by David Wind
Hyte stayed in his office on Monday. His team, sequestered in the conference room, reexamined the coach passenger interviews.
At ten, he called Prestone in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“I’m sorry to bother you Senator.”
“This is about the killings, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. Senator, although the victims lived in the New York area, I feel you should be on guard—”
“Lieutenant, I’d prefer to have this conversation in person. I’ll be in New York on Thursday.”
“I don’t think coming to New York would be wise at this time.”
“Most especially at this time. If someone is murdering my fellow passengers, I’m not going to sit in an office two thousand miles away and do nothing. I’ll see you Thursday, Lieutenant.” Prestone hung up before Hyte could speak.
“Shit,” Hyte snapped at the phone. A second later, his intercom lit up. “Yes?”
“Upstairs. Now,” ordered Phil Mason.
<><><>
Alice McMahon was in Mason’s office. Hyte chose the seat next to her. “We’ve spent the past hour with the commissioner,” Mason said. “He’s very distressed about the Barnes murder. When I brought up your requests, he vetoed them all. You’ll have to notify the passengers, Ray, spell it out for them. I’ve already ordered protective surveillance for all the passengers within our jurisdiction.”
“And if one of them is the killer?”
“That’s the chance we have to take. The commissioner wants a full public disclosure.”
Hyte’s stomach soured. “Jesus Christ, Phil, that’ll make it three times as hard.”
“Lieutenant,” McMahon said, her voice softer than usual, “I happen to agree with you in this instance, but the public has a right to know, and the press is asking some pointed questions.”
“They always do.”
“Yes,” McMahon agreed. “And we need to work out something. The boat basin was considered a safe area.”
“He wasn’t killed there,” Hyte said.
“I didn’t know that,” the chief of detectives said, frowning. “Where was he killed?”
“In his driveway. I have the bolt that was used to knock out the garage light.”
“You’re sure?” Mason asked.
“As sure as I can be.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wanted the evidence at our lab, not with the New City police,” Hyte said. He turned to McMahon. “There’s no way that the locals could keep something this big from the press. And we’d lose the only things we have to weed out phonies—the murder weapon and the poison.”
“If Barnes was killed at home, why did the killer bring him here?” Mason asked. “That was a stupid risk.”
“Calculated, not stupid. It was a message. But I haven’t been able to decipher it.”
“We still need to figure out what we’re going to tell the press,” Mason reminded them.
“Only what we have to,” McMahon said. “We’ll announce the connection between the victims. The public will be less afraid if they know the killer is only going after certain people. It is all we have, isn’t it, Lieutenant?”
He met her look openly. “Nothing else is being held back.”
When McMahon left, Mason glared at Hyte. “Don’t pull that crap again.”
“I wasn’t pulling anything. I was waiting for the forensic report. It came in five minutes before you called. They confirmed the bolt as being from the same manufacturer.”
“And what are you looking for now?”
“Anything at all.”
<><><>
“Let’s hear what we’ve got so far,” Hyte said to his team. “Sy?”
“The Moffertys’ relatives check out clean. The pilot, Haller, was an only child. He had a wife and son. The son is attending medical school in England. Haller’s widow is living in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. I spoke with her, she’s clean.”
“What about the flight engineer?”
“Another only child. He had three children, one three-year-old and twins who are five. His widow and children live in Los Angeles. LAPD confirmed her whereabouts on the night of the Kaliel death.”
“Which leaves us with who?”
“Jonah and Emma Graham,” Cohen said. “I checked with Jonah Graham’s doctor. The stroke paralyzed Jonah from the neck down. He can’t speak, either.”
“And Emma Graham was in California Friday night,” Hyte said.
Cohen nodded. “Which I confirmed.”
Hyte ignored Sally O’Rourke’s sharp breath of surprise.
“And?”
“The airline’s records show that Emma took Flight 172 from California to Chicago, where she made a connecting flight. She arrived in New York Saturday morning. LaGuardia.”
“Where I picked her up, at ten-thirty,” Hyte said. “Thank you, Sy. Anyone else have something to add?”
“What about the little girl’s parents?” O’Rourke asked.
“She was a full-term hostage also.”
“By mistake,” Hyte said. Although he hadn’t considered Lea’s adoptive parents as suspects, he wondered if his lack of suspicion was because of the friendship that developed between the Desmonds, himself, and Emma, following the hijacking. “Sy?”
Cohen nodded. “Just like you said. We are investigating everyone connected with the full-term hostages. So far there’s nothing on the Desmonds.”
Randal Schwartz entered, carrying a large manila envelope. “This just came in,” Schwartz said. “The label is typed and there’s no return address just the initials FNK.”
“FNK? Friday Night Killer?” Hyte looked at the envelope. “Crime boys!”
“I’m doing it,” Cohen said, the phone already at his ear.
“How was it delivered?” Hyte asked Schwartz.
“The duty officer said a messenger just walked up and dropped it on his desk.”
“Get that cop, now!”
O’Rourke left.
“Did you handle it much?” he asked Schwartz.
“Just by the corner.”
Hyte looked up. Everyone was standing around him, staring at the envelope. He knew they all held the same thought. They might have finally gotten a break.
The crime scene man arrived at the same time as O’Rourke and the lobby cop.
Using long tweezers, the man moved the envelope to the center of the desk and powdered it. When the fine powder filmed evenly, he brushed it lightly, looking for prints. There were two full sets. The forensic specialist lifted the prints and turned the envelope over. He repeated the process and lifted another set of partials along with a double print from the upper corner.
Hyte turned to the uniformed Duty Officer. His nameplate said LANETT. “Did you handle it, Lanett?”
He nodded. “I didn’t—”
“No one’s criticizing you. What did the delivery man look like?”
“Old. Sort of stooped over. Smiled a lot. He had the envelope in an old shopping bag.”
“Shall I open it, Lou?” asked the technician.
“Carefully.”
The technician placed a flashlight behind the envelope and turned it on. “Something is in it, but no wires.” He opened it with a razor blade, and then used a thin probe to re-check for wires. He then upended it.
A crossbow bolt fell on the desk. A single sheet of paper followed. “Use the tweezers then bag it. Get it over to toxicology after you dust the letter,” Hyte said.
The technician went over the note for prints. “It’s clean,” he pronounced.
“Take Lanett with you,” Hyte said, pointing to the lobby cop, “I think you’ll find the prints on the envelope are his. The ones on the corner belong to Schwartz. I’ll send the note down for a typewriter comparison.”
“Forget it, Lou, it’s not a typewriter, it’s a dot matrix computer printer. They’re next to impossible to trace.”
Hyte stared at the note, sure of its authenticity. The crossbow bolt was
confirmation. Had it only been two nights ago, Hyte wondered, that he’d told Emma there had been no messages from the killer?
Lieutenant Hyte: Know you that I am Samael, God’s Messenger of Death, sent to collect those who think they have outwitted death. You cannot stop me. I will have my due. When the last eight have been collected, my work will be at an end.
Eight! The number flashed like neon in his mind. He looked at the chalkboard, and at the names of the nine full-term hostages who were still alive.
“Randal,” Hyte said, “get me the chief.”
<><><>
In the restaurant on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street, Hyte spotted Professor Walter Alinski immediately.
His former clinical psychology teacher had changed. He looked older, his face wizened. His long shock of white hair, combed neatly back, the ends curling upward over his collar. Streaks of pink scalp showed through. His face was thin, the skin drawn tightly over sharp, Slavic cheeks. His eyes were steady, and although Alinski had retired from N.Y.U., he was still a clinical psychologist of considerable repute.
They shook hands and sat. The waitress appeared.
Alinski ordered a deviled egg sandwich and iced tea. Hyte ordered roast beef and a Tsingtao beer.
“How can you drink that Communist swill?” Alinski asked, smiling.
“It tastes good. How have you been?”
“I manage.”
He knew Alinski well enough to accept that if Alinski wanted to say more, he would. “Doctor—”
“You want a profile, yes? Tell me about your new killer.” Hyte gave him everything he had. He finished just as the waitress arrived with their food.
Alinski ignored his sandwich. “You say you believe it is revenge, which would rule out the traditional psychopath. And you have evidence that it’s a man, yes?”
“Not physical evidence. But the assistant medical examiner feels the weapon is masculine.”
“I don’t think you should lock yourself into gender. A crossbow is definitely a male weapon. Unless of course, the user is a woman with male dominant homosexual tendencies.”
“It’s also among the most silent weapons I’ve seen.”
“Ah,” Alinski breathed. “So you have yet another objective in the use of the crossbow—silence. Man or woman, silence is inherent in the design. We also know it is not a killing for expediency. Are you positive each murder was planned?”
“Meticulously,” Hyte replied. “The killer is careful to the point of perfection. We haven’t found a single thing pointing toward an identity.”
Alinski nodded. “From everything you’ve said, I believe a paranoid schizophrenic is the most likely possibility. A hostage who might suffer from delusions that the others are after him for some reason known only to himself.”
“But definitely not a sociopath?”
“The note confirms the killer has a purpose and specific victims. That excludes the apparent randomness of a sociopath. “
“Which means that without any clue to his identity, there are eight weeks of hell left.”
“Or that the killer is deceiving you, as paranoid schizophrenics often do, and the note is misleading in some way.”
Hyte shook his head. “Is there another possibility? I don’t think we’re dealing with a schizoid, the pattern doesn’t fit.”
“I see,” Alinski said. “If you rule out psychopaths, and schizophrenics, who by definition are paranoid, what you have left is a classic paranoid. Raymond, do you remember your Freud?” Hyte nodded. “Good, because his theory of repressed homosexuality is the basis of paranoia.”
“But repressed homosexual or not, why would a paranoid kill people?”
“He’s killing because he has a grudge against the people who survived. The character disorder of the killer is most likely long-standing but dormant. In most probability, it was set off during the hijacking by one of the killings.
“Raymond, you must understand that a true paranoiac is among the hardest of all character disorders to diagnose. I cannot stress this too emphatically. Although the paranoiac’s basic premise may be faulty—in this case the other people surviving a disaster while the one the paranoiac cared for died, or was injured—everything that follows, the assumptions and thoughts based on the initial erroneous premise, will be faultless and make complete sense. And not just to the paranoiac, but to others as well.”
“All the relatives have been checked out and all accounted for on the nights of the deaths. “
“Don’t be so certain. The principal reason classic paranoia is so hard to detect is because the paranoiac is intact outside the delusional structure. The paranoiac will present a perfect picture of lucidity. He will function in all social situations, as well as in business. If he is intelligent, he will have planned for many contingencies, including having what, on the surface, seems to be a foolproof method of averting any suspicion from himself.
“Raymond, you cannot spot a paranoiac from a conversation, from a business deal, or even from the most intimate of relationships. You may be able to detect something out of the ordinary—a hint given by an expression, or a strangely turned phrase—but only if you know the person very well. In order to uncover a paranoiac, you must first learn what the basic misconception was—the source that produced the delusion.”
Hyte looked at his hands, then at Alinski. “Which is nearly impossible, if I’ve followed your line of reasoning. If you’re right, and we’re dealing with a paranoiac, what you’ve said boils down to one simple thing. Someone is lying—either one of the passengers, or one of the relatives.”
“Yes,” Alinski agreed. “And there’s one other thing to keep in mind. You can’t separate a paranoiac’s delusion from reality. There will be no reasoning with your killer if you are able to confront him.” Alinski picked up his sandwich, took a bite, and chewed it slowly. His eyes looked troubled. “Raymond, classic paranoia is untreatable.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
“We have four days to come up with something,” Hyte said, addressing his small task force. “Sometime after ten o’clock on Friday night, our man will strike again.”
He tapped the chalkboard. “We have to go with the assumption that there are eight victims left.”
He paused to scan their faces. “You’ve all heard what I learned from Dr. Alinski. If our killer is a paranoiac, he’ll be very hard to spot. Ideally, our best shot is to start back at the night of the hijacking and check what every passenger and relative has done since then. Since that’s a realistic impossibility, we’ll start with the first killing and work forward.
“I want to know everything that each of the victims did the night they were killed. I want a record of every step they took, every person they spoke to, and every place they might have gone. I want the neighborhood people interviewed again, but from a new perspective.
“Roberts, you take the Flaxman murder. Smith, you take Kaliel. Sally, you get Samson. Sy, do the relatives once more, and check to see if any of them have been seeing a shrink since the hijacking, or before. Starting tomorrow, each of you will take inside duty shifts. I think we’re going to get a whole bunch of crazies turning themselves in. One of us needs to weed them out if they get past the precincts.
“I’ve put Schwartz on the name the killer gave us. He’s calling seminaries to get a make on Samael.” Hyte covered the chalkboard. “All right, people, let’s go to work.”
Sy Cohen lingered until the other three were gone. “You didn’t mention surveillance on the out-of-jurisdiction people. Why?”
“The PC wouldn’t go for it.”
“That leaves our man free to do whatever he wants.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Hyte said without elaborating.
<><><>
Hyte remained in his office during the press conference, preferring to sit out what he knew would become a circus the moment the commissioner told the reporters about the note.
As usual, he found himself staring at the chalkboard.
One column listed the nine people from first class who were still alive. The second column was comprised of the four victims, in the order of their death. The third column listed close relatives of the original victims; a fourth contained the names of four people: the three killed by the terrorists on Flight 88, and Sonja Mofferty, who the terrorist raped.
Eight of the nine people were marked for death. Was one of the nine Samael? His disgust rose. A moment later, there was a knock on his door. “Yes?”
Dan Carson came in. “You wanted to see me?”
He had called Carson shortly after talking with Sy Cohen about the out-of-jurisdiction people. “The press conference over already?”
“It was more like a zoo.”
“I bet. Dan, I need a favor. What I’m about to tell you is confidential and completely off the record. If a single word gets on the air, it will cause considerable harm to the investigation. Is that understood?”
“You have my word.”
“As you know, the killer told us eight more people are slated to die. What you don’t know is that it isn’t just any eight passengers from Flight 88, its eight specific people.”
Carson blinked. “The press is about to swarm over all the passengers and scare them even more than they are. Is that what you want? Is that why what you’ve told me was withheld at the conference?”
“Yes, I want them scared because we can only protect the people who live in our jurisdiction. What I’ve told you is guesswork. The press conference was accurate, as far as the note goes, but if the killer had given us a name-by-name list, I would have withheld it. I want all the passengers, not just the ones targeted, to be on their guard. It may save lives. We don’t know if the killer is telling us the truth.”
Hyte thought about his talk with Phil Mason. “That’s why I need you to go on the air and call for protection for all the passengers of the hijacking, no matter where they live.”
“What good will it do?”
“It may help ease the passengers’ fears. It also tells the killer that we don’t believe him. Maybe he’ll get careless.”
“You can’t really think that an outraged cry for protection will trick the killer into making a mistake.”
