by Oliver Stark
Tom Harper was devastated by the news, but he didn’t show it to the other guys. The false profile had been his idea. He had forced it through and now Nate Williamson was dead, cut down outside his own home. He looked each of them in the eye solemnly as they listened to Lafayette going through the next steps. Then Lafayette turned to Harper. Harper was feeling bruised by his own guilt, but most of all he felt angry. He’d watched Nate walk away from the scene with his head bowed. He could have gone after him. He stared back at Lafayette.
‘Detective Harper, we need you to step up to the plate on this. I want you as the lead. Nate would’ve wanted it too. I know what you must be feeling, but bottle it. This guy has killed six people, none of which is anybody’s fault but his. Listen to me, Harper, I want you to take this bastard down for all of us. What do you say?’
Harper moved his weight from one foot to the other. He wasn’t worthy of it. He gritted his teeth and looked up. ‘I’ll do it if the team wants me to, otherwise you gotta find another guy.’
Lafayette looked around the room, and each member of Blue Team nodded the signal that it was okay by them. ‘Okay, I’m in,’ said Harper. ‘Let’s get to work. He’s a cop-killer now: we’re all targets.’
Chapter Thirty-Six
Blue Team
November 21, 1.00 p.m.
Lead Detective Tom Harper knocked back his fifth cup of strong black coffee. He hadn’t slept at all since he walked in on Elizabeth Seale’s still-warm corpse and now he didn’t want to sleep. Williamson had been dead less than twelve hours and someone needed to focus the investigation. There were so many people involved now, the leads were in danger of getting lost in the mass of detail.
‘We can count on this being private until tomorrow morning,’ said Harper to Captain Lafayette and Eddie Kasper. ‘Then, if she’s true to form, Erin Nash will tell the world that the American Devil took out the lead detective.’
‘You want us to put the frighteners on her, Tom?’ said Eddie.
‘I tried that and she doesn’t frighten easy. I think I might have even strengthened her resolve. But maybe we could try to get the DA to agree to get her put under surveillance. What do you think, Captain?’
‘You want the District Attorney to agree to the NYPD spying on journalists? Are you out of your mind?’
‘Look, Captain, did you read her account of Elizabeth Seale’s murder? It’s just gone up on the website. She’s got everything. She knows about the false arrest in the wrong apartment and another piece of information that we only got back from the autopsy this morning.’
‘What was that?’
‘That the killer took another trophy. Elizabeth Seale’s uterus had been removed from the body.’
‘I didn’t know. How the hell did she get that information?’
‘Only Blue Team and the Medical Examiner’s office knew that her uterus was taken,’ said Harper.
‘You think it’s someone on the team?’ asked Lafayette.
‘I’d hate to think that, but where else? And if not, then we’ve got to pin her source down. Can’t you do anything at all, Captain?’
‘After what you tried with her, you’re lucky we’re not facing a lawsuit. Her editor made it clear that he’ll run with a harassment and assault suit if Erin gets any more heat.’
‘It was self-defence,’ said Harper.
‘Always is with you, but even if they make the complaint, you’re out. You made her untouchable.’
Harper shot looks between them both. ‘Look, if the DA won’t sanction it, Eddie, how about you see what you can get done unofficially.’
‘Will do, boss.’
‘And one more thing, Captain. Can you at least get us some peace? Guys are getting hammered as they go in and out of the building. The press have been camping outside since Erin Nash called this guy a serial killer. Now we’ve got news crews running hourly updates. If I’ve got a grimace on my face, they’ll report it.’
‘I can move them away from the building, but it’s a free country.’
‘Well, get them across the street, at least. Give our guys a chance.’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
Harper had been sifting through the files for an hour and he wasn’t at all impressed with Williamson’s approach to systematic logging and filing of case information. In fact, the dead man’s approach stank. Harper could see what was wrong immediately. Due to the speed of the kills, each murder hadn’t been fully investigated and the information hadn’t been cross-referenced with any of the other victims or even logged centrally. Williamson was leaving too much to chance and old-fashioned thinking. This all meant that they were walking blind through the case, hoping to stumble on something. With Harper in the lead spot, it had to be different.
At 1.15 p.m. Tom Harper called the investigation team together for a briefing. Along with the core members of Blue Team, he had over a hundred detectives working the case, but he only wanted his top people. He had six members of Blue Team, another six members of Manhattan North, four detectives drafted in from Manhattan South, and another six from the precinct detective squads. These experienced homicide detectives made up his core team. Along with his administrative team, there were twenty-five faces looking up at him, all angry and expectant.
‘Good morning to you all. I’m Detective Harper and this is Detective Kasper. Nate Williamson was a good cop and he didn’t deserve to die. So we’ve got to nail this creep for Nate. We’re here to take down the American Devil, but we’re not going to do it unless we’re organized. So far, as far as we know, this guy has killed five women in New York and one cop. Around the room, we’ve got five boards. I’m putting a team of six detectives on each woman. I need their lives fully investigated. We’ve got another team working Williamson’s murder. I want to know everything these women did for the last month of their lives. I want to know every person they spoke to, every phone call they made, every shop they visited. I want a moment-by-moment account with nothing left out. I want to see photographs and names of their boyfriends, dates, family, and friends. I want their computer records searched. I want everything back here. This killer has been interacting with them and he will have left traces.
‘So listen up, we will work two systems. The boards for all the visuals and key incidents, people and places. The database for absolutely everything. Every name, number, location and event. We’re working six different murders here, gentlemen, and it’ll be easy to miss something, but the computer won’t. It’ll flag up any similarities. Got that? The boards for basic facts, key leads and suspects, the database for everything. All clear?’
The room nodded its approval. Harper continued. ‘Secondly, I’m putting three teams, round the clock, to respond to information from the public. I don’t want to be swamped by this shit and I don’t want to miss anything. Again, all names, numbers, details logged and cross-referenced to crime scene details - if anyone is authentic it should flag it up. We meet every day to give a brief report, we see what the computer flags up and we see if anything on the boards throws up an idea. We haven’t been doing the ground work, gentlemen, and it’s not good enough. He’s one man, we’re many. We’ve got over a thousand hours a day of detective time pouring into this case, so let’s not waste any of it.
‘And one more thing. We’re getting serious heat from One PP and I don’t want anyone, and that means anyone, talking to the press. Someone is briefing Erin Nash and it’s ripping big holes in our investigation. They’re hyping this up enough as it is. I trust you, so be trustworthy. Now, let’s go to.’
‘Amen!’ shouted Kasper and the room laughed in response.
Harper dismissed the detectives to set up their teams and then started calling in the advisers he’d identified as necessary. First he called the FBI at the New York field office and asked for two special agents to join the task force and offer advice. As far as Harper could see, they needed every bit of help they could get.
By the end of his first few hours in the lead spot, Harp
er returned with Kasper to find the boards were already filling up. They had three full-time administrative staff and it was finally beginning to look like a serious operation.
Harper looked at the photographs of the five female victims. They had a lot of overkill and they were all posed. He looked slowly at each in turn: Mary-Jane Samuelson with her legs apart in the hallway of her own home; Grace Frazer, hands together, on the rocks off Ward’s Island; Amy Lloyd-Gardner posed like an angel in an underground parking lot; Jessica Pascal posed like Christ in the doorway of her apartment; and Elizabeth Seale posed like a nude in a painting on her own bed.
Each of the victims had their most recent photograph next to their crime scene shots. They looked undeniably similar. All had the same blond hair, but more interestingly they all had similar features. It took a while for Harper to see, but there was definitely a ‘look’ the killer went for. They all had long hair and thin, angular faces. And, of course, they were all very rich and very beautiful. But it was more than that. Harper called Eddie to his side.
‘What do you think? It must take him quite a while to find the particular type,’ he said.
Eddie moved over to the boards. ‘Yeah. Rich, blonde and - well, if I saw them in a club, I’d call them stuck-up. No, not even that. They’ve got a quality to them. I don’t know. Innocent. Not ones I’d pick out for a one-night stand.’
Their eyes fell from the five bright smiling faces to the corpses. It was a terrible contrast. Harper’s eyes scanned across the women in quick succession. The horror jumped right out, but so did something else. The five corpses were sexual to different degrees.
The victims, Elizabeth Seale, Jessica Pascal, and Amy Lloyd-Gardner were posed with their genitals covered; the others were posed pornographically. Kasper put it a lot more plainly. ‘Open legs, shut legs.’
Harper jumped down his throat. ‘Okay, I like the jokes, but do some thinking too. Why are they like that?’
Kasper looked again at the corpses. ‘Some got him hot, some didn’t.’
‘Try harder,’ said Harper.
‘I don’t know, Tom, that’s not my area.’
Harper paced up and down in front of the boards. ‘Maybe he thought some were whores, some were angels. Maybe it depends on how they responded to him. It’s still a feature that we can’t explain, so we ought to look into it.’
‘I’ll put it on the list for the briefing,’ said Eddie.
Harper thought about calling Denise Levene. He picked up the phone and then put it down. He needed clarity. He’d think through this himself.
Thirty minutes later, after reaching no conclusions whatsoever, he called Levene directly. He admitted to himself that he didn’t know what the symbols meant. Maybe this was Levene’s area. He heard her voice on the line. They hadn’t spoken since Nate’s death.
‘How is it going up there?’ she asked. ‘I wanted to call. I didn’t know if I should.’
‘Well, it’s been hard, but we’re all focusing on the investigation. It’s all we can do.’
Denise held her breath for a moment. ‘I’m sorry, Tom.’
‘We’re all sorry.’
‘My profile backfired, badly. I don’t know what to say.’
‘It wasn’t the profile, Denise. This guy had been stalking Nate for a good few days. We’ve got eyewitnesses.’
‘You sure?’
‘Don’t beat yourself up. The killer wanted to show us what he’s capable of.’
‘I thought it was my fault.’
‘Well, you can’t take the credit this time.’
‘You shouldn’t joke.’
‘What else can I do? No time for feeling. I’ve got to cut to the chase here.’
‘Fire away. What you got?’
Harper gathered his thoughts. ‘Our killer is a compulsive sexual predator, right? We’ve just got the crime scene photos of all five women in front of us. Amy, Elizabeth and Jessica are posed with their genitals covered, but Grace and Mary-Jane are posed explicitly. What do you think? Anything might help.’
Denise thought for a moment. ‘It’s a difficult one to call, Tom. Research says that if a killer poses them graphically and hides or mutilates their faces, then it’s likely that he knows the victim. Hiding the face and exposing the genitals is an act of depersonalizing the victim and, some say, blaming her.’
‘What about the other type?’
‘Well, the other type suggests that he doesn’t know them, so they aren’t personal to him.’
‘Can I conclude from what you’re saying that this killer might have known Mary-Jane and Grace?’
‘Well, it’s possible.’
‘But that’s important. That’s real important. How would he know them?’
‘It’s possible, if - as you say - the killer is stalking these women, that they are women he knows and has become obsessed by. Sometimes killers start with people they know. Then they move on to the unknowns.’
‘Okay, Denise, that’s a great help. We need to have a look at that. What the hell kind of job might this guy have to meet this kind of woman?’
‘Might not be his job. Maybe he knows them socially?’
‘What, like this guy is an upper-class madman?’
‘I don’t know, Tom, but it could be anything, that’s all.’
‘We’ll follow it up.’
‘I’ll try to work up some ideas.’
Harper nodded. ‘Keep thinking, Denise. We’ve got until tomorrow. If he’s keeping to his two-day cycle, then we’re expecting another body to show up.’ He put the phone down, his head spinning.
‘What she say?’ said Kasper.
‘Maybe the killer knew the first three victims.’
‘Okay, that’s worth a look,’ said Kasper. ‘We need to cross-reference every place they come into contact with others and see if there’re any points of connection.’
‘Exactly. Let the teams working Mary-Jane, Grace and Amy know about this.’
Eddie shrugged. ‘Will do, Harps. And listen, we’ve already got news coming in from the teams. You want the headlines?’
‘Sure, run it.’
‘They found out that Elizabeth Seale was drinking in the Fullerton Lounge yesterday. We got a pretty firm memory from the bartender that she was talking to a man in the bar before she met a friend. The bartender said the guy hit on her so he didn’t know her. The guy drank a Black Russian, wore a black suit. He was also good-looking with a touch of grey hair. It could be him.’
‘Just like he did with Jessica Pascal. So let’s say Denise is right and he knew the first three, then ran out of victims or maybe he tried to date the next two and that changed things for him. He likes to interact with them. He gets a buzz out of it.’ Harper went across to the board. ‘Listen, Eddie, we need to know where he got to meet these three women, which might be where he’s scoping the next victims. We need to find out where he does his stalking.’
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The Frick
November 21, 4.30 p.m.
Across town, after the day shift, Tom met Denise at the Frick. He wasn’t sure whether she thought he was uncultured and needed an injection of art or whether she was keen to pick his brains about the job.
Walking the east side of Central Park in the fall dusk was a pleasure anyway. The wealth of New York had lined these avenues with grand houses, beautiful gardens and a peacefulness that you couldn’t often find in the city.
The Frick was a New York treasure. A beautiful house that was now a museum and art gallery. Harper stood around staring at the visitors, trying to guess at their lives. It was hard to know. Creative types, rich types, students - people who didn’t do nine to five or shift work to make ends meet.
Denise arrived in a yellow cab. She was dressed in a long black coat with her fair hair loose about her shoulders.
‘You not tried dyeing your hair like the rest of New York?’ asked Harper. He’d read that morning that New Yorkers had given up being blonde since news of the killings ha
d come out. Everyone was turning brunette.
‘Mine’s natural and I like not being taken seriously.’
Harper laughed. ‘What’s the idea with the museum?’
‘I was thinking about things. Thinking about Williamson’s murder.’
‘I was going over it myself. It’s cruel.’
‘Then I remembered something. Something I want to show you.’
They talked low as they went into the museum. It was quiet and hushed inside the beautifully ornate rooms. It was obvious that Denise spent some of her spare time in the Frick, as she moved purposefully through the rooms to one in particular.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘See if you can spot it.’
Harper looked around the room. Lots of pictures hung closely together. Harper didn’t know what he was looking for, so he moved slowly from picture to picture. Denise watched him closely. She was comfortable with Harper. He had a rare commodity: he didn’t interfere, he let you be. It was just a quality he had and it was something she liked about him.
Suddenly, Harper shouted out, ‘Fuck!’
A guard took a step into the room and hushed him severely. Harper apologized. He turned to Denise. ‘Is this why you brought me here?’
She nodded and moved over to his shoulder. They stared together at the picture.
A classical figure, muscled and toned, tied to a tree, stripped naked except for a loincloth. His face was turned upward towards the sky, his eyes transfixed in pain and hope.
Harper’s eyes dropped down his body. The first arrow went through his neck, there were two in his chest and another in his shoulder. His stomach was peppered with three and then one in his thigh.
‘You think the guy who killed Williamson was an art connoisseur?’
‘Dunno,’ said Denise. ‘I count seven arrows and I don’t like coincidences.’
