I Am Pilgrim (3 page)

Norris shakes his head. ‘There are four drug warrants out for his arrest; he’s probably halfway to

Mexico. No, Alvarez here’ – he indicates his female partner – ‘she recognized a guy wanted for burglary living upstairs.’ He looks at his partner, not sure how much more to say.

Alvarez shrugs, hopes for the best and comes clean. ‘I offered the burglar a get-out-of-jail-free card if he’d pick the locks on the manager ’s office and safe for us.’

She looks at Bradley, nervous, wondering how much trouble this is gonna cause.

Her boss’s face gives away nothing; his voice just drops a notch, even softer. ‘And then?’

‘Eight locks in total and he was through ’em in under a minute,’ she says. ‘No wonder nothing’s safe in this town.’

‘What was in the woman’s file?’ Bradley asks.

‘Receipts. She’d been living here just over a year,’ Norris says. ‘Paid in cash, didn’t have the phone connected – TV, cable, nothing. She sure didn’t want to be traced.’

Bradley nods – exactly what he was thinking. ‘When was the last time any of the neighbours saw

her?’

‘Three or four days ago. Nobody’s sure,’ Norris recounts.

Bradley murmurs, ‘Disappeared straight after she killed her date, I guess. What about ID – there must have been something in her file?’

Alvarez checks her notes. ‘Photocopies of a Florida driver ’s licence and a student card or something – no picture on it,’ she says. ‘I bet they’re genuine.’

‘Check ’em anyway,’ Bradley tells them.

‘We gave ’em to Petersen,’ says Norris, referring to another young detective. ‘He’s on to it.’

Bradley acknowledges it. ‘Does the burglar – any of the others – know the suspect, anything about her?’

They shake their heads. ‘Nobody. They’d just see her come and go,’ Norris says. ‘Early twenties,

about five eight, a great body, according to the burglar—’

Bradley raises his eyes to heaven. ‘By his standards, that probably means she’s got two legs.’

Norris smiles, but not Alvarez – she just wishes Bradley would say something about her deal with

the burglar. If he’s going to ream her out, get it over with. Instead she has to continue to participate, professional: ‘According to a so-called actress in one-fourteen, the chick changed her appearance all the time. One day Marilyn Monroe, the next Marilyn Manson, sometimes both Marilyns on the same

day. Then there was Drew and Britney, Dame Edna, k. d. lang—’

‘You’re serious?’ Bradley asks. The young cops nod, reeling off more names as if to prove it. ‘I’m

really looking forward to seeing this photofit,’ he says, realizing that all the common avenues of a murder investigation are being closed down. ‘Anything else?’ They shake their heads, done.

‘Better start getting statements from the freaks – or at least those without warrants, which will probably amount to about three of ’em.’

Bradley dismisses them, turning to me in the shadows, starting to broach something which has been

causing him a lot of anxiety.

‘Ever seen one of these?’ he asks, pulling on plastic gloves and taking a metal box off a shelf in the closet. It’s khaki in colour, so thin I hadn’t even noticed it. He’s about to open it but turns to look at Alvarez and Norris for a moment. They are heading out, weaving through the firefighters, now packing up their hazchem pumps.

‘Hey, guys!’ he calls. They turn and look. ‘About the burglar – that was good work.’ We see the relief on Alvarez’s face and they both raise their hands in silent acknowledgement, smiling. No wonder his crew worships him.

I’m looking at the metal box – on closer examination, more like an attaché case with a serial number stencilled on the side in white letters. It’s obviously military, but I only have a vague memory of seeing anything like it. ‘A battlefield surgical kit?’ I say, without much conviction.

‘Close,’ Bradley says. ‘Dentistry.’ He opens the box, revealing – nestled in foam – a full set of army dental instruments: spreader pliers, probes, extraction forceps.

I stare at him. ‘She pulled the victim’s teeth?’ I ask.

‘All of ’em. We haven’t found any, so I figure she dumped ’em. Maybe she flushed them down the

john and we’ll get lucky – that’s why we’re tearing the plumbing apart.’

‘Were the teeth pulled before or after the victim was killed?’

Ben realizes where I’m going. ‘No, it wasn’t torture. The coroner ’s team have taken a look inside

her mouth. They’re pretty sure it was after death, to prevent identification. It was the reason I asked you to drop by – I remembered something in your book about home dentistry and a murder. If it was

in the US, I was hoping there might be a—’

‘No connection – Sweden,’ I say. ‘A guy used a surgical hammer on the victim’s bridgework and

jaw – same objective, I guess – but forceps? I’ve never seen anything like that.’

‘Well, we have now,’ Ben replies.

‘Inspiring,’ I say. ‘The onward rush of civilization, I mean.’

Putting aside my despair about humanity, I have to say I’m even more impressed by the killer – it

couldn’t have been easy pulling thirty-two teeth from a dead person. The killer had obviously grasped one important concept, a thing which eludes most people who decide on her line of work: nobody’s

ever been arrested for a murder; they have only ever been arrested for not planning it properly.

I indicate the metal case. ‘Where’s a civilian get one of these?’ I ask.

Ben shrugs. ‘Anywhere they like. I called a buddy in the Pentagon and he went into the archives: forty thousand were surplus – the army unloaded the lot through survival stores over the last few years. We’ll chase ’em, but we won’t nail it that way, I’m not sure anybody could—’

His voice trails away – he’s lost in a labyrinth, running his gaze around the room, trying to find a way out. ‘I’ve got no face,’ he says softly. ‘No dental records, no witnesses – worst of all, no motive.

You know this business better than anyone – if I asked you about solving it, what odds would you lay?’

‘Right now? Powerball, or whatever that lottery’s called,’ I tell him. ‘You walk in, the first thing you think is: amateur, just another drug or sex play. Then you look closer – I’ve only seen a couple anywhere near as good as this.’ Then I tell him about the antiseptic spray, and of course that’s not something he wants to hear.

‘Thanks for the encouragement,’ he says. Unthinking, he rubs his index finger and thumb together,

and I know from close observation over a long period that it means he’d like a cigarette. He told me once he’d given up in the nineties and there must have been a million times since then that he’d thought a smoke might help. This is obviously one of them. To get over the craving, he talks. ‘You

know my problem? Marcie told me this once’ – Marcie is his wife – ‘I get too close to the victims,

ends up I sort of imagine I’m the only friend they’ve got left.’

‘Their champion?’ I suggest.

‘That’s exactly the word she used. And there’s one thing I’ve never been able to do – Marcie says it could be the only thing she really likes about me – I’ve never been able to let a friend down.’

Champion of the dead, I think. There could be worse things. I wish there was something I could do

to help him, but there isn’t – it’s not my investigation and, although I’m only in my thirties, I’m retired.

A technician enters the room fast, yelling in an Asian accent: ‘Ben?’ Bradley turns. ‘In the basement!’

Chapter Four

THREE TECHNICIANS IN coveralls have torn apart an old brick wall. Despite their face masks, they’re almost gagging from the smell inside the cavity. It’s not a body they’ve found – rotting flesh has its own particular odour – this is leaking sewage, mould and a hundred generations of rat shit.

Bradley makes his way through a sequence of foul cellars and stops in the harsh light of a bank of

work lights illuminating the wrecked wall. I follow in his wake, tagging along with the other investigators, arriving just in time to see the Asian guy – a Chinese-American who everyone calls Bruce, for obvious reasons – shine a portable light deep into the newly opened space.

Inside is a maze of cowboy plumbing. Bruce explains that, having torn up the bathroom in Room

89 without finding anything trapped in the U-bends, they went one step further. They got a capsule of Fast Blue B dye from the forensic guys, mixed it into a pint of water and poured it down the waste

pipe.

It took five minutes for all of it to arrive, and they knew if it was running that slow there had to be a blockage somewhere between the basement and Room 89. Now they’ve found it – in the matrix of pipes and illegal connections behind the wall.

‘Please tell me it’s the teeth,’ Bradley says. ‘She flush ’em down the toilet?’

Bruce shakes his head and shines the portable light on a mush of charred paper trapped in a right-

angle turn. ‘The pipe comes straight from Room 89 – we tested it,’ he says, pointing at the mush.

‘Whatever this is, she probably burnt it then sent it down the crapper. That was the right thing to do –

except she didn’t know about the code violations.’

With the help of tweezers, Bradley starts to pick the congealed mess apart. ‘Bits of receipts, corner of a subway MetroCard, movie ticket,’ he recounts to everyone watching. ‘Looks like she took a final sweep through the place, got rid of anything she missed.’ He carefully separates more burnt fragments. ‘A shopping list – could be useful to match the handwriting if we ever find—’

He stops, staring at a piece of paper slightly less charred than the rest. ‘Seven numbers. Written by hand: 9. 0. 2. 5. 2. 3. 4. It’s not complete; the rest has been burnt off.’

He holds the scrap of paper up to the group, but I know it’s me he’s really speaking to, as if my job at an intelligence agency qualifies me as a cryptographer. Seven handwritten numbers, half destroyed: they could mean anything – but I have one advantage. People in my former business are always dealing in fragments, so I don’t just dismiss it.

Among everybody else, of course, the speculation starts immediately – bank account, credit card,

zip code, an IP address, a phone number. Alvarez says there’s no such thing as a 902 area code, and

she’s right. Sort of.

‘Yeah, but we connect to the Canadian system,’ Petersen, the young detective – built like a linebacker – tells her. ‘902 is Nova Scotia. My grandfather had a farm up there.’

Bradley doesn’t respond; he keeps looking at me for my opinion. I’ve learned from bitter experience not to say anything unless you’re certain, so I just shrug – which means Bradley and everyone else moves on.

What I’m really thinking about is the wall calendar, which has been worrying me since I first saw it.

According to the price on the back, it cost forty bucks at Rizzoli, the upmarket book store, and that’s a lot of money to tell the date and never use. The killer was obviously a smart woman, and the thought occurred to me it wasn’t a calendar at all to her: maybe she had an interest in ancient ruins.

I had spent most of my career working in Europe and, though it’s a long time since I travelled that far east, I’m pretty sure 90 is the international code for Turkey. Spend even a day travelling in that country and you realize it has more Greco-Roman ruins than just about any place on earth. If 90 is the country prefix, it’s possible the subsequent digits are an area code and part of a phone number.

Without anyone noticing, I walk out and head for the quietest part of the basement and make a call to Verizon on my cellphone – I want to find out about Turkish area codes.

As I wait for the phone company to pick up, I glance at my watch and I’m shocked to realize that

dawn must be breaking outside – it is now ten hours since a janitor, checking a power failure in the next room, unlocked the door to Room 89 to access some wiring. No wonder everybody looks tired.

At last I reach someone on a Verizon help desk, a heavily accented woman at what I guess is a call

centre in Mumbai, and find my memory is holding up – 90 is indeed the dialling code for Turkey.

‘What about 252? Is that an area code?’

‘Yes, a province … it’s called Muğla or something,’ she says, trying her best to pronounce it.

Turkey is a large country – bigger than Texas, with a population of over seventy million – and the name means nothing to me. I start to thank her, ready to ring off, when she says: ‘I don’t know if it helps, but it says here that one of the main towns is a place on the Aegean coast. It’s called Bodrum.’

The word sends a jolt through my body, a frisson of fear that has been barely dissipated by the passage of so many years. ‘Bodrum,’ she says – and the name washes ashore like the debris from some distant shipwreck. ‘Really?’ I say calmly, fighting a tumult of thoughts. Then the part of my brain dealing with the present reminds me I’m only a guest on this investigation, and relief floods in. I don’t want anything to do with that part of the world again.

I make my way back to Room 89. Bradley sees me, and I tell him I figure that the piece of paper is

the first part of a phone number all right, but I’d forget about Canada. I explain about the calendar and he says he’d seen it earlier in the evening and it had worried him too.

‘Bodrum? Where’s Bodrum?’ he asks.

‘You need to get out more. In Turkey – one of the most fashionable summer destinations in the world.’

‘What about Coney Island?’ he asks, straight-faced.