The Judas Child (8 page)

“You leaked the runaway theory to the press
before
I brought in Sadie Green’s bike.” This was not an accusation, only a dry delivery of fact. “Why?”

“Gwen Hubble’s father is a security fanatic. Pathetic, isn’t it? The poor bastard sets up this elaborate alarm system to keep the bogeyman out. Never occurred to him that it was useless for keeping a kid
inside.
We found Gwen’s prints on the number pad for the door alarm. So she slipped out to meet her little friend Sadie, and they left town on the bus.”

“You’ve had time to interview all the drivers on that route.”

“Very good, kid. And we came up dry. Interesting, huh?” In the next moment, Costello wondered when—precisely
when
he had become Rouge Kendall’s interrogation subject.

“So I’m the only one working the runaway angle,” said the younger man, “because you really think they were snatched.”

Costello smiled. Kendall obviously understood his place in the world. While the real BCI investigators were working the case, he was to be the fetcher of minor facts and loose threads, the task-force janitor, and most important, the press decoy.

Rouge Kendall rose from his chair. “You don’t seriously think a ten-year-old went out to meet this pervert in secret—like a lover. You figure it was someone who knew Gwen would see Sadie that day. But you don’t know if it was a relative, a friend of the family or a stalker.”

All right, so Kendall has the raw makings.
But there was still the matter of a heart for the job.

The young cop turned his back and walked to the door, saying, “You think David Shore is hiding something, maybe he saw something—important.” His hand was pulling on the knob. “Are you sure you don’t want a
real
investigator to cozy up to the kid?” Kendall passed through the open door, and his voice trailed into the next room. “Oh, sorry. You probably tried that, and it didn’t work.”

Costello sighed. Perhaps the heart was overrated.

 

The air of the conservatory was dense and moist, rich in aromas of flowering plants and earth. A small pony motor hummed with the work of running the plant mister, and his spade scraped out the grittier noises of metal, soil and a clay pot. Outside the glass walls, living leaves still clung to his hardiest hybrids, but the ceiling of the pearl-gray sky was low and menacing. Nature was threatening to kill his garden with the first snow.

Always in thoughts of death these days.
Mortimer Cray knew when he would die and how, just as he knew the times and particulars of all his appointments.

His right hand, thick with veins and dappled with liver spots, dropped the spade and began to tremble. A side effect of ending the new medication, he supposed. This little self-deceit was short-lived; he knew what the tremors meant.

At age sixty-nine, he was semiretired from the practice of psychiatry, removed from all but a few of the really dangerous minds. Still, he thought of death six times in an hour. It rankled him that he should spend his last days troubled by a Sunday school God Whom he had tossed out in childhood, but Who had lately come back to him with such great wrath. New atrocities bloomed in the doctor’s brain and would not leave him be.

These past few days since the girls had disappeared, he had tended to put off going to his bed. Fully clothed, he would fall asleep at the desk in his study and wake up at odd hours. All his habits of regimentation had dissipated, and he was without any order which servants did not create for him. The meals were still served and eaten at the same hours, but the man who ate them was unshaved, unwashed. And he always brought something to the table with him, something in his eyes which made his valet, Dodd, avoid looking directly at him.

His niece Ali had planned a small cocktail party today, and for this occasion, he had allowed Dodd to make him presentable with a razor and a clean shirt. Also thanks to the valet, his suit had been recently tailored to fit the ever decreasing dimensions of his thin body. Now he was disguised as merely slender, not sick and wasting.

The gravel in the driveway crunched under a slow and ponderous weight. He wiped one hand across his apron and adjusted the frames of his gold-rimmed glasses, the better to see the black Porsche pull into formation with his own vintage Mercedes. Standing behind a camouflage of dangling vines and a mosaic of flowers, Mortimer peered through the glass wall as Dr. Myles Penny unfolded his lanky body from the passenger’s side.

Ali had only requested William’s presence, but of course Myles would come along. The Penny brothers lived together, ate together and practiced medicine in the same clinic.

Myles moved a few steps closer to the conservatory. Pure white thinning hair and poor posture made the general practitioner seem a decade older than his fifty-eight years. And because he had never learned how to sit down in a suit, his pants bagged out at the knees, and his jacket wrinkled at the midsection.

The elder brother, Dr. William Penny, stepped out from behind the wheel of his sports car. This doctor’s hair was still a luxuriant brown, not a single strand of gray. His jowls and all the deepest wrinkles had been removed, but the surgically shortened nose had been a grave mistake. It was too pug, like a canine breeding error, giving William the carnival aspect of an aged dog-faced boy. And though this glaring flaw sat in the middle of his face, the heart surgeon seemed unaware of it as he preened before his own reflection in the greenhouse panes.

Mortimer left the cover of his plants, moved closer to the wall of glass and waved at his visitors. Proper William—never Bill or Will—elegantly lifted one hand in slow salutation as he stood beside his rumpled brother.

Mortimer pressed the intercom button.

“Yes, sir,” said Dodd’s mechanized voice.

“Tell my niece our guests have arrived.”

The slanted glass roof afforded a partial view of the main house; four stories of stucco facing and wood beams joined the conservatory in a common wall. The greenhouse was large, even by commercial standards, yet an intimate space had been carved out amid the plant life to accommodate the small grouping of chairs and a table.

“So Ali has her Ph.D.” Myles Penny did not wait on ceremony, but poured his own wine from the decanter and then made two more splashes into Mortimer’s glass and William’s. “Bet you never figured she’d go that far at twenty-five.”

“Actually, she was twenty-three when she completed her dissertation.” And in truth, Mortimer Cray had never believed his niece would ever attempt any advanced degrees.

William sipped his wine and nodded with approval, as if he had the palate to know a bad burgundy from a good one. “You must be very proud of her, Mortimer.”

Shocked would be a better word. Mortimer remembered Ali when she was small and barely there in every respect, a quiet, plain little girl with no distinguishing marks or characteristics.

“Has she had anything done about the scar yet?”

“No, Myles.”
She isn’t done with the bloody thing yet.

“I know a plastic surgeon in Manhattan—good man,” said William. “When he’s done with her, she can cover the damage with makeup.”

Mortimer shook his head, but not because William’s nose was such a poor advertisement for a cosmetic surgeon. He knew his niece would never give up her mutilation. Perverse young woman—she was miles more interesting now, wasn’t she? “I’m afraid Ali didn’t ask you here for a referral, William.”

“She’s not worried about your heart condition, is she?”

“No, but it
is
a consultation of sorts. Sorry—I know you’re officially on vacation.” And William was fanatical about his free time. Patients could drop like ninepins and not interfere with the heart surgeon’s holiday plans.

“But Ali’s field is pedophilia,” said William. “Not my territory.” He looked toward the door at the far end of the room and raised his hand in greeting. “Well, hello there, young lady.”

Ali Cray slowly walked down the corridor of orchid tables, and Mortimer noted that the long skirt had no slit. No doubt, this was her concession to the company of genteel William. Yet there was a sensuous freedom in the artless swing of Ali’s arms and the sway of her hips. She carried herself with such confidence. As a small child, she had walked close to the walls of every room, eyes cast down with the humility of a tiny nun.

“Ali, you look wonderful,” said courtly William, holding out her chair. “Academia must suit you. My belated congratulations on the Ph.D. Bright girl.”

Myles Penny lifted his wineglass. “I’ll second that, Ali. Now why didn’t you go to St. Ursula’s when you were a kid? You’ve certainly got the brains. And I know your old uncle here would have kicked in the obscene tuition.”

“Ali’s parents would never take money from me,” said Mortimer, in a hurry to get the words out before Ali could admit, unabashed, that she had failed the entrance exam.

In light of how far she had come and how fast, he sometimes wondered if Ali had deliberately scored low on St. Ursula’s intelligence test. In early childhood, she had avoided calling any attention to herself. But that was years before her face had been marred, making her the focal point of every room she entered. He suspected the secret of Ali’s academic success was a bit darker; that she had worked harder than more gifted students—so that she might live up to the scar.

His niece went against everything he knew of human behavior and logic. The mutilation of her face should have crushed her ego. In no reasonable scenario could Ali have blossomed in this way.

“Allow me, young lady.” William poured her a glass of wine. “I was just telling Mortimer, I don’t know how I could possibly help you. You probably know more about pedophiles than anyone on the Eastern Seaboard. I don’t even dabble in the subject.”

“But fifteen years ago you did,” said Ali. “When you were the acting county medical examiner? You worked on the body of a victim—Susan Kendall.”

William leaned close to her, his voice conspiratorial, almost prissy. “Now why would you want to dredge up that sad business of the little Kendall girl?”

“I wondered why you didn’t collect any forensic evidence.”

“Well, it was obvious she died by a broken neck. No need to go any further. I gave testimony in—”

“No rape kit?”

“No!” William’s face flushed to a high red color. “Ali, it wasn’t necessary. The priest was charged with murder, not molestation.”

“One year after the murder,” said Ali, “you published a paper on a genetic abnormality.”

“Genetics?” Mortimer was surprised, for this was far outside the surgeon’s field. Most of William Penny’s papers had been related to procedures, hardware and chemicals for the heart. Ah, but publishing in another area would fit well with the inflated image of himself as a Renaissance man of modern medicine.

Ali continued, “It was a postmortem on a little girl. Her surviving identical twin was a boy—a case in a billion.”

“Identical?” Mortimer spilled red drops of wine on the white tablecloth. “Ali, surely you don’t mean monozygotic twins?” When she nodded, he turned to William. “Of different genders? That’s
possible?”

“That’s the problem with shrinks,” said Myles Penny, addressing Ali with a wink. “They don’t keep up on the medical literature.” And now he smiled at his host. “But you’re way behind. The first case was reported back in the sixties.”

The psychiatrist dabbed at the wine spill and made it worse. “A hermaphrodite perhaps? The testicles never descended?”

“No, Mortimer, a
real
girl,” said Myles, despite his brother’s attempt at signaling him to shut up. “Susan Kendall only had female genitalia. ’Course the ovaries were just fibrous knots.”

William slumped back in his chair, lips pressed together in a thin, tight line as he glared unkindly at his brother.

Ali was smiling, and now Mortimer realized she had been on a fishing expedition. Any physician would have taken great care to disguise the identity of his subject, changing the age of the girl and the date of the postmortem.

“Thank you so much, Myles,” said William. “Old fool. Ali, you can’t disclose that information to anyone.”

“I read your autopsy report,” she said. “There’s no mention of the organ abnormalities or the monozygotic aspect. Did you leave out those details so you could be first to publish?”

“Certainly not!” William seemed appalled by Ali’s suggestion.

But to Mortimer’s thinking, that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. “Surely William wasn’t the
first
to do a paper on the Kendall twins.”

“I was the
only
one,” said William, somewhat offended. “Apparently the twins’ obstetrician never even considered the possibility. He probably delivered them with separate placentas—that sometimes happens. Any
common
doctor would have assumed they were fraternal.”