FBI Field Office, New York Special Agent Angelita Fernandez handed over the necrophilia research to the Task Force's newest recruit, Sebastian Hartson. Straight out of the Academy, he was so wet behind the ears Fernandez wanted to towel him dry. Incidentally, those ears stuck out like jug handles and weren't helped at all by the military-style haircut he'd ill-advisedly chosen. 'Grow it long, man, cover up those trophy handles,' she had told him.
Fernandez desperately wanted to join Jack and Howie in beating up 'Toxic Tariq' as she called him, but Howie told her that her mission of the morning was to chase up the other loose ends. Manny Lieberman was top of her list. The FBI had its own in-house forensic documents examiners but almost anyone who knew Manny, used Manny. He was eighty-two but his eyes were still as sharp as a fox on a midnight run to the hen house.
Fernandez knew there was no point ringing him. Whenever Manny was busy he ignored the phone; in fact he ignored everything. She grabbed her stuff, diverted her calls and made her way to his office off Liberty Avenue near the Jewish Cemetery. The black lettering on the frosted window declared the business to be Lieberman amp; Son amp; Daughter. The ' amp; Daughter' had been added two years earlier when Annie, his 'Princess', as he referred to her, had graduated and finally decided that she did want to work with the old man after all. As Manny would tell you, it had been a toss-up between him and taxidermy, and he had been forced to use all his charm, wealth and family connections in order to narrowly defeat a stuffed animal. What could he say? The Liebermans specialized in all forms of handwriting analysis, including detecting forged signatures, validating signatures, spotting alterations to wills, land titles, deeds and all manner of other business documents.
The walls of his tiny reception area were plastered with hundreds of forged cheques that he'd spotted and that the cops had given him as mementos of successful prosecutions. Beneath the bottom line of cheques, worth a total of about $2 million, Manny's son David answered phones and ran the admin. David was drop-dead gorgeous and gayer than Elton John. Such a waste, thought Fernandez, as she stared into his baby blues and waited for him to hang up.
David Lieberman cupped his hand over the phone and whispered to her, 'Go straight through, Agent Fernandez, my dad won't mind.'
'Thanks,' she said, wondering whether it would be possible to 'convert' him. What the hell, even if she couldn't she wouldn't mind trying.
Fernandez knocked on a cheap wooden door, pushed it open and walked into an even cheaper-looking room. Manny wasn't big on spending money on anything other than essentials and that was a category he reserved solely for the tools of his trade. Lately, his hearing had virtually gone and he didn't even look up from his work as Fernandez stood in the open doorway, waiting to be invited in.
The old man sat behind an uncluttered desk, with bright angle-poise lights and a variety of hugely expensive, long-handled magnifying lenses strewn across it like discarded lollipops. He wore an ancient dark blue jacket, white shirt and blue tie, pulled tight into the collar. 'Look professional, act professional' he'd always told his family.
'Morning, Mr L,' chirped Fernandez.
The head of thinning white hair half cocked towards her, one eye still focused on his M-glass and the paper beneath it.
'Morning, Agent Fernandez, come on in. Are you here to harass an old man?'
'Not at all,' she lied, moving into the heart of the room. 'In fact, I've come to make him very happy.' She dug into her purse and produced a paper bag containing a quarter of iced gem biscuits, a type only available at a local baker near her parents' home out on Staten Island.
Lieberman now gave her his full attention. 'Aaah, you're an angel fallen from the clouds of heaven,' he said as he took them off her. The iced gems were a running joke between them, going back to the first case they'd worked together, when Manny had helped Angelita bag a top burglar and a bent jeweller from Manhattan. The jeweller would sell high-quality diamonds to wealthy clients, and give the burglar the addresses where the 'ice' was. The burglar would steal the diamonds and the jeweller would buy them back from him for a fraction of their value. Afterwards the jeweller would resell the gems through shops he had in other states.
'You know, Angelita,' mused Manny, a five-carat sparkle in his eye, 'if only I were twenty-five years younger and free and single, then you and I -'
'Yeah,' laughed Fernandez. 'Then you and I'd be down the jail house'cos you'd be busted, on account that I'd still be under-age and you'd still be a wicked old man.'
They both laughed. Fernandez took one of the tiny biscuits and crunched off the icing. 'You got anything for me, Mr L? Or do I have to come back again?'
Manny Lieberman sighed. He knew he was being 'worked' by the sassy agent, and he loved every minute of it. He put the document he had been examining into a file and demoted it to a desk drawer. He took out another file. Fernandez instantly recognized the carefully cut piece of cardboard with the black felt-tip writing as coming from the package containing Sarah Kearney's head sent to the FBI. Manny also slid out a photocopy of the BRK note from Italy and placed this alongside the cardboard.
'I know you officers have very short attention spans, so I'll try to be as brief as possible about this.' He folded his hands together. 'The same man wrote the same writing with the same pen. Your Italian package and your American package were addressed by the same hand.'
Fernandez's eyes widened as she took in the implications of his snappy summary. 'You're sure?'
Manny picked up some gold wire-rimmed glasses and popped them on. 'Aah, so now you want the not-so-brief version?'
'Afraid so.'
'Okay; then let's start with the science first. As you know, I am a little old-fashioned in my ways and methods, but they haven't let me down yet. I pin-scraped a tiny part of the ink from the writing on both samples that you gave me. I then subjected these scrapings to pyrolysis gas chromatography, which I have always favoured for analysis of paint and fibre samples. The final program produced in this process is virtually unique. Certainly reliable enough for me to say confident lyin any court that the samples matched.'
'Fine,' said Fernandez, getting her evidential bearings. 'So that tells us that it was the same type of pen, maybe even the same pen, but it wouldn't be evidence that the same guy used it?'
'No, indeed it wouldn't. And that presumably is the main reason why you came to me.'
'Mr Lieberman, where else would I go – you're the best.'
'Flattery, my dear Agent Fernandez, will get you everything your heart desires.' Manny slid a piece of tracing paper out of the file envelope and paper-clipped it on to the photocopy of the BRK letter recovered in Italy. 'First I did top-of-the-letter analysis, and I've marked up this "trace" to show how the offender starts off his letters. Can you see?'
Fernandez had to stand behind him to get a proper look. The trace paper was covered with tiny marks. The first marks were made at the highest point of all the letters. 'I've got it,' she said.
'Okay. Next I marked out where his second peaks are. So, for example, on the letter B, my first mark is at the top of the B, then my second mark is where the top half-circle of the B hits the middle of the vertical letter line. You got that too?'
Fernandez looked at the trace paper closely. 'Yeah, Mr L, I'm still with you.'
Manny sat back. 'By marking out all the peaks and troughs of his letters with those small dots that you saw, I was able to join up the dots and get a kind of graph. Let me show you.' He returned to the trace paper and ran his finger along the pencil line, which looked to Fernandez very similar to the printout you might get from an ECG or a polygraph. 'Then, I was able to take this trace from the BRK letter and place it over the writing on the label of the box sent to your office here in New York.' Manny slid the trace over the cardboard sample and clipped it into position. 'You'll see now that although he wrote in capital letters, obviously to avoid handwriting detection, he has still given us enough to go on. The height of all the letters is identical, the mid-points are identical, the spacing between the letters is identical, the spacing between the words is identical and the spacing between the lines he's written is also identical. As I said, the same man wrote the same messages with the same pen.'
'Mr L, at times like this I wish I was fifty years older,' said Fernandez, planting a kiss on the top of his head.
Suddenly, all the hunches and gut instincts were justified. At last, they had positive proof, hopefully proof strong enough to one day put before a jury, that there hadn't been two killers at work. Just the one. The Black River Killer had indeed crossed continents and killed in Italy.