At first it looks like the face of Jesus. Then it looks likes birds.
What happens next?
I reach up my hand for my mother to take me somewhere. Anywhere but here. I'm scared.
Does she take your hand?
I take the person's hand, but as we walk away I realize it can't be my mom.
Why not?
The hand is too big. And rough. It is a man's hand.
Is there anything else you remember?
Yes. We get into a car. And there is a new smell. Two new smells.
What are the new smells?
A different kind of smoke. Different from the burning plastic smell. Like from a pipe, I think. A pipe that people smoke. Like men smoke.
And what else?
Apples. Empire apples. We have lots of apples in Western Pennsylvania. Especially near the fall.
Do you remember what else happened that day?
The fire. The ground shaking. Being scared.
What about the man? What happened with him?
I don't know.
What about his face? Do you see his face?
When I look at his face it isn't there.
What about the fire? Do you remember what that was? Do you remember what caused the fire?
Yes. I remember, but only because I found out later.
What was it?
It was Flight 93. It was September 11, 2001, and Flight 93 crashed right near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
Lucy looked down at her hands. She had been clenching her fists so tightly that she had eight little red crescents on the palms of her hands. She eased her fists open, stepped out of the closet, looked around. For a few crazy moments she did not know what room she was in. Most people, even people who worked at Le Jardin, would be hard pressed to tell the standard guest rooms apart, their only clues being, perhaps, the view from any given window But Lucy knew every room on the twelfth floor. It was her floor.
She smoothed out her uniform, stepped into the bathroom, went through the mental checklist in her mind, then checked the entire room.
Done.
She opened the door, stepped into the hall. Two older men were approaching from the elevator. They were probably with the convention. Everyone on the floor this week was with the convention. They nodded to her, smiled. She smiled back, although she didn't feel it inside.
When she reached the business center on the twelfth floor — really just a small niche with computer, fax machine and printer — she sensed another guest coming down the hall. The unwritten rule was that in the hallways, elevators and most public spaces, guests, along with all front-of-the-house personnel, had the right of way. You didn't hide or sidestep from anyone, but if you were any good at your job you knew how to defer with style.
Lucy stepped into the alcove just as the man passed the door of the business center. She did not get a good look at him, just a glimpse of his dark coat.
But she didn't have to see him. It was not her sense of sight that took the floor from beneath her. It was her sense of smell.
There, beneath the hotel smells of cleaning products and filtered, heated air, was another smell, a scent that closed a cold hand over her heart, a smell that unquestionably trailed behind the man who had just passed her in the hallway.
The smell of apples.
She looked down the hall, and knew that he had come out of one of the rooms. Was it 1208? It had to be. She had just cleaned the other two rooms at that end, and they were empty.
Lucy pushed her cart madly down the hall, caught the service elevator to the basement. She left her cart in the basement, ran up the steps toward the service entrance to the first floor. She tried to calm herself as she walked toward the lobby. She didn't know what she would do if she confronted the man, or even who she was looking for.
She stepped into the northern end of the lobby. There were three men in the lobby, none of them wearing or carrying a dark overcoat. Everyone else was staff.
She went out the side door, onto Sansom Street. The sidewalk was crowded. Men, women, children, people making deliveries, cab drivers. She rounded the corner, looked in front of the hotel. Two bellmen were taking bags out of a limo for an elderly couple.
Lucy's heartbeat began to slow. She took a moment, then walked up the drive on the east side of the hotel.
The smell of apples.
It had to be her imagination. Brought on by going to see that crazy old man. She was never going to find out what had happened on those three days. Not really.
She rounded the wall at the back of the hotel, turned the corner.
'Hello, Lucy.'
She stopped, her heart in her throat, her legs all but giving out. She knew the man standing before her. She knew his face.
'It's you,' she said.
'Yes, Lucy,' he replied. 'It's Detective Byrne.'
Chapter 23
Jessica spent the early afternoon running data through ViCAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. Started by the FBI in 1985, ViCAP was a national registry of violent crimes — homicides, sexual assaults, missing persons, and unidentified remains. Case information submitted to ViCAP was available to authorized law- enforcement agencies around the world, and the system allowed investigators to compare their evidence with all other cases in the database and to identify similarities.
Jessica searched the database with the most salient points of the case, those being the signature marks of the shaving of the victims, as well as the use of paper to blindfold them.
She found a similar case from 2006 in Kentucky, where a man had shaved off the hair of three prostitutes before stabbing them to death and dumping their bodies along the banks of the Cumberland River. In this case the man had shaved only the hair on the victims' heads, including their eyebrows — not their entire bodies. There was another 1988 case in Eureka, California of a man who had shaved a strange pattern into the scalps of four victims. The pattern was later identified, through the man's confession, as what he thought were the first four letters of an alien alphabet.
There were many cases of blindfolded victims, most being execution- style homicides. There were also numerous examples of preand post-mortem mutilations. None matched Jessica and Byrne's case.
There were no incidents where all three signatures were present.
Jessica was just about to print off what she needed when all hell broke loose in the duty room. She stood aside as a half-dozen members of the Fugitive Squad ran down the hallway, then through the door to the stairs. They were soon followed by three men wearing US Marshals windbreakers.
Why were the US Marshals there? The purview of the marshal's office, among other things, was the apprehending of fugitives, the transport and managing of prisoners, as well as the protection of witnesses.
Jessica looked across the room to see Dana Westbrook walking toward her. 'What happened?' she asked.
'We had a break.'
