88 Killer

by Oliver Stark

  ‘Okay, Dr Levene. I’ll give you the three sessions, but no one else speaks to the children.’

  ‘No one but me.’ She reached out her hand and the consultant shook it. He held it a moment too long, just as she’d expected.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Children’s Psychiatric Unit, Harlem

  March 12, 9.00 a.m.

  The room was a small ugly square. It had the lack of generosity and aesthetics of every municipal building. Denise had asked for the three sessions to be held in a single morning. It wasn’t ideal. It would have been better to hold them on consecutive days, but time was too important.

  The first two sessions had gone reasonably well. The kids didn’t utter a word, but the odd nod and their facial expressions showed Denise that they were paying attention.

  The third session was the important one. Harper sat at the back, watching, with his sketchpad open. Denise talked about her own mother. The kids didn’t seem to care.

  Denise knew she didn’t have long to get a connection with them. She took her question out and smiled at the two kids. ‘We’ve got to go now, unless there’s something more you want to tell us?’ She searched their faces. They had no idea what to say or why.

  She toyed with the question in front of her. She turned it in her hand, let the time slip by. Finally, she looked up.

  ‘Is there anything you can tell us about what happened in the alley that might help us catch the man who hurt your mother?’

  She waited. The boy’s face seemed to show thought. His eyes moved around. The girl didn’t even look up. She hadn’t once held Denise’s gaze.

  Nothing. Two minutes passed. They had all said that the boy knew something. He gave out more clues with his non-verbal communication, as if he needed to get this horror out of his system.

  In the corner, Harper sketched a falcon from memory, the pylon below. Denise watched the children closely, then spotted something. A small, perhaps insignificant thing. She honed in on the girl and flicked a quick look over her shoulder. The girl was watching Harper.

  What was interesting her? Denise waited another two minutes. Again, the girl’s eyes rested beyond Denise’s left shoulder.

  Denise leaned back in her chair and reached her arm out. ‘Can I have your sketch?’

  Harper let her take his notebook. Denise started to look through the pictures, concealing them from the girl. She needed to know what was interesting her. Another two minutes passed. The second hand on the white clock-face was slipping by. She didn’t have much time left. Then it happened again. The girl looked up through her bangs. She looked first at Tom but then quickly searched the room and rested her eyes on the book in Denise’s hand.

  It was not Tom she was interested in, it was the book. Denise placed it in front of her. She slowly lifted her eyes again and stared at the picture of a falcon. There was a moment of apprehension, then she reached out and touched the picture of the bird.

  ‘Do you have the crime-scene sketches in here?’ said Denise.

  ‘Few pages back.’

  Denise took up the book and flicked back to the scene of the alleyway. It was drawn several times, from different angles. She chose the one from the perspective of the far end where the dumpster was. She placed it in front of the children.

  They both stared at the alleyway. The little girl reached out her hand and touched it.

  ‘Tom, draw a figure in the alleyway.’

  Harper moved across and sketched a person standing in the alleyway. The two children watched intently.

  ‘Okay, draw another figure.’

  Tom drew another figure. The mother this time, wearing a black suit. The little girl’s hand reached out and touched the figure.

  ‘Good. Now draw a third figure.’

  Harper moved in again and drew a third figure next to the first. The girl’s hand darted out and she started to shake her head vigorously. Harper took his pen and scribbled over it. The girl calmed.

  ‘Okay, this is good. It’s one guy.’ She looked at Tom. ‘Draw me the dumpster.’

  He did. The children looked at it. Presumably, they had heard people coming up the alleyway and had scurried behind it.

  ‘Draw them. Draw the boy watching but the girl hiding her eyes.’

  Harper drew, but the girl’s head started shaking again. Tom sketched the boy hiding his eyes. He then showed the girl watching. There was no interference. ‘It was the girl who saw what happened,’ said Denise. ‘No one’s ever asked her. We’ve all just presumed the boy saw it while the girl hid.’

  Harper drew a gun in the man’s hands. The girl pointed to the page. Harper seemed to understand and changed the man’s arm to point to the ground. Then the little girl pointed to the sketch of her mother and then at the man’s feet. It had been Harper’s instinct that she’d been kneeling and polishing his boots. He drew. The girl rested her finger on the man.

  ‘What?’

  She took the notebook and turned a few pages back. She found the bird and pointed at it.

  Harper and Denise stared for a moment. They didn’t understand. The girl then turned back to the alleyway and she pointed to the man.

  ‘A tattoo?’ said Denise.

  Harper drew a small bird on his arm. The girl nodded. Harper then drew three quick sketches of birds. She chose the picture of the American Eagle, its head to the side, its wings arched.

  ‘Unbelievable,’ said Denise. ‘She was ten yards away.’

  Harper looked at the girl. Her features were like her mother’s. Blue eyes, freckled cheeks. He drew her mother from memory and put it in front of her. The girl stared down. It had been only a day since the children had seen her face. Her brother looked away, biting his thumb, curling all his limbs inwardly.

  The girl’s hand reached out and touched the face on the page. Harper handed her the pencil. She took Harper’s pencil and wrote two numbers beside her mother’s face. Two number 8s, side by side. Then she looked up at Denise and Harper. ‘Did he say anything?’ said Denise.

  The girl looked up. It was the first time she had spoken and her voice was clear and unemotional. ‘He said his name.’

  Harper and Levene held their breath. ‘What was it?’ asked Denise.

  ‘Something I don’t remember,’ said the girl.

  ‘Josef Sturbe,’ said the boy. ‘I heard it.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said, “I am Officer Josef Sturbe. Clean my boots”.’

  The girl and the boy stared at them, clear-eyed.

  ‘It’s going to be okay,’ said Denise. ‘It’s going to be okay. Do you think you could tell us your names?’

  ‘Ruth Glass,’ said the girl. ‘This is Jerry. We’re both seven but I was born first.’

  ‘Thank you, Ruth. We’re going to go now, but we’ll find the person who did this to your mother. I am so sorry she’s been taken away.’

  Denise stood up as the social workers walked in. Denise thanked them again as she walked out. Harper waved at the little girl and drew a quick smile on a face on his sketchpad. As he showed it to her, the little girl forgot herself for a single moment and smiled back.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn

  March 12, 4.06 p.m.

  He sat outside the garage, drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. His eyes were fixed on the small TV screen. He’d bought every one of the papers but none of them mentioned a blue eagle from the murder. He liked reading about his dead. He liked to see how dumb they all were, how little they understood. He liked to keep the clippings about them. But he didn’t understand how someone had seen the eagle.

  They’d found the body of Becky Glass a day earlier but the TV reports were now talking about the latest NYPD discovery. They were looking for a man with a blue eagle tattoo. The image they had was of a small blue eagle with its wings outstretched. It was more of an American eagle than the one on his arm, but it was still shocking to see the image in connection with the 88 Killer. It shouldn’t h
ave happened. How did the cops have a picture of the eagle on his arm? He considered it closely.

  He hadn’t removed his coat until he was alone with Becky Glass. He had waited outside the alleyway until she walked by. She looked distressed. She was searching for her children. He was an opportunist. He’d told her they were in the alleyway.

  She ran in, all on her own. Stood there and looked around her. Then he put the gun against her head and told her to take off her pants.

  He only wanted her to do that in order to remove her underwear. It was important that she was degraded and humiliated. He had not intended to rape her. She had fought and cried and disobeyed him. He had to hit her face. He had to rip off her clothes. The attack excited him. He was ashamed. He made her kneel at his feet and wash his boots clean with her spit.

  No one but the victim should have been able to see the blue eagle.

  He let his mind return to his victim kneeling in front of him, thinking about angles. Perhaps someone had seen him from the street. He had pushed a large metal bin in the entrance to the alley, but someone might have looked round it.

  He didn’t usually kill in the daylight, but he couldn’t help himself. It had been a mistake. He had lost control. He had only meant to trail her. He had been trailing Becky Glass for a while. He knew she had two children. They were even there with her at the interview, but they’d run off before she made it back down to the reception area. She was searching for the children. That’s why she went into the alleyway, to look for them, and that’s why he had acted. He hadn’t planned to kill her so soon, but it just overcame him and he couldn’t resist. He didn’t even bother to check to see if the children were in the alley. He had been foolish. The urge was too strong; the pressure of the press and the cops was getting to him.

  He knew that Becky was a single mother. She had told him as much as he placed the gun at her head. He had listened to her pleading on behalf of her children as he dragged the clothes from her body. He hadn’t imagined for a moment that her children were watching, but, thinking logically, where would they go?

  He recalled the scene. She had polished his boots. It had made him feel better. He had said he was pleased. He remembered her anxious gaze around the alley.

  It was obvious and he wanted to kick himself for being so stupid. He had presumed that she was looking for help. But she had been terrified about her children witnessing the scene rather than what was happening to her. Witnesses. The children had seen him kill her. He leaned back against the garage. The children would be able to identify him. That couldn’t be allowed. That would put an end to his plans.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Museum of Tolerance, Brooklyn

  March 12, 4.42 p.m.

  Denise sat in the large glass atrium of the museum waiting for Aaron Goldenberg to appear. She had already scented the 88 Killer and thought she understood the way his mind worked – from the clinical bullet-hole to the forehead to the brutally angry use of barbed wire. One mind, twisted beyond normal limits, a man with a need for control – surgical control – and a deep, deep pain that needed to be screamed from the housetops. But he was losing that control. Which would make him even more dangerous.

  She looked down at her notebook and took up her pen. She kept seeing the number that Ruth Glass had written on the page. She wrote the words across the top. Profile of the 88 Killer.

  Denise was in the process of unpicking the killer’s mind. Like an expert unpicking a lock, she would press each lever in turn, teasing and testing until it fell in line and suddenly the whole row would be along the shear line and the lock would open. That was all she was after – the killer’s shear line.

  So far, she had written: He’s male, early- to mid-thirties, gifted, but a failure in something, single, unable to form strong relationships, with a background in security or military-type work. A man without siblings, a lone child, probably with a normal-looking family, a family he felt never knew what he was, never accepted him. Possibly adopted.

  She looked at the words and felt the give of the first lever of the lock. She continued to write. He’s used to being alone, it’s not a problem for him to be alone. He’s been alone his whole life, he can take it. But he needs to be understood and that’s confusing him. He feels a dual push to keep hidden but to be understood. His latest kills show an increased stress level. He is getting more extreme, his attacks becoming regular, necessary. He is not a neo-Nazi with Nazi sympathies, it is stronger, the identification almost exact. He is a Nazi.

  Just then, Aaron Goldenberg appeared, holding a sheaf of papers and folders. He looked at Denise’s notebook.

  ‘It should say Profile of Josef Sturbe,’ he said.

  Denise turned. ‘Aaron. How are you?’

  ‘Better now. It has been so many days with nothing to do. Now I can work.’

  ‘So what did you find? Is Josef Sturbe a real identity or an assumed one?’

  ‘I will let you know what I found out,’ said Aaron. ‘But how did Harper get on?’

  ‘Detective Harper has tried every database that he can find and there’s nobody coming up with that name. The Feds have nothing on him either. They think it’s a name Martin Heming uses. A pseudonym.’

  ‘Then they’d be wrong,’ said Dr Goldenberg. ‘Very wrong.’

  Denise raised both eyebrows. ‘He’s real?’

  ‘Yes, Josef Sturbe is real, all right.’

  ‘How the hell did you find a man when the combined forces of the NYPD and FBI couldn’t?’

  ‘They weren’t looking in the right places.’

  ‘Then what are the right places? Where can we find him?’

  ‘We can’t find him, but we know who he is. Josef Bernard Sturbe was born in Bavaria in 1923. We don’t have any records of him until 1943 when he turns up in the Warsaw Ghetto.’

  ‘He was an actual Nazi?’

  ‘Yes. A member of the SS. Of the feared Totenkopf – Death’s Head Division. According to reports, he believed he was fighting only for the Führer. He was fascinated by Hitler’s Mein Kampf – obsessed by eighty-eight words from its text. “88” is not just a code for Heil Hitler,’ said Aaron. ‘It also refers to the following passage. Let me read it to you: What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the Fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the Creator of the Universe. Every thought and every idea, every doctrine and all knowledge, must serve this purpose. And everything must be examined from this point of view and used or rejected according to its utility.’

  ‘He was into eugenics? What was he?’

  ‘A curious case. After the war, they could not find Josef Sturbe. The Nazi Hunters had him on their wanted list but he didn’t turn up. Many Nazis, members of the SS, went to South America after the war. There was a Network, ODESSA. It helped members of the SS to escape. They think Sturbe went to Argentina and ended up in America.’

  ‘Was he ever found?’

  ‘No. Never.’

  ‘What was he famed for?’

  ‘He was a murderer. Very vicious. A serial killer in the ghetto. A man who was so desperate to prove his loyalty to the Führer that he hunted in the ghetto after dark. He kept a record of how many he had killed. He conducted experiments, trying to emulate men like Dr Joseph Mengele. But he was an amateur. In SS circles, he was mocked. Sturbe had a secret, though.’ Aaron paused. ‘He was a Jew.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘The son of a young Jewish girl who had got herself into trouble, he was adopted by a German family. The Sturbes pretended the baby was theirs. His papers proved he was a German, but he looked Jewish. All through the 1930s he was bullied and mocked. He joined the Hitler Youth, but they could see he was no Aryan. He tried to change his appearance. He bleached his hair, but it made them ridicule him more. He joined the SS when they only allowed pure Aryans. He was obviously not
, but they accepted him based on the ancestry of the Sturbes. It was on the eve of his acceptance into the SS that his father told him the truth.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He never spoke to his father again. But this knowledge was like a canker inside him. It was as if he could never outstrip his own identity. He hated the Jews even more than the other officers did. He started to murder in the Warsaw Ghetto. He was insatiable, proving his hatred every day.’

  ‘And no one knows what happened to him?’

  ‘No. The SS all had their blood group tattooed on the inside of their upper arm. After the war, the Nazi Hunters found a man in Boston who they claimed was Josef Sturbe. He was recognized by someone who lived in the ghetto. But he had no mark under his arm, so they let him go. Fifteen years ago, the Sturbe myth surfaced. Someone found Sturbe’s notes and in it, he stated that he never allowed them to tattoo him, because he feared that they would be able to detect his Jewish ancestry in his blood.’

  ‘He was insane?’

  ‘Yes. He was insane. I doubt he was the man in Boston, but we shall never know.’

  ‘So what do you think this has to do with our 88 Killer?’ Denise asked. ‘Josef Sturbe would be about eighty-seven if he was alive.’

  ‘I expect our killer has taken him as a model.’

  ‘Our killer feels the same? A fraud? A fake?’

  ‘I think it might be something like that,’ said Dr Goldenberg, ‘but we must continue to search.’

  ‘I think our killer is afraid of Jews. I think he’s deeply afraid of them. It’s why he caged Capske, it’s why he’s starving Abby. The Jew has a hold over him, a power. In his imagination, it is a terrible power. He’s trying to reduce it, to lessen the power, the anxiety.’

  ‘Maybe not a terrible power,’ said Dr Goldenberg, ‘but a terrible secret.’