Hell (24 page)

Sanders would be photographing every square inch of the houseboat from every angle, and if feasible, the Miami Beach detectives guessed that he would want the bathtub extricated from the cabin, then raised by a forklift on to a flatbed tractor trailer and taken back to his office.

Sam and Martinez had caught preliminary glimpses of more than the tub.

In the second small cuddy cabin.

Cooper's very own operating room.

No table, but another blood-splattered floor.

Other things, too, in plain view.

An anatomy textbook.

A large plastic container holding the collection of surgical instruments and tools about which Martinez had been told. Some of it makeshift, some the real McCoy: two pairs of common kitchen scissors and some tongs, two scalpels and a rib spreader.

‘Holy Mary,' Martinez said, looking at the instruments. ‘I am going to get under the hottest shower when I get home tonight and I may never get out of it again.'

Sam felt sick.

‘You shouldn't be here, man,' Martinez said.

‘Where the hell else should I be?' Sam said.

Pushing away the memory of the hypodermic.

The New Epistles of Cal the Hater
stood in what seemed pride of place on a table in the sitting area.

Not written in the cheap notebooks Cooper had used in the old days.

Leather-bound now.

No expense spared.

And as soon as Crime Scene released them, Sam and Martinez would pore over every single word. Both with the same deep-down, off the record motivation.

Finding the link with Bianchi.

Proving Grace's self-defense plea.

Not yet though.

Cooper was out of surgery.

No visitors. Certainly no interviews.

He had been placed under arrest when they'd hauled him back on to the
Aggie
, had been read his rights, but had been in no shape for anyone to be sure he'd comprehended them.

No one was going to take chances.

He'd been asking to see Sam, but word had come down from Captain Kennedy. No visit.

Martinez drove Sam to City Hospital.

They did not set foot inside the room.

Sam stood outside, looked through the glass window.

Shackled to his hospital bed, left arm bandaged, a dressing on the right side of his head, Jerome Cooper, aka Cal the Hater – most probably aka Tom O'Hagen too – was sleeping.

He looked peaceful, Sam thought, for a depraved, damned man.

Cooper's eyes flicked open.

He looked straight at Sam through the glass.

Smiled again. Then waved.

‘Easy,' Martinez said, softly.

Sam felt it pass through him.

The urge to kill.

He let it go.

Not a feeling he liked.

THIRTY-TWO

May 18

T
hey'd kept Cooper in City Hospital for three days, had moved him late Monday to the prison ward at Jackson Memorial. Too soon after surgery to move him into the prison population.

Tests so far concluded that the killer did not have HIV, hepatitis or STDs.

Sam remembered, from his first
Epistles
, Cooper declaring himself a Trojan (‘American's Most Trusted') guy.

Safe
sex for the monster.

It hadn't prevented Sam from having to spend the weekend shuttling back and forth between Key Biscayne and Miami General. Grace doing her best, when he let her, to take care of him, make sure he rested.

And then, this Tuesday morning, she'd seen him off at the big steel front door, same as she often did at home on the island.

She knew what lay ahead for him.

‘Try not to let him get to you,' she said.

‘I'll do my best,' Sam said. ‘It won't just be me, so don't worry.'

‘I love you, Sam,' she said.

‘Me too, Gracie,' he told her.

Five of them present at the first interview.

Sam and Martinez. Detective Peter Collins from City of Miami. Dave Rowan from Broward. And FDLE Special Agent Joe Duval – who'd assisted Miami Beach during the Couples case last year, and who was with them today to help smooth the way in respect of the multiple jurisdictions. Any more might have made the interview non-consensual in the eyes of a lawyer.

No one leaving a single goddamned thing to chance.

There was no lawyer. Cooper, secured to his bed rail, left arm now in a sling, a smaller dressing on the side of his head, had been pronounced fit for questioning, and had waived his rights to an attorney and to silence.

The killer having undergone anesthesia and surgery since his arrest, Sam had begun by reading him his Miranda rights again to ensure that he fully understood them.

Cooper understood OK.

There were just too many things he wanted to talk about.

Things of which he seemed proud.

Like the creation of Tom O'Hagen.

That had always been one of his
things
, he reminded Sam: creating personae, for himself and others.

‘O'Hagen was the new me,' Cooper said. ‘The one with the whacky houseboat and cool clothes.'

Five of them there, but the killer had, thus far, spoken only to Sam.

‘Tom O'Hagen is an anagram of the name of a Nazi who liked taking potshots at Jews. Amon Goeth. I read that Schindler book and saw the movie.' Cooper smiled. ‘I figured we might have had something in common, and though I looked him up and the real bastard was ugly and fat, the actor who played him in the movie was just the kind of guy I'd always wanted to be – lean and gorgeous.'

The notion rang true to Sam. Cal the Hater had always prided himself on his liking for reading, and the name-play was not new, and Sam wondered how far Cooper planned to go with his confession, if there was any hope that he was to be speedily proven right about the killer having renamed Richard Bianchi using the Jackal's aliases.

As to appearance, Cooper had never been gorgeous, so far as Sam knew, but he had certainly been leaner than he now was. And what was more than a little strange – and damned important, from Sam's personal standpoint – was that the late Richard Bianchi had, in some ways, looked almost more like the old Cal-Cooper than the killer did now.

‘You've put on a little weight,' Sam said, ‘since the last time we met.'

‘I've been eating well,' Cooper said. ‘Or I was till your pals shot me.' He smiled again. ‘How're you feeling, after your swim?'

‘Got yourself a nice new boat too,' Sam said.

Not planning on being drawn to the ocean ambush till he was damned well ready.

‘Glad you like it.'

‘Is that where you live?' Detective Collins asked.

Cooper didn't answer.

‘Where have you been living since you left Miami Beach almost two years ago?' Dave Rowan asked.

‘Here and there.' Cooper directed his answer to Sam.

‘Here and there in Florida, or elsewhere?' Joe Duval asked.

Cooper ignored him too.

Likewise when Martinez questioned him about Andrew Victor.

Same deal when Rowan asked him about Ricardo Torres.

Sam felt their anger and empathized.

‘Tell us about the
Aggie
,' he said. ‘Did you name her?'

‘Details in the
New Epistles
,' Cooper said.

‘We got better things to do than read your diary,' Martinez said.

‘Somehow I doubt that.' Cooper looked at Sam as he responded. ‘Especially considering how much information the original
Epistles
must have given you.'

‘You're not wrong there,' Sam said.

More than enough in those writings for Cooper to have been charged with the murders of Sanjiv Adani, Tobias Graham – his first two known victims – the attempted murder of Mildred Bleeker, and the kidnapping of Joshua Becket.

They, and everyone else involved in the investigation, would be reading every single word of the
New Epistles
. Balm to this man's ego.

Meantime, plenty more things and people he was refusing to talk about, or was flat-out denying.

Like having known Richard Bianchi.

‘What about Charles Duggan?' Sam asked.

‘I never heard of him,' Cooper said.

‘But you got his name out of a movie, too, didn't you?' Martinez said. ‘A little like O'Hagen.'

‘Or was it the book?' Sam asked.

‘I told you,' Cooper said. ‘I never heard the name.'

‘But reading's still your big thing, isn't it?' Sam said. ‘And writing, of course.'

‘I like reading.' Cooper shrugged. ‘I like – and hate – all kinds of things.'

‘What do you hate?' Dave Rowan asked him.

‘I hate you,' Cooper said to Sam.

‘Tell me something I didn't know,' Sam said.

‘All in good time,' Cooper said.

‘What was in the hypodermic you stuck Detective Becket with last Wednesday the thirteenth of May?' Detective Collins asked.

Miami's case, after all.

Cooper did not look at him.

‘I was beginning to think you might not get there in time,' he said to Sam.

‘I'm glad I didn't disappoint you,' Sam said.

‘I might have drowned, waiting,' Cooper said. ‘Imagine that.'

Sam said nothing, not rising to it.

‘I presume you guessed I was aiming for your black heart?' Cooper said.

No one reacted.

‘What was in the hypodermic?' Collins persisted.

Cooper smiled at Sam.

‘Like I said, all in good time.'

‘I'm thinking the game-playing means Bianchi was his, for sure, and he knows we know it,' Martinez said, later. ‘He's just not going to help us prove it until he maybe wants something from us.'

‘Or it could mean he knows damned well I need a lot more than something from
him
,' Sam said, ‘so he's just making out he has something to hide.'

‘You don't really believe that,' Martinez said.

‘No,' Sam said.

What this was about, they both knew, was Cooper trying to play his endgame his way, and maybe he might have gone on living and killing if the Brits hadn't spotted the blood in the water, or maybe Cooper had felt it was all over after Bianchi's death, and had deliberately leaked the blood.

But at least they had him, and that was good in itself, that was fine, and they were going to keep him, too, which was even better. The task on and around the
Aggie
gigantic, but the wealth of evidence patently of the kind that ought ultimately to be enough to send Cooper to death row.

Meantime, Grace's life – their world – was still on hold.

THIRTY-THREE

May 19

T
he Crime Scene work would last for many days, perhaps weeks.

Technicians taking apart every piece of the
Aggie
that could be taken apart, examining, gathering, preserving, analyzing the discernible evidence – the blood, the prints, the human remnants – and hunting down the hidden, the invisible. Assembling conclusive proof of Cooper's guilt, seeking evidence of the presence, prior to their deaths, of Andrew Victor and Ricardo Torres and whichever poor soul or souls had come Cal the Hater's way more recently; because the remains on board had been relatively fresh. Which meant that he had probably taken, murdered, mutilated and disposed of another victim too recently for the killer to have finished cleaning up with the pressure washer and Clorox – Cooper's old favorite brand – found on board.

No sign of Andy Victor's red pushbike or iPod, or his cellphone. Or any other victims' belongings.

No new body had yet washed up anyplace.

No new heart in a toy dinghy or anywhere else.

No proof yet that Richard Bianchi had ever stepped on to the
Aggie
, though even if such proof was never found, what Sam wanted badly was hard evidence that Torres had been on board, since that might help serve to make Bianchi, by association, a suspect of at least conspiracy to commit murder.

Nothing so simple.

A little more solid information was starting to flow their way.

The anatomy textbook contained illustrations relating to heart excision prior to transplantation, and a sheaf of downloaded printed material appeared to cover the same subject. No computer, however, had been found on board the houseboat, and there was no way of identifying from the printouts themselves which or
whose
computer they might have been downloaded from.

No likelihood yet – if ever – of obtaining a warrant to search any computers owned or used by Richard Bianchi.

And, by the by, confirmation had finally arrived from Elliot Sanders's office that the first heart found – the one that had come tucked inside two Tupperware containers in the kiddie dinghy tied up outside the Becket home – had belonged to Andrew Victor.

Plenty of useful stuff for Sam Becket, the investigator.

None of it enough for Sam, the husband.

The man of the moment – the center of massive media attention focusing on the comings and goings at Dinner Key – was still being held on a no bail warrant in the prison ward at Jackson Memorial. Only six days since they had boarded the
Aggie
, and already Sam was painfully conscious of his anger levels rising ever higher. And he
thought
he was sure he could keep that under control, had learned how to deal with scum and frustration over the years, but still, he was beginning to admit to himself – and
only
himself – that this was one case from which he ought, by rights, to be considering withdrawing.

But Cooper had made it personal, had repeatedly endangered his family – and Sam was doing his damnedest to block out the assault on himself with the hypodermic. But he was now as sure as any man could be that Cooper was also to blame for everything bad that was happening to Grace right now.

Which meant, right or wrong, that of all the violent crime cases currently under investigation in the entire state of Florida, this was the very
last
case from which he would ever withdraw.