Amanda was obviously displeased at the sudden change to her schedule, but when Balint told her that Steinhoff would be visiting the clinic the following Monday, she had little choice but to join them. Another official from the synagogue accompanied the group—a statuesque, sheep-faced woman who looked far more Scandinavian than Jewish—as did the squat, acerbic wife of Chairman Sanditz. After exploring the clinic on a Monday night, the cardiologist assured himself, his wife would have little reason to drop by again on a Wednesday.
The clinic was operational, but far from successful. It turned out that another free clinic already operated in the neighborhood—one affiliated with a local African American church. On some nights, Project Cain boasted as many physicians as patients. As a result, much of Balint’s VIP tour consisted of showing off unoccupied office space. Without patients, the clinic looked remarkably like any other physician’s suite.
“When do you open?” asked Mrs. Sanditz.
“We are open,” answered Balint.
He steered his entourage across the waiting area into an examination room. One of the house officers relaxed at a computer, playing solitaire. “This is examination room number one,” said Balint—as though flaunting the Crown Jewels of England. “This is our supply cabinet. This is our refrigerator. This is Dr. Desai, one of our senior residents.”
Dr. Desai smiled awkwardly and shook several hands.
“I’m confused,” said the sheep-faced woman. “Why aren’t there more patients?”
“Maybe we’ve cured them all,” said Balint. He continued the tour. “And this is the cabinet where we keep the spare gowns. And this is the unisex bathroom. Would any of you like to try out the unisex bathroom?”
Rabbi Steinhoff exchanged a few inaudible words with Amanda. Then he adopted his pulpit voice and said, “I think it’s crucial to remember that we’ve only been open for a month. The community is just beginning to hear about us.”
“One wonders,” quipped Mrs. Sanditz, “precisely what they’re hearing.”
“And this is the janitor’s closet,” said Balint. “And, lo and behold, this is Mr. Paderewsky, the janitor. Would any of you like to say hello to Mr. Paderewsky?”
Amanda didn’t utter a word to him all evening. He imagined she was thinking: I can’t believe I gave up my night of passion for this. But it hadn’t been his idea to offer healthcare that nobody actually wanted. His fear now was that Steinhoff might pull the plug on the whole enterprise before he’d had an opportunity to do any killing. Fortunately the rabbi wasn’t the plug-pulling type. Balint could already envision the fool doubling down on his clinic—maybe establishing a chain of unwanted healthcare centers—because men like Steinhoff possessed far more hope than life’s evidence ever merited.
IN AN ideal world, he’d have committed his next murder on Long Island. After studying his atlas, Balint concluded that Nassau County was the preferred location—but also, that the distance would be too far for him to travel on a weekday night. Instead he decided that he’d kill in northern New Jersey this time, then find a weekend night when he would have more time for the next murder. If his fifth victim were Sugarman, that would still leave a wide-enough spread to focus investigators on New York City.
He worked as rapidly as possible. His first task was to arrange coverage at the clinic, which proved more difficult than he’d anticipated. Wednesday evening, it turned out, was the surgery department’s Christmas party, and many of the junior medicine attendings planned to crash the shindig for the free booze. After nearly a dozen calls, Balint finally found a visiting pulmonologist from Taiwan whom he was able to cajole with promises of exposure to “unique patient populations.”
On Tuesday, he skipped grand rounds and drove out to the fishing cabin. Fortunately the snow on the stone path had melted—although the undergrowth alongside the trail lay buried under several inches. In preparation for the winter, he cut off six yards of ribbon and secured it inside his wallet. What choice did he have? Then he returned to Laurendale-Methodist during his receptionist’s lunch break. By the time she was back at her desk, he’d already registered the next patient on his own. Nobody, he was confident, had noted his four-hour absence.
Wednesday dawned clear and cold. Balint spent an hour on the telephone that morning with Delilah, assisting her with the complex dosing problems on her nursing school homework. Ever since he’d informed her that he’d managed to place her father on the transplant list—which wasn’t true, yet, but might well be soon—the girl had been frolicking at the top of cloud nine. When they met, at least one afternoon each week, she appeared prettier than ever. Fortunately she’d been assigned to an overnight shift for the next three months, at a hospital two counties away—a clinical requirement for graduation—so she rarely placed any additional demands upon his time. He enjoyed helping her with her homework. It made him feel as though she was also deriving a benefit from their relationship—as though he wasn’t simply using her for his own ends. After he’d taught her tricks for converting doses of short-acting benzodiazepines into long-acting benzodiazepines, he spent the remainder of the day auscultating chests and palpating abdomens. His last patient canceled. At four o’clock, he pulled the Mercedes onto Veterans Boulevard.
This time, he hadn’t chosen a particular town in advance. Instead he cruised up the parkway for an hour and then took the first exit that appeared vaguely suburban. The village he found himself in was Upper Chadwick, a middle-class bedroom community of widely spaced, split-level homes. As though looking ahead to Balint’s spree, the town planners had lined the hamlet’s streets with evergreen shrubs—boxwoods, and laurels, and privet. Most of the sidewalks, especially on the back streets, were largely shielded from the nearby homes. Balint didn’t have a particular plan for selecting his prey, so he circled down various lanes and culs-de-sac, hunting for a promising victim. For a while, he trailed a pair of teenage girls, hoping they might separate, but they ultimately ducked up the same front path. He passed a young man leaning over an open automobile hood, in a particularly quiet stretch of road opposite a vacant park, but the motorist looked strong enough to put up a fight. How much easier, reflected Balint, if he’d been shooting instead of strangling. But guns generated noise and were more difficult to conceal. And, to be candid, he had no idea how to purchase a firearm illegally.
The clock on the dashboard had passed six o’clock. He was feeling desperate, yet he knew not to let his emotions influence him. If he couldn’t find a suitable target, he’d have to defer until another evening. Slipshod work led to the gas chamber, at least metaphorically speaking, although there were no gas chambers left in New Jersey. Yet he had crossed state lines for the Rockingham murder, he knew, so he could indeed face the death penalty in federal court—all the more reason not to be apprehended.
He allotted himself half an hour more. A few minutes later, he passed a local middle school—and, on a whim, he looped into the parking lot. One glimpse was all he needed to confirm his target.
The kid looked to be thirteen or fourteen. Old enough. He was an overweight creature, not obese, but his limbs were stubby; if this weren’t sufficient punishment, genetics had cursed him with a soft chin and a sloping forehead. He sat on a swing set, trailing his feet in the sand below. An enormous backpack rested on the concrete nearby. Not another human being was in sight. The panoramic lights from the middle school roof, affixed at the top of every drainpipe, afforded Balint a complete view of the parking lot, the playground, and the baseball fields beyond. He could not have asked for a more promising victim.
He pulled the Mercedes to the side of the lot. The adolescent looked up for a moment, then returned to his moping. Balint had known boys like this kid before—in high school, fewer in college. They faced miserable futures: What woman wanted to wake up each morning next to a specimen like that? What employer asked a youth like that to sign a contract? The more Balint thought about the boy, the worse he felt for him—and the more convinced he became that, in strangling hi
m, he’d actually be doing the hideous child a favor. Sure, his parents would miss him. Maybe his siblings too. But in the long run, they’d be spared the indignity of watching their homely, hopeless offspring struggle through an adulthood of wretched gloom. He’d spare beautiful women—like Phoebe and Jessie would someday become—from the creature’s pestering advances; he’d save public health dollars squandered on the loser’s future psychotherapy bills. Killing the Rockinghams could be chalked up as a necessary evil; putting this youth out of his misery might actually qualify as a good deed, even if the authorities didn’t see matters that way.
Balint slid on his gloves. He unwrapped the ribbon and stuffed it into his pocket. Even though he’d only done this once before, his actions already seemed like a well-worn routine.
He exited the vehicle and set out across the asphalt. It was a crisp evening. Overhead, in the darkening sky, a solitary planet gleamed. The distance between him and his target was roughly thirty yards. The boy still hadn’t looked up.
At twenty yards, the teen noticed his approach. He eyed Balint curiously. At ten yards, he looked as though he might speak. Balint was literally five feet from the swing set when the kid said, “Hi.” His was a tentative voice, but deeper and more resonant than Balint had expected.
“Hi,” said Balint. “Mind if I join you?”
The teen appeared baffled. He obviously wasn’t accustomed to having his isolation interrupted. But what choice did he have? “Okay,” said the boy.
Balint stepped alongside him, as though he might mount the adjoining swing. Instead he reached out suddenly and wrapped his hands around the teen’s neck. Maybe it was the shock—or maybe the kid felt resigned to what was coming—but he offered surprisingly little resistance. He pried at his assailant’s fingers for a few seconds; then his entire body went limp and heavy like a waterlogged blanket.
Balint dragged the corpse to a nearby hedge. With the dexterity of a trained assassin, he removed the boy’s winter coat to gain better access to his neck, and using a nearby rock, sliced free twenty-four inches of ribbon. He coiled the ribbon around the flabby neck and tied a bow. Then a better idea struck him—and he cut loose another two strands of trim.
He wrapped the additional green strands around the boy’s throat. Three ribbons for victim number three. That would give them a distinctive pattern. Not even the most incompetent of investigators could avoid taking notice.
CHAPTER SEVEN
They did take notice.
By midnight that evening, listening to the radio in his study, Balint learned that the state had put out an amber alert for the missing teen; when he drove to work the following morning, a bird-watcher had already discovered the body. He soon found out that his victim hadn’t been any ordinary adolescent. Not hardly. From among all the awkward teenagers in the state of New Jersey, he’d managed to stumble upon sixteen-year-old Kenny McCord, the oldest son of State Senate Majority Leader Veronica Sanchez-McCord. So if the killing of the Rockinghams had been fodder for the crime blotter, Balint’s third murder blanketed the front pages of newspapers across the state. Local civic groups tripped over each other offering reward money for information leading to an arrest. Soon the bounty topped $100,000. “Justice will be served,” warned the Upper Chadwick chief of police, an avuncular officer who perpetually looked as though he’d just been roused from an afternoon nap. “It is hard to imagine anyone wanting to harm an intelligent, well-liked young man like Kenny McCord. But whoever is behind this outrage, rest assured we will find them.” Chief Putnam informed a press conference that the last murder in his jurisdiction had occurred in 1958. He did not mention any green ribbon.
So saturating was the media coverage of the killing that even Balint’s patients brought it up during their appointments. One elderly woman confessed that she worried about her granddaughters away at college; another blamed the incident on “television and drugs and dancing.”
While Balint waited at the fax machine, he heard his receptionist speculating about the case with the man who’d come to fill the watercooler. “Mark my words,” said his receptionist. “It will all be about a girl.”
“They’re saying that kid was some kind of genius,” said the watercooler man. “IQ over 200. What a waste.”
“No girl is worth dying for.”
Balint had heard similar speculation about other crimes, but now that he knew the truth, these musings sounded downright silly. The kid had indeed been murdered over a girl, in a way, although not remotely as his receptionist imagined.
Even Delilah brought up the murder the next afternoon. They’d met at the motor inn for a brief tryst before she drove out to Somerset County for her overnight shift.
“I’ve always wanted to have children,” she said. “But then I hear about something like that . . . and I don’t really know anymore.”
Balint lay beside her, holding her bare, delicate frame to his. “It’s a fluke. A one-in-a-million,” he reassured her. “The vast majority of children grow up without anything like this ever happening to them . . .”
“But what about those who don’t?”
He wanted to change the subject—but feared it might appear odd.
“I know it’s not a popular thing to say, but my sense is that most of these tragedies are highly preventable. As a parent, you have to be careful. You can’t protect your kids from everything, obviously, but you can make a major difference.”
“I guess,” said Delilah. She gazed at him thoughtfully. “Do you think you’ll have children someday?”
“When I’m ready,” replied Balint—but he hated himself for the deception. Denying the existence of his own daughters upset him viscerally, in a way that lying about his marriage or career never did. “And if I do,” he added, “I’m going to make absolutely sure nothing like that ever happens to them.”
He meant it too.
ANOTHER FOUR days passed before the authorities tied the McCord killing to the Rockingham murders—or at least until the media reported on the connection. During those four days, Balint devoted his every free minute either to following developments in the case on the radio or to reading the New York City papers. Now that the story had become national news, he no longer worried about concealing his interest. If he hadn’t appeared curious—at least mildly so—that might have raised suspicions. Chief Putnam updated the media twice daily, at ten A.M. and six P.M., doing his utmost to debunk conjecture about ransom notes, copycat offenses, even claims of a link to the Lucchese crime family and international terrorism. It was at one of these ten o’clock press conferences that the “Drowsy Detective”—as the chief had been dubbed by the pundits—revealed a potential relationship between the crimes. He stood in front of a seal of the State of New Jersey, flanked by the United States attorney and the FBI’s regional bureau chief. Balint watched the spectacle unfold on one of the monitors in the hospital cafeteria.
“We have been in close contact with investigators in Westchester County,” declared the soft-spoken chief. “We now have reason to believe that the same perpetrator or perpetrators behind the killing of Kenny McCord were also responsible for the murder of an elderly couple in Cobb’s Crossing, New York, on November 24.”
Chief Putnam did not use the term serial killer. The television analysts did.
Expert consultants on the news networks generated precisely the profile of the killer that Balint had anticipated: an angry, disaffected white male between ages twenty and forty, probably a loner without stable employment. To be frank, in spite of his extensive reading on the subject, Balint still had no clue how these experts were able to produce such a specific profile from such limited data—but he wasn’t complaining. All that mattered to him was that none of these profiles predicted the killer to be a married cardiologist with two daughters and a thriving medical career.
Who first disclosed word of the green ribbon to the media remained an unsettled question long after the murder investigation itself had concluded, and successive inquiries b
y multiple task forces were never able to establish the source of the leak. Yet within a week of the McCord killing, the detail became public knowledge. Soon the police themselves were making reference to the “Emerald Choker”—which, Balint conceded, had a more romantic flair than the “Green Ribbon Strangler.” As a result of the leak, Balint learned of his first decisive victory over the authorities: they had traced the ribbon fibers to a wholesaler who supplied retailers in Minnesota and Wisconsin. He took considerable pride in his foresight. Had he purchased his materials locally, the police might already have been on his trail.
Only once did Balint experience any emotional reaction to the ongoing—and increasingly distorted—accounts of his crimes. Following a week of seclusion, State Senator Sanchez-McCord conducted an exclusive interview with Isabel Crosby of “Trenton Tomorrow.” In addition to questions about her son, Crosby asked the young widow about her firefighter husband’s recent death in the line of duty. Only halfway through the encounter, both women were crying. “This isn’t only about Kenny,” said Sanchez-McCord after she’d composed herself. “This is about all of our children. My son might easily have been your son or your daughter.” Balint shut off the radio. He didn’t experience sympathy for the grieving mother, but raging anger: How dare she connect her stunted loser of a son to his darling princesses?
AT MOMENTS, engrossed by the media storm surrounding the “Emerald Choker,” Balint almost felt that he’d already accomplished his goal. But then a flesh-and-blood encounter with Warren Sugarman would jolt him back to reality. The first of these occurred on the same evening that the authorities traced the origins of the ribbon to the Midwest, while he was hurrying into the parking lot en route to his daughter’s ballet recital. Sugarman called out to him from across the plaza.
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