Lock-Up, Bedford-Stuyvesant
March 14, 6.12 a.m.
The killer stared out through the glass shield. His hands were coated in thick protective gloves and he could feel the heat from the metal below. He hadn’t slept. He couldn’t any more.
He pushed his arms forward. The fierce shriek of the angle grinder as it bit into the steel rod bellowed throughout the garage. Sparks sheeted out in every direction. The metal scaffolding poles had been picked up here and there. He had known they would be useful one day. His big idea was pinned to the far wall, sketched in pencil on to a roll of paper.
He cut the pole right through and it fell to the concrete floor with a clatter. There were several of these on the floor now, all the same length. He rolled the last one into the pile and then counted them again. His shoulder was aching and the heat in the small garage with the low iron roof was bad. He was streaming with sweat, wearing a shirt to protect his skin from the sharp fragments of steel and the red sparks.
The diagram on the wall was repeated in actual size on the floor. Two chalk lines extended from the back wall into the room. A third line connected them, forming a square. There was a wooden board on the floor, two pallets of bricks, and bags of sand and cement.
Having finished cutting his steel poles, which were going to be perfect tubes, he removed his shirt and undershirt. He took a spade from the side of the room and ripped open the cement bag. He poured it on to the board, and then added a shovel of sand. In the heat he went over to the hose and doused himself liberally first, before filling a bucket with water.
He used the spade to form a cavity in the sand and cement mix, then threw in water from the bucket, folding it in with the spade.
When he was happy with the consistency, he took a trowel and started to lay a thin line of mortar between the chalk lines. He then took the point of his trowel and formed a V in the mortar. From the block of twelve bricks he took the first one, laid it flat side down on the mortar and pressed it firmly into place with a slight twisting motion. He laid the second brick along from the first, filling in the joint between them, then placed his spirit level on top to check that they were flat. He continued until the walls were nearly all built.
The killer could see that the evolution of the species only worked if people destroyed what was weak. If not, humanity would continue to be diluted by impure genes. He lifted another brick and placed it on top of the mortar. He was still depressed about missing the children, but now he had Lucy. Second attempts were good enough.
He thought about Section 88. They were amateurs. Fools, most of them. They had been useful, but they hadn’t understood him. Not at all. If there was one thing he knew better than anything else, it was how to keep a fire burning. It had burned through the last twenty-five years, it had grown through any slight, any injustice, and become a raging, tormenting anger.
The truth — if there was such a thing as truth — was that he now felt bad if he didn’t kill. He felt cowardly, and as though he, too, was weak. Once you started to kill, the need was impossible to stop. It was mechanical and vast. It consumed him.
The killer heard a bark, then a whole series of barks. Someone was outside. He stood and reached for his gun.
A moment later, a knock rapped on the door. He unlocked the door and opened it.
‘I got what you asked for, Sturbe,’ said Martin Heming.
North Manhattan Homicide
March 14, 10.18 a.m.
Harper slept three hours then walked back to the station house, his head full of dark images. The news media had just picked up the story and the panic and rage were building.
There were no reporters outside the precinct and the investigation room was nearly empty. It would take Forensics another day to get anything from the Auxiliary Truck, but Harper already knew that there would be nothing. The killer was too good, and the purpose of the attack was unmistakable — it wasn’t just to kill, it was to prove his superiority to the police.
Denise Levene sat in the circle of light from a low desk lamp in the corner of the room. She looked asleep. Harper moved across, his feet making no sound on the old carpet. Denise turned quickly as he approached. ‘Tom! Are you okay?’
‘I’ve never seen anything as bad as what I saw in that truck, Denise. We’ve got to find this guy. He’s escalating beyond anything I could’ve imagined. Five kids gassed in a police van.’ Harper threw himself into a seat. ‘Anything coming together here?’
‘I’ve got nothing new. We’ve been working all night.’
‘No leads on Lucy?’
‘We haven’t found anything. He’s cleaned all traces.’ Denise stared up at Harper. ‘It’s always darkest just before dawn,’ she said.
Harper smiled in response and stared down at the book that Denise was looking at. ‘What is it? Your high-school scrapbook?’
‘It’s my casebook. I keep a close eye on the Abby case. I keep every detail, every article.’
‘You really feel for her, don’t you?’
‘Sure, don’t we all?’
Harper picked up the casebook. He held it as he crossed to the coffee pot and poured out a fresh cup of coffee. ‘Interesting,’ he said.
‘What is?’
‘Looking back over the life of a case.’ Harper sat and started to flick through the images. He saw outrage, hope, despair, page after page. The turns and dead ends of a fruitless investigation. At the end, the presumption of death.
‘They look alike, don’t they?’ said Harper, staring at a picture of Abby Goldenberg smiling in a high-school shot and the photos of the murder victims on the wall.
Denise stood up and stretched. ‘Yeah. There’s definitely a type he goes for. No question.’
‘No, I mean Abby and Lucy.’
‘They do,’ said Denise.
‘I don’t understand how Lucy could be a target,’ said Harper.
‘Why?’
‘She’s not Jewish, is she? He must’ve been going for Capske, but then why come back for Lucy?’
‘Because she saw something the night he was taken, something that would lead us to him.’
‘Yes. I thought of that,’ said Harper, ‘but if she was only taken because of some accident, then it’s damn strange that she’s a dead ringer for Abby. I don’t get how this fits together.’
‘I don’t get it either, but Lucy had something he wanted to keep from us.’
‘Another thing, if we’re working on the assumption that the killer is Heming, then why does it matter if Lucy saw him? It makes no sense. We know it’s Heming, don’t we?’
‘No, but he’s all we’ve got.’
‘He’s smart, right? Smart enough to find a police safe house and kidnap two kids, smart enough to leave no evidence. You met Lucy. She’s not a difficult target. She seemed kind of lost in her own head. Why did he feel the need to take her?’
‘Could be part of the escalation,’ said Denise. ‘He’s not thinking straight.’
‘You read about Heming and his wife. She went off with a Jew. You don’t think that’s what’s happened here, do you? Lucy was going out with Heming, maybe after the marriage broke up. Maybe lightning struck twice for him. She was dating him and then left him for a Jewish boy.’
‘Could be,’ said Denise. ‘But they don’t seem to be a good match.’
‘No, and again, I can understand him wanting to punish her, if that’s his psychosis, but why take the hard drive and the diaries?’
Harper flicked through Denise’s casebook and stopped at a picture of Abby standing next to some boyfriend from her past. He turned to Denise. ‘Our killer knows the children can ID him, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So he’s confident he’s got alibis and he’s confident that there’s no physical evidence to link himself to the crime. We didn’t even get a strand of hair from the Becky Glass murder. He didn’t rape her either, even though it looks like he wanted to. Perhaps he’s afraid of leaving his DNA. I mean, maybe he’s on file so he’s got to keep the scenes clean. He certainly knows how to clean a crime scene. If it was Heming, the children could ID him from a photograph.’
‘If the psych team allowed us.’
‘He doesn’t know that.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘The only thing that can put our killer at the scene is the children. And the only other person who is linked to the case and to him is Lucy Steller. Fuck!’
‘What?’
‘He killed Capske out of spite, because he was jealous, because he was in love with Lucy Steller. He let himself make that mistake. That’s why he called the press. He knew he had to try to put us off the scent. The other kills are random, perhaps linked to Section 88 and hate attacks, but David Capske was never attacked by Section 88. David isn’t his victim type. David was an error, a personal vendetta. That’s why he’s taken Lucy. Our killer knew her. And she knew him.’
‘Where are you going with this?’ said Denise.
Harper stood up and took his coat. ‘It’s the only thing that makes sense. Lucy is the key to his identity. Lucy is personal. And that means you need to work harder than ever to find out who she went out with.’
‘Okay, we can do it,’ said Denise.
‘It also means something else,’ said Harper. ‘It means that we’ve been searching for the wrong man.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s not Martin Heming. It makes no sense to take Lucy or to try to take the children if the killer is Heming. Our killer’s identity is locked up in those three, but Sturbe is not Heming.’
‘The profile never matched,’ said Denise. ‘We’ve been chasing the wrong guy.’
Lock-Up, Bedford-Stuyvesant
March 14, 10.40 a.m.
He’d been working on the structure for hours and it was nearing completion. The two Flemish bond brick walls came out from the back of the workshop, forming a three-sided space. The walls turned into the fourth side at full height, stopped for a door and continued with a two-foot wall and space for a window. The operation at the vigil had given him all the confidence that he needed, but he wanted to see them die. He didn’t want them to die in the dark. He needed to see the pain on their faces.
The fourth wall was fitted with a door that had special seals to ensure that no air could get in or out. The final piece of the fourth wall was about to be completed. Glass would have been perfect but it was too heavy and too expensive. He’d bought a single eight-foot by six-foot piece of clear Plexiglass and fitted it into the large window space. On the inner side, he had cemented security bars between the two walls. The Plexiglass was sealed into place, and then he added a further layer of bricks on the sides and bottom to add strength.
He stood back, looked at his creation and was pleased. He opened the door and walked in. The door shut into a wide jamb and was sealed on the outside by an old-fashioned set of bolts. Inside, the space was ten feet by ten feet. It was large enough to make a cell for a number of people. He looked up at the ceiling. The small inner room was still open to the roof.
He levered four strips of corrugated iron into place across two supports made of simple wooden planks. He drilled the iron into the wood and then bolted it together to form the roof.
He climbed up the ladder and on to the roof carrying a thick latex sealant and coated all the joints and bolts.
It had taken all morning and he sat with a take-out staring at his construction. He finally picked up his tubes. He would have two feeder tubes running from the roof of the inner building. He cut two holes in the roof and fixed shower heads into the corrugated roof, then sealed the join and a joining piece to his tubes and ran them both across the roof, down each side of the building and around to a central unit made of an old plastic bin with a sealed lid.
He welded the tubes together, ensuring that they were fixed. Finally he joined both to the large plastic bin.
He inspected his finished cell. It was perfect. He had a chair, throne-like, positioned opposite the Plexiglass wall.
He took a red flare, lit it and placed it inside the room and locked the door. The room filled with thick red smoke and for a while all the smoke was contained within the room, but soon, several wisps started to escape through the joins in the brickwork. He walked around, carefully marking each leak with a spray can. When he had marked each space, he started to plaster each one with more sealant or mortar. As he sealed, the red smoke reduced until no more was escaping. His cell was airtight. That was vitally important.
He watched for thirty minutes and then, satisfied, opened the door to let the smoke dissipate. He walked outside into the yard, pulled his balaclava back on, opened the trunk of his car and looked down at Lucy.
Apartment, Upper East Side
March 14, 11.18 a.m.
Harper had re-sent CSU to look for what they could at Lucy’s apartment. If the killer had been a past boyfriend, then there might be other evidence. He now paced around her apartment, looking and desperately trying to work it out. Then there was a call from the hallway.
Harper found the CSU team dusting the linoleum just inside the door and taking pictures. ‘What have you got?’
‘We’ve found a print of a boot. The bastard tried to clean it, but rubber can’t just be dusted off. It’s left one or two marks.’
‘Is it anything you can work on?’ Harper asked.
‘Sure it is,’ said the Crime Scene detective. ‘Look at this.’ He crouched and shone his flashlight at the boot-print. ‘See these marks of the sole? There’s lots of small tears in the rubber. It’s unusual. It would identify the boot, for sure. It’s as good as a fingerprint.’
Harper stared at the small marks. ‘I think I know what they are,’ he said. ‘Tears from barbed wire. The killer was rolling David Capske with his foot. Shit, he hasn’t even changed his boots. That’s how confident this guy is. It’s nothing if we don’t find the owner of that boot. How the hell do we do that?’
‘It might not help you find him, but it’ll help you nail him, Detective.’
‘I just worked out why the killer called the networks,’ said Harper. ‘David Capske was personal. He realized he’d made a mistake. Jesus, we should’ve seen it. That’s what felt so wrong about the whole political angle. It was fake, but it worked. We were sidelined — and he knew that we would be.’
Harper’s cell buzzed. He picked it up.
‘I’ve got good news,’ said Denise.
‘What is it? I need some good news.’
‘We followed your suggestion and looked into Lucy’s past. We found something.’
‘A name?’
‘No.’
‘A picture?’
‘No.’
‘Then what?’
‘Get back over here and we’ll show you.’
Harper rushed into the investigation room. Denise and Gerry Ratten were hunched over a computer screen.
‘What have you got for me?’
‘Ratten has found something. Postings on the Internet by a girl called Lucy S.’
‘Is this Lucy Steller?’
‘These are posts from fourteen months ago. And our suspect wouldn’t have known anything about them.’
‘Why not?’
‘She wrote them on a women’s forum, a help group for victims of domestic violence. A place to talk, to get up the courage to report the bastards.’
‘What makes you think it’s her?’
‘She says she’s writing a book. Her name is Lucy S.’
‘It’s not enough,’ said Harper.
‘And she says there’s a grocer’s which she can see from her apartment window.’
‘It wouldn’t wash in court.’
‘We’ve got evidence,’ said Gerry Ratten.
‘How the hell did you find it?’
‘You got to know where to look,’ said Gerry. ‘I just got a warrant and got her ISP to release her IP address and browsing history.’
‘They give you the websites?’
‘Yeah. We saw where she’d visited. We tracked a lot of them. I got two interesting things. One, that she was seeing a man that she called X. Two, that he was beating on her. Three, that he was racist and four, that about a couple of weeks earlier, they’d gone on a road trip to Yellowstone Park together.’
‘Why did she call him X?’
‘It’s a domestic violence forum,’ said Denise. ‘You’re not allowed to name the bastards. That would be against the law.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yeah, seriously. She made over four hundred posts over an eight-month period. Read some of the highlights.’
I am in an abusive relationship. My boyfriend does not let me go out or look at other men. He tries to make me admit that I have had an affair. He interrogates me for hours until I admit it, then he beats me.
X hit me twice today. Both times in the back. I don’t know what to do.
He drinks and he rapes me sometimes, but I kid myself it’s not rape, right?
X accused me of liking Jews too much and Blacks. It’s only because I’m supposed to be going to a party tomorrow. He said I’m trying to undermine him. He says I’m a slut. I said that I wasn’t. He gave me a black eye so I couldn’t go to the party.
I’m a good girl today. Will I get high fives all round? I finally broke up with X. It wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. He wasn’t happy, but he didn’t shout or scream. He just stared at me. Just stared and stared and didn’t say a thing. Not a word. Not one single word.
I got home today. X was standing outside the building again. He looked okay, but he’d obviously been drinking. I can always tell. Then he ran at me and put his hands all over me. It was only when I got inside the door that I realized that I was smeared all over with blood. I don’t even know where it came from.
Midnight. I woke up, he was at my bed. He was in my room, at my bedside. I screamed in terror. He pleaded with me to take him back. I would die if he came back. I can’t take it. He tells me that if I report him, he’ll make my life a living hell. It already is. Not one day goes by without phone calls or visits or one of his reports.
Harper read what he could. ‘No names.’
‘We can probably glean information, but it’ll take time.’
‘You mentioned Yellowstone,’ said Harper.
‘It’s the one date-posted message that tells us where our killer was for a week last year.’
‘That’s worth following up. Okay,’ said Harper. ‘We’ve got to go through Lucy’s whole electronic history. There’ll be a connection. We find she uses a credit card in some hotel, then we check every other receipt. He’s got to be there. He was with her for eight months, he can’t hide that well.’
Lock-Up, Bedford-Stuyvesant
March 14, 12.43 p.m.
The food left out in front of the shed had attracted enough of the local homeless. Not people, but stray dogs. He sat on a high pallet overlooking them. They were frail and needy. He saw the one he wanted. A little beige-brown mutt, about two foot high with a white underbelly and a nice clean snout. It was probably a hybrid of a hybrid, not a pure gene in it.
He climbed down from the pallet, took a biscuit out of his pocket and threw it to the one he wanted. The little dog looked up with big brown eyes, full of expectation and gratefulness. He threw it another biscuit.
As he walked away, the little beige dog followed him. It wasn’t fast or eager, it moved with a tentative stride. He took a third biscuit out of his pocket and held it out; this time, the dog walked across and took it from his hand.
He went inside the lock-up. The little dog followed. He shut the door. He heard Abby move in the small room behind the door. She would get her chance soon enough. The dog stopped and seemed to be aware that somehow it was no longer free. It looked at the door, at the man — and then another biscuit was thrown in its path and it forgot its instincts.
The dog looked up. A line of biscuits ran all the way across the room. It ate and moved and ate and moved, and before long, the small beige mutt was inside the room that the man had built.
The man closed the heavy acoustic door and bolted it. He moved to the Plexiglass window and looked in. The mutt had eaten the rest of its biscuits and was looking up at the window.
The man watched for a minute; there was something appealing in the dog, in its lack of knowledge. He turned, put on large yellow gloves, and opened a big round can using an old-fashioned can-opener. He poured the blue pellets into the plastic bin and then sealed the lid.
He crossed eagerly to the window. The gas was odorless and colorless. He watched for a moment, but nothing seemed to happen. He waited and watched. The dog sat, wagged its tail and barked once.
He moved closer to the window. Then the dog’s muzzle sniffed. The gas must have reached the ground level where the animal was.
The scene was unpleasant to watch, if one watched it emotionally. But if one used the scientific side of one’s nature and observed the effect of the gas, rather than reacting to the perceived pain of the dog, it was fine. Lucy was tied in the chair staring at the window. She was not detached, but then again, she was not supposed to be. He wanted to see the fear in her eyes.
The dog barked, scratched, ran a small circle and jumped up at the window. It was in agonizing pain and showed every sign of terror. But within seven minutes, it was lying on its side, almost dead.
The man raised his hand and pressed his palm to the Plexiglass. The little beige-brown mutt was still and lifeless. A harsh lesson in trusting strangers, he thought, but his experiment had worked.
North Manhattan Homicide
March 14, 4.32 p.m.
In the precinct, they reopened the cases: the brown, scratched case-files, the box-files of accumulated evidence, the database that Harper insisted on that hooked up every detail, to find links and matches. They looked back through each case slowly, letting their minds wander over the detail, trying to see what they’d overlooked. They had Lucy Steller’s phone records, Internet records, credit-card statements, bank statements and everything else besides.
On the board in front of them they had a large eight-month calendar. Every call, receipt, purchase or interaction was noted by each date. They were piecing together her life story from Internet forums, relatives, friends and the accumulated electronic data.
After just a few hours, the eight-month period was beginning to fill out. Harper stared at the board. Every time he spotted a date where Lucy was with Mr X, he had his team cross-check each receipt.
Harper had the team bring in every person who knew Lucy Steller. The interview rooms were all full and the corridors outside were lined with people. Someone had to have seen Lucy with this man, but they’d been at it for hours already and not a soul had seen him.
Denise walked up to Harper. He was staring at the cases. He had put the picture of Abby side-by-side with Lucy. He could see something. A pattern. He looked from Abby to Lucy to Capske. There was something there. What was it that was nagging away in his head? Something connected them. He looked across at the kidnapping of the children. All the unanswered questions came at once. What was the blue eagle the kids saw on the killer? How did the killer sit for hours with Capske with no one bothering him? How did he know about the safe house?
Harper’s mind clicked once, then twice. He saw a picture in his mind. He saw another. Some route through all these threads seemed to be forming, but he just couldn’t quite catch it.
‘The boot-print,’ he called to Swanson. ‘What did CSU say?’
‘Nothing at all. It’s just a boot-print. No matches on record.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Harper. ‘Come on, something must break here. Eddie, anything from the interviews?’
‘Nothing yet,’ shouted Eddie, ‘but we’re trying.’
Everyone was silent, working the case, poring over and over every detail.
Denise raised her head. ‘I’ve found nothing in any of Lucy’s old journals, not one reference to his name or appearance.’
‘Then we’ve really got nothing,’ said Harper. He looked up and saw Heming’s face staring out from one of the boards.
‘Where did you disappear to, Heming?’ said Harper. He stared at the pictures of Lucy and Abby. They might be both alive, somewhere out there, with a man intent on torturing and killing them. Harper looked up again at the board. Something was speaking to him, he just couldn’t quite hear it.
Back at the start of it all, they still hadn’t worked out how the killer had enticed David Capske to East Harlem. Maybe there was something in it. They’d made so many small discoveries — the whole Nazi story — but none of it led to the killer. They knew so much, but so little. Then something emerged. He hit the desk.
Denise looked across. ‘What is it?’
‘Your profile, Denise. Listen, I’ve had this feeling all along. This terrible feeling that he’s always ahead of us, always in the know.’
‘What are you saying?’ said Denise.
Harper pulled out his shield and looked at it. ‘Remember the bird of prey that Ruth Glass chose? A blue eagle. We thought it was the Eagle of the Third Reich, didn’t we? We fell into that trap. Listen, Denise, the killer took a big risk in taking those kids. I think they hold the key.’
‘But they won’t let us near them. You’ve no idea where they are.’
‘Maybe they’ve already given us the answer,’ said Harper.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The cop who came out of Lukanov’s apartment. He fooled the detectives, right? And you know what else? I even think that’s how he got away with staying so long at the bodies.’
‘I don’t follow,’ said Denise.
‘How the hell did he drive the Auxiliary truck to the heart of a police operation without impersonating a cop?’
‘I still don’t see what you’re driving at.’
‘I’ve got an idea.’ He looked at Denise. ‘Come with me.’
Lock-Up, Bedford-Stuyvesant
March 14, 4.43 p.m.
Lucy looked all around her. She was in a brick room with a barred window. She looked up at the ceiling. Four shower heads.
She knew enough about history to know that this was no shower. She looked out of the Plexiglass and saw the metal tubes leading to the bin. She had smelled the strange smell from inside the van. Almond.
Outside, in his antechamber, a man was sitting on a chair staring into the window. It was him. Someone she had known. Someone she had made a mistake about. An evil man. He was concentrating. He clenched his fists hard in their leather gloves.
He walked through to the next room. He didn’t appear to want to look at her. He returned with a metal can and walked over to the plastic bucket. Lucy watched him, terror in her eyes. She placed both hands on the Plexiglass and hit hard.
He would not look at her. He took the new can and opened it. Poured the whole tube of Zyklon B pellets into the plastic bucket. Then he turned and stared at Lucy. All he had to do was open the channel.
She tried to recall events, but her mind wasn’t functioning. He must have drugged her. She couldn’t remember things in the right order. Lots of the last few hours were blank. She could remember further back. She was his girlfriend, the love of his life, his black-and-white happy ending, his meaning, his everything. Not someone else’s.
He walked across to the cell and stared inside.
‘You’re going to die,’ he said, and smiled. ‘Once upon a time, you made me sane. Just the warm curl of your skin and the smell of your neck — that’s all it took, and the hatred was a world away. You gave me redemption, Lucy, then you took it away.’
She stared up at him, the tape around her mouth preventing her from speaking, preventing her from pleading.
‘You were more than my lover. You never understood that you were my antidote. You were my hope and you left me.’
He pressed his face against the Plexiglass. ‘I have so much hate and anger inside me now, Lucy, that I can’t get rid of it. I have killed because of you. Then I realized why you hated me. Because you want a Jew for your bed.’ He reached out his hand. ‘I still want you, but I hate myself for it. You excite and repulse me. I found someone who looked like you,’ he said, through the Plexiglass, ‘but she wasn’t enough. She didn’t feel like you, Lucy. She didn’t have what you have. Her name is Abby. She was bigger than you, Lucy. I had to starve her just so I could feel her ribs like I could always feel yours.’
Lucy stared out, shocked and silent. She was going to die. She knew it with horrible certainty.
Central Park
March 14, 5.15 p.m.
Harper drove down the side of Central Park with Eddie and Denise in the car.
‘Where are we going?’ Denise asked.
‘To test a theory.’
‘What theory?’
‘Just keep your mind open and try to think of what kind of person this could be.’
Harper turned off and parked in East Drive surrounded by trees. He got out of the car. ‘Hear that?’
‘No,’ said Eddie.
Denise got out of the car too. ‘Nice to hear some wildlife,’ she said. ‘It’s been an intense few days.’
‘So many birds in this little park. Makes you think.’
‘About what?’ said Eddie.
‘Life,’ said Harper. ‘Makes you think about life.’
‘What the hell is he on about?’ said Eddie. ‘We came to hear a theory.’
Harper took out his NYPD shield and opened it up. ‘I needed to tell you this somewhere private. Away from the rest of the team. Away from all the cops we know and love.’
‘What is it?’
‘Look at my shield. What do you see?’
‘A police number,’ said Eddie.
‘A gold emblem,’ said Denise.
‘And what’s in the emblem?’
‘An eagle,’ said Denise. Her voice dropped. The sound of birdsong rose high above them.
They stopped. Denise and Kasper suddenly saw where Harper was going.
‘When did it click?’ said Denise.
‘A few hours ago. I’ve just been turning every angle in my head, trying to see if I’m thinking straight.’
‘And are you?’
‘Yes. I’m sure of it. Think about it. It clicked for me with the children. I couldn’t make it work out. How the hell did this killer lure Capske into East Harlem? How did he lure Becky Glass off a street into an alley? How the hell did he dare to sit with Capske all that time? He’s a cop.’
‘You can’t be serious,’ said Eddie. ‘How the hell could this happen?’
‘It’s the only thing that pulls this all together. He knew the safe house, right? He knew how many people would be there. Christ, he even knew the weak point between shifts. He knows so much, it’s the only possible answer.’
‘You might be right,’ said Denise.
‘I’ve been thinking about Denise’s psychological fingerprint all day. We’ve got a killer who is fixated on Lucy Steller, a non-Jewish girl. She throws him off. She gets together with a Jew. And this guy’s got levels of anti-Semitic hatred so deep he’s never really acknowledged them, and this is the trigger. She leaves him and he kills someone who looks like her. A Jew. Esther Haeber. Then he abducts a girl who looks very like her. Maybe to try to replace her. But he can’t deal with the lover, David Capske. So he kills him, then tries to disguise it. And now he’s in love with his own power.’
‘Damn right,’ said Denise. ‘Lucy’s the trigger. He starts to stalk her after she ends it, then he starts to hassle Jews, and blame them, then he kills one. He starts to let this fantasy grow.’
‘Then, he joins Section 88,’ said Harper. ‘But never as a member like the rest. Why conceal his identity even then? Because it would show up. Because he knew, even then, back at the start of this. He’s known all along. How to kill in different precincts, how to stage, how to keep Abby from being fully investigated.’
‘How comes he used the same bullet and shit?’ said Eddie.
‘Some things he can’t help,’ said Denise. ‘He’s a narcissist. He believes he’s ultimately powerful. The rituals he can’t change. He wants to be known, they are part of this identity, a uniform so that he can express this self.’
Harper looked up to the sky. ‘He needed a name that allowed him to hide his identity but also to display what he was.’
‘Sturbe,’ said Denise. ‘A Nazi serial killer.’
‘Exactly. He wears the name like a confession.’
‘Meaning?’ said Eddie.
‘Meaning, people want to show what they’ve done, so he’s wearing the badge — the serial-killer name. Like some sick joke.’
‘It’s unbelievable.’
They stared at each other, a horrible truth dawning. Harper looked from Denise to Eddie. ‘Tell this to no one. Not another soul. If our killer is a cop, then we’ve got to stay one step ahead of him — and that means keeping our communication tight.’
‘How do we find him?’ asked Denise.
Harper smiled.
‘What you got, Tom, what you thinking?’
‘If it’s a cop, then he’s listening in. He’s got access to case information. You know what we do?’
‘No.’
‘We use the same lure on him that he’s used on others.’
‘What’s that?’
‘The lure of authority.’
‘How?’
Harper sat down on the hood of his car. ‘We’ve got to frighten him into believing we do know his face or are about to. I guess that’s what he did with Capske. I guess he had something to sell. I guess he told Capske that he wanted to put things in the past with Lucy. We do the same. We lure him to us.’
‘What’s the plan, big man?’ said Eddie.
‘We go back in. We claim we’ve found something. A roll of film — that’s it. A roll of film from Lucy Steller’s apartment, dated according to her journal on some trip and labeled Yellowstone. It might be enough of the truth to get him interested.’
‘Yeah,’ said Eddie. ‘She was a good photographer. Used 35mm film. She had lots of photographs of animals from that trip. No reason why there wasn’t another film.’
Harper nodded. ‘We make all this known, we send the film to the photographic lab, then we lie in wait. And then he’ll come to us.’
North Manhattan Homicide
March 14, 8.33 p.m.
The plan had been set. They didn’t even tell Lafayette the truth. They only wanted the three of them to know. Any more added extra layers of doubt. A single offhand word, the smallest indication that it was a fraud and they were dead in the water. And that meant Lucy and Abby were also dead.
The evidence was sealed in a brown paper evidence bag. Harper brought it into North Manhattan Homicide after a further visit to Lucy Steller’s apartment.
He threw it down on the table and called to Denise, ‘Hey, we’ve found something that might give up the clue to this boyfriend.’
‘What have you got?’ said Denise. The team listened in.
‘We’ve got a roll of film. Lucy used an old 35mm camera. She liked to take shots. This is dated the last week of May last year — anything in the journals?’
Denise nodded and moved towards her desk. The other members of Blue Team started to draw in.
‘What is it?’ asked Garcia.
‘Film from Lucy Steller’s place. Dated. Could have shots of the killer,’ said Harper.
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Garcia, ‘and it’s just been sitting there all this time.’
‘Exactly.’
Denise rushed back over with an open journal. ‘That’s fantastic,’ she said. ‘Lucy spent the whole week with this guy in Yellowstone. This is dynamite.’
Harper banged the table. ‘We might just have him. Let’s get this down to the photographic lab, see if they can get us something.’
Harper made sure that the team spoke about the new evidence via email, radio and phone. He had no idea who the killer was or how and when he was listening, but things were getting increasingly tense so he presumed the killer had some direct line.
Harper, Kasper and Levene made their way down to the Forensic Unit’s photography labs. They checked in the evidence and walked through the corridors.
‘We need to stick with the evidence,’ said Harper. ‘If he comes, it has to be tonight. Tomorrow would be too late if we had the film.’
‘What about me?’ said Denise.
‘I want you to sit in the parking lot, keep an eye on who’s coming and going. Try to give us some warning.’
The three of them walked to the photographic lab and looked into the room. ‘That’s the in-tray over there,’ said Harper. ‘In thirty minutes that’s where our lure will be sitting.’
Lock-Up, Bedford-Stuyvesant
March 14, 9.15 p.m.
The killer threw open the door of the lock-up and went inside. Several dogs were around his feet. He stared into the cell where Lucy was lying and snarled, ‘You hid things from me!’
Lucy turned and shivered. ‘I didn’t do anything on purpose,’ she cried out.
The dogs ran into the room and darted up to the Plexiglass and the door of the cell. They could smell the new intruder and sense their master’s anger. The killer crossed to the cell and smashed the Plexiglass with his fist. ‘Think, Lucy, or I’ll cut your veins and let these dogs in.’
‘Think about what?’
‘Me, Lucy — images, pictures, videos of me.’
‘I… there weren’t… you made me destroy them.’
‘I thought I did, but you lied — you had more.’
‘No.’
‘Think, Lucy. You have three minutes to let me know what was on that film.’
‘What film?’
‘Yellowstone. Our trip. What was on that film.’
‘I…’
‘Three minutes.’
The killer left and the dogs continued to circle and bark and jump up against her cell.
A moment later, he returned with a large package. He heaved it into the corner. It was a white powder. A chemical with a big hazard sign emblazoned on the side.
‘This is going to end badly, Lucy,’ he shouted. ‘They think they’ve got me cornered, but I’ve got something in store for them.’
‘What is it?’
‘Ammonium nitrate, Lucy.’
‘What for?’
‘You’ll find out one way or another.’
The killer left again and returned with another sack of the same white granules. He hauled it across to the corner. Lucy was staring, petrified. He left again and returned with two bags of nails and threw them on the ground next to the sacks.
‘I didn’t take any pictures of you. You didn’t allow me.’
‘Secret pictures, Lucy. Did you take any secret pictures?’
‘Only pictures of the park, and the marmoset and the moose. Not you. I promise.’
‘Not good enough. One minute and they’ll eat you alive.’
The killer brought in two three-foot pipes that had been sawn down. He threw them to the side, then shut the door.
‘Things are changing quickly, Lucy. The world is changing quickly too. It’s not enough to live, you have to make a difference, leave a legacy. I could’ve gone on for years, but things change. They want this to end badly? Well, that’s what it’s going to do.’
‘I can’t help,’ she said.
The killer marched across to the door and grabbed a large German Shepherd by the scruff of its neck.
‘Let’s see how honest you’re being.’ He opened the bolt and entered the cell. The dog saw Lucy. She was weeping and crying and shaking. The German Shepherd barked and bared its teeth.
The killer kicked the door shut and moved across, holding the dog firmly. ‘Now, Lucy, what was on that film?’
He moved the dog’s snapping jaw close to Lucy’s face. The teeth flashed and the bark was high and persistent. She shook and held her hands to her ears.
‘You!’ she shouted. ‘A picture of you!’
The killer moved back. ‘You were always a liar and a coward. What faith did you ever show me? None. I loved you so much and you gave me nothing, and now this. You betray me to the cops.’
‘I didn’t do anything on purpose. I really don’t know. I really don’t.’
‘It’s over now,’ he said. ‘It’s all going to change. It’s going to be big. It’s going to change the world for good.’
Photography Labs, Manhattan
March 15, 2.15 a.m.
The CSU photography lab was built of slabs of cinder block which were painted black. Rows of computers ranged one wall, while the rest of the room was lined with different lenses, enlargers and projectors. To the right, a room with a red light held the developing lab.
The majority of photographic work undertaken by the team was digital. Fewer and fewer jobs involved film, and when they did, the team soon uploaded the pictures on to a screen to enlarge and manipulate.
Still, most cops liked big glossy prints and the unit processed hundreds of prints each day, collecting the vast array of disturbing images from crime scenes across the city and sending out prints for the files.
The analysis work was complicated too. Working out locations from the merest details or the time of day from the detail of a single shadow. It was a busy, round-the-clock office except for now.
The last of the team had clocked off at 11 p.m., leaving Harper and Kasper alone. As agreed, Denise was stationed outside in a car.
Inside the building, the corridors went quiet. The night lights flickered on, providing just enough light to allow the security guards to walk the long tour of duty through the facility. The security guards were still patrolling, but tonight they had been told to leave any lone intruder to Harper and Kasper.
Harper had placed the package on the counter by the far wall. He figured that the killer would see it from the corridor, through the big plate-glass window. But to put his hands on it, he would have to walk into the lab and past the three-tier shelving units.
Behind the first unit, Harper was sitting with his gun on the shelf. He had moved the boxes and books to give him a vantage point. Kasper was on the opposite side of the room. They could just about see each other to signal.
They waited, sitting on uncomfortable boxes, listening out and wondering if their plan would work.
Harper hunkered down, his eyes peering out through the shelves, his phone on vibrate.
He called Denise.
‘How’s it looking out there?’
‘It’s all dead quiet. There’s a beautiful moon in the sky.’
‘I’ve got a view of a dim corridor, want to swap?’
‘No, I’ve never much liked waiting for serial killers.’
‘It never improves,’ said Harper.
‘How’s Eddie?’
‘He’s fallen asleep twice.’
‘Nice to know he’s relaxed.’
‘He would sleep on Death Row.’
Denise stopped. She turned her head. ‘I can hear something.’
‘What is it?’
Denise listened. There was a faint sound. A car somewhere in the distance. Perhaps it was rolling towards her, perhaps it was a street further along. Then in the distance, she spotted headlights.
‘We’ve got a car heading our way.’
‘Type?’
‘Difficult to tell. Going slowly. Engine’s hardly audible.’
‘Okay, slip out of sight, we don’t want him to spot you.’
‘I’m way off the lot, so we should be fine,’ said Denise. She looked out at the car. ‘The car’s stopped quite a way up the drive.’
‘Can you make the car out or the plate?’
‘Can’t see any detail.’
Harper checked his gun automatically and called across to Eddie: ‘We’ve got a visitor.’
Denise watched closely. The car was parked along the dark driveway. She saw the door open and someone get out. They went around to the back of the car, opened the trunk and took something out.
‘What’s going on?’ said Harper.
‘One guy. He’s taken something from the trunk. He’s not coming my way. He’s walking across the lawn to the side of the building.’
‘He’s probably going for the back entrance,’ said Harper. ‘Let us know if you see anything else.’
Denise agreed and hung up. She stared out. The car was still, the lights out, and the figure disappeared around the side of the building.
Lock-Up, Bedford-Stuyvesant
March 15, 2.43 a.m.
Forty minutes of silence. Lucy counted it by the minute. She had heard the door shut and the dogs yap around him, but she waited forty minutes until she dared stand up.
Her legs felt tired as she stood. She looked out through the Plexiglass at a small garage. She stared open-mouthed at the sight that met her eyes. A large Nazi flag against the wall and a desk with a typewriter and Nazi memorabilia all around. A map of Manhattan had been stuck to the wall. The madman had drawn thick lines around the Jewish areas as if creating his own twenty-first-century ghetto.
Lucy tried to think back to the man she’d met. He’d seemed so normal, so kind at the start. But it hadn’t lasted. He started to get possessive almost within the first week. Just the smallest sign, here and there. Not aggressive at that point, but he was just too interested in what she did when she wasn’t with him.
It took two months for it to flourish into an all-out obsession. He said he loved her and wanted to understand her. He was obsessed by Jews from the start, as if they possessed something he never could. What was it? Belonging? That’s why he wanted to possess her, body, mind and soul. Possess her and control her.
She stared at the tubes leading from the roof of the homemade cell to a structure on the other side of the room. She didn’t want to think about it any more. He had lost his mind. He had turned crazy when she rejected him. But she didn’t know what else to do. He had wanted her to never go out. He had wanted her to submit herself entirely to him. He had wanted her to clean his boots to prove her subservience.
She said no. And then he stalked her. She had been scared but thought it would just pass. Lucy’s eyes moved around the room. It hadn’t passed. His obsession had deepened. She wondered if he had been indulging in these fascist fantasies the whole time they were together. She thought back, remembered things they’d done. Her body convulsed with horror and disgust, as she began to realize that she had always been some puppet with which he was playing games of lust and disgust. To which he was as repulsed as he was attracted.
Lucy understood the Nazi images. The powerful confident black and red insignia was a way of controlling and dominating human fear and resentment, and trying to make the revulsion and attraction — the full neurosis — into something meaningful and ordered.
Her eyes moved across to another door. It was the door to a closet. Lucy remembered what he had said about a girl called Abby. She had read about the missing girl. She’d been missing for days already. Lucy’s eyes widened. It seemed so much worse to her that another human being was caught and imprisoned. Her heart welled up and her hand moved instinctively over her mouth. Abby might be there, a few yards away. Abby might already be dead.
Lucy moved as close as she could to the door; she scraped her mouth and teeth against the wall until the duct tape pulled away, then she called out, ‘Abby.’ And she kept calling over and over again, terrified by the silence that came from the closed door.
Photography Labs, Manhattan
March 15, 3.55 a.m.
For nearly two hours, Harper and Kasper had been sitting tense and ready, but no one came. Harper called Denise to ask for an update. ‘We’ve got nothing down here,’ he whispered. ‘Anything happening?’
‘No one’s come in or gone out.’
‘Maybe he’s waiting for the security guard’s shift to change.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Denise.
Eddie suddenly signaled across the counter. Harper looked across. Eddie’s gun pointed into the corridor. Harper turned. A single flashlight streaked across the hallway.
‘He’s here,’ whispered Harper. He lifted his gun to shoulder height. The beam flickered across the corridor from the ceiling to the floor. Someone was walking towards the room.
The plan was simple. Catch the killer and don’t kill him. If they killed him, it would mean they might never find Lucy and Abby. And if they felt it wasn’t safe to arrest him, they had to wound him.
Inside the room, they couldn’t hear footsteps from the corridor, but the beam of light grew until it stopped at the glass door to the photography lab. The light turned towards them and hovered over the shelves. Harper held his breath. The light moved slowly around the room, then disappeared and the sound of the handle turning seemed to slow time.
The door opened with a low squeak and the light beam returned. Harper stared across at Eddie.
The figure moved towards the counter, paused and scanned his flashlight across the room.
Lock-Up, Bedford-Stuyvesant
March 15, 4.18 a.m.
Abby opened her eyes. She had been in the tiny cell for so long, fighting in her mind, but the starvation was sapping her will. She was feeling so weak that her head felt too heavy to lift, but something had pulled her back from her dreams. The food had stopped altogether, along with the water. Every few hours, she fell into some deep sleep; perhaps it was even unconsciousness. Her dreams raged and tormented her. The silver-blue lines of ocean waves were infested with snakes; her tongue seemed to swell so large in her mouth that she couldn’t breathe or swallow.
‘Abby!’ She heard it again. It was a soft voice. A woman’s voice, but not like a real voice, probably a voice from her dreams, hidden somewhere within her subconscious. But her eyes were open. She scratched her leg and the pain felt real. Her eyes lifted and there on the wall were the marks that she’d made with her restraints. If she was awake, then the voice wasn’t imagined.
‘Abby!’
Abby tried to speak, but her throat was dry. A low croak stretched her mouth and her lips cracked. She tasted blood on the tip of her tongue and started to suck on it. She tried again to speak, but only a low whisper came out. She felt herself start to heave with frustration and cry in dry, waterless sobs.
She heard her voice called out again and turned to her right. Her knee rapped hard against the door. She twisted herself again and again, the sound reverberating. Outside, the voice stopped as she continued to knock against the door with her knee. Then she stopped knocking and waited. It had been days and days since she had communicated with anything or anyone. Only a monster.
‘I can hear you,’ said the voice. ‘Maybe you can’t speak. Maybe he has gagged you. I’m Lucy. I’m in another cell, only a few yards from your door. I hope you’re okay. You’re Abby, aren’t you? The high-school girl? Your mom and dad are still hoping. I saw them on the news. They’re holding up okay.’
Inside the cell, Abby listened, and though they were only words, she felt as if she was being given a long drink. She wanted to speak out, but at first her words came out light and airy like feathers, so at each pause she knocked and when the voice stopped, she knocked and knocked and knocked until the voice started to speak again.
Finally, Abby pushed herself upright. She breathed deeply and called out, ‘I’m here. I’m Abby.’
‘God bless you,’ said Lucy. ‘You okay?’
‘Yes, but need water.’
‘Is there any way we can get out of here?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Abby. ‘I really don’t think so.’
Photography Labs, Manhattan
March 15, 4.23 a.m.
The figure at the bench stopped and started to turn. There was no time left. Harper was already two paces across the room, his body charging towards the bench. Kasper jumped to his feet from the side. The figure turned to Eddie Kasper and as he did, the full weight of Harper’s charge landed heavily on his side, throwing him to the ground.
Harper fell on top of him and they tumbled twice across the floor. The suspect shouted something, but Harper’s arm was already around his neck pulling hard and Eddie Kasper already had the suspect’s gun.
As Harper’s arm jammed hard into the suspect’s neck, the figure stopped fighting and lay still. Eddie Kasper flicked on the lights.
He looked down at the red face of the man on the ground. ‘Fuck you!’ the man shouted. Eddie looked away. Harper pushed the figure off him and stood up.
‘We fucking cleared this with security,’ said Harper. ‘No one comes this way tonight.’
‘You fucking animals,’ said the guard, standing and brushing himself down. ‘Animals.’
‘What the hell happened?’ demanded Harper. ‘We could’ve killed you.’
‘I got told to come here, do a sweep.’
‘This is bad news,’ said Harper. ‘Who told you?’
‘One of your guys.’
‘What do you mean, one of our guys?’
‘Cop. He had a badge. Said he was on the stake-out.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘Like a cop — big, arrogant, impatient and ugly.’
‘Where?’
‘He came by the security door.’
Harper and Eddie looked at each other.
‘How long ago?’
‘I don’t know, ten minutes?’
Harper looked around. He spoke quietly: ‘The killer knows we’re here now, but he’s still going to want those prints.’
‘How the hell did he know we were on a stake-out?’
‘He’s not just a cop, is he? He’s a fucking smart cop.’
A second later, the lights flickered and then died. Harper pulled Eddie to one side. ‘He’s going to try to take them — get out of the line of fire.’
In the darkness, they heard a key in the door to the room. ‘He’s locking us in,’ shouted Harper. ‘Do you have a key?’
‘Sure,’ said the security guard, but there wasn’t any time. Something smashed the window of the door and a lighted bottle flew in the room. It shattered over the floor and the contents exploded into flame. Harper and Eddie jumped.
‘What the fuck do we do?’
‘Is there a sprinkler system?’ said Harper.
‘Sure, in the corridor, but not in the photography lab.’
Harper ran towards the door as the flames spread and caught the wood of the benches and the books and files.
The security guard moved to the door and tried his key. ‘Shit, he’s broken his key in the lock.’
Harper’s flashlight picked out the jagged edges of the door windows. It was too small to get through. Eddie moved across, holding his mouth as the thick black smoke started to rise and fill the room. He stumbled against the broken glass, his hand sliced across. ‘I’m cut, Harper.’
‘We got to get out of here,’ said Harper. ‘Get you some help.’
The smoke was filling the room. Harper took his Glock and pumped three bullets into the lock mechanism, then kicked the door open. He rolled into the corridor, his gun in one hand, his flashlight in the other. ‘All clear,’ he shouted.
The security guard led them as quickly as they could through the dark corridors. He pressed the alarm on the wall and the sprinkler system kicked in. Somewhere down the corridors, they could hear a door slamming. The killer was ahead, but not far.
‘Is there a quicker way out of here?’ asked Harper.
‘Not unless you just burst out through the windows.’
‘Which windows?’ said Harper.
The security guard moved across to a door and opened it. The room was illuminated by the faint moonlight from outside. ‘Gotcha,’ said Harper. ‘Get an ambulance, Eddie.’
‘I got to come with you,’ said Eddie.
‘You’ll slow me down,’ said Harper, then he ran at the window, shot once and watched the plate-glass shatter and fall. He leaped on to the bench and out of the window.
A figure was moving quickly across the ground, towards a car. Harper sighted him and shot twice. The shots missed and Harper sprinted towards the car. The figure jumped in and the car’s engine rumbled to life. Harper shot again and hit a side window. The car didn’t make a U-turn as expected, it turned to the right and Harper heard the sound of its undercarriage screech and scrape on the concrete edge of the lawn. The headlights rose across the ground and Harper was suddenly illuminated in a wide patch of grass with no hiding place.
The car started to gain speed, the bumps in the ground making it lift and lurch left to right. It was a hundred yards away and gaining fast. Harper had no time to run; he stood firm and put his gun hand out, steadying it with the other. Shooting someone dead through the windshield of a car that was traveling at speed was hard enough; with the tension and the darkness it was ten times more difficult.
He waited as the car approached. He had one chance and had to leave it as late as possible. Harper counted down. At two seconds he would shoot to the right side of the driver and jump to his left.
His finger pressed. Three seconds. He was blinded now by the headlights, by the roar of the engine. Two seconds. He shot twice and threw himself to the left. The car veered right and clipped Harper’s feet as he was moving through the air.
Harper turned, his gun pointing as the car drove on a few more seconds, then stopped. Harper exhaled. He’d hit him. The killer was down.
Harper scrambled to his feet and moved cautiously towards the car. He peered into the darkness, but through the shattered windshield he couldn’t see a thing. He moved round to the driver’s side. There was a body leaning against the door. He could just make out the trickle of blood from a wound on the side of the head. Harper pulled open the door. Then a gunshot rang out from inside the car. Harper was thrown backwards and the dead driver was pushed out on top of him.
A masked face glanced across. The killer moved across to the driver’s seat and drove the car away.
‘Two of them,’ said Harper. ‘There were two of them.’ He shoved the dead weight off him, stood up and turned over the body at his feet.
Martin Heming’s grimace and wide eyes stared back at him.
Photography Labs, Manhattan
March 15, 4.53 a.m.
Harper ran across the open ground and reached Denise in the car. He was breathing deeply. ‘We got to follow that car.’
‘Yes — are you all right?’
‘I’m okay. What the hell happened?’ said Tom.
‘I don’t know,’ said Denise. ‘They must have dropped one guy off earlier. One guy came out, then the second guy came out a couple of minutes later — the one you shot at.’
‘Let’s follow,’ said Harper. ‘We’ve got to get this killer.’
‘Where’s Eddie?’
‘He got hurt.’
‘Bad?’
‘I hope not. He’s okay, I think.’
Denise drove off.
‘Did you get the plates?’ Harper asked.
‘Sure, here.’ Denise tossed him a notebook. They could see the tail lights up ahead. Harper called base and put out an APB on the license-plate.
‘It was Martin Heming,’ said Harper.
‘Heming?’
‘The guy on the grass. He’s dead. I don’t fully understand his involvement yet. We got a lot of working out to do. He wasn’t involved in the killings. There was only one guy at the Capske scene and the Glass scene. Heming might have been helping him. Or maybe the killer was blackmailing him, who knows?’
They drove in silence, Harper trying to keep focused on the tail lights ahead. ‘He’s heading into Brooklyn,’ he said.
‘Abby and Lucy are in danger,’ said Denise. ‘If he’s panicking, he could do anything. We can’t lose him.’
‘That’s right,’ said Harper. ‘So put your foot down.’
They drove over the bridge and into Brooklyn. The car they were following headed into the area called Bedford-Stuyvesant. Harper watched the car slow ahead. Then it turned.
‘I think we’ve found his lair,’ said Harper.
‘You think we should call for backup?’
‘Yes, but we can’t wait for it. We’ve got to get Lucy and Abby out of there now.’
They turned the final corner and saw a long alley. The car had vanished. They drove on, then turned and circled, but the car was nowhere to be seen.
‘What now?’ said Denise.
‘Now,’ said Harper, ‘we try to find him again. We’ve lost him. I’ll call Patrol, get this area saturated.’ Harper shook his head. ‘Shit. How the hell did he slip away? We almost had the bastard.’
Lock-Up, Bedford-Stuyvesant
March 15, 5.35 a.m.
The killer entered the lock-up and slammed the door. He was sweating; it had been a very close call. Too close. They had nearly caught him. Time was short now. There was nothing else to do. His final plan had to be actioned. Ahead of him, Lucy stared out of her Plexiglass and brick prison. His shirt was covered with pieces of glass and his face was bright red.
He stood for a moment, shaking, unable to move; his rage was burning him up inside. He moved across to his desk and violently swept everything aside. The typewriter and papers and Nazi medals cascaded to the floor. Then he turned. He stared at Lucy. She was the origin. He picked up the typewriter and threw it across the room. It hit the Plexiglass and rebounded on to the floor.
He turned away, running his fingers through his hair. Across the room, he had written the eighty-eight words that once upon a time had meant so much.
There was nothing else left now. There was no need to wait, no need to hide, no need to keep Lucy or Abby alive. They were closing in on him. He felt the noose tightening. He had to destroy them, pack up, and then make his final point.
Heming was dead but it didn’t matter. The man was expendable. He had come across Heming when he needed help, when he had needed Section 88 to help hurt and destroy.
He had big plans now and he’d have to carry them out alone. Karl Leer had got him another old truck. It was an orange Dodge and it was waiting outside.
It would be just like it was in the book about Sturbe. The book that he had devoured, that had incited him and made him feel that he also had the power to turn all that feeling of being bullied and broken into revenge — not against his attackers, but against those that they attacked too.
Sturbe had come alive in his mind. He was like a father to him. A guiding light. When the Jews tried to resist, in the Warsaw Ghetto, German troops destroyed the synagogue. A final symbolic gesture. He would do the same.
He turned to Lucy. The time had come. They all had to die. He had to die too. No question, no question at all. It was only a matter of when.
He opened the door to Abby’s closet, pulled her out forcibly and dragged her to her feet.
She was weak but she screamed her lungs out in a hoarse voice. The killer held her neck and squeezed, watching the pain cross her face. Lucy banged frantically on the Plexiglass. She howled at him to stop.
He stared at Abby with grim satisfaction before pulling open the door of his gas chamber and throwing her inside as Lucy raced at him, trying to reach the door before he slammed it shut and bolted it.
He stood staring at them, breathing deeply. He wasn’t sure any more if it was real or a game. He felt the emotion welling up in his chest. He had to be strong to the end.
He moved across to the canister of Zyklon B and saw the reaction in the gas chamber, as blind panic spread over the faces of Abby and Lucy and they began screaming and hitting the Plexiglass. He would not kill them yet, he decided. They would be last. First, he had to make sure of something. Everything was a battle and this one he wanted to win.
The Brooklyn Library
March 15, 7.05 a.m.
‘Lafayette, it’s Harper. We lost the killer. We chased him to Bed-Stuy and he disappeared. Eddie’s in the hospital — he’ll tell you everything.’
Lafayette was pacing his room. ‘Shootings at the Forensic Unit, Harper? An operation I knew nothing about? Is this right what I’m hearing? I’m telling you, get back here now.’
‘I can’t. He’s going to do something. He’s taking big risks. He’s feeling the pressure. You’ve got to let me do what I can to try to find him.’
‘The Chief of Detectives has called me in, Harper. You know what he’s saying? I’ve fucked up. I can’t lead my men. And you, Harper, you’ve let this case run away with you.’
‘I’d like to listen to the lecture, Captain, but I’m running out of time.’
‘Don’t you dare hang up. I’ll have you on a charge, Harper.’
‘Then I can’t come in until this is finished, you understand.’ Harper hung up and turned to Denise. ‘This has to work. We’ve got to find out who this killer is.’
‘No one knows if it will or won’t help, but Aaron has been working through the library stacks. He thinks it’s the only link.’
‘What’s he got?’
‘Just like we said — the book on Sturbe was in very few libraries.
He know our killer is local, so we can presume his local library was in Brooklyn. Only one Brooklyn library held his book.’
‘And this is it?’ said Harper, looking up at the dark Gothic façade.
‘Dr Goldenberg’s already inside. We had to get the librarian to come in and open specially for us.’
‘I’ll leave you here,’ said Harper. ‘I’m going to see Eddie and then I’m going to see if those patrol cops got any leads in Bed-Stuy. If there’s nothing, I’ll be talking to the agents selling Nazi memorabilia, see if they got me anything. Call me.’
Aaron Goldenberg brushed a thick layer of dust off an old volume. His face was growing more drawn each day. Denise put her hand out and touched his arm. ‘She’ll be okay.’
‘She’s been missing so long. Be honest with me, Denise, what are her chances?’
‘We got to keep trying, got to keep believing that she’s still alive.’
‘I will try,’ he said. He looked around the room. ‘I spend a lot of time here.’
‘Studying?’
‘Now, yes, but as a kid I didn’t study much. Like Abby. She’s lazy too.’
‘Didn’t think of you as the rebel type.’
He took out his reading glasses and put them on, then he walked along the stacks, saying, ‘Come on, let’s be quick. Abby’s out there, right? The answer’s in here, yes?’
Denise saw a long line of old filing cabinets. ‘Yes, Aaron. In here. We just got to find it. You go that way, I’ll see if they’ve got a catalog.’
‘Sure,’ he said, ‘but it won’t necessarily lead you to the book.’
‘It doesn’t need to, does it?’
‘Guess not.’ Aaron Goldenberg moved slowly down each aisle, moving his eyes up and down the rows. He knew the numbering system. ‘They never moved to Dewey. They never liked Dewey.’
‘And why’s that?’
‘Stupid system.’
‘Really?’
‘No. Dewey set up a club. It excluded Jews. Hard to swallow.’
‘The truth often is,’ said Denise. She located the catalog. ‘These aren’t in title or author order. What do I look for?’
‘Depends.’
‘On what?’
‘On the judgment of the librarian. Sturbe’s story could come under a number of headings. Biography, Military History, Holocaust, Infamous Jews, Criminal Minds.’
‘Great.’
‘You just have to use your instinct. If it was here, it’ll be in the catalog. I never knew the book. Not my thing as a boy.’
‘What was your thing? Rabbinical texts? Kabbalah?’
‘You have me down as an academic, Dr Levene.’
‘You are, aren’t you?’
‘I am now. Back then, no. Back then I liked Harold Robbins.’
‘Seriously?’
Aaron nodded. ‘I hid his books in Rabbinical texts.’ His face creased. Every few minutes she could see the horrible thoughts crossing his mind. He was trying to keep himself together, but it wasn’t easy. He was tortured by the imaginings that he couldn’t keep from appearing
Denise felt his pain. She knelt by the side of the first filing cabinet and pulled out the old metal drawers. The whiff of mold and mildew mixed with the puff of fungus dust. She leaned back. ‘I’ll start with Biography.’
‘Please do,’ said Aaron.
Silence fell in the room. Aaron’s slow footsteps continued to move along each shelf, and Denise’s search was punctuated by the squeal of old runners. She flicked through the old cards, her eyes looking for the single word. Sturbe. He wasn’t in Biography, or under Criminal Minds, or under Holocaust. Denise shut the drawer. ‘There’s only a dozen entries under Holocaust.’
Aaron stopped and looked up. ‘Holocaust. Yes. Specifically titles addressing the generic topic. Anything else will be under a more specific title.’
Denise looked down the letters on the front of the cabinets.
She thought about Tom Harper and looked at her watch. He’d be wanting a call by now.
Her eyes stopped on the ‘W’. She opened the drawer and flicked the files forward. She stopped at Warsaw.
‘Aaron,’ she called out. ‘She filed it under the Warsaw Ghetto.’
Aaron moved quickly towards her, with his face full of expectation. ‘You found it! Come on, Denise. We’ve got to be quick.’
Denise held up the card. Sturbe: The Story of a Jew by Malachai Jiresh. The writing was on a pink card that had faded all along the top edge. The typing was old and in two colors, half blue, half red with some letters light on the page. She handed it to Aaron.
‘I didn’t think we’d find it,’ he said. Tears would’ve come, but he shook his head. He let the feelings turn hard and tried to focus his mind. He looked at the number.
‘H.831.33.2,’ he repeated.
Denise and Aaron ran back up the stairs. ‘You don’t want to find the book?’ she asked.
‘I want the bastard’s name, not the book,’ he panted.
‘I understand,’ said Denise.
They rose up the wooden stairs and into the light.
Denise approached the desk. The library wasn’t open but she saw the bright-eyed woman who’d helped get them access to the archives. ‘We found the reference.’
‘Well, then,’ said the woman, ‘if you’ve got the book number, I’ll see what I can get you.’
The woman disappeared. Thirty minutes later she came back. ‘It’s not good, I’m afraid. I’m sorry.’
‘What? It’s not there?’ said Aaron.
‘No, please, come this way.’
Denise and Aaron followed her down a long corridor. ‘I had hoped that the records would have been put in some order.’ She opened the door marked Archive to reveal shelves of old ledgers.
‘Even for her day, the librarian was an old-fashioned woman, but fastidious. Once you have the reader, you can look through the reader cards and find the whole of his or her reader history. But without a name…’
‘Can we set ourselves up in here?’ Denise asked.
‘Sure, please do. I’m sorry it’s not any easier.’
The door closed. Denise and Aaron stared at the rows of books. Aaron pulled one out. He opened it. ‘All handwritten. There’s a lot of borrowing. We’re never going to be able to find him.’
‘We will. Let’s just try to narrow it down to some dates.’
‘How?’
‘A ten-year slot. He’s in his thirties. He might have started this as a teenager. So, let’s say he’s thirty-five. Twenty years ago he’s fifteen. About the right age, give or take a couple of years. We can go five years either side of thirty-five. So let’s start in 1990. You go five years forward, I’ll go five years back.’
‘I don’t understand your logic, Denise, but it’s a plan.’
Lock-Up, Bedford Stuyvesant
March 15, 7.35 a.m.
Abby pulled herself up slowly and stared out. ‘We can’t sit here like victims. We’ve got to do something.’
‘No.’
‘You’ve got to help, Lucy,’ said Abby, straining with each word. ‘You know him. What makes him tick?’
‘He doesn’t like women.’
‘Or Jews. He wants me to reject my Jewishness. Why should that matter to him?’
Lucy pushed herself against the brick wall. ‘He’s Jewish, Abby.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘He can’t be. That’s… Come on, Lucy, help me. I need something. I feel so weak. Please.’
‘He’s a cop. Did you know that?’
‘Then he’ll kill us.’ Abby felt her legs aching and she stumbled against the wall and fell to the ground. Since getting out of her tiny cell, she wanted to walk, to feel her limbs again, but she couldn’t. She didn’t have the strength. She looked up at the shower heads.
‘He’s made a gas chamber. He’s Jewish? I can’t understand it.’
‘He was adopted. His mother was Jewish, I think, and he was adopted by a Christian family. I think his mother was a prostitute, but I don’t know. I don’t know if he knows. He wanted to find her as a kid, as he was growing up, as he was feeling different, but he couldn’t trace her. He was adopted when he was five. He loved her, you know. Guess she didn’t love him back.’
‘Did they mistreat him?’
‘I guess they did. Not like you’d call social services,’ said Lucy. ‘They just weren’t kind to him.’
‘That’s it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What about his father and the shoes in the cellar?’
‘He didn’t have a cellar. I don’t think it’s his story.’
‘Then what’s his problem?’
‘He’s sensitive, I don’t think he was ever loved. I don’t think he could belong. Other kids knew he was Jewish — he was bullied and all that — but he wouldn’t talk about it. He won’t talk about anything that makes him feel weak.’
‘He hurt you?’ said Abby.
‘To some men, Abby, a woman constantly makes them feel weak. He needed me and hated it. He hated my existence. Look — I’m not a psychiatrist.’
‘He joined the cops because he wanted to exert power,’ said Abby.
‘Probably,’ said Lucy.
‘Is there anything that you can remember? Anything that might help us?’
Lucy stared blankly ahead.
Abby waited but nothing came. She walked around the walls, pushing at every brick, looking for a weak point. ‘I’m not going to die like this, Lucy. You got to fucking think.’ She looked at Lucy, who was crying. Abby stood over her. ‘Quit it!’ she rasped. ‘Just fucking quit it.’
Lucy looked up, surprised and upset.
‘I want you to think, Lucy. We need something to get this bastard to think twice, or to pull back. What does he want, Lucy? What does he really want?’
Lucy closed her eyes. ‘He always said he wanted to find his mom. He imagined that she’d be proud of him. A cop. A detective. Big and strong.’
‘Well, she’s not going to be proud of this fucking get-up, is she? Nazi crap. He’s like a child, playing games. I don’t know if it’s real. You look at his eyes and they’re empty.’
‘I’ll try to think of something,’ said Lucy.
Abby paused. She stared out at the Nazi flag. He had become the worst thing he could become. ‘You don’t need to think of something,’ she said. ‘I think you already did.’
Brooklyn
March 15, 9.05 a.m.
Harper stood outside the home of Martin Heming and stared at the street. What had they missed? He had nothing from the research on the memorabilia. He walked down the rundown street, looking for a clue as to why these people formed their sick little hate groups. As he reached the subway, he got a call from the Hate Crime Unit.
‘It’s Jack here. How are you, Harper?’
‘I’m out on a limb, Jack. I guess you heard about the operation.’
‘I’m down with Heming’s body now. I heard all right. We’re hoping there’s something on him.’
‘Been there already, I got nothing. Shit, Jack, I went out without authorization last night.’
‘You got to do what you got to do.’
‘That’s okay if it works,’ said Harper. ‘But if it doesn’t?’
‘You got Heming, that’s got to weaken the killer’s position.’
‘That’s true.’
‘No right-hand man to help him out.’
‘No.’
‘Did you see the other guy? See anything at all?’
‘No,’ said Harper. ‘I got nothing.’
Carney’s voice lowered slightly. ‘Listen, Harper, don’t get all fucked up. You tried to find something on Heming. After you left, they did get something. He had a cell phone without a SIM card, right?’
‘That’s right.’
‘We found the SIM card.’
‘Where was it?’
‘In his right sock.’
‘Shit, does it tell you anything?’
‘I think we might have something here, yes.’
‘What have you got?’
‘Heming is the key to finding the killer,’ said Carney.
‘And Lucy and Abby,’ said Harper.
‘Well, Heming must’ve been with the killer, with him in his lair, right?’
‘Right.’
‘With the SIM we can see who he called. We can even get a location on the phone’s position. We can locate where he was when he made the calls.’
‘That’s fucking great, Jack. What have you got?’
‘We’ve got several locations, but the most promising is a set of garages. I’m heading over now to do a drive-by and a little surveillance. You in?’
‘We should get Blue Team and SWAT.’
‘You are Blue Team, Harper. We’ve got the Hate Crime Unit, so we’re not alone. But we can’t be sure he was with the killer, so let’s take a look at this before we call in the cavalry. You don’t want another botch-up, do you? And I certainly don’t.’
‘What’s the address?’
Carney gave him the street name. ‘There is no number for the garages. It’s just a row of dilapidated real estate. There’s a garage on the corner, we’re going to meet up there and see how the land lies.’
‘I’ll be there,’ said Harper.
The Brooklyn Library
March 15, 9.09 a.m.
Denise and Aaron Goldenberg sat side by side at two large oak tables. Each of them had the handwritten ledgers for a five-year period. They were flicking through at a pace, their fingers sliding down the pages. All they needed to find was the name of someone who had borrowed the book on Josef Sturbe and this could lead them to Abby, to saving Abby. It wouldn’t be conclusive, but it might give the investigation something.
Denise saw the name Josef Sturbe on the page. She felt herself tingle. ‘I’ve got one here,’ she called out.
‘Who is it?’ said Aaron Goldenberg.
‘Her name’s Hannah Sternberg.’
‘Age?’
‘I need to check her reading card.’ Denise crossed to the large files and searched for Hannah Sternberg. She took it out. ‘She’s about fifty-two now.’
‘Not our killer.’
‘Maybe not, but she’s interested in the Nazis — look at this record.’
Aaron pulled Hannah Sternberg’s reading record. There were several books on Nazis and the ghettos and the Holocaust.
‘She might have been trying to find something,’ said Aaron. His face contorted in pain. ‘But it’s not her, is it? We’re not going to find my Abby. Never, never, never.’
‘Don’t give up now,’ said Denise.
‘I can’t stand it. I miss her like… You could never understand.’
‘No, I couldn’t,’ said Denise. ‘But this is all we’ve got, so let’s keep searching.’
Aaron calmed himself. ‘Yes, for Abby. Because we must always have hope.’ He clenched each fist slowly and continued to search.
Denise’s phone rang a few minutes later. It was Tom Harper. ‘How are things in the archives?’
‘It’s okay, we’re getting through quite fast. Not many people read this book. One so far, a fifty-two-year-old woman.’
‘Keep going,’ said Harper. ‘I’ve got a lead. Set of garages on 118th in Bed-Stuy that we think Heming used when he was in hiding. It just might be the place.’
‘Be safe,’ said Denise. ‘You want help?’
‘I don’t want Aaron around if his daughter’s there. Keep in touch.’
‘Okay,’ said Denise.
‘Call me if you need me.’
‘I will,’ said Denise.
They continued to search. Aaron raised his hand in the air fifteen minutes later. ‘I found another name. A man called Albert Moile.’
‘Go check his file,’ said Denise.
Aaron looked through and found the library record card for Albert Moile. He looked across. ‘If he’s still alive, he’s ninety-five,’ said Aaron.
A moment later Denise’s finger ran down the page and stopped. She saw the name Josef Sturbe again and moved her finger across the ledger to the borrower’s name. She looked down at it and felt her body chill. ‘I’ve got a name,’ she said, with a tremble in her voice. ‘It’s the killer. I know who it is.’
Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn
March 15, 9.45 a.m.
Harper arrived at the garage on the corner and Jack Carney was already there, waiting.
‘We’ve got a vague location point for the lock-up along this row,’ said Carney. ‘Let’s go.’
Harper and Jack Carney ran up the street searching for some sign as to where the killer was. They did two sweeps of the road but couldn’t see anything.
‘Where the hell are these garages?’ said Harper.
‘They must be somewhere around here,’ said Carney.
Then Harper spotted a broken wire fence and walked over. He looked at the edge. ‘Jack, check this. The wire’s been bent recently. The scratches on the wall are recent too.’
Harper pushed through the fence, quickly followed by Carney. They walked across the wasteland, their eyes scanning every building, before fastening on an old abandoned lock-up. Then Harper stopped. ‘Listen.’
Carney listened. ‘Banging.’
‘And voices,’ said Harper. They moved quickly towards the sound. Harper saw the garage. He looked at the bolts. ‘New bolts in a derelict area.’
‘This must be it,’ said Carney.
The banging became more intense and frightened. They could hear two women crying out for help and looked at each other. Carney stood by the door as Harper moved all around the building. He reappeared at the other side and shook his head.
‘No windows.’
They looked at the door. ‘You kick it in,’ said Carney quietly. ‘Let’s hope to God that they’re okay,’ said Harper. He motioned for Carney to move to the side, raised his gun and indicated the handle. Carney put his hand on it.
‘Let’s take a look,’ said Harper.
Carney depressed the handle and Harper pulled the trigger. The padlock split open and Carney pushed open the door. ‘NYPD. Put your hands in the air.’ Harper raised his gun and moved in. ‘What is that smell?’ he whispered.
‘Cyanide,’ said Jack Carney.
Harper scanned the room with his gun. He saw the two women directly ahead in a strange prison. He saw the pipes running across the length of the room and to the roof of the cell. Just like the gas van.
Inside the cell, the two women were screaming and shaking. They were pointing towards the back of the garage. Harper swiveled round and suddenly felt something hard against his skull.
Jack Carney’s gun was pressed tight to his head. ‘Drop your gun, Harper, or I kill you right now.’
Lock-Up, Bedford-Stuyvesant
March 15, 9.58 a.m.
Harper stared into Jack Carney’s eyes. A hundred tiny inconsistencies and questions suddenly fell into place. He felt sickness in the pit of his stomach. Disgust so sudden and violent that he couldn’t speak.
‘The gun, Harper, or I kill you.’ Carney eased the trigger back.
Harper heard the click of the breech and he dropped his gun to the ground. His hands formed into large, heavy fists, and hatred and anger burned in his eyes.
‘Tom Harper, I thought you were better than this,’ said Carney.
Harper held his gaze and looked directly into the eyes of the ruthless killer.
‘It’s hard to believe,’ said Carney. ‘Move over to the cell.’
Harper edged backwards. ‘You’re dead, you fucking animal,’ he shouted. ‘You know that? There’s no fucking way out. You’re trapped, Carney, you sick fuck.’
‘Anger and hatred, Harper. You feeling it?’ Carney smiled. ‘This is the killer’s Luger. You were the only one who could work this out,’ he said. ‘I knew you were close but I’m not ready to give in.’
‘They all know,’ said Harper. ‘It’s over. Let these two go.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Carney. ‘Now they’re going to have a big problem on their hands. You went off on your own last night. The story is going to go like this — the killer lured you here and you heroically tried to save the girls. But oh, how close you must’ve come.’
Carney moved across to the canister of Zyklon B. ‘I add these pellets in here, they react with the air and Lucy and Abby will die. You will try to open the door and the killer will shoot you.’
‘It’s a good plan, but people know.’
‘Who?’
‘Everyone.’
‘You sure about that, Harper? Don’t bluff the master.’ Carney chuckled.
‘You got to give yourself up,’ shouted Harper. ‘You need help.’
‘I’ve got a mission, Harper. A mission.’
‘Open the cell,’ Harper commanded, but Carney moved across to the cyanide.
‘Lucy,’ called Harper into the cell. ‘Is there any way out of here?’
She shook her head.
Harper turned and looked at the drained and emaciated figure of Abby in the cell behind him. He smashed his fist against the Plexiglass but it was too thick. It wouldn’t break. He turned and stared at Carney. ‘You can’t do this, you’ve got to stop. You’re a cop.’
Carney took the can across to the small tub. ‘This is the Zyklon B. Everything had to be authentic.’ He smiled. ‘It causes a slow and painful death.’
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘The heart has reasons that reason knows not of,’ said Carney. He turned to Harper and moved close to the Plexiglass. ‘And because I hate them. All of them. Jews, her, you, everyone.’ He opened the canister, pulled back the lid of the plastic bucket.
‘How long will it take them to die?’
‘Ten minutes, a little more,’ said Carney.
They heard the sound of the first pellets hitting the base of the bucket. Harper moved across to the door and barged at it with his full weight. He tried again.
‘You won’t rescue them,’ said Carney. ‘That’s not the story I’ve planned.’
Abby Goldenberg pulled herself to her feet with her last reserves of strength and moved up to the front of the cell. ‘I know what you are!’ she called out.
‘Do you?’ shouted Carney. ‘Well, I’m Josef Sturbe and you’re dead.’
‘Your mother was in touch with Lucy. Did you know that? You think you know everything. You couldn’t find her yourself, but Lucy found her. Lucy told her about the beatings, about the man you’d become. She was disgusted.’
Carney stopped and stared across to the cell. He replaced the lid on the pellets. ‘Fuck you, you’re lying. She’s dead. Fucking dead.’
Lucy was crouched in a corner. ‘She’s not dead, Jack. She’s alive. I met her.’
Jack Carney moved across to the cell. ‘Have you been telling secrets? Did you find my mother?’
Abby’s voice was barely a whisper. ‘She’s the only one who knows where your mother lives. You kill her and you’ll never find her.’
Abby was a smart kid, Harper thought. She was buying time. He looked around. What could he do? The gas ran through hastily welded scaffolding pipes, across and then above him.
‘Where is she?’ said Carney. ‘I want her dead. I want you all dead. Fuck her. It’s too late. It’s too fucking late.’
‘It’s not too late,’ said Abby, drawing breath slowly at each sentence. ‘She’s been living right here in Brooklyn all that time. Knew who you were. She’s been keeping clippings of you, your whole life.’
‘Is this true, Lucy? Speak or you die.’
Lucy nodded.
‘Tell me where she is. She’ll be the next one to die.’ Then Carney looked at them and laughed. ‘You’re both lying. You’ll regret that.’
Carney turned and headed back to the Zyklon B. Harper jumped and grabbed on to the scaffolding pole with both hands. It snapped under his weight. Carney turned and shot. It hit the Plexiglass. Harper swung hard and low. He didn’t want to miss. The pole hit Carney’s legs and he fell. Harper moved to him, but Carney was good. The Luger pointed directly at him. ‘Go on, make another move, Harper.’
Harper stopped. ‘You’re not going to gas them, you fucking freak. You can shoot us all, but your sick little experiment isn’t going to work.’
Carney pulled himself up from the floor. ‘I don’t care a damn for her! Lucy, you understand? Fuck you all. Fuck her. I’ll show you. I’ll show her too. I’m going to be written about for years.’ He pointed the gun at Harper’s face.
Then at the door, he heard a shout. ‘Drop your weapon.’ They turned and saw Denise Levene step in the door. She raised her gun. ‘Move away from the bucket, victim,’ she shouted.
Carney let out a laugh. ‘You too.’ His hand started to turn.
‘Don’t try it, victim!’ she told him.
Carney saw her fear and smiled. ‘You wouldn’t dare — that’s your problem, isn’t it?’
‘Try me,’ she said. Denise remembered everything Mac had told her. She wasn’t afraid; she was the hunter — not him. She fired, two quick rounds, into the wall. Carney’s hand stopped moving. ‘Drop the weapon.’
‘You don’t want to kill your beloved detective, do you, Dr Levene?’ sneered Carney. ‘You shoot me and I’ll put a bullet through his head.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Denise. ‘It’s over now. We know — Blue Team knows. They’re on their way. We found you, Jack. We traced the book on Sturbe, traced your lending record. It’s all there. Jack Carney’s self-hatred. The Jew who couldn’t stand to be a Jew.’
‘Fuck you,’ said Carney.
‘And you know what, Carney? We understand how it happened.’
‘What do you understand?’ ‘You were searching for your mommy, weren’t you? That lovely Jewish woman who abandoned you. The one who gave you your Jewish blood then dumped you on a group of Gentiles. Confusing for a kid, wasn’t it? It’s not unusual, Jack, to become obsessed, to identify with your attackers, to try to destroy the part of yourself you think they hate. You’re not a special case, you’re just a boy who didn’t grow up properly — not emotionally. You learned to hate yourself.’
‘So clever and so wrong.’
‘Really? We found your mother, Jack. She borrowed the same books as you. Every book you read, she read a week later. She was looking out for you all that time. Must’ve been watching you. Desperate to contact you, but scared. Her name was Hannah Sternberg.’
‘Sternberg?’
‘She left you when you were five. I guess what happened was that you only vaguely remembered her name. There weren’t any adoption records. That’s partly why your parents hated your Jewishness. What they did was illegal: take a child off a twenty-year-old Jewish girl with no other options. So you searched for your mother, didn’t you? For a name you could only half-remember. Sterne, Sterne-be. Sturbe. You came across this Nazi, and he made sense to you, right? You thought it was some incredible truth about you. And you devoured it and replaced all that loss and pain with this monster.’
Jack looked shaken. He stepped backwards. He was finding it hard to take in. ‘Is she alive?’
‘She wants to see you, Jack.’
Carney lowered his head. ‘It’s too late,’ he spat. ‘It’s way too late for that Jewish whore to save you, any of you. I’m going to make you all pay for this. I’m going to finish this for good. I must complete the transformation. I have it all planned. There is nothing else to do.’ He fired suddenly without lifting his head. The bullet hit the door. Denise threw herself against the wall. It was enough. Carney rose quickly, pushed past her and darted out of the lock-up.
Crown Heights, Brooklyn
March 15, 10.33 a.m.
The orange truck was heavy over the potholes, the back end lifting and heaving on the old springs. Carney tapped impatiently on the steering wheel. He turned too quickly into 82nd Street. The van lurched high on its suspension and sat flat with a jolt.
‘Damn roads. City’s run by fucking monkeys.’
Still, that didn’t matter now, did it? He felt the walls moving in. Harper had survived. They all knew. Everyone would now be chasing Jack Carney. It had to be now. Nothing mattered any more. Not anyone, either. Friends, colleagues. Screw the lot of them. All except one.
There were still things he wanted to say to Lucy. Their separation had never made sense to him. All that talk about his behavior and her need for freedom. All that he had understood when she ended things was that she had rejected him because he was a Jew. And then she had started dating Capske — a Jew. The insult was unbearable, so much so that he could hardly let himself think about it. The implication was clear — it wasn’t his Jewishness that offended her, it was just him. Carney felt the anger rise again; he still nurtured the wounds as if they were fresh cuts.
He felt the weight of thirty years of being oppressed by the filth who now ran this country. He felt their betrayal as a stream of invective. The Nazi slogans and racist bile jumbled in his mind.
He hit the steering wheel hard with the heel of his hand. ‘Shit alive, I hate this fucking world.’ He drove on with a determined expression. Past an NYPD Charger with two asshole cops eating in the front seats. One Hispanic and one black.
‘Take a fucking look at that, Josef, that’s who we answer to now. The fucking parasites are leading the beasts.’
Carney patted his antique Luger pistol, pressed hard against his hip, raised his hand towards the officers and formed a gun with his fingers. They didn’t bat an eyelid as they watched the bright orange truck trundle by.
He turned into the street and pulled to a halt halfway down. He looked over at the big mansion on the corner. The location had been carefully chosen. The synagogue lay at the eastern end, but it would be empty today. The Museum of Tolerance to the west, however, would be full of Jew-lovers. It was the perfect target. He reached for a pair of binoculars and brought the façade into sharp focus. It was a nice building. Gothic. It looked like a French château. Another example of the fakery ruining the western world.
To the left and right, the leafless trees had green buds beginning to emerge. It gave him an uninterrupted view. He checked his watch. The doors to the Museum of Tolerance would open soon enough, the crowds would enter and then he would start his work.
Carney thought of himself as a security expert. He told people willing to listen that he was an ex-Marine. In truth, he’d never made the Marines and ended up as a cop. He had become a good cop too, keeping his leanings hidden and his need for power in check, satisfied by seeing the destruction of others through his work with Hate Crime.
Maybe the assholes who were running this investigation would get to him, but he didn’t think so. He’d outsmarted them before, but not on this scale. This would give the truth about the Jewish conspiracy the maximum chance to get proper billing. Every story needed a picture and this would be it, a shattered street and a screaming line of hostages. He would make them recite the eighty-eight words into the camera, standing tied up in a bomb-shattered street. That was how it had gone in his mind, over and over again.
Carney took out his gun and held it as he watched the people start to gather at the Museum of Tolerance on the corner. It was a crisp spring morning, still below zero. He chewed on a piece of gum and watched as cars and people bustled by. All the time, Carney was counting the visitors entering the museum.
He drove the truck another hundred yards and parked right outside the museum next to an old beige bus, as close as he could so that the truck wasn’t visible from afar.
He got out quickly before anyone had the chance to question him, went into the back of the truck to set things up, then emerged carrying two metal crutches. He locked up and moved away. He limped towards the museum.
Brooklyn
March 15, 10.45 a.m.
Harper had seen the truck leaving and caught two numbers on the license-plate. It was an orange Dodge, but he didn’t catch its tail. By the time he was out on to the street where Denise’s car was parked, the orange truck had disappeared.
Harper and Denise called backup, but it was already in the street. They heard the sirens getting closer. Harper pulled back the bolts and moved across to Lucy.
Denise rushed to the exhausted body of Abby Goldenberg. She knelt at Abby’s side, stroked her face and looked down at her. ‘You okay?’
Abby managed to nod, but the last few minutes had left her reeling, her eyes closed.
Harper helped Lucy to her feet and walked her out of the brick cell. He looked across to Denise. ‘You want to get her out?’ he said.
‘We need a gurney, Tom, she’s very weak.’
‘We got to get on Carney’s tail, Denise. Soon as backup gets here we go, right?’
‘Okay,’ she said. Denise looked at Abby’s eyes. She was still the girl in the photographs, the beautiful, bright teenager, but the experience had left her gray and gaunt. ‘You’re going to be just fine,’ said Denise. ‘If I can do it, Abby, and I’m half as willful as you seem to be, then you’ll be back on your feet in no time.’
Abby’s eyes flickered open. ‘Where’s my daddy?’
Denise held her hand. ‘We’ll get him for you, dear. He’s fine. He never gave up. He’s been helping all this time, helping the cops find you.’
‘I knew he wouldn’t let anything happen,’ said Abby. ‘I felt him here the whole time.’ Then the girl’s face contorted and Denise tried to calm her. The noise of the squad cars and ambulances broke in from behind.
Denise turned as the uniformed cops entered with two paramedics. ‘Let’s get you to hospital, Abby. You need a little attention first.’
Denise let the paramedics take the girl. ‘You ready?’ she said to Harper. She steeled herself. It wasn’t over, not yet. The predator had ousted the victim once and for all, but the prey wasn’t down.
Harper ran for the exit, Denise followed. They jumped into a squad car and Harper started to drive.
‘Where we going?’ said Denise. ‘Carney’s got nowhere to go. He’s going to do something bad. We just have to try to get to him first. Every cop in New York will know about him by now.’ Harper called Lafayette as he drove. ‘What have you got set up?’
‘We’ve got all the bridges in Manhattan covered. Ditto all routes in and out of New York. He’s circled, Harper. An orange truck won’t go unnoticed. We got hundreds of men out there. It’s going to show up. It’s just a matter of time.’
‘He’s going to do something,’ said Harper. ‘You alerted Counter-Terrorism?’
‘All Hercules squads are live and active. If we get one sniff of him, he’s ours.’
‘That’s good,’ said Harper. ‘I’m worried about it, though. He’s known this day is coming for a while now.’
‘I know,’ said Lafayette. ‘We’re doing what we can.’
‘Parkways and expressways covered?’
‘Yep, like I said, we’ve got patrols on all major routes in and out.’
‘I don’t think he’s leaving. I think Carney knows this is over.’
‘He’s a dead man walking,’ said Lafayette.
‘No,’ said Harper, ‘he’s a ticking bomb.’
Harper hung up and continued to drive. He felt the frustration of being unable to do a goddamn thing. Denise had been trying to make calls on her cell phone.
‘How was Abby?’ he asked.
‘She’s pretty messed up, but the light’s still in her eyes,’ said Denise. ‘I guess she’ll be okay. I tried to call Aaron. He’s not at home and his cell went straight to message. He’s going to scream.’
‘He’s a lucky man. Down to you, Denise. You did good. Real good.’
‘We did good. What did Lafayette say?’
‘Nothing seen or heard yet, but roads are covered everywhere.’ Harper cast his eye down another side street. ‘I need something on Carney,’ he said. ‘What’s he going to do?’
‘You want my analysis?’
‘Yes. You got anything?’
‘He’s going to make a final gesture,’ said Denise. ‘He’s a cornered animal now, there’s no way out.’
‘I know, but what’s it going to be?’
‘Josef Sturbe was there on the last day of the ghetto.’
‘And what happened on the last day?’ said Harper.
‘The Nazis blew up the Great Synagogue of Warsaw.’ Harper’s mind raced. ‘God help us, if that’s what he has in mind.’
Denise nodded to herself. ‘He might. It’s symbolic — a final action. I remember reading the reports by one SS officer. He said: “What a wonderful sight!” when looking at the burning synagogue.’
Harper called Lafayette immediately. ‘He might be going for a synagogue. Send the word out, get the patrols to every single one.’
Museum of Tolerance, Brooklyn
March 15, 10.48 a.m.
Inside the lobby of the Museum of Tolerance, Carney stopped and took out a handkerchief. He wiped his brow and leaned down to feel his leg with a grimace. He tried to move on his metal crutches. The two security men stared across. One of them said something to the other. Carney’s training told him two things about getting through security — get noticed and then get the guards themselves noticed. Guards don’t like to be embarrassed.
Carney acknowledged their look and started over to them. His right leg slipped from under him and he sprawled to the floor, his leg lying straight as if injured. Carney yelled in pain. He tried to push himself to his feet but he couldn’t get up. One of the beefcakes moved slowly across.
‘Help me!’ Carney shouted.
The guard looked awkward as he crossed the marble floor.
‘Sorry, man, this is real embarrassing,’ said Carney. ‘I can’t get this attached without a seat.’
‘No problem, sir. I’ll fix you up.’ The guy put his hands under Carney’s arms, picked him up and helped him across to a bench seat.
‘God, I hate these injuries. Humiliate the life out of me at every moment,’ said Carney.
‘How’d you hurt the leg?’
‘Afghanistan,’ said Carney.
‘You in the service?’ asked the security guard.
‘Yeah, until the IED blast. You’re a soldier too, right?’ said Carney.
The security guard showed his tattoo. A Marine. Carney nodded.
‘Those bastards bombed the fuck out of us and what did our government do? They withdrew troops.’
‘It’s too bad.’
Carney shook his head. He felt close to tears. Sincere tears. He pushed down his jeans and stood up.
‘I gotta thank you, fella.’
‘Not a problem. Good to help a soldier.’
Carney stood up and, with the aid of his crutches, hopped towards the gate with the security guard. ‘I hope I didn’t embarrass you.’
‘Not at all. War wound is something to be proud of.’
‘You’re a real gent.’ Carney pointed at the metal detector. ‘You don’t want me to hop through there without these babies, do you? I’ll be flat on the floor again if you do.’
‘No, man, that’s cool, just walk through.’
Carney walked through. The machine beeped. He stopped and turned.
‘Am I all right to go on?’
‘Sure, man, take it easy.’
Carney walked slowly down the corridor away from the gate. He could feel the sweat soaking his shirt and his hands shaking, but he was smiling now, not that they could see it. He found the elevator, pressed the button and waited.
The problem was that Lucy was about the only person he’d ever felt safe with. Why was it? Why was he so complicated? A Jew who was not a Jew, who hated Jews, who was betrayed by a Jew. He had felt safe with hatred. Hatred silenced all his self-loathing.
Carney walked into the bathroom on the second floor. He felt warm and flushed. He threw water over his face. She’d remember him after today, wouldn’t she? In the mirror, a worn-out man stared back at him. Older than his years. He was tired, red and looked mad as hell. In his head, he’d felt like a hero. He turned his face away quickly.
He took out a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket and opened it up. On it, the words looked small and hazy. He couldn’t focus, even in the bright fluorescent lights of the toilet. He recited the words. One powerful paragraph. Only eighty-eight words.
Crown Heights, Brooklyn
March 15, 11.02 a.m.
Harper made a judgment. Crown Heights had the largest number of synagogues in the area. He picked up Denise from the hospital. He needed someone with knowledge of Brooklyn. They drove towards the first on his list. He stopped and got out of his car, stretched his neck to get a good look up and down the street. Denise got out beside him.
‘Anything?’ she asked.
‘No,’ said Harper. ‘Let’s try the next.’
Harper saw a huge flock of starlings rise in a single movement from the rooftops. He looked up. It was a moment, that was all. He didn’t have time to wonder. A second later, a massive explosion ripped through the morning air with a horrifying shriek of violence. In a heartbeat, the world had changed once again.
At the shock of the explosion, Harper dived. His knees bent, and almost instantly as the first soundwave rushed by, he darted towards Denise with an outstretched arm, using his body to shield her. His mind was still taking in the noise, his body in adrenalin production, as he held Denise close to his chest. Time slowed. The blast lasted under a second, but the soundwave continued, lessening, widening like a gunshot disappearing over a plain, ricocheting off tall buildings.
A second after the blast, the treetops rushed with sudden air. Then the air was still.
And for a fragment of a second, it was so quiet. Maybe it was longer. It seemed longer. The silence seemed to hang in the air. Then someone took off the pause button and the scene burst to life with the shriek of car alarms and children crying.
Harper and Denise stood up. The blast had been close. Close enough for them to feel the shockwaves. Close enough for them to hear the raw burst of force and pressure. Maybe half a mile away, or less.
They watched a plume of black and gray smoke rise above the rooftops.
Harper’s ears rang and he saw the people all around dash into huddled groups. Taking Denise by the hand, Harper raced back to his car. ‘Get in,’ he shouted. They pulled away, turned and drove towards the center of the explosion.
Crown Heights, Brooklyn
March 15, 11.18 a.m.
Harper and Denise abandoned their car a street away. The traffic was too bad. Hundreds of cars packed tight. They got out and ran hard towards the scene. There was no telling what the bomb had done or how many were injured. The priority for the team was to get the injured out of there and to secure the scene. His priority had to be to stop Jack Carney.
Harper moved through the crowds at the end of the street. He slowed as he came across the scene. A gray New York street spread out from the center-point of chaos. Scattered, twisted, smoking metal. The wasted hulk of an exhumed truck, quietly breathing gray-black smoke. The spread of debris. Dazed victims, some staggering at the edges of the blast, some moving on the ground, others still. The whole front wall of the museum blasted to pieces. Carney hadn’t targeted the empty synagogue but a museum full of people. What’s more, like some final insult, he’d chosen Aaron Goldenberg’s workplace. Harper’s mind raced.
He stared at the devastation in a civilian street. Blood on concrete. Torn clothes. Papers and shoes. Body parts against fast-food wraps. The pressure wave had been enough to crush the closer victims. Their bodies were hit by an impenetrable wall of high pressure and had been thrown against the buildings. Further out, the shrapnel had caused carnage. The mix of bright red blood and black soot was smudged across the entire frontage of the museum.
Harper made for the makeshift Incident Command. He scanned the scene quickly.
There was no one in the bomb zone except the essential medical services and the Bomb Squad. There were two Bomb Squad detectives in big green EOD 8 Bomb Suits, fifty layers of Kevlar shielding them from any potential explosion. Thank God that they’d put the city on red alert. Every team had been up and mobile. The response time was astonishing and it meant that lives were being saved. The bomb crew were on all fours looking under cars along the street with a mirror.
A great phalanx of injured bodies lay at the entrance of the Museum of Tolerance. It was the epicenter.
‘There’s too many. Far too many bodies,’ said Harper.
Denise was in shock. She turned. ‘What?’
‘Something’s wrong. A street scene at this time wouldn’t have been this busy.’
Harper watched for a moment as the paramedics continued the pre-hospital triage — a hell of a thing to be doing in a New York street: tagging each of the wounded red, amber or green depending on how long they’d live. The red-tags were already being moved to the ambulances. Amber and greens would have to wait in the street in horrible agony.
As soon as Harper and Levene entered Incident Command, they spotted Sergeant Luce Colhoon, who called them across.
‘Just got here,’ Harper said. ‘You have anything on the bomber?’
‘Listen, we’ve got emergency services taking care of the wounded. Three dead already in ambulances. We got the utilities on it — there’s a burst gas main somewhere down the street, but they’ve closed off the gas already. I’ve got no idea about the bomber. What we got to know, Detective, is this: what the hell happened?’
‘You speak to any witnesses?’
‘Nobody who can hear me. They’re all deaf.’
Harper went back to the street. He looked again at the mass of bodies outside the museum, and then across the street. Debris, smashed car glass. Walls full of shot. Dazed and wounded people sitting where they could, receiving treatment. The ground scattered with nails. A sickeningly barbaric device aimed at maiming the maximum number of people.
But there were too many dead and wounded. That’s what he saw again. Normally at this time, the street would’ve maybe had a dozen or so people on the sidewalks, but this looked like someone had let off a bomb in a crowd.
Harper edged forward, mentally totting up the numbers. He put his hand on the shoulder of a cop trying to clear a path for the paramedics.
‘You get anything from any witnesses?’
‘I don’t know. There was a guy on the second floor of the building opposite the museum who said he was watching the street. Saw a crowd streaming out of the museum — and then the blast shot his window out. He’s in one of the ambulances. Maybe he’s gone already.’
‘They were coming out of the museum before the bomb went off?’
‘That’s what the man said.’
Harper thought for a moment and looked up at the museum. There was a window out on the second floor. Not unusual given the scene, but it was the only one out. Maybe there had been a smaller blast first. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe someone had set off an alarm.
Harper pulled Denise across to the entrance and in through the shattered glass doors. Two security officers were helping set up a temporary hospital area in the foyer.
‘We got to find out what happened,’ Harper told Denise. ‘Talk to people.’
‘This is where Aaron Goldenberg works. I need to find him. He might be hurt.’
‘Okay, try to locate him,’ said Harper. He went up to a security guard. ‘Detective Harper. I need some information fast.’
‘Okay, sir, I’ll tell you what I can, but you gotta speak up.’ The guard tapped his ears by way of an explanation.
‘Okay. Listen, did something happen prior to the blast, anything you see from in here?’
‘Yeah, something, but I don’t know what it was. The fire alarm went off and people began to walk towards the exits, then this crowd started down the stairs from the upper floors, in a panic, caused everyone to stampede. We couldn’t stop them. They got out of the doors and then, BAM! The device went off.’
‘The alarm went off first? You sure? Sometimes it can get confusing.’
‘It went off first. That’s why the blast hit so many. Like they were running right into it.’
‘Can you show me where the alarm was set off?’
‘We didn’t get a chance to look. The control is in the back office. I’ll take you.’
The security guard took Harper inside the main office and through a back corridor to the security unit. It was empty. The security officer stood in front of a bank of lights. ‘It’s flashing in Area 8B, I got to look it up, give me a second.’ Harper gazed at the TV screens as the guard looked up the code. Two screens were blank, but the two screens on the outside of the building were still working.
‘8B is up on the second floor in the exhibition room.’
‘And these two cameras that are out?’
‘Shit, I didn’t see. Okay. Maybe something happened. They’re both from the exhibition room. Shit. That’s bad news. You don’t think someone’s set off something to…’
‘To what?’
‘To create a diversion and steal the artefacts?’
‘If that’s what’s going on, it’s the most fucked-up theft I ever heard of.’ Harper was already out the door, his Glock 19 firmly in his hand as he leaped up the stairs to the second floor. The security guard followed.
The second floor was quiet. Harper stopped. The big wooden doors at the end of the corridor were closed. He waited until the security guard caught up.
‘They should be open, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Okay, let’s take this nice and slow. We don’t know what’s going on.’
‘Nice and slow.’
Harper made his way down the marble corridor, his reflection perfect in the freshly polished floor. At the door, he stopped and sank to his knees. He put his eye to the large old-fashioned keyhole and stared for a moment. It was enough. He turned and pulled out his radio.
‘Sergeant Colhoon, it’s Detective Harper,’ he whispered. ‘I’m in the museum up on the second floor.’
‘So what have you got for me, Detective?’
‘This is worse than we thought. The first blast happened up here. We’ve got several casualties on the second floor. And you’re going to need to call a SWAT team. Maybe two. The bomber is in the building. And he’s got hostages.’
Museum of Tolerance, Brooklyn
March 15, 11.32 a.m.
The truck had been packed with explosives. Nothing ornate or fancy. Ammonium nitrate sitting loose in a flat box. Three bangers stuck in there and a can of fuel. All according to the instructions he’d been given. Carney had also thrown in a few bags of old nails he had no more use for.
The truck bomb had worked better than he’d expected. The fuse must’ve been just right. He’d had exactly the right amount of time to walk up to the second floor, set off a small incendiary device, start screaming, ‘Fire!’ all over the place, and then watch as the chaos ensued. All of them running as if to freedom, only to feel the heat of a bomb blast and a barrage of red-hot nails flaying their skin.
In the chaos, he shot out the two cameras on the second floor and then he shut the door to the exhibition room behind him. Those who hadn’t managed to escape stood there in front of him. Mindless sheep, unable to think or realize what was happening. He blocked the doorway. The crowd stopped.
‘What are you doing, man?’
‘There’s a fire in the stairwell. Smoke’s real bad. It’ll kill you.’
‘What do we do?’
‘There’s another stairway. Follow me.’
There were about twelve of them. Men, women, children. They turned from the exit and followed Carney down a corridor and into another exhibition room. When they were all in the room, Carney shut the door and pulled out Josef.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Making a point that needs making. Now all of you, sit the fuck down.’
The twelve hostages started to scream and panic. Carney shouted but the panic had set in. He pulled a man out of the crowd of wailing, crying people and pushed his Luger hard into the man’s cheek.
‘Shut the fuck up.’
Carney shot one round into the floor, then returned the gun to the man’s face.
‘What’s your name, Jew?’
‘Jeb Rosenbaum,’ the man said. Slowly, the group fell silent.
‘I’ll kill the children first, if you scream again.’
Jeb held his head in his hands. He was crying. Carney turned to him. ‘What are you crying for, Jeb? You’re the lucky one.’
He took Jeb by the elbow and pushed him against the opposite wall.
‘Why are you doing this? What do you want?’
‘I want people to know.’
‘What?’
‘Kneel.’
‘Please don’t kill me. I’ve got three children.’
‘It’s the breeders that are the worst. Fucking kneel!’ shouted Carney.
Jeb knelt and Carney took out a knife from his boot leg. He stood in front of him and stared.
‘You know what a scapegoat is, don’t you?’
‘I don’t know what you mean…’
‘Yes, you do. It’s the innocent goat sent away bearing the sins of its people.’
‘I don’t understand you.’
‘You will. Don’t you worry about that.’ Carney produced a roll of barbed wire from his backpack. He threw it down. ‘I’m going to wire you up, Jeb.’
The twelve stopped and stared. Carney stared back. He stepped up to the man and held up his gun. ‘You are not human. You are no longer human, you understand?’
Carney moved in with the barbed wire. He took Jeb and wrapped the wire three times around his neck.
Museum of Tolerance, Brooklyn
March 15, 11.37 a.m.
Harper sat with his back against the wooden door to the exhibition room. Inside, he’d seen Jack Carney clutching a Luger and pointing it at a group of hostages. He counted twelve: one of them was half-wrapped in barbed wire.
Harper looked through the big keyhole again. Carney was armed. His face and clothes were coated in a film of soot from the incendiary device. Harper watched in silence as Carney taped an explosive device around one of the hostages. Harper felt his breath shorten as he listened to the hostages pleading. They were terrified. Carney would be in no mood for negotiation. Harper could sense the tension in his voice. It was a bad sign. Carney clearly had a plan and he was going to stick to it.
Harper spoke low into his shortwave. ‘How long till SWAT get here?’
‘Three to four minutes. Keep it nice and quiet up there.’
‘I don’t think this guy intends to live. That makes him very dangerous.’
‘I’ll pass it on, Harper. Just sit tight.’
Harper tried to breathe deeply. Three to four minutes to get to the location. A minute to get out of the SWAT truck and a minute to get up to the second floor. Inside, a couple of the younger hostages were sobbing. In the background, further off, was the sound of crying and shouting. A scuffle, then silence. There was too much silence.
Harper looked again. Right in front of him was a man. He was about forty years old; three sticks of dynamite were now taped around his waist beside the detonation device. His face was blank. He had goose bumps all over his body.
Harper heard the killer walk up and down the room.
‘I just want the world to see you as you are. Rich bastard, aren’t you? I want you to crawl out of this place. I want to hear you bleat like a goat.’
Then what? Harper considered the plan. He looked at his watch. Time was too tight to call. If he waited for the SWAT team to get there, something might have happened, but if the killer was planning on getting his hostage to crawl out of the museum, he’d have a chance. Harper heard Carney’s voice barking commands.
‘Okay, all of you now get down on all fours.’
Harper leaned in and watched the killer orchestrating his delusions. Then he called into Command.
‘We’ve got a situation developing. He’s wiring the main hostage with explosive devices.’
‘They want to know the exact layout of the rooms, you got that information?’
‘Sure. But how long till we got some backup here?’
‘They’re caught in the fucking chaos. They’ve left the truck but they’ll be maybe another five minutes.’
‘I could take a shot.’
‘This is an order, Detective. Do not, I repeat, do not attempt a rescue.’
‘Okay. I’ll hold off.’
Inside the room, the terrified hostages were on their hands and knees. When the device blew, the explosion would savage them all.
Harper watched Carney stand back.
‘Look at you go. Terrified to die, my little goats?’ Carney wiped his mouth. Spit was forming on his lips. He looked tired. The adrenalin must have hit him in fits and starts — rising up and then falling like a wave.
Carney approached Jeb Rosenbaum.
‘You want to know what’s going to happen? You’re going to crawl out into the street.’
Carney laughed.
Jeb dared not look up. Carney took out a small black device that looked like a cell phone. He held it up.
‘You know what? I’m going to see how far you all get to. I shall let you go, just so long as you don’t squeal. But if they touch you, I press this number; it dials, connects to the little receiver next to that dynamite and what it will do, Jeb, what it will do… is explode.’
Jeb started to shake.
‘The idea is that it will rip your head clean off. Your head will go flying into the crowds. It’s up to you. You keep them off you, you’ll live. For a time. I want the TV crews to see you Jews as you should be seen.’
Harper listened and turned to the security guard. ‘If he gets that hostage into the street, that fucks up the whole idea of a rescue. Any other way into that room?’
The security guard pointed to the stairs. ‘You can get into it from the other side.’
Harper nodded. ‘Keep watching through the keyhole. Soon as you see me on the far side, knock three times on the door. He’ll look up and I’ll… well, I’ll do something.’ Harper stood and shot up the stairs.
The security guard waited in terrified silence. He didn’t hear someone coming up the stairs until she was right there. He turned and saw a blond-haired woman. ‘Who are you?’
‘Denise Levene. I’m with Harper. Where’s Dr Goldenberg?’
The security guard shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Harper’s gone round the other side.’
‘What’s his plan?’ asked Denise.
‘I don’t think he has one.’
Inside the foyer of the museum, Aaron Goldenberg stared down at the dead and injured. The cops had taken the worst to the ambulances. He saw one of his security guards lying on his back, a bloody bandage pressed to his shoulder. He approached the man and knelt at his side.
‘What happened, Bill?’ he said.
‘Dr Goldenberg. God, Dr Goldenberg. A bomb, that’s what happened.’
‘I know there was a bomb. The alarm went off in here. Why?’
‘They think he’s in here, the 88 Killer. The cops just went up. I’d like to go up with them. Some lady is looking for you, too. I sent her up to the exhibition room.’
‘The 88 Killer?’ said Dr Goldenberg.
‘Detective took the other guard. They went upstairs. Exhibition Room.’
Aaron Goldenberg let the pain emerge. He could think of just one thing. He reached down to the security guard’s side and opened the plastic holster.
‘What are you doing, sir?’
‘Shh,’ said Aaron. ‘He’s got my daughter.’ He pulled the gun out and held it in his hand. He looked at it. ‘How do I work it?’
‘You can’t do it, Dr Goldenberg. You got to leave it to the police.’
‘I have — for seventeen days. Now I’ve got to do something. He’s here. Where’s the safety?’
The guard nodded to the side of the gun. Aaron pushed down the small button. ‘This ready now?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said the guard.
Aaron touched his cheek. ‘I took it without your knowledge. And thank you, Bill.’
Aaron Goldenberg stood, held the handgun by his side and walked across to the stairs.
Two floors up, Carney circled his hostages and continued to speak in a slow drawl. ‘The problem with you guys is that you think you have a right to own the fucking world. Everyone’s got to feel sorry for you. Who feels sorry for guys like me? Guys who want the world back, guys getting destroyed by your conspiracies.’
‘I don’t understand what that has to do with me.’
Carney looked up. ‘It’s because…’
Carney stopped a moment, the little black phone in his hand. His mind seemed to miss a beat, as if the usual connection wasn’t available and he didn’t know what else to say.
The hostage went on: ‘You know no one’s to blame here. We’re all just trying to make a living like you.’
The words dragged Carney back to life.
‘Like me? You don’t fucking know what being like me is. You people… you’ve bled us fucking dry. This is America.’
‘I’m American.’
‘That right? You can be American when it suits but you only care about your own kind.’
Aaron Goldenberg walked up the stairs through broken glass. His heart had been walking through broken glass for days.
The 88 Killer. The man who had his daughter, Abby — who had her imprisoned somewhere — was in his building. He reached the first floor and then started up to the second. He wanted his daughter. He wanted revenge. The purpose focused him.
‘Abby,’ he said to himself. ‘Abby, Abby, Abby.’ In his heart, he felt she was dead. That was all he’d learned to expect, that there was only worse to come — a broken, beaten corpse, his daughter’s magnificent life reduced to nothing. Tears were streaming down his face, a burning agony in his chest. He had never known feelings like these. Suicides and murders hadn’t ever come within his world, but now his purpose was clear. He could not live without his daughter. He would not live without her. Not another day.
He would not walk alone on earth without love. And the killer would not walk on the earth another day either. Let this be the end.
He knew what he had to do.
Inside the exhibition room, Carney stood up. ‘They’re here. Time to take you all for a walk.’
He took the cell phone and brought up the number of the receiver hanging around Jeb’s neck.
‘Time to go, goat-boy. Crawl forward.’
Carney moved to the door and pulled it wide open.
The security guard and Denise Levene stared in horror at the hostages on their hands and knees.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ Carney demanded.
‘Security.’
Carney laughed. ‘Fuck you.’ He pulled out his gun and shot the security guard without a thought. The gunshot reverberated throughout the building. Denise felt a wave of shock and nausea. She stepped backwards.
Carney stood at the entrance to the exhibition room. ‘Ah, Dr Levene — you made it.’
‘I understand you, Jack,’ she said, trying to hide the tremble in her voice. ‘You need help. We can get you help. This isn’t the end of the line. There’s a way out here.’
‘What do you mean? This is it. The media is all run by Jews. No one tells the truth, that’s why I’ve got to splash the truth all over the front page.’
‘Is that why you’re doing this, for attention?’
‘American soldiers die every day, we report that, but every day, Americans here in America are being destroyed by the Jews running the country.’
‘How?’
Carney walked across to the stairwell and leaned over. There was a solitary man walking up the stairs, but Carney could see all the way down into the foyer.
‘I represent true American interests,’ he shouted. Down in the foyer, horrified people stared up at the killer, paralyzed with fear. ‘I am fighting to free America from the insidious influence of the Jew and his kind. These here are the Jewish scapegoats. These poor Jews are going to die for the sins of their brothers and sisters. They are going to be sacrificed.’
He turned to Denise. ‘In my hand here, you can see the detonator. One move and I blow them, and the rest of us, sky-high. If my thumb presses dial, this little goat will erupt, splattering his offal all over you. So back right off, Dr Levene, and watch the show.’
Carney pulled back. ‘Keep walking, goats,’ he commanded. Jeb and the other eleven hostages started crawling towards the stairs.
Harper was at the far door of the exhibition room when he heard Carney talking and shouting. He then heard a woman’s voice and realized that it was Denise. He could see the poor hostages, all stripped and tied with wire. Carney had lost his mind. He was going to go out in a blaze of hatred. There was no time to wait.
Harper saw the detonator in Carney’s hand. Any trigger and Carney could blow them all to pieces. The security guard raised the thumb on his fist and raised his eyebrow. It was enough. Harper got it. The explosion was a single movement of his thumb.
Down below, on the marble floor, Harper could hear the sound of boots. Lots of boots. The cops were coming up the stairs. At this point, that was bad news. Carney would blow them all up.
Harper pushed off his shoes and started to move across the floor of the exhibition room, his Glock held out ready to take a headshot. Denise saw him move. She understood. ‘Hey, Carney, you know what Lucy said in the ambulance?’
Carney turned. ‘What did she say?’
‘She said she thinks you’re right.’
‘What?’
‘She doesn’t understand why you took her. She’s not a Jew.’
‘Because she knows I am,’ he said. ‘I made that mistake in school, I made that mistake with Lucy. You tell someone you’re a Jew and they shit all over you.’
‘Damn right, they do,’ said Denise.
Harper was five feet from Carney. His gun was aimed at his head. Carney caught one of the hostages glancing behind him and Harper saw him tense. A boxer knows muscles — and Harper had boxed for years. He knew what muscles did when they sensed danger, when they were about to move. And Harper saw Carney’s right arm and shoulder flinch ever so slightly. The hand crease, the finger move.
Carney had just about begun to turn his head. Harper had the start on him and lowered his gun. He had to get the cell phone, but couldn’t afford a struggle. In a struggle, everyone was dead. Even with a headshot, the thumb could press the button.
Harper moved in tight and pulled the trigger. The nozzle of his Glock was thirty centimeters from Carney’s elbow and the bullet ripped the joint to pieces. Carney’s body froze. Enough time for Harper’s right hand to grab Carney and pull his thumb from the detonator.
The two of them slumped to the floor. Harper’s left hand reached out towards Carney’s right hand. Carney’s arm was limp but his hand was still hard-gripped around the cell phone.
Denise Levene watched in stunned awe. She didn’t move. Her mouth just opened wide.
The room went silent. They were all waiting for the blast. Harper’s right hand was firmly around Carney’s thumb. Harper’s left hand slowly prized the cell phone, finger by finger, from Carney’s grip.
Harper suddenly realized he needed to breathe. He’d been holding his breath the whole time he’d walked across the room. Maybe two whole minutes. He breathed in deeply, took Carney’s other hand and crushed it with his boot until the Luger dropped. Harper grabbed it and rolled away from Carney with the gun. He held up the cell phone.
He looked at Jeb. ‘It’s okay. Keep calm. I got it. Denise, untie these people.’
Harper checked Carney and cuffed him. They could deal with him later. Denise and Harper moved across to the hostages. Behind them, Aaron Goldenberg reached the top of the stairs. He could see Jack Carney lying on the ground. All he could feel was anger and pain. He wanted this man dead. He stopped and stood over Carney. ‘You know who I am?’
‘Yes,’ said Carney.
‘Where’s my daughter?’
‘She’s dead. You’re all dead.’
Aaron pointed the gun at Jack Carney’s head. ‘Then I’m going to kill you.’
‘Then do it, Jew.’
Denise turned and saw the gun rise and tremble. She called out, ‘Aaron, stop, don’t do it! Don’t ruin this now!’
‘After what he’s done,’ said Aaron, ‘why shouldn’t I kill him?’
Aaron’s hand was shaking. His finger tightened around the trigger.
Denise was next to him now. ‘Aaron — we got Abby. She’s alive. Abby’s alive. Don’t throw it away now. She’s okay. I mean it — I’ve seen her.’
Aaron Goldenberg seemed not to hear. Then his head turned. He looked at Denise. ‘Where is she?’
‘Brooklyn Memorial.’
Aaron Goldenberg dropped the gun and ran towards the stairs.