The Death Dealer (15 page)

“You couldn’t see the bruises on her throat when she was wet,” Victor said. He was a gruff man, a good, steady cop. His looked a little green around the gills, though, and Joe thought it was good to see that, even after all these years, the autopsy of a murder victim still bothered him.

The coroner explained that the bruises had appeared as the skin had dried out.

They were deep blue and black, forming a horrible necklace around the woman’s throat, just like in Joe’s dreams. Except that in his dreams…

They had been around Genevieve’s throat.

He swallowed hard as he felt bile rise in the back of his throat. He’d been to too many autopsies to get sick at one now. But if he were ever going to…

This would be the one.

Or was he only queasy because he had looked at the corpse’s face and seen another? A face he knew intimately. Stared not into Lori’s eyes but into Gen’s. Eyes that he couldn’t help thinking were staring back at him accusingly.

He found himself thinking back to a passage he had read online that morning.

July 28th, 1841. A group of young men out for a casual walk along the shoreline of the Hudson River, on the New Jersey side, in an area of Hoboken known as Sybil’s Cave, a place where people often come to escape the busy, hectic crowding of New York City, came across what appeared to be a mass of clothing in the water. When the young men hurriedly took a boat from a nearby dock and went to investigate, they discovered that what they had taken for clothing was really the body of a young woman. Her face seemed to have been severely battered. She was a terrible spectacle to behold.

They would never have associated the decomposing corpse drawn from the river with the missing girl who had been regaled by an entire city for her sheer loveliness.

Joe swallowed hard and forced himself to stare at Lori’s ravaged face.

No one would readily associate this corpse with someone who had once been young and pretty.

There was no way that Lori Star was looking at him. It was difficult even to see where her eyes should be.

Ben Sears spoke in a clear, emotionless voice, directing his words to the microphone that hung down above the body as he worked on it. The corpse had already been photographed, washed and laid out for him. Additional pictures were being taken by a police photographer as Sears pointed out injuries done to the flesh, asking for close-ups.

“Marks at the neck suggest manual strangulation. There is also a strip of lace, apparently from the young woman’s blouse, that was tied around the neck so tightly that it sank into the flesh, even before postmortem swelling due to immersion. The pattern of bruising suggests that the killer is right-handed.”

His voice droned on as he commented on the fact that the physical damage inflicted by her assailant appeared to be mainly to her face and head. The decomposition and damage done elsewhere on the body appeared to have been from her days in the river.

Joe stood by silently while the chest was opened and Sears stated firmly that strangulation was the cause of death, not drowning.

Organs were weighed.

Specimens were taken.

In the back of his mind, Joe was aware of the constant gurgle of running water washing away the fluids that leaked from the body as the medical examiner went about his work.

Scrapings taken from under the nails suggested that the victim had lacked the chance to fight back against her attacker, and ligature marks on the wrists suggested that her hands had been bound. Damage to the sexual organs was postmortem and possibly due to the depradations of the river creatures.

Sears ended the autopsy by asking his assistants to sew the body back up, and telling the microphone above the corpse that further comments on the death would come after he received the lab work on various samples he had taken.

Joe realized, looking at the cops assembled around the stainless-steel autopsy table, that the procedure had seemed to affect them all the same way it had affected him.

Every man there seemed frozen.

Finally they all roused themselves to walk out. There was no goodbye to the man at the front desk, nothing.

“Jesus,” Vic said when they got outside, looking up at the sky and taking a huge gulp of fresh air.

“That was a bad one,” Tom Dooley said.

“So do you think this murder’s related to your guy?” Vic asked the New York detectives.

“I think we have to operate on that assumption,” Raif said.

That assumption became fact a moment later, when one of the coroner’s assistants came running out after them, holding a sealed evidence bag containing a torn piece of typing paper.

“Detective Nelson?”

Vic turned around.

“Doctor Sears thought you should take this to the lab right away. It was in her pocket. We’re sending the clothes over for analysis ourselves, but he thought you’d want this first.”

Vic held the bag up to the sun, so they could all see the contents.

It was just a ripped piece of what appeared to be run-of-the-mill printer paper, but there was something written on it that had all but faded away. Joe read the typed words aloud.

Quoth the raven: die.

There was a media frenzy.

Dr. Sears denied mentioning the scrap of paper to anyone, so maybe it had been one of his assistants. But it didn’t really matter how word got out, only that it
was
out.

By the time the evening news aired, every station in the Tri-State Area was carrying the story, and linking the murder of Lori Star—born Lori Spielberg, one of the stations discovered—to that of Thorne Bigelow.

Someone had come up with a picture of Lori at her prettiest, and some enterprising reporter had made the Mary Rogers-Marie Roget connection, so she was now being compared to the beautiful cigar girl who had once worked at Anderson’s Tobacco. The girl who had been given eternal life in her pathetic death by the great American author Edgar Allan Poe.

Lori was more famous than she ever could have imagined.

Her somewhat questionable past had been forgiven. She was the medium who had witnessed the accident through some spectral magic, connecting Sam Latham’s injuries to Thorne Bigelow’s death, a connection the police were now avidly following up on.

Joe had watched the news at a bar, sharing a beer with Vic, Raif and Tom. Then, disgusted with the over-the-top coverage, he excused himself and headed out. On the way to his car, he decided to follow the trail of the murder that had taken place in the eighteen-forties. He walked the Hoboken shoreline, but since he couldn’t really go back in time over a hundred and fifty years, he could only close his eyes and try to imagine.

Of course, the contemporary killer couldn’t possibly have gone back in time, either. And Joe didn’t think the killer had done a particularly impressive job of murdering Thorne Bigelow à la Poe, anyway. The man had died via his love of wine, true, but he hadn’t been walled up to die slowly, gasping for air, thirsting, known that the end was coming. He had been poisoned, a somewhat less drawn-out method.

Poisoning the unsuspecting was easy, while strangling an eager and unsuspecting young woman, though not impossibly difficult, would taken a certain amount of strength.

Did that eliminate the women as suspects?

He walked the shoreline, and realized after a while that he’d been waiting for something.

And then he knew what.

Dead people were talking to him.

He was hearing whispers in his ear when he shouldn’t have been.

He spoke aloud to the breeze. “If I’m going to go crazy, you might want to give me some useful information.”

Luckily there was no one around to hear him and think right along with him that he was going nuts.

He felt like a fool anyway.

When it seemed as if the voices weren’t going to tell him anything, he gave up and walked back to his car, ready to return to Manhattan.

This murder had changed everything. There couldn’t possibly be a Raven who wasn’t frightened now. Not that Lori Star had been a Raven, but she had connected Bigelow’s death with Latham’s accident, and that had been enough to paint a target on her back.

He put a call through to Genevieve’s apartment, his irrational sense of fear for her growing again. She answered on the first ring, and he was glad to hear her voice.

“You saw the news?” he asked.

“You can’t miss it. It’s on every network,” she told him.

“Right.”

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Fine.”

Yeah, right. He thought of his last visit to a morgue, when the corpse had turned to him. Thank God Lori hadn’t spoken to him through that broken face.

He asked after Eileen, who Gen assured him was safe at home, then told her that he would see her soon.

His thoughts turned to Sam Latham, who was still in the hospital—and quite possibly in danger.

When Joe reached the city, his first order of business was going to be to visit Sam, and to make sure that his wife, Dorothy, had indeed hired private security to watch over him. There was no longer any doubt. Whether Sam had been a target that day on the highway or not, there was a serial killer on the move, and Sam was certainly a sitting duck now.

When Joe arrived at the hospital, he was relieved to see that there was an imposing uniformed guard in a chair outside the door to Sam’s room. The guard asked him who he was, and Joe showed his credentials.

“Hey, I’ve heard of you. I should have recognized you.”

“Why would you have recognized me?” Joe asked.

“Your face was just on the news,” the man said, nodding toward the TV visible just inside the door to Sam’s room.

“Why?” Joe demanded.

“The Lori Star murder. They linked it back to some literary group and a bunch of wealthy people, and one of them has a daughter, that Genevieve O’Something who was kidnapped last year. And that led to you,” he finished.

Joe stared at the man, who’d sounded as calm as if he were reciting a chorus of “The hip bone’s connected to the leg bone.”

Damn it all, he cursed silently. He didn’t want the city recognizing his face again, knowing him.

“Mr. Latham is sleeping, but his wife’s in with him. I’ll tell her you’re here,” the man said.

Joe nodded, still cursing fate.

When the guard ushered him into the room a moment later, Sam was sleeping, and Dorothy was sitting in a chair at his side, watching the small television with the sound turned down low.

“Mr. Connolly, so nice to see you,” she said, and stood.

“Mrs. Latham,” he acknowledged. “I’m very glad you’ve hired security for Sam’s room.”

She nodded, studying him. “Sam really was targeted by some madman, wasn’t he?” she asked, worry evident in both her tone and her eyes.

“We don’t know that for sure, but it’s best to assume the worst and take precautions.”

“I admit I’m terrified now.”

“Just be careful and smart, Mrs. Latham.”

She smiled warmly. “Dorothy, please.”

“Dorothy,” he repeated. “And I’m just Joe.”

“Thank you, Joe,” she said.

Even as she spoke, the machine monitoring Sam’s vital signs began to beep shrilly.

“Oh, my God!” Dorothy gasped.

Joe frowned, staring at the IV leading into Sam’s arm. “Who’s been in here?” he demanded.

“No one but one of the nurses a few minutes ago,” she said.

He didn’t hesitate. Maybe he should have. But he didn’t.

He strode toward the man in the bed and ripped the IV from his arm.

In Jared Bigelow’s penthouse on Park Avenue, Mary Vincenzo watched the news as it unfolded.

She had just come in, and this was the first time she was seeing everything that was being plastered all over the news.

And plastered it was.

She was watching coverage of an interview with a police spokesman on one of the major networks, but she could see reporters for the other networks and at least half a dozen cable channels in the background.

On the channel she had randomly chosen, a handsome man with a lean build and silver-white hair was solemnly comparing Lori Star’s murder to the one it had clearly been intended to emulate, that of Mary Rogers, so many years ago.

Mary
Rogers. A woman with her own name. She couldn’t help finding something creepy about the coincidence. The newsman kept using the name as he spoke, and it gave her the shivers.

She wondered why it bothered her so much. After all, the girl who had just died was named Lori.

Watching, she shook her head. She could visualize the girl who had been killed, remembering her from when she had been on the news after the accident on the FDR. What an idiot she’d been to talk so publicly about what she knew. Of course, that was in retrospect. When Lori Star had gone to the news stations, she had surely never imagined herself as the next victim.

Mary watched, drawn like a moth to a flame. Had Lori’s death been the work of the same killer who’d murdered Thorne? True, there had been an identical note, but the police weren’t saying whether they were convinced that the same perpetrator was responsible. Someone might have had it in for Lori and then decided to blame it on the Poe Killer to throw off suspicion.

Behind her, Jared Bigelow sniffed. “Psychic actress, my ass,” he said.

“Jared!” she snapped.

“What?”

“The girl is dead.”

“So? That doesn’t automatically turn her into a saint.”

“Have some respect. She was murdered.”

“And now she’s dead and at peace—which she didn’t need to be. She talked a ton of trash, hogging the limelight, after that accident,” Jared said.

Mary turned to him, troubled. “Jared, that’s horrible. It sounds like you’re saying she asked for what happened to her.”

“Your words, not mine,” he said.

She shivered, hugging her arms around her.

“Oh, my dear Miss Mary,” he said, using the nickname he had long ago given her. He walked over and sat down at her side, slipping his arms around her. “She was trash, Mary. Pure trash.”

“But, Jared…”

“You’re with me. You’ll always be safe,” he promised her.

She looked at him. He was the only child and sole heir of a wealthy man. He was intelligent, courteous and extremely handsome in his slightly long-haired, artistic way. He’d been given every earthly possession he had ever wanted. And despite all his advantages, he could be petulant, with a tendency to pout like a two-year-old.

She was just five years his senior.

She had started to fall in love with him when he’d been just seventeen. But her husband had been alive then, a man who had demanded all her attention. He’d been quite a bit older than she was, and rich. Very rich. A man with a family fortune and no children.

She hadn’t been a bad wife. She’d been a faithful while he’d been alive, grateful for all the doors the Bigelow money had opened for her. She’d never had to work, unlike her sister back home in Iowa, who had grown old fast, serving hash and hamburgers at a roadside diner.

She had been grateful for her marriage, and if she’d dreamed of younger men and attending trendier clubs, well, she had limited herself to dreaming. She had made herself be a good wife.

Then he died of a heart attack. And the ironic thing—a truth somehow kept out of the papers—was that he had died in the arms of a younger woman. She’d almost found it amusing. She’d been as true as the pure white snow, while he had gone after a younger lover.

He’d been close to his brother and nephew, though.

So was she.

After all, she was family, and she remained family. And she had fallen more and more in love—or maybe just lust—with her nephew, who was, after all, only a nephew by marriage.

There was just something about him.

He could make her do anything, even when she knew he was behaving like a spoiled brat.

She looked at him now, though, and swallowed hard. “I would think you, of all people, could be sympathetic. She died a terrible death.”

“What death isn’t terrible?” he asked lightly. Then he wrapped his arms around her. His fingers teased suggestively against her breasts. She felt an instant surge of excitement sweep through her. He was young and handsome.

And rich.

She couldn’t help be afraid that he would lose interest in her. She needed to go on acting a little bit forbidden, to keep herself exciting and erotic.

She rose and lifted her skirt so she could straddle him, where he sat on the couch. She knew that he liked it when things seemed a little taboo. Dirty. He liked to sneak in quickies in places where they shouldn’t be exposing themselves. He liked to do it when she was dressed, just lifting her skirt for access. Like this.

She moved her hand, playing with his trousers, pretending to struggle with his belt buckle and zipper. As if she were desperate.

He was actually so easy.

And he had a real thing for her. He lusted after her. Maybe he even loved her.

They made swift, frantic love there on the couch, and she relaxed against him.

She had forgotten the television while they were in the throes of passion, but now she could hear the anchorman again as he suggested that Lori had been sexually assaulted by her killer, that she had probably been killed soon after she had last been seen, somewhere between four and nine o’clock on Sunday afternoon, and that several days in the water had accelerated the decomposition of her body.

Mary leaned against Jared and stared in his eyes. She could feel him growing hard again inside her.

“Jared?”

“What?”

Where were you on Sunday evening?

But the words wouldn’t form on her lips. She shook her head, closed her eyes and leaned against him again. Afraid.

Afraid that he might realize what she had been about to say.

“Never mind,” she said, and started to move above him.

At O’Malley’s, Don Tracy, Brook Avery and Larry Levine were sharing a table.

“It’s all so horrible,” Brook said, shuddering.

“Nevermore, indeed,” Don said, lifting his beer.

“Shit,” Larry swore.

Brook set a hand on his shoulder. “Larry, we’ll be all right.”

Larry frowned. “Of course we’ll be all right. That’s not why I’m pissed.”

“Then…?” Don asked.

“I should have fucking been there!” Larry said. “Can you believe it? I’m a Raven, and this is the story of the year, and I should be covering it.”

Eileen Brideswell and the rest of the board members walked into the bar at that point, staring at the television as they walked over to join the others, who pulled over an empty table to make room for them.

Over in a corner, Paddy pulled out his phone. He hated feeling like a tattletale, but he couldn’t help worrying about Eileen. In his opinion, Genevieve needed to know where her mother was.

In his robe, in his own room, Albee Bennet watched the evening news and lifted his teacup to the television.

“Quoth the raven,” he said sadly. “Ah, Thorne, you would have loved the irony.”

Then he set his teacup down and looked around.

The night had somehow become ominous.

He rose and locked the door to his room, even though the house had an excellent security system, and these days it was always set.

He wasn’t about to end up like Thorne. He wouldn’t trust anyone. He would be safe.

Even so, when he went to bed, early, he couldn’t help feeling afraid.

She had hired Joe Connolly because he was good at his job, Genevieve told herself, even if she had to admit that other reasons might have lurked in the back corners of her mind. He was good, and she was living proof of that.

Adam owned a place up by Central Park, so he had headed up there a while ago and was making arrangements for his employees to join him. Brent Blackhawk, who was coming with his wife, was a sheriff in Virginia. A lawman. That should mollify Joe, once he found out what she had done, she thought.

With Adam out of the house, she tried to think as Joe would think, to reason. The possibility remained that the killer had nothing to do with the New York Poe Society and was using the connection as a smoke screen. She started with simple deduction. Had the murders been carried out in a manner that definitely spoke of someone emulating Poe’s writings?

No.

Poisoned wine didn’t connect directly with any of Poe’s stories, nor was it terribly unique.

Sam Latham had been hurt in a car accident, and there was certainly no vehicular homicide in any of Poe’s stories. Nor had a note been found at the scene.

Lori’s murder was the only one that really lined up with Poe’s work, and even then, the parallels weren’t definitive.

Was the killer trying to slay every member of the society, or at least the board? There was no way to know, but certainly the killer wasn’t limiting himself to that group, though Lori Star
had
connected herself to the case.

Okay, she told herself. Time to try eliminating some possibilities.

She made a list of the members of the board, then looked down it, considering each one as a suspect. She eliminated three names right off the bat: Thorne, because he was dead; Sam, because he was in the hospital; her mother…

Because she was her mother.

That left Jared Bigelow and Mary Vincenzo, whom she suspected were sleeping together. Both stood to gain from Thorne Bigelow’s death—Jared directly, and Mary through her relationship with Jared. Lila Hawkins, unlikely, but not impossible. Lou Sayles? God, she hoped not. The woman had worked with the city’s children for years, and the thought of a murderer having that kind of access…She shuddered. Barbara Hirshorn, such a timid little bird, but you never knew…Still waters and all that.

It took ingenuity, not strength, to administer poison, but what had been done to Lori Star had taken strength.

Four men remained as possible suspects. Five, if she counted Albee Bennet, and she knew Joe would. After all, he had admitted being in the house when Thorne was murdered. So she added him to the list that still included Larry Levine, Brook Avery, Don Tracy and Nat Halloway.

She was anxious to talk to Joe now, but she was afraid, as well, given that she had called in the ghostbusters. But something was disturbing him deeply, and she couldn’t help feeling that Adam Harrison was the man who could help.

Her phone rang, and she picked it up absently.

She could hear noise and Irish music in the background, and frowned. Someone was calling her from O’Malley’s, she thought.

“Hello?”

“Is that you, lovely Genevieve?”

The slight Irish lilt was a giveaway.

“Paddy? What’s up? Why are you calling me?”

“I just thought you should know. Your mum is here. And all her bird society people.”

“You mean, the Poe Society? Thanks for letting me know, Paddy,” she said, then hung up a moment later and leapt to her feet. What was Eileen doing going out without protection, and with that group, of all people? Disturbed, she grabbed her purse and headed out.

Joe had been shoved out of the way when the doctors and nurses rushed in, but he was quick to warn them that they needed to find out what had been in Sam’s IV.

He’d actually been afraid he was going to be tackled by the security guard, but Dorothy had jumped to his defense, and then, thank God, a nurse had shouted that she didn’t like the look of the IV fluid, and taken the bag of fluids away for testing. One of the doctors suspected a morphine overdose, but final word would have to wait for the lab results.

Once the medical personnel got Sam stabilized—though he was still unconscious—inserted a fresh IV and left, Dorothy broke into sobs, and Joe tried to calm her.

“I hired security and everything,” she said. “Why does someone want to kill Sam?”

Why indeed? Joe asked himself.

Two police officers arrived a few minutes later, men Joe didn’t know. They started by interviewing the security guard, then Dorothy, then him, followed by all the medical personnel on duty on the floor, none of whom had been in to change Sam’s IV.

The shift change had been at seven, about fifteen minutes before Joe had arrived, and Dorothy’s best recollection was that someone had come in right in the middle of it to adjust the IV. It had been the perfect opportunity for someone to slip into hospital scrubs during the busy changeover, then casually walk in and inject something that shouldn’t have been there into Sam’s IV.

Dorothy wasn’t certain she could identify whoever who had come in. She had dozed off and still been half asleep when the last person came in to adjust the IV.

The guard in the hallway swore up and down that no one who wasn’t in proper hospital attire had gotten past him.

It seemed forever before things began to calm down. By then, Raif and Tom Dooley, looking seriously worse for wear, had arrived.

Another round of questioning began.

The police ordered official round-the-clock surveillance. Other than Dorothy and anyone she approved, no one wearing a surgical mask or without hospital ID was to be allowed into Sam’s room, which was immediately changed. Records were altered so he was no longer listed under his own name.

A team of crime-scene investigators came in to examine the room, although everyone thought that it was a losing proposition. The would-be killer had been wearing scrubs, including latex gloves, so fingerprints were unlikely.

Around ten, Sam woke up, none the worse for an ordeal he’d been totally unaware of, but he could add nothing to what the police had already found out, since he’d slept through the IV change. After he heard the full story, he was simply grateful to be alive.