by David Wind
He went back over the killings, refusing to give in to the sick churning of his stomach. Samael took Barnes in his driveway; the Helenezes died in the security of their burglar- proof apartment, Samael got Sylvia Mossberg outside the synagogue, and Joan Bidding in the Trans Air parking lot.
While he worked out the methods Samael could use to infiltrate the Mofferty house, twilight came. The trees turned gray, the house dulled. A row of low voltage lights lining the driveway came on, as did the wrought iron lamps at each side of the main door.
He picked up the radio. He wasn’t worried about the sound any longer. He knew how Samael would do it. “O’Rourke. Find out what time Masters is supposed to arrive.”
“Between seven-thirty and eight.”
“I want the Moffertys in their bedroom and the door locked. As soon as I hang up, I’m calling the locals. Wait for them. I want this house sealed with cops.”
“What’s—”
“Samael’s going to Masters’ place. That’s the plan. And we’ve got less than a quarter of an hour.”
Hyte flipped the frequency switch on the radio and called Captain Tanner who, with his men, was waiting for Hyte’s signal.
“Captain, I think I know how it’s coming down. I’m going to try to intercept our killer. I’ll need you and your men at the Mofferty house as backup. Inside and out. The Moffertys will be in their bedroom. Captain, make your men aware the killer uses a crossbow and poison. And no sirens, please.”
“Lieutenant, are you sure he’s coming?”
“Dead sure,” he said, and shut the radio off.
Then he called O’Rourke. “Tell the Moffertys the locals are on their way. Sally, wait here for them.” He turned the radio off, got into the driver’s seat, and started the engine.
Hyte pulled out of the garage and saw O’Rourke race down the steps and cut in front of the car. He stopped. O’Rourke opened the door and hopped in.
“I told you to wait.”
“You’re not going alone. Not now.”
He turned to her, his mind numb and cold. “Get the hell out of this car! Wait here for the locals, and brief them. If Samael gets by me, you have to direct the locals. Now get out!”
“Lou—”
“Damn it, Sally, get out!”
Hyte hit the accelerator the instant she closed the door.
Two blocks from the Mofferty house, four speeding patrol cars passed him, headed toward the Moffertys.
When he reached the cul-de-sac where Masters lived, he slowed, shut off his lights, and came to a stop two houses away. He drew the Beretta and checked the clip.
He looked at the pistol, remembering what Professor Alinski told him when Alinski had first brought up the possibility of Samael being a paranoiac. ‘Classic paranoia is untreatable.’
“Maybe,” he said aloud, cocking the automatic.
Hyte walked slowly to Masters’ house. He stopped at the edge of the circular driveway. Masters’ blue Mercedes was near the front door.
The sky, painted in darkening shades warned that twilight was giving way to the night. But it was still too light to walk in openly.
Bending low, Hyte inched toward the car.
He was ten feet away when the front door opened.
A figure wearing a floppy hat and trench coat came out of the house. There was a bulky object in Samael’s right hand. Self-loathing made his pulse erratic. He fought the emotion, beating it back until he could breathe normally.
When Samael reached the car, Hyte stepped from concealment. The sound of his shoes on the asphalt announced his presence.
Samael spun and, dropping the leather bag, raised the crossbow.
“No more, Emma, it’s over,”
Chapter Forty-five
“No more, Emma, it’s over,” Hyte repeated.
Emma Graham smiled coldly. “Not yet.”
“No more collections. No more deaths. Put the crossbow down. I’ll make sure you get the best help possible.”
“I have the best help possible.” She brushed her gloved fingertips across the crossbow’s scope. “My little messengers of death. When did you finally understand? You didn’t know last night.” She paused, smiling sadly. “I’m glad you didn’t.”
He wanted to pull back on the trigger, but even with the proof of the warped actions of the woman he loved, he couldn’t. The cop within had to have the answers. “Why, Emma?”
She stiffened. “They thought they outwitted death.
They believed they’d traded their lives for my mother’s life. You know they all had to die—just as the Moffertys must die. Then you. You’re to be last. You can’t outwit death anymore.”
“You won’t get them unless you take me out first. And that isn’t the way you planned it.”
“Plans can change.” Her voice was calm and serene.
“The Moffertys have a dozen cops with them now. And Sally O’Rourke. You won’t kill the others to get the Moffertys.”
Her mouth tightened. “If I have to, I will.”
“No, Emma, it’s over,” Hyte said for the third time. He looked into the eyes of the woman he’d thought he knew, and saw a stranger. A coldness spread through his mind, damping his emotions.
He fired.
The bullet caught her in the chest. She staggered, her face contorted with madness.
He fired again, and again, until the magazine was empty. Each strike knocked her backward. He fired nine times at her protected chest. On the ninth, Samael went down.
Hoping the force of the bullets against the vest had stunned her; he discarded the Beretta and drew his service piece.
Before he could take a step toward her, Emma got to her knees, raised the crossbow, and squeezed the trigger.
He saw the bolt leave the crossbow, knew it would hit him, but could not get out of its way. It struck him in the midsection. He stumbled under the impact, but remained on his feet. Staring down, Hyte saw the missile sticking out from his stomach. Blood pounded against his temples as he yanked the bolt from the vest.
The vest had held. His breath hissed out. He looked up and found Emma standing a dozen feet away. The crossbow cocked and aimed at him.
“Even if you kill me, you won’t get away.”
“It doesn’t matter, Raymond, because you’ll be dead.”
The last dregs of twilight illuminated her pale and drawn face. Suddenly, he saw her eyes go flat. Now! He threw himself sideways at the same instant he heard the low twang of the crossbow’s string. He hit the ground hard, rolled once, and fired blindly. When he gained his feet, Emma was gone.
“Why do you fight it, Ray?” she asked, springing out from behind the Mercedes, the crossbow tracking toward him, another bolt in place.
He fired. The first shot hit her chest, knocking her back.
She didn’t shoot at him.
He fired again. She lurched. “Damn you!” she screamed, pulling the crossbow’s trigger.
Hyte dropped even as she moved, firing twice before be hit the ground. The first shot struck the side of her head. The second went wild.
Emma Graham spun in a circle before she fell.
Hyte looked behind him. The bolt was quivering in a tree, heart high. He went to Emma. She was on her back. Blood seeped from her head— somehow, Emma lived.
She stared up at him, her eyes glazed. He wondered if she knew who he was as he calmly and coldly centered the Beretta on her forehead just above her brown eyes.
He thought of Sy Cohen, and of the other eight people her tormented mind had sentenced to death.
He thought of Lea Desmond, and of his daughter, Carrie. He remembered J. Milton Prestone’s words: Find Samael. Stop that murdering bastard.
He thought of himself and of what he was about to do.
He put on the safety and holstered the piece.
It was over.
<><><>
The sun had crested the skyline. Heat shimmered from the tops of the buildings across the East River. Hyte turned to look at
the people in Mason’s office. The chief of detectives was behind his desk. Schwartz, Roberts, and Smith were sitting together on the couch. Sally O’Rourke and Deputy Police Commissioner Alice McMahon sat on chairs borrowed from Mason’s outer office.
The hectic aftermath of Emma’s attempt to kill the Moffertys was behind them. They found Franklin Masters in his house, alive but unconscious. The Islip police had cordoned off the block so that no one was able to get in. An ambulance had taken Emma to the hospital.
After the preliminaries were over and Captain Tanner had turned the case back to him, Hyte had gone to the hospital. There, the doctor attending Emma had told him the chances were seventy-thirty that Emma wouldn’t make it through the night.
She did make it through the night, and he intuitively knew Emma would survive to live out her life in an institution, condemned to replaying her delusion for whatever time remained to her.
‘Classic paranoia is untreatable’, Alinski had said.
Hyte shook away his thoughts. He had a press conference in fifteen minutes. Before he could face the reporters, and their inevitable questions, he wanted to explain everything to the people who’d worked so closely with him.
He was still numb, and was glad. He wanted to keep on feeling numb until it was all over, and he could take some time off. He had mourning to do, for Sy Cohen, and for Emma Graham.
“Ray?” Mason said.
Hyte looked at Mason, and nodded. “My mistake was at the very beginning, because I accepted a false premise caused by the weapon. Harry Lester, and everyone else, said the crossbow is a man’s weapon. And it is.
“Then Walter Alinski set it in my mind that our killer was a paranoiac. He suggested latent homosexuality as the underlying factor. Again, I locked my thinking into picturing Samael as a man. It was seeing her mother shot to death that triggered Emma’s paranoia.
“As the Graham’s only child, Emma chose to emulate her father. Which, I’m sure, was because of her latent homosexuality. A homosexual tends to love the same sexed parent. It’s usually a homosexual’s first and most important love. And, by Emma’s emulating her successful father, she was proving she was her father’s equal and could provide all her mother would ever need.”
“But she wasn’t a lesbian,” O’Rourke said.
“Latent homosexual. Watching her mother’s murder was the catalyst that brought everything together. The latent homosexuality had already manifested itself in paranoia—a subconscious fear of being a homosexual. When she lost the most important love object in her life, the paranoia manifested itself by twisting reality.
“Instead of understanding what had happened, Emma created a scenario to explain why her mother died. This…delusion made her think her mother died because the other people had outwitted death—she believes her mother died in the other peoples’ place. Every time she watched the tapes, it reinforced the delusion until it turned into an obsession for vengeance. There was even more that fed the paranoia. Her father had a small tape machine that had been on since the start of the hijacking—”
“That’s it! That’s why he kept tapping on his pocket. He had a recorder in it, right?”
He glanced at O’Rourke, surprised she’d picked it up from watching the tape. “Yes, she was the only person, other than the hostages, who heard everything that was said throughout the entire hijacking, and not just from when the camera was set up in the plane.
“Then her masculine role model, the man she had emulated all her life, the man from whom she had learned to be strong, had a stroke and became as helpless as a baby. Emma’s mind broke—her paranoia took control and at that point planned her revenge.
“In her paranoid misconception, she believed her mother died because the others said, ‘Not me, someone else.’ What Emma couldn’t accept, will never accept, is that her mother wasn’t killed for that reason; Anita Graham died because she was a brave woman. But from the basis of that single misconception, Emma incorporated everything else into it until it was all completely logical and acceptable—to her.”
A frown pulled at the corners of Schwartz’s mouth. “But the weapon is masculine. Why did she choose the crossbow?”
“Because she’d put herself in the male role. Her mother represented femininity, Emma, masculinity. She was an executive—what are today’s executives if they aren’t the warrior class of centuries ago? Emma chose a warrior’s weapon, one that held meaning. She was using the weapons of her life, the very things that had given her and her family wealth and power.”
“I know how she got to Kennedy last Friday,” O’Rourke said.
Hyte looked at her. “So do I. She flew into Kennedy earlier, tranked the pilot and, after she killed Bidding and Sy, drove to LaGuardia. She probably parked the car on a nearby street, or in a motel parking lot. She changed in the car and took the last flight to Denver. When she came back for Sy’s funeral, she moved the car to the long-term lot.”
“She flew under the name M. D. Samael. How did you know?”
“She did it with the Barnes killing,” Hyte said, surprised at how calm his voice sounded. “It was good, too. All the times were so absolute. Barnes died between twelve-fifteen and twelve-thirty. The drive to the city was another forty-five minutes. No way for someone to get to the airport and fly to California in time to make the flight she was booked on.”
“But she was on that plane! You picked her up at the airport,” O’Rourke stated adamantly.
“And she called you from California that night. I was in the office with you,” Tim Smith said, speaking for the first time.
“The plane stopped over in Chicago. That’s where she got on, not California. She flew from New York to Chicago, and picked up the flight there. It wouldn’t be much of a trick to find someone to use her first-class ticket, and her name.”
“But how did she get to Chicago?” Roberts asked.
“If you were rich, wouldn’t you rent a private jet? It was most likely one of the executive air charter services at Teterboro, in Jersey, or at the Westchester airport. We’ll find out in the follow-up. The flight should be logged at O’Hare. We can trace it back, or just call the services here.
“And the phone call,” he went on, looking at Smith, “was done using her car phone, which sounds similar to that peculiar overlap of talk you get with a satellite call from the coast.”
“God, the planning,” Mason said with a shake of his head.
“It’s all part of a paranoiac’s pattern. Everything is worked out to the minutest detail. And I’ll give you odds that Cristobal Helenez, or his wife, purchased something from the Graham International catalogue.”
“Which is why she knew where he was, and we didn’t.
“What about you? How did she...I mean—” O’Rourke stopped herself.
“It’s all right, Sally,” Hyte said, easing her embarrassment. “You want to know how I ended up playing into her hands?” He met her gaze openly. “That was the easiest part, for her. I was attracted to her from the start…and she knew it.
“I think the paranoia came on relatively fast—within a week or two of the hijacking. Once she’d decided on who would die, the method of reaching them followed. That first week, she was angry with me, blaming me for what happened to her mother. Within a month of the hijacking, we had our first date. She called me for it.”
“What I still don’t understand, is why she made you the last victim when she could have taken you out at any time,” Mason said.
“I was last for several reasons. Emma held me responsible for her mother’s death, as responsible as Mohamad, but she wanted to use me to make sure she could complete her mission of revenge. The plan was one from which she never deviated, until tonight. She had me scheduled to die last, and she was going to make it happen that way. When I intercepted her at Masters’ house, she had no choice. I think she knew it would come down to that, because she knew I’d be waiting for her. I told her so last night.”
“But the private heat said she was in
Westchester all night during the Helenez killings,” Schwartz said. “And I spoke to her also. The phone company’s call logs verified it. How could she get around that?”
Hyte explained about Sy’s letter. “Emma snuck out.”
Then she used the call forwarding. She called her number in Westchester, probably from a pay phone in the city. Her own phone was preprogrammed to forward the call to my office. The second part of the call, from Westchester to my office, registered on her phone. I think Sy’s suspicions rose that night at my apartment when she got the phone call from the Japanese businessman. Do you remember that?” he asked O’Rourke.
When she nodded, Hyte said, “Even though Sy suspected Emma then, finding out that he was right was a hard enough shock to slow him down at the airport.”
Hyte’s gaze swept across the expectant faces. “And I contributed to his death, because I missed all the little signs. Her expressions at certain times when we spoke. Her questions were always carefully worded, and so damned precise. Christ, I was her step-by-step investigation manual. Every time I was stuck, I told her what was wrong with the way Samael did things, and like magic, within a day or two I’d have a new lead to follow.
“Samael’s first note came a day after I’d told Emma I was puzzled as to why we hadn’t heard from the killer, as we usually do in cases like this. Then after the Mossberg killing, Emma was furious that McPheerson remained on the case. She pressed me that whole weekend to find out if I was going to stick with it, regardless of the Department. Samael’s phone call came the next day. It was Emma’s insurance, a teaser to keep me in action.”
Hyte exhaled. “Alinski warned me that I probably wouldn’t be able to spot a paranoiac,” he said, and fell silent.
“I’m still having trouble with the idea of you as a victim,” O’Rourke said. “I can’t accept the idea that she wanted to kill you because Rashid Mohamad said you were responsible.”
“It wasn’t what Mohamad had said that had set Emma on me. She’d heard me say something that in her eyes condemned me. She must have heard me say it a thousand times. It was at the end, when Captain Lacey and the anti-terrorist squad came into first class.”
