“What’s so funny?” asked Peter.
“Nothing, just a stupid thought. You might as well come in if you want.” She stepped into the darkened apartment and Peter followed her.
“Gee, sound a little less enthusiastic, why don’t you?” Peter muttered.
A man appeared out of nowhere like a soundless black shadow. A light flashed briefly in Finn’s face and she lifted one arm to cover her eyes, her heart pounding in her chest as fear clutched at her throat.
“What the hell?” was all Peter had time to say.
There was a brief rustling sound from directly in front of them and Finn caught a quick scent of cheap aftershave before something hit her on the side of the head hard enough to take her to her knees. The flashlight? Maybe, because everything was dark now.
She heard Peter rush forward to help her, and in the last split second before the blackness swallowed her, she heard a distant terrible cry cut short by a drawn-out gurgling sigh and she wondered who it was making that awful noise.
6
The man looked as though he was in his middle sixties. He was on the short side, five eight or nine, maybe, and reasonably fit. He had gray crinkly-curly hair fading back to midskull from a widow’s peak that made his forehead look abnormally large. The eyes behind his round, steel-framed glasses were a very dark brown, almost black. He was wearing a nicely tailored navy pinstripe three-piece suit that was probably something safe, like Brooks Brothers, a simple, no-name, crisply starched white shirt and a Turnbull amp; Asser tie with thin, dark blue stripes. The shoes were Bally wing tips. The watch on his right wrist was a gold Bulgari that was a little garish but it matched the Yale ring on the index finger of his left hand. There was no wedding ring. He smelled faintly of Lagerfeld.
Someone had taken a nine-inch-long, curved-blade, Moroccan koummya dagger and jammed it into the man’s mouth, slicing up through the soft palette and into the man’s brain, the exposed end of the weapon sticking out between his lips like some sort of nasty silver-and-black tongue, the long, tooled-metal escutcheon keeping the head lifted slightly off the green leather-and-felt blotter that covered the antique desk. There was very little blood; that was the kind of detail Lieutenant Vincent Delaney of the chief’s Special Action Squad was paid to look out for.
According to the title on the office door, the dead man with a dagger in his mouth was Alexander Crawley, director of the Parker-Hale Museum at Sixty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, directly across from the Central Park Zoo. Delaney glanced out the tall windows at the opposite end of the office. The old-fashioned green velvet drapes were pulled back and tied off with matching velvet ropes. Maybe a baboon in the zoo had seen something but Delaney doubted it. He never had that kind of luck. Actually, he’d never been to the Central Park Zoo and he wasn’t even sure if they had baboons there.
There were four other people in the room: Singh from the M.E.’s office, Don Putkin, the crime scene specialist, Yance the photographer and Sergeant William Boyd, his overweight and badly dressed partner. Billy was watching the dead man’s mouth while Singh turned the neck slightly to check for rigor. There wasn’t any. Downstairs at the cocktail party in the main reception hall there were nine hundred elegantly dressed suspects drinking martinis and wondering what the hell was holding up the hors d’oeuvres. Bigwigs, one and all, from the governor and the mayor on down. Delaney sighed. It was going to be a stinker.
“What’s the word, Singh?”
The man from the medical examiner’s office looked up and shrugged. “Dead maybe an hour, a bit more. No rigor yet. Strangled, probably with a piece of nylon rope. I’ve picked up a few fibers so far. Basically someone got in behind him and garroted him.”
“Any ideas about the dagger?”
“It’s not Pakistani or Indian. I can tell you that much. Too long. Probably Berber. Arabic of some kind, by the look of the design work.”
“You said he was garroted,” said Billy, still staring at the dagger. “He wasn’t stabbed?”
“Maybe some kind of ritual thing. The victim was already dead when the dagger was inserted.”
“Some kind of freak,” said Delaney.
“Not for me to say.” Singh shrugged again. “Who knows, maybe he just didn’t like art.”
Delaney’s cell phone twinkled at him, playing the Simpsons theme. His teenage daughter had programmed it in as a joke, and he kept seeing Bart skateboarding through Springfield every time it rang. He popped open the phone, listened for a moment, grunted once or twice and then clapped the phone shut.
Delaney looked across at Billy. “Go find out if they’ve got an intern here named Ryan, would you? First name Finn.”
7
The man sat in full uniform in the empty room. It was nothing more than a cell, really, with bare white concrete walls, a gray-painted wooden chair and a single small opening for ventilation in the far wall, always closed, always covered, even in the heat of summer. The only furniture in the room was an army cot and blanket in one corner, a chair and a long table for his work, a combination draftsman’s lamp and magnifying lens clamped to one corner. It was the only light in the room-the only one necessary. He did not read there, or eat there or do anything else there except sleep and sit in his chair, working. Sometimes he thought for long periods at a time, but any thinking he did could be done in the dark. There was no sound except the hollow thunder in the distance and the rustling noises of small animals and mad things that could just as easily be in his overburdened mind.
He stood and went to the heavy steel door in his room. First he made sure all the locking mechanisms were in place and then he undressed slowly, hanging each piece of his uniform on the brass hook on his door. His boots he took and placed neatly at the end of his army cot. When he was completely naked he returned to his chair and sat down again. He saw that he was hard but he ignored it. He’d had no one to share his passion with for many years, so it was better to simply disregard it.
He reached out, picked a fresh pair of surgical gloves out of the box on his table and ran his fingers over the thick, carved leather cover of the immense, heavy book that sat in the absolute perfect center of the table.
The motif of the cover was simple and explicit, one of the first such things he had attempted: a deeply carved cross, lines radiating out from it like beams from a star. Hanging upside down was the Virgin Mother, hands nailed to the upright, legs spread on the crosspiece, revealing her agony at both her crucifixion and the birth of the only child she would ever have-a child born ascending, not to earth, but to his place beside his Father. God’s child, his power killing her even as she died willingly on the cross to bear him, never to know the immensity of what she was birthing. The wonder of him and the fury, his commitment to a just and true revenge for the world. The naked man prayed briefly to the Mother then opened the book to the last page he had been working on and began a new verse.
Since it was the first of the column it would need to be illuminated as in any Bible. He opened the small glue pot, and, using his finest brush, he drew a faint line of the thin, sticky liquid along the penciled outline of the letter. He blew on it carefully then used a block of gold leaf, sliding a single sheet off the block with a cotton swab to cover the glue line.
He waited patiently, letting the tissue-thin leaf set with the glue, then used a wider and softer sable brush to remove the excess gold. He’d already chosen the color he would use for the interior of the letter: copper red, just like the girl’s hair, like the smell of fresh blood on a hot summer day, the way it must have been so long ago.
8
Finn sat huddled on the end of the couch as the paramedic dabbed at her temple with an alcohol swab. The woman was black and fat and very gentle.
“Must have used some kind of sap or something. Skin’s barely broken. There’ll be a bump but not much else. You were lucky, girl.”