Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks) Read online

  “What’re you doing here, Zack?” Amy Mannis approached him from the other side of the living room. She had her hand-held out, and her white plastic gloves on. She looked official. “Dex and I drew this case.”

  “You get to assist,” he said. “I’m overseeing you. I can tell you from the blood spatter alone that this one fits into a pattern.”

  Her lips thinned. “Why don’t you wait until the preliminary report before you hone in on our case, Zack?” “Because the last time I did that, the vital evidence was gone. You don’t know what you’re looking for.” “And you do?”

  He glanced at the living room. The other detective and the roommate were watching the exchange. He lowered his voice so that they couldn’t hear him.

  “At first you thought robbery. But all that’s missing are homemade DVDs and photographs of the victim, as well as some pieces of jewelry—anything with a gem or pearl on it.”

  Her expression didn’t change. She obviously hadn’t been here long enough to know what was missing. He’d only gotten the call half an hour ago, and the 911 report had come in a half an hour before that.

  “In the roommate’s bedroom—not the victim’s—you’ll find the bed turned down and a Godiva truffle in its original box sitting on the pillow. That room will be neat as a pin even if it hadn’t been left that way.”

  Amy started. She had seen that.

  “The jewelry will be missing from the roommate’s room. The victim’s room will be untouched.”

  “Son of a bitch.” Amy shook her head. She knew that he would take charge. He’d worked with her before. She hated playing the subordinate. “I don’t supposed I have a choice.”

  His smile was thin. “I don’t suppose you do.”

  The victim was Rhonda Schlaffler, a forty-five year-old book editor who worked just off Times Square. Divorced five years before, no alimony, no children, living off her salary which barely covered essentials, and saving for an apartment of her own.

  Her roommate was 34 year-old Trisha Newman who managed a Greek restaurant off Times Square. Newman, who’d never been married, had a spotty employment history, and a tendency to quit jobs in the heat of anger. She was also extremely competent, so when she did find work, she was promoted rapidly.

  The women had met when Newman advertised for a roommate through one of the apartment services. They’d lived together for five years, but never socialized. Newman didn’t even characterize them as friends. Still, she’d been upset and terrified—upset at her roommate’s death, terrified at the staged scene aimed at her.

  The body confirmed what Wheldon had already guessed. The first wound, somewhat shallow, in the back beneath the ribcage, catching some blood vessels. Two more wounds, also in the back, near the spinal chord, and the fatal wound in the neck, severing the carotid artery.

  The only surprise were matching rips in the collars of victim’s coat and shirt, caused by a hand gripping them too tight and pulling, straining the material until it tore. Either the victim had made a near-successful bid to elude her attacker or her knees had buckled and he had to use her coat to hold her up while he finished the job. Judging by the blood spatter, she had nearly gotten away.

  Wheldon had come to all of those conclusions by late evening of the first day. His greatest gift as an investigator was his ability to place himself at the crime scene—to see things that others missed.

  It was also his greatest curse. His mind was always filled with what-ifs and would-have-beens. After thirty years of tough cases, he had become quiet and morose. His friends wouldn’t let him drink with them any more, and he’d stopped dating ten years before.

  The job was everything, and everything, for the moment, focussed on Rhonda Schlaffler.

  Her last few seconds must have seemed like hours.

  He doubted she’d noticed her attacker following her, although he might have joined her in the elevator, making her uncomfortable. Or maybe not. Maybe she had been the kind of woman who closed into herself in an elevator, ignoring the people around her. In either case, she had gotten off the elevator on her floor, pulled her keys out of her purse, and unlocked both deadbolts on her door.

  She’d pushed the door open before noticing him behind her, but there was no way to tell whether or not she had gone inside voluntarily. Perhaps he had shoved her forward, perhaps he had just followed her—the evidence was inconclusive about that. What it was conclusive about was that the attack started just inside the door. He had to still be standing in the hall when he stabbed her the first time.

  Unfortunately, the building’s security system was as primitive as its locks. An old-fashioned buzzer system on the front door instead of a doorman, security cameras set up in the 1970s and not maintained since, and a super who was away from his apartment more than he was inside it. New York had too many buildings like this, and the killer knew it. He seemed to know a lot about his victims and their roommates, and he used that knowledge to achieve his ends, whatever they might be.

  That was what Wheldon couldn’t figure out. He couldn’t tell from the evidence whether he was trying to find a serial killer, defined as someone who killed randomly and indiscriminately within a certain physical or personality type, or a series killer, defined as someone who killed for a select period of time to fulfill some kind of pattern only he saw. After the second murder, Wheldon had ruled out murder for hire. Neither victim had been wealthy enough nor had they had enough enemies to justify the expense.

  In fact, he had found only a handful of things in common between all four cases: the manner of death, the victims’ gender, the neighborhood, the presence of a female roommate, the Godiva truffles and the turned-down bed, and the stolen DVDs and jewelry.

  Everything else was different. The victims’ ages ranged from 24 to 53; their incomes ranged from $20,000 a year to $80,000; and their marital status ranged from divorced with children to permanently single. None of them worked in the same place or even the same neighborhood, none of them frequented the same shops or restaurants, and none of them had the same friends. They even used different on-line services.

  The murders weren’t quite random, but they were random enough to give him fits. After the second killing, he’d entered the information in the FBI’s National Database of Unsolved Crimes. He’d thought the Godiva trick unique enough to bring a hit from another state, should such a thing exist. But after the third killing, he’d given up hope. He’d found nothing else like it in his search of unsolved crimes nationwide.

  He’d also found nothing when he searched for murders connected to chocolates. His investigate of the Godiva boxes didn’t help either—they were all from different batches which had been on the market all over the country on the day of the murders, and hundreds of them were sold in New York City alone—with most of the purchasers paying cash.

  Even though he entered information from the fourth murder into the database, he had no illusions this time. He knew he would have to catch this killer on his own.

  And he knew he would probably have to wait until the killer struck again.

  Wheldon had already moved the Schlaffler case off his desk when the Suits came to visit. In the two weeks since Schlaffler’s death, Wheldon overseen four other difficult homicide investigations and helped solve three of them. The fourth would be wrapped within the week.

  Solving difficult cases was his specialty, which was why the Godiva cases really bothered him. Still, he hadn’t thought about them in two days when he arrived at his office to find two women in cheap black suits waiting for him.

  They looked official. He figured they were either Internal Affairs, coming to see him about some of the cops he’d overseen, or the Feds, wanting to argue jurisdiction on something he hadn’t even heard of yet.

  He wasn’t surprised when they flashed their shiny Bureau badges at him and asked him to shut the door. He did, after he ran their badge numbers through his hand-held, and saw photos that matched the faces before him. The women smiled as he did that, one of t
hem commenting that she liked his caution.

  He’d learned, over the years, that caution made him a good cop.

  “Agents Ambersson and Kingsbury,” he said as he sank into his chair. “Your identification checks out, but doesn’t tell me what unit you’re in.”

  “That’s right,” said Ambersson. She was younger than he was by at least twenty years, a bright-eyed thirty-something who still had the patina of a true believer. “Our status is on a need-to-know.”

  “And our superiors believe you need to know,” said Kingsbury. She was closer to his age, with a deep rich voice, and a world-weary manner. He got the sense that she tolerated her partner, but didn’t entire approve of her.

  Wheldon folded his hands, leaned back, and waited. They clearly wanted something from him, and they would take their own sweet time to get there.

  “We understand you’ve been investigating a series of murders in the West 80s.” said Kingsbury.

  “That’s right.”

  “We’re particularly interested in the last murder. Rhonda Schlaffler.”

  Despite himself, he felt a surge of hope. At last a breakthrough. Maybe Schlaffler had a secret double-life. Maybe she had been under FBI surveillance for political actions in the late 80s, her college years. Maybe she had been a Person of Interest in another crime.

  “According to the information you entered in our database,” Ambersson said, “you can pinpoint the time of death to a 15-minute window, is that correct?”

  He frowned, somehow not expecting them to pick up on that detail. “Yes.”

  “You came to this conclusion how?”

  “Her workplace uses an electronic i.d. system. Her employee identification number ran through the exit machine at 6:05 p.m. She walked with a friend to the subway and took the train home. It arrived at her stop at 6:32 that night. The stop was a two-minute walk from her apartment. Even if she stopped somewhere, like a deli, she had to have arrived before 6:50.”

  “Because?” Kingsbury asked.

  “Because her neighbor received a visitor at 6:50—his ex-wife. He didn’t get along with the wife, and didn’t want her inside the apartment, so he talked with her, more like argued with her, in the hallway for the next half an hour. He watched Schlaffler’s roommate unlock her apartment door, enter, and heard the screams. We figure Schlaffler arrived home at the earliest at 6:35 and died before 6:50, since there was no other way out of the apartment.”

  “Not even a fire escape?” Ambersson asked.

  “A point of contention between Schlaffler and her landlord. There had been a fire escape out the bathroom window, but the iron had rusted through and fallen away from the building. Anyone trying to exit that way would have had a three-story drop before hitting another fire escape landing, which probably wouldn’t have supported the perp’s weight.”

  “I trust you checked this,” Ambersson said.

  Wheldon was beginning to get impatient. He wasn’t used to being quizzed on his cases. “Of course. We looked for fibers, blood, hair, asked residents about strangers or anything out of the ordinary, even checked with the two homeless guys who slept in the alley, and we turned up nothing.”

  “Excellent,” said Ambersson.

  “Excellent?” Wheldon asked. Whatever response he had expected, it was not that one.

  She wasn’t paying attention to him. Instead, she was looking at her partner and smiling as if they’d caught the killer without Wheldon’s help. “Sounds good to me.”

  Kingsbury shrugged. “I’d like something tighter, but this’ll have to do.”

  “What are you talking about?” Wheldon asked.

  The agents turned toward him. The look of expectation was still on Ambersson’s face. Kingsbury’s expression hadn’t changed at all.

  “For the past three days,” Kingsbury said, “we have conducted an investigation of you.”

  “Me?” Wheldon frowned. “For what?”

  “A high-level security clearance. If you sign the forms we’ve brought with us, you will receive a six-month clearance, subject to renewal and review. We have brought documents with us for you to sign. Anything you learn because of your security clearance will remained classified. You can’t speak of it to anyone. Ever. Is that clear?”

  “No,” Wheldon said. “I haven’t requested security clearance and I really don’t want one. I have no desire to work for the FBI, and I don’t appreciate being investigated.”

  He said that last a bit breathlessly. It was, he realized as he spoke the words, the real reason he was irritated. He was the one who conducted the investigations. He wasn’t the person who was investigated. He’d worked his entire career at being a clean cop, despite all sorts of temptation. He didn’t appreciate having that spotless record examined now.

  “It’s just a matter of routine,” Ambersson said.

  “For you, maybe. Not for me.”

  Kingsbury held up her hand. It was a small gesture, meant to silence her partner, not Wheldon.

  “You want to find this killer, don’t you?” she asked Wheldon.

  “Of course.”

  “Well, we have the means to do so. We can do it with or without you, but you know the most about these cases. It’s better to have the primary detective involved.”

  “How can you help me?” he asked.

  “In order to answer that question, you have to accept the security clearance.”

  He stared at her for a moment. She stared back. Ambersson shifted in her chair like a child caught on the sidelines of an adult fight. Kingsbury continued to wait.

  He was actually considering it. This particular killer frustrated him. The brazenness of the murders, the suggestion of making things right for the roommates, the personal nature of the thefts, disturbed him more than he wanted to admit.

  Besides, the FBI had already conducted their investigation of him. Nothing he could do could change that.

  He sighed. “If I accept your damn clearance, I’m not going to have to do anything else, am I?”

  “Like what?” Ambersson asked.

  “Like join the FBI?”

  Ambersson started to answer, but Kingsbury held up her hand again.

  “Of course you won’t.” Kingsbury shot an irritated glance at her partner. Wheldon’s sense that the two of them were a marriage of convenience rose again. “You’ve got it only for this case. That’s why the clearance is limited.”

  “What do I tell my superiors?”

  “Nothing,” Kingsbury said. “We’ve already briefed them and told them we need you to catch this killer. They’ve approved your time away.”

  He glanced at the cases on his in-house computer. He closed 85% of the cases he was involved in—the best closure record in the precinct and, in some years, the best record in the entire department. Six months was a long time to concentrate on one case. The others would sit until they got cold.

  Finally he shook his head. “I can’t afford the time away.”

  “It may only be for a few hours, Detective.” Kingsbury’s irritation had turned on him.

  “You’ve gotten me a six-month clearance.”

  She nodded. “They don’t give 3-day high-level security clearances.”

  “So I’ll be back here within a few days?”

  “Probably.”

  “And if not, a week? A month? Six months?”

  Ambersson smiled at him. “I wouldn’t worry about the time, sir.”

  The “sir” surprised him. It seemed involuntary, an acknowledgement of their age difference. It also seemed a bit condescending, as if his advanced years had made him a doddering fool.

  “I have to worry about the time,” he said. “It’s what we lack around here.”

  Ambersson’s smile grew. “Then accept our clearance, and we’ll make sure you have more of it than you could ever imagine.”

  Kingsbury’s cheeks flushed—not with shame, he realized, but with a sudden anger. He got a sense that Ambersson would get a tongue-lashing once he was out of ear
shot.

  “Can you guarantee me we’ll catch this killer?” he asked Kingsbury.

  “Can you guarantee me that everything you told me about the case is accurate?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Then I guarantee you, we’ll catch the killer.”

  He took a deep breath. He was almost as curious about how an FBI agent could guarantee that a murderer would get caught as he was about who this killer actually was.

  “All right,” he said. “Hand me the documents. I’ll take your clearance. But I’m leaving if we haven’t made any progress in a few days.”

  “Don’t worry,” Ambersson said as she tapped her hand-held. On his desk screen, a series of documents appeared, the signature line blinking. “You’ll be pleasantly surprised at the kind of progress we can make.”

  He’d been to the New York branch office of the FBI dozens of times, but had never been allowed anywhere except the public areas. For the first time, they let him keep his gun and handcuffs. The two agents took him to a documents room where he got his security badge and some temporary identification.

  Then they led him through a labyrinthian series of corridors, each gray and lit with florescent bulbs that dated from the previous century. They went down several flights of stairs, until they reached what had once clearly been a parking garage.

  The concrete beams remained and, in some places, so did the oil-stained concrete floor. Parts of it were covered in carpet, but the deeper the women took him into the building, the more of the old parking garage became evident. The walls that had been added seemed both old and temporary. Some of them appeared to be made of fraying particle board. Others were no better than the cubicle dividers popular when he was just starting out.

  So when the women opened a double-locked steel door at the very bottom level of the former parking garage, he entered with trepidation, expecting even rattier furnishings than he had seen at the upper levels.

  Instead, he found himself in a stainless steel room, filled with modern lighting and wall-to-wall computer access. The floor was covered with carpet so thick that he couldn’t hear his own footsteps. The furniture was comfortable, and the area was warm and inviting in a medicinal sort of way.