The Russian - SETTING

by Patterson, James

  No, he had to do it tonight. This girl, she’d made him too agitated. He needed to calm himself. Feel the relief. In a way, Ott was the victim. He had to kill to get mental peace.

  Daniel Ott slipped on the heavy rubber surgical gloves he always wore during his murders. He also took a moment to slide fabric booties over his shoes. He felt like a surgeon. Or a medical examiner.

  Then he froze, relishing the sensation that washed over him. There it is. The first tingling of the first wave of elation.

  He found Elaine’s door and gave a quick, cheerful double knock. It would sound like someone she knew. He stood there with the sharpened Phillips-head screwdriver in his hand. At the last minute he’d decided against the wire cutter.

  He heard the lock turn, and the door opened wide. Elaine really didn’t have any clue about living in New York.

  Ott said, “Hey, Elaine, remember me?” He threw her a cheerful smile. Why not? He was in a great mood.

  He enjoyed the confused look on her face. Even though she’d seen him around her office, she couldn’t place his face. It was both satisfying and infuriating at the same time.

  She started to say something. Before she could complete a single word, he acted. He swung the screwdriver in his right hand in a wide arc just inside the door. It pierced her throat smoothly. He let go of the handle and just gazed at his fantastic work. The black handle of the screwdriver stuck out of one side of her neck and the bloody end poked out the other side.

  Elaine stood straight, just staring at him, still trying to speak. All that came out was a gurgling sound. And blood.

  Ott casually stepped inside, shut and locked the door.

  It took longer than he’d expected, but the shock from the deeply bleeding wound finally caught up to Elaine. The snobby intern took one step back before her legs gave out. First she dropped to her knees. Then she reached out as if she expected help from him. She didn’t look quite so arrogant now.

  When he didn’t take her hand, Elaine tumbled forward.

  This was going to be a night of confusion. At least for the cops.

  Using his gloved hands, he smeared Elaine’s blood in every room on almost every surface he could find.

  Then he began his signature ritual. He took out a vial of blood he had been saving from a previous victim.

  There were a dozen or so baseball bobblehead figurines sitting on a shelf next to the kitchen. He separated four of them and dribbled the blood from the vial over their heads. He couldn’t keep from chuckling. What will the cops make of this? Taunting the police was part of the fun. It was a habit he’d developed over time. It made life a little more interesting. The added thrill made the taunts worth the risk.

  Ott was always simple and subtle with his messages. Maybe one day someone would figure it out, though he didn’t think it would do them any good. He doubted he’d ever be caught.

  Now it was time for his final task. He always left this for last. Ott kneeled next to Elaine’s body, now carefully positioned in the middle of a round throw rug. He pulled out his Gerber folding knife and held it in his right hand. It hadn’t been terribly expensive, but he was impressed with the quality.

  He studied her pretty face and admired her full lips. She’d lost so much blood that her complexion had turned sallow.

  Her eyes were open, staring up at him. He plunged his blade into the left one.

  Chapter 13

  In bed that night, after another long day of not-so-promising leads, I again reviewed reports and Mary Catherine tossed and turned. Finally, she sighed and said, “Maybe if I watch TV it will make me sleepy. Do you mind?” Without waiting for my answer, she took the remote.

  As soon as I heard the theme music to local news, I wished Mary Catherine had never turned on the TV. The anchor led with a simple line: “With three bloody murders in less than three weeks, the city is on watch.”

  Well, it was clear the media had already decided our cases were linked. I tried to tune out the news segment, during which a reporter interviewed people about how they planned to protect themselves. Comments ranged from practical to blasé, and one young woman even seemed enthusiastic about the chance to defend herself: “It’s kind of cool.” And of course one knucklehead lodged the predictable complaint that the cops weren’t doing their jobs. I wondered what he would think if he saw me covered with interview transcripts in my bed.

  Mary Catherine rolled over and draped an arm across my chest. “One of those murders is your case, isn’t it? You need to be careful. It won’t be any fun to walk down the aisle if I have to do it alone.”

  Mary Catherine always had a quip to make me smile. Thankfully the news eventually moved on to other stories, and I drifted off into a deep, exhausted sleep. When my cell phone rang, I was sleeping so soundly—dreaming about my evening with Mary Catherine—I incorporated the ringtone into my dream. It took Mary Catherine’s knee in the small of my back to wake me up.

  She mumbled an apology as I grabbed the phone.

  I heard a male voice. “Mike, sorry for the middle-of-the-night call. It’s Dan Jackson down at Manhattan South.”

  I mumbled the standard answer: “It’s okay, Dan. I was just getting up.” This is old hat for any cop. Holidays, birthdays, it doesn’t matter. You’ve got to respond.

  “Sure you were. Anyway, it looks like we have a homicide down here that’s similar to the ones I hear you’ve been looking at. Two roommates found a female victim with a distinctive facial injury. It’s a very messy scene. There’s so much blood, forensics isn’t a hundred percent sure we’re dealing with only one victim. They’ve just started processing the scene, but they’re theorizing that the killer may have taken a second victim away from the scene.”

  He gave me a little more info and an address just south of Herald Square. I said, “Be there quick as I can.”

  I rolled over in my incredibly warm and comfortable bed, then gave Mary Catherine a quick hug. She murmured something. I kissed her on the cheek and said I’d call her later, to which she responded with more murmuring that sounded like “Be careful.”

  I could get dressed in the dark as quickly and quietly as any human alive. But as I hustled out of the apartment a few minutes later, I caught the flicker of the TV from the living room.

  I saw Brian on the couch, concentrating on the TV. I stepped through the dining room toward him, but his attention never wavered from the screen. As soon as he noticed me, he shut it off and slipped something under the pillow next to him on the couch. I didn’t have to be a cop to notice that furtive movement. Every parent’s experienced it at one point or another.

  “Whatcha doin’?” I asked in a friendly tone.

  Brian shrugged. “Couldn’t sleep. It’s so quiet around here at night. I’m not used to it anymore.”

  “What were you watching?”

  “Nothing, really. Just flipping around the channels.”

  I decided the crime scene I was headed to wasn’t going anywhere. I sat on the end of the couch.

  Brian said, “You heading out to work?”

  I nodded.

  “I used to think I wanted to be a cop just like you. I guess that won’t ever happen now.” His voice had trailed off. With his prison record, he would never be able to get a police job. Another part of the high price he’d paid for his bad choice of working for a drug dealer.

  I could sense his depression. I slid a little closer to him. “You know you can talk to me about anything.”

  “Thanks. I know.”

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Nothing other than I ruined my life and now I’m trying to fix it.”

  “I’ve got news for you, Brian, that’s all any of us are trying to do, all the time. Some of our mistakes might not be as obvious as yours, but we’re all out here trying to fix things.”

  “Even you?”

  “Especially me. Don’t think you’re going through anything alone.”

  Then my son surprised me: he lean
ed over and gave me a hug. But for a moment, I felt like I was holding the old Brian. The cheerful kid who cared more about sports than anything else.

  I left the apartment feeling remarkably good. At least as good as I could be, considering I was heading to a murder scene on only a few hours’ sleep.

  Chapter 14

  With no traffic, I was at the address on 30th Street in less than twenty minutes.

  Brett Hollis met me at the front of the apartment building wearing a new bandage on his nose, not nearly as big and unwieldy as the previous one.

  I couldn’t keep from pointing and saying, “It looks better.”

  “I had to change it because I was having dinner with my mother. There was no way I would’ve survived her questioning if she’d seen a huge bloody mass on my face.”

  “What did you tell her happened? Not the truth, I bet. You lied to make it sound less serious, didn’t you?”

  Hollis shrugged. “I never lie to my mother. I told her I wasn’t paying attention while running. That’s accurate.”

  Detective Dan Jackson from Manhattan South poked his head out of the front door. “You guys ready to come up? We’re trying to limit access.”

  Jackson was known throughout the department for having once chased down and tackled a New York Jets running back who’d punched a woman. Jackson didn’t advertise that he had played college football and was a linebacker at Notre Dame—but that Jets running back would never forget. After he spent the night in the hospital with three broken ribs, the guy had had the nerve to claim he’d been hit by a car. Witnesses contradicted him—they all said Jackson ran him down and hit him like a car.

  I got a feel for the victim’s apartment building as we climbed three flights of stairs to the crime scene. It wasn’t luxurious, but it wasn’t run-down either. Thin but new carpet, decent paint, and lights in the halls. Unremarkable, but better than a lot of Manhattan apartment buildings.

  When we slipped out of the third-floor stairwell, I noticed two sets of crime-scene barriers. I expected the one at the door to the apartment. The other cut the hallway in half about ten feet from the door. I looked at Jackson.

  The big man said, “You’ll understand when you see the scene itself. There’ll be a lot of looky-loos coming up here today once word gets around. I want to be able to stop them before they even get close to the apartment.”

  It made sense. More than one crime scene has been contaminated by inexperienced officers wandering through it.

  We paused by the apartment’s open front door as a crime-scene tech finished a video walk-through of the apartment. I asked Jackson the obvious questions. “Husband or boyfriend?”

  “Roommates said she broke up with her last boyfriend about five months ago. No one serious since. Coworkers and neighbors all liked her but didn’t know her well.”

  “I guess it’s too much to hope for any information from video surveillance cameras.”

  “No cameras in the immediate area. We’re going to canvass the neighborhood in the morning when the businesses are open.”

  It was time for us to go inside. I elected to go in and leave Hollis behind the second barrier. Jackson had a disposable hooded biohazard suit for me to slip over my regular clothes. I’d done it enough times that it didn’t take too long. The suit would keep me from contaminating the crime scene as well as protect me from any pathogens that might be present.

  It’s no exaggeration to say the scene took my breath away, even with Jackson’s warning and my recent experience at Chloe Tumber’s apartment. At first, I thought the apartment was just poorly lit. Then I realized there was so much blood smeared on the walls that it made the whole apartment appear dark. With this much blood, I understood the concern that there could be more unaccounted-for victims.

  It didn’t get any better as I stepped into the living room, where several crime-scene techs were photographing the space from a dozen different angles. In the middle, on a round carpet, lay the body of the young woman. She had a horrendous wound in her neck as well as a stab wound in her left eye. Blood and other fluids had pooled on the floor.

  I tried to keep my composure as Jackson led me around the apartment. The victim looked so young. She must’ve been close in age to my oldest daughter, Juliana. All I could think about was who would notify her parents. To lose a child was horrendous. To lose one like this was unimaginable. I quickly said a prayer for her departed soul.

  When we stepped back into the living room, an assortment of baseball bobbleheads caught my eye. The figurines were lined up on a shelf near the kitchen, but there was a gap between four on the right side and ten on the left side. It looked strangely deliberate. Were there some missing? I noticed blood dribbled over the heads of the bobbleheads—but only the four on the right. The application was different from the blood spread on the walls.

  What did that mean? I made a note to check the crime-scene photos from Chloe Tumber’s apartment, confer with Terri and Javier about any blood at their crime scenes that seemed intentionally placed.

  It wasn’t obvious to me yet, but the blood on the walls and tabletops and bed told a story. The message I got most strongly was that the killer wasn’t finished. No way someone did a killing this methodical, this deliberately bloody, then just quit and never do it again.

  This one had me worried.

  Chapter 15

  I stepped back into the hallway and lowered the hood of my biohazard suit to get some fresh air. Just like Dan Jackson had predicted, there were several uniformed officers out there already, who seemed to have stopped by just to gawk at the bloody scene. Jackson wasn’t having any of it.

  He barked at patrol officers, a sergeant, and even the local precinct lieutenant to get lost. None of them gave him any shit either. The lieutenant mumbled something about being the local commander on duty but still walked away as he was ordered.

  I walked to the other end of the hallway, where Hollis and a couple of other detectives had set up a little command post with computers and evidence boxes.

  Hollis sat on the floor at the very end of the hallway, working on a laptop. I was pleased to see he interacted well with the other detectives, gathering information we would need for a summary to our own bosses.

  One of the detectives looked up from his computer screen and asked, “Is the FBI here? Someone from the mayor’s office is asking.”

  Another detective said, “They said someone would swing by in the morning. Tell the mayor’s office the FBI is in the loop. That should shut them up.”

  When Hollis saw me, I motioned him toward the apartment. I let him pass the first barrier and then stopped him at the door. He hadn’t been issued a biohazard suit because Harry Grissom had him on data collection, but I thought he ought to take a look at this truly bizarre and horrible crime scene.

  It was even worse than what we’d seen at Chloe Tumber’s place.

  I thought I might have to catch Hollis as he looked into the apartment. His legs got shaky and he took a big gulp of air, but he seemed stronger than he had at Chloe’s apartment.

  “I’m gonna say we’re dealing with a true nut in this case,” I said.

  “That’s not an official NYPD term.” He tried to smile.

  “It’s not a term used by any professionals. But I dare someone to look in that apartment and not say whoever did it is bat-shit crazy.”

  I’ll admit, I was creeped out. This guy was a new level of nasty.

  Chapter 16

  I hit the streets, and Hollis hit the books.

  The next day, after spending all day interviewing techs and comparing photos of the New York crime scenes we were trying to connect, I made a beeline for the Manhattan North Homicide office, one floor of an office building owned by Columbia University but nowhere near campus.

  It wasn’t particularly flashy, convenient, or blessed with decent views, but I still loved my office. Its best quality was its location—nowhere near One Police Plaza. It was pure homicide investigation, no precinct built arou
nd it.

  I walked in to find Hollis asleep at his desk, surrounded by stacks of notebooks and color-coded folders. After a few minutes, he popped awake and went right back to reading like he’d never been asleep. That was the mark of a smart cop.

  “You ever read about serial killers?” he asked once he realized I was there. He held out a sheaf of printouts.

  I shook my head. “I learn by experience.”

  “Never? I’d think the topic would interest you.”

  Now I turned to my partner. “I already have interests. Maybe you forgot that I have ten kids? I also have a full caseload. I even have hobbies. Reading about serial killers would be like a lifeguard going to the beach on his day off. Besides, I’m on legwork, you’re the one on research. Remember?”

  He surprised me by then saying, “Not today. I need a second pair of eyes.”

  Hollis explained that he had started a series of searches in newspaper databases, thinking maybe he could find a connection there that the police databases had overlooked.

  I had to agree he made a good point. For the next hour we aggressively searched published records, from the New York Times to local papers to websites dedicated to identifying and tracking serial killers.

  “I never knew all these disturbing details about serial killers, like how so many of them favor strangling and stabbing,” Hollis said. “This shit is horrible.”

  I had to agree. The gory photographs bothered me the most. Followed closely by the knowledge that some people liked looking at crime-scene photographs. There were dozens of websites dedicated to serial killers that showed almost nothing but gruesome photos of their victims.

  Then Hollis had the bright idea to widen the search beyond New York. We came across a news article from San Francisco dated almost a year earlier. There had been two murders there in the span of two weeks; both of the victims were women in their thirties who’d lived alone, and both had been stabbed by sharp implements with their faces “brutally mutilated,” according to the article. One of the women had been slashed around the neck, but the other one was what caught my attention. She had been killed by some sort of implement driven directly through her throat—just like Elaine Anastas.