The Architect (2 page)

Another star.

“He crossed state lines, we got involved. Now, two more in the last six months: Southampton, New York...”

A fourth star.

“Ironwood, Michigan.”

A fifth.

“The press is all over us.”

Forensic psychiatrist Frank Clevenger, forty-nine, looked over at Ken Hiramatsu, the agency’s chief pathologist. ‘Tell me about the bodies.”

Hiramatsu motioned the control room for the next series of images.

The screen filled with what looked like a photo from
Gray’s Anatomy
.

“His dissection is beyond competent,” Hiramatsu said, with what sounded like admiration. “In each victim, a different organ or vessel or joint is masterfully exposed. In Darien, it was the heart of a twenty-seven-year-old woman.”

Clevenger could see the sternum and rib cage of the victim had been neatly cut away, the muscles and fascia beneath them held back by silver nails, giving a full view of the heart, freed even from the fibrous, pericardial sac that normally clings to it like a glove.

“He goes deep,” Hiramatsu said, motioning the control room again. “He wants to see everything.”

The image on screen changed to a close-up of forceps holding open a window cut into the left ventricle, revealing the aortic and mitral valves. It changed again to show a second window onto the tricuspid valve, inside the right ventricle.

“You get the idea,” Hiramatsu said. He twirled a finger in the air. The slides began cycling.

Clevenger watched one image of meticulous carnage after another. A section of abdominal wall excised to reveal the kidney of a teenage boy, the renal artery and ureter brought into view by threads tied around them, pulled tight and anchored by silver nails. The right hip of a middle-aged woman open to show
the neck and head of the femur, with the gluteus medius, quadratus femoris, and iliopsoas muscles stripped clean. The jugular veins and carotid arteries of a beautiful, thirty-something woman. The spine of a man face down in a bed of leaves.

“The spine is the one from Michigan,” Hiramatsu said. “His most accomplished work.”

Clevenger glanced at him.

“In its attention to detail,” Hiramatsu said quickly. “Each and every spinal nerve tied off. The vertebral arteries pristinely dissected. Not one of them torn. Not even a nick.”

“Any evidence of sexual abuse?” Clevenger asked.

“None,” Hiramatsu said.

“Cause of death?” Clevenger asked.

“Poisoning.” Hiramatsu said. “We found traces of chloroform and succinylcholine in every body.”

Chloroform was a sedative-hypnotic agent. Succinylcholine was a potent paralytic. Just three milligrams would freeze every muscle in the body, including the heart.

“We’ve thought about a surgeon,” Dorothy Campbell, an older, elegant woman who ran the PROFILER computer system, said. “The blade is consistent with a scalpel.”

“You’d think he’d get enough in the O.R.,” Clevenger said.

“Maybe some hotshot fired for drugs or malpractice,” White said. “Out to show everyone just how competent he is.”

“Possible,” Clevenger said.

“What we know for sure,” White said, “is that he’s
got a ticket. All five victims are from serious money, even the kid.”

“He can’t meet these people by chance,” Campbell said. “They know him. They trust him.”

“Do they know each other?” Clevenger asked.

“The husband of one victim and the father of another served on the board of National Petroleum together” White said. “We could never make anything of it.”

“Other leads?” Clevenger asked, looking around the table.

A few seconds passed in silence before White cleared his throat again. He winked. “If we were making a lot of headway, you wouldn’t be here.”

TWO

Dr. Whitney McCormick, director
of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, had left instructions with her secretary to let Clevenger wait in her office.

He took the armchair opposite her grand mahogany desk and looked at a picture of himself on her cre-denza, beside others of her with her ex-U.S. congressman father, her mother and sister, her black Lab, her Nantucket cottage.

He focused on McCormick. She was just a teenager in the photo, with a girlish smile and hair down to her waist. Yet even then he could see the rare combination of wisdom and vulnerability in her eyes that attracted him so powerfully to her.

It was no secret that McCormick and he were on-again, off-again lovers, though no one at the agency could ever guess whether they were on or off on any given day. He wasn’t always sure himself.

He knew they couldn’t go a month without seeing one another, at least for a couple of hours in bed. He knew they couldn’t go a whole season playing house,
shuttling back and forth between his Chelsea loft outside Boston and her apartment in D.C. And he knew some of the reasons why.

They were extraordinarily well-matched intellectually, equally fascinated by the human psyche and its pathologies, with equally stubborn minds that worked problems ceaselessly until they were solved. And they were extraordinarily well-matched sexually. Lock and key. Clevenger liked taking control in the bedroom; McCormick liked yielding it.

They could talk for hours and they could make love for hours and they knew what a rare thing that is in this world. But, somehow, knowing it didn’t trump the stuff that kept splitting them apart—this time for a little over three weeks.

“Get what you needed?” McCormick asked, walking in.

He turned to her, kept looking at her as she took a seat behind her desk. She was thirty-seven now, hair just off her shoulders, wearing black silk pants and a simple black camisole shirt under a black blazer. He noticed she’d taken off the diamond crescent moon necklace he’d given her for her birthday two years before. “I’m up to speed,” he said. “Take any heat for bringing me on board?”

“I’d bring bin Laden on board if it meant catching this guy.”

That put him in rare company. “Listen, I’m sorry,” he said, leaning forward. “We should talk about—”

“The case. Let’s talk about the case.”

He settled back in his chair.

“Obviously, we’re dealing with someone organized. He knows exactly who he wants to kill and exactly how.”

“Beyond organized,” Clevenger said. “Obsessive. Maybe, literally, OCD.” He was getting lost in Mc-Cormick’s deep brown eyes. “This is hard,” he said.

“You can handle it.” She waited a few seconds. “OCD...”

He forced himself to focus. “I don’t know about you, but my cadaver in med school didn’t look like any of the photos I just saw. I was always in a rush to get where the dissection guide said to go. Things got messy. Not with this guy. He takes his sweet time. He’s a perfectionist.”

“Which goes with the way he disposes of the bodies—shallow graves, arms folded over their chests, wrapped in plastic sheets.”

“Mummies. Clean, protected from the elements,” Clevenger said. “He’s not angry at these people. No overkill here. He puts them to sleep with chloroform first. He wants them dead, but he doesn’t want them to suffer.”

“How kind,” McCormick said, smiling for the first time since she’d walked in the room. “And he only dissects one area of the body. Nice and neat.”

“He loves human anatomy the way some people love fine wine. Savors every drop. He doesn’t let himself get drunk on it.”

“A connoisseur.” She tilted her head, squinted at him.

“What?”

“You haven’t been drinking, have you?”

“Not lately,” he said.

She kept looking at him, diagnosing.

“If you want to play doctor, I’ll get undressed for you.”

“ ‘Not lately,” as in hours, or years?”

“I thought we were gonna stick to the case.”

She stared at him.

He looked away, then back at her. “I miss you.”

Her eyes went ice-cold. “Let me tell you something: If you’re drinking and saying I’m to blame, you can get out right now. We could really use the help, but—”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” he shot back. “Two years sober. I don’t miss you enough to blow that.”

She didn’t look convinced. “This isn’t any easier for me than it is for you. But this time I’m sticking with what I said: I need things you can’t give me. If you love me, you’ll respect that.”

“I do,” Clevenger said. He paused, took a breath. “And I will.”

“Thank you.” She paused. “What do you need to get started?”

“Everything. All crime scene evidence back to 2003—every fiber and drop of fluid, every photo. All police reports and agent field reports, including internal memos. Direct access to the bodies, if they haven’t been buried. Maybe even if they have.”

“No problem. For starters, you can go through the file before you leave. Order copies of whatever you want”

“And North Anderson comes aboard.”

North Anderson, a former Baltimore cop and the first black chief of police on Nantucket, was Clev-enger’s partner in Boston Forensics—and one of his few friends.

“That’s fine,” McCormick said. She looked like she had something else to say.

“What?”

“This can’t leave the room. Two people at the agency know: me, and the director.”

“I don’t keep secrets from North.”

“We’re trying to keep this—”

“Ever,” Clevenger said. “You know that.”

She hesitated. “North, no one else,” she said, finally. “Your word.”

He nodded.

A few seconds passed in silence.

“He sent the president a note,” she said.

“The president?” He leaned forward again. “Of the united States?”

“It was opened by a staffer at the White House five days after the first body.”

“How do they know it was from him?” Clevenger asked.

“The victim’s driver’s license was enclosed.”

Not subtle. “What did it say?”

“I guess the president has his support.” She unlocked a drawer at the side of her desk and took out a sheet of paper. She handed it to Clevenger.

It was a photocopy of the card, words typed in the center, a simple cross drawn over them:

Keep faith. One country at a time or one family at a time, Our work serves one God.

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FIVE

AUGUST 10, 2005, 11:10 P.M.

By 9:00 P.M. West
Crosse had heard from two of the three people he had met at 11204 Beach Drive.

Ken Rawlings had called to tell Crosse that he and his wife wanted him to design their Montana home. They hoped he could start immediately.

Rawlings’s assistant Maritza had called to find out whether he was too tired to meet for a drink at the Delano Hotel on South Beach, where the Rawlings had put him up.

He was never too tired to serve a client. He met Maritza at the hotel’s Blue Door restaurant, a whitewashed art deco nightmare with round plaster columns blasting fifteen feet into flat ceilings, sheer draperies over walls of glass, white tablecloths, white chairs, a white candelabra holding white candles. It made him feel like a plastic figurine on an egomaniac’s wedding cake, and he would have liked nothing more than to have used one of the candles to set fire to the white shades of the white standing lamps, just to give the place a little color and heat and life.

Instead, he focused on Maritza—her full lips, light brown skin, platinum-blond hair, long nails. In just seconds, he imagined her with more naturally blond, straighter hair, a better complement to her chestnut-brown eyes and slightly rounded face. He trimmed her nails, wiped away her pink nail polish in favor of a more subtle French manicure. He pulled off her tight, scoop neck T-shirt and covered her in a looser, rose-colored camisole that showed less cleavage. He helped her out of her hip-hugger jeans, redressed her in black cigarette pants. He changed even the pressured way she was trying to explain why she had called him, made her speak more softly and slowly.

“Which is,” she summed up, “a long way of saying, I don’t know why I called, exactly.”

“Of course you do,” Crosse said. He leaned toward her. “Would it be easier if I said it?”

“Maybe.”

“You called because you know you can be more with me than you can without me.” He saw her stiffen, mistaking his honesty for arrogance. “I feel exactly the same way about you. You can add something to my life. I’m certain of it. Otherwise, I would never have accepted your invitation.”

That put the two of them on an equal footing. She relaxed.

“What we can’t know is what we ultimately have to give one another. It could be as simple as your teaching me about growing up in Cuba, what you loved about it and what you hated about it. The way the light changes during the day. The ideal plants and flowers for a garden. The most beautiful beach and street and archway
you remember. The piece of land where you dreamed of having a house as a little girl. What that house would look like, smell like, feel like.” He paused. “Or you may have even more to teach me, about what makes you feel most alive, about your passion.”*

Her neck began to redden, as it had at the Rawl-ingses” house. “What do you have to teach me?” she asked.

“For starters, that you’re more captivating than you believe. You worry someone might miss your beauty. That’s why you grow your nails a bit too long.” He took her hand, ran his thumb down her slender fingers. “You dye your hair a dramatic shade. You wear tight clothing.” He looked into her eyes. “But your beauty is unmistakable.” He saw her eyes start to sparkle. “When you see it as I do, so will every man you meet.”

She looked down, fiddled with her silverware. “How do I know you don’t say this to every woman you meet?” She looked back up at him.

“Because the truth is all I have. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Certainly not for sex.” He gazed even more deeply into her eyes. “Not even for love.”

She believed him. And why not? He sounded like he meant everything he said with every fiber of his being. And she believed him even more as she lay naked on his white bed in his white room looking over the whitecapped waves of Miami Beach. Because no one could fake the tenderness with which he ran his fingers through her hair as he kissed her mouth. No one could invent the hungry, yet unhurried way he caressed her neck and breasts and stomach. No fraud would have noticed when she lifted her hips half an inch, inviting
him between her knees. No liar could lead their dance precisely where she hoped to go, sense the moment when nature was about to take control, and suddenly stop, leaving her trembling at that velvet edge where her body and soul were fading into one another. No one but a lover of truth—
her
truth—could give her back all that control—what she so feared and craved— by simply rolling onto his back and crossing his wrists over his head.