Upper East Side
November 22, 12.12 p.m.
The first full freeze hit the city and coated it in a fine grainy dust. It was Thanksgiving and no one felt like celebrating. The trees and street furniture were already filling up with Christmas lights all down the avenues and the shop fronts grew brighter each day. New York looked like a child’s toy sparkling with colour and light.
Harper returned home at 8 a.m. and slept for a few hours. He woke from dreams he couldn’t remember and chose to walk down towards Madison Avenue via the meer. He had a bagful of bird seed and a growing sense that he was finally getting somewhere. The birds were skating around on the surface of the frozen lake, looking confused and lost, as if waiting for someone to come and put their world right. Harper took a handful of seed and tossed it across to the stranded ducks. In the frosted branches of the trees, the blackbirds and finches looked on with interest. Harper wandered around the circumference, breathing in the chill air and crunching the icy blades of grass beneath his feet.
He recalled that Lisa had never really liked Central Park. He sensed that she was just uncomfortable in places where people’s actions weren’t predetermined. She liked order. A cop’s life was anything but, it was reactive and random. It must’ve driven her half mad. Tom realized that it was the first thought about Lisa for nearly two days. It seemed a good sign. He looked out at the frozen landscape. There were times when he could’ve never imagined letting go of her. The connection had been too deep, but now, somehow, she was starting to fade away.
He threw the last few handfuls of seeds to the birds and made his way down through the centre of the park. It was so beautiful and peaceful that his pace slowed. At around 82nd Street he peeled off and joined Madison Avenue just above the Museum of Modern Art. After the reconstruction with Denise, he’d hit the precinct and given the task of finding the shop which sold the two gold and crimson Vivienne Laurec scarves to the two FBI agents. By the time he woke up just after 11.30 a.m., they’d called. They had found the right store. It was simple, they said, but Harper didn’t mind them showing off their skills.
Two Vivienne Laurec scarves seemed such a flimsy and weightless hook to hang an entire murder investigation on, but it was all he had. There was still, in his analytical mind, a nagging doubt about the scarves and he couldn’t quite understand why he was less than a hundred per cent about what they were telling him. Maybe it felt too easy.
The team was focused more than ever after Williamson’s murder. Whatever the captain had tried with the media, it hadn’t worked. Around the precinct, there was an hourly barrage of questions from a seemingly endless stream of newspaper journalists and TV reporters. The story was being drip-fed emotion daily with new stories from the families of the bereaved, new theories about the poems and the posed corpses. There were websites and blogs dedicated to the killer and everything about him. Whoever this killer was, Harper guessed that this was all part of his need.
Asa Shelton and Isaac Spencer, the two special agents from the FBI’s New York field office, had spent a couple of hours talking to distributors for Vivienne Laurec, then they got through to Vivienne Laurec itself. The scarf Harper had taken from Elizabeth Seale’s apartment had its own identity code, and once they had sent this over to Vivienne Laurec’s head office the company could give the Feds the life story of the scarf, from production through distribution to sale. They not only knew the store, they knew when the scarf had arrived and when it had sold.
Harper called Denise to let her know and arrived at the store about ten minutes later than he’d arranged. Denise Levene was standing at the window admiring the luxury goods. Inside the store, the two special agents were already talking to the young sales girl at the counter. Harper crossed and took up the questioning. The girl confirmed within minutes that they had sold that particular scarf. She took out the store records, which were still written down by hand in a large ledger before they were logged on the database.
‘So what’s in the big book?’ said Harper.
The girl leafed slowly though the pages. ‘Okay, I’ve got five sold this month. The gold and crimson only came in at the end of October, so that’s the whole story. Five sales.’
‘Do you have names down there?’
‘Yes, sir, they all leave their names,’ she said, and smiled. ‘That’s what we do at a store like ours.’
‘Well, I’ll know where to come next time I’ve got a hundred to spare.’
She smiled thinly and read out the names. The fourth name was male.
‘Bingo,’ said Harper as the name John Sebastian was read out. ‘Okay, let me check I’ve got this right. On November 17, Elizabeth Seale buys a crimson and gold scarf. She pays with a credit card. Right?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then, on the same day, a “John Sebastian” comes in. What does he pay with?’
‘It was a cash purchase.’
‘No records, right.’
‘No.’
‘What do you think, boys?’
Asa Shelton and Isaac Spencer both nodded. ‘We’ll check the name, but he’s not going to pay with cash just to leave his real name. Obviously Sebastian is some kind of alias.’
‘You remember the cash buyer?’ asked Harper.
The sales girl nodded. ‘Yeah, pretty much. It was only a few days ago. People don’t use cash any more, so he made a joke about it. Said his wife checked his credit card bills so he had to use cash for presents and affairs. I didn’t laugh. Why would I? Affairs aren’t that funny. He had glasses, greying a little. He had a nice smile, but he was a bit intense.’
Harper clenched his fist. They had something. The killer had purchased the Vivienne Laurec scarf the same day Elizabeth had bought hers — the sales girls had seen him. Then he had killed her with it.
It was unravelling. The killer had made a mistake. They always did at some point. He’d not been able to resist. He’d stepped off the path. He’d thought himself clever enough to get away with it. He’d coveted her possessions. And for Harper it meant that there were now two links to the stores on Madison Avenue. First with Amy Lloyd-Gardner and now with Elizabeth Seale. He needed more precise information, but he was beginning to see where the killer stalked his victims and that would give him a chance to set a trap. He looked at Denise.
‘I think you’ve got something,’ she said.
‘Yeah, I got something, but it’s gone midday already, and he could be on his way to kill any time now.’