"So what'd it look like," Abbott asked. He was standing in the doorway of Noah Bain's and Zev Overpeck's office with a sheaf of papers in one hand and a pencil in the other. His shirttail was coming out a little in the back and a frail lock of his thinning sandy hair was sagging over his forehead. He had just come form seeing the captain and had walked back into his office when he saw Noah and Overpeck come into the squad room. Never taking his eyes off them, he had walked around the plate-glass window behind his desk and out the office door. Ignoring the squad room confusion, he followed them around the noisy, narrow aisle that circled the island of cubicles in the middle of the homicide division to their office, one of the many small, windowless compartments which lined the walls like computer-equipped monks' cells in a high-tech monastery.570Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡkO0GGjhfn0
"It looked like we'd seen it before," Noah said, sitting down and pushing off his shoes.
"I'll be fucked," Abbot said, and his long face, which always took on the hollow features of a mendicant by the end of the day, registered a respectful surprise. "I didn't believe him. Yung called in and said he thought he had something like the San Felipe case you guys had caught. Wanted you to come out and look at it."
"Well, he'd been doing his homework," Overpeck said, "because that's exactly what we had."
"Where is he?" Abbot looked at his watch.
"The morgue."
He looked at Noah. "You got time to tell me about it right now?"
"Sure," Noah said, wishing he had stopped by the men's room to wash up.
Abbot stepped outside and grabbed a worn-out typist's chair that was sitting at a vacant desk in the squad room and dragged it into the cubicle. He closed the door, put is paper on the side of Overpeck's desk, slipped the pencil behind his ear and sat down in the wobbly chair.
As Noah walked him through it, Abbot listened attentively, nodding, interjecting a question occasionally, shaking his head at the description of Dowey's wounds, frowning at the contents of the bureau drawer. But mostly Abbot just looked at him. He had no habits, not gum or cigarettes or coffee or hard candy, and when he listened to you he didn't fiddle with anything, sip anything, or doodle on paper with his pencil. He just listened, no frills or entertaining nervous tics. He was a good lieutenant. He liked his job and liked his men and had a natural talent for managing detectives. he didn't have any enemies up the ladder or down the ladder and everyone who worked with him felt they could trust both his judgement and his word. He talked straight and didn't play games. You always knew where you stood with him.
When Noah finished, Abbot sat a moment, nodding, looking at him, thinking. "A married woman and a single woman," he said. "Besides the M.O. what are the victim similarities?"
The phone rang and Noah picked it up. It was one of the patrolmen who had gone to Stanley Needham's address. Needham no longer lived there, and the older couple who did said they had bought the place from Needham nearly six months ago. They didn't know where he was now or how to get in touch with him.
"Geography," Overpeck said. "They lived about a mile or so from each other. Social background. Dowey is a college-educated professional who had to be pulling down some bucks to afford that condo."
"Age?"
"San Felipe was thirty-four," John said. "Dowey's driver's license said thirty-eight. They both were blond."
"That's good," Abbot said, brightening. "If they were random targets that could be important. And it's good that they were low-risk victims. Maybe we won't have all this complicated by prostitutes."
"But that's about all," Overpeck said. "At least as far as we know at this point."
Overpeck's telephone rang next. He spoke briefly and hung up. "That was Pittman. The autopsy's over, and they're on their way in."
Abbot nodded slowly, thinking. He looked at his watch. They can make it in fifteen minutes. When they get here let's meet in my office. We'll just lay everything out and see where we are." He looked at Noah. "You've talked it over with them? You're going to work the cases together?"
"Sure," Noah said. "We haven't worked out the details, but we've agreed to it."
Abbot looked at him. "This case could attract a lot of heat, a lot of media. Unless we're incredibly lucky it could take a while. Are you and Yung going to be able to stay away from each other's throats?" It was a blunt question, but Abbot had characteristically gone right to the heart of it. If Noah hadn't made peace with Yung, now was the time to get it out in the open.
"I think we've come to some kind of understanding," Noah said. "I don't anticipate any problems." He would have said the same thing about working with Satan. He wanted to be on this case, and he wasn't going to let a question like that bump him off this early in the investigation. If it was necessary, he would deal with Yung when the time came. Right now he wasn't his big concern.
"Fine," Abbot said. He got his papers off Overpeck's desk. "Gimme a buzz when you're ready." He pushed the typist's chair out of the office ahead of him and left it in the squad room where he had found it.
Overpeck looked at Noah. "Jesus. I'm glad to hear you don't anticipate any trouble."
"I know," said Noah. "What was I supposed to say?"
"Want some coffee?"
Noah shook his head. "I think I'll wash up and get a glass of water."
In the rest room Noah slicked back what remained of his hair with a fine-toothed plastic comb, took of his Timex watch, and began washing his hands and arms up to the elbows with soap and cold water. Then he washed his face, rising repeatedly, splashing a little of it on the back of his neck until he began to feel his body heat subside and the tension ease in his shoulders. He dried unhurriedly, being careful with the rough brown paper towel from the dispenser. He looked at himself in the mirror above the sink. Slowly he raised one hand and gently touched a middle finger to the carotid artery to one side of her neck. When he found a pulse he lay the thumb of the same hand on the carotid artery of the other side. He stood a moment, feeling the regular, rushing pulse against her fingertips, and then he tried to imagine his freshly washed face without eyelids. It was easy to do. That done, he returned to the squad room.
By the time Noah got his glass of water and walked into the office, Overpeck was already at the computer typing up his portion of the report. Without further conversation, he came down at his desk, flipped on his own screen, and set to work.
The meeting in Abbot's office came at the end of the day when a blood sugar and energy were ebbing and everybody would rather have been someplace else. Abbot's office was a large one in a corner in the big squad room. It had two other metal desks beside his own and a number of chairs scattered around. It was often used as a bullshit-session room, and because of the cramped accommodations in the homicide division the other two desks were variously occupied from time to time by other lieutenants. But when one of them needed it to talk with his men, the others found someplace else to go.
Abbot sat behind his desk and at his back the plate-glass window of the office looked out into the squad room. The four detectives sat in chairs around Abbot, using the corners of the other desks for their files and coffee cups and soft-drink cans. Pittman, who didn't like autopsies but watched every minute that Yung watched----and Yung usually watched them from the first incision to the last suture like a bored kid glued to the fifty-fifth return of a TV horror movie----nursed a plastic glass of water with a couple of Alka-Seltzer tablets churning in the surface. He didn't toss it right down, but sipped it like a martini. Yung, looking like he wanted a real drink, had the ankle of one leg propped on the knee of the other and was wagging his foot nervously, absentmindedly, his tie loosened and the collar of his black shirt unbuttoned and open. Overpeck was eating one of the cafeteria's old doughnuts ion which the glaze had melted to make a soggy surface around the doughnut's tough core. Noah wondered what the long-term effect must've been on his health. He had had one every afternoon around this time, with a bad cup of coffee, for years.
At Abbot's request, Noah opened the meeting by quickly reviewing the San Felipe case while passing around the photographs from the crime scene. He pointed out the similarities that they had seen that morning with Dowey and noted that he was going back through the San Felipe file before the meeting he realized that both women had been killed on the same day of the week, Thursday. Then he reviewed what they knew so far in the Dowey case, his interview with Burr, what he and Overpeck had found in Dowey's condo.
When he finished, Yung went over the results of Dowey's autopsy.
"The cause of death was ligature strangulation." Yung began unbuttoning his shirt sleeves and rolling them up while he read from his notebook propped on his crossed legs. "Collins compared the furrows with the one on San Felipe and got a perfect match. They weren't all that pronounced, which Collins says could indicate the thing was removed as soon as she died. The cartilage in the larynx and trachea was crushed, hell of a lot more than was necessary to kill her."
Yung constantly shifted in his chair, the snug crotch of his gigolo's pants causing him discomfort. The police department chairs weren't designed for being cool, naturally. Noah found it amusing to watch him squirm.
"Temperature in the condo screwed up the time-of-death indicators," he continued, his words coming out in a singsong fashion from a long sigh. "And because she was naked, she chilled down even quicker. Collins can only call it between three days and a week. But," Yung held up an open hand and looked at Abbot, "we should be able to narrow that down. She'd had a pepperoni and green olive pizza which had just about run its course in her stomach. Todd says he remembers a pizza box in the kitchen trash. Maybe we can nail down when it was delivered, or when she picked it up."
Yung flipped through the pages of his notebook. "We got swabs and smears on the way to the lab as well as found hair and pubic combings. Collins found cotton fibers in her mouth, like from a bath towel, guessing maybe she'd been gagged. We need to check these against the towels in her clothes hamper. Her vagina had been roughed up, bruised, but not torn. Collins says maybe a dildo. He also said that from the looks of the scar tissue in there she had a history of rough treatment. Same thing in her anus, and weak muscle tissue there, too. It says she'd have to have been into some pretty nasty stuff to get that kind of treatment."
"Aside from the recent damage, did he have any idea how old those scars were?" Noah asked. "Years?"
"He didn't say."
Noah made a note, and Yung watched him before he continued.
"The wounds," he paused for emphasis, were antemortem. Nipples and eyelids had been removed with clean cuts, but the eyelid wounds were actually several smooth cuts instead. of one single uninterrupted cut like it would have been if you held it up and ran a knife along it. He's guessing scissors. Snip, snip, snip for each eyelid." Yung used the forefinger and thumb of his left hand to simulated grasping a nipple and stretching it up from a breast while the same fingers of his right hand became scissors. "Snip. Snip. One for each nipple.
"Bite marks. Vicki San Felipe had nine, six on the breasts, three just above her pubic hair. Dowey got sixteen, five around the breasts, couple around the navel, three on her right inner thigh, two on the left thigh, and the rest around the pubic area----a couple actually in the hair. These were pretty bad, with suck marks on them. Collins said they were also antemortem and were made slowly, not in the heat of struggle as if the teeth had been used as a subduing 'tool.'"
Yung closed his notebook and sat back in his chair, trying to tug unobtrusively at his crawling pants legs.
"Aren't the bite marks excessive?" Noah asked, looking at Overpeck. "I mean, a lot of them?"
"That's a lot," Overpeck acknowledged, swallowing the last wad of doughnut. "A few times I've seen a hell of a lot more, but not that often. Most of the time, it seems, you know, there're less. I mean, sixteen. The guy was really going after it."
"What about the severity of them?" Abbot asked. He had been listening with unwavering concentration. "Did most of them penetrate the skin, or what?"
"Yeah," Yung nodded quickly. "As a matter of fact, they did. About half of them went right through. Once, just inside the parameter of pubic hair at the top, he damn near took a mouthful out of her. Both upper and lower teeth penetrated, and embedded pubic hair into the wound."
Abbot grimaced.
Pittman sipped his water, which was losing some of its fizz.
"The bites around the navel," Noah said. "Did Collins remark on those?"
Yung seemed to be a little irritated that Noah had picked up on that, but he went into it. If he was inclined to hold out on him, he couldn't while Pittman was around. It was the work Yung did alone that Noah worried about.
"Um, yeah, as a matter of fact he did," Yung said, wrinkling his eyebrows as if just remembering. "They were placed just right so that they made a complete circle around her navel. Looked like he did it deliberately. You know, put his teeth around it in a certain way. Also, it was the bite wound with the severest sucking evidence. He really went to work on her belly button, like he was trying to suck it out of there."
"Christ!" Overpeck said.
Noah imagined that: the man, naked, bent over Dowey's nude outstretched body, sucking on her navel. It must have felt like he was trying to empty her body through her stomach, suck her dry like a spider feeding on a live insect. It was an image he would not forget.
"What about the conditions of her face?" Overpeck asked.
"Right." Yung nodded. "Yeah, she was in a bad shape, jaw busted in two places, nose broken, a tooth chipped, a fractured cheekbone, a fractured eye socket."
"Which one?" Noah asked.
"Um," Yung referred to the report, "her right one."
"Could he tell what she'd been hit with? Fists?"
"As a matter of fact, he didn't think so. Maybe something rounded and covered with padding. He didn't see any serious abrasions or evidence of a sharp edge. Something blunt and padded."
It was clear to all of them that the intensity of the killings, if they continued, was likely to follow an accelerating pattern. It was a grim prospect.
"Dowey's photographs will be ready in the morning?" Abbot asked.
Overpeck nodded. "They'll get 'em up here tonight, probably."
"Okay." Abbot was thinking, looking at Overpeck. "Shit," he said, turning his chair sideways to his desk and throwing a look out into the squad room. He thought about it, ignoring them in his silence, and then said, "Okay, I'm not going to expand this thing. I'm going to let the four of you go after it. Put all your other cases on the back burner and concentrate on getting a handle as soon as you can. I'll go to the captain when we go through here and tell him what we've got and that I'm going to put the four of your on all the overtime you can handle. That'll piss them off in the chief's office, but if this thing gets away from us, gets out of control, the bad P.R. would be worse for the department than a drain on operating funds."
He looked at each of them. "First things first. How do you want to proceed?"
After a brief discussion they agreed to have one of the evening-shift teams follow through with trying to locate Stanley Needham.
"If they find him," Noah said, "I want them to call me. I don't care what time it is. I'd like a little time with him before a lawyer gets in on it."
Abbot looked at him, and he could see him trying to assess her request. After one moment he nodded without saying anything. He raked his eyes across Yung, who was trying to decide what she was up to and whether or not he should be there too.
They decided Yung and would follow up with Dowey's associates at TechCube, including Geoffrey Stewart, and try to find Willard somebody, somebody Hogan, Curtis somebody, and somebody Pristino, the bank president. Yung and Pittman would make another call on Nolie Burr after she had calmed down and would talk again with Toby San Felipe. They would also canvass the neighborhood and check into the question of the time of the pizza delivery, and make a more thorough check of the house.
"One other thing," Noah said. He was really stepping out in front on this one. Abbot looked at him again. "I want to get an FBI criminal personality profile on both of these. I've got everything I'll need for San Felipe----our case report, the photographs, the autopsy protocol and lab reports----and by tomorrow morning I'll have Dowey's photographs. I can pull together a case report. And I'll do the VICAP report for both of them too. If any cases ever justified it, these do."
Abbot raised his eyebrows in shocked approval. "Good,' he said. "This guy sure as hell qualifies for a psychological analysis. Fine, go ahead." He looked around at each of them. "I want you to pull out the stops on this one. I'm going to be glued to your supplements, and I want you to feed them to me often. No big lag times. After I brief the captain on this he's going to be on my tail for updates, and I don't want to be empty-handed. What comes down, goes down. So help me out!"570Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡmISLcVmIDM
