by John Griffin
“Stakeout time!” the voice answered before hanging up. As Solomon sat up in bed and rubbed his face, his door opened. In walked a short South Asian man, skinny with wisps of a beard and wearing a knitted cap, chambray shirt, and blue jeans with sparkling white sneakers.
“Fuck, Sham. I’m practically naked here.”
“Dude,” Sham replied. “None of these doors have locks. I’ve seen mad old poor man wiener just walking around. And someone’s making fish in the hall. Fish in the hall! And I’m going to rob a fucking house with you. That’s a little more intimate than knowing you wear tighty-whiteys.”
“I’ll get dressed.” Solomon stood.
Sham looked around the room and opened the lone drawer in the dresser. “In what?” he asked. “You ain’t got no clothes!”
“Fuck, Sham. Take it down a notch. I’ve got neighbors.”
“They’re all drunk and high and stupid. Why do you live here?”
“I’m unemployed.”
Sham laughed. “I’ve been unemployed since discharge from the navy, and I still live in an apartment like a person with a shower and an oven.”
“Do you cook in it?”
“Fuck no, Sol. I’m a New Yorker. I keep my shoes in it. Warm them up before going out in winter. Keeps my toes toasty.”
“What’s in the bag?”
“Steaks!”
“You bring donuts and coffee to stakeouts,” Solomon said as he dressed in his suit.
“Taupe ain’t dope,” Sham said. “And I have coffee and Philly cheese steak sandwiches, and fuck your donuts.”
They made their way to the target house. Sham and Solomon sat on the park bench. The evening was cool and damp. The street was well lit. Sham was eating his sandwich and drinking his coffee. Solomon had a brown bag in his left hand and his coffee in his right.
“Who stakes out without a car?” Sham asked.
“Shut up,” Solomon replied. “It’s a nice night.”
“I know, but seriously. Shouldn’t we have a van or something? And some high-tech surveillance gear? Or just a car? Like, a wood-paneled station wagon or a van. We should have gotten a van.”
“Don’t be an idiot,” Solomon said, pushing a donut out of the paper bag and taking a bite.
“That stuff is going to kill you.”
“I didn’t want a sandwich.”
“You didn’t want to pay five bucks for a sandwich,” Sham said.
“Five hundred calories, seventy-five cents,” Solomon said, holding up his donut. “Five hundred calories, five bucks,” he added, motioning toward the sandwich Sham had bought for him.
“Fuck, Sol, you have money.”
“The donut is more delicious.”
“Whatevs. Mo’ for me!”
There was a steady flow of pedestrians on the street. Many were walking their dogs for their evening stroll. When they made eye contact with Sham or Solomon, they nodded to each other and continued.
“They’re getting creeped out,” Sham said after an hour of waiting.
“No, they are not. This is what these people do.”
“We should have gotten a car or a van.”
“Do you know what they would do if they saw a van was parked on their streets for hours without anyone coming out? They’d call the cops. And if they saw two people sitting in a car for hours, they would come out and ask questions. This is a neighborhood. It is Short Hills, not the Bronx. People notice unusual things. People pay attention. They do not notice people sitting on benches drinking coffee, because that’s what people do here.”
Sham unwrapped his second sandwich and started eating. A man walked out of a Georgian Colonial home across the street from the park. Sham and Solomon took notice. He was rolling luggage to his midnight-blue BMW X6, walking slowly and limping heavily, favoring his left leg. After loading the luggage, he returned to his home, set his alarm, closed and locked the door. He got into the car and left.
“That’s that,” Solomon said.
“The tip was good?” Sham asked.
“You saw it. He’s gone. He’s packed for more than a few days. We come back Saturday night.”
“Saturday night?” Sham asked. “Why not tomorrow? Saturday’s four days from now.”
Solomon stood and started to walk. “Because all these fuckers are going away for the long weekend.”
Sham stood and followed. “And why can’t we take a cab to the station?”
“It’s only a three-mile walk.”
“I’m not walking on Saturday, you cheap fuck.”
“Saturday,” Solomon said, “we have a car. I just need a driver.”
Solomon shook the bottle in his pocket. He took it out, removed a pill, and swallowed it dry.
Chapter Seven:
Reg
Greg’s notes were much better organized than Sol’s, but Greg had much less interaction with Psycho, so they took up less than a quarter of the file. Greg was certain the kid —Justin Graham — was Psycho. He never saw him. Was not there when Sol shot him. But he was certain in the way that partners are when they trust each other and back each other up. Reg wanted to feel that way someday about someone.
He wrote at length in support of Sol. Talked about how the profile fit — but he used all sort of words in the wrong context. Greg was a high-school grad who worked his way up to detective the old-fashioned way. He was not Ivy League educated like Sol and Reg, and you could tell. The people reading his reports probably knew it, too. But he tried his best. It was not enough.
Reg put down the tablet. It needed to be charged. He went to his kitchen and then opened his oven, taking out a pair of shoes that had been warming for five minutes. He put them on and nodded, picking up his phone and calling Sham.
Sham answered, “Happy, happy birthday, son!”
“It worked.”
“I fucking told you it would. I’m ruined for shoes now. I can’t put on cold shoes. Even room temperature shoes feel weird.”
“Then I won’t do it too often.”
“Okay by me.”
“How was the stakeout?”
“Delicious.”
“Sham.”
“I had cheese steaks from Shorty’s. I stand by my statement.”
“How’s Sol?”
“He had donuts.”
Reg took the phone away from his face and exhaled hard. “What did you guys see?”
“A plethora of old man penis,” Sham said.
“Do you ever turn it off?” Reg said. “You can’t be like this the day of.”
“Every doctor has their own coping mechanism. Me? I’m detached from everything. I could watch someone literally blow up in front of me and simply start making a list of what I want for dinner.”
“That’s probably PTSD.”
“It’s definitely PTSD. It’s why I left the navy to become a cop. I needed to lower my exposure to kids and young soldiers without limbs. I’m not convinced I’ll ever be a doctor again. That shit sucked.”
Sham’s moment of seriousness made Reg feel guilty. “So how was the stakeout?” he repeated, calmer this time and less frustrated.
“Dude left. Put bags into his car and left, just like Sol said he would.”
“So we are a go?”
“We are.”
“So me, you, and Kevin should probably get together?”
“Absolutely. I’ll call him. How about 11:00 a.m. at Lisa’s place?”
“Sure,” Sham said. “See you there. Keep your toes toasty!” He hung up.
Reg texted Kevin: 10:30 a.m. Lisa’s place. He hoped a half an hour would be long enough. He left his apartment and arrived right on time, and Kevin was already waiting in one of the booths. Reg sat down. Kevin was young, fair-skinned with dark hair and blue eyes. He looked every bit the part of a software genius
worth millions.
“Where’s Sham?” Kevin asked.
“Running late,” Reg said. “Be here in thirty minutes.”
Kevin nodded nonchalantly, as if that was expected. “Fair enough. Want to wait or just want me to run through everything?”
The waitress came by. Reg turned his cup over the way Lisa did, saying nothing and getting a cup of coffee as she passed. “Let’s wait,” Reg said, taking a sip. “I’ve been reading up on the Psycho case.”
Kevin shook his head. “Kills me everyday that we did not catch that guy.”
“Did you hear he’s back?” Reg asked.
“Hear it?” Kevin said. “Psycho asshole announced it to the world.”
“I thought it was a pretty closed circle of people who knew? Just the note in that girl’s throat?”
“That’s not how he works,” Kevin said. He took out his computer — not a Mac, Reg noticed, which surprised him. Kevin opened it up and turned it to face Reg. “Watch. And more importantly, listen.” Kevin brought up a page at a gore website in the deep web — Reg recognized it, saw that he needed to use the Tor browser just to get there.
The video was just over three minutes long. It looked like a simple nature video, a pastiche of thirty scenes from snow-covered mountains to babbling brooks to autumn leaves. The landscapes struck him as remarkably European. The audio running through the visuals sounded like claws running across a blackboard and the hiss of a modem connecting to the Internet the way they used to in the nineties. Reg instinctively covered his ears and shook his head.
“I didn’t hear any announcement,” Reg said as the video ended.
“We had thought he went to Europe when he left the country. This was probably a vacation video.”
“Okay. But that could be anyone. That’s not enough.”
“That audio?” Kevin said. “If you run it through a visualization filter, shows a very different scene.” Kevin brought up a different program. It looked familiar enough. He had seen audio visualization before. Usually, though, it showed some abstract combination of colors rising and falling. This time, the scene was clearly animated. It started with a man, and as the video pulled out the car was on fire. Reg was watching Greg die in colors and patterns generated by the sound on the video, only visible if you had the right audio visualization software to decode it.
“I missed this in his first video,” Kevin said. “This is what he does. He encodes another set of imagery — always him killing someone — and programs the audio so that only those curious enough to try running the audio through the right visualization feature find it, unlock that code and see what he wants them to see. And it is all very public. The sort of thing that grows in the gore community.”
“It wasn’t anywhere in the file,” Reg said.
“Wasn’t supposed to be,” Kevin replied. “This is the bit we kept back — from the official files and from the media — so we could be certain who he was. I missed it. In that first video? I missed it. The girl probably could have been saved if I had found it, if I had thought of it. But that first time? Sol had just brought me in. I was literally just walking around the station, and there I was in the middle of a serial killer investigation. He taunted us — told us everything we needed to know about where the girl was, and I missed it. Won’t happen again.”
“So you’re still helping Sol?” Reg said.
“If it helps get this guy caught, hell yeah, I’m still helping,” Kevin said.
Sham walked in as they were chatting and sat down. “Kev! Where’s my money?”
“I don’t owe you any money,” Kevin said.
“I bet you a million dollars and you lost.”
“I never accepted the bet. You can’t just grab my hand and shake it and then ask me for a million dollars.”
“A man can try,” Sham replied.
Kevin shook his head and put his computer away. He took out a nylon cylinder about as long as his arm. “So here it is.” There were a few buttons to snap the top closed. “One of these buttons is a GPS tracker.”
“Which one?” Reg asked.
“Classified,” Kevin said. “Lisa asked that I not tell anyone — not you guys, and not Sol.”
“Fair enough,” Reg said.
“Just make sure Sol does not tamper with it and uses this one for the painting. So keep it to yourselves until the day of. The tracker is off — it isn’t sending off any signal, and won’t for another five days. With the theft coming up on Saturday, and the trade-off happening the next day, this should make it all the way to the target before turning on, so they won’t find it with a scan. And then it will broadcast, and hopefully we can get there before they find it and turn it off.”
“So that’s it?” Reg asked.
“It’s a simple plan. We go ahead with the theft. Sol gets away, gets out of the country, probably never comes back, though he says he wants to. I’d be surprised. But we get the person we are really after.”
“Eyes on the prize,” Sham said.
Chapter Eight:
Solomon
Solomon was leaning against a lamppost and watching the door of the building at 28th and 124th in Queens. A black woman wearing scrubs walked toward the stoop. Solomon waved at her and crossed the street. “Ms. Frogue,” he said.
The woman stopped and looked at him, and then continued on. “I’m Detective Roud,” Solomon said. “I’m here to ask you about Hyacinth. I don’t believe she ran away.”
“Well, she did,” Ms. Frogue said. “She has done it nine times. She’ll be back when she runs out of money.”
“Ms. Frogue,” Solomon said. “You don’t really believe that.”
She shook her head. “She isn’t the girl I raised. I don’t know what happened. I just got off a shift, and I’m tired. What do you want?”
“I understand shift work,” Solomon said, taking a seat on the stoop. Ms. Frogue stayed standing. “Which hospital do you work at?”
“Metropolitan. I’m a resident.”
“A resident?”
“Yeah. Had Hyacinth young but went back to school. Oldest resident in the program.”
“Good,” Solomon said. “What do you think Hyacinth is going to be?”
“Dead.”
“Any boyfriends that troubled you?”
“No.”
“Drugs?”
“Nothing major.”
“You’d know the difference?”
“I see enough everyday.”
“Strange men calling, hanging around?”
“No. I’m not here that often, though. Just can’t be around. Career and children.”
Solomon nodded. “Not sure I look forward to having to make that choice one day. It’d be damn hard.”
“It is.”
Solomon’s phone rang. He took it out of his pocket and looked at the name. “I’ve got to take this, ma’am.” He answered. “Hold on, Lisa.” He put the phone to his chest. “I’m going to bring her home, ma’am.”
“She’ll come home on her own, when she runs out of money,” Ms. Frogue said before climbing the stoop and going into the building.
Solomon walked east. “Lisa?”
“Found Gyp. I’ll text you his address.”
“And?”
“Just a dealer, from what we can see. A few arrests for battery, but mostly just busted for dealing. Think he’s involved with Psycho?”
“No,” Solomon said. “That’s not Psycho’s MO.”
“Know which girl he has?”
“Probably.”
“What are you going to do?”
Solomon took the note from Psycho out of his pocket. “I’m going to follow the leads.”
“I’m stopping the sting on the Queen Bee.”
“Queen Bee? That’s new,” Solomon said.
“He could
be a woman. You don’t think a woman can be a criminal mastermind? And it worked better with sting.”
“You can’t stop the sting. We’re close.”
“Don’t be stupid, Solomon. You’re distracted. I’ve worked too fucking hard on this for you to fuck it up here at the end.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“This was a mistake.”
“What?”
“A mistake, Sol. I never should have done this. I’m up to my eyeballs in reports for the captain. She’s watching this close. I’m not sure it is worth the risk.”
“I can do this. And I need to do this. I need the money, the force needs the real criminal.”
“You don’t need the money, Sol. The force is still paying you, and you’ve got your father’s money.”
“I haven’t spent a penny of the old man’s money.”
“But you could. Sol, it doesn’t matter. We’re pulling out. We’re stopping the sting.”
“You know you can’t. He will go underground and pop up as a guy with some other stupid name, and you’ll never find him again. You know it.”
“I know it.”
“Then?”
“If you fucking die.”
“Let me worry about that.”
“I’ll end up in jail.”
“Let me worry about that, too. Captain know Psycho is back?”
“Yeah.”
“She want me to come in?”
“Yeah.”
“Why is she asking you to bring me in on it? Who’s on it?”
“Roger and his newbie, Thomas something. I know you better.”
“Good,” Solomon said. “Good.”
“They want to see you.”
Solomon had made his way to the subway. “Two hours?”
“Two hours is good.”
“I’m on my way.” He hung up and descended the stairs into the subway.
Sitting in the subway, he had nothing left to do. Whenever he had nothing to do, he thought about the dead girls, and there he was again thinking back to his first exposure to Psycho. He was sitting in his car with his left arm hanging out the window. His right held a cup of coffee. The car was not moving. Ahead, a uniformed officer was holding up traffic as a crane unloaded a flatbed with prefabricated building parts and workers put it together. As Solomon inched forward, he watched as it was half done by the time he started moving fluidly again.
