American Devil

by Oliver Stark

  She shook her head. Her knuckles were white on her glass. Her eyes were rimmed with red. She knew she mustn’t cry, but she kept sniffing and the glass was now trembling.

  ‘From a French gentleman called the Marquis de Sade who enjoyed inflicting pain on his lovers and anyone else for that matter. But the young man who was operating that night wasn’t just an over-enthusiastic lover, Jessica - he was something else entirely. Sixty-three times. In and out, that’s one hundred and twenty-six individual movements. In and out.’

  Jessica was praying now. She was hoping her prayers could somehow help her as they had always done before. Help me, Lord Jesus.

  ‘Seriously. Is that sick or what?’ The killer breathed deeply. ‘Do you think, Jessica, that he was enjoying the sensation? Why do you think he stopped? Do you think he got excited watching the knife go in and out?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you scared, Jessica?’

  ‘Yes, I’m scared.’

  ‘What do you say, Jessica? Would you like to go to bed with me now or have you changed your mind?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘I think that’s a wise choice. I don’t think you’d like it at all.’

  The man stood up and walked over to her; he flicked open the top button of her blouse. A small silver crucifix caught the light.

  ‘Do you believe in God, Jessica?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Do you think he’d come and save one of his own if she needed his help?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How about we test him out? Or do you think it’s wrong to tempt him?’

  ‘Please. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I’ve done,’ she said, the tears now falling.

  The man moved to the door. ‘Be careful who you invite into your home, Jessica.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I will be.’

  ‘You know what might save you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe God. Let’s see, shall we?’

  The man turned and unbolted the three bolts on the door. Then he opened it and stood there.

  ‘Today’s special number is sixty-three. You think you can count to sixty-three? Count to sixty-three before you move and you can go free. God has sixty-three seconds to save you. And you just need sixty-three seconds of faith. Do you have that much faith?’

  Jessica nodded and the killer smiled. He didn’t really think she’d get past five or six, but he wanted to give her a chance. Everyone deserved a chance - even God.

  He walked out, leaving the door slightly ajar. Jessica sat and suddenly started to shake uncontrollably. She counted as she stared at the door.

  ‘One, two, three, four ...’

  But she kept imagining that the door would fly open and he’d return.

  ‘Five . . .’

  She felt so vulnerable.

  ‘Six.’

  So scared, so terribly scared. It was too much. She was terrified. Suddenly, she ran at the door and closed it with the full force of her body. Her trembling hand reached for the dead bolt.

  But she wasn’t quite quick enough. Or strong enough.

  The door burst open and Jessica fell to the floor, her wet, terrified eyes staring up. He was back. Not the bright, witty guy she’d met at church, but a sinister figure weaving the curled edge of the knife in the air.

  ‘They call me the American Devil, Jessica. Do you want to know why? I want you to call out my name. I want to hear you say it.’

  Jessica did as she was told, but the words trembled on her lips.

  ‘You only had to do what I told you and you’d live. Faith is hard, isn’t it? It was that simple, but you couldn’t resist, could you?’

  He took her by an ankle and pulled her towards the centre of the room.

  ‘Shall we start counting again, Jessica?’ he said. ‘Let’s see what we can get to. But this time, each number comes with a price.’ He put the point of the blade against the sole of her foot.

  ‘One,’ he said, loud and firm as the point of the knife pressed into her flesh.

  She closed her eyes and wished for an angel.

  None arrived.

  Chapter Twenty

  East Harlem

  November 19, 5.58 A.M.

  Either someone was putting something in his coffee or Harper woke up feeling better after his first two sessions with Denise. In truth, he had unloaded almost nothing of his feelings about Lisa, but it was enough just to hear Denise put them in some kind of order. He liked her hard edge and her lack of sentimentality. Maybe that was exactly what he needed.

  From his drab apartment he looked out on the new day. The morning was grey all the way across the city and a light rain was falling. Harper was up before first light and at 6 a.m. headed out to Central Park with his binoculars. He needed to spend a simple hour in the park. It was the walking that did it: somehow it released his mind and got him thinking. The American Devil was interacting with his victims, and had been for years. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, he started to kill. There was nothing similar on the Federal database. Why did a man start to kill? What was it about Mary-Jane that triggered this terrible spree?

  Harper walked along the wet street and ran the thought over and over in his mind. Maybe he hadn’t intended to kill her? The killer was in her room, wasn’t he? Maybe he was there before Mary-Jane. Yeah, he thought, it just might be. He’d have to look at the case information, see if his idea had any weight. He looked up. Even early in the morning, the poor of Harlem seemed to leak out of the pores of the city. Harper stopped in a doorway and looked down on a woman in her fifties, lying on her side underneath a hard sheet of cardboard. She was wearing a pair of old tennis shoes without socks and her legs were swollen and glowing with a bluish tinge. Harper knelt down beside her and put his hand on her forehead. There was still heat under the skin. She wasn’t dead, just right next door. Harper stood up and walked on. Then he stopped and turned back. He walked across and put a couple of twenties into the woman’s hand. It was a cold day: the weather had turned again.

  Eddie Kasper was walking up the block and caught sight of Harper leaning over the homeless woman. He shook his head and shouted up the street, ‘Why don’t you leave the poor woman to sleep? If you want a date, Tom, I can sort you out.’

  Harper looked up. Kasper being up at 6 a.m. wasn’t a good sign. ‘What’s up?’

  Eddie Kasper was shaking his head. ‘Are you looking to be sainted or have you lost your sub-prime mortgage and are sorting out alternative accommodation with the homeless doorway rentals?’

  ‘I’m just connecting, like my psychoanalyst tells me to.’

  ‘She does, does she?’

  ‘This is a type A behaviour, for which I get a reward. Type A is the kind of behaviour I’m supposed to do more of, so I’m doing more of it. And you know what, crazy as Dr Levene is, she’s right. It makes me feel a whole lot happier.’

  ‘Are you thinking of fucking her, is that it?’

  ‘Your mind is a sewer, Eddie. There are other motivations in life.’

  ‘So you’re just being good for goodness’ sake?’

  ‘Goodness is its own reward,’ said Harper.

  ‘I fucking hate those kinds of rewards.’

  ‘Cut to the chase, Eddie. What’s happened? What the hell got you out of bed at dawn?’

  Eddie shook his head, ‘Sorry, man, they found another body. A girl in Yorkville.’

  Harper felt his stomach clench. ‘Damn this bastard. He’s like a machine.’

  The two of them walked in silence from the darkness of the doorway into the flurry of New York City. The rain started to fall harder, causing the few people who were out to rush about, covering their heads with any objects to hand. Harper stared at the ground as he walked alongside Kasper, his chin down in his collar.

  Eddie’s car was round the corner, so they walked through the rain getting soaked to the sound of tyres ripping up surface water. Harper noticed the chang
ing colour of the asphalt under the rain and the dawn light - it was almost purple. He thought of the water on the rocks at Ward’s Island. He remembered the wet ground by the corpse in the parking lot. Did this killer like water? The waves must’ve kept coming up over Grace Frazer’s body. One more piece of the illogical that would make some kind of sick sense in the killer’s mind.

  Eddie pulled a pastrami and mustard sandwich from his deep jacket pocket, held it tightly in his left paw and started eating hungrily. ‘Anyhow, Harps, I’m sorry to break up the dogooding, but this one looks bad.’

  Kasper’s red 1996 Pontiac was parked at an angle, half on the kerb. They both looked at it. ‘What?’ asked Kasper. ‘I was rushing to get you.’

  Inside the car, Harper finally spoke. ‘What’s the situation? Fill me in.’

  ‘A college kid, Jessica Pascal, living in the dorm district. One of the students found her. The door of her apartment was left wide open. She was just lying there in the entrance, just like Mary-Jane.’

  ‘Dead?’

  Eddie looked at Tom. ‘Yeah, it looks like it. We’re homicide, right? That’s when we get the call, when people are dead. Did you just think it was bad luck?’

  ‘Is it the same killer?’ said Harper.

  ‘If this is his, he’s on some roll. Three kills in a week.’

  ‘He’s in heat.’ Harper slipped on the seatbelt. The old leather seats crunched under his weight. ‘Any details?’

  ‘I ain’t got no more details, Church-boy, so don’t do your questions.’

  Eddie pulled the car into gear and slipped into the traffic, causing another car to slam on the brakes and honk.

  ‘Any indication of the method?’

  ‘Bloody.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Don’t know. They said we gonna need to get overtime for the cleaners on this one.’

  Harper stared ahead. Speeding headlong towards a bloody crime scene hadn’t figured in his plans. He’d wanted to check out his theory on Mary-Jane. He felt the whole case dragging him in.

  Harper closed his eyes and rested his head back on the seat. He had already started to prepare himself for what was waiting for them in Yorkville. He was clearing his mind, trying to create a space for what was to come, a place inside his head where he kept all the bloody images and case materials. A room he could close and lock at the end of the day. A fresh murder room.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Yorkville Crime Scene

  November 19, 6.45 a.m.

  The car took forty minutes to pass through the snarl-up and continued noisily towards the crime scene with some mid-range R&B that Harper couldn’t identify. They arrived at the corner of York Avenue and East 82nd Street. Two uniforms were taping off the entrance to the building and a small crowd of seven or eight civilians were hanging round to watch the action. Two Dodge Chargers had cut off the street with their flickering lights, but there wasn’t an ambulance in sight and the Crime Scene Unit hadn’t yet showed up.

  ‘It’s just the start of the day,’ said Kasper. ‘Everyone works slow for a couple of hours.’

  On the fourth floor, Harper and Kasper entered the hallway and saw the entrance to the apartment. It was one of the better buildings in the area, much more expensive than the usual student could afford. They moved past the officer on the door and signed the log.

  ‘Watch out,’ he said. ‘It jumps right out at you.’

  Tom flicked a smile towards him. ‘Thanks for the warning.’

  Together, they turned the corner and looked into the interior of a smart and well-kept apartment.

  ‘Anyone been in yet?’ Tom called to the officer.

  The man appeared at the door. ‘No one yet. We just got here, called it in and taped it off. The cavalry are on their way, Detective.’

  Tom Harper and Eddie Kasper felt the icy breeze coming through the open sash window at the end of the hall. Someone had already been feeling queasy. The smell of a corpse could choke you, but the sight was worse. They looked down at the body.

  The stark glare of a naked 100-watt bulb illuminated the grainy early-morning darkness of the room. Below it, the bloody remains of a sweet college kid, her future now brutally crossed out with yellow police tape: college, life, marriage, career, kids, grandkids - nada. No entrance.

  Both men felt their nerves jangle. The girl’s body was directly in the doorway, her legs close together, a white cloth covering just her groin as if hiding her modesty. She was cut to pieces.

  Eddie grimaced and popped a strong mint into his mouth. He offered one to Harper, who declined and pressed his palm to the door frame. ‘This bastard wanted that to be the first thing anyone saw.’

  They had to step over the body to get into the apartment. The floor was red and slimy throughout with large bloody footprints all over the carpet and linoleum. This killer didn’t care enough to cover his traces.

  The victim’s body was lying cruciform and naked, posed like a dead Christ. Harper looked down across the body. Small cuts all over the arms, down the thighs and calves, and even in the feet. The Medical Examiner called them torture cuts. Too shallow to kill, deep enough to really hurt and always on the veins so there was enough blood to cause fear.

  ‘He’s taken another trophy,’ said Harper. ‘See?’

  Kasper was looking round at the room. ‘I ain’t sure I could say what organs you’re supposed to have.’

  ‘He’s cut off her breasts,’ said Harper.

  It was their man again. It had all the savagery of the three earlier kills and the body was again strangely posed. She was a young blond-haired student who had started the day with her whole life ahead of her and ended it cut to ribbons. Tom saw the two highball glasses on the small side table and leaned in. He smelt the vodka and cranberry. ‘Seems like the kid here had a guest.’

  ‘A date?’

  ‘Yeah, maybe. They had a drink and then he put enough holes in her to make a sieve. Some date. He likes to cause pain, doesn’t he? And he likes to shock. You see any flowers anywhere?’

  Eddie shook his head and then pointed at the white loincloth and screwed up his face.

  ‘Maybe. You want to take a look?’ said Harper.

  ‘No. You?’

  Harper pulled on a latex glove and reached across. The white gauze lifted easily from the corpse. ‘What you see?’ said Eddie.

  Tom replaced the gauze, shook his head and looked closely at the victim’s hands and arms. ‘So many cuts. Jesus.’

  ‘It’s the American Devil again,’ said Kasper. He clicked on the CD player. ‘Hound Dog’ by Elvis erupted into the room. The two men looked at each other. ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ said Eddie.

  ‘Music you can torture by - loud enough to hide the screams.’ Tom kept looking at the corpse, counting the small black knife slits. ‘There’s a lot of work gone on here. Upward of fifty individual wounds.’

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘She’s got a similar look to the others. He likes them fair-haired, wide-eyed and pretty. And if she’s a student, then she’s got a helluva place. Wealthy parents, no doubt.’

  ‘I got something else, Tom.’

  Harper looked up. ‘What?’

  Eddie Kasper was standing further into the room. From behind, Tom could see the tension in his shoulders as he kept himself from throwing up. ‘He’s left a picture.’

  Harper rose slowly and moved to the window. He felt the horrible anticipation from the slight quiver in Kasper’s usually deep and robust voice.

  On the window was a photograph printed out on a sheet of plain white paper. It was a picture of the victim before she was dead. She was sitting on the floor in an old dress, staring up. Both her feet and her hands had already been cut but she was smiling a horrible forced smile and staring up at the camera.

  Below the photograph, there was a quotation. Subtle he needs must be, who could seduce Angels.

  The two men remained speechless. They found somewhere inside themselves to h
ide as they stared at the photograph. Her eyes were so full of pain and fear, yet she thought she was going to live if she behaved. This killer was enjoying the feeling of absolute control.

  ‘What’s your reading?’ said Kasper. ‘He’s some kind of religious nut? Maybe it’s some kind of revenge attack.’

  ‘No damage - look at the place. Nothing turned over. No struggle.’

  Harper had a strong sense of pitiless evil. He looked at Kasper. ‘This is going to get worse before it gets better. He’s a well organized killer with a plan and he has all the features of your all-American psychopath - sex, religion and violence.’

  The two cops walked out of the room to wait for Crime Scene to arrive. They both headed straight for the open window in the corridor and gulped the cold air.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  OCME

  November 19, 2.02 p.m.

  Out in East Manhattan later that day, at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Tom Harper and Eddie Kasper were led into the blue-tiled morgue for Jessica Pascal’s autopsy. It was windowless and claustrophobic, with great banks of white and steel drawers.

  Closets of the dead.

  Robert Toumi, the diener, had worked for the OCME for twelve years. He pointed across to the autopsy room. ‘We’ve not even got her on the slab, gentlemen. Laura’s scrubbing up. You’re welcome to watch me work, but it ain’t pretty.’ He went across to a body bag on a gurney. ‘I’ve weighed her and she’s had an X-ray. Pretty busted up by the look of it. Gangbangers, was it?’

  Kasper shook his head as Toumi wheeled the gurney through to the autopsy room. The two detectives followed silently. It was never nice being inside the morgue. Dead or alive.

  In the centre of the room, the stainless steel autopsy table shone clean and bright. Kasper took a sideways glance at the instrument table and began to feel less than comfortable. Bone saws, hammers, scalpel. Kasper suddenly jumped.

  ‘Jesus, man, that’s a fucking pair of garden secateurs!’