East Harlem
November 15, 6.14 p.m.
Harper felt the air cool around his neck. Dusk had fallen quickly and any hope of continuing his hunt for the last of the winter migrants had seeped away in the sudden thump of Captain Lafayette’s parting words. Tom walked back through the park feeling like someone had hit him hard in the gut. Lisa Vincenti wasn’t a weak spot so much as a great big hole in his life. Walk too close and he’d fall right back in and start the whole process of slow-motion drowning all over again.
Lafayette’s words continued to rattle around in Tom’s head as he walked back to the rented one-bedroom apartment he still called home. The apartment was on the second floor of a decaying four-storey block, in what the realtors liked to call a transitional area. That meant that the poverty was still real enough, but the condos and multi-million-dollar developments were only a stride or two away. Transitional — just another fancy word for unfair.
He’d lived along East Harlem’s southern edge ever since he and Lisa decided they were a long-term proposition. They’d honeymooned in the two small rooms above the fish market on 110th and Third, eating romantic hot dogs looking out across the Harlem River with their legs dangling through the steel walkway crossing FDR Drive.
Tom Harper and Lisa Vincenti went back twelve years. They’d met as optimistic twenty-two year olds. They connected in the deeps and in the shallows. But after Tom was made a homicide detective, things got difficult. The pattern killer cases absorbed him and Lisa must’ve got sick of waiting for her husband to come home. She wanted the man she married, not this obsessive guy with monsters in his head.
She had packed up and left. Harper now wanted to leave, just like she had. The apartment and the whole of Manhattan felt like the setting for a story that was no longer his. She’d taken the heart out of it all.
Tom wandered across to the window. His hand rose to his face and felt the stubble. If Lisa walked into the room right now and saw his hangdog look and the shit all over the apartment, she’d blow a fuse. He loved her still and missed her even more, it was that simple. He missed the smell of her skin, the look in her eye, the way she could talk until everything seemed right again. She believed in things, too. She had faith. Not many people did any more; he missed that. He missed the rhythm of being two. Beating a drum with one stick had no rhythm at all.
Tom walked back to the armchair that sat staring at a blank TV screen. Another long night lay ahead of him. Another night of slowly letting the whisky close off the different switches in his brain until he was numb to the whole wide world.
He closed his eyes, but for the first time in months it wasn’t Lisa’s image that formed in his mind as he lay back in his decrepit old armchair. It was the photograph of a pale and bloody body lying dead in some rich folks’ apartment.
Harper opened his eyes quickly and saw the glaring reflections on his window from the street below. The city was a mosaic of shadow and light. Once upon a time, city lights excited him, but he didn’t like the promises any more. He reached for his backpack and pulled out his notebook. Each dog-eared page was beautifully illustrated with quick sketches of various birds. Dates, times, locations and notes surrounded each sketch.
He picked up his pen and sucked the end until he tasted ink on his tongue. He drew the faint outline of the warbler from memory. He wrote the date, stared at it and then looked again to the window. His mind wouldn’t settle.
Across the room, his cell phone chimed a cheap tune. Harper jumped up and grabbed it. He’d not once given up on Lisa. He was endlessly optimistic that one day she’d want to come back. And he would forgive her — no question. He put the cell close to his ear. ‘Yes?’
‘Didn’t disturb you, did I?’ Harper’s heart sank. Not her voice. A man’s voice. Captain Lafayette.
‘You don’t give up, do you?’
‘Blue Team have just left the crime scene. Don’t know much about the victim yet. But she looks the same type and the injuries are similar. Like we feared, we think it’s the same unsub.’
‘Sorry to hear that.’
‘They found her on Ward’s Island. She was left out on the rocks in the water. Probably died late last night. The body’ll be there another hour or so.’
Harper sat down. ‘What’s the MO?’
‘She’s been strangled. Same ritual — torture cuts, left naked. She was also posed.’
‘Posed how?’ said Harper, pen in hand, tracing the outline of a rock on his notebook.
‘Like she’s praying.’
‘Hands tied together?’
‘Yeah, with copper wire.’ Lafayette paused. ‘I want you to take a look before they take the body. No commitment. Just give us something, Tom. Anything. For God’s sake.’
‘I’m not ready to go back, Captain.’
‘How about you just take a look at this girl, tell me what you can? Maybe what you see will help us nail this bastard. Call it a leaving gift.’
Harper was silent. The figure of a girl with her hands in prayer appeared in black ink on the page in front of him.
‘I’m in a black Impala outside your apartment. I’ll wait ten minutes. If it’s a no, then whatever you go on to do, Harper, good luck and all that. You were a first-rate cop, the best. Don’t ever forget that while you’re down there in Vegas hunting slot-machine fixers.’