Prodigal Son

insanity.
        She needed to get background on Victor Helios. With the World Wide Web, she was able to unwrap a fictitious biography more easily than in the days when a data chase had to be done on foot or through cooperating officers in other jurisdictions.
        She typed in her search string. In seconds, she had scores of hits. Helios, the visionary founder of Biovision. Helios, the local mover and shaker in New Orleans politics and society Helios, the philanthropist.
        At first she seemed to have a lot of material. Quickly, however, she found that for all his wealth and connections, Helios didn't so much swim the waters of New Orleans society as skim across the surface.
        In the city for almost twenty years, he made a difference in his community, but with a minimum of exposure. Scores of people in local society got more press time; they were omnipresent by comparison to Helios.
        Furthermore, when Carson attempted to track the few facts about Helios's past, prior to New Orleans, they trailed away like wisps of evaporating mist.
        He had gone to university "in Europe," but nothing more specific was said about his alma mater.
        Though he inherited his fortune, the names of his parents were never mentioned.
        He was said to have greatly enlarged that fortune with several financial coups during the dot-com boom. No details were provided.
        References to "a New England childhood" never included the state where he had been born and raised.
        One thing about the available photos intrigued Carson. In his first year in New Orleans, Victor had been handsome, almost dashing, and appeared to be in his late thirties. In his most recent photos, he looked hardly any older.
        He had adopted a more flattering hairstyle-but he had no less hair than before. If he'd had plastic surgery, the surgeon had been particularly skilled.
        Eight years ago, he had returned from an unspecified place in New England with a bride who appeared to be no older than twenty-five. Her name was Erika, but Carson could find no mention of her maiden name.
        Erika would be perhaps thirty-three now. In her most recent photos, she looked not a day older than in those taken eight years previously.
        Some women were fortunate enough to keep their twenty-something looks until they were forty. Erika might be one of those.
        Nevertheless, the ability of both her and her husband to defy the withering hand of time seemed remarkable. If not uncanny.
        "They got him, O'Connor."
        Startled, she looked up from the computer and saw Tom Bowmaine, the watch commander, at the open door to the hallway, on the farther side of the Homicide bullpen.
        "They got the Surgeon," Tom elaborated. "Dead. He took a header off a roof."

CHAPTER 58
        
        ONE BLOCK OF THE ALLEYWAY had been cordoned off to preserve as much evidence as possible for the CSI crew. Likewise the roof of the building and the freight elevator.
        Carson climbed the stairs to Roy Pribeaux's apartment. The jake outside the door knew her; he let her into the loft.
        She half expected to find Harker or Frye, or both. Neither was present. Another detective, Emery Framboise, had been in the area and had caught the call.
        Carson liked Emery. The sight of him didn't raise a single hair on the back of her neck.
        He was a young guy- thirty-four-who dressed the way certain older detectives had once dressed before they decided they looked like throwbacks to the lost South of the 1950s. Seersucker suits, white rayon shirts, string ties, a straw boater parked dead-flat on his head.
        Somehow he made this retro look seem modern, perhaps because he himself was otherwise entirely of a modern sensibility.
        Carson was surprised to see Kathy Burke, friend and shrink, with Emery in the kitchen. Primarily Kathy conducted mandatory counseling sessions with officers involved in shootings and in other traumatic situations, though she also wrote psychological profiles of elusive perpetrators like the Surgeon. She seldom visited crime scenes, at least not this early in the game.
        Kathy and Emery were watching two CSI techs unload the contents of one of two freezers. Tupperware containers.
        As Carson joined Kathy and Emery, one of the techs read a label on the lid of a container. "Left hand."
        She would have understood the essence of the