“Are you listening to me, Gene? Are you? Do you want me to—?”
Lassiter struck like a fencer, lunging forward and jabbing the little man in the chest. He pushed the needle into his flesh, driving him back.
“What the—?” Banerjee looked down at himself. A circle of blood the size of a dime stained his perfect white shirt. “Are you crazy?”
Lassiter waved the pole syringe. “This is what they use on mad dogs and rabid cats. The ones too vicious to get close to.”
Banerjee’s blinked, his eyes rolling. He crashed to his knees on the cement floor.
“This is the anesthesia, Sam. What you’re feeling now is what they feel just before the second shot.”
Banerjee keeled over onto his side. He twitched, struggling to move his limbs, but his muscles didn’t respond.
“You, however, are not worthy of the second shot.” Lassiter grabbed the man’s ankles and dragged him across the filthy floor toward the oven. He wondered if Banerjee’s suit was a Brioni. It looked like it could be. Such a waste, he thought.
He picked up a thick leather glove from the floor, put it on, and opened the over door. A blast of fiery heat made him squint. Three-inch flames licked the inner walls. He pressed a button on the control panel, and the metal grid conveyor belt that extended the length of the incinerator started to move with a monotonous groan.
He looked down at Banerjee who was absolutely motionless. But his eyes were screaming.
Lassiter grabbed him by the belt and hauled him up.
Thank God, you’re a little pipsqueak.
He heaved the man into the oven head first, the conveyor gobbling him quickly. His feet flipped up over the lip, knocking off one of his Gucci loafers. Lassiter picked it up and tossed it in. He shut the door and fixed the latch, then pressed another button, feeding more gas to the flames.
The roar of the fire drowned out the barking and yowling. He listened for while, estimating the trip from one end of the oven to the other. When he was satisfied that Banerjee had completed his final journey, he pressed buttons to stop the conveyor belt and turn down the flames. He picked up the pole syringe so he could take it back to the apothecary room. By the time he stepped out into the hallway, he’d already forgotten about the pesky little man. He was thinking about Trisha.
Chapter 10
The next Saturday Lassiter walked from his townhouse to the farmer’s market in Union Square. He needed something. He entered the open-air market from 16th Street, falling into step with the slow-moving crowd. Dozens of tables and booths displayed fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, cheeses, baked goods, and honey as well as folksy arts-and-crafts items—a little bit of Vermont in Manhattan, except that the sun was hot, there was no shade, and the air was heavy with exhaust fumes. The city rarely had much of a spring. The seasons usually went from winter to summer with little transition. It was the end of May, but it felt like the middle July.
He wore a light blue polo shirt, khaki cargo shorts, and a navy-blue Yankees cap, but he hadn’t dressed for the weather. He wanted to blend in. He immediately bought a head of green-leaf lettuce and a bunch of carrots with the tops still on and put them in the canvas bag he’d brought, printed with the words, Be Nice To Your Mother (Earth). He wanted to look like just another environmentally aware, health-conscious shopper. But produce wasn’t what he was here for. He needed something else.
He scanned the crowd through dark sunglasses, honing in on one woman after another, searching for a good prospect. He saw a few possibilities. A painfully thin brunette in black shorts and a yellow tank top with a pink straw tote over her shoulder. An overweight middle-aged black woman struggling with several paper bags full of produce. A sour-faced woman in her sixties with jet black hair and a deep olive complexion who moved slowly from stall to stall, scowling at every item she considered. Not the greatest selection, he thought.
Then he spotted a woman walking with an aluminum cane, carrying a large canvas tote. He veered in her direction to get a closer look, weaving through the crowd. She had tousled chestnut brown hair that swished over her bare shoulders as she walked. Medium height, athletic build. She wore a faded tangerine-colored tank top and cut-off jean shorts. Her body seemed younger than her face. Mid-forties, he guessed. He moved in closer to get a look at her feet. She wore a running shoe on one foot and a royal blue removable cast on the other. Her tote was full of fresh greens. A silver and green backpack hung from her left shoulder, the main compartment unzipped.
He maneuvered through the shoppers like a salmon swimming upstream until he was right behind her and able to peek into the backpack. He could see her wallet, which was made out of some kind of reddish brown nylon fabric.
How stupid, he thought. This is New York City for God’s sake.
He slowed down and let her get a few steps ahead as he pretended to be interested in a row of fruit pies at a baker’s stall. He wasn’t worried about losing her—her injury kept her from moving very fast.
He watched her closely, assessing her. She was impaired, but she was in good shape otherwise. She might put up a fight. But it was always hard to predict.
“Can I help you?” A fresh-faced farm girl in a white apron smiled at him from behind the pie counter. She had a moon face and arms like hams and wore her straw-colored hair in coiled braids over her ears Princess Leia-style.
“No thanks. Just looking,” he said and moved on. He didn’t like people looking at him for too long.
The woman with the cane was leaning over a busy vegetable stand, picking out green beans one at a time and putting them in a paper bag. It wasn’t easy for her, holding the bag, her tote, and her cane. He squeezed in right behind her, setting his bag down between his ankles.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I just want to get some brussel sprouts.” He reached over her to grab a small cardboard box of sprouts with his right hand as his left slipped into her backpack. He nudged her wallet aside, felt loose tissues, then touched what he was hoping to find, her cell phone. He pulled it out and put it in his pocket all before he’d picked up the little green box. His body had shielded the theft from view.
He examined the brussel sprouts. “Hmm… maybe not,” he mumbled to himself and put them back.
The woman paid him no mind. He pretended to look for a better box, then gave up and wandered away from the stand. He didn’t rush as he left the farmers’ market, strolling west on 16th Street, like a guy on a Saturday morning who had all the time in the world. He walked with his hand in his pocket, fingering the silver ring with the onyx stone that he’d taken from Mrs. Wexler’s jewelry box. Despite his happy-go-lucky demeanor, he was on fire inside.
Lassiter descended the extra narrow staircase to the basement of his brownstone on West 21st Street. The house had been built in the 1870s, but sometime during Prohibition, the owner, a Mr. Winston Burwell, had purposely narrowed the staircase with a ten-inch brick wall, a common alteration made by people who ran speakeasies in their cellars. If the police ever raided Mr. Burwell’s illegal establishment, they would have had to come in single file, which gave the patrons a chance to flee through the large rear windows that were level with the backyard. Five years ago, when Lassiter had been house hunting, the speakeasy staircase was one of the main selling points for him. He’d told the real-estate agent that it was the meticulous restoration of the interior that had captured his heart, and without dickering he paid the asking price of $2.4 million.
But it was really the basement space that appealed to him. The rear wall had a bay with three windows that looked out on the garden, which he’d had re-landscaped with crowded stands of tall bamboo around the perimeter to give him year-round privacy. The room had southern exposure, which provided warm natural light during the day, but the other walls were windowless so he always felt as if he were safely inside a cave down here.
As he came off the bottom st
ep, he stared at the shafts of sunlight crossing the king-size bed in front of the windows, and his heart did a little rat-a-tat in anticipation. He’d bought the house because this room reminded him so much of Natalie’s room, and he’d furnished it the way he remembered it. Big bed, puffy pastel blue comforter, golden-oak end tables, periwinkle-blue ginger-jar lamps, lace curtains on the windows.
He crossed an oval brown, beige, and blue hooked rug and went to the door that led to the “dirty basement” where the furnace, water heater, and workbench were located. He opened the door and flipped the light switch. Florescent ceiling lights flickered on over the workbench, which was neat but a bit dusty because it was seldom used. Tools hung from hooks on the yellow-painted pegboard behind the bench—a hammer, a crosscut saw, a hacksaw, vice-grip pliers, a variety of screwdrivers, an orange extension cord, and an ax. A power drill, a belt sander, and a portable circular saw lay on the bench, like three sleeping creatures. A row of glass jars hung over the bench, the lids nailed to a board attached to the floor joists. The jars contained a hodgepodge of nails, screws, bolts, washers, and picture hooks. They had been put up by a previous owner, and Lassiter got the stray hardware with the house.
The rest of the dirty basement was pure Edgar Allan Poe. The red brick walls reminded him of “The Cask of Amontillado,” the Poe story in which a man lures a drunk into a cellar on the promise of sharing a fine brandy, then walls him in with bricks and mortar, guaranteeing a slow agonizing death by starvation. Weak light came in through a small casement window, which had been the coal chute once upon a time. The bricks directly under the window were still dark and discolored with old coal dust. Lassiter suspected that was how Mr. Burwell sneaked hooch into his speakeasy. An iron gas pipe came in from the street through the front wall and extended along the ceiling and through the interior wall into “Natalie’s room” before it curved up to the kitchen.
Lassiter went to the workbench and reached up for the second jar from the left, unscrewing it from the lid. He poured out the contents onto the bench—bolts, nuts, washers—but mixed in with the dull gray hardware were women’s rings. And hair barrettes. And ear rings. And a small pot of lip balm. He picked out the personal items and set them aside. He then dug into his pocket and pulled out Mrs. Wexler’s onyx ring, throwing it on the pile. He didn’t need to count the items. He knew how many he had—23—each one taken from a different bleeder. He would have had more if he had started collecting from the very beginning, but he had been too nervous back then to think about that. He regretted that he hadn’t taken something of Natalie’s, something—anything—to remind him of her. His greatest fear was that he would forget her, that her face, her touch, her smell, everything about her would fade from memory. His time with her, brief as it was, had shaped his entire life. Without her and the memory of her, what would he be? Nothing.
He picked up his cherished reminders one by one. Mrs. Wexler’s ring. Ms. Thayer’s turquoise earring. Mrs. Martinson’s tortoise-shell hair comb. Ms. Trappiani’s oversized, anti-freeze green plastic op-art ring. Mrs. Whiteson’s gold stud. The silver Scotch terrier, an orphan charm he found in Mrs. Appelbaum’s jewelry box. The tiny zip-lock plastic bag containing a little nest of dark hair from the hairbrush of Mrs. Chisolm, one of the Philadelphia women. The cheap dangling earring with multiple ruby rhinestones from Ms. Businski, the other Philadelphia woman. The wedding band from the woman in Indiana. The other wedding band, the braided one, from the woman in Sebastopol. The Chinese red barrette from the schoolteacher in Toronto. He didn’t even know the names of some of the early ones. Back then he’d blow into a town, do his business, and move on, sometimes all in the same day.
He cupped his hands together and rattled some of his prized possessions, like dice. So many nice “souvenirs” he had. The word made him smile. That’s what the profiling books called them, souvenirs. Like six-inch replicas of the Statue of Liberty? Or Mickey Mouse ears from Disney World? Hardly. Mementos might be a better word. It was closer to the way he felt about these objects, but even that word wasn’t exactly right. These things were aides that helped him remember what he’d done and how he’d done it. It was all in his head, and these objects helped him remember. They also helped him recall his first time with Natalie so that he could try to reproduce the feelings he’d had with her. That was his goal—to repeat his Natalie experience with each new bleeder. Some were better than others, but none was as good as her. Except for Trisha. He had high hopes for her. She would come as close to her mother as he could ever get. She might be even better.
He wondered if Trisha had figured out yet that he took things. He never took anything directly from the bodies. He always looked for what struck him as neglected items, things that wouldn’t be missed right away, if ever.
He poured his prizes back into the jar and swept the washers and bolts inside as well, then shook them so they blended before screwing the jar back onto the board. He walked quickly to the doorway, his sneakers squeaking on the gray-painted concrete floor.
He turned off the lights and closed the door behind him. Standing on the hooked rug, he stared at the bay windows. He was impatient, and his body throbbed with longing. He wanted to do Trisha right away. As soon as possible.
He went to the window on the left and pulled down the white shade, then walked around the bed and pulled down the right one. He then knelt on the bed to get the middle. He sat back and took in his artwork.
On the left and right shades he had drawn from memory the view from Natalie’s windows. He’d used color pencils, which gave the scenes the ethereal quality of a dream, which is exactly how it existed in his mind. He wasn’t a great artist, but he was good enough. The left shade showed half of the barn and some of the dirt driveway that ran along the pond, which he had shaded in green and black and dotted with dark pink lily pad flowers.
On the right shade he’d drawn the stage and the carousing party guests on the lawn. Michael McCleery’s band was on stage—drummer, bass player, lead guitarist, keyboard player, and at the edge of the stage leaning into a microphone was Michael himself, strumming an acoustic guitar. The only one missing was young Trisha.
She was on the middle shade. He’d modeled the portrait on a headshot he’d found in an old People magazine next to a review of her one and only album, Shouts and Whispers. But he had modified it a bit, made her more mature, shortened the hippie hair, and changed the mouth to her mother’s weary Mona Lisa smile. He’d worked on that picture a lot, using spit and Windex to erase and revise, over and over. He still wasn’t satisfied, but it was good enough. When he finally lured her here, he would make memories that would last him a long time. Maybe forever. If Trisha was his last bleeder, that would be fine. In fact it would be perfect. Trisha was the ultimate. Killing her would bring him back full circle to his Natalie ecstasy.
He lay on his side and stared at her face. His breathing slowed. His eyes didn’t blink. He slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled out the cell phone he’d stolen at the farmers’ market. He flipped it open and pressed buttons until he got a screen for sending a text message. He punched in Trisha’s personal number. Even though she’d given it to him when they’d had coffee near his office, he’d already gotten it from the trustee forms Cindy and Michael had filled out when they’d started their accounts, and he knew it by heart. His thumbs hovered over the keypad as he considered what to write.
What will get her over here? he wondered. What might goad her into coming? Same thing as before? “Wd really like to know u better”? No, it should be something different. “Meet me at 397 W. 21”? Yeah, right, I’m sure she’d rush right over. And of course, she’d come alone. No, I need something better, something clever and enticing, something subtle.
He stared blankly at the phone. All he could think about was her blood seeping out little by little, watching her die drop by drop.
He forced himself to blink, rousing himself from the budding kill
trance before it got out of control. He detested himself when he was this desperate. He tossed the cell onto the bed, then reached into his pocket for his own phone.
He punched in her number but didn’t press the Send button. He took a deep breath and pulled himself together. He closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see the drawings on the shades. He didn’t want her to hear desire in his voice. Not that kind of desire.
He opened his eyes a crack and pressed Send.
It rang once, twice. He felt his pulse racing, knowing that he’d be hearing her voice—
“This is Trisha. Can’t take your call right now. Please leave a message.”
Voicemail. Damn it! He had wanted to talk to her. But he didn’t hesitate after he heard the beep.
“Hi, Trisha, this is Gene Lassiter. I was wondering if you might like to have lunch or dinner sometime. Actually I was thinking of a trip to the Cloisters. If you haven’t been there, you really should see it while you’re here. If you’re interested, call me.” He gave his number. “Bye.”
He kept his eyes closed and considered how he had sounded on that message. Did he sound likeable enough? Did he sound like a nice guy, someone datable, someone worth considering?
He opened his eyes, and the portrait of Trisha was looking right at him.
Please call, he thought. Please.
His eyes were moist.
Chapter 11
The smells of thyme, mint, fennel, licorice, sorrel, basil, and juniper swirled around Trisha as she strolled through the neatly plotted quadrants of a medieval herb garden on an expansive stone balcony that overlooked the Hudson River and the New Jersey palisades on the other side. She was glad that Gene Lassiter had suggested they come here to the Cloisters, a recreated European monastery from the Middle Ages in upper Manhattan that was part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A tower loomed above them, spears of sunlight peeking through the open arched windows. Trisha imagined lonely Rapunzel held captive there, her long hair flowing down.
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