Secret of the Seventh Sons

by Cooper, Glenn

  Beyond that, Mueller’s partner was a young Special Agent, only three years out of Quantico, who was so imbued with devout ambition and agency rectitude that he likened her to a religious fanatic. He had observed her hustling around the twenty-third floor, speed-walking through the corridors, profoundly humorless and sanctimonious, taking herself so seriously it made him ill.

  He leaned forward, almost ashen. “Look, Susan,” he began, his voice rising, “this is not a good idea. That ship has sailed. You should have asked me to do the case a few weeks ago, but you know what? It was the right call. At this point, it’s not good for me, it’s not good for Nancy, it’s not good for the office, the Bureau, the taxpayers, the victims, and the goddamned future victims! You know it and I know it!”

  She got up to shut the door then sat back in her chair and crossed her legs. The rasp of her panty hose rubbing against itself momentarily distracted him from his rant. “Yes, I’ll keep my voice down,” he volunteered, “but most of all, it’s terrible for you. You’re in the chute. You’ve got Major Thefts and Violent Crimes, the branch with the second-highest visibility in New York! This Doomsday asshole gets caught on your watch, you move up. You’re a woman, you’re ethnic, a few years you’re an assistant director at Quantico, maybe a Supervisory Special Agent in D.C. The sky’s the limit. Don’t fuck it up by involving me, that’s my friendly advice.”

  She gave him a stare to freeze mud. “I certainly appreciate this reverse mentoring, Will, but I don’t think I want to rely on career advice from a man who is sliding down the org chart. Believe me, I don’t love this idea, but we’ve gone over it internally. Benjamin and Ronald refuse to move anyone from Counterterrorism, and there’s no one else in White Collar or Organized Crime who’s done this kind of case. They don’t want someone parachuting in from D.C. or another office. It makes them look bad. This is New York, not Cleveland. We’re supposed to have a deep bench. You’ve got the right background—the wrong personality, which you’re going to have to work on, but the right background. It’s yours. It’s going to be your last big case, Will. You’re going out with a bang. Think of it that way and cheer up.”

  He took another run at it. “If we catch this guy tomorrow, which we won’t, I’ll be history by the time this thing goes to trial.”

  “So you’ll come back to testify. By then the per diem will probably look pretty good.”

  “Very funny. What about Nancy? I’ll poison her. You want her to be the sacrificial lamb?”

  “She’s a pistol. She can handle herself and she can handle you.”

  He stopped arguing, sullen. “What about the shit I’m working on?”

  “I’ll spread it around. No problem.”

  That was it, it was over. It wasn’t a democracy, and quitting or getting fired were not options. Fourteen months. Fourteen fucking months.

  Within a couple of hours his life had changed. The office manager showed up with orange moving crates and had his active case files packed and moved out of his cubicle. In their place, Mueller’s Doomsday files arrived, boxes of documents compiled in the weeks before a sticky clump of platelets turned a few milliliters of his brain into mush. Will stared at them as if they were stinking piles of dung and drank another cup of overstewed coffee before deigning to open one, randomly plucking a folder.

  He heard her clearing her throat at the cubicle entrance before he saw her.

  “Hi,” Nancy said. “I guess we’re going to be working together.”

  Nancy Lipinski was stuffed into a charcoal-gray suit. It was a half size too small and it pinched her waist enough to force her belly to bulge slightly but unattractively over the waistband. She was pint-sized, five feet three inches in stocking feet, but Will’s assessment was that she needed to drop some pounds everywhere, even from her rounded soft face. Were there cheekbones under there? She wasn’t the kind of hard-body grad Quantico typically spit out. He wondered how she’d passed muster at the academy’s Physical Training Unit. They busted it down there and didn’t cut the gals any slack. Admittedly, she wasn’t unattractive. Her practical collar-length russet hair, makeup, and gloss were all put together well enough to complement a delicately shaped nose, pretty lips, and lively hazel eyes, and on another woman her cologne would have done the trick for him. It was her plaintive look that set him off. Could she really have become attached to a zero like Mueller?

  “What are you going to do?” he said rhetorically.

  “Is this a good time?”

  “Look, Nancy, I’ve hardly cracked a box. Why don’t you give me a couple of hours, later this afternoon maybe, and we can start talking?”

  “That’s okay, Will. I just wanted to let you know that even though I’m upset about John, I’m going to keep working my tail off on this case. We’ve never worked together but I’ve studied some of your cases and I know the contribution you’ve made to the field. I’m always looking for ways to improve, so your feedback’s going to be extremely important to me…”

  Will felt he had to nip this kind of wretched talk in the bud. “You a fan of Seinfeld?” he asked.

  “The TV show?”

  He nodded.

  “I mean I’m aware of it,” she replied suspiciously.

  “The people who created the show made the ground rules for the characters, and those ground rules set it apart from all the other sitcoms. Do you want to know those rules? Because they’re going to apply to you and me.”

  “Sure, Will!” she said brightly, apparently ready to absorb a lesson.

  “The rules were—no learning and no hugging. I’ll see you later, Nancy,” he deadpanned.

  As she stood there, looking like she was deciding whether to retreat or respond, they both heard quick light footsteps approaching, a woman trying to run in heels. “Sue alert,” Will called out melodramatically. “Sounds like she’s got something we don’t have.”

  Around their shop, information endowed the bearer with temporary power, and Sue Sanchez seemed to get a jazzy rush from knowing something before anyone else.

  “Good, you’re both here,” she said, shooing Nancy inside the cube. “There’s been another one! Number seven, up in the Bronx.” She was giddy, borderline juvenile. “Get up there before the Forty-fifth Precinct screws it up.”

  Will threw his arms into the air, exasperated. “Jesus, Susan, I don’t know a goddamned thing about the first six yet. Gimme a break!”

  Bang. Nancy chimed in brightly, “Hey, just pretend this is number one! No biggee! Anyway, I’ll catch you up on the way.”

  “Like I said, Will,” Sue said, cracking an evil grin, “she’s a pistol.”

  Will picked up one of the department’s standard-issue black Ford Explorers. He pulled away from the underground garage at 26 Liberty Plaza and navigated the one-ways until he was pointing north, heading up the FDR Drive in the fast lane. The car was detailed and running smooth, the traffic wasn’t bad, and usually he enjoyed a nice run out of the office. If he’d been alone, he would have tuned in WFAN and satisfied his sports jones, but he wasn’t. Nancy Lipinski was in the passenger seat, notebook in hand, lecturing him as they passed under the Roosevelt Island tramway, its gondola slowly gliding high above the choppy black waters of the East River.

  She was as excited as a perv at a porn convention. This was her first serial murder case, the champagne of homicides, the defining moment in her prepubescent career. She pulled the assignment because she was Sue’s pet and had worked with Mueller before. The two of them got along famously, Nancy ready and willing to fortify his brittle ego. John, you’re so smart! John, do you have a photographic memory? John, I wish I could conduct an interview like you.

  Will struggled to pay attention. It was relatively painless to get three weeks of data spoon-fed, but his mind wandered and his head was still fogged up from his late night tryst with Johnnie Walker. Still, he knew he could get into the groove in a heartbeat. Over two decades, he had taken the lead in eight major serial killing cases and kibitzed in countless
others.

  The first was in Indianapolis, during his inaugural field assignment, when he wasn’t much older than Nancy. The perp was a twisted psycho who liked to put out cigarettes on his victims’ eyelids until a discarded stub broke the case. When his second wife, Evie, got into grad school at Duke, he pulled a transfer to Raleigh, and sure enough, another crackpot with a straight razor started killing women in and around Asheville. Nine agonizing months and five diced-up victims later, he nailed that creep too. All of a sudden, he had a reputation; he was a de facto specialist. They bumped him, messily divorced again, to headquarters to work Violent Crimes in a group headed by Hal Sheridan, the man who trained a generation of agents how to profile serial killers.

  Sheridan was a cold fish, emotionally detached and tightly wound to the point where he was the butt of an office joke: if a killing spree broke out in Virginia, Hal would have to be on the hot list. He doled out the national cases carefully, matching the criminal’s mind to the mind of his agents. Sheridan gave him cases involving extreme brutality and torture, killers who directed massive rage at women. Go figure.

  Nancy’s recitations began to penetrate his fog. The facts, he had to acknowledge, were pretty damned interesting. He knew the broad strokes from the media. Who didn’t? It was the story. Predictably, the perp’s moniker, the Doomsday Killer, came from the press. The Post nabbed the honors. It’s blood rival, the Daily News, resisted for a few days, countering with the header POSTCARDS FROM HELL, but soon capitulated and started blaring Doomsday all over the front page.

  According to Nancy, the postcards did not have common fingerprints; the sender probably used fiber-free, possibly latex utility gloves. There were a few nonvictim, nonrelated prints on a couple of the cards, and cooperating FBI field offices were in the process of working up postal workers in the Las Vegas to New York delivery chain. The postcards themselves were plain white three-by-fives available in thousands of retail outlets. They were printed on an HP Photosmart ink-jet printer, one of tens of thousands in circulation, fed in twice to print each side. The font was from the standard Microsoft Word pull-down menu. The ink-drawn coffin outlines were probably all done by the same hand using a black Pentel pen, ultrafine point, one of millions in circulation. The stamps were all the same, forty-one-cent American flag designs, one of hundreds of millions in circulation, the backs peel-and-stick, DNA free. The six cards were mailed on May 18 and cleared through the central USPS processing center in Las Vegas.

  “So the guy would have had plenty of time to fly from Vegas to New York but it would have been a stretch for him to drive or take a train,” Will interjected. He caught her by surprise since she wasn’t sure he’d been listening. “Have you gotten passenger lists for all direct and connecting flights from Vegas arriving at LaGuardia, Kennedy, and Newark between the eighteenth and twenty-first?”

  She looked up from her notebook. “I asked John if we should do that! He told me it wasn’t worth the trouble because someone could have mailed them for the killer.”

  Will honked at a Camry going too slowly for his liking, then aggressively passed on the right when it didn’t yield. He couldn’t mask his sarcasm. “Surprise! Mueller was wrong. Serial killers almost never have accomplices. Sometimes they’ll kill in pairs, like the D.C. snipers or the Phoenix shooters, but that’s rare as hell. Getting logistical support to set up the crimes? That’d be a first. These guys are lone wolves.”

  She was scribbling.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Taking notes on what you said.”

  Christ, this isn’t school, he thought. “Since your pen is uncapped, take this down too,” he said caustically. “In case the killer did do a cross-country dash, check for speeding tickets along major routes.”

  She nodded, then asked cautiously, “Do you want to hear more?”

  “I’m listening.”

  It boiled down to this: the victims, four males and two females, ranged in age from eighteen to eighty-two. Three were in Manhattan, one each in Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens. Today’s would be the first in the Bronx. All the M.O.’s were the same. The victim receives a postcard with a date one or two days in the future, each with a coffin drawn on the back, and winds up being killed on the exact date. Two stabbings, one shooting, one made to look like a heroin overdose, one crushed by a car that jumped the sidewalk in a hit and run, and one thrown out a window.

  “And what did Mueller say about that?” Will asked.

  “He thought the killer was trying to throw us off by not sticking to one pattern.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “I think it’s unusual. It’s not what’s in the textbooks.”

  He imagined her criminology texts, passages compulsively highlighted with yellow markers, neat marginalia, tiny lettering. “How about the victim profiles?” he asked. “Any links?”

  The victims appeared to be unconnected. The computational guys in Washington were doing a multidatabase matrix analysis looking for common denominators, a supercomputer version of six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but so far no hits.

  “Sexual assaults?”

  She flipped pages. “Just one, a thirty-two-year-old Hispanic woman, Consuela Pilar Lopez, in Staten Island. She was raped and stabbed to death.”

  “After we finish up in the Bronx, I want to start there.”

  “Why?”

  “You can tell a lot about a killer by the way he treats a lady.”

  They were on the Bruckner Expressway now, tracking east through the Bronx.

  “You know where we’re going?” he asked.

  She found it in her notebook. “Eight forty-seven Sullivan Place.”

  “Thank you! I don’t have a fucking clue where that is,” he barked. “I know where Yankee Stadium is. Period. That’s all I know about the fucking Bronx.”

  “Please don’t swear,” she said sternly, like a reprimanding middle school teacher. “I have a map.” She unfolded it, studied it a moment and looked around. “We need to get off on Bruckner Boulevard.”

  They rode in silence for a mile. He waited for her to resume her tutorial but she stared at the road stony-faced.

  He finally looked over and saw her lower lip quivering. “What? You’re mad at me for dropping the F-bomb, for fuck’s sake?”

  She looked at him wistfully. “You’re different from John Mueller.”

  “Jesus,” he muttered. “It took you this long to figure that out?”

  Driving south on East Tremont, they passed the Forty-fifth Precinct house on Barkley Avenue, an ugly squat building with too few parking spaces for the number of squad cars packed around it. The thermometer was touching eighty and the street was teeming with Puerto Ricans, toting plastic shopping bags, pushing baby carriages, or just strolling along with cell phones pressed against ears, moving in and out of the grocerias, bodegas, and cheap mom-and-pop stores. The women were showing a lot of flesh. Too many heavy chicks in halter tops and short-shorts, jiggling along in flip-flops, for his liking. Do they actually think they look foxy? he wondered. They made his passenger look like a supermodel.

  Nancy was buried in the map, trying not to screw up. “From here, it’s the third left,” she said.

  Sullivan Place was an inconvenient street for a major murder. Cruisers, unmarked vehicles, and medical examiner vans were double-parked in front of the crime scene, choking off the traffic. Will pulled up to a young cop trying to keep one lane passable and flashed his badge. “Jeez,” the cop moaned. “I don’t know where to put you. Can you swing around the block? Maybe there’s something around the corner.”

  Will parroted him. “Around the corner.”

  “Yeah, around the block, you know take a couple of rights.”

  Will turned off the ignition, got out and tossed the cop the keys. Cars started honking like mad, instant gridlock.

  “Whaddya doing!” the cop hollered. “You can’t leave this here!” Nancy continued to sit in the SUV, mortified.

  Will calle
d to her. “C’mon, let’s get a move on. And take Officer Cuneo’s badge number down in your little book in case he does anything disrespectful to government property.”

  The cop muttered, “Asshole.”

  Will was spoiling for a dust-up and this kid would do just fine. “Listen,” he said, boiling over with rage, “if you like your pathetic little job then don’t fuck with me! If you don’t give a shit about it, then take a shot. Go on! Try it!”

  Two angry guys, veins bulging, face-to-face. “Will! Can we go?” Nancy implored. “We’re wasting time.”

  The cop shook his head, climbed into the Explorer, drove it down the block and double-parked it in front of a detective’s car. Will, still breathing hard, winked at Nancy, “I knew he’d find us a spot.”

  It was a pocket-sized apartment building, three floors, six units, dirty white brickwork, slapped together in the forties. The hallway was dim and depressing, brown and black ceramic checkerboard tiling on the floors, grimy beige walls, bare yellow bulbs. All the action was in and around Apartment 1A, ground floor left. Toward the rear of the hall, near the garbage shaft, family members crowded together in multigenerational grief, a middle-aged woman wailing softly, her husband, in work boots, trying to comfort her, a fully pregnant young woman, sitting on the bare floor, recovering from hyperventilation, a young girl in a Sunday dress, looking bewildered, a couple of old men in loose shirts, shaking their heads and stroking their stubble.