Jules Gym, Lower Manhattan
March 6, 8.12 p.m.
A tattooed arm swung in fast from the right and connected with a thud of leather. The guy in the red shorts took the full force of the blow on the point of his chin; his head jerked up and he staggered three steps backwards on to the ropes, then tucked his head between his gloves. The attacker strode across and started to pummel his body repeatedly.
In the faded ring, the boxers had been going two rounds, fighting toe-to-toe, trading uppercuts, right and left hooks, and body blows. Under their head guards, each guy’s face was bubbling up with bright red bruises.
The audience whooped at every big punch that landed. It was not difficult to imagine that the head guards didn’t so much protect as prolong the time in which each man was getting his brain pounded. But it was a precinct grudge match, honor was at stake and neither boxer was going to stand down. The big crowd roared their approval, jumping, shouting, spitting and drinking like a bunch of out-of-control rioters.
The NYPD’s fight night was in full swing and it was brutal.
Through the double doors into the locker rooms, the narrow, airless corridor was tiled in blue and black. Inside the third locker room the next fighter prepared, listening to the excited bloodlust of the crowd. The air was coarse with the smell of sweat, and the striplight above, twenty years’ deep with dead insects and dust, shed a clouded yellowing light on the fighter below.
Detective Tom Harper of the NYPD’s Homicide Division tried to focus. He caught the image of the majestic peregrine falcon in his mind’s eye. He’d spotted the raptor earlier in the day, perched imperiously on one of the pylons of the Brooklyn Bridge. The peregrine was a skilled hunter. It flew way up high and watched the world below, unnoticed and unseen until it sighted its prey.
The fight was ten minutes away. On the white clock-face ahead, the seconds ticked past, but Harper could only see the raptor.
There was a great roar from the gym; it rattled the doors, which hung loose on their hinges. Someone had gone down. The crowd loved a knockout — they loved to see someone hit so hard that the brain would momentarily lose motor control and the body twist and sink like a bag of cement.
The roar faded and Harper was left with the silence, the bare red brick of the locker room and the ingrained smell of male sweat. He shifted on the bench. He needed to feel ready for the fight, was waiting for the trigger — anger or a sense of injustice — but all he felt was the cold air, the hard bench and the fear trickling slowly through his veins.
He tried to imagine his glove landing on his opponent’s jaw, tried to imagine hitting someone into submission, but the image faded as fast as it appeared. If you couldn’t imagine beating someone, then how the hell could you go out and do it?
There was a loud smacking sound as Dylan, the all-in-one corner man, manager and trainer, chewed his gum. Harper looked down at the man taping up his fists. ‘Can’t you cut that out?’ he said.
Dylan looked up, his unshaven face pockmarked. ‘The champ feeling a little tetchy tonight?’
‘Just trying to focus here,’ said Harper. He exhaled slowly. Ahead of him, a boxer in red satins stared out from a torn poster, his shining gloves held high, his body tense and ready. Harper tapped his booted feet on the floor. ‘Let’s just get this done.’
Three years ago, Harper had made NYPD Cruiserweight Champion. He’d beaten an opponent who was bigger and heavier. Harper had had reserves that night, and he’d wanted it bad. Now he didn’t know what he was doing here. Rusty and tired even before he stepped into the ring. Maybe that was the problem — three years of rust was making his muscles feel dull and heavy.
From somewhere beyond the small room, both men heard another roar echoing down the corridor. Harper’s muscles twitched. He imagined the referee lifting the winner’s arm, the loser standing beaten. Avoiding failure used to be Harper’s main motivation. It’d been three months since the end of his last big case. A tough case. And three months since he’d seen Denise Levene. And that hurt too.
Guilt still kept him from sleeping. He’d brought Levene on to the case — she’d impressed him, she was smart and eager. She knew things about criminal behavior that no one else seemed to understand. They’d worked well together. Then it all went wrong. The killer targeted Denise Levene and kept her for two terrible days. For three months since, Harper had been unable to put the monster to rest inside his own head and Denise Levene wouldn’t speak to him or see him. And without forgiveness you can’t go forward, you can only keep punishing yourself.
Out at ringside, the first bout was cleared. The ring was mopped of sweat and blood as more cops poured in from the street for the main event. They were there to see the ex-champ Harper take on the new boy Castiglione. Harper had retired as champ, had never been beaten and word was, he wanted his title back. People of all ages, from the old vets to the fresh-faced rookies, began opening beers and jostling for space on the battered wooden benches.
In the locker room, Harper thought about the weeks of preparation and training. He’d pushed himself hard, working long shifts at North Manhattan Homicide and then carrying on with lengthy sessions at the gym.
Cops weren’t supposed to be affected by what happened to them, they were supposed to move on to the next case, the next body. The reality was different. The cops Harper knew hid their weaknesses. The hardening of the heart was the price you paid for being in the game, but every cop knew that underneath, every damn thing stuck in deep and clawed away at you. Awake, you could control your fears, but asleep, there was nothing at all between you and the abyss.
Harper stood up, his gloves on and laced. He was in good physical shape — six two with broad shoulders and toned muscles. His age showed only in the gray flecks in his hair.
Pushing his mouth guard in, he gritted his teeth and let himself be led out of the room into the darkness beyond. They walked slowly up the narrow corridor as the noise of the crowd grew louder and louder, the heavy beat of stamping feet rising to meet them.
The door to the gym opened up, the noise doubled in a moment and hit them like a wave. There was no fancy music, no fancy name. Just Tom Harper who had demons to face and had decided he’d try to face them in the place he knew he could fight best. The ring.
He looked across at Marco Castiglione pacing his territory. He was a short, bullish patrol cop with a mean and hungry look in his eye, who was out to prove himself. Once upon a time, Harper had been that guy.
As Harper walked towards the ring, the cops started shouting his name, rising from their seats and patting his back as he passed. He pushed the top rope high and stepped through on to the canvas, standing opposite the young Italian, who was shadow boxing in his corner.
The referee walked up and stood between the two men. The fighters came together. Harper held up his gloves, but stared right through Marco Castiglione’s direct gaze. Denise Levene was still in his head, back in the dungeon, the face of the killer behind her. Fragments of his nightmares kept breaking in.
From ringside, Harper’s partner Eddie Kasper slurped on a beer and leaned back, his arm curling around the shoulder of the cop next to him. ‘My man is going to slay this guy,’ Eddie boasted. ‘It’s going to be brutal. I’ve got a hundred dollars here that says so.’
In the ring, Tom Harper felt a wall of fear rise up like never before. It was like a sudden freeze, turning his muscles to waste and leaving his mind in flashes of white-frosted panic.
But time had run out. The bell rang three times and, from across the ring, Castiglione approached like a beast from the shadows.
Upper East Side
March 6, 11.28 p.m.
He sat in his car opposite the building, waiting. He had been watching for three hours, his focus on the door of the club. His hands were cold now. He held them out in front of his face and looked at them closely. Thin and elegant, like a pianist’s, his nails were cut and filed. He liked all aspects of his life to be neat, ordered and clean.
He was a hunter. He was supreme. He could wait and wait. Sometimes for days, until the opportunity was right. The point was to be on duty at all times. Always vigilant. The hunt he could control. Not like everything else in his life.
Love hadn’t worked out for him at all. For six months she’d made him happy, then she had cut herself free. She had rejected him and what he believed in.
He had never really understood her problem and he didn’t believe she did either. She was part of the world — the world that was corrupt and out of order. He had to put it all back into shape. Frighten when necessary, hurt when necessary, and kill when necessary. But it had to start changing.
The man stared across at the black railings and stone steps that led down to a red basement door. He knew they were inside: him and her. He had planned this for a long time, had lived it in his mind and waited patiently for the right time. He had his kit on the seat beside him: the barbed wire, duct tape, knife, gloves, flashlight, pistol, needle and ink. There was going to be pain first, then resolution, and then freedom.
Orders were orders, whatever you thought about them and however you played it. People had to understand — there was no morality, no absolute, in battle and war. God’s will was self-assertion and evolution — the drive to secure the future for your own kind. He’d read more than he could remember about it. The science was unmistakable. People were just a genetic code seeking its own silent future. They were just incubators for God’s code. Bodies were nothing. But people had forgotten what God’s chosen code was and what the inferior code was doing to the world.
His purpose had been sharpened over the years. He understood who he was now; finally understood that it was possible to be alive in both the present and the past. When he had absorbed that simple truth, the whole of his life fell into place. Time was not linear, time was all-present. It didn’t matter if you weren’t part of the original purpose, you were part of the eternal struggle which happened outside time and space. And anyone you killed was killed throughout eternity.
The man knew he wasn’t really an individual; he was part of a hive, a single cell in a larger mind. He didn’t need to understand the whole, only his work, his duty, his small piece of the city that needed cleansing.
Tonight was special. The order was to kill again. He would follow them slowly. He would make them cry out for death. Then, he would help them.
Outside the club, his watch chimed at fifteen-minute intervals. He checked the time visually before going through his other checks. The first was his weapons check. He pulled out the small pistol, examined the magazine, removed it, took the bullet out of the breech, clicked the trigger twice, replaced the magazine, levered the bullet back into the breech. Then he took out his army combat knife, a small four-inch holed blade. He unsheathed it, felt the blade, sheathed it and put it away. Next he took out his flashlight. It was combat standard, strong and simple to use. He flicked on the beam and picked out the shadows opposite, then quickly switched it off and replaced it in his pocket. He took out the gloves. They were industrial gloves, so that he could handle the barbed wire. He was ready. He opened the window a couple of inches and pulled out a cigarette. A match flamed in the darkness; he dragged deeply and felt the rush of nicotine in his blood.
Soon, it would be time. He held the anger in and felt it spread throughout him, the rage forming in each muscle in turn, mingling with the nicotine. He didn’t just hate. Hate was for part-timers. He was hate. It was his DNA, his purpose, his sole trajectory.
Hate was a bloodline. It had grown in his cells like anything else: blue eyes, brown hair, muscularity — and hate. Hate was his inheritance, his birthright — and his duty.
He stared across, blew smoke out of the window and repeated the eighty-eight words softly to himself.
Salsa Club, Upper East Side
March 6, 11.50 p.m.
Inside the basement salsa club, the dance floor was heaving with bodies, the walls running with condensation under dark red lights. The series of small rooms reverberated with the high-pitched hoot of the trumpets and the rhythm of the bongos. A barely audible singer led the song in Spanish.
David Capske was twenty-seven, engaged to be married and very pleased with how life had changed for him. He put his arm around Lucy, pulled her in tight, sipped his fifth Corona and stared at her. She was so perfect. Lucy’s eyes followed the dancers; David, too, turned to watch.
The couple on the dance floor were breathtaking. The woman twirled in a tiny silver dress, flicking her long legs around on high heels, her elegant arms draped across the shoulders of her chisel-jawed partner. He was tall and taut in every movement — like a fixed bar against her fluidity.
The dancers moved quickly, their legs and hips lifting and falling to the rapid thump of the beat. David stared transfixed. Then he felt something on his thigh. He looked down and saw Lucy’s hand slowly moving across it.
‘You want to dance?’ he shouted over the noise.
‘I see you like to watch her dance,’ she teased. ‘You getting excited?’
David grinned. ‘I was admiring her technique. She’s got great upper-body isolation.’
‘That’s why you were staring so hard at her upper body region?’
‘What’s to look at? She’s not half as beautiful as you and she’s not even got the moves you’ve got.’ He reached out and tried to kiss her. ‘Now your upper-body isolation is second to none.’
She pulled away and smiled. ‘I need proof.’
David leaned closer. ‘That’s not a problem.’
‘How are you going to prove it to me?’
‘By taking the most beautiful woman in this place home and showing you,’ he said.
‘Flatterer! Anyway, that might be second-hand excitement. You might be thinking of anyone. I want better proof than that.’
They stared at each other. This was happiness, David Capske thought. Whatever more was to come, couldn’t compete with the feeling he had when they were together.
‘My family have disowned me, is that not proof enough?’
Lucy laughed and stood up. ‘They just want you to meet a nice Jewish girl and not some—’
‘Talented and brilliant young writer.’ He gazed into her blue eyes. He meant it. She was the one. True, Lucy Steller was not what his family had in mind for their firstborn. They were part of the wealthy establishment and she was still working in a supermarket.
‘Let’s go home then.’ She took his hands and dragged him to his feet. David kissed her.
They stood outside in the cold night air. They were both sweaty from the heat of the club, and the cold air stung. Lucy had goose bumps. David put his arm around her and rubbed her bare arm briskly to try to warm her up. The road was quiet — just a line of dark shop windows and a row of parked cars under gloomy street lights.
‘I love being with you,’ he said.
In one of the parked cars across the way, a light suddenly flared in the driver’s seat: a face illuminated for a second seemed to be staring directly across at him.
Lucy felt David’s body tense. ‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. The light went out in the car and smoke drifted from the half-open window. ‘Someone just lit a cigarette.’
‘We should get going,’ she said, and took his arm.
‘He was staring right at me,’ said David. ‘Not a nice look, either.’
‘Don’t start with the paranoia,’ she said, and drew him close. As they began to walk up the street, David turned and looked again over his shoulder at the parked car, but all he could see was a trail of smoke from the window.
Apartment, Lower Manhattan
March 7, 7.04 a.m.
Denise Levene lay alone in her bed, staring up at the ceiling. Everything about her had changed. She used to leave her clothes all over the room, for one, but now her whole apartment was obsessively neat; even her shoes stood in an orderly line in the closet and there wasn’t so much as a sock on the floor.
It suggested an ordered mind. And that’s how she wanted it to look.
She felt just like a dam wall trying to stop the waters from breaking through. She knew she could neither fight nor outrun the panic attacks. The best she could do was to try to distract herself. But she could feel fears looming — the black thoughts that had started to seep through from her dreams into the new day.
She held the memories at bay for several minutes. Then a half-thought appeared. His face in the shadows. And suddenly she was in the dungeon again and the whole fragile world seemed in danger of splitting open.
Denise threw back the duvet and stood up. Movement helped. She rushed through to the utility room, took her sweat-pants from the basket and pulled them on, then an old tank top. She put on a hoodie and her old sneakers and ran out of the apartment, slamming the door, heading fast down the eight flights of stairs.
Then she was out in the street gulping air. The sense of terror was intense; she felt a momentary release, but she had only avoided it for a moment — the panic was still chasing her down. She felt the thoughts hiding somewhere in her mind, just behind her eyes, waiting.
Denise sprinted up the street, avoiding the look of anonymous faces, hearing only the rumble of the city and feeling only the morning chill. Her feet pounded with long strides and her heart raced. She turned south and headed across the Brooklyn Bridge, out to the projects — the destitute parts of Brooklyn where she had grown up.
On the street her head continued to swarm with dark thoughts. The fears returned, but so did the image of Tom Harper, the man she’d once admired. She could no longer deal with him in the aftermath — and as much as he tried to contact her and talk, she just flat out refused. Tom Harper had been cut off. Daniel, her boyfriend, was another casualty. He’d stayed around long enough to know she had changed, then he took the dog and moved someplace else. Denise didn’t feel much about it.
She hit the ground hard, pushing her muscles as far as she could, and kept it going, thirty seconds, forty seconds, a minute… her heart rate soaring, her mind blank. It was working. She kept it up for another minute and then slowed her pace and settled into a rhythm, feeling the sweat start to form around her hairline and down her back.
Her therapist called it ‘acting out’. To escape the panic, she had to put herself in danger out there on the streets. Because the danger made sense, and the fear of the outside world didn’t seem as bad as the terror inside. The pain of burning muscles was nothing to the memories that left her choking on her own silence.
She knew the theory. As a psychologist herself, she had trained and taught at Columbia, then re-trained as a police therapist for the NYPD. She knew far too much about radical trauma and its manifestations. In medical terms, she knew what she was. In layman’s terms, she was a basket case, running away from fear, losing touch with everything and everyone.
She ran for an hour then arrived back exhausted but calmed. She stopped across the street and stared at a car outside her building. It wasn’t one she’d noticed before. She saw the window ajar and smoke twirling from inside and felt a stab of panic.
‘You’re being a freak, Denise. Stop it. It’s just a car.’ She tried to move but her limbs refused to obey. She looked around, feeling self-conscious as she stood paralyzed on the sidewalk, the sweat beginning to roll off her.
Two long minutes passed. Denise could make out two forms in the car. Two men, possibly. She twisted her fingers together as she looked at the door to her building. The car was parked illegally. She could see the two men looking around. They were waiting for somebody. She had to do something about this debilitating fear. After the abduction, Harper had given her the name of a specialist — a guy called Mac who he said could help her. She’d dismissed it at the time, but she’d always kept his number. Denise pulled out her cell phone and dialed. There was just an answerphone message giving the times of the classes and the address.
Denise had wanted to speak to a person. She needed help. She’d done so much herself and come a long way, but she needed to walk around without fear. She finally talked herself into crossing the street. She planned to keep her head straight, keep tight to the building and make her way inside immediately.
As soon as she started to walk past the car, the two doors opened. They must have been checking their mirrors. Denise jerked to a halt. She wanted to react well, to appear normal, but it sent a shiver right through her and her eyes shifted about for an escape route.
The two people were out of the car quickly, both medium height, purposeful, tidily dressed. Their quick eyes and languid movements told her that these were cops or gangsters, but most likely cops.
‘Miss Levene,’ said one of them.
Denise didn’t speak, she just nodded slightly.
The first cop held out his shield. He had obviously sensed her apprehension.
‘Sorry to jump out like that. Detective Munroe, Missing Persons.’
Denise looked at the second officer. She’d been wrong. It wasn’t a man, but a tall athletic woman with broad shoulders.
‘Detective Gauge,’ she said, smiling.
Denise was standing and sweating, aware that she looked like a car-crash victim.
‘What do you want?’ she said firmly.
‘You’re hard to get hold of, Miss Levene.’
‘Am I?’
Detective Sarah Gauge had warm brown eyes and a way of holding people’s attention. She stepped forward, her gestures open and non-aggressive. ‘I failed, if the truth be told, Miss Levene. I tried calling you, but you never pick up. I came round here three times, you never answer your buzzer.’
Denise Levene stared at them both. Still distrustful. ‘I wondered who was calling,’ she said. ‘Most people stopped trying a month back. I don’t socialize much.’
‘We need to talk to you,’ said Detective Munroe. ‘If that’s possible.’
‘About what? I’m not a missing person, I’m just not very good company.’
Detective Munroe opened his hands, showed both palms. ‘We just need your help. Can we come inside, Miss Levene? It’d be good to talk to you.’
‘It’s Dr Levene, for the record.’
‘We’re aware of your academic qualifications, Doctor. My apologies.’
‘You must be desperate to look me up. Someone at the NYPD send you?’
Munroe shook his head. ‘We can tell you more inside.’
Denise tried to imagine why they were there. ‘You’re both from Missing Persons?’
‘Right.’
Denise looked up. The city was concrete gray under a pale blue sky. The traffic was rushing by in a frenzied continuous strain. The sweat was turning cold on her skin. She turned back to Sarah Gauge. ‘So, who’s missing?’
Gauge glanced at Munroe then cleared her throat. ‘You heard of Abby Goldenberg? The missing schoolgirl, Abby?’
‘No,’ said Denise. ‘Should I have?’
‘It’s been on the news. She went missing a week ago.’
‘I don’t watch much TV.’ Denise hadn’t heard of Abby, but the name Goldenberg rang a bell somewhere in her memory.
‘Kind of cut yourself off,’ said Munroe. He pushed a finger in one ear and scratched. ‘It’s not a solution.’
‘You’d know this?’ said Denise. ‘Because you’re a psychiatrist, right? Forgive me, I didn’t realize.’
Munroe’s lips formed a half-smile. ‘No, lady, I’m no shrink. It’s common sense. No one learned to ride again by hiding from a horse.’
‘Yeah, well, what I do is up to me, right?’ said Denise.
‘Sure, but—’
She held up her hand, cutting him off. She walked past both detectives and opened the heavy glass door of her building. Munroe and Gauge followed her in. ‘I apologize for being so persistent,’ said Munroe, ‘but a girl’s life is at stake here. We need your help.’
‘I’m on the eighth floor. You can take the elevator. I’ll meet you there.’ Denise went towards the stairs.
‘You’re taking the stairs eight floors?’ said Gauge. ‘You on some fitness program?’
‘I don’t take elevators,’ said Denise. The door to the stairway closed behind her. She was sheeted in sweat. The brief conversation had not been easy for her. The two cops looked at each other and Munroe pressed for the elevator. ‘What’s with her?’ said Gauge.
‘The killer held her underground for two days,’ said Munroe. ‘Only way in or out of her prison was an elevator shaft.’
Diner, East Harlem
March 7, 8.07 a.m.
He sat in the diner in East Harlem, five minutes from the murder scene, eating a bacon and egg bagel. He was alone on a table for four but the diner was only half full at that time of day. An old lady to his right sat staring ahead, her head slightly crooked on her shoulders, wearing a pompous and refined air as if she was better than the rest, but beneath the table, she had no shoes and her bare feet were cut and rancid.
There were two cops sitting in the corner booth. He stared at them as they ate and joked. Jimmy Headless and Johnny Neckless. Every day, he imagined that this was how they started their shift — sign in, drive two blocks up from the precinct, park up and take free coffee and bagels from Enrico.
He took out a cell phone. Prepaid, untraceable. He had used it to call David Capske the night before, just after midnight. He’d told David that he had photographs of him taking cocaine. Threatened the palpitating young man that he was going to embarrass the hell out of the Capske clan and lose David his job.
David asked what he wanted. ‘Easy,’ he’d said. ‘One thousand dollars delivered tonight to a trash can on East 112th Street.’
He took the cell-phone battery from his pocket, put it back into the phone and waited for the software to load up and the satellite connection to show. He sipped some hot coffee as he logged on to a new Hotmail account and laboriously typed in the email addresses of all the networks and newspapers. Then he composed a short but important message.
He looked across to Jimmy and Johnny. Arch-morons of the modern world. Keeping up the illusion that we were all safe. He smiled at the waitress and nodded as she held up the coffee pot. He pressed send.
He sat and waited, the murder weapon still in his pocket like a memento of the kill. He remembered the feeling. He wanted to have that high again. But he couldn’t, not yet. He knew that he must remain hidden. His task was not to bathe in glory but to conquer the inferior. His task was to carry out orders.
He let the emails sail through space and time, hunting out their electronic destinations, and watched as they disappeared from the outbox.
He waited a good fifteen minutes, and then he put the phone to his ear and called 911. The tone clicked. The voice seemed small and distant. Not what you want in an emergency.
‘911, which service please?’ said the wheezy voice.
‘Police.’
‘What seems to be the problem, sir?’
‘There’s a dead body on East 112th Street, in an alleyway at Jenson House.’ He hung up, took the battery out of the cell phone and tossed it on to the floor. The phone would be wiped clean, smashed and deposited in a trash can on his walk to work.
He looked at his stopwatch and smiled at the number. His victim had taken seventy-nine minutes to die. There had been a lot of pain. That’s what he enjoyed. Pain.
He walked out past Jimmy and Johnny. ‘Hi there, fellas,’ he said, his right hand wrapped around the plastic grip of his gun, feeling the dirty excitement of flaunting it. They both looked up and nodded.
As he left, he guessed that the police dispatch would be chirping on the police radio for some squad car to go take a look. He waited in the street and, sure enough, the nearest cop car belonged to Jimmy and Johnny. They ambled out of the diner, fat and stupid, in no hurry whatsoever, and already about five hours too late.
He wanted to follow the dumb cops to observe them as they came across the corpse, to see their reaction to what he had done. He would’ve liked to have gone back to see the corpse and to take some pictures. But that was foolish. The cops would scan the scene. He couldn’t afford to be noticed.
He felt restless as he walked up the street, almost as if he’d set up a party that he wasn’t allowed to attend himself. Most of all he felt hungry for more blood. He only just realized what it was, the sudden feeling, almost unrecognized because it was unexpected.
He stared across the street. People were walking to work or to school. Then he felt it again. He thought it might have been some leftover excitement from the murder. Maybe the remembering, the sending of death messages, maybe all of the paraphernalia of the morning-after was tripping him up.
He was standing still, wearing a leather coat, a little unshaven, already late for work, his stomach warm from coffee, the blood of the dead man smeared across his chest and left to dry. He repeated the eighty-eight words as if a prayer.
If anyone wanted to know, if anyone asked now, who had killed that guy at Jensen House, he’d fucking scream from the rooftops: ‘I did, you fuckers! I did.’
He smiled at a woman approaching. He felt invulnerable, like a man on something. A blood-high, he called it, the freedom that comes from a kill.
He decided that what he was feeling could be called happiness. He hadn’t been happy his whole life long, but now… yes, that’s what it was, wasn’t it? That buzz of self-confidence, a sense of freedom, of optimism, of potency, of shamelessness — that was happiness, right there, sitting right there in his own heart and mind.
It was 8.22 a.m. on the streets of New York, the morning after the murder, and it came to him that he already wanted to kill again.
At first it was months before the intoxicating need filled his head, then weeks… now just a day. There was a feeling in his head like a ticking. Sometimes it went on for hours, like a roulette wheel slowed down. And when it stopped, then the order came.
It was ticking again.
He saw the world like never before, as if he was the central figure in his own movie and that movie had meaning. And its meaning was right there — blood on the streets, happiness, the urge to kill and a man nearly dancing with delight.
Apartment, Lower Manhattan
March 7, 8.28 a.m.
Inside her apartment, Denise seated the two Missing Persons detectives in the living room. She left them for a moment and came back in clean sweatpants and a fresh top. She noticed the way Munroe stared at her. What was it? A chance to gawp or was he suspicious in some way? Difficult to tell.
Denise moved to the kitchen and poured a glass of orange juice. She didn’t offer the two detectives a drink and she didn’t sit down, either. She stood in the center of the room and looked at one then the other. She felt her nerves rising and falling, but tried to keep it hidden.
‘Nice place,’ said Sarah Gauge. ‘I like your things. All sleek and modern. I like a modern style.’ She gestured at the Italian sofa and then two angular aluminum candlesticks.
‘Can you get to the point?’ said Denise.
The two detectives sat on the sofa and Denise watched them, then leaned against the wall. Munroe took a white envelope out of his pocket and pulled out a photograph.
‘This is Abby,’ he said. ‘This is the most recent shot we’ve got of her. Red highlights included, although she was brunette when she disappeared.’
Denise stared across at Abby. She was a striking-looking girl. ‘What is she? Tenth or eleventh grade?’
‘Senior,’ said Munroe. ‘She’s just turned sixteen. She’s a Queens girl — Forest Park area. Parents divorced. Lives alone with her father. Mother lives in New Jersey with a new family.’
‘The girl is Jewish?’
‘Yeah, she’s Jewish. Her father’s keen on his Jewish heritage, if you know what I mean.’
‘Before you jump in with your locker-room anti-Semitism, you do know I’m also Jewish?’ said Denise. She glared down hard at Munroe.
‘I didn’t mean anything wrong by it,’ said Munroe. ‘It’s just that he’s a specialist. An academic. He curates exhibitions about the Holocaust. That’s all I meant.’
‘Where does he work?’
‘He lectures at Columbia and curates at the Museum of Tolerance.’
‘Goldenberg, you said? Thought I recognized it from when I used to work at Columbia.’
‘Well, he knows you too, Dr Levene. Only by reputation.’
Denise began to search her memory for the name. ‘What’s his first name?’
‘It’s Aaron. Dr Aaron Goldenberg.’
Denise felt her heart pump. Any link just brought the tragedy closer. She paused and turned from the two cops, looking out of the window. ‘I never knew him well. We probably met at an event. I don’t think I ever met his daughter.’
‘We know that.’
‘So what are you doing here?’
‘Truth is, this investigation is drying up fast. We’ve exhausted all avenues and Dr Goldenberg knows it. He’s a very persuasive man, Dr Goldenberg. He wanted us to go one more round. He wrote a list. We always ask for a list. All the people who his daughter might have known, wanted to know or had been influenced by. If she’s a runaway, she might go for someone she barely knows.’
‘And?’
‘You were on that list.’
‘In which category?’
‘She admired you, apparently.’
‘Me? She didn’t know me.’
‘She wanted to major in Psychology. Her father took her to one of your lectures. When you left Columbia for the NYPD, she thought that was cool.’
‘Cool?’
‘Packing in academia for a real career.’ Munroe tried a smile. Denise didn’t respond. ‘One in the eye for her old man, I expect.’
Detective Gauge stood. ‘We’ve got her diaries. She mentioned you in there too. Not so much about the Psychology. She seemed to like your style, the way girls do. Thought you looked beautiful and confident. That’s what she wrote.’
Munroe pulled out a copy of the diary entry and handed it to Denise. ‘She was quite affected by your abduction too. She followed the case on the news. She wrote a few prayers for you.’
Denise felt her emotions stir and she tapped the wall hard.
‘Dr Goldenberg has this theory that she might be disappearing to emulate you in some unconscious way. Maybe she sees it as a means of getting some attention. Her mother’s a real live-wire. Doesn’t have much to do with Abby.’
Denise shook her head. ‘That’s bullshit.’
‘He’s trying to imagine why she’s not come home. He doesn’t want to think she’s just cut loose on him and run away with some guy.’
‘And what do you think, Detective?’
‘Looks like she planned to go away. She stowed her books and a set of clothes in a tree in the woods near her home. A dog-walker found them. She faked a phone call to a friend to get out of the house. We think she was going to meet someone. Maybe it was to run away, maybe she got into trouble.’
‘If she was planning to run away, would she leave her diaries? This stuff is quite intimate. She’d know it’s the first place you’d all look. She mention any boyfriend in the diaries?’
‘No, she didn’t.’
Denise turned. ‘She’s not a runaway. But you’re not here for an opinion, are you?’
‘Listen, we’re ticking boxes here, Dr Levene. We’ve got a list, your name’s on it. We got to ask. Have you seen her? Has she contacted you? Anything? This would’ve been a phone call if you ever picked up.’
‘No. Nothing. As you know, I’m not easy to get hold of.’
Denise used the towel around her shoulder to rub her hair. She looked at Abby’s picture again. She saw a bright, kind face, both cheeky and prepossessing. If she was to take a guess on the girl’s attitude, she’d say that she was a fun-loving risk-taker who had her father wrapped round her little finger. The smile would get her a long way, not necessarily in the right direction.
‘Is that all?’ said Denise. ‘I’ve got an appointment to keep.’
Apartment, East Harlem
March 7, 8.51 a.m.
The door to Harper’s bedroom opened. The drapes were drawn back and Eddie Kasper stood over his partner, saying, ‘What the hell happened?’
Harper’s eyes remained shut. He lay flat out on his bed, his face all cuts and bruises, each one of which he felt reverberating through his head.
Eddie flicked the switch on the radio that lay askew on an old crate and turned the volume high. It blared out a news report complete with high-pitched crackles. The man on the bed failed to stir.
‘The parents of the missing high-school girl, Abby Goldenberg, have made a fresh appeal for witnesses. Abby’s mother and father have come together to make a video appeal to help find their daughter who went missing at 5.15 p.m. on February 26.’
‘She’s probably already lying dead someplace,’ said Eddie and turned the radio off.
‘Optimist.’
‘So now you’re awake.’
‘What do you want, Eddie? I’m not on shift for two days.’
‘Leave has just been cancelled.’
Harper turned and moaned. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Just get up, Harper. I’ll tell you all you need to know on the way. Come on, we got to go.’ He threw a bag of grapes on to Harper’s stomach. ‘And there’s some get-well-soon food for you from the girls at the precinct. They love a loser. Shirley was almost weeping when I told her about the fight, Harps. Weeping. You should think about it. She’s not a bad-looking woman.’
Harper listened without response. He was finding it difficult enough to open his right eye. The left one was completely closed over. All he could see was a cloud of pinkish red. He was almost blind.
‘I need ice,’ he groaned. ‘I can’t fucking move.’ He lifted his head and it shrieked like a train rushing towards a subway station. ‘Get me something, Eddie. Codeine. Anything.’
‘Hell, you’re a sad mess of a man,’ said Eddie. ‘And it smells like a goddamn locker room in here. Harps, come on, what the hell are you doing to yourself?’ Eddie threw open a window and headed into the tiny kitchen that was hidden behind a torn drape.
Harper moved his legs to the floor and lifted his torso off the bed. He sat for a moment, feeling the thumping of pain, then coughed violently and felt his ribs ache like they were broken in several places. He spat blood on to the floor, then looked out through a thin slit of light at the tall, slim figure of Eddie Kasper looming above holding a glass of water and a handful of pills.
‘I’m guessing I didn’t win,’ said Harper.
‘There we go. Make a joke of it. You could have got seriously hurt and I’m not going to be pushing you to no crime scene in a wheelchair.’
Harper grunted and tried to rouse himself from the bed but as he moved, his head thudded with bolts of pain. Every part of his face felt too large: his lips, gums, jawbone, and eyes. His chest, kidneys and stomach felt raw. Every muscle was yelling at him.
Eddie passed him the glass of water. ‘Shit, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, Harps. I was not prepared. I am upset, man. I was feeling emotional for you last night. Nearly jumped in the ring myself.’
‘Should’ve helped me out,’ said Harper out of the corner of his mouth. His lips cracked and he tasted blood on his tongue.
Eddie walked close and pushed Harper’s head back. Harper struggled with the pain. ‘What the hell, Eddie?’
‘I lost a hundred on you, Harps. I’ve got a very expensive date tonight and I’ve been promising her some fancy place. Now I got nothing. So much for a sure bet.’
‘Then don’t gamble.’
‘What am I going to tell her?’
‘I don’t know, Eddie, just cut out the middle man and take her to bed.’
Eddie stood up straight for a moment. ‘Not a bad idea, maestro. Looks like that little Italian didn’t mess your head up too bad.’
Harper tried to stand and felt a fresh stab of pain across his chest and stomach. He sat down again and breathed deeply.
Eddie looked at his partner’s face. ‘You were never handsome, Harps, not like me, but you weren’t no monster, either. But now, I gotta tell you, you look like someone took that ugly stick and beat you half to death with it.’
‘You’re way too sympathetic, Eddie, you know that?’
‘What you want sympathy for? No one forced you to fight. We all told you to stay clear.’
‘You’re right, no one forced me.’
‘A hundred bucks, Harps — where’s the sympathy for my losses?’
‘It’s boxing, Eddie — remember not to bet on the white guy.’
‘The other guy was a white guy, Harps.’
‘Then I really was no good.’
Eddie took one of the coffees he’d brought with him from the deli in the street outside and handed it to Harper. He sat down and shook his head. ‘Man, your face is like some close-up of a fungus. You should see a doctor.’
‘I’ll survive.’ He threw four pills down his throat and gulped back water.
‘And when the doctor’s finished with you, you should go see the psychiatrist and get your head mended. And when the shrink’s finished with you, you should take your gloves and throw them in the Hudson. You stank, man.’
‘That bad?’
‘It was like someone had switched you off. You didn’t land a single punch, Harps. Not a single punch. You let him boss you round the ring. He was taking pot shots at you. Using that pretty face of yours for target practice. It was a massacre.’
Harper stared across, unable to smile. ‘First time I slept that well in a long while, though.’
‘Being unconscious doesn’t count as sleep.’
‘It gets you from night to day just the same. Look, these injuries may look bad, but he wasn’t packing much in those punches. No lasting damage.’
‘It upset me, man, and I don’t like that. Come here, big guy.’ Eddie pulled Harper to his feet, wrapped his arms around him and squeezed him tight.
‘Go easy, Eddie,’ said Harper, pulling away and reaching out for his phone. ‘And where’s that ice pack?’ Harper looked down his messages. Lots of messages, probably heckling his performance, but nothing from Denise Levene.
He felt something like the beginning of grief again. Then it passed as the pain started up. He couldn’t move his neck too well, so he presumed he’d been caught on the point of his jaw from a right hook, snapping his neck fast and twisting the spinal column. Rotational force. Sudden drop in blood pressure, brain slamming to the right as the skull went left — concussion maybe. He must’ve been out for the whole ten count.
Eddie returned and handed Harper an ice pack. He took it and held it to his worst eye.
‘Seriously, Eddie, it’s good of you to drop by. Appreciate it.’ Harper walked to the bathroom.
‘I care, Harps, you know that. But there was one other thing.’
Harper took a mouthful of water from the faucet and swilled it around his mouth, then spat it out. The white porcelain turned a translucent red.
‘What’s that, Eddie?’
‘Captain’s called Blue Team together again.’
Harper appeared at the bathroom door. ‘What is it?’
‘They found a body this morning in East Harlem.’
‘They called the whole team?’ asked Harper. ‘Something I should know?’
Eddie nodded. Harper let the thought swirl around in his head and compete with the pain. Blue Team was the elite unit of homicide detectives from North Manhattan Homicide. The last time the whole of Blue Team was on a case, they were chasing a serial killer. Harper looked at Eddie Kasper, ‘Well, you might as well tell me, I’m going to have to see it soon enough. What’s the MO?’
‘A body all wrapped up in barbed wire,’ said Eddie. ‘And Lafayette wants you to lead this one. It’s nasty. Welcome back to our world.’
East 112th Street, Manhattan
March 7, 9.22 a.m.
East 112th Street ran all the way to Second Avenue and stopped adjacent to Jefferson Park. On Saturday morning, the pace was slow. The big blocks of public housing stood quietly in the morning sun. On one side of the street a gang of youths sat on a stoop; five big guys all stretching out, baseball caps backward, watching. The few stores were open, but there wasn’t much going on. A couple of eateries, a grocery store with everything on sale, a mini-mart and a store selling nothing but wheel rims. But business was slow for the moment.
At the entrance to Jenson House XI across the street, a small dark alley ran behind the huge municipal trash loaders and led through to House VI. There was nothing remarkable about the alley, except for the single patrol car parked neatly in a 90-minute wait slot and a single uniformed NYPD officer standing beside a piece of yellow police tape.
Within seconds, the quiet street erupted with the sound of traffic. Left and right, trucks and cars started to stream towards the alley, except they weren’t police vehicles. They were all marked with the bright logos of television networks.
About a half-mile away a red Pontiac belonging to Eddie Kasper swerved through the corners towards the crime scene. Harper kept his head low and his eyes covered with shades. His head hadn’t let up the dance beat of pain. ‘Promise me you won’t ever drive an ambulance,’ he said.
‘I’d get to the hospital quick enough, wouldn’t I?’
‘Sure, but the question is — would you get there with anyone alive?’
Eddie turned to look at Harper and grinned. ‘You made a joke, Harps! That’s real progress. You keep up like this and you’ll be human one day.’
He reached out and slapped Harper on the arm. Harper winced. The painkillers were only keeping out half of the pain coming from various parts of his body. Eddie swung into 112th Street. They came upon Jenson House XI almost immediately and Eddie slammed on his brakes.
Harper pushed up his shades and stared out. ‘What the fuck is going on?’ The street was log-jammed with cars and trucks. There were rows of TV trucks, seven or eight TV crews with reporters, cameramen, sound crews and even a few executives, all milling between the street and Jenson House. The presence of the networks had attracted a crowd of thirty to forty people standing round the fringes and trying to see what all the fuss was about. There were only a few patrol cars at the scene and the uniformed cops were having trouble keeping order.
Eddie pulled up to the curb and switched off the engine. The two Homicide cops glanced at each other.
Harper pushed his shades down again. ‘What’s going down, Eddie? I thought this was a fresh kill. Why are they all here?’
‘I don’t know, Harps. And how did they hear about it so quick?’
‘Question is, why the hell are they so interested? There’s been no ID, right?’
‘Right.’
Harper pushed his body out of Eddie’s old Pontiac and on to the sidewalk, a grimace crossing his face. A cold breeze ran across the street even though the sunlight was bright. The effect, through his bruised eyes, was surreal. It was like a circus had come to see a homicide in action.
Eddie moved around and said to Harper, ‘Keep close, champ, or someone’s going to mistake you for the victim.’
There was a battle going on up ahead, with the two police officers trying to push back the TV cameras and reporters. Harper lowered his head, held up his shield and muscled his way through, ignoring the pain.
A smiling brunette from CNN spotted the shield and turned her TV crew through 180 degrees. ‘We’ve got another detective coming through, let’s try for a comment.’ As she said it, a minor stampede headed Harper’s way.
She moved across, ahead of the pack. ‘Detective, can we get a statement? Can you confirm the identity of the body?’
Harper looked up. ‘I just got here. I haven’t even seen the body.’
The reporter saw Harper’s beat-up face and shrank away. ‘We all got an email, Detective, about a body found early this morning in a Housing Project in East Harlem. They are saying that it’s Judge Capske’s son, David. Email said it was a political statement for America. What have you got to say about that?’
Harper shook his head. ‘I don’t know nothing about this as yet. No comment.’ He pushed forward, more confused, wondering why the networks had been sent this information. The press rounded on him, coming from all sides at once, throwing lights and microphones in his way. ‘I’ll give you a statement, ladies and gentlemen, if you let me take a goddamn look at my crime scene.’
Harper and Kasper made their way through to the rising volume of eager and excited questions.
Inside the makeshift compound, there were four police cruisers and a white truck belonging to the Crime Scene Unit. All the red and blue lights twirled without sound, hardly visible in the lights of the TV crews. Over to the right, a dark rectangle of shadow marked the entrance to the alleyway. Canary-yellow police tape crossed the crime scene and flapped in the breeze. They’d managed to get a rudimentary screen up, but Harper guessed that the cameras would’ve caught the image of the corpse already.
‘Did the department get sent the same information about Judge Capske’s son?’ asked Harper. ‘Is that why the whole of Blue Team got the call out?’
Eddie looked around, scanned the trucks and microphones. ‘No, we didn’t get shit. Must’ve gone straight to the TV stations.’
‘Someone out there wants to cause maximum fucking chaos,’ said Harper. ‘Does anyone know what the hell’s going on?’ he shouted.
A tall cop standing in the shadow at the edge of the alleyway moved into the light, thumbs hitched in his belt. It didn’t matter that there were several cameras pointed his way, world-weary nonchalance emanated from every pore.
Harper felt another sudden sharp pain cross his forehead, and he moved over the yellow crime-scene tape. ‘You know what’s going down here, Officer?’
‘They just rolled in about fifteen minutes ago,’ the officer replied. ‘Said they got a warning. We were here quick, so I’d guess they were told before we were.’
Harper stared out at the circus and felt anger rising in his blood. ‘I want this whole fucking street cleared, you hear? I need more patrol cars and uniforms right now.’
‘The whole street?’
‘The whole street. Every fucking TV truck. This is a crime scene, not a sideshow. Move them out now. Right out of my sight.’
East 112th Street
March 7, 9.28 a.m.
Harper spotted his team further up the alleyway, congregating as close to the corpse as possible, as if the lifeless body would somehow reveal the secrets of the crime as long as they got in tight enough. Harper knew that they weren’t just clinging to the case, but that they were standing around the corpse clinging to the fragments of the victim’s humanity.
Detectives Garcia, Greco, Ratten and Swanson, the other four members of Blue Team, were talking in brief sentences and looking around. No detailed forensics work going on — just experienced cops getting a feel for what had happened. Looking for the story, talking down options, trading insults and jokes. Each of them opening their account on the next dead body.
Harper moved towards his team. ‘They’re going crazy over there,’ he said. ‘The media said this is Judge Capske’s son David. Has anyone ID’d our victim?’
‘Can’t do it. Take a look for yourself. Can’t tell who it is.’
Garcia stopped as he saw Harper’s face. ‘Lafayette gave you the lead looking like that? You look like shit,’ he said. ‘And for the record, you fight like shit.’
‘I’m leading this, that’s right,’ said Harper. It was going to be a day of soaking up the jibes and jokes.
Harper looked at the ground. There was a spread of white powder on the wet asphalt, with three or four small wraps, torn open. ‘The email to the networks said this is a political statement. That might or might not be true. Could be drug-related. A gang maybe? You know of any gangs with a barbed-wire calling card? Maybe it’s some anti-drug thing. Vigilantes? Who the hell does this?’
‘Never heard it used,’ said Garcia, ‘but, who knows, there’s new gangs forming all the time.’
‘Anyone going to ID this corpse?’ said Harper. ‘The reporters are going to break through sooner rather than later.’
‘We can’t get near the body. It’s wound up tight. Crime Scene are just finished and the Deputy Coroner is on his way.’
Harper looked down the alleyway. ‘I’m going to take a look.’
‘Has anyone checked whether the body is infected?’ Eddie joked. ‘Our lead detective is carrying open wounds.’
Harper and Eddie walked towards the corpse, looking down at the body covered with a bloodstained sheet, the breeze lifting the edges and rippling the white cotton. A pair of bright white sneakers, spotted with black circles of dried blood, stuck out from under the sheet.
‘Small feet,’ said Eddie. He turned to Harper. ‘How you feeling?’
‘Don’t ask. Let’s take a close up.’
‘Out of the way, people, we got the Cyclops coming through.’
‘Concentrate, Eddie,’ spat Harper.
‘The humor is medicine, man.’ Eddie patted Harper’s back. ‘Humor is the door out of the dungeon, that’s all it is.’
Harper moved towards the body. ‘Gerry,’ he shouted. ‘Get back to the precinct and find out everything you can about Judge Capske.’
Gerry Ratten nodded. ‘Already done a quick search on my phone. He’s the judge who shut down that New York local radio station after one of the shock jocks made death threats against the anti-gun lobby.’
Harper considered it. ‘So this could be a political hit. We need to know more. Go and dig, Gerry. Find out what you can about David Capske too. Call me the second you got something. We’re going to have to speak to the press within the hour.’
‘I’m on it,’ called Gerry, heading towards his car.
Harper glanced about. ‘Garcia. Go and question the networks. I need to know what time the information came in. The exact message. Get me what you can.’ Harper paused. ‘Jesus.’
‘What is it?’ asked Garcia.
‘Looks like some Colombian drug deal gone wrong. We’re in fucking East Harlem.’ He stared down at the wraps. ‘Not enough to kill for, surely, but maybe they’re just trying to smear Capske’s family. Shit, if this is a political execution, then the organization responsible wants it known. Garcia, find out if any political organization has made any previous statement against Judge Capske.’ Harper felt nauseous as he stared across the bloody asphalt. The whole alleyway was a big stage for someone’s hatred. ‘This set-up is too good for some gangbangers,’ he said to Eddie Kasper.
‘Premeditated,’ said Eddie. ‘Unless the gangs have started to carry barbed wire around with them.’
Harper stood for a moment in the dark of the alley trying to readjust his sight. He looked at the water that was still pooled in parts of the ground. ‘Was it raining last night?’
‘Yeah, some time early morning. Why do you ask?’
‘Just find out for me. It’s still wet in here, but the streets out there are pretty dry.’
‘Not much of a breeze to dry it off down here.’
Harper stared at Eddie, then he noticed something. ‘You were in those clothes at the fight. Same stupid T-shirt.’
‘They make a good outfit,’ said Eddie. ‘Tried and tested.’
Harper nodded. Then he recalled the blanket on his armchair in the apartment. ‘You didn’t go home, did you? You were sitting in my apartment all night.’
‘Hey, Harps, don’t go fantasizing! I got a life to lead,’ Eddie said and flapped a hand in the air.
Harper smiled briefly, then looked at the scene in front of him. Two different stories were forming in his head. The location, presence of drugs, reported gunshot and the victim’s white sneakers all pointed to a gangland drug shooting. The barbed wire and the presence of the TV crews, the possible killing of a judge’s son, all suggested someone with a bigger and possibly political agenda. But there was a third story forming in his head and it was an even worse one.
In the alley, the rain still sat in droplets all over the plastic trash sacks. Harper looked down at the body, at the shoulder of the victim peeping out from under the red and white sheet. The jacket hadn’t dried off, either. Harper kicked a piece of trash away from the victim’s legs and then reached out and pulled off the white sheet.
Harper stared down at the strange sight. The body had been tightly wound in barbed wire; it was so thick that most of the man within was hidden. There were so many cuts that the victim’s clothes were all completely dark from the blood. The barbed wire continued over the victim’s face and head. Harper moved in close with a flashlight. Many of the barbs were bent.
‘That’s some cruel work,’ he said to Eddie. ‘And the body’s been rolled about, by the look of things.’ He snapped the latex glove on his right hand and crouched by the corpse. He touched the barbed wire, its metallic surface hard against the softness of flesh. He spanned his hand between the barbs. ‘Galvanized steel. The barbs are approximately seven and a half centimeters apart; each barb is two centimeters long. Nasty. He’s got to be full of hundreds of holes.’
Through the gaps in the wire, Harper could see how the barbs had gone in deep and torn the flesh. The ground was covered in blood, seeping in every direction, smeared as the body was rolled or moved. The victim had clearly been alive for most of this ordeal, while his poor heart kept pumping fresh blood to the wounds. Someone was pushing this body around, possibly enjoying hearing the victim’s cries of pain.
Harper tried to understand. He searched Eddie’s face. ‘This is some mean bastard. Are we sure that no one heard this? This victim must have been in excruciating pain. Eddie, I want a ground team talking to every person in these blocks. Someone heard this man dying. Probably lots of them heard it. Shake these people and shake them hard. I don’t want any of the usual shit. Someone heard this man and I need to know about it.’
Eddie nodded and walked across to a heap of trash sacks. ‘I’ll set it up. Hey, Harper, have a look at these trash bags. Might just be some hobo, but it looks like someone’s been sitting here.’
Harper looked around. ‘Sitting and watching, maybe. Why? Torture? Punishment?’ He let the thoughts move around his mind. Felt something come to the surface. ‘It’s like a body-cage, isn’t it? Close containment, right?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Once the vic is wrapped in wire, he’s absolutely powerless. Our killer or killers might have enjoyed the complete control. Enjoyed watching the victim suffer. Sitting there, shining a light, maybe, waiting until he bled out.’
Harper found a patch of skin close to the temple that was not covered with blood. ‘Whoever it is, they’re Caucasian,’ he said. ‘I can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman.’
Harper’s sight wasn’t great, with his bruised eye, but he slowly moved his good eye over the barbed wire, seeing if there was anything more he could detect. He was looking for the gunshot. At the forehead, he stopped.
‘The wire’s broken here. It’s pretty blackened but I think I’ve found an entrance wound. Small caliber. Maybe nine millimeters.’ Harper looked at the hole. Something wasn’t quite right about it. ‘Very clean wound,’ he said. ‘Lots of gas burn. The barrel was pretty tight to his head.’
Eddie came across and leaned over Harper’s shoulder. ‘What’s your story so far?’
Harper thought for a moment. ‘No question about whether the vic was killed here. The killer rolled the body, kicked it about, watched the vic die slowly, waited for the blood loss to take him to the very edge, then shot him to make sure. That’s how it looks to me.’
Harper looked around. The ground was marked with the scrapings of metal on asphalt. ‘We could probably get some sense of what happened if we tracked these scratches and blood smears. Looks like he rolled the body the whole way down the alley. He starts bleeding about a third of the way in and with each roll, more of the barbs dig in.’
As Harper knelt again and cast his eyes up the alleyway, Swanson walked across. ‘Never seen nothing like this before, Harper.’
‘Me neither. He might have taken the victim out of the trunk of a car, but he rolled him in the alley. You can see the marks left by the barbs. Some business, that.’
‘Soles of his shoes will be cut up, right? He can’t have been using his hands, can he?’
‘Right. Eddie also thinks that he was sitting on the trash bags.’
‘Cold bastards,’ said Swanson. ‘One guy couldn’t do this. This is a two- or three-man job.’
Harper thought for a moment. ‘Could be, but I got a single gunshot wound to the forehead. My take is that the killer sat waiting, watching his victim cry out in pain, then, at some point, executed him.’
‘Killers, don’t you mean?’
‘I don’t see any evidence of multiple killers but I’m not ruling anything out.’
‘To roll a man in barbed wire would take a team of men.’
Harper scanned the scene. ‘You could be right. Let’s see what Crime Scene can tell us.’
‘Shit,’ said Eddie. ‘I hate it when you get all mystical. Is Swanson right or not?’
‘This is the thing,’ said Harper. He took a moment, as if allowing his thoughts to settle into some kind of order. ‘It could be a hit, it could be a drug shooting or it could be some political revenge. There’s a lot of overkill. There’s passion and hatred here.’ He tried to imagine the killer, working at night, a roll of barbed wire at his side, a man screaming in pain, a maniac sitting on some wet sacks watching.
‘Drug wars? Some kind of revenge gang kill? Trying to make out they’re fearless?’ asked Swanson. ‘You know how it goes, building a reputation.’
‘Maybe, but the body’s white, there’s drugs left all over the ground, and look at those hands, too. Not someone who’s done much manual work.’ Harper leaned further down and looked at the four fingers of the right hand. He lifted them and then looked up. ‘Index finger shorter than the ring finger. Probably a male victim. Whoever did it is a sadist, for one thing. He’s theatrical, for another. And this isn’t his first kill.’ Harper sniffed. ‘I don’t think he or they are finished, do you?’
He put his hand under the corpse. The ground was dry. Harper started to calculate. The dry ground and wet clothes gave them a timeframe. It depended on when the rain started. ‘We need to officially ID this body,’ he said. ‘Check that Crime Scene have finished, Eddie, and get some wire cutters.’ Eddie moved off down the alleyway, leaving Harper and Swanson.
Harper kept re-telling the story from different angles. But every time, there was something missing. It was Harper’s way — you tell the best story you can, then you pull the story to pieces. Then you start again. Over and over until some threads remained.
Eddie reappeared with wire cutters, the Deputy Coroner with him. The latter shook his head. ‘Some business.’ He knelt down. ‘CSU have cleared the scene. If you want to find out his ID, we need to cut this wire.’
‘We’d appreciate it,’ said Harper. ‘Press have already been given a name.’
They watched as the DC snapped at the wire around the head of the corpse. With each cut, he carefully pulled back the wire. After a few minutes he’d exposed a blackened and bloody face. ‘It’s a guy,’ he said.
The men stared in silence, an acknowledgment of the pain etched on the young man’s face. The DC cut a line down to the chest. He pulled back the wires and reached into the jacket pocket. He fished out a wallet. ‘We’ve got something here,’ he said and passed it to Harper.
Harper opened up the wallet, which held one thousand dollars in fifties. He picked out a driver’s license. The photograph showed a cheerful face surrounded by a mop of black curly hair. Then he saw the name.
‘Okay,’ said Harper. ‘It’s David Capske, which means that we have got to work fast. This has been labeled political so the Feds and Counter-Terrorism will already be applying pressure at Headquarters trying to pull this from us. Everyone’s going to want to know what happened here and why.’
‘What do you need from me?’ asked the DC.
‘Can you give this top priority for me? I want the autopsy within the next few hours. I need that bullet and anything else you can tell me.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said the DC. ‘Dr Pense will handle it.’
Harper looked at the black curly hair sticking out between strands of barbed wire. ‘Someone’s tortured and executed the son of a judge and they’re very proud of themselves. It’s not going to end here.’
East New York
March 7, 10.22 a.m.
The drive took forty-five minutes in all. Denise sat in silence, ignoring the ramblings of the cab driver. She was unable to explain why she was still feeling so scared. Her therapy wasn’t giving her what she wanted. Tom Harper had made the suggestion about Mac right after her ordeal. It had seemed stupid at the time. It had made her angry. Three months later, still terrified by people at her own apartment and unable to answer her own door, Denise needed to move on.
Tom had wanted to help, not with fancy theories but in a practical way. Denise stared ahead as the cab turned off the street. The out-of-town warehouse in the timber yard was at the end of a pitted road. The car rocked from side to side.
The cab pulled over. The whole place was deserted. There was no sign over the door and no indication of what this place was. ‘This is the address you gave. You sure this is where you want to go?’
Denise pushed a twenty through the glass and nodded. She got out of the car and stood on the rough ground. As soon as she was out, the cab driver put his car into gear and drove away.
Denise watched the car’s brake lights as it slowed at the junction and then headed into the distance. She breathed as she’d taught herself and looked around. It was an open space in the middle of unfamiliar and run-down buildings. She didn’t feel good at all. And there was only one way out — through the unmarked black door. The cab had gone, there was nowhere else to go.
She knew Harper must have felt secure about this place and with that knowledge she started towards the door. The fear was growing inside her, a dark anxiety that had felt so close for months now. She tried to hold it back and looked up ahead.
There was no bell or buzzer, just a sheet of steel in peeling black paint. She pulled it open. It grated on an old metal runner. The sound shot right through her. Metal on metal. She knew that from the dungeon. She held the door and her breath.
There were no lights in the corridor, so she walked in and followed a narrow path around to the right. She stared ahead, where two dim yellow lamps lit the way. By the time she made it to the end of the corridor, Denise’s heart was pounding. She came to another door and pulled it open.
A line of steel steps led down to a large warehouse space. In the strange space, there was a car parked next to a van, a small gym set up on one side, a few concrete stairs leading nowhere and a doorway just like in a house. All around were different scenes that looked like some fire sale from a film set. She looked at each in turn. The mood was strangely foreboding.
Denise descended the steps and called out, ‘Hello?’ Her voice echoed against the huge tin roof. From a door across the room, a man appeared. He looked up at Denise. He took her in slowly.
‘I’m D—’
‘Don’t tell me a thing.’
‘Tom Harper gave me your name.’
‘I said not a thing. You don’t owe me an explanation.’
Standing on the last step, Denise stared back at him. The man was rough-looking. About five feet eight in height, big and strong across the shoulders, hands like spades and a mean look in his eyes. She didn’t like him. He was tattooed across his biceps and neck.
‘Get in here.’
He walked back through the door. Denise stood for a minute. She climbed back up the stairs, took three or four paces and then stopped again. What was she going to do? Sit in the yard and cry? She knew that she couldn’t be in danger. Tom would never send her into that kind of situation. She turned round and felt the steel under her feet as she made her way down.
Across the floor, the door was half open. She opened it and looked in. The short guy with the attitude was sitting on an old pommel horse in front of a group of seven women and one man. They were all hunkered down on the floor. The guy on the pommel horse pointed to the floor. Denise walked across and sat down.
‘First things first. You never trust me, ever.’ The guy jumped down off the horse and addressed his little group. ‘Welcome, victims. I don’t know why you’re here or what happened to you, but I know by looking into your sorry faces that you have ignored your birthright.’
The guy stepped towards the group. They shied away in unison. ‘You, lady,’ he said, pointing at Denise. ‘Stand up.’
Denise stood. This was clearly some kind of self-help group. Not the sort of thing she thought Harper would have been involved with.
‘Where are your eyes, victim?’
‘I don’t understand the question.’
The guy moved two fingers up to her eyeballs. ‘Where are my fingers coming from?’
‘In front of me.’
‘And what if I come from here?’ He moved his hand round behind her ear.
‘I can’t see them.’
‘Here?’ he said again, moving his hand behind her head.
‘I can’t see them.’
‘So tell me, victim, if you were meant to be scared of predators, where the hell would God put your eyes?’
‘The side of my head so I could see them coming.’
‘Fucking exactly. Go to the top of the class.’
‘Can I sit down?’
‘No, victim, you cannot.’ He leaned in close. He smelled of two-day-old sweat and stale beer. Denise veered away.
‘You don’t like my smell?’
‘No.’
‘You think a rapist is going to smell sweet? Going to get all washed and put on his best cologne? You better get used to the thing you’re going to learn to fight.’
Denise couldn’t speak.
‘I’m a pig, because that’s what you’ve come to me for — to get rid of that stench he left on you. Am I right?’
Denise stared ahead.
‘I said, AM I RIGHT?’ He shouted hard, close up to Denise.
‘Yes,’ she said and looked down at her feet, her heart thumping.
‘Sit back down, victim.’
He walked around the group, his eyes moving from person to person. ‘We got work to do, victims. A lot of work. But you’ve all come here from something bad and you all don’t like where it left you and I’ll tell you why you don’t like it. You’re not prairie rabbits. You’re not cattle or deer or ducks. You don’t like being victims, people, because you are not made to be victims. You know what you are, people? No? I didn’t think so. You’re predators. Each and every one of you. Predators who have nothing to fear in the world but other predators. And you know what? Predators shouldn’t ever be afraid. That’s why your eyes sit right up there on the front of your skull. Front and center, to measure the distance between you and your prey accurately. You’re made to hunt and kill and cause fear and maximum damage. You’re not made to anticipate attacks and defend yourself. So I’m here to turn you back into predators. You understand? So sit down, listen and learn.’
Mac turned back towards the pommel horse, then stopped and faced the group. ‘People who come here want to learn how to survive. Well, this is the right place. Welcome to Predator Class, victims.’
Investigation Room, North Manhattan Homicide
March 7, 2.05 p.m.
‘Wait up, Harper. I need to speak to you right now!’ bellowed Captain Lafayette.
Harper was moving fast down the beige and brown corridor of the precinct house. ‘I’ll get back to you,’ he shouted. ‘I’ve got something that needs my full attention.’
Lafayette’s face reddened and he marched up to Harper. ‘Stop with the fucking games, Harper. I need to know, right now.’
Harper stopped and turned; he pointed his finger. ‘You know and I know that someone is going to try to pull this out of our hands. The media are painting this as a political assassination so we’re going to be dragged off-course unless we focus. We’ve got maybe twenty-four hours to make this our own.’
‘Then help me to keep them off your back.’
‘What do you need to know?’
Lafayette sighed. Harper looked bad and he felt wired. Everything was urgent, everything had to be done an hour ago. Evidence evaporated the moment it was born. Time was all they needed and time was the one thing that destroyed evidence. Harper had sent out his teams to interview witnesses, families, friends and anyone else who might have come into contact with Capske.
‘It looks like a political attack, Harper. I got to explain to the Deputy Commissioner why we’re closing the door to the Feds and Counter-Terrorism.’
‘Don’t close the door, just point them in another direction. Look, tell the Deputy Commissioner that, as it stands, there’s not a scrap of evidence that this was political.’
‘You really think that? The killer emailed the networks to tell them just that. Jesus, I thought this was an open and shut case.’
‘You know Judge Capske and his wife had cut ties with David because he was marrying a non-Jew?’
‘No, I didn’t know that.’
‘Did you know David Capske was big into cocaine a year back?’
‘Come on. Harper, I know nothing till you tell me.’
‘We can’t presume it’s political just because someone emailed. I’ve got the team bringing in evidence all the time. Just let me see this my way. What have the Feds got? Our victim’s related to Judge Capske — that’s it. You going to hand over every investigation on account of their parent’s CV?’
Lafayette grabbed Harper’s shoulder and turned him towards the window.
‘Look out there, Harper. What do you see?’
Harper stared out of the sixth-floor window down to the street below. The crowd of news teams kept growing. The nearside sidewalk had already been filled, and new teams and the later arrivals from the print media had set up on the opposite side of the street. The whole mass of people seemed to be in constant circulation. ‘I see about a hundred and fifty people down there telling some bullshit story before we’ve even got an autopsy report,’ he said.
‘What you see is pressure,’ said Lafayette. ‘By the fucking truckload. They’ve got Judge Capske’s rulings and every third one is some battle with the gun lobby. He’s been threatened a hundred times. They don’t need an autopsy report to put two and two together. And someone called them, Harper. Someone wanted this to make the front page.’
‘I get the connection, Captain. I get how we’re supposed to read this, but we’ve got to work from evidence, not from what the media think.’
‘That’s how it used to be, Harper, but you know as well as I do that this is not how it is these days. The media is your biggest fucking threat. Worse than me, Harper. They apply the pressure, start questioning why a homicide team are leading on a political assassination, why we’re ignoring the obvious, and we’re history.’
‘Looks to me that this is an East Harlem gang shooting. Cocaine found at the scene. All the hallmarks.’
‘Don’t bullshit me, Harper. Twenty-four hours, then I’m fighting our corner at a multi-jurisdictional meeting with the Feds and Counter-Terrorism, and you better give me something better than three wraps of cocaine and a smile.’
‘If it’s a political kill, then I’ll back off, but until I get to look at the whole story, I can’t lie down for the Feds or anyone else.’
The Captain stared down at the street. ‘It’s the way of things now. Trial by media. You don’t want to get caught up in the middle of it.’
‘We need time,’ Harper repeated. He looked at the man who’d headed up North Manhattan Homicide for nine years and protected him for most of them. He knew Lafayette’s intentions were good, but sometimes things got taken out of the Captain’s hands. ‘I’ll get you something.’
Harper started down the corridor. Lafayette called after him, ‘Why do you want to play it like this, Harper? A conviction on this isn’t going to be easy. The media will want a fall guy. Who do you think that’s going to be?’
‘I am what I am,’ said Harper. ‘Let’s just say I get excited by the complex cases.’
‘This might be the shortest lead you’ve ever taken,’ said Lafayette.
Harper turned. ‘If I’ve got just twenty-four hours, I need help. I want Blue Team, plus four other detectives. No rookies — I want experienced guys. I want whoever it is leading the Federal investigation to come and tell me what he’s got. I want a profiler from the FBI Field Office to start working on this. And I want someone to keep the press happy. I need a specialist team to respond to the calls. We’re going to get a lot.’
‘You finished?’
‘For now,’ said Harper.
He moved back into the investigation room. The overriding smell was of coffee and fresh paint; it wasn’t a good mix, or a good time to start a major refurb. Three maintenance men in blue overalls were finishing up the latest addition to North Manhattan Homicide’s investigation room — a new set of cubicles for each of the detective teams.
The rest of the room remained as it had for twelve years: a big open space with a dirty blue carpet and a long string of fluorescent lights that leaked out a dull yellow glow. Outside, the sun hit the building only to show up the haze of deep gray dirt on the windows. Beyond the grime, the heavy bass note of the city could still be heard.
Harper walked across to his old desk, his head swimming with details from the case that he needed to get down and think about. He didn’t want a cubicle. Career advisers used cubicles. It wasn’t right. Harper just wanted the old, worn, paper-stacked brown wooden desk that had been good enough for the last five years. Blue Team liked to spread and merge and, like all cops, they didn’t like change.
Calls of, ‘Hey, champ!’ followed Harper through to where the rest of the team were setting up base camp. Cops didn’t make a very sentimental bunch. It never took long to go from a hero to a zero in the eyes of your fans. Harper shrugged it off.
Eddie Kasper pulled out a chair and fixed his backside to it with a sigh. ‘What did he say?’
‘The press want it to be political. The Feds want to argue jurisdiction. I need something to give the Captain and the Chief of Detectives if we’re going to keep this in house. And that means I need to know why Capske was killed.’
‘What if it is some wacko from the gun lobby?’
‘I got to tell you, Eddie, I’m not buying this Judge Capske thing. There are too many questions. Why the son not the father? Why has no political organization claimed the kill? They say it’s a political statement but not what for or who made it.’
‘You’ve got a point.’
‘Then ask another question: why would they torture the guy? If it’s a group, then they’ve got to be in and out fast. This feels different. This killer liked to spend time with his victim.’
Eddie narrowed his focus. ‘You know something more than you’re saying, Harper? You got that look about you.’
‘Maybe this is about Judge Capske and some group who thinks he’s a threat to American freedom, but if it is, they found someone who hated the victim. Hated him so bad they wanted to watch him bleed to death. Think about the mind that can do that, Eddie. If Denise Levene were here, she’d say the same thing. Overkill like this is pretty unusual — it’s either a hell of a political statement or it’s not political at all, it’s something much more personal.’
Squad Room, Missing Persons
March 7, 4.15 p.m.
Denise spent three hours being spat at, hounded and abused — and what’s more, she paid for the privilege. After the session, she didn’t go home. She walked a while and thought about things. What Mac had done was not nice but it had left her feeling stronger than she had in months.
She grabbed a cab over to Missing Persons. All she was thinking about as Mac was screaming at her was Abby Goldenberg and what she might be going through. Abby Goldenberg who was just sixteen and had her whole life ahead of her.
Denise could help herself now, but if Abby was somewhere out there she wanted to try to help her too. The guy on the desk called upstairs and Detective Sarah Gauge came down, welcomed her and showed her into their offices.
At the squad room at Missing Persons, Abby Goldenberg’s disappearance was cataloged in four large box-files and one chronologically ordered lever-arch file. The two detectives had gone through a lot of leads in the eight days since her disappearance.
Although they’d not voiced the level of their concerns to Dr Goldenberg, it appeared that they’d treated it as a potential abduction since day one. They’d even tried to get the detectives from the Major Case Squad to consider it a kidnapping. The latter had looked at the case-file and sent it back, saying there wasn’t a single shred of evidence. Or, more importantly, the evidence they did have suggested she was a runaway.
Denise saw the problem. If the case stayed with Missing Persons, Abby Goldenberg would become another sad photograph on the NYPD Missing Persons website.
Denise flicked through the case-files. Munroe and Gauge had been working hard to find a break, often on their own time. Not many cops would’ve visited every last person on Dr Goldenberg’s list, but they had done it. Was it something to do with the girl’s beauty or her father’s distress? It was difficult to say what moved cops to go the extra mile, but in the end it came down to a mixture of professionalism and personal integrity.
Denise pulled out the daily report summaries written by Munroe. The pair didn’t seem to have taken a break in eight days. ‘You’ve done well,’ Denise said. ‘You’ve kept the trail warm.’ She flipped another page; pulled out an FBI profile. It was a one-page document, nothing more.
Denise turned to Gauge. ‘You seem pretty convinced that Abby’s not just a runaway.’
‘I know runaways. What can I say? Some strike you that way, some don’t. I can’t see this Abby kid putting her father through this if she could help it. Not a chance.’
‘So, if she didn’t run, what happened?’
‘Rape murder, most probably. The body buried in some shallow grave or cut up and stored in someone’s ice compartment.’ She saw Denise’s face whiten. ‘Sorry, Denise. But it’s the truth. These things we know and it takes some doing to keep her old man from thinking them. I’m not cynical. I hope that she is a damn runaway. I hope she’s on some romantic delusion with some idiot boyfriend — I hope she’s screwing half of New Jersey to impress her mom. I hope she’ll come back tomorrow, but they don’t come back, not often, not after eight days. Not when they’re sixteen and don’t have a drug or home problem.’
‘How much time you got left on the case?’
‘None. We’ve been busting a gut to finish our other caseloads, working our own time, and generally lying and shit to give this case some light, but we’re all done. The Squad Sergeant is going to move it to the back room.’
‘And then what happens to Abby?’
‘We keep in contact with her father every few months, we give the impression that we’re still looking. Officially it’s still an open case, but between you and me, it doesn’t get a second of our time.’
‘He’s a smart man, he probably guesses. I was thinking that’s why he mentioned me. I’m a link — Columbia and NYPD.’
‘Yes, it could be. You want some time with this stuff?’
‘Please.’
‘Well, let us know if you think we’ve missed something.’
‘What’s the bottom line?’
‘Unless you can find some physical evidence to prove to the Squad Sergeant that this is an abduction or murder, then it’s over for Abby. She’s a statistic.’
Denise nodded. She looked down at the FBI profile. ‘They sent this through to you?’
‘We made up some details about the case to get a second opinion.’
Denise read the profile.
‘Any use?’ said Gauge.
‘Inductive profiling. It’s pretty basic. They use the limited information they’ve got about known criminals and match them up with the crime under consideration. All this tells you is that in the last twenty years, the kind of person abducting teenage girls in this type of location tended to be men aged somewhere between thirty-two and forty-five years old who have previous convictions. It’s not going to help you much.’
‘It didn’t.’
Denise took a pen and pulled a clean sheet of paper from the tray on the desk. ‘Deductive profiling works quite differently. The Feds use statistical averages, but that’s a blunt tool. Deductive reasoning is harder but it uses every piece of forensic evidence, every detail of the victim, the location and time of the attack to build an individualized picture of the perpetrator.’
‘There’s nothing for you to work on.’
‘I can piece something together. At least, I can try.’
‘Well, let us know if you need anything else,’ said Sarah Gauge. ‘Right now I’ve got a missing prostitute and an absconded husband to track down.’
Detective Gauge left the room and Denise was alone. A research psychologist by training, she had worked for years on the relationships between behavior and personality types, comparing these to criminal profiles and then analyzing where FBI and police profiles had gone wrong. It had drawn her into contact with killers across America, but always from a safe distance.
She took the job at the NYPD to get closer to the action and in a very short time, she was too close altogether.
Her research had shown her that inductive profiling worked in less than fifty per cent of cases. Human beings were not entirely predictable and Denise was interested in the fifty per cent who were more difficult to profile simply by using statistics. These were difficult because they were not normal. They were the criminals with psychologies so distorted and perverse that basic models and types didn’t help. They needed individual attention.
On the piece of paper in front of her, she started to analyze the victim. It was often the biggest part of the profile, trying to understand why the killer was motivated to take this particular girl and for what particular reason. Denise wrote down everything she could about the kind of girl that Abby was.
The facts were simple. The last thing they knew about Abby was that she left home just before 5.15 p.m. and was last seen leaving the house by her father. A driver spotted her crossing Parkway, but didn’t see anyone following her. There was a report that a truck nearly knocked her over. So presumably Abby was preoccupied. She was going somewhere secretive and she changed her clothes, so it would be something to do with a boy or a band. Denise couldn’t really see another reason for her to deceive her father. And this was to protect him, not harm him.
Denise concluded that Abby was someone who was willing to listen to her own feelings and not be swayed by others. It seemed unlikely then, that she would have been seduced into a car, as some girls were by clever kidnappers who appeared injured, or seemed to need help or offer some inducement. She would also have had a high degree of self-confidence.
Abby was sixteen, pretty, adventurous and slim. A sexual motive was certainly possible, if not probable. She was also Jewish and Denise couldn’t rule out that this might have been important to the killer in some way. There had been no contact with the family — no ransom request, and the family was not wealthy. Kidnapping for monetary gain seemed implausible. It was more probable, therefore, that it was someone she knew or who knew her family.
A personal motive seemed likely. It might well have been someone who had become obsessed with her. But the cops had exhausted that train of enquiry and found nothing. If it was a relative, a friend or a stalker, they’d kept their interests well hidden.
Abby had left the house in the dark just before it started to rain. It was not even a predictable event, as Abby rarely went out on a school night and this seemed to be a plan that she told no one about.
An opportunist would more likely be trawling in a car and would take someone waiting or in need of help, not someone rushing to meet up with the new man in her life.
No, Denise thought, Abby wasn’t just unlucky — someone had targeted her specifically and either knew she was heading out that night or was following her. For that reason, Denise thought that the killer was likely to be known to the suspect and to live close. It might have even been a neighbor who saw her pass and decided to follow.
If someone had planned to kidnap the girl, it was likely that they would scope the victim’s movements and choose a place and time that was part of the girl’s normal routine. But this wasn’t part of her normal routine and yet they somehow knew she was heading out and knew to be there. The perpetrator had to be very confident and very proficient to take someone and leave no evidence.
Denise pushed her short blond hair back and rubbed her forehead. She tried to clear her head. A moment later, Sarah Gauge ran back in the room. She walked past Denise and across to a couple of guys on the far-side desks. ‘Guys, switch on the TV,’ she said.
‘What is it?’
‘Captain says they’ve identified the body in Harlem.’
‘What body?’ called Denise.
‘Unidentified bodies excite Missing Persons; they found one this morning in East Harlem.’
A couple of the guys from the squad started searching for the remote. Sarah walked across and reached up to the TV. ‘It works with a switch, too, fellas.’
‘Jesus, Johnny,’ said one of them. ‘Did you know they made them with switches? Is that like the latest thing, Gauge?’
‘No,’ said Gauge. ‘The latest thing is a wise-ass cop with a face full of pizza.’ The TV came on. It was an old model, pinned to the wall high on a metal arm. Sarah said to Denise, ‘Lot of our cases turn up at the morgue as unidentified bodies.’
Denise rose and stood next to Sarah. ‘It’s a cruel job you’ve got.’
‘It’s nothing new. I’ve been checking every day for the bodies, hoping it’s not Abby.’
The news channel was throwing out information about a crime scene up in Harlem. A dark-haired reporter with hair blowing about was live at the scene, speaking in an urgent voice with very little to say. The red tickertape across the top of the screen declared Breaking News and the voices of the two anchormen in the studio could be heard as they tried to piece together the story. Someone had died. It was someone connected to some case in the news, but they couldn’t say any more. It was big news, but they were unable to report the facts until the family had been informed.
Denise leaned in and her hands started to shake. A body found. As yet unidentified, read the tape. Her mind immediately started to imagine how they might find Abby. But what was the likelihood? She stared at the screen.
‘Over to Kirsty, down on 112th Street. Can you tell us what’s happening?’ There was a pause, a crackle, then a different tone as Kirsty’s voice came on. Behind her, the chaotic noise of a hundred media teams clamoring for news.
‘We’ve just seen another team of detectives head to the crime scene. As yet, the NYPD have not made a statement. We’re just waiting to hear. That’s all we can do. We’ll let you know the moment things change.’
‘But what do we know, Kirsty? Is anything confirmed?’
Kirsty pushed several strands of hair out of her face. ‘All I can say is what we were told this morning. We received an early-morning email which told us that there was a body. It gave a name, but we can’t confirm.’
Then out of the chaos, a familiar face appeared. Denise watched Tom Harper move towards the camera. He was surrounded at once by a group of baying reporters. He wasn’t saying much, but was showing signs of irritation. The camera went in close. Denise saw his face — the bruised, swollen eye, the cut lip. She shivered. What had happened to him? She couldn’t help feeling for him and it wasn’t anger. That was strange. The anger wasn’t there.
Denise remembered what her therapist had said. ‘You’ve got to work out what’s going on in yourself, in the past and in the present.’ Tom Harper was in the present. It was the first time in three months that she’d seen his face, although not the first time she had thought about him.
Up to that point, she’d kept herself physically away from him, connecting him so strongly with her experience at the hands of a serial killer that she couldn’t cope with the thought of seeing him. Somewhere in her mind, she blamed him for dragging her into the case and for what happened to her. But looking at the man on the television, she realized that he was just the fall guy. He was easy to hate, because Harper didn’t want to be hated and Denise needed a reaction. Tears formed in her eyes.
On the screen, Harper was framed by the building and two other cops. He pulled out a piece of paper, stood still and stared into the camera. ‘The NYPD were called to an incident early this morning. Two officers responded to the call and found a single victim. The body was tightly wound in barbed wire making identification difficult. We have now been able to confirm the identity of the victim and we have informed the family. I can now let you know that the victim’s name is David Capske, aged twenty-seven. As soon as we have further information we will let you know. No questions, please.’
Denise felt a sudden strong sense of relief. It wasn’t Abby’s body in the alley. She turned to Sarah who seemed to feel the same.
She continued to watch as he came on screen again and appeared close to the camera. Tom Harper. He was her problem in the present, the problem she had to resolve. She had to let herself forgive him, but more than that, she had to let herself try to be part of something that mattered to her.
She stared at Harper — his hair ruffled, his damaged face, his coat torn at the shoulder. Tom Harper. Always at the scene, always in her thoughts, always at the center of everything, always where the trouble was. But if there was one man she’d like at her shoulder now, looking at the mass of information about Abby Goldenberg, it’d be Harper every time.
Investigation Room, North Manhattan Homicide
March 7, 5.05 p.m.
Harper returned from interviewing Lucy Steller and Capske’s family. He called Blue Team together for a briefing and pulled up a chair.
‘We’ve spoken to Lucy Steller. She’s twenty-nine, works in a 7–Eleven store and writes novels. She’s badly shaken up, but her story seems simple enough. She left the club with David, walked home but when they got to her building, David Capske received a phone call. He told Lucy that he had to go to help a friend. He wouldn’t tell her why. He said he’d be an hour. The only other thing she said is that they saw a car outside the club. A red car. Someone inside was smoking. We’re checking CCTV on that. Eddie’s pieced together a tape of Capske’s last walk.’
Eddie Kasper dimmed the lights and clicked on the laptop in front of him. ‘We got every piece of CCTV tape between Lucy Steller’s apartment and the crime scene. I’ve got Capske in seven different shots.’ The team watched the grainy images of Capske walking up various streets.
‘Here,’ said Eddie, pointing. ‘He took out a thousand dollars from this ATM. It was found in his wallet. Later, he received a second phone call. We’ve got to guess that the first phone call told him how much money was needed, the second was for directions. So this might suggest that he was lured up there due to drugs or some kind of deal or blackmail. We got nothing else, but we’re going over this tape frame by frame.’
‘We got a trace on these calls?’ asked Garcia.
‘Damn right,’ said Harper. ‘Greco, what did you find?’
‘We’ve got one cell-phone number used in the two calls to Capske and the 911 call this morning. Untraceable account and the phone is not transmitting. The killer bought a cell, used it, dumped it.’
‘So the person who called Capske also called the cops,’ said Harper. ‘Why did he do that? We need answers. What else? Ricky? We got any new witnesses with anything to say yet? I can’t believe no one heard anything.’
‘We’ve done four hours of door-to-door. We leafleted the whole area. We got a woman in Jensen House who heard a single gunshot at around 3.30 a.m. Two more witnesses give the same time.’
‘That’s good, we’ve got a TOD right there. Eddie, what’s your best estimate on when he arrived at the alleyway?’
‘Last frame is clocked at 1.38 a.m. It’s five minutes from Jensen House. Let’s say he arrived at 1.43 a.m.’
Harper stood up. ‘We’ve got a guy leaves his fiancée after an unexpected phone call. It’s something he doesn’t want his fiancée to know about, so we presume it’s trouble. He takes out a thousand dollars, walks to East 112th and arrives at 1.43 a.m. Between that time and 3.30 a.m. he is wrapped in barbed wire. That’s an hour and forty-seven minutes the killer spent with his victim. Does that sound like a hit to anyone?’ No one spoke up. ‘Another detail we got is the weather report. Rain started at 2.41 a.m. The ground under the victim was dry. He was lying in barbed wire in that spot for fifty minutes before he was shot. Why?’
‘Maybe the killer was talking to the vic,’ said Mary Greco.
‘Well, that’s one possibility. One thing we can assume is that this killer is confident. More than that, he’s fearless. Two hours with the vic in a public alley — that’s no gangbanger or deranged killer. That’s an organized and planned mind. Garcia, you getting anything on these right-wing groups who have been targeting the Judge?’
‘Ratten found these right-wing assholes getting heated on the forums,’ said Garcia. ‘A lot of celebratory shit about the murder. They read it as a direct political attack.’
‘Well, that’s going to be front-page news by tomorrow.’
‘Yeah, they’re calling the killer a hero.’
‘Fucking hard to believe these bastards,’ said Ratten.
‘Isn’t freedom of speech just great?’ mocked Harper. ‘Can we trace them?’
‘Maybe, maybe not,’ said Ratten. ‘It’s a matter of priority. Could take two men four days to track this thread down and then you’re going to find that most of them are just a bunch of inadequate losers, sitting in their bedrooms, kicking back Oreos, living with their parents and collecting welfare. Also,’ Ratten continued, ‘I did take a quick look and the key information is encrypted.’
Ratten moved across to a PC and tapped the keyboard. ‘The forum is called the White Wall, but there’s no overarching organization that claims to run it. Not that I can find yet. But a few of them claim to be part of something called the White Wolves.’
‘Find out what it means,’ said Harper. ‘Give the lead to the Feds and get them to trace it. It might lead somewhere.’
‘Sure,’ said Ratten.
Harper pulled out a set of photographs from the alley. ‘I got Forensics to give me something on the single or multiple killer angle. At the moment, they can only find traces of one set of boot prints in the wet. They aren’t clean prints, but because kicking the wire has cut up the soles, they can ID each print and they’re pretty sure that there was only one guy in that alley. Our killer’s not just organized and fearless, he’s strong and determined.’
Harper took a marker pen, wrote the name David Capske at the top of a clean white board and pinned up a big glossy photograph of the twenty-seven year old who seemed to have got caught up in a world where he didn’t belong.
‘Capske was also a user,’ said Greco. ‘Apparently, he gave it up after meeting Lucy Steller, but he might have been looking to score again. His friends still use the same dealer. We met him, but he tells us Capske’s not using him.’
Harper turned to the team. ‘Keep at it. Something will break. This whole picture doesn’t add up. Someone lured him to that alleyway. Maybe the drugs were a lure, maybe it was blackmail. He took out the thousand dollars for something. Keep looking.’ The team started to move. ‘Oh, one more thing,’ he added. ‘Victim Support working with Lucy Steller told us that a reporter had already offered her money for the story.’
‘A reporter? Seriously? You get a name?’
‘No. But if it’s not Erin Nash, I’d be surprised. Be aware, that’s all.’
‘She doesn’t give up, does she?’ said Eddie.
‘No, she doesn’t, so get moving. I need to know more about this killer. We’ve got the FBI profiler already working on a profile. All we know so far is that he’s powerful, he’s angry and he doesn’t lose control for a moment. That’s a pretty scary combination.’
Lock-Up, Bedford-Stuyvesant
March 7, 5.27 p.m.
The barking of the dogs announced his return. Abby’s hands were handcuffed behind her back and her mouth was gagged with a leather restraint. The floor of the small room was covered in a thin mattress. The room, as far as she could tell, was no more than a closet. There was not enough space to lie flat. Abby could either lie on her side with her knees bent or sit up against the walls and stretch out her legs. She was wearing the same tartan skirt and T-shirt she’d put on eight days earlier. To one side of the mattress on the thin strip of bare concrete floor was a green plastic bedpan.
There was no direct light in the room, but the wall didn’t quite reach the corrugated roof and light from outside filtered in. Not much, but it helped. Complete darkness would’ve been harder to cope with. Strange as it was, you were grateful for the smallest things. A thin mattress, a chink of light, a bedpan.
Sometimes Abby imagined the things that he might do to her. She let the horror snake around her and leave her cold with sweat. But he hadn’t killed her or raped her. Yet. She attempted to convince herself that this was because he was trying to get money out of her folks. For days she tried to work out why the smell of his cologne was familiar. It was a strong musky scent, but she couldn’t put a place or face on the smell. It was driving her crazy.
She tried to keep her mind from getting lost in the stupefying boredom by having imaginary conversations with friends, with her mom and dad, her grandparents. She visualized how they’d all react when she got out. How they’d be, what they’d say. She imagined the warm hugs, the wide eyes and big smiles, tainted with tears. She’d try to remember details from every part of her home, then she’d count the threads in the mattress and then recount them in different multiples. She had to keep her head straight. She was lucky she had her music, and in her head, she played note by note, practicing with imagined hands on an imagined saxophone.
Getting some kind of exercise was difficult, but there was enough space to stand and she spent some time each day standing and sitting, pressing her legs against the wall, turning, squatting, rising. It all helped to give some structure to the time.
On the wall she marked the days by dragging her cuffs in a single line across the brick. It was important to keep watch of time. The worst thing was the food. So little. Each day her abductor pushed a piece of bread, a piece of cheese and a cup of water through the flap. She would push out the bedpan. One little ritual.
She had tried to speak in the beginning, during the feeding times, when the restraint was removed. ‘I’m missing my dad, you know. He’ll be trying to solve this. Schoolwork will be piling up. My name is Abby Goldenberg.’
But he stopped it. Insisted on silence. The flap would shut and she would hear him move about, typing, changing clothes.
On the fourth day, she turned the mattress over and spent hours with her hands and teeth, pulling at a small tear. She had the idea that if she could get a rag of the mattress, by pressing her back to one wall and her feet to the other, she might be able to lift herself up to the roof and somehow push out a flag. It was not going to save her, but it might cause some attention and then she could hammer at the door with her feet. She’d tried that for hours already, but stopped out of frustration, and now tried it only every few hours. The thing was — her abductor was regular. He came at the same time each day. An hour or so before the sun went down. So she knew when it was safe to try to attract attention.
She was very cold. At night, all the time. Never anything but cold. She could hear cars and trucks and in the quiet hours, she could hear birds. They sometimes landed on the top of the roof and she listened to their footsteps.
The dogs barked outside. She felt terrible panic and the instant retching of her guts. The outer door opened and he was inside. The dogs sniffed and ran about the room as they did every time. Their claws scratched on the hard floor, they wagged their tails and bumped into things. There were lots of them and they sniffed at her door. She tried to count them, but there were too many.
The dogs were shooed out. The flap opened.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Can I come out… just for a second? Just for one second? Please let me. You’ve got to let me stretch my legs. You’ll never guess, it’s my sax exam tomorrow. If I don’t practice, I’ll fail. I want to talk to you. I understand why people do things. It might be good to talk about it.’
There was no reply. The bread and cheese were pushed through the flap. She used her feet to push the bedpan out. ‘For God’s sake, stop doing this,’ she said in a whisper. The bedpan scraped across the ground.
Then his hand grabbed her foot. She froze. His skin was cold. His fingers closed around her ankle. She could hear him breathing. Don’t react, she was telling herself. Don’t get angry. ‘I’ve been thinking about my mom,’ she said. ‘Missing her. She’s not a great mom. She’s a bit… selfish. You have to forgive people when they disappoint you, don’t you? Everyone’s got a reason to do what they do, it’s just we don’t always understand what those reasons are. Everyone’s a mystery, right?’
The hand released her and she pulled her foot back through the flap. She was gulping for air.
‘My name’s Abby,’ she said. ‘I’m just sixteen. I’m scared. I miss my home. That’s all, mister. I just miss my mom, my dad, my nana, my friends.’
There was no reply. The flap shot up and was locked.
Apartment, East Harlem
March 7, 5.55 p.m.
Harper crossed to the desk to sign out a department saloon. He needed to head up to the morgue and get the autopsy report. Dr Pense had said it’d be ready after 6 p.m. The guy on the desk raised his head and checked out Harper’s face. ‘Don’t tell me, I should see the other guy!’ he joked. Harper nodded, unsmiling, and took the keys without a word.
Harper walked down towards the car. He turned into the lot and stopped. Ahead of him, Erin Nash flashed a big cheap smile. The Daily Echo’s crime reporter looked lithe and purposeful, leaning on the hood of a parked SUV with one foot up on the chrome grille. Something about her had changed since he’d last seen her. He didn’t know what it was at first. Maybe it was wealth. She had made a lot of money selling her stories.
‘Erin, it’s nice to see you. You spot an opportunity to fuck us over again?’
‘Now, listen to you. I’ve come by to see how you are. Saw you at the crime scene. You look like shit. I was concerned.’
‘Concerned enough to ride straight to the victim’s grieving girlfriend and offer her money.’
‘Harper, you know that’s not ethical.’
‘That’s never stopped you before. I know it was you.’
‘You’re playing down the political angle on this murder, is that ethical?’
‘I’m playing the percentages. If someone’s targeting the government, then it’s the government’s problem. I’m just trying to solve a homicide.’
‘What about the coke? You seriously think he was shot while trying to score?’
‘I think the drugs might be relevant.’
‘I guessed you would.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘We’ve all got skeletons in the cupboard, right, including you, Tom Harper. A journalist’s job is to sniff them out.’
‘Yeah, well keep sniffing, I’ve got nothing to hide.’ Harper stared at Erin Nash and felt the anger coming in spurts. ‘What do you want?’
‘I’m not into scandal-mongering, Detective, but an old friend of yours tells me that you were in rehab for something a few years back. Amphetamine addiction, maybe.’
‘How much did you pay for that?’
‘Listen, I don’t want to make trouble and I wouldn’t want to do harm to an investigation, but give me something. This Capske guy was dealing, am I right? Maybe he got in over his head.’
‘I’m busy,’ said Harper.
Erin Nash let out a little light laugh. ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just walk away like that? You want me to run a drug story on you or on your victim? Nice simple choice.’
Harper stopped. He was running things over in his head. ‘If you’ve got something to say about me and you’ve got the evidence, then print it. If not, go back to the sewer.’
‘I wouldn’t get so hung up, Tom.’ Erin paused for a second. ‘I wouldn’t want to harm you just yet. You’re a hero, Harper; people want to hear more about you. New case, first major one since your big moment.’
Harper looked to the ground. ‘You want to know about David Capske, not me.’
‘Come on, Harper. Just want to know what you’re thinking? Trail a cop who’s trailing a killer, that kind of thing.’
‘Get this, Nash — it’s a no. If you can’t read it, put it in 72-point Helvetica like the rest of your headlines.’
‘His father’s a pretty important guy. A judge. This is going to run and run.’
‘I got nothing for you, Nash.’
‘Why were the media called this morning? What’s the connection?’
‘Not sure. Whoever killed Capske wanted a big audience and he knew how to get one.’
‘Gun lobby would love the attention,’ Erin said.
‘You’re a dog with a bone and you know I can’t say anything, even if I knew something. Which I don’t.’
‘You know nothing, right?’
‘And just for the record — you can’t quote me on that.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it, Detective.’ Erin Nash took out a card and handed it to Harper. ‘Just one more thing — here’s my number. You scratch mine and I’ll avoid pulling you off that great big pedestal.’ She looked at him and locked eyes with his. ‘So, soon as you get anything on this case, just holler.’
Erin Nash nodded and walked away. Harper watched her go. For a second, he wanted to reach out and shake her. Then his head started to pound again and he reached in his pocket for his painkillers, threw two pills down his throat and headed for his car.
Harper called Dr Pense from the car as the rain started to pound down again. ‘Hey, it’s Detective Harper. How’s it going with my corpse?’
‘Hell, Harper,’ Dr Pense said. ‘Well, it’s not nice, but I’ll be ready in thirty minutes.’
‘Anything I should know?’
‘I’ll tell you in thirty minutes.’
Harper looked at his watch. He needed a shower, a change of clothes and some more painkillers, and since he had a few more minutes before heading to the morgue, he pulled out and headed for home.
Harper climbed up the stairs and entered his two-room apartment. He never used heating, and as a result the apartment was constantly damp. He took a quick shower, saw the extent of his bruises for the first time and was shocked at how he’d let himself get beaten up. He dressed and found more painkillers. Well past their sell-by date, but he figured they’d work as good as any. He went to the window, took a quick look across the street. The hookers were huddled out of the rain, trying to peer into cars from a distance. It wasn’t working for them or the curb crawlers.
As quiet as Harper was, he found it hard to attain silence. His mind rarely stopped working. When he was on a case, that driven, tireless mind found a home and, for a time, his trait had a worthwhile outlet. As he was staring out into the rain, several thoughts passed through his mind. Each case was a puzzle that kept returning, and he knew that his mind was going back every few minutes to try to solve it afresh.
The shrill ring of the buzzer broke into his thoughts. He pushed open the window, took in the fumes of gasoline and rain and looked down to the ground floor — but whoever was there was taking cover from the cold sheets of rain. The ringing continued.
He walked to his buzzer. ‘Hello.’
‘Tom.’
Harper paused. ‘Denise?’ He felt his pulse rising with unexpected excitement.
‘Yes, Tom, it’s me.’
A line of heat ran along the underside of each of Harper’s eyes. He pressed his head to the cold gloss of the door. ‘Denise.’
‘It’s raining, Tom.’ There was a silence. ‘Tom, I’m getting soaked down here.’
‘Denise,’ he said again. He felt like a man encountering a ghost. It had been a long three months and she’d been in his thoughts every day. ‘I just don’t believe I’m hearing you. I called you — I left messages. You’ve never replied. I didn’t expect to hear from you.’
‘I got all your messages, Tom. Please believe it, and open the door. I’m freezing.’
Tom was on the stairs, heading down as fast as he could. He reached the front door and stared out. She was framed by the red wrought-iron bars that crossed the glass panel in the door. Her blond hair was shorter and plastered to her head, her face was charged with something he didn’t yet understand, she had lost some weight, but it was Denise. He watched her a moment and opened the door.
‘I can’t believe I’m actually looking at you.’
‘I’m sorry, Tom.’
‘For what?’
‘For being so… out of touch. I couldn’t cope with you.’ Denise’s eyes fell to the ground. ‘Sorry.’
‘Forget it,’ he said. He suddenly felt like the pieces of a puzzle he’d been struggling with for months had fallen into place. He was wide open. More open than he’d felt in months. Here she was. Denise Levene. He smiled.
‘I’ve hated you, you know,’ she said. ‘I want you to know that’s what’s been going through my sick head.’
‘You were always too honest. You could’ve kept that one to yourself for a while, at least.’ Harper looked at her. ‘Hell, maybe I’ve deserved it.’
‘I don’t think you have. I’ve been in a bad place. No idea how to get out.’ The tone of her voice dropped a note and with it the volume. ‘I went to see Mac.’
‘I’m surprised, I thought that wasn’t your thing.’
‘Been to see every other specialist there is. Thought I’d give your recommendation a try.’
‘What did you think?’
‘Brutal, but it works.’
‘That’s good to hear. Come on, let’s sort you out.’
Harper led her in silence up the stairs and walked into the apartment. She looked around in obvious dismay.
‘Wow, you’ve decorated,’ she said.
‘It really makes a difference, doesn’t it?’ They looked at the one wall that had been half-coated in white paint. Harper went to a closet, pulled out a large clean towel and passed it to her. Denise ruffled her hair and pulled the towel around her. She sat down. She was shivering but still smiling. He went through to his bedroom and brought out a pair of sweatpants, a T-shirt and a hooded top.
‘You should get into these, before you—’ He stopped himself.
‘Catch my death?’ she offered.
He twisted his mouth. ‘Okay, I’ll cut out the fussing.’
Denise took the clothes and disappeared into the bathroom.
Harper stood at the door. ‘So, what you working on?’
‘What do you mean?’ said Denise.
‘I can read you, Denise. You didn’t come here just because of my problems.’
Denise called through the door, ‘You’re still good on observations. What gave it away?’
‘You’ve got a newspaper on you. You never liked newspapers. I figure you’re looking for news, which means you’re up to something. And, the big giveaway is you came here.’
Denise opened the bathroom door and stood there. ‘I came to ask for help.’
‘What is it?’
‘An old colleague and a missing child. His daughter ran away or something worse. He doesn’t understand. I went by to see him. He’s a mess. He thinks something or someone happened.’
‘And what do you think?’
‘I agree with him.’
‘What does he want you to do?’
‘Prove that she didn’t run away. Missing Persons are shelving the case. I’m all he’s got.’
‘You get anywhere?’
‘I’m not a detective. But you are.’
Harper looked up. ‘On a good day.’ Then: ‘Can I offer you something? A word of advice?’
‘You can try.’
‘Don’t try to solve other people’s problems because you can’t solve your own.’
She looked up, hurt. ‘That’s unfair, Tom. I’m trying to get back to work.’
‘You could have come to see me any time.’
‘No, Tom, I had to know this was about me, about whether I could face this alone.’
‘Come on, you’re a helper, Denise — all your life, you’ve been saving someone, helping someone. That’s who you are. You helped me. You brought yourself up. You saved your old man from losing hope when he was inside.’
‘No, I didn’t. I left him. I visited every week. That was all I could do.’
‘Sure you did, Denise. He told you that you always had to have faith. The same faith you used to get you through. What did he call it? That thing in the dark that he said he always held every night and that kept him from being afraid.’
‘His fantastic sparkler,’ she said.
‘That was you, Denise. That was you he was holding in the dark all those years in prison. His fantastic sparkler.’
Denise broke into silent sobs. Harper didn’t comfort her. It wasn’t pain that she was suffering. It was relief.
‘What the hell do you want, you bastard? Making me cry and look weak and foolish. This is why I hate you!’
‘I want to help you.’
‘It’s not that kind of help I want, Tom. I’m involved in this case because I think I can do some good. I went to see the case-files; I started a profile. Victimology.’
‘What did you find?’
‘A way in. I think there’s something here.’
‘Okay,’ said Tom. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll help if I can, but I’ve got a big case just starting up.’
‘I know. I saw you on TV,’ she said. ‘What’s the deal?’
‘Put simply, David Capske got wrapped in barbed wire and shot. Everyone has it down as a political killing.’
‘But you don’t see it like that?’
‘No evidence. I know it’s nice and neat, and someone wants us to see it like that, but I see something that I’ve only ever seen with sadistic serial killers.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Someone who’s got no real ulterior motive. The kill is the thing, the whole thing and nothing but the thing. Whoever killed Capske liked it. Liked it a lot and will do it again.’
‘Gratification killer?’
Harper raised his eyebrows.
‘You got a profiler working on this?’ said Denise.
‘Rookie that the Feds sent.’
‘Any good?’
‘Not good enough. We’ve only got twenty-four hours before Lafayette rolls over and the Feds come in and take over the investigation.’
‘I could take a look,’ she said. ‘Offer a comment.’
‘Tit for tat?’
‘One good deed deserves another…’
‘What do you want me to do on the missing girl?’ asked Harper.
‘I need some help getting access to the Hate Crime Unit.’
‘What do you need them for?’
‘A couple of months back, Abby was roughed up as she walked home. It’s all I’ve got. A group of four young men. Hate Crime found them and took them in for questioning but couldn’t make anything stick. A week later, there was a swastika painted on the Goldenbergs’ front door.’
‘You think it’s related?’
‘It’s the only evidence of anyone targeting the family and my profile suggests that if Abby was attacked, then it was someone who knew where she lived, knew her name and wanted to hurt her and her family.’
‘What are the guys called?’
‘Raymond Hicks, Patrick Ellery, Leo Lukanov, Thomas Ocksborough.’
Harper wrote down the names. ‘I know someone in Hate Crime. I can call him up, give you a good reference, get you some information.’
‘Thanks, Tom. It might help.’
‘And if you’re going to help me, you need to take a look at this victim.’
‘I suppose I’d have to.’
‘It’s not pretty. It’s a hell of a way back in to your day job.’
‘I’ll cope,’ said Denise. ‘Or at least I’ll give that impression.’
Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Manhattan
March 7, 6.36 p.m.
Harper waited for Eddie Kasper to find his way to the department parking lot. Eddie got in the front passenger seat and turned round: Denise Levene sat in the back of the sedan. Eddie’s eyes opened wide. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’
‘Yeah, maybe, but I’m not one of your conquests.’
‘I wish,’ said Eddie, ‘but I don’t go for smart women, they see right through me.’
‘And see what? A good guy with a fine line in self-deprecation.’
‘Hey, Tom, she’s back, right? The mouth and everything.’
‘Yeah,’ said Tom, ‘and everything.’
They drove by the city Medical Examiner’s office and caught up with Dr Laura Pense, the Deputy Chief Medical Examiner. Denise stood at the back of the small group as they entered. She wanted to be closest to the door if the panic attack started.
Harper turned to Levene. ‘This one is pretty bad, Denise. You sure you want to tag along?’ She nodded.
The two detectives and Denise Levene walked inside and trailed down familiar corridors. Dr Laura Pense was sitting in a small windowless office, writing up paperwork. Harper knocked and stood at the door.
‘Hey, Dr Pense, how are you?’
Laura Pense continued to hammer out something on her keyboard. ‘All good, here, Detective, how about you?’
‘He’s a fucking mess,’ said Eddie, ‘but you already know that, right?’
Laura turned and saw Harper’s face for the first time. ‘Jesus,’ she said. ‘Were you assaulted or something?’
‘Or something,’ said Harper.
Laura Pense stood up, acknowledged Denise with a smile and then peered more closely at Harper’s face. ‘That’s pretty bad. Abrasions to the nose, lips, jaw, eyes. Deep tissue bruising. Potential fracture on the left cheek. Is that sore, there?’
‘I can’t feel it any more.’
‘He’s popping four painkillers every hour.’
Laura Pense raised her eyebrows in disapproval. ‘Don’t tell me you’ve been boxing?’
‘You’re right, he wasn’t boxing,’ said Eddie. ‘No, you couldn’t call what he was doing anything more than giving someone target practice.’
‘You been checked out?’ said Laura.
‘This guy?’ said Eddie. ‘This is a Neanderthal, Doctor, a throw-back. You know, when men were men and pain was personal disgrace.’
‘Macho men!’ said Dr Pense. ‘God, the amount of big guys I’ve seen who have been brought down by a spot of blood. Intracranial hemorrhages, Harper — perhaps you can fix that yourself, too.’
‘Is that my report?’ said Harper, pointing at the computer screen.
‘Are you lead on the Capske case?’ asked Laura.
‘I’ve been given the honor. Blue Team are on the case.’
‘Well, I’m just signing off.’
‘Anything I should know?’
‘Sure, come through. You got to see this.’
Harper felt reluctance stir inside him. He didn’t feel too good already, but he followed Dr Pense through to the autopsy room. Eddie was even further behind with Denise.
Dr Pense put on a fresh pair of gloves and approached a gurney covered in a green sheet. She whipped it back like a magician.
The sight was not magical at all, but macabre and strange. The barbed-wire cage had been opened with wire cutters and each clawing strand of wire pulled back. It lay open like a metal ribcage or a huge barbed chrysalis. Beneath the barbed wire was a bloody carcass. The skin was punctured by hundreds of dark round holes and slits.
‘Some of the puncture wounds are straight, but many have torn and ripped the skin where the victim has struggled. They’re deep too, deep enough to get right through the skin. He lost a lot of blood. Practically bled to death.’
Harper and Kasper passed their eyes over the corpse.
‘It’s a vicious death,’ said Dr Pense. ‘I can’t be exact but he’s been left to bleed for an hour or more. Tortured, I should say. In incredible pain. He probably blacked out. Look at this.’ She tilted his head so that one eye could be seen. The eyeball was punctured in two places. ‘Every single inch is punctured. You can’t imagine. You really can’t imagine.’
‘So, we got anything to nail his killer?’
‘He was shot once in the forehead. Little black wound, right here. He must’ve been tight to the ground, the bullet went in through the skull, out, hit the ground, re-entered and mashed the brain like an electric whisk.’
They both looked at Laura. ‘Nice image.’
‘Sorry, I’ve been taking French cookery courses, you know, trying to keep alive.’
‘That’s nice. Did you find the bullet?’
‘Yeah, sleeping like a baby in the left frontal lobe.’ Laura picked up a little lump of metal with a pair of forceps and dropped it back into the tray with a jingle.
‘It’s not got much shape left,’ said Harper. ‘The wound is unusually small too. What’s the exit wound look like?’
‘Interesting that you should ask. Bullet left the skull here. Not a great piece of scalp knocked out. Looked like it zipped through.’
‘It’s unusual,’ said Harper. He lifted the bullet with the forceps and turned it under his eye. ‘There’s something about this that isn’t right. I want Ballistics to tell me what they can about this, Eddie. Can you get them to do it tonight?’
‘Not much for Ballistics to go on,’ said Eddie. ‘But I’ll give it a go.’
‘Did you find a cartridge?’ asked Dr Pense.
‘No,’ said Harper. ‘You find anything more?’
Laura shrugged. ‘We had samples taken; we did checks, but nothing to report, yet. I mean, we don’t know what we’re looking for, but his organs all look healthy. Apart from his septum.’
‘The coke?’
‘Yeah, signs of damage but it’s healed. I’d say he used to be a user, but not in the last year or so. I won’t know if there was any coke in his blood for another few hours. And another thing. We’ve got a lot of dirt under his nails.’
‘What kind?’
‘Petroleum-based with some black dye.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Boot polish.’
‘So he cleaned his shoes before he went out dancing,’ said Eddie.
‘He was wearing white sneakers,’ said Harper.
‘You got any theories?’ said Laura.
‘Maybe he cleaned the killer’s boots,’ said Denise from the far side of the room. ‘Punishment and containment. It wouldn’t surprise me if he humiliated and demeaned the victim first.’
Harper and Dr Pense turned. ‘Where did that come from, Denise?’
‘Deduction. If it’s not his boot polish, maybe this killer’s got some big-time subservience thing going on — a malignant narcissist, something like that.’
Harper and Levene caught each other’s eye. Harper sensed there was more that Denise could say, but he dropped it.
‘Could be a small-time dealer. Selling to his friends. Got mixed up with some bad boys,’ said Eddie.
‘Not the usual MO for a gangbanger, is it? They shoot and scatter like rats,’ said Harper.
‘We’ve also got slight abrasions to his knees, just surface scratches.’
‘Was he dragged across the floor?’
‘No. Not dragged. This was like he was kneeling. Fits with Denise’s idea that the killer made him polish his boots.’
‘Kneeling?’
‘At some point, before the torture and execution.’
The four of them stared down at the bloody carcass with the horrible possibilities reverberating in each of their thoughts. Harper gazed at Laura as the harshness of the word ‘execution’ hung in the air. ‘Anything else?’
‘Yes,’ said Laura, ‘but I don’t know what it is.’ She walked over to Capske’s body and swabbed the corpse’s chest until it was clear of blood. ‘There,’ she said.
‘What are they?’
‘Tiny needlemarks. Some have traces of ink, but the barbed wire has torn most of it to shreds.’
‘They look like they form a series of lines,’ said Harper.
‘Yeah, there’s a few more in the torn skin. Can’t reconstruct anything. What do you think?’
‘Tattoo,’ said Harper. ‘It looks like a home-made tattoo.’
‘There was also a card stuck to his chest.’
‘What?’
Laura Pense brought out a small rectangle of black card. ‘It’s got his name on it and the word Loyalty.’
‘Where was it?’
‘Inside his shirt.’
They looked at the card and then at Capske’s chest where a series of small pinpricks stretched across the skin — but the tears and puncture marks obscured them. The marks ran across his chest and each line was in a different direction. Some were straight, others curved slightly, some were horizontal, others vertical.
Harper took out his sketchpad and drew the marks. ‘It might be something important,’ he said. ‘Shame the barbed wire has ripped it all away.’
‘The marks were made with a fine-point needle,’ said Dr Pense. ‘The killer took his time doing that.’
Harper looked down at his sketchbook. The marks led left to right in a line and fell away to the right. All in all, there were about thirty-two tiny puncture marks. The others were lost in the torn skin. ‘Denise, you got any idea?’
‘Sociopathic not political. Maybe the killer thinks he’s fulfilling some political purpose, but this kind of behavior is compulsive. The need to mark the corpse, to torture, to execute.’
‘I agree,’ said Harper. ‘What about the word on the card?’
‘Loyalty. It might give you a clue to the motive or it might be related to his conceptual framework, his ideology. He thinks this is purposeful, even necessary.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘A typed card in black. Like an execution card, right? Like his target has been pre-ordained.’
‘Could it be from someone David betrayed?’
‘He might feel that David has betrayed him. I wouldn’t imagine that the betrayal is real. This is someone’s psychosis working things through on real people. It’s dangerous, Tom.’
‘These other marks, what do they mean? Just dots…’
Harper looked down at the pattern on the page in front of him.
‘What do you think it means?’ he asked, looking at Eddie and Denise. They stared hard and shrugged.
‘No idea,’ said Eddie. ‘If that helps.’
‘Thanks, Laura,’ said Harper. ‘We’ll be in touch.’
Dr Pense stood up and followed him out. ‘Can I take a look at your face?’
Harper stopped. ‘What for?’
‘How’s your sight?’
‘Right eye good. Left eye not so good.’
Laura pushed Harper through the double doors into her office. ‘Sit down. I want a closer look.’
‘What for?’
‘Because if I don’t, no one will, right?’
Harper sat down at her desk and waited. Laura scrubbed her hands in a sink by the side wall, brought a pen light and pulled his head back. She shone the light into his eye and held it there for a minute.
‘Feds are looking into it too,’ said Harper. ‘They want to know if it’s to do with Judge Capske’s ruling and the reaction from the Gun Lobby.’
‘Is it?’
‘I doubt it.’ He looked up. ‘What’s the damage?’
Laura clicked the pen light off and put it in her pocket. ‘I think you’re okay. Your eye’s responding well to the light. But you should get it looked at properly.’
‘I just did,’ said Harper, rising and offering his hand. She took it and they shook.
Hate Crime Task Force, Brooklyn
March 7, 7.03 p.m.
Denise stood outside the rundown precinct in Brooklyn that housed the Brooklyn Hate Crime Squad. Harper had squared things with the Lieutenant, a friendly cop called Phil Trigg. They’d talk to Dr Levene, give her some background and chase up the records of the four men accused of bias attack on the Goldenbergs. All she wanted was something to take back to Detectives Munroe and Gauge that indicated abduction or worse.
Harper went with Eddie to Ballistics. The mangled bullet was the only piece of physical evidence that came from the killer, so Harper wanted to know if there was anything in it. Time was ticking down fast.
Denise headed up to the fourth floor. She still had her Civilian NYPD ID card with her photograph against a blue background. She approached the tall gray-haired figure ahead of her. ‘Dr Levene,’ she said, and held out her hand.
Lieutenant Trigg shook it firmly. ‘Harper explained,’ he said. ‘I’ve kept one of the team back for you. Detective Carney’s the man you want to speak to. His knowledge of the area is second to none. He’s got every hate group mapped and tagged. It’s an impressive operation he runs.’
‘I appreciate this,’ said Denise.
‘We all got daughters, Doctor, so if this might help some poor guy, then we’re happy to assist.’ The Lieutenant pointed. Denise found herself looking at the back of Jack Carney. He was tall, athletic with broad shoulders.
‘Detective Carney,’ said Denise.
Jack Carney turned. He stared across the precinct investigation room. His eyes were clear blue. He was handsome and confident. ‘You must be Dr Levene. Good to meet you.’
‘Thank you for agreeing to help.’
‘Not a problem. Harper gave me four names: Raymond Hicks, Patrick Ellery, Leonard Lukanov and Thomas Ocksborough.’
‘You know them?’
‘I know them as Ray Hicks, Paddy Ellery, Leo Lukanov, Tommy Ocks. I’ve done a quick check. I know a couple of them pretty well. That’s not usually a good sign.’ He smiled. Denise smiled back.
‘You married?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Is that relevant?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ said Carney. Denise stared. ‘Come on, I’m kidding you. You got to loosen up, Doctor. This is no comedy show down here, so we’ve got to cheer ourselves up.’
‘Can we concentrate on these four guys, rather than my marital status?’
‘Sure,’ said Carney. ‘Let’s go find a seat somewhere.’ He led Denise into one of the interview rooms, asking, ‘You got any indications of hate crime on this missing girl?’
‘Such as?’
‘Words, symbols… any indication that it was because of her religion?’
‘No. There’s nothing except this attack which happened much earlier.’
‘But you think these guys might have held a grudge?’
‘That’s what I’d like to take a look at. Where do they hang out?’
‘Brooklyn.’
‘Any chance you can take me on a tour? Maybe speak to them?’
‘These aren’t nice characters, Dr Levene — you sure you want to?’
‘I’m sure as long as you can spare the time.’
‘You’re not going to like what you see. They’re sick little thugs and they believe what they spout. It’s pretty hard not to react and I know you’re the kind to react.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Denise.
The third name on the list was Leo Lukanov. Carney and his partner muscled up close to the door. They were an intimidating pair. They knocked hard and loud and shouted out ‘NYPD — open up!’ They kept it going until the person inside felt that this was drawing too much attention to him.
The door opened. Leo Lukanov stood there. Close-cropped blond hair, pale blue eyes, full red lips. He was wearing a tank top, the number eighty-eight tattooed on one shoulder above an iron cross, some SS symbols on the right. Denise shied away immediately. She hadn’t expected the Nazi symbols.
Carney stared at Lukanov. He was strong and wiry. He didn’t smile or speak.
‘This is Dr Levene, Leo. Now you be nice and answer the lady’s questions or I’ll serve this warrant here and tear your digs to pieces.’ Carney waved a warrant. Denise had been told that it wasn’t real, but it didn’t need to be. Leo Lukanov’s eyes settled on her. ‘She’s working on the disappearance of Abby Goldenberg,’ added Carney.
Denise looked at the big tattooed figure ahead of her. He was cold, difficult — not bright, she guessed.
‘Mr Lukanov, you were questioned in relation to an alleged bias-attack on Abby Goldenberg,’ said Denise. ‘Do you remember the allegation?’
Lukanov smiled and leaned against the door. ‘The girl who thought someone grabbed her ass and shouted “Let’s fuck a Jew”? It was just wishful thinking. She couldn’t even say who grabbed her ass and who shouted something.’
‘Is that right?’ said Denise.
Leo leered forward. ‘Some girls just want to improve their bloodline,’ he said. ‘Maybe you like the look of what you see, too?’
The back of Carney’s hand hit Lukanov’s shoulder. ‘Be polite, retard.’
Denise flicked open her notes. ‘This your line, Leo, sexually motivated hate crime? You into that — hate and lust? That make you tick?’
‘We didn’t do nothing. She imagined it. We were shouting all kinds of things. Just walking and shoving. Nothing about or against anyone. She must’ve got confused.’
‘You’re wearing some Nazi symbols,’ said Denise. ‘Do you hate Jews?’
‘I don’t take political stances, lady.’
‘She also heard someone say, “Die you kike bitch”.’
‘She misheard.’
‘She heard it twice.’
‘She misheard it twice. Some kids, some Jews, they’ve got a persecution complex. One of us says something innocent and because we’re wearing Nazi symbols, they get confused and bitter. We’re the victims, here.’
‘I think we all know you’re lying, Mr Lukanov. Those symbols are offensive.’
‘HCU will tell you that it ain’t a crime. Pro-Nazi symbols aren’t anti-Semitic in their own right, did you know that?’
‘Is that right?’ asked Denise.
Jack Carney nodded and twisted his mouth.
‘You heard or seen or know anything about Abby’s disappearance?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘You know anything?’
‘No,’ said Lukanov. He took a rolled cigarette from behind his ear and lit it.
‘You ever think about going round to her house after she reported the four of you to the police?’
‘No, we never thought that.’
‘Don’t get smart, Leo, or I’ll put it about that you’re an informer.’
‘Sorry, Detective.’
‘You be very sorry, Leo, now answer the questions.’
‘Look, lady, we might do some shit, but we don’t do no serious shit.’
Denise looked at him. She sensed that he was capable of cruelty. ‘I’m just saying, Mr Lukanov, that one story going around my head is about the four of you, becoming angry that some little high-school girl gets you all a night in the cells. Must’ve been embarrassing. Two of you lost your jobs on account of it. What do you say about that?’
‘I’d say you should stop telling stories,’ said Lukanov.
‘You have a few drinks, decide to go see her. Maybe you follow her into the woods. Maybe things got out of hand and maybe you hurt her, maybe worse.’
‘Fuck you. Is she allowed to make these fucking allegations, Detective? Fuck you, bitch.’
Jack Carney moved in close and pushed Leo’s head against the door. He held it there tight. ‘Don’t you ever speak like that to anyone in my company, Leo, or you’ll be in serious trouble.’
‘You got a car,’ said Denise, ‘between you?’
‘Answer the question, deadbeat,’ said Carney.
‘Yeah, Paddy rolls.’
‘What is it?’
‘Red Ford.’
‘We’re going to check this car, we’re going to check your story, Leo. I want to know where you were at five-fifteen on Thursday, February 26.’
‘Don’t remember,’ said Lukanov.
‘Try,’ said Carney.
‘Do whatever, some kid runs away, that’s all and I get the fucking shakedown.’
‘What were you doing?’
Leo thought for a moment. ‘Nothing. Finished work, probably having a drink with Paddy.’
‘Where?’
‘We go to the pool hall.’
Denise nodded. ‘Thank you for your time, Mr Lukanov.’
They left him at the door, returned to the car and drove off.
‘What did you think?’ said Carney.
‘Nice boys,’ said Denise. ‘Leo’s the one hiding something, though.’
‘You think?’
‘Yeah. The other two we found didn’t seem as cagey or as aggressive.’
‘He’s bad news all right. A little sadist. You should try to get a warrant to turn him over.’
‘I’ve got nothing at all to put him at the scene.’
‘Well, I hope it helped,’ said Carney. ‘You want to try Tommy Ocks? He’s not blessed with looks or brains. And his politics stink too.’
‘Let’s make it a full house,’ said Denise.
Crown Heights, Brooklyn
March 7, 9.03 p.m.
Brooklyn wasn’t Brooklyn any more. That’s what Martin Heming was fond of saying. He walked with his head high, an odd little twitch in his neck making its presence known every few paces. Heming was born and bred in Brooklyn, schooled and beaten and mugged in Brooklyn. His first kiss was a Brooklyn kiss, his first love was a Brooklyn high-school beauty queen whom he had won, married, beaten and lost. And now, the whole world was caving in, even in Brooklyn.
He paced up the sidewalk with Leo Lukanov at his side. ‘What did the bitch have on you?’
‘Nothing. Not a thing. Just went on about the time we put the frighteners on the girl.’
‘Her name?’
‘Denise Levene.’
‘Another Jew,’ said Heming. ‘Look at these people, Leo.’ They stared across the street. The black and whites were out and about in numbers. Alien faces, alien customs, alien dress. Heming felt the anger well up. It was happening all over and now they were hanging around in his street. In his own fucking street.
‘We should teach this Jew cop a lesson.’
‘I’d like that,’ said Leo. ‘She needs a slap.’
‘She needs to know she doesn’t fuck with us,’ said Heming.
Leo nodded and bristled, his shoulders moving back and forth, a kind of semi-conscious limbering up. ‘What are you looking at?’ he shouted across the street. He licked his upper lip that carried a line of hair, masquerading as a mustache.
Heming and Lukanov each had a fist of leaflets. They’d produced them themselves. It was important, as a cell, to become active and to keep active. Heming said it every damn day — they spent too long waiting around doing too little as these immigrant communities grew stronger. Action made sense. It was an imperative. Every moment of inaction tipped the balance against the future for real Americans.
As they walked, they dropped a leaflet every few yards, scattered them outside the Jewish schools, up the pathways to synagogues, in parks and along busy walkways. The type was in a gothic script, chosen on Lukanov’s computer in his dirty little room in a poor part of Brooklyn. A neat little Swastika had been cut and pasted in each corner and in the middle they’d typed three bold words:
The message had the desired impact on the local Jewish population. It created outrage and outrage was good. It made Section 88 feel strong and powerful.
Heming was twenty-eight. Lukanov was two years younger. They’d met at a neo-Nazi rally, when Heming and his Section 88 gang started to turn up the heat in Brooklyn with placards and signs declaring God Hates Jews and more. Heming had been involved in the neo-Nazi movement for over eight years before he set up his own group two years earlier.
Heming knew that attacking illegal immigrants would find sympathy in the jobless communities in Brooklyn; graffiti on synagogues seemed to capture people’s hidden internal hatreds.
Heming sent orders down the line, where he wanted more or less action. He followed political elections, trying to ramp up pressure on the liberal Left and secure greater popular appeal for his movement from the far Right. His gang organized small riots, attacks on immigrant communities, right-wing graffiti, harassment and — the pinnacle for any Section 88 member — violence against persons of Jewish or non-white origin. The 88s even had a tattoo, worn like a badge of honor, that members were entitled to if they spilled the blood of the undesirables. It was a blue eagle.
Heming and Lukanov threw the last few leaflets down on the sidewalk and continued to walk. Heming had been working closely with Lukanov for a few months, trying to get him more involved. Lukanov was strong, stupid and impressionable. He’d kill if you told him to, and that made Heming excited.
Across the street, a group of Hasidic Jews stared at them. One of them was showing a leaflet to the other men. Their mutterings in Hebrew started low and secretive, but they soon became louder. Their long curled strands of hair started to shake and they pointed across the street at the pair.
‘Get the fuck out of here!’ shouted Heming.
There was a switch in Heming’s head and he didn’t know much about how it got there, but once it was turned on, he felt anger welling up like water in a blocked drain. Over time, the little things had become the big things: a feeling of being an outsider turned into anger against the invader, a feeling of being judged became harsh judgment, a feeling of being spat on and disenfranchised by the American government became a need to express hatred. Now he hated the Jews, the Federal government and non-whites in that order.
‘I just want to hurt them,’ said Heming, staring hard at the group of angry men. His tattooed knuckles twisted into fists. His gun was tight in his waistband. He touched it with the heel of his hand for reassurance.
‘They’re so fucking in your face,’ said Leo. ‘What do you want me to do, Martin? Talking that shit. This is America! You want me to hurt them?’
The group of men continued to stare. It felt like a challenge to Lukanov and Heming.
‘Fuck them up,’ said Martin.
‘I’ll do it, Martin, I’ll do all of them.’ Lukanov felt a jerk of excitement. He pulled a switchblade out of the back pocket of his jeans.
‘Turn away! Turn your fucking eyes away!’ shouted Heming, but none of the seven pairs of eyes moved or seemed to understand. They looked like a group of deer staring up at a distant noise. Heming stepped out into the street. ‘Stop fucking looking at me, you fucking Yids.’
Lukanov moved past Heming and started to march across the street. The rising tide of anger was impossible to contain.
Heming strode with confidence towards the group, a step behind Lukanov. One or two started to say something. But they didn’t scatter and that annoyed Heming even more. ‘Cut them, Leo,’ he shouted.
Lukanov flicked open his blade and held it at arm’s reach, pointing towards the seven men. He felt good now, he felt like a hero, ready to clean up his city. He just wanted to cut, wanted to kill. ‘Now, Martin?’
‘Make them run, Leo.’
Leo ran at the sidewalk. The group didn’t wait any longer to find out if this thug was willing to kill. They scattered both ways.
‘Do not stare at me, not in my fucking street. You hear? Not in my fucking street!’ shouted Heming.
He stepped up to the sidewalk. The men were running away in both directions. Leo was breathing heavily. ‘That fucking showed them,’ he panted. ‘They fucking scattered like rabbits. You see them dance?’
‘You did good, Leo. You’re a real rising star.’ Heming was still. His eyes stared with something close to longing. ‘You want to go after that cop, Leo? Call some boys together. You feel ready to lead your own team?’
‘Sure,’ said Lukanov. ‘I’m ready. I’m more than ready.’
Salsa Club, Upper East Side
March 8, 1.30 a.m.
Harper arrived alone at the Dancer Downstairs. The club was closed and shuttered. A sign on the small door at the bottom of a flight of steps expressed sympathy for the family of David Capske and said they were closing for two days. He knocked for several minutes, but no one was there. From the street the club was hardly visible. He took out his watch and started to walk the route that the murder victim, David Capske, and his fiancée, the writer, Lucy Steller, had walked the previous evening.
It took Harper twenty-five minutes to reach Lucy Steller’s apartment building. He headed off again, following the route David Capske had walked to the alleyway before he was killed. It took him just under an hour. It was quite a walk for someone rich and white, traveling into the heart of Harlem at night. Harper knew that Capske had reached the alleyway at 1.43 a.m. The caller in the apartment building said that a shot was heard at 3.30 a.m. If the rain started at 2.41 a.m., then the victim was lying on the ground in that spot for a long time, all wrapped up before he was shot. So between 1.43 a.m. and 2.41 a.m. what happened to Capske was still uncertain. However, after the visit to the morgue, it was clear that the killer had spent some time tattooing something on to David Capske’s chest.
Harper looked around him. Two uniformed patrol cops stood at the alleyway and nodded. He pulled out his shield and waved it towards them. Alleyways in East Harlem were dangerous places. There were limited exit routes for one thing, and victims didn’t stroll into alleyways too easily for another. Would Capske have gone into a darkened alleyway with unknown dealers? How did the killer lure him?
Harper tried to imagine how a man would have been able to wrap another man in barbed wire, unaccompanied. It wouldn’t be easy.
Surely the victim would have to be unconscious in order to allow the killer to start to wrap him. Harper made a mental note to ask the Medical Examiner about head wounds. If a man did this alone, his best bet would have been to knock the subject out, bind him, roll him, then wait until he came round. Harper thought about the timescales. It was possible, wasn’t it?
Perhaps Capske was just unlucky. Perhaps he was on his way to meet a dealer when someone in the alleyway hit him, dragged him unconscious into the dark and wrapped him as he lay flat out. That would explain the marks across the ground. If the body was flat out, the only way to bind him would have been to push the body across the wire. Harper pulled out his sketchbook. There were two places where the body had lain still. The first was halfway up the alley, but the majority of the blood was to the right side of the alley and it was less than the size of an entire body. The second spot was where they found the victim and there was blood the whole length of the body. How did that happen?
But a random attack? It seemed highly unlikely. Capske had been targeted specifically and he had been punished. And furthermore, someone had informed the police and the media.
Harper’s flashlight criss-crossed the alleyway. He’d found something that fitted, something that explained the situation, the strange time-lag and the marks across the ground. Harper let a smile cross his lips.
He thought about Denise Levene. She was back and had already spent the evening tracking racist thugs in Brooklyn. Whatever Mac had put her through, it had given her the confidence to start again.
Some of the guys in Blue Team, earlier in the day, had gone back to a multiple attacker theory. The Captain had lapped it up. Harper was now sure that what they were looking at was something darker. A solitary killer, a night stalker, waiting in an alleyway, ready with his cosh and barbed wire.
What kind of animal hunted like that? A political killer? No, not to his knowledge. Political killers tended to be martyrs who sacrificed themselves. This was someone who liked to kill for the sake of killing. If there was a political issue caught up in this kill, it was not the prime motivation.
He needed to know if the victim had been unconscious. He took out his phone to call the Medical Examiner’s office. He direct-dialed Laura Pense. It was a long shot, but a moment later she answered the phone.
‘You work nights too,’ said Harper.
‘Everyone else decided it’s vacation time. What do you want?’
‘I’m at the Capske crime scene and I’ve got a theory. What I need is a blunt-force trauma to the head and I’ve got a full house. I think he must’ve been knocked unconscious. Do you have that card?’
‘No. There’s no blunt-force trauma to the head. But there was intracranial hemorrhaging, so he got hit somehow. He was probably hit on his jaw. There’s a fracture running across his left side. X-rays just came back. Couldn’t see the bruising because of the tears in his cheek.’
‘That’s useful, thank you,’ said Harper. He suggested she go home to get some sleep and hung up. So that’s what had happened: the killer caught the victim on his jaw hard enough to give him brain damage. While he was knocked out, he taped his hands and ankles, wrapped him in barbed wire up to his chest, then he tattooed him. That was the first resting-point, with blood from the abdomen and legs. Then he waited, rolled his upper torso and head and shot him.
Harper imagined Capske waking up in his steel cage. He could feel the horror, the constriction. He could see the face of the attacker above him. Smiling, laughing? A terrifying end. But why would a killer wait to shoot him? Denise was right. It wasn’t just political. He wanted to hurt and punish Capske. Or maybe there was something else. Harper took out his sketchpad and opened it. He stared at the sketches of the crime scene, the placing of the body.
In his mind, he saw the corpse. There was something there, but he couldn’t bring it to mind. Harper nodded to the patrol still guarding the entrance of the alleyway as he headed out of the darkness.
Now he had the MO, the how and the what, the next thing Harper needed to work out was the why — the motive was everything. And this murder had many potential motives — drugs, politics, anti-Semitism. But none quite accounted for the ritualized kill scene, the sudden, brutal ambush, the waiting game and the execution, except for Denise’s description of some form of deranged narcissism.
Harper walked across the street. They’d not found a single piece of the kill kit. They’d been chasing down CCTV from every municipal and private source for five blocks. They had plenty of people on tape, but it was impossible to judge if any of them were involved. No one on the tape was seen carrying anything. So either the killer was in a car or, if he was on foot, he dumped his kill kit as soon as he used it.
Harper looked up and down East 112th Street. There were CCTV cameras at either end of the street. Rows of garbage from the cafés and eateries lined the sidewalks. Harper looked across again. Even if the killer cut through the housing project up to East 113th Street, the CCTV tapes would have caught him coming out further up. No, thought Harper. We would’ve found the kill kit. Somehow he got the stuff taken away.
He watched as the garbage truck turned up, and the men threw the bags lining the streets into the back of the truck. Harper looked at his watch and cursed. It was only 1.45 a.m. He had imagined that the killer might have waited until 3.30 a.m. in order to catch the garbage truck, so that he could dispose of his kill kit as he left the scene. But it was too early.
Harper crossed the street. A surly garbage man was tossing bags into the back of the loader. ‘Detective Harper, NYPD, can I ask you a question?’ said Harper.
The guy looked up. ‘Go ahead.’
‘We had a murder at this site last night. We reckon the victim got here at around this time — one forty-three a.m. He was hurt real bad. So bad, he must’ve been screaming at some point. Were you working this route last night?’
‘Sure was, and every other night.’
‘Did you see or hear anything?’
‘What time you say?’
‘The victim arrived around this time.’
‘Well then, I heard nothing and saw nothing.’
‘Why’s that?’ asked Harper.
‘We’re a couple of hours ahead of schedule tonight.’
‘So what time did you get here last night?’
‘Last night? About three-thirty a.m., give or take a few minutes.’
‘Last night, you were here at that time? You see anything?’
‘Not a thing worth noting.’
‘Where do you go from here?’ said Harper.
‘We got this street, then we complete the round.’
‘Then where do you go?’
‘Queens.’
‘What for?’
‘To unload. You’re very interested in garbage for a cop.’
‘Can I ride with you?’
‘Ask the driver. I don’t see why not.’
Harper jumped up to the cab and introduced himself. ‘Can I ride with you, ask some questions?’
The driver shrugged. ‘Whatever turns you on.’
‘Where do you unload?’
‘Queens.’
‘I know. Where in Queens?’
‘North Shore Marine Transfer Facility.’
‘And what happens to the trash at the North Shore?’
‘It gets loaded into a container. When it’s full, it gets put on a barge and it sails away, to where I do not know or care.’
‘What about last night’s garbage? Will it have gone already?’
‘Hey, what do you think I do, keep tags on my garbage? I’ve no fucking idea, Detective.’
‘That’s okay. I can find that out.’ Harper took out his cell and called Eddie. He answered on the first ring. ‘You at the Station House, Eddie?’
‘Still chasing down these leads, but getting nowhere fast.’
‘I think I might know where the killer dumped his kill kit.’
‘What are you thinking?’
‘This killer is smart,’ said Harper. ‘And if he’s smart, he’s going to dump it somewhere we won’t find it.’
‘They checked the storm drains, the sewage, the trash, the streets, the houses, the roofs, the alleys; they’ve been everywhere, Harper,’ said Eddie.
‘I’ve been wondering why he waited until three-thirty a.m. to shoot this guy. It’s risky, right?’
‘It’s damn risky.’
‘Maybe he was waiting for Department of Sanitation.’
‘How so?’
‘Garbage trucks, Eddie. On Saturday, they collect around three-thirty a.m., and all our killer has to do is take his bloody clothes, the barbed-wire spool, the gloves and maybe even the murder weapon, put it out on the sidewalk and watch the city pick it up and take it away for him. Then he walks.’
‘That’s brilliant. Where are you now?’
‘In a garbage truck on the way to the North Shore Marine Transfer Facility in Queens. Meet me there in one hour with Blue Team and Crime Scene Unit. See if you can get the Logistics and Operational Manager for the Facility. We need to trace last night’s garbage.’
‘I’m on it, Harps. They work the same routes each night, right? We just need the truck number and the dumpsite. It’s going to be a dirty night’s work for someone in the Crime Scene Unit.’
North Shore Marine Transfer Facility, Queens
March 8, 2.23 a.m.
Harper arrived at the huge blue warehouse at the North Shore Transfer Facility. Eddie Kasper, the team and two CSU trucks were sitting there waiting. Harper thanked the driver and jumped off. The air was cold next to the river, and in the distance he could hear the industrial hum of hundreds of loaders, dump trucks and garbage trucks transporting New York’s waste to someplace else.
‘Quick work, Eddie, what have you got?’
‘Dogs are on their way. We’ve got David Capske’s jacket coming across from the OCME to give them something to work on, but the handlers aren’t sure how they’ll cope. Depends on how rancid the trash is.’
‘That’s great, Eddie. What about the location of our load?’
‘We’ve dragged the Logistics Supervisor out of bed, the Operations Manager and the roll-on team. We’ve got tonight’s team on hold. Nothing leaves until we find our trash.’
Harper looked at the tired faces of the people in front of him. Two men who looked like they just got out of bed stood shivering in the wind. Behind them, three more of the team from the Transfer Facility. Their faces were cynical and bored.
Harper walked across. ‘This is a homicide investigation, gentlemen. I apologize for the disturbance, but we need your help. You’ll go back to bed when this is over, but our victim never will. So no wise-ass bullshit. We’re serious about finding that kill kit and we’ll keep the whole plant closed down until we do. Understand?’
The men nodded one by one. ‘That’s good. Now let’s locate the dock and the barge.’
He turned as the CSU trucks started to unload. Several men and women all wearing white suits tramped across the concrete.
‘First up, what happens when the trash gets here?’
The Operations Manager took Harper through the routine. Eddie Kasper took the Logistics Supervisor back inside with the truck number.
Within fifteen minutes, they came back together. Harper gathered the team.
‘We’re in luck,’ he said. ‘Our garbage is sitting on a barge in Dock Four. It’s due to leave later tonight, so we just made it. The garbage truck unloads in one of bays sixteen to twenty-two, which means the trash will be on the right section of the barge. We’ve been through the options. There’s no way we can jump on board and start sifting. We’re going to crane the rubbish back on shore, and sift it load by load. Any questions?’ There was silence. ‘Well, let’s get going.’
Harper searched with the team throughout the night, staring out over the vast mountains of trash as far as the eye could see. It seemed like an impossible task. At six, he lay down on a bench in the warehouse and closed his eyes. An hour later, he felt someone pushing his shoulder. He looked up.
‘Eddie, what’ve you got?’
‘We got something,’ said Eddie. Just then, Rick Swanson burst in. His blue suit was stained at the knees with dark wet patches, his hands were black with dirt, his jacket was covered in unpleasant-looking detritus. Behind him, Mary Greco was a five-foot-two picture of perfect cleanliness in a plain white tank top and jeans. She was wearing gloves and holding a plastic bag high in the air.
‘Five fucking hours in Harlem’s shit for forty-two-thousand dollars a year, Harper! No sleep, no nothing. It smells worse than a body in that dump,’ said Swanson.
Harper clapped. ‘But you found it! You’re a hero.’
‘Six fucking hours.’
‘You said five,’ said Eddie. ‘Either I’m not hearing things right or that’s one quick hour.’
‘Fuck you,’ said Swanson. ‘Six or seven hours, what’s the difference?’
‘How comes he’s all dirty and you’re clean, Greco?’
‘They offered us white suits, but Mr Macho found the onesies a little effeminate.’
‘I’m not wearing a fucking Babygro.’
‘No, you’re wearing cabbage and diapers by the smell of you.’
‘You got it, though, am I right?’ said Harper.
‘Yeah, we got it, all right,’ said Swanson.
‘What’s in there?’
Swanson took off his jacket and threw it straight into the bin. ‘I can’t wear this no more. It’s going to remind me of stamping through a container of putrid Harlem crap.’
‘What’s in the bags, Swanson? Focus.’
‘He’s not as smart as he thinks,’ said Swanson. ‘He’s bagged the lot together. We weren’t getting anywhere until the canine unit brought in the sniffer dogs.’
‘We would’ve been another twelve hours,’ said Mary. ‘And this macho pig moans like a girl with a broken nail. Every five seconds. I couldn’t stand it any more.’
‘We got a rag of Capske’s blood from Forensics and they found it. You know what? I hate being second to a dog.’
‘In every way, Swanson,’ said Mary Greco. ‘In every way.’
Rick Swanson muttered something. He pulled off his shoes and put them in the trash too. ‘The fucking canine unit… if they’d come first, I wouldn’t have ruined my suit and shoes.’
‘The department will clean your suit,’ said Harper. ‘For the last time, what’s in the bag?’
‘The whole shebang. Gloves, remnants of wire on a wooden spool, knife and overalls.’
‘Weapon?’
‘No gun.’
‘Let’s get it straight to the lab.’ Harper looked at his team. ‘That’s good work, guys. Real good work. Let’s hope they find something for us to go on.’
North Manhattan Homicide
March 8, 11.30 a.m.
Denise Levene was wearing a smart black suit, a white blouse and glasses. She breathed slowly, trying to control the nerves that were making her hands tremble. It was impossible to know if what she was doing was right for her, but it no longer mattered. She needed progress.
She walked right back into the North Manhattan Homicide investigation room and stood there. She felt her world begin to click back into place. No one looked up. No one noticed her. She looked down at the old blue carpet, at the tar spots, at the discarded gum that had turned gray.
She held back tears, but they were not tears of fear, they were tears of pride. She had made it through the door. She had thought about it a hundred times, and every time she’d backed out, unable to even make it to the door. Now she was there.
Mark Garcia turned. He was wearing a pink shirt and even from a distance, Denise could smell his cologne. It took a moment for him to identify the woman in front of him, to place the pale face that he hadn’t seen for three months. Then recognition dawned on him. ‘Hey, fellas, look who’s come back home!’
The other detectives turned. Apart from Gerry Ratten, they’d all worked the American Devil case. Harper felt the hairs on his neck stiffen as he turned and saw Denise standing there in the doorway, in the same black suit that she’d worn the day he met her, when she was safely ensconced in One Police Plaza as a psychotherapist who looked at the aftermath of trauma and kept her distance from the streets.
Rick Swanson had pulled on his gym kit, a Yankees sweat top and a pair of black sweatpants. He was a mean and cynical son of a bitch, but even he felt the atmosphere and smiled.
Garcia took a glance around the room. The detectives of Blue Team were a tight group and Denise had worked with them and suffered for it. A team didn’t forget that. Garcia started to clap. The others joined in. And Denise Levene stood, her cheeks flushed red, not knowing where to look. Harper stared at her, brimming with pride and a strange fear. Whatever she’d been through, they had to make sure it wasn’t repeated.
The clapping died down. ‘How the hell are you?’ said Swanson. ‘Took your time. I thought as a psychologist you could’ve healed yourself.’
‘I’m wondering how you’ve all got time for applauding some amateur profiler when you’ve got a case to work. I hear it’s a bad one.’
She walked directly to the coffee pot and poured herself a cup. Harper sidled up. ‘Denise,’ he said. ‘I—’
‘Don’t say a goddamn thing or I’m going to break here.’
Harper closed his mouth, took a step back, let her regain composure. ‘Welcome home, Denise,’ he said.
Denise leaned her back against the wall and took a look around the room. ‘Feels odd to be back in here. Nice cubicles. You’ve been busy building.’
‘You haven’t seen the Captain since he spent some time in the Bronx.’
‘Always captures the big ideas, doesn’t he?’
Harper nodded. ‘You get anywhere with Abby?’
‘Yes, thanks to you. I met some real morons. The worst was Leo Lukanov. Leo gave a false alibi for the evening when Abby disappeared, and it transpires that Dr Goldenberg saw him the day before in a car outside the house. So we’ve got extra time on the case.’
‘That’s good. You were brave to go over there.’
‘Well, I’m feeling better. I’m here to return the favor.’
‘Profile?’
‘I can try.’ Denise spotted a wiry fair-haired man in one of the new cubicles, who had eyed her a few times. She nodded towards him. ‘Is he the competition?’
‘The kid in the corner with the snarl? He’s the FBI’s boy. New profiler from the New York Field Office. He’s squaring up for a battle. He’s heard about you. You’re all we talk about.’
‘Only to piss him off, I hope.’
‘Yeah, only to piss him off. Second-rate, unfortunately, even though he’s trying.’
‘Well, let’s hope that’s good enough.’
Harper laughed. ‘You’re going to kill him. It’s not a fair fight. Not fair at all.’
‘Where are you on the case?’ asked Denise. ‘We’re waiting for something to break,’ Harper told her. ‘We found the killer’s kill kit last night. We’re just checking out leads.’
‘Good, that’s progress.’
‘Well, I’ve got the case-files set up for you. Take your time, just as long as you’ve got something by this afternoon.’
Denise looked up. ‘No honeymoon period? This really is like old times. Where are you headed?’
Harper picked up his coat. ‘I’m going to check out some barbed-wire manufacturers.’
‘Lucky you,’ said Denise.
North Manhattan Homicide
March 8, 12.30 p.m.
Harper arrived back at the precinct. He had news about the barbed wire to give Lafayette. What he had was good but he needed something more. He approached Eddie. ‘I got your message. Where are they?’
‘In the interview room.’
‘How sure are you?’
‘It’s good, Harps.’
They headed straight for a small interview room that had been set up with three phones. Three Chinese cops were on the phones, speaking in Mandarin.
‘They traced the number, like I asked?’ said Harper.
‘Just like you asked.’
‘And they got something?’
‘They did. Harps, you were right.’
‘I don’t care about right, I care about catching this guy. Let’s see what they got.’
‘The purple serial number you found on the spool was our only lead,’ said Eddie. ‘We’ve been chasing that number all morning. We reckon the barbed wire is a Chinese import, and the serial number had an import number next to it. We traced the import number through shipping number via customs. We’re tracking down manufacturers.’
Harper looked around him. ‘In China?’
‘There aren’t too many barbed-wire manufacturers importing to the US, so we’re down to the last one. But I don’t know that the number will give us anything. Even if we find where it came from, we might not see where it went to.’
Harper put his hand on the shoulder of one of the guys. ‘Anything?’
Detective William Hong nodded. ‘We think we’ve got the manufacturer. They’re tracing that batch number, might be able to tell us where it was sent.’
‘Call me the second you know,’ said Harper.
He walked back into the investigation room and sat down by Denise, on an old plastic chair. ‘How’s it been?’ he asked.
‘Okay.’
‘No progress?’
‘Not yet. I’m just absorbing all the details. It’s not nice.’
‘No,’ said Harper.
‘There’s nothing on the bullet. You anywhere with that?’
‘They can’t ID the bullet. It’s so mangled. It’s just a lump of metal. I’m going to get it looked at. There’s something more to it. Why, what are you thinking?’
‘I need to know what kind of gun he used. It might tell us something.’
‘Like what?’
‘Confidence with a gun, military background, who knows.’
‘They say it was a 9mm bullet.’
Denise nodded. ‘I went through the sequence of events, the witness statements, the confession letters, the forensic details, the autopsy protocol. Then I went through it all again.’
‘And?’
‘He’s not a political animal. He’s a sociopath. I agree with you — I think there’s something else, too. Something…’
William Hong emerged from the interview room and called across. ‘Harper, we’ve got it. This consignment was headed for Washington. Then headed for a commercial supplier.’
Harper turned. ‘And where did they send it?’
‘It’s been a ride. The commercial supplier sent it to a local state wholesaler. They found the order. We know the shop this spool was bought from.’
Eddie Kasper took the faxed copy of the import order. Chinese letters across the top of the paper. ‘If he’s a right-wing pro-America freak, Harper, do you think he knew he was buying Chinese barbed wire?’
Harper felt the release in the tension with the breakthrough. ‘We got to get up there, have a look at the layout. See if they have CCTV. But first, I’ve got to tell Lafayette that we have a lead. It’ll buy us a few more hours.’
In the background, Denise looked through Harper’s murder book. A sketch of a wind-ruffled falcon graced one page. She turned over and saw the strange sketch of dots and scratches that they’d seen at the morgue.
‘Sorry, Denise, you were about to say something?’
‘No, nothing really. Hey, you thought any more about this?’ she asked.
‘No, why?’
‘Another strange sense I get. I think I half recognize these marks, but I don’t know why or how.’
‘Well, give it time — it’ll come.’
Levene drifted into thought. An image from her childhood emerged deep from within her memory, but it was so vague she couldn’t capture it. Perhaps it was some picturebook her father had showed her. If so, it was before he went to prison, when she was nine years old. She didn’t remember the book. She remembered black and white photographs, her father not speaking, just turning the pages in silence, then when she turned, seeing her father’s tears. His large leathery hand stroked her hair. She could taste his pipe smoke in her throat and hear the accent that never left him.
Her hand reached out and moved across the scratches. Something appeared, a pattern of some sort, but she couldn’t read it. Not yet.
Lock-Up, Bedford-Stuyvesant
March 8, 1.05 p.m.
He parked his old sedan three streets away, put on an overcoat and baseball cap, then walked the rest of the way, past derelict housing blocks and shuttered shops scrawled with graffiti.
He reached the razor-wire fence and pushed through a small gap at the side into a grassy alley between two buildings. He walked through to a wide patch of scrubland that was once the backyard of a clothing business that had long ago closed down.
Several stray dogs appeared from each corner of the square, eager-eyed and barking. The man took out his bag of meat, which consisted of cheap scraps that he collected from the meat market. The dogs ran towards him, yapping and jumping, saliva dripping and swinging from their jowls. There were about sixteen strays of all types. He took out handfuls of fatty meat and tossed them around the yard.
The dogs were his homemade security force. He’d started to feed them a few months back, after he’d found the abandoned garage on one of his tours of duty. He knew that a lock-up without additional security would not last in that part of Brooklyn, so he’d spent the time trying to get the dogs to see the garage as their place and defend it. No one would try to get past a pack of wild dogs. Not even gangbangers.
He got to the door of the garage and unlocked each of the three padlocks. The dogs surrounded him, yelping and circling tight around his legs.
He pushed open the door and flicked on the light. The dogs ran in all around him and their barking filled the room and echoed against the tin roof. He threw more meat down and filled three bowls with water.
He sat in a battered armchair and started feeding some of them by hand. They fed furiously, angrily, gulping down the lumps of fat and gristle with excited glee. They were a pack, a team, but underneath that organization, they were out for themselves. If one of them got injured, they’d tear the animal to shreds.
The man stood up and went back to the door. He threw the remaining lumps of meat into the yard and watched them tear out of the room. He slammed the door shut and breathed excitedly. Around the room, there were several scaffolding poles that leaned against the walls, and bags of sand and cement piled in corners. Outside the garage door stood a large pallet of bricks. He’d brought about four dozen bricks into the room and had started to mark out two internal walls along the floor, coming out from the back wall. He’d been planning on a building project for a while now, but was waiting for the right kind of girl. It was going to be a room within a room, a very special room. One he’d dreamed of his whole life.
The large brick garage had been empty for years. A piece of derelict real estate in a part of town no one wanted to live in. He had a new door fixed, new bolts and padlocks. He’d bricked up the one small window. Across the garage was a second door which once upon a time housed a bathroom. The cistern and sink had been smashed. He’d cleared the room out and sealed it up as best he could.
He took a metal plate from a shelf next to the door. Removed a piece of dry bread and a small piece of cheese from a tin, and put them on the plate. He then poured some water from a bottle into a metal cup. He placed both at the bottom of the door where there was a hinged flap.
He stood at the door, knocked twice and pulled back a small slot that he’d cut in the wood. He stooped and stared into the room at the bundle lying on the floor.
‘Stand,’ he ordered. The prisoner did as he requested. He did not listen to her when she spoke or cried. He had taught himself to believe it was another language. The language of lies. She stood and turned her back to the door. He moved his hands through the slot and unbuckled her wrists and then her mouth restraint. Then he shut the slot and pushed the metal plate through the hinged flap with his foot.
A few seconds later, a bedpan was pushed out. He picked it up, took it outside the door and threw the contents on the ground. The dogs ran at the sewage as if it were more food.
As she was eating, he started to undress and place his clothes in a wooden trunk. From the trunk he took out another set of clothes. He was going hunting again. He dressed in his hunting uniform, slowly adding each item of clothing that he’d carefully sourced over the years. He pressed his hair flat to his head and looked at himself in a jarred fragment of mirror. His eyes flinched at the sight of his own dark hair and olive skin. He moved his gaze quickly to the uniform to stem the self-loathing that flooded within him at the sight of his own features. He shifted nervously from foot to foot, letting the whole effect grow in his mind and now feeling excited by the transformation.
He walked to the cell and knocked. He kicked the clean bedpan through the hinged flap. A moment later, the empty plate and cup appeared at the bottom of the door. He knocked again, opened the slot and the prisoner stood again and turned. He stared into the tiny cell, and opened the door.
Every day, it was the only interaction he allowed himself with the prisoner. Distance was important.
He walked the girl out into the room, where she picked up the tin of boot polish from the table and a rag and knelt at his feet. She started to polish his boots as he stared down at her.
‘That is good, Abigail. You are behaving well today.’
‘I hope you’re pleased with me,’ she said. ‘I try to please you.’
He pulled back and looked down at his boots. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now stand. I need to inspect your cell.’
Abby moved away as he leaned into her cell and checked the door hinges and the mattress.
‘I recognized your cologne. I’ve smelled it before. I just can’t think where.’
‘I’ve been close to you a number of times, Abigail. I came close to taking you but each time something got in the way.’
The memories suddenly clicked.
‘The man in the dark. You pushed into me.’ She felt a shiver of fear, then anger, a fury that she couldn’t control. She picked up a brick started towards him.
He heard the movement behind him and turned. The girl was running towards him. He was shocked for a moment. A brick hit him hard on the side of the head. He stumbled backwards into the cell, his hand grabbing on to the door frame. She smashed the brick down on his hand and he let go, tumbling backwards. She pushed the door shut on him, but he wasn’t unconscious. His boots, bright black and shining, kicked the door open. The girl was hit but did not give up; she approached again with the brick.
He stood up, a trickle of blood over one eye, cradling his left hand. She stared, panting, the brick raised.
‘It’s wrong, what you’re doing. It’s sick and it’s wrong and I want to go home,’ she shouted. ‘I won’t stay here. I won’t!’
He moved towards her. ‘You betrayed the trust I put in you, Abigail.’
‘Don’t come any closer or I’ll smash your filthy head in.’ ‘Will you?’ he said, and closed in on her. The girl raised the brick, but he was expecting that. His arm came across to bat it away, but the brick didn’t move; her body shifted and her left leg rose high in a karate kick and the side of her foot hit his chin. He reeled backwards.
‘Don’t come near me,’ she shouted. Then she stepped towards the door. ‘Help!’ she screamed. ‘Help!’
‘You will be punished for this, you realize. And I will make your father aware of every moment of your suffering.’ He stepped towards her, his face angry now.
‘Get away from me. You find suffering a turn-on, do you, you sick bastard?’
He moved quickly. She threw the brick at his head; it glanced off his shoulder. She twisted, punched and kicked. But he came too fast and his bulk pushed her back and pressed her against the wall. He held her there, his mouth close to hers.
‘They will find you dead, Abigail. A naked corpse on your father’s doorstep — half-eaten by dogs. But I want to find out how close to death you can go. How slowly I can kill you.’
She was shivering. His hand tightened around her neck. He leaned back and smashed his forehead against her nose. ‘You will not be beautiful any more.’
He gritted his teeth. He shoved her hard into the chair, took out a knife and started to chop away at her hair as she wept and screamed. She stared into the shard of a mirror leaning against the wall. The girl she knew, the girl everyone knew, was disappearing. All around her, her long brown hair lay discarded on the floor.
‘We will not call you Abby any more.’
‘What?’
‘You are an experiment now, not a person. We will call you 144002.’
‘Fuck you,’ she spat.
He breathed, his hand so tight around her arm that he could feel the bone.
‘We will call you 144002.’
‘No.’
He pushed her head back violently and she stopped speaking for a moment, but she needed to know. To know why.
‘What are you doing this for?’
‘144002 must be quiet. 144002 speaks again and I will cut out 144002’s tongue.’
The girl stared across. Her eyes fixed on the red and black insignia on his arm. He smiled. ‘You can’t believe it, can you? But it is real. It is very real. This is not a dream. You will not wake up. You will never wake up from this.’
Eastern Hardware Store, Maywood
March 8, 1.50 p.m.
Harper and Kasper headed out of town. They pulled up at a hardware store off the Interstate. It was a vast warehouse structure, a rectangle of steel and plastic thrown up in what looked like a matter of days. The whole complex was a sprawling mass of similar buildings, all with their own large, bright signs.
Kasper parked close to the entrance. Harper was speaking on the phone to base, but no one had anything. Harper looked around. ‘Big.’
‘Sure is,’ said Eddie. ‘This isn’t going to be easy.’
They met the manager of the store, and followed him up a long, wide aisle of fencing, rails, pipes and tubes until they got to the barbed wire. It was sitting on huge wooden pallets, three different grades, and three different types: razor wire, barbed wire and galvanized barbed wire.
‘This the only place someone can get barbed wire in the store?’
‘Sure is.’
Harper looked up and down the aisle. ‘Okay. I want this aisle taped off and dusted for prints.’
‘I’m not closing an aisle. It’s a big sales day for us.’
‘I’m trying to stop a killer, Sunday or not. I could close the whole store if you’d prefer.’
The manager shook his head.
‘Eddie,’ said Harper, ‘I want this whole area dusted, then the cash register area. We know he’s been here.’
‘So have thousands of people,’ said Eddie.
‘We might get lucky.’
Eddie’s eyebrows rose slow and high. He took out his phone. ‘I’ll get Crime Scene across here.’
They spent an hour with the manager going through the sales data and receipts, picking out every sale of barbed wire. ‘We’ve got hundreds,’ said the manager. ‘No telling which one bought your roll.’
‘We’ll take all the names, and follow them all up.’
The manager handed a printout to Harper. ‘Impossible to tell which one. The digital readings are our own — they only have the product, price and date. No import number, no license. But the batch you’re after — it only came out of the back store nine days ago.’
‘Let’s try CCTV,’ said Harper. ‘You keep it?’
He nodded his head. ‘We keep one week of tape. If it was within the week, we might see someone.’
‘Eddie, try to find him.’
‘Will do.’
Within the hour, eight CSU detectives arrived. Their supervisor, Detective Ingleman, moved straight across to Harper. ‘What are we looking for?’ he asked.
‘Someone was in here in the last nine days buying a roll of barbed wire,’ said Harper. ‘I’ve got a guy here from the cleaning company, and he’s going to tell you where they wipe down. We know whoever bought it was over in the barbed-wire area, by the cash register, and at the door. We think the door and checkout counter get wiped. I just wonder if you guys can find a needle in a haystack.’
‘You’re kidding? You want us to dust a whole store?’
‘Not the whole store. The barbed-wire aisle to start with.’
Ingleman followed Harper to the aisle. He walked up to the pallet. ‘What’s he going to touch, apart from the roll he’s buying?’
Harper shrugged. ‘It’s a long shot. He may have touched other rolls, the price tags, I don’t know, but this killer is going to kill again. We’ve got to do something.’
The supervisor walked off, shaking his head. He had a team of top detectives and he was going to ask them to dust a store. He went outside to the vans and organized his teams, shaking his head so much that his jowls wobbled.
Harper sat down at the computer in the store’s back office. He called Denise. ‘You been getting on with our young profiler?’
‘He thinks this was a group attack. That’s going to go to the Captain and he’ll lap it up and pass it to the Chief of Detectives. I need to stop him.’
‘So what do you think?’
‘Single male, early- to mid-thirties, delusional fantasies, but nothing that would prevent him from operating successfully. You want your type, think controlled, obsessive, and this guy’s got hooked on a clean-up.’
‘Like a prostitute killer — a moral cleaner?’
‘There’s something in that, something of the cleaner, but it’s strange. Like a military operation, taking out numbered targets.’
‘Ex-military?’
‘Not possible to say right now. But could be. How’s it going up there?’
‘Time is short, the work is slow.’
‘Well, let’s hope for something.’
Harper hung up and wandered out of the small office and into the aisle. He walked up to the team, slowly taking prints off every surface. ‘How’s it looking?’
‘We’re getting so many prints, Harper, we’ll be here all day and then it’ll take all night to get them uploaded and checked.’
‘We haven’t got all night.’
‘There ain’t no short cut.’
Harper walked away. He sat down. Another hour slipped by, his mind going over the case, detail by detail.
Eddie came through at 6 p.m. He was nodding.
‘You got something?’ Harper asked.
‘Come see.’
Harper and Eddie sat together in the security room. Eddie pulled the tape back and then played it.
‘We’ve got a guy here coming out with a cart three days ago.’ He froze the tape. ‘Can you see it?’
The grainy still was difficult to read. Harper moved closer. At the edge of the man’s arm was a cross of wood. ‘That’s the barbed wire spool?’
‘Looks like it.’
They watched the man push the cart across the parking lot, until he was nearly out of sight behind two other cars.
‘Problem is,’ says Eddie, ‘we don’t see his face or his car.’
‘You looked back and forth?’
‘Sure have and it’s empty. Sorry.’
‘You must have quite a few guys buying barbed wire — why’d you focus on this guy?’
Eddie smiled and then pushed in another tape. ‘This is from the camera on the checkout.’
Harper watched. ‘He keeps his back to the camera, the whole time. Like he wanted to keep his identity hidden.’
‘And he pays cash,’ said Eddie, as the man leaned across the counter to hand cash to the guy on the register.
‘That’s it?’
‘He’s pretty suspicious for a man in a hardware store, but no, that’s not it. Look at this.’ Eddie moved the tape back and zoomed. There was a close-up of the man’s forearm.
‘What is it?’
‘The words.’
Harper looked down. ‘Loyalty, Valiance, Obedience. The word Loyalty, you mean?’
‘That’s what it said on the Capske black card, right?’ ‘That’s right.’
Harper watched the tape again. He stopped it. ‘It’s got a time and date here. Does that cross reference with the man at the car?’
‘Yeah, two minutes later.’
‘Go speak to the manager and find out who was serving on the cash registers at that time and then get him here and get a description from him.’
Eddie stood up. ‘I’m on it.’
Harper took the sequence back to the beginning and watched it. He repeated it three more times. There was nothing to go on. Then he took out the disk and put in the film from the parking lot. Again, there was nothing to tell him who this guy was. A blue hooded top, white sneakers, blue jeans. The man could have been anyone. He went through it again, right to the point when the man was only distantly visible by his car.
Then Harper stopped the tape. He zoomed in and peered into the grainy image.
‘Eddie!’ he shouted. There was no response. Harper moved across to the door. ‘Eddie, get back here.’
Eddie ran back in. ‘What is it?’
‘Come here.’ Harper’s finger touched the screen. ‘You see?’
‘No. What is it?’
Harper pulled back the tape. ‘Just describe what he does.’
Eddie watched. ‘He wheels his cart between two cars, and then stops. He leans forward. He’s unlocking the car, maybe. He picks up something from the cart. Can’t see what, puts it in the trunk. He stops, leans up against the street lamp, does something with his foot.’ Eddie stopped. ‘Aha!’
‘You see it?’ said Harper.
‘I see it. Hell, man, that’s good. That’s very good.’
Harper ran across the store and shouted up the aisle, ‘Ingleman, I’ve got something for you!’
Ingleman moved away slowly from his team. ‘I hope you don’t want the whole store dusted, Harper.’
‘No, but I think I’ve got you a print.’
‘Where?’
Harper led Ingleman into the security room and ran the tape. ‘See there?’ said Harper. ‘He puts his arm up and leans on that street lamp. High up. You think he might have left a print?’
‘I like that,’ said Ingleman, nodding. ‘That’s good thinking. How do you know this is our man?’
‘We don’t. It’s not a hundred per cent but it’s all we’ve got.’
‘Okay,’ said Ingleman, ‘let’s see if we can get a clean print.’
Within the hour, the print had been lifted from the street light in the center of the parking lot. The team traveled back to Manhattan and went directly to the Latent Prints labs. In the meantime, the print had traveled electronically to the crime lab and was being enhanced and analyzed.
The prints team worked fast and the print was soon scanned into the national print database. Within a few minutes, a match had come up on screen.
By the time Harper and the team arrived, it was all completed. The team saw two prints sitting side-by-side, green on a black background. The red hieroglyphics of the points of comparison showed an identical print.
‘That’s what I call a breakthrough,’ said Harper.
‘We’re lucky he’s in the database.’
‘So who is he?’
The technician clicked on to the personal file. ‘His name’s Leo Lukanov.’ A photograph of a muscular white man in his early twenties came up on the screen. He was covered in tattoos.
‘That’s our guy?’ said Eddie. ‘Like Frankenstein in jeans.’
‘Shit,’ said Harper.
‘What?’
‘Where’s Denise?’
‘She’s gone home.’
‘Try her for me, Eddie.’
‘What is it?’
‘Leo Lukanov was involved in an attack on Abby Goldenberg. Denise went to question him yesterday with Hate Crime Unit. If he’s involved, then Denise is in danger.’
‘I’ll call,’ said Eddie. He left the room.
‘What’s his record?’ asked Harper.
‘Assault, robbery… small-time stuff.’
‘He got an address?’
‘Yeah, here it is.’
Harper took the address and rose from his chair. ‘Get moving on a warrant, but we haven’t got time to wait for it. Let’s go.’
East 1st Street, Manhattan
March 8, 7.05 p.m.
The man in the long gray coat walked down First Avenue, close to the gutter. He kept his head low and peered out from under a heavy brow. Fourteen minutes into his tour, no sight of his target.
On the corner of East 1st Street, he saw the preacher emerge from a doorway. The old man was draped in a torn coat that was stained brown from sleeping on wet ground. His nose was broken. One of his nostrils was missing. The wounds were fresh.
The preacher pushed a sign high above his head. It read Jesus Loves You. He started to speak. ‘I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.’
The man stopped. His fingers flexed in his leather gloves. He hated weakness. He wanted to puncture the preacher’s lung with a sudden blow. He wanted to watch him cough out his last sermon. Weakness, filth and arrogance. He hated it all.
‘It has happened before,’ the preacher shouted. ‘And it will happen again. The beast will appear. A righteous beast. He will destroy the unrighteous. And he will take down the innocents with him.’
The man was the only person listening in the heat of the night. He stood at the edge of the sidewalk nodding. The preacher was right about the beast, he thought.
He leaned into the wind and moved back towards his car. His tour of duty was not yet complete.
‘It has happened before,’ he repeated as he drove away.
The streets were busy with traffic making its way down East Houston Street and Baruch Drive. He drove slowly, keeping a close eye on the streets and cursing the careless drivers cutting in as they passed. He traveled under the Williamsburg Bridge and parked again. He crossed the footpath over FDR Drive on foot.
He walked at a pace, a sweat beginning to form under his heavy coat. He was thinking. There was no difference in his mind between then and now — the line was crossed a long time ago, not by him, but by another man in the shadows. Perhaps the circumstances were easier then. Or perhaps it always felt like you were going upstream.
The dark skies above Manhattan were closing in with cloud. He watched the stream of white and red lights rushing by, then looked at his watch. Time to go again.
His next tour was half a mile from the river. Half a mile meant a good time outside the safety of the shadows. He walked away from the wailing of cars as they hit the shell of the Williamsburg Bridge and slipped out beyond it.
He walked up Delancy and glanced into Downing Park. The trees ahead were covered in pale flowers. They looked ethereal and beautiful. He walked down Abraham Place, stopped and stared across Grand Street. The large apartment block was a grey mass in the darkness, scattered yellow lights like golden bricks trailing up the side of the building. He took out a Black Card. The name was typed. He mouthed the syllables slowly, his spit sticky in his mouth.
The sky reflected in the puddles on the ground. He decided to take another turn around the block. He didn’t want to be seen waiting for too long. He turned left and walked down to Abraham Kazan Street, circled and returned. Up ahead a figure came into view, walking towards him. He slowed his steps. If it was her, she must’ve been at her mother’s apartment later than usual.
The figure — a woman in her twenties with brown hair — walked along the side of the road opposite, her heels clipping the asphalt and echoing. Then she slowed. No doubt she had spotted him. He didn’t mind that. People were very predictable. They rarely ran unless directly threatened. He could get very close before she tried to defend herself, and by then it would be much too late.
He watched the hesitation in her step. He was enjoying it. Fear was growing inside her. It was what his hate fed upon. People’s fear: their open-mouthed horror and pain.
He had plans for Marisa. He wanted to see how long she would survive in the river. He wanted to watch the cold snake up and grab her, the horrible pain of the cold. She would be subservient then. She would not complain and throw her human rights in his face. She would plead like a dog for her life, for an end of the pain.
And then he would give her what she wanted. Salvation. A bullet through her head.
He could tell she was looking at him. She had seen him silhouetted against the dim light and was calculating as women had to do. What are the risks? If only she knew how big the risks were, but the future is blind except to those who are going to hack out a pathway. Only they know the future — the leaders, the visionaries. The victims are always blind.
He turned and walked away, playing with her state of mind, knowing that she would feel sudden relief. But at the top of the road, as he felt her eyes on him, he turned. How easy to double fear in an instant. Offer a way out, then bar the door. Each glimpse of an escape only increased the fear.
He stood still and stared directly at her. He saw her take out her cell phone.
She crossed the street, her phone to her ear as if that would save her. His eyes peered at her as she continued to walk quickly through the trees. She didn’t call out. He imagined she was telling herself that he was just some jerk.
He let her walk on for fifty yards. He imagined her heart racing as the light hit her eyes, now slowly returning to normal, her mind beginning to tell her she was safe. The road ahead was brighter and she was nearly there.
A cool wind ran down the avenue and shook the trees along the park. They rattled up above like a child’s toy. The woman shot a look over her shoulder. He wasn’t there.
He had moved closer and darted into a doorway. He hid for a moment, until he heard her footsteps. Now she was ripe. Now she was confused. He moved out of the doorway and started to run. He wanted to get her as she passed the entrance to the park. It was darkest there, and the park gave him cover. He looked up and down the street and there was no one around.
He pushed hard against the ground, the wind at his back. The thrill rose up through his body and left him light-headed. When she heard the sound of his boots on the ground, she turned. But he was ten yards away by then and traveling at speed. She didn’t stand a chance. He was a hunter and she was his.
A whoosh of air from her left side and suddenly she was reeling. Her phone fell from her hand and smashed on the sidewalk. She stumbled and fell. He stood above her, opened his coat and took it off. The uniform was very striking. It was the part he liked to play most of all. It gave him such a sense of power. He towered above her, resplendent.
‘Your name.’
‘What do you want?’ she said.
‘Your name,’
he shouted.
She was shaking and breathing hard. She didn’t understand. Above her, his wide eyes stared out. He pulled her into the park, into the undergrowth, his hand over her mouth.
‘I will shoot you like a dog if you disobey me,’ he whispered in her ear.
Marisa shook visibly. He let his hand drop from her mouth. ‘Please don’t hurt me.’
‘No talking.’
‘My mother is dying. Please. Please don’t hurt me.’
She felt the barrel hard against her skull. She was crying in fear.
‘You will be punished for talking. Kneel.’
‘I don’t want to die. What do you want?’
‘Kneel,’ he spat.
The woman fell to her knees and looked up. He pressed the barrel of his gun to her forehead. The thin skin creased against her skull.
‘Clean my boots,’ he said.
She stared at him imploringly. He liked that look, the look of the dying animal. It pleased him.
‘I am Officer Sturbe of the SS. Now, clean my fucking boots.’
Brownsville, Brooklyn
March 8, 7.49 p.m.
Denise ran down Manhattan and across the Brooklyn Bridge. She ran up street after street. Pounding for mile after mile. The high-rise blocks gleaming in Manhattan started to disappear behind her. In their wake, as she passed through each Brooklyn neighborhood, things got meaner and sharper. It had felt good to get back into work, good to help the Missing Persons investigation, good to start profiling. It had been good to be working closely with Tom Harper.
The streets were full of people like her and not like her. They belonged to some different world, but she was born in Brooklyn and she enjoyed going back. Harper had triggered some deep memories.
Denise pounded up Brownsville, past stooping old black women carrying plastic bags of overpriced food from the only convenience stores that would locate outside the wealthy areas.
She turned off Riverdale and noticed a black sedan crawl past. It didn’t stop but carried on right up to the lights. Denise looked over her shoulder. She felt her heart rate rise and she noted the license plate. The car took a right at the lights. Denise looked ahead. A long empty road lay in front of her.
Denise tried to ignore it. She was running. It was what she needed. The cool air and the ache of muscles. Sweat poured from her. She needed to see the abused face of the city. She ran up through deserted lots, abandoned buildings, through housing project after housing project. The spent lives stared back at her, hard and pitiless. No one cared about no one and that meant they certainly didn’t care about you.
Faces, cold and stern, stared out at her. Old men sitting in beach chairs on the sidewalk, lazy hoods on the stoops, crackheads and hobos. Everyone just looking for the next drama.
The sedan rolled past again. It turned and then followed her up the street. The windows were blacked out, but she knew the kind of people who were inside. It was the second time the same sedan had rolled by and in Brownsville, that wasn’t good news. In the projects it wasn’t going to be a welcome party.
Crown Heights, Brooklyn
March 8, 7.56 p.m.
Three cars drove at speed through the streets towards an address in Brooklyn, a four-story public housing block on the edge of an Orthodox Jewish area. They had traced Leo Lukanov quickly. He wasn’t good at hiding his tracks, especially when he’d been claiming welfare.
Harper was feeling afraid, the adrenalin pumping through his blood, since they hadn’t been able to contact Denise Levene. He’d sent a squad car over to her building, but they’d come back with nothing. She wasn’t at home or at work, and Harper didn’t know enough about her to guess at where she would be.
In the car, the team were staring out, steely eyed and focused. Harper knew what was going on inside. Eddie kept making light, but he felt it too. Levene had been targeted before. It couldn’t happen again, could it?
They parked side-by-side in a deserted lot and all six detectives got out and walked towards Leo Lukanov’s apartment. Harper directed Swanson and Greco round the back of the building. The rest headed up the stairs.
Leo Lukanov lived along a dark brown corridor with a single window at the far end. His apartment was a small one-bedroom, three quarters of the way along the corridor. As Harper and the team walked towards the door, they could smell marijuana and hear distant voices — an argument, followed by a baby crying. Harper took out his Glock and knocked on the shabby door. Kasper and Garcia had their guns out too. Gerry Ratten leaned against the wall. Harper glanced at him.
‘I don’t always carry my gun,’ he said.
Harper raised an eyebrow.
‘He makes a good shield, though,’ said Garcia.
‘Then keep a watch,’ said Harper.
Harper listened. There was no reply. He knocked again. Shouted through the door: ‘NYPD, open up!’
Nothing.
They looked at each other for a moment. Harper tried the door, but it was locked. They hadn’t had time to get a warrant through.
‘He might have left already,’ said Eddie.
‘We need to find him, quick,’ said Harper as he put his shoulder to the door and leaned his weight on it.
‘You do that and anything we find is inadmissible,’ said Garcia. ‘We need a conviction on this, Harper.’
Harper held his shoulder a second. He let the thought go twice round his mind, then he barged his weight against the door and it flipped open. ‘It’s about saving lives. Now let’s see if we can do something.’
The apartment was a hell of a mess. The smell was bad but the pictures and symbols were worse. Every wall was covered in neo-Nazi slogans and images. There was a large red and black Nazi flag, several large black crosses and slogans: The triumph of the will. The final solution.
‘He’s not sane,’ said Harper.
‘He’s sane enough to have kept out of prison,’ said Garcia.
Harper started at the desk drawers, Garcia went for the small wardrobe and Eddie started pulling out boxes from under the bed.
A moment later, Ratten walked in, licked the sweat off his mustache and twiddled his stubby fingers. He watched the frenetic search, then calmly walked up to the desktop and switched it on.
He laughed to himself. Loud enough for Harper to hear. ‘What is it, Gerry?’
‘You lot, searching like some cops out of the Dark Ages. People don’t keep their secrets under the bed any more. They keep them online.’
Mary Greco looked around the room, flicked through his bookshelves.
‘What are you thinking, Mary?’ asked Harper.
‘History books,’ she said. ‘He’s interested in fascism and there’s a few seminal texts here in the demented white supremacist line.’
‘He’s one of them, for sure,’ said Harper.
Gerry connected to the Internet and opened Leo Lukanov’s browser history. ‘Little bastard wipes his history.’ A couple more clicks and he was looking at the systems files, the temporary Internet files and Internet cache. ‘Voilà!’ he said. ‘Look at that — Leo likes to paint on the White Wall. This is his last post. He even calls himself Goering. Nice to model yourself on a mass murderer, I always think.’
‘No delusions of grandeur, then,’ said Eddie from the bed.
Gerry brought up the White Wall and started to look for posts by Goering. He found the latest thread. ‘Look at this shit. Pretty vicious.’ He read down the threads. ‘Now look at this. As soon as they get interesting, it goes into runic fucking symbols. I’ve been working on this site for a day and a half and I can’t understand it all. They use code.’
Harper stood up. ‘It’s going to take too long. If he’s out there, he might not be coming back.’ He pulled a bank statement from a drawer and looked down the list of items. ‘Gerry, keep at it and I’ll stick to paper. There are basically four locations on this list. There’s a bar he hangs out in, a pool room, a shop he goes to. There’s an ATM he frequents. I’m going to take a look with Eddie.’
Harper stopped and looked down at the bin under the desk. He lifted it up on to the desk. ‘Wait up,’ he said.
Harper pulled out eight small pieces of black card and placed them on the desk. Eddie and the rest of the crew came in close. Harper moved the small squares of torn black card around, matching up the rips. In the top corner, the word Valiance formed. Harper moved the three pieces that crossed the middle line. Two words appeared in front of them. Harper and the team stared in silence. They weren’t just words. It was a name. A name they knew well. Denise Levene.
Brownsville, Brooklyn
March 8, 8.19 p.m.
In Brownsville, the car slowed to a crawl as it passed her, then went straight up the street. She watched it, then she turned left into a smaller street, hoping to avoid a third sweep.
She continued running through the vacant lots and low-rise housing projects surrounded by wire fences. She glanced to her side. The sedan was right there, out of nowhere. Four guys in the car. Two guys hanging out of the window, tracking her. Not gangbangers. White guys. Two she recognized as Tommy Ocks and Leo Lukanov. She looked ahead. There were no other cars on the street. No people. This was a ghost town.
‘Hey, Jew, you want to make a complaint about us?’ shouted one of them, his hands drumming on the side of the car.
‘We found ourselves a stray kike bitch,’ called the other.
‘Come on, lady, you want to stop and talk about missing Jews?’ All four men in the car laughed.
Denise stared straight ahead, her pace increasing, her heart rate speeding up. Adrenalin starting to make her muscles feel weak. Condition red just around the corner.
A baseball bat appeared through the blacked-out window in the back seat. ‘You want me to take her Jew legs out? That’ll slow her.’
‘Not yet, fool, back off,’ said Lukanov.
‘Let me take her out, man. Let’s take the bitch home and keep her for a while.’ The drumming on the side of the car intensified.
Denise kept her eyes on the road ahead. She was so scared, her legs felt like Jello — so weak and tired that she couldn’t even coordinate her strides.
‘You talk about us again, Jew, and we’ll cut you to pieces.’
The sedan drove on ahead of Denise and then stopped. Denise slowed her pace. Two guys got out of the car. They were both over six two. Tommy Ocks was dark and mean. Leo Lukanov was pale and intense. They sneered, hitched their low-slung pants, jiggled their shoulders. Behind them, the background vocals from the sedan was a low persistent abuse.
Denise was fifty yards away. Life was a fifty-yard play.
‘Hey, Jew, we’re gonna show you how to behave right.’
Denise stepped off the curb and ran across the street. The two guys jeered.
‘You want us to hunt you down? We can do that too.’
Apartment, Lower Manhattan
March 8, 8.39 p.m.
Harper sat in his car outside Denise’s apartment and continued trying to call anyone who might know anything about her. He called the building manager at her apartment, her neighbors, her colleagues and her therapists, but no one knew where she might be. Denise had kept herself to herself over the last few months.
Eddie appeared at the window and handed Harper a piece of paper. ‘That’s his cell.’
Harper nodded and called Daniel, Denise’s ex-boyfriend. He introduced himself.
‘Not you again — what the hell do you want?’ said Daniel.
‘Denise might be in danger, Daniel. So let’s forget our hang-ups. Try to help us here.’
‘What kind of danger?’
‘Just answer my questions.’
‘I’ll try. What do you need to know?’
‘Denise started running after the abduction.’
‘Yeah. Obsessively.’
‘We’ve been in her apartment. Her running shoes are missing, but her cell phone was still there. We guess she’s out there running somewhere. We’ve got an APB on her. You any idea where she might be?’
‘Brooklyn, I guess,’ said Daniel.
‘Brooklyn’s a big place,’ said Harper.
‘Listen, she has a GPS wristwatch. She downloads her routes and times on to her PC. If you can get on to her computer, it’ll have all her routes mapped.’
‘That’s great, Daniel. Thank you.’
‘Let me know when you find her.’
‘Will do,’ said Harper. He called across to Gerry Ratten and sent him up to Denise’s apartment. Harper and Eddie followed closely behind. ‘Call Dispatch, get some squad cars ready in Brooklyn.’
Gerry stopped and turned. ‘Harper, you drive across to Brooklyn — I can talk you through the routes by phone. No point in us all sitting in her apartment.’
Harper stopped. ‘Yeah, let’s do that. It might save us a few minutes.’ He watched Gerry lumber into the building. ‘Let’s hope he finds something.’
‘If it’s on her PC, Gerry will find it,’ said Eddie.
Brownsville, Brooklyn
March 8, 8.52 p.m.
Denise felt her heart pounding even faster now. It was hitting dangerous levels. She saw them head out towards her. She turned, started to run back towards Manhattan. A long way away now. Her head was hazy and confused, her vision began to tunnel.
‘Fuck you, bitch.’
The two neo-Nazis went back to the car, slipped in quickly and the driver pressed the gas hard. The car lurched off the curb, screeched as it reversed and turned.
Denise was sprinting. How long could she keep it up? After an hour’s run, not long. With her heart racing in fear, even less so. She felt her legs pounding. She could only hear the sound of her feet; all her senses had hollowed out a focus about a foot in front of her face. The sedan raced by, a hand slapped her ass, then laughter pealed ahead. The car ripped across her path, the suspension hitting the curb with a heavy clunk. Metal on concrete. Two guys jumped out. The slam of the car door. Quicker now. Closer. The last ten yards. Endgame.
Tommy Ocks smiled. His thick biceps were covered in tattoos. The sickening feeling of fear was drowning her. The debilitating fear.
‘She’s all hot and sweaty,’ called out the guy.
‘Just shoot her on the street, man. Don’t want my car messed up.’
Denise shouted but she had no voice.
‘You gonna repent, Jew? You gonna accept that you’re the inferior race?’
Denise looked to left and right. She was paralyzed and confused. There was a wire fence to her left. A small opening at the bottom where local kids slipped under to play in the abandoned lot.
‘Or I can make you repent,’ said the second guy, taking a step towards her. Denise took her chance and darted towards the fence. The two big guys lurched after her. She made it through the hole in the fence, but it was much too small for the broad-shouldered neo-Nazis chasing her. She stood. Across the vacant lot, she could see Riverdale. There were cars and people on Riverdale. She started to run.
Crown Heights, Brooklyn
March 8, 8.56 p.m.
Harper and Eddie were driving fast through Brownsville.
‘Where are you?’ asked Gerry.
‘We’re coming back the same way,’ said Harper. ‘Is there no other route?’
‘This is pretty obsessive stuff, Harper. She runs the exact same route, has done for three months. She times it and tries to beat it. She’s brought her time down by twenty minutes. She’s got some strength.’
‘But she’s not here,’ said Harper.
‘Keep circling,’ Gerry told him. ‘I’ll keep looking.’
Harper turned to Eddie. ‘She’s gone off the path.’
‘Or someone made her.’
Harper felt the flurry of anxiety again. ‘I called Hate Crime. They can’t find these guys anywhere.’
Eddie turned the car and they started back up through the streets of Brownsville.
Harper’s cell went again. He picked up. It was Gerry Ratten. ‘What is it?’
‘I had a thought. If her GPS watch is sending out signals and getting pinpoint location…’
‘Can you trace it?’
‘I’m waiting. I called the company. They want a warrant. They can’t release location information.’
‘They’re sticking to that?’
‘Seems so.’
Harper hit the window. ‘Come on.’
‘So,’ said Gerry, ‘I tried a little trick or two I know.’
‘And?’
‘The watch sends signals back to base. You can get your runs logged in real-time to share with others and race with others. I’ve signed her up for this service. It’s just loading up.’
Harper held his breath. Gerry kept them waiting. ‘It’s worked,’ said Gerry. ‘I got it live. Not quite live. But three minutes ago she was two blocks west from where you are. Then left.’
‘Let’s go, Eddie. Two blocks.’
Brownsville, Brooklyn
March 8, 9.05 p.m.
Behind her, she heard them curse and start climbing the fence, but Denise was fast. She was halfway across the lot by the time they jumped down. Her eyes were scanning the fence ahead. She spotted another gap, a vertical cut, and headed off to her right. She was going full speed but they were gaining on her quickly.
Five yards to the fence she felt a hand slap her back. She hurtled forward and rolled, with laughter following her. Footsteps skidding on the gravel. The gap was close enough now and she scrambled through. A hand caught her ankle. She turned over and stared at his face. His name was Paddy Ellery. He was sweating, his eyes were brimming with excitement.
‘I’m just going to hold the Jew bitch here. You jump over and help her back through.’
Denise watched Tommy Ocks move down to a post and start to climb. Paddy held her ankle hard and watched, his chest pounding. ‘God, you’re pretty for a Jew,’ he said.
Denise felt the fear subside for a moment, to be replaced by a sudden clarity. She had to do something. ‘I’m not a victim,’ she said. ‘I’m a predator.’ Her eyes peeled around. As Tommy Ocks reached the top of the fence, Denise saw a beer bottle lying on the ground. She pulled and leaned towards it, twisting her upper body, and grabbed it. She sat up and smashed the bottle on the ground. Then she jerked towards Paddy Ellery and drove the jagged edge of the smashed bottle into his arm. Ellery looked up; he didn’t seem to feel much, then he saw the deep cut and the bottle gleaming with his blood.
Ellery screamed as he let go, his arm oozing blood. It gave Denise the time she needed. She pushed herself up as Tommy Ocks jumped down from the fence and looked for instructions. He took too long and Denise edged back, her hand holding up the bloody broken bottle.
She turned and ran straight into the street, but the sedan had circled and cut off her path. It drove right at her. Denise jumped to one side. Ocks and Ellery started to move in from the right. The car was advancing from the left. Denise saw no escape. Only an alleyway.
She backed into the alleyway, turned and ran, only to come up against a locked garage door and a brick wall. She looked round: the car had turned and the light cut into the darkness. Ocks and Ellery appeared either side of the car.
‘Now, let’s do this,’ said one of them. ‘Let’s finish it.’
Brownsville, Brooklyn
March 8, 9.08 p.m.
The car screeched around the corner. Harper spotted the black sedan at the head of an alleyway. They pulled to a halt, rushed out and ran across the ground, guns out.
The sedan was blocking the entrance. Harper jumped on to the trunk and leaped on to the roof and across the hood. Eddie followed. There, in the headlights of the car, four men were standing around Denise Levene.
She was in the center, a jagged broken bottle in her fist.
Harper jumped off the hood and into the alleyway.
‘Police,’ he shouted, raising his gun. ‘Move away!’
Tommy Ocks grabbed Denise and pushed her out in front of him. ‘You going to shoot? Then shoot.’
‘That’s dumb, that’s so fucking dumb,’ said Harper. He took his gun and handed it to Eddie. ‘No chance for a shot. This has to be done by hand.’ He moved fast down the alley, took the first thug by the collar and pushed him to one side. There was no reaction. He shoved past Leo Lukanov and Paddy Ellery, then stood in front of Tommy Ocks. He took Denise by the hand. ‘You’re coming with me,’ he said. ‘You okay?’
‘I’m okay,’ said Denise. She stared with anger at her four attackers and Tommy released his grip.
‘Let’s not make this worse than it is,’ said Harper. He patted Tommy Ocks on the shoulder. ‘Because I would just relish the opportunity too much.’
Denise walked back up the alleyway to Eddie. Harper held them in his gaze for a few seconds. ‘Uniform are on their way. Empty your pockets.’ He spat on the floor.
Tommy Ocks was first. He landed a heavy blow on the back of Harper’s neck. Harper fell to his knees. Eddie darted forward and raised his gun. Harper looked up to Eddie. ‘Take her to the car, Eddie. Call back-up.’
‘I can’t leave you,’ said Eddie.
Harper pushed himself to his feet. ‘Take her to the car, Eddie, and call back-up.’
He watched Eddie leave and then turned and looked at the four guys. ‘Your third dumb move.’ Harper considered. Four to one. The odds weren’t good, but he was feeling something he’d not felt for three long months and it was running through every vein and artery, pulsing in every muscle.
Running away was not an option. He’d needed this feeling in the ring, but it’d deserted him — yet it was there now, like a fire. His fists clenched, his body felt strong and agile, his eyes narrowed. Tommy Ocks positioned himself on his front foot. His aim was to hit Harper hard on the side of the head. The other three thugs had already closed in.
Harper moved so quickly and decisively that they had no time to react. He threw his foot out wide in a great sweeping movement, hooking the feet of Tommy Ocks and jerking his ankles back with sudden force. Ocks lost his footing and fell flat on his back, his arms in the air.
‘Fucking help me,’ shouted Tommy.
Paddy Ellery and Ray Hicks moved in. Harper caught Leo Lukanov circling round behind him. He turned, but Lukanov wasn’t coming round for an attack, he was heading up the alleyway.
Harper pushed a boot into Tommy Ocks’s neck and held him on the ground. He eyed Ellery and Hicks. ‘You’ve got to make a calculation here. You must be half-smart. So far, you’ve got harassment. That’s not good, but your chance of getting away is quite high. You want to add assault on a cop?’
He watched the two guys move nervously on their feet. Lukanov was getting away. It was Lukanov he wanted. He had to act.
Harper felt Tommy Ocks try to rise. He pressed hard on his neck. Ocks screamed. Paddy Ellery pulled a knife out of his jacket. He smiled like some moron who felt he’d suddenly got the upper hand.
Harper’s right hook was so fast, that they only saw the recoil. By which time, Paddy Ellery was lying on the ground with his nose mashed up. Ray Hicks ran in and kicked.
Harper reached out, grabbed his leg, locked it, jerked it up violently and threw Hicks on the ground. He looked down on all three. ‘Now, I can hand you over to my partner.’
Harper raced up the alleyway. Lukanov was in the sedan, staring out from the driver’s seat. The car’s engine growled. ‘Eddie,’ shouted Harper, pointing at the car. ‘Help me out here. Block this bastard in.’
Eddie’s Pontiac roared across the back of the sedan and screeched to a halt.
Harper raced to the door. Lukanov pressed on the gas and swerved the wheel towards Harper. The car lurched forward, scraped the wall and jammed Harper against the car. Lukanov shoved the door open and clambered out. His big fist hit Harper hard on the side of the head. Once, then twice. Harper felt the power of the blows and struggled to get his arms free as Lukanov came in again. Harper swerved his head and the third shot missed his face and landed hard on the wall. Lukanov cried out and Harper saw his chance. Leaning back, he threw the whole weight of his head forward. His forehead connected hard with Lukanov’s face and the big man dropped against the car. Harper squeezed out from behind it and grabbed Lukanov’s collar.
‘Leo Lukanov,’ said Harper, breathing heavily, ‘I’m arresting you for the murder of David Capske.’