Exceptional Clearance Page 9

  Moose and Marsella looked up from their typewriters. “Think the racial mix is significant?” Moose asked.

  “I just don’t know,” Vinda said, reaching for a yellow pad. “Let’s see what we know about our perp.” He discussed the details of each homicide, and spoke at length about the killer’s telephone calls to the media and May Gold. “This guy appears to be going after the Job,” he said, “which means he has a real or imagined grievance against the department or some cop.” He looked at his men. “I think until we come up with something else on this guy, we’re going to have to start checking out records. Cover all the bases—the Civilian Complaint Review Board, Corporation Counsel, federal and state courts for lawsuits against the department and any of its members.”

  “How many years you want to go back?” Moose asked.

  “Twenty,” Vinda said.

  Sighs of exasperation issued from the detectives. “That’s a lotta records,” Moose groused.

  “When we find his grievance, we’ll find him,” Vinda said.

  “Lou, hundreds of complaints are filed each year against cops, alleging everything from false arrest to abuse of authority,” Marsella moaned.

  Vinda held up a protesting palm. “We’re looking for something out of the ordinary. Something that could flip a guy out, make him need to kill.”

  He dialed David Pollack’s centrex number. When the reporter answered, he told him what they were doing and asked him to check out the newspaper morgue, going back twenty years.

  “There are only about a thousand stories a year relating to police screw-ups,” the reporter shouted into the mouthpiece.

  “Aren’t you the one who bragged what a good detective he was?” Vinda said, and hung up. His next telephone call was to the “Honorary Desk” at the Health Service Bureau. Honorary Police Surgeons were medical professionals who rendered gratis health care to members of the service out of a sense of public service and because they liked cops. He told the sergeant manning the desk what he needed, and was given two names along with addresses and telephone numbers.

  Dr. Terry Young’s specialty was prosthodontics, the replacement of missing teeth with bridges and dentures. His suite of offices was on the twenty-second floor of a glass tower on the northwest corner of Lexington Avenue and Fifty-fourth Street.

  Vinda entered the office. The receptionist looked up from behind her glass cage. “Mr. Vinda?”

  “Yes.”

  “Doctor Young will see you right away.”

  Late thirties, short, rotund, with a chin and stomach padded with layers of fat. Here is a man who likes to eat, Vinda thought.

  Motioning Vinda toward a small sofa inside his private office, Young said, “Health Services telephoned and said you’d be right over. Now, what can I do for you, Lieutenant?”

  Vinda put the morgue photos of the four homicide victims on the desk in front of the dentist and proceeded to tell him about the case. He told Young they were stymied, trying to figure out how the killer was able to control his victims and inflict such wounds at the same time, and that he’d thought the killer might have held the murder weapon in his mouth somehow, but that that surmise had been shattered by an assistant medical examiner named Patricia Marcal, who had told him it was impossible. “I needed to check her conclusions with a dentist specializing in prosthodontics,” he finished.

  Dr. Young studied the photos of each victim. He took his time reading the autopsy protocols.

  Vinda stared at the pastel wallpaper and tried to contain his impatience, waiting for him to finish.

  Young looked up from the reports and said, “What you are talking about, Lieutenant, is a prosthesis capable of invading the throat and severing the common carotid artery and the internal jugular vein without causing physical injury to the wearer of the device. In other words, a pair of fangs.”

  Vinda was surprised. “I suppose you’re right. I never thought of the murder weapon in those terms.”

  “Well, no matter. I’m sorry to have to tell you that your medical examiner was correct. The force needed for such an invasive act could not be generated by a prosthesis attached to the teeth of a human mouth.” He picked up a plaster cast of the mouth, and proceeded to give the policeman a lesson on prosthodontics. “The type of device you are looking for would have to protrude from the mouth so that the wearer would not cut off his own tongue when he used it.” Darting his pencil over the cast, measuring different parts of the mouth, he added, “The incisors would have to be razor sharp.” His face twisted into a thoughtful expression; he looked Vinda in the eyes. “I’m sorry. What you are looking for simply does not exist. The mouth’s configuration makes it impossible.”

  “Can you think of any device that could be attached to the mouth and cause such wounds?”

  Young picked up the photos, looked them over again, and said, “No, thank God!”

  “Sister? Sister Mary Margaret?” Vinda called, poking his head into the second-floor office at the Manhattan campus of Fordham University.

  “Over here,” a pleasant voice called out from behind a desk buried deep in academic disarray.

  Two large windows faced Lincoln Center and an assortment of indoor plants cluttered the sills. A photograph of Freud hung on one wall next to a wooden crucifix; on another were a peace symbol and several framed diplomas.

  Entering the office, Vinda edged his way around the stacks of journals and term papers cluttering the floor, heading for the desk. A head popped up from behind the uneven ridgeline of books.

  Sister Mary Margaret Fenner appeared to be in her late forties; she was a short woman with a gentle face, a glowing smile, and amber eyes. She wore a black skirt and a yellow sweater with a brown vest, and sneakers with blue horizontal stripes on the sides. Only her black veil showed she had taken vows.

  “I’m John Vinda, Sister,” he said, picking his way to the desk. “It’s good of you to see me on such short notice.”

  “When Health Services telephoned and told me your problem, I was fascinated, so I rearranged my schedule so that I could see you today. Now. Sit here and tell me everything,” she said, scooping up an armful of books and papers off the chair. She slipped her hand under a stack on her desk and came out with a pack of cigarettes. She shook one out, offered him one, which he declined, and lit her own. “My brother is a state trooper in Kentucky. He’s always boasting about how discreet policemen are. Is that true?”

  “It certainly is, Sister,” Vinda answered with a grin.

  “Then you won’t tell anyone about my little vice, will you?” she said, taking a drag and quickly waving the smoke away. “Now tell me all.”

  Vinda looked up at the portrait of Freud and the crucifix, unsure how to begin. He had homicides being committed with some impossible instrument. The medical people told him there was no such instrument. So if he couldn’t identify the weapon, maybe he could start to understand the mind of the person who used it. “I understand you’re a psychiatrist, Sister.”

  “No, I’m a clinical psychologist. I also have a doctorate in theology. I teach graduate classes at the university. And, as a staff member of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, I am charged with the responsibility of investigating, along with others, all kinds of supposedly supernatural phenomena. Despite what our many critics say, the Church is scrupulously scientific when it comes to investigations of supernatural events and incidents.” She smiled. “Do I fit the bill, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, Sister, you do.” He took out the morgue photos and passed them to her. She studied them without displaying any emotional reaction while he explained the details of the investigation. “Is it possible for a person to drink human blood, Sister Mary Margaret?”

  “Sick minds have a strange way of overcoming the body’s intrinsic revulsion to certain acts. For instance, some people are able to ingest human feces. What I see in these dreadful photographs is anger—Eros denied. The Marquis de Sade is a classic example.”

  Vinda nodded and said, “W
e have reason to believe that his anger is directed at the police department.”

  A doubtful expression came over her face. “It’s not that simple. If your killer was seeking revenge against your department, he’d vent his rage at the police or police facilities, but he’s not. He’s killing women. So I suggest to you that his illness is not subject to simplistic diagnosis.”

  “I suppose people with mental problems believe all sorts of strange things,” he said, hedging.

  “Sick minds, Lieutenant, are capable of all sorts of aberrations.”

  “You must deal with a lot of weird people, Sister.”

  She smiled. “Neurotics build dream castles, psychotics live in them, and psychiatrists collect the rent.”

  “What type of dream castle does my killer live in?”

  “From what you have told me, I would guess that you’re dealing with a paranoid whose delusions and obsessions have emotional and symbolic meaning to him. Such people are known as classical paranoids. They function well in most areas, but have a fixed delusional system woven into their lives. A capsulated psychosis that springs out whenever the right button is pushed.”

  “Could such a person believe he was a vampire?”

  Her eyes widened in surprise, and she paused before she said, in a low voice, “Yes.”

  “Would such a person be knowledgeable about vampire lore?”

  “Yes. It would possibly fuel the delusional system.”

  Vinda leaned forward, a vague uneasiness stirring inside him. “Have you ever dealt with people who believed they were vampires?”

  “Yes, I have. I’ve investigated eight so-called vampiric incidents over the years. Every one of them involved pathology, not vampires. And I can tell you that in each case the person who believed he—or in one case, she—was a vampire ended up in a mental hospital.” She flicked ash into a partly open drawer of her desk and inhaled deeply on her cigarette. “From what you have told me so far, I see no reason to believe you are dealing with a vampire psychosis. What facts do you have to substantiate such a theory?”

  “It’s not a theory, Sister, it’s a suspicion, one of several that this investigation has engendered, which I have to look at and examine.”

  “Okay. Tell me what has led you to this, er, suspicion.”

  “The similarity of the wounds on all victims, the fact that the ME is not sure if any blood was missing, the fact that we cannot find any blood leading away from any of the crime scenes.”

  She got up out of her seat and went over to the windows. She opened one; a blast of cold air gushed across the room. She tossed out the cigarette, closed the window, and hurried back to her seat. Leveling a cold, almost unfriendly gaze on him, she said, “Most of what you’ve told me can be explained away, Lieutenant. For instance, arterial evulsion—gushing blood—makes it almost impossible to account for all the blood loss. Perhaps your killer is wearing some sort of blood-absorbing suit. You’re not dealing with a vampire, Lieutenant, real or imagined.”

  He couldn’t keep the shock out of his voice. “Real vampires?”

  “The earliest references to vampires are in Chaldean and Assyrian tablets. Ancient Greek and Roman lore contain many references to incidents of vampire attacks,” she said, obviously trying to sidestep the question.

  Vinda was hooked. He forced the issue and asked bluntly, “Sister, do they or don’t they exist?”

  Sister Mary Margaret did not respond for several long moments. She seemed to be struggling to make a decision of some sort. Finally she sighed and said, “I guess that all depends on your perception of God and life.”

  “I might be looking up the wrong tree, Sister, but it’s a tree I have to look up. And you can help, maybe save a woman’s life.”

  She nodded slowly in agreement and went on: “The first thing you must do in order to understand the phenomenon of the vampire is to separate the ones of Hollywood and fiction writers from the body of scientific knowledge on the subject. A true vampire, Lieutenant, is someone neither dead nor alive, but living in death. A corporeal being with its own body, one that requires blood to prevent decomposition.”

  He looked at her in disbelief. “How can you believe that stuff?”

  “You asked me, I told you. Both the Old and New Testaments cite many examples of the dead being brought back to life.”

  “That’s the Bible. I can’t use that on a witness stand. We’re talking about four homicides in 1991 A.D.”

  “Do you know what November second is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s the Feast of All Souls. When many still celebrate the annual return of the dead to this world. In 1991 A.D.! Many people still believe that the dead retain a certain material form, that they even have hunger and thirst. The custom of bringing food to the grave and eating it there has survived from the very distant past because people still believe the dead will be strengthened and comforted by the sight of living people eating, Lieutenant.”

  Looking at her in bewilderment, he leaned up out of his seat and asked, “What does that have to do with this case?”

  “The significance of this custom,” she continued, ignoring his question, “implies that the feeding of the dead is done so that their hunger will be sated, so they won’t come back from the grave and attack the living.”

  Vinda sat back in the chair. He had stumbled into strange territory that belonged to philosophers and theologians, not cops. Stick to the Patrol Guide, he admonished himself. Don’t get tangled up in this religious gobbledygook. He looked at her and asked, “According to the lore, how does a person become a vampire?”

  Nervously toying with her pack of cigarettes, she answered, “By being a victim of a vampire, by committing suicide, by having been excommunicated, or by being the illegitimate son of an illegitimate son.”

  Recalling Linda Camatro’s brazen daylight murder, he asked, “Is it true that vampires can only come out at night?”

  “That is a Hollywood idea. According to tradition, they can function any time, day or night, and they appear normal in all respects. The only restriction on their movements is that they may not leave their burial place on a Saturday.”

  “Why is that, Sister?”

  “Because Saturday is sacred to the Mother of God. Saint Bernard tells us that the day after the death of her son, Mary remained constant in her faith.”

  Vinda looked at her with open skepticism. “The entire subject of vampires is steeped in religious mysticism.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is. C. S. Lewis wrote that all important truth comes to us through myth, not necessarily through scientific formulae and laws.”

  “I always thought God created us in His image and likeness.”

  “He did. He created the angelic and man, both good. They did evil because God gave them free will. Lucifer was an angel whose great crime was his desire to equal God. Perhaps your killer thinks he is like Lucifer?”

  Vinda felt a mounting sense of frustration. He tried to get things back on the rails. “You said before that they appear normal in every respect. Is there any way to spot them?”

  The nun said, with some reluctance, “The ancient Church believed they could be detected by their foul and fetid odor. But I’m not too sure about the probability of that.”

  Grasping at straws, Vinda asked, “Anything else?”

  “Paranoids are extremely adept at drawing people into their delusional belief systems. They’re the perfect confidence men; they fabricate a life in their own minds and can even make you a part of it. That’s something you might look out for.”

  “Can you think of any reason why he would kill only young women?”

  “According to the tradition—the myth, if you will—their blood is pure and strong, and it is the blood that sustains and nourishes the vampire, prolonging its existence of life-in-death.”

  Vinda slid a brown department envelope out of the inside breast pocket of his sport jacket, removed several small photographs, and handed them to her. “These are en
largements of the wounds on each of the victims. Look carefully at the marks to the right and a little below each wound.”

  He watched her scrutinize the first one. Her mouth fell open in shock; she looked up at the crucifix, and her lips moved in silent prayer. She stared at the cross for a long time, not saying anything.

  “Those marks, what are they?”

  She replied softly, “The impulse to bite under stress of strong sexual desire is a common act. With some vampires, the taking of prey is a sexual act. They kiss the throat first, as if engaging in foreplay, and then bite deep. Those marks are known as the vampire’s kiss. I’ve never seen them, only read about them.” She looked at two more of the photographs and shuddered.

  Vinda was suddenly aware of the weight of the revolver on his hip and asked, “How is a vampire destroyed—according to the myth?”

  She quickly took out and lit another cigarette. “Why do you want to know?”

  “I have to know everything there is to know about this guy if I’m to stop him from killing again.”

  She took a deep breath, and said, “There are several ways. Cutting off its head, driving a stake through its breast, burning it and scattering its ashes to the wind, or transfixing its heart. But you must be careful to transfix it with a single blow, because two or more would restore it to life. Or so tradition says.”

  Vinda got up out of his chair and smiled at her. “Thank you. You’ve been a great help.”

  She walked with him to the door. “If you need me again, don’t hesitate to come back and see me.” She took hold of his wrist, stopping him. “You should know that as time passes he will become more audacious and bloodthirsty. I’ll pray for you and your men. The importance of the myth is that the killer believes it. It’s real for him—and he’s making it real for the rest of the world.”

  TWELVE

  A wrap party for the cast and crew of Lovers and Friends was being held in Paula’s, a Third Avenue restaurant favored by high rollers and showbiz types. Replica Tiffany lamps filled the ceiling in a rainbow of shimmering color that ran the length of the art deco bar and continued back into the restaurant, where a five-piece jazz band belted out “The Sugarman Blues.”