by Oliver Stark
‘Let’s make it a full house,’ said Denise.
Chapter Eighteen
Crown Heights, Brooklyn
March 7, 9.03 p.m.
Brooklyn wasn’t Brooklyn any more. That’s what Martin Heming was fond of saying. He walked with his head high, an odd little twitch in his neck making its presence known every few paces. Heming was born and bred in Brooklyn, schooled and beaten and mugged in Brooklyn. His first kiss was a Brooklyn kiss, his first love was a Brooklyn high-school beauty queen whom he had won, married, beaten and lost. And now, the whole world was caving in, even in Brooklyn.
He paced up the sidewalk with Leo Lukanov at his side. ‘What did the bitch have on you?’
‘Nothing. Not a thing. Just went on about the time we put the frighteners on the girl.’
‘Her name?’
‘Denise Levene.’
‘Another Jew,’ said Heming. ‘Look at these people, Leo.’ They stared across the street. The black and whites were out and about in numbers. Alien faces, alien customs, alien dress. Heming felt the anger well up. It was happening all over and now they were hanging around in his street. In his own fucking street.
‘We should teach this Jew cop a lesson.’
‘I’d like that,’ said Leo. ‘She needs a slap.’
‘She needs to know she doesn’t fuck with us,’ said Heming.
Leo nodded and bristled, his shoulders moving back and forth, a kind of semi-conscious limbering up. ‘What are you looking at?’ he shouted across the street. He licked his upper lip that carried a line of hair, masquerading as a mustache.
Heming and Lukanov each had a fist of leaflets. They’d produced them themselves. It was important, as a cell, to become active and to keep active. Heming said it every damn day – they spent too long waiting around doing too little as these immigrant communities grew stronger. Action made sense. It was an imperative. Every moment of inaction tipped the balance against the future for real Americans.
As they walked, they dropped a leaflet every few yards, scattered them outside the Jewish schools, up the pathways to synagogues, in parks and along busy walkways. The type was in a gothic script, chosen on Lukanov’s computer in his dirty little room in a poor part of Brooklyn. A neat little Swastika had been cut and pasted in each corner and in the middle they’d typed three bold words:
KILL ALL JEWS
The message had the desired impact on the local Jewish population. It created outrage and outrage was good. It made Section 88 feel strong and powerful.
Heming was twenty-eight. Lukanov was two years younger. They’d met at a neo-Nazi rally, when Heming and his Section 88 gang started to turn up the heat in Brooklyn with placards and signs declaring God Hates Jews and more. Heming had been involved in the neo-Nazi movement for over eight years before he set up his own group two years earlier.
Heming knew that attacking illegal immigrants would find sympathy in the jobless communities in Brooklyn; graffiti on synagogues seemed to capture people’s hidden internal hatreds.
Heming sent orders down the line, where he wanted more or less action. He followed political elections, trying to ramp up pressure on the liberal Left and secure greater popular appeal for his movement from the far Right. His gang organized small riots, attacks on immigrant communities, right-wing graffiti, harassment and – the pinnacle for any Section 88 member – violence against persons of Jewish or non-white origin. The 88s even had a tattoo, worn like a badge of honor, that members were entitled to if they spilled the blood of the undesirables. It was a blue eagle.
Heming and Lukanov threw the last few leaflets down on the sidewalk and continued to walk. Heming had been working closely with Lukanov for a few months, trying to get him more involved. Lukanov was strong, stupid and impressionable. He’d kill if you told him to, and that made Heming excited.
Across the street, a group of Hasidic Jews stared at them. One of them was showing a leaflet to the other men. Their mutterings in Hebrew started low and secretive, but they soon became louder. Their long curled strands of hair started to shake and they pointed across the street at the pair.
‘Get the fuck out of here!’ shouted Heming.
There was a switch in Heming’s head and he didn’t know much about how it got there, but once it was turned on, he felt anger welling up like water in a blocked drain. Over time, the little things had become the big things: a feeling of being an outsider turned into anger against the invader, a feeling of being judged became harsh judgment, a feeling of being spat on and disenfranchised by the American government became a need to express hatred. Now he hated the Jews, the Federal government and non-whites in that order.
‘I just want to hurt them,’ said Heming, staring hard at the group of angry men. His tattooed knuckles twisted into fists. His gun was tight in his waistband. He touched it with the heel of his hand for reassurance.
‘They’re so fucking in your face,’ said Leo. ‘What do you want me to do, Martin? Talking that shit. This is America! You want me to hurt them?’
The group of men continued to stare. It felt like a challenge to Lukanov and Heming.
‘Fuck them up,’ said Martin.
‘I’ll do it, Martin, I’ll do all of them.’ Lukanov felt a jerk of excitement. He pulled a switchblade out of the back pocket of his jeans.
‘Turn away! Turn your fucking eyes away!’ shouted Heming, but none of the seven pairs of eyes moved or seemed to understand. They looked like a group of deer staring up at a distant noise. Heming stepped out into the street. ‘Stop fucking looking at me, you fucking Yids.’
Lukanov moved past Heming and started to march across the street. The rising tide of anger was impossible to contain.
Heming strode with confidence towards the group, a step behind Lukanov. One or two started to say something. But they didn’t scatter and that annoyed Heming even more. ‘Cut them, Leo,’ he shouted.
Lukanov flicked open his blade and held it at arm’s reach, pointing towards the seven men. He felt good now, he felt like a hero, ready to clean up his city. He just wanted to cut, wanted to kill. ‘Now, Martin?’
‘Make them run, Leo.’
Leo ran at the sidewalk. The group didn’t wait any longer to find out if this thug was willing to kill. They scattered both ways.
‘Do not stare at me, not in my fucking street. You hear? Not in my fucking street!’ shouted Heming.
He stepped up to the sidewalk. The men were running away in both directions. Leo was breathing heavily. ‘That fucking showed them,’ he panted. ‘They fucking scattered like rabbits. You see them dance?’
‘You did good, Leo. You’re a real rising star.’ Heming was still. His eyes stared with something close to longing. ‘You want to go after that cop, Leo? Call some boys together. You feel ready to lead your own team?’
‘Sure,’ said Lukanov. ‘I’m ready. I’m more than ready.’
Chapter Nineteen
Salsa Club, Upper East Side
March 8, 1.30 a.m.
Harper arrived alone at the Dancer Downstairs. The club was closed and shuttered. A sign on the small door at the bottom of a flight of steps expressed sympathy for the family of David Capske and said they were closing for two days. He knocked for several minutes, but no one was there. From the street the club was hardly visible. He took out his watch and started to walk the route that the murder victim, David Capske, and his fiancée, the writer, Lucy Steller, had walked the previous evening.
It took Harper twenty-five minutes to reach Lucy Steller’s apartment building. He headed off again, following the route David Capske had walked to the alleyway before he was killed. It took him just under an hour. It was quite a walk for someone rich and white, traveling into the heart of Harlem at night. Harper knew that Capske had reached the alleyway at 1.43 a.m. The caller in the apartment building said that a shot was heard at 3.30 a.m. If the rain started at 2.41 a.m., then the victim was lying on the ground in that spot for a long time, all wrapped up before he was shot. S
o between 1.43 a.m. and 2.41 a.m. what happened to Capske was still uncertain. However, after the visit to the morgue, it was clear that the killer had spent some time tattooing something on to David Capske’s chest.
Harper looked around him. Two uniformed patrol cops stood at the alleyway and nodded. He pulled out his shield and waved it towards them. Alleyways in East Harlem were dangerous places. There were limited exit routes for one thing, and victims didn’t stroll into alleyways too easily for another. Would Capske have gone into a darkened alleyway with unknown dealers? How did the killer lure him?
Harper tried to imagine how a man would have been able to wrap another man in barbed wire, unaccompanied. It wouldn’t be easy.
Surely the victim would have to be unconscious in order to allow the killer to start to wrap him. Harper made a mental note to ask the Medical Examiner about head wounds. If a man did this alone, his best bet would have been to knock the subject out, bind him, roll him, then wait until he came round. Harper thought about the timescales. It was possible, wasn’t it?
Perhaps Capske was just unlucky. Perhaps he was on his way to meet a dealer when someone in the alleyway hit him, dragged him unconscious into the dark and wrapped him as he lay flat out. That would explain the marks across the ground. If the body was flat out, the only way to bind him would have been to push the body across the wire. Harper pulled out his sketchbook. There were two places where the body had lain still. The first was halfway up the alley, but the majority of the blood was to the right side of the alley and it was less than the size of an entire body. The second spot was where they found the victim and there was blood the whole length of the body. How did that happen?
But a random attack? It seemed highly unlikely. Capske had been targeted specifically and he had been punished. And furthermore, someone had informed the police and the media.
Harper’s flashlight criss-crossed the alleyway. He’d found something that fitted, something that explained the situation, the strange time-lag and the marks across the ground. Harper let a smile cross his lips.
He thought about Denise Levene. She was back and had already spent the evening tracking racist thugs in Brooklyn. Whatever Mac had put her through, it had given her the confidence to start again.
Some of the guys in Blue Team, earlier in the day, had gone back to a multiple attacker theory. The Captain had lapped it up. Harper was now sure that what they were looking at was something darker. A solitary killer, a night stalker, waiting in an alleyway, ready with his cosh and barbed wire.
What kind of animal hunted like that? A political killer? No, not to his knowledge. Political killers tended to be martyrs who sacrificed themselves. This was someone who liked to kill for the sake of killing. If there was a political issue caught up in this kill, it was not the prime motivation.
He needed to know if the victim had been unconscious. He took out his phone to call the Medical Examiner’s office. He direct-dialed Laura Pense. It was a long shot, but a moment later she answered the phone.
‘You work nights too,’ said Harper.
‘Everyone else decided it’s vacation time. What do you want?’
‘I’m at the Capske crime scene and I’ve got a theory. What I need is a blunt-force trauma to the head and I’ve got a full house. I think he must’ve been knocked unconscious. Do you have that card?’
‘No. There’s no blunt-force trauma to the head. But there was intracranial hemorrhaging, so he got hit somehow. He was probably hit on his jaw. There’s a fracture running across his left side. X-rays just came back. Couldn’t see the bruising because of the tears in his cheek.’
‘That’s useful, thank you,’ said Harper. He suggested she go home to get some sleep and hung up. So that’s what had happened: the killer caught the victim on his jaw hard enough to give him brain damage. While he was knocked out, he taped his hands and ankles, wrapped him in barbed wire up to his chest, then he tattooed him. That was the first resting-point, with blood from the abdomen and legs. Then he waited, rolled his upper torso and head and shot him.
Harper imagined Capske waking up in his steel cage. He could feel the horror, the constriction. He could see the face of the attacker above him. Smiling, laughing? A terrifying end. But why would a killer wait to shoot him? Denise was right. It wasn’t just political. He wanted to hurt and punish Capske. Or maybe there was something else. Harper took out his sketchpad and opened it. He stared at the sketches of the crime scene, the placing of the body.
In his mind, he saw the corpse. There was something there, but he couldn’t bring it to mind. Harper nodded to the patrol still guarding the entrance of the alleyway as he headed out of the darkness.
Now he had the MO, the how and the what, the next thing Harper needed to work out was the why – the motive was everything. And this murder had many potential motives – drugs, politics, anti-Semitism. But none quite accounted for the ritualized kill scene, the sudden, brutal ambush, the waiting game and the execution, except for Denise’s description of some form of deranged narcissism.
Harper walked across the street. They’d not found a single piece of the kill kit. They’d been chasing down CCTV from every municipal and private source for five blocks. They had plenty of people on tape, but it was impossible to judge if any of them were involved. No one on the tape was seen carrying anything. So either the killer was in a car or, if he was on foot, he dumped his kill kit as soon as he used it.
Harper looked up and down East 112th Street. There were CCTV cameras at either end of the street. Rows of garbage from the cafés and eateries lined the sidewalks. Harper looked across again. Even if the killer cut through the housing project up to East 113th Street, the CCTV tapes would have caught him coming out further up. No, thought Harper. We would’ve found the kill kit. Somehow he got the stuff taken away.
He watched as the garbage truck turned up, and the men threw the bags lining the streets into the back of the truck. Harper looked at his watch and cursed. It was only 1.45 a.m. He had imagined that the killer might have waited until 3.30 a.m. in order to catch the garbage truck, so that he could dispose of his kill kit as he left the scene. But it was too early.
Harper crossed the street. A surly garbage man was tossing bags into the back of the loader. ‘Detective Harper, NYPD, can I ask you a question?’ said Harper.
The guy looked up. ‘Go ahead.’
‘We had a murder at this site last night. We reckon the victim got here at around this time – one forty-three a.m. He was hurt real bad. So bad, he must’ve been screaming at some point. Were you working this route last night?’
‘Sure was, and every other night.’
‘Did you see or hear anything?’
‘What time you say?’
‘The victim arrived around this time.’
‘Well then, I heard nothing and saw nothing.’
‘Why’s that?’ asked Harper.
‘We’re a couple of hours ahead of schedule tonight.’
‘So what time did you get here last night?’
‘Last night? About three-thirty a.m., give or take a few minutes.’
‘Last night, you were here at that time? You see anything?’
‘Not a thing worth noting.’
‘Where do you go from here?’ said Harper.
‘We got this street, then we complete the round.’
‘Then where do you go?’
‘Queens.’
‘What for?’
‘To unload. You’re very interested in garbage for a cop.’
‘Can I ride with you?’
‘Ask the driver. I don’t see why not.’
Harper jumped up to the cab and introduced himself. ‘Can I ride with you, ask some questions?’
The driver shrugged. ‘Whatever turns you on.’
‘Where do you unload?’
‘Queens.’
‘I know. Where in Queens?’
‘North Shore Marine Transfer Facility.’
‘And what happens to the t
rash at the North Shore?’
‘It gets loaded into a container. When it’s full, it gets put on a barge and it sails away, to where I do not know or care.’
‘What about last night’s garbage? Will it have gone already?’
‘Hey, what do you think I do, keep tags on my garbage? I’ve no fucking idea, Detective.’
‘That’s okay. I can find that out.’ Harper took out his cell and called Eddie. He answered on the first ring. ‘You at the Station House, Eddie?’
‘Still chasing down these leads, but getting nowhere fast.’
‘I think I might know where the killer dumped his kill kit.’
‘What are you thinking?’
‘This killer is smart,’ said Harper. ‘And if he’s smart, he’s going to dump it somewhere we won’t find it.’
‘They checked the storm drains, the sewage, the trash, the streets, the houses, the roofs, the alleys; they’ve been everywhere, Harper,’ said Eddie.
‘I’ve been wondering why he waited until three-thirty a.m. to shoot this guy. It’s risky, right?’
‘It’s damn risky.’
‘Maybe he was waiting for Department of Sanitation.’
‘How so?’
‘Garbage trucks, Eddie. On Saturday, they collect around three-thirty a.m., and all our killer has to do is take his bloody clothes, the barbed-wire spool, the gloves and maybe even the murder weapon, put it out on the sidewalk and watch the city pick it up and take it away for him. Then he walks.’
‘That’s brilliant. Where are you now?’
‘In a garbage truck on the way to the North Shore Marine Transfer Facility in Queens. Meet me there in one hour with Blue Team and Crime Scene Unit. See if you can get the Logistics and Operational Manager for the Facility. We need to trace last night’s garbage.’
‘I’m on it, Harps. They work the same routes each night, right? We just need the truck number and the dumpsite. It’s going to be a dirty night’s work for someone in the Crime Scene Unit.’
Chapter Twenty
