Douglas Preston - Two Graves

One thing D’Agosta had learned about meetings like this was to create a little bit of drama by saving the best for last, knowing this would keep everyone awake and paying attention. And in this case, the best was Warsaw, the video geek from the forensic investigation division who specialized in analyzing security videos. While he was officially a detective, Warsaw looked more like a scruffy teenager, with his slept-on hair and pimples. Unlike the others, he didn’t wear a suit, even a bad one, but rather skinny black jeans and T-shirts with heavy-metal logos. He got away with it because he was so good.

He was also a bit of a show-off. He came bounding up to the podium with a remote in hand; the lights dimmed.

“Hello, everyone,” Warsaw began. “Welcome to the perp show gag reel.”

That got a laugh.

“The Marlborough Grand has the latest in digital security, and we got beautiful, and I mean beautiful , footage. We got the perp from the front, back, side, above, below—HD all the way. Here are the highlights, edited down to, ah, five minutes. Your folders have a selection of still shots taken from the footage, which is as we speak being shared with various other luxury hotels and—very soon—with the Times, Post , and Daily News .”

The movie began, and it was just as good as Warsaw promised. The excerpts showed the perp—his left ear bandaged—in the lobby; on the elevator; walking down the hall; walking up the hall; pushing into the victim’s room. And then it showed excerpts of the man leaving more or less the same way, unhurried, unruffled, unconcerned.

D’Agosta had seen the excerpts before, but they chilled him all over again. Most killers, he knew, could be divided into two broad groups, disorganized and organized. But this man was so cool, so methodical, that he almost deserved a category of his own. And once again D’Agosta felt deeply bothered by this. It just didn’t fit. Didn’t fit at all.

The clip ended, there was a smattering of applause. To D’Agosta’s mild annoyance, Warsaw hammed a bow and left.

D’Agosta returned to the podium. It was now two thirty. So far, everything had gone like clockwork. His stomach rumbled again—it was starting to feel like he’d swallowed a bottle of hydrochloric acid. He had saved the very last bit, the earlobe, for himself. Squad commander’s prerogative.

“We don’t have DNA yet on the extra body part recovered from the crime scene—the earlobe,” he began. “But we do have some prelims. It belongs to a male. The condition of the skin indicates an age under fifty—that’s as close as we can get. It’s almost certain that the presence of the earlobe was not a result of a struggle at the crime scene. Rather, it seems to have been carried to the crime scene and deliberately placed there. It also appears the earlobe was removed from its ear some hours prior to the time of the homicide—and it was removed not postmortem, but from a body still alive—no surprise, since as you can see from the video the perp is most definitely alive and kicking.

“We know what the perp looks like, and soon all of New York City will know. He’s striking, with his ginger hair, expensive suit, good looks, and Olympic-athlete physique. We got prints, hair, clothing fibers, and soon we’ll have his DNA. We’ve ID’d the Charvet tie, and we’re close to IDing his suit and shoes. Looks like we’re one step away from nailing the guy.”

D’Agosta paused, made a decision to say it.

“So—what’s wrong with this picture?”

It was a rhetorical question and nobody raised their hand.

“Is the guy really this stupid?”

He let the question hang for a long moment before continuing. “Look at the guy in the video. Can he really be the complete and total idiot he seems? I mean, there are simple steps he could have taken to disguise or alter his appearance, to evade the cameras at least in part. He didn’t have to stand stock-still in the middle of the lobby for five minutes while the entire staff noticed him and the cameras shot B-roll from four angles. He’s not a guy trying to blend in. We got psych working on it, figuring out what makes the guy tick, what motivates him, what the message on the body means, what the earlobe left at the scene means. Maybe he’s crazy and wants to be caught. But it strikes me the guy seems to know what he’s doing. And there’s no way he’s stupid. So let’s not assume this case is anywhere near being in the bag, despite all we’ve got.”

A silence. There was another thing bothering D’Agosta, but he chose not to mention it, because it might sound a little strange, and anyway he didn’t know quite how to articulate it. It had to do with the timing of the attack. The camera caught it all. The guy was strolling down the hall, and—just as he was about to pass the door of the victim’s room—she opened it to get the paper. The timing had been perfect.

… Coincidence?

6

KYOKO ISHIMURA WALKED SLOWLY DOWN THE HALLWAY, whisking the polished wooden floor ahead of her with a traditional hemp broom. The hall was spotlessly clean already but Miss Ishimura, out of long practice, swept it anyway, day in, day out. The apartment—three apartments, actually, which had been combined into one by the owner—was shrouded in a close, listening silence. The traffic noise from West Seventy-Second Street barely penetrated the thick stone walls here, five stories above the street.

Returning the broom to the nearby maid’s closet, she took a felt cloth, walked a few steps farther down the hallway, and passed into a small room with Tabriz and Isfahan carpets on the floor and an antique coffered ceiling above. The room was full of beautifully bound illuminated manuscripts and incunabula, stored within cases of mahogany and leaded glass. Miss Ishimura polished first the cases, then the glass, and then, with a separate special cloth, the volumes themselves, carefully passing it over the ribbed spines, the head caps, the gilded top edges. The books, too, were already clean, but she dusted each one nevertheless. It was not simply from mere force of habit: when Miss Ishimura was anxious about something, she found solace in the act of cleaning.

Ever since her employer had returned home four days ago, without warning, he had been acting strangely. He was already a strange man, but this new behavior was exceedingly disturbing to her. He spent his days in the sprawling apartment, clothed in silk pajamas and one of his English silk dressing gowns, never speaking, staring for hours at the marble waterfall in the public room, or sitting in his Zen garden for the better part of a day, in an apparent stupor, unmoving. He had stopped reading newspapers, stopped answering the telephone, and ceased communicating in any way, even with her.

And he ate nothing—nothing. She had tried to tempt him with his favorite dishes—mozuku, shiokara—but everything went untouched. More disturbingly, he had begun taking pills. She had surreptitiously noted the names on the bottles—Dilaudid and Levo-Dromoran—looked them up on the Internet and was horrified to find they were powerful narcotics, which he showed every evidence of abusing in larger and larger quantities.

At first, it had seemed to her that he was wrapped in a deep, almost unimaginable sorrow. But as the days passed, he seemed to physically collapse as well, his skin turning gray, his cheeks slack, his eyes dark and hollow. As he sank increasingly into silence and apathy, she felt that, rather than sorrow, there was no feeling left in him at all. It was as if some terrible experience had burned all emotion from him, hollowed him out, leaving him a dry, ashen husk.