the house. Soon they found themselves in the dining room, where the
lights were on, and a tape deck played music. Anna could smell coffee,
eggs, some kind of fried meat.
“Dr. Oh, dear God!”
Horrified, Anna saw what Resting had seen.
An old man sat in a wheelchair at the table, before a plate of
breakfast. His head was on his chest, the eyes fixed and dilated. He
was dead.
They’d gotten to him too! That in itself didn’t surprise her. What
stunned her was the timing so soon before their arrival, it had to be.
As if they knew the authorities were coming.
She tasted fear.
“Dammit,” she said. “Call an ambulance. And the homicide squad. And
please, don’t let them touch anything.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE.
A squad of crime-scene officers from the homicide squad of the Zurich
Kantonspolizei arrived within the hour and took video and still
photographs. The victim’s house was dusted carefully for fingerprints,
particularly the front and back doors and the three windows that could
be accessed from the ground level. Anna asked the specialist to print
both Rossignol’s wheelchair and all exposed skin on the deceased’s body.
Elimination prints were taken from Rossignol himself before the body was
removed.
Had the Americans not taken such an interest in Rossignol prior to his
murder, even requesting surveillance, the old man’s death would
certainly have been treated as a natural occurrence. Gaston Rossignol
had been ninety-one, after all.
But instead an autopsy was ordered, with special attention paid to the
ocular fluid. The postmortem would be done in the facilities of the
University of Zurich Institute of Legal Medicine, as was standard, since
Zurich had no medical examiner.
Anna returned to her hotel. Exhausted–she hadn’t slept on the plane,
had decided against taking an Ativan–she drew the curtains, got into an
oversize T-shirt, and climbed into the bed.
She was jarred awake by the telephone. Momentarily disoriented, she
thought she was back in Washington, that it was the middle of the night.
She glanced at the phosphorescent dial of her watch and saw that it was
two-thirty in the afternoon, Zurich time. She picked up the phone.
“Is this Miss Navarro?” a man’s voice asked.
“That’s me,” she croaked, then cleared her throat. “Who’s this?”
“I’m Sergeant Major Schmid from the Kantonspolizei. I’m a homicide
detective. I’m sorry, did I wake you?”
“No, no, I was just dozing. What’s up?”
“The fingerprints have come back with some interesting results. Can you
find your way to police headquarters?”
Schmid was an affable man with a wide face, short hair, and ridiculous
little bangs. He wore a navy blue shirt and had a gold chain around his
neck.
His office was pleasant, light-filled, sparsely furnished. Two blond
wood desks faced one another; she sat at one, he at the other.
Schmid toyed with a paper clip. “The fingerprints were run at the
Knminaltechmk. Rossignol’s prints were eliminated, leaving a number of
other prints, most of them unidentified. He was a widower, so we assume
they belong to his housekeeper and a few others who worked at his house.
The housekeeper was on duty overnight, until this morning, when she made
his breakfast and then left. They must have been watching the house and
saw her depart.”
“He didn’t have a nurse?”
“No,” Schmid said, bending the wire paper clip back and forth. “You
know, we now have a computerized database of fingerprints just like
yours.” He was referring to the Automated Fingerprint Identification
Service, which stored a bank of millions of prints. “The prints were
scanned in, digitized, and sent by modem to the central registry in
Bern, where they were run against all available databases. The search
did not take long. We got a match very quickly.”
She sat up. “Oh?”
“Yes, this is why the case was assigned to me. The prints belong to an
American who was detained here just a few days ago in connection with a
shooting in the vicinity of the Bahnhofplatz.”
“Who is he?”
“An American named Benjamin Hartman.”
The name meant nothing to her. “What do you know about him?”
“A fair amount. You see, I questioned him myself.” He handed her a
file folder containing photocopies of Hartman’s U.S. passport, driver’s
license, credit cards, and his Swiss police records with mug shots.
She examined the copies closely, fascinated. Could this be her man, the
killer? An American? Mid-thirties, an investment banker for a
financial firm called Hartman Capital Management. A family business,
she assumed. That probably meant he had money. Lives in New York City.
Here on a Swiss ski vacation, he had told Schmid.
But that could be a lie.
Three of the remaining Sigma victims had been killed during the time he
was here in Zurich. One victim had lived in Germany, which was a train
ride away, so that was a possibility. Another was in Austria; also
possible.
But Paraguay? That was a long plane flight from here.
Yet the possibility could not be ruled out. Neither could the
possibility that he was not working alone.
“What happened on the Bahnhofstrasse?” she asked. “He shoot someone?”
The paper clip Schmid was worrying snapped in the middle. “There was
gunfire along the street and in the shopping arcade beneath the
Bahnhofplatz. He was questioned in connection with that. Personally, I
don’t think he was the shooter. He insists someone tried to shoot him.”
“Anyone killed?”
“Several bystanders. And, in his account, the guy he insists tried to
shoot him.”
“Hmm,” she said, puzzled. A bizarre tale: How much of it was true? Who
was this guy? “You let him go?”
“We had no basis on which to hold him. And there was some string
pulling from his firm. He was instructed to leave the canton.”
Not in my backyard1. Was that the Zurich approach to law enforcement?
Anna wondered sourly. “Any idea where he is now?”
“At the time, he claimed he was planning to go to St. Montz. The Hotel
Carlton. But we’ve since learned that he never checked in. Then,
yesterday, we received a report that he’d reappeared in Zurich, at the
Handelsbank Schweiz. We tried to bring him in for further questioning,
but he escaped. Another misadventure, accompanied by shooting. It
follows him around.”
“Surprise, surprise,” Anna said. “Do you have a way of finding out
whether Hartman is staying at some other hotel in Zurich, or anywhere
else in the country?”
Schmid nodded. “I can contact the Hotel Control in each of the cantons.
Copies of all hotel registration forms go to the local police.”
“How current are they?”
“Sometimes not so current,” Schmid admitted. “At least we can tell
where he was.”
“If he checked in under his own name.”
“All legitimate hotels require foreigners to show their passports.”
“Maybe he has more than one passport. Maybe he’s not staying at a
‘legitimate’ hotel. Maybe he has friends here.”
Schmid looked mildly annoyed. “But you see, I’ve met him, and he didn’t
look to me like someone who carries false passports.”
“Some of these international businessmen, you know, have second
passports from places like Panama or Ireland or Israel. They come in
handy sometimes.”
“Yes, but such passports would still have their true names on them,
right?”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. Is there a way to tell if he left the country?”
“There are many different ways to leave the country–plane, automobile,
train, even on foot.”
“Don’t the border police keep records?”
“Well, the border police are supposed to look at passports,” Schmid
admitted, “but often they don’t. Our best bet would be the airlines.
They keep records of all passengers.”
“What if he left by train?”
“Then we may find no trace, unless he made a seat reservation on an
international train. But I wouldn’t be hopeful.”
“No,” Anna said, ruminating. “Can you start the search?”
“Of course,” Schmid said indignantly. “It is standard.”
“When can I expect the autopsy results back? I’m particularly
interested in the toxicology.” She knew she was probably pushing the
man a little too hard. But there was no choice.
Schmid shrugged. “It could be a week. I could put in a request to
speed things up.”
“I have one specific neurotoxin I’d like them to search for,” she said.
“That shouldn’t take so long.”
“I can call for you.”
“Would you? And bank records. I need Rossignol’s bank records going
back two years. Will Swiss banks cooperate, or are they going to give
us that whole secrecy song-and-dance?”
“They will cooperate with the police on a homicide,” Schmid said
huffily.
“That’s a nice surprise. Oh, and one more thing. The photocopies you
took of his credit cards–think I could have those?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Wonderful,” she said. She was actually starting to like the fellow.
Sao Paulo, Brazil
The wedding reception was being held at the most ultra-exclusive private
club in all of Brazil, the Hipica Jardins.
The club’s members were mainly drawn from the quatrocentoes, Brazil’s