Jordan gave an almost imperceptible nod to Burroni. The detective put his hand in his pocket, took out a business card, and gave it to Haze.
‘All right, Mr Haze, I think we’re done for now. I’d like to continue our conversation this afternoon, at Headquarters. When you get there, ask for me.’
Haze took the card and slipped it into the pocket of his jacket, then stood up and said goodbye.
They waited for Chandelle Stuart’s now unemployed bodyguard to leave the room, then Burroni took his walkie-talkie from his belt.
‘Burroni here. A man’s on his way down. Grey hair and dark suit. His name is Randall Haze. Put someone on his tail, twenty-four-seven. And make sure it’s discreet. This guy knows his job.’
In silence, they left the study and walked back the way they had come. By the time they reached the living room, the body had been removed. There were still traces of glue on the shiny lacquer of the piano, as well as marks left by the crime scene team to indicate where the elbows had been.
‘What do you think, Jordan?’
‘I think we’re in deep shit. We have two victims. Two extremely dubious individuals, both from very high-profile families. And the same MO linking them. So far we’ve managed to keep a pretty tight lid on things, but how long do you think it’s going to take now for the whole story to come out, including my involvement in the investigation?’
‘I think this means we have to work damn fast.’
‘Right. For a whole lot of reasons. The most important being that, if we don’t, we’ll soon have three victims instead of two.’
‘And what do you think of Randall Haze?’
‘You were right to put someone on his trail, but I don’t think it’ll lead us anywhere, any more than it has with LaFayette Johnson.’
‘Christ, what a story. The things people do for money.’
Jordan shook his head, staring at the piano. ‘It’s not only a matter of money. In fact, I’d say that in this case money has nothing to do with it. You may think this is crazy after what he told us, but I’m convinced that Randall Haze was in love with Chandelle Stuart.’
Burroni turned to look at Jordan.
He was standing in the middle of the room, gazing intently at the enormous painting on the wall, as if he had just become aware that there was a new passenger on board the raft of the Medusa.
CHAPTER 20
The walkie-talkie on Burroni’s belt emitted the two beeps that meant a call. The detective lifted it to his ear.
‘Detective Burroni . . . All right, we’re on our way down.’ He turned to Jordan. ‘The Security Manager for the Stuart Building has just arrived. You want to talk to him?’
‘No, you go, for now. If you don’t mind, I’d like to stay here for a few minutes alone.’
Burroni nodded. He did not yet fully understand Jordan Marsalis’s investigatory methods, but he had accepted them, instinctively knowing that it wasn’t just a question of experience or inclination, but of genuine talent. The man’s fame was fully justified. He stepped into the elevator and the doors closed noiselessly on the image of Jordan, motionless in the middle of the living room.
Jordan stood there, waiting for the apartment to speak to him. There was always something that hovered in the air at a murder scene, some invisible sign you couldn’t pick up with fingerprint powder or Luminol or any of the other methods available to the investigators. Jordan had often sensed it, and every time he had felt goose bumps on his skin. It was as if Death wanted one last round of applause and was going to wait there until it came.
Calmly, he walked back in the direction of the study where they had questioned Randall Haze. On the way, he went inside all the rooms he had previously only glanced in, and listened to what the apartment was telling him. It was a story of wealth and boredom and sickness, of money spent – in vain – trying to defeat the boredom and the sickness.
At last he came to the study. He knew something had struck him while he was talking to Haze, but he couldn’t remember what it was. That was why he was here again, alone, waiting for an answer only he could hear. He sat down in the armchair he had occupied during the questioning and let his eyes wander around the room.
Behind him were bookshelves filled with volumes. To his left, the French windows, leading to the balcony and the lights of the city. Facing him, on the wall behind the desk, a Mondrian with its lines and squares and perfectly balanced colours. On either side of the desk, two more areas of shelving similar to that on the wall behind him.
On a shelf to the left of the desk there were . . .
That was what it was! Jordan stood up and went to take a closer look at the four volumes with dark red bindings lined up side by side on a shelf at eye level. On the cover of the one closest to him was a logo and below it, in gold lettering, the words:
Vassar College
Poughkeepsie
He knew Vassar. At one time, it had been reserved for women, and along with six other women’s colleges had formed part of a group called ‘The Seven Sisters’. It was considered very exclusive, with fees of about a hundred thousand dollars a year. At the end of the 1960s, a glance at the balance sheet had persuaded the board to open Vassar College to men. The college specialized in the creative fields, like art, writing and drama.
Jordan took out one of the volumes and opened it. It was a yearbook containing the photographs of all the pupils on a course of Theatre and Film Directing. He continued leafing through the pages until he found the photograph he was looking for.
Chandelle Stuart, much younger and much less well groomed, looked out at him, unsmiling, from the glossy page. Her dark, slightly frowning eyes fully revealed her difficult character, partly concealed by a pair of glasses that might have been there with the express purpose of giving her an intellectual air. Jordan couldn’t help comparing that image with the one he still had in his mind: the same eyes held open by a layer of glue, staring as if blinded by the sudden flash of death.
Then he was struck by a detail.
Pinned to Chandelle’s chest was a brooch. It was only a cheap thing made of tin, the kind that had been popular in the mid-1970s. There were black lines on a white background, lines immediately recognizable as the graphic style of Charles Schulz, and those lines depicted a face.
Lucy.
Jordan felt the kind of exhilaration he had not experienced for some time. It was as if a hole had been made in the wall of a dark room to let in a ray of light.
He had never confessed it to anyone, but he was firmly convinced that every investigator setting out to track down a criminal was really doing it for himself, that justice was merely a pretext, and that what he was really looking for was that exhilaration, a high as strong as any you could get from drugs.
He had often wondered if murderers had the same high at the moment they committed their crimes. And if he himself was anything other than a potential criminal who had somehow ended up in a uniform.
He took out his cellphone and dialled his brother’s private number at Gracie Mansion. Christopher replied immediately, which meant that he was already awake. Or maybe still awake.
‘Hello?’
‘Chris, it’s Jordan.’
‘At last. How’s it going?’
‘Badly. I’m at Chandelle Stuart’s apartment.’
‘I know. What can you tell me?’
‘It’s him. Same killer as Gerald. The victim was stuck to a piano in a way that recalls Lucy, the Peanuts character.’
‘Shit.’
‘Precisely. And for the moment, no lead worthy of the name. We’re waiting for the post-mortem report and the Forensics results.’
‘I’ve already given orders for everything to be done as quickly as possible. We should have the first results soon.’
‘Listen, there’s something I’d like to ask you.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Gerald went to college for a couple of years, didn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘He didn?
??t go to Vassar, by any chance?’
‘Yes, he did. Why?’
‘I think you should make a call to the President of Vassar and tell him I’ll be going there to ask him some questions soon. And I’d like to go alone.’
‘No problem. I’ll get on it right away. Is this an actual lead?’
‘Maybe yes and maybe no. I have a kind of idea, but I want to be sure before I talk about it.’
‘All right. Keep me informed. Anything you need, you’ve got. This was all we needed, another maniac at loose in the city.’
‘OK, talk to you later.’ Jordan hung up and put the phone in his pocket.
At that moment, preceded by a slight squeak of new shoes on a wooden floor, an officer materialized in the doorway.
‘Detective Burroni asks if you could go down. There’s something he wants you to see.’
Jordan followed the officer. In silence, they stepped into the elevator and travelled down to the lobby. The main entrance of the Stuart Building was T-shaped, with the widest part facing the street. The ceiling was very high, giving a sense of space, and the floors were of marble. In the middle, opposite the two revolving doors, and beneath the inevitable American flag, was the Security and Information desk. At the moment, a man in a black uniform was sitting there. He watched them pass with a slightly stunned expression on his face, as if bemused by the night’s agitation.
They went in through a door behind the Security desk and climbed two flights of stairs, until they reached a large room with a balcony that gave a view of the entire entrance. In front of a bank of TV screens, another man in a black uniform was sitting with his back to them. Beside him was Burroni and a tall middle-aged man with a receding hairline, whom Jordan knew well. His name was Harmon Fowley and he was also an ex-cop. When he had retired from the police, he had become a consultant for Codex Security, a company for which Jordan had also occasionally worked after he had quit the Department.
If Fowley was surprised to see him, he didn’t show it. He held out his hand. ‘Hi, Jordan. Pleased to see you.’
‘Me too, Harmon. How’re you doing?’
‘Surviving. These days, that’s a luxury.’
For a moment, Jordan read on Fowley’s face the same dissatisfaction he himself felt.
‘I was sorry to hear about your nephew,’ the man went on. ‘A nasty business. And if I understand correctly, what happened here tonight has something to do with that?’
Jordan looked to Burroni for support. Burroni nodded: Fowley could be trusted to be discreet.
‘Yes. We think the two things are connected. We don’t yet know how, but we have to work fast, otherwise there’s going to be another victim.’
‘And fast means fast,’ Burroni confirmed. ‘Do you mind if we take another look at what we saw earlier?’
They all stood together behind the man sitting in front of the screens, while Fowley explained the system.
‘As you can see, the entrance is filmed day and night on closed circuit TV. The recordings are made directly onto rewritable DVDs. We keep them for a month and then recycle them. There are lots of stores, offices and restaurants in the lower part of the building. The apartments are all on the upper floors and are served by a series of elevators on both sides of the lobby. The one exception is Miss Stuart’s apartment. That has a private elevator, which is controlled from inside the apartment and comes equipped with its own code and video entryphone.’
‘Does the entryphone camera on that elevator take recordings?’
‘No. It wasn’t considered necessary since the area is already covered by the other cameras.’
Burroni pointed to the series of screens. ‘And look what they picked up this evening.’
Fowley placed a hand on the seated man’s shoulder. ‘Go ahead, Barton.’
The man pressed a button and on the central screen, which was larger than the others, the images started appearing. They had been taken from a camera directly facing the entrance. At the beginning, they saw the figure of a man in a jacket and tie walk past the window on the left and approach the revolving door. As he was about to enter, a figure ran across the street and came up behind him. He was wearing a tracksuit with the hood up and his head bowed so that his face was concealed.
Jordan gripped the edge of the desk. For a fleeting moment, he had the absurd idea that inside that hood wasn’t a living face, but the grinning skull and empty eye-sockets of Death.
On the screen, the man stepped into the revolving door, and as it turned he moved in such a way as to make sure the person who had entered before him was between him and the cameras for as long as possible. In spite of this and in spite of the blurred nature of the image, it was clear that he had a limp in his right leg. When the two men were in the lobby, the man in the tracksuit started walking fairly quickly and disappeared from the frame on the right of the screen.
The angle changed. They were now watching the images from another camera.
Again, the man was seen from the back. They saw him limp to Chandelle Stuart’s private elevator and press the button, not with a finger, but with the sleeve of his tracksuit, clearly trying to avoid leaving prints on the button. From the movements of his head they could tell that he was talking to someone, presumably Chandelle. Soon afterwards the elevator doors opened and the man stepped inside. As the doors closed, he still had his back to the camera.
‘What time was this?’ Jordan asked.
Fowley indicated the time-code on the screen. ‘Ten before ten.’
Jordan moved to the side of the officer who was working the DVD player. He could sense the unease in the room. Although films and novels were full of highly improbable killers, flesh and blood murderers were generally fairly predictable and made lots of mistakes, out of stupidity, or conceit, or inexperience, or because they got carried away by the emotion of the moment. This man, though, seemed much colder, much more determined, and above all much more intelligent, than the norm.
‘The son of a bitch knew there were cameras,’ Jordan said. ‘He waited for someone to go in and used him as a screen. And he kept his back to the camera all the time.’
‘There’s another thing,’ Fowley said. ‘We’re just opposite Central Park and most people who live here regularly go jogging there at all times of the day or night. If I show you other recordings, you’ll see dozens of people looking exactly like that one. The security guard certainly didn’t notice anything suspicious about him.’
Burroni leaned on the desk. ‘Barton,’ he said to the seated man, ‘what’s your first name?’
‘Woody.’
‘All right, Woody, I’m going to ask you for two favours. The first is to make us a copy of this recording. The second, and this would really be a great help, is to keep as quiet as you can about what you’ve seen and heard tonight. Other people’s lives may depend on it.’
Barton, who gave the impression that he was a man of few words, confirmed with a nod that he understood the situation perfectly.
‘There’s no problem about that,’ Fowley said. ‘I can vouch for Barton.’
Jordan started feeling a little restless. Ever since he had arrived, he had done nothing but store data, and now he felt the need to go somewhere quiet and process it. Burroni must have felt the same need, because he now held his hand out to Fowley.
‘Thank you. You’ve been a great help.’
‘My pleasure. Good luck, Jordan.’
‘You too. Good night, Harmon.’
They went downstairs, crossed the lobby, and found themselves back on the street. The air was cool, and the rain had almost stopped. They walked to the car. Burroni was the first to say what they were both thinking.
‘LaFayette Johnson said he saw somebody just like that as he entered your nephew’s building.’
‘Yes. Which means two things, maybe three.’
‘Shall I say it or will you?’
Jordan nodded at Burroni. ‘Go ahead.’
‘The first is that the person who killed G
erald Marsalis also killed Chandelle Stuart. The second is that she knew her killer personally, or she wouldn’t have let him in. The third is that it’s quite likely the first victim also knew him.’
‘Precisely. But there’s another thing.’
Burroni raised his eyebrows in a silent question.
‘In all probability,’ Jordan said, ‘the person who’s been indicated to us as the third victim also knows the person who’s planning to kill him. And we have to discover who both of them are, before we find Snoopy dead as well, maybe glued to his doghouse.’
CHAPTER 21
By the time Jordan opened the door to the apartment, the sun was coming up. The rainclouds had gone, and now a bright red light was descending the walls of the skyscrapers to chase the shadows from the streets.
He was greeted by the slight fragrance of vanilla that had hovered persistently in the air ever since Lysa had first appeared in that apartment and in his life. In the deserted living room he found the TV on, with the sound turned way down. He took a few steps into the middle of the room and saw her. She was lying asleep on the couch facing the TV, breathing gently, a light plaid thrown over her. As he looked at her lying there, alone and defenceless, Jordan could not help feeling like an intruder.
He switched off the TV set. For a moment, Lysa stirred in her sleep and opened her eyes. They were iridescent in the morning light, and Jordan, looking down at her, felt as if he was seeing something, not only that he had never seen before, but that he had never even known it was possible to dream about. Then he immediately felt stupid for thinking such things.
Lysa closed her eyes again and turned lazily on her side, smiling like someone who at last feels safe.
‘Oh, good,’ she said sleepily. ‘You’re home.’
The naturalness and familiarity of those few words seemed to break through the shell Jordan had always placed around himself. He was a man who had spent all his life alone and, whenever he had heard a voice inside him asking why, he had preferred to ignore it. There had been people whose lives had crossed his, men with whom he’d exchanged words and gestures of affection and trust, women who had come to him with the promise of something he had taken for love. Ultimately, he had not let any of them linger for long.