Murder Scene Read online

  Dedication

  For Paloma

  luce mia

  Epigraph

  Show me the two so closely bound

  As we, by the wet bond of blood.

  —ROBERT GRAVES, ‘Two Fusiliers’

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Amsterdam

  Being the True Diary and Journal of Eva Claire Larssen

  Autumn—The Fire Boy

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Winter—Ravens

  Being the True Diary and Journal of Eva Claire Larssen

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Spring—Abbeville

  Being the True Diary and Journal of Eva Claire Larssen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Summer—Godwin Hall

  Being the True Diary and Journal of Eva Claire Larssen

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Autumn—Harvest

  Being the True Diary and Journal of Eva Claire Larssen

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  Chapter Eighty-Seven

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  Chapter Eighty-Nine

  Chapter Ninety

  Chapter Ninety-One

  Chapter Ninety-Two

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Richard Montanari

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Amsterdam

  March 22, 1819

  On the third day of his madness Dr Rinus van Laar tasted the mouth of the devil.

  He stepped from the ruin of his home, into the orchard where the body of his wife, dead these three days past, had begun to soften and color. He remembered the first time he had seen Anna that day by the river, the way the summer sun had brushed her hair with honey. She was now the color of winter.

  Anna’s killer lay scattered beside her in seven pieces. Six, Rinus amended. He could not remember where he had put the man’s head. He longed to look one last time into those feral, lifeless eyes.

  As he uncapped the amber vial he considered the aviary snare tucked beneath the eaves. The white bird studied him, watching, waiting, scheming, the thin leather strap tightly coiled around one leg.

  Rinus van Laar raised the vial to his lips, let seven drops of mandragora fall onto his tongue. He lay next to his wife, took her cold hand in his own, and beckoned the fire.

  At dawn, Rinus van Laar carefully returned the drawings to the leather portfolio. Fourteen sketches by the master, already more than two centuries old.

  Seven vices. Seven virtues.

  It was this treasure the killer sought. It was in defence of this treasure that Anna had given her life.

  He placed the portfolio into the steamer trunk, latched it, and secured the iron lock. He tacked funeral instructions and payment to the front door.

  As he prepared to leave, he looked one last time at his wife, and saw the bright green leaf seeking sunlight through the matte claret of Anna’s dried blood.

  In her virtue there was life.

  Six hours later, his infant son in his arms, Rinus van Laar left for America.

  Being the True Diary and Journal of Eva Claire Larssen

  July 21, 1868

  We left Richmond before dawn. I am riding back wagon with Deirdre Samuelsson and her brother Jonah. Jonah is still small, and thinks of all this as an adventure. Deirdre is my age, just fourteen, and terribly shy due to her stammer.

  They say six hundred thousand died in the war. Imagine. Daddy was killed at Manassas. Mama also died from Yankee hellfire, but not right away. Not Sonja Larssen. She held ground three years, and breathed her last yesterday at noon. Our first day’s journey took us seven miles.

  The dead walk behind us.

  August 7, 1868

  The rain is endless. We got stuck twice on the road out of Rowleton, where we picked up two weeks’ domestic work. Mr Samuelsson had to ask some local boys and their mules to help pull the wagon from the culvert. My sweater got soaking wet, and as the wool dried by the fire last night it smelled of Mama. I cried myself to sleep again.

  August 19, 1868

  We crossed the Ohio River at Wheeling this morning. Deirdre and I went to the general store and bought nails and tobacco for Mr Samuelsson. He let us buy some fruit, and I had the most delicious pear.

  Ohio looks like home before the war.

  September 1, 1868

  I awoke to the sound of church bells. When I climbed down from the wagon I saw that we were stopped on the crest of a hill overlooking the most beautiful valley I have ever seen.

  When I stepped to the edge I saw them for the first time. Two grand houses facing each other across a field of green, houses so important they even have names. Veldhoeve and Godwin Hall. I will be working at one, and staying in the other.

  Imagine.

  September 2, 1868

  All the buildings here are freshly painted and well cared for. The war did not come to this place. When we reached the town square I looked at the plaque.

&nb
sp; ABBEVILLE, OHIO. EST. 1790

  Perched on top of the plaque was a beautiful white bird, its pearl feathers glossed with early morning rain. I sat on the bench across from it and took out my pencils and pad. This is my drawing.

  Although I am not taken by such notions, as I left the square, I could swear that bird was watching me.

  Tomorrow morning I will begin work at Godwin Hall. If you are reading this, if the sun now shines where you stand, it means I am long forgotten.

  If you are reading this, it means I never made it back home again.

  Autumn – The Fire Boy

  1

  At just after 4 a.m., five days before the flames ended his world for the third time, Will Hardy stood on the corner of Mercer Street and West Houston.

  There was a time of day, Will believed, a still and transient moment when an outright silence came to New York City, a time when he could ride his Cervélo through the darkened streets and allow his mind to fill with things other than traffic and stray dogs and noise, or the vagaries and brutal competitiveness of academia.

  A tenure-track professor at New York University for the past six years, Dr William Michael Hardy, thirty-eight, was well published in his field of forensic psychology. His work had appeared in the Journal of Clinical Psychology and Psychological Trauma, as well as many other peer-reviewed publications. He had lectured at universities in both the US and Great Britain, and was slated to be on a panel on the foundations of psychopathology in Stockholm this coming winter.

  He had consulted many times with the NYPD, most recently on the case of a serial rapist hunting the Brownsville section of the city. Because of his work on that case, Will had been profiled in New York Magazine, and had twice appeared on the Today Show.

  By the time Will reached 14th Street the morning sky had begun to lighten, casting a soft lavender radiance onto the buildings.

  As he had every morning for the past three weeks, Will rode slowly onto the sidewalk at Union Square, and stopped in front of Barnes & Noble. He checked and reset his watch. Near record time.

  He leaned his bicycle against a leg of the aluminum scaffolding, removed his helmet and gloves, and regarded the collection of books on the racks facing the street. His heart still fluttered when he saw the cover, the clever photo of black and white 35 mm movie film curled onto the smooth and seductive curve of a woman’s shoulder.

  It had been nearly a month, and he still found it hard to believe. Somehow, Dr William Hardy had the No. 13 hardcover on the New York Times non-fiction list, a surprise hit called A Flicker of Madness. The book was an informal study examining seven classics of film; each, in the author’s opinion, a masterful depiction of criminal psychosis.

  For Will, the hardest part of writing the book was picking only seven films to feature, in the end selecting, among them, The Night of the Hunter, The Silence of the Lambs, and Fritz Lang’s M.

  Ego stroked for the moment, as he turned onto University Place, and headed back, he saw the black birds silhouetted against the morning sky. For Will Hardy it marked the beginning of a new day, and led the way home.

  Twenty minutes later, Will sat on the bus bench across from the brownstone on Prince Street. Eighty-eight days earlier this had been his home.

  He sipped his coffee, looked at the third floor, at the lights coming on, at the shadows essayed on the blinds.

  Inside, his wife of sixteen years was just starting her day. The daughter of a New Rochelle surgeon and a concert pianist, Amanda Kyle Hardy worked as a juvenile social worker in the Administration for Children’s Services, as well as a counselor for a variety of drug and alcohol dependence facilities. If there was one thing at which she was more proficient than Northern Italian cooking, it was landscape watercolors. At thirty-seven, she was often taken for a woman in her late twenties.

  Will glanced at the corner window of his daughter’s room. An early riser like her father, Will knew that fifteen-year-old Bernadette – who went by Detta, and then only to her father and mother, as well as a few close friends – had already been up for an hour, making her mother’s favorite coffee, toasting the cocoa bread from the Ghanaian bakery on Greene Street, poaching two eggs.

  After sixteen years of marriage Will Hardy had awakened one day to find himself blindsided by his own blindness. Somehow he had not seen any of the warning signs of his life and marriage drifting away.

  The main reasons, at least as Will saw it, or wanted to believe, were his long hours and dozens of added responsibilities on the tenure track, obligations that kept him away from home for sixty to seventy hours a week, and many times the weekends.

  Will and Amanda had been at chilly arm’s length all spring, saying things like ‘excuse me’ when they passed each other in the narrow hallway of the apartment. They’d done much of their communicating, such as it was, via Post-It notes on the refrigerator.

  It was Will’s decision to move out, not wanting it to get to the point where it would be Amanda’s choice. He figured if he moved first, moving back would still be possible.

  And all this time Detta Hardy had been the tolerant and reluctant referee, living an only-child’s nightmare, the daughter of a psychologist and a social worker, two people who were supposed to fully understand all this.

  In the early years of their marriage Will and Amanda had tried to have a second child, seeing every fertility doctor in Manhattan that either of their benefit packages would allow. It was not to be. There would only be Bernadette and for that Will Hardy felt eternally blessed.

  He wondered if she was faithfully taking her meds.

  2

  Located in the heart of Greenwich Village, New York University was one of the largest private non-profit institutions in the country, with centers on the Upper East side, as well as the MetroTech Center in Brooklyn.

  On this Monday morning Will’s first class of the new year was a forensic core course with thirty-two students. The class was held in a tiered, medium-sized lecture hall with one hundred seats, fitted with a pull-down screen and state of the art video projector.

  Psychology of Violence covered, among other topics, case law as it applied to risk assessment and the treatment of violent patients, as well as sexual violence.

  Today’s lecture was titled Medium Cruel, the designation a play on Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool.

  Will took a deep breath before opening the door to the hall. He had done this many times, and each time, at the precipice of a new year, he felt the same trepidation, the same sense of anxiety and unease, the belief that he was in all ways a fraud, taking his salary under false pretenses.

  He opened the door anyway.

  ‘Good morning,’ Will said as the last two students hurried in and found their seats. He knew only a handful of the students, but they surely knew him. In addition to his CV and publishing history he had also consulted on the TV police dramas Brooklyn Steel and Station 21.

  At a smaller school, these credits might have made Will Hardy a modest celebrity. At NYU the star-bar was much higher, being the alma mater of Woody Allen, Burt Lancaster, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Neil Simon, and Martin Scorsese.

  After welcoming the students to the new academic year, and to his class, Will offered a brief introduction to the lecture.

  ‘We’ve all seen these TV shows and asked ourselves if they are accurate depictions of not only crime in America, but also of the men and women who fight the good fight. As of this fall season, nearly fifty percent of all primetime drama is about police, fire departments, or medical facilities. Clearly, the interest in these subjects is as high as ever.’

  Will lowered the lights, and started the video, a compendium of scenes from popular police TV dramas over the years: Blue Bloods, Homicide: Life on the Street, Beretta, Miami Vice, NYPD Blue, Cagney and Lacey, even the original NYPD, starring Frank Converse and Jack Warden.

  When the lights came up, Will began his talk.

  ‘It seems, especially in western societies, that what happens at eight p.m., on p
rime time television – where we see no end to gun play, extreme physical violence, and sexual sadism – at eleven p.m. becomes tragedy, with newscasters offering solemn expressions and an earnest, sotto voce recounting of the day’s horrors.

  ‘Violence sells deodorant and cell phones and beer and luxury sedans at eight o’clock. At eleven o’clock the news presents the same heinous acts as fact, but this time our reaction is not to immediately jump on Amazon to buy the widgets, but rather to wring our hands and walk around with signs saying stop the violence.

  ‘Which is the real culture?’ Will asked of the room. ‘Prime time or night-time? If violence is truly abhorrent to us all, why do we watch it for three hours every night, reveling in each gunshot, each thrown punch, each citizen violated in some terrible way?’

  A hand went up. The student was David Kleinman, a near genius twenty-year-old who had already earned his BA. Will acknowledged him.

  ‘I read somewhere that you worked on Brooklyn Steel.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘If you don’t mind me asking, what, exactly, did you do on the show?’

  The truth was Will did quite a bit of standing around, eating craft service, and watching the younger female extras on the show adjust their costumes.

  ‘I answered their questions about procedure and motivation,’ Will said. ‘To the best of my ability.’

  ‘That show was canceled mid-season.’

  Will amended his posture, gearing up for a skirmish. ‘It is called show business, after all. Sometimes compromises must be made.’

  ‘What sort of compromises?’

  Let’s see, Will thought. Reality, character, plot, plausibility, motivation.

  ‘Not much,’ Will said. ‘Once in awhile we discussed procedural aberrations.’

  Another raised hand. A pretty young woman named Jenny Barclay, a sociology major from Evanston, Illinois. Will called on her.

  ‘What sort of aberrations?’ she asked.

  It was a soft grounder.

  ‘Well, on any given prime time cop show, we are usually presented with a crime before the credits roll and the first ad break. Yes?’

  Nodding heads. A few students shifted in their seats.

  ‘As the show progresses our intrepid detectives conduct due diligence, and eventually discover where the suspect is working, usually at a loading dock. Cut to our cops spotting the subject from a block or so away. It is at this point they yell the man’s name. Invariably, the suspect takes off running, which allows for an exciting foot chase through the streets of Manhattan. Ultimately, the suspect gets hit by a cab, and is triumphantly taken into custody. Cue pithy exit line, roll end credits.’