by Blake Banner
“Shakes you up, a case like this, huh?” She nodded, watching me, waiting. I smiled. “You want to order in? I’ll teach you how to play backgammon.”
“You don’t have to feel sorry for me, Detective Stone.”
“I don’t. I think of you more as an unwitting victim.”
She sighed to cover her smile. “Okaaay, Stone, if it will make you feel better, I’ll keep you company for a while. We can order in if you don’t feel like cooking.”
I climbed the stairs with her just behind me and unlocked the door. I pushed in and switched on the light. There was a note on my mat, with my name printed on it, Detective John Stone. I bent and picked it up. Dehan was at my shoulder. I opened it. It said:
“Well, it took you long enough…”
NINE
I slipped it into an evidence bag and sealed it. Then I put it in my pocket and pulled my piece. Dehan stepped in with her weapon drawn, and I closed and locked the door. If the writer of the note was still here, they weren’t leaving. I pointed to Dehan to cover the stairs, and I checked the kitchen. It was clear.
I went on to the stairs, and Dehan covered me from behind. We made the landing. There were four dark doors confronting us. I signed Dehan to cover three of them and moved into the fourth. It was the small guest room. There was nobody there.
Dehan moved up to cover two of the remaining three, and I burst into the second spare room. It was a double and bigger, with two single beds. I checked between them and under them, and in the closets. It was clear.
The bathroom was clear too, and that only left my bedroom and the en suite bathroom. I burst in with Dehan behind me. The room was still and silent. Everything was as I had left it that morning. Except that I knew I had turned the bathroom light off, and now I could see light reflected on the closet door.
I looked at Dehan. I could see in her eyes that she had seen it too. She covered me again, and I stepped in. There was nobody there or in the shower. But there was another message.
He had mixed what looked like blood with soap in the soap dish and used it to write on my mirror.
YOU’D HAVE DONE BETTER TO LEAVE ME SLEEPING.
The Crime Scene team turned up within twenty minutes and did a thorough sweep of the house. It didn’t take them long. By half past nine, they had established that he had picked the lock, which I logged as one of his skills, he had gone directly upstairs, written on my mirror, come down, left the note carefully on the mat, and left. Careful observation had shown traces of a muddy shoe print under where the note had been. It was not my shoe or Dehan’s, and there was no trace of shoe prints anywhere else in the house, ergo he slipped plastic covers over his wet shoes and left the note when he left.
Frank, the team leader, paused at the door as they were leaving. “We’ll get a good DNA sample from the blood. The only question you have then is, is it his blood? You going to be okay? You want me to send a car from the precinct?”
I shook my head. “No. I don’t want to scare him off. Let him grow confident.”
“Your call.”
He went down the stairs. There was a volley of car doors in the wet night, and they pulled away. I watched their red taillights disappear and turned to Dehan, who was standing behind me with her arms crossed, shivering slightly.
“You want me to drive you home?”
She shook her head. “You going to kick me out without feeding me? What kind of man are you? After all I’ve done for you.”
I closed the door. “I need more than takeout.”
I went to the kitchen, found a bottle of Turnbull Cabernet Sauvignon, 2013. I’d heard it was exceptional, so I opened it and poured two glasses. She watched me do it and said, “You’re supposed to let it breathe.”
I raised my glass to her, and she chinked hers against mine.
“Let us be grateful, Carmen, that we are still breathing. It can breathe while we drink.”
She laughed suddenly. It was startling. “You’re a riot, Stone. You’re cool. Let me see what you’ve got.” She opened my fridge and started rummaging in my cupboards. “Let’s have spaghetti. You like spaghetti? I’ll make spaghetti.”
She made spaghetti and we finished the bottle. It was better after it had breathed.
Dehan had the spare room. I put the dead bolt on the back door and wedged a chair under the front door. I more or less slept, but if I slept seven hours, I woke up seven times imagining I’d heard something. It was probably wind and rain. But seven times I got up to check, and to look in on Dehan to make sure she was okay.
As soon as I saw the sky turning gray, I was able to fall asleep properly. But I caught an hour and a half at most, because at half eight, Dehan was cooking bacon and making coffee again. I groaned and dragged myself to the shower.
As I sat, she put a plate of fried eggs, bacon, and toast in front of me, with a large cup of black coffee.
“Lots of protein this morning, Sensei. How many times did you get up last night? I counted seven.”
“Seven.”
“The bureau called.”
I frowned at her.
“Your phone was on the table. It rang. The screen said Bernie. I answered. It was the bureau.”
“What they want?”
“They’re sending over Dr. Fenninger at eleven to talk to us and review what we have.”
“Good. Thanks, Dehan.”
She sat opposite and smiled. “God. I feel like your mother.”
Special Agent Anja Fenninger was neat, petite, and aggressively efficient in a way that only neat, petite women can be. She arrived bang on eleven with blonde hair and a luminous smile and said that she believed that if you were in time you would always be on time. Or it may have been the other way around. Either way, she was both. I looked for signs of rain on her neat blue jacket and her blonde hair. There weren’t any, and there was no mud on her shoes either. Neat, petite people can do that, effortlessly.
We found a conference room and sat around the table.
“What makes you think you’re dealing with a serial killer?”
I outlined the investigation so far and highlighted the point about the arms. “It’s hard to get around. If the killer was trying to dispose of the body and get rid of the evidence of the killing, then A, why didn’t he do with the arms what he had successfully done with the rest of the body? And B, what prompted him to leave the arms in a place where he must be sure they would be found before long? Add to this the fact that that particular unit seems to have been chosen over the others, and it looks as though we may be dealing with an organized serial killer.”
Agent Fenninger listened very carefully, not looking at me but gazing abstractedly at the table. When I’d finished, she blinked once and said, “I agree. Couple of things I want to clarify first, though. Profiling, in any field, is descriptive and not prescriptive. That is so much more so in the case of serial killers, because we know so little about them. Some psychologists suggest that there is actually no such condition as a serial killer. However, what we can do, and we do it rather well, is describe what we have seen and what seems to be typical so far.” She gave a small laugh, as though somebody had just suggested something stupid. “That does not mean that serial killers are somehow required to follow the rules that we at the bureau have laid down.”
I nodded. “Understood.”
“Having said that…” She leaned back in her chair and said nothing while she stared at the ceiling. I stole a glance to see what she was staring at. All I could see were the shadows of the raindrops on the windows. “Having said that,” she said again, “I am having trouble reconciling your suspect Zak with the arms. Zak is by definition chaotic and opportunistic. He actually sees himself as a wolf, roaming through a forest, waiting to see what life will bring him.” She smiled, like she was about to indulge in some harmless flippancy. “You know the song from Easy Rider, ‘Born to be Wild’? Well, Zak is looking for adventure and, crucially for me, whatever comes his way.”
Dehan si
ghed. We glanced at each other, and her face told me that what Agent Fenninger was saying made perfect sense to her. Fenninger went on.
“So, either we fit the careful placing of the arms in the lockup into an opportunistic, chaotic behavior pattern, or we dismiss Zak as a prime suspect.” She looked up at the ceiling again, and I realized she had her list of suspects pinned up there. “Hank, if you have him as a suspect, would simply not fall into the category of a serial killer. Serial killers do not kill their partners. Almost, I would say, by definition.” She sat blinking at the table a moment and added, almost impatiently, “I would say that is true of Zak as well, to some extent. In both Hank and Zak’s case, you are looking at killings driven by a motive. Which would put them outside the definition of serial killer.”
Dehan interrupted, “That doesn’t mean we discard them as suspects. It just means they have a motive, right?” She glanced at me. I nodded. Fenninger went on as though she hadn’t spoken.
“Peter, who owns the lockup, could certainly fit into the profile of an organized serial killer. Clearly he has issues with women and seeks to humiliate and control them. Such a need for control often speaks to a profound, volcanic rage against women that cannot be suppressed. Women who are perceived as flirty, promiscuous, careless, thoughtless—who step outside of what the man considers appropriate or acceptable behavior—can trigger a profound, destructive rage.
“We also see a pleasure in taking control in a cold, methodical way. This feeds his ego and would be very much present in the aftermath of the killing. If you look into his past, you are typically going to find a mother who humiliated him, perhaps in public, and a cruel father, or perhaps no father at all. Either way, the father has abandoned him and left him to cope with the humiliation of his mother on his own, so that the only outlet for his rage becomes physical violence. But not against her! He dare not! It must be against an unknown woman, a blank canvas if you will, against which he can project the nightmare image of his mother that he has created in his mind and which he must destroy. So! Your question: does Peter fit the profile? Prima facie, yes, but I would urge you to look into his childhood. You know…” She laughed suddenly. “He may be just a harmless prick!”
We smiled and she went on. “Dave, certainly, from what you have outlined, would fit the profile. He seems to have a tendency toward obsessive, compulsive behavior. Again, he displays a need to control his environment. His inability to relate may be due to a physical condition like severe dyspraxia or autism, but that inability to relate is a common feature of the organized serial killer. When it is, it is generally the result of a loveless and often violent home life as a child. The obsession with pornography, especially child pornography, is also a common feature. As before, it speaks to a need to control the love object, a fear that if he loses control of her, something bad will happen. She will hurt him in some way. He will lose her love.
“So love is organized and controlled in a way where there is no risk of humiliation or rejection. You can see,” she said, as though it were obvious, “how this can lead to narcissism, where love is directed toward himself, instead of toward the object of love. In the end, where masturbation is the only source of loving consolation, he becomes the object of love, controlling his environment and the women in it. I say women, but of course they are not real women, but simply two-dimensional images.”
Dehan said, “So any woman who upsets that two-dimensional relationship…”
“Could trigger very violent rage indeed.”
Dehan stared down at the table, chewing her lip. Special Agent Fenninger leaned back and stared up at the ceiling again, consulting her list, and I stared out at November. It had started to rain again. The naked trees looked like boney hands that had been trying to claw their way out of their graves but had changed their minds because the weather was so awful.
Fenninger was talking again. “Now, the note and the message on your mirror. These tell me a couple of things. First, and most important for you, he is close to you. He knows you have reopened the investigation. Second, it is possible that he has been inactive since the arms. Both messages: ‘It took you long enough,’ and especially, ‘You’d have done better to leave me sleeping,’ suggest very strongly that he had hoped for a reaction, some official response, back when he killed his victim, but has not killed since. Sometimes serial killers do lose the urge to kill. But now he is telling you that your sudden interest in the case has provoked him and reawakened his hunger.”
“Great.”
She stared hard at me. “It is not your fault, Detective Stone.”
I nodded. “Dave’s interest in the case at the time…”
“Is suggestive, but far from conclusive. I can tell you that two of your suspects, Peter and Dave, seem to fit, in general terms, a possible profile. But I would need to know a lot more about the crime, which of course is not possible, and you need to find out more about their backgrounds, their childhood relationships…”
Dehan sighed. “That makes a lot of sense.”
I asked, “Can we come back to you as we learn more?”
“Of course, anytime.” She smiled and handed me her card. “I’d be glad to hear from you.”
Dehan blinked a lot and smiled. “What about me?”
Special Agent Fenninger smiled at her and rose to leave.
The door opened and a sergeant leaned in. “Detective Stone, you have a call on line one.”
Fenninger smiled at Dehan. “It’s okay, I’ll see myself out.”
“Thanks again!” I called to her neat, petite retreating form and picked up the phone. “Stone.”
“Detective Stone, this is Detective Marco. I’m with the 62nd Precinct, Rockway Beach?” He said it like he was asking me.
I said, “Yeah.”
“We are looking at a homicide that you may be interested in. We’ve got the crime scene guys in right now, but you might want to come down and have a look.”
“Hank Junkers…”
“Uh-huh…”
TEN
The gray drizzle had turned to heavy rain, with huge, broken clouds dragging in off the Atlantic like ripped sails from some cosmic Trafalgar. What traffic there was crawled through the cascades of rain with their lights splattered and distorted on the roads. It was half past one, but it looked more like early evening. I turned in to Hank’s parking lot. It was cordoned off by yellow-and-black tape that was bouncing and dancing in the deluge. There was a meat wagon and a couple of cop cars, all with their red-and-blue lights, looking urgent and alarmed after the event. The third car was Charles Hanlan’s, the ME.
We got out holding up our badges, ducked under the tape, and ran inside. The first thing I saw was Hank. He was lying more or less sideways onto the door. His arms were splayed, like he’d fallen after a hefty blow to his head or his back. His legs were also splayed, as though he’d been standing akimbo. Stuck in his back, about where his heart was, was a dagger. It had been stabbed through a large piece of paper. Charles was squatting next to him, examining the back of his neck. He glanced up and muttered something as I stepped in.
The CSI guys looked as though they were finishing up. Standing with his arms crossed in a long beige raincoat was the man I assumed was Detective Marco. He stepped toward me.
“You Stone?”
I showed him my badge and indicated Dehan. “Detective Dehan, my partner. What happened?”
“Kid from the neighborhood came to have his bicycle tire pumped up. Found him sprawled out like that. Ran, told his mom, and she called us.”
“What made you call me?”
“Two things.”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out an evidence bag. Inside the bag there was a cell phone. When he touched the screen, it lit up. It was open on the address book at my number.
“He was about to call me when he was killed.”
“The phone had skidded over there, under that bike.” He pointed at a bronze Harley 1200, two or three yards away from Hank’s head.
“The other thing is this.” He stepped toward the body, and I followed him. “I noted your name, Stone. Take a look.”
Dehan came up beside me, and we both looked down. There wasn’t much blood on it, so it was easy to read. It said “STONE COLD.”
I glanced at Charles. He was watching me. He had a way of looking at people that you learn in Harvard. “He was stabbed postmortem.”
He nodded. “There is practically no bleeding. I’ll be able to tell for sure when I get him back to the lab, but I am pretty certain what killed him was this blow to the back of the head. The bruising is extensive, and it feels as though it broke the vertebra.”
Dehan asked the rookie question. “How long has he been dead?”
Charles patronized her with his best Harvard smile. “That’s impossible to tell. Probably, probably, within the last seventy-two hours because there is no immediate sign of decomposition.”
“The blow—” I pointed at his neck. “—was delivered from the side.” Charles raised an eyebrow at me. I continued, positioning myself behind where Hank had been standing. “If I hit him from here, the blow is going to be on the right side of his neck. It will stun him, but it probably won’t kill him. But his bruise is straight across the back of his neck, which means that, if the killer was right-handed, he was standing there…” I moved to stand on Hank’s left, round about where his feet were. “And I would strike like this, from the shoulder.”
Charles was watching me and nodding. “Yes.”
Marco scratched his chin. “What’s your interest in this case, Stone?”
I was staring at the Harley. I said, absently, “It’s probably related to an ongoing investigation. Does that strike you as strange?”
I pointed at the bike, and Dehan went and squatted down next to it. There was a neat, conical pile of sand directly in front of Hank’s head. It made a perfect right angle with the center of the open door. I turned and looked behind me. There was a cement column, and at its base there was a heavy champagne bottle. The label had been soaked off, and it was full of water.
