The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [10]
Afterward, McVey spent ten days in a cold, third-floor office in Scotland Yard poring over the extensive police reports of each crime, more often than not finding it necessary to confer on one detail or another with Ian Noble, who had a much larger and warmer office on the first floor. Mercifully, McVey got a respite when he was called back to Los Angeles for a two-day testimony in the murder trial of a Vietnamese drug dealer McVey had arrested himself when the man tried to kill a busboy in a restaurant where McVey was having lunch. Actually, McVey had done nothing more heroic than stick his .38 service revolver in the man’s ear and quietly suggest he relax a little bit.
After the trial, McVey was supposed to take two days for personal business and then return to London. But somehow he’d managed to squeeze in some wholly elective oral surgery and turned the two days into two weeks, most of which was spent on a golf course near the Rose Bowl where warm sun filtering through heavy smog helped him, between strokes, muse on the killings.
So far, the only thing the victims seemed to have in common, the only single connecting thread, was the surgical removal of their heads. Something that on first go-round appeared to have been done either by a surgeon or by someone with surgical capabilities who had access to the necessary instruments.
After that, nothing else fit. Three of the victims had been killed where they were found. The remaining four had been killed elsewhere, with three dumped by the roadside and the fourth tossed into Kiel Harbor. For all his years in homicide, this was as confounding and more curious than anything he’d ever encountered.
Then, golf clubs put away, and back in the damp of London, exhausted and disoriented from the long flight, he’d barely settled back on the thing the hotel passed off as a pillow and closed his eyes when the phone rang and Noble informed him he had a head to go with his bodies.
It was now quarter of four in the morning, London time, and McVey was sitting at a writing table in his closet of a room, two fingers of Famous Grouse scotch in a glass in front of him, on a conference call with Noble and Captain Cadoux on the Interpol line from Lyon.
Cadoux, an intense, stockily built man, with a huge handlebar mustache he could never seem to keep from rolling between his thumb and forefinger, had in front of him a fax of young medical examiner Michaels’ preliminary autopsy report, which described; among other things, the exact point at which the head had been removed from the body. It was precisely at this same point the seven bodies had been separated from their heads.
“We know that, Cadoux. But it’s not enough for us to say for certain that the murders are connected,” McVey said wearily.
“The age bracket is the same.”
“Still not enough.”
“McVey, I have to agree with Captain Cadoux,” Noble said genteelly, as if they were talking over four o’clock tea.
“If it’s not a connection, it’s too damn close to being one to ignore it,” Noble finished.
“Fine . . .,” McVey said and repeated the thought he’d had all along. “You gotta wonder who this lunatic is we got running around out there.” The minute McVey said it both Scotland Yard and Interpol reacted the same way.
“You think it’s one man?” they said together.
“I don’t know. Yeah—” McVey said. “Yeah. I think it’s one man.”
Begging off that jet lag was about to put him under and could they finish this later, McVey hung up. He could have asked for their opinion but didn’t. It was they who had asked for his help. Besides, if they felt