Tess Gerritsen - The Surgeon

A silhouette moved past the window — a woman’s, slender and long-haired. Very much like Catherine’s.

He saw it now, in his mind’s eye. The young man on the porch, knocking on the front door. The door opening, spilling golden light into the darkness. Catherine standing there, haloed by that light, inviting in the young colleague she knew from the hospital, never suspecting the horrors he had in mind for her.

And the second voice, the second man — where does he come in?

Moore sat for a long time, studying the house, noting the windows and the shrubbery. He stepped out of his car and walked along the sidewalk, to see around the side of the house. The shrubbery was mature and dense, and he could not see past it, into the backyard.

Across the street, a porch light came on.

He turned and saw a stout woman standing at her window, staring at him. She was holding a telephone to her ear.

He got back in his car and drove away. There was one more address he wished to see. It was near the State College, several miles south. He wondered how often Catherine had driven this very road, whether that little pizza shop on the left or that dry-cleaning shop on the right was a place she had frequented. Everywhere he looked, he seemed to see her face, and this disturbed him. It meant he’d allowed his emotions to become entwined in this investigation, and it would serve no one well.

He arrived at the street he’d been looking for. After a few blocks, he stopped at what should have been the address. What he found was merely an empty lot, thick with weeds. He had expected to find a building here, owned by Mrs. Stella Poole, a widow, age fifty-eight. Three years ago, Mrs. Poole had rented out her upstairs apartment to a surgical intern named Andrew Capra, a quiet young man who always paid his rent on time.

He stepped out of his car and stood on the sidewalk where Andrew Capra had surely walked. He gazed up and down the street that had been Capra’s neighborhood. It was only a few blocks from the State College, and he assumed that many of the houses on this street were rented to students — short-term tenants who might not know the story of their infamous neighbor.

A wind stirred the soupy air, and he did not like the smell that arose. It was the damp odor of decay. He looked up at a tree in Andrew Capra’s old front yard and saw a clump of Spanish moss drooping from a branch. He shuddered and thought: Strange fruit , remembering a grotesque Halloween from his childhood, when a neighbor, thinking it a fine display to scare trick-or-treaters, had tied a rope around a scarecrow’s neck and hung it from a tree. Moore’s father had been livid when he saw it. Immediately he’d stormed next door and, ignoring the protests of the neighbor, cut down the scarecrow.

Moore felt the same impulse now, to climb into the tree and yank down that dangling moss.

Instead he returned to his car and drove back to the hotel.

Detective Mark Singer set a carton on the table and clapped dust from his hands. “This is the last one. Took us the weekend to track ’em down, but they’re all here.”

Moore eyed the dozen evidence boxes lined up on the table and said, “I should bring a sleeping bag and just move in.”

Singer laughed. “Might as well, if you expect to get through every piece of paper in those there boxes. Nothin’ leaves the building, okay? Photocopier’s down the hall; just log in your name and agency. Bathroom’s thataway. Most times, there’ll be doughnuts and coffee in the squad room. If you take any doughnuts, the boys’d surely ‘preciate it if you’d slip a few bucks in the jar.” Though all this was said with a smile, Moore heard the underlying message in that soft southern drawl: We have our ground rules, and even you big boys from Boston have to follow them.

Catherine had not liked this cop, and Moore understood why. Singer was younger than he’d expected, not yet forty, a muscular overachiever who would not take kindly to criticism. There can be only one alpha dog in a pack, and for the moment Moore would let Singer be that dog.

“These here four boxes, they hold the investigation control files,” said Singer. “Might want to start with ’em. Cross-index files’re in that box, action files are in this one here.” He walked along the table, slapping boxes as he spoke. “And this has the Atlanta files on Dora Ciccone. It’s just photocopies.”

“Atlanta PD has those originals?”

Singer nodded. “First victim, only one he killed there.”

“Since they’re photocopies, may I take that box out? Review the documents in my hotel?”

“Long as you bring ’em back.” Singer sighed, looking around at the boxes. “Y’know, I’m not sure what you think you’re lookin’ for. Never get a more open-and-shut case. Every one of them, we got Capra’s DNA. We got fiber matches. We got the timeline. Capra’s living in Atlanta, Dora Ciccone gets killed in Atlanta. He moves to Savannah, our ladies here start turning up dead. He was always in the right place, at the right time.”

“I don’t question for a minute that Capra was your man.”

“So why you diggin’ through this now? Some of this stuff is three, four years old.”

Moore heard defensiveness in Singer’s voice and knew diplomacy was key here. Any hint that Singer had made mistakes during the Capra investigation, that he’d missed the vital detail that Capra had a partner, and there’d be no hope of cooperation from the Savannah PD.

Moore chose an answer that would in no way cast blame. “We have a copycat theory,” he said. “Our unsub in Boston appears to be an admirer of Capra’s. He’s reproducing his crimes in painstaking detail.”

“How would he know the details?”

“They may have corresponded while Capra was still alive.”

Singer seemed to relax. Even laughed. “A sick fucker’s fan club, huh? Nice.”

“Since our unsub is intimately familiar with Capra’s work, I need to be, as well.”

Singer waved at the table. “Y’all go for it, then.”

After Singer had left the room, Moore surveyed the labels on the evidence boxes. He opened the one marked: IC #1 . The Savannah Investigation Control Files. Inside were three accordion file folders, each pocket filled to capacity. And this was just one of four IC boxes. The first accordion folder contained the occurrence reports for the three Savannah attacks, witness statements, and executed warrants. The second accordion folder held suspects files, criminal record checks, and lab reports. There was enough, just in this first box, to keep him reading all day.

And there were eleven more boxes to go.

He started by reviewing Singer’s final summary. Once again he was struck by how airtight the evidence was against Andrew Capra. There were a total of five attacks on record, four of them fatal. The first victim was Dora Ciccone, killed in Atlanta. One year later, the murders began in Savannah. Three women in one year: Lisa Fox, Ruth Voorhees, and Jennifer Torregrossa.

The killings ended when Capra was shot to death in Catherine Cordell’s bedroom.

In every case, sperm was found in the victim’s vaginal vault and the DNA matched Capra’s. Hair strands left at the Fox and Torregrossa crime scenes matched Capra’s. The first victim, Ciccone, was killed in Atlanta the same year Capra was finishing his final year of medical school in Atlanta’s Emory University.

The murders followed Capra to Savannah.

Every thread of evidence wove neatly into a tight pattern, and the fabric appeared indestructible. But Moore realized he was reading only a case summary, which pulled together the elements in favor of Singer’s conclusions. Contradictory details might be left out. It was these very details, the small but significant inconsistencies, that he hoped to ferret out of these evidence boxes. Somewhere in here, he thought, the Surgeon has left his footprints.