VC03 - Mortal Grace (58 page)

Ellie looked at the documents and then back at Cardozo. “So?”

“He hired a jeweler to make an exact copy.”

She held Fabrikant’s invoice up to the light. “Is this genuine?”

“Fabrikant says so.”

Ellie did not speak, but her jaw tightened.

Cardozo looked at his wristwatch. “Did my watch stop?”

“It’s only four. Feels later.”

He handed her back the empty cup.

“Don’t tell me you want another.”

“I don’t know what I want. Sleep.” He yawned. “No word from any of the churches?”

“Nothing yet, thank God.” She turned in the doorway. “One odd thing came in on the radio. Happened right here in Manhattan, Ninety-third Street, but it’s not us. Someone broke into an empty Greek Orthodox church.”

Cardozo’s fist hit the desk. “I’m an idiot.” He was erect in his chair, awake. “They recognize each other’s orders.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“The Catholics and the Greek Orthodox. In an emergency they can take communion from one another. He couldn’t get into a Catholic church, so he went there.”

SEVENTY-THREE

F
ATHER SAW THAT HIS
thumb and forefinger had left pink half-moons on the hamper.

He crossed the room and lifted the rotary saw out of the vulcanized iron washtub. He set it carefully on the cement floor. He turned the hot-water tap and held the cellulose sponge under the flow just long enough to dampen it.

He returned to the hamper and wiped the white plastic-foam surface clean.

Three fine strands of blond hair trailed out from under the lid.

He opened the hamper. The young face stared up at him, gentle now, gaze cool and beyond the reach of tribulation.

Father’s finger traced the line of the lips. He separated them and eased the mouth open.

“God loves you,” he whispered.

From the pocket of his smock he took a pyx, and from the small container he took a paper-thin white wafer. He slid the wafer between the lips.

“So do I.”

He kissed the lips and then with his fingers he closed them.

At 6:32
A.M.
a two-man patrol car was cruising east on the two-lane express road that cut through Central Park at Eighty-fifth Street. As the driver passed the police station just south of the road, he slowed.

“Something the matter?” his partner asked.

“Maybe not.” The driver nosed the car up onto the curb, brought it to a stop, and stepped out.

He played the beam of his flashlight over the fieldstone walls of the one-story station house. It had been abandoned during the budget cuts of the eighties. The windows and doors were sealed with steel plate to prevent the homeless from breaking in.

He shined his beam up along the slate roof and down the rear of the building. Coming back to the pavement, the beam rippled over the edge of something that looked like a three-foot cube of dry ice.

The cop’s hand checked that his gun was ready at his right hip. He stepped forward. The flashlight beam flattened on the side of an unmarked white plastic-foam basket. A dribble of red was slowly leaking from a dent near the base.

Above the cop’s head, the starless night suddenly seemed charged with chemical poisons.

His fingers found the gap in the basket where the lid pressed down. He took a ballpoint pen from the evenly spaced row in his breast pocket. He jammed the pen into the gap and pushed.

It took ten more strategically aimed pushes, and the lid was loose. He raised it.

He looked into the basket and felt the blood drain sickeningly from his head.

He turned toward the patrol car. “Hey, Joey!”

Dan Hippolito inserted the key into the lock and turned. The steel door had a light powdering of frost. It swung open. He pulled out the body tray and lifted the black nylon sheet.

Light hit the dead woman in the face.

Cardozo looked down. He closed his eyes.

“You know her?” Dan said.

“I recognize her. Her name was Jaycee Wheeler.”

“She’s been dead less than ten hours.”

“How’d she die?”

“She was strangled, then dismembered with an electric saw. The saw is similar to the one used on Sandy McCoy.”

“She was alive when he did that?”

“I doubt she felt anything. There are no defensive wounds anywhere.”

“I hope you mean unconscious.”

“I’d say so.”

“Did you find a communion wafer in her mouth?”

“I found something that sure as hell looked like one. The lab will tell us for sure.”

“What about s/m markings on the body?”

“None.”

Cardozo reached for the sheet.

Dan caught his arm. “Vince, you don’t want to see. She’s been cut up like an animal carcass, only not professionally.”

“I want to see the hand.”

“That’s in here.” Dan opened the neighboring locker.

The arms and legs had a tray of their own. In the shock of seeing them detached, Cardozo needed a moment to tell left from right. The ring finger stood upright and naked, extended away from the others.

“Wasn’t she wearing a ring? A funny thing made out of flip-tops?”

Dan shook his head. “I didn’t see it. But there were clothes folded in the basket with her—a blue chambray shirt and khaki pants. They had bits of gray acrylic shag sticking to them. They’ve gone to the lab.”

“Sounds like she dressed up for him. And it sounds like he got her down on the same rug as the others.”

Cardozo looked away from the limbs. He didn’t want to remember them. His gaze went back to her face. Even dead she had that provocative, in-your-face, meant-to-be-noticed look.

He felt sad. He felt gravity pulling him down.

“Do me a favor, Dan. Let me know if there are any drugs or azidofluoramine in her bloodstream.”

“Bad news,” Cardozo said. “Very, very bad. Maybe you’d better sit down.”

Scott Rivera’s brown gaze flattened out, became guarded. “Jaycee.”

Cardozo nodded.

“She’s hurt?”

Cardozo was silent.

A wind of shocked disbelief shot through Rivera’s eyes. He slid onto a stool. It rocked backward beneath him and he barely managed to keep it from tipping over.

Cardozo watched Rivera a moment. He was wearing a sleeveless cotton sweatshirt the color of Wheatena. He was hugging himself hard. For a build so slight, his arms were strong: long-tendoned muscles carried up to his shoulders. They were the gym-acquired arms of a convert to self-defense.

“How did she…?” The question leaked away into silence.

“It was him,” Cardozo said. “The communion killer.”

“I told her not to go on that interview. Not alone.”

“So why did she?”

“Her hustler friend said that was Damien’s condition.”

“And knowing what she did, she trusted him?”

“For Jaycee, life was like a ballgame. She had to take a swing at whatever flew over the plate.”

“When was this interview? And where?”

“I don’t know where. Her contact phoned yesterday, said to meet him at seven
P.M.
at some bar down by the docks.”

“The Sea Shell?”

“Possibly. I didn’t take the message, she didn’t give me details.”

“Who’s this hustler contact?”

“I don’t know the name.”

“Have you ever seen him?”

“He came up here once—a white kid, blond hair—he wore it in a ponytail.”

Eff
, Cardozo realized, and his heart felt sick.
Eff was her informer. She died chasing down a scam.

“The guy was a sleaze,” Scott said. “A pimp. He procured teenagers for all kinds of sickos.”

“How did Jaycee get him to open up?”

“Money. She topped Damien.”

“How much was Damien paying?”

“The deal was two hundred dollars for each trick. In three years he delivered five tricks, and so he made a thousand dollars. Jaycee offered him five thousand if he would tell her about them.”

“What did she learn?”

“She was extremely secretive about this story. It was going to be her breakthrough—the first investigative Pulitzer to a gay rag.”

“Did she keep notes?”

“If you can call two Hefty bags of crumpled paper notes.”

“Where are the Hefty bags?”

“Right this way.”

Rivera wasn’t kidding: the closet held two thirty-gallon black plastic garbage bags stuffed with torn, balled-up paper.

“I need to borrow your floor.”

“Be my guest.”

Cardozo emptied the bags in the middle of the loft floor. For the next two hours he combed through phone numbers, shopping lists, MasterCard charge duplicates, scribbled phrases that could as easily have been poetry as reporting.

A shadow fell across the sorted piles and Cardozo looked up. Rivera stood there holding a bag of audiocassettes.

“These were in her desk. I don’t know what the hell they are, but she sometimes recorded her interviews.”

SEVENTY-FOUR

C
ARDOZO LEANED BACK IN
the swivel chair and-pressed the
play
button on his cassette player. He’d been working his way through Jaycee’s tapes and this one was the third of eight, none of them labeled.

Nineteen minutes into an openly lesbian choreographer discussing AIDS in dance, a male voice interrupted. “I met him that September, in group therapy. I said I knew the gays that broke up a Mass at St. Pat’s and he said he was a priest, and he would be interested in meeting them and helping them, could I arrange it.”

Cardozo brought his chair upright, listening closely now. Jaycee had obviously recorded over the beginning of an interview with Eff, and this was the middle of the interview.

“I figured he was just another freak priest wanting to get his rocks off. I said these gays were whores and would do anything so long as there was money involved. He said he’d pay two hundred dollars. He was sentenced to group therapy for only eight weeks and he was leaving in a week, so I went to the docks and photographed eight people. I gave him the photographs. The deal was, he would send me a photograph of the gay he wanted, plus directions where and when to deliver the gay.”

The voice that spoke next was Jaycee’s. “And were any of these people actually involved in the St. Pat’s zappings?”

The male voice said, “How the shit do I know?”

“Were any of them even gay?”

“For a price these kids would be anything you wanted.”

“Can you introduce me to this priest?”

“Sure, if you turn that tape recorder off.”

The blank hiss that followed had a horrible finality.

The phone rang. It was Dan Hippolito calling to report alcohol, but no drugs or azidofluoramine in Jaycee’s bloodstream.

“Wine in her stomach?”

“You guessed it.”

“So the bastard gave her communion.”

“And then strangled her. A regular one-man church.”

Cardozo replaced the phone receiver. Dan’s wisecrack pushed his thoughts a little further in the direction that Jaycee’s interview had started them. He angled the desk lamp closer to the spiral binder that she’d used for work notes. She had kept a running, updated record of cathedral zappings. As he leafed through the dates he realized that the media had reported only the zappings of the last twelve months. They had actually been going on for over three years.

The early dates interested him: Jaycee had first zapped St. Pat’s on October 27, three years ago. The second zapping had occurred January 10, two years ago; the third, February 27, the same year.

There was no obvious pattern to the dates. Yet something about them disturbed Cardozo, some sense of the familiar.

Before he could home in on it, the phone rang again. “Cardozo.”

“Jaycee’s clothes were saturated in incense.” It was Lou at the lab.

“Was it the same kind as the other victims?”

“It was the same and again, it tells us nothing. On the other hand, what
does
tell us something is the chalice from the Greek Orthodox church. The fingerprints match the prints from the V.A.”

“Those are Colin Draper’s prints.”

“Do I know who Colin Draper is?”

“You do now.”

As Cardozo hung up, Ellie stepped through the doorway. She was holding a sheet of fax paper. “Hot off the wire.”

Cardozo glanced at the chemical analysis of the contents of Jonquil’s unlabeled cosmetics jars. “I was hoping someone on the crime-scene crew might have found that ivory cameo ring.”

“Maybe she hocked it.”

“I don’t think so. It was her good luck charm. She said she always wore it.” He handed back the fax. “Say, Ellie, do these dates mean anything to you?”

She frowned at the page of Jaycee’s notebook. “Six dates. One’s a Sunday—two are Wednesdays. You have a three-month gap, then a one-month gap, then a fifteen-month gap.” She shook her head. “No, there’s no pattern I can see. Maybe a computer could. Except maybe…” She was thoughtful. “What about the killings?”

“Those aren’t the right dates.”

“But they’re the right intervals, aren’t they?”

“If we’re talking very approximately…” Cardozo picked up a ballpoint and flipped a blue departmental order form over to the blank side. He drew up two lists side by side: in one column, the dates of Jaycee’s zaps. In the other, the approximate dates of death of the six known victims of the communion killer.

The connection struck him like a slap in the face. “He was getting even.” He showed Ellie. “Within three weeks of each zapping, there was a communion killing. And Eff was providing the victims.”

Ellie’s eyes came around to Cardozo’s, cool and inquiring. “How do you figure that?”

He wound back Jaycee’s tape and played the segment where Eff answered questions.

“I don’t hear
was
providing the victims,” Ellie said. “I hear
is
providing. He hasn’t stopped.”

“How do we find him?” Cardozo sat tapping his ballpoint against the blue page.

“Pierre Strauss.”

Cardozo shook his head. “No way. Civil libertarian. Better twenty more kids get killed than a single one of Eff’s rights gets infringed.”

After a moment Ellie said, “Sy Jencks.”

“Jencks doesn’t know where Eff is.” The pencil stopped tapping. “But he said all his probationees are enrolled at Operation Second Chance.”