“Into the Abyss”, 2/6

[aadler]

 
Second installment.

Part 1 here

Part II

I slept till mid-morning; then, after I’d had a brisk breakfast and gotten some personal business out of the way, I drove back to my workplace. Some of that was to make up for leaving early the previous night, and some to get a head start on wrapping up things for the weekend (I usually worked four days on, one off, but once a month I took a three-day weekend to even out my hours and keep them technically clear of overtime), but quite a bit was to get me back into the nerve center that was the norm for me. I had a broadband connection for my desktop system at home, but the newspaper office had information streaming through it all the time, not just news but data that hadn’t yet been formed into news, and there were times when that extra access made a big difference.

This time, there was something else. This time, my sanctuary - the Abyss, in the center of the labyrinth that few besides janitors and maintenance people ever penetrated - had a note on the door. It was one of those pink While-You-Were-Out memos, and the message read Call me immediately. URGENT. - R.G., followed by a local telephone number.

Well. Well, indeed. I settled myself in at my desk, sorted out my thoughts, and then punched in the number. The phone was answered on the first ring, he must have been sitting there waiting for the call: “Yes, hello?”

“Mr Giles,” I said.

“Yes, yes, Ms Schoeren. I was actually about to go out, didn’t expect you to show till later in the day and of course your employer wouldn’t give out your home number -”

“Mr Giles,” I said again, firmly. After his departure last night, I admit it felt good to be in control for the moment. “Your message was marked urgent.”

“Yes,” he agreed; then, a new note in his voice: “You’ve not, er … I take it, then, you’ve not yet seen the news?”

I smiled into the telephone. “I don’t get the paper at home, Mr Giles; why should I? and I don’t bother with the morning news shows, usually I’m still asleep. And I just got here, haven’t had time to check the office feeds yet … What news?”

I don’t believe it was my imagination, I think I actually could feel the tension on the other end of the line. Then Giles’s voice, still with the kind of precision I was coming to suspect might be control over more active emotion: “It would appear that your issues and mine are not so distinct as I stated yesterday evening. One of the murdered ‘bag ladies’ has been identified … as the second of the prominent women to have gone missing. From the list you provided. I’m sure the police are moving mountains even now to ascertain if the other murder likewise corresponds to the other disappearance. I rather suspect confirmation won’t be long in coming.”

“They’re … connected,” I said, working for some control of my own. “The disappearances, the killings … they’re, they’re the same women.”

“It would certainly seem so,” he answered crisply. “I think we should meet. As quickly as possible, don’t you agree?”
*               *               *
I had him join me in the Abyss, of course. No one would be aware of his presence, or care if they knew, I’ve had years to construct the kind of life that suits me and that life is solitary. More than that, my own personal Information Central was invaluable for the type of private investigation we were apparently launching. Even apart from the regular feeds that came in steadily, even apart from my ability to track the news stories currently in progress (too many people on our intranet were a bit too casual about password security, and I kept track of such things), the archives were an inexhaustible mine of stored data, of which I knew every passage and side-branch.

“Okay, the two missing VIPs,” I told him once he had arrived and I’d set him up some desk space. “They were high on the up-and-coming lists for years, and for longer than that now they’ve had ‘got there and staying there’ status. Amelie Linden, the woman whose body’s been identified, she was a celebrity gossip columnist but she did it so well that by now she was basically a newsmaker herself; she was one of the people you went to for a good quote to spice up a story, and she’d done a few television specials, she was a gateway if you want to get yourself set solid in the public eye. Danica Carlisle, the first woman to go missing? top-tier fashion designer, basically an infallible instinct for which way styles were heading or for making them go the way she wanted; if she’s the other body, she went out on a high note, she was about to have a major show in Milan and the word is that nobody else had even a hope of keeping up.”

“Yes, well,” Giles said. “You said the proposal you submitted had only the two names. Were any others mentioned or suggested?”

“No, sorry.” I shook my head. “It seemed to me that there were so many possibilities out there, I only needed to name off a couple of examples, let the actual writer do the final selection and follow it out.”

“Ah. Why, er, if you’d not had specific persons in mind, why did you think in terms of the series being limited to women?”

I shrugged. “Couldn’t say. Maybe it was just, the two top candidates had me thinking of females, or maybe I had some sense that a line of features about women at this level would carry some extra flavor of mystique or glamor.”

“Mm.” He nodded, but I could tell by the lack of focus in his gaze that his thoughts were elsewhere. “As it happens, then, both of the articles that referenced these unfortunate women originated with you. I called that a coincidence, and such it still seems, but rather more pointed than I appreciated at the time.”

I gave that some consideration. “Maybe not purely chance,” I observed at last. “I think … I mean, Danica Carlisle was the one who did make it into Connie’s series, so when she disappeared - and then Amelie Linden, too - even though we didn’t know anything then except they’d dropped off the radar, I sort of had them on my mind. The idea of pointing to them to contrast how little publicity the murdered homeless women were getting - except now we know there’s more to it than that - well, to me the ‘coincidence’ was that the women I’d mentioned had gone missing. Tying them to the dead bag-ladies, I guess you could say I came up with that because the first coincidence bothered me.”

“Yes, I can see how it would do so.” He pursed his lips, regarded me assessingly. “I suppose that we should investigate whether your … ‘Connie’ … might have some more direct connection to this matter; if she used only one of your suggested subjects, then only you and she would have known of the link to the other woman -”

“Uh … well, not exactly.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Yes?”

“The features editor would also know,” I told him. “I sent that up to him - Alan Brady, just like on the old Dick Van Dyke Show - and he was the one who approved it and passed it on to Connie. But, I can’t see either of them being involved, Alan’s fifty-six and has three grandkids, Connie does mostly the society pages and is more into macrobiotics than any serious current issues.” I shook my head. “What I’m saying is, these are average people. Newspaper-average, anyhow. To imagine either one of them caught up in some kind of murder conspiracy, it’s just …” I shook my head.

“Mm. Well, you know them and I don’t. We shall have to consider them, but your opinion there must carry some weight.” He drummed his fingers on the table, frowning slightly. “I wish I knew more of the physical details of the murders. If we knew what killed these women, then -” He trailed off.

I looked at him; there had been something there … “What do you mean, what killed them?” I asked him.

He started slightly, and then his eyes seemed to go vaguely opaque. “The, um, the modus operandi and means, the forensic evidence, what weapon was used, any of those might give us some clue as to how to proceed …”

I found myself hoping he couldn’t read me as readily as I could read him. He was lying, again, and I didn’t know why but some possibilities were beginning to suggest themselves. I let it pass by, for now. “I think I can help you with that,” I told him. I swiveled to put myself at the main keyboard, brought up the screen, and began working my way through subdirectories. “George, he has the police beat, he’s an old Quincy, M.E. fan and he loves to know the nitty-gritty on autopsy reports, he pays a guy in the coroner’s office to fax him copies of really interesting stuff. The PD would stomp him flat if he ever published anything they hadn’t officially released, but he knows better, he just uses it to give himself some informed context for, um, you might call it intelligent speculation.” George was one of those who wasn’t too militant about electronic security … but, honestly, who but me would even care enough to look, or have the means to do so? “Okay, good, I’ve found the report he got on the first victim, he scanned it in and saved it as a PDF. Probably the Carlisle woman, from what we know now.” I looked it over with half my attention while I kept rooting through George’s files for anything on the second victim (Linden).

The scan had been of decent quality but George never bothered with OCR, and I was never as comfortable with a flat image as with live text. Still, I could read it easily enough. “Hmm, yes, the public reports were a little vague, but … okay, victim died of asphyxiation due to crushing injuries, enough to break most of her ribs and puncture one lung while massively traumatizing the other … except the lungs and several other parts of the torso were also penetrated by multiple stab wounds, maybe enough to kill in time, but no blood-bearing organs were pierced, so the victim lived long enough to die of the crushing injuries instead. So, umm, weapon was something pointed but not a knife, more like a tent-stake or a railroad spike - What?”

Giles had jerked at my last words, but recovered himself as I looked at him. “Nothing,” he said. “Muscle spasm. Go on.”

Right. “Well, death wasn’t fast after those wounds, estimate is ten or fifteen minutes, but the coroner’s opinion is that nothing further was done after the initial attack, whoever it was just stood there and watched her die. And then … whoa.”

“Yes?”

“The, um …” I swallowed. “The heart was removed, post mortem. But not surgically, nothing that clean. Chest … ripped open, just split from the outside and the two sides pulled apart like somebody tearing open a roast chicken, and … well, the language is more technical but the gist of it is that the heart was, was, gouged out.” I looked back to Giles. “Whoever did this is seriously sick. I mean, purely bad.”

“Practically demonic,” he murmured in agreement; but his eyes, as was so often the case, seemed focused on something invisible to me.

He was hiding something, shutting me away, and I was about to call him on it but, “Okay,” I said, “here’s the second report, looks like George saved it in the wrong folder, he’s sloppy that way. So, um -” I skimmed quickly over the document in front of me, and announced, “Pretty much what we saw in the first one, there’s even an addendum that the consistency in MO strongly supports both killings being done by the same perpetrator. Only real difference is, he describes some unusual dental work.”

Again the abrupt reaction, though not really a jerk this time. “Unusual in what way?” Giles asked.

“Nothing bizarre,” I told him. “Just non-standard, specialized. They probably narrowed down which orthodontists do this kind of work and used that to identify Amelie Linden.”

“Ah. Yes. With that as an indicator, the police should confirm identity on the other woman in short order.” Giles’s voice was pensive, deliberate. “When that is announced, your colleagues may be reminded of your having named both of these local luminaries in your original profile suggestion. That could pose a problem for you -”

“It’s worse,” I interrupted. “Oh, God, it’s worse than we thought.”

“What?” He looked to me. “What do you mean?”

“There’s another one,” I told him. “The rest of this report - there was a reference to something, and I just read it to the end, and there’s another one. Body of a homeless woman found at the main landfill, this was ten days ago, she’d apparently got crushed inside the garbage truck that dropped her along with the rest of the trash, they figured she’d been sleeping inside a dumpster … She was so messed up, one of the deputy coroners signed off on cause-of-death without checking too close, but two more bodies got them wondering and so they pulled her back to check again …” I looked up, doing my best to keep my expression under control. “No heart. Somebody’s definitely getting fired over this. But this happened before any of the others. If she fits the pattern -”

“- Then she might have been simply unlucky,” Giles finished for me. “Or … there might be another prominent woman whose disappearance hadn’t been noted yet. Is there any way you might check for that?”

There were several ways, and I knew the systems and knew the people who filed the information that found its way into these archives, plus I had a few inside tracks of my own. I spread my net wider, went outside the paper’s internal network and out into the wider Internet to follow out possibilities. Giles sat patiently, not interrupting or asking for updates or even fidgeting; I was doing the necessary work, and he wasn’t about to interfere with that. Even more, it was as if he had experience with waiting when waiting was all that could be done, and had learned how to, basically, put himself into idle mode, husbanding his energies until they could be usefully applied. This kind of thing is rare (I have something like it, but in me it’s more akin to personal detachment), and it raised yet more questions about this man who had somehow appeared in my life.

Just now, however, there were rather more urgent questions to be addressed.

It was more than an hour before I was ready to offer any conclusions, but at last I turned to him. “If the first dead woman was another area celebrity, I think I’ve found the most likely candidate. Have you ever heard of Nicolette Herveaux?”

His smile was faint, but real. “I have, er, limited familiarity with American popular culture.”

“She’s a local author, one of those who made a hit with her first book and just kept going after that. She had a new wrinkle, writing about travel agents getting mixed up in mystery and suspense and usually some romance. Maybe a little bit of a rut, but Dick Francis has made mystery-and-horses work for nearly forty years, and Herveaux’s stuff may not be great literature but her books are popular; two of them have been optioned for movie scripts and there’s been talk of building a TV series around the overall concept.”

He nodded, the first hint of impatience showing. “And, is she missing?”

“Maybe.” I gestured toward the main monitor. “She was scheduled for a week’s vacation at Cape Cod, right about the time that first body was found, so nobody’s been looking for her. The thing is, I haven’t found any mention of her in the papers there - there’s usually some little comment somewhere, So-and-So seen at such-and-such event - no big deal, and maybe not meaningful if it isn’t there, but still. And there was supposed to be a book-signing today back here in the city, but now it’s been postponed. If it is her, they may just now be realizing she’s fallen off the grid.”

“Mm, yes.” He was turning over the idea. “Would she have fit on your list?”

I blinked at him. “I’m sorry, what?”

“The concept you first proposed; you only gave them two names as examples, but you seem to have had a fairly specific idea of the type of individuals you saw as suitable subjects. If you had finished developing the list, if you had chosen to write the profiles yourself, would this Ms Herveaux have been among them?”

I thought about it. “Maybe. Maybe even probably. She definitely doesn’t not fit.”

He nodded. “Very well, then, it might be time for us to attempt a, a different type of profile.”

I was fairly sure I knew where he was going with this, but I wanted to confirm it anyhow. “What do you mean, exactly?”

“If you have indeed identified a third victim - except, she would have been the first, wouldn’t she? - then we could begin to extrapolate from that. Which women might be next approached, if these killings continue … and, I’m afraid, the current situation wouldn’t lead me to expect them to stop. We could warn the prospective victims, so they might look to their personal safety or perhaps seek police protection. We might even have some sense of where to watch for the, er … the individual committing these dreadful acts.”

That last part definitely called for further comment, but I was still stuck on what came before. “Police? I’m not really keen on calling attention to myself here.”

He smiled quickly. “Nor I, but I’m sure that someone with your resources could find some means of conveying information without compromising your privacy.”

He was right about that, I most certainly could. He was continuing, however. “Now, these three women: Amelie Linden, Danica Carlisle, and, er -?”

“Nicolette Herveaux,” I supplied.

“Yes, thank you. Assuming their prominence, what things do the three of them have in common?”

I turned back toward the desk. “I can start checking background on them -”

“We’ll want that, of course,” he broke in, “but first I’d like to hear your, er, unfiltered perceptions.”

“What?” I frowned. “Why?”

“First impressions can sometimes capture the key elements,” he told me. “Too, these are public women, and it may be that our killer is motivated by some aspect of their public personae.” He gestured toward the monitor. “We’ll certainly go into further depth, but first I wish to hear what you already know of them. What most people here would know.”

I thought about it. “Well, let’s see … All three are relatively young women to have achieved the success they have, I think late thirties. All three started up the ladder twelve, fifteen years ago, and none of them exactly rocketed to the top but they kept climbing pretty steadily after that first rung. I don’t believe any of them were married … in fact, I’m not sure they’ve ever been married, you’d hear about boyfriends and ‘seen in the company of’, and I think somewhere along the line there would have been extra comment if there were a husband in the background.” Hmm, what else could I tell him -? “They’ve moved around comfortably enough in society, especially the last ten years, but none of them are from society, or I’d have heard. And none of them have serious money - not the way their current circle measures money - but they’re really comfortable; probably at least one of them has managed millionaire status by now, maybe all three.”

“I see,” Giles said. He had that faraway look again, but at the same time he was more intent than I’d seen him before now. “Interesting, and suggestive …” He looked up to me. “I believe I should like to see you finish your list now.”

I frowned. “Look, I’ve told you the public knowledge about them -”

“No, no.” He waved that away. “Your present quandary began when you recognised that you had named, in your initial proposal, the two women who had disappeared. Now there is a third, and you have acknowledged that she would accord with the perhaps half-formed conditions by which you would have drawn such a list.” He tapped the desk where I sat. “Very well, then. You say you would have profiled five, perhaps six women. We have three names now. Write out three more, as you would have done if you followed out your original thought.”

“I can’t …” I fluttered my hands in weak protest. “I can’t just …”

He leaned toward me, insistent. “The concept came from you. The first names came from you. It may be that, in some way we can’t yet understand, you and the killer are following something of the same selection process. So finish the list: not blindly, not at random, but following your natural impulse.” He tapped the desk again. “Thirty seconds should be sufficient, we don’t want you to overthink it. Begin.”

I stared at him, trying to formulate an answer or even to just pull my thoughts together. Then I picked up a pen and began writing on a small memo pad. First the three names we already had; then another; then another; then I crossed that one out, wrote a different one in its place; then, after maybe ten seconds’ consideration, one last name.

Giles seemed to read it in my demeanor or body language. “Finished?”

“Yes.” I shook my head. “This is not what I normally think of as proper investigative technique.”

“Perhaps not.” He reached across, turned the pad to where each of us had a diagonal view of the list. He pointed. “Why did you cross off this name?”

“Martha Allen? She just didn’t quite fit, she’s forty-six years old and she’s spent nearly twenty-five of that building up the charitable foundation she heads. Striking personality, she’d be worth profiling on her own, but … I don’t know, as soon as I wrote her name down I knew it was close but not right.”

“Ah.” He nodded at the list. “And these others?”

“Well, we have Luciana St Claire: television producer, golden touch, splits her time between here and Los Angeles; you know how a new TV series seems to have maybe a twenty-five per cent chance of lasting a full season? well, the shows she green-lights have more than seventy per cent success rate, and most of those go three seasons or more. Lots of boob-tube hotshots talk a big game, but she delivers, and consistently, and she’s been doing it since the mid-Eighties. Debbie Brown: software developer, just got her own company started, there’s talk of an IPO; people like to call her ‘Jill Gates’, but it’s maybe a little early for that. Finally, Clarissa Howsten, she started a small publishing house that landed some big-name authors, leveraged that to land some more, and now it’s a prestige thing and big names are courting her.”

Giles was nodding. “An impressive panoply of names, with an impressive record of achievements. Do they all fit the same profile as the first three?”

For some reason my reaction was defensive. “Look, you asked me to run this out off the top of my head -”

“And you did precisely as I requested, and now I am assessing the results. So: are all these women in their late thirties?”

“I never said that meant anything,” I protested, exasperated. “It was just the first thing I thought of when you wanted to know what they had in common.”

“And I’m not judging, I simply want to clarify. Are the last three women within that age cohort?”

I shook away my annoyance. “Debbie Brown is twenty-eight, I believe. The others, I think they fit.”

“Ah. And the progress of their success?”

“They, I don’t know …” I thought about it. “Well, about the same: steady, solid climb for the last several years … except for Debbie again, she just started showing up in the news within the last six months.”

“I see. Marital status?”

“Um, let’s see: don’t know, don’t know …” I sighed, looked to him. “Debbie Brown is going through a divorce right now, but she is married. I’m crossing her off one line at a time, aren’t I?”

“There is that appearance, yes. Now, what were your other criteria …?” His brow crinkled as he thought. “I can, can only recall one: financial success, in the general range of one million of your dollars.”

“They all qualify there, but you did forget one. I said none of them came from society, and that’s true of the last three, too. I mean, Martha Allen is in the Register, but I already ruled her out for other reasons.”

“Yes, indeed you did.” He was studying the list again. “Something else strikes me, however. Listen.” And he read off all the names, starting from the top. “Danica Carlisle. Amelie Linden. Nicolette Herveaux. Luciana St Claire. Debbie Brown. Clarissa Howsten.” He looked to me. “As Xa-… as a young man I know might say, ‘Which of these things is not like the others?’ ”

I shook my head. “We just went through all that, didn’t we?”

“I don’t mean the individuals as such,” he said. “Simply the names. Look at them again, read them off to yourself.”

I did, and then again. “Huh,” I said. “With ‘Debbie Brown’ sitting in there, it sort of jumps out. That’s the kind of regular name we see all the time. The others, though …”

“The other names are distinctive,” he agreed. “Euphonious. Impressive, even … or, perhaps, designed to impress.” He looked to me, one eyebrow raised. “Might one say … pretentious?”

“They’re …” Again I shook my head. “Okay, yes, they’re the kinds of names you might see in particularly florid romance novels. So, you think these women are being targeted because they have exotic names?”

Giles gave me a smile. “That might indeed be the case,” he murmured. “But my own thought was something else.” He stood up. “Well, as I said at the beginning, we do need more comprehensive knowledge of the backgrounds of all these women. You’re familiar with this city, not only its history and personalities but its norms as well, so you should be the primary investigator for that. I have a, a colleague, however, who can gather data from other channels; I’ll have her relay any findings here, so we can pool her information with our own.” He sighed. “I shall also need to contact my hotel, I’m afraid.”

“Hmm? Why?”

“I had already completed morning check-out,” he explained, “when I saw on the lobby television the news item that changed my plans. I used one of their desk phones to try and call you here, and left a message instead; when you called back, I was considering whether I should come here and attempt to contact you directly. Given the events since then, I shall need to reserve another room, I would expect for at least one night and perhaps longer.”

“Ah. Got it.” I looked at him. “You know how, in a mystery novel or movie or TV episode, the murderer always turns out to be someone who’s already been introduced to the audience?”

He nodded. “I am familiar with the convention, yes.”

“So how do I know that’s not you?” I asked him. “Come to check on what the police know or, heck, even get me to help you pick out your next target?”

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