Page 37 of Broken Hearts

16

Agent Jason West

Rubbing my eyes,I tossed the paper I’d been reading aside. Dead end.

After speaking to Cora Rossi a couple of weeks ago, I’d been going through the DMV records of all possible owners of the vehicle she’d spotted so many times around the corner of her and Celeste Riley’s block. Unfortunately, I’d run into two major roadblocks in my hunt for the car and its registered owner. No pun intended.

Firstly, I had to work this angle on the down-low, as Foley had made it clear a long time ago that I was to drop the search for Celeste and focus on my ‘real’ work, even though I was beyond certain she had been taken by the Heartbreaker, which was my real work. He disagreed, obviously. And after yet another Heartbreaker victim was found a few days ago—George Baldwin, a Supreme Court Justice, found on the outskirts of the city with several parts missing—we had more work on the case than ever. Things had been hectic.

Secondly, 3941 seemed to be the most common number combination on Mercedes vehicle plates registered in this state. Even though Cora had given me enough information to be helpful (new-looking silver Mercedes), it was still a tedious slog to get through all of the possibilities. In Allegheny County alone, there were over seventy silver Mercedes with that number on their license plate, and my search encompassed the entire Greater Pittsburgh Region, which included several other close counties as well. All in all, I had well over a hundred and fifty possibilities to go through. It was taking forever.

The option I’d just looked at was another no-go. The owner of the car was an elderly female and had been out of the state during most of the murders. She lived alone and didn’t have any family members who would use her car. Not a suspect. Not even close.

With a sigh, I grabbed the next sheet from the file. This car was a 2014 model with the serial HLE-3941, registered to an Alex Magnusson. Magnusson was almost thirty-six years old, six foot two. No criminal background. Not even a parking ticket.

Hmm. Off the bat, I’d say he wasn’t a suspect for the Heartbreaker—or Celeste’s captor—based on the lack of criminal record, which knocked him right off the profile that’d been established for the killer. However, I had to operate under the assumption that the damn profile was incorrect, otherwise we would have found the guy by now.

I put the paper down and typed his name into my computer to search through more records on the guy. Apparently he owned three properties: an apartment in the golden triangle downtown, a house on a small block in Shadyside, and a two-hundred acre property between the towns of Burgettstown and Hickory, about twenty-five miles from downtown Pittsburgh.

He had no family living close by, and he was a doctor based at Morrison Wright Memorial Hospital, a new health campus that’d opened downtown a few years ago. He always paid his taxes on time, made regular donations to charities, and occasionally volunteered his time for pro bono work at a few free clinics. An upstanding citizen, by all means.

My forehead creased in a frown, and I tapped a pen against my chin. This guy was perfect on paper, but something was still bothering me, a little needling thought squirreling its way through my brain, trying to touch on something else relevant. Something I heard recently….

My eyes widened as it hit me. Paula Halloran said something in particular to me a few weeks ago when I interviewed her. She said the guy who came to her house not long after her husband’s murder (the same guy I assumed to be posing as an FBI agent to trick her) had strongly resembled a ‘handsome young doctor’ who once treated her for a chronic wrist condition. She said the man who came to her door was blond, but she also said she thought he was wearing a wig—ostensibly to cover up his real hair color.

Alex Magnusson had dark hair, and judging solely by his license photo, he fitted the conventional standards of ‘handsome’. Hardly anyone looked good on their driver’s license, but this guy looked like he should be strutting down a damn catwalk in Florence or wherever the hell they held fashion shows these days.

He was also a pain specialist, according to hospital records. He could’ve certainly treated Ms. Halloran for a wrist condition years ago, by pure coincidence. On top of that, I’d also found an article lauding him for a recent breakthrough he’d made in deep brain stimulation surgery. He’d developed a technique for the surgery that was far less invasive than the usual technique of having to remove a rather sizable chunk of the skullcap. With his method using microelectrodes, only a tiny hole was required.

Some of the Heartbreaker victims had tiny holes drilled in their skulls, and while this had fallen under the umbrella of the usual mutilations—the victims were almost always covered in holes, or had chunks of flesh missing—it occurred to me in the most macabre sense that the victims with the holes in their skulls may have been forced to undergo this surgery as part of their torture.

The research Dr. Magnusson had published certainly indicated that a person could be made to feel the utmost pain with a few electrodes implanted in their brain, without any actual physical damage being done. His study was apparently carried out in order to find solutions for chronic pain, not causes, but still, it was all in there. Pain could be helped with the electrodes, or it could be caused. I wouldn’t put it past someone as sick as the Heartbreaker to do such a thing.

My heart pumping slightly faster, I did more searches on the guy, hoping to find something more solid to link him to the Heartbreaker case. While I was excited, I couldn’t very well arrest the guy for simply being a doctor and pain researcher. I had to find real connections, not forge them myself from tenuous coincidences.

An old newspaper article popped up, and I leaned closer and stared at the screen, my pulse tripling. Shit. This could be it. A possible link.

I printed out what I’d found, stuffed it all in a file, and headed to ASAC Dwyer’s office. He was speaking to Foley, who gave me a filthy look and swept out of the room.

“He’s as friendly as ever, as you can see,” Dwyer joked with a wry grin as he adjusted a framed photo of his kids on the desk. “How can I help you this morning, Agent West?”

I closed the door behind me before carefully placing my file in front of him. Then I sat and told him what I’d discovered. He was quiet, listening to everything I had to say—unlike Foley, the prick—and then he leaned forward.

“To start off with, this is all purely circumstantial,” he said, a crease forming between his eyebrows. “We aren’t sure that there’s any secret group operating in the city that our killer might be going after, and like you said, we can hardly arrest a guy for simply being a doctor who may or may not look similar to a man who visited one of the victim’s wives years ago.”

“Sir, I—”

He held up a hand, cutting me off. “Having said that, I agree with you. I think there’s a lot more to this case—and our killer—than is suggested by that profile the buffoons at the BAU gave us. And this guy.…” He swept a hand over the Magnusson file. “Yeah, it could all be a coincidence. But I’m like you, West. I don’t believe in coincidences.”

“So what are you saying?”

He leaned forward again, eyes sparkling. “I’m saying I think you’re right. I think this might actually be our fucking guy.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I don’t know what it is, but when I look at him in these photos, I just get a feeling in my bones. Probably not very professional of me to claim such a thing, but still, I feel it.”

I nodded slowly. That was exactly how I felt. “Me too, sir.”

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