Mind Scrambler

  New Jersey’s (and maybe America’s) premiere forensic expert sort of looks like a garden gnome without the ski cap or beard. Dr. McDaniels is short, under five feet tall, with bony matchsticks for legs and arms. She keeps her prickly white hair short, too. Wears a female buzz cut that reminds me of a bottle brush.

  The last time we worked together, Dr. McDaniels was decked out in cargo shorts and a Hawaiian shirt from the Tabasco Sauce Collection. Today she’s wearing a somber black pantsuit over a black blouse. Maybe because it’s October. Maybe because she wants to show her respect for all the dead. She met Katie Landry in Sea Haven a couple summers ago; came to visit her in the hospital. She knew Detective Flynn, and probably his partner, too.

  Dr. McDaniels sees us. Nods. “Ceepak. Boyle.”

  Usually, Dr. McD delights in busting our chops—zinging Ceepak with some wisecrack about his bulging muscles or telling me how my abs remind her of Irish oatmeal. Lumpy.

  Today, all we get are our names.

  “I went to the Shore Memorial morgue early this AM, prior to receiving the call on this incident,” she reports without a trace of emotion, sounding more like Ceepak than Ceepak sometimes does. “During my examination, I paid particular attention to the ligature markings circling Ms. Landry’s neck. The numerous abrasions and indentation marks made it readily apparent that the strangulation device had been repeatedly tightened, then loosened. As you know, all it takes to cause unconsciousness is eleven pounds of pressure applied against both carotid arteries for a period of ten seconds.”

  Ceepak nods so I do, too—even though I never knew any of that.

  “If the pressure is subsequently released, consciousness will be regained rather quickly, usually within ten seconds. We hypothesize, then, that her assailant choked Ms. Landry at least a half-dozen times, undoubtedly intending to terrify her by making her think she was dying—in much the same manner that water-boarding gives a torture victim the sense that he or she is drowning. It is no wonder Ms. Landry involuntary urinated during the ordeal, which is often the case during strangulation.” She stops. “Are you gentlemen okay hearing this?”

  We both nod.

  “Then you are better men than I’ll ever be,” she says with a tight crinkle of her pale blue eyes. “It made me sick. I haven’t tossed my cookies like that in fifteen, twenty years.” She shakes her head. “Torture sucks. You have any MP buddies still doing it down in Gitmo, tell them to knock it off.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” says Ceepak.

  McDaniels sucks in some more fresh air, pushes on: “I also noted the pronounced presence of petechiae—tiny red spots caused by ruptured capillaries—around the eyes, under the eyelids, and on the neck above the area of constriction.”

  “I noted that as well,” says Ceepak. “She also presented with extremely bloodshot eyes due, no doubt, to similar capillary rupture in the whites surrounding her pupils.”

  “Right,” says Dr. McDaniels.

  My shoulders sag and my legs tremble with some sort of horror palsy. I hate hearing this kind of gory detail about a girl I was once head-over-heels in love with.

  “Danny?” This from Dr. McDaniels.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “The phenomenon Ceepak and I noted, this pronounced petechiae, typically suggests a particularly vigorous struggle between the victim and assailant. In other words, Katie Landry did not give up easily.”

  Even though she was bound and gagged. So much for all the consensual sex-play theories.

  Dr. McDaniels turns to Ceepak. “As you undoubtedly know, John, sexual humiliation, as evidenced by the ill-fitting S and M costume Ms. Landry was forced to wear, is another indication that she was tortured before she ultimately succumbed to asphyxiation.”

  “Yes,” says Ceepak sadly. “It is, unfortunately, a common technique.”

  I remember the photos from the Abu Ghraib prison. Pyramids of naked Iraqi men with women’s panties draped over their heads. That girl leading the nude Muslim man around on a dog leash, shooting the camera a smiling thumbs-up.

  “The killer wanted information from Katie,” mutters Ceepak.

  “Yeah,” says Dr. McDaniels. “He or she sure did. And you know what? I don’t think Ms. Landry cracked. I don’t think she gave the bastard what he or she was looking for.” Now Dr. McDaniels knuckle-punches me in the arm like she used to do when we first met. “Irish girls? We’re tough, Mr. Boyle. Fighters.”

  “Thank you.” It’s all I can say over the lump in my throat.

  “I gotta get back in there,” she says, gesturing toward room 212.

  “Thank you for the update,” says Ceepak.

  “We’ll keep you posted. We’re close to pegging a more precise time of death using the virteous humor formula.”

  Eye jelly, they call it. A neat bubble of viscous fluid sealed off from the rest of the body inside the eyeball. You measure the levels of nitrogen, sodium chloride, calcium, and potassium in the postmortem eye and you get a pretty precise T.O.D. I took notes the last time Dr. McD worked a crime scene with us.

  “You know,” she says, “if Katie held out, didn’t give whoever strangled her what they were looking for, the search is, most likely, still continuing. So find this bastard, boys. I’ve examined enough dead bodies for one day.”

  Ceepak responds with a very slow, bobble-head nod. Usually, that means he just figured something out.

  Dr. McDaniels disappears into room 212. “Okay, guys,” I hear her say to her team. “Finish the photographs. Chief Maroney? Dollars to doughnuts, Mr. Pratt was dead on the bed before your two detectives even walked through the door.”

  “You sure?”

  “No. I’m damn sure. This thing only plays one way. Krabitz killed Pratt, then ambushed your guys.”

  Orders get barked. Radios crackle. I don’t think Kenny Krabitz will be released on his own recognizance any time soon.

  Wow.

  Krabitz killed Pratt.

  Then he, not Pratt, killed the two ACPD detectives.

  And what did he do the minute David Zuckerman and Jessica Rock sprang him from his jail cell?

  He headed over to the Super 8 Motel to knock on Jim Bob and Blaine’s door. Actually, I think he meant to kick it in until we showed up.

  Because he was looking for the “last notebook.”

  The one Jake Pratt didn’t have.

  “The last notebook,” I mumble.

  “Roger that,” says Ceepak, who no doubt reached that same conclusion back when he was bobble-heading. “I believe it has been missing since yesterday and that whoever hired Krabitz had initially suspected Katie knew where it might be located.”

  “Did Krabitz kill Katie, too?”

  “It’s a possibility.”

  “That’s why Krabitz was skulking around in the lobby before the show, demanding to see Zuckerman, wondering ‘what the big problem’ was. He’s their hit man!”

  Ceepak’s eyebrows slant quizzically over his nose.

  Doesn’t stop me. “He could’ve gone backstage. If he knew about the security camera, how they disabled it, he could’ve gone into Katie’s room. Killed her.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Because somebody told him to? Why’d he kill Jake Pratt?”

  “Unclear at this juncture. And, Danny, we must still account for the presence of Mr. Pratt’s pubic hair on the floor in Katie’s room.”

  Yeah. I’ve been trying to deal with that for nearly twenty-four hours.

  “Not to mention the sales receipt found in the shopping bag and the love note scrawled on the fogged bathroom mirror,” Ceepak continues.

  “U could be Sherry Amour,” I say. “It’s kind of an ambiguous love note, you know?” Then I remember: “Katie said she’d found something!”

  “Come again?”

  “Yesterday afternoon, when Katie left me that voice mail, she said she needed to talk to me about Jake Pratt. Said she’d found something.”

  “Did she elaborate further?”


  I shake my head. “No. She couldn’t. She had to hang up. Some woman kept calling for her. Probably Mrs. Rock. Could’ve been Sherry Amour.”

  “Interesting,” says Ceepak as he begins drifting back toward the staircase. I follow behind him. “Perhaps Katie had found the ‘last notebook.’ ”

  “So what was in it?” I ask. “More magic-trick plans like the ones they found in Pratt’s room?”

  “Doubtful,” says Ceepak.

  “How come?”

  “Because, so far, Danny, that is exactly what everybody has insisted was in them. No, I suspect that the missing notebook or notebooks contain something of a more personal, potentially incriminating nature.”

  “Like a diary or something?”

  “Precisely.”

  His cell phone chirps. He whips it off his belt.

  “This is Ceepak. Go.”

  He covers the mouthpiece to clue me in to who’s calling: Cyrus Parker. Not his dad.

  “Fascinating.” Now he glances at his watch. “We’ll be there in five.”

  He closes up the phone.

  “What’s up?”

  “Cyrus has requested that we return to the control room and take a look at some footage his team recently isolated.”

  “More on Lady Jasmine?”

  “Negative. Jake Pratt, riding in an elevator with a blond woman. Either Mrs. Rock or Ms. Amour.”

  “Parker can’t tell which one it is?”

  “Affirmative. He hopes you might be able to help them make that call, since you saw Ms. Amour up close in the karaoke club.”

  “What were they doing on the elevator?” I ask. “Pratt and the blonde?”

  “Holding hands.”

  31

  We abandon our motorbikes with the ACPD officers guarding the Royal Lodge and dash across the street to the Xanadu.

  Actually, Ceepak insists we go up the block to the crosswalk and wait for the light to change. Then we look both ways and proceed across the avenue when the red palm switches to the sideways ambling man. I’m just glad Ceepak doesn’t make me hold his hand while we cross the street.

  That’s what Jake Pratt is doing with one of the two busty blondes on a video screen inside the security office.

  “This footage was captured a little after thirteen-hundred hours on Sunday,” says Cyrus Parker. “It’s from elevator twelve. Over in the Crystal Palace Tower.”

  That’s where my high-roller room is located.

  Parker taps the TV screen. “They’re holding hands pretty tight. The blonde seems to be the one initiating the squeeze.”

  “Roger that.” Ceepak agrees. Me, too.

  In fact, at one point the blonde grips Pratt’s hands so tight, his fingers splay out. It looks like she’s milking a goat udder. I think the only reason the two lovebirds aren’t tearing each other’s clothes off and leaping into a Fatal Attraction sex-in-the-elevator scene is because there’s one of those slot-machine-loving Italian grandmothers in a flamingo-print muumuu riding with them.

  “Watch this,” says Parker.

  The elevator stops, the doors slide open, and muumuu woman waddles off. When she’s gone and the doors glide shut again, the blonde gives Pratt a soft, maybe teasing, peck on his cheek. She raises her left hand so she can nibble on his ear or whisper something dirty. Pratt just stands there, grinning like a horny idiot.

  They don’t do much else, at least not in the elevator. Since they work at the Xanadu, they must know about the eye-in-the-sky surveillance cameras recording their every move in every corner of the building. Apparently they were savvy enough to save their triple-X action for across the street at the Royal Lodge.

  “Who is she?” Parker asks. “Mrs. Rock or Ms. Amour?”

  “I can’t tell,” I admit.

  “Rewind it,” Parker tells the woman twisting the control knobs. “Take one more look, okay, Boyle?”

  So we watch it all again and my eyeballs get the front-row seat. It’s tough. The two women could be identical twins. Same hair. Same face. Same impossibly rotund boobs.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I can’t tell.”

  “Okay,” says Parker. “At least I only have two people to keep tabs on today. One of them, Ms. Amour, nobody can find. The other one, she’s getting her nails done. Bring up seventeen, Kim.” The woman at the controls punches some keys and we’re looking at the Xanadu’s luxurious spa. Mrs. Rock, wearing a bathrobe, her hair in a towel turban, is sitting in a padded chair while servants in nurse uniforms buff her hands and feet.

  “Who is currently watching the Rocks’ children?” Ceepak asks. “Mr. Rock?”

  “Kim?” says Parker.

  “The kids are in the candy shop off the main lobby,” says the woman at the console as she clacks a couple more keys. “They have a new nanny and she’s pretty lame. I think she’s one of the chorus girls from the show. Young. African American. She keeps yawning. Needs coffee. Anyway, she’s letting the rug rats run wild.”

  She clicks her mouse. The camera zooms in.

  “Britney just shoplifted a pocketful of gummi fish.”

  “Gentlemen,” says Parker gesturing toward his day-shift super-snoop, “I suggest you do not get on Ms. Kim Hammond’s bad side. She’ll see every bad thing you’ve ever done and then send a videotape of it to your mother and your wife.”

  “Now the girl’s pawing through the malted milk balls,” Hammond reports.

  Parker heaves a sigh. “Have one of the guys suggest to young Miss Rock that she put her goodies in a paper sack and pay for them up front. About time someone taught that child some manners.”

  “You got it,” says Hammond. “Jeremy? This is Kim upstairs. Go have a word with the young girl in the LA Dodgers baseball cap moving toward the caramel apples inside Kubla Khandy. Ask her to show you the inside of her pockets.”

  “You want me to escort her upstairs?” a voice comes back over the radio. “Hold her in the room?”

  Parker shakes his head. “Nah. Just tell that damn babysitter to wake up and pay for what the kid tried to rip off.”

  On the screen, I watch a beefy man in a sport jacket step into the picture and tap Britney on the shoulder while her hand is literally in the cookie jar. Well, the jelly bean jar.

  Britney, of course, throws a hissy fit. Pouts. Stomps on the floor. Throws a fistful of Jelly Bellies up in the air.

  The new nanny looks like she’s awake now.

  When Britney won’t show the security guard what’s crammed in her pockets, the nanny digs inside them to see for herself.

  Now Britney is screaming. Probably threatening to sue the casino, sue the new nanny.

  I see her brother, little Richie. He’s still wearing that tiger backpack but now he’s pounding his fists on the babysitter’s butt.

  “Dammit! Haul those two brats up to their mother!” says Parker—almost loud enough for his floor man Jeremy to hear him without the aid of his radio. “She’s in the spa.”

  “Ten-four,” comes the reply.

  We see the kids being escorted out of the store.

  “Let’s bring the nanny up here,” suggests Ceepak. “She’s in the show. Works with both Ms. Amour and Mrs. Rock. She might be better able to ID who it is on the elevator with Jake Pratt.”

  “Good idea. Kim?”

  “I’ll tell Jeremy.”

  “Thanks,” says Parker. “Damn kids had me fooled.”

  That’s right. Yesterday, he told us he’d had dinner with the whole Rock clan. Thought the kids were a couple of cuties. Another illusion shattered.

  “Cyrus?” says Ceepak.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yesterday, you indicated that you had helped Mr. Rock with his act but had signed a confidentiality agreement that prevented you from revealing what it was you had done.”

  “True and true.”

  “Given recent developments, do you now feel at liberty to divulge what it is you did for Rock?”

  “You mean will I go back on my word?”

  “
Circumstances have changed.”

  “Yeah. They have a way of doing that on a regular basis, don’t they?”

  “People have been murdered,” Ceepak adds. “Katie Landry. Jake Pratt. Detectives Flynn and Weddle.”

  “I didn’t sign any damn confidentiality agreement,” says Ms. Hammond from her control console.

  “True,” says Parker. “However, Kim, since technically, you work for me—”

  “Hell’s bells—you can’t swear me to secrecy just because you swore it.”

  “Ms. Hammond?” says Ceepak.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Parker and I attempt to live our lives by a very strict, perhaps overly rigid, moral code.”

  “Tell me about it,” says Hammond as she gulps a slug of coffee from a lipstick-rimmed mug. “The big man won’t even let me lie to myself about how many doughnuts I had on my break.”

  Ceepak makes a finger tent under his nose. “Allow me to advance a theory. If I am wrong in the particulars, I trust, Cyrus, that you will cut me off and, thereby, prevent me from spreading further falsehoods.”

  “Yeah. Okay. I could do that,” says Parker. “Because I won’t lie or tolerate your lies, either. So, if you get it wrong, I’d be duty-bound to tell you. Cool.”

  “Very well. I presume you primarily assisted the show’s stage technicians, helping them gain access to your security-camera feeds, that you wired them up to all pertinent cameras arrayed along the route Mr. Rock follows when he leaves the Shalimar Theater and proceeds to the high-roller room.”

  Parker doesn’t correct or contradict Ceepak. In fact, he doesn’t do anything. He just stands there like a six-foot-two brick wall.

  “I also assume that Mr. Rock has his own backstage control room where the show’s technicians switch between your camera feeds and determine the sequencing of images to be shown to the audience on the video screen.”

  The room is quiet, except for the constant clack and tap of computer keys, the whirr of hard-drive fans.

  “Is that it?” asks Parker.

  “Yes,” says Ceepak.

  “Good. Next issue: how are we going to find Ms. Sherry Amour? You got any theories on that one, Lieutenant Ceepak?”