Longstreet grunted. “Planted?”
A smile. “Perhaps.”
“The police still cooperating?”
“The East Hampton chief was unhappy about a certain drive I took along their beach. But he and the NYPD are officially grateful for our assistance.”
Longstreet took a sip from his Arnold Palmer, sitting on a coaster on the nearby table. “The last time we spoke, Aloysius, we were dealing with two murders in which both victims were beheaded. I asked you to determine whether there was a connection between the homicides; if both were the work of a single killer. Now we have three such murders, in addition to six others that could best be described as collateral damage, and the question is even more pressing. Are we dealing with a serial killer?” He raised his eyebrows quizzically.
“I take it you’re aware of the NYPD’s theory?”
“You mean, that one individual killed Grace Ozmian, and that killing in turn inspired a second and third killing by somebody else. Is that what you think, too?”
Pendergast paused a moment before speaking. “The similarities in the M.O. between victims two and three are striking. In both cases the killer was methodical, calm, deliberate, and exceptionally well prepared. It’s likely they were the work of a single individual.”
“And the first one?”
“Highly anomalous.”
“What about motive?”
“Unclear. We focused on two suspects with strong motives in the first two killings. The suspect in the Ozmian killing was cleared. The second suspect, an ex-employee of Sharps and Gund, will soon be questioned. He looks promising, so far.”
Longstreet shook his head. “That’s the strangest thing. The victims seem so unconnected that it’s hard to imagine a linking motive. What does a mob lawyer have to do with a Russian arms dealer with an irresponsible socialite?”
“I would submit to you that the apparent lack of motive might, in fact, be motive itself.”
“There you go again, Aloysius, talking riddles.”
Instead of responding, Pendergast waved a hand.
“You’re still avoiding my question: Do you or do you not agree with the theory that the first murder was committed by a different person than murders two and three?”
“It all revolves around the anomaly of the first beheading — why wait twenty-four hours? The other two happened almost before the victims were dead.”
“You’re still evading my question.”
“Another item I find interesting. No matter how violent or messy the murders may be, the beheadings were done with great fastidiousness. This would argue against the first murder being done by a different killer. On top of that, the first body appears to have been — unlike the others — deliberately concealed.”
Longstreet grunted. “Interesting, as you say — but on its own, inconclusive.”
“We’re in a logical bind. It could, as the police are assuming, be a copycat situation, especially since murders two and three have numerous points of congruency not found in the first. However, equally logically, the coincidence of three beheadings in the space of a week would strongly suggest a single killer. We suffer from a paucity of evidence.”
“You and your ‘paucities’ and ‘logical binds,’” Longstreet growled. “It almost got us killed by that recon party of Ugandan mercenaries — remember?”
“And yet we’re sitting here today, are we not?”
“True — that we are.” He reached over and pressed a buzzer on a nearby intercom. “Katharine? Please bring an Arnold Palmer for Agent Pendergast.”
21
Anton Ozmian sat behind his vast desk of black granite, staring out the south-facing windows in his corner office, his gaze taking in the myriad lights of Lower Manhattan reflected in an overcast winter sky.
He looked past the bulk of the Freedom Tower, past the buildings of the Battery, and over New York Harbor toward the dark outline of Ellis Island. His grandparents, coming by ship from Lebanon, had been processed there. Ozmian was glad that some self-important, xenophobic bureaucrat had not tried to Americanize the name to Oswald or some such nonsense.
His grandfather had been a watchmaker and repairer of clocks, as had his father. But as the twentieth century drew to a close, it became a dying profession. As a child, Ozmian had spent hours in his father’s workshop, fascinated by the mechanical movements of fine watches — the fantastically tiny systems of springs, gears, and rotors that made visible that ineffable mystery called “time.” But as he grew, his interests turned to complex systems of another sort: the instruction registers, accumulators, program counters, stack pointers, and other elements that made up computers — and the assembly language that governed them all. This system was not unlike a fine Swiss watch, in which the ultimate goal was to make the greatest use of the least amount of energy. That was how assembly language coding worked — if you were a true programming acolyte, you constantly strove to shrink the size of your programs and make each line of code do double or triple duty.
A young man who’d grown up in the outskirts of Boston, after college Ozmian had passionately immersed himself in a number of unusual hobbies — composing, cryptography, fly fishing, and even, for a time, big-game hunting. But his hobbies fell by the wayside when he discovered a way to blend his interest in music and ciphers with his fanaticism for tight code. It was this marriage of interests that helped him develop the streaming and encoding technologies that would become the backbone of DigiFlood.
DigiFlood. He flushed at the thought of his company, whose stock price had soared for years, now being hammered because of the unauthorized leak of its most valuable proprietary algorithms onto the Internet.
But now — as happened so often — his thoughts returned to the killing of his only daughter…and the filth about her that had been exposed by that motherless ass-fucker of a reporter, Bryce Harriman.
A distinctive triple rap on the door of his office interrupted these free-flowing thoughts.
“Come in,” Ozmian called out without turning his gaze from the window.
He heard the door open; the soft tread of someone entering; the door closing again. He did not look around; he knew very well who had just stepped inside. It was his most unusual and enigmatic employee with the noble, ancient, and unusually long name of Maria Isabel Duarte Alves-Vettoretto. Over the years Alves-Vettoretto had worked for Ozmian in many capacities: aide-de-camp, confidante, expediter — and enforcer. He sensed her presence come to rest a respectful distance from his desk and he turned to face her. She was compact, athletic, and quiet, with a tumbling mane of rich mahogany hair, dressed in tight-fitting jeans and an open silk blouse with pearls. In all his years, he had never found anyone quite so remorselessly efficient. She was Portuguese, it seemed, with antique notions of honor, vengeance, and loyalty, whose ancestors had been involved in Machiavellian intrigue for eight hundred years. In her, the art had been honed to perfection.
“Go ahead,” Ozmian said, turning his gaze away from her intense face to stare out the window as she spoke.
“Our private investigators have submitted a preliminary report on Harriman.”
“Give me the short version.”
“All reporters are of questionable character, so I’ll leave out the minor sins and peccadillos. Aside from being a muckraking, ambulance-chasing, rumormongering, backstabbing journalist, the man is a straight arrow. A preparatory school product who comes from old, old money — money that is petering out with his generation. The bottom line is that he’s clean. No prior convictions. No drugs. He used to be a reporter for the Times, but then — for reasons that aren’t relevant — he made a lateral move to the Post. While that might seem like a career killer, he did very well for himself at the Post. There isn’t anything in there that will give us traction.” A pause. “But…there is one piece of information worthy of special note.”