Sean McCarthy took a chair opposite Mike's desk. Greene closed the door to his office and slumped in his chair.
About four years ago a doctor named Vincent Cardoni was accused of torturing several victims in a house in Milton County. That was your case, right?
It was a Milton County case, but I assisted, McCarthy answered.
Frank Jaffe represented Cardoni. His daughter, Amanda, is representing Justine Castle, Cardoni's ex-wife, in a case with several similarities to the old case. Amanda thinks her client has been set up by Cardoni.
Cardoni is dead.
That's what Alex DeVore said, but Amanda says that no body was ever found.
That's true.
So ... ?
McCarthy was quiet for a moment. How similar are the crime scenes?
Amanda says they're almost identical.
Really. Identical how?
Greene found the crime scene photographs and handed them to McCarthy. The detective shuffled through them slowly. He kept one picture and set the stack down on Greene's desk.
What do you think? the deputy DA asked.
McCarthy turned over the picture he was holding. It showed the half-filled coffee mug that had been found on the drain board in the farmhouse kitchen.
Did the lab find Justine Castle's fingerprints on this mug? McCarthy asked.
Greene nodded. They were on a scalpel with the blood of one of the victims on it, too.
That really bothers me.
Why?
We found more or less the same thing in the house in Milton County four years ago. The press knew about the scalpel, but we never told them about the coffee mug.
What about the motion to suppress?
A list of the items seized was submitted, but there was no mention that prints were found on any of them.
So you think that someone who knew about the mug set up Justine Castle?
Or she poured herself some coffee while she was working. A year or so after Cardoni disappeared I had a drink with Frank Jaffe. At one point the conversation turned to the Cardoni case. Frank told me that Justine Castle had given the coffee mug to Cardoni as a present and Cardoni claimed the mug had been stolen from his office at St. Francis. Cardoni thought that Justine Castle had used the mug and the scalpel to set him up.
Chapter 40
The weather front that had bedeviled Oregon for the past week was attacking again. Sheet after sheet of heavy rain bombarded Amanda's car. Even with the wipers on full, the visibility was so poor that Amanda counted herself lucky when she spotted the gap in the fence that bordered the farm. As soon as she turned onto the driveway the car started hitting puddles and potholes. Rain pounded the roof. Amanda's high beams raked the darkness, illuminating trees and shrubs before spotlighting the yellow crime scene tape that stretched across the door to the farmhouse.
Amanda shut off the engine and sat listening to the rain. She had convinced herself that she would know if Cardoni had created both chambers of horror simply by walking through the farmhouse. Now that she was here, the idea sounded ridiculous. Amanda turned on the interior light and took another look at the pictures that Mike Greene had given her. One showed the graveyard surrounded by trees and far from the boundaries of the property: a place that would be hard to find accidentally. She flipped to the next shot. Three bodies, all showing marks of torture, lay stretched out on a ground sheet. A tarp had been erected over them to keep the corpses as dry as possible. A close-up of a female victim showed the abuse the frail body had taken in the days before she died.
Another set of photographs showed the interior of the farmhouse. Amanda shuffled quickly past the close-ups of the body in the basement. One long look when she first saw the photos had been enough. She reviewed the other pictures before realizing that she was stalling. Amanda grabbed a flashlight and ran through the rain until she reached the overhang that covered the front door. She ripped away the bright yellow tape and walked inside.
Amanda played the beam of her flashlight over the entryway and the living room. They were as bare and sparsely furnished as the house in Milton County had been. Amanda found the bedroom. The police had left the furniture after dusting it for prints and scouring it for trace evidence, but they had taken the books and the journal from the bookcase. Amanda tried to imagine the killer sitting in the armchair and thumbing through the manuals in preparation for the next torture session. What type of monster could coldly plan the ritual degradation of another human being?
Amanda walked back through the living room to the kitchen. Outside, the wind gusted, rattling the shutters and skittering across the roof. Amanda felt a flutter in her stomach when she turned the knob of the basement door and looked into the dark space below. She flicked a light switch, and a bare bulb lit the lower part of the basement stairs. An oil-burning furnace stood in one corner. In another corner a rectangular patch of floor, cleaner than the area surrounding it, told her where the mattress had lain before forensics had removed it. She saw holes in the wall where the manacles had been secured; these too had been moved to the crime lab. Then she noticed the crudely mortared concrete wall that divided the basement in half.
The wall looked as if it had been constructed by a do-it-yourselfer from a how-to book. Amanda descended the stairs and peered through an opening that led into a dark space where the light from the 40-watt bulb barely reached. Amanda turned on her flashlight and shone it through the doorway. The operating table was there. Above it was another bulb. Amanda pulled the string attached to it, and the light illuminated a space bare except for the operating table. Everything else from the room had gone to the crime lab. Suddenly she flashed on an image of Mary Sandowski's tearstained face, and a wave of nausea surged through her. She shut her eyes for a moment and breathed deeply. There was no way that she could prove it, but there was absolutely no doubt. The person who had turned the mountain cabin into a place of horror had been at work here.
Amanda circled the table. Fingerprint powder darkened the steel legs. She knelt down and saw a dark brown fleck. Was that blood? She stared at it for a moment, then stood up.
A man was standing in the doorway.
Chapter 41
The man stepped out of the shadows, blocking the only way out. He was wearing a rain-drenched trench coat. Amanda raised the flashlight and retreated.
I' m not here to hurt you, the man said, raising an empty hand, palm outstretched. I' m Bobby Vasquez.
It took a moment, then Amanda recognized the intruder. Vasquez's face was fleshy. Rain dripped from his long, unkempt black hair; a bushy mustache covered his upper lip. Under the open raincoat Amanda could see faded jeans, a flannel shirt and a threadbare sports jacket.
I didn't mean to scare you, Vasquez told her. I tried to talk to you at the Justice Center, but I couldn't get close with all the reporters.
Vasquez paused. He saw that Amanda was frightened and wary.
Do you remember me? he asked.
The motion to suppress.
Not exactly my shining hour, Vasquez said grimly. But I was right about Cardoni. He killed those people in Milton County and he killed these people, too. You know it, don't you? That's why you're here.
Amanda forgot her fear. What makes you think he's alive?
Look at this place. When I read about the graveyard and the operating room, I knew.
What about the hand? Cardoni was a surgeon. He wouldn't cut off his hand.
Cardoni counted on everyone buying into that notion, that a surgeon would never amputate his own hand. But most surgeons aren't being hunted by a maniac like Martin Breach.
Or facing a death sentence.
That too. Plus, this guy is flat-out insane.
Amanda shook her head. I want to believe Cardoni did this. The crime scenes are so alike. But I always come back to the hand. How could he do it? How could he cut off his own hand?