Sigma Curse - 04 (12 page)

“So you don’t think this killer is some psycho.”

Again she smiled. She came over and put her arms round Venn. He felt her warmth, smelled the faint traces of a perfume.

“That word ‘psycho’ has no medical meaning, either. Your killer may have a psychopathic personality disorder. An antisocial personality, more accurately. But that just means she, or he, doesn’t feel guilt about what they’ve done. It allows them to be ruthless in a way most normal people would be incapable of.” She looked up at him. “I’m not being much help, am I?”

“Oh, you’re being plenty helpful.” He kissed the top of her head, closed his eyes, breathed deeply of her scent.

*

T
he call came at four twenty in the morning.

Venn thrashed awake, kicking off the bedsheets in confusion and scrabbling for the bedside table. He knocked his phone to the floor, fumbled about for it in the darkness, hit the ‘receive’ key just as Beth was beginning to mumble in protest beside him.

“Yeah,” he muttered, as quietly as he could, rising quickly at the same time and pulling on his bathrobe and heading out of the bedroom.

“Joe? It’s Teller.” The FBI man sounded wide awake. “Sorry to call you at this hour. But we’ve got another one.”

“What?” Venn headed for the kitchen to put the coffee on. It could brew while he dressed.

“Another victim. Same brand, the sigma on the forehead. A bunch of junkies found her in the weeds in Dumbo an hour ago.”

“Her?”

“Yeah. A woman this time. And she’s black.”

Venn forgot about the coffee. He said, “Okay. Meet you there in fifteen,” and went back into the bedroom to throw on some clothes.

––––––––

D
umbo – Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass – was a formerly seedy but now achingly hip area in Brooklyn on the East River. Home to artists and bohemians of all stripes, it boasted spectacular loft apartments and quaint, cobbled streets.

The cops were clustered at the water’s edge as Venn pulled up in his Jeep. Through the splash of the flashers he saw Teller, huddled in a fleece-lined overcoat against the freezing wind, gazing downward. Rickenbacker was with him, almost unrecognizable in layers of woolen garments. A bunch of uniformed precinct cops hung around, securing the scene, while the odd passerby stared curiously before being shooed away by the cops.

Venn stepped out, glad he’d thrown on a scarf on his way out the door.

He walked over to the others. Teller greeted him with a nod, then turned back to gaze down the bank.

Beyond the rail, the river shifted and gleamed blackly, lapping softly at the concrete bank. A body lay halfway up, three or four crime scene personnel crouched around it, taking and bagging samples. The body was small, slight, its sodden clothes fused to it like a second skin.

Venn glanced at Teller, who nodded. He stepped over the rail and crawled awkwardly down the slippery concrete slope until it evened out to a platform at the bottom. One of the crime scene people moved aside to let him closer.

The woman lay on her back. She was perhaps thirty, though it was difficult to tell in the semi-darkness and because of what the water had done to her skin, rendering it wrinkled and puffy at the same time. Her eyes were half open, a rim of white showing beneath the upper lids.

In the middle of her forehead, Venn saw the symbol. Sigma.

He hunkered down and peered at the body, aware of the tension among the crime scene techs. Keeping his hands out of the way – he knew the techs were antsy that he might touch the evidence – he studied the exposed wrists, the ankles. No sign of restraint that he could make out. There was also no visible injury, apart from the ragged hole under the jaw near the throat.

He straightened. He’d get a better look at the body in the morgue.

Venn clambered back up the slick slope and rejoined Teller and Rickenbacker. He said: “Tell me.”

Teller took a moment to speak, and when he did his voice was thick, as if the cold was numbing his facial muscles. “Bunch of junkie skells were out foraging an hour or so ago. They saw something bobbing in the water among the weeds. Thought it might be a sack of some kind. They went down the slope to have a look, saw it was a body, and did the right thing. Called 911.”

“Civic-minded of them.” Venn peered around. “They still here?”

Teller shook his head. “They were freezing their asses off, and there was nothing to them but skin and bone anyhow. The cops took them down to the station to warm them up and quiz them. But their story sounds legit. I mean, if you’d seen these guys, you’d know they wouldn’t be able to subdue even a small woman like this one.”

“Any ID on her?” said Venn.

Rickenbacker spoke up. Venn had noticed that about her: if she thought Teller was talking for too long, and she was being left out, she made a point of chiming in. “No. No purse or anything else.”

Venn gazed out across the river toward the Brooklyn Bridge in the distance, and the lights of Manhattan on the other side. “So much for a pattern,” he murmured.

“That’s exactly what we’ve been saying,” Rickenbacker said. She lifted a hand and for the first time Venn saw a cigarette glowing between her fingers, which looked like sausages in her thick wool gloves. She inhaled, then spoke through a cloud of smoke. “Patterns don’t usually help us. All you need is something to break them, and your carefully considered theories go up in flames.”

Venn watched the techs working on the body. “Do they know how long she’s been in there?”

“Always difficult with the ones in water,” said Teller. “But she’s not decomposed at all. The fish haven’t even really had a chance to nibble at her. I’d guess she was dumped there within the last twenty-four hours. Probably the last twelve.”

Venn took out his phone, taking care not to let it slip between his numb fingers. “Harmony needs to be in on this.” He glanced at Rickenbacker as he held the phone to his ear. She looked away, took a drag on her cigarette, said nothing.

Harmony answered on the third ring, her voice thick and irritable with sleep. “Yeah? Venn?”

“We got another one,” he said. “Courtesy call. Unless you’d rather have me tell you about it in the morning.”

“Hell with that.” Her voice was suddenly alert. “Where?”

He told her, then ended the call.

From where he stood, the woman’s face looked peaceful, not the mask of horror you might expect in somebody who’d died so grotesquely. Venn realized something else about her, apart from the fact that she was black and a woman. She appeared... classy. Educated. He knew it was a sign of prejudice to judge that kind of thing from somebody’s face, but it was also true.

If there was a pattern to the choice of victims, it was such an obscure one he’d need a miracle to crack it.

A miracle, but possibly also Fil Vidal, his computer guy.

Venn looked at his watch. Almost five o’clock. No, there was no point calling Fil now. He’d do so in a few hours.

*

H
armony Jones was down at her Crown Vic before she’d even finished pulling her jacket on.

She lived in a three-bedroom apartment which she shared with her sister Monica and Monica’s eight-year-old son. She could probably afford her own place – her position with the Division of Special Projects meant her pay was a cut above that of other detectives of her rank – but that would mean living alone, something she’d never gotten used to. It would also mean leaving Monica and Harry to fend for themselves, and she couldn’t do that. Monica worked a day job as a secretary, and while she wasn’t exactly on the poverty line, she’d struggled to make ends meet until three years ago, when her big sister had suggested they share the rent on a place.

Right now, though, Harmony wasn’t thinking about Monica. She wasn’t even thinking about the Sigma case, as she’d started thinking of it as, though she’d felt the familiar stirring in her blood when Venn had called and told her another body had been found.

Rather, what Harmony was thinking about as she gunned the Crown Vic’s engine more dramatically than was strictly necessary, especially at this hour of the morning, was her father.

Clarence Jones was currently a patient at Revere Hospital in Lower Manhattan, the hospital Venn’s Beth worked at. He’d been there eight days now, and showing no signs of being ready for discharge. His health insurance would cover another week or so, but Harmony was prepared to dip into her savings to keep him there a little longer if necessary.

Clarence – Harmony had always called him that, never Dad, even as a small kid – suffered from heart failure and diabetes. He’d been thus afflicted for the last fifteen years, and now, at the age of seventy-two, the twin conditions had wrecked his body to the point where the doctors were talking about amputating three of his toes, maybe even his whole left foot. He couldn’t sleep flat on his back, and even propped up on a bunch of pillows, the gurgling from his chest made him sound like a deep-sea diver with an aqualung. He was almost completely blind. His blood pressure stayed under control for a couple of days at a time, if he was lucky, before skyrocketing again.

If he was lucky...
Harmony didn’t smile at her own expression. Luck had nothing to do with the state he was in. Well, maybe a little. She’d read up bout heart failure and about diabetes and had come to the conclusion that sometimes people got diseases without deserving it. Shit happened, and you took the knocks life handed you. But there was resistance in the face of adversity, and then there was opening the door to adversity and rolling out the red carpet to welcome it. Which was exactly what Clarence Jones had done over the last decade and a half.

He was a crotchety old bastard, and he was damned if any doctor was going to tell him what to eat, when to exercise, and generally how to live his own life. The pills the medical profession threw at him were all poisonous, and designed to do nothing but keep the pharma companies in profit. Doctor were all overpaid assholes – Clarence’s actual words – and who wanted to live forever anyhow, especially in a world as screwed up and shitty as this one?

Harmony tried a compassionate approach at first, something that didn’t come naturally to her. She’d pointed out how much Clarence had to live for, how devastated she and Monica and their brother Jacob would be if he passed prematurely.

Clarence wasn’t having any of it. “You young folk have inherited the earth,” he’d say. “My time here is almost over. It’s the natural cycle of things.”

Harmony had tried appealing to the old man’s supposed religious faith – he was a weekly attender at the local Pentecostal Church. “God tells you to take care of yourself,” she’d said lamely. When Clarence had demanded to know which piece of scripture she was referring to, she had to admit she didn’t know.

Finally, Harmony had lost her temper, after weeks of listening to the old curmudgeon’s excuses and self-righteousness. “Start taking care of yourself or we’ll cut you out of our goddamn lives,” she yelled during one particularly fiery row. And he’d simply snorted, rolled his eyes as if to say:
what can you expect from your kids?
, and ordered her out of his apartment.

She hadn’t spoken to him for almost six months after that. Then she’d gotten the call one day, from the nurse at the ER. Was she the next of kin of Clarence Jones? Harmony had closed her eyes, thinking he was dead. Fighting to ignore the feelings rising within her, feelings that shamed her. But the nurse told her that her father had been admitted in severe cardiac failure, and that she needed to come to the hospital right away.

Clarence had received her not with the arrogance and dismissiveness she’d been expecting, but with the frightened eyes and pathetic gratitude of a child. And Harmony had felt a twist in her heart.

Of course she couldn’t abandon him.

So she’d been visiting near enough every day for the last week and a half, calling on her phone when she couldn’t make it, and had made a pain in the ass of herself with the doctors and nurses, demanding updates on her father’s condition and arguing with them about what was best for him. The most infuriating part of it was that, after he’d been pulled back from the brink of death to a place a few feet shy, Clarence’s old obstinacy had reasserted itself. He’d become truculent, uncooperative, refusing his meds when he thought he was being too many pills or ones of the wrong color, complaining loudly and vocally about the quality and quantity of the hospital food, and causing more than one fellow patient to demand an immediate transfer to a different ward. The resident in charge took Harmony aside one day and told her as tactfully as he could that if this continued, they’d be forced to discharge her father and try to manage him as an outpatient. Harmony had responded by tearing Clarence a new one, warning him that this was his last chance, that if he wanted her to continue visiting and bringing him stuff he needed to change his ways. He’d relented a fraction, but she knew it wouldn’t last.

And all through this, Harmony had carried on doing her job as best she could, trying to keep up a brave face, while dealing with the heady mixture of anger and resentment and guilt and fear churning inside her. She wasn’t surprised when Venn, detective that he was, noticed she was crabbier than usual.

Why hadn’t she told Venn? Harmony wondered, as she cruised the nighttime streets toward Brooklyn. He’d be sympathetic, she knew. He always was. She couldn’t complain about him as a boss. Nor as a friend. In fact, she’d defend Venn to the death, not just his physical person but his honor as well. She had to admit that she often felt... well, no. She couldn’t admit that.

But if she told Venn, it would mean letting her image slip. Her image of tough, don’t-give-a-damn nonchalance. It was something Venn had told her he’d admired in her from the start, and it had been one of the qualities that had led him to hire her in the first place. If she started to tell him about her father, with his bloody-mindedness and his terrible physical health and his demands, she’d risk letting out a genie that she’d never be able to force back in the lamp. She might, God forbid, break down in tears. And if that happened, however supportive Venn was of her, he’d never quite see her in the same way again. Something between them would be changed, forever. And she didn’t know if she could carry on working for him in that situation.