“Just remember what I’m capable of,” Kadyrov replied. He was starting to regret saying so much. “Some little bird calls the cops on your business here and you’re going away forever. I go down, and you go down. Then ain’t nobody going to be around to protect your old lady.”
“Yeah, yeah, right, you don’t remember telling us about those other women last July,” Vinnie said. “You know, the one come at you like a pit bull so you had to stick her a few times. Then you fucked that other one and did her, too. You was bragging that you’re the Columbia U Slasher.”
“Fuck you. I never said nothing like that,” Kadyrov retorted.
“Yes, you did,” Lydia said, chiming in. “I was sitting right here. I also noticed those blood spots on your pants right after you done them gals.”
“So you did that woman in the Bronx, too?” Vinnie asked. “Or is this guy telling the truth?”
“Whether I did or didn’t, I think both of you should watch your fucking mouths,” Kadyrov said threateningly, standing up. “And remember, snitches end up in ditches. Or maybe a little bird will start singing to the cops about what you do in this rat hole you call home.”
Vinnie held up his hands. “Hold on, son,” he said. “Ain’t nobody snitching on nobody else. What you do on your own is your own business. And I don’t stick my nose in another man’s business, so long as he don’t stick his nose in mine. Your money’s good here, and that’s all I care about. We cool?”
Kadyrov smiled. “Yeah, we’re cool. Outlaws got to stick together, right?”
“Right, son,” Vinnie replied. “And just to show you there’s no hard feelings, how about another bump on me?”
“Now you’re talking,” Kadyrov said. “Care to join me?”
Vinnie smiled and picked up his own kit from the end table next to his chair. “Don’t mind if I do.”
Ten minutes later, Kadyrov was gone. He’d done so much meth he was practically bouncing off the walls and talking about “some big deals” he was going to put together. “Then I’ll be buying ounces, and I better get a good deal or I’ll take my biz somewhere else,” he said, and left.
“That guy gives me the creeps, Vinnie,” Lydia said after the door closed. “I don’t care how much he was tweaking, what he did to those women was bad, real bad.”
“It ain’t our business, Mama,” Vinnie replied. “If we started cutting the killers and creeps from our so-called clientele, we’d have no one to sell to anymore.”
“Did you get that recorded?” Lydia asked.
Vinnie smiled and picked up the fake pack of cigarettes from the coffee table that held a small digital recorder. “Right here,” he said.
After he saw the newspaper article about a suspect being arrested in the Atkins murder, he got an idea. He was pretty sure Kadyrov was the real killer, based on what he’d told them about the killings in Manhattan. He also knew that he’d be dropping by for drugs as soon as he could get the money together. “It wouldn’t hurt,” he’d told his wife, “to get a little something on him in case I ever need to pull an ace from my sleeve with the cops.”
Vinnie pulled the recorder out of the cigarette case, pressed the rewind button for a second, and then played it back. “Whether I did or didn’t, I think both of you should watch your fucking mouths. And remember, snitches end up in ditches. Or maybe a little bird will start singing to the cops about what you do in this rat hole you call home.”
“It ain’t much,” Vinnie said. “Wish I’d thought of it the first time back in July.”
“Well, he’s by here every few days,” Lydia said. “Maybe next time, you should get him really high-he’ll get talkative again.”
Vinnie winked at his wife. “That’s what I’ll do, Mama. We’ll get his ass in a sling pronto.”
10
Entering the forty-eighth precinct house, Detective Joey Graziani made a face as if he’d tasted something bad. He hated working the Bronx, especially as his last assignment had been at the Twenty-sixth Precinct on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Any NYPD detective worth his salt knew that working any borough after Manhattan was a step down. Hell, he’d have rather worked in Harlem than the Bronx.
Graziani knew he’d brought it on himself, though he thought exile had been a bit extreme for his transgression. He considered himself to be a good cop- Fuck that, a great cop, he thought-who had put his life on the line numerous times for Gotham’s taxpayers and his fellow officers. A lot of bad guys were off the streets because of him. And he’d earned his detective’s shield the hard way; he was the son of a Brooklyn butcher with no “rabbi” to grease the skids to the high echelons of NYPD officialdom.
He just got a little greedy, that’s all. Working narcotics, it was common practice for the guys to “split the pot”-some drug dealer would get popped with $20,000 in ill-gotten gains, and maybe only $10,000 went on the official report and into the evidence locker. It was one of the few perks of a dangerous job-“hazard pay,” so to speak.
Graziani’s troubles arose when a coke dealer he busted turned out to be a midlevel operator the DEA had been watching for a year, hoping he’d lead them to “Mr. Big.” Unfortunately for Graziani, the feds’ snitch had just made a buy from the guy using bills whose serial numbers had been recorded. So when half of it went missing and was deposited instead in the bank account of Mrs. Graziani, his ass was in a sling.
The feds were pissed-not so much about the money (they had their own “hazard pay” system) but because of all the time they’d wasted with nothing to show for it. So they wanted Graziani’s head. But the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association had stuck up for him and a compromise was reached. Instead of booting him off the force, they sent him to hell in the Bronx.
Graziani looked at the clock above the fat desk sergeant’s dais. Eleven.
“Sleep in this morning, Graziani?” the sergeant said.
“Fuck you, McManus,” Graziani said without stopping. Even if he hadn’t been hungover, he would have been in a surly mood. He was ruggedly handsome with a perpetual tan, though the drinking was starting to sag his once-chiseled Italian features and the gray was a lot more prevalent than it had been a year earlier. But that didn’t bother him as much as being forty-three years old with twenty years on the job and a career that had taken a giant step backward.
“Fuck you, too, Joey.” McManus shrugged and went back to studying the racing form for the Meadowlands Racetrack. If Graziani wanted to be a prick, let him; he made no attempt to make friends with anyone at the Four-Eight, and the sergeant was more interested in the horses.
Graziani couldn’t have cared less what McManus or anyone else thought of him and made no pretense that he was doing anything other than biding his time until he could get out of there. He didn’t like the people of the Bronx; he didn’t like his fellow officers. Everything was low-class to him and he’d been looking for a way back across the East River since the day he arrived. He figured it was going to take breaking a big case or maybe a commendation for heroism, but so far all he’d managed were a few minor-league drug busts.
As he got to his desk in the squad room, he noticed a small crowd, including some of the top brass, had gathered over in the corner of the large detective bureau room, where the guys in homicide sat. A lot of the attention was directed at Phil Brock, one of the older detectives. The mood seemed jovial, with a lot of back-slapping and handshakes, although, Graziani noted, Brock himself seemed more subdued.
“What’s going on over there?” Graziani said to the young detective sitting at the desk across from his.
“You been on another planet this morning or something?” the younger man replied. He tossed the morning edition of the Post across the desks.
Graziani noted the headline:
POLICE ARREST SUSPECT IN BRUTAL BRONX SLAYING
“This Brock’s case?”
“It is now,” the young detective, a red-haired freckled newbie named O’Connor, said. “He caught a break on the Atkins murder-some asshole th
e guys in patrol picked up yesterday morning after he tried to jump some girl student in Mullayly Park. She made him at a lineup, then Brock stayed on him until he confessed to the assault and then spilled his guts about the Atkins murder.”
Graziani felt his heart skip a beat and then quicken its pace. He had a theory about the Atkins case and the two Manhattan murders that had happened near Columbia University when he was still assigned to the Two-Six detective squad. He’d never shared his theory with anybody else, hoping against hope that if he kept his ear tuned to the drug world, he might be able to break both cases open. And that would mean a transfer back to Manhattan. The Atkins case appeared to be solved, but that still left Yancy and Jenkins.
He’d still been working Narcotics out of the Two-Six when the Columbia U Slasher struck that past July. After a couple of weeks with virtually no leads and the public, egged on by the press, clamoring for an arrest, the brass had put together a small task force comprised of the homicide detectives working the case as well as detectives from other squads.
Graziani had been sent over from narcotics because the shrinks in the NYPD behavioral sciences unit thought there was a high probability that the killer was a junkie. Basically, they said there were two main reasons for their conclusion.
One, the perp robbed his victims but took only items that were easy to locate in purses or in plain sight on dresser tops, or took jewelry from the bodies. He was only after cash or items, like jewelry, that could be quickly converted into cash. But he’d missed a lot-including jewelry and money left in bedroom drawers-and avoided such items as laptop computers and cameras that a professional burglar would not have overlooked.
“But it wasn’t like he was trying to get out of the apartment any too quickly,” one of the homicide detectives working the case had commented. “He took his time raping and torturing his second victim, Olivia Yancy. And then he even washed up, stole a shirt-we’re assuming he trashed the other due to blood-stains-and left like a ghost. This had more to do with rape and wanting to murder this woman than robbery or burglary. Getting a few bucks out of it to feed his habit was secondary.”
Which brought the detective to the second reason the psychiatrists thought the guy was “either your run-of-the-mill psychopath” or “crazed on drugs-like meth… we all know how violent tweakers can get.” And that was the level of violence.
“Not so much the older woman, Jenkins,” the homicide detective said. “She appears to have surprised the killer after he subdued Yancy. We believe there was a struggle and he killed Jenkins in the course of that, but he didn’t rape or maim her. But the younger woman, Yancy, was tied up, gagged, and defenseless. The shit this creep did to her after that went beyond murder. This was rage, plain and simple.”
At that point, photographs from the crime scene had been distributed to the members of the task force. Even Graziani, who’d seen plenty of bloody rooms and bodies, was nauseated by the images. He agreed with the idea that the killer, if not simply a mad dog, was hopped up on methamphetamines. Any cop who knew the difference would rather take on five heroin addicts, who tended to be slow-witted and passive, than one speed freak. Meth addicts always seemed to be armed with guns and knives and were willing to use them. But it was the extreme nature of their violence that separated them from other violent criminals.
Up for days without sleep or food, paranoid and often delusional, meth users could be volatile, and when they went off, they tended to go berserk. It was as if they were releasing the demons of their drug-crazed and fevered minds. And because one of the effects of methamphetamines was to increase the amount of adrenaline in the bloodstream, they could be incredibly strong, quick, and hard to stop. The rule of thumb garnered from the streets was that when dealing with a speed freak carrying a knife, “shoot and don’t stop shooting until the asshole isn’t moving.”
With the photographs fresh in their minds, the task force hit the streets. The guys in sex crimes questioned every deviant they could locate. Burglary checked out the pawnshops looking for the stolen jewelry and questioned the burglars they knew with a history of sexual assault. Graziani’s main contributions had been to question the dealers and tweakers, especially the guys known for carrying knives. But everybody came up empty.
The psychiatrists had been convinced that the Columbia U Slasher would strike again. “This isn’t the sort of rage that goes away,” they said. “It may ebb after a killing, but it will build up again and have to be released. He may have been escalating to reach this point, and if so, he may continue escalating.”
But months passed and there were no new murders that seemed to match this killer. The detectives assumed that either the psychiatrists were wrong and the Yancy-Jenkins murders were a one-time wrong-place, wrong-time incident, or that the killer had left the area, been killed himself, or was in jail for some other offense and wouldn’t strike again until he got out. With nothing new to go on, the Twenty-sixth Precinct task force had been disbanded.
When Dolores Atkins was murdered nine months later, however, good fortune smiled on Graziani. He’d gone out for a beer with his only friend at the Forty-eighth, who happened to be the sergeant in charge of homicide, Jon Marks, a tall, good-natured cop with a receding hairline and a habit of snorting when he laughed. Actually, “friend” may have been a stretch. They’d been partners many years earlier while working uniformed patrol. Graziani had actually saved Marks’s life when he shot and killed a whacked-out biker intent on stomping Marks into the hereafter. So they occasionally went out for a few drinks though they didn’t have much in common.
Over beers, Graziani had learned some of the facts about the Atkins case that weren’t general knowledge to the public or even the rest of the detective squad. The brass had wanted to squelch loose lips from slipping information to the press, so it was supposed to be “need to know” only. But a third beer got Marks talking.
And as he talked, Graziani heard a familiar story. The killer got into the apartment with no sign of forced entry, and no one heard or saw anything. The victim had been gagged and bound faceup on her bed, and she’d been raped, possibly when she was dead or dying. She’d been robbed, but again only of easy-grab cash and jewelry. And the killer had used a very sharp knife and used it extensively.
“You don’t even want to see the photographs of the crime scene,” Marks said. “It was a bloodbath, and he took his time. Then when this guy got done, he washed up.”
Graziani was convinced that Atkins’s killer was the same lunatic who murdered Yancy and Jenkins. But he didn’t say anything to Marks. Nor did he say anything over the weeks that passed, hoping the Manhattan homicide detectives back at the Two-Six wouldn’t pick up on it either given that the brass at the Four-Eight kept such a tight lid on the details. He couldn’t believe his luck that the Columbia U Slasher had reappeared in the precinct where he’d been exiled. If he could just figure out which tweaker liked to cut up women, Graziani would have his ticket punched back to Manhattan. Maybe finally be promoted to detective first grade, he thought.
Now apparently Brock had stumbled onto his suspect. But that’s only for the Atkins murder and this assault, he thought. I can still be the one who ties it to Yancy and Jenkins.
Graziani stood up from his desk and worked his way over to where Brock was being congratulated. He spotted Marks and sidled up to him with a smile. “Hey, can I have a word with you, old buddy?”
“Can’t it wait?” Marks replied. “We got the guy who did the Atkins murder. The captain and the assistant chief are here, and they’re happy with the Forty-eighth detective squad right now.”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” Graziani said quietly. “I think this could be even bigger than that.”
“Okay, shoot, whaddaya got?”
Graziani shook his head. “Not here,” he said. “Too many ears.”
Marks looked back at the circle around Brock then nodded toward an empty office. “Give me a minute, and I’ll meet you there.”
<
br /> When Marks entered the office, Graziani shut the door behind him. “You know I was part of the task force looking into that double homicide near Columbia last July,” he said.
“Yeah, what about it?” Marks asked suspiciously. Although easygoing, he had a well-deserved reputation for not tolerating idiots, bigots, and fools. It was no secret that Graziani wanted back on Manhattan, preferably his old precinct.
“Well, ever since that night you and I went out for beers after the Atkins murder, I’ve been thinking that the same guy also did Yancy and Jenkins,” he said. “Same MO-weapon, bloodbath, and cherry on top, the killer cleans up in the apartment after bloodlust.”
“You think our perp is the guy?” Marks said doubtfully.
“I think there’s a good chance,” Graziani said. “I’d like to ask him a few questions before he’s arraigned and gets a lawyer. Can we put the arraignment off until late this afternoon?”
“Yeah, shouldn’t be a problem,” Marks said.
“Do you know if a quickie indictment is in the offing?” Graziani asked.
“Not sure,” Marks replied. “They had some assistant DA take a statement from him last night after Brock got him to confess. They have our reports; now it’s up to them.”
“Then I should do this quick,” Graziani said.
The sergeant thought about it. “You know, I should probably call homicide at the Two-Six. It’s their case.”
Graziani felt his chance slipping away. “C’mon, buddy,” he said. “I worked for the task force. I know the details of the case, stuff only the killer would know. You call the Two-Six and they’ll take over the case. They’re Manhattan and this is a double homicide. The Four-Eight probably won’t even get credit for Atkins, not until they’re done with him. The brass here won’t be happy with that either.”
Marks considered Graziani for a minute. He didn’t believe that his old partner gave a lick about the Forty-eighth getting credit, but what he said was true. NYPD worked all five of the boroughs, but everybody knew that Manhattan got preference and everybody else was a red-haired stepchild.
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