88 Killer

by Oliver Stark

  ‘It has happened before,’ the preacher shouted. ‘And it will happen again. The beast will appear. A righteous beast. He will destroy the unrighteous. And he will take down the innocents with him.’

  The man was the only person listening in the heat of the night. He stood at the edge of the sidewalk nodding. The preacher was right about the beast, he thought.

  He leaned into the wind and moved back towards his car. His tour of duty was not yet complete.

  ‘It has happened before,’ he repeated as he drove away.

  The streets were busy with traffic making its way down East Houston Street and Baruch Drive. He drove slowly, keeping a close eye on the streets and cursing the careless drivers cutting in as they passed. He traveled under the Williamsburg Bridge and parked again. He crossed the footpath over FDR Drive on foot.

  He walked at a pace, a sweat beginning to form under his heavy coat. He was thinking. There was no difference in his mind between then and now – the line was crossed a long time ago, not by him, but by another man in the shadows. Perhaps the circumstances were easier then. Or perhaps it always felt like you were going upstream.

  The dark skies above Manhattan were closing in with cloud. He watched the stream of white and red lights rushing by, then looked at his watch. Time to go again.

  His next tour was half a mile from the river. Half a mile meant a good time outside the safety of the shadows. He walked away from the wailing of cars as they hit the shell of the Williamsburg Bridge and slipped out beyond it.

  He walked up Delancy and glanced into Downing Park. The trees ahead were covered in pale flowers. They looked ethereal and beautiful. He walked down Abraham Place, stopped and stared across Grand Street. The large apartment block was a grey mass in the darkness, scattered yellow lights like golden bricks trailing up the side of the building. He took out a Black Card. The name was typed. He mouthed the syllables slowly, his spit sticky in his mouth.

  The sky reflected in the puddles on the ground. He decided to take another turn around the block. He didn’t want to be seen waiting for too long. He turned left and walked down to Abraham Kazan Street, circled and returned. Up ahead a figure came into view, walking towards him. He slowed his steps. If it was her, she must’ve been at her mother’s apartment later than usual.

  The figure – a woman in her twenties with brown hair – walked along the side of the road opposite, her heels clipping the asphalt and echoing. Then she slowed. No doubt she had spotted him. He didn’t mind that. People were very predictable. They rarely ran unless directly threatened. He could get very close before she tried to defend herself, and by then it would be much too late.

  He watched the hesitation in her step. He was enjoying it. Fear was growing inside her. It was what his hate fed upon. People’s fear: their open-mouthed horror and pain.

  He had plans for Marisa. He wanted to see how long she would survive in the river. He wanted to watch the cold snake up and grab her, the horrible pain of the cold. She would be subservient then. She would not complain and throw her human rights in his face. She would plead like a dog for her life, for an end of the pain.

  And then he would give her what she wanted. Salvation. A bullet through her head.

  He could tell she was looking at him. She had seen him silhouetted against the dim light and was calculating as women had to do. What are the risks? If only she knew how big the risks were, but the future is blind except to those who are going to hack out a pathway. Only they know the future – the leaders, the visionaries. The victims are always blind.

  He turned and walked away, playing with her state of mind, knowing that she would feel sudden relief. But at the top of the road, as he felt her eyes on him, he turned. How easy to double fear in an instant. Offer a way out, then bar the door. Each glimpse of an escape only increased the fear.

  He stood still and stared directly at her. He saw her take out her cell phone.

  She crossed the street, her phone to her ear as if that would save her. His eyes peered at her as she continued to walk quickly through the trees. She didn’t call out. He imagined she was telling herself that he was just some jerk.

  He let her walk on for fifty yards. He imagined her heart racing as the light hit her eyes, now slowly returning to normal, her mind beginning to tell her she was safe. The road ahead was brighter and she was nearly there.

  A cool wind ran down the avenue and shook the trees along the park. They rattled up above like a child’s toy. The woman shot a look over her shoulder. He wasn’t there.

  He had moved closer and darted into a doorway. He hid for a moment, until he heard her footsteps. Now she was ripe. Now she was confused. He moved out of the doorway and started to run. He wanted to get her as she passed the entrance to the park. It was darkest there, and the park gave him cover. He looked up and down the street and there was no one around.

  He pushed hard against the ground, the wind at his back. The thrill rose up through his body and left him light-headed. When she heard the sound of his boots on the ground, she turned. But he was ten yards away by then and traveling at speed. She didn’t stand a chance. He was a hunter and she was his.

  A whoosh of air from her left side and suddenly she was reeling. Her phone fell from her hand and smashed on the sidewalk. She stumbled and fell. He stood above her, opened his coat and took it off. The uniform was very striking. It was the part he liked to play most of all. It gave him such a sense of power. He towered above her, resplendent.

  ‘Your name.’

  ‘What do you want?’ she said.

  ‘Your name,’

  he shouted.

  She was shaking and breathing hard. She didn’t understand. Above her, his wide eyes stared out. He pulled her into the park, into the undergrowth, his hand over her mouth.

  ‘I will shoot you like a dog if you disobey me,’ he whispered in her ear.

  Marisa shook visibly. He let his hand drop from her mouth. ‘Please don’t hurt me.’

  ‘No talking.’

  ‘My mother is dying. Please. Please don’t hurt me.’

  She felt the barrel hard against her skull. She was crying in fear.

  ‘You will be punished for talking. Kneel.’

  ‘I don’t want to die. What do you want?’

  ‘Kneel,’ he spat.

  The woman fell to her knees and looked up. He pressed the barrel of his gun to her forehead. The thin skin creased against her skull.

  ‘Clean my boots,’ he said.

  She stared at him imploringly. He liked that look, the look of the dying animal. It pleased him.

  ‘I am Officer Sturbe of the SS. Now, clean my fucking boots.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Brownsville, Brooklyn

  March 8, 7.49 p.m.

  Denise ran down Manhattan and across the Brooklyn Bridge. She ran up street after street. Pounding for mile after mile. The high-rise blocks gleaming in Manhattan started to disappear behind her. In their wake, as she passed through each Brooklyn neighborhood, things got meaner and sharper. It had felt good to get back into work, good to help the Missing Persons investigation, good to start profiling. It had been good to be working closely with Tom Harper.

  The streets were full of people like her and not like her. They belonged to some different world, but she was born in Brooklyn and she enjoyed going back. Harper had triggered some deep memories.

  Denise pounded up Brownsville, past stooping old black women carrying plastic bags of overpriced food from the only convenience stores that would locate outside the wealthy areas.

  She turned off Riverdale and noticed a black sedan crawl past. It didn’t stop but carried on right up to the lights. Denise looked over her shoulder. She felt her heart rate rise and she noted the license plate. The car took a right at the lights. Denise looked ahead. A long empty road lay in front of her.

  Denise tried to ignore it. She was running. It was what she needed. The cool air and the ache of muscles. Sweat poured from her. She needed to
see the abused face of the city. She ran up through deserted lots, abandoned buildings, through housing project after housing project. The spent lives stared back at her, hard and pitiless. No one cared about no one and that meant they certainly didn’t care about you.

  Faces, cold and stern, stared out at her. Old men sitting in beach chairs on the sidewalk, lazy hoods on the stoops, crackheads and hobos. Everyone just looking for the next drama.

  The sedan rolled past again. It turned and then followed her up the street. The windows were blacked out, but she knew the kind of people who were inside. It was the second time the same sedan had rolled by and in Brownsville, that wasn’t good news. In the projects it wasn’t going to be a welcome party.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Crown Heights, Brooklyn

  March 8, 7.56 p.m.

  Three cars drove at speed through the streets towards an address in Brooklyn, a four-story public housing block on the edge of an Orthodox Jewish area. They had traced Leo Lukanov quickly. He wasn’t good at hiding his tracks, especially when he’d been claiming welfare.

  Harper was feeling afraid, the adrenalin pumping through his blood, since they hadn’t been able to contact Denise Levene. He’d sent a squad car over to her building, but they’d come back with nothing. She wasn’t at home or at work, and Harper didn’t know enough about her to guess at where she would be.

  In the car, the team were staring out, steely eyed and focused. Harper knew what was going on inside. Eddie kept making light, but he felt it too. Levene had been targeted before. It couldn’t happen again, could it?

  They parked side-by-side in a deserted lot and all six detectives got out and walked towards Leo Lukanov’s apartment. Harper directed Swanson and Greco round the back of the building. The rest headed up the stairs.

  Leo Lukanov lived along a dark brown corridor with a single window at the far end. His apartment was a small one-bedroom, three quarters of the way along the corridor. As Harper and the team walked towards the door, they could smell marijuana and hear distant voices – an argument, followed by a baby crying. Harper took out his Glock and knocked on the shabby door. Kasper and Garcia had their guns out too. Gerry Ratten leaned against the wall. Harper glanced at him.

  ‘I don’t always carry my gun,’ he said.

  Harper raised an eyebrow.

  ‘He makes a good shield, though,’ said Garcia.

  ‘Then keep a watch,’ said Harper.

  Harper listened. There was no reply. He knocked again. Shouted through the door: ‘NYPD, open up!’

  Nothing.

  They looked at each other for a moment. Harper tried the door, but it was locked. They hadn’t had time to get a warrant through.

  ‘He might have left already,’ said Eddie.

  ‘We need to find him, quick,’ said Harper as he put his shoulder to the door and leaned his weight on it.

  ‘You do that and anything we find is inadmissible,’ said Garcia. ‘We need a conviction on this, Harper.’

  Harper held his shoulder a second. He let the thought go twice round his mind, then he barged his weight against the door and it flipped open. ‘It’s about saving lives. Now let’s see if we can do something.’

  The apartment was a hell of a mess. The smell was bad but the pictures and symbols were worse. Every wall was covered in neo-Nazi slogans and images. There was a large red and black Nazi flag, several large black crosses and slogans: The triumph of the will. The final solution.

  ‘He’s not sane,’ said Harper.

  ‘He’s sane enough to have kept out of prison,’ said Garcia.

  Harper started at the desk drawers, Garcia went for the small wardrobe and Eddie started pulling out boxes from under the bed.

  A moment later, Ratten walked in, licked the sweat off his mustache and twiddled his stubby fingers. He watched the frenetic search, then calmly walked up to the desktop and switched it on.

  He laughed to himself. Loud enough for Harper to hear. ‘What is it, Gerry?’

  ‘You lot, searching like some cops out of the Dark Ages. People don’t keep their secrets under the bed any more. They keep them online.’

  Mary Greco looked around the room, flicked through his bookshelves.

  ‘What are you thinking, Mary?’ asked Harper.

  ‘History books,’ she said. ‘He’s interested in fascism and there’s a few seminal texts here in the demented white supremacist line.’

  ‘He’s one of them, for sure,’ said Harper.

  Gerry connected to the Internet and opened Leo Lukanov’s browser history. ‘Little bastard wipes his history.’ A couple more clicks and he was looking at the systems files, the temporary Internet files and Internet cache. ‘Voilà!’ he said. ‘Look at that – Leo likes to paint on the White Wall. This is his last post. He even calls himself Goering. Nice to model yourself on a mass murderer, I always think.’

  ‘No delusions of grandeur, then,’ said Eddie from the bed.

  Gerry brought up the White Wall and started to look for posts by Goering. He found the latest thread. ‘Look at this shit. Pretty vicious.’ He read down the threads. ‘Now look at this. As soon as they get interesting, it goes into runic fucking symbols. I’ve been working on this site for a day and a half and I can’t understand it all. They use code.’

  Harper stood up. ‘It’s going to take too long. If he’s out there, he might not be coming back.’ He pulled a bank statement from a drawer and looked down the list of items. ‘Gerry, keep at it and I’ll stick to paper. There are basically four locations on this list. There’s a bar he hangs out in, a pool room, a shop he goes to. There’s an ATM he frequents. I’m going to take a look with Eddie.’

  Harper stopped and looked down at the bin under the desk. He lifted it up on to the desk. ‘Wait up,’ he said.

  Harper pulled out eight small pieces of black card and placed them on the desk. Eddie and the rest of the crew came in close. Harper moved the small squares of torn black card around, matching up the rips. In the top corner, the word Valiance formed. Harper moved the three pieces that crossed the middle line. Two words appeared in front of them. Harper and the team stared in silence. They weren’t just words. It was a name. A name they knew well. Denise Levene.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Brownsville, Brooklyn

  March 8, 8.19 p.m.

  In Brownsville, the car slowed to a crawl as it passed her, then went straight up the street. She watched it, then she turned left into a smaller street, hoping to avoid a third sweep.

  She continued running through the vacant lots and low-rise housing projects surrounded by wire fences. She glanced to her side. The sedan was right there, out of nowhere. Four guys in the car. Two guys hanging out of the window, tracking her. Not gangbangers. White guys. Two she recognized as Tommy Ocks and Leo Lukanov. She looked ahead. There were no other cars on the street. No people. This was a ghost town.

  ‘Hey, Jew, you want to make a complaint about us?’ shouted one of them, his hands drumming on the side of the car.

  ‘We found ourselves a stray kike bitch,’ called the other.

  ‘Come on, lady, you want to stop and talk about missing Jews?’ All four men in the car laughed.

  Denise stared straight ahead, her pace increasing, her heart rate speeding up. Adrenalin starting to make her muscles feel weak. Condition red just around the corner.

  A baseball bat appeared through the blacked-out window in the back seat. ‘You want me to take her Jew legs out? That’ll slow her.’

  ‘Not yet, fool, back off,’ said Lukanov.

  ‘Let me take her out, man. Let’s take the bitch home and keep her for a while.’ The drumming on the side of the car intensified.

  Denise kept her eyes on the road ahead. She was so scared, her legs felt like Jello – so weak and tired that she couldn’t even coordinate her strides.

  ‘You talk about us again, Jew, and we’ll cut you to pieces.’

  The sedan drove on ahead of Denise and then stopped. Den
ise slowed her pace. Two guys got out of the car. They were both over six two. Tommy Ocks was dark and mean. Leo Lukanov was pale and intense. They sneered, hitched their low-slung pants, jiggled their shoulders. Behind them, the background vocals from the sedan was a low persistent abuse.

  Denise was fifty yards away. Life was a fifty-yard play.

  ‘Hey, Jew, we’re gonna show you how to behave right.’

  Denise stepped off the curb and ran across the street. The two guys jeered.

  ‘You want us to hunt you down? We can do that too.’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Apartment, Lower Manhattan

  March 8, 8.39 p.m.

  Harper sat in his car outside Denise’s apartment and continued trying to call anyone who might know anything about her. He called the building manager at her apartment, her neighbors, her colleagues and her therapists, but no one knew where she might be. Denise had kept herself to herself over the last few months.

  Eddie appeared at the window and handed Harper a piece of paper. ‘That’s his cell.’

  Harper nodded and called Daniel, Denise’s ex-boyfriend. He introduced himself.

  ‘Not you again – what the hell do you want?’ said Daniel.

  ‘Denise might be in danger, Daniel. So let’s forget our hang-ups. Try to help us here.’

  ‘What kind of danger?’

  ‘Just answer my questions.’

  ‘I’ll try. What do you need to know?’

  ‘Denise started running after the abduction.’

  ‘Yeah. Obsessively.’

  ‘We’ve been in her apartment. Her running shoes are missing, but her cell phone was still there. We guess she’s out there running somewhere. We’ve got an APB on her. You any idea where she might be?’

  ‘Brooklyn, I guess,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Brooklyn’s a big place,’ said Harper.

  ‘Listen, she has a GPS wristwatch. She downloads her routes and times on to her PC. If you can get on to her computer, it’ll have all her routes mapped.’