Detective Carson Ryder Thriller Series Books 4-6: Blood Brother, In the Blood, Little Girls Lost. J. Kerley A.
pushed aside files on his desk to make a place for his elbows and flicked a paper at me, Office of the Medical Examiner on the letterhead.
“The prelims on the autopsies. Both were done last night and side-by-side. Folger and I pushed it through.”
I grimaced at the bullet-pointed information. “The womb was taken?”
“Basically, the victims received amateur hysterectomies. I attended the post mortem. The pathologist told me it was like an angry monkey hacking away with a knife. When all that was over, the head was pushed into the wound.”
The picture that came to my mind was so ugly I shut it off.
“Jesus. Forensics find anything useful?”
“We’re screwed by the hairs and fibers on the scene. But we did ID the victim. Dora Anderson, thirty-six years of age. She works for the realtor. She went there to meet a prospective buyer.”
“Alone? At night?”
“It’s a fairly upscale neighborhood. The guy must have presented himself benignly on the phone. She felt safe in his presence, obviously.”
A man who could tear another person apart and still present a perfectly normal appearance and demeanor was a total psychopath, a human chameleon. I shivered involuntarily and tossed the prelim on Shelly’s desk. It felt greasy in my hands, like the vileness of the murder had tainted the paper.
“You realize our perp hates women, right? More than anything?”
He nodded. “By removing the womb, he castrated her. I’ve seen my share of gender kills, though nothing quite that extreme.”
“Shelly, you’ve got a real nightmare brewing out there.”
Waltz’s phone rang. He grabbed it up. I turned my eyes away and pretended not to listen but, like everyone in the world, cops especially, kept an ear tuned to his voice.
“I’m in the middle of a … She’s in town? The Chief wants me specifically? No, I can do it. I’ve got to do it, right? Listen, we have a guy here, a specialist in, uh, people with bad intentions. OK to bring him along? Good. We’re heading there now.”
He hung up. “I know you heard that, Detective. I’d be disappointed if you hadn’t.”
“I take it we’re going somewhere?”
“There’s a political convention in a week or so, women from around the country, leadership types. I’m supposed to vet the threats, determine which are hot air, which are truly dangerous.”
“Threats?”
“The keynote speaker is Cynthia Pelham.”
“Holy shit,” I whispered. Cynthia Pelham had been on the American political scene for over twenty-five years. Her saga started at age twenty-three, when the county sweet-potato queen with two years of junior college married a fifty-eight-year-old senator from Georgia.
By thirty, she was making statements contrary to the senator’s positions regarding women’s right to equal pay and maternity leave. She had three-fourths of a law degree, obtained at night, since she’d had to spend her days on the senator’s arm and smiling the sweet-potato smile at cameras.
By thirty-five, she had the degree, but not the senator. Following a high-profile divorce, the senator’s allies, of whom there were many, spread rumors that Cynthia Pelham was – depending on the day and rumormonger – a lesbian, a woman who bedded every man she saw, frigid, a drug addict, a drunkard and, according to the New York Watcher, maybe even an extraterrestrial. Ms Pelham’s friends, of whom there were few at that time, simply said, “She grew up.”
By forty, Pelham was representing a mainly poor congressional district with such concern and passion she was uncontested in the next election. Since she was unmarried, held centrist feminist ideals, and kept her personal life personal, rumors of lesbianism persisted, her denials met with scorn. Websites and blogs sprang up calling for either her vilification or beatification.
By fifty-two, her present age, she had been convinced by grass-roots support and a generous helping of ambition – never denied – to run for President of the United States. Though bitterly divisive among partisans and ideologues, she wielded enough centrist appeal that odds were even money she’d win.
A few nights back I’d seen news from a typical Pelham event in Miami. Three-quarters of the crowd were supporters, the others ranting, waving fists, and carrying signs and posters. One showed a mangy female dog with bloated teats, Pelham’s face in place of the dog head. The caption said, “Time to Put the Bitch to Sleep.”
I said, “How long will Pelham be here, Shelly?”
“She’s coming to coordinate the eastern seaboard campaigns. The lady will be in and out of town all the next week.”
“What about the Secret Service?”
“They’ll accompany Pelham while we vet everything else.”
“‘We’ meaning you?”
“Basic security isn’t my problem, a special team handles the bodyguard routine, checking traffic routes and so forth.” He sighed. “The Chief wants me to explain to Ms Pelham’s handlers how the NYPD will keep snakes from wriggling under her door.”
I nodded my sympathy. Given Pelham’s flashpoint index it would take someone with experience to determine which threats were hot air and which were dangerous. It was nasty work, like dredging sewage with your fingers.
Waltz stood and grabbed his hat. “Like you heard, I bartered you into the mix. Straighten your tie and let’s get running.”
The powwow was at Ms Pelham’s NYC headquarters, a storefront near Cooper Union. There were the usual banners and posters and photos of the candidate. The desks were staffed by earnest-looking folks with phones in one hand, pencils in the other.
We met in a back room with Ronald Banks, a square, bespectacled African-American Secret Service agent in charge of the operation. I took the room to be a place for strategizing, a large map of NYC on the wall, broken down into precincts, voting registrations or projections sticky-taped to the map. There was a round table, a few chairs. Boxes of campaign flyers on the floor.
“She getting many threats?” Waltz asked Banks.
“People love her or hate her. The ones who hate her all seem to have rabies. Good luck, Detective Waltz.”
Our heads turned to a commotion in the work area: Cheers, applause, whistles. Either someone was dispensing free money, or the candidate was visiting. Three minutes later, Cynthia Pelham entered our room, two aides de camp in her slipstream. Somewhere along the road the sweet-potato queen had been replaced by a whirlwind in a pantsuit and sensible shoes. She ran to a corner, cellphone to one ear, finger in the other, talking as loud as if she were alone for miles around.
“Dammit, I don’t care how much money he has, the sonuvabitch is trailing garbage. The day after we take his donation the bastard will be indicted for screwing a goat or something. See if you can piss him off and maybe he’ll give the money to the other side …”
The second she snapped the phone closed it rang again. She listened for a ten-count. “The answers are, respectively, Yes, Yes, No, Hell yes, and the lobster bisque.” She switched the phone off and tossed it to a woman beside her, a petite blonde with quiet eyes and a square jaw who tucked the phone in a fat briefcase I figured doubled as the candidate’s purse.
The sweet-potato queen had turned from a pretty girl into a handsome woman, auburn hair now mixed with gray, her form shaded to the heavier side, skin lined with experience. The eyes that looked piercing on television seemed more curious in real life. She aimed the eyes at Waltz and me, moved to us as if pulled by gravity.
“You gentlemen look official. Am I triple-parked again?”