Spectrum (The Karen Vail Series) (21 page)

33

>ELLIS ISLAND

Sunday, November 7, 1976

Niklaus leaned back in the chair in Dmitri’s room and tossed an ace of spades onto the bed. The candle burned atop the mantle of the fireplace, which charred its logs low and slow.

Dmitri was looking over his hand, spreading them apart, and then pulled out a queen of clubs and placed it atop the pile. “Do you remember your mom?”

Niklaus froze for a second, then chose another card. “Yeah. Kind of.” He paused, then said, “Not really.”

“Do you miss her?” Dmitri asked.

“Why are you asking?”

“You never talk about her.”

Niklaus tossed down a five of diamonds. “Just play, will you?”

“Do you have any pictures of her?”

“My dad does.”

They traded turns a few times before Dmitri said, “How’d she die?”

Niklaus’s head snapped up. “What?”

“Your mom. How’d she die?”

“Why do you want to know?”

Dmitri kept his gaze on the cards.

“Dmitri. Look at me.” When he did not move, Niklaus leaned forward and angled his face up toward his stepbrother. “Look at me.”

He slowly lifted his eyes.

“Why are you asking me about this?”

Dmitri glanced back down at his cards. “I want to know.”

Niklaus sat back in his chair and fiddled with his hand. A minute later he said, “Cancer.”

Dmitri nodded. “That’s when cells grow too much and they take over the body’s normal cells, so if it’s in your liver, you get useless cancer cells taking the place of real liver cells. And then the liver doesn’t work right. And you die.”

Niklaus looked at him a long moment. “How do you know all that?”

“It can also be where the tumor grows so big that it crowds out the organ, and eventually crushes it.” He set his cards down and clapped his hands together. Hard. “Bam! Like that. It’s pretty bad. Cancer is.”

Niklaus inched forward in his chair. “How do you know this stuff?”

Dmitri shrugged. “My book.”

“What book?”

Dmitri sat for a moment looking down at his cards, then got off his chair and walked over to a spot beside his bed. He felt around, then pulled out his pocket knife, stuck the tip into the floorboard and pried it up.

“What the hell are you doing?” Niklaus asked.

He lifted a foot-long section of the plank and set it aside, then stuck his hand into the abyss.

Niklaus knelt down beside his stepbrother and peered in. “What’s down there?”

Dmitri felt around and then pulled out a worn clothbound hardback book.

Niklaus took it and brushed his hand across the cover, dusting off the dirt. “How Humans Die.” He thumbed through it, pausing to look at the diagrams showing photos of normal anatomy and diseased organs. “This is sick.”

“It’s got all kinds of diseases in there. And murder too. Like when you stick a knife in the lungs, it tells you why you die, at a … at a microscopic level. The pressure inside the al—alvee—alveoli—”

“Why’d you draw an X on this page?”

“I wanted to show that part to you. There are a lot of really cool things. Like when you have a stroke, the blood supply to the brain is cut—”

“Dimitri, where’d you get this book?”

He looked down at his lap. “A store.”

“With what money?”

“I didn’t need to pay for it.”

“You stole it?”

“No. I just … took it.”

“What else you got down there?” Niklaus asked, craning his neck to look into the crawl space. He shoved his hand into the hole and felt several more books and magazines.

He pulled out one of them—a worn copy of a December 1970 issue of
Playboy
. “She’s a looker,” he said, studying the blonde wearing a Santa’s hat—and nothing else. He reached down again into the hole and—

“No,” Dimitri said. “Leave it alone!”

“I just wanna see what other stuff you’ve g—”

“I said no!” Dimitri grabbed his arm. “It’s mine, Nik. Stop!”

Niklaus extracted his hand—and along with it, another two books:
Killer: A Journal of Murder
and
Confessions of the Boston Strangler
. He turned away, shielding them with his body. “Dmitri, what are you doing with these?”

“Give ’em to me,” he said as he tried to reach around Niklaus’s shoulder.

Niklaus splayed the first hardcover open and flipped a couple of pages but Dmitri tried to grab it away. He got hold of the edge and the two boys struggled, eventually hitting the floor.

Niklaus regained control and yanked the books away, but they went flying across the room. One struck the door, which opened a second later.

“What the—what’s all the noise about?” Livana asked. She bent down and picked up the hardcover at her feet. Her mouth fell open and she looked up. “What is this?”

Niklaus sat up. Dmitri pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head. Neither of them spoke.

“Fedor!” Livana called. “Come in here, please.”

Niklaus turned to Dmitri, who merely stared at the ground.

“I asked you a question,” she said. “What is—I mean, I know what this is. Whose is this?”

Fedor came up behind Livana. She handed him the book.

“Where did this come from?” He looked at Niklaus, who bit his lip and then turned to Dmitri, who did not move.

“A store in the city,” Niklaus said, still looking at Dmitri.

“It’s yours?” Fedor asked.

“I, uh …” He turned to his father, then back to Dmitri. “Yeah.”

Dmitri turned to Niklaus, glanced up at him, then canted his eyes down again.

Cassandra poked her head in the doorway, but Livana pushed her away. “Go back to your room.”

Fedor bent down and scooped up the Boston Strangler book. He handed it and
A Journal of Murder
to Livana, then took a few steps toward the bed. “What are you hiding there, Nik?”

Niklaus looked down at the other hardback and then handed it over, moving the floorboard over the opening with his shoe as he reached forward.

“
How Humans Die?
This yours too?”

Niklaus swallowed hard. “It’s really interesting. You can learn about all kinds of diseases. Like cancer. Now I know why Mom died.”

Fedor recoiled. His eyes teared up. He cleared his throat. “I’m taking this with me,” he said, holding the hardcover against his chest.

“It’s mine,” Dmitri said. “The
Playboy
too.”

“What
Playboy
?” Livana asked.

“Here.” Dmitri pointed at the floor.

Niklaus broke out into a sweat, concerned that she would see the hole in the floor. He looked down to where the issue of
Playboy
was lying face down. He quickly gathered it up and handed it to her.

Livana took it but immediately handed it off to Fedor, as if touching it made her feel dirty.

“I’m very disappointed in you,” Livana said. “Both of you, bringing that trash into our home.”

“Our
home
?” Niklaus said. He looked around the room. “We live on an
island
. No friends. No electricity. No TV, no radio. Weird people, abandoned buildings—”

“That’s enough!” Fedor said. “Go take a walk, clear your head.”

“It’s pitch-black outside. Where should I go?”

“Out,” Fedor said through clenched teeth. “You too, Dmitri. With your brother. Just … get out.”

Dmitri stood up, repositioned his hood, and trudged out, Niklaus following close behind.

“SO WHO’S TELLING THE TRUTH?” Livana asked. “Whose books are they?”

Fedor, standing in the kitchen leaning against the counter, crossed his arms. “Nik was covering for Dmitri.”

“But they both admitted it—”

“I know my son.”

Livana felt unsteady. She reached for a chair and sat down heavily. “My god. Why is he so interested in death? Why the book about killers? And the
Playboy
… ”

“Liv, his father was brutally murdered right in front of him. And he was chained to tracks and nearly run over by a train. Not to mention …” He wiped his brow. “I mean, forgive me, but we don’t know what those bastards did to him while they were holding him. That would affect any of us. And he was just a kid. Who knows what that whole experience did to him. I mean, we know what we see: he’s withdrawn, quiet. He doesn’t make eye contact. Whatever happened, it left its mark. It’s kind of remarkable he’s doing as well as he is, all things considered.”

“And the
Playboy
?”

Fedor chuckled. “He’s a teenage boy. Do I need to say more?”

Livana set both elbows on the table and rested her head in her hands. “I didn’t realize Niklaus was so unhappy here. Has he said anything to you?”

“I think he was just blowing off steam.” Fedor was silent for a moment, then said, “He hasn’t mentioned anything. This is the first I’m hearing of it. But I know it’s tough on the kids. All of them. They’re different. Isolated from other kids and what ‘normal’ teenagers do after school. They get on a boat and get taken back into isolation. I think, for them, it’s like a prison.”

“Should we start looking at moving?”

Fedor turned away. “I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s safe.”

Livana stood up. “How long can this go on, Fedor? I mean, we can’t live in fear the rest of our lives. The kids—they’re growing up. At some point they’re going to want to live a normal life. We can’t keep them here forever. Nor should we. When your—at some point, when your grandparents pass, we should move. To California. Or Texas. Okay?”

Fedor nodded. “Okay.”

34

>ELLIS ISLAND

Sunday, November 7, 1976

Niklaus and Dmitri trudged down the dirt path, flashlights in hand.

“They’re really pissed,” Niklaus said.

“Not my fault,” Dmitri said. “Not my fault.”

“Well, it wasn’t
my
fault,” Niklaus said. “If you hadn’t acted like an idiot, she wouldn’t have come in.”

“I wanna go back.” He shivered. “I’m cold. I need my jacket.”

“We’ll go back when they cool down. They need some time.” They walked in silence a moment. “Bummer about the books. If you didn’t freak out, they wouldn’t have known they were yours. Both of us didn’t need to get in trouble. I wouldn’t have told on you.”

“Maybe they’ll give them back.”

“They’re not gonna give them back.”

“Maybe we can find where they put them, take ’em back. They belong to me.”

“I’ll help you look. But it’s gotta be when they go into the city on a weekend, where they can’t walk in on us while we’re looking. Or you can just buy another copy.”

They walked a few more feet. “Doesn’t matter, I’ve got more.”

“More books?”

“Yeah.”

“More books on killers?”

“I like them. One guy, he built a three-story castle, which was really like a hotel. And people came to stay there and they never left because he killed them.”

“No one missed them?”

“This was a long time ago, 1893. In Chicago. The killer’s name was Herman Mudgett but he used the name Holmes. Like Sherlock. When the police searched his castle they found hidden stairs, trapdoors, fake walls. The rooms where the people slept were airtight so that Mudgett could kill them by pumping poison gas through pipes that were controlled by valves in his own bedroom.”

“No kidding?”

“And he dissected them in his basement, stripped off their flesh and then sold their organs to a local medical school. Some of the bodies he cremated after he was done with them.”

“‘Done?’ With what?”

“He also had torture machines down there. Like a rack to stretch their arms and legs, to pull the limbs off the bodies.”

“How many people did he kill?”

“He confessed to twenty-seven, but some think it was two hundred.”

“Two hundred? Holy shit.”

They reached the island’s edge and stared out at the rough, cold waters. Directly ahead of them was the Statue of Liberty, in profile, lit from below. The aura from her torch—barely visible from this angle—put out an orange glow, muted by the thick, foggy air.

“Are you interested in this stuff,” Niklaus asked, “because of what happened to you? When those guys took you?”

Dmitri stared out into the darkness but did not answer.

“What happened when you were there?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Just tell me what they did to you.”

Dmitri clapped both hands over his ears. “Wasn’t my fault, wasn’t my fault, wasn’t my fault!”

“Calm down,” Niklaus said. “I didn’t say it was.”

They stood there, looking out at the statue.

Dmitri wrapped his arms around himself to ward off the chill. “I like her, Liberty.”

Niklaus faced his stepbrother. “What?”

“We should go live
there
,” Dmitri said. “She’s really big. Nobody’s gonna bother
her
.”

35

>ONE POLICE PLAZA

Fourteenth Floor

Manhattan

Thursday, April 1, 1999

Vail sat across from Antonio Fonzarella, chief of detectives Aidan Kearney, and police commissioner Brendan Carrig. Deputy commissioner Sandy Gelber, the commanding officer of the homicide squad, Orlando Mendoza, and bor
ough commander Wallace Yarles rounded out the conference table. Russo occupied the chair directly to her left.

She had never met the commissioner before, and she had a feeling that this would not be an occurrence she would want to write home about, let alone remember.

They had made little progress on the case and the media had started to notice the pattern of murders because of a leaked detail revealing that almost all of the victims were Greek women. And in New York City, when journalists sunk their teeth into something, they were like dogs clamping down on a piece of meat: they did not let go, and it was impossible to distract them or dislodge their prey.

And with attention from the press came pressure from the brass. Hence the meeting, called by the commissioner, who sat at the head of the conference room table.

Carrig, a large man with a crew cut and thick features, tossed a copy of the
New York Post
onto the polished wood surface. The bold headline screamed from the paper:

HADES SLASHER SERIAL KILLER

MURDERS FOUR

NYPD hides it from public

Vail closed her eyes.
Great, they’ve even got a name for him.

“Hades was the Greek god of the underworld and the dead,” Carrig said. “So the
Post
obviously did their homework in choosing his nickname.” He removed his reading glasses. “I don’t have to tell you that the stakes are now higher—in terms of publicity. Our jobs are now harder. We’ve had sufficient time to solve this case and what have we got? Very little to show for our efforts.” He nodded at Chief Kearney.

Kearney, whose head was narrower at the top and got wider near the shoulders, looked like a former football player whose neck was com-pressed from too many helmet-first tackles of 350-pound linemen. In a thick New York accent he said, “Let’s do a thorough review of what we got in the file. I wanna start with vic one.”

“That’d be Carole Manos,” Vail said. “But we’re not—”

“No,” Kearney said. “Detective Fonzarella. Please.”

Mozzarella wasn’t even there. I was. This is bullshit.

Fonzarella cleared his throat. “Right. Vic one was found in a bed, a shard of glass shoved into the side of her neck.” He proceeded to recount the details of the case—until Vail interrupted him.

“Commissioner,” she said, “we can’t be completely sure Ms. Manos was the first victim.”

“What do you mean, we can’t be sure? She either was or she wasn’t. Was there another victim exhibiting the same MO who was killed before her?”

“No. I mean, we don’t know. As far as we know, there wasn’t any in New York.”

Carrig spread his thick hands. “Then what on earth are you talking about?”

“I spoke with the FBI about this case, their Profiling and Behavioral Analysis Unit, and they feel that—”

“Wait. What?” He turned to Mendoza. “What the hell are you doing?”

Mendoza, his Hispanic complexion darkening in anger, gave Vail a stare that could kill if so empowered. “I didn’t know anything about this.”

“If I may,” Fonzarella said. “Detective Vail took it upon herself to contact them. I put a stop to it as soon as I found out about it.”

“And I disagreed,” Vail said. “I think they have a unique approach to serial crimes, and we could use the help.”

“Maybe we could use the help because we’ve had the wrong detectives working this case.” Kearney’s gaze was directed at Vail, not Fonzarella.

Russo inched his chair closer. “If I may, commissioner.” Carrig gave him a wave, so he continued. “I’ve been keeping tabs on this at regular intervals. Detective Vail has done nothing wrong in her management of the case. Nor has Detective Fonzarella. I think their approach has been sound.”

“Yet we’re nowhere.”

“Despite our best efforts, we’ve failed to generate a lead. I don’t have to tell you that sometimes it happens. This killer hasn’t left any forensics to speak of. He’s smart. And very good.”

Kearney laughed. “I like to think we’re smart too. And very good.”

According to Detective Mozzarella, we’ve got the best detective on the East Coast working the case.

“Then—for now—we’ll keep at it, with the current team intact. Detective,” he said, gesturing at Fonzarella. “Continue. Vic two.”

“Right. This one was a little different. Different because it was a male vic, the Castiglia capo, Dominic Crinelli.”

“Hang on a second,” Kearney said. “There was something back a couple of years ago, when Tim Thorne was killed in that car accident. A witness. You two were on your way to meet him.” He looked at Vail. “Did you ever follow up with him?”

“I tried. The guy was gone, like he was never there. I brought in a forensic crew. The apartment was clean—like it had been wiped down.”

Kearney shared a look with Carrig and then asked, “What about the name of this witness?”

“Bogus,” Vail said. “I looked into it. We don’t have a way of recording incoming calls, so we’ve got no voice print, no nothing. We don’t even have caller ID. Only thing we could do was trace the calls to a pay phone.”

“So what the hell does it mean?”

“I’ve been over this with Lieutenant Russo. We can’t figure out what the deal was with that. There are a number of possibilities, but none make a whole lot of sense. The best one we came up with is that our ‘witness’ was the killer trying to lure us to his apartment. But he changed his mind and left when we didn’t show because of the accident.”

“Really? That’s the best you’ve got?” Kearney frowned, then made some notes on his yellow pad.

Vail felt like the principal had just suspended her for a week.

“Crinelli was a capo,” said Gelber, the deputy commissioner. “Anyone think of looking at this as a retribution kill?”

“We did,” Russo said. “We went all the way back to his early days as an enforcer. This goombah broke heads in all five boroughs. But we checked everyone, cleared everyone.”

“Vic three,” Mendoza said, without looking up. “Fonzie.”

“Right.” Fonzarella turned the page in his folder.

Vail buried her nose in her copy of the file and tried to look busy. She was paging through the DD-5 reports from the Manos murder when something caught her eye. The DD-5 was a standard NYPD form that the detective completed after each contact she had with the case: a phone call with a witness, a message she left for a detective in another state, contact with the crime lab … anything that happened relative to the case required her to complete, and sign, a DD-5. They now had eighty-nine DD-5s in the Hades file.

But it wasn’t the DD-5 that was the problem: it was her signature on the facing page, the sixty-one—also known as the complaint report. It did not look right. She leaned toward Russo and whispered in his ear.

The commissioner cleared his throat. “Sorry if we’re boring you, Detective Vail.”

“Oh—you’re not—I mean, I need to look into something important pertaining to the case.” She rose from her chair and gathered up the file. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’m sure Detective Fonzarella will do a bang-up job until I get back.”

Vail walked out and headed to Manhattan South homicide, lights and siren. She found a parking spot down the block and went directly to the aide on duty in the crime analysis office.

“I need the scratch sixty-ones on my case.”

Every sixty-one started off with a handwritten “scratch” version that was then transcribed by the police administrative aide, or PAA, who manually typed the data into the Omniform computer system. The original was always retained in case incomplete or erroneous information was created during transcription.

“All the sixty-ones are in that box on the second shelf, arranged by month and year.”

Vail started digging through documents, looking for the form she had concerns about. But the report she wanted to see was missing.

As she stood there paging through the documents one more time—to be certain it was not there—her BlackBerry rang.

“Vail.”

“Karen, what the hell are you doing?”

It was Russo—and he did not sound pleased.

“Like I started to tell you, something’s not right in the file. I’m in crime analysis looking for the scratch—”

“Get your ass back here ASAP. We got a problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

“Come and you’ll find out.” And then he hung up.

VAIL HIGHTAILED IT back to One Police Plaza and arrived ten minutes later—remarkable time, in fact.

But it was too late. When she walked in, the meeting had already adjourned, and she got a cold stare from the commissioner as he was walking back into his office. Kearney did not even bother looking at her.

Only Fonzarella gave her the “courtesy” of a comment. He shook his head and snorted. “You sure know how to make an impression. A bad impression.”

As he pushed past her, Russo emerged, arguing with the deputy com-missioner and chief of detectives. Whatever they were discussing, Russo was losing the battle. Both men walked off and left him standing there, shoulders slumped. He saw Vail down the hall and headed in her direction.

“What’s going on?”

Russo checked over his shoulder, then ushered her toward the steps. They pushed through the metal fire door and stood in the stairwell.

“You shouldn’t have left.”

“But I told—”

“I don’t care how important it was, Karen, you don’t walk out on a meeting with the police commissioner, his deputy, and the chief of detectives.”

“It’s not like they were listening to anything I had to say. It’s clear they wanted Fonzarella running the show.”

“Be that as it may, you have to show them respect.”

Vail leaned back. “I wasn’t disrespecting them. I noticed something in the file, a forged sixty-one, and I thought time was of the essence—”

“Karen, listen to me. You don’t have to convince me of anything. I know that if you left there was a good reason. I know you. They don’t. They know
of
you, through me, because of your … recognitions of valor. But this Hades case is bad, it’s a goddamn demerit on your resume, you hear me?”

“Because we haven’t caught the killer?”

“Yeah, there’s that. And—oh, yeah—he’s killed four people. And now he’s on the press’s radar. This is an A-list high-profile case now, and they don’t think you’re up to the task.”

This is leading somewhere. Do I want to know where?
Vail shifted her weight. “Meaning what?”

Russo set his hand on the gray metal handrail. “I’ve been around the block so I know what’s happening here: they’re handing this case to Fonzarella. You’re still on board, but you’re gonna be marginalized. You’ll be given grunt work, bullshit stuff. Nothing even remotely important.”

She looked at the door and started to reach for the knob. Russo clamped his hand over hers.

“No. You’re not supposed to know what’s going on. I’ve seen it before, and if the brass doesn’t want you in the thick of things, you’re not gonna be in the thick of things. Way it is. And don’t be gettin’ on anyone’s case about it. Because they’ll know it came from me, and I’m already takin’ some heat over this.”

She didn’t need to ask why. Russo had pushed for her promotion to detective and he had pressed for her to take over the Hades case.

Vail dropped her hand from the knob. “Okay.” She took a deep breath. “So what do I do?”

“My advice is to keep a low profile. Do your thing, work the case, don’t stir up any trouble. Be the perfect little detective. And don’t let on to anyone that you know they’re trying to fuck you over. Got it?”

“Yeah.”

“But don’t be surprised when they keep things from you.”

“I’ll keep my eyes and ears open.”

“Stay focused on the main idea: we’re trying to catch this killer. You’re not doing it for the department, or for Carrig or Kearney or Mendoza or Fonzarella. You’re doing it for the innocent people this asshole’s targeting next. You work for the victims.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s get back to the house.” They started descending the stairs. “So what’d you find? A forged sixty-one? And you went back to get the scratch?”

“Right. Checked with crime analysis. But it’s not there.”

Russo stopped midstairs. “Shit.”

“All’s not lost.” Vail grinned. “I keep copies of all my reports. I’ve got ’em back home.”

“Then I suggest we take a ride to Rosedale.”

IT WAS NEARLY two o’clock when Vail and Russo pulled into her drive-way. Deacon’s car was parked at the curb in front of the house, where he had left it the night before.

When they walked in, Vail stopped three steps down the hall—for directly to her left, lying on the living room couch, was Deacon. His hair was a mess and he was on his stomach, left arm draped over the side and resting on the floor.

“Deacon,” Vail said, walking over to the sofa. “Deacon.” She shook his shoulder and he lifted his head, focused on her face, then dropped back to the cushion.

“What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at work?”

She knelt down in front of him and immediately drew back. “Oh, Jesus. You’ve been drinking.” As if she needed proof, to his left on the side of the couch was a garbage pail filled with spent beer cans.

Russo cleared his throat. “I’ll wait outside. Come get me when you—when you’ve got this straightened out.”

The storm door swung closed. Deacon pushed himself erect and he leaned back, his head falling from side to side until he righted it. “What are you doing here? What time is it? Who’s that guy? You having an af—an affffair?”

Vail stood up. “What the hell’s going on, Deacon? Answer my question. Why aren’t you at work?”

He rubbed his eyes. “Called in sick.”

“Again?”

“Guess so.” He tried to stand, thought better of it, and sat back down.

Terrific.

Vail left Deacon and ran upstairs to the third bedroom, where she kept the fireproof box that contained photocopies of her case files. She retrieved the Hades folder and clomped back down the steps. Deacon was still on the couch, his head between his knees, vomiting into the garbage pail.