Thomas Cook - Blood Innocents

“That’s quite enough,” Mr. Tower exclaimed.

Daniels looked thoughtfully at Reardon but said nothing.

“What do you think, Mr. Daniels?” Reardon asked, trying to strike through the wall of lawyers that separated them. Daniels did not appear at all like the spoiled child Langhof had described. He looked confused and a little worried. But more importantly, Reardon sensed that Daniels did know something and wanted to tell him about it.

Daniels stared quietly at Reardon.

“You saw something, didn’t you?” Reardon asked.

“That’s enough!” Mr. Tower exclaimed.

Daniels did not seem to hear Mr. Tower. He continued to stare at Reardon’s face, and for a moment Reardon saw him not as a pampered delinquent, but as a pained young man, barely out of childhood, confronting something dreadful, confronting it fully, for perhaps the first time.

“What was it you saw?” Reardon asked firmly.

Mr. Tower grasped Daniels’ arm. “I think we’d better go, Winthrop.”

Daniels jerked his arm from Mr. Tower’s grasp. “Sit down,” he told him.

“Winthrop, stop it!” Tower said. He remained standing but did not resume his grasp of Daniels’ arm.

Daniels looked at Reardon as if trying to determine something about his character, whether he could be trusted. “Was it in the park?”

“Yes,” Reardon replied. “Two deer were killed.”

“Deer?” Daniels asked with surprise. “Am I a suspect?”

Reardon nodded cautiously. “You might be.”

“You see?” Mr. Tower warned. “You’re a possible suspect.”

Reardon continued. “The deer were killed in the Children’s Zoo. You were near the deer cage only a few minutes after they were killed.”

Mr. Tower looked at Reardon, then at Daniels. “Winthrop, please don’t get yourself any deeper in this. You don’t know how the police operate.”

Daniels continued to look straight into Reardon’s eyes. “I didn’t have anything to do with killing those deer,” he said calmly. “But I may know who did.”

Mr. Tower slumped down in his chair. “That’s it,” he said. “At this point, Winthrop, I would advise you to tell Mr. Reardon everything you know about this case.”

“Thank you, Mr. Tower,” Reardon said politely. He looked at Daniels. “What do you mean, you may know who did?”

“I saw a man with an ax.”

“When?”

“Around three in the morning. Something like that. Maybe a little later. Maybe a little earlier.”

“Go on,” Reardon said.

“I was standing under the Delacorte animal clock. You know, the one where the animal figures turn around when the clock chimes? You go under it to get to the Children’s Zoo.”

Reardon nodded.

“Well, I was standing in that little brick portal, and I saw a man pass me. He was wearing a Parks Department uniform. It was green. It said ‘Parks Department’ on the sleeve.”

Reardon thought of Gilbert Noble. “Was the man you saw black or white?”

“He was white.”

Reardon thought of Harry Bryant. “How big was he, the man in the uniform?”

“Average, I suppose. I’m almost six feet, and he was a lot shorter than me.”

“Did you get a close look at this man?”

“Not at that point,” Daniels said. “But later I got a good look.”

“You saw him again?”

“Yes.”

“How did you happen to see him again?”

“Well, he had only passed me a little while before when I started walking into the park in the same direction.”

“Careful here,” Mr. Tower whispered to Daniels.

“Yes, watch yourself,” Mr. Arington said.

Daniels understood. “I mean, I was just strolling around. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Like a connection, I mean. I wasn’t looking for anything, any person.” Daniels’ fingers began to fidget nervously with the buttons of his shirt.

Reardon nodded. “I’m just interested in what you saw.”

“I mean, the cops say I was going to meet a connection,” blurted Daniels agitatedly. “For the cocaine they say I had.”

“Just go ahead with the story,” Mr. Tower said exasperatedly.

“As far as I’m concerned,” Reardon said, “you were just taking a stroll in the park.”

“Yeah, right,” Daniels said. “A stroll. I strolled up the cement walk that leads from the animal clock to the Children’s Zoo. That’s where I saw the man again. I had a good look at him too. He looked strange. Kind of groggy. He looked so strange that I got a little scared, to tell you the truth. He looked like he was about ready to freak out. He was just leaning there against the deer cage, holding the ax.”

“How did you know it was the deer cage?”

“Because I could see one of the deer peeking out of that tin house where they stay. Then this deer walked out toward the bars right up to the guy, poking its nose against his side, there where he was leaning.”

“What happened then?”

“I just kept looking. Then he turned around and looked at me. But he didn’t seem to see me. He was in a fog or something. Wacked out.”

“Then what?” Reardon asked.

“He took a few steps away from the cage and just seemed to stand there, like he was in another world. Then he took a few more steps. That’s when I got scared. Really scared. I started to walk away. Pretty fast too. I was afraid he was coming after me.”

“Was he?”

“I thought so. So as I was walking, I looked back over my shoulder.”

“And he wasn’t following you?” Reardon asked.

“No. He had turned around again. He was walking away from me.”

“Where was he walking to?”

Daniels smiled. “He was walking back toward the deer cage. He had taken the ax off his shoulder and was dragging it behind him, you know, like a kid would pull a wagon.”

Reardon opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out photographs of Gilbert Noble, Harry Bryant and Andros Petrakis. He laid the photos face up on the table and pushed them across the desk to Daniels. “Have you ever seen any of these men before?” he asked.

Daniels’ face paled. “God, it scares me just looking at him,” he muttered.

“Which one?”

He pointed to the photograph of Andros Petrakis, then stared up at Reardon. He grinned. “Bingo,” he said.

So Harry Bryant had told the truth, Reardon thought, after Daniels and his attorneys had left the precinct house. Petrakis had come to work the night the fallow deer were killed. And Daniels had seen him there, slumped against the deer cage, a peculiar expression on his face, the ax nestled menacingly in his hands.

But Reardon was still no closer to Petrakis than the photograph he had already placed back in the top drawer of his desk. Petrakis and his whole family had vanished, leaving Reardon with nothing more than two conflicting images of the man. The one drawn by Mathesson was easier to understand. Mathesson had portrayed an enraged man, capable of sudden explosions of strength and violence, animated solely by an overwhelming hatred of Wallace Van Allen, who had come to symbolize for Petrakis the utter devastation of his life.

And so Andros Petrakis had killed. He had come at three in the morning from the deathbed of his wife to the Children’s Zoo, where he began that process of revenge which, he believed, would result in the destruction of Wallace Van Allen. He had butchered a fallow deer with fifty-seven blows of an ax and killed the other with a single thrust. But that was only the beginning. He had then acquainted himself with Wallace Van Allen’s holdings in New York. He had picked out an apartment house which belonged to Van Allen, waited patiently in the early hours of the morning, somehow managed to get into the apartment of Lee McDonald and Karen Ortovsky, and had then butchered them in exactly the same manner as the fallow deer.