15- Jack

Jack sat in the hotel lobby, sipping at the bitter coffee in his travel cup and rubbing at the aching muscles in the back of his neck. He had been bent over his computer all night, trying to put everything together in his head. Nothing made sense.

The local cantonal police were investigating an attempted murder at the hospital they had visited, and since it had involved the two witnesses they had recently questioned, Jack and the four specialists he was working with had been informed of the details. The attacker, a tall Asian male with long black hair, had sneaked into Hespah Stille’s room with what witnesses described as a short sword. Somehow Ms. Stille had been forewarned of this attack, and had previously hidden herself in a different room. Then, as if this whole situation were not bizarre enough, Ms. Stille’s personal lawyer, Karl Waiblingen, appeared on the scene and confronted the man with a handgun. According to witnesses, Mr. Waiblingen managed to shoot the attacker multiple times, and yet the man was somehow still able to get all the way downstairs and into a waiting car. Mr. Waiblingen himself suffered several lacerations, including a life-threatening stab wound in his abdomen, but was immediately treated by the doctors and nurses on staff at the hospital, and was expected to make a full recovery.

The most puzzling part of this whole story was that Ms. Stille and Mr. Waiblingen both refused to assist the police with their investigation into this matter, and neither of them wished to take any legal action against the man. Even though it was obvious that they both knew the man who had attacked them, and had even known beforehand that he was coming, they refused to provide any information about him.

The Swiss were currently checking into the validity of Ms. Stille’s and Mr. Waiblingen’s passports and identifying documents. After the discovery of Nadina Jones’s false identity, and based on a few comments made by Stille and Waiblingen during Jack’s interview, there was reason to suspect that their documentation might be false as well. Personally, Jack was willing to bet on it.

These people had a secret. Jack knew they must be involved in something big, and now it was clear they would go to any lengths to cover it up. Some kind of international organized crime group, or . . .

Jack jumped when he felt a hand on his shoulder, sloshing lukewarm coffee onto his sleeve. He looked up and found one of his colleagues standing over him. It was that Eastern European fellow, Kostya something-or-other. The one who gave him the audio-recorder at the hospital.

"I’m sorry to have scared you."

"No, it’s alright, I was . . . lost in my thoughts. Did you need something?"

Frowning, Kostya sat in the chair across from him and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. "I want to talk to you about this investigation."

Jack looked at him. This was the first time any of them had sought him out to discuss the case. "Okay. . ."

"Why are you here with us?"

Jack felt his face grow hot. He knew the others had no respect for him as a detective– he’d sensed it from the start. But none of them had come right out and admitted it to his face. "I– I shouldn’t have to defend my right to be on this investigation! I– "

Kostya held up a hand. "Please, Inspector. Please do not misunderstand. I’m sure you have many qualifications and experiences. But you did ask to join this team, am I right? You made a special request to come here. Why did you do that?"

"Well, I . . . I feel very strongly about this case. I’ve been connected to it from the start. I want to see it through. You weren’t there . . . I saw the bodies. The mother and her boyfriend. Photographs can’t– you can distance yourself, just looking at pictures, but . . . And this boy, he’s only three years old. I can’t explain . . . It– It’s my case. I just feel like I have to be a part of this investigation, I . . ."

"So then follow the case from home. Everything we find, we are sharing with your people back in London. You would be able to do the same thing that you are doing here, you could do this from home. So what is the point of being here? Why did you want to come with us?"

Jack narrowed his eyes at him. "What are you saying, exactly?"

"I’m saying that there are two investigations on this case right now. Ours, and yours. We go over all of our information together, we talk about it, we share everything and work as a team to track this killer. All except you. You sit in the corner. You make your own copies of everything and you keep your thoughts to yourself. Right now, we have all been upstairs discussing the implications of the attack at that clinic and its importance in relation to our case, and you are sitting down here in the lobby, as you said, lost in your thoughts. Why are you on this team if you refuse to work with us?"

Jack stared at the man. "Me? I refuse? I– You have all made it quite clear that I am not welcome among you. This entire time that we’ve been in Switzerland, no one has ever asked me for my opinion. Not once. In fact, no one has said more than two words to me this entire time, aside from you."

Kostya shook his head, then gave Jack a condescending, pitying smile. "Inspector, have you ever seen any of us ask for anyone’s opinion? I tell you, Durand, Landin, Claes . . . none of them have ever asked me for my opinion. No one says, ‘What do you think, Demko?’ No. We all just offer our thoughts to the group, because that is why we are here. And you. Have you ever asked any of us for our thoughts? Do you come to me and ask what I think? Do you hold my hand and ask me to join you in your lonely little corner to help you in your investigation? Is that what you expect from us?"

Kostya stood up and stretched his back, then looked back down at Jack. "It’s almost noon. None of us have slept yet, and we are all getting hungry. In about an hour, we will probably order some food and discuss all of our theories while we eat. If I were you, I would come upstairs and help us decide what food to order."

Jack watched Kostya walk back to the lift. He felt somewhat like a foolish child who had just been scolded. It was humiliating, and yet a part of him– the part that wasn’t busy agonizing about how embarrassing it was– that part of him was happy. It was as if he were a little boy who had finally been invited into the club. Even though Kostya had made it clear that he had been acting like a complete ass all this time, he was determined to prove to everyone just why he was here.

When he entered the room, any thoughts of food had been pushed aside. His four colleagues were all crowded around a single computer screen. For a moment, he considered pulling up whatever it was on his own computer, but he decided against it. Pretending it was perfectly natural, Jack squeezed in with the others to see what they were looking at.

The local police had finally managed to obtain photographs of Ms. Hespah Stille prior to her operations. She had been a patient at that clinic three times before in the past two years. Apparently she was having some rather drastic changes done, and the police had requested documentation so that they could run a search on her old face to check for prior criminal involvement. The clinic had handed over records from each surgery, along with "before" and "after" photographs and detailed descriptions and diagrams of what had been done, and notes on her recovery.

The whole team gawked at each set of pictures, starting with the "before" photo from her most recent operation. As they looked over the work that had been done, a few people wondered aloud why she had to go to such lengths to change her appearance. What could she be hiding? She’d had implants under the top of her scalp to change the shape of her head. Implants on her chin and cheekbones to make them fuller and rounder. The bones in her forehead had been filed down and sculpted, her nose had been completely transformed, her jaw had been reshaped, her lips, her teeth . . . nearly everything had been altered.

Then they opened the last set of photographs. The original "before" pictures.

"Oh, my god," Jack heard himself mutter.

The woman in the photo was unlike any he had ever seen before, outside of textbooks. Long, matted, crayon-red dreadlocks framed a pale, wild-looking face. A low hairline sat just above a pair of jutting eyebrows. Her brilliant green eyes were set deep into the shadows of her huge brow, and beneath them she had almost no cheekbones at all. Her nose was big– wide and bulbous but somehow shorter than it should be, causing her mouth look like it hung too low beneath it. Her lips were huge and wide, and her teeth stuck out oddly– in fact, from the side-profile and x-rays it was clear that her entire mouth jutted forward from the rest of her face. And then her chin was just a weak little slope that seemed to just melt back into her neck.

Durand pointed to the x-ray, tracing the top of the skull with her finger. "Her head is so flat on top," she observed.

"She’s like a Neanderthal," Kostya agreed. " The Missing Link."

The Belgian officer cleared his throat. "I’ve seen all I need to see. We should not mention these pictures if we speak to Ms. Stille again."

The other fellow– Jack was fairly certain his last name was Landin, but he wasn’t sure where the man was from or what his rank was– nodded his head and was the first to turn away from the computer. "Well, now we know why she wanted to change her face, and we know that it has nothing to do with our investigation." He sat at the table in the center of the room and pulled out his phone. "I am ordering something to eat. Who else is hungry?"

Jack glanced at Kostya, then turned to Landin. "I’m famished," he said with a smile, "What are we ordering?"