Switch (15 page)

"Sounds like you walked through a little fast," Aaron said. "You did the whole thing in an hour and a half, but she says it could have taken an hour at each end to fix things up. You know, there's something very relaxed about that. Certain and very confident."

"Superbly planned."

"Maybe perfectly planned."

"He knew what he was going to do before he started. But do you think all that multiple stabbing was relaxed?"

"That's what doesn't fit, that violent stabbing and then the precise and careful work afterward with the heads."

"Two signatures. Two weapons. What about two people? Or one person with two personalities? My photographer friend said she felt he handled the victims 'lovingly.'"

"Sure, kill them violently, then gently love them up. Once they stop moving you can do what you want with them. Mold them to your will."

"But they're still warm and bleeding. You'd have to be a freak to be able to play with them and stay detached."

"For Christ's sake, Frank, we know we're dealing with a freak."

"An artistic freak."

"Sure. A very artistic kind of freak."

In the subway on his way downtown
Janek
played switched-heads with the other passengers. Crushed together on the seat, their heads at nearly the same level, it was even easier than in the car. Two high school girls side by side. Bang! Switch them. Then switch them back. If he shifted his eyes fast enough he could do it almost instantaneously. The process reminded him of police artists calling up features onto computer screens. A way to design people, or to redesign them. Police artists. Someone artistic. A painter, sculptor or photographer. After his frenzy the killer was relaxed.... But there was still something gnawing away at the back part of
Janek's
brain. Forget it. Let it simmer. The thing now, he knew, was to improvise a theory he could use to dazzle Hart.

He switched more heads as he crossed Police Plaza, and some more in the elevator on his way to Hart's floor. He switched a pair of secretaries walking toward him down the hall, but knew that the difference between imagining it and doing it was as great as the difference between fantasizing making love to them and raping them in a parking lot.

"Anyone look at that engine yet, Lieutenant?" Sergeant Sweeney grinned at him from behind his well-ordered desk.

"What?"

"Your car. Remember—
I drove your car
."

"Yeah."
Janek
nodded. "Didn't you mention a garage?"

Sweeney snatched a card out of a drawer, scribbled "20% Discount" on it, stamped it with an NYPD seal, then initialed the back.
Janek
didn't like Sweeney and for a moment he thought about tearing the card in two and dropping the pieces on the desk. But then there was a buzz, Sweeney picked up his phone, listened, nodded and, in the special tone of an usher on intimate terms with power, whispered, "CD will see you now, Lieutenant," while he drew a neat line through
Janek's
name on his appointment list.

Hart was pale. Like most of the chiefs he spent too much time indoors.
Janek
recognized the pallor, flesh cooked sallow by fluorescent lamps. And, as always, he was struck by Hart's eyes, cold lifeless glowing little stars.

"So, how's it going, Frank? Things okay? That
DiMona
woman settling down?"

"Looked in on her yesterday. She's doing about as well as you'd expect."

"Good." Hart sounded pleased. "Better keep an eye on her anyway. I thought she looked pretty raw. Any clue yet what was going on with
DiMona
the last few weeks?"

Janek
shook his head.

"Burnout, I guess. Post-retirement kind. Department commissioned a study some years back. We wanted to know the danger signs so we could put the wives on alert. If that wife of his had gotten the word she might have saved herself a lot of grief. So..." Suddenly Hart beamed. "How goes Ireland/ Beard?"

Janek
shrugged. "Still not coming clear."

"It will. It will. You must have some kind of theory. I know you're not sitting on your can."

"Got some theories, sure."

"Like what?"

"Walked through it Saturday night. Was struck by how thrilling it must have been."

"A real thriller. Yeah. Looked into voodoo? I was thinking about voodoo the other day."

"Doesn't check out."

"Try some of our black detectives. Lots of experience there. Great resource waiting to be tapped. Sex?"

"No semen."

"So he wore a rubber. I never heard of a whore who didn't have semen in her ears."

"Doesn't smell like sex to me."

"Then what
does
it smell like?" Hart was getting irritable.
Janek
spoke softly. "I'd say some very special kind of thrill."

"You keep talking about thrills. You mean the switch?"

"The whole ritual. The switch would have been part of it,"
Janek
agreed.

Hart scratched the side of his face.
Janek
could hear his nails scrape his cheek. "Sorry, Frank, you're losing me. Just what are you trying to say?"

Janek
stood up, picked a speck out of his eye, walked over to the window, peered down at Police Plaza, at the hundreds of people crossing the square, so rapidly, like ants. He turned. "There's only one connection we can find between the victims, and that looks like a typical New York coincidence."

"There's got to be a connection."

"Sure. But it's not like the whore was taking French lessons in the morning and the French teacher was whoring after work. The connection's in the killer's mind. It's like you told me in the car. A psychological crime. The killer's fantasy. His stunt. His private little treat."

Hart held his face as if struck by a migraine. His cold little eyes were sparkling now with pain. "You're still being enigmatic, Frank."

Janek
turned back to the window, looked down again at the figures scurrying below and practiced switching a couple of their heads. "When someone's dead," he said, "and you do something to his body, you're not doing anything to him—you're making a display. Like in war when the enemy kills one of your guys and they strip him and set him up in the forest with his genitals cut off and stuck into his mouth. They haven't done anything sadistic to him, because he was already dead before the mutilation was carried out. They've done it for your benefit, the guy who finds him later, and, on a deeper level, they've done it for themselves. The ostensible purpose is to demoralize you. A display like that fills the viewer with anger and despair. It works subconsciously—breaks down the spirit, replacing the cool skill it takes to fight with a hot and clumsy debilitating rage." He turned back to Hart. Not a bad improvisation; he wondered if the Chief was dazzled.

"So if that's the ostensible purpose, what's the real one?"

"The underlying benefit is for the displayers themselves, a way of acting out their anger coolly without having to worry about the person fighting back. Or squirming, or screaming, arousing their pity or making them afraid. A dead guy's just so much meat, so you can treat him like meat. Maybe you kill him in anger so you can cut him up afterward with an almost kindly feeling in your heart."

Hart was slowly nodding his head. "I think I see what you mean."

Janek
didn't understand how that was possible, since he couldn't see it himself. "Anyway," he said, "here's the bottom line. Whoever did this gave himself a lot of satisfaction, a good part of which could have been the effect it would have on us. The business with the heads is so implausible it makes me wonder if that may have been his point. To add a complication which would be even more disturbing than the homicides. A way to almost beautify his crime, turn his maniacal rage into a twisted kind of art."

Hart sucked in his lips. "That's one weird theory, Frank."

"This is one weird case."

"What you're telling me sounds very strange."

"I know. Deep waters. Limitless depths."

"More like you're setting up to dump this one in the files. Because if you're saying what I think you're saying, you're telling me you may never run it down."

Janek
shook his head. "All I'm telling you is I don't think I'm going to solve it by turning up some overlooked piece of physical evidence, or, excuse the expression, by good old-fashioned detective work."

Hart leaned back disgusted. He didn't like the reference to his own frequent exhortations to "wear down shoe leather" and "in my experience it's the tedious routine work that breaks the case." He examined
Janek
skeptically. "So how
are
you going to solve it?"

"Maybe by inspiration,"
Janek
said.

Hart snorted his amusement. His little eyes glinted now with mirth. "Grand. That's grand, Frank. Well, you just go back uptown and get yourself inspired. And if anything hits you and it happens to work out, please be sure and let me know."

A
t the precinct house that afternoon, a carnival atmosphere: Howell and his promised roundup of Upper West Side whores. Other detectives assigned to the Sixth came in to help keep order and watch the fun: an endless stream of squealing, chattering, hooting ladies of the night.

Formal interviews: "Now, in regard to your clients, Ms. Fernandez . . ." Snappy retorts:
"
Head
freaks? Johns into
heads
?
Honey, they're
all
into heads. I
mean
head
is
where it's
at...
"

Janek
enjoyed the parade, a respite from the frustrations of the case, and he could see that Howell reveled in it. Howell would make a great Vice Squad detective, he thought; he took the proper corrupting pleasure in depravity.

While
Janek
watched he practiced switching heads. He tried out a bleached blonde's on a black girl, and then the reverse. But by seven o'clock things started growing tense. Howell was cutting into working hours, the humor was wearing thin, and none of the women had even heard of Brenda Beard.
Janek
finally shooed them out; Howell could finish with them downstairs. When, finally, the squad room was cleared, he and Aaron were left alone. Aaron studied the victim profile books.
Janek
, sensing a glimmer of a notion, went again to the wall and stood before the crime-scene photographs.

He looked, stared, peered, walked away, strode back and squinted again, bringing his face up close. Yes, there was something. He tried it again.
Yes
.
Feeling a small rush of triumph, he called Aaron to the wall.

"Remember how we stood here the first day? The way we paced back and forth studying the shots?"

"Sure. Something bugged us."

"Remember what you said?"

"I said 'too perfect,'" Aaron paused. "Didn't I?"

"You also said 'contrived.'"

"Yeah. I remember now. That's sort of like your lady friend's 'arranged.'"

"You said, 'Something that hits you until you look too hard and then you don't see it anymore.'"

Aaron agreed that that was what he'd said.

"Okay. I want you to try something."

Janek
unpinned two of the photographs, one from each side, shots taken of each victim from approximately the same angle directly above their beds. He pinned them back onto the cork beside each other in an empty space.

"Now what I want you to do is shift your eyes back and forth and try and switch the heads in your mind. What happens is you hold the image of one and superimpose it for a split second on the other. You may have to practice. I've been doing it all day. Took me a while to get the knack."

Aaron tried it. Then he stood back and blinked. "They keep slipping back to where they belong."

"The idea is to carry a face a little to the side. Try moving one. Move Amanda right to left. Leave Brenda where she is."

"Okay."

"Now move Brenda."

"This is tough work, Frank. All I'm getting is a kind of flash."

"A flash is good. A flash is all you need."

"Strange—I mean what I'm doing here is putting them back together the way they were."

"Right. You're putting them back together. So keep on doing it awhile."

"It's coming now. You're right. It does get easier."

"Keep going."

"What am I looking for?"

Janek
was silent.

"Wow. This could get to be a nasty habit."

Janek
stood back; he didn't want to lead Aaron on. "Hmmm. 'Something that hits you until you look too hard and then you don't see it anymore.'"

Silence.

"Now I'm getting confused."

"How?"

"Getting them mixed up."

"Go on."

"They seem almost..."