Switch (5 page)

"Interesting. Sort of a curious subject for a woman."

"Come on,
Janek
, you don't believe in stereotypes. Anyway, male aggression can be a turn-on. I saw more than my share of it when I was covering the war, and I found myself attracted at times. So, the subject is aggression, but there's a strong erotic theme. What's next? I wonder. Still
lifes
? Water swirls in the sand?" She shook her head. "Wish I knew. Not going backwards, that's for sure."

It was nearly midnight when he left. It had been an exhausting day—the funeral, the switched-heads case—but for all of that he felt refreshed. Caroline Wallace was extraordinary; he couldn't put her out of his mind. As he drove back to Manhattan he found himself starting to envy Al. Friendship with a woman like that—how very lucky Al had been.

C
hief Medical Examiner Gerald
Heyman
was not his usual cheerful self. "I told Hart straight out," he said, "don't send any more of your goons down here."

Dr.
Heyman
was in his early fifties, with a permanent tan and the look of a man who jogged laps around Central Park at dawn. His iron-gray hair was parted in the middle. His chin was squared off and he sat rigidly in his chair behind his precisely ordered desk.

"We have our temperamental flare-ups. We're human beings, too. But we're also professional men and we observe the normal courtesies. When we have a disagreement we talk it over. Sometimes voices are raised. What we don't do is try and settle things with fists. Another thing we don't do is get pieces of bodies mixed around. When someone's been dismembered, and I don't care whether it's limbs or heads, we tag the pieces and keep them together, and the photos always back us up."

"There was never any question of a mix-up. Hart was very clear to me on that."

"Fine. I just want to make sure you know where I stand. I don't want this to reach a point where some baby prosecutor or some simpering defense attorney starts claiming we made the switch down here."

"I don't think that's going to happen."

"I predict, absolutely, that it will."

"The photos would certainly dispute such a claim."

"Exactly."

Well, then
,
Janek
was tempted to ask,
who gives a good goddamn?

He restrained himself. No point in being argumentative. Dr.
Heyman
, satisfied that he had conveyed his position, turned him over to David Yoshiro, the deputy examiner who had performed the autopsies.

Yoshiro was a short, serious, formal young Japanese-American who wore black-frame glasses and seemed dwarfed in his starched white coat. He spoke neutrally, methodically, in a deep resonant voice.

"Ireland was stabbed through her shower curtain once in the back and an even dozen times in a cluster pattern across her chest. I found pieces of the curtain in the wounds. She was then carried or dragged to her bed, unrolled, turned over and decapitated as if by an executioner—a single powerful blow straight across the back of the neck. Later the killer or executioner made an effort to affix the Beard head to the place where the Ireland head had been. He cut both of them in the same place, so the pieces fitted together fairly well."

Really, thought
Janek
, this is an atrocious case. Absolutely nauseating. "What about Miss Beard?"

"I count eleven wounds, also in the chest. These were deep plunges, grouped closely around the heart. The extra thrusts were not necessary. Clinically speaking both women were killed almost at once. Beard was stabbed through a sheet, decapitated from the back the same as Ireland, then turned over so that Ireland's head could be pushed onto her neck. I have the impression that the heads were transported in plastic bags. Carefully, too, because the hair wasn't bloodied much. No finger marks anywhere. The killer was very careful. I suspect he handled the heads through the plastic, pulling the bags off slowly once he had them mounted the way he liked."

Plastic bags. It was Wednesday—if the bags had been dropped into a street barrel, the evidence had long since been ground up in a cartage truck.

"How close in time?"

"Certainly within a couple hours. I'd say that Ireland was murdered first. I can't swear to that, but there are signs."

"Weapons?"

"Two. The stabbing weapon, a sharp-pointed hunting or kitchen knife, and the decapitation instrument, a long-bladed knife, very sharp, very heavy, very fine. The work was precise—single blows. The executioner did not hesitate. It is not that easy to decapitate. You can hack and hack. But in this case it was accomplished with a single stroke." Yoshiro made a gesture as if bringing down from over his head a sword gripped in both his hands.

"Could this have been done with a sword?"

"Conjecture. Even if you brought me such a weapon I might not be able to say for sure. It was a very clean cut. No kind of weapon signature. Of course, if I had a sword with blood and tissue on it, then I could link it to these women. But I already checked on that, and I suspect you are not going to find it
uncleaned
."

"What do you mean you checked?"
Yoshiro's
formality was starting to get on
Janek's
nerves.

"I thoroughly examined both sets of wounds. No tissue cells or blood from one in the wounds of the other. I would surmise the same instruments were used but cleaned up in between. I understand, by the way, that the drain checks were negative for blood in both apartments."

Janek
looked at him. The man was obviously upset. "You discovered the switch, didn't you?"

Yoshiro nodded. "I was working on the Ireland cadaver and right away I realized the two pieces didn't fit." He shook his head. "We've had decapitations in here before but never with the heads placed back on. I want to emphasize the oddity of that. The heads were not placed atop the bodies casually. They were literally pressed into the bodies as if an attempt was being made to recombine the heads and bodies in a way the killer preferred."

"Yes," said
Janek
. "I see. That does seem very odd."

Yoshiro looked at him. Suddenly he swept off his glasses. "I am a forensic pathologist, not a psychologist, Lieutenant. But I would say, based on my understanding of human nature, which comes from personal observation, the reading of poetry and literature, and some courses I took at Cornell Medical School..."

"Yes?"

"I would have to say that it seems to me that this man was trying to create people as much as to destroy them. Do you see what I mean?" Dr. Yoshiro snatched up his glasses and put them on again. "He killed them, certainly. But to use the parts his own way. So in a sense we could say he was a creator. Destroyer and also creator. Both. It's a difficult concept, I know. I've had some difficulty even thinking about it. I can't seem to deal with it, which is strange considering the sort of work I do. Normally I am quite imperturbable. Taking apart bodies, performing autopsies—none of that disturbs me at all. But I am confused by this case. It disturbs me very much. I sense a man here who has presumed to create new human beings, who has presumed to play at being God. And now please excuse me. I have a terrible headache. I must take some aspirins and lie down. You will get a complete report, of course, as soon as we finish up. Excuse me now." He rose and bowed slightly from the waist.

Janek
nodded and withdrew. A strange little man, he thought, with a strange and sensitive reaction. A scientific man, assured and confident, until he begins to ponder the meaning of the crime and then his head aches and he becomes confused. He senses mystery, creation and destruction, vectors he cannot reconcile. And such irreconcilability strikes hard at a man who slits open bodies and weighs organs and deals daily with the gross carnality of human beings.

It was also striking at himself,
Janek
thought, as he drove over to the precinct house. There was something here that transcended a brutal homicide. Something awful, evil, and fascinating too.

Sixth Precinct headquarters was one of those new police buildings that had grown old very fast. Built a dozen years before to be as indestructible as a public school, it had quickly acquired a patina of grime and the stench of all precinct stations: stale cigarette smoke, stale sweat and the effluvia of human distress.

Aaron Rosenthal had already organized the special squad office on the second floor in back. Desks, telephones, filing cabinets, a map, and a wall-size cork bulletin board to which he'd tacked the crime-scene photographs. The Ireland photos were on the right, the Beard photos on the left. Between them was a diagram showing the various routes between the two apartments. There was plenty of room left for any new documentation that might later come along.

Aaron was a superb detective, a fine tracker, excellent at interrogation and brilliant on the phone. He was a forty-three-year-old detective second grade, equivalent to a sergeant, balding, paunchy, bespectacled, with hideous mutton chop sideburns, a quick smile, a lovely wife, four gorgeous daughters, and a hard-edged New York cynicism which
Janek
greatly enjoyed. Occasionally he wore a yarmulke to work, a mystery to his colleagues, since there was no correspondence between this action and any known Jewish holidays. There was speculation that Aaron was doing private penance for a misdeed in the past, but like so many mysteries facing the Detective Division the mystery of Rosenthal's yarmulke had been relegated to the "unsolved" file drawer.

"How do you like the case?"
Janek
asked. He'd only spoken briefly with Aaron the day before.

"Goddamn horror show. Sorry about Al, Frank. Lou all right?"

"She'll make it,"
Janek
said. "You talk to Taylor yet?" Taylor was the precinct commander, a uniformed captain not overly fond of detectives who used his space but were not under his control.

"He's pissed at Hart. Wanted these rooms for a rape crisis center."

Janek
looked around. "Nice. Sweep it out yourself?"

"Everything but the interrogation rooms. Thought I'd leave them just the way they were."

Janek
checked the pair of cubicles separated by a short corridor which allowed observation through narrow slits of one-way glass. "Better buy some roach spray," he said. "You know...yesterday I couldn't stand having to deal with this. I actually prayed aloud the guy would come in this morning and confess."

Aaron shrugged. "Yeah. Well, when they're that easy they're no fun."

They went downstairs, then out to the Taco-Rico on Seventh Avenue South where they ate lunch and talked. Aaron knew all about Stanger and Howell and the fistfight in the morgue. Everyone knew about it. "It's Sweeney. He blabbed, and how now they're being punished by having to work the case under you."

"Sweeney's saying that?"

"That's what's going around."

"That prick. Yesterday I let him drive my car."

"He told you
you
needed a ring job, right?"

"Said my engine sounded bad."
Janek
glanced at Aaron. "He blabbing about that too?"

"Not that I know of. But cars are his sideline. He owns a piece of a garage." Aaron eyed him carefully. "You know, Frank, you really ought to be more excited about this case. Got great potential. Kind that can make you famous."

"Yeah, I know, it's the big bizarre case you wait for all your life. Great if you solve it. The worst kind if you don't."

"We'll solve it."

"I'm not so sure. Anyway, I don't like it all that much."

"Right now you don't. But you will, Frank. When you get into it you will."

A
fter lunch they returned to the office and stared together at the crime-scene photographs. They each stood before a set, then changed places, then changed again. Then
Janek
started pacing, back and forth, looking for something which he felt was there that he had missed before. What was it? Something revealing, abnormal, even beyond the abnormality of the switch. Something about the way the crime scenes looked. Something . . . he didn't know exactly what.

"See anything?" he asked Aaron finally.

"Guess you do, the way you're pacing around."

"Do you?"

"Crime-scene photos."

"Yeah, of course."

"Maybe there's something else."

Janek
waited, and when Aaron didn't continue he became impatient, wondering if he hadn't looked too hard seeking an aura which wasn't there.

"Too perfect," Aaron said after a while.

"Interesting. What do you mean?"

"Not sure."

"Come on, Aaron."

"They're contrived, somehow."

"
Yeah?
"

"Like they were meant to be photographed, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean."

"The killer didn't take the pictures."

"Of course he didn't. Still..."

"You mean the scenes look like they were arranged to be photographed?"

Aaron was bent over now, peering very close. "Hmmm. I'm not sure about that either."