City of the Dead (Alex Delaware, #37)(84)

I pointed to my screen. He came over and had a look. Pushed the print button, collected the paper, and sat back down. Sweat beads had collected at his hairline. He wiped them with a handkerchief. Flexed his jaws and his nostrils. Looked at me.

“So what’re we saying? Guy’s marriages fall apart and he takes out his rage on surrogates? Why not the women who actually piss him off?”

I said, “Don’t know for sure but my best guess is displacement. Projecting anger and other emotions onto substitute targets. It’s the basis of racism and it’s also common in borderline personality. So are inappropriate anger and a distorted self-image. Grandiosity, seeing yourself as above the rules, which is how Toni describes Deeb’s approach to his superiors. His career’s been based on the study of symbols and that could be rooted in more than scholarly interest.”

“No such thing as accidents, huh?”

“Oh, there are,” I said. “But rarely when it comes to murder.”

“What about the first wife? She healthy?”

“All I’ve got is a first name, Adele, was about to trace her when you got here. I figured I’d start with the University of Rochester because that’s where Deeb taught before he moved to Bloomington.”

He got up again and pointed to my monitor. “May I?”



* * *



—

Milo’s LAPD password gives him access to the usual databases and several beyond civilian reach.

It didn’t take him long to find an eight-year-old address for Adele and Conrad Deeb on Raleigh Street, in Rochester, New York. Nor to learn that Adele’s Social Security number now traced to Adele Banerjee, Ph.D., associate professor of classics and women’s studies at Barnard College in Manhattan.

Banerjee’s faculty headshot showed a pretty, bespectacled redhead in her forties with an open smile. Primary interest: re-contextualizing the writings of Edith Wharton to make them compatible with post-feminist perspectives. She’d been at Barnard for eight years, had earned tenure after four.

I said, “She did a lot better than Deeb.”

Milo said, “Another reason to be pissed off. Okay, let’s see if he symbolized anyone else.”



* * *



—

A woman had been butchered a month and a half prior to Conrad Deeb’s second divorce. Finding the date of his first divorce, Milo worked backward, beginning with two months earlier. NCIC gave up four women slain in Rochester during that period.

Three were the victims of gunshot homicides in high-crime neighborhoods. Two of those cases had been solved.

The fourth victim was a twenty-nine-year-old secretary in the university’s chemistry department named Christa Leanne Wurtz who’d been found stabbed to death in her apartment.

Basement flat in a house on Raleigh Street.

Three blocks from where Deeb and Adele had lived.

No image of Wurtz on NCIC, newspaper accounts, or the Web. Milo got on the phone to Rochester PD Homicide and was put in touch with a detective named Elizabeth Stoller who recalled the case, but not as an investigator.

“I was a rookie on patrol,” she said. “Happened to be riding along when that call came in. The D was a wise man named Cohen, very fatherly, tried to convince me not to look at the crime scene but I was stubborn so he let me. Nasty, near-decapitation. Poor thing was blitz-attacked in the hallway outside her bedroom. Like she’d woken up and got slammed by a prowler. A few things were taken, phone, some cash, a few trinkets. Looking at it made me sick to my stomach but I couldn’t show Cohen. An hour later, I decided I could handle it and was going to be a murder gal. I even tried to cold-case Wurtz around three years ago when I got promoted but the boss said no. So this is very good, Lieutenant. Weird but good.”

Milo said, “No promises but if I get you some satisfaction, you’ll be the first to know.”

“That would make you my Prince Charming. What’s the deal? Can you give me some details?”

He gave Stoller a sketchy summary.

She said, “Professor type? Interesting. There actually were some questions about a chem prof, real weirdo, peed into jars and kept them around. But he alibied out. So how can I help this along?”

“Love to see the case file.”

“It’ll be expressed out today. Address?”

Milo gave it to her. “Do you remember what Wurtz looked like?”

“In terms of body position?” said Stoller.

“No, general physical appearance. Starting with hair color.”

“That’s easy. She was a carrot-top, bright-red hair. Curly. Nice looking, all her photos showed her smiling. That work for you?”

“Oh yeah,” said Milo. “Don’t open the champagne yet, but start thinking about your favorite brand.”

“I’m a martini gal,” said Elizabeth Stoller. “But you close this, I’ll drink any darn thing you want.”

He hung up, wiped his brow, sat back. “Crazy has just turned rational. Okay, I need to get DNA on Deeb and match it to the unknown blood at Cordi’s house.”

I said, “He’s due for another appointment. I’ll offer him something to drink. If he says no, I’ll observe what he touches and—”

He sliced air with a big hand. “Not. Gonna. Happen.”