American Devil (12 page)

‘You heard yet?’ asked Eddie, tossing a paper across to him.

Tom looked up. ‘I’m just trying to imagine how I’d follow a rich shopaholic. Maybe Amy didn’t notice things around her. Or the killer got too close with Mary-Jane and Grace and he watched Amy from a distance. What do you think?’

‘You really haven’t heard, have you?’

Tom turned the paper towards him. ‘What?’ He looked at the story in the
Post
. The NYPD had done a good job of keeping the press from linking the killings. There was enough heat after Mary-Jane’s murder, and they were already getting over fifty confessions a day. They didn’t want this to escalate. They’d be swamped. Tom read the small story about Amy Lloyd-Gardner in the paper. Another murder. The reporter had none of the gruesome details. He’d presumed a robbery and the interest level dipped to monotone prose.

‘I’ve seen this,’ said Harper. ‘If we can keep it like this, it’s good news.’

‘Yeah, that’s right, but it’s not going to stay that way,’ said Eddie.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Lafayette’s just gone in. We need to get to the briefing. Harps. You’re not going to like this.’

Tom and Eddie got to the briefing room and found a spot amongst the other detectives working the heart of the case. Lafayette was sweating. His red face looked agitated. Williamson wasn’t looking the audience in the eye. What the hell had happened? Not another body?

Lafayette craned his neck and the room slowly went quiet. ‘Okay, people. We’ve got a problem. This has been running since early this morning and we’re getting nowhere with it. I just want you all to know, we’ve been down at One PP all day using any leverage we can get and they won’t budge. Not an inch.’

‘Not an inch,’ said Williamson. ‘I’ve got a copy made, so pass these around.’ He handed a thick ream of paper to the end of the row. The pile made its slow route around the room.

‘What is it, Eddie?’

‘I ain’t gonna tell you, Tom. I don’t want to be in the firing line.’

Tom watched the pile moving up the rows.

‘Just to paint the picture,’ said Lafayette. ‘The
New York Daily Echo
did us the courtesy of sending across the copy this morning. They informed us that they intend to go to print tomorrow morning. They asked if any of the details in the story are inaccurate. We’ve been at them all day. Our lawyers have been trying to get this stopped, but it looks like we’ve got nothing.’

‘What are you talking about?’ said Harper.

‘Read the paper, big guy. If you can’t do the long words call me over. We can sound them out together and wiki them online. Then again, it’s the
Daily Echo
, four syllables bad, two syllables good - one syllable even fucking better - so you should be all right. You know why they call it the
Daily Echo
? Once they start blabbering about something, you can never get them to shut up.’

‘What am I looking for?’

‘Read the report by Erin Nash. She’s an investigative reporter who has just blown our case wide open. She seems to have some hotline to the heart of the case.’

Harper had been through the papers that morning. Most of them gave the basic story about Amy Lloyd-Gardner, reflecting what the NYPD had decided to tell them. A homicide in a parking lot in suspicious circumstances. Another woman found dead. Police yet to comment. No one, so far, was linking Mary-Jane, Grace and Amy, and the cops hadn’t released any of the details. The pile of tomorrow’s paper then arrived in Harper’s hand. He took one and passed the pile to Eddie. He stared down at the
Daily Echo
. The headline kind of spat at you in large red and black print.

Harper sat up straight in his chair. Everyone had absorbed the information. There was a long silence. Every one of the cops in the room who’d worked a high-profile case knew the impact the story would have. It was like standing in front of a derelict building, with the wrecking ball about to fall. ‘They’re going to print it?’ he asked. ‘That’s the bottom line?’

‘That’s the bottom line, Tom. This goes to press in the next couple of hours. It’ll be on the newsstands tomorrow first thing, then the world and his nephew is going to come calling. And you know what they’re going to say, don’t you? They’re going to start pointing and asking why the hell didn’t Homicide let anyone know?’

‘Who the fuck is Erin Nash? And how has she got this information?’

‘We don’t know, Tom. We have no idea. The paper is keeping her well protected. We haven’t been able to speak to her.’

‘Do we even know this shit?’ said Tom. ‘It says the victim had cherry blossom in her throat.’

‘Yeah, it’s true. The Medical Examiner confirmed it. The report went up to Williamson this morning.’

‘Who did you share it with, Nate?’

‘Not a soul,’ said Nate. ‘Soon as it came in, I got pulled out and taken down to headquarters to try to talk these newspapers into sense.’

‘So how many people knew about the cherry blossom?’ asked Tom.

‘The Medical Examiner and her team. Me and the captain. A couple of other administrative staff.’

‘You think one of us is briefing the gutter press, Nate?’

‘No. No one in Blue Team would piss on his own floor. Either this is a very good investigative reporter piecing together fragments, or else I don’t know how she knows.’

‘They’re going to be all over this now,’ said Eddie. ‘She’s called him a serial killer, she’s given him a moniker. Hell, where did that name come from? The American Devil?’

‘She probably made it up,’ said Williamson. ‘Creative types do that. Make up names to scare people.’

‘What’s the plan?’ Harper asked.

‘We got a few hours to put out our own story. That’s all. We’ve got to take the initiative and roll this out ourselves. We’ve got a press conference in a couple of hours.’

‘And what about the scale of the operation we’re going to need?’

‘It’s being agreed,’ said Lafayette. ‘We’re going to double the team, keep the press pack away from you guys. I want you to keep working the case, not the fucking media.’

Harper
was
working the case, but his question was all about Erin Nash and where she got that privileged information. He looked at the apprehension in the faces around him. The investigation had just entered phase two. Phase one was the quiet time, when you tried to get a lead. Now it was the public phase. And the media would be hunting for every scrap of information and raising fear levels by a factor of about a thousand.

 

F
rom a distance, the killer watched the release. They always threw them out early in the day. Winston Carlisle was a sad case. He was thirty-six years old, his family had abandoned him at an early age and he had stalked and attacked pretty young girls once too often. He’d never actually raped any of the girls. He liked following them and had groped them, pushed them to the ground, threatened them with a knife and exposed himself to them. He didn’t seem able to go further. His records showed that he was arrested for attempted rape at the ages of twelve and fourteen, twenty-two and twenty-nine. However, not one of these attacks resulted in a court case. Instead, because he was delusional, Winston was given treatment. He’d been in and out of institutions his whole life.

And now Winston Carlisle was on the sidewalk outside Manhattan Psychiatric Center with a small brown case, an address he didn’t recognize and a look of profound confusion on his face.

The killer followed him as he walked from the hospital towards the bus stop. He took the bus into the city and the killer got on behind him and sat there. He enjoyed the feeling of following people. It was like being in a movie. You had real purpose when you were scoping out a victim. Winston got off the cross-town bus and struggled to work out the right way to go. He stared at the scrap of paper the orderly had given him and then up at the street signs. He finally just started walking.

At the first burger joint he came to, Winston stopped and ate three hamburgers, one after the other. It was the only time he looked content. He got on his way again soon enough and even asked a passer-by about the address. Eventually he found the discreet halfway house that would be his new home.

It didn’t surprise the killer much that characters like Winston spent their whole lives in horrible anonymity and bewilderment - moving between the ordered cleanliness of a psychiatric unit and the profound confusion of the outside world. Winston needed an escape, that was for sure. The killer just knew it.

He was going to make Winston famous. He was going to give this nobody a profound legacy. Winston Carlisle, another nobody from nowhere, was going to be remembered, just like his victims. The killer smiled at the thought as he watched Winston enter the halfway house. Winston looked just right for the part he was going to play. But he would need some very close direction.

The killer noted the address and went on his way. A sprinkle of New York rain was beginning to fall. He smiled. He liked the rain. It called to him. He walked down the street and hailed a cab. He spoke through the glass.

‘Kinsley Memorial Church.’

He sat back, leaving his seatbelt undone. A recorded voice suddenly cut in, telling him to belt up and proudly exclaiming, ‘That’s the law in New York City.’ He pulled the belt across his chest. This was one law he was happy to oblige.

 

The cab took thirty minutes to travel three blocks through a snarl-up on Second Avenue. As it passed the big yellow diggers and two blocks of orange and white plastic bollards and vehicle barriers, the cabbie complained, ‘Can you see a fucking construction worker? They close off the street and then go for a three-hour cup of coffee. No one works any more.’ The passenger in the back seat checked his watch again and nodded silently. It was ten minutes before ten.

They turned into East 61st Street and the cab pulled up. The passenger slipped the driver a twenty-dollar bill. It was a nice neighbourhood - a quiet, residential tree-lined street. He got out and stood on the sidewalk, a man in his prime, tall, angular and athletic. He was feeling his passion now as he came closer to the girl who was number four on his list. Her time was up. She didn’t know it, but this was her last day on earth. The killer breathed deeply with the thought. There was no limit to what he could do. The gift of life or death was in his hands. God had no more power than he did. He just had different uses for it.

The Baptist church was a surprisingly large and ornate stone building, dating back to the mid-1850s, when someone built it in honour of Wesley Kinsley, a philanthropist of vast industrial means. It was a well-attended church with a good choir, a healthy smattering of young people and a very liberal bias - they accepted everything and anything at the Kinsley Memorial and were devoutly opposed to violence, which was a shame. It was homosexual liberals against Iraq at the Kinsley.

The morning service crowd was already sauntering through the large wooden doors. The organ inside was playing a modern hymn and the Reverend Angela Timms was greeting her flock with a smile and a wink.

In his disguise, the killer went inside and sat, as he always did, as far from the altar as possible. From the very back row, he scanned the heads of the flock, looking for the girl he’d grown attached to, but he couldn’t see her.

This was bad. He didn’t like disappointment. He’d already waited too long and his patience was beginning to snap. He needed someone soon. He couldn’t bear another day of imagining girl number four contorted and weeping under his hands - even one more day would be an unimaginable cruelty to himself. He needed her image. He needed her, period. The rain had whetted his appetite. Fat raindrops appeared on the dry sidewalk like drops of blood.
The American Devil
, he thought. He liked that. He was the sidewalk Satan. He smiled towards the altar. Would they guess that the devil was there in their flock?
Sometimes, everything made sense.

The killer had been interacting with the girl even more in the last month. She was such a prudish type, he liked to shock her. He’d Photoshopped an image of her head on a nude by Manet and stuck it to her apartment door. It was at a Manet lecture he’d first spotted her. She had long blond hair and always sat very still, listening intently to the lecturer. He liked to think they were made for each other, a prudish virgin Baptist and the American Devil. It felt perfect. She was an exceptionally pretty girl who smiled too easily at strangers and did voluntary work. Her eyes were so brightly blue that he thought she might be wearing coloured lenses - but her outfits suggested that vanity wasn’t her thing at all.