Some of the unsolved homicides that HITS turned up were interesting, but nothing seemed to relate to the city landfill case and Meyer was getting tired. He and St Claire had been at this cross-matching game for three hours and his stomach was telling him it was lunchtime. The office was empty except for the two of them. They had developed a list of seventy-six missing persons and nineteen unsolved homicides throughout the state, but neither of the figures appeared to correlate.
'What're you after, Harvey?' Meyer asked. 'None of these cases could possibly relate to the landfill.'
'The three bodies have to be connected in some way. They were almost side by side, so they had to have been dumped at the same time, don't you agree?'
'That makes sense.'
'Well, think about it. Three people show up in the same area of the city landfill. If they were dropped at the same time, in all probability they knew each other. They had something in common.'
'Yeah, they're all dead,' Meyer said.
'Also they've been in there awhile. What I'm gettin' at, son, is that if the three of them knew each other and were involved with each other in some way, and they all disappeared at the same time, don't you think somebody would have reported that? First thing I did this morning, I called Missing Persons and asked them one question. "You looking for three people who knew each other and were reported missing at the same time?" The answer was no.'
'Maybe - '
'Folks who are missing friends or relatives will come forward to see if they can identify these bodies. Hell, if your kid was missing, and you picked up the paper and read that three unidentified bodies were found in the city landfill, wouldn't you be curious to see if he might be one of those three? There's a lotta missing persons out there, cowboy. And at least one person looking for every one that's missing.'
'What the hell's your point, Harve?'
'Let's say we don't get an ID on these people - at least for a while. Doesn't that raise the possibility that maybe they're from someplace else?'
Meyer looked away from the screen for a moment. 'You think they're out-of-towners?'
'Maybe tourists. Conventioneers. Or assume for a minute that they were killed out of town and brought here.'
'You're reaching on this one, Harve.'
'Humour me, son. I know it's a long shot. What if they ain't local? Think about it. What if they were involved in something outside the city? A bank heist, a dope deal, some cult thing. And suppose it went sour and these John and Jane Does were killed because of this deal and they got dropped in the dump. Hell, somebody dumped those people out there, they didn't fall out of the sky.'
'It's a wild-goose chase.'
'Maybe,' the old-timer said, throwing his empty coffee cup into a wastebasket. He leaned back in his chair, tucked a fresh pinch of snuff in his cheek, and interlocked his pudgy fingers over his stomach. 'I'm remembering a time five, six years ago. The Seattle police turned up two white males in a common grave just outside the city. They couldn't ID the victims. Six months go by, they've about written the case off, and one day they get a call from a police chief in Arizona. A thousand miles away! Turns out the Arizona cops nabbed a guy for passing a hot fifty-dollar bill that was lifted six months before in a bank heist. The guy breaks down and not only confesses to the bank job, he says there were three of them involved and they drove up to Seattle to hide out and started squabbling and he takes them both down and buries them out in the woods and drifts back down to Phoenix. The story checks out. The Seattle police solves its case. The Arizona PD solves its bank robbery.'
'And everybody's smilin' but the guy that did the trick,' said Meyer.
'Right. The last place the Seattle PD would've expected to get a line on their John Does was in Arizona. So you never know. We're looking to see if anything strikes our fancy, okay?'
Meyer was back staring at the big computer screen, watching it scroll through case descriptions. Suddenly he stopped it.
'How about Satanism, Harve? Does that strike your fancy?'
'Satanism?'
'Here's a little town called Gideon down in the southern corner of the state, probably hasn't had a major homicide in twenty years. The local PD thinks Satanists killed a housewife down there.'
'Gideon? There's a nice biblical name,' St Claire said. 'Seems an unlikely place for Satanists to rear their ugly heads.'
The chief of police refused to supply any crime reports. Didn't even call in the state forensics lab - which is required by law in a case like this. According to the cover sheet, it's a small, religious community. They think it involves Satanism and they don't want any publicity about it.'
He ripped a computer printout of the cover report from the printer and read it aloud:
'UNREPORTED HOMICIDE, 7/12/93: Murder of Gideon Housewife. Gideon is a religious community of Mormons. The population is approximately 2,000. Al Braselton, an agent with the state Bureau of Investigation, learned of the event while on an an unrelated investigation in Shelby, 12 miles north of Gideon. The Gideon police chief, Hiram Young, reluctantly turned over to Agent Braselton some photographs and the sketchy homicide report. This is all the information the Bureau has on this crime at this time. According to Chief Young, the town didn't want a lot of outsiders coming there…'
Meyer exclaimed, 'And this in quotes, Harve, ' "Because of the Satanism angle"! The homicide is still unresolved.'
'There's an angle I never thought about,' said St Claire. 'Satanism.' He laughed at the thought. 'My God, look at these photos,' Meyer said. Six photographs had popped up on the computer monitor. Like all graphic police studies of violence, they depicted the stark climate of the crime without art or composition. Pornographic in detail, they appeared on the fifty-inch TV screen in two rows, three photos in each row. The three on the top were full, medium, and close-up shots of a once pleasant-looking, slightly overweight woman in her mid to late twenties. She had been stabbed and cut dozens of times. The long, establishing shot captured the nauseating milieu of the crime scene. The victim lay in a corner of the room, her head cocked crazily against the wall. Her mouth bulged open. Her eyes were frozen in a horrified stare. Blood had splattered the walls, the TV set, the floors, everything.
The medium shot was even more graphic. The woman's nipples had been cut off and her throat was slit to the bone.
But the close-up of her head was the most chilling of all.
The woman's nipples were stuffed in her mouth.
'Good lord,' St Claire said with revulsion.
'I'm glad we haven't had lunch yet,' Meyer said, swallowing hard.
The lower row of photographs were from the same perspective but were shots of her back, where the butchery had been just as vicious.
'I can see why the police chief thinks Satanists were involved,' Meyer said. 'This is obscene.'
St Claire leaned over Meyer's shoulder and together they read the homicide report filed by Chief Hiram Young:
On October 27, 1993, at approximately 8 A.M, I answered a call to the home of George Balfour, local, which was called in by a neighbour, Mrs Miriam Peronne, who resides next door. I found a white female, which I personally identified as Linda Balfour, 26, wife of George, on the floor of the living room. Mrs Balfour was DOA. The coroner, Bert Fields, attributes death to multiple stab wounds. Her son, age 1, was five feet away and unharmed. Her husband was several miles from town when the crime occurred. There are no suspects.
Meyer turned to St Claire. 'Not much there,' he said.
But St Claire did not answer. He stood up and walked close to the screen. He was looking at the close-up of the back of the woman's head. 'What's that?' he asked. 'What?'
'There, on the back of her head.' St Claire pointed to what appeared to be markings under the woman's hair. 'I'll zoom in,' Meyer said.
He isolated the photograph, then blew it up four times before it began to fall apart. Beneath the blood-mottled hair on the back of her head were what appeared to be a row of marks, but the blown-up photo was too fuzzy
to define them.
'Maybe just scratches,' Meyer suggested. 'Can you clear it up any?' St Claire asked. Meyer digitally enhanced the picture several times, the photo blinking and becoming a little more distinct each time he hit the key combinations.
'That's as far as I can take it,' Meyer said. 'Looks like numbers,' St Claire said, adjusting his glasses and squinting at the image. 'Numbers and a letter…'
'Looks like it was written with her blood,' Meyer said with disgust.
A familiar worm nibbled at St Claire's gut. Nothing he could put his finger on, but it was nibbling nevertheless. 'Ben, let's give this Chief Young a call. He's got to know more about this case than the network's got.'
'Harvey, I've got four cases on my desk…'
'I got a nudge on this, Ben. Don't argue with me.'
'A nudge? What's a nudge?'
'It's when your gut nudges your brain,' the old-timer answered.
Six
In the lobby of the Ritz Hotel, the city's three hundred most-powerful men preened like gamecocks as they headed for the dining room. They strutted into the room, pompous, jaws set, warily eyeing their peers and enforcing their standing in the power structure by flaunting condescending demeanours The State Lawyers Association Board of Directors luncheon was the city's most prestigious assembly of the year and it was - for the most powerful - a contest of attitudes. Three hundred invitations went out; invitations harder to acquire than tickets to the final game of a World Series because they could not be bought, traded, or used by anyone else. The most exclusive - and snobbish - ex officio 'club' in town established who the most powerful men in the city were. To be on the invitation list connoted acceptance by the city's self-appointed leaders. To be dropped was construed as a devastating insult.
Yancey's invitation to be the keynote speaker was a sign that he was recognized as one of the city's most valued movers and shakers. For years, he had secretly yearned to be accepted into the supercillious boys' club and he was revelling in the attention he was getting. Vail followed him into the dining room, smiling tepidly in the wake of the pandering DA as he glad-handed his way to the head table. This was Yancey's day and Vail was happy for him, even though he regarded the proceedings with disdain.
His seat was directly in front of the lecturn at a table with three members of the state supreme court and the four most influential members of the legislature, an elderly, dour, and boring lot, impressed with their own importance and more interested in food and drink than intelligent conversation. Vail suffered through the lunch.
Yancey got a big hand when he was introduced. And why not? Speaking was his forte and he was renowned for spicing his speeches with off-colour jokes and supplicating plaudits for the biggest of the big shots. As he was being introduced, Yancey felt an annoying pain in the back of his head. He rubbed it away. But as he stood up to speak, it became a searing pain at the base of his skull. He shook his head sharply and then it hit again like a needle jabbing into his head. The room seemed to go out of focus; the applause became hollow. He reached for the lectern to steady himself.
Vail saw Yancey falter and shakily steady himself by gripping the lectern with one hand. With the other, he rubbed the base of his neck, twisting his head as if an imaginary bee was attacking him. He smiled, now grabbing the edge of the speaker's platform with both hands. From below him, Vail could see his hands shaking.
Yancey took all the applause, taking deep breaths to calm himself down.
'Before I begin, I'd like to take this opportunity to introduce, uh… my… m-m-my right and left, uh, left…' His speech was slurred and he was stuttering.
Vail leaned forward in his chair. What the hell was wrong with Yancey? he wondered.
'… one of this… this, uh…'t-t-this country's great p-p-prosecutors, and the m-m-man who… uh…'
Yancey stopped, staring around the room helplessly, blinking his eyes. Vail got up and rushed towards the end of the head table, but even as he did, Yancey cried out, 'Oh!', pitched forward over the lectern, arms flailing, and dropped straight to the floor.
Vail rode in the ambulance with the stricken DA, after first calling St Claire and sending him to find Yancey's wife, Beryl. Yancey was grey and barely breathing. The paramedics worked over him feverishly, barking orders to each other while the driver called ahead to alert the trauma unit and summon Yancey's personal physician to the emergency room. When they arrived, they pushed Yancey's stretcher on the run into the operating room and Vail was left alone in the wash-up room.
Almost an hour passed before Yancey's doctor came out of the OR. Dr Gary Ziegler, was a tall, lean man with a craggy, portentous face studded with sorrowful eyes. He looked perpetually worried and was not a man who exuded hope to those waiting to get news of a stricken loved one. He wearily pulled off his latex gloves and swept off his cap and face mask, then pinched the bridge of his nose with a thumb and a forefinger and sighed.
'That bad, Gary?' Vail asked.
Ziegler looked over at him and shook his head.
'I hope you have a lot of energy, Martin.'
'What the hell does that mean?'
'It means you're going to be a busy man. It's going to be a long time before Jack goes back to work - if he ever does.'
'Heart attack?'
'Massive cerebral thrombosis.'
'Which is what, exactly?'
'Blockage of a main artery to the brain by a thrombus - a blood clot. Specifically, it means the cerebellum of the brain has been deprived of blood and oxygen.'
'In other words, a stroke.'
'In other words, a massive stroke. He's suffering severe Hemiplegia - we can already determine that, his reflexes are nil. And I suspect he's suffering aphasia, although I can't tell how bad it is yet.'
'Translate that into simple English for me,' Vail said.
Ziegler walked to the sink and began scrubbing his hands. 'Paralysis down his entire left side caused by damage to the right cerebral hemisphere. A speech deficiency caused by damage to the left hemisphere. It could have been brought on by a brain tumour, atherosclerosis, hypertension, I can't be sure at this point. Right now we've got him stabilized, but his condition is poor and he's unconscious.'
'My God.'
'The fact that he survived the first two hours is encouraging,' Ziegler said. 'If he holds on for another week or ten days, the outlook will be greatly improved. But at this point there's no way of predicting the long-term effects.'
'What I hear you saying is, Jack could be a vegetable.'
'That's pretty rash,' Ziegler said, annoyed by Vail's description.
'It sounds pretty rash!'
'Well, nothing good can be said about a stroke of this magnitude, but until we can do an ECG, blood tests, CAT scans, an angiography, hell, I couldn't even guess at the prognosis.'
'Can I see him?'
Ziegler pointed to the door of the Intensive Care Unit.
'I'm going to clean up. If Beryl gets here before I come out, talk to her, will you? I won't be long.'
Vail looked through the window of the ICU. Yancey lay perfectly still with tubes and IV bottles attached to arms and legs, his face covered with an oxygen mask, machines beeping behind his bed. He was as still as a rock and his skin was the colour of oatmeal.
What irony, Vail thought. One of the biggest days of his life and his brain blows out on him.
A few moments later the lift doors opened and Beryl Yancey and her 30-year-old daughter, Joanna, accompanied by a uniformed policeman, stepped out. They looked dazed and confused and stood at the door, their hands interlocked, looking fearfully up and down the hallway. When Beryl saw Vail, she rushed to him, clutching him desperately, and chattering almost incoherently. He put his arms around her and Joanna. Beryl Yancey knew there were frequent skirmishes between her husband and Vail, but she and Jack Yancey both liked the tough prosecutor and were well aware that his stunning record had helped keep Yancey the district attorney for the past ten years.
'I was at t
he beauty parlour,' Beryl babbled. 'Can you imagine, the beauty parlour? Is he alive, Martin? Oh, God, don't tell me if he's gone. I can't imagine. I won't - '
'He's hanging on, Beryl.'
'Oh, thank God, thank you, Marty…'
'I didn't - '
'Is he awake? Can we see him? Oh, my God, my hair must be a mess. I was right in the middle of…' The sentence died in her mouth as she primped her incomplete hairdo.
'Gary Ziegler's just inside the emergency room. He'll be right out. He can give you all the details.'
'They came and got me in a police car. The whole beauty parlour got hysterical when that nice man… Who was that man, Martin?'
'His name's Harvey. Harvey St Claire.'
'He said he would wait for you in the car.'
'Fine.'
'You're not going to leave us, are you? Nobody would say anything, you know. Mr St Claire wouldn't tell me anything! I thought… Oh, God, I thought everything.'
'He doesn't know anything, Beryl. Harvey doesn't know any more than you do.'
'How bad does my hair look?'
'Your hair looks fine, Mom,' her daughter said, patting her on the arm.
'You know if you need anything, anything at all, just call me. At the office, at home…'
'I know that, Martin. But Jack's going to be all right. I know he'll be all right. He never gets sick. Do you know, he never even gets the flu?'
A minute or two later Ziegler came out wearing a fresh gown and the two Yancey women fled immediately to him. Vail took the lift to the first floor, but as he stepped out he saw a half-dozen reporters and a television crew clustered around the front door. He jumped back inside the lift and rode it to the basement. He took out his portable phone and punched out the car's number. It rang once and St Claire answered. 'Where are you?' he asked.