“Is this his room?” Ambrose asked when they’d reached the top floor.
“Yes, sir.”
“After you,” Congreve said, and let the big man open the door and enter ahead of him.
A sharp coppery smell assaulted Congreve’s twitching nose. He knew what he would find even as he reached for the light switch beside the door. There was fresh blood in this room. A lot of it. He turned on the light.
“Oh, lord Jesus,” the orderly said. “Oh, sweet Jesus, how did this—”
Ambrose looked at Lavon Greene and said, “This man was alive when you last saw him?”
“Yes, sir! He—”
“The last time you saw him was when you administered his medication. You gave him his medication at what time?”
“Six. Six o’clock, is what I’m saying. Same time every day. Oh, my lord.”
“You’re absolutely sure he was alive at six o’clock this evening?”
“Alive as you or me. Yes, sir. He was.”
“And you haven’t heard anything since then? No noise? No shouts or cries?”
“No, sir.”
“I believe you. That bloody pillow on the floor was held over his face. Could one of your patients have done this?”
“No, sir. Ain’t none of ’em got the strength to cut a man’s head half off.”
“Has anyone besides you and the manager been in this house tonight?”
“Just the dish man.”
“Dish man? A cook?”
“No, sir. Man who came to fix the dish on the roof.”
“Ah, that dish. What time was this?”
“Around seven, I guess. Everybody who ain’t bedridden was down in the lounge watching the TV and suddenly the picture went out. Man showed up here about ten minutes later said he was here to fix the dish. Had to go up on the roof, he said.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was a little guy. Big smile on his face. A Chinaman.”
“A Chinaman. That’s very interesting. I want you to go downstairs right now and ask Captain Mariucci to come up here immediately. Can you do that, Mr. Greene? Run down there, now.”
“Ain’t nothing like this ever happened here before this. Never.”
“Go.”
The late Benny Sangster lay faceup in his blood-soaked bed. His throat had been slashed down to the spinal column and the wound was gaping like a second red mouth under his chin. Approaching the bed, Congreve could see the blood was partially congealed. That’s when the second wound caught his eye.
There was also a gash in the center of the chest. In Ambrose’s experience, this meant organs had been removed. From the size and location of the wound, he would guess the heart.
Someone had known Congreve was coming to New York and why. That someone had beaten him to the punch, had gotten to Benny Sangster before Ambrose could. Congreve heard Mariucci’s heavy tread racing up the stairs.
“Captain!” Congreve shouted over his shoulder, “Where the bloody hell is Coney Island?”
“What are you, a tourist? It’s in Brooklyn, for crissakes. The southernmost—Aw, shit,” Captain Mariucci said. He was standing in the doorway staring at what was left of Benny Sangster.
“Joe Bones is next,” Congreve said, “Let’s go.”
“He’s next, all right,” the captain said, “and whoever did Benny here is thinking the same goddamn thing. Let’s get outta here.”
Traffic was light for a Friday night. The uniform had the Impala cruiser doing at least one hundred on the Belt Parkway, weaving in and out of the lanes.
“He’s a cannibal,” Ambrose remarked, gazing out the window at the blur of Brooklyn.
“What? Who is?” Mariucci said.
“The killer. The Chinaman who murdered Sangster.”
“Fuck you talking about, Ambrose?”
“Eating the heart of one’s enemy. An act of psychological brutality. The killer ate Sangster’s heart. At least he removed it. Assuming it would be cumbersome to transport, especially if he’s planning a second murder tonight, I believe he ate it while standing over the corpse.”
“Jesus.”
“The Chinese are not as squeamish as we are, Captain.”
“You saying this is understandable behavior?”
“I’m saying the taboo against cannibalism is weaker there than it is in the West. In wartime, many starving Chinese acquired a taste for human flesh. And there are many stories of workers in morgues or crematoriums slicing off the buttocks or breasts of female corpses and taking them home for supper. Stuffing for dumplings, you see.”
“Can you stop? Please?” Mariucci begged. “Now!”
The uniform up front turned around. “Here?” he asked, dumb-founded.
“Not you, him,” Mariucci said.
At Exit 6, the cop driving the cruiser went up on two wheels taking the turn. He then went south on Cropsey Avenue, taking that all the way down to Surf. At the corner of Surf and West Tenth Street, he screeched to a halt and the captain and the Scotland Yard man scrambled out of the backseat.
Joe Bones, Mariucci had learned tonight, worked at Coney now. Ever since his retirement from family-related activities, he’d been the night man at the Wheel. Since it was a Friday night and not quite midnight, Mariucci figured his best chance of finding Joey was at Coney. The rides closed at midnight, so he was probably still here. He’d got on his cell and called in the homicide as they ran down the stairs of the rest home. The meat wagon was already en route to Bide-a-Wee. He figured Lavon wasn’t going anywhere. The big man was still standing over the corpse and weeping when they ran out of the room.
Chapter Thirty-four
Bad Reichenbach
FRAU IRMA WORE JACKBOOTS UNDER HER LONG BLACK skirt, Stoke was pretty sure. Shiny black ones, right up to her chubby, pink little knees. She wasn’t the prettiest girl in Bavaria. She had her wispy grey-blonde hair pinned up in two big doughnuts on each side of her head. She had a square, flat face with a beaky nose right in the middle of it. She wore some kind of heavy white face powder, although she was already quite white enough, in Stoke’s humble opinion. She had a short, compact body, and one good thing you could say about her, she looked very strong for a woman.
“Zo,” Irma said to Jet, looking down at her registration book, “we had no idea you were coming.”
“We’re hiking,” Jet said, repeating what she’d already said twice when they were still standing outside, hot and thirsty in the blazing sun at the front door. The Frau was obviously very surprised to see Jet without her boyfriend the baron. And when Jet had introduced Stokely Jones as her personal trainer, she’d looked at him as if he were some giant alien specimen of another life-form. Stoke had smiled and said Guten Tag, but she didn’t seem to understand his German too well. GOO-ten TOG. Had to work on that one.
“Ach. Hiking,” Frau Irma Winterwald said, but not in a warm, welcoming way. The way she said it, Stoke thought maybe hiking was strictly prohibited in these mountains. The gasthaus, Zum Wilden Hund, was a little spooky inside. Thick velvet drapes kept out most of the sunlight. The carved furniture was heavy and dark and there were a lot of shaggy heads with beady glass eyes mounted high up on the walls. Dead stags and deer and bears all staring down at the huge man in hiking shorts as if it were him who should be up on the wall and not them.
The guest house, Stoke decided, was a Bavarian version of the Bates Motel.
Another weird thing was the music. There was very loud piano music coming from a great big grand piano at
