He looked up when Zerbrowski and I entered. Something flickered through his pale eyes: interest, curiosity, worry? The look was gone before I could decipher it. He picked up his glasses, giving me a blank, innocent face. With his glasses back on, he came closer to looking his age. They broke up the line of his face, so that the frames were what you saw first.
"You want a fresh cup of coffee?" I asked him as I sat down. Zerbrowski leaned against the wall, near the door. We'd start out with me questioning Heinrick to see if I got anywhere. Zerbrowski made it clear that I was up to bat, but no one, including me, wanted me alone with Heinrick. He had been following me, and we still didn't know why. Agent Bradford had guessed that it was part of some plot to get me to raise the dead for some nefarious purpose. Bradford didn't know, not for sure. Until we knew for sure, caution was better. Hell, caution was probably always better.
"No," Heinrick said, "no more coffee."
I had a fresh cup of coffee in one hand and a stack of file folders in the other. I placed the coffee on the table and made a show of arranging the pile of folders neatly beside it. His gaze flicked to the folders, then settled serenely back on me.
"Had too much coffee?" I asked.
"No." His face was attentive, blank, with a touch of wariness. Something had him worried. Was it the files? Too large a stack. We'd intended it to be too large. There were files at the bottom that had nothing to do with Leopold Heinrick, Van Anders, or the nameless man that was sitting in another room just down the hall. It was impossible to have a military record with no name attached, but somehow the dark-haired American had managed it. His file was so full of blacked-out spaces that it was almost illegible. The fact that no one would give our John Doe a name, but they would acknowledge he was once a member of the armed forces was disturbing. It made me wonder what my government was up to.
"Would you like something else to drink?" I asked.
He shook his head.
"We may be in here a while."
"Talking is thirsty work," Zerbrowski said from the back.
Heinrick's eyes flicked to him, then back to me. "Silence is not thirsty work." His lips quirked, and it was almost a smile.
"If sometime during this interview you want to tell us exactly why you were following me, I'd love to hear it, but that's really secondary to why we're here."
He looked puzzled then. "When you first stopped us that seemed to be very important to you."
"It was, and I'd still like to know, but the priorities have changed."
He frowned at me. "You are playing games, Ms. Blake. I am tired of games."
There was no fear in him. He seemed tired, wary, and not happy, but he wasn't afraid. He wasn't afraid of the police, or me, or going to jail. There was none of that anxiety that most people have in a police interrogation. It was odd. Bradley had said that our government was going to just let Heinrick go. Did he suspect that-know that? If so, how? How did he know? Why wasn't he the least bit afraid of spending time in the St. Louis jail system?
I opened the first file. It held grainy copies of old crimes. Women Van Anders had slaughtered in foreign countries, far from here.
I laid the photos out in front of him, in a neat row of black and white carnage. In some of the photos the quality was so bad that if you hadn't known you were looking at human remains, you'd have never guessed. Van Anders had reduced his victims to Rorschach tests.
Heinrick looked bored now, almost disgusted. "Your Detective O'Brien has already shown me these. Already marched out her lies."
"What lies would those be?" I asked. I sipped my coffee, and it wasn't bad. It was fresh, at least. As I sipped, I watched his face.
He folded his arms across his chest. "That there are fresh murders here in your city like these old ones."
"What makes you think she's lying?"
He started to say something, then closed his mouth tight, his lips a thin angry line. He just glared at me, pale eyes bright with anger.
I opened the second folder and began laying out colored photos just above the old black and whites. I laid them out in a line of bright death, and watched all the color drain away from Heinrick's skin. He looked almost gray by the time I sat back down. I'd had to stand to reach the ends of the table, to lay out the photos.
"This woman was killed three days ago." I got another file out of the stack. I opened it, and fanned the photos on top of it, but didn't put them with the stack. I wasn't a hundred percent sure I'd be able to match the photos back to the right crime. They were supposed to be marked on the back, but I hadn't marked them personally, so I didn't want to risk it. Once you get into court the lawyers get damned picky about evidence and stuff.
I pointed to the file pictures. "This woman was killed two days ago."
Zerbrowski stepped forward and handed me a plastic baggie with a handful of polaroids in it. I tossed the baggie across the table so that it slid by him, and he caught it automatically before it hit the floor. His eyes were very big when he saw the top print.
"Those women died last night. We think there were two victims, but truthfully we haven't finished putting together the pieces, so we're not a hundred percent certain. It could be more, or it could be just one woman, but that's an awful lot of blood for only one woman, don't you think?"
He laid the baggie of polaroids carefully on the table, so that they didn't touch any of the other photos. He stared at all the pictures, his face gone death white, his eyes huge. His voice squeezed out like it was an effort to breathe, let alone talk. "What do you wish to know?"
"We want to stop this from happening again," I said.
He was staring down at the pictures, as if he couldn't look away. "He promised he would not do it here. He swore that he could control himself."
"Who?" I asked, softly. Yeah, the government had given him a name, but that was the same government that wouldn't give our John Doe one.
"Van Anders," he whispered the name. He looked up, and there was surprise underneath the shock. "The other detective said you knew it was Van Anders."
Great. Nothing like giving your suspect more information than he's giving you.
I shrugged. "Without eyewitnesses it's hard to be certain."
Something like hope sparked in his eyes and he started regaining some of his color. "You think this might be someone else? Not Van Anders?"
I riffled through the files again, and Heinrick flinched. I found the thin folder with the picture of Van Anders and the two women. I flashed him the picture. "Van Anders with the victims from last night's slaughter."
He winced at the last word, and the color that had been seeping back into his face drained away again. His lips looked bloodless. For a second I thought he might faint. I'd never had a suspect faint on me before.
His voice was a hoarse whisper. "Then it is him." He laid his forehead on the table.
"Do you need some water, something stronger?" I asked. Though truthfully, black coffee was as strong as I could give him. There were rules about giving liquor to suspects.
He raised his head, slowly, but he looked awful. "I told them that he was crazy. I told them not to include him."
"Told who?" I asked.
He sat up a little straighter. "I agreed to come here against my better judgment. I knew the team was assembled too quickly. When you rush such a task, it ends badly."
"What task?" I asked.
"To recruit you for a mission."
"What mission?" I asked.
He shook his head. "It doesn't matter now. Some of our people got you on tape raising a man in a local cemetery. He did not look alive enough for what my employers wished. He looked like a zombie, and that is not good enough."