The Stolen Ones (10 page)

Luther sat in the late-afternoon gloom.

The old woman had not said a word to him, not even to ask why. She
knew
why. He had searched her house three times, on his previous visits, looking for anything that would tie her to the hospital – newsletters, patient lists, medication protocols, anything. He’d found nothing. But that didn’t mean she didn’t have something somewhere else.

Luther knew all about cubby holes and secret places.

Removing her from the house had been a challenge, but not one with which he was unfamiliar. He had taken her out of the basement through the crawlspace – a portal he had used for entries on his previous visits – then up into an abandoned shoe store five buildings down.

As a shadow moved to his right, Luther looked over to see that the policeman stood no more than three feet from him. He tensed for a moment, the bone-handle knife now slick in his grip. The danger soon passed.

Luther quickly arranged the table, descended the steps. A few minutes later he watched the flame begin to caper and dance. In the dream he was in a small village in Harju County. In that place two men were lashed to a roof beam in a stable – local men who loaned money to farmers at a usurious rate. Soon the green countryside became the dank basement of G10. In this dream Luther saw flames ripping up the back of soiled hospital gowns, scarlet harpies on blackening flesh. It stirred something inside him.

Earlier in the day the doctor, dead these many years, had stepped forward from the shadows, and told him what needed to be done. The digging machines were finally near, and when they turned over the ground all secrets would be revealed. This could not be. Each body told a story, and each story would lead to ruin.

‘Do you understand what you must do?’ the doctor had asked.

‘Yes,’ Luther said.

‘Do you know the dreams?’

Luther had closed his eyes, and in his mind walked the dream arcade, the long colonnade of bright exhibits, the carefully mounted dioramas of the dead.

‘I do.’

When it was time, when the air began to shimmer, Luther rose to his feet, crossed the room, and stole into a darkness deeper than midnight.

When Jessica and Byrne arrived at Priory Park, for the second time in as many days, they were met by two units from the 8th District. Jessica stopped the car, put it in park, kept it running. Byrne was out of the vehicle like a shot. He spoke to one of the patrol officers, then returned to the car.

‘We’ve got cars at all four corners of the park. We’ve got two on the avenue, two on Chancel Lane.’

‘Anybody see anything?’ Jessica asked.

Byrne shook his head. ‘No.’

Jessica emerged from the car, slowly turned 360, looking for something, anything that looked out of place. She saw nothing. She reached in the car, retrieved her two-way radio, pointed to the tree line at the northwest section of the park, about one hundred yards away.

‘I’m going to head up there,’ she said.

‘I’ll take the southern end,’ Byrne replied.

Both Jessica and Byrne had grabbed department-issue rain slickers out of the trunk of the car before heading to the park. It turned out to be a wise decision. As Jessica began heading across the open field she put up the hood on her slicker, pulled the cord tightly around her chin. The good news was that she had worn her boots. However, she had not brought gloves. She had been out of the car less than a minute and already her hands were freezing.

They had not said much on the drive to Priory Park. There was no concrete reason to think that Joan Delacroix was a victim of extreme violence. Not yet. There might be a number of plausible explanations for fresh blood on her earring. Neither Jessica nor Byrne really believed that. They wanted to, but their experience pointed them in the other direction.

When Jessica stepped into the wooded area she was somewhat shielded from the rain by the canopy of trees. She took out her flashlight, ran it along the ground. She saw no footprints.

When she’d gone twenty yards or so, toward the creek, she saw it. It was so incongruous sitting on top of the dead pine needles and composting leaves that she had to look twice. She almost walked by it.

But there was no mistake. It was the woman’s other earring.

Jessica keyed her radio. ‘You better get up here, Kevin. Have the officers circle around to the northwest section of the park.’

Jessica put the two-way radio in her pocket, reached beneath her rain slicker, and drew her weapon. The only sound was the steady rain, and the pounding of her heart. A few moments later she heard footfalls. She spun around to see Byrne making his way through the trees.

Jessica pointed to the earring on the ground. Byrne drew his weapon, held it at his side. Standing a few yards apart, the two detectives began to make their way through the pines. When they got to the clearing, and the southern bank of the creek, they saw her.

‘Oh my God,’ Jessica said.

The body of Joan Delacroix was lying, face up, on the muddy creek bed. Her feet were in the frigid water, her arms straight out to her sides. On each of her hands was placed a large rock. Even from twenty feet away Jessica could see that the right side of the woman’s skull had been all but crushed. She also saw something that made the scene even more surreal.

The woman’s shoes – a pair of white Rockport walkers with rubber soles – were on the wrong feet.

Jessica turned away, fighting the emotion, the nausea and revulsion. She glanced over at Byrne. He stood in the clearing, in the freezing rain, eyes closed. He seemed to be searching the air for a scent.

The park looked like an armed camp. At least a dozen sector cars flashed. There were no fewer than six CSU officers walking a tight grid around the creek bed, every so often placing small yellow markers at what might have been evidence.

The rain continued to pour, hampering efforts to maintain the integrity of the scene.

Byrne stood in the downpour, now holding an umbrella, his gaze locked on the woman’s body. They would have to wait for an investigator from the medical examiner’s office to move or cover the corpse. It was just one further indignity for the victim to bear.

While they waited, Detective Kevin Byrne stood guard, just a few feet away. The wheel, once more, had turned.

He had his new case.

Jessica sat in the Taurus, heater on full blast. She couldn’t get warm or dry. Someone had brought hot coffee, which, in the few minutes since she had opened the container, had gone tepid. She drank it anyway. She was just about to once more brave the elements when her cell phone rang. It was Dana Westbrook.

‘What’s going on, Sarge?’

‘How bad is it, Jess?’

Jessica glanced at the supine form of the woman through the trees. ‘As bad as it gets.’

‘I’m en route,’ Westbrook said. ‘I’ve got Inspector Mostow with me.’

Jessica hadn’t even considered the fallout until she heard that an inspector was coming to the scene. There was always a command presence at the scene of every homicide, but rarely did it reach this level. The truth was that a citizen had been abducted and brutally murdered right under the noses of two city detectives. It would be red meat for the local media.

Jessica said nothing.

‘There’s something else you should know,’ Westbrook added.

‘What is it?’

‘I just got a call from the supervisor in the 22nd. He’s on scene at that Brewerytown address.’

This did not make sense. If anyone was dispatched to that house it should’ve been divisional detectives. Either way, it would soon be considered a crime scene, and folded into the murder investigation of Joan Delacroix.

‘I don’t understand,’ Jessica said. ‘You’re talking about the house where Joan Delacroix lived?’

‘Yes.’

‘What about it?’

Jessica heard Dana Westbrook take a deep breath, release it. ‘It’s burning to the ground.’

The predator watched the boy from across the square. The boy seemed a natural leader, taking charge midfield, kicking the ball to a teammate instead of reaching for glory each time he neared the goal. On the field he was surefooted, almost balletic in his movement.

Alas, when the game was over, the boy’s team lost 2 to 1.

The boy remained behind while his teammates congregated at the other end of the field. He sat on a bench, reading from a paperbound book.

The predator approached.

‘That was a very good game,’ he said.

The boy looked up. His eyes were brown, his hair a deep chestnut, his features delicate. ‘We lost.’

‘I know,’ the predator said. ‘This sometimes happens, despite our best efforts.’

The boy considered this. ‘Perhaps it was not my best effort, then.’

The predator smiled. ‘How old are you?’

‘I am nine.’

‘You are big for your age.’

The boy said nothing.

‘I used to play for the national team,’ the predator said. ‘When I was much younger, of course.’

The boy just listened.

‘I can teach you a few things. Particularly your first touch. It is probably the game’s most important, yet underrated, skill. Would you like to learn?’

‘Yes. Very much.’

The predator looked around. ‘We shouldn’t do it here.’ He pointed to the far end of the field. ‘The other boys will see, and then it will not be our secret.’

‘I know a place,’ the boy said. ‘It is very quiet there.’

They rose from the bench, crossed the avenue. It was mid-summer, and the breeze from the Gulf brought with it a welcome coolness.

They walked a narrow path through Lillepi Park. When they came to a small clearing they stopped. The boy reached into his bag, removed the soccer ball, placed it at the predator’s feet.

The predator put down his shoulder bag, took off his shirt. He now wore only a sleeveless tunic.

‘You look very strong,’ the boy said.

‘Would you like to see?’

The boy nodded.

The predator lifted the boy effortlessly into the air. When he put him back on the ground he brought him very close, close enough to smell the boy’s shampoo. It smelled of cinnamon. He ran a hand through the boy’s hair. The boy did not resist or pull away.

‘Show me things,’ the boy said. ‘There is a larger clearing, just over here.’

The predator looked around. The dell was a little too exposed for his liking. Still, the boy was beautiful. He followed.

‘What is your name?’ the predator asked.

‘Eduard.’

‘That is a wonderful name. Quite regal.’

They came to a small, sun-drenched glade. To the right, the predator saw something unexpected. There was a small burial site, with three crudely made cruciform. ‘Look at this,’ the predator said. ‘It seems someone has buried their pets in Lillepi Park.’

The predator stepped forward, bent over, and saw that there were names written on the markers. Dr Andrus Kross. Marta Kross. Kaisa Kross.

‘Dr Andrus Kross,’ the predator said. ‘I know this name. How odd that it would be —’

At first, the predator reacted to the cut as if he had merely caught the front of his clothing on a briar. When he looked down, and saw his tunic sliced side to side, and the blood begin to pour forth, he knew what had happened. The boy stood a few feet away, a razor-sharp bone-handle knife in hand.

The predator fell to the ground.

The boy, whose full name was Eduard Olev Kross – son of Andrus and Marta, brother to Kaisa – took a small cruet of the man’s blood. Before he stepped away he ran the knife once more along the wound. The predator’s intestines now glistened in the afternoon sun.

‘They say that stomach wounds are particularly painful,’ the boy said. He pulled up the three makeshift stakes, put them in his bag. His father and mother and sister were not buried here. They were, instead, in a mass grave in Võru, murdered by the hand of the man now bleeding out in front of him. ‘They say it can take a long time to die.’

The boy, who was twelve years old, not nine, slung his bag over his shoulder.

‘What will you think about in your last moments, Major Abendrof?’ the boy asked.

As he lay dying, the predator turned his head to see the boy standing in the dell. In the half-light of his passage the predator thought he saw something in the boy’s eyes he had never before seen in one so young, a malevolence that seemed to swirl within like a dark squall.

Ten minutes later, as storm clouds gathered over the Gulf of Finland, the predator was dead.

White Rita sat on the floor, her back to the wall, her legs splayed. The water pooled on the filthy linoleum beneath her. She was called White Rita because there were two other women named Rita in her ward. One of them was black, the other was mute. They were Black Rita and Silent Rita.

White Rita had managed to conceal her pregnancy from staff and fellow inpatients for all eight months. Many nights she tried to rewind her thoughts – this is how she thought of her mind, as a large tape recorder – to recall who the father might have been. She could not remember.

In the Long Hallway – which functioned, among other things, as a patient transport corridor – White Rita sat near the T-junction with the Echo Hallway. People always yelled in the Echo Hallway, just to hear the reverberation, so when White Rita screamed, no one paid her any mind. Hours later, it seemed – there were no windows in the Long Hallway, so it was impossible to tell if it was night or day – White Rita looked between her legs and saw a baby.

Someone had left a baby.

The night nurse was a man in his mid fifties, a former medic in the Army. He had served in the 12th Field Hospital in France, in the grime and chaos of the French Naval Hospital, which had first been overrun by the Germans, then the Allies in the liberation of Cherbourg.

When he gained employment at the hospital in Philadelphia, in the early 1950s, he encountered more than a few men he had helped patch up in Cherbourg, most of them in the contingent of POWs who were not transportable when the 68th Medical Group cleared out. He often wondered, seeing these men in their near catatonic states, if it hadn’t been a mistake to save them.

When the intern brought the newborn baby to the clinic, the night nurse looked into the baby’s eyes, and felt something he had never felt before. Childless and unmarried, he had never considered what it would be like to care for a child.

He cleaned the newborn, swaddled it in gauze. The intern who had brought the baby said he had found it in the Long Hallway, near the entrance to the catacombs. This probably meant the baby belonged to one of the women who was a ward of the state.

The night nurse wondered:
What kind of a future will this boy have?
There was a good chance he would be raised in some filthy group home, end up in prison. Or, worse, come right back here to this hell on earth.

There were plenty of places to hide a baby in a complex the depth and breadth of the hospital: cubby holes, dumbwaiters, patient transfer hallways, eaves, attics. How hard could it be? There were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men and women who were all but ghosts to the staff and administration. Many went unwashed, their open sores untreated for weeks.

He looked again at the baby’s eyes. He wondered what to call him. He was a firm believer that a person became the name they were given. His mother had been born in Norway and, although she mispronounced her only son’s name right up until the day she died – calling him
Looter
, a source of ridicule from the few childhood friends he’d had – he always loved his name, and it had served him well enough in his fifty-four years.

He decided right there and then that the baby would have his name.

He would be called Luther.

The two dead men lay at the bottom of the quarry, their pants around their ankles, their naked buttocks in blunt, pink relief to the blinding white of the limestone.

The killer stood at the top of the gorge. He did not hear the four men approach.

By the time he turned around, the largest of the men – a lumbering giant in an ill-fitting Soviet Army infantry uniform – raised the butt of his ancient Mosin Nagant rifle and slammed it into the killer’s chin. The killer sagged, but was prevented from tumbling into the pit by the two other soldiers.

The fourth man in the group, older than the soldiers by more than three decades, took a handkerchief from his pocket. He draped it over his right hand, put it beneath the killer’s chin. He turned the nearly unconscious man’s head, a man he had been pursuing for more than twenty years.

‘
Hulkur
,’ the man said, using the killer’s provincial appellation, an Estonian word meaning
vagabond
. ‘We meet at last.’

In the eight years Eduard Kross had been in the storied mental hospital in rural Parsti Parish, he had not spoken a word. He was said to have committed more than one hundred murders in his decades-long spree. His path of evil stretched from the Gulf of Finland to the forests of Riga.

For thirty-four years – from the moment he had all but disemboweled the man he held responsible for the murders of his mother, father and sister – Eduard Kross was a wraith, moving at night, never seen by anyone who would live to tell of the man in the sack-cloth suit and floppy felt hat.

The doctor was young – young for this facility, where the average age of physicians seemed to be in the sixties.

His name was Dr Godehard Kirsch.

Among the mostly Estonian hospital staff there was little known about Kirsch, but there were many suppositions. One about which there was little doubt was that he was the sole heir of a very wealthy family – his late grandfather had made his millions with Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach, a Prussian who had the good fortune to marry into the Krupp family in 1906 – and the foresight to move his fortune into Swiss accounts before the war.

Among the other rumors was that months before his arrival in Estonia Dr Kirsch had ordered a series of therapies begun on Eduard Kross, therapies that included testing with various combinations of medications to artificially induce dreams.

‘This is he?’ Kirsch asked, looking through the mirrored-glass portal into Eduard Kross’s padded room.

‘Yes,’ the nurse administrator said. Riina was a sturdy, raw-boned woman in her late forties, by all benchmarks unattractive, with a broad forehead and a man’s jaw. In her time as nurse administrator of the clinic she had met a number of men like this Dr Kirsch, officious overeducated men practicing fringe science, lording their doctorates and wealth over staff like some Teutonic
Hochmeister
. Yes, he had the letters MD after his name, but this did not, nor had it ever, impressed Riina.

Because she was free from the strictures of games played between attractive women and the men with whom they dealt, she was able to speak her mind. As often as not it got her into trouble, which was probably why she did not work at one of the larger clinics in Tallinn or Parnu.

‘How long has he been here?’ Kirsch asked.

Riina knew that the doctor knew the answer to this question. She had for many years wondered why they played this game. She proffered a smile. ‘Just over eight years.’

‘And what has been his progress?’

Riina nearly laughed, but refrained. Laughing would be unprofessional. ‘There has been no progress, Doctor. We are not equipped or funded for rehabilitation or even the most basic regimen of behavioral therapy.’

‘Then what is it you do here,
Lapsehoidja
Riina?’

The title he gave her was an insult. It meant
babysitter
not
nurse
. Riina put her clipboard down on the desk, squared herself in front of the doctor. He was only an inch or so taller than she, but they were nearly eye to eye. She waited until the doctor turned his eyes to hers.

‘Dr Kirsch, we are a warehouse – a crumbling provincial warehouse at that – for the criminally insane. No more, no less. We bathe them, clean up their shit and vomit, intercede when their violent impulses outlast their medication, and bolt them down at night. What do
you
do, Dr Kirsch?’

The doctor proceeded, unfazed. ‘What is his protocol?’

Riina turned a page on her clipboard. ‘900 mg Lithium, thrice daily.’

The doctor pulled on his coat, slipped on his expensive leather gloves. He handed her a thin sheaf of documents. ‘I have accepted a position in the United States. Philadelphia, to be precise. Mr Kross will be coming with me. We have much to learn from him.’

Riina glanced at the form on top. ‘I’ve heard nothing of this.’

Without looking at her he produced another document, one that appeared to be a patient transfer to a yellow house in Novosibirsk, a gulag by any measure.

Riina knew what it meant.

‘It’s my understanding that he has not yet said a word,’ Kirsch said.

Riina filed the forms, like a good little
lapsehoidja
.

‘He talks,’ she said.

The doctor turned at the door, a look of surprise on his face. ‘He talks?’

‘Yes,’ Riina replied. She slammed shut the file cabinet drawer, sat on the edge of her desk, shook a cigarette from the pack, took her time lighting it.

Time was her only weapon.

Finally she said: ‘But only in his sleep.’

At the hospital, the one they called Cold River, Luther’s world was the catacombs that linked the buildings far below ground, miles of long stone corridors lighted by dim fixtures caged in steel. Luther gave each hallway a name, as if they were streets in the city above. The only time he saw other boys and girls his age – there were not supposed to be patients under eighteen, but Luther knew of many who were – was when there were the infrequent staff picnics, mostly in summer.