The Schwarzschild Radius (10 page)

he search for Kirsten Schrodinger ended last night when the body of the sixteen-year-old was found brutally mutilated and dismembered. Police stated that judging from the partially healed wounds, the girl had been tortured over a period of days, if not weeks, before being killed…

… Inside sources have confirmed that an eye-witness saw a man carrying a large duffel bag entering an abandoned tenement the night before the victim’s body was discovered there.

Massey dropped the paper into the waste-paper basket, then called the office of New York Representative Richard Smythe to cancel their appointment tomorrow. He threw everything into his garment bag, then got online and tried finding a shuttle to New York in the next couple of hours. Everything was booked. Amtrak then. The five-sixteen would get him into New York by ten-thirty.

While on the train, he cancelled all his meetings and interviews for the next two days. He read every article he could find online on the Schrodinger murder. The police had substantial leads. The Post called it the most brutal murder in recent memory. Pathologists had discovered layers of torture that the victim had endured, just as geologists can read the traumas of the earth in a core sample.

She had been electrocuted as evidenced by the charring at the top of her head and her left foot. The head had caught fire, and the eyeballs had been pushed out, not gouged out. The contractions of the body had been so great that ribs and fingers had broken. She had been violated with a large object such as a baseball bat. This was accompanied by severe beating resulting in the broken radius of her arm, broken hip, ribs and jaw. A number of her teeth had been pulled out.

The article said the FBI had been called in. He stared out the window for twenty minutes. Substantial leads.

He went to the restroom to wash his face and nearly gasped when he saw his reflection. His abundant black hair was wet with perspiration. His eyes looked as if he’d spent the night drinking. He looked like so many bums he’d seen as he walked every day to Transcendence House from the subway station. Massey toweled off and threw his hair back with his hands.

Back in his seat, he googled,
How to erase your hard drive.

When he arrived at Transcendence House, he had thirty-six messages. Before he could take off his jacket, the phone rang again.

“Joe Sadlis―Daily News.”

“Ah, yes. I suppose I have time now,” said Massey, collecting himself.

“Kirsten Schrodinger was found dead today. Do you know if she knew Olivia Wallen, who disappeared last week? I understand Olivia volunteered at Transcendence House.”

“I’m not aware of any relationship. Kirsten Schrodinger wasn’t a guest at Transcendence House, as far as I know.”

“As one of the last people to see Olivia Wallen before she disappeared, could you shed some light on her relationship with the kids she worked with, her co-workers, and yourself?”

He had couched that question well and Massey had to handle this guy carefully. The wrong response and he’d print “Despite repeated questioning, Father Massey was unforthcoming.”

“As far as I could tell, Olivia had a fine working relationship with her co-workers, and some of the kids had real affection for her. She was a very lovable person. Everyone will tell you that. As for myself, I don’t get too close with anyone here, and that’s the greatest irony. You just can’t function well when you lose your objectivity. My responsibilities are primarily management of our organization, and I don’t have the luxury of being able to interact very much with either the kids or the counselors. She had been volunteering here for almost a year, which is an unusually long time. Most kids come here for a summer and that’s enough. Not to be cynical about anyone’s motives, but that’s all you need to put something on your resume. Olivia was different. She had a genuine vocation for this kind of work. Our prayers go out to the family.”

“Rumors have been surfacing from multiple sources that she was a call girl. How do you respond to that?”

“I don’t, and I hope her parents don’t hear this. Please have the decency and professionalism not to print anything, but established facts. I’m afraid I’m out of time. Thank you for calling and good night.”

After Massey shredded several dozen documents, he removed the digital camcorder from behind the bookshelf and, with a few strokes, deleted its contents. He overwrote the camcorder’s hard drive by placing it on his desk and filming the blank wall of his office.

What else?
he thought. He deleted the call log on his cell phone. He went through his emails for anything remotely suspicious. More deletes. Of course, all that could be retrieved by the authorities, but it was a start. There was nothing else in the office that needed to be addressed.

In his house in Bensonhurst, Massey went through every drawer and nook. He found a pair of panties and a condom wrapper. Kirsten Schrodinger had been up here only once, but long hairs have a way of turning up at the wrong moment. He gathered up all his linen and towels and packed them in garbage bags. These went to the curb. He’d need to get new ones right away. The guitar got wiped down, along with everything with a handle on it.

The priest backed up his laptop to the external hard drive. His collection of child pornography had always been his solace, the images that had obsessed him for years, the pictures so beautiful that he could not imagine living without them. He had to see them one last time.

They were boys and girls between eight and thirteen, arching their backs for him, and they never grew old. Like the figures on Keats’ urn, they were forever young. They were the first thing he thought of in the morning and the last thing before he closed his eyes at night. They were the most valuable thing he owned, and even he knew there was something wrong with that. And now that he had visited them, he closed the images one by one and was again alone.

Massey now held in his hand the drive which contained all his sensitive files. He knew from all the computer whizzes that taught at Transcendence House that when you delete a file, you are really just deleting a reference to it from a table of contents on the disk. The data is still there and easily recoverable by authorities. One way to permanently delete the data was to overwrite the hard drive using privacy software. He downloaded Window Washer. After highlighting all his porn directories, his finger pressed DELETE, and the children vanished.

lexander Hamilton stood magnificent, but unknowing that he would soon cross the Hudson to his death. Rachel walked past the statue and into the Columbia bookstore where she purchased the rest of the books she’d need for Lit-Hum: Julius Caesar, Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, Vergil, Augustine. On the newsstand there was one more reading assignment. Kirsten Schrodinger had been found dead.

“I just heard about the Schrodinger girl,” said Rachel on her cell phone. “You know what I’m going to ask.”

“There’s no evidence they’re related, Rachel. At least for now,” replied Detective McKenna.

“Did you find out anything about the video?”

“That was just a fragment of a video. It doesn’t have the usual disclaimer and records information that all adult videos are required to have at the beginning. So it’s going to be hard to locate the source. Still trying.”

Rachel had to sit on the steps on hearing this. “So none of the people in the video could be identified? I had high hopes for that.”

“So far, no. Sorry you and your family had to read about the Schrodinger murder at a time like this. Don’t torture yourself thinking about that. How are your folks holding up?”

“Not well. The worst part is just sitting around waiting for news. Isn’t there facial recognition software that you can use to identify the people in the video?”

“Only if they’re in a database to start with. Look, Rachel, like I told you last night, just stay in close touch with your parents and give them support. I saw all the posters you and your neighbors put up. That helps. We’re getting leads, but nothing’s panned out yet.”

“Besides putting up posters, is there anything else I can do?”

“You’re doing just fine. I understand you’re in school. That’s good. You need to keep going and not let this take you over.”

“It’s already taken me over.”

“You have to keep functioning, is what I mean. Life can’t stop. Rest assured that we’re doing everything we possibly can. I hope that gives you the small comfort you might need to keep on going with your life. I’m sure your sister would want that.”

When McKenna hung up, he reviewed the platitudes he had just repeated to the girl.

He didn’t tell her that he had in his hands at just that moment the Medical Examiner’s report on the Schrodinger girl. It was far worse than what the media had described. They weren’t even supposed to get that much. You want to keep some information secret, so there’s still something that only the perpetrator would know in case you capture him, such as how the body was found and the wounds on it. Damn rookie cop on the scene started yapping to the press.

His eyes panned each photo. The torture was unimaginable and drawn out over a period of days. As he had done many times during his career, McKenna tried to enter the mind of the animal that would do this. It wasn’t for money―no ransom had been demanded. It wasn’t a political or mob rubout. This was sheer sadism.