The Conspiracy Club (26 page)

Finally, the German authorities got their way. The day after the extradition certificate was drawn, Dergraav blocked the peephole in his cell with chewing gum, ripped up his jail-issue clothing, knotted the strips into a rope, and hung himself. He was nearly sixty, but had the appearance of a forty-year-old. The jailer who discovered him remarked on the healthy, peaceful appearance of the White Angel’s corpse.

Nearly seventeen years ago, to the day, Gerd Dergraav’s ashes had been strewn at sea.

Seventeen years ago
jump-started Jeremy’s memory.

The first laser article had been published that very year.

Norwegian authors. Russians, an Englishman. He rechecked the names. No Dergraav.

It was the
date
he was supposed to notice. Origins in Oslo.

Seventeen years ago, a murderous doctor had hung himself.

Laser surgery, physician suicide.

Oslo, Paris, Damascus by way of Berlin.

Gerd Dergraav had been born and trained in the Norwegian capital, learned female surgery in France, settled and tortured and murdered in Berlin.

Escaped to Damascus.

Arthur and surrogates had traced the Laser Butcher’s bloody swath.

How long before a postcard of Rio arrived in the mail?

A pretty picture of Sugarloaf or the white sands of Ipanema or some other Brazilian panorama?

Dr. C,
Traveling and learning.

The cards had set up the pattern; the articles had filled in blanks. Laser surgery on the eyes, because Dergraav had begun as an ophthalmologist, before switching to ENT, the source of the envelopes.

Lasers for female surgery to match Dergraav’s final career switch: women’s doctor. Women’s killer.

Where did the English girls fit in? Dergraav was long dead by the time of their murders.

Why all this attention paid to someone whose ashes had dissolved in a warm, welcoming ocean seventeen years ago?

Then he remembered his night drinking with Arthur. Collegial time in the Excelsior bar that old man had been so intent on sharing. Telling that apparently pointless story. Predatory insects that burrowed under their victims’ skins in order to plant their parasitic spawn.

The moral he, himself, had drawn from the tale.

Sins of the fathers.

Arthur’s pet topic: the origins of very, very bad behavior.

When Gerd Dergraav fled Germany, his wife escaped to the States, changed her name, disappeared into the great American freedom.

Along with her son.

Dergraav.

Dirgrove.

Arthur laying it out for him. Wanting Jeremy to
understand
.

The son was here.

Now Jeremy knew that his initial instinct had been right: That day in the dining room, Arthur
had
been studying Dirgrove.

And, for some time, Dirgrove had been studying Jeremy. Watching, following. Jeremy and Angela. Such a sensitive guy, always there to listen to a needy resident. No doubt his patients loved him — a nice case of genetic charm. Merilee Saunders’s mother had been smitten, but Merilee hadn’t been taken in.

Freaky Dirgrove. Roboticon.

Now Merilee was dead.

Did Sensitive Ted have a camera hidden in his office? Today’s technology made that so much easier than in his father’s day, everything miniaturized, computerized.

Getting rid of the daughter, taking the mother.

The take was the
core
— Dirgrove had targeted Angela because she was already seeing another man.

Just as apes raided colonies of other apes, murdered the males, made off with the females, some humans did the same thing under cover of war or religion or whatever dogma was at hand.

Some humans needed no excuse.

A sickening realization hit Jeremy.

Sensitive Ted and Jocelyn.

Putting a face on his lover’s killer drove home the horror, and suddenly Jeremy was as wrenched and raw and overcome by weeping as the day he’d found out. A red film blanketed his vision, and he lost balance, had to struggle to remain on his feet.

He walked to the window, threw it open on stale air shaft fumes. Stood there, hearing the rattle of a generator, snippets of human speech, the wind. Heart tripping, breath raspy. Swallowing the scream.

Jocelyn, taken from him.
Because
of him.

Now, Dirgrove had turned his sights on Angela.

He forced himself to stay calm. Reasoned it out, still staring out at the air shaft.

Killing and dissecting was late-night supper for a monster. A nice girl like Jocelyn as the main course, street girls tossed in as snacks.

Angela as . . . dessert?

No, the banquet would never end unless the diner choked.

He thought about Dirgrove’s technique. Attracting Angela with his sensitivity. Being different than the other surgeons.

The same ploy his father had used. Charming Ted had been how old — late twenties — when his father hung himself. The barest progress from adolescence to manhood, an age of strong sexuality, strong impulses.

Well aware of his father’s impulses.

The origin of very, very bad behavior.

A bright man, a careful man. He’d set up the move on Angela with surgical precision. Inviting her over for a medical lesson, all the journals, bookmarked, laid out neatly on his desk.

Angela, ever the good student, begins reading, he steps behind her.

I can make you happy.

Had all that just been a setup — an appetizer — for his ultimate plan?

Had Dirgrove set Jocelyn up the same way? She’d never mentioned his name to Jeremy, but why would she? A surgeon conferring with a nurse was the essence of usual.

Would Dirgrove have had anything to do with Jocelyn’s neurology patients? If one of them had developed heart problems, sure.

Was it possible that he’d hit on Jocelyn, and she’d chosen not to tell Jeremy?

People talked about sharing, but . . .

Jocelyn had cared deeply about her patients. A doctor pretending to do the same would have impressed her, mightily.

Angela was a highly intelligent woman, and she’d been fooled.

Jocelyn, for all her street smarts, had been an innocent.

Easy pickings.

A surgeon showing up, late at night, in the nurses’ lot, waving, smiling wouldn’t have sparked any panic in Jocelyn. As always, she was overconfident, laughed off Jeremy’s suggestions that she not walk to her car alone.

A weary, white-coated warrior dragging his way toward her after a tough day on the wards would have evoked sympathy from Jocelyn.

He approaches her, they chat.

He takes her.

The more he reasoned it out, the more convinced he became that Dirgrove had toyed with him, too. Asking him to see Merilee Saunders but not telling Merilee. Knowing Jeremy would encounter anger, resistance, walk away feeling like a failure.

Taunting him by telling him he’d been a big help.

Delivering the message through Angela.

The referral had been a sham.

Or something much worse? Was all Dirgrove’s talk about the risk of an autonomic spike simply laying the groundwork for what he knew would happen in the O.R?

Had Merilee been frightened about her surgery because she sensed something about the
surgeon
?

He’s a stiff . . . except when he wants to turn on the charm. My mom loves him.

Dirgrove hadn’t even bothered to inform Jeremy about the O.R. disaster. Had dropped the news in the cafeteria, after finishing a chat with Angela.

How had he managed it? The merest flick of his wrist after he’d flayed the chest, sawed through bone, exposed the pericardial sac, dipped lustily in to take hold of the pulsating plum — the skinless tomato — that nourished Merilee’s soul?

What’s the worst that can happen, I die?

Jeremy was due to see Doug Vilardi in five minutes. He took a detour to the ground floor of the office wing, entered the Attending Staff office, and asked the secretary for a look at his own
curriculum vitae
in the Academic Status File.

“Yours, Doctor?”

“I want to make sure you’ve got the most current version.” He was dry-mouthed, felt shaky, hoped he was coming across credible. Hoped she wouldn’t take the trouble to remove his CV from the looseleaf binder, but rather hand over the entire book.

“Here you go, Doctor.”

Yes!

He took the binder to a chair across the room, sat down, flipped to cardiothoracic surgery and when the secretary became involved in a personal phone call, tore out Theodore G. Dirgrove’s most current résumé, folded it hastily, and stuffed it in his pocket.

He hurried to the nearest men’s room and locked himself in a stall. The folded papers were burning a hole in his pocket, and he ripped them free.

Theodore
Gerd
Dirgrove. Born in Berlin, Germany, April 20, 1957.

A perfect match to Colin Pugh’s chronology of the Laser Butcher’s life: marriage to an upper-class woman, birth of a child, during the late fifties.

Dirgrove listed himself as growing up in Baltimore, attending college and medical school at an elite, Eastern university. Not the same ivy-covered citadel where Norbert Levy had taught engineering and physics, but one very much like it.

Science awards, graduation with high honors, the usual hurdle-jumps.

The bastard had published a fair number of academic papers in surgical journals. Angela had mentioned a lecture on revascularization of the heart and there it was: one of Dirgrove’s specialties.

Endomyocardial laser channeling for revascularization.

Perhaps that’s what he’d been demonstrating to Mandel and the dark, mustached man. Showing off his technique, proud of his virtuosity with the instrument his father had wielded so creatively.

A Humpty-Dumpty situation . . .

Jeremy scanned the résumé, and something else caught his eye.

For the past six years, Dirgrove had spent his summers in London, teaching bypass surgery at Kings College of Medicine.

Six summers ago, Bridget Sapsted had been abducted and murdered in Kent, a couple of hours’ drive from the city, her skeleton retrieved two years later, after her chum Suzie had met the same fate.

Dirgrove had been in England during both killings.

That’s why Jeremy’s question about surgical precision had seized the attention of Detective Inspector Nigel Langdon (Ret.). Who’d undoubtedly called his successor, Det Insp Michael Shreve. And Shreve had taken the time to return Jeremy’s call. Not to inform him, to
pump
him. Then Shreve tracked down and alerted his American counterpart, Bob Doresh.

Leading to Doresh’s showing up at Jeremy’s office.

Both Langdon and Shreve had been to Oslo. Random travel? Or were the British investigators familiar with the details of Gerd Dergraav’s swath of horror and aware of similarities to the Kent murders?

And, now, a spate of American murders.

How much did Doresh understand? The man came across as cloddish, but Jeremy remembered his first impression — he and his partner, Hoker. Eyes that didn’t miss a thing.

But they were missing plenty now.

Why do they still suspect
me
?

Because bureaucracy trumps creativity and expediency trumps justice.

There was no point dealing with Doresh or his ilk. Despite what Jeremy knew — the nightmare truths of which he was
certain
— sharing with the mulish detective would be useless. Worse — it would cast more suspicion on Jeremy.

Great theory, Doc. So . . . you’re pretty interested in this gory stuff, huh?

Going through channels wasn’t going to work.

He needed to be unfettered.

And that, he realized with staggering clarity, was the whole point. Of Arthur’s correspondence, the messages the old man had sent directly and through his CCC pals.

The focus of the entire late-night supper.

Tina Balleron’s suggestion that he stay on target.

Think about the gannet birds, simply doing the right thing.

Evil happened and, too often, expediency did trump justice. The law demanded evidence and due process, but provided little to make things right.

Husbands were murdered at their desks, their killers never brought to justice. Men of spirit and peace were gunned down in greasy parking lots, fortunes were plundered, entire families — entire races — wiped out, and no one paid the price.

A tiny, blond beauty born to smile, could be taken so easily . . .

You couldn’t depend on others to fix things.

Arthur had been certain Jeremy would understand that because Jeremy had been
through
it.

Sitting in the toilet stall, a wave of peace washed over him.

Pathology and psychology were polar opposites, but none of that mattered. What counted was the
ordeal
.

The sword of war comes to the world for the delay of justice.

A two-thousand-year-old lesson from the Fathers, but it couldn’t have been more timely.

A glance at his watch reproached him.

Twice-stricken Doug Vilardi was waiting for him. Another type of ordeal.

At least this pain was something Jeremy had been trained to deal with.

Words. Strategic pauses, kindness in the eyes.
Meaning
it.

Not enough, not nearly enough . . .

Here I come, victims of the world. God help all of us.

D
oug looked like a patient.

Hooked up to his chemo drip, still in good spirits and voluble, but his facial muscles had slackened.

His prosthesis was covered in a vinyl case and lay on the floor.

Jeremy sat down, made small talk, tried to edge him toward masonry. Doug shook off the distraction.

“You know what bugs me, Doc? Two things. First of all, they let other guys get their chemo at home, but me they want to keep cooped up here.”