“Must mean he’s good at his job.”
Grant, happy to accept any compliment from his daughter, gave her an appreciative nod. And decided to wade gently into the unsteady waters.
“So, are you going to at least tell me how you are?”
Grant could see a wisecracking response form in her eyes but was encouraged when it just as quickly faded away.
“I’m fine. Good, actually. I like my job. I’ve got nice friends.”
“I just want to know that you’re happy.”
“I’m happy enough, Dad.”
Her eyes betrayed that there was more as well, but there was also a plea there that she finally voiced.
“Can we just leave it at that?”
“I’ll do whatever you want, Rachel. I’d hope you’d know that by now.”
“Thank you,” she murmured. As she dabbed her lips with the napkin, it didn’t escape his notice that she ran it quickly across her eyes, which he could have sworn had begun to well up.
Grant was certain she was holding back something. Whatever it was, he had no idea. But in that moment, he needed to fill the void of silence that was beginning to engulf them once more.
“As for what I revealed about the case . . .”
“Don’t worry. You’re off the record, Dad.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.”
“You probably did, but that’s okay. I wouldn’t put anything in print you didn’t want me to.”
“I appreciate that. There could come a time where I might want you to.”
He purposely trailed off again. Rachel got the gist right away.
“If it’ll keep someone safe and help you catch this lunatic—I’m your girl.”
You’ll always be my girl, Rach.
“Good,” he simply said.
Rachel started to gather her things. The breakfast clearly over, Grant got to his feet and pulled Rachel’s chair out for her.
“Can I see you again before I leave?” he found himself asking.
“That’s up to you. Everett obviously has my number,” she said, as if he needed reminding. “Maybe this time you’ll call instead of him.”
She moved for the door before he could even consider a hug or any sort of embrace. He wasn’t sure it would have been accepted.
As he watched her leave the restaurant, he thought at least they’d gotten through a meal together.
Sadly, it had taken a homicidal maniac to finally bring them together.
7
Grant decided to make the remaining calls to the residents of 988 Eighth Avenue from the precinct rather than the London. The office might be cramped and devoid of style but it had access to all the NYPD resources should he need them.
By the time he was finished, Frankel had contacted his half of the list as well. They met up and compared notes in the ubiquitous coffee corner, where Grant was pleased to see the fresh box of Lipton English breakfast tea that Frankel had requisitioned.
But unhappy to learn they were pretty much where they started.
With close to six hundred men and women interviewed, there wasn’t a definitive person to single out as the most likely target. Over ninety-five percent of the residents were automatic throw-outs for one reason or many, and the few they gave a second look were long shots at best.
“I wouldn’t be upset if you’ve been holding on to a major lead, Commander.”
“I wish I had one.” Grant proceeded to share the ideas he’d kicked around with Everett the previous evening. Frankel paid close attention but each seemed to be its own haystack devoid of needles.
Grant was replenishing his tea when someone cleared their throat behind them. Both men turned to see a younger detective holding an iPad.
“What’s up, Morton?” asked Frankel.
“Thought you’d want to see this, sir,” Morton responded.
Frankel took the tablet and quickly glanced at it.
Grant would need to have been blind to miss the glower. “What is it?”
“The shit hitting the fan,” answered Frankel. He handed over the iPad.
Five seconds later, Grant was sharing the same grim expression.
It was the web page for the Daily Mail. A headline screamed out that would have been well above the fold in the print edition.
Serial Killer Takes His Act on the Road.
Monte Ferguson’s byline wasn’t quite the size of the headline, but close.
Here we go, thought Grant.
Moments later, Grant and Frankel were in the Media Relations office, having been called on the carpet by its head, a man named Little, and Frankel’s superior, Desmond Harris, a Black lieutenant in his fifties. Harris told Grant his closely shaved, more-salt-than-pepper hair was due to putting out fires that Frankel had started.
“Like the current one,” Harris added.
He indicated a flat screen on the wall that was playing back a just-aired noon newscast. Unlike the stick-to-the-point BBC broadcasts, Grant couldn’t help but be aghast at the sensationalistic display that was the norm on America’s airwaves. Half a dozen field reporters who looked like rejects from a runway model audition had been deployed to every borough. For a station that plastered red chyrons like STORM WATCH or DEADLY WEATHER, the news that an “international serial killer is on the loose” was like reporting on the End of Days.
Monte Ferguson got barely a mention, merely as “first reported by a British journalist.” But Ferguson must have loved the coverage, which had the network’s “crack news team covering the story from every angle!” They had already acquired photos of Father Peters along with Lionel Frey, Melanie Keaton, and the Blasphemers’ Billy Street. The dead never looked so good, like they’d been airbrushed by some Hollywood art department. Someone had even dug up Billy’s not-so-euphonious hit, “Ain’t I Good Enough for You,” and played it in the background of the field reports about a “homicidal maniac preying on New York City.”
Harris muted the replay with the remote. “The job is hard enough without these wannabe actors spreading panic in the streets.”
“That wasn’t the intention when we fed the story to the British reporter,” said Frankel.
Grant was taken aback to see Frankel share responsibility for the deal with Ferguson. He couldn’t let the detective take heat from his superior for something he’d only agreed to but hadn’t instigated.
“I was actually the one who gave Ferguson permission,” Grant told Harris.
“And why the hell would you do that?”
“He was ready to print the story a few days ago in England, even before the priest was murdered. I was able to hold him off at the time, but he quickly made the connection when Father Peters died, and then there was no stopping him.”
Harris shook his head. “If he’d just gone lone wolf with a random story for that rag of his instead of us corroborating it, we could have issued a flat-out denial. Now we have to spend valuable man hours fending off the national media.” He swiveled toward Little. “How many calls have you gotten since this broke?”
Little finally spoke up. “Over three dozen since it went online an hour ago.”
Grant’s eyes drifted back to the muted television. His very own Sergeant Hawley stood on the steps at the Yard holding up a hand to fend off the barrage of questions from the horde of British reporters.
Explains the missed call and voice mail Hawley left me thirty minutes ago.
He’d have to apologize to the sergeant when he called him back. Clearly this was avalanching beyond any control that the men in this room possessed.
“No one talks to this man Ferguson again unless it’s cleared by me or this office,” said the lieutenant. “Is that clear?”
“Gotcha, Loot,” Frankel replied. “In the meantime, should we scrap the ‘denial’ idea and just go with ‘no comment’ when asked?”
“Not so funny, Detective,” Harris told Frankel.
Grant looked over at the television again to avoid a fuming Harris seeing the smile on h
is face. The newscast had moved on to the next story. The red-haired talking head had swiveled in her chair to another camera as a new chyron flashed just below her plunging neckline: Not So Welcome Homecoming.
Meanwhile, Harris continued. “We’re going to work with Little’s office here to prepare a blanket statement everyone needs to stand by until further notice.”
The newscast was running old file footage of a night crime scene. Two bodies on gurneys were being wheeled out of a big house. Grant started to look away but then noticed something in the upper-left-hand corner of the screen.
Another chyron.
Then it disappeared as the coverage ended and the redhead appeared again, ready to talk weather.
Grant waved frantically at the television set. “Wait, wait . . .”
An annoyed Harris glared at him. “What is it, Commander? You’re already on my shit list.”
Grant pointed at the remote control. “Wind that back. Please.”
“Why? It’s not like we’re going to see something we don’t already know, especially since these fools know nothing themselves.”
Grant snatched the remote control and pressed rewind. The images squiggled by until he got to the old crime footage of two bodies being removed from the house. He freeze-framed the image—and felt a familiar chill run up his spine. Grant grabbed Frankel by the shoulder. “Take a look at that.”
The detective was confused. “At what?”
“The upper left corner of the screen,” said Grant.
The red chyron was a specific date.
September 9, 1988.
“You’re shitting me.”
Grant was happy to see the detective was quickly catching up.
“What the hell is this?” asked Frankel.
“It’s follow-up on a story they’ve been running since last night,” Little told them. “The Timothy Leeds case.”
“Timothy Leeds?” Grant asked. “Never heard of him.”
“He got released from prison last night after doing thirty years for a double murder,” explained Little.
“A double murder?” repeated Grant.
Something started gnawing deep in his brain, trying to come together.
“Out on Long Island somewhere,” Little said. He indicated the chyron. “That’s the night it happened. September 9th, 1988.”
The crime blotter report.
The one he’d looked up late the night before when he couldn’t sleep.
It had been right there.
“Oh, shit,” said Frankel. He turned his attention fully to Grant. “I heard a story the other day that this guy was getting released. They made a big deal how he was going to be out in the real world for the first time as an adult.”
“And that would be because . . .?”
“He was only seventeen when he was convicted for murdering his parents,” explained Frankel.
Timothy Leeds had been the textbook case where everyone who knew the teen said he was a quiet kid who had never done a violent thing in his life.
Until one night in early September 1988, when he blew both of his parents away with his father’s shotgun in the Long Island town of Cedarhurst.
It was probably that reputation and no previous record that got him tried as a minor instead of as an adult. Between that classification and the good fortune that the crime had occurred before the State of New York reinstituted the death penalty, Timothy had avoided being given a lethal injection.
Instead, he got a fifty-year sentence but had been granted his release for model behavior following his first parole hearing, having served more than half his term.
When asked why he killed his mother and father by countless physicians, therapists, officers, and magistrates, Timothy Leeds offered up the same answer.
“They wouldn’t let me borrow the car.”
It wasn’t due to a sordid tale of abuse by sadistic parents or unabashed greed like the Menendez brothers. Three decades ago, Timothy Alan Leeds had a very bad day. He had stopped taking the antianxiety medication that his folks had given him since he was an “overactive toddler,” and just acted out in the worst way possible when his parents said he couldn’t take his father’s new car to impress a senior girl.
He had been found weeping over their bodies when the police arrived (a pair of shotgun blasts in the Five Towns will get 911 calls going fast and furious), saying he only wanted to borrow the Ferrari. Timothy never denied his wrongdoing and accepted his sentence like the man he wasn’t yet. He didn’t miss a dose of medication in the thirty years that followed and emerged from his confinement as a man who just wanted to peacefully reenter society.
Unfortunately for Timothy, the city of Cedarhurst didn’t take to this idea.
The upper-crust Long Islanders weren’t about to welcome the town’s not-so-favorite son back with open arms. An online petition when Timothy’s parole hearing was announced became a full-fledged protest the moment he was freed.
So, despite his desire to return to his hometown as a forty-nine-year-old man wanting to resume the life he’d never had, it was arranged for him to be assigned to a halfway house in Far Rockaway, little more than a stone’s throw from cushy Cedarhurst, but more than a few rungs down the class ladder.
By the time Grant and Frankel hit the Long Island Expressway in the unmarked car, the commander had absorbed all of this. They also learned that Leeds had entered the halfway house the previous evening and left shortly after breakfast that morning.
And hadn’t returned.
The best thing about Timothy’s new digs was the unobstructed ocean view, one of many gone-to-seed buildings adjacent to the dilapidated boardwalk that was still in the urban planning stages post–Hurricane Sandy. Directly in the JFK flight path, the sandstone edifice was probably last painted during his presidency.
For more than three decades, it had been taking in released prisoners whose day-to-day movements were pretty much unrestricted. Their recidivism rate was less than five percent, leading Grant to believe someone was doing something right there.
A Long Island sheriff named Barnes met them at the building’s entrance. Stylish, with a white beard and mustache fit for a stint that month as Macy’s Kris Kringle, Barnes had been the one Frankel had gotten on the phone when he’d contacted the local authorities. The sheriff had been unable to locate Leeds upon arriving at the halfway house. That was why Barnes was now standing beside Bentley Edwards, the man who ran the facility.
Edwards, in his midforties, had enough bulk to stand up to the residents he watched over but enough caring in his soft green eyes to make Grant believe the man would lend a tender ear and shoulder to lean on when necessary. Edwards told them he’d seen Leeds just before the man left that morning. Frankel asked if it were normal for a newly released prisoner to be allowed to roam freely, especially one with Leeds’s notoriety.
“There’s a curfew he has to adhere to,” explained Edwards. “Anyone assigned here has been triple-checked by medical professionals and prison authorities before being deemed fit to handle a day-to-day life.”
“No one’s questioning you, sir,” Frankel said. “We’re just trying to get a complete picture here.”
Edwards summarized Leeds’s arrival at the halfway house. The Sing Sing authorities had made sure the release ran smoothly, arranged a quick opportunity for the gathered press to take pictures when Leeds exited the maximum-security prison, then secured safe passage (i.e., no media allowed) to Far Rockaway. Leeds had done the standard intake review with Edwards and later took dinner in his room.
“He said he wanted KFC. So, we got him a bucket and he seemed content,” Edwards said. “Especially at the prospect of sleeping without other people screaming all night as he has for the past thirty years.”
“And what about today?”
“He said he wanted to take a stroll on the boardwalk and dip his toes in the ocean. Can’t say I blame him—even though I wouldn’t go near it with a ten-foot pole. You can’t believe the crap that en
ds up in there.”
“So that’s where he headed?”
Edwards shook his head. “I don’t think so.”
“How’s that?” wondered Frankel.
“He got a call on the house phone. Must have been right around breakfast. One of the other residents took it and came to get him. Leeds left a few minutes later.”
“Did he say who it was?” asked Frankel.
Edwards shook his head. “I didn’t even know about the call until you phoned asking about him. But Chet, the resident I just mentioned? He said Leeds told him it was a reporter who wanted an interview and would pay him good money for his time. So off Leeds went.”
Frankel and Grant traded wary glances.
“Chet didn’t happen to catch the name of this reporter, did he?” asked Grant.
“No,” Edwards answered, his eyes fixing on Grant. “Funny you should ask though. Chet said the man on the other end of the phone had an English accent.”
8
The fresh air felt good on Timothy Alan Leeds’s face.
For the first time in three decades, he was outside the walls of Sing Sing. It didn’t matter that the temperature was barely above freezing, the sky filled with ominous thunderclouds, and the walk to the bar three times as long as the little man back at the halfway house had told him.
He was barely out a day and already looking at making a small fortune.
A thousand dollars. That’s what the reporter had promised.
Back when he’d been incarcerated, that amount of money would’ve kept an angst-ridden teen rolling in dough for six months. Now, he knew a grand would probably not get him very far in life. But with nothing on his résumé except successfully killing both his parents with shotgun blasts, he knew it was an opportunity he had to jump at.
Not that he didn’t yearn to become a useful member of society who could hold down an everyday job. It was all he’d dreamed about in his ten-by-twenty-foot cell. But he knew he wasn’t going to be anyone’s number one candidate.
Therefore, he hadn’t hesitated in going to meet the man at Connolly’s.
The angry gray surf pounded the shore for miles in either direction. For Timothy, the stark power of the Atlantic and deserted white sand was breathtaking, considering the only view he’d experienced for almost three decades was a metal door and grimy stone walls.
The Last Commandment Page 7