A grim-faced Chang and Pizaka picked up the twins an hour later, from their office. Chang called Meghan when they drove up to the front of their building, and didn’t answer their expectant looks when they seated themselves in the large vehicle.
‘Where is it?’ Beth asked Pizaka and got only her reflection on his polished shades, in response.
Chang turned on the lights and siren and traffic melted away as he raced through gridlock and an ocean of honking. He was tight-lipped as he sped up Henry Hudson Parkway and just as Meghan thought he’d take the George Washington Bridge, he turned right.
On to the Cross Bronx Expressway, their radio whispering softly on the dash, riding the concrete and steel structure of Throgs Neck Bridge, and forty minutes later, he pulled up beside other cruisers in Queens Village.
Chang and Pizaka spoke to other cops who looked in the direction of the twins and made way for them.
Meghan ducked under yellow tape and followed her sister and the two cops as they went through a large gate and stopped at the sight of buildings, several of them, arranged around a large yard.
‘It was an asylum at one time,’ Chang waited for her to catch up. ‘For those declared to be insane. It’s now owned by the city, maybe not for long.’
‘The heir of the original owners is claiming it back. Legal battle,’ he explained.
They hurried to join Pizaka and Beth who were making haste across the vast yard, toward a building in a corner.
Building 26, declared a stark sign.
Meghan suppressed a shiver as they navigated crumbling pieces of concrete and stepped inside the building. It was dark, damp, and once lay silent. Now it was flooded with cops, floodlights, and forensic technicians.
Beside what might once have been a reception desk was a flight of stairs. Pizaka took them down to a basement, along a hallway and through several doors and when he opened the last one, stepped aside for them to have their first view. The room was large and had a high ceiling, for a basement. It looked like it had been a store with pieces of furniture and medical equipment scattered in it.
There was a central table of stainless steel, above which was a naked light bulb. The stench of rat feces filled the room, but even through that, Meghan could detect the odor of human flesh, and death.
A white-coated technician opened a large closet and pointed to the dark stains on its walls.
‘We found a body here,’ Chang came up behind Meghan and showed how the body lay in the closet. ‘We’re still trying to identify it.’
Meghan’s breath stuttered as if she had been punched. She spun on her heels, her eyes widening, seeing the answer in his eyes even before she asked, ‘is it her?’
‘It’s female, that’s all we know for now,’ he answered heavily.
‘A bird dropped a finger, not far from here.’ Chang showed them around the room while Pizaka stood at the entrance talking to other police officers. ‘It took a while for that digit to get to us, but when we did, we searched every alley, every nook. We knew about the asylum, but it had escaped our previous searches for some reason.’
‘This was the killing table,’ he drew them back to the center of the room, to the steel table which gleamed dully under the lights. It was scratched and scarred and on closer inspection, Meghan found it had restraining belts at its bottom.
She fingered one belt, realized suddenly what it had been used for, and dropped it as if it had burned her.
‘Restraints,’ Chang said unnecessarily. ‘Lots of DNA on it, in fact all over the room.’ He stopped avoiding Meghan and Beth’s eyes finally. ‘Lab’s still working. We got here at four am. Give them time. Maybe there’ll be traces of Cali.’
Soft murmuring, Pizaka and the cops, was the only sound in the basement for long minutes, before Beth pushed her brown hair back and sighed. ‘How do you know it’s Cain?’
Pizaka came up to them, removing his shades and pocketing them. The grimness left his face, replaced by a lighter expression. Not a smile, but close enough. ‘We found a journal.’
The journal, a notebook whose brown cover was faded, some of its pages falling out, had been found inside a sleeping bag. The sleeping bag had been found stuffed in a cardboard box, which also had a change of clothes, all black.
Another cardboard box held a velvet case. A white-coated technician opened it and revealed knives, scalpels, a small hammer, a saw…Beth closed her eyes, trying to wash away the images the sight of the instruments brought.
‘Are those what I think they are?’
‘Yeah,’ Chang replied. He didn’t look sleepy anymore. The early morning rise, the long hours, didn’t show. He was alert, his suit was crisply ironed, for a change.
Maybe he ironed it at four am knowing this discovery would close a big case, Beth thought inadvertently. A knife caught the light and winked evilly at her. The room is shabby, run down. Not the instruments. He took good care of them.
‘What’s in the journal?’ Meghan asked when the technician had put away the killing tools. She breathed deeply as they left the grisly basement behind, and entered the yard. Flashes caught her eye and she turned to see a phalanx of photographers and reporters at the gate.
The media had turned up, and in force. She turned her back on them and despite the surroundings and the discovery, couldn’t suppress a smile at Pizaka’s actions.
His shades had gone back on his face, his hands were instinctively smoothing his jacket. He can smell interviews in the air.
‘Not much. It’s disappointing. No names. No records of victims. A lot of doodling and drawing that’s meaningless. Just a few lines on a page. Here, you can see for yourself.’
Chang opened the photo gallery app on his phone and selected several images and handed his phone over to the twins.
The first page had a name scrawled on it, confirming the identity of the killer.
CAIN.
The scrawl was strong, and slanted upwards. Thick lines, neat spaces between the letters. Blue ink, probably a ballpoint pen.
‘Yeah, we’ve got ink and handwriting experts on it too,’ Chang sensed Meghan’s question and answered it.
Several pages of aimless lines and random circles followed.
Today’s was good. She resisted a long time.
There was no date to the entry. No reference to the victim. Who they were probably didn’t matter to him. How long they lasted under his knives… a sudden rage swept through her, blinding her, making her hands shake. It disappeared as quickly as it had come and left her cold and empty.
Beth took the phone from her trembling fingers and swiped through more images till she came to the last sentence.
They feed me women.
Chang raised his hand in surrender before either of them could utter a word. ‘Don’t ask me. I’ve no idea what that means.’
Beth handed the phone back to Chang and looked around when a thought struck her, ‘I thought Cain was Bennett and Johnson’s case. Where’re they?’
Chang jerked a thumb at the crowd at the gate. ‘Giving interviews. Zak’s not liking that,’ he smirked.
It was late evening when Meghan got the call from Chang.
They had left the two cops at the asylum after viewing all there was to see. The action had moved to the forensic labs; they would put names to the DNA, wherever they could, and would seek to identify the killer known only as Cain.
‘No match,’ Chang sounded tired and Meghan could picture him pinching the bridge of his nose, his feet on his desk. ‘That body we found is Jane Doe. Her DNA doesn’t exist in the system.’
‘Other DNA findings?’ her voice was taut, fearful of the answer. Beth gripped her shoulder reassuringly as they bent over the phone, waiting for Chang.
‘Not Cali's.’
A deep sigh left Meghan as she sagged back, the coiled tension in her unwinding slowly. She was aware of Beth asking more questions, Chang responding, but she wasn’t paying attention anymore.
Not Cali's. Those were the only words ringing in her mind.
‘Maybe you were right all along,’ Beth acknowledged as she heated bowls of soup for the two of them. Dinner in the office. Just them and Werner, who eschewed human food. Zeb had disappeared somewhere on one of his errands.
‘Doesn’t mean much. Our investigation just got more complicated.’ Meghan closed her eyes as the warm liquid filled her mouth and teased her taste buds.
‘No idea where to–’ She froze as a synapse fired in her mind, a connection was made, and something at the edge of her memory became clearer.
She slammed the spoon down with a clatter, grabbed her jacket, pocketed the SUV’s keys and shouted over her shoulder, ‘Come on.’
The drive didn’t take long, but connecting to Chang on the way took more time. He sounded as if he’d woken from sleep when Meghan posed her question.
‘No.’ Just that one word from him before he crashed his phone shut.
That one word was enough for Meghan to floor it and minutes later, she came to a skidding stop in front of her destination.
‘Why’re we here again?’ Beth gasped as she recognized the building and hurried after her sister.
Meghan didn’t reply. She jabbed a finger in the elevator button and crossed her arms and looked at the numbers as they sped up, as it carried them.
‘Surely we should ask permission,’ Beth protested when Meghan bent to pick the lock expertly.
Meghan swung open the door in reply and entered the apartment. She went immediately to the bedroom and rummaged through stacks of clothes, notebooks, and binders.
She dragged out the notebooks and riffled through them one by one after seating herself on the bed.
‘Can I help, or is this a one woman show?’ Beth mocked her as she watched her sister discard one book and pick up another.
Meghan tossed her a handful of books and ordered, ‘Search for any reference to Cali and her group of researchers.’
‘Your wish is my command,’ Beth saluted her and started flicking through the first book. ‘Can this humble servant ask why?’
She sighed and got to reading when no reply came.
An hour went past. From the hallway outside the apartment, they heard noises of people coming, a few raucous folks shouting. No one came to their apartment. The pile of notebooks grew and when it had finished, Meghan started on the folders.
She controlled the sinking feeling growing in her and flipped through the first one, the pages moving in a blur. The folders didn’t have any answer.
She rose, disheveled, and surveyed the mess in the room. There was a desk in one corner which once had housed a computer. In its place was clean white space that dust hadn’t covered yet.
Next to it were more papers and a thick binder. There were work related notes in it and just as she was tossing it away, several entries caught her eye. She ran her finger down them and stopped at the third from the last.
Beth started when Meghan whooped loudly and fist pumped. ‘What? What is it?’
Her mouth turned into an O when she read the entry. ‘You think...?’
‘It’s worth a try. Let me call Chang.’
Chang wasn’t a happy cop when he picked up after the third ring. ‘New York’s Finest aren’t at their best at one am,’ he snapped.
‘Take this down,’ Meghan ordered peremptorily.
Chang swore softly and called out to a female voice, ‘It’s alright, honey, just some pesky do-gooders.’
‘This had better be worth it,’ he warned when he found a notepad.
It was.
The next morning, he confirmed the body they’d found was Lian Cheng Vaughn's.