by Oliver Stark
He took a metal plate from a shelf next to the door. Removed a piece of dry bread and a small piece of cheese from a tin, and put them on the plate. He then poured some water from a bottle into a metal cup. He placed both at the bottom of the door where there was a hinged flap.
He stood at the door, knocked twice and pulled back a small slot that he’d cut in the wood. He stooped and stared into the room at the bundle lying on the floor.
‘Stand,’ he ordered. The prisoner did as he requested. He did not listen to her when she spoke or cried. He had taught himself to believe it was another language. The language of lies. She stood and turned her back to the door. He moved his hands through the slot and unbuckled her wrists and then her mouth restraint. Then he shut the slot and pushed the metal plate through the hinged flap with his foot.
A few seconds later, a bedpan was pushed out. He picked it up, took it outside the door and threw the contents on the ground. The dogs ran at the sewage as if it were more food.
As she was eating, he started to undress and place his clothes in a wooden trunk. From the trunk he took out another set of clothes. He was going hunting again. He dressed in his hunting uniform, slowly adding each item of clothing that he’d carefully sourced over the years. He pressed his hair flat to his head and looked at himself in a jarred fragment of mirror. His eyes flinched at the sight of his own dark hair and olive skin. He moved his gaze quickly to the uniform to stem the self-loathing that flooded within him at the sight of his own features. He shifted nervously from foot to foot, letting the whole effect grow in his mind and now feeling excited by the transformation.
He walked to the cell and knocked. He kicked the clean bedpan through the hinged flap. A moment later, the empty plate and cup appeared at the bottom of the door. He knocked again, opened the slot and the prisoner stood again and turned. He stared into the tiny cell, and opened the door.
Every day, it was the only interaction he allowed himself with the prisoner. Distance was important.
He walked the girl out into the room, where she picked up the tin of boot polish from the table and a rag and knelt at his feet. She started to polish his boots as he stared down at her.
‘That is good, Abigail. You are behaving well today.’
‘I hope you’re pleased with me,’ she said. ‘I try to please you.’
He pulled back and looked down at his boots. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now stand. I need to inspect your cell.’
Abby moved away as he leaned into her cell and checked the door hinges and the mattress.
‘I recognized your cologne. I’ve smelled it before. I just can’t think where.’
‘I’ve been close to you a number of times, Abigail. I came close to taking you but each time something got in the way.’
The memories suddenly clicked.
‘The man in the dark. You pushed into me.’ She felt a shiver of fear, then anger, a fury that she couldn’t control. She picked up a brick started towards him.
He heard the movement behind him and turned. The girl was running towards him. He was shocked for a moment. A brick hit him hard on the side of the head. He stumbled backwards into the cell, his hand grabbing on to the door frame. She smashed the brick down on his hand and he let go, tumbling backwards. She pushed the door shut on him, but he wasn’t unconscious. His boots, bright black and shining, kicked the door open. The girl was hit but did not give up; she approached again with the brick.
He stood up, a trickle of blood over one eye, cradling his left hand. She stared, panting, the brick raised.
‘It’s wrong, what you’re doing. It’s sick and it’s wrong and I want to go home,’ she shouted. ‘I won’t stay here. I won’t!’
He moved towards her. ‘You betrayed the trust I put in you, Abigail.’
‘Don’t come any closer or I’ll smash your filthy head in.’ ‘Will you?’ he said, and closed in on her. The girl raised the brick, but he was expecting that. His arm came across to bat it away, but the brick didn’t move; her body shifted and her left leg rose high in a karate kick and the side of her foot hit his chin. He reeled backwards.
‘Don’t come near me,’ she shouted. Then she stepped towards the door. ‘Help!’ she screamed. ‘Help!’
‘You will be punished for this, you realize. And I will make your father aware of every moment of your suffering.’ He stepped towards her, his face angry now.
‘Get away from me. You find suffering a turn-on, do you, you sick bastard?’
He moved quickly. She threw the brick at his head; it glanced off his shoulder. She twisted, punched and kicked. But he came too fast and his bulk pushed her back and pressed her against the wall. He held her there, his mouth close to hers.
‘They will find you dead, Abigail. A naked corpse on your father’s doorstep – half-eaten by dogs. But I want to find out how close to death you can go. How slowly I can kill you.’
She was shivering. His hand tightened around her neck. He leaned back and smashed his forehead against her nose. ‘You will not be beautiful any more.’
He gritted his teeth. He shoved her hard into the chair, took out a knife and started to chop away at her hair as she wept and screamed. She stared into the shard of a mirror leaning against the wall. The girl she knew, the girl everyone knew, was disappearing. All around her, her long brown hair lay discarded on the floor.
‘We will not call you Abby any more.’
‘What?’
‘You are an experiment now, not a person. We will call you 144002.’
‘Fuck you,’ she spat.
He breathed, his hand so tight around her arm that he could feel the bone.
‘We will call you 144002.’
‘No.’
He pushed her head back violently and she stopped speaking for a moment, but she needed to know. To know why.
‘What are you doing this for?’
‘144002 must be quiet. 144002 speaks again and I will cut out 144002’s tongue.’
The girl stared across. Her eyes fixed on the red and black insignia on his arm. He smiled. ‘You can’t believe it, can you? But it is real. It is very real. This is not a dream. You will not wake up. You will never wake up from this.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
Eastern Hardware Store, Maywood
March 8, 1.50 p.m.
Harper and Kasper headed out of town. They pulled up at a hardware store off the Interstate. It was a vast warehouse structure, a rectangle of steel and plastic thrown up in what looked like a matter of days. The whole complex was a sprawling mass of similar buildings, all with their own large, bright signs.
Kasper parked close to the entrance. Harper was speaking on the phone to base, but no one had anything. Harper looked around. ‘Big.’
‘Sure is,’ said Eddie. ‘This isn’t going to be easy.’
They met the manager of the store, and followed him up a long, wide aisle of fencing, rails, pipes and tubes until they got to the barbed wire. It was sitting on huge wooden pallets, three different grades, and three different types: razor wire, barbed wire and galvanized barbed wire.
‘This the only place someone can get barbed wire in the store?’
‘Sure is.’
Harper looked up and down the aisle. ‘Okay. I want this aisle taped off and dusted for prints.’
‘I’m not closing an aisle. It’s a big sales day for us.’
‘I’m trying to stop a killer, Sunday or not. I could close the whole store if you’d prefer.’
The manager shook his head.
‘Eddie,’ said Harper, ‘I want this whole area dusted, then the cash register area. We know he’s been here.’
‘So have thousands of people,’ said Eddie.
‘We might get lucky.’
Eddie’s eyebrows rose slow and high. He took out his phone. ‘I’ll get Crime Scene across here.’
They spent an hour with the manager going through the sales data and receipts, picking out every sale of barbed wire. ‘We’ve got hundreds,�
�� said the manager. ‘No telling which one bought your roll.’
‘We’ll take all the names, and follow them all up.’
The manager handed a printout to Harper. ‘Impossible to tell which one. The digital readings are our own – they only have the product, price and date. No import number, no license. But the batch you’re after – it only came out of the back store nine days ago.’
‘Let’s try CCTV,’ said Harper. ‘You keep it?’
He nodded his head. ‘We keep one week of tape. If it was within the week, we might see someone.’
‘Eddie, try to find him.’
‘Will do.’
Within the hour, eight CSU detectives arrived. Their supervisor, Detective Ingleman, moved straight across to Harper. ‘What are we looking for?’ he asked.
‘Someone was in here in the last nine days buying a roll of barbed wire,’ said Harper. ‘I’ve got a guy here from the cleaning company, and he’s going to tell you where they wipe down. We know whoever bought it was over in the barbed-wire area, by the cash register, and at the door. We think the door and checkout counter get wiped. I just wonder if you guys can find a needle in a haystack.’
‘You’re kidding? You want us to dust a whole store?’
‘Not the whole store. The barbed-wire aisle to start with.’
Ingleman followed Harper to the aisle. He walked up to the pallet. ‘What’s he going to touch, apart from the roll he’s buying?’
Harper shrugged. ‘It’s a long shot. He may have touched other rolls, the price tags, I don’t know, but this killer is going to kill again. We’ve got to do something.’
The supervisor walked off, shaking his head. He had a team of top detectives and he was going to ask them to dust a store. He went outside to the vans and organized his teams, shaking his head so much that his jowls wobbled.
Harper sat down at the computer in the store’s back office. He called Denise. ‘You been getting on with our young profiler?’
‘He thinks this was a group attack. That’s going to go to the Captain and he’ll lap it up and pass it to the Chief of Detectives. I need to stop him.’
‘So what do you think?’
‘Single male, early- to mid-thirties, delusional fantasies, but nothing that would prevent him from operating successfully. You want your type, think controlled, obsessive, and this guy’s got hooked on a clean-up.’
‘Like a prostitute killer – a moral cleaner?’
‘There’s something in that, something of the cleaner, but it’s strange. Like a military operation, taking out numbered targets.’
‘Ex-military?’
‘Not possible to say right now. But could be. How’s it going up there?’
‘Time is short, the work is slow.’
‘Well, let’s hope for something.’
Harper hung up and wandered out of the small office and into the aisle. He walked up to the team, slowly taking prints off every surface. ‘How’s it looking?’
‘We’re getting so many prints, Harper, we’ll be here all day and then it’ll take all night to get them uploaded and checked.’
‘We haven’t got all night.’
‘There ain’t no short cut.’
Harper walked away. He sat down. Another hour slipped by, his mind going over the case, detail by detail.
Eddie came through at 6 p.m. He was nodding.
‘You got something?’ Harper asked.
‘Come see.’
Harper and Eddie sat together in the security room. Eddie pulled the tape back and then played it.
‘We’ve got a guy here coming out with a cart three days ago.’ He froze the tape. ‘Can you see it?’
The grainy still was difficult to read. Harper moved closer. At the edge of the man’s arm was a cross of wood. ‘That’s the barbed wire spool?’
‘Looks like it.’
They watched the man push the cart across the parking lot, until he was nearly out of sight behind two other cars.
‘Problem is,’ says Eddie, ‘we don’t see his face or his car.’
‘You looked back and forth?’
‘Sure have and it’s empty. Sorry.’
‘You must have quite a few guys buying barbed wire – why’d you focus on this guy?’
Eddie smiled and then pushed in another tape. ‘This is from the camera on the checkout.’
Harper watched. ‘He keeps his back to the camera, the whole time. Like he wanted to keep his identity hidden.’
‘And he pays cash,’ said Eddie, as the man leaned across the counter to hand cash to the guy on the register.
‘That’s it?’
‘He’s pretty suspicious for a man in a hardware store, but no, that’s not it. Look at this.’ Eddie moved the tape back and zoomed. There was a close-up of the man’s forearm.
‘What is it?’
‘The words.’
Harper looked down. ‘Loyalty, Valiance, Obedience. The word Loyalty, you mean?’
‘That’s what it said on the Capske black card, right?’ ‘That’s right.’
Harper watched the tape again. He stopped it. ‘It’s got a time and date here. Does that cross reference with the man at the car?’
‘Yeah, two minutes later.’
‘Go speak to the manager and find out who was serving on the cash registers at that time and then get him here and get a description from him.’
Eddie stood up. ‘I’m on it.’
Harper took the sequence back to the beginning and watched it. He repeated it three more times. There was nothing to go on. Then he took out the disk and put in the film from the parking lot. Again, there was nothing to tell him who this guy was. A blue hooded top, white sneakers, blue jeans. The man could have been anyone. He went through it again, right to the point when the man was only distantly visible by his car.
Then Harper stopped the tape. He zoomed in and peered into the grainy image.
‘Eddie!’ he shouted. There was no response. Harper moved across to the door. ‘Eddie, get back here.’
Eddie ran back in. ‘What is it?’
‘Come here.’ Harper’s finger touched the screen. ‘You see?’
‘No. What is it?’
Harper pulled back the tape. ‘Just describe what he does.’
Eddie watched. ‘He wheels his cart between two cars, and then stops. He leans forward. He’s unlocking the car, maybe. He picks up something from the cart. Can’t see what, puts it in the trunk. He stops, leans up against the street lamp, does something with his foot.’ Eddie stopped. ‘Aha!’
‘You see it?’ said Harper.
‘I see it. Hell, man, that’s good. That’s very good.’
Harper ran across the store and shouted up the aisle, ‘Ingleman, I’ve got something for you!’
Ingleman moved away slowly from his team. ‘I hope you don’t want the whole store dusted, Harper.’
‘No, but I think I’ve got you a print.’
‘Where?’
Harper led Ingleman into the security room and ran the tape. ‘See there?’ said Harper. ‘He puts his arm up and leans on that street lamp. High up. You think he might have left a print?’
‘I like that,’ said Ingleman, nodding. ‘That’s good thinking. How do you know this is our man?’
‘We don’t. It’s not a hundred per cent but it’s all we’ve got.’
‘Okay,’ said Ingleman, ‘let’s see if we can get a clean print.’
Within the hour, the print had been lifted from the street light in the center of the parking lot. The team traveled back to Manhattan and went directly to the Latent Prints labs. In the meantime, the print had traveled electronically to the crime lab and was being enhanced and analyzed.
The prints team worked fast and the print was soon scanned into the national print database. Within a few minutes, a match had come up on screen.
By the time Harper and the team arrived, it was all completed. The team saw two prints sitting side-by-side, green on a black background. The
red hieroglyphics of the points of comparison showed an identical print.
‘That’s what I call a breakthrough,’ said Harper.
‘We’re lucky he’s in the database.’
‘So who is he?’
The technician clicked on to the personal file. ‘His name’s Leo Lukanov.’ A photograph of a muscular white man in his early twenties came up on the screen. He was covered in tattoos.
‘That’s our guy?’ said Eddie. ‘Like Frankenstein in jeans.’
‘Shit,’ said Harper.
‘What?’
‘Where’s Denise?’
‘She’s gone home.’
‘Try her for me, Eddie.’
‘What is it?’
‘Leo Lukanov was involved in an attack on Abby Goldenberg. Denise went to question him yesterday with Hate Crime Unit. If he’s involved, then Denise is in danger.’
‘I’ll call,’ said Eddie. He left the room.
‘What’s his record?’ asked Harper.
‘Assault, robbery . . . small-time stuff.’
‘He got an address?’
‘Yeah, here it is.’
Harper took the address and rose from his chair. ‘Get moving on a warrant, but we haven’t got time to wait for it. Let’s go.’
Chapter Twenty-Five
East 1st Street, Manhattan
March 8, 7.05 p.m.
The man in the long gray coat walked down First Avenue, close to the gutter. He kept his head low and peered out from under a heavy brow. Fourteen minutes into his tour, no sight of his target.
On the corner of East 1st Street, he saw the preacher emerge from a doorway. The old man was draped in a torn coat that was stained brown from sleeping on wet ground. His nose was broken. One of his nostrils was missing. The wounds were fresh.
The preacher pushed a sign high above his head. It read Jesus Loves You. He started to speak. ‘I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness.’
The man stopped. His fingers flexed in his leather gloves. He hated weakness. He wanted to puncture the preacher’s lung with a sudden blow. He wanted to watch him cough out his last sermon. Weakness, filth and arrogance. He hated it all.
