On my way out of the lab, to my surprise, I saw that it was after four in the morning. The gorilla had been told to escort me all the way back to our apartment. I managed not to screw with him by turning into a werewolf on the way. Karen was awake, but drowsy, so I kissed her and lay down beside her.
‘What happened?’
‘They told you I’d be late, didn’t they?’
‘Yes. What was Rivers doing?’
‘He’s got a new sidekick. Dr. Alexandra ‘I’m Pale Because I Only Come Out at Night’ Brown. She’s not only a grade-one weirdo, but she’s got a process.’
‘That sounds worrying.’
I gave her a rundown, wondering if she’d be put through it after she’d given birth. Were the drugs safe? Then I felt myself heading rapidly toward sleep’s Niagara Falls. I managed to kiss her again before my barrel went into the watery void. My last thoughts were: what exactly was in Dr. Brown’s pharmaceutical cocktail? And was I about to set off on a trip to hell?
I woke up with a clear head and serious hunger, having had no dinner the previous evening. It was nearly noon. Karen was encamped on the sofa, watching a kids’ cartoon on TV.
‘I’m getting in training,’ she said.
‘Yeah, we’ll be seeing a lot of those in the next few years. How do you feel?’
‘All right, I suppose. My appetite seems to have gone walkabout.’
‘So you don’t fancy a full English?’
She gave me a foxy smile. ‘As in breakfast? No, thanks.’
‘Sexual innuendo at this time in the morning? Shame on you, Karen Oaten.’
‘Why don’t you try “Karen Wells”?’
‘Because I know you’ll keep your own name. That’s who you are in the Met.’
‘Work isn’t everything, Matt.’
‘I never thought I’d hear you say that.’
She took my hand and put it on her bulge. ‘We’ve got someone else to think about now. Magnus Oliver Wells.’
‘Where did “Oliver” come from?’
‘My grandfather on my mother’s side. I liked him.’
‘Okay.’ There were worse names. Like Heinz. Or Sebastian. ‘I’m ravenous. Do you mind if I stuff my face?’
Karen shook her head, then pulled me closer, her eyes suddenly damp. ‘Don’t ever leave me, Matt.’
‘Of course I won’t. What’s got into you?’
‘Nothing. It’s an emotional time. Now go and have your grease feast.’
When I came back with a plateful of eggs, bacon and sausage, I sat at the table. Karen had drifted off to sleep, so I left the cartoon and found a news channel.
I was halfway through a mouthful of food when I heard the announcer’s voice get serious.
‘In the City of Brotherly Love, a gruesome discovery,’ said the over-made-up woman with huge hair. ‘TV stations, including our own, were directed by anonymous calls to a disused factory in North Philadelphia. There, the crews found human organs said to come from murdered university professor Jack Notaro. His body was…’
The pictures showed a scrum of cameramen and reporters around a police line.
I watched as a tall man wearing a senior officer’s insignia on his uniform jacket and cap inserted himself between two street cops. Microphones were immediately directed at him, like arrows on their way to Saint Sebastian. Which made me wonder where the FBI man with that surname was. I was sure this was where he and Bimsdale had flown off to last night. The caption read Major Andrew Carstens, Philadelphia Homicide Chief.
The reporters were baying like wolves. It wasn’t often they got to make the headlines in their own story. A particularly pushy type, an oxlike man with carefully sculpted facial hair, got his question in first.
‘Major, will you confirm what was found?’
The policeman gave him a weary look. ‘As I think you know, Wayne, a human eye and kidney were located in the building behind me.’
‘By the crew from WZNT News,’ the reporter said proudly.
‘Major!’ yelled another reporter, this one Chinese and almost as tall as the cop. ‘Major, what about the Nazi objects that were with the organs? Are they linked to the murders in other cities?’
Carstens looked reluctant to answer. I wasn’t surprised. Peter Sebastian had probably fitted an explosive device to his backside. If he strayed onto the FBI’s patch, his colon would be well and truly irrigated. This was looking bad. Rothmann and his group of extremist thugs had to be involved.
Eventually the major went on, confining himself to stating that a copy of Mein Kampf, a Nazi flag and an SS dagger had been arranged around the eye and kidney. There were also Waffen-SS marching songs playing on a boom box.
I pushed the plate away, no longer interested in food. The camera was panning around the crowd, then zooming in on individual members of the public. These were the ghouls who rushed to rubberneck at crime scenes, the gorier the better. That was when I saw him, the shithead. He was wearing a beard-probably false-and had a woolen hat pulled down to his ears, but I recognized his ratlike features immediately. It was Gordy Lister, one of Heinz Rothmann’s sidekicks. In Washington before the slaughter at the cathedral, we’d made the mistake of letting him go before we knew just how important he was. Here he was, right back in the frame.
I picked up the phone-it only connected to our FBI minders-and told Julie Simms to get Sebastian on the line as quickly as she could. It wasn’t only Alexandra Brown who could make significant discoveries.
Ten
Special Agent Arthur Bimsdale was perplexed. Back in his hometown for the first time since he had been posted to Washington six months ago, he had never seen Philadelphia in a worse light-even on the autumn day that his parents, killed in a car crash three years ago, had been laid to rest in the Episcopalian cemetery. It was then that he had questioned his faith for the first, but certainly not the last, time.
It didn’t help that it was winter and the city’s prevalent color was gray, in a plethora of merging shades, but there was more to his feeling of disquiet than that. A sensitive person would have put it down to his proximity to death, in the forms of Jack Notaro and his predecessors in recent weeks. That didn’t apply to Bimsdale. He might have looked like the Yale scholar he once was, but his few friends knew he had a stainless steel backbone. There was no question that the behavior of the local media had been horrifying-a school of barracuda would have shown more respect to the professor’s mutilated corpse. No, the root of the problem was that his boss, Peter Sebastian, had chosen Philadelphia as the place where he finally showed his true colors.
And those, Bimsdale reflected as he hurriedly downed a cheesesteak at a stall near the university, were blacker than a pirate’s heart. He had suspected from the beginning that Sebastian saw him as a lightweight. His boss had read his personnel file, but quoted only selectively from it. In fact, the special agent in charge at the Butte, Montana, field office had given Bimsdale the best report he’d ever signed off on, commending in particular his aptitude for handling violent crime and his diligence in nailing the most hard-nosed felons. Sebastian seemed unimpressed by that. Arthur knew that his previous assistant was in jail, and he couldn’t understand what he was doing wrong. Maybe his boss had been romantically attached to the mysterious Dana Maltravers.
But all that was in the past. The fact was that Bimsdale hadn’t dropped the ball in the brief period they’d been working together. He had acted as the link between Sebastian and the Bureau’s investigators, both at the Hoover Building and in field offices, as well as dealing with local homicide teams. He had written reports, often in his boss’s name. Sebastian read and signed them, but he had never given him one word of praise. He even kept the media off Sebastian’s back, which had been quite some job since the career of ‘Hitler’s Hitman,’ as the killer was now called by the press, had started in Greenwich Village. Just remembering what information had been made public and what had been restricted in each case required an elephantine memory.