The Russian - SETTING

by Patterson, James

  “That bugs the shit out of me. I’ve been over those crime-scene photos and back to that apartment several times. Nothing. I don’t know if the killer was interrupted and had to leave or if there’s some other explanation. But I still think we’re onto something.”

  Emily said, “Maybe the message at the Staten Island crime scene is tiny. Or just not as obvious as these, like a handful of buttons or some grains of sand. Something someone could have accidentally swept up or knocked over. Based on your theory, this guy clearly needs to taunt us. That’s ballsy.”

  I smiled at her dispassionate evaluation of our killer.

  She said, “So what do you want from me?”

  The research you promised me, I thought, but before I could answer, I heard a voice.

  “Detective…?”

  I turned in my seat and recognized FBI ASAC Robert Lincoln from our previous meeting at One Police Plaza. He wore a gray suit with a red power tie and stood at the entrance to Emily’s cubicle, snapping his fingers like he couldn’t remember my name.

  I recognized it as an old trick meant to put me in my place, but I fell into the trap anyway. I offered, “Bennett.”

  “Yes, of course. What brings you down here? I was under the impression that the NYPD had no use for the FBI.”

  Emily saved me. God bless her. She said, “Detective Bennett was just updating me on their multiple-homicide case. He’s linked the killer we’re investigating here to previous homicides in San Francisco and Atlanta.”

  That caught the FBI supervisor by surprise. “Really? Do you have all his reports, Emily?”

  She nodded.

  Lincoln said, “And you’ve confirmed this?”

  Emily nodded again.

  “Open an FBI case on it. Get in touch with the other jurisdictions. They may be more interested in our help than the NYPD has been.” He looked at me. “We’ll keep you up-to-date on our case.” He paused and threw in a quick, “As time permits.”

  I smiled and said, “Of course.”

  Lincoln asked, “Who will be my contact?”

  I didn’t hesitate. “Macy, John Macy. Technically, he’s with the mayor’s office. You two should hit it off.” I gave him John Macy’s card and Lincoln walked away without another word.

  Emily looked at me. “You handled that pretty well. You’re full of surprises today.” She pulled out a blank notepad and said, “I think I have an idea of what I can do for you. I’ll run everything in your reports, and in the forensic reports, through every database. I’ll also see about getting police reports from the two Atlanta suburbs who refused to cooperate with the NYPD. I’ll even see if I can find some travel patterns.”

  I said, “Emily, you are absolutely the best.” And then, “What took you so long?”

  She gave me a perfect smile and said, “First, tell me something I don’t know. Second, I think we just made it official. We’re both on the same case.”

  Chapter 55

  Somehow, even after everything I’d dealt with during the day, I made it home with energy to spare. I felt excited to engage with my children or even go for a bike ride with Mary Catherine, if that’s what she wanted. We hadn’t been riding quite as much as the three times a week she’d intended when we bought the bikes, though we’d ridden enough that I could tell the difference in my endurance.

  As usual, as I walked to my apartment, I looked forward to experiencing one of my great joys in life: a greeting from my beautiful children. I didn’t care that as they got older, fewer and fewer of them physically met me at the front door. Tonight I just wanted to be with them. Any of them.

  So it was a major disappointment when I opened the front door and found no sweet little ones there to greet me. No one at all. Not even the littlest girls, whom I could usually still count on to be excited to see me.

  The apartment felt eerily quiet. Something was different. I called out, “Mary Catherine? Chrissy, Shawna?” But I got no response.

  I wandered into the kitchen, expecting to find someone in there, but even that was empty. Then I heard someone shout in the living room. Actually, it sounded like several people shouting. Was it an argument? I hurried out of the kitchen, cut through the dining room, and froze at the edge of the living room.

  Three of my boys—Trent, Eddie, and Ricky—were all engaged in some kind of monumental battle on our Nintendo gaming system. I watched over their shoulders for a few moments. I couldn’t tell who was represented by which avatar on the screen. There was an ogre, a guy in green tights, and what looked like an elf, all fighting with crazy-looking monsters. I’d issued a partial ban on realistic shooting games when the boys were younger. As they grew older, I used the excuse that I didn’t want their little sisters exposed to the violence.

  These characters may not have had guns, but there was definitely violence. Still, I withheld any comments. Honestly, I was glad to see the boys all playing so well together. I raised my voice to be heard over the clamor of the battling warriors on the TV. “Hey, guys. Where is everyone?”

  Immediately, Trent pressed a button and the action froze. The three boys looked up at me like they had been caught stealing cookies.

  I assured them that they weren’t in trouble. “I’d prefer a game that taught you something, but at least I’m not seeing any brains being splattered by a sniper here.”

  Ricky gave me a wide grin. “We are learning all kinds of things, Dad.”

  “Like what?”

  “How to fight with swords, what magical spells work best, and most importantly, how much fun it is when the girls all go out for a while.”

  Trent chimed in. “And Eddie figured out how to hack the game to give us access to more powerful weapons.”

  Is it wrong to be proud of your son when he uses his incredible ability with computers to hack a stupid game like this? It didn’t matter. I’m proud of them all.

  I said, “Where are Mary Catherine and the girls?”

  They said in unison, almost like they had practiced it, “Wedding stuff.”

  I chuckled. “What about Brian? Have you seen him?”

  “Mary Catherine left some money, so he went to go pick up pizza,” Eddie said. “He should be back pretty soon.”

  My stomach tightened when I heard that Brian had some extra cash and had volunteered to go out. I was more worried about him than I’d let on to Mary Catherine. Before I could start my interrogation about how much cash and where he’d said he was going, the front door opened and Brian walked in holding two large pizza boxes.

  He looked at me and simply said, “Hey, Dad.” No subterfuge, no hiding anything. He put the boxes down on the dining room table, then joined his brothers in the living room.

  All four of my boys together, playing a game and getting along. No scene could have made me happier.

  I decided to throw caution to the wind and took a slice of pizza into the living room, breaking one of Mary Catherine’s most sacred laws: all food must be eaten at the dining room table.

  I felt emboldened, but as soon as I sat at the end of the couch with a slice of mushroom and onion pizza in my hand, I considered my actions and quickly asked, “What time did Mary Catherine say they would be back?”

  “The girls said they were going to grab something to eat while they were out,” Trent said. “I doubt they’ll be back before nine o’clock.”

  I relaxed and took a big bite out of the slice. I was excited to spend an evening with my boys, playing some kind of stupid video game. It was every father’s dream.

  “Am I allowed to join the game?” I asked.

  The boys were delighted at my request. They immediately stopped the game and restarted it to add me as a player. As I basked in the unanimous acclamation, I felt like a celebrity.

  Before I could start my turn, though, my phone rang, and I dug it out of my pocket. It was Detective Dan Jackson. All he said was “Looks like we have another homicide.”

  “Where?”

  “SoHo. I’ll text you the exact address.�
��

  “I’ll be there as quick as I can.” A tiny part of me shriveled up when I had to inform the kids I was going back to work. It hurt like hell to leave my boys. Especially with those looks on their faces.

  A classic example of a cop leaving his own family to protect someone else’s.

  Chapter 56

  I found the building in SoHo, one with three apartments above an Asian grocery offering certified organic produce. The kind of place young hipsters love.

  A small, anxious crowd had gathered behind the yellow crime-scene tape. About a dozen people watched intently as NYPD personnel came and went from an unmarked blue door on the right side of the market. It was a mild evening with a cloudless sky. New Yorkers will do anything to get outside for a few minutes in nice weather, but I wished they would move along to a park or the waterfront instead of worrying about a serial killer.

  I immediately spotted Detective Dan Jackson’s broad form in the shadows next to the building’s door. He looked up from where he was directing some NYPD forensic investigators and held up a hand in greeting as I walked toward him. Jackson was sufficiently imposing to stop a fight with just a look. But he also got the most out of the people he worked with. The talent that came naturally to him was a difficult skill to learn, much less to master.

  After we slipped hooded biohazard suits over our street clothes and walked up a straight staircase with thick carpet that muffled our steps, Jackson pulled out his notepad. “Lila Stein, twenty-six, didn’t show up for work at the county courthouse on Centre Street. She’s reliably held her position as a court clerk for the past four years. One of her coworkers stopped by to check on her and got no answer at the door. The coworker called 911, and first responders entered the apartment and found the body. Seems to be in keeping with our serial killer’s MO. Dispatch called patrol. They called me. I called you. And here we are on this fine evening.”

  “You know, Dan, I had other plans for ‘this fine evening,’” I said. “They involved video games, pizza, and my teenage sons.”

  “I feel ya, brother. I was going to watch Frozen with my five-year-old twins.”

  I slid on my filtering mask and followed Dan Jackson through the door. I immediately saw Lila’s body, lying on the linoleum floor at the edge of the kitchen, her long brown hair spread out around her head. She almost looked like she was sleeping.

  She wore a bathrobe over a sheer nightgown. Blood stained the front of her garments. The stab wound indicated that a blow from a sharp instrument had struck very close to her heart. There was also a puddle of blood and fluid near the right side of her face.

  Jackson said, “This scene isn’t nearly as bad as the one on 30th, but like that poor vic, this one’s also been stabbed in the eye. That’s why I figured it was connected to our serial killer.”

  I glanced around the apartment, careful not to touch anything. I looked down at the victim again, realizing she had been stabbed in the right eye, like Marilyn Shaw. And this apartment was less of a hellscape than some of the others, more like the scene on Staten Island. Not much seemed to have been disturbed beyond the murder victim.

  So now we had four victims who’d been stabbed in the left eye and two stabbed in the right. Was I placing too much emphasis on which side the killer chose?

  I continued to walk carefully around the apartment. Jackson followed as I explained the working theory Hollis and I had come up with after our examination of the previous scenes in the other cities. About how the killer arranged objects to keep count of his victims. No matter how hard Jackson and I looked, though, we didn’t find any of those markers here.

  Are Hollis and I on the wrong track? What the hell does this mean?

  Chapter 57

  Daniel Ott found an internet café in Midtown Manhattan. The little spot served coffee and stale pastries at high prices in exchange for the privilege of signing on to their lightning-fast Wi-Fi. On a busy day, the place resembled a fancy communal diner, the café’s three long tables crowded with as many as fifteen customers, mostly younger people with lots of piercings and tattoos.

  Ott used a VPN—a virtual private network—to conceal his identity and location after logging on to the Wi-Fi. It might’ve been overkill, but given his internet research, Ott didn’t want to risk anyone accessing his online history from this café.

  He hadn’t finished his research on Detective Michael Bennett. At the library, he’d found out that the Bennett children went to a Catholic school called Holy Name on the Upper West Side. Ott hacked into the faculty chat room, where the most popular topic of conversation was Michael Bennett’s getting married!

  Now, this was a pleasant surprise. Finally, a personal commitment guaranteed to take Bennett’s mind off the case. Ott took a few handwritten notes rather than risk saving any of the hacked links to his computer. He had no real plan just yet. But he trusted one would come.

  Just as Ott reached for his overpriced, bitter coffee, a muscular young man in a black T-shirt and baggy black pants turned to him. Ott tried to decipher the tattoos curling around the man’s neck and up his face but couldn’t tell what any of them meant.

  The tattooed man said, “Yo, dude, nice computer. Why don’t you let us use it for a little bit?”

  One of the man’s tablemates, a scrawny young guy about six feet tall, added, “I promise we’ll only keep it for a couple of days.” The three girls they were with all laughed at his wit.

  Ott didn’t think this was funny at all. He hated men like this, almost as much as he hated arrogant American women. He decided the best course of action was to ignore them, and purposely focused his attention back on the screen of his tricked-out Lenovo laptop.

  The tattooed man wouldn’t leave it alone. He stepped in close to Ott. “I was trying to be nice. Let it seem like you were being generous by giving us your computer. Now I’m just going to take it.” He reached for the laptop.

  As he did, Ott casually drove the point of his steel tactical pen straight through the middle of the man’s hand, pinning it to the wooden table. The tattooed man’s eyes popped wide and he gasped.

  Ott said in a low voice, “Shout or do anything stupid and this pen goes into your throat. Do you understand?”

  The man barely nodded. He was so scared he couldn’t even reach across to pull the pen out of his hand. Ott did it for him with one quick jerk. A tiny spout of blood shot into the air and landed back on the man’s hand.

  Ott said, “Usually my lessons in manners are more severe and intensive. Did this one do the trick? Are you going to bother people you don’t know anymore?”

  The tattooed man shook his head.

  Ott pulled a wad of napkins off the short stack directly in front of him. He handed it to the man, who wrapped it around his hand. Ott calmly used another napkin to wipe up the blood on the table.

  Ott said, “Gather your friends quietly and leave. Right now. If I have to deal with you again, you’re going to lose an eye. Understand?”

  The man nodded again and did just as he was told. He turned to his friends, cleared his throat, and said, “Let’s go.”

  One of the girls said, “I’m not done yet.”

  The tattooed man snatched her coffee off the table and they all followed him out the door.

  Daniel Ott felt very satisfied with himself.

  Chapter 58

  To a cop in the middle of a serial killer investigation, sleep is a precious commodity. Which is why I felt frustrated when I sensed a movement near my feet that dragged me out of my dream. I mumbled Mary Catherine’s name. Then I heard a man’s voice. What the hell?

  I sprang up, completely disoriented. I wasn’t in my bed. I wasn’t even in my bedroom. I shook my head, then rubbed my eyes. I felt like a toddler waking up from a nap, unsure of where I was.

  Finally, I realized I was lying on the couch in our living room. Remnants of the boys’ game night were still evident. Extra chairs were pulled around the Nintendo system, which was still hooked to the TV, and two empty pi
zza boxes sat neatly stacked on the floor, waiting to be recycled.

  I looked to the foot of the couch and realized it was Brian who’d brushed my feet as he gathered up some papers and stuffed them into his backpack.

  Brian said in a quiet voice, “It’s just me, Dad. My phone was stuck in the couch and I needed some of these papers. Sorry.” He stood up and slipped on the backpack. “Why are you sleeping on the couch? Did you have a fight with Mary Catherine?”

  I shook my head, actually had to think before I answered, as if I’d been drinking the night before and everything was confused. “I got in late, didn’t want to wake her, and the next thing I knew you were here.” I looked at the blinds and saw slants of sunshine pushing through the slats. “What time is it?”

  “About six thirty in the morning. I think everyone else is still asleep. They’ve all been really quiet.”

  That quiet was shattered a few moments later as my other sons all came tumbling out of their rooms. I looked at Brian and said, “Thanks for the gentle wake-up, as opposed to the cymbal clash of our very own Bennett family percussion section.”

  I stood up and realized I was even still wearing my shoes from the night before. My body was stiff, and I tried to shake out my shoulders. I felt like I was doing a walk of shame when I shambled into the dining room. The girls all smiled. Chrissy jumped up and gave me a hug.

  Mary Catherine said in a flat voice, “You need more sleep.”

  I wanted to say, No shit. Instead, I just nodded.

  Mary Catherine was serious. “The wedding is sooner than you think. I don’t want you making yourself sick from not eating or sleeping right.” She walked across the kitchen into the dining room, then kissed me gently on the forehead. “The boys told me you got called out again last night. Did you get a break on the serial killer?”

  I shook my head and mumbled, “Just another body.”

  Mary Catherine spoke up so everyone could hear her. “That’s why I instituted a no news policy in this house. There’s nothing else on the news these days but the murders. CNN is even starting to cover them.” She looked at the bright faces around the dining room table and said, “Does everyone understand?”