by Blake Banner
He took a deep drag and put his lighter away, then walked toward me, blowing smoke. His footsteps were loud in the stillness of the night. Finally he stood in front of me, massive, menacing and smiling. “Hello, Detective Stone Cold. This is the first time I have seen you when you haven’t had my future in your hands. It feels good.”
“What do you want, Wayne?”
He laughed. “That question again. It’s what my therapist kept asking me inside: ‘What do you want, Wayne?’” He shrugged and chuckled. “It’s a stupid question. What you want changes from one moment to the next, don’t it, Stone? Half an hour ago you wanted to cuddle up in bed with your cute lady. Now, just thirty minutes later, you want to find out what I know. And in another thirty minutes, who knows what you’ll want then?”
“I’m getting bored. Have you got something for me or not?”
“Oh, I have got something for you, Stone, for sure.” He shook his head. “Ask not what a man wants, John, ask always what a man intends. What he wants may change from one moment to the next, but if he is a man, what he intends will remain constant.”
“All right, Wayne, what do you intend?”
“I thought I had made that clear, John.”
“Cut to the chase. You’ve got thirty seconds. Then I am getting in my car and I am going home. Your bullshit bores me, Wayne. Get to the point.”
He stared at me for a long moment and his eyes were dangerous. There was a hunger in them, and a suppressed rage. “Thirty seconds? Is that all you give me? Thirty seconds and counting. What are we down to now? Twenty? Fifteen?”
I sighed, pulled my keys from my pocket and turned toward my car.
He spoke from behind me: “Always with the ultimatums. Or should that be ultimata?” I opened the door and went to climb in. He said, “I want—I intend—to tell you the truth.”
SEVENTEEN
I paused, looking at him across the roof of my car. I spoke with more anger than I had intended. “Is this going to be fifteen hours of B movie bad guy bullshit? Or do you intend to get to the point before breakfast? Because I am telling you I am not interested in being a captive audience of the Wayne Harris Show. You are not amusing and you are not interesting. So unless you have something to tell me, Wayne, you can go to hell!”
He studied the tip of his cigarette. “I think you will be interested in what I have to tell you.”
“So tell me.”
He smiled and pointed down toward the river. “Down there.”
“Are you kidding? You want to go down to the river?”
He nodded. “I need to show you something.”
I pulled my 1911, pointed it at him and cocked the hammer. “OK, show me something.”
His face went tight. “You pulled a gun on me? Man, you are so uptight.”
“Lean on the car.” He put the butt in his mouth and leaned on the car. I patted him down. He was clean. “OK, walk. Show me.”
He pushed himself off the car and moved toward the gate in the fence. We went through and he began to stumble and slide down the track toward the river. A waxing moon in its first quarter was rising, ghostly and orange over Brooklyn, but offered no light on the path, which was dense with shadows.
Finally he broke out onto the flatter ground and ran a couple of steps. I followed after him and he stopped and turned to face me. He looked at my weapon and shook his head. “Put your gun away, Detective. I don’t know what to do to make you trust me, man.”
I looked around, listening. “Telling the truth might be a start,” I said. “Sit down.”
He nodded. “That’s what I brought you here for. To tell you the whole truth.” He sat and I started to inspect the undergrowth surrounding us while he continued to speak. “You’re a smart man, Stone. A lot of cops are stupid. You know that? But you—you’re smart. What I told you was the truth, but it wasn’t all the truth, and you saw that.”
When I was satisfied we were alone I returned to where he was sitting, found a rock and sat where I could see the path up to the road. I released the hammer and holstered my gun.
“You saw the news, huh?”
He chuckled. “Yeah, I saw the news. I’m a hero!”
“You didn’t know we’d found Rosario and Sonia.”
He shook his head and waved his hands in circles. “But, dude, you jump to so many conclusions on the basis of nothin’. I told you there were other girls. I told you he was talkin’ to some chicks. The only one I witnessed was Angela.”
I smiled without much humor. “So what am I doing here?”
He wagged a finger at me like I had been naughty. With his left hand he took a last drag on his cigarette, dropped it on the turf and crushed it out with his toe. “I knew! I knew that you would start over-thinking things, and read too much into these other chicks. And I thought, if we could have a private conversation, just you and me, we could resolve any doubts that you have.” He leered. “You feel me?”
I shrugged. “The DA believes you, my inspector believes you, why do you care what I think?”
He nodded down at his feet. “Because you, my friend, are a Rottweiler. You grab a hold of somethin’ and you will not let go. Even if you’re wrong. I know dudes like you, and I am never gonna get a day’s rest as long as I have you on my tail.”
“So what are you going to show me, Wayne? Jimmy’s trophies from Rosario and Sonia?”
He sat upright and spread his hands. “Now, how in the world would I know where to find them?”
“You tell me, Wayne. The same way you got hold of Angela and Cherry’s panties. The same way you got hold of all those photographs.”
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, Stone. I think you have developed a fixation.” He leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees, and pointed at me. “You know what I think? I think you are sufferin’ from a bad case of jealousy.”
I smiled. “Really?”
“Your cute Detective Dehan, man, she could put the cuffs on me any day. You think I ain’t noticed the way she looks at me?” He grinned. “All that anger and hostility, man, that masks passion and hunger. A woman like that, with all that animal power, she is drawn to a badass like me. It ain’t cerebral, Stone…” He shook his head. “Her relationship with you? That’s love. I can see that. It’s a connection of two minds. But with me? Dude, it is pure animal biology. That pony wants this cowboy to ride her.”
There was a hot rage in my belly, but I was not going to let him see it. Not yet. Instead I kept the smile fixed, shook my head and gave a small laugh. “You’re sloppy, Wayne. You overrate your own intelligence. An IQ of 145? What did you do, get a DIY Home IQ Test? You sure it wasn’t just 45? Let me tell you what happened. You called Jimmy and you told him not to go to work, because you were going to go and visit him. As soon s you got out you went straight to his apartment. You took a bottle of rum with you, to celebrate your release. You sat with him on the sofa and filled his head with all that pretentious shit you talk, and then you shot him. You wiped your prints off the gun and squeezed his hand onto the butt and the trigger. Then you took the glasses to the kitchen, washed the prints off them and left, taking your bottle of rum with you, because you remembered you had told me you liked rum.”
“That’s quite a story.”
“It’s more than a story, Wayne.”
Yeah?” He laughed. “How you gonna prove it? You ain’t got no witness.”
“Witness? Oh, I have a witness, Wayne. I have you. You are at least intelligent enough to know that a guilty plea can seriously affect sentencing. You will plead guilty.”
He laughed out loud. “You are one crazy son of a bitch, Stone. How’d you figure that?”
“Well, for a start there is the circumstantial evidence.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Like the fact that Jimmy did not own a gun, and he was too timid and mild ever to have fired a gun. He was all talk, he was a fantasist, but there was no way on Earth that he was violent. He did not belong to a gun club
and he did not own a gun.”
“That is bullshit and you know it. New York is full of dudes who own guns that are not registered.”
“Second, and a little more persuasive, is the fact that, in those photographs you helpfully left in the box, you can see clearly that Jimmy was right-handed. We can find a hundred witnesses to testify to that if we need to.” I studied his face. He was expressionless. Somewhere on the river a barge moaned. The orange moon was turning silver and her molten light warped on the black water. I shrugged. “I guess it must have been awkward. That was his spot on the sofa. That was where he always sat, with his right elbow on the arm. You couldn’t very well say to him, ‘Hey, Jimmy, you mind if I sit there and you sit here? Only, I have to shoot you in the right temple. So you banked, correctly as it happens, on the authorities’ willingness to turn a blind eye to small details, so long as they could report to the press that the Westchester Creek Strangler was no longer a threat.”
He grunted. “That is… odd. You might get some people scratchin’ their heads. But it ain’t conclusive, not by a long chalk.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. You know? It is really hard to shoot yourself in the temple, even with your dominant hand. There are all those autonomic responses that make your hand waver at the last minute, plus the recoil. Most people who try it wind up maiming themselves instead. To manage such a lethal shot with his left hand, that is almost impossible. But, you are right, it is not conclusive. To be conclusive I would need something that showed that you had definitely been at the apartment shortly before his body was found.”
He shook his head. “There ain’t no way in hell you ever going to prove that.”
I stared at him for a long moment. “You’re stupid, Wayne. And you know what makes you stupid? Your vanity and, above all, your laziness. You spend so much time thinking about how damn smart you are, you forget to actually be smart. Being smart, Wayne, is something you do, not something you are.”
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“Being smart means thinking. And thinking means learning, studying, knowing your subject. Not memorizing smart quotes that make you look and sound smart.”
“Cut to the chase, Stone.”
I laughed, “Dude, chill man, you have such a bad attitude.” I sat a moment, smiling at him, enjoying his discomfort. Eventually I said, “The glasses, Wayne. You should have dried them and put them away. For a start, why would he have two glasses there when everything else on the rack was a single item? One plate, one knife, one fork, but two glasses. On its own, that means almost nothing, but added to the left hand shot? It tells us there was somebody else in the apartment. The glasses were still wet, so they were used very recently, and whoever used them took the bottle away with them. What would make them do that? Well, the fact that they didn’t want me to know they drank rum. Careless and sloppy, Wayne. Very careless and very sloppy. But the most important thing? The really, really stupid thing?”
His face was as tight as a bowstring. He said, “Stop calling me stupid, Stone.”
I leaned forward. “What was really stupid, Wayne, was that after you washed off your fingerprints, you rinsed the glass under the tap and put the glasses on the rack. Leaving fresh prints.”
“They were wet. You can’t leave prints on a wet surface.”
“I don’t know where you got that gem, Wayne, but it’s bullshit, just like everything else in your head. Those prints are being processed right now. And you are going down for Jimmy’s murder, as well as Angela’s and all the others. You are not a genius, Wayne, you’re a moron.”
I was expecting it, but even so his size, his weight, his strength and the sheer rage of his attack overwhelmed me. I am not small, but he was a giant. He collided with me and threw me on my back. He straddled me, sitting on my belly. His massive hands fastened around my throat, he locked his elbows and his thumbs began to press into my windpipe. His face was twisted and contorted with rage and hatred.
My instinctive reaction was to grip at his wrists and his arms, but I knew that if I did that I would never have the strength to pull him off. I would be signing my own death warrant. My lungs were screaming for air and my heart was pounding in my ears. I groped for a rock, anything solid, but there was nothing there. I was going, slipping into darkness.
Then, it may have been panic, I don’t know, but a furious rage welled up inside me and I twisted and rammed my forearm savagely into his locked elbow, forcing the joint the wrong way. He didn’t let go, but he howled with pain and his grip slipped. I rammed again, twice and he stood, backing away, holding his arm, swearing. I was still suffocating, but I knew I could not give him time to recover. I scrambled and charged him, roaring like something demented, with a mixture of rage, fear and sheer relief at getting air into my lungs. I smashed my head into his chest. He went over backwards and I stumbled, tripped and fell sprawling just beyond him, rolling down the slope into cold, shallow water.
I staggered to my feet and started to scramble up the slope, gulping air as I went. I got to the top with my legs shaking. He was standing just eight or ten feet away. His left arm was hanging limp by his side. I said, “Give it up, Wayne. It’s over.”
As I said it I reached for my weapon. He moved with the speed of a viper. He leapt at me, swinging his right fist. I leaned back but not far enough and the rock in his hand caught me a glancing blow on my temple. The pain was like a knitting needle being driven through my skull. I staggered back and he lashed out with his foot, catching me on the thigh. I fell painfully and rolled down the slope again, into the shallow pools of water. Sharp stones stabbed into my back and for a moment I went into spasm, unable to move or breathe. Above me I could see his silhouette, standing at the top of the slope, with the rock still in his hand.
He half ran, half skidded down and stood over me. Thin shards of pain shot through my lungs. Air rasped in my throat. I wondered if I had broken my back. I could feel the water lapping at the side of my cheeks and my mouth, and I knew what he was going to do. He was going to beat me unconscious with the rock and then drown me, face down in the black river. I thought of Dehan and knew I could not let that happen. He knelt and loomed over me, leering down into my face.
“First you,” he said. “Then I’m going to pay a visit to your cute Detective Dehan. I’m gonna ride me that pony tonight.”
I struggled to focus. I moved first my toes and then my fingers, and knew my back was not broken. Wayne raised the rock in his right hand, high above his head. I had maybe a second, at most. It was enough. His vanity would betray him.
I said, “Wait, if you’re going to kill me, at least tell me first. Was it you who killed Angela? Was it you?”
He threw back his head and laughed. Then he grinned down at me. “Yeah, I did. I killed ’em all, right here. This is my killin’ hill on the River Styx. And wouldn’t you love to know how!”
I said, “You’re under arrest, Wayne.”
He snorted. “Fuck you. Now you gonna be real Stone Cold.”
He raised the rock again, gritted his teeth. I pulled the 1911 from my holster and shot him through the heart. He looked very surprised, then slowly keeled over and fell into the dark waters where he had cast the bodies of all the young girls he’d killed.
All but one.
EIGHTEEN
I dragged myself up onto the bank and lay gasping for thirty long seconds. Then I reached into my jacket and pulled out my phone, saying, “Dehan! Did you get that? Did you call for backup…?”
I stared at the screen. I was not connected. My brain ached. I called dispatch. “This is Detective Stone requesting backup at Randall and Zerega. Notify the inspector. Wayne Harris is dead. I’ll need a team and the ME.”
I hung up and struggled to the top of the bank, trying to think. I called Dehan.
“The number you are calling is turned off or out of range. Please try again later…”
A burning pellet of dread seared in my belly. I ran, scrambling, stumbling and falling through
the dark, up the track toward the gate in the fence. I burst out onto the road, gasping, my heart pounding in my ears, trying to think, trying to make sense of what was happening. Somewhere in the night sirens were wailing. Two patrol cars skidded around the corner from Randall Avenue. I hailed them and they screeched to a halt in front of me. As they climbed out I shouted at the nearest, “Secure the scene! Wayne Harris is down there. He’s dead. You!” I turned to the other. “Get on to dispatch. Have a car go to my house, now! Detective Stone’s house! Haight Avenue! Check on Detective Dehan! See if she is there! Now! Do it now!”
She was already talking on the radio. I was running for my car. My phone was ringing. I fumbled for it, praying it would be Dehan. It was the inspector. I answered as I clambered into the Jag.
“Stone! What the hell is this? Harris is dead?”
I said, “I haven’t got time. I think Dehan maybe too. Get off the line.”
“What? Stone! Talk to me! Where?”
Where?
I said, “I don’t know.” My mind was reeling. “I left her at home. There’s a car going there now.”
“You left her at home? John, you’re not making sense. Where are you? Are you at the river?”
I was at the river. I was at the river where all the killings had gone down.
All but one.
“Yes. I’m at the river.”
“What the hell are you doing there?”
“He called me.”
“Who did? Wayne Harris?”
My mind was beginning to clear. “Yes. He called me and told me he wanted to talk to me, alone. He said he didn’t want to see Dehan there. He said he wanted to tell me the truth.”
