D’Agosta tried to wrap his head around it. “Chopped off with what?”
Martinelli nodded. “Right over there.”
D’Agosta turned and there it was: a medieval weapon of some kind, lying on the floor, its blade completely covered in blood.
“It’s called a bearded ax. Viking. Replica, of course. Razor-sharp.”
D’Agosta glanced at Pendergast, but he was even more opaque than usual inside the Tyvek suit.
“Why didn’t they scream? Nobody heard anything.”
“We’re pretty sure a secondary weapon was involved. Probably a firearm. Used in a threatening way to keep them quiet. On top of that, those doors are extremely thick, and the entire suite is heavily soundproofed.”
D’Agosta shook his head. It was the craziest thing, killing the twin CEOs of a major company right in their own offices at the busiest time of day, with cameras running and a thousand people around. He looked again at Pendergast. In contrast to his usual poking and prying about with tweezers and test tubes, this time he was silent, and as calm as if he were out for a stroll in the park. “So, Pendergast, you got any questions? Anything you want to look at? Evidence?”
“Not at present, thank you.”
“I’m just the blood spatter guy,” Martinelli said, “but it would seem to me the killer’s sending some kind of message. The Post is saying that—”
D’Agosta cut him off with a gesture. “I know what the Post is saying.”
“Right, sorry.”
Pendergast now spoke at last. “Mr. Martinelli, wouldn’t the perpetrator be covered in blood after decapitating two standing people?”
“You’d think so. But the handle is unusually long on that ax, and if he stood at some distance, decapitated each of them with one clean swipe, and if he were agile enough to jump aside to avoid the jetting arterial blood as the bodies fell, he might just get away without being splattered.”
“Would you say he was proficient in the use of that ax?”
“If you look at it that way, yes. It’s not easy to decapitate someone with a single blow, especially if they’re standing up. And to do it without getting covered in blood — yeah, I would say that takes serious practice.”
D’Agosta shuddered.
“Thank you, that is all,” said Pendergast.
They met up with the SEC guy in the security office in the basement. On their way down, passing through the lobby, they had seen a crowd in front of the building. At first D’Agosta thought it was the usual unruly press, and it was that, of course, but more. The waving signs and muffled chanting indicated it was some sort of demonstration against the one percent. Damn New Yorkers, any excuse to protest.
“Chat over there?” he said, indicating a seating area in the waiting room. The NYPD techies were downloading and preparing the last of the security footage.
“As good as any.”
The three of them took their seats, the SEC guy, Pendergast, and D’Agosta.
“So, Agent Meldrum,” D’Agosta said. “Brief us on the SEC investigation.”
“Of course.” Meldrum handed over a card. “I’ll have copies of our files sent over to you.”
“Thank you.”
“The Burches are, or rather were, a married couple — twenty-two years. Back during the financial crisis they set up an investment scheme that took advantage of people with distressed mortgages. It collapsed in 2012 and they were arrested.”
“And they didn’t go to jail?”
Meldrum engaged in a mirthless stretching of the lips. “Jail? I’m sorry, Lieutenant, where have you been these past ten years? I can’t tell you how many cases I’ve worked on where, instead of prosecuting, we negotiated a settlement and levied a fine. These two swindlers got slapped on the wrist and quickly opened a new rip-off shop — LFX Financial.”
“Which does what?”
“Targets the spouses of soldiers and retired vets. Two basic swindling schemes. You got a soldier overseas. The spouse — usually a wife — is stateside, having a tough time economically. So you get the wife to take out a balloon mortgage on the house. Small initial payments, then the rate resets to what they can’t afford. LFX takes the house, flips it, rakes in the bucks.”
“Legal?”
“Mostly. Except there are special rules about foreclosing on a soldier on active duty that they didn’t follow. That’s where I come in.”
“And the second scheme?”
“LFX would identify the widow of a vet who’s living in a nice house, fully paid off. They’d persuade her to take out a small reverse mortgage. No big deal, done all the time. But then LFX would force a default on the reverse mortgage for some bogus reason: nonpayment of homeowner’s insurance or some other trumped-up or trivial violation of terms. Just enough of an excuse to take the house, sell it, and keep an obscene amount of the proceeds as late fees, fines, interest, penalties, and other jacked-up charges.”
“In other words, these two were the scum of the earth,” said D’Agosta.
“You bet.”
“Must have had a lot of enemies.”
“Yes. In fact, some time back there was a mass shooting in this very building — a soldier who lost his home came in and aired out the place before committing suicide.”
“Oh yeah,” said D’Agosta. “I remember that. So you think the two were killed by a victim seeking revenge?”
“It’s a reasonable hypothesis, and that’s what I thought when I first got the call.”
“But you don’t think so now.”
“No. It seems pretty clear to me it’s the same psycho who did those other three headless people: a vigilante type punishing rich dirtbags. You know, like what the articles in the Post are saying.”
D’Agosta shook his head. As much as he couldn’t stand that bastard Harriman, his theory was looking more and more likely. He glanced at Pendergast and couldn’t help but ask: “What do you think?”
“A great deal.”
D’Agosta waited, but it was soon clear that would be the extent of his comment. “It’s insane. You got two people decapitated in the middle of the day in a busy office building. How’d the killer get past security, how’d he get into the office, how’d he kill them, cut their heads off, and get out — with nobody seeing anything? Seems impossible, like one of those locked-room mysteries by — what’s his name? — Dickson Carr.”
Pendergast nodded. “In my opinion, the important questions are not so much who the victims were, why they were selected, or how the murder was done.”
“What else is there to a murder than the who, why, and how?”
“My dear Vincent, there’s the where.”
33
The sound engineer clipped the lavalier mike to Harriman’s shirt, adjusted it, and then retreated to his station. “Speak a few words, please,” he called over. “In a normal voice.”
“This is Bryce Harriman,” Harriman said. “Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky…”
“Okay, we’ve got good levels.” The engineer gave the producer a thumbs-up.
Harriman looked around the studio stage. A television studio always amused him: 10 percent of it was done up to look like somebody’s living room, or an anchor’s desk, and the rest of the space was always a huge mess, all concrete floor and hanging lights and green screens and cameras and cable runs and people standing around watching.
This was the third show he’d done this week, and each had been bigger than the one before. It was like a barometer of how successful his article, and its follow-ups, had been. First, there was the local New York station — taped, not live — that had given him a two-minute spot. Next had been an appearance on The Melissa Mason Show, one of the most popular talk shows in the tristate area. But then the news of the double murders had broken — murders that fit his predictions to a T. And now he was appearing on the big kahuna: America’s Morning with Kathee Durant, one of the biggest nationally televised morning shows in the country. And there was Kathee herself, sitting not two feet away from him, getting her face touched up during the commercial break. The Morning set was done up to look like an upscale breakfast nook, with American naive paintings on the fake walls and two wing chairs with doily antimacassars facing each other, a large-screen monitor in between.