The Killer in My Eyes (40 page)

‘How fast does she go?’

‘Fast enough to stop the traffic cops getting the number.’

‘Don’t tell me Lieutenant Marsalis breaks the law.’

Jordan remembered Officer Rodriguez. ‘You sound like someone I know. Do I need to remind you I’m not a lieutenant any more?’

‘Maybe not officially, but I think you still keep your hand in. From what I hear, you caught the guy they were looking for.’

‘Apparently, yes.’

‘Only apparently?’

‘I need to check something and I can only do that through you. Thanks for waiting for me. You’re doing me a very big favour.’

Fowley shrugged. ‘Don’t mention it. Since my divorce, I’ve had a lot of time on my hands.’

‘You know what they say? When the cat’s away, the mice . . .’

Fowley returned a mirthless smile. ‘Seems like right now the cat’s having more fun.’

‘Do you miss her?’

‘I don’t know . . . I spent the last three years dreaming of freedom, and now that it’s here I don’t feel any satisfaction coming home late with a few more beers in my body. The fact I don’t have to wipe the lipstick marks from my shirt-collar kind of takes away the sense of adventure.’

By now they had gone through the revolving doors into the Stuart Building.

The pleasantries were over. Now it was down to business.

‘From your call, I got the impression this was quite urgent. What can I do for you?’

‘Harmon, I need to take another look at that evening’s DVDs. Do you think it’s possible?’

‘No problem. And you’re in luck – Barton’s on duty tonight. You remember him from last time? He’s one of my men and we won’t have any problems with him.’

As they climbed the stairs leading to the control room, Jordan remembered the night of Chandelle Stuart’s murder. When they had seen the limping figure crossing the lobby of the Stuart Building, they had allowed themselves to be blinded by that apparition and had neglected other possibilities.

One above all, which Jordan couldn’t forgive himself for not considering.

He had seen him come in, but he hadn’t seen him go out.

They came to the desk where Barton was sitting, his face lit by the reflections from the bank of screens.

‘Barton,’ Fowley said, ‘my friend here would like to examine the DVDs of the night the Stuart girl was killed. Is that possible?’

‘Sure. Come with me.’

Barton got up from the leather armchair and led them into an office to the left. Inside, on the wall facing the door, were shelves on which all the used discs were arranged in chronological order. In the middle of the room was a desk with a computer linked to a DVD player.

‘This is the office where we keep the discs and format them to use again.’

Barton approached the shelves and took out two black plastic cases, which he placed on the desk.

‘Here we are. That night’s recordings from the cameras at both the entrances.’

Jordan moved a chair from the wall towards the desk. ‘Good. I think I can manage by myself now. I’m not asking you to stay here with me – this might take a long time and I know you’re busy.’

Barton pointed to the computer. ‘Do you know how this kind of program works?’

‘I think so, yes.’

‘To play the discs, it’s pretty much like a regular home DVD player.’

Jordan sat down and switched on the computer. ‘I think I’ll get by.’

Barton nodded and left the office. Fowley had realized that Jordan was following his own thought processes and wasn’t with them any more. He put a hand on his shoulder.

‘OK, Jordan, I’m going. Whatever you’re looking for, I hope you find it – or not, whichever you think is better.’

‘Thanks, Harmon. You’re a friend.’

‘Don’t mention it. I’ll tell Barton, whatever you need, he should let you have it.’

Jordan watched him go out and close the door behind him. Then he turned and picked up the first case, took out the disc and inserted it in the player. On the computer screen he clicked on the icon
DVD Player
and started watching.

Thanks to a lot of judicious fast-forwarding, it took him little more than an hour to go through both discs.

It had been both grotesque and tragic seeing again the killer’s limping figure, made ridiculous by the speeded-up motion, on his way to accomplish his fatal mission.

He had watched until his eyes smarted the constant view of those entrances over a period of twelve hours, deserted for the most part, apart from some rare nightbird coming home after a night on the town. According to the hour marked on the time-code, only towards morning did the scene start to become more animated: early-morning joggers headed for Central Park, men in grey suits holding briefcases, a couple with suitcases who looked as if they were leaving on vacation.

As the hour approached when the stores and offices opened, the number of people coming in and out increased, until he was faced with the usual hustle and bustle of a place like the Stuart Building.

Jordan found no trace of what he was looking for. No limping figure, even half hidden by the others, trying to slip away unobserved by one of the cameras.

According to what he had seen, the man had entered the building but hadn’t left it.

Unless . . .

Jordan forced himself to start all over again from the beginning. He began replaying the first disc, watching even more carefully, and at a certain point his gaze was attracted by something that made him quickly press the
Stop
button.

He went back a little and replayed the recording at normal speed. He checked the time-code on the screen. The images he was seeing corresponded to seven-thirty in the morning.

A man in a dark suit was crossing the lobby towards the exit, taking care to always keep his back to the camera. Even though he was almost hidden by the people who were starting to crowd into the lobby, Jordan had spotted him precisely because of the illogical way in which he was forced to move in order to preserve that position.

And at a certain point something happened.

A bald, well-built man who was coming in the opposite direction, distracted because he was talking to someone next to him, knocked into the man in the dark suit as he headed for the revolving doors. The impact spun him around and for a moment he had his face to the camera.

Jordan immediately paused and reversed the image frame by frame until he had the man in the middle of the screen.

It took him a moment to find the zoom function on the toolbar and enlarge the figure. And although the image became grainier as he did so, he soon found himself looking at a face he knew.

Jordan’s heart skipped a beat.

If things were as he suspected, this man had waited all night on the stairs in order to leave unobserved by mingling with the morning crowd.

To be absolutely sure, there was still one thing he needed to check, and to do that he had to go up to Chandelle Stuart’s apartment.

He left the office and walked to the bank of screens showing images similar to those he had just finished watching.

‘Burton, are there still seals on Chandelle Stuart’s apartment?’

‘No, they were removed a couple of days ago.’

‘Do you have the code?’

‘Yes.’

‘I need to take a look around. If you don’t trust me, send someone up with me. I don’t want to get you in trouble.’

Burton took a yellow Post-it from the desk in front of him, quickly wrote down a number and handed it to him. ‘Mr Fowley said anything you want.’

‘Thanks, Barton. You’re a good man.’

A minute or two later, he was stepping out of the elevator into Chandelle Stuart’s apartment. There in front of him was the white outline drawn by the Crime Scene team to mark the position of the body.

He took a look around. The apartment had remained the same but now there was no sense of expectation in the air. Only a slight layer of dust on the furniture.

He passed the Gericault painting without so much as a glance and walked towards the study and the bedrooms.

This time, too, what he was looking for was so normal that nobody would have bothered hiding it away. In fact, they would have taken care to have it as close to hand as possible. He started with the bathrooms, then moved to the bedrooms, examining any piece of furniture that had drawers.

Nothing.

And in looking for what he did not find, he found what he was not looking for.

In a drawer in the study was a series of medical records. He glanced at them for a moment, then took them out and placed them on the table. He read through them one by one. They were mainly reports of tests and periodic check-ups, but to his surprise he discovered something that might explain a lot.

He had remembered a while earlier that, in the photograph in the Vassar College yearbook, Chandelle Stuart had been wearing a pair of glasses – quite thick ones, from the look of them. Yet in the apartment, right now, there was no trace of spectacles or contact-lens cases, or bottles of saline solution to wash them, which was what he had been looking for.

But what he
had
found was a report recording the success of a laser operation to reduce her short-sightedness, performed at Holy Faith Hospital.

To clarify his ideas, Jordan needed to have a few words with the person he had seen on the DVD, leaving the Stuart Building the morning after the death of Chandelle Stuart. Maybe it was only a coincidence and there were a number of possible explanations, but he was curious to know what that person was doing in that place, at that time, and on that particular day.

It was a question that could only be answered by the man himself, the elegant and ironic Professor William Roscoe, who in all probability was also the person who had requested a series of cheques from Chase Manhattan Bank in the name of John Rydley Evenge. Chance maybe, but if you replaced the middle name with an initial, it became John R. Evenge.

Revenge
.

‘Revenge,’ William Roscoe said. ‘That’s the only reason. You of all people should be able to understand that.’

Maureen said nothing, trying not to be mesmerized by the black eye of the gun pointing at her.

‘Tell me one thing, Maureen. When that man killed Connor Slave right there in front of you – once past the initial grief, didn’t you feel a fierce hate and an obsessive desire for revenge? Don’t you feel right now the desire to have him in front of you so that you can make him pay in person for all the suffering you’ve felt and will have to feel for the rest of your life?’

Yes, with all my strength
, she thought.

‘Yes, but that’s not up to me,’ she said out loud.

Roscoe smiled. ‘You’re not a good liar, Maureen. The light of hate is in your eyes. I recognize it, because I know all about hate, and
I
gave you those eyes.’

For some moments after finding Maureen at his mercy for a reason he could not grasp, William Roscoe had felt stunned, unsure what to do next.

‘Are you all right?’ he had asked as she got up off the floor, with even now, despite the situation, a doctor’s professional concern in his voice.

Maureen had replied with a terse nod of the head, unable to speak.

Pointing with the barrel of his gun to the curtain behind her, Roscoe said, ‘Through there.’

Moving the curtain aside, Maureen discovered that beyond it lay a narrow corridor which led to the rear of the house. With the barrel of the gun thrust into her back, she moved slowly forward. In the dim light, she could just see the outline of a glass door leading to a porch at the other end. However, before they got there, Roscoe ordered her to stop in front of another door, a heavily armoured one, in the wall on the left.

The surgeon went up to a device attached to the wall next to the door, and placed his open palm on it. The door opened inwards, and a light inside came on automatically, revealing a steep staircase leading downwards.

‘Go down.’

Maureen had preceded him down two flights of steps and finally they had come out into a huge room completely tiled in white, which took up the entire basement area of the house. Standing on the small railed gallery just inside the door, she was impressed. Illumined by overhead lights, there in front of her was a real research laboratory, filled to bursting with machines and instruments whose purpose she did not know but which gave the impression of being very expensive and state of the art. Against the wall to the right was a long workbench on which stood a number of computers and a huge electronic microscope linked to monitors by fibre-optic cables. In the middle of the room, like an island, was another workbench, this one occupied by a whole series of machines equipped with articulated arms for working in a sterile environment. Half the wall to the left was taken up by a large window, beyond which could be glimpsed a refrigeration chamber lit with bluish fluorescent light.

‘My private lab,’ Roscoe declared, as they descended the steps. ‘Nice, don’t you think? It’s in places like this that we try to revolutionize science. Though I admit it’s sometimes all smoke and mirrors.’