Thomas Cook - Blood Innocents

An investigation showed that the teacher, Randolph Devereaux, had repeatedly attacked Kevin Dowd in class, often reducing him to tears. On one occasion Devereaux had forced the boy to stand at the front of the room with his arms outstretched, holding two heavy books in each hand. This had lasted for several minutes until the boy’s arms had collapsed from the strain.

Two weeks later Reardon went to Devereaux’s apartment and introduced himself as a detective from the New York City Police Department. Reardon would always remember how Devereaux’s body had suddenly slumped, every feature of his face sinking downward, and how he had sounded almost relieved when he’d said, “You must be looking for the ears.”

A one-in-a-million chance, thought Reardon, just like Gustave Lamprey.

Whatever fame Reardon had in the New York City Police Department rested in part on the Lamprey case.

While still a uniformed patrolman Reardon had been called to a disturbance in a movie theater in Chinatown. A young man had made a nuisance of himself by continually shouting obscenities at the characters on the screen. Several people in the theater had unsuccessfully attempted to quiet him. Finally an usher was called and when he told Lamprey that he would either have to keep quiet or leave the theater, Lamprey pulled a machete. “I don’t speak Chinese,” he said to the usher, even though the usher had addressed him in English.

The usher quickly apologized for disturbing Lamprey, excused himself, and walked briskly back to the lobby of the theater and called the police.

Reardon and another patrolman, Harry Flynn, arrived at the theater lobby ten minutes later. The usher escorted them down the aisle and pointed to the back of Lamprey’s head. Reardon told Flynn to cover him from behind and cautiously descended the aisle toward Lamprey. As if warned by some private guardian, Lamprey shot out of his seat just as Reardon reached the row where he was sitting. He turned and faced Reardon, not more than four feet away.

Lamprey was very tall, thin and straight as an icepick, with bright, searching eyes. But the thing that Reardon would remember most was that he wore an unusual metal ring shaped into a dragon’s head. The eyes of the dragon were enormous, grotesquely disproportionate with the head, and they were made of deep red glass, the deepest red that Reardon had ever seen. The hand wearing the ring carried a wicked-looking machete.

“Mister,” Reardon said, “there’s another policeman behind you and he’s pointing a pistol right at your head.”

“I don’t speak Chinese,” Lamprey said.

“I’m talking to you in English,” Reardon said. “Now I want you to put your hands behind your head and move very slowly toward me and into this aisle.”

Lamprey cocked his head as if receiving instructions from some invisible force. Then he smiled at Reardon and complied.

Gustave Lamprey was booked for disorderly conduct and possession of a concealed weapon, and Reardon did not expect to ever hear of him again. But almost twenty years later he did.

It was in the summer and he was examining a corpse found on a tenement roof. The body had been deposited on the roof and left there to bake in the hot July sun. It was bloated, blackened, nude except for a pair of socks. It lay on its back, legs together, arms stretched perpendicular to the trunk like the spread wings of a fallen bird. There was nothing unusual except for tiny bits of red glass which had been ground almost to a powder and sprinkled ceremoniously over the dead man’s chest. It was the color of the glass which drew Reardon’s attention. It was not just red, but deep red, and Reardon could not recall where he had seen that color before, if he ever had. He stared at the body for a while, knowing that something was familiar about it, but he could not tell what.

He walked down the stairs to the street, and as he neared the entrance of the building he glanced at the nameplates on the mailboxes. One of them brought the colored glass into rigid focus in his mind. It was printed neatly in black type: “Institute for Chinese Studies – Gustave Lamprey, Director.”

And it was that chance connection – the vague familiarity of the deep red color of glass, and the sudden memory from twenty years before of the minor arrest of a man with an odd name and an obsession with things Chinese – that had led Reardon to a chain of evidence and an airtight case that had made him famous among his peers.

A one-in-a-million chance, Reardon thought again. He did not believe that any sudden revelations would come forth to solve the case of the fallow deer. It was, he knew, the more mundane details that broke a case, or incriminating evidence left at the scene, or obvious motive, or, better yet, eyewitnesses. In the deer case there was none of these. There was only the crime itself, its brutal details, and a floating cryptogram of numbers: fifty-seven, one, two.

When he arrived at the precinct house on Monday morning Reardon was informed that the weapon thought to have been used in the killing of the fallow deer had been discovered. It was Piccolini who told him, a delighted smile decorating his face. Even his office seemed to have taken on an airiness Reardon had never noticed.

“Who found it?” Reardon asked.

“Trash detail.”

“Where’d they find it?”

“In a sewer under Fifth Avenue.”

“Fifth Avenue?” Reardon was surprised. “I expected the killer to head out through the park, not on to Fifth Avenue.”

“Yeah,” Piccolini said, “me too. But maybe we’re dealing with a guy who’s not too sophisticated. A nut.” Piccolini smiled. “I think we’ve got him. If he was crazy enough to run up on Fifth Avenue, then he’s crazy enough to have left his fingerprints. The lab’s checking for ’em now.”

“What was the weapon?” Reardon asked.

“A double-edged ax. But there’s more than that. It was a Parks Department ax. Had ‘Property of New York City’ written on it!”

Petrakis, Reardon thought. “I’m going to put out an all-points bulletin on Andros Petrakis,” he said.

“He shouldn’t be hard to find,” Piccolini said. “A person at loose ends like that, crazy and all, he’ll leave a trail a blind man could follow. We’ll have him in custody by the end of the week.”

“Unless the ax points to someone else.”

“Not likely. He hated Van Allen and so he took a Parks Department ax and killed those deer to get even.” Piccolini smiled. “He should have known that nobody gets even with a guy like Wallace Van Allen. Nobody. No way.”

“Have the Van Allens been told about the ax?” Reardon asked.

“For sure. They get a daily report on the case.”

“Well, hold back a few details for Christ’s sake,” Reardon said irritably. “I mean, this is a criminal investigation. You need to hold back some details.”

Piccolini looked up. “Look, I know what I’m doing in this case. And we’re going to break this case. And it’s going to stick. Personally, I think we’ve got our man, and that’s all there is to it. This thing will be wrapped up by the end of the week.”

“What about the women?” Reardon asked.

Piccolini looked at Reardon quizzically. “What women?”

“The women in the Village.”

“Oh,” Piccolini said, “those women. Well, I don’t know. Probably no connection there.”

“I think there is,” Reardon said, convincing himself of it.

Piccolini looked at Reardon scornfully. “You know, you’re really somethin’, John. At first you didn’t think there was a connection. No reason, you just didn’t think so. Now you think there is. Do you have a reason?”

“Only what you know.”