88 Killer th&dl-2
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Harper started down the corridor. Lafayette called after him, ‘Why do you want to play it like this, Harper? A conviction on this isn’t going to be easy. The media will want a fall guy. Who do you think that’s going to be?’
‘I am what I am,’ said Harper. ‘Let’s just say I get excited by the complex cases.’
‘This might be the shortest lead you’ve ever taken,’ said Lafayette.
Harper turned. ‘If I’ve got just twenty-four hours, I need help. I want Blue Team, plus four other detectives. No rookies — I want experienced guys. I want whoever it is leading the Federal investigation to come and tell me what he’s got. I want a profiler from the FBI Field Office to start working on this. And I want someone to keep the press happy. I need a specialist team to respond to the calls. We’re going to get a lot.’
‘You finished?’
‘For now,’ said Harper.
He moved back into the investigation room. The overriding smell was of coffee and fresh paint; it wasn’t a good mix, or a good time to start a major refurb. Three maintenance men in blue overalls were finishing up the latest addition to North Manhattan Homicide’s investigation room — a new set of cubicles for each of the detective teams.
The rest of the room remained as it had for twelve years: a big open space with a dirty blue carpet and a long string of fluorescent lights that leaked out a dull yellow glow. Outside, the sun hit the building only to show up the haze of deep gray dirt on the windows. Beyond the grime, the heavy bass note of the city could still be heard.
Harper walked across to his old desk, his head swimming with details from the case that he needed to get down and think about. He didn’t want a cubicle. Career advisers used cubicles. It wasn’t right. Harper just wanted the old, worn, paper-stacked brown wooden desk that had been good enough for the last five years. Blue Team liked to spread and merge and, like all cops, they didn’t like change.
Calls of, ‘Hey, champ!’ followed Harper through to where the rest of the team were setting up base camp. Cops didn’t make a very sentimental bunch. It never took long to go from a hero to a zero in the eyes of your fans. Harper shrugged it off.
Eddie Kasper pulled out a chair and fixed his backside to it with a sigh. ‘What did he say?’
‘The press want it to be political. The Feds want to argue jurisdiction. I need something to give the Captain and the Chief of Detectives if we’re going to keep this in house. And that means I need to know why Capske was killed.’
‘What if it is some wacko from the gun lobby?’
‘I got to tell you, Eddie, I’m not buying this Judge Capske thing. There are too many questions. Why the son not the father? Why has no political organization claimed the kill? They say it’s a political statement but not what for or who made it.’
‘You’ve got a point.’
‘Then ask another question: why would they torture the guy? If it’s a group, then they’ve got to be in and out fast. This feels different. This killer liked to spend time with his victim.’
Eddie narrowed his focus. ‘You know something more than you’re saying, Harper? You got that look about you.’
‘Maybe this is about Judge Capske and some group who thinks he’s a threat to American freedom, but if it is, they found someone who hated the victim. Hated him so bad they wanted to watch him bleed to death. Think about the mind that can do that, Eddie. If Denise Levene were here, she’d say the same thing. Overkill like this is pretty unusual — it’s either a hell of a political statement or it’s not political at all, it’s something much more personal.’
Chapter Twelve
Squad Room, Missing Persons
March 7, 4.15 p.m.
Denise spent three hours being spat at, hounded and abused — and what’s more, she paid for the privilege. After the session, she didn’t go home. She walked a while and thought about things. What Mac had done was not nice but it had left her feeling stronger than she had in months.
She grabbed a cab over to Missing Persons. All she was thinking about as Mac was screaming at her was Abby Goldenberg and what she might be going through. Abby Goldenberg who was just sixteen and had her whole life ahead of her.
Denise could help herself now, but if Abby was somewhere out there she wanted to try to help her too. The guy on the desk called upstairs and Detective Sarah Gauge came down, welcomed her and showed her into their offices.
At the squad room at Missing Persons, Abby Goldenberg’s disappearance was cataloged in four large box-files and one chronologically ordered lever-arch file. The two detectives had gone through a lot of leads in the eight days since her disappearance.
Although they’d not voiced the level of their concerns to Dr Goldenberg, it appeared that they’d treated it as a potential abduction since day one. They’d even tried to get the detectives from the Major Case Squad to consider it a kidnapping. The latter had looked at the case-file and sent it back, saying there wasn’t a single shred of evidence. Or, more importantly, the evidence they did have suggested she was a runaway.
Denise saw the problem. If the case stayed with Missing Persons, Abby Goldenberg would become another sad photograph on the NYPD Missing Persons website.
Denise flicked through the case-files. Munroe and Gauge had been working hard to find a break, often on their own time. Not many cops would’ve visited every last person on Dr Goldenberg’s list, but they had done it. Was it something to do with the girl’s beauty or her father’s distress? It was difficult to say what moved cops to go the extra mile, but in the end it came down to a mixture of professionalism and personal integrity.
Denise pulled out the daily report summaries written by Munroe. The pair didn’t seem to have taken a break in eight days. ‘You’ve done well,’ Denise said. ‘You’ve kept the trail warm.’ She flipped another page; pulled out an FBI profile. It was a one-page document, nothing more.
Denise turned to Gauge. ‘You seem pretty convinced that Abby’s not just a runaway.’
‘I know runaways. What can I say? Some strike you that way, some don’t. I can’t see this Abby kid putting her father through this if she could help it. Not a chance.’
‘So, if she didn’t run, what happened?’
‘Rape murder, most probably. The body buried in some shallow grave or cut up and stored in someone’s ice compartment.’ She saw Denise’s face whiten. ‘Sorry, Denise. But it’s the truth. These things we know and it takes some doing to keep her old man from thinking them. I’m not cynical. I hope that she is a damn runaway. I hope she’s on some romantic delusion with some idiot boyfriend — I hope she’s screwing half of New Jersey to impress her mom. I hope she’ll come back tomorrow, but they don’t come back, not often, not after eight days. Not when they’re sixteen and don’t have a drug or home problem.’
‘How much time you got left on the case?’
‘None. We’ve been busting a gut to finish our other caseloads, working our own time, and generally lying and shit to give this case some light, but we’re all done. The Squad Sergeant is going to move it to the back room.’
‘And then what happens to Abby?’
‘We keep in contact with her father every few months, we give the impression that we’re still looking. Officially it’s still an open case, but between you and me, it doesn’t get a second of our time.’
‘He’s a smart man, he probably guesses. I was thinking that’s why he mentioned me. I’m a link — Columbia and NYPD.’
‘Yes, it could be. You want some time with this stuff?’
‘Please.’
‘Well, let us know if you think we’ve missed something.’
‘What’s the bottom line?’
‘Unless you can find some physical evidence to prove to the Squad Sergeant that this is an abduction or murder, then it’s over for Abby. She’s a statistic.’
Denise nodded. She looked down at the FBI profile. ‘They sent this through to you?’
‘We made up some details about the case to get a secon
d opinion.’
Denise read the profile.
‘Any use?’ said Gauge.
‘Inductive profiling. It’s pretty basic. They use the limited information they’ve got about known criminals and match them up with the crime under consideration. All this tells you is that in the last twenty years, the kind of person abducting teenage girls in this type of location tended to be men aged somewhere between thirty-two and forty-five years old who have previous convictions. It’s not going to help you much.’
‘It didn’t.’
Denise took a pen and pulled a clean sheet of paper from the tray on the desk. ‘Deductive profiling works quite differently. The Feds use statistical averages, but that’s a blunt tool. Deductive reasoning is harder but it uses every piece of forensic evidence, every detail of the victim, the location and time of the attack to build an individualized picture of the perpetrator.’
‘There’s nothing for you to work on.’
‘I can piece something together. At least, I can try.’
‘Well, let us know if you need anything else,’ said Sarah Gauge. ‘Right now I’ve got a missing prostitute and an absconded husband to track down.’
Detective Gauge left the room and Denise was alone. A research psychologist by training, she had worked for years on the relationships between behavior and personality types, comparing these to criminal profiles and then analyzing where FBI and police profiles had gone wrong. It had drawn her into contact with killers across America, but always from a safe distance.
She took the job at the NYPD to get closer to the action and in a very short time, she was too close altogether.
Her research had shown her that inductive profiling worked in less than fifty per cent of cases. Human beings were not entirely predictable and Denise was interested in the fifty per cent who were more difficult to profile simply by using statistics. These were difficult because they were not normal. They were the criminals with psychologies so distorted and perverse that basic models and types didn’t help. They needed individual attention.
On the piece of paper in front of her, she started to analyze the victim. It was often the biggest part of the profile, trying to understand why the killer was motivated to take this particular girl and for what particular reason. Denise wrote down everything she could about the kind of girl that Abby was.
The facts were simple. The last thing they knew about Abby was that she left home just before 5.15 p.m. and was last seen leaving the house by her father. A driver spotted her crossing Parkway, but didn’t see anyone following her. There was a report that a truck nearly knocked her over. So presumably Abby was preoccupied. She was going somewhere secretive and she changed her clothes, so it would be something to do with a boy or a band. Denise couldn’t really see another reason for her to deceive her father. And this was to protect him, not harm him.
Denise concluded that Abby was someone who was willing to listen to her own feelings and not be swayed by others. It seemed unlikely then, that she would have been seduced into a car, as some girls were by clever kidnappers who appeared injured, or seemed to need help or offer some inducement. She would also have had a high degree of self-confidence.
Abby was sixteen, pretty, adventurous and slim. A sexual motive was certainly possible, if not probable. She was also Jewish and Denise couldn’t rule out that this might have been important to the killer in some way. There had been no contact with the family — no ransom request, and the family was not wealthy. Kidnapping for monetary gain seemed implausible. It was more probable, therefore, that it was someone she knew or who knew her family.
A personal motive seemed likely. It might well have been someone who had become obsessed with her. But the cops had exhausted that train of enquiry and found nothing. If it was a relative, a friend or a stalker, they’d kept their interests well hidden.
Abby had left the house in the dark just before it started to rain. It was not even a predictable event, as Abby rarely went out on a school night and this seemed to be a plan that she told no one about.
An opportunist would more likely be trawling in a car and would take someone waiting or in need of help, not someone rushing to meet up with the new man in her life.
No, Denise thought, Abby wasn’t just unlucky — someone had targeted her specifically and either knew she was heading out that night or was following her. For that reason, Denise thought that the killer was likely to be known to the suspect and to live close. It might have even been a neighbor who saw her pass and decided to follow.
If someone had planned to kidnap the girl, it was likely that they would scope the victim’s movements and choose a place and time that was part of the girl’s normal routine. But this wasn’t part of her normal routine and yet they somehow knew she was heading out and knew to be there. The perpetrator had to be very confident and very proficient to take someone and leave no evidence.
Denise pushed her short blond hair back and rubbed her forehead. She tried to clear her head. A moment later, Sarah Gauge ran back in the room. She walked past Denise and across to a couple of guys on the far-side desks. ‘Guys, switch on the TV,’ she said.
‘What is it?’
‘Captain says they’ve identified the body in Harlem.’
‘What body?’ called Denise.
‘Unidentified bodies excite Missing Persons; they found one this morning in East Harlem.’
A couple of the guys from the squad started searching for the remote. Sarah walked across and reached up to the TV. ‘It works with a switch, too, fellas.’
‘Jesus, Johnny,’ said one of them. ‘Did you know they made them with switches? Is that like the latest thing, Gauge?’
‘No,’ said Gauge. ‘The latest thing is a wise-ass cop with a face full of pizza.’ The TV came on. It was an old model, pinned to the wall high on a metal arm. Sarah said to Denise, ‘Lot of our cases turn up at the morgue as unidentified bodies.’
Denise rose and stood next to Sarah. ‘It’s a cruel job you’ve got.’
‘It’s nothing new. I’ve been checking every day for the bodies, hoping it’s not Abby.’
The news channel was throwing out information about a crime scene up in Harlem. A dark-haired reporter with hair blowing about was live at the scene, speaking in an urgent voice with very little to say. The red tickertape across the top of the screen declared Breaking News and the voices of the two anchormen in the studio could be heard as they tried to piece together the story. Someone had died. It was someone connected to some case in the news, but they couldn’t say any more. It was big news, but they were unable to report the facts until the family had been informed.
Denise leaned in and her hands started to shake. A body found. As yet unidentified, read the tape. Her mind immediately started to imagine how they might find Abby. But what was the likelihood? She stared at the screen.
‘Over to Kirsty, down on 112th Street. Can you tell us what’s happening?’ There was a pause, a crackle, then a different tone as Kirsty’s voice came on. Behind her, the chaotic noise of a hundred media teams clamoring for news.
‘We’ve just seen another team of detectives head to the crime scene. As yet, the NYPD have not made a statement. We’re just waiting to hear. That’s all we can do. We’ll let you know the moment things change.’
‘But what do we know, Kirsty? Is anything confirmed?’
Kirsty pushed several strands of hair out of her face. ‘All I can say is what we were told this morning. We received an early-morning email which told us that there was a body. It gave a name, but we can’t confirm.’
Then out of the chaos, a familiar face appeared. Denise watched Tom Harper move towards the camera. He was surrounded at once by a group of baying reporters. He wasn’t saying much, but was showing signs of irritation. The camera went in close. Denise saw his face — the bruised, swollen eye, the cut lip. She shivered. What had happened to him? She couldn’t help feeling for him and it wasn’t anger. That was strange. The anger wasn’t there.
Up to that point, she’d kept herself physically away from him, connecting him so strongly with her experience at the hands of a serial killer that she couldn’t cope with the thought of seeing him. Somewhere in her mind, she blamed him for dragging her into the case and for what happened to her. But looking at the man on the television, she realized that he was just the fall guy. He was easy to hate, because Harper didn’t want to be hated and Denise needed a reaction. Tears formed in her eyes.
On the screen, Harper was framed by the building and two other cops. He pulled out a piece of paper, stood still and stared into the camera. ‘The NYPD were called to an incident early this morning. Two officers responded to the call and found a single victim. The body was tightly wound in barbed wire making identification difficult. We have now been able to confirm the identity of the victim and we have informed the family. I can now let you know that the victim’s name is David Capske, aged twenty-seven. As soon as we have further information we will let you know. No questions, please.’
Denise felt a sudden strong sense of relief. It wasn’t Abby’s body in the alley. She turned to Sarah who seemed to feel the same.
She continued to watch as he came on screen again and appeared close to the camera. Tom Harper. He was her problem in the present, the problem she had to resolve. She had to let herself forgive him, but more than that, she had to let herself try to be part of something that mattered to her.
She stared at Harper — his hair ruffled, his damaged face, his coat torn at the shoulder. Tom Harper. Always at the scene, always in her thoughts, always at the center of everything, always where the trouble was. But if there was one man she’d like at her shoulder now, looking at the mass of information about Abby Goldenberg, it’d be Harper every time.