"Are you all right?"
"I'm fine."
"You don't look fine. You look sick."
"I'm fine." He fumbled for a file at random and opened it. She was still there. "What?"
"What's the plan for today?" she asked.
"The plan is for me to drink my coffee and for you to come back in an hour."
Dutifully, she reappeared in precisely one hour. His pain and nausea were subsiding but his thinking was still milky. "Okay," he began, "what's our schedule?"
She opened the ubiquitous notebook. "Ten o'clock, telecon with Dr. Sofer from Johns Hopkins. Two o'clock, task force press conference. Four o'clock, uptown to see Helen Swisher. You look better."
He was curt. "I was good an hour ago and I'm good now." She didn't look convinced, and he wondered if she knew he was hung over. Then it dawned on him- she looked better. Her face was a little thinner, her body a little sleeker, her skirt didn't pinch as much at the waist. They had been constant companions for ten days and he'd only just realized she was eating like a parakeet. "Can I ask you a question?"
"Sure."
"Are you on a diet or something?"
She blushed instantly. "Sort of. I started jogging again too."
"Well, it looks good. Keep it up."
She lowered her eyes in embarrassment. "Thanks."
He quickly changed the subject. "Okay, let's take a step back and try to see the big picture," he said foggily. "We're getting killed with details. Let's go through these, one more time, focusing on connections." He joined her at the conference table and moved the files onto other files to give them an uncluttered surface. He took a clean pad and wrote on it, Key Observations, and underlined the words twice. He willed his brain to work and loosened his tie to encourage blood flow.
There had been three deaths on May 22, three on May 25, two on June 11, and none since. "What does that tell us?" he asked. She shook her head, so he answered his own question. "They're all weekdays."
"Maybe the guy has a weekend job," she offered.
"Okay. Maybe." He entered his first key observation: Weekdays. "Find the Swisher files. I think they're on the bookcase."
Case #1: David Paul Swisher, thirty-six-year-old investment banker at HSBC. Park Avenue, wealthy, all-Ivy background. Married, nothing obvious on the side. No Enron skeletons in his closet as far as they knew. Took the family mutt for a predawn walk, found by a jogger just after 5:00 A.M. in a river of blood-watch, rings, and wallet missing, left carotid cleanly sliced. The body was still warm, about twenty feet out of range of the nearest CCTV camera located on the roof of a co-op on the south side of 82nd Street-twenty goddamned feet and they would've have had the killing on tape.
However, they did have a glimpse of a person of interest, a nine-second sequence time-coded at 5:02:23-5:02:32, shot from a security camera on the roof of a ten-story building on the west side of Park Avenue between 81st and 82nd. It showed a male walking into the frame from 82nd turning south on Park, pivoting then running back the way he came and disappearing down 82nd again. The image was poor quality but FBI techs had blown it up and enhanced it. From the suspect's hand coloration they determined he was black or Latino, and from reference calculations, they figured he was about five-ten and weighed 160 to 175 pounds. The hood of a gray sweatshirt obscured his face. The timing was promising since the 911 call came in at 5:07, but in the absence of witnesses they had no leads on his identity.
If not for the postcard, this would have been a street mugging, plain and simple, but David Swisher got a postcard. David Swisher was Doomsday victim one.
Will held up a photo of the hooded man and waved it at Nancy. "So is this our guy?"
"He may be David's killer but that doesn't make him the Doomsday Killer," she said.
"Serial murder by proxy? That'd be a first."
She tried another tack. "Okay, maybe this was a contract murder."
"Possible. An investment banker is bound to have enemies," Will said. "Every deal has a winner and a loser. But David was different from the other victims. He was the only one who wore a white collar to work. Who's going to pay to murder any of the others?" Will flipped through one of the Swisher files. "Do we have a list of David's clients?"
"His bank hasn't been helpful," Nancy said. "Every request for info has to go through their legal department and be personally signed off by their general counsel. We haven't gotten anything yet but I'm pushing."
"I've got a feeling he's the key." Will closed Swisher's file and pushed it away. "The first victim in a string has a special significance to the killer, something symbolic. You said we're seeing his wife today?"
She nodded.
"About time."
Case #2: Elizabeth Marie Kohler, thirty-seven-year-old manager at a Duane Reade drugstore in Queens. Shot to death in an apparent robbery, found by employees at the rear entrance when they got to work at 8:30 A.M. Police initially thought she'd been killed by an assailant who waited for her to arrive to steal narcotics. Something went wrong, he fired, she fell, he ran. The bullet was a. 38 caliber, one shot to the temple at close range. No surveillance video, no useful forensics. It took police a couple of days to find the postcard at her apartment and connect her with the others.
He looked up from her file and asked, "Okay, what's the connection between a Wall Street banker and a drugstore manager?"
"I don't know," Nancy said. "They were nearly the same age but their lives didn't have any obvious points of intersection. He never shopped at her drugstore. There's nothing."
"Where are we with her ex-husband, old boyfriends, coworkers?"
"We've got most of them identified and accounted for," she replied. "There's one high school boyfriend we can't find. His family moved out of state years ago. All her other exes-if they don't have an alibi for her murder, they've got one for the other murders. She's been divorced for five years. Her ex-husband was driving a bus for the Transit Authority the morning she was shot. She was an ordinary person. Her life wasn't complicated. She didn't have enemies."
"So, if it weren't for the postcard, this would have been an open and shut case of an armed robbery gone bad."
"That's what it looks like, on the surface," she agreed.
"Okay, action items," he said. "See if she had any high school or college yearbooks and have all the names entered into the database. Also, contact the landlord and get a list of all her present and former neighbors going back for five years. Throw them into the mix."
"Done. You want another coffee?" He did, badly.
Case #3: Consuela Pilar Lopez, thirty-two-year-old illegal immigrant from the Dominican Republic, living in Staten Island, working as an office cleaner in Manhattan. Found just after 3:00 A.M. by a group of teenagers in a wooded area near the shore in Arthur Von Briesen Park, less than a mile from her house on Fingerboard Road. She'd been raped and repeatedly stabbed in the chest, head, and neck. She had taken the ten o'clock ferry from Manhattan that night, confirmed by CCTV. Her usual routine would have been to take the bus south toward Fort Wadsworth, but no one could place her at the bus station at the St. George Ferry Terminal or on the number 51 bus that ran down Bay Street to Fingerboard.
The working hypothesis was that someone intercepted her at the terminal, offered her a ride, and took her to a dark corner of the island, where she met her end under the looming superstructure of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. There was no semen in or on her body-the killer apparently used a condom. There were gray fibers on her shirt, which appeared to have come from a sweatshirt type of fabric. At postmortem, her wounds were calibrated. The blade was four inches long, compatible with the one that killed David Swisher. Lopez lived in a two-family house with an extended group of siblings and cousins, some documented, some not. She was a religious lady who worshipped at St. Sylvester's, where stunned parishioners had packed the church for a memorial mass. According to family and friends, she had no boyfriend, and the autopsy suggested that even though she was in her thirties she had been a virgin. All attempts to connect her with the other victims proved fruitless.