“Hello?”
“Lee?” His mother sounded upset—her voice was shaky.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s Groucho. He’s…” Her voice shook, and he could hear a muffled sob.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t find him last night, and today I found him underneath the willow tree.” Another muffled sob, and then she came back on the line. “I don’t know if I’m imagining things, but I think he was poisoned.”
“Have Stan take him to the vet for an autopsy.”
“Am I being silly? I know he’s just a cat, but—”
“No, you’re not being silly! How’s Kylie taking it?”
“She’s very upset. She’s with her father today.”
“Okay. Now listen carefully. You call Stan and have him take Groucho to the vet for an autopsy—and let me know the results, okay? Then you go immediately to George’s and stay there.”
“But—”
“Please! Do as I say—for God’s sake!”
“All right,” she answered meekly.
“I’ll call you in an hour to see if everything went all right. And for God’s sake let the police escort know where you’re going in case you get separated, will you?”
“Yes, dear. What do you think…?”
“I don’t know. But please don’t take any chances.”
“I won’t. I’ll be all right. Stan’s here with me.”
“Good—keep him with you.” The more people he could surround his family with, the safer they would be.
I’ll take Manhattan…
The Slasher, whoever he was, didn’t make empty threats.
Chapter Forty-eight
The results from the vet in Jersey were exactly as Lee had expected. The cat had indeed been poisoned—arsenic, mixed in with canned tuna fish. “Poor Groucho. He never could resist tuna fish,” Lee’s mother had said on the phone. There was no way to determine who had done it, of course—but Lee didn’t have much doubt. He urged Fiona to stay at George’s and not leave the house unless she was accompanied by a policeman.
Their meeting in Chuck’s office the next day had a desultory feeling. There didn’t seem to be any way to stop the Slasher—in fact, he seemed to be hitting his stride. Chuck sent out a notice to all precinct commanders in Manhattan to be on alert, but none of them thought it would do any good. The level of vigilance was already high citywide after the attack on the World Trade Center.
Long after darkness closed in on the city, Chuck sent them all away. The mayor had called a press conference for the following day, and he had to meet with the mayor that night to catch him up on their progress—or lack of it.
As everyone was leaving, Chuck beckoned to Lee.
“Got a minute?”
“Sure—what’s up?”
Chuck looked down at his shoes.
“I’m worried about you.”
“Look, Chuck, I—”
“No, please—just hear me out, okay? I was willing to believe on some level that the attack in the subway might be unrelated to this case, but after the incident in Jersey, I’ve been thinking long and hard about this, and we’ve got to face it, Lee: he’s after you now.”
“But why me in particular?”
“That’s what I’ve been asking myself, and I don’t have any answers. But it’s getting too dangerous for you. I wish you’d just—”
“I know what you’re going to say. Now let me say something. I need this case, okay? If we allow him to win, I’ll never be able to get over it. Besides, we don’t know for sure that whoever is after me is really the Slasher.”
Chuck folded his arms. “No, we don’t. But what do you think the odds are?”
“I don’t know—just like I don’t know how he knows the details of my sister’s disappearance, or even if he does. But I have to be the one to find out. You can see that, can’t you?”
Chuck looked down at his shoes again. They gleamed like a new penny.
“For God’s sake, Lee, put it all together. The gunshot, the text message, the—”
“Look, just give me a couple more days, okay?” Lee said. “Please—I’m begging you.”
Chuck bit his lower lip and looked out the window at the darkened city. “Okay, okay,” he said. “Christ, even in school you could always get your way in the end. I’ll let you stay—but for God’s sake, Lee, be careful, will you?”
“I promise.”
What neither of them said was that all the vigilance in the world couldn’t keep the Slasher from making his next move.
Lee went home and played the piano for two hours straight. He spent the entire first hour thrashing through a Bach partita he was working on. It was gritty, sweaty work—the Devil himself had taken up residence in the left-hand passages. What was really irritating was that he could just imagine Bach himself playing the damn thing without so much as a minute of practice.
“Goddamn genius,” he muttered as he grappled with a knotty modulation. No matter what he played, though, the same song kept intruding, running through his head: I’ll take Manhattan…
He made a pot of coffee and drank it until his teeth ached, as he looked through his case notes. After several hours of this, he had to stop, but he was too caffeinated to sleep, so he turned on the radio. A Verdi opera was playing, and he wasn’t in the mood for tremulous tenors and overwrought sopranos, so he tried television.
He watched the Turner Classic Movies’s rerun of Gaslight for a while, but Charles Boyer’s sadistic, tormenting husband routine irritated him. If only villains announced themselves so baldly, he thought. If only their evil intentions were so obviously displayed. He wanted to grab Ingrid Bergman and shake her, lovely as she was, scream at her to wake up and realize what was going on.
“Trying out a little projection, Campbell?” he muttered as he changed channels restlessly. Well, it’s always easier from the outside looking in, isn’t it? Everything is easier—spotting people’s neuroses, destructive patterns, self-delusions. Much harder to spot your own. Physician, heal thyself, indeed.
There was nothing else good on the television, so around 2 A.M. he sat down at his computer and logged on to the Internet. The moment he typed in his password, an instant message appeared in the upper left-hand corner of his monitor. Lee’s chest tightened when he saw the name on the screen: Holyman.
Hello there. What’s the matter, can’t sleep?
He took a deep breath and typed a reply:
I like being up late. What about you?
I’m what they call a night owl, I guess. What do you know—that’s something else we have in common.
Do I know you?
No, but I know you.
Tell me what else we have in common.
We both have a fascination with death.
I hadn’t realized that.
But it’s so obvious.
Maybe you’re right.
Humor him, Lee thought. Try to draw him out.
The only difference is that I’ve held the power of life and death in my hands, and you haven’t.
Really? What do you mean?
You know what I mean.
Okay.
So how is it going?
How is what going?
The investigation, of course. Too bad about the cat.
Anger flooded Lee’s body, making his stomach tighten. So he was behind Groucho’s death. He decided not to give the man the satisfaction of a response.
How did you get my screen name?
Oh, please. Ask me something harder—like how did I manage to abduct a coed from a crowded campus.
Why did you do that to Sophia?
If you were any kind of decent Catholic you’d know.
I know what you took from them. Why did you take what you did?
There was a pause, and then the reply came.
I’m disappointed in you.
I’m sorry to hear that.
You have no idea what it feels like, to hold
another person’s life in your hands.
Tell me.
Do you think that’ll give you another piece of the puzzle you need to catch me?
Not really. I’m just curious.
Curiosity killed the cat.
I’ll take that chance.
Like your sister? Did she take chances?
Lee leaned back in his chair. This man was trying to get him—but had told him nothing important, except that he had done his research about Lee’s family. He counted to ten and typed.
Why do you do it?
He tells me to do it.
Does it get easier or harder?
Easier. Much easier. The first time was the hardest.
Don’t you feel bad for the women?
No. I just think of where they’re going. I’m sending them to God—away from this world of sin and on to God. It is a great privilege, really.
But killing is forbidden by the Bible.
I am a Servant of God. He tells me who to kill.
Lee wondered if this was just a put-on. Was he saying this to set up an insanity defense later? I hear voices from God ordering me to kill, Your Honor. David Berkowitz—a.k.a. Son of Sam—had tried it, claiming his evil impulses were the result of urgings from the neighbor’s rottweiler, but the jury hadn’t bought it. Later he confessed the dog voice thing had occurred to him after his second killing. Berkowitz was highly intelligent, and so was this man.
Lee decided to go fishing, to play along. Maybe he’d find out something.
How did you know about my sister?
It was in all the papers.
Not the detail about the dress.
Oh, that.
How did you find that out?
Finders keepers.
Lee wondered if Holyman had something to do with Laura’s death. He doubted it—though Laura fit the victim profile, it had been over five years since she disappeared. He wouldn’t have taken five years between killings—unless, of course, he was in prison for something else. What, though? This was not the kind of person who would be a “common criminal”—definitely not drugs or alcohol. He tried a tactic to appeal to the man’s sense of isolation.
I do understand you, you know.
Nobody understands me.
I do—I swear it. I know what it feels like to be you.
If you did, you’d know what I’m going to do next.
I do know.
You think you’ll get me to tell you that way?
I don’t need you to tell me.
Reverse psychology—that’s so pathetic.
You seem to know something about psychology.
I know all I need to know.
Really? What’s that?
I’ll be striking closer to home next time.
What’s that supposed to mean?
You figure it out. You’re the one with the degree.
We’re a lot alike, you and I, don’t you think?
Nice try. See you later.
The message box read,
Holyman has logged off.
Lee bit his lip and stared at the screen.
I’ll be striking closer to home next time.
Chapter Forty-nine
The mayor stood on the platform, the sun reflecting off the bald spot on his head. Camera crews jostled with each other to get the best angle, the closest shot. People in the crowd craned their necks and stood on tiptoe, climbing up onto the bases of street lamps, straining to see better. Chuck Morton stood behind him and to the left, next to the Manhattan DA and the police commissioner. The police presence on the street was heavy. Patrolmen dotted every corner, and there were still a few National Guardsmen roaming around in their military outfits.
There was an oddly festive atmosphere in the air. Ice cream vendors wheeled their carts down Park Row, men selling brightly colored helium balloons plied their way through the crowd, and there were pretzel and hot dog vendors on every corner, all of them doing a brisk trade. After a cold, dark February, the temperature had shot up to nearly sixty degrees. Lee could smell coconut oil, bringing with it the incongruent memory of summer days at the beach. He and Butts stood at the edge of the crowd, near the iron gate leading into the park.
Lee couldn’t help thinking of the scene at public hangings, or the crowd that surrounded the guillotine as Madame Defarge calmly knitted her way through the carnage. Knit one, purl two. He suspected most of the people here didn’t believe they were in danger from the Slasher, and that they were just attracted by the event itself. Oh, look, Harriet, the mayor’s giving a press conference open to the public. Let’s grab the kids and head on down. After 9/11, people seemed to gather in groups in public more often, as if there truly was safety in numbers.
“What do you think?” Butts said, sucking on a salted pretzel. “Is this guy full of it or what?”
“Well,” Lee said, “I guess we’ll see.”
The mayor raised his arms, and the buzzing in the crowd subsided. He looked out across the rows of expectant, upturned faces, eager for him to lead them once more, to recite magic words of comfort, once again restoring order out of chaos. The crowd grew silent, and Lee could hear the rushing of the wind through the caverns of lower Manhattan, picking up speed as it crossed over the flat expanse of New York Harbor, to wind its way through the twisted labyrinth of downtown skyscrapers.
A gust of wind lifted a tuft of the mayor’s thinning hair, and he put a hand up to stop it, then seemed to forget all about his hair as the shifting wind brought with it the thin, acrid smell of smoke from the still smoldering ruins a few blocks to the south. The mayor hunched over the microphone and tapped it. There was a buzz, a short, high-pitched burst of feedback, and then silence as the sound crew adjusted their dials. The mayor cleared his throat, and the crowd leaned in to hear his words.
“My fellow citizens,” he began, adjusting the mike stand, “this has been the most trying time in this great city’s history. The events of five months ago proved that New York is indeed the greatest city in the world.”
He paused for the wave of applause that rose from the crowd below, cresting upward and echoing off the narrow streets. “Now, once again, we are challenged by another kind of terrorism—this time violent actions of a lone, mentally disturbed individual. But this great city survived the worst attack ever on American soil, and we will not be cowed by the evil deeds of a single, psychotic individual!”
Again the pause for applause. The mayor removed a stringy strand of hair from his forehead and placed it back on this top of his head. He knew where the applause breaks were in his speech, and his audience didn’t let him down—they clapped long and hard, with a few cheers and whistles sprinkled in.
“And so,” he continued, “I am creating a special task force to oversee the apprehension of the man known as the Slasher.”
More applause. Lee looked at Chuck, standing behind the mayor, his normally impassive face grim. He shifted from one foot to the other, coughed, and looked away. He’s not enjoying this, Lee thought. It was clear that his friend did not like the mayor. He wondered if the mayor knew this. If he did, he was too professional to show it.
After introducing everyone, he stepped back and clapped a hand on Chuck’s shoulder. Lee saw Morton stiffen at the gesture. He managed to force out a stony smile, but Lee wasn’t fooled. The mayor didn’t seem to notice, though, and Lee concluded that he hadn’t gotten where he was by paying attention to every little slight. Like most successful politicians, the mayor had control over his emotions in public. He managed somehow to look both serious and hopeful.
“I am confident that Captain Morton will be successful in leading the elite task force to the successful capture of this heinous criminal.”
“Elite task force, huh?” Butts muttered under his breath. “Wait till the wife hears that one.”
“What does this mean for us?” Lee asked Chuck later, as the three of them walked uptown, passing the Chinese merchants piling empty wooden crates and bags of garbage on the narro
w curb of Mott Street, the fading sun casting a golden glow over the jumble of streets and alleyways.
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