For the first time in her life Indiana felt the impulse to slap Amanda, but she didn’t so much as raise her hand. Instinctively, she tried to reinterpret her daughter’s message, since the words might have distorted it. When she saw how angry the girl was, she blushed with shame. For someone who valued loyalty as much as she did, what she had done to Ryan was inexcusable. She should have given him an explanation before going off with Alan, but she’d just disappeared, ignoring the plans they had made together for the weekend. If she loved Ryan, as she’d led him to believe she did, or at least if she respected him as he deserved, she would not have treated him this way. She should have been open with him and given him her reasons. She hadn’t dared confront him, and had justified this by arguing that she needed time to decide between the two men; in fact she had gone to Napa because she had already chosen Alan, to whom she felt connected by something more than just four years of love. She had gone with the intention of sorting her head out and had come back with a ring in her purse—she had taken it off her finger as she stepped out of Alan’s car, so her daughter would not see it.
“You’re right, Amanda,” she admitted, hanging her head.
There was a long silence. Mother and daughter sat on the floor, close yet not touching, and then Amanda reached up and wiped the tears from her mother’s face. Indiana’s horror at the idea of marrying somebody her daughter detested was growing by the minute, while Amanda was beginning to think that if Keller was going to be her stepfather, she would have to make some effort and be polite to him.
Their thoughts were interrupted when Amanda’s cell phone chirped into life: Carol Underwater, trying to find Indiana, whom she hadn’t had contact with since Thursday. Indiana took the phone from her daughter and explained that she had spent a few days in Napa. In her usual plaintive tone, Carol said she was pleased for Indiana that she had so much going for her: love, holidays, and health, most of all health, and she hoped that Indiana never lacked it, because without health life wasn’t worth living, she could tell her from experience. Radiotherapy was her last hope. She wanted to hear all the details about Indiana’s little break in Napa, about how Alan had persuaded her to take him back—after all, a betrayal like his was impossible to forget. Indiana ended up giving her an explanation, as though she owed it to Carol, and they agreed to meet at the Rossini at six thirty on Wednesday.
“Carol called me a bunch of times, asking about you,” said Amanda, “and she flipped when I told her you were back with Keller. You must be her only friend.”
“How come she has your phone number?”
“She calls to ask about Save-the-Tuna. Actually, she’s come by to visit her a couple times. Carol loves cats—didn’t Grandpa tell you?”
Monday, 5
Esmeralda played the next session of Ripper from a hospital bed in Auckland. The boy was undergoing embryonic stem cell treatment, another stage in his mission to walk again. Amanda, in her role as games master, had drawn up a list of all the key data relating to the five murders they had been puzzling over since January. Each player had a copy, and having studied the facts through the magnifying glass of his unassailable logic, Sherlock Holmes had arrived at conclusions that were very different from those of Abatha, who had approached the same facts via her meandering, mysterious pathways, or from those of Colonel Paddington, whose approach was dictated by strict military criteria, and from those of Esmeralda—a gypsy waif who saw no need for anyone to rack their brains, since things would become clear in their own time, one only needed to ask the right questions. The kids all agreed, however, that they were faced with a criminal as enthralling as Jack the Ripper.
“Let’s start with the Case of the Misplaced Baseball Bat,” began the games master. “Go ahead, Kabel.”
“Ed Staton was briefly married in his youth, but had no relations with women after that, and paid male escorts and watched gay pornography. Neither the jacket or the cap of his uniform were found in the school or his jeep, but the students who were in the parking lot saw him leave and recognized him by his uniform.”
“Who were the escorts?” asked Esmeralda.
“Two Puerto Rican guys, but neither of them had a date with him that night, and their alibis are solid. The witnesses from the parking lot didn’t see anyone else in the car he left in.”
“Why didn’t Staton use his own vehicle?”
“Because the person they saw wasn’t Ed Staton,” Sherlock inferred. “It was the killer, who put on the guard’s jacket and cap and calmly left the school in plain view of the three witnesses, to whom he waved before getting into the same car he had arrived in. The guard never left the school, because by that time he was lying dead in the gymnasium. The killer arrived at the school when the parking lot was full of cars, and nobody noticed his—he went in the main gate without a problem, hid inside, and waited for everybody to leave.”
“He attacked Staton in the gymnasium when Staton was doing his rounds, closing up and putting the alarm on,” Colonel Paddington continued. “The surprise attack: a common strategy. He paralyzed the victim with a Taser and then executed him with a bullet in the head.”
“Have we found the link between Ed Staton and Arkansas State University?” Esmeralda asked.
“No. Deputy Chief Martín looked into that. Nobody at that university or on its sports team, the Red Wolves, knew Staton.”
“The Red Wolves? Maybe there isn’t a connection, but it’s some kind of code or message,” suggested Abatha.
“The red wolf—Canis rufus—is one of the two North American species of wolf,” said Kabel, who had studied the topic the year before, when his granddaughter had developed an obsession with werewolves. “The other species, the gray wolf, is larger. In 1980 they declared the red species extinct in the wild, but they mated the few animals they had in captivity and managed to set up a breeding program. Now there are estimated to be about two hundred in the wild.”
“That’s of no use to us at all,” the colonel replied.
“Everything is of use,” Sherlock corrected him.
The games master suggested moving on to the Case of Branding by Blowtorch, and Kabel shared with them the photograph he had gotten hold of, showing the burns on the victims’ buttocks: an F on Michael Constante, an A on Doris. He also presented them with photos of the syringes, the blowtorch, and the bottle of liquor, explaining that the Xanax the killer had used to put the Constantes to sleep was dissolved in a carton of milk.
“For a cup to have the necessary effect, the murderer had to dissolve at least ten or fifteen tablets in the liter of milk.”
“It would be irrational to dissolve the drug in milk: it’s a drink for children, not adults,” the colonel cut in.
“The kids were on a trip to Lake Tahoe,” Kabel explained. “For dinner, the couple would always have ham or cheese sandwiches and a cup of instant coffee made with milk. Henrietta Post, the neighbor who discovered the bodies, told me that. The coffee masked the taste of the Xanax.”
“So the killer knew the couple’s habits,” Sherlock mused.
“How did that liquor get into the Constantes’ refrigerator?” Esmeralda asked.
“Rakija can’t be found in this country,” the games master explained. “The bottle was totally clean of prints.”
“Or it was handled with gloves,” said Sherlock, “like the syringes and the blowtorch, which means the killer put it there deliberately.”
“Another message,” Abatha said, interrupting.
“Exactly.”
“A message from one reformed alcoholic to another?” asked Esmeralda. “From Brian Turner to Michael Constante?”
“Who?” asked Paddington.
“Turner was the guy who had the fight with Constante, remember?”
“Brian Turner’s a crude guy—that would be way too subtle for him,” said Kabel. “If he’d wanted to send a message, he would have tipped a couple bottles of beer over the bodies, not gone looking for a rare Serbian liquor to put in the refrigerator.
”
“Do you think the killer is Serbian?”
“No, Esmeralda,” said the colonel, irritably. “But in each case I think the killer left a clue for us to identify him with. He’s arrogant enough that he thinks he can afford to play games with us.”
“Play games with the police, you mean—he doesn’t know we exist,” said Amanda.
“That’s what I mean. I think you get the point.”
“Nothing has been found to link the suspect, Brian Turner, who had had a fight with Michael Constante, with the other victims,” said Amanda. “The night the psychiatrist died, Turner was being held in jail in Petaluma for another fight. That proves his poor character, and it also proves he’s not our suspect.”
“The night of their death . . . ,” Abatha stammered, but, dizzy with hunger and medication, she could not even finish her sentence.
The games master explained that in the Case of the Electrocuted Man, the prime suspects were still Ayani and Galang. Her father had questioned everybody who had contact with the psychiatrist in the two weeks leading up to his death, above all anyone who had been in his study. He was investigating the possibility that a Taser had been lost by the police or someone else authorized to use one, and looking for anybody who had bought one or more in California in the last three months, even though the killer could have gotten hold of one in many other ways. The criminal psychologist who had been studying Steppenwolf—the novel that Ayani was sent in the mail along with her husband’s socks—found a dozen or so leads to follow, but they all turned out to be dead ends; it was a complex book, open to endless interpretations. More than sixty distinct types of DNA were found in Ashton’s study, and only Galang’s matched a registered sample, as he had spent six months in jail in Florida in 2006 for possession of narcotics; but as Galang worked in the Ashton house, it was only natural that he had left traces everywhere.
“And finally, we’ve got the definitive autopsy report for the Case of the Executioner Executed,” said the games master. “The woman was garroted.”
“The garrote is a time-honored torture method,” Paddington informed the players. “It involves strangling the victim slowly to prolong their agony. Generally the instrument has been a chair with a post at the back that they tied the convict to. The rope, wire, or a metal cinch around the neck would then be tightened from behind with a tourniquet. Sometimes it had a knot at the front that pressed down on the larynx.”
“They used something like that on Rosen—nylon fishing line with a little ball on it, possibly of wood,” the games master said.
“Once it’s set up, the garrote makes easy work for the executioner; you just have to turn the tourniquet,” continued Paddington, always keen to show his knowledge in this area. “There’s no strength or dexterity needed. And Rosen was drugged—she couldn’t defend herself. A little old woman could strangle a giant with a garrote.”
“A woman . . . It could have been a woman, why not?” suggested Abatha.
“A woman could have killed Staton, Ashton, and the Constantes, but it would take strength to overpower Rosen, lift her body, and hang it from the fan,” the games master pointed out.
“It depends,” said Paddington. “Once Rosen was on the bed, it would just have been a question of hoisting her up bit by bit.”
“And the woman was sedated when they garrotted her—that’s why she didn’t defend herself.”
“Hmm, the garrote . . . It’s an exotic weapon,” mused Sherlock. “The victims were all executed. In each of these cases the killer chose a different method of capital punishment: Staton was given the mercy shot; the Constantes, lethal injection; Ashton was electrocuted; and it was the garrote, or else the noose, for Rosen.”
“Do you think these people deserved particular types of execution?” asked Esmeralda.
“We’ll know that when we have the motive and the connection between the victims,” Sherlock replied.
Friday, 9
Pedro Alarcón got to Ryan’s loft shortly after ten in the evening, having tried unsuccessfully to reach him on the phone. He’d had a call from Indiana sometime around noon to say she was very worried about Ryan, having told him the night before that she was going to marry Alan Keller.
“I thought you loved Ryan,” Pedro said.
“I do, I do love him. But Alan and I have been together four years, and we have something in common that I don’t have with Ryan.”
“And what’s that, exactly?”
“That’s not the point, Pedro. Besides, Ryan has a lot of stuff to deal with from his past—he’s not ready for a serious relationship.”
“You were his first love—that’s what he told me. He was going to marry you. Typical Miller, coming to a decision like that without actually talking to the person in question.”
“He did talk to me, Pedro. This whole thing is my fault, I wasn’t clear with him. I guess I was in a pretty bad way after Alan and I broke up, and I clung to Ryan—he was like a lifeline. We spent a couple of wonderful weeks together, but even while I was with Ryan, I was thinking about Alan—it was inevitable.”
“Comparing them?”
“Maybe . . . I don’t know.”
“I find it hard to believe that Keller came off better.”
“It’s not as simple as that, Pedro. There’s another reason, but you can’t tell Alan, because it’s got nothing to do with him. Ryan got mad, accused Alan of controlling me, of manipulating me—he told me I wasn’t capable of making a rational decision, said he was going to protect me, to stop me doing something stupid. He was screaming and threatening to sort things out his way. He changed, Pedro. He was like a lunatic, just like that night at the club with Danny D’Angelo, except that last night he hadn’t been drinking. Ryan’s like a volcano—he’ll suddenly explode and spew red-hot lava everywhere.”
“What do you want me to do, Indiana?”
“Go see him, talk to him, try to make him see sense. He won’t listen to me, and now he won’t even take my calls.”
Pedro was the only other person with a key to Ryan’s apartment, mostly so that he could take care of Attila when Ryan was traveling. If it was only for a couple of nights, Pedro would stay in the loft with the dog; if it was an extended trip, he took Attila back to his apartment. Pedro pushed the buzzer a few times, but when he got no answer, he punched in the key code, opened the door to the old printworks, and rode the huge industrial elevator up to the only floor in the building that was occupied. He used the key Ryan had given him to unlock the heavy metal doors and stepped straight into the vast, empty space his friend called home.
Everything was dark. He couldn’t hear Attila barking, and no one answered when he called out. He groped along the wall for a switch, turned on the light, and hurried to turn off the alarm, the security system designed to electrocute potential intruders, and the CCTV cameras, which would be activated by the slightest movement—all of which Ryan turned on whenever he went out. The bed was made; there wasn’t so much as a single dirty glass in the dishwasher, the place was as neat and pristine as a monk’s cell. Pedro sat down and read one of Ryan’s computer manuals while he waited.
An hour later, having tried several times to call his friend on his cell, Pedro drove back to his place to pick up some maté and the Latin American novel he’d been reading and took them back to the loft. He popped a couple of slices of bread in the toaster, boiled some water for the maté, and sat down in the armchair again to read. This time he took a pillow and Ryan’s electric blanket, as the loft was freezing and he still hadn’t managed to shake the cold that had been bothering him since January. At midnight, feeling tired, he turned out the light and fell asleep.
At 6:25 a.m., Pedro woke with a start to feel the barrel of a gun pressed against his forehead. “I nearly killed you, you knucklehead!” The faint glow of a misty dawn spilling through the curtainless windows made Ryan’s imposing figure seem gigantic. His pistol was gripped in both hands, his body coiled and ready to attack; his face bore the b
lank, single-minded expression of a killer. The impression lasted only a moment before Ryan straightened up and slipped the weapon back into the holster under his leather jacket, but still the image was burned onto Alarcón’s mind like a revelation. Attila—still panting in the elevator, where Ryan had probably told him to wait—watched the scene.
“Where you been, dude?” asked Pedro, pretending to be calm, though his heart was in his mouth.
“Don’t ever come in here again without warning me! The alarm and the electrics were disconnected—I was expecting the worst.”
“A Russian gangster or an al-Qaeda terrorist? Sorry to disappoint.”
“I’m serious, Pedro. You know I’ve got classified information in here. Don’t ever scare me like that again.”
“I called and called. So did Indiana. I came because she asked me to. So I’ll ask you again, where have you been?”
“I went to talk to Keller.”
“You went strapped? Great idea. I suppose you killed the guy.”
“I just shook him up a little. What the hell does Indi see in that poser? The guy’s old enough to be her father.”
“Sure. The point is, he’s not her father.”
Ryan explained that he’d gone down to the Napa Valley vineyard, planning to have it out with Keller, man to man. For four years he had watched this man treat Indiana like some part-time, almost secret lover—one of many, since he dated other women, including the Belgian baroness everyone said he was planning to marry. When Indiana finally worked out what was going on and dumped him, Keller had let weeks pass without getting in touch, proving how little the relationship meant to him.