The Prettiest Feathers (19 page)

Well, that was that. If Pop said it was the gentleman who pulled the gun on the guys in the bookstore, then it was. He’s never wrong about this stuff, though I can’t even begin to figure out how he does what he does. If he had been a lousy profiler, he’d still have his practice in Boston. He wouldn’t have had to run all the way to the Michigan woods to escape the killers who keep breaking into the sanctity of his mind. But at least Michigan is a better out than the one that I had feared he might take. There was a time when I would visit his apartment every three or four days, just to do a sweep of his medicine cabinet. I even got rid of his ant traps.

I did what he said. I papered the entire state of New York with faxes, asking about murdered or missing women in the target age range. Then I sent inquiries into the New England
states, and Pennsylvania. If I hadn’t been so tired, I would have checked our local records, too.

I got worn out just thinking about my schedule for the following day. I might get some feedback from Pop. Robert might let me know what he found out at Harvard. And I had a long list of people that I wanted to talk to: Sarah’s boss at the bookstore, the girl upstairs at the massage parlor, everyone at Fast Eddie’s, Miller from the scientific evidence unit, and Hanson.

Actually, I didn’t want to talk to Hanson. He wanted to talk to me. At least that’s what the note on my desk said.

So, the next day was going to be a big one. But there was no way I could head home without sending Pop a quick reply.

I was ready to leave for the day, when I had one of those hunches that I just can’t leave alone. I called the Landgrove PD.

“You had an untimely up there,” I told the dispatcher, after explaining who I was. “Antiques dealer named Wallingford. Was an autopsy performed?”

After telling me that Mr. Wallingford was one of Landgrove’s most respected benefactors, she said that she didn’t know whether an autopsy had been performed. But she did know the name of the ME who, in the absence of their own medical referee, had been called to Wallingford’s estate.

Dr. Alan Chadwick.

T
hursday night I got back from Boston with less than two bucks in my pocket, and not much more in my checking account. Friday was payday. I stopped by the precinct first thing in the morning to pick up my check.

When I walked in, I saw that the suits were there—FBI special agents from Quantico, the Bureau’s Behavioral Sciences Unit. The chief suit was an agent named Dexter Willoughby, a three-piece bureaucrat cut from a mold they keep in a vault at the Smithsonian. If I hadn’t already had a headache, he was exactly the kind of guy who could have given me one.

Willoughby and Hanson were standing in the hall deep in conversation. “There’s a meeting of the minds,” I told Fuzzy.

“Hey, Bobby. How’s the head?”

“Solid as a rock.”

“I figured,” he said. “What’s up in Beantown?”

“Red Sox ain’t in the world series. Where’s Lane?”

“Conference room. You guys have a briefing with the feebles at eight-thirty,” he said.

“Doesn’t anybody remember that I’m on leave?”

Everybody was wearing plastic security tags. I hadn’t seen that happen since Clinton threatened to visit.

“Is Dexter Willoughby really that guy’s name?” I asked.

“They don’t tell me shit,” Fuzzy said, then grabbed his allotment of parking tickets for the day and headed out.

This trip one of the feds was a pantsuit—nicely wrapped. But I couldn’t help thinking that a night in the sack with her would be like fucking my accountant. And I’d have to pay taxes on it.

Lane and Ms. Agent were side by side, with Lane towering about six inches above her federal friend. What the little woman didn’t know was that all the power dressing and power lunches in the world wouldn’t do her any good when dealing with my favorite Amazon. I waved to Lane.

“Hang on,” she said to the agent, and came over by the door where I was standing. “You’re alive.”

“I’m doing,” I said. “Look, I’ve got a lot to run by you.”

“We have a briefing with the feds in about ten minutes. The woman is Special Agent Walker. There are a couple more of her colleagues around. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. Maybe after that.”

“Who brought them in? Hanson?”

“They brought themselves in. They’ve been working three unsolved cases up in the Albany area. Same MO as our two.”

“Weren’t you running some checks, too?”

“There were nineteen sheets on my desk when I got in this morning. I haven’t had a chance to look at them yet. That’s not counting our two and the Bureau’s three. We’re looking at five states.”

Five states—maybe two dozen victims. I wondered what the hell we were dealing with.

“You and I aren’t going to have any time to talk,” I complained.

“Maybe after the briefing—”

“I’m not going to any briefing, and I won’t be around later.”

“Hanson says—”

“Fuck Hanson. I met Alan Chadwick.”

Lane’s eyes opened wide. I knew I had her attention.

“He’s a pathologist at Boston City Hospital. Early forties, but he looks sixty. Pathetic kind of guy, but I liked him. Our Chadwick was an imposter—managed to get his hands on this guy’s credentials. The diploma, the transcript, the residency, everything.”

The room was starting to fill with detectives. Hanson and Willoughby moved toward the portable podium at the front.

“Our Chadwick didn’t die in the explosion,” Lane said.

“I didn’t think so.”

“ATF pulled a fairly intact finger from the debris, but it didn’t match up with the Chadwick prints on file with the state. We’re still checking out who the dead guy might be. I had a fax from the Hasty Hills PD saying they have two possible missing persons—their medical examiner, who’s the guy they know as Chadwick, and a handyman at the Municipal Building who hasn’t shown up at work all week.”

“What do you have on the guy who calls himself Chadwick?”

“He owned a piece of land north of Hasty Hills. State cops found some mounds out there, also some sinkholes in the soil. Could be a burial site. They’re up there doing methane probes right now. He also signed a death certificate on your guy over in Landgrove.”

“My guy?”

Hanson was clearing his throat, rapping his knuckles on the table, while Willoughby looked with barely concealed disgust at the coffee urn and two trays of dunkers Hanson’s secretary had set out for our guests.

“I have to get out of here,” I said. “I’ve got some calls to make.”

Landgrove rang a bell, but I had to leave before Lane
could try to talk me into staying. Hanson loves to throw parties about as much as he likes to see himself on the six o’clock news. He’d be pissed that I didn’t attend his affair, but I figured Lane would cover for me. Technically, I wasn’t on duty anyway.

The Paul Wolf angle couldn’t be more than a bizarre coincidence. It sounded as if everybody but the doc agreed that Chadwick’s girlfriend had jumped to her death. Besides, our Wolf’s first name was John. But I couldn’t leave it alone. It’s the kind of thing that would nag at me if I didn’t check it out.

I went back to my cubicle and got on the phone. Directory assistance had a number at Harvard for an office dealing with student affairs. I tried that one first. Judy Newton at that office gave me Helen Trammell’s number at alumni. Paul Wolf hadn’t graduated. Helen directed me back to Judy. Judy connected me to a dean named Harvey Hesselman. Harvey educated me about confidentiality, court orders, and lack of jurisdictional standing. I placed another call to my friend Judy.

“Harvey doesn’t understand me,” I told her.

She laughed. “I don’t want to get in any trouble. I could lose my job.”

“I don’t want that to happen,” I said, “but I think you can help me without putting yourself in a bad position. If you can get a look at this guy’s file, just memorize what you can out of it. Don’t try to write anything down. If all you can get is his date of birth, that would help. And call me.”

I gave her the number at my desk, and my home phone.

“I can’t promise anything,” she said.

“I wouldn’t ask you to. I appreciate anything you can do, Judy.”

I had a feeling that Judy wouldn’t let me down. Regardless, the legal affairs people would have to start the wheels turning to obtain a court order. Even Harvard isn’t immune.

I wandered over to the desk that Lane shares with two other investigators when they’re not off sick or on disability.
Her nineteen victims had become twenty-one. I read the top one. Rebecca Holbrook, twenty-eight, separated, mother of two, climbed into her Volkswagen one morning three and a half years ago. She dropped the kids at day care, then went off to her job at a bottling plant. Rebecca never got there. She vanished—disappeared from the face of the earth. Her car was found on a bus route almost midway between the day care center and the plant. There were no suspects.

I wondered if Rebecca Holbrook was residing just north of Hasty Hills.

The second sheet was more recent. Ten months ago, Susan Cullen, twenty, was a cashier at a convenience store in a town of 15,000 in Connecticut. She was supposed to work until 11:00, then close the store. Shortly after 9:00 a regular customer came in for his newspaper and six-pack. The place was empty. Susan’s body was found floating in a river a week later. The cause of death was ligature strangulation—a leather thong was still in place, knotted so tightly around her throat that it had disappeared into her skin.

The number of cases involving strangers killing strangers is skyrocketing. Almost a quarter of all homicides in this country are of that variety, and most of them are committed by serial killers. But the numbers don’t impress me. The names and the details do.

Silvia Chambers, thirty-six, strangled. Lydia Hall, thirty-one, bludgeoned. Ann Waters, twenty-one, strangled. Miriam Spender, twenty-five, stabbed. Connie Snow, twenty-nine, missing, foul play suspected. Some of the cases went back to the 1970s. Most were of more recent vintage.

Not all these cases were related. They couldn’t be. But I was starting to think that a sizable number were—and, once we sorted it all out, we’d discover that this case spanned a lot of years and a lot of communities, bringing horror to a lot of families.

How could Sarah have been so comfortable, so relaxed with this guy? She could be a little spacey. There were times when she was an absolute flake. But at the end, she was like a
young girl falling in love for the first time. It wasn’t that Sarah was
that
bad a judge of people. It was that this guy was so good—sexy, suave, a smooth talker. My name’s this. No, my name’s that. And she bought it.

Wallingford. Sarah said that he was from Landgrove. What the hell did that mean? Lane said Chadwick had signed a death certificate in Landgrove. “My guy,” she said. If Wolf said he was Wallingford, and Wolf turned out to be Chadwick, maybe he’d signed his own fucking death certificate. Jesus. I needed a drink.

The fax machine started cranking. I reached for the sheet. Make it number twenty-two. Catherine MacKenzie, thirty-eight, found with her neck broken in a stall in a men’s room at the airport. Possible suspect: white male, graying brown hair, blue eyes, six foot, educated, tried to pass himself off as a bank official. Said he had a delivery for Ms. MacKenzie, and managed to get into her apartment building. But she had called the bank, knew he was a fraud, so the place was crawling with cops. He smelled them and ran—all the way to the airport, where MacKenzie had a flight booked to Heathrow the following morning. Sounded like the brass balls of an Alan Carver to me.

I added the sheet to the pile and went back to my cubicle. After sending off a formal request for information on the suicide and the homicide
my
Chadwick had told me about, I gave him a call. He was between patients, he said—one on the table to his right, and one on the left. I was starting to like this guy.