Author's note: Well, that was fun, wasn't it? But it's time for Lisa to get some screen time, and here she be. I did some research into Toronto on the web, which is where I found out they call themselves a police service instead of a police department (they call napkins serviettes too and little girls in uniforms who guilt-trip you into buying cookies Girl Guides instead of Girl Scouts, but this chapter isn't about napkins or Girl Scouts.). As before, all glaring mistakes are strictly my own fault, I tried, mea culpa. But hey. Here we also learn the mystery of Susana's alias. The one fellow who tried – well, you were right, but there was a simpler connection than the 'irons' bit. But enough of my a/n, on with the show….
Lisa Starling rubbed her eyes as she got out of the Toronto police car and entered the warehouse. She had already been pulling a late night when Susana called with her little singing telegram. A quick call to Toronto Police Service had alerted them to Susana's call. The Toronto cops had already secured the scene and were investigating. Like most metropolitan police departments, there was a liaison officer with the FBI, and he seemed to think that having an FBI profiler up to take a look at the scene couldn't hurt. Lisa was anxious to get up there herself and try to hunt down her cousin.
So she caught the last United flight from Washington to Toronto, at 10 PM. The flight was uneventful and most of the passengers seemed tired. Customs was its usual minor hassle. The liaison officer was there at the airport to pick her up. Nice touch.
His name was Sergeant John Frobisher, and he was in his late twenties or early thirties. He was tall and filled out his uniform nicely. He had chiseled features and deep blue eyes. Her first thought on seeing him was that he was pretty cute. But this was a work call, not a social visit. They stopped for coffee and then he brought her out to his patrol car parked out by the arrivals gate.
"Glad you could make it on such short notice," he said in the car.
Lisa sipped from the espresso she had bought in the airport and sighed. "Not a problem," she said. "If it's who I think it is, she's very dangerous."
"You think it's Susana Lecter?" he asked as they merged into traffic.
"Yes," she answered after a moment. "It's either her or she knew about it."
"Well, we'll get her," he said. "I've been to that,…" he snapped his fingers, searching for the name. "That National Academy the FBI does. Interesting stuff. What can you tell me about her?"
Lisa blinked at the way he said about. She considered and wondered how much time she had. She could go on for hours about her cousin.
"She's…Hannibal Lecter's daughter," she began diffidently.
"Hannibal the Cannibal, eh?" he observed drily.
"Yes. A killer in her own right. She uses guns and knives, mostly. Have your officers on the lookout – she's killed cops before. She'll do it again without a second thought."
"What brought her up to Toronto?" he asked. He was direct. She liked that.
"Well," she said, "she was hurt. Escaped from prison two and a half weeks ago, on July 27th. She'd want somewhere to hole up, somewhere cosmopolitan. Probably she was counting on Toronto because she could fight extradition if she got picked up. She was looking at capital charges back in Virginia."
He nodded. "Death penalty, yeah."
"She likes the high life," Lisa continued. "The best shopping, the best restaurants, stuff like that. She called me, I don't know if they told you. She mentioned the Chanel boutique. What's the ritzy part of town here? Where that sort of stuff would be?"
He thought for a moment. "Yorkville," he said. "Chanel's on Bloor Street. A couple other fancy-dancy boutiques, Hermes and Versace, eh. You think that's where she is?"
"Yup," Lisa said, staring straight ahead. The aroma of the coffee was wonderful, and the caffeine served to jerk her body towards wakefulness. "If I were you, I'd go to every four and five-star hotel in the city. Get a list of every single woman who's checked in since the 27th. What do we know about the victims?"
"Not much. Two were visiting from Alberta. One of their uncles lives here. We checked him out and he seems clean. The other just moved back to Toronto, had a job and an apartment. The fourth is a Yank romance novelist. American, excuse me."
Lisa ignored it. It was irrelevant. "Any links between the victims that we know of?"
"There is one thing. We've gone over the one victim's computer and she was a member of some online Lecter fan club. We're running down the names on the list and trying to see if we can pop up the other two. There's a diner not far away, the waitress remembers seeing the two from Alberta there. Said some lady in a suit met them and left with them."
Lisa sat up suddenly. "Any description?" she asked immediately.
Sgt. Frobisher shook his head. "Not worth much," he said. "Brown hair – she thought – maybe five foot two, five foot four. Let me get cracking on that list, eh?"
He picked up the mike on the radio and called into dispatch. In the terse tones that police use on the radio, he asked for cars to go out to the best hotels and check them out. Then he turned his attention back to her.
"The crime scene's pretty nasty, I'll warn you now," he said. "We left it up since you were coming. I don't know what you need to do your profiling, but let me know. We'll cooperate as much as we can. We want her caught too, eh. Can you get us mugshots and fingerprints?"
"Sure," Lisa said. "I just need to make a call. Didn't they get those for you already?"
He shook his head. "In the works, you know? I was thinking if you called you might be able to get those a little faster. FBI agent and all, you know."
"I'll see what I can do," Lisa said. She took out her cell phone and called back to Quantico. The secretary was glad to hear Lisa had arrived in Toronto all right and agreed to send Susana's arrest records to Toronto. Lisa thanked her kindly and turned back to him as she hung up.
"There you go," she said.
"Thanks," he said. They had arrived at the warehouse. Cruisers were pulled up around it along with a forensics van. Wooden sawhorses prevented the curious from coming in and trampling all over the crime scene. Uniformed policemen worked busily throughout the crime scene. Lisa walked into the crime scene with Sgt. Frobisher. When she saw it, she winced.
Reann and Teri hung silently from their ropes, their corpses being photographed by the police photographer. Meagan lay still and silent against the post. Blood from her stumps had covered the floor around her in a dark crimson pool. The rope she had gripped for so long swung free by the post, teeth marks embossed deeply into its surface where she had held on for dear life. Shawn Irons's corpse lay on the floor nearby.
A chainsaw sat on a table nearby, already in a plastic bag and tagged. Blood marred its blade in a large streak across its end. Next to it was a hammer, also stained with blood. Lisa closed her eyes for a moment as she realized what they had been used for. Chainsaw must've been used on the one on the floor. Hammer on the one hanging upside down. The one bent over like that looks like it was just the weights that did it. She doesn't look mutilated.
One of the uniforms walked up to her with a plastic evidence bag in his hand.
"Are you the profiler from the FBI?" he asked.
Lisa nodded. "Yes. What've you got?"
"We found this paper here. They're posed to resemble it. Thought it might help you."
He handed her the bag. Inside it was a piece of paper. On the paper was a printed picture of two people bound as Teri and Reann had been bound. Two people were beating the one hanging head-down with a hammer. Just as Teri had been. Lisa frowned down at the paper. The cop handed her another one. In this picture, there were more people – one person hitting another with an axe, and two others busily engaged in sawing someone in two. Over on the right, however, was a person by himself or herself. The picture was blurry and Lisa could not tell. This poor soul had their arms amputated just below the shoulder joint and feet amputated about halfway up the calves. Just as Meagan had been.
Lisa turned around and took in the scene. The victims. The weapons. The bloodstains. Something wasn't right here. She narrowed her eyes and walked silently up to the bodies. She squatted down to look at them close up. A few uniformed cops looked at each other and wondered what she was doing.
What the hell were you doing, Susana? she thought. This was wrong, somehow very wrong. The victimology was wrong. Susana had never targeted young girls. When she posed her victims, she had done so only to memorialize murders committed by her father. And she had certainly never tried to duplicate a picture before.
And what the hell was this picture anyway? What kind of nut case would draw this kind of picture? It was horrible indeed. Had Dr. Lecter committed a crime like this long ago, maybe? He liked medieval things, and he had committed murders equally as horrible.
Adding to the puzzle was the fact that Susana had essentially announced to Lisa where she had been and what she had been doing. The phone booth she had called from was across the street from the warehouse. The cops had prints off the chainsaw and hammer, and Lisa knew long before they were submitted that they would match Susana's. Susana had given her this one, gone out of her way to make sure Lisa would identify her as the person responsible. But the murder was hardly Susana's style.
Lisa thought about what she knew about her cousin's style of murder. Her theory was that Susana's murders were really of two kinds. There were murders that were a means to an end, and murders that were ends in themselves. Lisa believed that virtually all the police officers Susana had ever killed – and she counted the Chicago murders that had never been definitively tied to Susana – were means to an end. Susana didn't have anything against police officers; she killed them in order to escape or to get to her main prey. Or in the case of David Jameson's murder, she had killed police in order to get their uniform and cruiser. Murders that were ends in themselves were murders like the three Tattler reporters, Margot Verger, Ray Herman, and Roland Mapp.
Lisa didn't think that Shawn Irons's murder had been related to the three younger women. She had been cut on, that was obvious, but there was no picture. And Susana might have a reason for killing Shawn Irons. Her new book was supposedly about Dr. Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling. Lisa Starling would have denied it through being threatened with red-hot pokers, but she was a closet fan of Shawn Irons's work.
Are you copycatting someone else's style, Susana? Hard to believe, but that's all I can think. It would be a little gauche for you. Why else would you do this? You put in a lot of time and effort. Can't be means to an end for you. When you kill someone as a means to an end, you put them down quick and dirty and go about your business. I could buy Shawn Irons as you settling her account – you've done that before. But what the hell did you kill these girls for?
What's your game, Susana? What are you trying to do now?
She tried to concentrate on Shawn Irons. Shawn was different. She was mutilated, yes, from the large gash on her stomach, but she hadn't been posed, just dumped. Shawn was probably the key.
"Do we know where she was staying in Toronto?" she asked Sgt. Frobisher, who had come up to watch her.
He consulted with another officer before answering. "Yeah. Four Seasons."
"Have we sent an officer over there to check names?" Lisa pressed.
He checked on his radio. Lisa could hear the answer herself over the walkie-talkie on his belt.
"Thirty names on the list," the voice said, tinny over the speaker. Lisa sighed. The next words of the voice made her happier, though.
"Twenty-six names just got regular rooms," the voice crackled. "Three got their regular business suites. And one got the biggest suite they have there. Our perp is supposed to be into that sort of thing, eh?"
If Lisa Starling could have, she would have gleefully teleported herself through the radio to kiss the owner of the voice. "What's that name?" she asked Frobisher, who relayed the request.
The radio crackled briefly. "Surratt, Mary, that's Sierra-Uniform-Romeo-Romeo-Alpha-Tango-Tango."
The name gave Lisa pause. She'd heard that name before. It had nothing to do with Susana that she knew of. For some reason it made her think of high school, old Beaumont High. She asked Frobisher if he'd ever heard of it. He shook his head.
It nagged at her the way things will when you know something but cannot remember the details. She shifted from foot to foot, muttering the name under her breath. After a few minutes, she pulled out her phone and called back to Quantico. She got Agent Witt on the line, a fellow profiler who'd been in the department for many years. Good. He might know. Late night, Lisa thought, glancing at her watch.
"Hi," she said. "I'm at the scene. I had a question for you. Have you ever heard of a Mary Surratt?" She spelled the name. "Can you run that name for me, maybe?"
It took a few moments before Andrew Witt answered with a chuckle and a startled voice. "I don't need to run it, Starling. There's a conviction on record all right, but it won't be in the computer. You a history buff?"
"No," Lisa said. "Why?"
"Well, I don't think Mary Surratt is staying at any hotels right now, Starling," he said. "That would be a good trick. She was part of the Lincoln conspiracy."
"The what conspiracy? Come on, it's late. Throw me a bone here," Lisa said.
"All right," he grinned, seeming amused. "Remember President Lincoln? There was a conspiracy to assassinate him, not just John Wilkes Booth. Mary Surratt was part of that. Well, supposedly. But whoever's in your hotel there isn't her. She was executed in 1865. First woman ever executed by the federal government."
First woman ever executed by the federal government. Lisa did not know how many others there had been, but she knew who probably would have been the next. It was very Susana, she thought. Cute, erudite, and allowing her to thumb her nose at the government that was seeking her.
"Thanks, Andy," she said calmly. "Talk to you soon."
She hung up the phone and smiled tightly at Sergeant Frobisher.
"Good news?" he asked.
"Depends," she said. "Can that guy find out if Mary Surratt is still staying at the Four Seasons?"
He nodded and radioed in the request. It took several minutes for the reply to come back, as the constable at the hotel had to ask the front desk, who in turn consulted with the hotel manager. The Four Seasons prides itself on offering the best service to its guests, but when those guests were murderers wanted by the Toronto Police Service and the American FBI, choices need to be made. Lisa Starling did not breathe until the reply came back.
"Yep," the voice said calmly, "she's still there. Also, get this, eh, they sent a housekeeper up to her suite about ten minutes ago. She was there watching Spanish TV. Is that your perp?"
Lisa Starling's eyes met John Frobisher's, equal blue meeting equal blue. The same sparkles danced in each.
"That's her," Lisa said.
"Roll it," Sgt. Frobisher ordered.
Lisa reached out and took the sergeant's arm. "I want to be there," she said.
He stopped and considered. "I don't know, Agent Starling. If she's as violent as you say, you know, it could be ugly."
"I'm armed," Lisa pointed out. "I'm a cop too. And you'll want at least five officers to take her down."
"And you know you won't be arresting her. She'll have to face charges here. I can't make any promises if you can get her back."
Lisa knew this. She'd be amazed if the Canadian authorities didn't want to try Susana themselves after what she had done. But that was a matter for the courts, and that was how it was done. And it made little difference whether Susana was behind Canadian bars or American ones.
"I know," she said. "I just want to be in on the collar."
Sgt. Frobisher heaved a mighty sigh.
"I'll bring you American cigarettes," she offered half-jokingly. He threw back his head and laughed.
"No, no. Don't want to have to arrest myself for smuggling. All right, just stay back and let us do the actual arrest. But you can be there."
"Thank you," she said, grinning.
The ride over to the Four Seasons was not too long, but for Lisa it seemed to take hours. She could not keep her legs from trembling in the car. She wondered what she should say to Susana when they took her out. There were several cops waiting in the lobby as they got there. Lisa tensed. Déjà vu, she thought.
The hotel manager was most helpful, providing them with a key to Susana's suite and explaining that Ms. Surratt had been a guest of the hotel for a few weeks. The concierge flinched when she heard the name. Lisa could understand. Susana had probably been a demanding guest after her months of deprivation in jail.
Slowly and carefully, five veterans of the Toronto Police Service ventured to the 16th floor of the suite. Lisa Starling trailed them, careful to keep out of her way. The hall to Susana's suite seemed a hundred miles long. There they were, at the door. One officer got in front of the door and the others got behind him, except for Sergeant Frobisher, who got ready to put the key in the lock.
Behind them, Lisa Starling waited, her gun drawn. She was quiet and watched the others intently for any signals. The officer knocked on the door. "Ms. Surratt?" he said. "Room service."
"OK, yes," came a voice from behind the door. "Momento, por favor."
Lisa's brow furrowed. Susana knew English perfectly well. Maybe watching Spanish TV had made her start thinking in Spanish. They heard bare footsteps on carpet approaching. Then the snap of the chain being removed from the door. The officers went into action.
Sergeant Frobisher put the key in the lock. The officer in front of the door opened it and rammed his way in. The good sergeant followed him and the others slid in behind him like a well-oiled machine. Lisa headed after them, a small American caboose pursuing a Canadian police freight-train. They already had Susana down and were cuffing her. She was screaming in Spanish, something not too nice from the sound of it.
Lisa entered the suite. It was incredibly majestic, huge and tasteful. No wonder Susana had bragged about it. But the suite meant nothing to her. The woman on the floor in the hotel bathrobe did. They were letting her up now, just as they had before. Lisa smiled, put her gun back in its holster, and crossed to face her cousin.
She took a deep breath. What should she say? Thought you could get away from me, huh? Where's my suit? Or just something simple, like You're under arrest, Susana, you know the drill by now.
Then she looked again, and her jaw dropped. And what escaped her lips was not a witticism or a just-the-facts FBI standard, but a barely voiced expression of shock and surprise.
"That's not Susana," she quaked.
Ana Castillo stood small and terrified, hands cuffed behind her back, the hotel bathrobe askew on her body, tears welling up in her eyes as five Canadian police officers stood around her and suddenly felt very dumb. So did Lisa.
Ana tilted her head at Lisa, the only other woman in the room. Her eyes brimmed sorrowfully, as if to ask Lisa what she had ever done to her to deserve this treatment.
"Susana?" she asked. "Ella no es aqui" Her lower lip pooched out like a small girl's. "Ella fue antes."
Lisa Starling sat down hard, her knees suddenly weak and bitterness coating her tongue like a dirty penny. In her mind, she heard her cousin's mocking laughter.