The Architect (16 page)

What we had been through together
...
the way he helped me
... She was still giving him plenty of credit. “Why couldn’t he get past it?” Clevenger asked.

“I think he had his fill of ugliness growing up,” she said.

“How so?” Clevenger asked.

“His father,” she said.

Fathers and sons. The sins of one generation seeping into another. Clevenger knew it at the core of his being, but listening now reminded him yet again: “There is no original evil in the world. Everyone is just recycling pain.”

“What about his father?” he asked Lauren.

“He contracted polio when West was seven. He was crippled by it.”

“He never got out of a wheelchair,” Laine Jones said. “It brought the family to its knees, financially. Not-enough-to-eat poor.”

“It was more than the money, though,” Lauren said.

Clevenger listened.

“His father changed,” she went on. “He felt helpless, and he tried to show how powerful he still was by controlling everything and everyone around him. West was an only child. He grew up afraid to turn on a light switch or turn up the heat or go to the refrigerator without permission. His father approved his clothing every morning before school—until he was sixteen. And he drank. When he did, he beat West’s mother.”

“West couldn’t protect her,” Clevenger said.

“Her, or himself,” Lauren said. “This disease came, ruined his father, ruined the family, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He begged his mom to take him and leave, but she wouldn’t. So they both kept suffering. West always felt he could have achieved much more in life if she had only had the courage to move on.”

“How did he put it?” Laine Jones asked his wife. “I can’t remember exactly.” He looked at Clevenger. “It was quite morbid, really very disturbed.”

If Clevenger had wondered why Laine Jones had been so forthcoming with him, why he had brought him home so quickly to meet his wife, now he knew. Jones liked the idea that Crosse might be a monster. He wanted Lauren to hear that her ex was a suspected serial killer—probably because he wasn’t quite sure she had ever stopped loving West

Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe Crosse’s design for Laine and Lauren Jones had a critical flaw: Laine Jones just wasn’t West Crosse.

“He only said it once,” she said defensively. “I didn’t respond well.”

“You can tell me. I’ve heard just about everything,” Clevenger said.

She still hesitated.

“Tell him,” Jones urged. “It’s important. We’re talking about seven murders.”

“He said...” She stopped, shrugged, then tilted her head in the miraculous way she could. “He said his mother and he lived with a corpse she never had the guts to bury.”

That was interesting, given that the killer never buried his victims. “And how did you respond?” Clevenger asked.

“I told him he needed to see a psychiatrist,” she said with a smile.

“Sounds like it’s time,” Clevenger said. “How do I find him?”

“We have no idea,” Lauren said.

Clevenger kept looking at her.

“He disappeared,” Laine said. “He had a few very committed clients who tried tracking him down. None succeeded, to my knowledge.”

Clevenger’s eyes traveled momentarily to Lauren’s breasts. He made himself look up, into her eyes. “Just out of curiosity, was your third surgery your last?” he asked her.

“Excuse me?” she asked.

“I wondered whether you had another surgery after things didn’t work out with your first husband. Or were you still feeling lucky to be alive?”

“How does that have anything to do... ?” Laine started.

You really don’t want the answer to that question
,

Clevenger was thinking to himself—as Jones stopped asking it.

Something cold and rageful came into Lauren Jones’s eyes for the briefest moment, a fleeting sign that she was indeed human, not a goddess, that she was subject to tides of emotion like the rest of us. “I had two more surgeries,” she said. “I guess the shock of facing my mortality wore off. I had the emotional reserves to think about my body again.”

“Nothing abnormal about that,” Laine Jones said.

“Not at all,” Clevenger said. “Were you able to have the work done here in the States?” he asked Lauren.

“Argentina,” she said. “Buenos Aires.”

“Did the two of you make a trip of it?” Clevenger asked. “It’s so beautiful there. I’ve been twice. I stayed at El Porteno both times—that hotel that was a factory.”

“It is amazing, isn’t it?” Lauren Jones asked. “Phillippe Starck was the architect. I would love for Laine to see it.” She glanced lovingly at him. “I went alone. Not exactly the kind of thing you want to do as a couple.”

Unless, Clevenger thought, she were still coupled with West Crosse. She had traveled with him to surgeons in Paris and Milan.

“Next time,” Laine said.

“Who was the surgeon in Buenos Aires, by the way?” Clevenger asked Lauren. “I have a friend who would really appreciate the referral.”

She hesitated again.

“Vega, wasn’t it?” Laine asked.

“Of course,” she said. She shook her head. “Maybe

I
need a psychiatrist. My memory isn’t what it used to be. Enrique Vega.”

“I think he’s generally considered the top plastics man in the world,” Laine said. “I checked him out with doctors around here. One of them put it pretty clearly:
After you see Enrique, there’s no one to see but God.”

“Did he do that comment justice?” Clevenger asked. “I don’t mean to pry.”

Lauren smiled and looked over at Laine.

“Perfect,” he said. “Man’s a genius.” He winked. “I’m forever in his debt.”

THIRTY-NINE

Clevenger called North Anderson
as soon as he was out of his meeting with Laine and Lauren Jones. It was 10:55 P.M.

“How did it go today?” Anderson asked him.

“All I have so far are hunches. But this guy Crosse certainly loved rearranging people’s lives. I’m going by Jones, Alison Design in the morning to look at some of the plans he drew up when he worked there, see if they look anything like the Groupmann estate or the others.”

“The guy in Boston—Smith—wouldn’t tell me a thing. I got thirty seconds with him in his office. But then his lawyer called and told me he’d be sending me copies of his travel documents. I’ve got ‘em. Private plane reservations, American Express receipts, even affidavits from two pilots and the manager of a hotel in Istanbul. Smith was working a project there most of last year, including long periods before and after bodies were found.”

“You still tackling Texas next? Dennis Jay?”

“I made a call. He’s away, too. London. These guys travel plenty. I’ll move on to Philly.”

“I could use help with one thing on Crosse.”

“Shoot.”

“I met his ex-wife, Lauren. She married Crosse’s former partner, Laine Jones.”

“Keeping it in the family.”

For some reason, that made Clevenger think of the note the president had received from the killer:

One country at a time or one family at a time,

Our work serves one God
.

“It’s convenient, that’s for sure,” he told Anderson. “Her name is Lauren Jones now. She told me she was a patient of a plastic surgeon in Buenos Aires named Enrique Vega. He supposedly performed reconstructive surgery on her breast after she had a mastectomy. I’d like to know if that’s true.”

“I’ll get on it,” Anderson said.

“You may run into confidentiality issues.”

“I’ll have my wife call, give the name Lauren Jones, and ask to book a follow-up. If they’ve never heard of her, we’ve got our answer.”

“Whatever it takes.”

“We could have the FBI contact Interpol. I’m sure they could pull her medical record, one way or another.”

“If Crosse is our man, I want to move the ball far enough down field that Whitney has to pick it up and run with it. Otherwise, I’m worried you’re right: Politics could get in the way.”

“Fair enough. It’s you and me, brother.”

“Always seems to end up that way,” Clevenger said. He thought of something else. “If you can send my cell phone a bunch of photos from the crime scenes— especially Chase Van Myer—I might be able to use them.”

“You need to give somebody a little religion?” “Put it this way: When you’re as beautiful as Lauren Jones, it could be hard to imagine how ugly murder can really be. Seeing is believing.”

Demo version limitation

FORTY-ONE

Clevenger dialed North Anderson
from the street outside 562 Park.

“Hey, Frank,” Anderson answered.

He flagged down a cab. “Where are you right now?”

“Logan. I’ve got about twenty minutes before my flight to Philly.”

“Change of plans. Hold on.” He climbed into the cab. “Madison and Thirty-eighth, please,” he told the driver. He spoke into the phone again: “Let’s both head to D.C.”

“Why? What’s happening?”

“I just got through talking to Lauren Jones. West Crosse is registered at the Mayflower Hotel, under the name William Russell.

“William Russell? Wasn’t that the guy who ran Skull and Bones at the beginning?”

“Founded it. Eighteen-thirty-two. You remember. He supposedly made his fortune smuggling opium from Turkey to China.”

“So what’s Crosse doing in D.C, under a pseudonym—especially that one?” Anderson asked.

“Good question. Jones was supposed to meet him there tonight. He told her he wanted to see her, because he wouldn’t be able to for a long time.”

“As a forensic psychiatrist friend of mine would say: ‘That can’t be good.””

“Doesn’t sound it. I’m headed over to Jones, Alison now to look at some of the plans Crosse drew. I figure if you fly down and try to at least spot him, follow him if you can, we could be that much farther down the road.”

“I’m walking to the ticket counter as we speak.”

“And if you can get to a computer, his photo might be on-line, somewhere.”

“I can pull up the Web on this phone.”

“Good deal.”

“Your gut tells you this is our man?” Anderson asked.

“I’ve been saving the punch line: He reconstructed his ex-wife’s breast after she had a mastectomy. Lauren Jones.”

“He...
what?”

“He remade her. She says the two plastic surgeons who worked on her didn’t even come close to what he achieved. He has a library of anatomy and surgery books as big as most medical schools”.”

“Ready to bring Whitney aboard?”

Clevenger knew the facts of the case merited it. So why did he still feel hesitant? Why go it alone when he could bring the resources of the FBI to bear? Did he really believe that allegiance to Skull and Bones would transcend Whitney’s allegiance to her job, to the rule of law? “I will—in person,” he said. “I’ll call her before
I leave for D.C. and see if she can meet me in the city.”

“See you there,” Anderson said.

“Call me when you get to the Mayflower.”

“Will do.”

They hung up.

Two minutes later, Clevenger’s cab pulled up in front of 222 Madison.

He paid the driver and headed up to Jones, Alison Design, on the twenty-third floor. The receptionist escorted him to the conference room.

Laine Jones was waiting for him.

“Morning, Frank,” he said. He extended his hand.

Clevenger shook it.

“All set for you,” he said. He nodded toward the conference table, covered with six sets of architectural drawings. “I picked projects that span West’s tenure here,” he said. “His style shifted a bit—use of materials and what have you—but I think the central themes of his work stayed very consistent.”

Clevenger walked slowly around the table, studying the plans, flipping pages. And his confidence that he was looking at the work of the man who had killed Jeffrey Groupmann and Chase Van Meyer and the others grew. Every square inch of the drawings was covered with extensive notes on color, the wood and stone and metal to be procured, specific guidelines on construction. And in every design was the magical use of space and light that Clevenger had seen in Pacific Heights, Southampton, and Chicago. Etched-glass ceilings, crisscrossing beams soaring skyward, endless runs of transom glass.

More than anything, though, what the plans showed was Crosse’s sensitivity to the life stories of his clients. A car collector would have a garage in which his cars were stored on ramps built into the interior side walls, conserving floor space. A remarried couple trying to maintain their independence while sharing their lives would move into a nine-thousand-square-foot home that was really three homes: five rooms for her on one side, five for him on the other, ten shared, in between. A playwright would have an amphitheater with a retractable roof and an ebony stage inlaid with a Mark Twain quote in bronze lettering: “All art is a lie that tells the truth.”

But Crosse had apparently moved far beyond the use of space to honor life stories. He was designing the life stories themselves.

Clevenger noticed a small cross penciled in the upper right-hand corner of each page. “Did he mean the cross as a religious symbol here?” he asked Jones. “Or does it have some significance architecturally I don’t know about?”

“It doesn’t have any special meaning within the field. West put that on every page of every set of plans he drew while he was here,” Jones said. “For a long time we took it as shorthand, in place of his initials or last name. But then he started speaking quite openly about his devotion to God. By the end, it had become a real problem.”

“How so?”

“I certainly didn’t want to get in the way of him worshipping whatever he wanted to. But there was an evangelical quality to it. It made people very uncomfortable.”

“They felt he wanted to convert them, save them?”

“All that, but even more, that he still needed saving himself, that he was using God the way some people use alcohol or drugs—as an escape.”

“From?” Clevenger asked.

“Well, that’s really your territory. I’d say his entire past. His father’s polio. That wheelchair. Growing up poor. All the rage and helplessness he felt. Most people around here didn’t know anything about his childhood, but I think they sensed real chaos under the surface. I think they were worried the religious stuff ultimately wouldn’t be enough to keep it in check, that he could lose it and become violent.”