“Any ideas, Micah?” Wolfsheim asked. “Think about it. The killer was set up and waiting when Handley came home at 12:55 a.m. The entire procedure could have taken say twenty or thirty minutes max, depending on how much the killer was enjoying it. Clearly S amp; M is involved in this. My guess is the perpetrator was out of there by one-thirty, two at the latest. And all the killer needed to bring into the scene was a hot water bottle or some other viable container, a three-foot IV, liquid Yohimbe, two pills, gloves, and some booties.”
“Stuff easily carried in a purse or a paper bag,” Cody said. “Maybe…to complicate matters? Maybe he was testing us? Or maybe…”
“Yes?” Wolfsheim asked.
“It was just a cruel joke.”
Everybody paused to think about that. Could Handley have set up his own sadomasochistic game only to be killed by his partner?
“Could have been a her,” Annie said.
Cody nodded. “True enough. We don’t know for sure whether it was a him or a her.”
“Or both,” Hue added.
“Or androgynous,” Bergman said with a smile. “A he-she.”
“It’s unlikely for this kind of killer to be a woman,” Kate said.
“Yes, it is unlikely,” Cody told her. “But it happens. Though when women kill they usually employ the softer devices, like suffocation.”
Larry Simon looked thoughtful. “But some women torture, and even use guns and knives.” He pointed out that Nell “Hell’s Belle” killed forty men; and that Theresa Noor, who shot her first husband and tortured other victims, including her own daughter, giggled while confessing.”
“She tortured her daughter?”
“Yeah,” Simon said. “She spread a whole pot of macaroni and cheese on her daughter’s legs, made her eat every bite, then killed her.”
“Now that’s torture,” Hue chuckled ghoulishly, remembering his mother’s awful mac and cheese that was so dry it nearly choked him on more than one occasion.
Cody hadn’t been paying attention to Simon’s war stories. He was thinking his own thoughts. “It wasn’t anyone in the Stembler family,” he said. “They were all at a party in Boston last night. The old man flew in on the company plane this morning.”
“How’d he take it?” Wolfsheim asked.
“Shock, disbelief. Then when it began to really sink in I think he was overwhelmed by the whole thing. Autopsy, wedding plans to be canceled, telling his wife and daughter.”
“He volunteered to make the ID,” Kate added. “Then he said he had to make a list.”
“Yeah,” Cody said. “The businessman in him started to creep out.”
“That’s pretty cold,” Hue said.
“He’s a corporate shark. He didn’t get where he is suckling on the milk of human kindness. Most people in his spot would have been more concerned with Handley. Motives, did we have any suspects, more details. He made the arc from Handley’s death to the problems he was facing in about three minutes flat.”
“Did you tell him what happened?” Wolf asked.
“I told him Handley’s throat was slit by someone he knew and that it was not a robbery or a fight.”
“Not entirely untrue,” Wolf said.
“For now that’s all anybody has to know but us.”
“I did notice that he didn’t bring up the possibility that the killer could have been a woman,” said Kate. “I got the feeling it was an option he didn’t care to deal with.”
“Maybe we should call the perp Androg,” Bergman suggested. “Covers all bases.”
“Sure, why not,” Wolf said. “Androg. I like it. Of course it opens up a few more doors. Now we really don’t know what the hell we know.”
Everybody laughed. Then Wolf added, “I’d make one change.”
“What’s that?” Hue asked.
“Play it safe,” Wolf answered. And then added edgily: “Make it Androg 1.”
Everyone fell silent.
Cody nodded slowly.
“You agree then?” Wolf said.
Cody continued nodding.
“This is too elaborate to be a one-off. There’s a demon loose amongst us,” Wolf said.
“Yeah, and so far Androg hasn’t left or taken any trophies,” Cody said impatiently. “What are we looking for? A time sequence? A location pattern? Moon phase? What? And why Handley? Hell, we don’t even have a signature yet.”
In the back of the room Larry Simon was staring at the big board. He said, almost casually, “Sooner or later the perp will start bragging. They all do.”
13
The crew, except for Vinnie Hue and Larry Simon, vacated the office quickly to follow their assignments. Wolf and Annie returned to the lab to clean up.
Hue was busy transcribing and editing the tapes that had been gathered in the four hours since Handley’s body was discovered.
Simon was at his desk toward the rear of the room, his eyes fixed on the screen, his fingers dancing across the keyboard of his computer.
If Vincent Hue was the nerve center of the TAZ, Larry Simon was its brain. Like Hue, Simon had an IQ that was off the charts.
From an early age, Simon, the youngest son of wealthy Jewish parents, mastered every subject his teachers threw at him with an ease that baffled them. Like a magnet attracts flux, Simon’s facile brain attracted information and retained it.
By the time he was sixteen, the eccentric, moody, loner was a senior in college, five-five, and slightly overweight; a baby-faced teenager with a brain eons older than his body and littered with encyclopedic fragments of knowledge, none worthy of his undivided attention. When a group of psychologists gathered to study the prodigious youngster, one diagnosed him as borderline autistic.
But a psychology professor at Harvard Medical School named Howard Reischman disagreed, observing that he showed none of the signs of autism. “There’s a big difference between frustration and rage and boredom and ennui,” he told Simon’s parents. “He just hasn’t found anything that holds his interest long enough to focus on.”
He enrolled Simon in one of his abnormal psych classes in order to observe his learning habits and his interaction with other students. He quickly noted that Simon had a devilish sense of humor, never voluntarily answering questions in class and, when called on, casually couched his answers either as abstractions or ingenious epigrams. He wasn’t challenging the other students, he was challenging Reischman.
Then, on a field trip to a mental institution, Reischman observed Simon taking copious notes while observing interviews with the inmates. Simon never took notes. Was he really that interested, Reischman wondered?
Simon did not appear in class for a week following the trip. Reischman was concerned until Simon appeared at his house one night with a book tucked under his arm.
“Do you have a minute?” Simon asked. The minute turned into a four-hour conversation. In that one visit to the institution, Simon had grasped the most subtle distinctions between psychopaths and psychotics and was comfortable discussing the subject in some depth.
“The psychopaths were pretty bright guys,” Simon said. “The look normal but one of them lied all the time about everything. Another one played with himself the whole time we were there and actually enjoyed it. Totally anti-social. What separates them from the psychotics is they aren’t nutty. They know right from wrong, they just don’t care. They don’t have a conscience.
“On the other hand, the psychotics are confirmed whackos. They hear voices and have visions that make them commit crimes. They’re like that David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, who claimed his dog made him do it.
“Thing is, we don’t know what motivates psychopaths, so we can’t stop them before they commit crimes.”
“That’s true,” Reischman answered.
“Classic psychopaths,” Simon said. “Knew what they were doing and they knew it was wrong but they just kept doing it until they got caught.”
Reischman was fascinated. He just listened. Simon had assimilated the history of serial killers and the range of iniquity that set them aside in a terrifying enclave reserved for the worst predators of society and the paradigm that distinguished them from the norm: They were not insane, they simply had no conscience.