Strip Search (37 page)

No, I decided to just stay here at the office. And wish I had something stronger than Valium in my pocket.

DID THEY REALLY think I would be so stupid? Esther wondered, as she watched the police converge on her house from a safe distance. Of course, she had moved the instant Tucker was captured. Now it was just her, and Stevens, and the ingredients she would use to make all those terribly dangerous very bad no good explosives. Amazing how easy those were to concoct, if you knew a little chemistry and math. She found the formula for homemade plastique on the Internet.

She was so close now, she could feel it. Was she the only one? Was it all one-sided? Or could God feel her breathing down His neck?

Never mind that. She had work to do. And she didn’t like to rush. The baby didn’t like it when she rushed.

WHEN THEY DIDN’T FIND ESTHER at any of the obvious places, everyone even remotely affiliated with the detective’s division was assigned to the investigation, including me. It was more than a little embarrassing. This was the second time we thought we had this case locked up—that I personally thought I’d cracked the case—only to have victory snatched away at the last moment. So I had to help, even if I wasn’t happy about it. I felt as if I had let everyone down, as if I were personally responsible for every death that occurred after I interviewed Goldstein but failed to recognize that she was the killer—and I knew many of the others on the force felt the same way. Granger had been strangely silent. I expected him to use this gaffe to get me fired, but he hadn’t. A rare moment of compassion? Or perhaps, after our contretemps in the interrogation room, he had finally realized it was best not to screw around with me.

I was up at the university, interviewing everyone in sight, every single member of the mathematics department, and you can imagine how exciting that would be. We heard the same things over and over again. She was quiet, kept to herself. Brilliant, but reclusive. A trifle strange, but what do you expect from someone specializing in cryptomathematics? From someone with the delusional idea that she was going to prove Reimann’s hypothesis? Actually, what I sensed was a lot of jealousy; she was smarter than anyone else and they knew it and were secretly pleased she had turned out to be a psycho—not realizing, perhaps, what that said implicitly about the rest of the math geeks in residence. The only reason she wasn’t running the place was that she didn’t want to—didn’t participate in office politics, didn’t go to the Christmas party. No one had seen Tucker here or seen her with anyone else. She was strangely popular with her students, despite being a tough grader. I was beginning to despair of hearing anything of interest. Until I stood in the tiny, messy office that served as the nerve center for the graduate math school and picked up an interesting tidbit of information from the department president.

“She was
pregnant
?” I wasn’t sure if this was a question or an exclamation.

“Yes,” Lars Engle, the head of the department, replied.

“How pregnant?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. It’s an awkward thing to ask about, when a member of the faculty isn’t, well, you know.”

“Married?”

“Yes, that. She was wearing loose-fitting clothing to disguise the alteration to her figure.” I thought back to the muumuu thing she had been wearing when I interviewed her. “But she was definitely pregnant. I took a message once from a doctor—de Alameida, was her name, I believe. An OB-GYN, I assume.”

“And you don’t know who the—”

“No idea.” Engle lowered his eyebrows. “Can’t even imagine.”

“Student? Fellow faculty member?”

“I think both highly unlikely.”

I pondered. I suppose it could have been Tucker, but I seriously doubted it. As the dominant member of the relationship, I couldn’t imagine why she would even want a child, much less allow it to happen by accident, but in any case, she wouldn’t have a child by her pet homunculus.

“Any knowledge of her outside activities? Habits? Places she haunted? Hobbies?”

He shrugged. “Esther was just as mysterious as her work.”

“Second home? Vacation cabin?”

“Not to my knowledge.” Or mine. If she had any such place, at least in her own name, it would’ve already shown up in our computer searches.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” Engle asked.

I pressed my hand against my forehead. My head throbbed, my knees were wobbly, and the very worst of it all was—in a few more hours, it would no longer be the twenty-ninth. “Yeah. What’s the next prime number after twenty-nine?”

“That would be…thirty-one.”

Two days. Two lousy days. Then she went after mankind.

IT WAS ALMOST AN HOUR before Stevens stopped crying, which threw Esther seriously off-schedule. She was tempted to go right ahead with the operation anyway, but somehow, with the man squealing like a baby, she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She didn’t like listening to that incessant caterwauling, didn’t like being in the same room with him. It was disturbing. And if it was upsetting to her, then it was almost certainly upsetting to the baby.

When at last he quieted, she returned to the room, wearing nothing but a black full-length robe. She liked it; it was comfortable, masked the bulge of her pregnancy, and lent a certain gravitas to the occasion.

“How pleads the defendant?” she asked, in appropriately somber tones.

Stevens peered at her through slitted eyes, his chest swollen and red and caked with blood. “I—I don’t know—”

“You are charged with forsaking the trust of a child, the greatest sin it is possible to commit. You knowingly and willfully abused the foster home program to fulfill your own base needs, not once, but on repeated occasions.”

“That’s—that’s all just gossip. It wasn’t true—”

“You were eventually stricken from the list of suitable foster parents, but because of your power and money and influence you were never charged for your crimes, never tried. So you shall have that trial here, today.” Her voice was weak and raspy; every day it became more difficult to speak.

“Nothing was ever proven because nothing ever happened.”

“Count One: Duggan Phillips.”

Stevens slowly recovered his voice. “He dropped his civil claims. The D.A. dropped the criminal charges.”

“You paid him off!”

“I settled the claims.”

“You gave him half a million dollars. That’s not a settlement. That’s a bribe.”

“It would’ve cost me a lot more than that to defend, once you consider legal fees and the time taken away from my business. It was worth it.”

“And the worst of it is, without a prosecuting witness, the District Attorney was forced to drop the charges.”

Stevens struggled uselessly against his chains. He hadn’t been able to escape when the branding iron had been pressed against his flesh and he couldn’t escape now. “So you’ve appointed yourself judge and jury, is that it?”

Esther’s eyes seemed to withdraw within herself. “I am the fallen one, cast out, unloved, but I will scratch and claw my way out of Purgatory, dismember the Sefirot one piece at a time, until creation itself is forced to come to me for its reckoning.”

“Lady…” His voice had lost most of the self-confident abrasiveness. He was a desperate man now, one who knew his time was limited. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but…you need help. You really do. And I can get you that help. I know the best docs in the city. Hell, the state.”

“Silence.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of good people have problems. I used to see a shrink.”

“Count Two,” Esther said, ignoring him. “Phillip Davis.”

“He was trouble from the get-go. He heard about Duggan and figured if he made up a lot of stuff about me, I’d pay him some money.”

“You violated his trust. You violated him.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“Don’t lie to me!” Esther screamed. “Do you think I don’t know what you’re like? Do you think I don’t remember? Coming into my bedroom, night after night. Raping a young girl, telling her it was fine, that was the way things were supposed to be!”

“A—A girl? I—I thought we were talking—”

“Never a thought to anyone else!” Esther continued ranting, tears streaming. “Never a thought to the damage you might be doing to—to…him.” Her voice quieted. “Conrad Sweeney.”

“Him? He wasn’t even my—” He froze, pressed his lips and eyelids together.

“Wasn’t even your
type
?” Esther screamed. “Is that what you were going to say? You inhuman monster.” She reached inside her robe and withdrew a large knife with a sharp blade. “Do you know how fortunate you were to be entrusted with a child? It’s a sacred trust, a holy privilege. Many people go their entire lives, wanting and praying for children, never getting them, or never getting them until it’s too late, until—”

Esther stopped, trying to catch her breath. Her face was red from rage and lack of oxygen. She breathed deeply several times over, in and out, until she finally recovered herself. Stay calm. Think of the baby. Think of the child.

“I find you guilty. Sentence must therefore be rendered.”

“Please don’t hurt me. Please!”

“You are Yesod, part of the primordial Sefirot. You must sacrifice that which you represent in the greater scheme of creation.”

“I beg you. Please!”

Her eyes slowly turned to black. “You will never hurt anyone again with your perverse fornicating lust. Never again.”

“God, no.
God!
”

“God? If God has some objection to what I’m doing, then let Him tell me Himself. Just as I’m telling Him what I think of His work. Myself.”

“FEDS?”

“Yup.”

“Lots?”

“Yup.”

“BSS?”

“Course.”

“DMI?”

“Yup?”

“Us?”

“Lickspittle.”

Darcy squinted his eyes as if he were having trouble seeing. “Are you two people speaking in a foreign language? Or is this maybe a code? Because I am usually good with codes but I cannot figure out what you are saying.”

I smiled. Granger looked annoyed. In short, each did what we did best. “Sorry, Darcy. Cop talk. Shorthand for actual dialogue.”

“Oh. Could I learn to talk cop talk? I would like to talk cop talk.”

“I’m sure you’ll pick it up in no time.”

“What did you say?”

“Bottom line: We’re about to be invaded by an infestation of FBI agents, specialists in serial killers, because they think we’re doing such an incompetent job of handling this case. Once they arrive, we’ll probably be delegated to paper-shuffling and answering the phone.”

The three of us stood in the front lobby of downtown headquarters. The university interviews were over, and beyond the revelation that our sadistic killer was on the nest, it had proved pointless. Plainclothes officers were interrogating all of Esther Goldstein’s neighbors, but I didn’t expect it to be any more productive. This woman had obviously planned her escape carefully and arranged a hideaway, probably stocked with lots of cash. I had a call in to her doctor, but in the time-honored tradition of doctors everywhere, she was making me wait. Until she received a court order.

“It isn’t fair,” Granger grunted. He was as unpleasant as ever, but at least he was speaking to me again. Although I may have preferred it when he wasn’t. “I’ve been busting my ass day and night on this case. We caught one of the perps.”

“But the murders haven’t stopped.”

“But why feds? They’re not any more likely to catch her than we are!”

Poor Granger, mourning over his lost turf. I could almost feel sorry for him, if I didn’t despise him so intensely. “This die was cast the moment Joshua Brazee became one of the victims and Thomas Stevens went missing. In this celebrity culture of ours, media attention of that magnitude was bound to create a hue and cry for federal intervention. We’ll just have to take it in stride.” I didn’t tell him my worst fear—that with the feds around, all nonessential personnel would be reassigned. Or that a consulting psychologist only hanging on to her job by a wing and a prayer would be dismissed.

Out the corner of my eye, I spotted O’Bannon lurching from his office, doing his best to make it appear that he didn’t need the cane at all. He approached, didn’t bother with pleasantries. “Pulaski, you’re doing the press conference.”

“Good morning to you, too,” I replied. Had to make the smart remark before we got on with business. It was like my trademark. “What press conference? I thought the Feds were invading.”

“That’s why we need a press conference. To, you know, explain the situation.”

“To save face.”

“Whatever. Wouldn’t be bad if you gave the impression that we asked for federal assistance. Not that we needed it, but as a goodwill effort to becalm the tourists, yadda, yadda, yadda. The city is already on orange alert. Any more murders and the whole town will shut down.”

“Chief…”

“Is it possible you could just do what you’re told this once without arguing about it?”

“You’ve got it wrong. I think the press conference is a good idea. But—do you remember what happened the last time I did a press conference for you?”

“That won’t happen again.”

“You say that, but—”

“Back then, no one knew who or what you were. With the Edgar case, you earned their respect. No one’s going to give you any crap.”

“Chief,” Granger cut in. Apparently he was incapable of allowing anyone else to talk to his boss for more than a minute without jamming himself into the conversation. “Nothing personal against Susan”—It isn’t?—“but shouldn’t the press conference be held by someone who is actually a member of the police force? Like maybe, the head of homicide?”

“Sorry, no. Gotta be Susan.”

Even I was perplexed by this. “Why me?”

“The feds aren’t idiots. They’ll be watching CNN, too. They’ll see this. So it has to be you.”

“Because…”

“Because the feds are okay with you. In fact…” He glanced at Granger, then quickly looked away. “They want you to act as liaison between them and us.”