by Robert Pobi
“All this proves is that the photograph from Deacon’s apartment was printed by the same printer as the invitation and that Winslow was in Greece when the Everett girl died. It doesn’t prove that he killed anyone. It’s all circumstantial.”
“So what do we do?”
“Get his Internet records; his phone records; credit card statements; air miles card; health club membership—anything that we are allowed to get. We dig. It’s there, somewhere.”
“He said he didn’t care where his son had come from. He said he hadn’t known. The guy looked cool about all this,” Phelps said.
“The man is fascinated by rare specimens, Jon—many the only known example of their kind. He values rarity. He wasn’t satisfied with an off-the-shelf model. He lied to us.”
||| NINETY-SEVEN
SCHLESINGER DIDN’T look skeptical anymore than he looked convinced. He sat at his desk, arms folded, stare locked on Hemingway. “Are you sure?”
“We found two Nikon lenses in Deacon’s bedroom. Wins-low has a collection of similar lenses by his window, part of his bird-watching arsenal. We ran the warranty card found in Deacon’s sock drawer and Winslow shops at the same store—B&H in Manhattan.”
“Half the world shops there,” Schlesinger said, sounding unconvinced.
She knew he was right; Daniel was there all the time.
Alan Carson stood in the corner, his arms folded across his chest. Babanel, the precinct’s lawyer, sat on the sofa, his tie open, looking as hot as the rest of them. Dennet and Phelps stood by the door, like a pair of carvings. But the prize was the district attorney—if they had him, they had the warrant.
Hemingway slid a photograph across the table. “Brayton’s eight girls began dying exactly two weeks after the opera, May last year. Dr. Winslow was deeply upset by this party.”
“Motive?” Schlesinger asked.
“Wouldn’t you be upset if you had ordered a prized purebred and you got a mutt?”
Schlesinger held up the file on Benjamin Winslow. “Kid’s got an IQ over 200. Youngest person ever admitted to Harvard. Hardly a mutt.”
“It’s not about what he has, it’s about what he was told he’d have. All of the Park Avenue Clinic’s patients expected a certain amount of exclusivity. When Winslow found out his son wasn’t as unique as he had been led to believe, it infuriated him.
“He decided to go after these children, beginning with the girls. Eight executions on a very precise schedule.”
Schlesinger shook his head. “A man like Dr. Winslow is going to hire excellent counsel. The first thing they will ask will be his motive. And so will the judge when I present this to him. Why would he do this?”
Hemingway slammed her fist into the desk. “Because he’s a sick fuck. Who knows why? His mommy didn’t breastfeed him. Or his daddy did. We have him.” She ground her finger into the report from the lab. “We have him cold.”
The district attorney stared at her for a second, then asked, “Give me a chain of events that I can work with.”
“I think Winslow and Deacon met on Randall’s Island while Deacon was out there staring at kids. Winslow was chaperoning his son’s class, something he did often. Both Deacon and Winslow carried expensive cameras with telephoto lenses. Winslow hunted birds, Deacon children. They struck up a conversation, maybe bought a coffee at the canteen at the same time. Became friends or at least buddies. Turns out they have a shared interest. Maybe Deacon pushed Winslow over to the dark side. But a learning process went on. Some sort of a team effort.
“Things soured at some point. Maybe they had their eyes on the same boy and Winslow was a sore loser. He killed Deacon. We wondered how the killer got into Deacon’s apartment with all those locks; Deacon let him in or he had his own keys. They had probably shared the garage for sessions.”
Schlesinger nodded as if she had good points. “A buddy system?”
“Some serial killers work in pairs; usually weak people who find confidence in superior firepower. The core system always comes from a dominant partner with a particular fantasy that he or she imprints on the weaker. Winslow could have been the dominant one, the one who wanted to take it to the next level, to this weird parts-taking ritual of his, and Deacon balked. So he finished Deacon off.
“If Deacon had been doing this as far back as eighty-six, he had the automatic role of master. Winslow was a lot smarter than Deacon and maybe he got fed up and decided to mutiny.”
Phelps stepped in, offering a little outside perspective. “Pairs of male killers feed off one another. That’s what they do. With someone else to record it mentally, it goes from being a participatory activity to a spectator sport. One is always the boss—always maintains psychological control.”
Schlesinger leaned over and picked up the photograph Phelps had taken with his cell phone out on Randall’s Island. There was nothing interesting about it except the battered duck decoy, head dented, blind with sun-bleached glaucoma that had whited out its eyes.
Hemingway tapped the table. “I saw that same decoy and rocks in a photograph in Winslow’s apartment. It was taken where I found Miles Morgan. Printed by the same machine that printed the torn photograph in Deacon’s apartment.”
Schlesinger’s expression was still anchored somewhere in the land of necessary objectivity. “And his wife’s death?”
Hemingway shrugged. “We don’t know. It’s been ruled an accident but who knows? If it was, maybe that’s what kicked this whole thing off. He wouldn’t be the first person to go off the deep end after the death of a spouse. If it wasn’t . . .” She let it drop off.
Schlesinger leaned back in his chair and ran his eyes over the people in the room. “Which brings us back to motive. Without it . . .” He let the question float out into the air above his desk.
Hemingway figured it was time to drop the bomb. “We think we have video of Winslow on the ferry.”
“When?”
“The day before the Simmons boy was murdered.”
“Not very convincing.”
“It is if it’s a dry run. He was carrying a knapsack Deacon’s drug dealer identified—it has a Canadian flag patch sewn on.” She pushed another photograph across the table, this one lifted from a security tape on the ferry. It showed a stooped figure carrying a knapsack.
“That could be anyone.” Schlesinger shook his head. “My grandfather.”
“Dr. Winslow has a pronounced stoop from a spinal injury.” Hemingway tapped the photograph. “It rained that day and he stayed on deck in his raincoat, looking down. Five feet from the escape hatch just off camera. There isn’t a single shot of his face but the body language is easily identifiable. He headed across to Staten Island. The cameras picked up his knapsack, and we can clearly isolate the flag.” She handed another photograph over. “And he’s wearing open-laced oxfords with leather soles. We were able to run down an account he has at Brooks Brothers and his foot is listed as a size ten wide, which is why the lab wasn’t certain if the footprints left behind at the crime scenes were ten or ten and a half. We get warrants for his home and office I bet we find the shoes and the knapsack. The murder weapon as well.”
“What about the day the Simmons boy was murdered? Can you place him on the ferry?”
At that Hemingway shook her head. She knew it was a pull in the skein of the investigation but they’d figure it out. It was only a matter of time. “Not yet.”
“Does he have alibis for the murders?”
“At this point, all we can say for sure is that he was at Randall’s Island this morning. Chaperone for his son’s class. We looked at some video footage at the time of Lincoln’s death and he’s nowhere to be seen.”
Schlesinger’s eyes shut down for a second as he went into thinking mode. “Okay, let me put warrants in front of the judge. Let’s see what he says.” He leaned back in his seat and knitted his fingers together on top of his head. “While I’m doing that, you bring him in for questioning.”
||| NINETY-EIGHT
HEMINGWAY AND Phelps flanked Dr. Neal Winslow’s door with two uniformed policemen. Alfred, the building manager, was along to make sure they didn’t cause any damage.
Phelps gave one grave robotic nod and pushed the buzzer. A long peal of songbirds broke out on the other side of the oak door.
Phelps rolled his eyes.
They waited thirty seconds.
No footsteps.
Phelps pressed his finger to the button again. Another peal of songbirds.
Followed by more silence.
“So you’re not sure if he’s home or not?” Phelps asked Alfred.
“We don’t keep tabs on our residents; this is America.”
Phelps rolled his eyes just as Hemingway’s phone vibrated. She answered.
“Detective Hemingway, Ed Schlesinger. I just finished with Judge Lester and you have your warrants. I’ve e-mailed it to you.”
“Thank you, sir.” She hung up, fired up her e-mail, and held the warrant out for Alfred to read.
“Which means?” he asked.
“That we are going to open this door.”
———
Hemingway, Phelps and the two uniformed officers swept through the place. Alfred stood by the door. When they finished, they met back in the living room, amid the glass-eyeballed birds.
Hemingway pulled out her phone and dialed Alan Carson. “Yeah, it’s Hemingway, can you get a lock on Dr. Wins-low’s cell phone? I’ve got an arrest warrant for him.”
“Hold on.”
Hemingway nodded off the seconds while Phelps looked around.
He opened desk drawers, looked behind paintings, doing a fast inventory of the place. He quickly branched out from the living room, one of the uniforms following him.
Carson came back on. “He’s moving too fast to be on foot right now. Fifth Avenue and East Sixtieth.”
“Keep somebody on him. We’re on the wa—”
From somewhere deep in the apartment, Phelps hollered, “Hemi!”
He was in the kitchen, standing in front of one of the floor-to-ceiling Sub-Zeros. The uniform was puking in the sink.
Phelps held a shoe by a lace and it dangled in his hand, spinning in the weird light cast up by the open freezer drawer. In his other hand he held a knapsack with a Canadian flag patch sewn to it.
Even from the other side of the room, Hemingway could see the dark crescent on the leather sole of the shoe.
But the big news was the freezer.
The cop was still letting go, his supper coming up in spasms.
Hemingway stepped forward and looked down into the lighted box.
Inside, neatly wrapped in cellophane, were parts of children.
||| NINETY-NINE
HEMINGWAY WAS still staring at the well-organized collection of hunting trophies when her phone rang. “Hemingway.”
The cop was still vomiting in the background and she stepped away from the noise. “Hemi, it’s Dennet. A boy disappeared on the way home tonight. Driver dropped him off in front of the building but the kid never made it upstairs. Sol Borenstein.”
Two blocks from Winslow’s last reported location.
Hemingway and Phelps left the two uniformed officers to wait for the medical examiner’s people.
As she followed Phelps to the door, she grabbed the photograph of the decoy bobbing in the current from the paneled wall.
||| ONE HUNDRED
HEMINGWAY SPOKE to Mrs. Borenstein on the phone. Elio had dropped Sol off at the front door—he needed to use the bathroom and couldn’t wait for the ride up from the garage. Elio watched him run inside and assumed the doorman sent him off to the private resident’s restroom behind the elevators. He figured the boy would meet him at the desk in the lobby.
Sol never made it inside.
He vanished between stepping through the front door and arriving on the other side.
Video from the surveillance camera showed the boy pulling the front door open, then looking off to his right. He smiled, waved, and stepped out of the frame.
Winslow’s location was fed directly to the onboard laptop mounted to the dash of Hemingway’s truck. Winslow was moving up Madison at twenty-seven miles an hour, between 71st and 72nd.
Hemingway and Phelps were three blocks down, at 68th. She didn’t have the cherries on and didn’t want to slow things down by being pulled over or—worse—alert Winslow up ahead. But she had skipped a few lights that drivers punctuated with the standard Fuck You!
She caught up to him by 77th. Winslow’s turn signal blinked on at the 79th Street entrance to the park. It was an easy car to spot, a black Bentley with heavily tinted windows, detailed to the teeth. Hardly inconspicuous.
The black luxury sedan cut across Park Avenue southbound traffic in a gentle sweep and headed into Central Park. The taxi up ahead balked at the amorphous opening and Hemingway floored it, pulling the big four-by-four around the cab in a fog of smoking rubber. She rocketed across the southbound lane in a blare of horns, caught one final glimpse of the museum off to her left, and was swallowed by the shadows.
She gained on Winslow’s Bentley, coming almost to its bumper as they swung down, beneath the grass, then up past the basketball courts.
Phelps fired up the dashboard cherry and the siren.
Winslow’s Bentley continued on for a few seconds, then the brake lights lit up. The car began to slow, to pull over.
The brake lights died, it lurched forward, then back to the center of the lane.
“What the fu—?” Phelps had his hand out on the dash.
The car hung in front of them for a second, perfectly balanced like a graceful bird in flight. Then the driver hit the brakes again and it veered sharply right, scraped the front quarter panel on the stone wall, jogged left, then swung around and impacted with the side of the tunnel.
The ass of the car swung out across the road.
Hemingway stomped down on the brakes with both feet. The dinosaur roar of rubber on pavement echoed in the tunnel and the Suburban slammed into the Bentley. The air was filled with a thousand different sounds and the framed photograph on the center console detonated against the windshield.
Hemingway heard nothing but a high-pitched squeal that she somehow knew was inside her head.
Phelps reached over, put his hand on her chest.
“I’m good,” she said, but all she heard was the sound nailing into her brain.
She didn’t hear the squeak of his hinge or any words he might have said.
She looked out the fragmented windshield. The nose of her truck was buried in the flank of the Bentley and the big sedan’s windows had blown out. There was a boy in the backseat: Sol Borenstein. Splattered with glass. Seat belt holding his head up at an odd, lifeless angle. Blood everywhere.
She caught the stooped form of Dr. Winslow as he lurched out the far side of the vehicle. Phelps was off to her left, a prismatic smudge in her peripheral vision.
Winslow had the boy with him.
His son.
Benjamin.
Winslow was screaming but she couldn’t hear him through the squeal that was still rocketing around her skull.
The photograph from Winslow’s was folded in half on the dash, the glass disintegrated. A corner of the picture stuck out of the splintered edge of the frame.
There was a spine-jarring suction as her hearing rumbled back in one big pressurized thump that shook her head with subsonic boom.
And she heard the distant screech of sirens and Phelps yelling at Winslow.
“Winslow, put the knife down.”
“I can’t. I have to do this!”
“Helllllllllp meeeee!” the boy screeched. “Shoot him! Shoot him!”
Hemingway slapped at her buckle and the seat belt let go and slowly crawled back across her body. She reached out to steady herself on the dashboard and her fingers clamped down on the edge of the picture frame. The frame came apart and the photo fluttered loose, into her lap.
Across the back, in th
e precise well-trained script of a gifted ten-year-old, were the words:
For Daddy.
I love you.
Your secret keeper.
Benjamin
And all of a sudden she knew.
She fought her way out of the car and stood on the pavement on borrowed legs.
Dr. Winslow was on the other side of the Bentley, his hand in the air, a bloody blade in his fist. He had Benjamin clamped around the throat.
“This has to stop!” Whatever constraint he had left ruptured, and the knife flashed toward Benjamin’s throat.
Hemingway screamed, “No!”
And her hearing went away again in a final, pneumatic snap timed to the flash of Phelps’s pistol.
Winslow shuddered once as a cloud of red mist vapor-trailed out behind him. He stepped back clumsily, pulling the boy with him. His arm came down and the knife sang into his son.
Phelps fired again.
||| ONE HUNDRED AND ONE
IT WAS hot and windless and with the gentle roll of the swell, the effect was hypnotizing. Hemingway pushed her Ray-Bans up on her nose and squinted into the light bouncing off the water to the south where the roiling patch of Hell Gate bubbled with the outgoing tide.
She was here to get a little perspective on what had happened.
And what was about to happen.
Big things. Forever things. No-turning-away-from things.
She had launched from Randall’s Island, not far from where she found Miles Morgan’s body floating in the shallows under the dock that day. At first her strokes were steady and purposeful—her shoulder clicking with each swing of her arm—but the further she got from land, the less she felt like paddling. Now she just rode the current, following the gentle pull of water on the hull.
It had all been there in front of them from the beginning but they hadn’t seen it. Not really. Not for what it was.
Because it was unthinkable.
They had been right about one part, of course: Trevor Deacon had run into a fellow enthusiast out on Randall’s Island. The friendship had come up out of nowhere, one of those random pairings of fractured minds that come around more often than anyone really wants to believe.
