Page 198 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Jury-rigged

this time. He had seen the TV news, so he said, and learned then
about the latest murder. His final word this time, the story he is going
to stick to, is that he could not be guilty for a medical reason: he
suffered from acrophobia and would never have gone up a ladder to
the height of that second story roof.”
“Interesting.” Labelle stopped giving most of her attention to the
computer and my notes, and looked at me instead of through me.
“Have you confirmed that diagnosis?”
“I am waiting for a fax from a hospital in Kiev. Hannibal swore
that he had spent two days there following a botched attempt to
scrape some gilding off the dome of a church. His accomplice on the
roof, responsible for holding the ladder Hannibal used to scale the
dome, had been spotted by the police and fled, allowing the ladder to
fall and break on the churchyard cobblestones fifty feet below. Mr.
Simulian then realized, he told me, that he had never before looked
down from heights. That time he did, and it made him sufficiently
dizzy and nauseated almost to lose his grip and fall off a narrow
ledge. Many of the medical personnel in that city died from radiation
sickness in the years following their assistance at the Chernobyl
reactor disaster, so the doctors who allegedly treated him are gone.
Hannibal knows that. He also knows we can get the police record
showing his rescue by crane after he been stranded for two hours,
but he was counting on the doctor’s notes being lost.”
“And you have a lead on them?”
“Yes. The psychiatrist who treated him is indeed deceased, and his
personal files are long gone. The hospital itself, in fact, was
demolished following glasnost in order to make room for a shopping
center. But in cases involving police matters, a copy of all notes is
kept in an official archive. It has taken several days to pry those
documents loose from their keepers. Interpol helped. If Hannibal
truly suffers from this panic disorder, we will have it authenticated.
But I suspect he was merely kept in the hospital under restraint and
sedation while the government was deciding whether to send him
East, to Siberia, or West, to wreak havoc on the USSR’s enemies.
Like his brothers and cousins, voluntarily and involuntarily, he
wound up here. My research indicates he could have figured out how
to fake acrophobia.”
“We would need expert opinion on that, Duncan.”

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