Sigma Curse - 04 (2 page)

Beside him, Harmony said: “Pro job.”

Harmony Jones was twenty-eight years old. She stood a full ten inches shorter than Venn, all sinewy wiriness and attitude. Venn had recruited her himself almost two years earlier, when he’d first begun to set up the NYPD’s Division of Special Projects. One of her selling points was that she didn’t look, or act, like a cop. As she was proud to admit, she was a sister who’d come from the ghetto, and part of her soul was still there. It made her good at undercover work.

Venn peered at the body on the slab. The pathologist had started to brief him but Venn had asked him to hold off. He wanted to form some initial impressions first, let his gut tell him stuff, before he learned anything about the dead guy.

The man lay naked, his skin gray under the harsh fluorescence of the lighting panels in the ceiling. His wrists and ankles were banded with green-black bruises, but there was no tell-tale widespread darkening around his front or his rear. It meant he hadn’t been lying for long before he’d been discovered, and the blood hadn’t had a chance to pool anywhere in his body.

The most immediately noticeable aspect of the body was the hole in the V formed by the bones of his lower jaw. Venn had seen the corpses of men who’d shot themselves by sticking a gun under their chins, but even a small-caliber firearm like a .22 would produce a bigger, more ragged wound. This one looked cleaner, as though it had been caused by an insertion with a sharp object.

As Harmony said, it was indeed a professional job.

Also noteworthy was the neat line around the top of the head, where a technician’s saw had cut through the bone to allow the summit of the skull to be lifted free from its base.

And there was a third feature of interest.

The blackened, depressed mark in the middle of the forehead, just below the line cutting across the skin and bone.

The mark was neat and careful, and had probably been made with some sort of branding iron. It consisted of two parallel lines, one above the other, with a zig-zag in between.

The guy’s age was indeterminate, as it was with many corpses. Death was the great leveler in so many ways. It often erased signs of ageing, Venn knew, better than Botox or any plastic surgery. Nevertheless, Venn judged the man to be somewhere between twenty-five and forty. He wore his hair in a crew cut, and had a sinewy, muscular frame with no spare fat. Clearly, he’d been somebody who’d taken care of himself.

Except for his arms. Venn noted something there he filed away for future consideration. It wasn’t much, and was barely noticeable, but Venn thought it was significant.

The corpse bore no signs of a struggle before death, other than the apparent ligature marks around the ankles and wrists. That too was interesting. A strong guy like this might be expected to have put up a serious fight.

Apart from Venn and Harmony, there were two other people standing beside the table. One was the pathologist, who’d been introduced by the other man as Dr Tariq Azizi. Azizi was a short, spare man in his late fifties, with a narrow face set in an expression of frowning glumness. He wasn’t like most pathologists Venn had encountered in the past. Most of them were wiseacres with a pitch-black sense of humor that went way beyond the boundaries of good taste. They spent so much of their working lives closeted with dead people that flippancy and cynicism seemed to have become part of their DNA.

But Azizi maintained a dignified, rather respectful demeanor, poring over the body on the slab with a seriousness Venn found engaging. The doctor seemed neither to resent the cops’ presence there nor to feel compelled to play up to it. Instead, he waited quietly while Venn gave the dead man the once over.

The other person was forty-five or so, tall and immaculately turned out in a charcoal Brooks Brothers suit and sporting an impressive head of black hair streaked lightly with gray at the temples. When he’d met Venn and Harmony upstairs, he’d given his name as Mort Teller, adding that he was a Special Agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His manner was easy, assertive, and his eyes measured Venn without being overtly challenging. He was clearly in charge without having to make a big song and dance about it.

Still, Venn looked at the doctor first. He wanted to hear the science before the speculation. The
what
before the
how
and
why
.

“Okay,” he said. “What’ve we got?”

Dr Azizi stood with his hands together and his head slightly bowed, in an attitude of prayer. His accent was surprisingly Brooklyn, with the faintest trace of the Indian subcontinent. He spoke slowly, enunciating each word with precision.

“The subject is a Caucasian male aged approximately thirty to thirty-five years. Judging by the body temperature, the degree of rigor mortis, and the extent of lividity, he’s been dead less than twenty-four hours. Closer to sixteen, in my opinion. The cause of death is a traumatic injury to the brain stem, resulting from the insertion of a sharp object through the soft tissues of the skin between the mandibular rami, up through the base of the skull.”

Azizi moved round to the head of the table and with his gloved hands gently lifted away the top of the skull. The brain was missing.

“A depression is noted on the inner aspect of the calvaria, here.” With one latex-clad finger he pointed.

Venn leaned in and peered at what looked like a tiny notch on the concave sweep of the inside of the skull’s lid.

The pathologist continued: “Dissection of the brain indicates the passage of a foreign body through the left cerebral hemisphere very close to the corpus callosum. The trajectory of passage is consistent with both the entry wound and the lesion on the calvaria.”

Beside Venn, Harmony said: “Doc. I don’t mean to be racist. But can you run that by me once more in English?”

Inwardly, Venn winced.

But Azizi didn’t appear to take offense. He nodded gravely.

He said: “It looks like a long, sharp object was inserted up under this man’s chin, right back near the Adam’s apple. It penetrated the base of his skull, traversed his brain stem, and continued up through the brain tissue, at a backward angle, close to the center, until the tip hit the skull bone. He would have died instantly.”

The doctor indicated with his eyebrows over his glasses. “Contusions at the ankles and wrists suggest that the subject was restrained at the time of death. The medial malleoli of the ankles - the inner aspects - aren’t bruised, so the feet weren’t bound together. The skin of both the wrists and the ankles is abraded on the inside, which points toward a spreadeagled posture, with the subject struggling against his restraints.”

Azizi replaced the cap of the skull, put his hands together once more.

“As you see, there’s a mark on the forehead, caused by the application of a heated object, probably metallic. Otherwise, the subject shows no abnormality. There are numerous scars on his upper limbs and abdomen, but they are old and well healed. The general musculature and the anatomical state of the heart indicate a high level of physical fitness. Full toxicology evaluation of the serum and cerebrospinal fluid is pending, but the preliminary results suggest nothing out of the ordinary. He was, as the British say, in rude health.”

Dr Azizi lapsed into silence.

As if he’d just listened to an elegy, Venn stood quietly by with the others, absorbing the pathologist’s words.

When the time seemed right, he looked at Teller, the FBI man.

Teller picked up on his cue, launched in, talking fast, his arms folded. “So we have an ID already. The guy’s name is Dale Fincher. He’s thirty-three years old. Single, with no family aside from a widowed mother. He was discovered at nine forty-five this morning by a maid at the Roebuck Hotel in Chelsea who went in to clean the room and found him lying there. On the bed, spread out like Dr Azizi said. Wrists and ankles tethered to the bedposts. It looked like an abattoir, blood soaking the pillows and sheets. But there was only the one wound, up under his chin. No weapon.”

Venn said, “Two wounds.”

Everybody looked at him.

Teller said: “Say what?”

“Two wounds.” Venn pointed. “That scar on his forehead. It’s new.”

“Yeah,” said Teller. “That. You know the symbol?”

Venn nodded. The gnarled but clearly discernible mark in the flesh of the corpse’s forehead made him think of his schooldays, and the math lessons he’d dreaded.

It was a letter from the Greek alphabet.

Sigma.

––––––––

T
he FBI offices were near the East River, a few blocks north of the United Nations building. Venn drove, with Harmony beside him in his Jeep Grand Cherokee. It was a replacement for his last, identical model, which had been shot up by a bunch of criminals three months earlier. He’d grown partial to the Jeep as a brand, and had decided to stick with the same car.

Through the windshield, the lights of Manhattan glittered coldly, the air brittle and clear. There’d been relatively little snow so far this winter, but January had only begun six days earlier, and there was plenty of time yet for the city to become submerged under a blanket of frost and white. Venn hoped not.

Harmony gazed out the window, saying nothing. It was a tell-tale sign.

“What’s bugging you?” Venn asked.

She didn’t answer for a moment. Then: “Working with the Feds.”

“What’s the problem?” said Venn.

She turned her head to look at him. “You
know
what it’s going to be like. They’ll want to be in charge, every step of the way. They’ll throw hissy fits every time they feel their authority’s being challenged. You’ll get pissed at them, and we’ll all be tangled up fighting each other. And the job won’t get done properly.”

Venn laughed softly. “Come on. Tell me you don’t want in on this. I bet you can’t.”

Harmony sighed. “Of course I do.”

“So, it’s big enough to warrant a federal taskforce. We’re lucky we got included at all. But now that we are, we’ve got to work with them. Get over it, Harm. It’ll be fine.”

“That Teller guy,” she said after another pause.

“Yeah.”

“Kind of a smarmy asshole.”

Venn shrugged. “I don’t know. He seemed okay to me. Not a bullshitter. Yeah, he dresses sharp. But most of them do. They’re the FBI, after all. Not working-class stiffs like us.”

Harmony snorted. “Don’t try that
I’m-one-of-the-people
crap with me, Venn. From where I’m sitting, you’re practically royalty.”

“Whatever.” He held up a hand to stave her off. “Harm, I got to say, you’re more than usually cranky tonight. Is something wrong?”

“No.”

They drove in silence. Venn counted down the seconds.
Three, two, one...

She muttered: “Personal issues.”

He’d just opened his mouth when Harmony said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

So he let it go.

*

V
enn had gotten the call at a little after seven p.m., ninety minutes earlier.

He was on his way to a grocery store on Ninth, a few blocks from his office, meaning to pick up a couple of steaks before heading home. Beth had said she’d be able to get away earlyish, which for her meant before eight, and he wanted to surprise her with supper. Medium-rare sirloin, new potatoes, a French side salad and a bottle of the Australian Shiraz they both liked. Some soft Latin jazz on the stereo to set the mood, and a slow post-dinner hour on the couch in the living room, in front of the fireplace, letting their conversation lead them in any direction it chose to wander.

Followed by... well, whatever.

But Venn never set foot in the grocery store. His cell phone buzzed in his pocket and he stepped into a doorway out of the cold wind and said, “Yeah.”

“Joe. You still at work?”

David Kang always sounded hearty. He had the kind of manner that would cheer you up if you were sick, but would probably strike a false note if you were
really
sick, like with cancer or something.

“I guess I am now, Cap,” said Venn.

Kang was Venn’s boss. A Korean-American who’d rocketed his way up the ranks in the New York Police Department, he’d recruited Venn almost two years earlier when he’d first set up his baby, the Division of Special Projects. Kang was flippant and irritating. But he was also smart, shrewd and ambitious, and knew exactly how to play the people under his command. Venn had pulled off a major coup for the DSP last summer, when he’d not only taken down one of the biggest narcotics barons in Mexico but had also torn the lid off an illegal government black-ops initiative which was involved in the war on drugs. Kang had gotten a commendation out of that business, something that would lubricate his path up the chute toward Commissioner, and Venn had been his golden boy ever since.

Kang said: “I’ve got some serious shit for you, Joe. I mean,
major
league. You won’t want to miss this one.”

“I’m all ears.” Venn checked his watch.
Damn.
An evening with Beth, and it looked like it wasn’t going to happen. Kang never called him in the evening between cases, unless he needed something urgently.

“Okay,” said Kang. “There’s been a homicide, out in Chelsea. Looks fetishistic. A guy tethered to a hotel bed, with an icepick wound through his brain. And some kind of weird symbol branded on him. The local cops barely secured the crime scene before the Feds appeared. They’ve set up a task force.”

“Huh.” Venn felt a quirk of interest. “Who’s the guy?”

Kang paused for effect. “He’s nobody. But his mom, on the other hand... She’s Marilyn Fincher.”

Venn searched his memory. The Division of Special Projects handled political cases, and as such he kept himself constantly up to date on the changing personnel in New York City’s Byzantine governmental structure. But the name Marilyn Fincher didn’t ring any bells.

He knew Kang was testing him, and he sighed in resignation.

“Okay,” said Venn. “You got me.”

“Judge Fincher is a justice of the Supreme Court of New York,” said Kang triumphantly, like a poker player brandishing a royal flush.