenever he wanted by merely closing his eyes. Her hair was a mix of blond on blond draped just below her shoulders. Her eyes, a windy blue, reminding him of the color of rain an hour before nightfall. Her skin was so soft and smooth that any incidental contact in the lab gave him an erection. But then, so did the way she looked at him sometimes. That lazy glint she could muster in those eyes. The rings she wore on her thumb and first finger. The way she walked around the lab trying to hide her limp.

Harriet Wilson was more than ten years younger than him but had been born in the same month. She was a lovely, twenty-eight-year-old Taurus, ruled by the planet Venus and the ways of love. And she would be celebrating her birthday this coming Friday. Fellows had jotted down a reminder over the weekend and clasped it to the file he kept on her by his bed. A file that included several pictures, along with photocopies of her employment records he’d lifted from the office one night when everyone else went home. He wanted to do something special for Harriet, even though she hadn’t remembered his own birthday just last Thursday.

Harriet stepped around the table gripping a large male cockroach in her hands.

Gromphadorhina portentosa.
The Madagascan hissing roach.

The four-inch-long insect seemed to know that he was about to die, hissing at them and tucking his head and antennae under his thorax so that his chest resembled a second head large enough to scare off a rival. As Fellows watched the insect, he thought about the pain he had been forced to endure last Thursday night. The look on Nikki Brant’s face as she was downgraded to the role of specimen.

“They can always tell, can’t they,” Harriet said, turning the roach over in her hands and stroking its belly.

Fellows selected a scalpel and nodded. “Yes, I think they can. Let’s get him in the glove box.”

She placed the insect in the air lock. As she slipped her
hands inside the second set of gloves, Fellows could feel her hip rubbing against him but filed the sensation away for later.

Of the thirty-five hundred known species, it was the hissing roach that they hoped would be the missing ingredient in creating the perfect apple. The large insect was a native of Madagascar, an island in the Indian Ocean off the eastern coast of Africa. On the plus side, it had no odor and could survive in a warm climate without food for as long as a month. Often known as living fossils, the insects were the size of rodents and remarkably similar to the cockroaches that inhabited the planet long before the appearance of dinosaurs. Fellows had isolated the gene enabling the roach to resist heat and inserted it in various types of apples, hoping the plant might flourish in tropical climates. His initial experiments had proven successful. But Fellows was less satisfied with the color of the fruit’s skin and wanted to refine it. He thought a red apple with zebralike stripes would stand out. Something he could easily identify if it ever turned up at the grocery store so that he wouldn’t buy or eat one by mistake.