“Professional criminals make it a point to avoid such things,” Mirot remarked.
“We’ve found nothing,” Talley replied. “And that’s where Loup-Garou comes into the picture. His DNA could identify his brother’s.”
“So we’re supposed to put an ad in the paper and ask the Loup to drop by and give a blood sample?” Marino was getting surlier as the morning went on.
“Here’s what we think might have happened,” Talley said, ignoring him. “On this past November twenty-fourth, just two days before the Sirius set sail for Richmond, the man who calls himself Loup-Garou made what we believe was his last murder attempt in Paris. Notice I say attempt. The woman escaped.
“This was around eight-thirty in the evening,” Talley began his account of the events. “There was a knock on her door. When she answered it, she found a man standing on her porch. He was polite and articulate; he seemed very refined; and she thought she remembered an elegant long dark coat, maybe leather, and a dark scarf tucked into the collar. He said he’d just been in a minor car accident and could he please use her phone to call the police. He was very convincing. She was about to let him in when her husband called out something from another room and the man suddenly fled.”
“She get a good look at him?” Marino asked.
“The coat, the scarf, maybe a hat. She’s fairly certain he had his hands in his pockets and was kind of hunched against the cold,” Talley said. “She couldn’t see his face because it was dark. Overall, it was her impression he was a polite, pleasant gentleman.”
Talley paused.
“More coffee? Water?” he asked everyone while he looked at me. I noticed his right ear was pierced. I hadn’t seen the tiny diamond until it caught the light as he bent over to fill my glass.
“Two days after the murder attempt, on November twenty-fourth, the Sirius was to sail out of Antwerp, as was another vessel called the Exodus, a Moroccan ship that regularly brings phosphate to Europe,” Talley resumed as he returned to his chair.
“But Thomas Chandonne had a sweet little diversion going, and the Exodus ended up in Miami with all sorts of guns, explosives—you name it—hidden inside bags of phosphate. We’ve known what he was doing, and maybe you’re beginning to see the HIDTA connection? The takedown your niece was involved in? It was just one of many spinoffs of Thomas’s activities.”
“Obviously, his family caught on,” Marino said.
“We believe he got away with it for a long time by using strange routes, altering books, you name it,” Talley replied. “On the street, you call it spanking. In legal business, you call it embezzling. In the Chandonne family, you call it suicide. And we don’t know exactly what happened, but something did, because we expected him to be on the Exodus and he wasn’t.
“And why not?” Talley posed it almost as if it were a rhetorical question. “Because he knew he was had. He altered his tattoo. He chose a small port where no one was likely to look for a stowaway.” Talley looked at me. “Richmond was a good choice. There are very few niche ports left in the United States, and Richmond has a steady stream of vessels going back and forth to Antwerp.”
“So Thomas, using an alias . . .” I started to say.
“One of many,” Mirot inserted.
“He’d already signed on as crew for the Sirius. Point was, he was supposed to end up in the safe haven of Richmond while the Exodus went on its way to Miami to make a run without him,” Talley said.
“And where does the werewolf come into all this?” Marino wanted to know.
“We can only speculate,” Mirot answered. “Loup-Garou’s getting increasingly out of control, his last murder attempt has gone haywire. Now maybe he’s been seen. Maybe his family’s had enough, plans to get rid of him and he knows it. Maybe he somehow knows his brother plans to leave the country on the Sirius. Maybe he was stalking Thomas, too, knew about the altered tattoo, and so on. He drowns Thomas, locks the body inside the container and tries to make it appear this dead person is him, this Loup-Garou.”
“Swapped clothes with him?” Talley directed this at me.
“If he planned to take Thomas’s place on a ship, he’s not going to show up in Armani.”
“What was found in the pockets?” Talley seemed to lean into me even when he was sitting up straight.
“Transferred,” I said. “The lighter, the money, all of it. Out of Thomas’s pockets and stuffed inside the pockets of the designer jeans his dead brother—if it is his brother—was wearing when his body turned up at the Richmond port.”
“Pocket contents swapped, but no form of identification turned up.”
“Yes,” I said. “And we don’t know that all of this change of clothing happened after Thomas was dead. That’s rather cumbersome. Better to force your victim to undress.”
“Yes.” Mirot nodded. “I was coming around to that. Exchange clothes that way before killing the person. Both people undress.”
I thought of the inside-out underwear, the grit on the naked knees and buttocks. The scuffs on the back of the shoes might have been caused later when Thomas was drowned, his body dragged into the corner of the container.
“How many crewmen was the Sirius supposed to have?” I asked.
It was Marino who answered. “There was seven on the list. All of them was questioned, but not by me since I don’t speak the language. Some guy in Customs had the honors.”
“The crewmen all knew each other?” I asked.
“No,” Talley replied. “Which isn’t unusual when you consider that these ships only earn money when they’re moving. Two weeks out to sea, two weeks back, nonstop, there’s going to be rotating crew. Not to mention, you’re talking about the kind of guys who never stay with anything very long, so you could have a crew of seven and only two of them might have sailed together before.”
“Same seven men on board when the ship sailed back to Antwerp?” I asked.
“According to Joe Shaw,” Marino replied, “none of them ever left the Richmond port. Ate and slept on their ship, unloaded and was gone.”
“Ah,” Talley said. “But that’s not quite the case. One of them supposedly had a family emergency. The shipping agent took him to the Richmond airport but never actually saw him get on the plane. The name on his seaman’s book was Pascal Léger. This Monsieur Léger doesn’t seem to exist and quite possibly was Thomas’s alias, the one he was using when he was killed, the alias Loup-Garou may have taken after he drowned him.”
“I’m having trouble envisioning this deranged serial killer as Thomas Chandonne’s brother,” I said. “What makes you so certain?”
“The cover-up tattoo, as we’ve said,” Talley replied. “Your most recent information about the details of Kim Luong’s murder. The beating, biting, the way she was undressed, all the rest of it. A very, very unique and horrific M.O. When Thomas was a boy, Dr. Scarpetta, he used to tell his classmates he had an older brother who was an espèce de sale gorille. A stupid, ugly monkey who had to live at home.”
“This killer isn’t stupid,” I said.
“Not hardly,” Mirot agreed.
“We can’t find any record of this brother. Not his name, nothing,” Talley said. “But we believe he exists.”
“You’ll understand all of this better when we go through the cases,” Mirot added.
“I’d like to review them now,” I said.
34
Jay Talley picked up the accordion folder and withdrew numerous thick files. He set them on the coffee table in front of me.
“We’ve translated them into English,” he said. “All the autopsies were done at the Institut Médico-Légal in Paris.”
I began to go through them. Each victim had been beaten beyond recognition, and autopsy photographs and reports showed bruising imprints and stellate lacerations where the skin had split when a blow was struck with some type of weapon that I didn’t believe was the same type as the one used on Kim Luong.
“The punched-out areas of her skull,” I commented as I turned
pages, “a hammer, something like that. I presume no weapon was found?”
“No,” Talley said.
All facial structures were broken. There were subdural hematomas, bleeding over the brain and into the chest cavity. The victims’ ages ranged from twenty-one to fifty-two. Each had multiple bite marks.
“Massive comminuted fractures of the left parietal bone, depressed fractures that drove the inner table of the skull into underlying brain,” I scanned out loud, flipping through one autopsy protocol after another. “Bilateral subdural hematomata. Disruption of cerebral tissue beneath with accompanying subarachnoid hemorrhaging . . . eggshell-like fractures . . . fracture of the right frontal bone extending down the midline into the right parietal bone . . . Clotting suggests survival time of at least six minutes from the time the injury was inflicted . . .”
I looked up and said to them, “Rage. Overkill. Frenzied overkill.”
“Sexual?” Talley held my eyes.
“Ain’t everything?” Marino asked.
Each victim was half-naked, her clothing ripped open or torn off from the waist up. All were barefoot.
“Strange,” I said. “It doesn’t appear he had any interest in their buttocks, their genitals.”
“It seems he has a breast fetish,” Mirot blandly commented.
“Certainly a symbol of mother,” I replied. “And if it’s true he was kept at home throughout his childhood, there must be some interesting pathology there.”
“What about robbery?” Marino asked.
“Not sure in all cases. But definitely in some. Money, that’s it. Nothing that could be traced, like jewelry he might pawn,” Talley answered.
Marino patted his cigarettes the way he did when he was desperate to smoke.
“Be my guest,” Mirot invited him.
“Possible he’s killed elsewhere? Other places besides Richmond, saying he murdered Kim Luong?” I asked.
“He did her, all right,” Marino said. “Never seen another M.O. like that one.”
“We don’t know how many times he’s killed,” Talley said. “Or where.”
Mirot said, “If there’s a connection to be made, our software can make the match as quickly as in two minutes. But there will always be cases we may not be aware of. We have one hundred and seventy-seven member countries, Dr. Scarpetta. Some utilize us more than others.”
“It’s just an opinion,” Talley said, “but I suspect this guy isn’t a world traveler. Especially if he’s got some disability that’s made it necessary for him to stay at home, and I’m guessing he was probably still living at home when he started his killings.”
“Are the murders getting closer together? Does he wait as long between them?” Marino asked.
“The last two we know of were in October, then there was the recent attempt, meaning he struck three times within a five-week period,” Talley said. “Just reinforcing our suspicions this guy’s out of control, it’s gotten too hot for him, and he’s fled.”
“Maybe he hoped he could start over and stop killing,” Mirot said.
“Don’t happen like that,” Marino said.
“There’s no mention of any evidence being turned into any labs,” I said as I began to feel the chill of the dark place where this was headed. “I don’t understand. Wasn’t anything tested for in these cases? Swabs for body fluids? Hairs, fibers, a torn fingernail? Anything?”
Mirot glanced at his watch.
“Not even fingerprints?” I said, incredulous.
Mirot got out of his chair.
“Agent Talley, will you please take our guests to our cafeteria for lunch?” he said. “I’m afraid I can’t join you.”
Mirot walked us to the door of his formidable office.
“I must thank you again for coming,” he said to Marino and me. “I realize your work is just beginning, but hopefully in a direction that will soon lay this terrible matter to rest. Or at least strike a blow that will bring it to its knees.”
His secretary pushed a button on the phone.
“Undersecretary Arvin, are you there?” she said to whoever was on hold. “I can conference you now?”
Mirot nodded at her. He returned to his office and softly shut the door.
“You didn’t call us all the way over here just to review these cases,” I said to Talley as he led us through a confusion of hallways.
“Let me show you something,” he said.
He directed us around a corner, where we were confronted by a ghastly portrait gallery of dead faces.
“Corpse to Be Identified,” Talley said. “Black notices.”
The posters were in grainy black and white and included fingerprints and other identifying characteristics. All of the information was written in English, French, Spanish and Arabic, and it was obvious that most of the nameless individuals had not died peacefully.
“Recognize yours?” Talley pointed at the most recent addition.
Fortunately, my unidentified case’s grotesque face did not stare out at us, but instead the notice displayed an unexciting dental chart and fingerprints and a narrative.
“Other than the posters, Interpol is a paperless organization,” Talley explained.
He walked us to an elevator.
“Paper files are electronically scanned into our main-frame, kept for a limited period of time, then destroyed.”
He pushed a button for the first floor.
“Better hope the Y-two-K bug don’t get you,” Marino said.
Talley smiled.
Outside the cafeteria, suits of armor and a rampant brass eagle guarded all who patronized it. Tables were crowded with several hundred men and women in business dress, all police who had come here from around the world to combat various organized criminal activities ranging from stolen credit cards and forgery in the U.S. to bank numbers involving cocaine trafficking in Africa. Talley and I selected roasted chicken and salad. Marino went after the barbecued ribs.
We settled into a corner.
“The secretary-general usually doesn’t get directly involved like this,” Talley let us know. “Just so you get an idea of the importance.”
“I guess we’re supposed to feel honored,” Marino said.
Talley cut off a bite of chicken and kept the fork in the same hand, European style.
“I don’t want us to be blinded by how much we want this unidentified body to be Thomas Chandonne,” Talley went on.
“Yeah, sure would be embarrassing if you took the black notice out of your fancy computer and then guess what? Turns out the son of a bitch ain’t dead and Loup-Garou’s just some local fruit loop who keeps on killing. No relationship between the two,” Marino said. “Maybe Interpol loses some of its membership fees, huh?”
“Captain Marino, this is not about membership fees,” Talley said with a dead-on stare. “I know you’ve worked many, many difficult cases in your career. You know how all-consuming they can be. We need to free up our people to work other crimes. We need to bring down the people shielding this dirtbag. We need to destroy the hell out of all of them.”
He pushed away his tray without finishing his food. He slid a pack of cigarettes out of the inner pocket of his suit jacket.
“That’s one thing nice about Europe,” he smiled. “Bad for your health but not antisocial.”
“Well, let me ask you this,” Marino kept going. “If it’s not about membership fees, then who pays for all this shit? Learjets, Concordes, ritzy hotels, not to mention Mercedes cabs?”
“Many of the taxis over here are Mercedes.”
“We prefer beat-up Chevies and Fords back home,” Marino said sarcastically. “You know, buy American.”
“Interpol isn’t in the habit of supplying Learjets and luxury hotels,” Talley said.
“Then who did?”
“I guess you can ask Senator Lord all about that,” Talley replied. “But let me remind you of something. Organized crime is all about money, and most of this money comes from honest people, honest busin
esses and corporations who want to run these cartels out of business as badly as we do.”
Marino’s jaw muscles were flexing.
“I can only suggest that for a Fortune Five Hundred company to buy a couple of Concorde tickets isn’t much to ask if millions of dollars of electronic equipment or even guns and explosives are being diverted.”
“Then some Microsoft-company-type paid for all this?” Marino asked.
Talley’s patience was being tried. He didn’t answer him.
“I’m asking you. I want to know who paid for my ticket. I want to know who the hell went through my suitcase. Some Interpol agent?” Marino persisted.
“Interpol doesn’t have agents. It has liaisons from various law enforcement agencies. ATF, FBI, the postal service, police departments and so on.”
“Yeah, right. Just like the CIA doesn’t snuff people.”
“For God’s sake, Marino,” I said.
“I want to know who fucking went through my suitcase,” Marino said as his face turned a deeper red. “That pisses me off more than anything has in a hell of a long time.”
“I can see that,” Talley replied. “Maybe you should complain to the Paris police. But my guess is, if they had anything to do with it, it was for your own good. In the event you might have brought a gun over here, for example?”
Marino didn’t say anything. He picked through what was left of his ribs.
“You didn’t,” I said to him in disbelief.
“If someone isn’t familiar with international travel, well, innocent mistakes can be made,” Talley added. “Especially American police who are used to carrying guns everywhere and perhaps don’t understand what serious trouble they could get into over here.”
Still, Marino was silent.
“I suspect the only motivation was to prevent any inconveniences for either of you,” Talley added, tapping an ash.
“All right, all right,” Marino grumbled.
“Dr. Scarpetta,” Talley then said, “are you familiar with our magistrate system over here?”
“Enough to know that I’m glad we don’t have one in Virginia.”
“The magistrate’s appointed for life. The forensic pathologist is appointed by the magistrate, and it’s the magistrate who decides what evidence is submitted to the labs and even what the manner of death is,” Talley explained.