The Death in the Willows (18 page)

“With the exception of one passenger.”

The phone rang and Kim left to answer it in the kitchen. They could hear her voice, which was obviously raised for their benefit. “Wentworth campaign headquarters, where the elite meet defeat … uh huh.” She reappeared in the living room. “Super pig would like to talk to Sherlock Holmes.”

Lyon picked up the phone with dread. “Yes, Rocco … I was afraid of that.… Can't the daughter do it?… Of course, I know where it is.”

His face was ashen when he returned to the living room. “They found Pasic's body. For reasons best known to the medical examiner's office, they don't want the daughter to make the identification.”

The Chief Medical Examiner's Office for the state of Connecticut is in the University of Connecticut Medical Center in Farmington, a town a few miles west of Hartford. It took Lyon forty minutes to make the trip. When he arrived he found Rocco and Pat in the parking lot waiting for him. They didn't speak as they entered the building containing the morgue. Pat nodded to the attendant, and they were led to the body storage area.

Lyon had never been in a morgue before, and expected that in this modern, new building, and with modern antiseptic techniques, that there would be no smell. He was wrong. The cloying smell of chemicals and death assaulted him. They were taken to a white tiled room with a stainless steel refrigerated chamber pocked with numbered drawers. The assistant medical examiner pulled open number 10.

Rocco and Pat stood aside as Lyon approached the corpse.

It was the man he had met in the New York hotel room, the man he now knew was Nikola Pasic.

He stepped back in revulsion. “My God! What happened to him?”

“Is it him?”

“Yes, but the condition of …”

“Multiple burns over the thorax and groin surfaces of the body,” the ME intoned. “Probably used a cigarette lighter. Death by strangulation.”

“The wire was still around his neck when we found him,” Pat said.

“He's been tortured.”

“Yes,” the M.E. said as he slid the body back into the refrigerator chamber. “The wire went back from his neck and was looped around his feet. It took him several hours to die.”

The lights in Darlene Whipple's apartment were out as Rocco and Lyon parked in front of the three-story house. As Lyon walked reluctantly toward the front door, Rocco called after him.

“I'll wait for you, and we can go down to Pat's office and make our statement together.”

Lyon nodded and continued up the steps to knock on the door. He waited and knocked again. The uneven shadows in the dark living room set off a subliminal alarm and he cupped his hands around the edge of his eyes and pressed against the glass.

Street light fell through the room and spilled across overturned packing cases that were now strewn haphazardly around the room. The faint light illuminated the edge of the couch he had sat on earlier in the day. It had been ripped with a knife and stuffing pulled from the cushions in large handfuls.

He elbowed glass from a lower pane and reached inside to unlatch the door. “Darlene!” He stumbled over the mess in the living room and fumbled along the edge of the dining room wall until his hand stuck a switch that lit an overhead light. He called again and ran for the bedroom hallway.

She was naked. Her frightened, hurt eyes stared up at him as he picked up a still lit overturned lamp. Her arms and legs were tied to the bedposts and a broad expanse of tape covered her lower face and mouth. Burns crisscrossed her body in streaks of red welts.

Rocco shouldered past him and slashed his pocket knife at the bindings. Lyon tore the bandage from her mouth and pulled her gently against him. Her breath came in short gasps and then she began to cry.

“In … in closet … Mark, …” she gasped.

Rocco found the little boy tied and gagged in the closet, released him, and handed her a terry cloth robe that hung there.

She folded the small boy in her arms as they sat on the edge of the bed swaying and gasping. She looked up at Lyon. “A man, at the door. I thought it was Pops until I saw the stocking over his head. He tied us up. Searched the house.”

Lyon looked around the room and found that it had been thoroughly ransacked, drawers spilled on the floor, the mattress slashed, holes were even punched in the plaster wall. “I see.”

“The spools. He kept asking where the spools were. Then he tied me to the bed.…” Her voice trailed off as she looked up at Lyon with wide eyes. “My father …”

Lyon sat next to her and the small boy and held them both in his arms.

He closed the door and stood for a moment with his back against it. The IV stand cast a crooked shadow toward his feet. She lay stiff and rigid in the hospital bed with her arms by her side and a blanket pulled deep under her chin. She seemed smaller than he remembered, as if the events of the past hours had wilted her, not only her natural exuberance, but also her stature.

“Darlene,” he called softly.

Her eyes opened. Facial lines he'd not noticed before cut tracks of fright. “Who is it?”

“Lyon Wentworth. May I talk to you?”

“I don't want to talk.” Her voice was flat.

He pulled a side chair toward the bed and sat in it silently. She continued looking at him without movement until her eyes blinked open, glazed from the effects of sedation. She fought to keep them open, as if afraid that the horrors-would return if sleep overcame her. He reached out to hold her hand.

“It's going to be all right.”

“Where's my baby?”

“Sergeant Pasquale took him home with him.”

She sat up and he pushed her back. “The police …?”

“If I know the Pasquales, your only problem is that Mark will come back to you plump as a partridge.”

A wan smile flickered briefly across her face. “What happened to my father?”

“He was murdered.”

“Oh.” Her eyes widened as if she were assimilating the fact and considering how much she might trust Lyon. “I suppose it was because he had a great deal of cash on him. I know he had several hundred dollars.”

“No, I don't think it was that. They found his wallet. Someone was looking for something more important than a few hundred dollars.”

“Which is why he locked Mark up and tied me to the bed.”

“Do you have any idea what he was looking for?”

“He just kept asking for the spools … the spools, and when I'd shake my head no he'd bring the …” She turned away.

“I know how difficult it is, Darlene, but I want you to tell me about your father, particularly the last few years. We might come across something that will help us catch the man who did this to you and to your father.”

With her head still turned she began to talk. At first in a hesitating, stumbling manner, and finally the words formed their own images and the dead man began to take on a distinctive shape.

Nikola (Nick) Pasic, as a very young man during World War II, had been deported by the Germans to work in one of their factories. Released at the end of the war, he had joined the masses of displaced persons roaming Europe. Finally obtaining passage to this country, he had landed in the United States in 1946. He had worked as a dishwasher and finally a waiter in Florida hotels while taking night courses at the University of Miami until he received his degree in accounting.

In 1950 he married Mary Lungsden, and shortly afterward Darlene was born. Her childhood, and seemingly the Pasic life, had been an average and uneventful one. They had always lived modestly, although Darlene knew that promotions he received while working for for the Hungerford Corporation could have enabled them to move into a more luxurious home. Her father had always been kind to her, although constantly fearful of losing his job and once again becoming a displaced person.

Darlene had married a serviceman and moved to Connecticut on his discharge. Last year her mother had died, painfully, of cancer, and this year her father had retired early with intentions of returning to Europe.

“He seemed to change after my mother died.”

“In what way?”

“The desire to return to Yugoslavia, for one thing. He'd never mentioned that before. And he didn't want Mark and me to come to Florida and live with him after my divorce. He got quite upset when I suggested it, even though he had the room with mother gone. I know he loved us, but it seemed as if he were afraid for us to be down there. He sent us money, and I told you about the condominium he bought for us. I didn't understand it.”

“When he arrived in Hartford did he have any luggage?”

“No. He said he'd rented a car in New Jersey, and there'd been a mix-up on his luggage in New York. He was in the process of buying new things.”

“Can you think of anything he said that was odd or out of character?”

She thought for a moment. “He was mostly concerned that I had enough money and that Mark and I would be all right. He said he would write us, but not to expect a letter until he got settled, which would be a year or so. Funny … he did say he was going to write one letter right away … to some important people here. I didn't know what he meant. When I asked about it, he wouldn't say anything. I'm not much help, am I?”

“You may have been. Why don't you go to sleep now?”

“I think I will.”

Lyon kissed her on the forehead. Her wide eyes looked up at him and then closed.

He left the Murphysville police station and walked toward Main Street and the Green. There was nothing he could do for the time being, and he'd left word at the desk where Rocco could find him.

They were all busy. Rocco on the phone to the state police concerning Nick Pasic's luggage, and Pat Pasquale on the phone with the Dade County, Florida, sheriff's office. The youngest officer on the force, Jamie Martin, was sitting in front of the communications console at the front desk looking perplexed.

The Green was deserted. The white gazebo sitting in its center loomed before him as he walked across the grass and sat on its steps. He looked overhead to see an occasional star as clouds blew past in the path of a strong northerly wind.

In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, Darlene had told Pat that the stocking man had used her curling iron to burn her.

A curling iron? A small boy terrified in a closet. The dead in the flaming bus—what was worth such horror?

He looked over the quiet streets surrounding the Green. The historical commission required that the building facades remain unchanged, and the surroundings were as they had been a hundred years ago. It took little imagination to implant gas lanterns along the edge of the Green and see into the past. Men also killed in those simpler times. They killed, as they always had, for lust, gain, or ideology. Knowledge of which of these motivated the murderer was the primary step in locating Pasic's killer, and would be the mechanism through which they'd find him.

The police car jumped the curb and ran across the grass to swivel to a stop directly over a bed of tulips. Rocco and Pat slammed from the cruiser and trooped toward the gazebo steps where Lyon sat.

“Negative on the luggage,” Rocco said. “The lab was able to identify Pasic's things from the bus and reconstruct the contents. There wasn't anything but the usual clothing and toilet articles.”

“Whatever he was carrying could have been burned,” Pat said.

“I don't think so,” Lyon replied. “When Pasic talked to his daughter after he arrived in Hartford, he spoke of sending a letter to someone important. I think he intended to write to the FBI or the governor of Florida once he reached Yugoslavia. He was going to tell where the spools were hidden. He'd put them someplace safe.”

“Florida has some interesting information,” Pat said.

Lyon leaned back against the gazebo post. “The company Pasic worked for is connected to the Organization.”

“How the hell did you know?”

“The man who's been calling me is willing to pay one hundred thousand for what Pasic had. Who else would pay that kind of money?”

“Right. Anyway, Nick Pasic, as he's known, worked for an outfit called the Hungerford Corporation. The Anti-Organized Crime Force in Florida has felt for a number of years that Hungerford is a primary outlet for laundering Mafia money by buying into legitimate business. It was a small local mortgage company until twenty years ago when it was purchased by some fronts. Then it began to grow by large infusions of mysterious capital. Today it's a major financial institution, loaning money and buying equity interests all over the country.”

“Who's behind it?”

“They can't prove it, but they suspect Sergei Norkov.”

“Who's that?” Rocco asked.

“The sick old man,” Lyon said. “The financial mastermind behind all the families. Evidently he hasn't had any formal training, but for a man who picked up his knowledge of high finance on the street, he's a genuis. The Las Vegas skim was one of his minor innovations.”

“And Nick Pasic was chief accountant for Hungerford.”

“Any record on him?”

“None. He seemingly lived normally with a modest life-style. They did mention one thing.”

“What's that?”

“When they checked Pasic's house, they found his cars still there and most of his personal belongings, but the house had been ransacked like someone was looking for something important.”

Lyon stretched. “It all fits.”

“How about letting us in on it before I book you for loitering in the park?”

“For whatever reason, Nick Pasic took off from Hungerford with the spools. They obviously contain information that is worth a good deal of money to someone, either recovered or destroyed. They hired a hit man to kill Pasic and destroy the spools.”

“The killer picked up Pasic in New York and followed him to the boarding gate for the New England Express. He got on and sat directly behind you.”