88 Killer

by Oliver Stark

  PART FIVE

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  Lock-Up, Bedford-Stuyvesant

  March 14, 6.12 a.m.

  The killer stared out through the glass shield. His hands were coated in thick protective gloves and he could feel the heat from the metal below. He hadn’t slept. He couldn’t any more.

  He pushed his arms forward. The fierce shriek of the angle grinder as it bit into the steel rod bellowed throughout the garage. Sparks sheeted out in every direction. The metal scaffolding poles had been picked up here and there. He had known they would be useful one day. His big idea was pinned to the far wall, sketched in pencil on to a roll of paper.

  He cut the pole right through and it fell to the concrete floor with a clatter. There were several of these on the floor now, all the same length. He rolled the last one into the pile and then counted them again. His shoulder was aching and the heat in the small garage with the low iron roof was bad. He was streaming with sweat, wearing a shirt to protect his skin from the sharp fragments of steel and the red sparks.

  The diagram on the wall was repeated in actual size on the floor. Two chalk lines extended from the back wall into the room. A third line connected them, forming a square. There was a wooden board on the floor, two pallets of bricks, and bags of sand and cement.

  Having finished cutting his steel poles, which were going to be perfect tubes, he removed his shirt and undershirt. He took a spade from the side of the room and ripped open the cement bag. He poured it on to the board, and then added a shovel of sand. In the heat he went over to the hose and doused himself liberally first, before filling a bucket with water.

  He used the spade to form a cavity in the sand and cement mix, then threw in water from the bucket, folding it in with the spade.

  When he was happy with the consistency, he took a trowel and started to lay a thin line of mortar between the chalk lines. He then took the point of his trowel and formed a V in the mortar. From the block of twelve bricks he took the first one, laid it flat side down on the mortar and pressed it firmly into place with a slight twisting motion. He laid the second brick along from the first, filling in the joint between them, then placed his spirit level on top to check that they were flat. He continued until the walls were nearly all built.

  The killer could see that the evolution of the species only worked if people destroyed what was weak. If not, humanity would continue to be diluted by impure genes. He lifted another brick and placed it on top of the mortar. He was still depressed about missing the children, but now he had Lucy. Second attempts were good enough.

  He thought about Section 88. They were amateurs. Fools, most of them. They had been useful, but they hadn’t understood him. Not at all. If there was one thing he knew better than anything else, it was how to keep a fire burning. It had burned through the last twenty-five years, it had grown through any slight, any injustice, and become a raging, tormenting anger.

  The truth – if there was such a thing as truth – was that he now felt bad if he didn’t kill. He felt cowardly, and as though he, too, was weak. Once you started to kill, the need was impossible to stop. It was mechanical and vast. It consumed him.

  The killer heard a bark, then a whole series of barks. Someone was outside. He stood and reached for his gun.

  A moment later, a knock rapped on the door. He unlocked the door and opened it.

  ‘I got what you asked for, Sturbe,’ said Martin Heming.

  Chapter Eighty-Nine

  North Manhattan Homicide

  March 14, 10.18 a.m.

  Harper slept three hours then walked back to the station house, his head full of dark images. The news media had just picked up the story and the panic and rage were building.

  There were no reporters outside the precinct and the investigation room was nearly empty. It would take Forensics another day to get anything from the Auxiliary Truck, but Harper already knew that there would be nothing. The killer was too good, and the purpose of the attack was unmistakable – it wasn’t just to kill, it was to prove his superiority to the police.

  Denise Levene sat in the circle of light from a low desk lamp in the corner of the room. She looked asleep. Harper moved across, his feet making no sound on the old carpet. Denise turned quickly as he approached. ‘Tom! Are you okay?’

  ‘I’ve never seen anything as bad as what I saw in that truck, Denise. We’ve got to find this guy. He’s escalating beyond anything I could’ve imagined. Five kids gassed in a police van.’ Harper threw himself into a seat. ‘Anything coming together here?’

  ‘I’ve got nothing new. We’ve been working all night.’

  ‘No leads on Lucy?’

  ‘We haven’t found anything. He’s cleaned all traces.’ Denise stared up at Harper. ‘It’s always darkest just before dawn,’ she said.

  Harper smiled in response and stared down at the book that Denise was looking at. ‘What is it? Your high-school scrapbook?’

  ‘It’s my casebook. I keep a close eye on the Abby case. I keep every detail, every article.’

  ‘You really feel for her, don’t you?’

  ‘Sure, don’t we all?’

  Harper picked up the casebook. He held it as he crossed to the coffee pot and poured out a fresh cup of coffee. ‘Interesting,’ he said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Looking back over the life of a case.’ Harper sat and started to flick through the images. He saw outrage, hope, despair, page after page. The turns and dead ends of a fruitless investigation. At the end, the presumption of death.

  ‘They look alike, don’t they?’ said Harper, staring at a picture of Abby Goldenberg smiling in a high-school shot and the photos of the murder victims on the wall.

  Denise stood up and stretched. ‘Yeah. There’s definitely a type he goes for. No question.’

  ‘No, I mean Abby and Lucy.’

  ‘They do,’ said Denise.

  ‘I don’t understand how Lucy could be a target,’ said Harper.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She’s not Jewish, is she? He must’ve been going for Capske, but then why come back for Lucy?’

  ‘Because she saw something the night he was taken, something that would lead us to him.’

  ‘Yes. I thought of that,’ said Harper, ‘but if she was only taken because of some accident, then it’s damn strange that she’s a dead ringer for Abby. I don’t get how this fits together.’

  ‘I don’t get it either, but Lucy had something he wanted to keep from us.’

  ‘Another thing, if we’re working on the assumption that the killer is Heming, then why does it matter if Lucy saw him? It makes no sense. We know it’s Heming, don’t we?’

  ‘No, but he’s all we’ve got.’

  ‘He’s smart, right? Smart enough to find a police safe house and kidnap two kids, smart enough to leave no evidence. You met Lucy. She’s not a difficult target. She seemed kind of lost in her own head. Why did he feel the need to take her?’

  ‘Could be part of the escalation,’ said Denise. ‘He’s not thinking straight.’

  ‘You read about Heming and his wife. She went off with a Jew. You don’t think that’s what’s happened here, do you? Lucy was going out with Heming, maybe after the marriage broke up. Maybe lightning struck twice for him. She was dating him and then left him for a Jewish boy.’

  ‘Could be,’ said Denise. ‘But they don’t seem to be a good match.’

  ‘No, and again, I can understand him wanting to punish her, if that’s his psychosis, but why take the hard drive and the diaries?’

  Harper flicked through Denise’s casebook and stopped at a picture of Abby standing next to some boyfriend from her past. He turned to Denise. ‘Our killer knows the children can ID him, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So he’s confident he’s got alibis and he’s confident that there’s no physical evidence to link himself to the crime. We didn’t even get a strand of hair from the Becky Glass murder. He didn’t rape her either, even tho
ugh it looks like he wanted to. Perhaps he’s afraid of leaving his DNA. I mean, maybe he’s on file so he’s got to keep the scenes clean. He certainly knows how to clean a crime scene. If it was Heming, the children could ID him from a photograph.’

  ‘If the psych team allowed us.’

  ‘He doesn’t know that.’

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘The only thing that can put our killer at the scene is the children. And the only other person who is linked to the case and to him is Lucy Steller. Fuck!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He killed Capske out of spite, because he was jealous, because he was in love with Lucy Steller. He let himself make that mistake. That’s why he called the press. He knew he had to try to put us off the scent. The other kills are random, perhaps linked to Section 88 and hate attacks, but David Capske was never attacked by Section 88. David isn’t his victim type. David was an error, a personal vendetta. That’s why he’s taken Lucy. Our killer knew her. And she knew him.’

  ‘Where are you going with this?’ said Denise.

  Harper stood up and took his coat. ‘It’s the only thing that makes sense. Lucy is the key to his identity. Lucy is personal. And that means you need to work harder than ever to find out who she went out with.’

  ‘Okay, we can do it,’ said Denise.

  ‘It also means something else,’ said Harper. ‘It means that we’ve been searching for the wrong man.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s not Martin Heming. It makes no sense to take Lucy or to try to take the children if the killer is Heming. Our killer’s identity is locked up in those three, but Sturbe is not Heming.’

  ‘The profile never matched,’ said Denise. ‘We’ve been chasing the wrong guy.’

  Chapter Ninety

  Lock-Up, Bedford-Stuyvesant

  March 14, 10.40 a.m.

  He’d been working on the structure for hours and it was nearing completion. The two Flemish bond brick walls came out from the back of the workshop, forming a three-sided space. The walls turned into the fourth side at full height, stopped for a door and continued with a two-foot wall and space for a window. The operation at the vigil had given him all the confidence that he needed, but he wanted to see them die. He didn’t want them to die in the dark. He needed to see the pain on their faces.

  The fourth wall was fitted with a door that had special seals to ensure that no air could get in or out. The final piece of the fourth wall was about to be completed. Glass would have been perfect but it was too heavy and too expensive. He’d bought a single eight-foot by six-foot piece of clear Plexiglass and fitted it into the large window space. On the inner side, he had cemented security bars between the two walls. The Plexiglass was sealed into place, and then he added a further layer of bricks on the sides and bottom to add strength.

  He stood back, looked at his creation and was pleased. He opened the door and walked in. The door shut into a wide jamb and was sealed on the outside by an old-fashioned set of bolts. Inside, the space was ten feet by ten feet. It was large enough to make a cell for a number of people. He looked up at the ceiling. The small inner room was still open to the roof.

  He levered four strips of corrugated iron into place across two supports made of simple wooden planks. He drilled the iron into the wood and then bolted it together to form the roof.

  He climbed up the ladder and on to the roof carrying a thick latex sealant and coated all the joints and bolts.

  It had taken all morning and he sat with a take-out staring at his construction. He finally picked up his tubes. He would have two feeder tubes running from the roof of the inner building. He cut two holes in the roof and fixed shower heads into the corrugated roof, then sealed the join and a joining piece to his tubes and ran them both across the roof, down each side of the building and around to a central unit made of an old plastic bin with a sealed lid.

  He welded the tubes together, ensuring that they were fixed. Finally he joined both to the large plastic bin.

  He inspected his finished cell. It was perfect. He had a chair, throne-like, positioned opposite the Plexiglass wall.

  He took a red flare, lit it and placed it inside the room and locked the door. The room filled with thick red smoke and for a while all the smoke was contained within the room, but soon, several wisps started to escape through the joins in the brickwork. He walked around, carefully marking each leak with a spray can. When he had marked each space, he started to plaster each one with more sealant or mortar. As he sealed, the red smoke reduced until no more was escaping. His cell was airtight. That was vitally important.

  He watched for thirty minutes and then, satisfied, opened the door to let the smoke dissipate. He walked outside into the yard, pulled his balaclava back on, opened the trunk of his car and looked down at Lucy.

  Chapter Ninety-One

  Apartment, Upper East Side

  March 14, 11.18 a.m.

  Harper had re-sent CSU to look for what they could at Lucy’s apartment. If the killer had been a past boyfriend, then there might be other evidence. He now paced around her apartment, looking and desperately trying to work it out. Then there was a call from the hallway.

  Harper found the CSU team dusting the linoleum just inside the door and taking pictures. ‘What have you got?’

  ‘We’ve found a print of a boot. The bastard tried to clean it, but rubber can’t just be dusted off. It’s left one or two marks.’

  ‘Is it anything you can work on?’ Harper asked.

  ‘Sure it is,’ said the Crime Scene detective. ‘Look at this.’ He crouched and shone his flashlight at the boot-print. ‘See these marks of the sole? There’s lots of small tears in the rubber. It’s unusual. It would identify the boot, for sure. It’s as good as a fingerprint.’

  Harper stared at the small marks. ‘I think I know what they are,’ he said. ‘Tears from barbed wire. The killer was rolling David Capske with his foot. Shit, he hasn’t even changed his boots. That’s how confident this guy is. It’s nothing if we don’t find the owner of that boot. How the hell do we do that?’

  ‘It might not help you find him, but it’ll help you nail him, Detective.’

  ‘I just worked out why the killer called the networks,’ said Harper. ‘David Capske was personal. He realized he’d made a mistake. Jesus, we should’ve seen it. That’s what felt so wrong about the whole political angle. It was fake, but it worked. We were sidelined – and he knew that we would be.’

  Harper’s cell buzzed. He picked it up.

  ‘I’ve got good news,’ said Denise.

  ‘What is it? I need some good news.’

  ‘We followed your suggestion and looked into Lucy’s past. We found something.’

  ‘A name?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A picture?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Get back over here and we’ll show you.’

  Harper rushed into the investigation room. Denise and Gerry Ratten were hunched over a computer screen.

  ‘What have you got for me?’

  ‘Ratten has found something. Postings on the Internet by a girl called Lucy S.’

  ‘Is this Lucy Steller?’

  ‘These are posts from fourteen months ago. And our suspect wouldn’t have known anything about them.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She wrote them on a women’s forum, a help group for victims of domestic violence. A place to talk, to get up the courage to report the bastards.’

  ‘What makes you think it’s her?’

  ‘She says she’s writing a book. Her name is Lucy S.’

  ‘It’s not enough,’ said Harper.

  ‘And she says there’s a grocer’s which she can see from her apartment window.’

  ‘It wouldn’t wash in court.’

  ‘We’ve got evidence,’ said Gerry Ratten.

  ‘How the hell did you find it?’

  ‘You got to know where to look,’ said Ger
ry. ‘I just got a warrant and got her ISP to release her IP address and browsing history.’

  ‘They give you the websites?’

  ‘Yeah. We saw where she’d visited. We tracked a lot of them. I got two interesting things. One, that she was seeing a man that she called X. Two, that he was beating on her. Three, that he was racist and four, that about a couple of weeks earlier, they’d gone on a road trip to Yellowstone Park together.’

  ‘Why did she call him X?’

  ‘It’s a domestic violence forum,’ said Denise. ‘You’re not allowed to name the bastards. That would be against the law.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Yeah, seriously. She made over four hundred posts over an eight-month period. Read some of the highlights.’

  I am in an abusive relationship. My boyfriend does not let me go out or look at other men. He tries to make me admit that I have had an affair. He interrogates me for hours until I admit it, then he beats me.

  X hit me twice today. Both times in the back. I don’t know what to do.

  He drinks and he rapes me sometimes, but I kid myself it’s not rape, right?

  X accused me of liking Jews too much and Blacks. It’s only because I’m supposed to be going to a party tomorrow. He said I’m trying to undermine him. He says I’m a slut. I said that I wasn’t. He gave me a black eye so I couldn’t go to the party.

  I’m a good girl today. Will I get high fives all round? I finally broke up with X. It wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. He wasn’t happy, but he didn’t shout or scream. He just stared at me. Just stared and stared and didn’t say a thing. Not a word. Not one single word.

  I got home today. X was standing outside the building again. He looked okay, but he’d obviously been drinking. I can always tell. Then he ran at me and put his hands all over me. It was only when I got inside the door that I realized that I was smeared all over with blood. I don’t even know where it came from.