Blood Brother
J. A. Kerley

For April and Mark, my brother and sister…

Siblings without rival.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

PROLOGUE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

FORTY-TWO

FORTY-THREE

FORTY-FOUR

EPILOGUE

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by J. A. Kerley

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Rural Southern Alabama, mid 1980s

The boy is in his teens, slender and blond, kicking a pine cone down the red-dirt country road, dense woods to his left, cotton field to his right. Though the Alabama sun lays hard across the boy’s bare arms and legs, his skin is pale, like light bounces off, never sinks inside.

A sound at his back turns the boy’s head to a bright truck grille a hundred yards behind. He steps to the road’s edge to let the truck pass. But it glides slower and closer until his nose fills with the oily stink of the engine. The truck pulls even.

“Hey, I saw you in the newspaper,” the driver calls through the open passenger window, a man in his early thirties with tight-cropped hair, angular face, eyes behind wraparound mirror sunglasses. His face is built around a smile, his voice is pure country twang. “You’re that kid who got a perfect score on the STA, right?”

The boy’s water-blue, almost feminine eyes drop with embarrassment. He mumbles, “SAT, Scholastic Aptitude Test.”

“And now you got free college and all that. You do us proud. Wanna ride?”

“I’m fine walking. But thanks.”

The driver grins with bright, even teeth. “It’s gotta be ninety-five degrees. We can’t have our local genius getting heat stroke. Where you need to go?”

“Town, then. The library.”

The driver nods, pleased. The boy climbs in the truck. Hard muscles on the driver’s arm dance as he shifts. He drives for a quarter mile before swerving on to a dirt lane scarcely wider than the truck. Branches squeal against the vehicle’s sides.

“Hey,” the boy yips. “You said we were going to town.”

The truck bounces to a small clearing and jolts to a halt. The boy’s eyes dart from side to side. Insects buzz from the trees.

“You recognize this place, son?” the driver says. “You been here before, right?”

Something in the man’s voice has gotten harder. The twang has disappeared.

“Listen, mister. I uh, I need to get back to –”

“It was last year, son. A dead man was found tied to that big pine tree yonder. Someone took a long time to kill him. A real long time.”

The boy’s hand sneaks to the door handle. He pulls the latch and dives against the door. The door doesn’t give. The boy’s terrified face turns to the driver.

“Locked,” the man says, his voice calm. “Under my control. It’s all under my control. Look here …”

The driver lifts his blue work shirt to reveal a pistol in his belt. Pictures and voices from the past align in the boy’s mind. He recalls who the man is, when they met, what was said.

The boy closes his eyes, thinks, It’s over.

The driver looks into the shadowed woods. “There was blood everywhere the day that man got torn apart. Someone said he didn’t know people had that much blood in them.”

“You’re wrong, mister,” the boy protests, his voice high and tremulous. “I didn’t do anything. I never been here before. I swear I ain’t never –”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP, KID!”

The insects are silent. Birds freeze in the trees. It’s as if time has stopped. When the man’s voice starts again, so does everything else.

“I’ve studied on that day a lot, son. More than you can believe. You know what I came up with in my thinking?”

“What?” the boy whispers.

“I’ve never heard of so much anger busting free. So much …letting out. You know what I mean by letting out?”

A long pause. “No. Not really.”

“Letting out is like floodwater piling up behind a dam. You can picture water rising behind a dam, right?”

The slightest motion as the boy nods. The driver continues speaking.

“The dam holds back the water – keeps it inside, under control. But a dam can’t stop the rain. So let’s say it keeps raining, day and night. The water rises and that held-back lake gets longer and wider and deeper. You know how that goes, don’t you? Maybe from experience?”

“Yes.” The boy’s whisper is almost lost in the sound of the insects.

“The dam’s a strong one and wants to hold. But that rain whips down day and night. Water keeps backing up, pushing harder. What do you think happens next?”

The boy’s face quivers and his eyes shimmer with liquid. A crystal tear traces down his cheek.

“It keeps raining. And the dam breaks.”

The man reaches over and erases the boy’s tear with his thumb.

“No, son. The dam opens just in time. And that’s how it saves itself.”

ONE

It was a morning for firsts.

My first landing at LaGuardia Airport, my first escort from a 737 while the other passengers were ordered to remain seated, my first hustling through a terminal by security police, my first ride in a siren-screaming police cruiser through gray Manhattan rain.

And I, Detective Carson Ryder of the Mobile, Alabama, Police Department, had accomplished them all in the past twenty-three minutes.

“No one’s gonna tell me what this is about?” I asked my driver, a Sergeant Koslowski by the nameplate. We skidded sideways through an intersection. Koslowski spun the wheel, goosed the gas, and we straightened out two inches from tagging a taxi. The hack driver gave us a bored glance and I wondered what it took to scare a New York cabbie.

“No one told me nothin’,” Koslowski growled. “So how can I tell you somethin’?” The growl fit; he looked like a bulldog in a blue uniform.

“What were you told, exactly?” I asked.

“Pick up your ass at the airport and deliver it to an address in the Village. There, now you know as much as me.”

Two hours ago I had been at my desk in Mobile, drinking coffee and waiting for my detective partner, Harry Nautilus, to arrive. My supervisor, Lieutenant Tom Mason, had called me into his office and closed the door. His phone was beside the cradle, thrown down instead of hung up.

“You’re on a new case, Carson. You got to be on a plane to New York City in twenty minutes. Your ticket’s waiting. The plane too, probably.”

“What the hell? I can’t just up and –”

“There’s a cruiser waiting outside. Move it.”

Koslowski did the sideways skid again, setting us on to a slender street. He jammed the brakes in front of a three-story brick warehouse. We threaded past four radio cars with light bars flashing, a Forensics van and what I took to be a command van. There was also an SUV from the Medical Examiner’s office. Whatever had gone down, the full cast and crew was present and accounted for.

I saw a portly man shambling our way, his black hat tucked low and his gray raincoat rippling in the wind. Mr Raincoat opened my door and I stepped out.

The guy looked in his late fifties, with a round face as morose as a bloodhound. His nose was large and beaklike. His eyes sagged above, bagged below, and probably looked sad even when a woman said Yes. Unlike everyone else, he seemed in no hurry. He offered his hand. “My name is Sheldon Waltz, NYPD. Friendlier folks call me Shelly, which I invite you to do. How was your flight?”

The warmth and sincerity in his voice made me drop pleasantries in favor of the truth. “I hate jets, Shelly. I’d have preferred being shot here by cannon.” I paused. “You gonna tell me what’s going on?”

He sighed and patted my back. Even his pats seemed doleful. “Actually, I was hoping you might tell me.”

The warehouse reeked of stale water and fresh rat droppings. We walked a plank floor toward a service elevator. A print tech dusted the paint-peeling wall for latents. I thought the tech was shooting me curious side-eyed glances, but realized he was studying Waltz. Also eyeing Waltz was a young guy in a Technical Services jacket who sat cross-legged on the floor with a small video monitor in his lap. He looked ready to spring into action, just as soon as someone told him what the action was.

To the right the corridor opened into a side room, the light coming from a bank of ancient fluorescents, bulbs sizzling and giving a jittery quality to the scene. I saw three detectives inside, the Alpha dick spotlighted by a sharp bark as the others bobbed their heads. Alpha was a woman, early thirties, with an ovoid face, slender lips, dark hair pulled straight back and held with a rubber band. Efficient and aerodynamic. Her rust-colored, no-frills business suit had a gold badge hanging from the jacket pocket. Her eyes flashed with intelligence and she looked as hard and fit as a dancer.

The woman’s eyes found me and glared, like I’d spit in her soup and run away laughing. I flicked a genial wave. Alpha showed me her back and her puppets followed suit. I heard one of the men’s voices mutter the word yokel.

“Who’s that woman, Shelly?” I asked as we stepped into the elevator, a cage with a floor. Waltz thumbed the button and we jolted upward.

“It doesn’t matter right now.”

The elevator clattered to a stop and we stepped into a maze of semi-finished sheetrock walls dividing a large room. Waltz said, “The building’s being turned into lofts. The construction foreman stopped in at six a.m. to leave instructions for the workers, found the victim. The foreman’s an older guy with angina. The sight had him grabbing at his chest. The med types didn’t want him to add to the body count, so they sent him to a nearby ER.” Waltz nodded to a second doorway. “The victim’s back here.”

I followed Waltz to a framed-in space I suspected would be a complete unit when finished, fifty feet long, twenty wide. At the end of the space a pair of sawbucks carried a sheet of plywood. Atop the wood was a blanketed shape I knew was a human body. I shivered, then realized the air conditioning was cranked to meat-locker level.

“The cold’s helping stabilize the body,” Waltz said, seeing my puzzlement.

“Until what?”

“Until you got here.”

There was a plastic runner on the floor, a path to walk without disturbing evidence. I saw a snip of hair beside the runner, a slender brown comma. Beside it was a tuft of white. I crouched, pursing my lips and puffing at the debris. The result floated in the air. “Several colors of hair,” I said. “Strange.”

Waltz turned. “Come on, Detective. We don’t have much time. Forensics will deal with the minutiae.”

The runner was slick and we walked with the care of men on ice. When we reached the form Waltz grabbed an edge of the white blanket. I took a deep breath and nodded, Go. Waltz pulled back the cover. I saw a woman’s body, headless. No, my mind suddenly screamed, the head was there. It had been jammed into a slashing cut made in the abdomen. The head, its eyes wide, stared at me from the belly. The scene was horrific and utterly incongruous.

Then I realized: I knew the face in the belly.

I gasped. My knees buckled and the room veered sideways. Waltz grabbed beneath my arm. I closed my eyes. Long seconds passed before they opened again.

“You know her, right?” Waltz looked at my face. “Take your time.”

I waited until the room stopped spinning. Found the breath to rasp out words. “Her name is Dr Evangeline Prowse. She’s the director of the Alabama Institute of Aberrational Behavior. It’s where some of the country’s strangest killers are kept, walking nightmares.”

“I know of the Institute. You’re sure it’s her?”

I nodded and strode to an open window to suck in air, hoping to stop the spinning in my head. Waltz appeared with a paper cup of water. He steered me to a chair.

“Better?” he asked as I gulped water.

“Getting there,” I lied.

“How well did you know her?”

“She consulted on several cases for the Mobile police. We enjoyed one another’s company. I guess you could say we were the kind of friends who always promise to see one another more, but can’t find the time.”

We’d never find the time. I’d never speak to Vangie again, an incredible loss.

“When did you last see Dr Prowse?” Waltz asked.

“Two months ago. I was in the Montgomery area and stopped by. We shared a sandwich in her office, spent a half hour talking. That was all.”

There was more to it than that. Much more. But only five people in the world knew that particular secret. Evangeline Prowse had been one of them.

“Did she mention anything about coming to New York?”

“Vangie grew up in Queens, lived in the city until her early thirties. Coming here was a regular event, no big deal.”

“How about a professional angle? You and Dr Prowse weren’t working together? A case?”

“Not for a couple years.”

“You’re sure? Nothing?”

“Shelly, why the hell am I here? Why not a co-worker or a –”

He blew out an exasperated breath. “There’s a bit of a mystery going on. Follow me.”

I accompanied Waltz back down the elevator to where the other detectives were waiting. The sleek Alpha lady was leaning against the wall with studied nonchalance, legs crossed at the ankles, cellphone nudging a high cheekbone. “I dunno what the Southern guy’s supposed to do. I’m waiting for him to pull the magnifying glass from his pocket, ask if there’s any footprints he can follow …”

She hung up and tapped her watch with a crisp pink talon. “I’ve got places to be, Waltz. And given that goddamn convention, I expect you do, too. Let’s open and close this little play right now.”

Waltz pursed his lips and whistled. The young guy in the Technical Services jacket appeared, cradling the battery-driven video playback unit as if it was an infant. His nameplate read J. Cargyle. The kid held the unit at chest level. Waltz tapped Play. Everyone gathered close.

A shiver of electrons and my heart climbed to my throat: Vangie’s face in close-up, a white wall at her back. The camera’s tiny microphone distorted background sounds into a rumbling sludge. She was holding the camera close and her hands were shaking, her face moving within the frame. Vangie looked worn, her brown eyes circled with shadow.

“If you have found this recording, I ask that you contact Carson Ryder of the Mobile Police Department.”

I startled at my name, but kept my eyes on the screen.

“I have worked with dozens of specialists in the profiling and apprehension of the homicidally deranged. Detective Ryder is the best I know at understanding these people, a dark gift, but a gift nonetheless. I am currently doing things that make little sense. But I needed a serious –”

A sudden thump, a noise like a growl. Vangie’s eyes widened and the camera spun. I saw the edge of a mirror, a seam of wall and ceiling. The thump and growl repeated. The screen showed a flash of palm and fingers, then went dark.

“It’s almost over,” Waltz said. “She put the camera in something. Her purse, probably.”

“What does it mean? Where was it –”

“Wait.” Waltz pointed back at the screen. As if adding a post script, Vangie lifted the still-recording camera from her purse and aimed it at her face. Tears were streaming down her cheeks.

She said, “Carson, I’m so sorry.”

TWO

“Do you know what she’s talking about, Detective?” Alpha Lady said, arms crossed high on her chest. “Outside of you being hotsie-totsie with the loonies?”

“No.”

“You have no idea what she’s doing that makes little sense?”

“No idea, Lieutenant.”

“Ms Prowse says, ‘I needed a serious …’ Something interrupts. Serious what?”

“How would I know that? Where was the recording found?”

Waltz said, “The memory card was in an envelope that read Open in Event of Emergency. It stood out, given the circumstances. I immediately had Tech Services play the video. One thing led to another and …”

“And now we’ve got an investigation on hold for hours and an outsider tromping through the scene,” the Lieutenant finished, shaking her head.

Waltz sighed and turned to the woman. “I’ve never heard of a case where the expertise of another detective was referenced by the victim. I thought it best to retain the death tableau and bring that detective here for a look. The ME’s people did their part, and forensic processing slowed but never stopped. If you have a problem with my decision, Lieutenant, I suggest you convey your displeasure to the powers that be.”

Waltz pulled a cellphone from his pocket, dialed a number. He held the phone up for the Lieutenant to take. The room was dead silent. I heard ringing from the phone, then a pickup.

“This is the office of the Chief of Police …”

The Lieutenant turned white.

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

She snatched the phone from Waltz’s outstretched palm, snapped it closed, thrust it back at him: A surrender. She turned her anger from Waltz to me, her voice angry and demanding, pushing her frustration my way.

“What was left of her clothes looked like a runner’s garb. Like she went running, got grabbed off the street, brought here. Did she like to run?”

I said, “She ran marathons, even at sixty-three. She was a fitness junkie.”

“She ever run late at night?”

“She ran whenever she found the time, or was stressed. Were there any defensive wounds?”

“How about you shut up and let the Lieutenant ask the questions?” snapped a detective a few years past my age of thirty-four, a hulking monster with a Greco-Roman wrestler’s neck and shoulders. His face was pale and acne-scarred, making his small eyes look like green buttons floating in a bowl of cream of wheat. His hair was neither brown nor blond, but some shade in between, brond, perhaps. I’d heard someone call him Bullard.

Waltz said, “Her forearms are bruised, probably defensive. No tissue is visible beneath her nails. They’re cut close, unfortunately. The Forensics crew will vacuum the floor when we leave, maybe find something important.”

Another interruption from Alpha Lady. “Why did the victim give the big-ass sales job on your behalf? She was sorry about what?”

“I just got here. How would I fucking know?”

“Hey,” snapped Bullard. “Watch your goddamn mouth.” He stood to show me he was taller than me. Wider, too.

Alpha said, “Stay calm, Bubba. I’m trying to get a handle on things. Waltz told me about the box of crazies where she worked, this Institute. Is it possible a former patient might have held a grudge?”

I shook my head. “Couldn’t happen.”

“You psychic as part of your talents?”

“The only way out of the Institute is to stop breathing. They don’t rehabilitate, they analyze.”

Waltz nodded. “He’s right. I know of the Institute.”

I said, “Have you checked Dr Prowse’s whereabouts since she arrived, Lieutenant? Maybe she was targeted by the perp earlier. Maybe as early as at the airport. You might want to –”

She held up her hand. Shot me a fake and indulgent smile. “I’m sure you do fine on your home turf, Detective. But the NYPD actually looks into such things. We’ve done it a few times before.” She turned the fake smile to Waltz. “Take him to lunch, Detective. Show him the Statue of Liberty. Let him buy some postcards. But then it’s time for Mississippi to get its missing policeman back.”

Before I could correct her, she showed me her back and strode away with the sycophants in tow. The little turf war now over, Waltz seemed unperturbed.

“Somewhere in the good Lieutenant’s soliloquy I heard the word lunch. There’s a decent deli a couple blocks away. Give it a shot, Detective Ryder?”

The deli was little more than a long, narrow counter, and a few tables against a wall decorated with faded posters of Sardinia. I was without hunger and fiddled with a salad. Waltz seemed light on appetite as well and nibbled at a chicken sandwich.

I couldn’t quite figure out Waltz’s position in the hierarchy. His rank was detective, the Alpha Lady – named Alice Folger, I’d discovered – was a lieutenant. She was brusque to Waltz, but was obviously afraid to push him too far. Another big question: What gave Waltz the power to slow an investigation for several hours so I could be flown here? That would have taken sledgehammer clout.

I was about to ask when Waltz slid a mostly uneaten sandwich to the side of the table. “Let’s say Dr Prowse felt she was in danger. Why didn’t she ask the NYPD for protection?” He paused. “Unless, of course, she wasn’t in danger. That fits with her taking a midnight run through the neighborhood.”

“What about the recording?”

“We have no idea when it was made. Or why. Are you sure you have no idea why she’d record a testament to your abilities vis-à-vis psychopaths?”

Waltz was conversational, but I knew I was being interrogated. I looked down, realized it was a tell for a person about to lie. I scratched my ankle to give my down-glance a purpose.

“I’m as much in the dark as you, Shelly.”

“You have no idea what she was sorry for? Or anything about the serious whatever she was seeking?”

This time I could look him in the eyes. “I’m utterly dumbfounded.”

“What’s your background, Detective Ryder – if I may ask?”

“Eight years on the force, five in Homicide. I studied at the FBI Behavioral Division for all of a month. I also work in a special unit called the PSIT: the Psychopathological and Sociopathological Investigative Team.”

“Impressive.”

“In name only. The whole unit, which everyone calls Piss-it, is me and my partner Harry Nautilus. We’re activated maybe five times a year, usually a false alarm. Though we do have a decent solve rate when the action is bona fide.”

“Which is?”

“A hundred per cent. Still, like the unhappy lady lieutenant said, this is New York. Y’all deal with more crazies in a day than Mobile does in a year.”

Waltz spun his glass of iced tea. “Dr Prowse said you had a special gift for investigating psychos. She called it a dark gift. What’s that mean, if I may ask?”

I repeatedly punctured a piece of romaine. I didn’t want to lie, but couldn’t tell the truth. Not fully.

“I was a Psych major in college, Shelly. I did prison interviews with psychos and socios. Dr Prowse thought I had a rapport with them, made them drop their guard. That’s probably the gift she was talking about.”

I sensed Waltz didn’t believe I was telling the full story. But he shifted the conversation. “I’m not ready to close this box yet. I’ve convinced those in command to give you a few days here in case we need your input.”

I raised an eyebrow at Waltz’s ability to sidestep immediate authority. “Sounds like you went above Lieutenant Folger.”

“A step or two. That’s not a comment on her, either personally or professionally. She seems unhappy with some aspect of her life, and it makes her brittle, but the Lieutenant is blessed with a highly analytical mind. She’s destined ever upward, as the sages say.”

“She seems young for all the authority.”

“She’s thirty-two, but has been climbing the ladder three steps at a time. After a degree in criminal justice – top of her class, highest honors – she started in uniform in Brooklyn, grabbed attention by using her head, analyzing crime patterns, offering realistic solutions. She worked undercover for a while, setting up sting operations, pitting dope dealers against one another, busting a fencing operation that reached from Florida to Canada …”

“Not your ordinary street cop.” I felt a sudden kinship with Alice Folger. My departmental rise began by solving a major crime while still in uniform.

Waltz nodded. “She seemed almost driven to prove herself as a cop. It got her noticed by a few people with clout. They touted Ms Folger to the big brass at One Police Plaza – HQ. Her supporters suggested the brass jump her in rank and send her here to be tested. We’re a big precinct and our homicide teams handle everything from street craze-os to murderous stockbrokers. It’s a plum placement for a detective displaying more tricks than usual.”

Perhaps like you, Shelly, I thought.

“I’m a fellow officer. Why does Folger think I’m useless?”

“Johnny Folger, her late father, was NYPD. All three of Johnny’s brothers were on the force, one died on 9/11. An aunt works in the impound. That’s just this generation. Before that …”

I held up my hand. “I get your point, Shelly. Folger has cop in her DNA.”

“Or overcompensating to create the genes.”

“What?”

He waved it away. “Nothing. I always found families more custom and tradition than blood, but that’s my take. What it boils down to is that Folger’s a partisan. She sees you as a –, as um …” Waltz fumbled for the word.

“As a rube,” I finished. “Someone to stumble over while the pros handle the heavy lifting.”

Waltz sighed an affirmation. I slid my unfinished salad over to join his sandwich and leaned forward, arms crossed on the table.

“How did I get here, Shelly? You know what I mean. How does a detective push the pause button on a homicide investigation, and get the NYPD to pull me from Mobile to New York in a heartbeat?”

Waltz looked uncomfortable. His fingers traced the rim of his glass. “Five years ago a councilman’s daughter ran off with a cult leader, a psychopath. I tracked him down in Alaska and personally brought her back. She had a successful deprogramming and the whole nasty incident stayed under wraps.”

I pursed my lips, blew silently. “There’s a grateful councilman on your shoulder? No wonder you could call the Chief direct.”

He shrugged. “That and a few other successes have given me a reputation for dealing with cases like your PSIT handles, the psychological stuff. I’m allowed latitude others don’t have. An input role.”

A thought about Shelly’s clout hit me. “Were you one of the supporters responsible for Alice Folger’s jump to the major leagues?”

He waved it away like it was no big deal. “I saw talent, I passed her name upstairs.”

I figured Waltz had seen a bright spark in Alice Folger and decided to drop it into an oxygen-laden environment to see if it would blaze or burn out. Judging by the veiled admiration in his voice, Folger had blazed bright.

I said, “Where do I go from here?”

“I’ve arranged you a hotel room nearby. Check in, get whatever you need and you’ll be reimbursed. You can come in to the department, or I’ll send reports to your hotel. I simply want you to see if you can add anything.”

“That’s all?”

“It’s what the lady wanted, it’s what the lady gets.”

Lady wanted, I thought, not victim wanted. Good for Waltz.

Waltz offered to drive me to the hotel, but needing to clear my head I started walking. I ducked into the continuing mist, my mind swirling into the events that had slammed my life into Dr Evangeline Prowse, with repercussions that would forever echo in my soul. Events I had not, could not, tell Sheldon Waltz.

The Alabama Institute of Aberrational Behavior housed an average of fifty criminally insane men and women. It had become one of the more enlightened such institutions under the stewardship of Dr Prowse, who had made a career-long study of psychopathy and sociopathy. It was claimed no doctoral candidate in abnormal psychology could write more than five pages without citing Vangie.

In one of her cases, a sixteen-year-old boy had murdered an abusive father, disemboweling him with a knife, a slow and hideous death by vivisection. The homicide was so savage that the local police did not suspect the boy, an intelligent and gentle soul, barely questioning him.

Starting two years later, five women were murdered in a grim, violent and symbolic manner. After the third mutilated victim appeared, the FBI gave the case material to Vangie. She studied the bizarre and ceremonial crime scenes, detecting signs of a tormented child. The police finally turned their eyes toward a twenty-six-year-old man whose father had died in the woods years before. He confessed, was ultimately pronounced insane, and Dr Prowse petitioned for him to be brought to the Alabama Institute of Aberrational Behavior.

I was in college at the time of the killer’s capture. Dr Prowse and I had met through that case, and had been bound by it for years.

The father was my father. The killer was my brother, Jeremy.

“Get back here, Jeremy, you little coward …stop that squealing …I’ll give you something to squeal about …”

“Don’t, Daddy, please don’t, Daddy …”

Though my father, Earl Eugene Ridgecliff, functioned as a respected civil engineer, he was diseased with anger. As children, my brother and I lived with the fear that anything – a word, a glance, a misperceived gesture – could explode into horror. My brother, older than me by six years, became the focus of our father’s physical rage, and I still awoke in cold sweats with my brother’s screams razoring through my home.

“Help me, Mama, help me, Mama … Daddy’s trying to kill me …”

I had never used the word murder for my brother’s actions against our father, preferring “attempted salvation”. Had Jeremy been caught and tried he might be free today, a jury figuring anyone suffering such agony had little recourse but to kill his tormentor.

But years of abuse had planted a seed of madness inside my gentle brother. Even as we built our neighboring forts in the oaks, signaling to one another with torn sheets like ship’s flags, fished for catfish in the slow Southern creeks, or lay in the summer grass and stared at clouds, the seed grew into vines that wrapped and strangled his soul.

My mother was a beautiful and emotionally fragile woman twenty years of age when my father, eighteen years her senior, passed through her small country town on an engineering project. Married within two months, my mother expected a storybook life. Instead, she found herself embroiled in a hellish drama so far beyond comprehension her only recourse was retreating to her room to practice her sole skill: the sewing of wedding dresses, white and flowing waves of satin and tulle.

The mutant seed within my brother caused him to believe our mother could have intervened in the nights of terror at the hands of our father. She could have more easily stopped the tides with her fingertips.

“The Alabama State Police today announced a suspect in the bizarre and brutal killings of at least five women …”

So deep was my brother’s belief in our mother’s complicity in his suffering that a few years after killing our father, Jeremy began killing our mother. I speak metaphorically: To actually kill her would have consigned me to a foster home – and he would not have done that – so surrogates fed his unfathomable need. Shamed by my brother’s actions, I changed my name, hid my private history behind veils of obfuscation, and refused to visit him.

It was Vangie – with input from Jeremy – who tracked me down and convinced me to reestablish a relationship with my brother. Jeremy and I had even collaborated – if that’s the word – on several cases where his unique insights helped me understand the crimes. He was so finely calibrated for madness he once boasted he could walk through a mall and point out a half-dozen people “either convinced Martians are reading their minds, or thinking things so dark they’d make Torquemada retch”.

My brother was not only insane himself, he was a Geiger counter for insanity in others.

THREE

The desk staff at the mid-town hotel were expecting my arrival and treated me with deference though I was in sodden clothes and my shoes squeaked footprints across the marble floor. They directed me to a nearby shop where I secured denim jeans, three cotton dress shirts, a white linen sport coat, a pair of upscale walking shoes plus underwear and socks.

Finally in my hotel room, a third-floor double dressed in somber monochrome – black, gray, gray-white – I showered, then snapped on a muted CNN to add color and distraction to my world. I unwrapped my new dress shirts and rinsed them in the sink to remove the creases and factory starch, squeezing them as dry as possible. In the cool and arid air conditioning they’d be set to iron in the morning. I did the same to the tees.

The phone rang, the desk advising me a package had just been delivered. A small Hispanic gentleman brought an envelope to my room, NYPD stamped on top left corner, the information Waltz had promised. As he had noted, it was spare, the investigation barely off the launching pad.

The prelims from the forensic teams in Vangie’s room featured all the No’s: No signs of struggle, No blood or body fluids visible, No seeming thefts, No signs of a search. I noted the mention of a closet with casual-type wear that seemed good for a week’s stay. It appeared she had packed for a normal visit to NYC.

Yet before this particular visit, Vangie Prowse turned on a video camera, noted my experience with serial killers, then proclaimed she’d made a strange decision, and was “doing things that make little sense. But I needed a serious –”

She’d had to hang up before finishing the sentence. Needed a serious what? Doing what things that made little sense? As if that wasn’t cryptic enough, she’d looked into the camera and apologized.

“Carson, I’m so sorry.”

What the hell had Vangie done?

I lay on the bed and studied the ceiling and ran that question in front of my eyes a hundred times until I drifted into a sweaty, twitchy sleep.

A ringing phone at the bedside awakened me. I dropped it, picked it up by the cord and bobbled it to my ear.

“Hmmp?”

Waltz. “We’ve got a dead woman, Detective Ryder. It’s a bad one.”

“Do I know her?” I mumbled from between two worlds.

“Jesus, wake up, Detective. You don’t know her. God, I hope not. I’m on scene and sending you a car. Be out front.”

“Waltz, um, wait. Let me get myself toget—”

The phone clicked dead. The clock said it was 8.10 p.m. I’d slept for two hours. My washed shirts were soggy. All I had was the one I’d worn through the day, reeking of sweat and despair. Holding my breath, I pulled it on and headed outside.

Day was failing fast, oblique light soaking the sky with an amber hue. City noise echoed down the man-made canyons, giving the sounds a reverberant depth. A police cruiser waited on the sidewalk, almost to the hotel steps. I was barely inside before the cruiser roared into traffic. I looked at the driver: Koslowski. He wrinkled his nose at my used clothes, shot me a glance, and rolled his window down.

“Where’s the scene?” I yelled over the siren. The traffic was mainly taxis. Koslowski kept his foot deep in the pedal, expecting cabs to open a path by the time he got there, and somehow they did.

“SoHo. If I don’t get you there in five minutes, Waltz is going to chew my ass.”

“I can’t imagine Waltz chewing ass.”

“He does it without words. It’s worse that way.”

“He’s an interesting guy,” I said, fishing for more info about the sad-eyed detective. “What’s your take on him?”

Instead of answering, Koslowski pulled to a brick Italianate duplex, a FOR SALE sign in the tiny front yard. I saw one cruiser by the curb, and a battered SUV with NYPD TECHNICAL DIVISION stenciled on the door. Beside it was a van from the Medical Examiner’s office. A blue-and-white was sideways across two lanes to keep gawkers distant, its light bar painting the street in shaking, multihued bursts. I jumped out and hustled toward the house.

“Hey, Dixie,” Koslowski called.

I spun. “What?”

“You asked me what I thought about Shelly Waltz.” He jammed the cruiser in gear. “When it’s nighttime for the whole world, and everyone is asleep, Shelly Waltz flies through the sky on a silver unicorn.”

“What?”

But Koslowski’s taillights were already flowing away. Shaking my head, I entered the house. A man and woman from the Medical Examiner’s office stood inside the door, opening a case of equipment. They looked shaken, ashen. They directed me down a hall to a bedroom. I smelled blood and my stomach shifted sideways.

I entered the room. Like the front rooms, it was devoid of furniture. Shelly was alone, standing above a draped figure in the center of the floor. The white cover was turning red as I watched. Waltz was rubbing his eyes with his palms.

“What is it, Shelly?”

He shook his head, lifted the cover. A woman’s nude body. Her eyes stared wide from the center of her own belly. Blood and fascia and yellow fatty tissue surrounded the head, having squirted out when the head was jammed into the wound. I let it all register for a five count, then closed my eyes.

“We’ve got a bad problem,” Waltz said.

“Bad as it gets,” I affirmed.

Waltz let the cover fall back over the corpse. When it fell it puffed out air, swirling hairs on the floor, the same amalgam I’d seen at Vangie’s crime scene: hairs of various colors and textures. Looking closer, I saw them scattered everywhere. On the tile floor, laying atop congealing pools of blood, on the window sill.

We turned to a thunder of footsteps approaching down the hall followed by Folger’s bray.

“Waltz? Are you back there?”

The footsteps turned into three agitated faces, Lieutenant Folger and Tweedledum and -dee from this morning – the hulking Bullard and Abel Cluff, a smaller and older guy with bulging eyes and the forward-pointing facial structure of a stoat. Cluff was wheezing, like he’d run a dozen flights instead of walking up a five-step stoop out front. Both men were in dark suits and white shirts, Bullard’s plank-thick wrists hanging two inches from his sleeves, like he’d grown since he’d bought the suit.

The trio moved past, stepping around the blood pools and smears. Cluff bent and lifted the cover from the corpse. His eyes showed neither surprise nor emotion and I figured being an older detective with the NYPD, he’d seen every possible permutation of horror.

“Oh Christ,” Folger moaned when she saw the body. “Tell me I’m dreaming, we don’t have a mad butcher out there.”

“Removing the head could be an attempt at depersonalization,” I ventured, trying to be helpful. “But inserting it in the abdomen could be a show of control: Behold my power. Or it might –”

Folger snapped her face to me. “What the hell are you doing here?” She sniffed, wafting her hand past her nose at my scent. “Jesus, they don’t have soap or deodorant where you’re from?”

Waltz said, “I invited Detective Ryder, Lieutenant. Given his experience with disturbed minds, I thought he might –”

“He’s not needed,” she said. “Stick him on a bus and aim it south.”

Bullard pinched his nose and gurgled a laugh. “You may want to spray him with something first.”

“Have you seen all you need, Detective?” Waltz asked. He shot me a look that said he knew I hadn’t, but it was time to let the Lieutenant win one. I nodded yes for the sake of harmony, and we retreated outside. There were now three cruisers on scene, one ambulance, an ME vehicle, a forensic vehicle, a large command vehicle and Waltz’s dinged-up blue Chevy Impala. The area was cordoned with yellow CRIME SCENE tape. The kid from Tech Services, Cargyle, jogged by, phone to his face and a heavy case slung over his shoulder.

I said, “Looks like you people are about to ramp into full investigative mode, Shelly. I’ll catch a cab.”

“One question, Detective. The eyes of the two victims. What do you make of the eyes?”

“That they’re open?” I said. “Not closed or covered or mutilated?”

“Yes.”

“He feels no shame at his actions, Shelly. There’s a good chance he feels pride his victims get to watch him at work.”

Waltz nodded sadly and turned as white as a man struck by lightning. Photoflash. I spun and saw a photographer a dozen feet distant.

Flash.

“Hey, Detective Waltz, s’up in there? Who’s dead?”

Flash Flash.

I saw blue squares floating in the air. Waltz gestured for a uniform to move the guy away. The photog retreated on wide and flat feet, grinning like a donkey, holding his hands up in the I surrender pose. He was a short guy, round, round, and round – face, belly, and butt, respectively.

I looked at Waltz. “One of the local media elite?”

“That piece of waddling excrement is the infamous Benny Mac. The prize scribbler-slash-camera jockey from the New York Watcher. It’s the newspaper for citizens who don’t like to read. We’ll be in it tomorrow, unless something important takes the space, like a celebrity getting a DUI or a cat that uses a toilet.”

I watched the guy pad across the street, shooting an arm into the air like an imperious wave. An engine roared to life down the block and a double-parked white Hummer sailed to Benny Mac’s side. He climbed inside, barked some command to the driver, and was whisked away, smirking through the window as he went.

FOUR

“Meester Ryder? Room service. I brought breakfas’.”

The Spanish-accented voice and knocking seemed too close. I felt something hard against my nose, something gritty pressing my cheek.

“Meester Ryder?”

My eyes popped open. I was on the floor by the door, nose against the wood, cheek on the carpet. I’d been dreaming.

“Just a minute,” I mumbled, staggering upright. “Be right there.”

I saw covers, sheet and pillows trailing from the bed to the door. Having dreams so disturbing I’d try to crawl away from them happened several times a year. The imagery was consistent: moaning shadows, faces comprised solely of teeth, a house where all windows faced inward …dreams generated during childhood.

I scooped the bedclothes up, threw the pillows and covers on the bed, wrapped the sheet around my naked body to answer the door. If the room service lady thought it unusual to find guests in ad hoc togas, her face didn’t let on. In fact, she beamed with recognition, and grabbed a newspaper from her cart. The woman waved the paper in my face, said, “Ees chew.”

“No thanks.” I thought she was offering me the paper. “Ees chew,” she repeated, snapping the paper open and pushing it to my face again. “Chew ees famous.”

I pushed it aside to look at her. “Pardon?”

“Aqui,” she said, tapping the third page with her finger. I saw a photo of Waltz and me. Beside the photo was a brief article.

Savagery in SoHo

New York’s Finest are close-lipped about a woman found with her abdomen sliced open in a vacant SoHo property. Perhaps the gruesome crime scene explains the look on the face of renowned Detective Sheldon Waltz, here conferring with an unnamed colleague …

At the housekeeper’s request – “Chew so famous!” – I autographed the article and took my breakfast tray inside. Naked on the bed with plate in one hand, fork in the other, I displaced the bad-dream bilge in my stomach with overcooked eggs and undercooked bacon and yearned for cheese grits with andouille. I showered for fifteen minutes, wishing I were at home on Dauphin Island, a hundred yards from the Gulf of Mexico, cool at this time of year, invigorating.

I dressed and walked to the cop shop, finding it kin to every station house in the civilized world: agitated bodies and loud voices, the smell of burnt coffee and all-nighter sweat, phones ringing, jammed-together desks piled with files. Waltz was in a glass-windowed office along the far wall. When I entered his office, he held up a copy of the New York Watcher turned to our photo.

“Must not have been any celebrity malfunctions overnight. You take a better picture than me. Have a seat.”

I sat. Waltz fixed me with a despondent gaze. “The techs are at their wits’ end, Detective. The hair you noticed on the floor at the scenes? It’s from hundreds of people. Men’s hair, women’s, different races. Plus dozens of fiber types, all mixed together.”

“What?”

“They did some tests, figure the killer collected hair from barber shops and beauty salons, fibers from anything. It’s an evidentiary nightmare.”

“Jeez, Shelly, even if you found something in the room that ID’d the guy …”

“The evidence would be polluted,” Waltz finished. “No sane DA would bring it to trial. It’s brilliant. How many madmen could figure out a ploy like this?”

I know one who could, I thought. But to everyone’s good fortune, my brother was in the fortress called the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior, locked up tight and forever.

Waltz pushed aside files on his desk to make a place for his elbows and flicked a paper at me, Office of the Medical Examiner on the letterhead.

“The prelims on the autopsies. Both were done last night and side-by-side. Folger and I pushed it through.”

I grimaced at the bullet-pointed information. “The womb was taken?”

“Basically, the victims received amateur hysterectomies. I attended the post mortem. The pathologist told me it was like an angry monkey hacking away with a knife. When all that was over, the head was pushed into the wound.”

The picture that came to my mind was so ugly I shut it off.

“Jesus. Forensics find anything useful?”

“We’re screwed by the hairs and fibers on the scene. But we did ID the victim. Dora Anderson, thirty-six years of age. She works for the realtor. She went there to meet a prospective buyer.”

“Alone? At night?”

“It’s a fairly upscale neighborhood. The guy must have presented himself benignly on the phone. She felt safe in his presence, obviously.”

A man who could tear another person apart and still present a perfectly normal appearance and demeanor was a total psychopath, a human chameleon. I shivered involuntarily and tossed the prelim on Shelly’s desk. It felt greasy in my hands, like the vileness of the murder had tainted the paper.

“You realize our perp hates women, right? More than anything?”

He nodded. “By removing the womb, he castrated her. I’ve seen my share of gender kills, though nothing quite that extreme.”

“Shelly, you’ve got a real nightmare brewing out there.”

Waltz’s phone rang. He grabbed it up. I turned my eyes away and pretended not to listen but, like everyone in the world, cops especially, kept an ear tuned to his voice.

“I’m in the middle of a …She’s in town? The Chief wants me specifically? No, I can do it. I’ve got to do it, right? Listen, we have a guy here, a specialist in, uh, people with bad intentions. OK to bring him along? Good. We’re heading there now.”

He hung up. “I know you heard that, Detective. I’d be disappointed if you hadn’t.”

“I take it we’re going somewhere?”

“There’s a political convention in a week or so, women from around the country, leadership types. I’m supposed to vet the threats, determine which are hot air, which are truly dangerous.”

“Threats?”

“The keynote speaker is Cynthia Pelham.”

“Holy shit,” I whispered. Cynthia Pelham had been on the American political scene for over twenty-five years. Her saga started at age twenty-three, when the county sweet-potato queen with two years of junior college married a fifty-eight-year-old senator from Georgia.

By thirty, she was making statements contrary to the senator’s positions regarding women’s right to equal pay and maternity leave. She had three-fourths of a law degree, obtained at night, since she’d had to spend her days on the senator’s arm and smiling the sweet-potato smile at cameras.

By thirty-five, she had the degree, but not the senator. Following a high-profile divorce, the senator’s allies, of whom there were many, spread rumors that Cynthia Pelham was – depending on the day and rumormonger – a lesbian, a woman who bedded every man she saw, frigid, a drug addict, a drunkard and, according to the New York Watcher, maybe even an extraterrestrial. Ms Pelham’s friends, of whom there were few at that time, simply said, “She grew up.”

By forty, Pelham was representing a mainly poor congressional district with such concern and passion she was uncontested in the next election. Since she was unmarried, held centrist feminist ideals, and kept her personal life personal, rumors of lesbianism persisted, her denials met with scorn. Websites and blogs sprang up calling for either her vilification or beatification.

By fifty-two, her present age, she had been convinced by grass-roots support and a generous helping of ambition – never denied – to run for President of the United States. Though bitterly divisive among partisans and ideologues, she wielded enough centrist appeal that odds were even money she’d win.

A few nights back I’d seen news from a typical Pelham event in Miami. Three-quarters of the crowd were supporters, the others ranting, waving fists, and carrying signs and posters. One showed a mangy female dog with bloated teats, Pelham’s face in place of the dog head. The caption said, “Time to Put the Bitch to Sleep.”

I said, “How long will Pelham be here, Shelly?”

“She’s coming to coordinate the eastern seaboard campaigns. The lady will be in and out of town all the next week.”

“What about the Secret Service?”

“They’ll accompany Pelham while we vet everything else.”

“‘We’ meaning you?”

“Basic security isn’t my problem, a special team handles the bodyguard routine, checking traffic routes and so forth.” He sighed. “The Chief wants me to explain to Ms Pelham’s handlers how the NYPD will keep snakes from wriggling under her door.”

I nodded my sympathy. Given Pelham’s flashpoint index it would take someone with experience to determine which threats were hot air and which were dangerous. It was nasty work, like dredging sewage with your fingers.

Waltz stood and grabbed his hat. “Like you heard, I bartered you into the mix. Straighten your tie and let’s get running.”

The powwow was at Ms Pelham’s NYC headquarters, a storefront near Cooper Union. There were the usual banners and posters and photos of the candidate. The desks were staffed by earnest-looking folks with phones in one hand, pencils in the other.

We met in a back room with Ronald Banks, a square, bespectacled African-American Secret Service agent in charge of the operation. I took the room to be a place for strategizing, a large map of NYC on the wall, broken down into precincts, voting registrations or projections sticky-taped to the map. There was a round table, a few chairs. Boxes of campaign flyers on the floor.

“She getting many threats?” Waltz asked Banks.

“People love her or hate her. The ones who hate her all seem to have rabies. Good luck, Detective Waltz.”

Our heads turned to a commotion in the work area: Cheers, applause, whistles. Either someone was dispensing free money, or the candidate was visiting. Three minutes later, Cynthia Pelham entered our room, two aides de camp in her slipstream. Somewhere along the road the sweet-potato queen had been replaced by a whirlwind in a pantsuit and sensible shoes. She ran to a corner, cellphone to one ear, finger in the other, talking as loud as if she were alone for miles around.

“Dammit, I don’t care how much money he has, the sonuvabitch is trailing garbage. The day after we take his donation the bastard will be indicted for screwing a goat or something. See if you can piss him off and maybe he’ll give the money to the other side …”

The second she snapped the phone closed it rang again. She listened for a ten-count. “The answers are, respectively, Yes, Yes, No, Hell yes, and the lobster bisque.” She switched the phone off and tossed it to a woman beside her, a petite blonde with quiet eyes and a square jaw who tucked the phone in a fat briefcase I figured doubled as the candidate’s purse.

The sweet-potato queen had turned from a pretty girl into a handsome woman, auburn hair now mixed with gray, her form shaded to the heavier side, skin lined with experience. The eyes that looked piercing on television seemed more curious in real life. She aimed the eyes at Waltz and me, moved to us as if pulled by gravity.

“You gentlemen look official. Am I triple-parked again?”

Waltz did his best to make his sad face smile. It looked like he was fighting a sneeze. “We’re here because a lot of folks don’t like you, Congresswoman. Men especially. At least that’s what I hear on the news.”

Pelham laughed, hearty and deep and bordering on bawdy. Unlike many candidates, she wasn’t afraid laughter would mark her as more human than machine, therefore unfit for high office.

“A lot of ladies don’t like me either. Hell, a lot of people’s pets don’t like me, if I’m to believe my mail.”

“You do seem to seriously set some folks off,” I said.

She raised an eyebrow at my voice, then the eyes went serious. “A lot of politicians get hate mail from people who live under rocks, but mine seems to come from the people beneath the people under the rocks. I showed a few letters to Rich Stanzaro when we were primary opponents. He said, ‘I see some strange shit, Cyn, but no one ever wants to cut my tits off.’”

“Rabies, like I said,” Banks noted to Waltz.

Pelham turned the curious eyes to me. “You’re the first NYPD cop I’ve ever met with a Southern accent.” She raised an eyebrow and grinned. “South Bronx, maybe?”

“I’m with the police department in Mobile, ma’am. I’m consulting on another case and Detective Waltz thought I might have a useful insight or two.”

“Because you’ve done something like this before? Helped guard against the angry people?”

“In a way. Back in Mobile I’m part of a unit that deals with mentally unstable criminals.”

“How unstable?”

“They’d not only cut your tits off, ma’am, they’d bread ‘em and fry ‘em up for supper.”

Eyes widened around us. Even Waltz raised an eyebrow. There was a moment of silence before the congresswoman barked the laugh, slapped my shoulder.

“I’m glad they sent out for Southern cooking, hon. You got some pepper in your gravy.”

Pelham shot us either a peace or victory sign and scurried off to pump up the cheerleader section out front. I stayed quiet as Waltz explained to aides and senior staff how he’d be checking the hate mail and unsavory phone calls, cautioning everyone to stay alert for strange people, incidents, and items in the mail.

The whole trip to and from Pelham’s HQ took under an hour. Cargyle, the young guy from Technical Services, ran across the floor as we returned to the detectives’ room, excitement in his voice and a tape cassette in his hand.

“Dr Prowse’s arrival was caught on security cameras at LaGuardia. I found two sections when she’s on camera. The first is by the baggage carousel, the second is going out the door. She seems normal, picking up her bag, heading out to grab a cab. She talks to a man beside her for a second. Probably small talk with another passenger.”

“Folger and her crew in?” Waltz asked.

“Due back shortly, but I don’t know exactly when.”

“Let’s get a preview.”

Cargyle wheeled a playback system into a conference room. He had a bag of tools and tape and electronic doohickeys slung over his skinny shoulder. His wristwatch had more buttons than my truck’s dashboard. He had not one but two skinny telephones. If Cargyle was like our Tech Services crew in Mobile, he read schematics instead of books.

“You just now find the footage?” I asked him.

“I’ve been at LaGuardia all night. Found one image at three, the other a half hour ago.”

“There all night, here all day? You ever sleep, buddy?”

Waltz said, “Cargyle’s assigned to the precinct, his training phase. I’m making sure he gets the full learning experience.”

“Full and more,” Cargyle grinned. The tape stuttered into action. The quality was better than your standard convenience-store cameras and I figured Homeland Security had a bigger budget than the Gas‘n’Gulp.

“Here’s the first segment,” Cargyle announced. “By the baggage carousel.”

I held my breath as Vangie stepped into the frame, flight bag over her shoulder. She ran to the carousel and snatched her suitcase. She paused, then spoke to a white-shirted man beside her, slender, facing away. The scene lasted all of five seconds.

“That’s snippet number one,” Cargyle said. “The second is a couple of seconds longer, but not much.”

The edited video jumped to the next scene. The camera was positioned above the door, the crowd herding tight for the exit like cattle down a chute.

“Here she comes,” Waltz whispered, picking Vangie from the on-rushing mob while she was still a blur. I leaned close to the screen. It took a second to discern the familiar features, the large eyes, dark and compact hair, rosebud lips. The eyes looked wary and tight with tension as Vangie exited the terminal with the slender man by her side, his head again canted away. At the last moment, he snapped his face toward the camera. His grin was ecstatic, his joy dominating the screen.

My spine turned to ice. I couldn’t choke back a gasp.

“What?” Waltz said. “You know him?”

“I’ve seen him before,” I whispered. “He’s a patient at the Institute. Brilliant and murderous and unpredictable.”

I didn’t add that he was my brother.

FIVE

“The crazy’s name is what?” Folger asked.

“Jeremy Ridgecliff,” Waltz said. “He killed his father when he was sixteen, then brutally murdered five women. Ridgecliff has been in the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior for over a dozen years.”

Folger turned to me. “Didn’t you say they never got out of that place?”

I barely heard her and made no response. I sat in the corner, stunned. Somehow, Jeremy had escaped and forced Vangie to New York. Vangie was dead, mercilessly and bizarrely mutilated by my brother.

Tell them, my mind said. Tell them he’s your brother. You’ve got to tell them now.

I opened my mouth to speak as Waltz waved everyone silent, holding up pages fresh from the fax machine. “Our first look at Ridgecliff. He likes knives, mutilation and symbolism. And he’s had years of incarceration to dream up new stuff. That’s the good news.”

A detective in the back of the room, Perlstein, looked up from his note-taking. “If that’s good, Shelly, what’s bad?”

“He has a higher IQ than anyone in this room, I’d wager. I’m talking maybe thirty points higher.”

Low whistles, groans. A killer with creative intelligence could be as elusive as a black shark in a midnight ocean.

Stand up and tell them, my mind repeated. They’re cops. You’re a cop.

Folger’s heels ticked on the floor as she paced. “Ridgecliff somehow coerced the Prowse woman into bringing him here, then killed her, no longer needed. What he did to her got him so juiced he had to do it again. Like Waltz said, this monster’s had years to let his fantasies cook. His feet barely hit pavement and we’ve got two women torn to bits.”

What would happen when I told them? I’d become their information machine, held distant from the investigation, used but not completely trusted. It was the smart thing to do. It’s what I would do in the same situation.

Waltz’s voice broke into my thoughts. “It was Detective Ryder who ID’d Ridgecliff, saving hundreds of man-hours. We all owe him a debt of gratitude.”

My face burned as the other faces in the room turned to me. Cop faces, my brethren, nodding thanks at me. I heard scattered handclaps. Folger walked over.

Tell her.

“Job well done, Detective. Waltz is right. We all owe you one.”

“Listen, Lieutenant, uh, I’d like to tell you about Ridgecliff. He’s –”

Folger’s hand, firm and cool, found its way into mine. “Sorry we got off on the wrong foot. You know how protective departments are about turf, right? You can head home and we’ll have Ridgecliff nailed in a day or two. Drop him back in the box. Or even better, lay him in the ground.”

“Bang,” Bullard said. “Problem solved.”

“Uh, listen, Lieutenant …”

But what if …What would change if …I said nothing. What was affected as long as I stayed near the investigation? Vangie could have mentioned Jeremy was my brother. Why didn’t she?

“Yes?” Folger said, a dark eyebrow raised.

“About Jeremy Ridgecliff …I’m part of a special unit that handles the edgy stuff, psychotics, sociopaths. I can help you more than you think.”

“We have homicidal crazies in New York, Ryder. I think the NYPD can handle –”

Waltz interrupted. “You recognized Ridgecliff right off the bat, Detective Ryder. Am I to assume you studied the suspect?”

I kept my face neutral and my voice even. “I have had conversations with Mr Ridgecliff. Quite a few, actually.”

Waltz turned to Folger. “Not only does Detective Ryder know a bit about Ridgecliff, it might speed up communication with Southern law enforcement if we had a liaison. And a local professional to interview the staff at the Institute.” Waltz looked to me. “You can handle the Southern pipeline on both counts, Detective Ryder?”

Though my heart was pounding like a hammer, I kept my voice nonchalant. “I have excellent contacts in the Alabama State Police and can have my partner handle interviews at the Institute. He’s experienced in psychological crimes.”

Folger said, “I don’t think we need –”

Waltz clapped his hands once, not applause, but finality. “That should settle things and sit well with the brass. Detective Ryder will be with us a few days longer. A consultant, if you will.”

Don’t go down this road. Tell them now. It’s your last chance.

I studied my shoes. My mouth stayed closed.

What am I doing?

Folger departed briskly, Bullard and Cluff on her heels. Waltz headed to a meeting with the DA on another case. I stood on unsteady legs and checked my watch: Ten thirty a.m. It was an hour earlier in Mobile. I blotted sweat from my forehead with my sleeve, took a deep breath and dialed my cellphone. Twelve hundred miles away in Mobile, my partner, Harry Nautilus, picked up.

“Cars? Jeez, what the hell’s going on? Are you still in NYC?”

I pictured Harry frowning into the phone, a six-four black man in a forty-eight long jacket, probably yellow or neon green. The pants might be plum, or mauve. Harry loved color and no one dared tell him it sometimes didn’t love him back.

“I’ll be here for a few days, Harry.”

“Why? I mean, one minute you’re here, the next you’re –”

“Jeremy escaped,” I said. “He’s in New York.”

“What?”

“He somehow coerced Vangie Prowse into bringing him here. Vangie’s dead, Harry. Jeremy killed her and another woman. He did terrible things to the bodies. He’s exploding.”

“Lord Jesus,” Harry whispered. “How in the hell did he get out?”

“I don’t know. Some kind of ruse. Maybe he got hold of a weapon, or found some security failing. It should have been impossible, but he did it. Listen, Harry, I know the State Police will be handling it, but could you take a look at the Institute, find out how –”

“Did you tell them, Cars? Did you tell them he’s your brother?”

I couldn’t find my breath. The day seemed to come crashing in and my eyes filled with tears. I gasped, wiped my face on my shoulder. Waited for Harry to tear into me, to tell me I was an idiot. Or worse.

Instead, Harry said, “Tell me what you need me to do, bro.”

We talked for a few minutes. After hanging up, I slunk toward the exit carrying a paper bag bulging with copies of the files faxed to Waltz by the Alabama State Police. On the way out I saw Alice Folger in a shadowy meeting room by herself, watching a television like something major depended on the outcome. I couldn’t see the screen or hear the audio, and wondered if it was a news program with NYPD featured in some way, or perhaps a verdict on a case she’d worked.

I crept by to the other side of the hall, shot a glance at the TV screen. I saw a suited man pointing at colored lines bisecting the nation’s midsection.

Alice Folger was hypnotized by the Weather Channel?

SIX

I returned to the hotel and set the files on the table, pushing them to the far side. Guilt at my inability to tell the cops the truth pooled in my guts like cold oil. There was more to feel guilty about: Even though a specialist in psychological crimes, I had never read the details of my brother’s murders. I had always feared that, in reading the cold facts of Jeremy’s cases, I might see a monster, and not the tormented child who killed his father after years of unspeakable misery …

I am just past my tenth birthday. Jeremy is sixteen. One day, playing alone in one of the forts Jeremy and I built in the woods behind our house, I walk from the trees to find the county police at our house. There is a policeman on the dirt drive of our house, another at the wheel of the car. The cop in the drive is looking at my mother, three steps up on the porch. Jeremy is on the porch as well, sitting a dozen feet away in the glider. He looks between the policeman in the car and the one in the drive, his eyes pensive.

The policeman’s hat is off and he is holding it over his privates. He is tremendously old, fifty maybe. He removes his mirrored sunglasses, his face creased with sorrow. I hear his words in soft groupings.

“I’m so sorry, ma’am …

“The coroner’s there now, no need for you to see such a …

“We’ll find this madman, ma’am, this person …”

I look to the police car and see the second policeman through the open car door. Younger. He’s reloading one of those cameras where the film turns into pictures as you watch. He sets the camera aside and his eyes study me. Strangely ashamed, I look at the ground. When I look up again, he is studying Jeremy. Then the moment passes and the cops turn to dust in the hot air. My mother stands in the yard like a statue. Jeremy rocks the glider to and fro, a faraway smile on his face.

I had never asked Jeremy about the day our father died. I had hated the man. When he left for work in the morning, I watched the truck disappear down the road and prayed for his death. A retaining wall cave-in, crushed under a bulldozer, falling from a bridge. I had a dozen hopeful scenarios.

Please God, make him die today in a gasoline explosion …

Instead, it was my big brother who finally exploded. Only later, after interviewing a hundred fiercely dysfunctional minds, did I realize Jeremy’s explosion had saved me from an escalating madness destined to end in a house full of dead bodies with the standard news bites from the neighbors.

“We never knew the Ridgecliffs real good, but they seemed decent enough …Earl didn’t seem the kind of man to do that to his family and hisself …it’s a tragedy, is what it is …”

Jeremy knew how it would end, and took the only course he could take. I am alive because my father never got the chance to kill me.

Every breath I take is a gift from Jeremy.

I arrayed Jeremy’s files before me in chronological order, starting with paperwork generated the day my father died. One of the first officers at the scene was Jim Day of the county police. Though higher-ranking officers had been in early attendance – Sergeant Willis Farnsworth, Lieutenant Merle Baines, Captain Hollis Reamy – it was Day who wrote up the report. It may have been that Farnsworth, Baines and Reamy wanted to avoid paperwork, not unusual for guys with the rank to lay the work on others; but it could also have been Day’s eye for minutiae and vocabulary for description.

Victim’s intestine, Day wrote, appeared to have been severed at lower end and pulled like rope from the slit in victim’s abdomen. This “rope” extended across the ground for a dozen feet. And later in the report: A kidney appears to have been thrown with great force into a tree, bursting like a water balloon. Fragments were on the ground at the tree’s base.

And near the conclusion of the report, Day noted that, “the scene seemed one of total anger. The feeling was of a threshold crossed, some form of decision acted on.”

It took an hour to read Jim Day’s details and descriptions. When finished, I was soaked in sweat and my hands shook, forced to experience the crime as it unfolded. I’d heard the screams for mercy, smelled the cut-copper reek of flowing blood. My mind’s-eye watched my brother cut my father apart with a knife I’d used to slice bologna.

I blotted sweat from my brow and pushed aside the six-inch-tall stack of copies generated by Jeremy’s remaining murders of the five innocent women. I’d get to them later.

Tomorrow for sure.

Twilight painted the air a clean and fragile blue as Jeremy Ridgecliff rode a subway car downtown. He was feigning sleep while shooting sidelong glances at his quarry, a pasty little man, fortyish and balding. He was dressed in khakis and a gray wool cardigan, and had wary, flickering eyes that often shot to the tattered briefcase locked beneath his arm.

Jeremy had spent the afternoon wandering in the library, never going too far from the Political Science stacks and the Archived Newspapers: Cheese for a very special kind of mouse.

Had he found one?

Jeremy had watched the man working in a carrel, muttering to himself and making notes. After an hour, the man exited the library cautiously, clutching the briefcase to his chest and jitter-stepping to the street, shooting glances over his shoulders.

Jeremy had followed, his antennae quivering.

The man had stopped at a cart for a sandwich. He opened the bread like it was booby-trapped, and inspected the interior. After wolfing the sandwich down, he’d skittered to the subway entrance. Jeremy slipped his Metro Pass from his pocket, followed the man into the ground.

Next stop Chambers Street …

The train slowed. Jeremy saw his quarry’s hands tighten on the bar, ready to exit, but not wanting anyone to know. The wheels squealed to a halt. Doors snapped open. People entered and exited. At the last possible moment, the man jumped from his seat and slipped through the closing doors.

Jeremy was already outside, waiting in the shadows. The man walked east for a dozen blocks, entering a neighborhood of expensive high-rise apartments and condos.

Jeremy slipped ahead with the stealth of a cat, appearing at the man’s side.

“Keep walking,” Jeremy growled. “Walk or die. Don’t make a sound.”

The man moaned. Jeremy steered him to a paved area outside an empty dog run. A dirty streetlamp turned the twilight into yellow haze. Jeremy’s finger jabbed the man toward a bench.

“Sit,” he demanded.

The man sat and held up the briefcase like a shield. “I-I have c- copies. If anything h-happens to me, copies g-go to the New York Times, the Wuh-Washington Post, the Chicago T-Tribune and the R-Rocky Mountain News.”

“Shut up or I’ll slice your throat. Show me what you have.”

The man fumbled at the locks with trembling fingers. The open case revealed hundreds of tattered pages. He selected what seemed an important page, names and dates linked by colored arrows. He pushed the page at Jeremy.

“You c-can’t hurt me. It’s all backed up. I have c-copies.”

Jeremy moved beneath the streetlamp. He studied arrows and lines snaking from Trilateral Commission to Ronald Reagan to the House of Saud to GW Bush. The Bay of Pigs was represented, as were the Kennedys. Each name was followed by a half-dozen exclamation points.

Jeremy stepped to the man’s side. Shook the page in front of the man’s eyes. “How long have you known about this?”

“T-Twenty-two years.”

Jeremy replaced the anger in his face with calm. He surprised the man by gently squeezing his shoulder.

“It’s terrible, isn’t it? They used hidden speakers to fill my house with noises at night. They were always sneaking up on me, dressed as repairmen. They put things in my food to make me sick.”

The man’s eyes widened. “You’re …one of us?”

Jeremy looked from side to side, whispered, “They were after me for a decade, but I managed to get free.”

“HOW?”

Jeremy put a finger to his lips and pointed to an approaching jogger, a man in white sweats, MP3 player wire running to his ears. The jogger shot an uninterested glance as he padded past.

“He saw us,” the man gasped. “Do you think he’s one of Them?”

“He’d been wired for sound,” Jeremy said. “Did you notice one wire was black, the other one white?”

The man’s hand swept to his mouth. “Oh Jesus …”

Jeremy crouched to look the man in the eyes. “Things are falling apart in Washington. They might be willing to forget you. I made them forget me.”

“TELL ME HOW! I’ll do anything!”

“Shhhhh. I bribed them. And I was free.”

“The NSA takes bribes? The CIA?”

Jeremy rubbed his fingers in the money-whisk motion. “It’s Washington, everything slides on the green grease.”

“What do they want?”

“What can you give them?”

The man’s brow wrinkled in furious thought as his fingertips drummed his briefcase. “Paper money’s going to be worthless soon. I can get my hands on Krugerrands, gold coins. Most gold is radioactive, but the South Africans make Krugerrands immune to the rays. I can’t get many – seventy or eighty thousand dollars worth or so.” He shook his head. “It’s nothing to Them.”

“They’ll soon be the only currency left. Give them half. It’s what I did.”

The man’s wary eyes returned. He pulled the briefcase to his chest, pages spilling across the pavement. “You could be one of Them. You’ll steal from me and still follow me.”

Jeremy patted the man’s forearm, one friend to another. “If I was after your money, wouldn’t I ask for all of it?”

The man absorbed the information, sighed with relief. “I don’t want to meet them. Can you take the gold for me?”

Jeremy straightened, put his hands in his pockets, shot furtive looks from side to side.

“I’ll have to catch the red-eye to DC tomorrow. Can you get the gold tonight? And maybe some cash to tide them over?”

SEVEN

The next morning I entered the detectives’ room to a heavy smell of sweat and adrenalin. Bodies were moving fast, papers shuffling, phones ringing. Cluff was on the phone and staring down at his fax machine. I watched a heavyset detective cross the room with a cup of coffee, enter a cubicle a dozen feet away, start talking with a colleague.

“Too freakin’ much,” the chunky guy said, laughing.

“What?”

“Len and me just got back from a condo in Tribeca. Ritzy place, owned by a husband and wife, the guy manages an investment firm. Good people, they keep a room for the wife’s brother, Gerald. Gerald’s forty-two, got a few head problems, mainly he’s paranoid-schizo. Gerald does OK until he skips his meds, then he weirds out, hides from the Feds, that sort of thing. The boys in blue track him down a couple times a year, bring him home.”

“Conspiracy type?”

“In spades. Seems Gerald came home last night, snuck in the husband’s office safe and grabbed forty-seven grand worth of Krugerrands the investment guy had stashed.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yep. By the time Mr Investment finds the shiny coins missing this morning, Gerald’s given them away, plus twenty-six thou in cash. Said he was buying his freedom from the CIA.”

A laugh. “Who’d Gerald give the stuff to? He say?”

“Won’t say anything, except he’s finally free and they’re all safe. He’s a happy camper. Showed us some backward scribbles on a piece of cardboard, claimed it was his receipt from the CIA …”

I shook my head and walked away, seeing Waltz arriving, opening the door of his office, tossing his hat to the corner of his desk. I crossed the floor, making my face benign, guileless. I had chosen duplicity over truth and there was no turning back.

My fear of discovery wasn’t overwhelming. I’d gone to a fair amount of trouble to wall myself off from my past. Except for paying a computer-savvy friend to delete items from a college database, it was mostly legal, changing my name and spreading carefully chosen rumors. Unless the few who knew of my connection to Jeremy Ridgecliff pointed my way, anyone looking for the missing brother of a blighted family might think the guy boarded a steamer and fell beneath the horizon, never seen again.

“What’s up, Shelly?” I asked, poking my head through his door.

“Cluff dug up tax records from Ms Dora Anderson. She wasn’t born a realtor, it was a career change.”

“From what?”

“A social worker in Newark. It was years ago, but …”

We were in Newark a half-hour later, in the city’s social services department. It resembled the detectives’ room at the precinct – a large space jammed with cubicles and filing cabinets and lined by small offices and conference rooms. Unlike the detectives’ room, the workers were predominantly women, the scent tending to perfume and hand lotions and other womanly nostrums. There were more pictures of families on the desks, fewer guys grinning beside large fish.

We had been directed to Jonnie Peal, a fortyish woman who held her head sideways as she talked, looking away every few seconds, like someone was whispering in her ear a half-dozen words at a time.

“Dora worked in the office all day. A mid-level administrator. Assignments, mainly, coordinating the schedules of our contact staff. I recall her having her realtor’s license back then. A part-time thing, weekends. One day she went for it full time. Guess she got tired of scheduling. Pay was better. Couldn’t be worse.”

“No contact with clients?” I asked.

Ms Peal nodded to a row of wide cubicles separated by tall gray dividers. “She worked in cubicle fourteen. Sat there all day long.”

I looked at Waltz. Desk-bound workers rarely made enemies that mutilated your body. It was the caseworkers, the folks on the street who were avoided, jeered, cursed, spat on, and sometimes harmed as they thrust themselves into situations where they were neither understood nor wanted. Cohabitational situations were bad, toss in kids and things got worse. Though parents might allow an infant to wallow in filth for days, let a social worker suggest inadequate care and things could explode into violence. But Ms Anderson had been insulated from those situations.

“That’s wrong,” said a voice. “Dora wasn’t always at that desk.”

We turned to see a petite, sharp-dressed Hispanic woman a dozen feet away. She stood up from a desk where she’d been on the telephone. Her phone rang. I figured it rang all day.

“Excuse me?” I said.

She punched a button on the phone and walked over. “I’m Celia Ramirez. Been here twenty years. Dora started in Social Services as a caseworker when she was fresh from college. It didn’t work out, I guess. She was put in filing, worked her way to scheduling.”

“She worked out of here? This office?”

Ms Ramirez pointed to an adjoining annex. “Back then she worked in Children’s Services. You know what kind of nastiness they see over there?”

“Yes,” I told her. “Unfortunately, I do.”

We followed Ms Ramirez’s directions to the Child Welfare section of the department. It mirrored government offices everywhere: cubes, chairs, desks with piled-high in-baskets, cabinets. But I knew horrors lurked in the cabinets and case files, the seeds of serial murderers. Psychopathic killers are created in childhood. They come from backgrounds of physical and psychological abuse on a scale almost inconceivable to the normal American mind.

No matter how childhood is stripped away, by sex or pain or perverse and relentlessly inventive combinations of the two, it leaves, or never begins. Many children endure these cauldrons of despair to create what we call productive lives. But endurance is a skill, not a foundation. Many are wounded in some way, unable to form normal relationships, or know anything akin to inner peace. Others have all vestiges of personality destroyed, as if an angry fire had seared away their soul. Nothing remains to hold evil at bay, and everything becomes a possibility.

Waltz noted my silence, said, “Are you all right, Detective Ryder?”

“I’ve been in too many of these places, Shelly.”

“Don’t I know it. Listen, two of us might seem heavy handed. Want to keep it one-on-one again, you being the one?”

I nodded. “Sounds right.”

He squeezed my shoulder, then stood on tiptoe and scanned the floor. “I’ve got to find a restroom. I drank two cans of diet fudge goo this morning.”

I wandered until I found the director, Eugenie Brickle, a slender and handsome black woman in her fifties with searching eyes. They searched me from toes to hat before deciding I was on the side of the angels.

“How long was she a caseworker?” I asked as we strolled the sidewalk in front of the building so Ms Brickle could have a cigarette. She didn’t really smoke, just sort of touched the cigarette to her lips and inhaled as she pulled it away, puffing out nothing. I figured her for a long-time smoker who’d found a way to get the motion without the potion.

“Dora worked with us for two years. Then she was moved to clerical. It was that or be let go.”

I paused, waited for a loud bus to pass. “Dora wasn’t good at her job?”

“Maybe too good, too sensitive. She didn’t know how to compartmentalize. Every child was Dora’s child, every situation could have a happy ending. If it didn’t, the failure was Dora’s. It was tearing her up. It wasn’t doing the staff a lot of good either, finding her weeping in the washroom three times a week.”

“It seems strange she left the field completely.”

We came to the end of the block, turned around. Ms Brickle had not-smoked the cigarette almost to the filter.

“Her mother lived with Dora and had been ill for several years. It’s why Dora did real estate on weekends, to help with the bills. Her mom took a turn for the worse and the bills piled higher …”

“Dora jumped for the added pay.”

“I imagine she was a super realtor, working to give every buyer a happy ending, find the dream home. Maybe that’s what she threw herself into. But she never let go of her social-work days completely.”

“Why do you say that?”

We stopped at the door. Ms Brickle pressed the cigarette into the sand of a receptacle, tapping it deep, so all that remained was a tan circle the circumference of a .32 shell.

“I was over in the city, saw her about a month back. She was clicking down the street in high heels and print dress flapping in the breeze, looking bright and happy and about to jump straight up into the blue sky. I asked if she’d just sold Donald Trump a building. She laughed and said she’d crossed paths with a client from her Child Welfare days, and he had made it through hell; not just survived, but was building a good life for himself.”

“She say who it was?”

She shrugged. “We see so many kids I probably wouldn’t have recalled the name. Just someone she’d seen in the course of her job.”

“A success story.”

“Even Dora had figured him for a lost child, too broken to ever be made right. But there he was, a responsible adult, working a good job and making a difference in the world. That day it wasn’t the real estate work lighting her face up, Detective. It was a case from years and years ago. Dora got her a happy ending.”

EIGHT

“Could you please stop pacing, Doc?” Harry Nautilus said. “It’s driving me nuts.”

Nautilus rolled a chair behind Dr Alan Traynor, bumping the back of Traynor’s knees. The psychiatrist half sat, half fell, into the chair.

“I’m trying to stay calm,” the acting head of the Alabama Institute for Aberrational Behavior mumbled. He ran pink fingers through thinning white hair, tiny blue eyes twitching behind wire-framed bifocals. “It’s all so mystifying. What would make Dr Prowse do such a thing?”

Nautilus sat another chair in the book-filled office that had belonged to Dr Evangeline Prowse. He rolled toward Traynor until their knees touched, hoping to lock the nervous shrink in place.

“I need to understand Dr Prowse’s last few weeks.”

Nautilus had left Mobile at six a.m. He’d spent most of the drive on the phone with the State Police, making sure they were working together, not at odds. For now, the death of Dr Prowse was being disseminated as inconclusive. That a patient was missing was being played close to the vest. Had Jeremy Ridgecliff been prowling the Alabama countryside, there would have been a full shrieking alert. Roadblocks. Helicopters. Bloodhounds.

“Dr Traynor?” Nautilus prompted. “Did you notice anything strange?”

“Like I told the State Police, I wasn’t here. She sent me and the three other senior staffers to a conference in Austin. It was last minute and strange.”

“Strange how?”

“The conference had little bearing on what we do at the Institute. It was on interpersonal dynamics, personality assessments, psychometrics …” Traynor’s hand rose to cover his mouth. “Oh Lord. Do you think Dr Prowse sent us to Austin to keep us away while all …the bad stuff was going on?”

“I don’t know enough to answer that. Was anything unusual?”

Nautilus watched Traynor’s face contort through memories. “She’d been nervous the past three or so weeks. But there wasn’t any major incident. One thing stood out, though it wasn’t recent. About six weeks back I was working second shift. Near midnight, I saw the Doctor in her office. I poked my head in, asked if I could help with anything. She said she was perplexed by a case.”

“I’d figure perplexing cases were pretty standard here.”

“She was more than perplexed, she was upset, though trying to hide it. I asked if I could help with anything. She said there might be confidentiality issues involved.”

“Confidentiality holds in here?” Nautilus frowned down the long white hall toward the patient section of the Institute, separated by shining steel doors. Every fifty feet of wall held a button labeled Emergency. It wasn’t referring to fires.

“Not at the Institute,” Traynor said. “But doctor-patient privileges could have been involved if she was talking about a private client.”

Nautilus raised an eyebrow. “Why would a world-renowned specialist like Dr Prowse want to see folks with sibling rivalries, panic attacks …”

“The standard afflictions? She wouldn’t. For Dr Prowse to accept an individual patient, he or she would be very compelling in some way. Of interest.”

“I’d imagine she sees all kinds of ‘interesting’ in here,” Nautilus said. “Jeremy Ridgecliff, for example.”

Traynor nodded. “Patricide following years of childhood abuse, mental and physical. That wasn’t overly unusual, a child reaching the breaking point, taking revenge. What was unusual was the shifting of anger to a disconnected mother, or rather, surrogates. And the startling amount of physical violence inflicted on his victims. Unfortunately …” Traynor shrugged, shook his head.

“Unfortunately what, Doctor?”

“Dr Prowse never fully opened Ridgecliff up. She figured ways to keep him calm and fairly reality based – that in itself was a monumental success – but she never reached the primal judgment.”

“Primal judgment?”

“Sorry …a term the Doctor and I used for the underlying motivator in killings. Another staffer calls it ‘The Fire that lights all fires’.”

“I thought abuse was the underlying factor.”

“That’s the fact of the case. The primal judgment is how the patient transforms that fact into his own beliefs. How the fact is perceived, interpreted and, in Jeremy Ridgecliff’s case, turned into a murderous impulse against women.” Traynor raised a wispy eyebrow, a note of condescension in his voice. “The concept is perhaps a bit difficult for the layman. A drunken and abusive man beats three sons. One son reads it as a form of contact, a misshapen display of love, and manages to love his father back. The second interprets it as hatred, responds in kind. The third son …” Traynor paused, tapped his fingers to his chin, trying to come up with an example.

“The third son,” Nautilus said, “might do something wholly different, such as judging the pain to be a message from God or Allah or the Universal Oneness – a sign that he’s been chosen for something, and the suffering is necessary.”

Traynor stared at Nautilus as if seeing him for the first time.

“Exactly, Detective. But Dr Prowse never found Jeremy Ridgecliff’s primal judgment, probably because he knew she was looking for it. They danced around the subject, almost playfully at times.”

“Playfully?”

“Both knew it was serious business, but Jeremy Ridgecliff had his whole life to play the game, his form of hide-and-seek. He held tight to his secrets.”

“So the two, uh, toyed with one another. Is that the right word?”

“Ridgecliff could actually be puckish. And wholly charming, when he wished. Lovable, almost. If you didn’t know his history.”

Lovable. Nautilus tumbled the word in his mind. Dr Evangeline Prowse was a friend of his partner. If Carson had a blind spot, it was overlooking imperfections in those close to him. Nautilus narrowed an eye at the nervous Traynor and decided to push him a bit.

“Tell me about the phenomenon known as transference, Doctor.”

Traynor frowned. “There’s no way Dr Prowse would allow transference to occur.”

“Transference of romantic feelings from patient to therapist …all kinds of patients fall for their therapists. Sometimes those vices get versa’d, right? The docs fall for the patients?”

The psychiatrist’s forehead reddened with anger. “There’s no way Dr Prowse would ever have a relationship with a patient.”

“Then why did she go to such lengths to smuggle Ridgecliff out?”

“She didn’t smuggle him out. He made her do it.”

“It was Dr Prowse who changed guard schedules, falsified medical transfer papers, made up a half-dozen false scenarios over at least two weeks’ time. You yourself suspect she diverted you to a conference to get you out of the way. Maybe it was all her idea.”

“I just told you, that is impossible!”

“She did all this while he was locked up. No knife at her throat, gun at her back. It seems irrational. Which leaves emotion. Powerful emotion. What possible leverage could Ridgecliff hold over Dr Prowse except for an emotional one?”

Traynor stood abruptly, sending the chair toppling. “I don’t know, goddammit! I DON’T FUCKING KNOW!”

Nautilus glanced at the toppled chair, raised an eyebrow at Traynor. “And when this transference happens under everyone’s noses, there’s surprise and anger. That’s because of something called denial, right?”

The psychiatrist turned his head away.

Said, “Yes.”

NINE

I grabbed a pastrami sandwich upon our return from Newark and brought it back to Waltz’s office. I ate as Shelly nursed a can of something fished from his mini-fridge.

“Ms Anderson had a short tenure at Child Welfare,” he said. “Ridgecliff’s family never lived in Jersey, you’re sure about that?”

We never lived any further north than a brief stint in Knoxville when I was five. All I recall is my father ranting about mountains. He hated mountains, he hated plains, he hated whatever was in between.

“It’s in the records sent by the Alabama police, Shelly. The family never resided or even visited above the Mason-Dixon line.”

“Anderson worked with dysfunctional families. The Ridgecliffs were dysfunctional enough to register on the Richter scale. It’s an interesting coincidence. I wish I could dig up the other kid. Charles Ridgecliff. Maybe he could make some sense of this.”

I faked a yawn. “I doubt it, Shelly. He’s long gone.”

Waltz frowned. “You think Anderson was purely an opportunistic kill, right? Nothing in her background to tie her to Ridgecliff?”

“It’s possible she’d been nice to him at some point in the last few days. It’s one of his triggers.”

Shelly shot me the sad eyes. “I forgot there’s a switch in Ridgecliff’s head that only flicks when a woman reminds him of his mother.”

My mother. My pathetic, terrified, mousy mother who scampered off to her goddamn sewing room every time my father’s voice rose …

I said, “It’s key to Ridgecliff’s delusion that his mother allowed the father’s abuse to continue. That she was complicit in the horror.”

“I saw in the records the mother’s deceased.”

I nodded. “Cancer took her.”

Took her with pain so hot it melted her hands into permanent fists. With screams that burned away her voice box until all she could do was rasp. She never took any medication or allowed me to do anything for her. She thought dying in hell might somehow help her gain entrance to heaven.

Waltz said, “Sorry. Off the track. You were talking about his target process?”

“Ms Anderson was medium build and blonde. At thirty-six she was squarely in an age range from early thirties to early forties. That describes every woman Ridgecliff has targeted because it basically describes his mother. He’d never kill a black or Oriental woman. Or an obese or very thin woman. They’re outside his mother image.”

“Dr Prowse didn’t fit the image.”

“He killed her to gain his freedom, Shelly. It also would have been personal.”

Waltz closed his eyes. He made a curious squeak and turned away. Coughed. Pounded his chest so hard I winced.

“You OK, Shelly?”

“Dry throat.” He took a pull from the can, followed it with a deep breath, regained his train of thought. “So Ridgecliff sees Anderson, his mind lights up with the word Mommy, and his juices start flowing. That how you think it went down?”

“Maybe they were on the street. He drops something, she picks it up. The action and her looks flick his switch. He can’t help following her. She walks to the realtor’s office. He manages to find out her name. From there it’s a simple deception to lure her to the property. He was probably laughing while he waited.”

“Folger’s got dicks and uniforms working for five blocks around, plus checking out Ms Anderson’s and her office on 26th, and her neighborhood in Brooklyn. They’re bracing people in the neighborhood, showing Ridgecliff’s pic.”

I thought for a moment. “Folger can pull the team from Brooklyn, Shelly. Ridgecliff’s in Manhattan.”

Waltz stared. “How the hell do you know that?”

“Uh, it’s more a hunch than anything.”

“I doubt Folger’s gonna pull a team on your hunch.” Waltz shook the can and glared like it was a personal irritant. I smelled chocolate and noticed a dark smudge over Waltz’s upper lip, like he’d borrowed Little Richard’s mustache.

“Are you drinking chocolate syrup?” I asked, happy to change the subject.

He held up the can. I saw the words Slim-EEZ Chocolate Fudge.

“It’s a diet drink,” he said, patting his gut. “The endless damn fight.”

“Chocolate fudge is diet?”

He sighed. “It’s one of those meal-in-a-can things. I remember when drinking your lunch meant three scotches. That was a lot more entertaining.”

“How’s the stuff taste?” I asked.

“Like pureed compost.”

He lobbed the can into the wastebasket. The intercom on Waltz’s phone buzzed, the desk sergeant. “Got a walk-in at the desk, Shelly. Guy wants to see the Southerner, Ryder.”

Waltz shot me puzzlement. Maybe two dozen people knew I was here, all officials of some stripe.

“A walk-in for Ryder? Who is it, Moose?”

“Ray Charles died, right? We’re sure about that?” The desk man chuckled and hung up. We hustled down the hall to the entrance. An older black guy sat on one of the benches, lanky as a pole vaulter, with ebony skin, tight pewter hair, wraparound shades. I put him in his mid-seventies, but he could have been a decade older. He wore a bright yellow blazer over a cream polo shirt. His pants were as white as the cane across his knees.

The desk sergeant saw us, grinned. “This is Mr Zebulon Parks. He wants to tell Ryder something.”

“Mr Ryder?” the blind man called out. “Mr Carson Ryder?”

“Right here, sir.”

The dark glasses turned to me. “You got a place we can sit? By ourselves?”

“You can talk here, Mr Parks. It’s fine.”

“I’m s’posed to tell you what I got in private.”

“There’s a room we can use.” I moved to him, held up my arm. “Would you care to hold on to my –”

“Just lead on,” he said. “Walk.”

I headed for a nearby conference room, Mr Parks’s cane tapping at my heels. Waltz shot me a conspiratorial eye and nodded down the hall. I winked assent and he tiptoed ahead and slipped into the room.

I entered with Parks behind me and closed the door. Waltz sat motionless in a far corner. Parks reached forward, finger-tapped the table, set his hat on it. His hand found a chair and angled it toward him, sitting straight as a rail. I watched his nostrils study the air.

“Now, Mr Parks, you said you had something to –”

“We alone?” Parks interrupted.

“That’s what you wanted,” I finessed.

He flicked his head at Waltz. “Then who that fat guy sitting down there?”

I leaned forward, looked into Parks’s obsidian-black lenses. I resisted the cliché of waving my hand before his eyes, but only barely.

“Can you see, Mr Parks?”

He nodded toward Waltz. “I heard his belly grumblin’.”

Waltz looked at his gut, then at me; neither of us had heard a thing. Waltz sighed. “My name is Sheldon Waltz, Mr Parks. I’m a detective. Sitting in was my idea, and I apologize. But in law enforcement another pair of ears is often helpful.”

“One pair works fine for me,” Parks said. “They heard your sneakin’ ass.”

“For which I again apologize. Could you please explain how you knew I am, uh, a bit heavier than preferable.”

“I smelled the air you walked through gettin’ here. Stinks of that fat people’s drink, Slim-Down or whatever. My sister drink a case of that stuff every week and the flo’ boards still squeal when she walk crost ‘em.”

Waltz grimaced. “You have very good senses, Mr Parks.”

“I hear birds light on branches, smell bacon cookin’ a mile away. I remember the ’zact taste of ever’ woman I been with.”

Waltz raised his eyebrows, started to ask a question, thought better of it. I leaned toward Parks. “You mentioned to the desk man that you had something to tell me?”

Parks canted his head toward the door. “That coffee out there smells real fresh. Like it’d be good with two sugars but just a touch of cream.”

“I’ll be right back,” Waltz said, returning seconds later with a Styrofoam cup of coffee. Parks sniffed from a foot away.

“Don’t drink no fake sugar.”

Waltz rolled his eyes, headed down the hall again. A minute later he set the coffee on the table. Parks sniffed the coffee and nodded approval.

“Well?” I asked.

“I was sittin’ in Washington Square an hour back when footsteps come at my bench. A fellow axed me how my sense of humor was. I said funny’s different to different folks. He said he was prankin’ a friend and he’d give me fifty dollars to help. I poked my cane his way and said to git on wit’ his sly bidness somewhere else.”

“What happened next?”

“He sat down next to me. I grabbed tight to my money pocket. But he said, ‘Do you hear inside the shadows, sir?’ I said, ‘What you talking about?’ He said, ‘Can you hear the music in the corner restaurant?’ The joint was a block down and the jazz-band music was under the sounds of cars, trucks, people yellin’ on the street, but sure, I could hear it. Next, he said, ‘What you hear best?’ I said it was the clar’net, but if I listened real hard I could separate out the bass notes on the piano.”

“Most people wouldn’t have heard anything but street sounds,” I said, my heart beginning to pound.

“Yep, the music was deep under things. Then the man told what he was hearing, and damn if he wasn’t hearing ever’thing I could. It come to me that maybe he was blind, too.”

Cold prickles danced across my spine. “He wasn’t blind, was he, Mr Parks?”

“Nope, though he was sure tuned up scary high for someone ain’t never had to live in the dark.”

“Did he frighten you?”

Mr Parks frowned, like doing a puzzle in his head. “He had a strange feeling pouring off him, like he had to do a job so important the need was pushing from his skin like heat. That’s as close as I can get with words. Did I feel like he wanted to hurt me? No. But something underneath his voice said I wouldn’t ever want him mad at me.”

“What did you do?”

“Once I could feel he didn’t mean no harm, I got interested in how high he was tuned. We started listening and smelling and talking about how much there was to hear and taste and smell, stuff most people never knew was going on, though it’s right there in their ears and noses and mouths. After we talked a bit I decided to come here to pass on his words. I thought maybe they were important in a way I couldn’t know.”

“What exactly did the man say, Mr Parks?” I asked.

The frown again. Trying to get it just right, Parks spoke slowly. “‘Tell Mr Ryder to consider George Bernard Shaw’s thoughts on sanity in the US.’”

I closed my eyes, suspicions confirmed: I heard Jeremy’s precise diction echoed in the old man’s words. Waltz was staring at me. His silent lips formed the question, Ridgecliff?

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