I shut off the machine, popped the tape out and handed it to Jordain. “I need it back. You can make a copy, can’t you?”
“Yes.” He practically snatched it out of my hand. I stared at his fingers. I remembered them playing piano. And playing me a few nights ago. I couldn’t make the connection between that man and this detective.
“What is going on in here?” Her voice was strident and furious at the same time. Nina had never sounded so outraged. Perez and Jordain turned but she ignored them. Her anger was not directed at them. She glared at me. Whatever our attempt at reconciliation had accomplished the other night, it had been undone by having a contingent of policemen inside the Butterfield Institute taking a patient, even a potential patient, away in handcuffs.
Fifty-Four
Perez and Jordain stared at the living room wall. In its way, it was eerily like their own wall at the precinct house. Lessor had papered it from one end to the other with every newspaper article about the Delilah murders. There was a design to the black-and-white clippings, graphically annotated with red markings: a map of a madman’s mind.
Jordain started at the right, Perez at the left. They walked from one end to the other, reading mostly to themselves until they found a section that Paul Lessor had underlined. Those they read out loud.
The two policemen who’d gotten there earlier showed the detectives what they had found in their search of the apartment.
“Did you find anything at all that could suggest where the bodies are?” Perez asked.
Both Reston and Douglas said they hadn’t, but they showed the detectives the medicine cabinet full of pill bottles, including Thorazine and half a dozen other antipsychotic drugs. Most of them were half full.
“He’s been on everything,” Perez said. “It’s a freaking drugstore in here.”
An hour later, the wall had been photographed and, piece by piece, the art director’s lair had been dismantled. Nothing had been found to lead them to their next destination in this search.
Often serial killers take souvenirs of their victims, but nothing in the apartment suggested that Paul had done this. There were no weapons. No restraints. There was no evidence of any blood on any of the man’s clothes, but they bagged all of his dirty laundry from the hamper in the bathroom so that the lab could go over it.
“This place is so small there’s nowhere he could hide anything, but just in case he brought those men here, let’s get the place printed.”
One of the backups went to work on that.
“I don’t like this guy as much as I thought I would,” Jordain said after two and a half hours.
“Why’s that?”
“Other than his obsession with the stories, there’s just nothing here.”
“I’m betting he’s got some other place somewhere. Out of the city. He’s a successful art director at a big publishing company. Probably makes more than enough for a weekender upstate or even in the Hamptons.”
“We’ll know that as soon as we get a court order for Lessor’s bank statements, mortgage papers, phone records. It sure would solve a lot of problems if I am wrong and you are right.”
“And this time I bet you wouldn’t even mind,” Perez said.
“Not one little bit.”
Jordain was sitting at Lessor’s desk. Everything was neatly put away. One thing that had struck him about the whole apartment was how uncluttered and organized it was. Even the newspapers on the walls were carefully cut out. The underlining was all done in the same red ink.
He opened the maroon leather address book that sat in the right-hand corner of the maroon leather desk pad. Inside, page after page was filled in a studied and artful handwriting.
Nothing was out of order.
“Let’s get this cross-referenced,” he said to Douglas.
Butler had spent the past few days entering the information from each of the victims’ address books and PDAs into a computer. Cross-references might lead them to the killer. Or to someone who knew all four men. Or who might at least know what their connection was.
So far there were only a few matches in the books. A movie theater. The New York Department of Motor Vehicles. Bloomingdale’s. And a few restaurants, but that wasn’t all that unusual. They all lived in Manhattan, were all well off, were all professionals.
Maybe Lessor’s book would offer up something else.
Jordain had picked up the book and was about to bag it when he shook his head. “Jeezus…”
“What is it?” Perez spun around.
“We are so fucking stupid sometimes.” He pulled out his cell phone and dialed Butler. She answered on the first ring.
“Take off his goddamn shoes and socks and tell me if he’s got the mark on his foot.”
Fifty-Five
Nina listened to my explanation of what had happened in the consultation with Paul Lessor. She’d frowned when I described the razor blade and how he had held it up in the light. She’d leaned forward when I explained how he had started to lactate and how I’d put that together with a long-term Thorazine patient and what I knew from Jordain about the victims possibly being drugged with Thorazine before they had died.
Nina’s loyalty to those she loved was legendary. And so was the depth of her anger.
Over the years, everyone who worked with her had seen her go into battle for a patient, oppose interference from outside authorities, fight off family members who were detrimental to the patient’s regaining his or her mental health.
In the past four months, I had seen her angry more often than in the past thirty years. First over my involvement with the police in the Magdalene Murders, and now with the Scarlet Society case.
But that had been nothing compared to this.
What she said after I finished came hurtling out with a suppressed force that surprised me. She didn’t yell; in fact, her voice was like a whisper. But harsh. Her mouth was pursed and the vertical lines above her upper lip-usually almost invisible-were white with rage.
“You do not call the police to come into this institute and take a patient away in cuffs.”
“I explained to you he was not a patient. He was here for a consultation. But that was a ruse. He was here to threaten me, Nina. He had a razor blade. He knew things about the men who have been killed. He was threatening me.”
“How do you know that he was dangerous? How do you know he wasn’t simply delusional? How do you know that razor blade wasn’t only a prop?”
“I don’t, but I couldn’t take a chance. The man had a weapon.”
“You have worked with hardened prisoners. You know karate and self-defense. We all do. You know exactly what to do when someone comes at you. If he had a gun, if you were here alone at night, that might have been different. You weren’t. He didn’t. You were out of line here, Morgan. You were looking for an excuse to call the police. You’ve been looking for an excuse for days.”
“That isn’t true.”
Her well-shaped eyebrows arched high in disbelief. “Isn’t it?”
“Are you insinuating that I’m lying?”
“No. I’m assuming that you are not facing the truth.”
“Have I ever done that before?”
“That doesn’t mean you are not doing it now,” Nina said. “You’re not dealing with how you feel about this detective.”
“I am dealing with what I know about this spate of killings.”
“We’ve been over this before, haven’t we? What you know about the Scarlet Society can’t help the police. But that’s not the issue here. We’re talking about you calling them here.”
“I’m telling you that he was threatening me. That I thought there was a real possibility he is the killer and that he had come to make sure I didn’t help the police figure out who he was. Why he thought I could, I don’t know. Something about what I’d been quoted as saying in the paper. But how much of this matters anymore? They have him in custody. No matter what he did or didn’t do, the man brought what I perceived as a weapon into my office. Nina, what if he had jumped on me and cut me? What if he’d lucked out and slit an artery?”