part0018

“Detective Stone.”

“Speaking.”

“Dr. Saul Lipschitz.”

Sentences were obviously not the big thing with Lipschitz.

“Good morning. Thanks for calling.”

I heard a faint grunt. “How do you think I can help you?”

“We need to know more about your wife, Dr. Lipschitz, about her background, her private life...”

“Out of the question.”

I put it on speaker and set my phone on the desk. Dehan leaned forward. I said, “What makes you say that, Dr. Lipschitz?”

“My wife’s private life is none of your concern.”

Dehan answered. “With all due respect, Dr. Lipschitz, you don’t get to decide what is and isn’t our concern.”

“Who is that?”

“This is Detective Dehan, and the way it works, Doctor, is that witnesses don’t get to decide what is and isn’t relevant to our investigation.”

“Dehan? You are impertinent, Detective Dehan.”

His tone of voice sounded more amused than annoyed. Dehan’s face said she wasn’t all that amused. “On the contrary, Doctor. What I am saying is directly pertinent. Now, are you willing to help us find your wife’s killer, or are you going to continue to be a damned oysshteler ?”

I smiled at her, but her cheeks were flushed and her eyes were bright. She looked genuinely mad. There was a long moment’s silence, then, “I fail to see how my wife’s private life...”

I was getting bored so I interrupted. “Dr. Lipschitz, we have a couple of suspects, but we need to know how the killer came into contact with her in the first place.”

“What do you mean, came into contact with her?”

I raised my eyes at Dehan. “I don’t know how to put this without being blunt, Doctor? You’re not making it easy. Clearly the killer selected Mrs. Lipschitz as a victim? So it stands to reason that before doing that, he must have become aware of her. So how did that happen? Did they shop at the same supermarket? Did they use the same dentist? Was she attending evening classes?”

“ We had a housekeeper who took care of the household shopping. I very much doubt they used the same dentist, but I am happy to send you the contact details of our dentists. She was not attending evening classes. Anything else?”

Dehan stared at me a moment and then spoke in a tight voice.

“Dr. Lipschitz, it is very hard to escape the feeling that you are deliberately trying to conceal the killer’s identity.”

“That’s absurd!”

“Is it? I am pretty sure that if we start investigating, we could find dozens of reasons why you might want to conceal the killer’s identity. I have to tell you, Dr. Lipschitz, that in my experience, spouses who are reluctant to have the police investigate the murder of their husband or wife are hiding something, and often or not that something is the fact that they themselves murdered their partner...”

“How dare you!”

“Yeah, I dare, Doctor. Just like I dare to send a couple of cars over to the hospital to haul you in as a material witness and charge you with obstructing justice. I have to tell you that it stinks in my nostrils that we are trying to find your wife’s killer, and all you give a damn about is avoiding scandal among your colleagues. Well that’s tough, Doctor. We can do this the easy way or the tough way. You choose.”

“You’re threatening me.”

I glanced at Dehan and smiled again. “Yes.”

“You can’t...”

“Dr. Lipschitz, I have a lot of work to do. I will do you the courtesy of trying to keep you and Sharon out of the media, but frankly I am getting bored with this conversation. Are you going to cooperate or do I have to haul you in?”

He was quiet for a while and I began to think he might have walked away, but then he said:

“What do you want to know?”

“Does the name James Campbell mean anything to you?”

“No. I don’t know any James Campbell.”

“What about Nelson Vargas?”

“No. Who are these people?”

“Did your wife ever speak to you about any religious sects? Did she ever show interest in any religious movements that struck you as peculiar?”

“Sharon was not especially religious. She was a practicing Jew, as am I. She was far more interested in day-to-day, practical issues than in abstract concepts of religion and philosophy.”

“Was she a feminist?” It was Dehan.

The irritation was palpable in his voice. “What can that possibly have to do...”

I interrupted him. “Dr. Lipschitz. I assure you you are not the only busy person on the planet. We are trying to catch a serial killer who may, right now, be killing his seventh victim. Now do me a favor and answer the damned question. Was she a feminist?”

Another silence. “No. Like most intelligent people she was aware of the disparities that exist, but she was not a feminist. Neither was she a submissive woman.”

Dehan asked, “When you went out in the evening, did you always go together? Did she ever go out alone?”

“No, we always went out together.”

“Have you heard of the Mescal Club, in the South Bronx?”

“Hardly!”

“It is very important that you answer this truthfully, Dr. Lipschitz. Is it possible that your wife ever went there, with girlfriends, work colleagues…?”

“No. Absolutely not. And if she had, I would remember. It was a golden rule in our house: we go to bed together and we get up together, and we never go to bed angry. That was my grandfather’s recipe for a happy marriage, and it worked. The idea of her going to a nightclub, especially in the Bronx, alone is preposterous.”

“Dr. Lipschitz, where were you...”

“Dr. Hoffman told me you would ask this. The day Claire Carter was murdered I was in surgery from ten in the morning until six in the evening. I had my secretary make a list of the dates of the other Mommy’s Boy murders and correlate them with my schedule at the time. I believe she has sent them to your email at the 43rd Precinct. I have no recollection of what I was doing, but she tells me I was either in surgery or at conferences in most cases, if not all. I am sorry I can’t help you any more than that.”

“What car do you drive, Dr. Lipschitz?”

“A Bentley, why?”

“Thank you for your help, Dr. Lipschitz. We’ll be in touch if we need anything else.”

I hung up and sat staring at Dehan, who was looking at the backs of her fingers. She shook her head, like she wasn’t convinced they were her fingers at all, and said, “I think the technical term for what we are at the moment is ‘screwed.’”

I grunted. “I was thinking of a shorter, Norse farming term.”

She scowled at me. “You would. A Norse farming term?”

“Four letters, starts with an ‘F’ and means to plow and plant seeds.”

“Seriously...”

“Yup, and I won’t tell you what the furrow was called.”

“Another four-letter word?”

“The Norse peoples were very brief and concise in how they expressed themselves, Dehan. But we are drifting off task here. What makes you say we are screwed? I found Dr. Lipschitz very helpful.”

“Helpful...”

“Dare I say, plowing helpful.”

“Care to explain?”

“Not really, except that what he has told us, surely, eliminates a whole swath of possibilities and leaves the true killer revealed in all his terrible nakedness.”

“His, not their?”

I shrugged. “That of course is open to conjecture.”

“Stone, are you going to be a pain in the ass again?”

“I just need to tidy up some details, Dehan. But I do believe if you think it through logically...”

She sighed. “I am thinking logically, Stone. Don’t patronize me. This works one way and one way only: Campbell and Vargas conspired together to hunt and kill women. Campbell is the brains of the outfit and Vargas is the muscle. They pick women either from Campbell’s congregation, or from their wider neighborhoods. There are four criteria: they must be plump, they must have a son, they must be happy and cheerful, and they must be whores. I am guessing they spend some time watching their prey and then one of them, I figure they take it in turns, moves in and makes the kill. I figure they use Campbell, as a man of the cloth, to gain entry, and Vargas takes care of the violence.”

“What about the car?”

“The off-white Ford Kuga?”

“That car.”

“It’s Campbell’s. He told us that.”

I nodded. “Yes, he did. OK, how about the fact that Sharon was very far from being what these apes would consider a whore?”

“I knew you’d ask that, and I have been wondering about it, but I get the impression Campbell would include all Jewish women under that general umbrella.”

“You have thought this through. How about the fact that we can’t connect Sharon with either Vargas or Campbell?”

“I grant you that is tricky, Stone, but not impossible. In fact, when you think it through, it actually makes sense.”

“It does?”

“Yeah, smartass. She was the fourth of five, right?”

“Mm-hm.” I nodded.

“They had already killed three women who were connected somehow to either Vargas or the church, or both. So Campbell proposes, following his system of creating patterns and then breaking them, that they should go and hunt a completely random woman who fits their basic criteria. She is a totally random victim. And, if I can go out on a limb here, the way he breaks patterns begins, itself, to form a pattern, a signature if you like. And this departure from the norm fits that pattern.”

I raised my eyebrows and nodded. “That’s smart, Dehan.”

“So they go searching for a whore who is only a whore to them, and they select her at random in an area of the Bronx where they would not normally be active.”

“Some very fine reasoning, Dehan. Now how do we prove it?”

“We need that tap.”

“We do. So you are satisfied that all the other suspects are off the hook?”

She held up her left hand and counted them off, starting with her baby finger.

“Who have we got? Or, as you would say, whom? George Allen. We know his alibi is good. Golam Heitz, we know his alibis are weak, but we are also almost certain he could not, physically, have carried out the murders. That leaves us with Nelson and Campbell. OK, so Saul Lipschitz was briefly a suspect, but we’ve seen his alibis are watertight. Who else?”

The phone rang. I picked it up.

“John, it’s John. Can you and Carmen come up here please?”

“We’re on our way, sir.” I hung up. “Chief wants to see us. I’m guessing it’s about the warrant. You want to go on up? Tell him I’m on my way.”

She frowned. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m curious about the car. I just want to look into something. It’s probably nothing.”

“Like hell!”

“The chief is waiting, Dehan. Mustn’t keep the chief waiting. I’ll be right up.”

She narrowed her eyes at me and departed toward the stairs.

I made a couple of calls to a couple of PDs in the west and the north, sat thinking for a while, sent some emails and then followed Dehan up. I found her in the inspector’s office, leaning against the wall. There were two men in suits, too. One of them had a fair beard turning to gray and very short hair, and a vaguely maritime look to him. The other was younger, darker and slimmer and had college written all over him. They were sitting side by side on the sofa and could only have been Feds. They both stood and smiled and shook my hand when I came in. The chief spoke from behind his desk.

“John, these are Special Agents Trevellian and Panayotes.” He indicated the beard and the student in turn. “Special Agent Panayotes is here to escort Jose Budia to the Bureau. But I thought you might want a word with him before he does so.”

I nodded. “Thank you, sir.” I glanced at Dehan.

“Agent Panayotes,” she said. “We see two areas of activity here. One is of primary interest to you, the other to us. We believe that Vargas, for the last five years, as well as being engaged in large-scale drug trafficking, has also been involved in serial killing, possibly with an accomplice.

“Now, obviously, we hope Jose Budia is going to provide you with a lot of material on the Vargas operation, his bosses and the network leading all the way back to Mexico. That’s what he has promised us and we believe it to be true.

“That’s of interest to you, but what’s of primary interest to us is any information relating to his possible activity as a serial killer.”

Panayotes nodded. “That’s why I have come along with Special Agent Trevellian.” Trevellian smiled. Panayotes went on. “Doug has a PhD in criminology and psychology, and his specialist area is as a profiler in the field of serial killing. What we would like to do is liaise with you and Detective Stone through Special Agent Trevellian to see if we can take Vargas down in one coordinated operation.”

Dehan nodded but didn’t smile. “Swell. Our first concern is Vargas’s alibis for the killings of Mommy’s Boy’s first five victims. Jose Budia was cited as a witness in all those alibis. But since we’ve taken Jose into custody, we have rechecked those alibis, and Vargas has not cited Jose in any of them.”

Panayotes nodded serenely. “Sweet. So how do you want to do this? We want to cooperate as far as we can. You want to take that interrogation? You want us to deal with it and brief you? Or you want we should cooperate in the interrogation itself?”

I answered. “You take the interrogation. He’ll be cooperative. We don’t need any special strategy for this. Just get Jose to admit that the alibis were all fabricated, and if he can, to confirm where Vargas was on those days and at those times. He’ll give you everything he’s got. It’s in his interest to put Vargas away for as long as possible. If he can nail him for a string of serial killings, he’s guaranteed that Vargas will go away for life. He might even sleep at night. If you can let us have transcripts of any part of the interrogations that relates to the killings, the Church of the Holy Father and Son at the End of Days or James Campbell, that will do fine.”

Panayotes looked surprised. “You don’t want in on the interrogations?”

Dehan spoke before I could answer. “I do.”

I ignored the comment and went on speaking. “No, I don’t want to delay your operation. Vargas is probably already scrambling to limit the damage Jose can do. What I am interested in, if we are going to cooperate, is the kind of surveillance you guys can do, and we simply haven’t the resources. Vargas has a tight, rather strange relationship with Reverend James Campbell. He went to see him last night at about midnight, stayed for half an hour and then returned to the Mescal Club. We can watch him.” I glanced at the chief. “We may even be able to tap his phone, but I don’t know how much that is going to give us. But you guys,” I pointed at Panayotes, “you guys can get inside and hear their conversations. I think Reverend James Campbell might surprise us all.”

Special Agent Doug Trevellian made an interested face. “What makes you say that?”

I shrugged. “In my experience people don’t visit each other at midnight for just half an hour unless they are having a really speedy affair, unless they are exchanging goods of some sort, or unless they are exchanging information. Neither of the two struck me as gay, so it’s my opinion that a tap on both their phones, and a few strategically placed bugs in Campbell’s house, could reveal vital information about what exactly they were exchanging.”

Dehan, who was beginning to look pissed, said, “It could reveal information about their next intended target.”

I added, “Or their next delivery.”

Panayotes spent the next twenty minutes explaining to us the various ways the Bureau had of getting bugs inside the Reverend James Campbell’s dwelling. After that I asked him if he could give us a profile of Mommy’s Boy.