Sins of the Flesh Page 24

  He went to dilute his drink with club soda. “Well, what’s done is done, I hope the poor soul is at peace.”

  “I hope she’s in a kinder place than here,” Delia said.

  TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 1969

  It had fallen to Rufus to break the news about Ivy to Dr. Jess, but it hadn’t been high enough on his list of priorities to have happened before the news of Ivy’s suicide was relayed to him and Rha. When Anthony Bera called not ten minutes after Abe had come in person to tell the brothers, offering his services in a law suit against Holloman County for criminal negligence, Rufus had taken the call.

  “Mr. Bera,” he said in a tired voice, “go fuck yourself,” and hung up quietly.

  A retort that Abe was able to pass on to the Commissioner, as he was still present when Bera phoned.

  It had puzzled Jess that Rufus Ingham, of all people, wanted to see her, but she wasn’t particularly busy, and told him that he was welcome anytime. Her surprise increased when he arrived shortly thereafter, conducted down from the wall office by Walter Jenkins, who had difficulty finding a slot to fit the guy in, between the make-up, the grace of movement and the unconscious air of aristocracy. When the guy insisted on privacy with Jess, his hackles rose, but clearly she knew him well and liked him; Walter retired to his suite and thought of other things.

  Jess wept bitterly, facing a lonelier life.

  Having shed all his tears, Rufus comforted her as best he could, then waited for the first paroxysm of grief to pass, as it had to. With Jess, not such a long wait; she was controlled, her head would always rule her heart.

  “It was by far the best solution,” he said.

  “Oh, yes. I suppose I’m crying for her pain.”

  “As have all of us who know. How much did she tell you?”

  “Enough. But I do think her death is a way of sending you and Rha a message.”

  His face brightened, he sat straighter. “Tell me, please!”

  “That she’s expiated the guilt. That the pair of you should stop thinking about who and what your father was—yes, she knew Ivor fathered both of you! The only way you can betray her now is to continue living in guilt because your father was an evil man. In November you’re forty years old—that’s enough years, Rufus. Wake up each day shriven, not befouled. That’s her most important message.”

  “She did tell you everything!”

  “I think for a while, many years ago when we first met, Ivy hoped that I’d find a little scrap of brain tissue and label it FATHER’S GENETIC INHERITANCE, but I had to disillusion her by telling her that the code is in every single cell of the body, and cannot be extirpated after the egg is fertilized. It was a blow—she loved the pair of you so much!”

  “Yes, that we do know.” Rufus blinked hard.

  “So this is how she finally decided to extirpate the genes. Not by any process of reason, or even of fantasy. I believe Ivy took all the old sins on her shoulders and tried to negate them, ultimately by destroying them along with her life. You and Rha have to live on as innocents,” Jess said.

  “There’s no sense in it!” Rufus cried.

  “There doesn’t have to be. What is, is.”

  After Rufus left Jess didn’t buzz Walter’s room; she didn’t feel up to coping with Walter until her own emotions were under better command—oh, Ivy! It wasn’t difficult to understand why Ivy had chosen to kill in that manner; it inflicted great suffering over a long period of time without shedding a drop of blood. Even the castrations were relatively bloodless. Like all large people, she had grown in rapid spurts that demanded big quantities of food, which her father had denied her. Ivy’s childhood had been one of perpetual hunger; the only substance Ivor didn’t ration was water. One day, thought Jess Wainfleet, I will write a paper about Ivy Ramsbottom. It will contain facts neither her brothers nor the Holloman PD know, because it was to me that Ivy confided her life, her loves, her hates and her murders. She gave a sour grin. Fancy those ridiculous cops thinking she, Jessica Wainfleet, would ever betray a professional confidance! They’d have to rack her first, and no one in law enforcement did that anymore, though there were two inmates of HI who had.

  “The theory of torturing a suspect to get a confession is so ludicrous it’s comedic material,” she said to Walter with a smile when he brought her a mug of coffee.

  “Is it?” he asked, sitting. “Tell me more.”

  “In other times, suspects were submitted to ordeals of pain to wring confessions out of them,” she said. “It didn’t seem to occur to those inflicting the torture that physical agony produces more lies than truth, though my own theory is that they knew that already. They just liked to inflict torture. People confessed just to stop the pain.” She smiled. “The rulers knew that all they were doing was encouraging the growth of vermin who mentally and physically enjoyed the act of torture. It’s only recently that torture has fallen into disrepute.”

  “Is there any reason why torture could be good?” he asked.

  “Absolutely none, Walter. To enjoy torture is one of the primary signs of psychopathia.”

  “Is that why anesthetic is given before an operation?”

  Jess snorted. “You know that perfectly well. Where are you going, Walter?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said vaguely. “I just wondered.”

  “The answer lies in human kindness, and in education.”

  “You believe in education?” he asked.

  “Completely, no holds barred.”

  “Because of God?”

  She wanted to laugh, but kept a straight face. “God is a comfort-myth, my friend. If there is a God, it’s the Universe. Reward and punishment are human concepts, they’re not divine.”

  “That’s why Rose hates you.”

  “How interesting! I didn’t realize she did.”

  “There’s lots you don’t realize, Jess. That’s why I try to join the wardroom coffee breaks. Except for Dr. Melos, they all think I’m just a wacko, and speak freely.”

  “Clever Walter!” she said admiringly. “When I have more time, you can fill me in on your impressions.”

  His face lit up. “That would be good, Jess.”

  A stab of guilt smote her; she smiled at him ruefully. “Oh, my dear, dear friend, I am neglecting you! I wish you were my only patient, but there are around a hundred others, none of whom carries your importance or interest for me.”

  Then he did it—Walter smiled! A broad, unmistakably wide grin. Stiffening in her chair, Jess grinned back.

  Walter smiled! The floodgates were open, thundering a deluge down what had been an utterly dry and useless gulch; not only thoughts but emotions were cascading out, intermingled exactly as they should—how did triumph acquire a superlative? Because she had regarded Walter as a triumph for over thirty months by now, thinking that he had attained his peak, would grind to a stop. The smile said he hadn’t stopped, and the sophistication of some of his recent actions said he might even be exponentially evolving.

  “You’re happy now,” Walter said.

  “If I am, Walter, it’s entirely thanks to you.”

  Ivy Ramsbottom’s cellar hadn’t been an air-conditioned surgical paradise; that it had sufficed was astonishing in one way, but logical in another. It didn’t gel with Ivy’s fastidiousness, yet she had enough Ivor in her to construct a workable crypt.

  Paul Bachman thought that Ivy, a skilled seamstress, had had it connected to the water and sewer, then padded it with her own hands. The vent was as old as the cellar. She had also changed the tiny elevator into an oversized chair, apparently so that she could descend and sit watching her victim suffer. From the contents of a bathroom that contained the chair just off the kitchen, the forensics team had deduced that Ivy regularly had put her victim to sleep, brought him up to the bathroom, then cleaned, bathed and shaved him, even to touching up the roots of his hair. Once the victim grew too weak to cooperate at all she abandoned her ministrations. Finally she transported the body to a site where
trash was being illegally dumped, and threw him away like a dead animal.

  “The cottage was isolated enough that no one ever heard the screams,” Abe said to the Commissioner, “even though there was an open vent under the hedge line. I had Tony stand in the cellar and screech his loudest, but surprisingly little noise escaped. We think the acoustic dampening is due to the fact that the cellar and bathroom upstairs are not underneath the main house. They’re off to one side, the bathroom area is small, and the cellar covered by two feet of soil and turf on top of a concrete lid. No echo chamber effect. The only way in or out is the elevator chair.”

  “How is her last victim?” Silvestri asked.

  “Hanging in there, sir,” Carmine said. “He has a very long road to recovery, but I’m assured he won’t die. The worst is that he’s burned up most of his muscle fiber in staying alive, so there’s more involved than merely feeding him. He’ll need phsical therapy and psychotherapy.”

  “How’s his dog?” Liam asked.

  “Pedro is taken up from Animal Care on frequent visits,” said Carmine. “Rha and Rufus are picking up the hospital and treatment tabs, and I understand will send him home funded with a pension.”

  “Moving on, what’s happening about the guy who raided your house and shot up young Hank?” the Commissioner asked. “Will Hank be okay?”

  “He’ll walk normally by the end of a year, sir, so I’m told. The spinal damage was virtually nonexistent, though part of the pelvis had to be reconstructed. It’s muscle and skin grafts will keep him in the hospital a good while yet.” He drew a deep breath. “As for the guy who did the shooting—zilch, sir. Nothing. We’ve found no trace of him anywhere. In fact, we don’t even know if he drives a car or rides a motorcycle, though instincts say it’s a big, powerful bike. He dresses in black, that much we got from Hank, who thought they were leather, but won’t swear to it. Except that Hank is sure his face skin was white. The guy wore some kind of helmet, but neither a brain-bucket nor a Wehrmacht style. Pointed, according to Hank, whose eye is more for unusual than ordinary detail. I don’t think he belongs to a biker gang.”

  “A maverick, then?” Silvestri asked.

  “It’s my hunch that he’s always been a maverick.”

  “Not to mention a monster.”

  Everyone nodded.

  The Commissioner pronounced. “A nun killer is beyond anything,” he said, voice harsh. “We have to catch this evil bastard, and soon. No one in Holloman is safe, even the most innocent, until he’s behind bars. Fernando, I want your uniforms on the qui vive day and night. If he does ride a bike, patrols stand a good chance of spotting him.”

  “Yes, sir,” Fernando said.

  “Good,” said Silvestri, then, whispering, “A nun!”

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1969

  She hadn’t known quite how hard it was going to be living in a world devoid of Ivy. The shock had taken two days to dissipate, and it was followed not by depression, but by something worse; apathy. To Jess Wainfleet, psychiatrist, there was a difference between the two. Yes, depression could mean flatness of mood, but deep emotions continued to exist far down—there were pain and suffering. But not this time: Jess felt only an awful apathy, a total absence of any sort of suffering or pain.

  Of course it had one advantage. She could work—and work well, efficiently, swiftly, unerringly. Grateful for that, she took her hundred cases out of the safe and ploughed through them one by one, suddenly shown the insights those traitorous emotions had masked. To bury oneself in work was a universal panacea, a technique she preached to her patients and to her staff—even preached to Walter, whose concern for her, she was aware, was steadily growing. The excitement this realization would have provoked only days before was utterly lacking, but she knew it would return as the vacuum in her life created by the death of Ivy began to fill up, as vacuums did; then she would turn to Walter with renewed energy and enthusiasm.

  “Bear with me,” she said to him, “just bear with me for a few more days, Walter, then we’ll embark on some really fantastic stuff together, I promise. You’re the center of my whole world.”

  The aquamarine eyes studied her intently, then he nodded.

  No more was ever said about it, or needed to be said. Walter took himself off to the workshop to build something, while Jess kept on looking at her hundred cases.

  She was groping through the labyrinth of words again, still convinced that the clue to those elusive pathways lay in words, and fascinated by the phrase “I want!” Corpus callosum, globus pallidus, rhinencephalon, hypothalamus, substantia nigra …

  “Jess?”

  Startled, she glanced up to see Ari Melos in her doorway, an odd expression on his face.

  “Yes?”

  “Captain Carmine Delmonico is here, asking to see you.”

  An explosive sigh escaped; she looked down at the files, at striped and coded ribbons. “Oh, damn the man!” she said. “Ari, offer him two alternatives. If he can wait half an hour, I’ll see him then, or he can go away and come back later to risk it again.”

  But she knew what he’d answer; when Ari came back to say he had elected to wait, she was already retying the files, and when Jenny Marx her secretary ushered Captain Delmonico in, the safe was closed, every file gone.

  “Captain, I apologize to have kept you waiting, but my desk was littered with confidential files when you arrived, and they had to be put away—by me.”

  “No trouble,” he said cheerfully as he sat down again, for she was smiling too and he wondered if he would ever receive a truthful answer—why this winning smile? “It’s a rare waiting room offers reading material like Scientific American.”

  Simultaneously she was wondering how she had failed to notice the Captain’s amazing attractiveness—had she honestly been that keyed up during her interview with him and Delia? He was dynamite! Had it been Delia blinded her? Or her mood that day?

  Some men, she reflected, whether by accident or design, fell into their proper professions, the only ones they were properly suited to do, and this man was one such. Highly intelligent without the spark of genius, well educated without being entrapped by Academia, nigh infinitely patient, rational to the core yet subtle, emphatic when it suited him, and endowed with an analytical brain. A policeman by nature who might successfully have done a dozen things for a living, but had lit upon the one he was made for. His masculine appeal was undeniable but not a part of his arsenal because it didn’t loom large in his own idea of himself. Unaware she did so, Jess Wainfleet licked her lips and swallowed, her mind girding itself for battle.

  “I’ve come to talk to you,” Delmonico said, “understanding that I’ll get no answers worth their salt, but rather to see if you’re the kind of person I can wear down, literally and metaphorically. You will never be free of me. Just when you think I’ve given up, I’ll be knocking at your door again. You see, I know that you murdered six women in cold blood, and I’m not going to let you get away with it. Commencing with Margot Tennant in 1963, and at the rate of one per year, you killed six women. Why? is my chief question, and the chief reason why I refuse to let you go. What could possibly be the answer? I serve you warning, Dr. Wainfleet, I’m going to find out.” The unusual eyes bored into her. “No. I won’t let go!”

  She sighed. “Captain Delmonico, there is an entity called harassment, and what you propose sounds very like it. Rest assured, I’ll be telling my counsel, Mr. Bera, what you’re threatening to do.”

  “Nonsense!” he said. “I’m very well known, Doctor, and not for harassment. I wish you luck proving that! Why did you kill Margot Tennant? Or Elena Carba, for that matter? Julia Bell-Simon?”

  “I have killed no one,” Jess Wainfleet said, voice obdurate.

  Carmine shifted in his chair; somehow it came as no surprise that he also shifted subject. “Ernest Leto … A most elusive character. In fact, he seems to have no existence apart from work he did here in the Holloman Institute. He has a social security number, and acco
rding to the Internal Revenue Service paid tax on unspecified work he did here between 1963 and 1968. Part-time only. We have a description of Mr. Leto, furnished by HI staff: about five feet eight inches tall, thin and whippy in build, with black hair and a swarthy complexion. That could be Dr. Ari Melos, don’t you think?”

  “It could be, but it isn’t!” she snapped, eyes flashing. “Ari Melos is a fully trained and qualified neurosurgeon who served his time at Johns Hopkins! If you look at the amounts Ernest Leto was paid, you’ll see they’re a pittance compared to what a Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon would ask. Ernie Leto was paid a technician’s fees.”

  “Did Dr. Melos ever operate here?” Carmine asked.

  “Naturally!” Wainfleet said haughtily. “He has his patients in the prison, two of whom are with him in HI at the moment, and he takes an occasional private patient, just as I do myself.”

  Carmine put an envelope on the desk. “This is a subpoena for the records in your possession pertaining to Ernest Leto,” he said. “It’s a duplicate, actually. I’ve already served the original on your director of personnel.”

  “We will endeavor to help in any way we can,” she said in colorless tones. “Is there anything else?”

  “A hypothetical question,” he said.

  Her brows rose. “Hypothetical?”

  “Yes. Unlike the hypothetical situation Sir Richard Rich posed to Sir Thomas More, my question isn’t designed to trip you up in a court of law.”

  “I am intrigued,” she said lightly, feeling her curiosity stir. “Ask your hypothetical question.”

  “First, Mr. Leto,” the Captain said. “He’s a very difficult man to find. Your staff have verified that he does exist, that he came here to assist you on a number of neurosurgical interventions which the pair of you did alone, but that he did no other work here. What concerns me is that he assisted you in not merely six procedures, but forty-eight. That’s a multiple of six, so were the forty-eight operations all on the six missing Shadow Women, or are there as many as forty-two unknown patients Mr. Leto helped you with? His IRS records list eight periods of employment per year, totaling in each year sufficient to live quite comfortably provided he doesn’t have twelve children. Does he?”