“I’ve just been reading over E-Two’s latest manifesto,” the president said when Dennis Paull entered the Oval Office. He had to make way for the National Security Advisor, who was just leaving.
Paull took a seat on the plush chair directly in front of the president’s desk. The flags against the wall on either side of the thick drapes shone their colors in the burning lamplight. He felt as tired as they looked. Everyone around him did. In perpetual crisis mode, only the president, who leaned heavily on the advice of his close coterie of neo-conservative consultants, appeared sparkly eyed and rested. Perhaps, Paull thought, it was his faith, his vision, the absolute surety of the path his America was on, that made him burn so bright. Paull himself was ever plagued by doubts about the future, guilt about the past.
“The National Security Advisor brought it over himself.” The president raised the sheets of paper. “This is pure evil, Dennis. These people are pure evil. They want to bring down the country, weaken it, make it more vulnerable to foreign extremists of every stripe. They want to destroy everything I’ve worked toward for eight long years.”
“I don’t disagree with you, sir,” Paull said.
The president threw the papers to the carpet, trampled them underfoot. “We’ve got to root out E-Two, Dennis.”
“Sir, I told you before that in the short time left us, I didn’t think we’d be able to do that. Now I know it for a fact. We’ve been scouring the country for months without the slightest success. Wherever they are, we can’t find them.”
The president rose, came out from behind his desk, paced back and forth across the thick American blue carpet. “This reminds me of 2001,” he said darkly. “We never found the people responsible for those anthrax attacks. That failure has stuck in my craw ever since.”
Paull spread his hands. “We tried our best, sir, you know that. Despite millions of dollars and man-hours, we never even got to first base. You know my theory, sir.”
The president shook his head. “Blaming a rogue element inside the government is mighty dangerous speculation, Dennis. Just the sort the National Security Advisor guards against. And he’s right. We’ve all got to work together, Dennis. Circle the wagons. So let’s not hear any more of that kind of treasonous talk.”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, if we can’t find even a trace of E-Two—” The president held up his hand. “We require a change in tactics. Forget about a direct assault on E-Two.” His eyes narrowed. “We must make an example of these people. We’ll go after the First American Secular Revivalists.”
Paull was careful not to let his concern show. “They’re a legitimate organization, sir.”
The president’s face darkened. “Goddamnit, in this day and age we no longer have the luxury of allowing terrorists to hide behind the banner of free speech, which is for good, honest, God-fearing Americans.”
“It’s not as if they’re being funded by a foreign power.”
The president whirled. “But maybe they are.” His eyes were gleaming, always a dangerous sign. “President Yukin, who, as you well know, I’ll be seeing in a few days, has just announced that he wants to stay on in power.” The president grunted. “Lucky bastard. They can do that in Russia.” He waved a hand. “With the evidence in the Black File you’ve provided me, I think I can get more out of him than concessions on oil, gas, and uranium.”
Paull, truly alarmed, stood. “What do you mean, sir?”
“I think Yukin is just the man to provide whatever evidence we need that the Chinese are funneling funds to these missionary secularists.”
Paull smelled the National Security Advisor all over this. The president didn’t have the mind to come up with such a scheme.
“I mean, what could be more obvious?” the president went on. “You yourself told me that Beijing is in the process of setting up a Godless state. Americans have a long history of bitter antipathy toward mainland China. Everybody will be only too willing to believe that Beijing is attempting to export that Godlessness to America.”
Jack had tried Egon Schiltz’s cell, but it was off, and he knew better than to leave a message on his friend’s voice mail.
Egon Schiltz was not an old man, but he sure looked like one. In fact, give him a passing glance and he might be mistaken for seventy, instead of fifty-nine. Like a hairstylist, he was round-shouldered, with prematurely gray hair so thick, he preferred to wear it long over his ears. In every other way, however, Egon Schiltz appeared nondescript. One curious thing about him: He and his wife had tied the knot in the ME’s cold room, surrounded by friends, family, and the recently and violently departed.
He and Jack had become friends when Jack was asked to investigate missing cartons of fry, as embalming fluid was known on the District’s streets, where it had become one of a number of increasingly bizarre drugs illicitly for sale. On anyone’s list of bad drugs, fry was near the top, one of the long-term side effects of ingesting fry being the slow disintegration of the spinal cord. Certain bits of evidence were leading the police to suspect Schiltz himself of trafficking in fry, but after a long talk with Schiltz, Jack didn’t like the ME as a prime suspect. Jack went looking for the middle man, in his experience usually the easiest to latch on to, since he was usually less off the grid than either the thief or the pusher. Using his contacts, Jack found this particular fence, put the hammer to him, and came up with a name, which he gave to Schiltz. Together, they worked out the way to trap the thief, a member of the ME’s staff too impatient to wait for his state pension. Schiltz never forgot Jack’s faith in him.
Schiltz’s offices, sprawled on a stretch of Braddock Avenue in Fairfax, Virginia, were in a low, angular redbrick government building in that modern style so bland, it seemed to disappear. Using mostly the Innerloop of the Capital Beltway, it took Jack just over twenty minutes to drive the 16.7 miles from Langley Fields to Schiltz’s office.
“Dr. Schiltz isn’t here,” the diminutive assistant ME said.
“Where is he?” Jack demanded. “I know you know,” he added as her lips parted, “so don’t stonewall.”
The AME shook her head. “He’ll take my head off.”
“Not when he knows I’m looking for him.” Jack leaned in, his eyes bright as an attack dog’s. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”
She bit her lip, said nothing.
“Call him,” he said now, “and tell him Jack needs to see him, stat.”
The Indian woman picked up a cordless phone, dialed a number. She waited a moment, then asked to speak with Dr. Schiltz. In a moment, he came on the line, because she said, “I’m so sorry to bother you at dinner, sir, but—”
“Never mind,” Jack said, hustling out of the office.
Egon Schiltz was an Old Southern type. His meals were sacred time, not to be interrupted for anyone or anything. A creature of habit, he always ate his meals at one place.
The Southern Roadhouse, set back in a strip mall as nondescript as Schiltz himself, was fronted by gravel ground down over the years to the size and shape of frozen peas. Its mock Southern columns out front only added to the exhausted air of the place. At one time, the restaurant had had a platoon of white-gloved attendants, all black, to greet the patrons, park their Caddies and Benzes, wish them good evening. It still had two sets of bathrooms at opposite ends of the U-shaped building, one originally for whites, the other originally for blacks, though no one connected with the place spoke about their history, at least not to strangers. Among themselves, however, a string of ascendingly offensive jokes about the bathrooms made the rounds like a sexually transmitted disease.
Jack walked in the kitchen door, showed his ID to the chef, whose indignation crumbled before his fear of the law. How many illegals were in his employ in the steamy, clamorous kitchen?
“Dr. Schiltz,” Jack said as they made room for the expediter, bellowing orders to the line chefs. “Has he finished his porterhouse?”
The chef, a portly man with thinning hair and watery eyes, nodded. “We’re just preparing his floating island.”
“Forget that. Give me a clean dessert plate,” Jack ordered.
One was produced within seconds. The chef nearly fainted when he saw what Jack put on the center of it. With a squeak like a flattened mouse, the chef turned away.
Holding the plate up high in waiterly fashion, Jack put right shoulder against the swinging door, went from kitchen to dining room with snappy aplomb, and immediately stopped so short, the hand almost slid off the plate. Egon Schiltz sat at his customary corner table, but he wasn’t alone. Of course he wasn’t. He made it a point to have dinner with at least one member of his family even when he was working late. Tonight was his daughter Molly’s turn. Same age as Emma, Jack thought. Look at them talking, laughing. Is that what it means to have a daughter? All at once, his eyes burned and he couldn’t catch his breath. Jesus God, he thought, it’s never going to get any better, I’m never going to be able to live with this.
Molly, catching sight of him, leapt up, ran over to him so quickly that Jack had just enough time to raise the tray above the level of her head.
“Uncle Jack!” she cried. She had a wide, open face, bright blue eyes, hair the color of cornsilk. She was a cheerleader at school. “How are you?”
“Fine, poppet. You’re looking quite grown up.”
She made a face, tilted her head. “What’s that?”
“Something for your father.”
“Let me see.” She rose on tiptoes.
“It’s a surprise.”
“I won’t tell him. It’s in the vault, I swear.” She put on her most serious face. “Nothing gets out of the vault. Ever.”
“He’d tell by your reaction,” Jack said. You can say that again, he thought.
She waited a moment until she was sure Jack really wouldn’t let her in on the surprise. “Oh, all right.” She kissed his cheek. “I’ve got to go anyway. Rick’s waiting for me.”
Jack looked down into her shy smile. She still had her baby fat around her jawline and chin, but she was already a handsome young woman. “Since when have things become serious between you and Rick?”
“Oh, Uncle Jack, could you be more out of the loop?” She caught herself then. “Oh God, I’m so sorry.”
He ruffled her hair. “It’s okay.” But it wasn’t. He heard a sharp sound, was sure it was his heart breaking.
Molly turned. “Bye, Daddy.” She waved and was off out the front door.
Schiltz sighed as he flapped a folded copy of today’s Washington Post. “Speaking of Rick, I was just underscoring to Molly how religion and adherence to God’s commandments will protect her against the wages of sin, which these days are all too evident. Senator George is the object lesson du jour. I suppose you heard that august Democrat has been exposed as an adulterer.”
“Frankly, I haven’t had time for Beltway gossip.”
“Is that why I don’t see you anymore? How long has it been?”
“Sorry about that, Egon.”
Schiltz grunted as he slipped the paper into his briefcase. He nodded at the plate Jack was holding aloft. “Is that my floating island?”
“Not exactly.” Jack placed the plate on the table in front of the ME.
Schiltz redirected his attention from Jack’s face to the severed human hand on the dessert plate. “Very funny.” He took up the plate by its edge. “Would you tell Karl I want my floating island now.”
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible. Your presence is needed elsewhere.”
Schiltz glanced at Jack. Carefully, he placed the plate back down on the immaculate linen tablecloth. Not even a crumb of roll marred its starched white surface. The same could be said, in terms of emotion, for Schiltz’s face. Then he broke out into peals of laughter. “You dog, you,” he said, wiping his eyes. He stood up to briefly embrace his friend. “I’ve missed you, buddy.”
“Back atcha, Slim.” Jack disentangled himself. “But honestly, I need your help. Now.”
“Slow down. I haven’t laid eyes on you for months.” Schiltz gestured for Jack to sit on the chair vacated by his daughter.
“No time, Egon.”
“‘No time to say hello, good-bye, I’m late, I’m late, I’m late!’”
Schiltz quoted the White Rabbit in Bugs Bunny’s voice, which no matter his mood made Jack laugh.
“There’s always time,” he continued, sobering. “Give the hysteria of logic a rest.”
“Logic is all I have, Egon.”
“That’s sad, Jack. Truly.” He took a Cohiba Corona Especial out of his breast pocket, offered it to Jack, who refused. “I would have thought Emma’s tragic death would have taught you the futility of a logic-based life.”
Jack felt sweat break out at the back of his neck. His face was burning, and there was the same sick feeling in the pit of his stomach he’d had when he’d seen Emma in Saigon Road. In order to steady himself, he turned the chair around, pushed aside his holstered Glock G36, sat straddling the seat. “And you think faith is better.”
“I know it’s better.” Schiltz sat back, lit the cigar, turning it slowly, lovingly between his thumb and first two fingers as he took his first tentative puffs. “Logic stems from the mind of man, therefore it’s limited, it’s flawed. Faith gives you hope, keeps you from despair. Faith is what picks you up and ensures you keep going. Logic keeps you lying facedown in the muck at your feet.” He waved the gray end of the cigar. “Case in point: I’m certain you’re convinced that Emma’s death was senseless.”
Jack gripped the table edge with both hands.
“I don’t. She left us for a reason, Jack. A reason only God can know. I believe that with all my heart and soul, because I have faith.”
Say what you want about Schiltz, he knew how to hunt and he smoked only the finest cigars. These attributes were sometimes all that kept Jack from strangling him.
“Jack, I know how much you’re hurting.”
“And you’re not? You knew Emma as well as I know Molly. We had cookouts together, went camping in the Smokies, hiked the Blue Ridge together.”
“Of course I grieve for her. The difference is that I’m able to put her death into a larger context.”
“Egon, I need to make sense of it,” Jack said almost desperately.
“A quixotic desire, my friend. The help you need you will find only in faith.”
“Where you see faith, I see doubt, confusion, chaos. Situation normal, all fucked up.”
The ME shook his head. “I’m saying this as a friend: It’s time to stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
Jack reflexively blocked that advice by going on the offensive. “So what is faith, exactly, Egon? I’ve never quite been able to get a handle on it.”
Schiltz rolled ash into a cut-glass ashtray. “If you insist on reducing it to its basic elements, it’s the sure and simple knowledge that there’s something more out there, something greater than yourself, than mankind: a grand plan, a design that can’t be comprehended by you or by any other human being, because it is numinous, it is God’s design, something only He can fathom.”
“What about the angels? Can they fathom God’s plan?”
Schiltz expelled a cloud of highly aromatic smoke. “You see how logic binds you to the earth, Jack? It ensures you dismiss with a joke anything you can’t understand.”
“Like angels on unicycles, for instance.”
“Yes, Jack.” Egon refused to rise to the joke. “Just like angels on unicycles.”
“Then Emma, up in heaven, must know God’s plan for her.”
“Certainly.”
“She’s content then.”
Schiltz’s eyes narrowed slightly behind the aromatic blue smoke. “All who are in heaven are content.”
“Says who?”
“We have the Word of God.”
Egon gave Jack a look he might have reserved for the devil. “I suppose there’s only one way to get rid of you tonight,” he sighed.
“What do you want me to tell you about the hand?”
“Whether or not it belongs to Alli Carson.”
That got Schiltz’s attention. His white eyebrows shot up, cartoonstyle. “The president-elect’s daughter?”
“The same.”
Jack and Schiltz faced each other in the autopsy room, lights low to cut down on the glare from all the stainless steel and tile.
Schiltz snapped on rubber gloves, placed a magnifying lens over his right eye. Then he adjusted a spotlight, the beam illuminating the hand. He bent over, his shoulders rolled forward, a hunchback in his ill-lit garret beside the stone belfry. “Waterlogged as hell,” he said gloomily, “so you can forget about anything like DNA testing.” His fingertips moved the hand. “Interesting.”
“What is?” Jack prompted.
“The hand was sawn off, expertly.”
“With a chain saw?”
“That would be a logical assumption.” Was there a touch of irony in his voice? He held up the hand, stump first. “But the markings indicate otherwise. Something rotary, certainly. But delicate.” He shrugged. “My best guess would be a medical saw.”
Jack leaned in. The stench of formaldehyde and acetone was nauseating. “We looking at a surgeon as the perp?”
“Possibly.”
“Well, that narrows it down to a couple hundred million.”
“Amusing.” Schiltz glanced up. “Here’s what I do know: This was done with a sure hand, no remorse in the cut, no hesitation whatsoever. Plus, the immersion in water has made the pruning permanent. He’s betting we won’t be able to get fingerprints to make an ID.”
“So—what?—the perp’s done this sort of thing before?”
“Uh-huh.”
Jack held up the gold-and-platinum ring in its plastic evidence bag. “I took this off the third finger. It belongs to Alli Carson.”
“Which doesn’t speak to her state of health.” Seeing Jack blanch, he hastened to add, “All it means is your perp has access to her.” Schiltz used a dental pick to scrape under and around the nails, one at a time. “Look.” Holding aloft the implement so that the working end was directly in the light, he said, “What do you see here?”
“Something pink,” Jack said.
“And shiny.” Schiltz put the end of the pick close to his eye. “This is undoubtedly nail polish. Plus, the nails are newly cut, so my guess is that for whatever reason—”
“The perp cut this girl’s nails and removed the polish,” Jack finished for him. He stood up. “Alli Carson never wore polish; her nails were square-cut, like a boy’s. This isn’t her hand.”
“You may be sure, Jack, but I’m a forensic pathologist. I need proof before I say yea or nay.” He went to a sink, filled a pan with warm water. Immersing the hand in it, he gently loosened the skin, worked it off, starting at the wrist. The gray, amorphous jellyfish swam in the water. With the care of a lepidopterist working on a butterfly’s wing, Schiltz unrolled the translucent material.
“Ami!” he called.
A moment later, the AME poked her head into the room. “Yes, sir.”
“Got a fingerprint job for you.”
Ami nodded, took a place beside him.
“Left hand,” he said.
Ami put her left hand into the water. Schiltz rolled the skin over her hand like a glove. Ami air-dried the skin by holding her left hand aloft. Then he fingerprinted the human glove.
“You see,” he said, rolling each finger on the ink pad, “wearing the skin smooths out the pruning.” He held up the fingerprint card, nodded to Ami, who removed the skin, took the card, and went away. “We’ll soon know whether or not this hand belongs to Alli Carson.”
He took the severed hand out of its warm-water bath, laid it back on the metal examining tray, studying it once again. “Care to make a bet?” he said dryly.
“I know it’s not hers,” Jack said.
Several moments later, Ami popped back into the room. “No match in any system for the Jane Doe,” she said. “One thing is certain, she isn’t Alli Carson.”
Jack breathed a huge sigh of relief, dialed Nina’s cell, told her the good news. Pocketing his cell, he tapped a forefinger against his lips. “Alli’s ring, the nails cut to Alli’s length, the water pruning of the fingertips—clearly, someone wants us to believe this is her hand. Why play this grisly game? Why go to all the trouble?” Why had he taken her? What did Alli’s abductor want? “What sick mind has maimed a girl Alli’s age just to play a trick on us?”
“A very sick mind, indeed, Jack.” Schiltz turned the hand over. “He cut the hand off while the girl was still alive.”
Rain made a stage set of the parking lot, beaded silver curtains slid down the beams of the arc lights. Jack walked through the glimmer of the near-deserted asphalt. After jerking open the car door, he slid in behind the wheel, fired the ignition. But he didn’t pull out. The events of this morning overran him. His head pounded; every muscle in his body seemed to be screaming at once. Leaning over, he opened the glove box, shook out four ibuprofen, crunched down on them, wincing at the harsh, acidic taste.
He thought about the girl’s hand. The abductor had immersed it in water so they wouldn’t be able to ID her through fingerprints. But Egon had used it to prove that the hand didn’t belong to Alli Carson. And yet the abductor had sawn the hand off while the girl was still alive? Why had he done that? Everything else that Jack had seen led him to believe that this man was methodical, not maniacal. What if he wanted them to know that Alli was still alive? He’d made certain of that by cutting off the hand of a living girl. But he hadn’t cut Alli’s hand off. Why not? Jack’s thoughts chased each other like flashes of lightning. He rubbed his forehead with the heels of his hands.
Beyond the lot, out on the interstate, an unending Morse code of lights flashed across his face, strobed against his eyes, doubling his headache. Neon signs flashed pink and green like bioluminescent creatures deep in the ocean’s heart. A horn blared, carrying the diminishing sound behind it like a tail. The rhythmic thrash of the windshield wipers was like his father’s admonishing finger. With a convulsive lunge of his hand, he turned off the ignition, watched the rain slalom down the glass.
Alli, he thought, where the hell are you? What’s happening to you?
He was powerless to stop his thoughts moving toward Emma. His longing to talk with his daughter, so that she could spread the balm of forgiveness over him, brought tears to his eyes. His hands shook.
It’s time to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Schiltz’s advice came back to him like an echo in a cave. He knew his friend was right, but God forgive him, he couldn’t stop. He was like an alcoholic with a bottle to his mouth. Every fiber in his being ached for the chance to say he was sorry, to tell Emma how much he loved her. Why was it, he asked himself despairingly, that he could acknowledge his love for her only now, when it was too late? He slammed his fist against the steering wheel, making the car shiver around him like Jell-O.
He looked up, unsure whether it was the rain or his tears he was seeing. He felt, rather than saw, a shimmer, as if the shadowy air at the corners of his vision rippled like the surface of Bear Creek Lake. Startled, he looked around and smelled Emma’s scent. Was that her face he saw staring back at him in the rearview mirror? He whirled around, but his nose was filled with the cloying stench of hot metal, stripped rubber, and burnt flesh.
Gasping, he wrenched open the door, stumbled to his knees on the asphalt, head hanging down. The rain fell on him with an indifference that made him pound his fist against the car door. Pulling himself up on the door handle, he peered through the rain-beaded window. The backseat was empty. As he rested his forehead against the glass, his mind whirled backwards, into the dark whirlpool of the past.
He had taken Emma, Egon, and Molly to Cumberland State Forest to hike and fish in Bear Creek Lake. The girls were ten. He had bought Emma a Daisy air rifle. One afternoon she had come running back to camp, her eyes streaming with tears. She had aimed her rifle at a bluebird sitting on the branch of a pine and pulled the trigger. She’d never believed she would hit the bird, let alone kill it, but that’s precisely what had happened.
She was heartsick, beyond consoling. Jack suggested that they have a funeral and burial. The physical preparations seemed to calm her. But she’d cried all over again when Jack shoveled the dirt over the pathetic fallen bird. Then Emma took the air rifle, hurled it with all her strength into the lake. It sank like a stone, ripples spiraled out from its grave.
That was the last time Jack could remember really being with his daughter. After that, what happened? She grew up too fast? They grew apart too quickly? He was at a loss to understand where the time had gone or how Emma had changed. It was as if he had fallen asleep on a speeding train. He might never have woken up if it hadn’t been for the crash.
Schiltz opened the door in response to Jack’s pounding. His rubber gloves were slick with unspeakable substances.
He moved away from the door so Jack could come in. “You look like roadkill. What happened to you downstairs?”
Jack, immersed in the horror of his own personal prison, almost told Schiltz about his ghostly visitations, but he had a conviction that they weren’t visitations at all, merely wishful thinking, as if he could wish Emma back to life, or some transparent semblance of life. On the other hand, who but Egon, seeing God’s hand in the incredible, the unexplainable, might understand. Nevertheless, Jack chose to keep silent on the matter. It was too personal, too humiliating—he’d seem like a child lost in a ghost story.
“I ran into something that disagreed with me.” Sharon constantly accused him of hiding his true feelings behind sarcasm. What did she know?
The offices were shadowed, hushed. Carpeted and wood-paneled, they were a jarring contrast with the banks of stainless steel deathbeds, sluicing hoses, giant floor drains, vats of chemicals, rows of microscopes, tiers of body blocks used to elevate the cadavers’ chests for easier entry, drawers filled with the forensic implements of morphology and pathology: bone saws, bread knives, enterotomes, hammers, rib cutters, skull chisels, Striker saws, scalpels, and Hagedorn needles to sew up the bodies when work was done. Jack and Egon skirted the X-ray room and the toxicology lab, went through the standards room, as refined as a Swiss watchmaker’s, as blunt as a butcher shop, where cadavers as well as their major organs were weighed and measured. Even in the short corridor they felt the icy breath of the cold room, dim, blued, impersonal as a terminal, hushed as a library.
“So what brings you back? Nowhere else to go on a rainy December night?” Schiltz gestured at the wall of cadaver containers. “Since I’m not full up, I could give you an overnight berth in my Japanese hotel. It’s quiet as the grave and a gourmet continental breakfast is served in the autopsy room starting at eight. Would you like an upper or a lower berth?”
Jack laughed. Egon had the uncanny ability to dislodge his depressions.
“I’m interested in whichever berths the two Secret Service men are in.”
“Ah, yes,” Egon said. “The men in black.”
Having a sense of humor—the darker the better—was essential for an ME, Egon once told Jack. “Professional detachment only gets you so far, because eventually someone gets under your skin,” his friend had once told him. “After that, it’s every macabre jokester for himself.”
Schiltz moved Jack along the rows of gleaming stainless steel containers, opened two side by side at waist height. “In my fascination with your floating island, I forgot all about them. Maybe it’s because I didn’t do the original autopsies. The law now mandates that in cases of deaths of federal officials, pathologists from the Army Forces Institute of Pathology do the work.” He shrugged. “Idiotic, if you ask me, but that’s the government for you.”
The two cadavers lay on their backs, even features waxy, doll-like, their chests cut and sewn back up in the autopsy T-scar that went from just beneath the collarbone to the lower intestine. “The pathology is yesterday’s paper so far as your new compadres are concerned. They came, they saw, they were dead-ended.”
“Nothing at all?” Jack said.
“I performed my own autopsies just to make certain. Not so much as a partial print, a stray hair, a scrap of skin, paint or dirt under the nails. No hint of anything that might lead you to ID the perps.” Schiltz shrugged again. “Not much to see, either. One stab apiece—hard, direct, no hesitation whatsoever—interstitial, between the third and fourth dorsal ribs, straight into the heart.” He paused. “Well, sort of.”
Jack’s own heart had begun a furious tattoo. “What d’you mean?”
Schiltz turned the first cadaver onto one side, shoved it to the far side of the deathbed, turned it on its stomach. As he performed the same procedure with the second body, Jack peered at the entry wound.
“See here. I peeled back the muscle so I could get a closer look at the interior wounds. Smooth as silk, so the assailant didn’t use a serrated blade, but there was a slight curve to them. I can’t quite make out what sort of blade would leave that signature.”
But I can, Jack thought. He’d seen that odd, slightly arced wound before, once, twenty-five years ago. His subsequent investigation, all on his own, both dangerous and difficult, had unearthed the murder weapon: a thin-bladed knife, known as a paletta. It was used by professional bakers to spread batter or apply frosting. The truly odd part was this: A paletta had a rounded end. It was totally useless for a stabbing attack. This one, however, was unique among palettas: the murderer had ground the end into a mercilessly sharp point.
“You okay?” Schiltz peered into Jack’s frozen face.
“You bet,” Jack said in a strangled voice.
“Stole up behind them and bingo! No fuss, no muss.” Schiltz’s slightly bored tone indicated he’d been over this terrain numerous times in the past twenty-four hours. “Most professional, not to say impressive, especially in light of the victims’ training. In fact, I would venture to say the stabs were surgical in their precision. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t have done a better job of it myself.”
Jack hardly heard his friend’s last sentence. He was frozen, bent over in the space between the deathbeds, his gaze flickering back and forth between the two wounds. His galloping heart seemed to have come to an abrupt and terrifying halt inside his chest.
It’s absolutely stone-cold impossible, he told himself. I shot Cyril Tolkan while he was trying to escape over the rooftop where I’d trapped him. He’s dead, I know he is.
And yet, the evidence of his own eyes was irrefutable. These stabs were the hallmark of a killer Jack had gone after twenty-five years ago, after a murder that had left him devastated, sick with despair.