The Surgeon (29 page)

and sleepy voices, and he wondered what darkness lay
hidden from view.
When he returned to the squad room, he found Singer
typing at a laptop. "Hold on," said Singer, and he hit
Spellcheck. God forbid there be any misspellings in his
reports. Satisfied, he looked at Moore. "Yeah?"
"Did you ever find Capra's address book?"
"What address book?"
"Most people keep a personal address book near their
telephone. I didn't see one in the video of his apartment, and I
didn't find one on your property list."
"You're talking over two years ago. If it wasn't on our list,
then he didn't have one."
"Or it was removed from his apartment before you got
there."
"What're you fishing for? I thought you came to study
Capra's technique, not solve the case again."
"I'm interested in Capra's friends. Everyone who knew him
well."
"Hell, no one did. We interviewed the doctors and nurses he
worked with. His landlady, the neighbors. I drove out to Atlanta

to talk to his aunt. His only living relative."
"Yes, I read the interviews."
"Then you know he had 'em all fooled. I kept hearing the
same comments: `Compassionate doctor! Such a polite
young man!' " Singer snorted.
"They had no idea who Capra really was."
Singer swiveled back to his laptop. "Hell, no one ever
knows who the monsters are."
Time to view the last videotape. Moore had put this one off till
the very end, because he had not been ready to deal with the
images. He had managed to watch the others with
detachment, taking notes as he studied the bedrooms of Lisa
Fox and Jennifer Torregrossa and Ruth Voorhees. He had
viewed, again and again, the pattern of blood splatters, the
knots in the nylon cord around the victims' wrists, the glaze of
death in their eyes. He could look at the tapes with a minimum
of emotion because he did not know these women and he
heard no echo of their voices in his memory. He was focused
not on the victims but on the malevolent presence that had
passed through their rooms. He ejected the tape of the
Voorhees crime scene and set it on the table. Reluctantly he
picked up the remaining tape. On the label was the date, the
case number, and the words: "Catherine Cordell Residence."

He thought about putting it off, waiting until tomorrow
morning, when he'd be fresh. It was now nine o'clock, and he
had been in this room all day. He held the tape, weighing what
to do.
It was a moment before he realized Singer was standing in
the doorway, watching him.
"Man. You're still here," said Singer.
"I've got a lot to go over."
"You watched all the tapes?"
"All except this one."
Singer glanced at the label. "Cordell."
"Yeah."
"Go ahead; play it. Maybe I can fill in a few details."
Moore inserted it into the VCR slot and pressed Play.
They were looking at the front of Catherine's house.
Nighttime. The porch was lit up and the lights all on inside. On
audio, he heard the videographer give the date and time
--2:00 A.M.--and his name. Again, it was Spiro Pataki, who
seemed to be everyone's favorite cameraman. Moore heard
a lot of background noise--voices, the fading wail of a siren.

Pataki did his routine pan of the surroundings, and Moore saw
a grim gathering of neighbors staring over crime scene tape,
their faces illuminated by the lights of several police cruisers
parked on the street. This surprised him, knowing the hour of
night. It must have been a considerable disturbance to
awaken so many neighbors.
Pataki turned back to the house and approached the front
door.
"Gunshots," said Singer. "That's the initial report we got.
The woman across the street heard the first shot, then a long
pause, and then a second shot. She called nine-one-one. First
officer on the scene was there in seven minutes. Ambulance
was called two minutes later."
Moore remembered the woman across the street, staring at
him through her window.
"I read the neighbor's statement," said Moore. "She said
she didn't see anyone come out the front door of the house."
"That's right. Just heard the two shots. She got out of bed
after the first one, looked out the window. Then, maybe five
minutes later, she heard the second gunshot."
Five minutes, thought Moore. What accounted for the gap?
On the screen, the camera entered the front door and was
now just inside the house. Moore saw a closet, the door

opened to reveal a few coats on hangers, an umbrella, a
vacuum cleaner. The view shifted now, sweeping around to
show the living room. On the coffee table next to the couch sat
two drinking glasses, one of them still containing what looked
like beer.
"Cordell invited him inside," said Singer. "They had a few
drinks. She went to the bathroom, came back, finished her
beer. Within an hour the Rohypnol took effect."
The couch was peach-colored, with a subtle floral design
woven into the fabric. Moore did not see Catherine as a floral-
fabric kind of woman, but there it was. Flowers on the curtains,
on the cushions in the end chair. Color. In Savannah, she had
lived with lots of color. He imagined her sitting on that couch
with Andrew Capra, listening sympathetically to his concerns
about work, as the Rohypnol slowly passed from her stomach
into her bloodstream. As the drug's molecules swirled their
way toward her brain. As Capra's voice began to fade away.
They were moving into the kitchen now, the camera making
a sweep of the house, recording every room as they'd found it
at two o'clock on that Saturday morning. In the kitchen sink sat
a single water glass.
Suddenly Moore leaned forward. "That glass--you have
DNA analysis on the saliva?"
"Why would we?"

"You don't know who drank from it?"
"There were only two people in the house when the first
officer responded. Capra and Cordell."
"Two glasses were on the coffee table. Who drank from this
third glass?"
"Hell, it could've been in that kitchen sink all day. It was not
relevant to the situation we found."
The cameraman finished his sweep of the kitchen and now
turned up the hallway.
Moore grabbed the remote control and pressed Rewind.
He backed up the tape to the beginning of the kitchen
segment.
"What?" said Singer.
Moore didn't answer. He leaned closer, watching the
images play once again on the screen. The refrigerator,
dotted with bright magnets in the shapes of fruits. The flour
and sugar canisters on the kitchen counter. The sink, with the
single water glass. Then the camera swept past the kitchen
door, toward the hallway.
Moore hit Rewind again.
"What are you looking at?" Singer asked.

The tape was back at the water glass. The camera started
its pan toward the hallway. Moore hit Pause. "This," he said.
"The kitchen door. Where does it lead?"
"Uh--the backyard. Opens to a lawn."
"And what's beyond that backyard?"
"Adjoining yard. Another row of houses."
"Did you talk to the owner of that adjoining yard? Did he or
she hear the gunshots?"
"What difference does it make?"
Moore rose and went to the monitor. "The kitchen door," he
said, tapping on the screen. "There's a chain. It isn't fastened."
Singer paused. "But the door's locked. See the position of
the knob button?"
"Right. It's the kind of button you can push on your way out,
locking the door behind you."
"And your point is?"
"Why would she push that button but not fasten the chain?
People who lock up for the night do it all at once. They press
in the button, slide in the chain. She left out that second step."
"Maybe she just forgot."

"There'd been three women murdered in Savannah. She
was worried enough to keep a gun under her bed. I don't think
she'd forget." He looked at Singer. "Maybe someone walked
out that kitchen door."
"There were only two people in that house. Cordell and
Capra."
Moore considered what he should say next. Whether he
had more to gain or lose if he was perfectly forthright.
By now Singer knew where this conversation was headed.
"You're sayin' Capra had a partner."
"Yes."
"That's a mighty big conclusion to draw from one unlocked
chain."
Moore took a breath. "There's more. The night Catherine
Cordell was attacked, she heard another voice in her house. A
man, speaking to Capra."
"She never told me that."
"It came out during a forensic hypnosis session."
Singer burst out laughing. "Did you get a psychic to back
that up? 'Cause then I'd really be convinced."

"It explains why the Surgeon knows so much about Capra's
technique. The two men were partners. And the Surgeon is
carrying on the legacy, to the point of stalking their only
surviving victim."
"The world's full of women. Why focus on her?"
"Unfinished business."
"Yeah, well, I got a better theory." Singer rose from his chair.
"Cordell forgot to lock the chain on her kitchen door. Your boy
in Boston is copying what he read in the newspapers. And
your forensic hypnotist pulled up a false memory." Shaking his
head, he started toward the door. Tossed back a sarcastic
parting shot: "Let me know when you catch the real killer."
Moore allowed the exchange to bother him only briefly. He
knew Singer was defending his own work on the case, and he
could not blame him for being skeptical. He was beginning to
wonder about his own instincts. He had come all the way to
Savannah to either prove or disprove the partner theory, and
thus far he had nothing to back it up.
He focused his attention on the TV screen and pressed
Play.
The camera left the kitchen, advanced up the hallway. A
pause to look into the bathroom--pink towels, a shower
curtain with multicolored fish. Moore's hands were sweating.
He dreaded watching what came next, but he could not tear

his gaze from the screen. The camera turned from the
bathroom and continued up the hallway, past a framed
watercolor of pink peonies hanging on the wall. On the wood
floor, bloody shoeprints had been smeared and tracked over
by the first officers on the scene and later by frantic
paramedics. What was left was a confusing abstract in red. A
doorway loomed ahead, the view jiggling in an unsteady hand.
Now the camera moved into the bedroom.
Moore felt his stomach turn, not because what he was
staring at was any more shocking than other crime scenes he
had witnessed. No, this horror was deeply visceral because
he knew, and cared deeply about, the woman who had
suffered here. He had studied the still photos of this room, but
they did not convey the same lurid quality as this video. Even
though Catherine was not in the frame--by this time she had
already been taken to the hospital--the evidence of her
ordeal shouted at him from the TV screen. He saw the nylon
cord, which had bound her wrists and ankles, still attached to
the four bedposts. He saw surgical instruments--a scalpel
and retractors--left on the nightstand. He saw all this and the
impact was so powerful that he actually swayed back in his
chair, as though shoved by a fist.
When the camera lens shifted, at last, to Andrew Capra's
body lying on the floor, he felt barely a twitch of emotion; he
was already numbed by what he'd seen seconds earlier.
Capra's abdominal wound had bled profusely, and a large

pool had collected beneath his torso. The second bullet, into
his eye, had inflicted the fatal wound. He remembered the
five-minute gap between the two gunshots. The image he saw
reinforced that timeline. Judging by the amount of pooling,
Capra had lain alive and bleeding for at least a few minutes.
The videotape came to an end.
He stared at the blank screen, then stirred from his
paralysis and turned off the VCR. He felt too drained to rise
from the chair. When at last he did, it was only to escape this
place. He picked up the box containing the photocopied
documents from the Atlanta investigation. Since these papers
were not originals but copies of documents on file in Atlanta,
he could review them elsewhere.
Back in his hotel, he showered, ate a room-service
hamburger and fries. Gave himself an hour with the TV to
decompress. But the whole time he sat flipping between
channels, what his hand really itched to do was call Catherine.
Watching the last crime scene video had brought home
exactly what sort of monster now stalked her, and he could not
rest easy.
Twice he picked up the phone and put it down again. He
picked it up yet again, and this time his fingers moved of their
own accord, punching in a number he knew so well. Four
rings, and he got Catherine's answering machine.
He hung up without leaving a message.

He stared at the phone, ashamed by how easily his resolve
had crumbled. He had promised himself to hold fast, had
agreed to Marquette's demand that he maintain his distance
from Catherine for the duration of the investigation. When all
this is over, somehow I will make things right between us.
He looked at the stack of Atlanta documents on the desk. It
was midnight and he had not even started. With a sigh, he
opened the first file from the Atlanta box.
The case of Dora Ciccone, Andrew Capra's first victim, did
not make for appetizing reading. He already knew the general
details; they'd been summarized in Singer's final report. But
Moore had not read the raw reports from Atlanta, and now he
was going back in time, examining the earliest work of
Andrew Capra. This was where it all started. In Atlanta.
He read the initial crime report, then progressed through
files of interviews. He read statements from Ciccone's
neighbors, from the bartender in the local watering hole where
she was last seen alive, and from the girlfriend who
discovered the body. There was also a file with a list of
suspects and their photographs; Capra was not among them.
Dora Ciccone was a twenty-two-year-old grad student at
Emory. On the night of her death, she was last seen around
midnight, sipping a Margarita at La Cantina. Forty hours later,
her body was discovered in her home, nude and tied to the
bed with nylon cord. Her uterus had been removed and her

neck slashed.
He found the police timeline. It was only a rough sketch in
barely legible writing, as though the Atlanta detective had put it
together merely to satisfy some internal checklist. He could
almost smell failure in these pages, could read it in the
depressive droop of the detective's handwriting. He himself
had experienced that heavy feeling that builds in your chest as
you pass the twenty-four-hour mark, then a week, then a
month, and you still have no tangible leads. This was what the
Atlanta detective had--nothing. Dora Ciccone's killer
remained an unknown subject.
He opened the autopsy report.
The butchery of Dora Ciccone had been neither as swift nor
as skillful as Capra's later killings. Incisional jags indicated
Capra lacked the confidence to make a single clean cut
across the lower abdomen. Instead he had hesitated, his
blade backtracking, macerating the skin. Once through the
skin layer, the procedure degenerated to amateurish hacking,
the blade deeply nicking both bladder and bowel as he
excavated his prize. On this, his first victim, no suture was
used to tie off any arteries. The bleeding was profuse, and
Capra would have been working blind, his anatomical
landmarks submerged in an ever-deepening pool of crimson.
Only the coup de grace was performed with any skill. It had
been done in one clean slash, left to right, as though, with his
hunger now sated and the frenzy fading, he was finally in