In reality, serial killers were rarely as imaginative as screenwriters. They just wanted to kill people, and then masturbate themselves raw afterward. They had no handbook telling them that they had to be themed, had to leave clues, had to present a puzzle. In the police’s experience, these people were only special in their own minds. “Well, fuck you, buttercup, and get over yourself” was the unofficial mind-set.
Hammond was not an imaginative man. The psycho wall did not distract him for a second. Instead, he moved to where Suydam sat, blood leaking out of him in lazy pulses, and kicked a gun away. It skittered across the bare floorboards and stopped near Carter as he reached the top of the stairs. He saw it was a strange little thing: a Taurus PLY, its barrel reaching no farther than the end of the trigger guard. CSU later identified it as the smaller caliber .22 model rather than the .25. It was another thing wrong with the day. Suydam’s last line of defense was a tiny holdout pistol intended for concealed carry. It wouldn’t even take hollow points. Carter’s own backup pistol was a Ruger LCR-357, and he was content to bet his life on it. The Taurus was a dissuader, in his opinion, not a killer. It was a strange choice.
Of course, it turned out it didn’t matter at all. CSU also discovered the Taurus wasn’t even loaded.
Carter angled around the floor himself, since Hammond was staying by Suydam, but the area was obviously clear. The staircase opened into the middle of the floor, with a wooden railing guarding the well. There was nothing else in the room, no furniture, no crates, nothing. Just Carter, Hammond, Suydam, and the big end wall covered in crazy. Carter spared it a glance then.
The left end of the wall looked like the Hollywood version, all notes and pictures. The other three-quarters of the wall, however, was something else again. When Carter had been a kid, his mother had taken up a craft hobby. She would take corkboard and cover it with cloth, usually black, mount pins into it, and then spend hours running colored embroidery floss between the pins, back and forth, until the picture picked out by the pins became apparent. At the time, he’d called it lame, but that was just because of where he was in his life. He’d actually kind of liked watching the pattern form as she worked on her pin art, more than when it was finished.
The wall was the biggest piece of pin art he’d ever seen. Every pin was labeled with a small slip of paper that had been printed out, clipped, and glued up there. There was no pattern he could see in the labels. Some were locations, some were names, others were numbers, and others were even abstract nouns like “Desperation” and “Unawareness.” While he could see no pattern in them, there was clearly one in the great loom of crisscrossing lines. It wasn’t much of a pattern, to be sure. No inverted cross or pentacle for the forensic psychologists to get excited about. Just a thick, even field of colored strings, with a distinct thickening in the density of intersections running from the upper right down to about a third of the way along from the bottom-right corner on the lower edge.
“Where’s the boy?” asked Hammond.
“This”—Suydam shifted where he sat, as if trying to make himself more comfortable, and flinched slightly—“hurts more than I thought it would.” He raised the hand he’d been holding to the wound and examined it. A drop of blood fell from the dark red fingers and palm. His expression was as though he were considering an unpleasant thought rather than watching his life leak out of him.
“The boy, Suydam! What the fuck did you do to him?”
Suydam looked up at Hammond as if finding a wry humor in all this. “I pinched him. Quite hard. He squealed like a good ’un. Like a little pig. I knew he was the right one for the job, soon as I saw him on the street. Whining little crybaby. Perfect.” He nodded at the closed door farther along the wall. “He’s in there, Officer. I hope you have candy. Whining little shit that he is.”
Hammond nodded to Carter, but Carter was already moving to the door. He took position on one side and tried the handle.
Suydam watched it all with amusement. “There’s no one else here, Detective. I’m done. No more tricks. No more games.”
Carter ignored him. He opened the door and followed through in a crouch.
A moment later, he called back, “He’s here! Looks unharmed!”
“See?” said Suydam to Hammond. “I’m all done. The jig is up. The dance is over.”
“Shut up,” said Hammond. He called back to Carter, “Don’t bring the kid in here. Call it in.”
Suydam nodded. “Good idea. Coming in here might traumatize him, the poor baby.”
Carter was already ahead of his partner, but was having trouble getting a signal for his cell. The building seemed to be steel framed, or maybe there was construction mesh in the walls. Either way, it was behaving like an unintentional Faraday cage as far as getting reception was concerned. He went to the window and finally got a one-bar signal.
In the other room, Suydam said weakly, “Hey, Detective. I think you killed me.”
Hammond said nothing. He didn’t say good, but he plainly thought it.
“Was planning on being dead already. Blizzard of bullets, you know. Suicide by cop.” He coughed. “Seems to work out for everybody else who tries it. While we’re waiting for me to go into shock, how’s this? How about I tell you why I did it?”
“I don’t care, Suydam.”
“Oh. Okay. Okay. How about I tell you what all that’s about?” He nodded at the psycho wall.
Hammond glanced at it. He really, really wanted to tear it down, but he knew it had to stay intact until it had been recorded. He envied the people who would finally get to cut every thread, pull out every nail, remove every label. He hated the look of the threads, like a thick layer of web. He hated how this expressed just what was so fucked up about Suydam, and how Suydam had created it like a work of art. He glared at it, following the threads with his eyes. He hardly noticed that Suydam was still speaking. Hammond didn’t listen, but he heard.
Carter told Thiago Mata to stay where he was, that the bad man had been caught, and that Thiago would soon be back with his mom. He went back into the other room, the loom of madness on the wall.
Carter saw Hammond shoot himself through the mouth. He saw Suydam dead and smiling. He saw the caul of Suydam’s insanity, his perception, his reason, and his reasons hung upon the wall. There must have been a breeze in the room, for it seemed to swell slowly outward before lapsing back.
Carter understood none of it, and that was just as well.
* * *
It was a difficult public relations pitch. The serial killer without a nickname, known as the “Child-Catcher,” had been quickly and successfully run to ground before he could harm his most recent victim. The boy, Thiago Mata, had been rescued unharmed, and gentle questioning by child services had revealed he had suffered nothing at the hands of Martin Suydam but for being pinched, once and viciously, on his upper arm. He wanted to tell the child psychologist all about that at great length and repeatedly. He had a bruise, here, see? Thiago didn’t care about the abduction, the ride in the pickup, the old building, or any of that. He really resented being pinched, however. The man had told him to cry out as if hurt, and he had tried, but it hadn’t satisfied the man, who became angry and pinched Thiago hard here, see? On the upper arm. There’s a bruise, see?
Two detectives, hearing a cry, had due cause to enter the premises. They had encountered Suydam, who, on being challenged, aimed a gun at one of the detectives. The detective, Charlie Hammond, fired upon Suydam once. He hit Suydam in the stomach with a 9mm round, which perforated the lower border of the spleen and the mesocolon, severing the splenic artery, before hitting and jamming into the spine. Suydam hemorrhaged massively, the body cavity filling with blood, and lapsed into shock within a few minutes before dying.
This was all to the good. Then the heroic cops narrative hit the rocks when the shooter stuck his pistol in his mouth and sucked on a 9mm himself. There was no reason for it.
Charlie Hammond was a fifteen-year veteran. His psych reports were
clean, his home life was simple. He was once divorced, amicably and on the grounds of mutual incompatibility. She had moved to Chicago, and they still corresponded regularly by e-mail.
He drank in moderation, and got drunk maybe once a year, always in company. There was no secret drinking, judging by his apartment afterward. He was in a six-month relationship with a paramedic whom he’d met through the job. It was going well.
Charlie had no imagination, not the kind that makes people brood. When anyone who knew him was told he had killed himself, the first reaction was always disbelief. Charlie? Charlie Hammond? Are we talking about the same guy?
The department’s PR people mulled it over for a while and settled on referring to the entire posse of police who were en route to the house in Red Hook when it all went down as “the arresting officers,” Suydam dying when he aimed a gun at police, and one of the officers tragically dying due to an accidental weapon discharge. They’d worry about the fallout when it was all yesterday’s news.
That was for public consumption. Internally, Charlie shot himself because “the balance of his mind was disturbed.” It could happen to anyone.
Carter thought of the last time but one that he saw Charlie, angry with Suydam, but in complete control of himself. Then the last time, crying and laughing, tears on his face, the pistol between his teeth. He knew Charlie Hammond. For two years they’d been partners, day in, day out. He knew Hammond’s moods, his enthusiasms, his pet hatreds. He knew Charlie Hammond as well as anyone else on earth, and he just could not draw a line between those two moments. Carter could not begin to imagine what had happened in the three or four minutes he was out of the room, checking on the boy and making the call.
Martin Suydam had wanted to die, that much was obvious. The blatant kidnap in broad daylight using a vehicle registered to him. Using the boy’s cry to bring in the police he knew were out in the street. Provoking fire by waving an empty pistol at them. Suicide by cop, an unusually well-developed plan for it. Why he should want that was another thing.
Hammond’s funeral came and went. His ex flew in from Chicago to attend, and she wept real tears at the graveside. His girlfriend was still in shock; she’d seen him just a few hours before when their paths had crossed. He’d been fine, talking about taking her out before the end of the week. Good times. His ex sat with her afterward, and they talked quietly.
Carter felt like an intruder. Every cop present knew he’d been right there when it happened, and couldn’t say a word as to the “why” of it. Some of them seemed to resent him, as if it was his fault. Others pitied him, and Carter liked that less still.
* * *
He stuck it for barely six months after that. He got a new partner, but there was no empathy between them at all. The guy had come up from Miami and pretty obviously wasn’t happy about it. Carter never did find out why he had transferred if he hated New York so much. There were rumors he’d been forced out of Miami, but Carter didn’t care about the gossip one way or another; he simply didn’t want to be a cop anymore.
He handed in his resignation, astounding his lieutenant, who then spent an hour trying to talk him out of it. If he stayed on for another six or so years, the lieutenant argued, he could take early retirement instead. Why jump now when he’d covered half the distance? Carter couldn’t give him a straight answer. He didn’t have one even for himself. It was just time to go, that was all. He missed Charlie, and the job wasn’t the same anymore. It was time to go.
He didn’t mention the dreams he still had, of Charlie standing there with the gun in his mouth. Except, in his dreams, Suydam wasn’t dead yet. He was sitting there, just like he had been, but he was looking at Carter. Carter could never quite read the expression on Suydam’s face in the dreams. It wasn’t a nightmare where things were arranged to scare him, it wasn’t as if Suydam was grinning like Freddy Krueger or any shit like that. It was more like Suydam was in a bad situation, had made his best play to get out of it, and failed. He looked desperate. He looked scared. He looked hopeless.
Then the clack of gunmetal against teeth, and Carter’s first thought was always, Don’t do that, you’ll chip your enamel, and then the gun went off.
Now Charlie was dead, and Suydam was dead. Suydam always went from being alive to dead at the shot, without actually dying. Suydam was alive, or he was dead. In the dreams, there was no transition.
The dream didn’t end there. Carter would turn to go and get the boy, but he would stop because there was something behind him. He turned, and there was nothing there but two dead men, and the psycho wall. The threads billowed as if there was a wind blowing through the wall.
When he went to fetch Thiago Mata, sometimes he was alive, and sometimes he was dead, skull cracked open and amateur surgery carried out on his brain. Either way, he always complained about the bruise on his arm. Once, and once only, the dead version of Thiago Mata told Carter why Suydam had been killing boys, but Carter didn’t understand the words—simple, English words—and awoke confused and frustrated.
* * *
Daniel Carter did nothing at all for a month after resigning from the NYPD. Then he printed off a DOS-0075-f-l-a from the Department of State’s Division of Licensing Services site, and applied for a license. It took a while for him to think of five people to put down as character witnesses, mainly because he would need their signatures and he wanted the thing finished and ready to go as soon as possible. He ended up spending a full day finding the ones he’d chosen and having them sign. It made him feel like a bail enforcement agent, another license the DOS-0075-f-l-a covered. He had checked the first box, though.
APPLICATION AS (Check only ONE):
X Private Investigator
While Carter waited for the bureaucracy to sort that out for him, he downloaded another PDF, printed it out, and filled in as much as he could until he could find an office. He was going to need a business address; the home address he’d used on the private investigator’s license application looked halfhearted to him. He wanted a real business address this time, something real to enter into the PD 643-041 Handgun License Application. He filled it out with particular attention to section one of the “Letter of Necessity,” a detailed explanation as to why the applicant’s “employment requires the carrying of a concealed handgun.”
Chapter 3
FACTS CONCERNING THE LATE ALFRED HILL
The office was three blocks away from Suydam’s house. At least Carter didn’t have to go past there when driving to and from his apartment.
The Suydam house was sure to be demolished. The locals didn’t like having a “murder house” in their neighborhood, and a developer had already stepped forward, offering to demolish and clear the site. They’d made a very small attempt to pass this off as civic altruism, but nobody thought they wanted anything but the real estate, and the developer gave up the pretense quickly.
The house had a cellar, and Carter was glad he hadn’t seen it. Suydam had carried out his experiments in altered perception there, and the bodies of the remaining boys were found under fresh concrete in a subcellar. Suydam himself had consumed industrial quantities of hallucinogens—LSD, Salvia divinorum, psilocybin, and, his personal favorite, DMT—and painstakingly noted his experiences. These he had tabulated in a complex system that was identified as being largely based on the Aarne-Thompson classification system for folklorists. These sets and subsets were, in turn, weighted by an apparently arbitrary system of significances rendered as numbers to two decimal places. The system was sketched out in detail, though without anything but the most abstruse explanation, in the notebooks discovered in Suydam’s bedroom. The system was mapped out more briefly on the left-hand side of the psycho wall.
The rest of the wall defied analysis. Several hundred pictures were taken to form a detailed mosaic, and a CSU tech undertook to create a database of the wall in her own time. The case was, after all, closed.
Carter was obliged to attend the inquiry into the shooting, and it was deemed justi
fiable, Suydam intent on being an asshole to the grave by provoking the police into shooting him. It got out that Hammond had shot himself, and one tabloid made a front cover story of it. By the next day somebody famous for being famous had suffered a wardrobe malfunction, and a random cop eating his gun was no way near as newsworthy as a celebrity nipple.
* * *
Now here Carter was, a gumshoe.
He hadn’t been entirely sure what he was getting into, but it turned out that it was exactly what he had expected and nothing more. None of the additional work that he hoped would lift the job out of the mundane ever came along. Most of it was divorce work, some skip traces, background checks, and missing persons where the person obviously wanted to stay missing, but had left somebody behind who isn’t so cool with that notion. Very occasionally he had to attend court as a witness. Far too often he spent his entire day on the Internet, accessing assorted databases—tax, voter registration, DMV. He’d only used such databases peripherally when he’d been a cop; usually somebody else was quite happy to do it. Now, however, he had a notebook full of passwords for privileged access databases that the public never got a sniff of, a notebook of the kind he had been told by his computer guy not to keep, as it was a bad security risk. Fuck that, thought Carter. How was he supposed to keep all those passwords straight otherwise?
That morning he had a client turn up in the office, which was something that didn’t happen so much. Usually contact was made by phone or by e-mail. Perhaps only one in five clients, if that, actually wanted to sit in his office and talk to him, face-to-face.
None of the one in five was ever a smoky femme fatale, talking in one-liners and sitting provocatively on the corner of his desk. The desk was from IKEA, as was the single filing cabinet where he kept hard copies of contracts, and so were the chairs on either side of his desk. None of them would have suited a sultry femme fatale disporting herself upon them. She would have seemed out of place in the pine-toned office, with its pine-toned furniture and the sandy-haired man behind the desk with the face of a poetic boxer, as an ex-girlfriend of Carter’s had once described him.
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