A Killer's Essence

by Dave Zeltserman

  “So this is your new friend,” Bambi said, giggling harder and nearly falling over in her stiletto pumps.

  “Yep, this is my good buddy,” I said. Still grinning stupidly at Lynch, I added, “Zach, let me introduce you to my significant other, Bambi Morrison. We were in the neighborhood, thought we’d drop in, see how you’re doing, maybe talk you into going out for some coffee.”

  Seeing the disappointment in Lynch’s face sobered me up quickly. Very softly so Bambi couldn’t hear him he told me we needed to talk alone.

  “What’s he saying?” Bambi asked suspiciously, no longer giggling, her lips freezing into a hard smile.

  “Just a minute,” I told her. I stepped into Lynch’s apartment and he closed the door behind me.

  “You can’t do this,” he said. “It’s inappropriate. It’s also not fair.”

  “What?”

  “Bringing your girlfriend here for me to look at her. This isn’t a parlor trick I do.”

  “Chrissakes, that’s not why I came here,” I said.

  He didn’t bother responding, just stared woodenly off into a corner of the room.

  “Okay, so maybe that was part of the reason,” I admitted. “We were in the neighborhood, so I figured why not. Fuck, if I had you to look at my first wife sixteen years ago you could’ve saved me a lot of money and aggravation. So come on, what’s your verdict?”

  He shook his head, his mouth clamped tightly shut.

  “Zach, what’s the big fucking deal?”

  “I’m not invading her privacy like this,” he said. “You shouldn’t be asking me to.”

  My grin had long since turned plastic. I let it drop and rubbed a hand across my jaw to wipe off any remaining remnants of it. “How about a simple question then,” I said. “Would you date her if you could?”

  “Please don’t ever come here for something like this again,” he said.

  I gave him a pleading look and he returned it unfazed. “Okay, sure,” I said, sighing, waving my hand loosely in front of my face. “Ah, fuck, I’m sorry, I guess had too much to drink tonight. I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  We both knew I was being disingenuous, that I had this idea of bringing Bambi to see him ever since I knew what it was he saw. It wasn’t an accident that Bambi and I ended up in Manhattan that night. Or that I switched to vodka martinis so I could use the excuse of being drunk. I won’t say I felt ashamed about what I did, but I regretted invading Lynch’s privacy and trying to take advantage of him, even if it was in a way that shouldn’t have mattered that much to him.

  “What can I say,” I added half under my breath. “You’re a man of principle. I apologize.”

  I left him to rejoin Bambi. She still had a hard smile frozen on her face, but I could see the anger in her eyes. She had sobered up also.

  “What were you two talking about?” she demanded.

  I shook my head. “Nothing important.”

  “That was unbelievably rude, leaving me out here like that,” she complained.

  “Yeah, well, Zach’s kind of an eccentric. He wasn’t up to company right now. Let’s go get some coffee, maybe some dessert also.”

  “Your friend’s a goddamned freak,” she said, still fuming. “A pug-ugly stick figure like him acting snooty to me. Eff him!”

  We walked out of there and took a train back to the West Village, where we found a restaurant to have some dessert and espresso. I had a piece of pecan pie, and Bambi had something chocolate and gooey, but it didn’t help her mood. She was still smoldering by the time a taxi brought us back to Flatbush. It didn’t get any better that night.

  The next day I returned back to Lynch’s apartment bringing him the digital camera I had promised. We talked some over coffee and doughnuts that I had also brought along, and I promised him I would never again pull a stunt like I did the night before. He accepted my apology, and as we talked more, he confided in me that his date with Lisa went well. He further told me he didn’t give her my cell phone number; that she not only seemed to believe what he told her, but it was almost as if she were expecting it. His off-kilter little smile reappeared for a moment as he told me she was going to be coming over for dinner again Friday night. I was happy for the guy, maybe even a little jealous.

  Chapter 21

  Thursday, February 10, 2005

  Phillips ended up assigning Hennison and me to partner together. This happened the first week of February after Hennison’s old partner, Joan Lahey, decided not to come back after her maternity leave ended, and neither Hennison nor I could come up with a strong enough objection to keep us from partnering.

  I had gotten up early that morning and was on my way to the precinct when Hennison called at seven o’clock to tell me about a dead body found in SoHo. I ended up meeting him at the crime scene: a back alleyway behind a restaurant. The victim had been stabbed to death, and when Hennison and I saw the savagery of the murder, as well as the missing fingers, we looked at each other, both thinking the same thought.

  “Yeah?” Hennison asked, trying to get me to commit first.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” I said. “It could be our guy, even if a gun wasn’t used. Maybe the ME will be able to match up the knife. Fuck, though, it’s going to be a bitch identifying him.”

  “Yet one more thing that points this to the same psycho sonofabitch,” Hennison said.

  The victim was a middle-aged male, and while it was hard to be precise with the way he was crumpled up in a fetal position, I would’ve guessed he was about five foot ten, two hundred and thirty pounds. In addition to the missing fingers, his throat had been cut, his eyes gouged out, and his mouth caved in as if it had been stomped on. His face was stabbed enough times to make it unrecognizable. The victim was also missing a coat. Maybe he had one and it was taken off him, or maybe something caused him to rush into the alley. As cold as it was the other night, he should’ve had one on. His clothing was so torn and bloodied it was hard to figure out from that whether he was a street person or someone well-off, but his shoes gave him away. He had money. While a knife was used instead of a .40 caliber with hollow-points, it felt familiar, as if the killer were trying to obliterate the man’s face as much as the psycho who had butchered Gail Laurent and Paul Burke.

  The patrolman who called in the body was standing off to the side. Hennison waved him over to get a rundown of what he knew. The restaurant didn’t open until eleven and the patrolman was checking the back area to make sure there wasn’t any prostitution activity, something he had been alerted to a week earlier.

  “Employees were coming out here to dump garbage and finding a pro servicing her clientele,” the patrolman said. He stopped for a moment to blow on his hands. He’d been out there for a while, and it was turning out to be a bitterly cold February morning with the wind beginning to pick up. “The owner called the station on it,” he continued. “Since then, I’ve been back here a few times each day, making sure it wasn’t still going on.”

  Hennison grimaced as he looked around the alley, his jaw muscles tightening. “What a load of sick bastards in this city,” he said. “Just what you need to get yourself in the mood, standing in a filthy rat-infested back alley in the cold and, for good measure, breathing in the smell of rotting garbage.” He fixed his stare back toward the patrolman. “Any recent activity?” he asked.

  The patrolman shook his head. “Not since I’ve been checking.”

  “Anyone checking at night?” I asked.

  “I’d have to think so, but you’ll have to call the station about that. But if an officer was back here doing a quick check, I don’t think he’d see the body.”

  He was right. Late at night the body would’ve been in the shadows of the dumpster. Unless a patrolman swept the area with a flashlight, he would’ve missed it. A restaurant employee throwing away garbage wouldn’t have seen it either.

  “You know the pro working back here?” Hennison asked.

  “Not a hundred percent, but we have an idea who she is.
Her street name’s Ashlee Smith—her real name’s Willie Howard. She’s a he. Let me call the station and get a last known address, not that there’s much chance he’ll still be there.”

  He got on his two-way, and after a short conversation with dispatch and then what sounded like his desk sergeant, he gave us an address in the Bronx.

  We were pretty well hidden back there. The restaurant wasn’t going to be opening for another few hours, and there wasn’t any foot traffic, and not much chance that anyone other than a vagrant was going to be stumbling onto the crime scene. Hennison told the patrolman he didn’t have to stick around, that we could maintain the area ourselves. The officer nodded and stared hard in the direction of the corpse. “Fucking brutal what was done to this guy,” he said before leaving.

  Once the patrolman was out of the alley I told Hennison we were going to have to hunt down Willie Howard. He made a face but reluctantly agreed.

  “Who knows?” Hennison said. “Maybe he’s also our guy for Laurent and Burke.”

  Several vans pulled into the alley, and I nodded to a forensics team member I knew as he exited one of the vans, and watched as the evidence collection team emptied out of the other vehicle. I told Hennison I’d get us coffee and left him there to fill in forensics. It took me ten minutes, and by the time I returned to the crime scene the body was being loaded into the back of an ambulance and forensics was methodically going over the alley. I handed Hennison a large coffee. His ears bright red from the cold, he told me he’d put in a call for a canine unit and also to get Willie Howard brought in. While we waited, a call came in over his two-way to tell Hennison that the address in the Bronx wasn’t any good, that Howard hadn’t been seen there in months.

  “This is going to be a pain in the ass,” Hennison grumbled partly to me, mostly to himself. “Worse than a bad case of hemorrhoids.”

  The canine team arrived with two beautiful full-breed Belgian shepherds. They were led up and down the alley and then brought next to the dumpster, neither of them showing any agitation. With the way the dogs reacted, the odds were small that the missing fingers or eyes were left in the alley; still, though, forensics was going to have to have the dumpster carted away and painstakingly searched through. The dogs were taken out of the alley to search a radius of several city blocks for the missing body pieces.

  It was ten o’clock before we were able to get the manager of the restaurant, Thomas Langlois, to show up. He was in his late twenties, on the heavy side, with thinning blond hair, and looked both tired and disheveled as if he’d just crawled out of bed and hadn’t fully woken up yet. He explained that he’d locked up the restaurant the night before and didn’t leave until four in the morning, and that he wasn’t planning on returning to work until four that afternoon.

  “Is that usual for you?” Hennison.

  “Every day for the last three years. I’ll tell you, I could use some coffee bad, I mean real bad. How about I make you guys some also?”

  I wasn’t about to refuse the offer, and neither was Hennison. We were sitting at a table, and Hennison shrugged and told him if it wouldn’t be any additional bother we’d join him for coffee. Langlois said it wouldn’t be. We all moved to the bar area where they had a very expensive-looking espresso machine. Langlois got behind the bar and fired the machine up.

  “Espresso, cappuccino?” he asked us. “I can make you regular if you’d like.”

  “Espresso sounds good,” I said. Hennison grunted, indicating he’d take some also. While we waited for the machine to warm up, Langlois explained that he didn’t hear or see anything the other night, that if he had he would’ve called the police. “Any of my people, they would’ve told me. I can guarantee you no one working here saw or heard anything.”

  He poured a double-shot of espresso for himself, then the same for me and Hennison. His hands shook as he drank. “It’s like I’m a junkie,” he explained. “You wouldn’t believe how much of this I go through each day.”

  “You’ve had some prostitution activity out back of your restaurant,” Hennison stated.

  “Yep,” he nodded. “Three times last week employees saw sex acts being performed out there. I called the police about it each time.”

  “Anything since then?”

  He shook his head.

  “Did you use the dumpster last night?”

  “We use it every night. After we clean up in the kitchen, we throw the refuse out.”

  “What time would that be?”

  Langlois thought about it. “Last night, around three o’clock,” he said.

  “Did you do it?”

  “No, it would’ve been one of our busboys. I think Leonard would’ve done it last night.”

  “Anyone else step out back?” I asked.

  Langlois shrugged. “Not unless someone was catching a smoke. Like I said before, if anyone saw anything they didn’t mention it, at least not to me.”

  “We’ll need names, phone numbers, addresses of everyone working last night,” I said. “If you’ve got illegals working here, please include them also. You’ll only get everyone in more trouble if you leave their names off the list.”

  “I don’t have illegals working in my kitchen,” Langlois said, insulted.

  “Glad to hear it. If you remember later that you do, don’t leave their names off. This isn’t going to the INS. After you get the list made up, you could do us a huge favor by calling your employees and getting them over here so we can interview them. It would be better if we can talk to them now instead of when you’re busy later tonight.”

  “Sure, of course,” Langlois agreed, nodding.

  “Good. We appreciate your cooperation. We’re also going to need a customer list from last night. Whatever names you can pull off your reservations, credit card receipts, or anyone you remember seeing here.”

  Langlois looked depressed at providing us that. “Most of our business is repeat,” he said. “I hope you’re not planning to harass my customers.”

  “Nope,” Hennison grunted. “We’re going to be checking to see if they’re still alive.”

  Langlois looked blankly at Hennison. I explained we needed to make sure that the victim wasn’t one of their customers from the other night.

  He swallowed hard at that thought and told us he’d be willing to take a look at the body and tell us if he recognized him as one of his customers.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Hennison said.

  “No, really, I’m willing to do it.”

  “It wouldn’t help us,” I said.

  He gave us a questioning look but didn’t push it further; instead he told us he’d get started on the lists we asked for. “Not all of our customers pay by credit card,” he added. “More than you’d think pay cash, but I’ll try to work on as complete a list as I can. Is there a problem with me opening today, at least for dinner?”

  “There shouldn’t be,” I said. “The alleyway behind the restaurant is being maintained as a crime scene, and I’m not sure when we’ll be releasing it, but it shouldn’t stop you from opening up. Until further notice, your back entranceway has been taped off, and we also had to remove your dumpster. We’ll be returning it as soon as we can.”

  He gave me a puzzled sideways look. “Why’d you take our dumpster?” he asked.

  “We need to search it,” Hennison said in his best tight-lipped manner.

  The puzzlement clouding up Langlois’s face faded as it dawned on him what we might be searching the dumpster for. He left to go to the kitchen area. While we waited, one of the forensics team members knocked on the front door. I let him in.

  “Just what I expect from you prima donna detectives,” he said, smiling grimly at the half-drunk espresso in front of Hennison. “Sitting around drinking coffee while we’re outside freezing our asses off collecting every bit of muck we can.”

  “And?” Hennison asked.

  “And we’re done out there. The scene was pretty much a mess with rodent droppings and other assorted g
arbage, but we scraped up all the blood we could, and we’ll see if any of it came from a second party.”

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “Nothing surprising,” he said. “There’s been too much foot traffic out there to pick up a clean shoe print. All the blood was contained around the area of the corpse. There was some splatter, but not a lot given what was done to the victim, which makes me think most of the wounds were inflicted post-mortem. We’ll let you know if we find any surprises inside the dumpster. You can let the restaurant know the area’s open and they can use the back door if they want.”

  He left, and I was out the door shortly after him, leaving Hennison behind to collect the restaurant manager’s lists and interview the employees as they arrived. Both Hennison and I shared the same vibe that this was our killer giving us another chapter to his story, but until we had any hard evidence to take to Phillips we were going to have to handle this routinely, making Willie Howard our chief suspect.

  The first thing I did was call in an APB for Howard, then headed back to the precinct to pull up his sheet. He was twenty-seven years old but looked more like a teenager, only five foot four and a hundred and twenty pounds. They had taken his wig off for his mug shot, but he still had on thick layers of mascara and an even heavier coating of lipstick. Even with his slight build, it would be hard to imagine he’d fool too many people regardless of how he was disguised. He just had that look of a tough kid from the Bronx that no amount of makeup or fake wigs would hide.

  He had quite a sheet. His arrests went back over ten years, and four of those years were spent in prison, including what must’ve been two hard years at Dannemora. His arrests were mostly for prostitution and drug offenses, with his drug of choice being heroin, but there were also assault and battery charges mixed in. There were a few times where his johns were beaten up badly enough to send them to the hospital. I was surprised to see that over the last three years all of his charges were dropped before trial, especially given the violence involved, and it made me think he must’ve become somebody’s informant. It also made me think it was possible that he killed our latest victim, and if he did that one, maybe he also did the other two.