The Day After Tomorrow_ A Novel - Allan Folsom [22]
Abruptly McVey set the list aside, got up and crossed the room, his left hand balled up into a loose fist, and began absently to twick his thumb with his little finger. What was troubling him was what had troubled him from the beginning, a gut sense that whoever was surgically removing heads from bodies was not someone with a criminal record. McVey’s mind stopped. Why did it have to be a man? Why couldn’t it as easily be a woman? These days women had the same access to medical training as men. In some cases, maybe more. And with the current emphasis on fitness, many women were in excellent physical condition.
McVey’s first hunch had been that it was one person committing the crimes. If he was right, it narrowed the field from possibly as many as eight killers to one. But his second speculation, or speculations—that the murderer had some degree of medical schooling and access to surgical tools and could be of either gender and with perhaps no criminal record at all—tore the odds to hell.
He had no statistics at his fingertips, but if one totaled up all the doctors, nurses, paramedics, medical students, former medical students, coroners, medical technicians and university professors with some measure of expertise in surgery, to say nothing of the men and women who received some medical training serving in the armed forces, even if they stuck to Great Britain and the Continent alone, the figures had to be staggering. This was no haystack they were poking around in. It was more like a sea of grain blowing in the wind, and Interpol had no vast army of harvesters to separate the grain from the chaff until they finally uncovered their murderer.
The odds had to be narrowed and it was up to McVey to narrow them before he said anything to anybody. To do that he needed more information than he had. His first thought was that maybe somewhere he had missed a connective link between the first killing and the last. If so, the only way to find out would be to go back and start again with the most definitive facts at hand: the autopsy reports on the head and the seven headless bodies.
He was reaching for the phone to request them when it rang.
“McVey,” he said, automatically, as he picked it up.
“Oui, McVey! Lebrun, at your service!” It was Inspector Lieutenant Lebrun of the First Section of the Paris Préfecture of Police, the diminutive, cigarette-smoking detective who’d greeted him with a hug and a kiss the first time he’d set his size-twelve wing tips on French soil.
“I don’t know what it means, if it means anything at all,” he said in English. “But in going over the daily reports of my detectives I came across a complaint of simple assault. It was violent and quite vicious but simple assault nonetheless, in that no weapon was used. However, that is beside the point. What caught my attention is that the perpetrator is an orthopedic surgeon, an American, who happened to be in London the same day your man in the alley lost his head. I know he was in England because I have his passport in my hand. He arrived at Gatwick at three twenty-five Saturday afternoon, October first. Your man seems to have been killed sometime late on the first or early on the second. Correct?”
“Correct,” McVey said. “But how do we know he was still in England for the next two days? I don’t remember French Immigration stamping my passport when I landed in Paris. This guy could