The Judas Child (18 page)

“We don’t need that,” said Rouge. “The dirt samples went to a soil expert at the university.”

“And they don’t have a botanist on the faculty?”

“The captain says he has a local man coming in. He doesn’t want any press leaks on this.”

“So he told me—
three
times.” Chainy adjusted his lens as he peered through the eyepiece. “Wouldn’t it be simpler to just hand everything over to the FBI? They have the world’s best forensic lab—one-stop shopping.”

“It’s not their case
yet
,” said Captain Costello’s voice as he walked up behind them.

Dr. Chainy jumped. “Jesus, Leonard. Give a man some warning.” He bent over his scope again. “So I hear you’re playing keepaway with the feds.”

“I don’t remember inviting them to the party.” Costello handed a sheaf of faxes to Rouge. “That’s the analysis from the university. The soil in the lining—”

He broke off as the door swung open, and a thin old man with gold-rimmed glasses appeared beside a uniformed escort. Costello nodded a dismissal to the state trooper, and now the white-haired civilian stood alone on the threshold, hesitating, unsure of his coming or going. Rouge was shocked to recognize Dr. Mortimer Cray. The reclusive psychiatrist was not a common sight around town, and years had passed since they had seen one another. The changes in the old man were great. He was still well dressed, but not well fed, too slender to be in good health. Rouge remembered him with more authority in the way he carried himself. Just now, the old man moved like a thief, taking tentative steps into the room, testing the atmosphere.

“Dr. Cray?” Costello moved toward him.

The psychiatrist nodded as the captain extended his hand in a greeting. Mortimer Cray shook the hand gingerly, as though it might conceal a weapon.

“I’m Captain Costello. This is one of my investigators, Rouge Kendall.”

The old man nodded to Rouge, as though meeting him for the first time.

“Thanks for coming over so quickly,” said Costello. “I have a problem, Dr. Cray. You’re a psychiatrist, right? No problems with keeping secrets?”

Did Dr. Cray seem a little paler now? He did, and wary too, for the man’s eyes were darting from face to face in hopes of discovering something. Rouge looked at his captain and realized that Costello had also picked up on this and found it interesting.

The captain’s attitude altered slightly, eyes narrowing, smile broadening. “It’s about the missing girls, sir. I think you can give us information.”

A good shot by Costello. Mortimer Cray’s arms were limp at his side, but his hands were not still; they opened and closed like the mouths of air-stranded fish. And the psychiatrist’s stance was just a hair off balance.

Rouge knew the police made some people a little shaky under the best of circumstances; it might be only that. But the rich walked about with lawyers in their pockets, and they never seemed so rattled as the poor. This man was stiffening now. Bracing for a blow?

Costello held out the plastic bag bearing the remains of the dark fungus clotted with soil. “We found a jacket that belonged to one of the kids, and this was in the torn lining. Your niece tells me you’re a closet botanist.”

Dr. Cray stared at the bag, and Rouge wondered if the man held his breath. He seemed confused, and Rouge decided that this confrontation with a fungus was far from what he had expected.

“What can you tell me about it, sir?” Costello held the bag up, and his eyes were suddenly very bright. The captain’s grin was inappropriate and unnerving.

Medical Examiner Howard Chainy looked up from his microscope and rolled his eyes to heaven. “What’s the world come to, Leonard? You got me doing an autopsy on a damn fungus, and now you want a psychiatrist to analyze it?”

“A macrofungus, actually,” said Mortimer Cray, peering at the bag through thick bifocals. “It’s a truffle.”

Did the man seem relieved? The stiffening of his body passed off like premature rigor mortis, and his stance was more relaxed.

“I need to know where this came from,” said Costello. Ambiguity suggested the truffle might belong to the psychiatrist.

“May I taste it?” Mortimer Cray was not picking up on the captain’s implication. He was only scrutinizing the fungus. “It looks like a Black Diamond, but the Chinese have a similar species. The taste would tell me where it came from.”

Costello nodded to Chainy. The medical examiner sliced off a small section of the truffle and handed it to the psychiatrist, saying, “
Fine
. Now I’m serving fast food.”

Mortimer Cray placed the slice on his tongue, as if it were a Communion wafer, and savored it for a moment. “It’s the real article, a Black Diamond. Tuber melanosporin. It comes from the Quercy and Périgord regions of France. Also the Umbria—”

“Any local growers?”

“Commercial cultivation? Here? Not likely, Captain. They only grow in the wild, usually in the vicinity—”

“Oh, really?” Captain Costello took the faxes from Rouge’s hand. “I got a report here that says there’s fertilizer in the soil sample we scraped off that truffle. And we got another sample from the lining of the jacket.”

Dr. Cray gave no indication that he had been trapped in a lie. “There
are
experiments going on in states with more compatible soil and climate—Texas, Oregon, Washington. But nothing local, and it’s only experimental—nothing on a commercial scale.”

Costello turned to the medical examiner. “The kid’s jacket was found early this morning. Last night temperatures dropped to below freezing. Now that thing was in the lining. Can you tell me if it’s been frozen?”

“Oh, hell, Leonard,” said Dr. Chainy, slightly annoyed. “I don’t need a microscope to see that it’s never been frozen. It’s still firm, just like a fresh mushroom. Ever see a frozen one? All squishy and brown?”

“I agree.” Mortimer Cray picked up the specimen bag and probed the truffle through the plastic. “Very firm, very fresh. And you see this marbling? That would have disappeared if it had been frozen.”

Costello moved toward Mortimer Cray. Rouge decided the game was still on as the captain crowded the other man’s personal space. “Now what kind of operation do you need to grow truffles indoors?” This was not a polite question; it was a demand.

“It can’t be done.” The psychiatrist backed away from Costello and pushed his glasses back up the length of his nose. Small beads of sweat had made the frames slippery. “Not unless you want to grow a tree in the house. You need a symbiotic relationship to—”

“See this report?” Costello waved the faxes and raised his voice, almost combative. “I’ve got a slew of bacteria here that thrive at high temperatures. That puts the truffle in a greenhouse, or at least indoors. And I’ve got a long list of crap under the heading ‘unique to local soil.’ So it’s a good bet the kid’s jacket hasn’t been traveling west of the Mississippi. That and the fertilizer tells me I’ve got a truffle factory in the neighborhood.”

“Very unlikely,” said the psychiatrist, less sure of himself, more defensive now. “The truffles only grow with the roots of oak trees. You have to grow the tree specifically for that purpose, so the roots won’t be contaminated. It takes seven years to develop a symbiotic relationship between the tree root and the truffle.”

“It was grown indoors,” said the captain.

“Because of the bacteria and the fertilizer? No, the most likely scenario is that the truffle was dropped in a greenhouse or a potted plant. You might check with mushroom importers and—”

Costello took back the plastic evidence bag and held it up to the psychiatrist’s face. “When this goes to the FBI lab, I’ll tell them to look into the greenhouse theory.” His words had a mildly threatening quality. “You have quite a greenhouse, don’t you, sir? Your niece tells me it’s better equipped than the average commercial outfit.”

And this sounded like an accusation.

“I assure you I am not growing truffles in—”

“Oh, did I suggest that? I’m sorry.”

Rouge thought the captain’s apology sounded pointedly insincere.

“I want to know if you have any connections to people who do this kind of thing,” said Costello. “This
experimenting.
Has anyone, anywhere,
ever
grown truffles indoors?”

“Only the North American strains. They’re ghastly. You never want to taste one. Any experiments on the Black Diamond would be proprietary information—not available to the public.”

“So somewhere, it
is
going on.”

“I’ve only heard of one experiment under greenhouse conditions. The fungus produced
without
the oak root had the DNA of a truffle, but not the taste. I assure you, this one was not grown indoors. It has the full-bodied taste of a Black Diamond. It was most certainly grown in symbiosis with the roots of an oak tree.” The doctor was regaining his authority now, almost indignant. “And you can’t grow a full-sized oak tree indoors.”

Dr. Chainy pushed his chair back from the desk, apparently deciding that he was wasting his time at the microscope. “Well, I have an atrium in the house—right in the middle of the damn house. With that twenty-foot skylight, I guess I could plant a tree if I wanted to.”

Mortimer Cray shook his head, as though Howard Chainy were an insane patient. “The root system would tear up the foundation of your house. And you can’t produce a truffle in less than seven years. Even a twenty-foot ceiling is not sufficient for a full-grown oak. Do you know how big that tree would be?”

Captain Costello turned to Rouge. “I want photographs from the tax assessor’s office. We might be able to find an atrium in the aerial shots.”

He turned on Mortimer Cray. “Doctor, if you had a very sick patient with an atrium in his house, would you tell me?”

Costello let that remark waft around for a while, but it produced no effect on Mortimer Cray. The response was an unspoken
no
.

Now there was a trace of contempt in Costello’s voice. “How deep in the ground do truffles grow, Dr. Cray?”

The old man stared at the bagged fungus which had been found in a little girl’s jacket. In his face was the sudden realization that Costello was asking him to determine the possible depth of a child’s grave.

“Six to eight inches below the surface.”

A shallow grave.

The captain’s voice changed gears into light diplomacy as he said, “Well, thank you for coming in, sir.” With an air of dismissal, he turned his back on the old man and spoke to Rouge. “I got the paperwork back on the pervert. I know it’s late, but I wanna go over it with you before you leave.”

Rouge noted a stretch to Mortimer Cray’s neck, attenuating to a cocked ear. But Captain Costello did not elaborate to satisfy the man’s curiosity. When the captain turned back to Dr. Cray, he pretended surprise to see the psychiatrist still standing there. He extended his hand, saying, “Thank you again, sir. Would you like me to call someone to escort you back to—”

“I can find the way, thank you.” But it was clearly with some regret that the doctor was leaving the room and passing into the hallway.

Through the open door, Costello called out, “Oh, Dr. Cray? Those little kids are in deep trouble, sir. So you’re not gonna warn this bastard, are you?”

Mortimer Cray turned to stare at the captain, and then the door swung shut, blotting out the old man’s startled face.

 

There was very little traffic in the squad room. The best-trusted investigators were chasing down importers of truffles and mushrooms, and others were visiting sites from the aerial photographs. Two of his people were watching the psychiatrist’s house, noting who came to visit. Captain Costello had wanted a wiretap on Mortimer Cray’s phone, but two judges had turned him down cold, forbidding him to violate the doctor-patient confidentiality of telephone consultations.

The captain stood in the open doorway of the private office and looked out over the wide expanse of empty chairs and blank computers. Only Marge Jonas’s screen was alive with blue light and scrolling text. As she sat typing at the keyboard, she looked up for a moment to smile at him, a reward for playing nicely with her pet cop. Rouge Kendall was seated by the office window, engrossed in a file on Gerald Beckerman, the teacher from St. Ursula’s Academy.

Costello returned to his desk and lowered his tired body into a well-padded leather chair. He pulled a brown paper bag from the lower desk drawer and opened it to set out a recently purchased bottle and two small paper cups the size of shot glasses. Did he need to ask if Rouge wanted a drink, or could he put that much faith in the IA reports from Dame’s Tavern? He wasn’t sure. So this little exercise with the whiskey bottle was more in the nature of a science experiment than a social gesture.

The rookie investigator put up no fight, no protest, but neither did he act like a lush in need of a drink at the end of a long shift. He picked up his paper cup and sipped the golden vintage liquid, which might as well have been water for all this young cop cared.

The captain decided that the boy drank because he wanted to, and not because of a physical craving. He well understood the anesthetic effects of alcohol.

“I’ll save you some time,” said Costello, interrupting Rouge’s reading. “There’s no record on Beckerman in the States. But the Canadians want a few words with him.” The captain leaned over to tap the file Rouge was holding. “Check out the back sheet. Smart little bastard was working his shit in a summer camp over the border. Screening services don’t usually check outside the country. That’s why the school had nothing on him.”

Rouge scanned this final sheet. “A rich Ivy League graduate working as a summer camp counselor? That’s minimum wage. Why didn’t they—”

“He didn’t put that down when he applied for the job, and that was smart. That’s when the bells go off. The camp was a little mom-and-pop operation—no screening, and they paid him in cash. They didn’t even know he was a U.S. citizen.”