Mike could hardly ignore the cars parked in the company's yard. Next to a classic Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit from the 1980s and a Maybach only a few years old was a Lincoln stretch limousine that could comfortably seat eight people in the back. Most of the luxury cars in the rental company's range were currently on the streets of Boston, but the eight vehicles still available were so captivating that the detective almost forgot his real concern.
"Do you have a Volkswagen Phaeton in your inventory?" he asked Dean Cantrell, the owner of the luxury car rental company.
"Yes, the long version. Very nice vehicle, but unfortunately rented out at the moment."
"That's why I'm here," Mike continued, discreetly showing his badge on his belt. "I'd like to know who rented the car. And when."
Cantrell looked at his interlocutor with concern. "Has something happened?"
"Possibly, but don't worry, there's nothing wrong with your car. We're interested in the tenant."
Visibly relieved, Cantrell relaxed again and asked the detective to follow him into his office. Mike had difficulty turning his attention away from the vehicles, each of which he would have liked to take with him immediately.
"Well, let's see," Cantrell announced as he called up the data on the Phaeton on his laptop. "Ah, there we have it."
Mike was pressed for time. He still had a long list of addresses to work through, which he hoped would provide him with information about Ishmael's identity.
"Yes, the phaeton is still rented out until tomorrow evening," Cantrell reported. "It was picked up the day before yesterday morning."
"And who's the renter?" Mike pressed, involuntarily glancing through the window at the Spirit of Ecstacy figure on the Rolls-Royce hood, often incorrectly referred to as Emily.
"You know I can't give out my customers' details so easily?"
Mike narrowed his eyes for a moment. If Cantrell refused to hand over the information voluntarily, Mike would have to request the assistance of the DA's office, which would cost valuable time. "We suspect that the renter is planning a crime with your vehicle," he improvised. "It's conceivable that he could blow up the car in the city center."
Mike's ruse had an immediate effect. The idea of getting his fully equipped Phaeton back in pieces prompted Cantrell to reveal the renter's name. "All right, the car is with a Mr. Matthai. Paul Matthai."
Mike wasn't surprised that the rental car didn't lead him directly to Ishmael, but he couldn't deny an inevitable disappointment. Apparently, Ishmael had taken the necessary documents for renting a vehicle from Matthai, whom he had previously murdered, and then - which seemed particularly perfidious to Mike - deposited them back with the dead man. After all, the teacher's personal papers had been found in his apartment. After all, the detective realized, Ishmael had managed to conceal his identity this way. Nevertheless, there must have been someone who had met the car rental company in person. "What did the man look like?" he asked.
Cantrell had to pass. "I wasn't there when the car was picked up," he reported. "Do you really think the tenant is a terrorist? I really couldn't do with that kind of publicity. What do you think I have in the way of loans on my fleet?"
"Who handed over the phaeton?"
"That was my wife; she was alone with the store all day before yesterday."
"I need to speak to her. Maybe she can describe the tenant."
Cantrell didn't have to think long before he reached for his cell phone and called his wife. He briefly explained the situation to her and handed the cell phone to the detective.
"Do you remember what the customer looked like?" Mike asked the wife.
"I do," she replied to his relief. "I meet a lot of conspicuous people in my job. After all, we mainly hire out for weddings, galas, and celebrity events. But this Matthai and his wife were very unusual."
"What was so special about them?" Mike pressed, turning around to see neither the luxurious vehicles nor Cantrell, who was pacing nervously behind his desk.
"Well, the most striking thing was her clothes," the woman began so confidently that Mike was inclined to believe her description.
And with every word she spoke, the detective's tension grew. Until it was finally released in a single word.
"Unbelievable!"
xxx
"Where have you been all this time?"
Something was different than usual, and Elizabeth knew it immediately.
Nikki had been waiting impatiently for her mother on the side of the road about three hundred feet from the actor's home. Obviously, she intended to intercept the captain before running into Rupert Mardas.
Immediately after leaving the Boston Dungeon with Caleb and turning her cell phone back on, Elizabeth had been notified of the numerous missed calls. The tour of the Dungeon had taken about an hour, but during this time, something important happened in Ishmael's case. Elizabeth had immediately pressed a hundred dollars into Caleb's hand and asked him to spend the rest of the evening alone in Boston. Later, they had agreed that she would see the boy at his hotel, where they would discuss their plans for the coming day and then go out to dinner.
"You thought you were arresting someone, but all you found was a body," Elizabeth said before Nikki could say a word. "Our cars are the ones that would go out to make an arrest. But the hearse says otherwise. Of course, it could have been a botched arrest with fatalities, but then you and I wouldn't be here right now; we'd be at the hospital or BPD. So we have something unexpected in there again, don't we?"
Nikki didn't seem to have noticed her mother's words at all. "Ma," she prepared her mother for the upcoming crime scene viewing instead. "Didn't you watch that movie yesterday?"
"Only part of it. Then I fell asleep, it was --"
"... totally stupid and boring, yes, I know. But still, we found something in it. Did you really not notice anything?"
Instead of answering the question, Elizabeth looked at the situation a little more closely. "All right, why are you waiting for me outside the house?" Elizabeth wanted to know. "What do I need to be prepared for before I go in there?"
"You really have no idea, do you?"
"We have a dead body staged in a bizarre situation and an apartment hiding a puzzle that will lead us to a new clue. But who did you think you were arresting in there?"
Nikki exhaled slowly. "You can't combine that? Ma, is there anything you might want to tell me?"
Elizabeth became more agitated. Was her daughter's concern not about the dead man in the apartment in the apartment building? Could her meeting with Caleb have been noticed despite all the security precautions? What's more, how could she conclusively justify that she had been unavailable until the early afternoon? After all, she first had to take a cab home after she visited the Dungeon to change and then drive to the crime scene in her usual clothes.
"Stop playing games," she urged her daughter. "If it's about what we discussed at Max Downtown, please don't worry."
"It's too late for that," the detective replied. "I'm already worried. Go in there now, please, but be prepared to have your mind blown."
From Nikki's behavior, Elizabeth could not read any indication of what she was about to be confronted with in this house. "All right," she relented, chewing the inside of her cheek. "Do I have a problem?"
"Mardas discovered it. Not you. Is that problem enough?"
"Is there anything else you want to tell me?"
"Where the hell have you been, Ma? We haven't been able to reach you. And you haven't been to the BPD today either."
Elizabeth moved to reply, but Nikki pressed her right index finger to her lips.
"You don't have to answer to me," the detective explained. "But Mardas will want to know. And then Nick will want to know. And Grandma. So, if you'd rather have met a little blond boy than watch this video, you'd better come up with a good explanation. You're a captain in charge of the investigation and weren't available when we found this. And, between you and me, you fucked up big time!"
Elizabeth still needed to reply. She just nodded mutely, bowed with a submissive gesture, and only then walked to the front door. Nikki waited to follow her mother. She didn't want it to be too apparent that she had warned her mother.
xxx
"How nice that you were able to make it!" Mardas greeted his former partner in the hallway outside the small apartment.
Numerous children, as well as a few adults, were now lining the narrow corridor, chattering loudly, and had to be prevented by uniformed officers from looking into the apartment where the body had been found.
Elizabeth squeezed through the crowd of onlookers with her badge.
"It looks like you've done some investigating without me," the captain countered, pushing past Mardas into the small apartment.
The apartment was even more miserable than Paul Matthai's, and the smell of corpses had already reached a critical intensity. Just as Elizabeth had suspected, it would probably only have been twenty-four hours at most before neighbors noticed the smell coming from the apartment and informed the police.
"There are posters of theater performances in small, unsubsidized houses everywhere. "Only some names on a poster are known. I also see a pile of reminders on the table in front. I see rice crackers and tap water instead of potato chips or beer on the living room table. He has a fax machine, and the clothes in the checkroom are cheap but look expensive. The victim was an actor."
Mardas clapped his hands slowly before shouting loudly into the room:" Captain Rizzoli has made it possible to appear in person! She wants to see the body - last!"
Maggie then stepped out of the bedroom, which Elizabeth could not see from the entrance to the apartment. "Hello, Elizabeth," she said, greeting her wife, not unkindly but somewhat reservedly. "Come here, then."
Before Elizabeth had a chance to follow the invitation, she anticipated. "He didn't need much time for the show in there."
Mardas interjected again. "Who is he?" he asked in a tone that made even Maggie realize that the question was not directed at her but at her wife. "Ishmael, perhaps?"
Finally, Elizabeth's patience snapped. Without waiting any longer, she let Maggie make way so that she could finally examine the body in the bedroom. She stepped into the small room quickly, albeit with due caution, took one look at the corpse—and froze.
The corpse was tied, again with a fishing line, to an old armchair that must have come either from a garage sale, bulky waste, or the dead man's family estate. The corpse was dressed in a stage costume that reminded Elizabeth of the old-fashioned Shakespeare productions she had often watched with her parents as a child.
The dead man's right arm appeared to be stretched upwards, held in place by a length of rope that the perpetrator had wound over the ceiling lamp. A preserving jar was fixed to the victim's palm with super glue. The jar was filled with formalin, an aqueous formaldehyde solution used in medicine to restore tissue. But the formalin was not the only content of the jar. The dead man's eyeballs, which the murderer had previously forcibly removed from his eye sockets, were also floating in the liquid. The little finger of the dead man's left hand had also been cut off.
An actor watching himself.
"He hasn't been dead quite as long as the other two," Maggie reported from the background, while Elizabeth couldn't stop staring at the corpse in bewilderment.
"Now the story's getting exciting, isn't it?" added Mardas, who hadn't missed Elizabeth's reaction to the surprising sight. "Can you explain that to us? Because we're all too stupid for that."
Elizabeth heard the words. She also noticed the activity of her team, the smell of corpses, and the gruesome staging of the murder. She saw the pictures, the objects, the carpet, the bedding. She even noticed the commotion in the hallway. Nothing escaped her notice. And yet, only one fundamental realization struck her at that moment.
"I see what you mean, Mardas," she admitted approvingly, clearly identifying the victim as Ishmael.
xxx
Elizabeth and Mardas had retreated to the street in front of the apartment building to talk calmly about the consequences of the new development.
The actor Levin Coppens, who everyone had previously only spoken of as Ishmael, played the supporting role of the barman in the movie. The sketch, which, thanks to Elizabeth's information, had actually had almost the quality of a picture, had been lying on Nikki's desk for days. That morning, after Mardas had finally realized what had seemed so familiar to him and Nikki in the film's bar scene, he discovered Coppens' address through the film's production company.
"Levin wasn't particularly successful in his profession, nobody can say that," Mardas began the conversation.
In the meantime, he obtained information about the mostly unemployed actor's miserable career from his acting agency.
"And yet he was talented enough to lead me astray," added Elizabeth, who had been as affected by the day's results as he had been by his earlier actions.
"So an out-of-work actor picks you up on Boston Common in a car he couldn't even afford to rent for three hours," Mardas summarized, walking down the bumpy sidewalk with his arms crossed behind his back the way Elizabeth usually did for her team meetings. "He'll drive you to the scene of Dr. Praetorius' murder and drop you off. At this point, another murder has already taken place, that of Paul Matthai. Now, our Levin drives to his home, where he is murdered shortly afterward. The car remains missing."
Nikki approached the two of them. Without Mardas' seeing, she winked encouragingly at her mother and then briefly updated herself on the meeting.
"I'll get the colleagues to look for the navigation system. There's so much satellite technology in the Phaeton that it might be possible to find it using that," the young woman suggested.
Elizabeth, however, was cautious. "Only if it's active. If the car is switched off in an underground garage or at the bottom of the Charles River, we won't be able to find it that way."
"We shouldn't be discussing forensics right now," Mardas interjected. "I'm much more interested in the psychology behind this absurd story now."
With these words, he turned to Elizabeth and leaned so close to her that she could smell the aftershave Mardas had used that morning.
"Surely you have some conclusions to offer us, don't you?"
"The most important conclusion is that I didn't notice. You usually recognize an actor immediately."
"Normally?"
"An actor, at least the more conscientious ones, attend drama schools. A few of them are so talented that they get into state schools. The vast majority, on the other hand, are less talented and make do with private schools. They are admitted to these schools, but far too often not because of their talent, but because of the monthly checks they write to the school."
Mardas took a step back from Elizabeth and leaned casually against the barrier post that prevented uninvited drivers from entering one of the building complex's backyards. Nikki's gaze went blank, and she closed her eyes for a few seconds.
"Of course, the ambitious actors are all equipped with the same techniques," Elizabeth continued. "And these techniques become so ingrained in them that as soon as they're just playing something, they look like they're just playing. Gestures, looks, language - it always seems a bit exaggerated. It has a level of play, another dimension distinguishing the fake from the real."
"And Coppens didn't have this level of play?"
"His performance was theatrical, for sure. But he didn't seem memorized."
"And that's all? That you didn't realize he was just playing to you?"
"It wasn't just that. He simply didn't tell me what his action was about through anything. Not through words, clothes, gestures, or looks. He had a few enigmatic hints at the ready but didn't say anything about what was behind our outing. And I couldn't tell from him either. I've been thinking about why I couldn't notice it all for days. Now I know."
Nikki was also listening now.
"I couldn't tell him because he didn't know it himself! Coppens was just as much a victim as Praetorius and Matthai. Nothing more than a pawn in a perverse game. Whoever was behind the murders had recruited Coppens to play the role of the opaque Ishmael and drive me to the first crime scene. What might he have told poor Levin? That he was driving me to a surprise party? Was I part of a live role-playing game? That my friends were going to make fun of me? In any case, he had no idea that he was driving me to the scene of a real murder. He met up with the murderer, completely unaware, of course, gave him the Phaeton again, maybe got some money, and before he knew it, he was dead. A confidant is eliminated, and the next chapter in a game that is becoming increasingly inscrutable. Two birds with one stone."
"And his clothes?" Nikki asked with a frown. "Why didn't you notice that it wasn't his?"
Elizabeth had also thought about this question. "For the same reason that only I could find and decode the secret messages," the captain explained calmly. "Because the real murderer knows what makes me tick. So, he also knew what he could use to trick my powers of deduction. He equipped Coppens so that I couldn't do anything with it."
Both Mardas and Nikki had to agree with the captain.
"So what do we do now?" Nikki asked uncertainly. "The death of Coppens has set us back. Who are we looking for now?"
"I'd be surprised if we couldn't find a clue in Levin's apartment," said Elizabeth.
"I agree," Mardas confirmed, nodding slowly. "Let's go back up and look for it."
"Maybe we don't have to," Elizabeth disagreed and then asked for a moment's rest.
She leaned her head back and looked out at the sky. Only a few clouds obscured the bright blue that could be seen above the skyscrapers. Elizabeth now reviewed her impressions of the past hour. Her unjustifiable private excursion with Caleb, Nikki's warning, Mardas' open malice, and the sight of Ishmael's beastly corpse had made an impression on her. Maggie's explanation of how the perpetrator must have pierced his victim's eyeballs with a crooked surgical needle to pull them out of their sockets with some force. And also the fact that the perpetrator then had to penetrate the victim's skull through the eye socket with crooked scissors to reach the eye muscles. Last but not least, he imagined how he had severed the eye muscles before finally freeing the eyeballs from the crooked needle and soaking them in formalin.
Looking up at the sky, Elizabeth let these impressions sink in and, in her relaxation, took a close look at Levin Coppens' apartment in her mind's eye for the first time.
It just has to be. You increase the pace with every move, increasing our stress and making us more prone to mistakes. You've caused enough confusion with Ishmael's body. Whatever you left behind in his apartment, it must be ...
"Wait a minute!" Nikki exclaimed in surprise. "I think I've got it!"
Mardas and Elizabeth looked at her in astonishment.
"What have you got?" Mardas finally asked.
Nikki couldn't suppress a particular pride as she replied. "I bet they'll find the next clue in Levin's phone book!"