A Killer's Essence

by Dave Zeltserman

  He started to grumble about how thin they were, especially with game two of the Yankees-Sox playoffs that night. I interrupted him to let him know that I was missing the game also, and more than that, but I didn’t elaborate on the extra that I was missing.

  “Yeah, I know.” He hesitated for a moment before telling me he’d send out a canine team and also a couple of detectives to canvass the neighboring subway stops. “What do we got here?” he asked.

  “Hell if I know. It’s too early. We don’t even have an ID on the victim yet.”

  “Yeah, but come on. Your gut. Is this a spouse trying to make it look like a psycho, or do we have the real deal?”

  “My gut? We’ve got a psycho. Someone who’s just starting. My gut’s telling me it’s going to get a lot worse if we don’t get lucky. But that’s just my gut. What the fuck does it know?”

  “I had to ask,” Joe said.

  He hung up on his end, and I headed back to the station, surveillance tape in hand.

  Chapter 4

  I got lucky with the surveillance tape. Not slam-dunk lucky, not by any means, but the tape had a time track running in its lower-right corner, and according to that clock a man walked into view at six ten and twenty-three seconds. He had been heading in the direction of the murder and, while still in view of the surveillance camera, stopped, almost as if he were frozen in his tracks. He stood like that for forty-seven seconds, then slowly started to lift up his hands as if he were surrendering. His hands were halfway up when he flinched and stumbled backward, his hands frantically patting at his chest while he stared down at his open palms in disbelief. After several seconds of that, he looked back up and stared straight ahead for several more seconds before turning and running in the direction he had come from, his head lowered as if he were trying to protect it. He wasn’t the killer, that much was clear, but he had to have witnessed the murder. From his reaction, the killer must’ve also turned the gun on him and made him think that he had been shot in the chest. I played the tape a couple of dozen times and nothing else made sense.

  When I was satisfied with my interpretation of what I had seen, I printed out a dozen different frames from the tape, then had those blown up so they focused on my witness. He was in his late twenties, maybe early thirties, and was beanpole thin with this gawkiness and nervousness about him that gave you the impression that he’d have trouble making eye contact with anyone. He wore a windbreaker and light-colored slacks, and his hair was long and unruly, as if it hadn’t been cut in years, at least not professionally. He was also gaunt and unhealthy looking, but that might’ve been exaggerated given how scared he was in that videotape. Fear can do that to someone.

  I scanned the blown-up photos of the witness into my computer and emailed the images to Thomas Jones, then called him to let him know they’d been sent. I asked if he could try matching our witness against driver license photos in the DMV database. He told me he would, and also that so far he’d had no luck finding any profile matches to our killer.

  “I’ve gone back three years and haven’t found anyone cutting off fingers for souvenirs or expediency,” he said. “Same with using a .40 caliber for street shootings. The only perps I found favoring that caliber were using it for bank jobs, and they’re all currently in the system, two in Attica, another at Southport.”

  I suggested that maybe we’d have better luck identifying the witness, and asked him how much longer he was going to be on the job. Jones told me he was already on his third hour of overtime and was hoping to be out by ten so he could catch the rest of the game, and asked what I would need him for later. I explained how forensics was going to be dropping off a facial reconstruction drawing of the victim, but for him not to worry about it and to enjoy what he could catch of the game, that we could do an DMV database search on it tomorrow.

  “There’s a good chance someone will call in identifying her after we get the drawing out over the airways,” I added.

  “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t bet on it,” Jones said. “I have a feeling the only luck we’re going to have tonight is the Yankees laying waste to Boston. Sox have Pedro Martinez pitching and we’ve owned his ass the last two years. Yankees’ his daddy, right? I’m predicting a sweep.”

  “A sweep, huh? Wishful thinking. Last year they took us to seven games.”

  “And they blew it by leaving Martinez in too long,” Jones said. “They’ll find a way to blow it this year too. It’s in their nature. You wait and see.”

  I told him I hoped he was right, and I got off the phone so he could get started searching for my witness. As I sat at my desk my stomach rumbled. It was already past nine and I hadn’t eaten anything since noon. I bought a couple of hot dogs from the vending machine, nuked them, and brought them back to my desk. Other than the mustard I slathered on them, they were tasteless.

  I thought about calling Bambi, but I had no idea when I’d be heading back to the hotel. I wanted to get a name for the victim that night if possible. If she was married and her spouse was behind her murder, it would make all the difference talking to him before he had a chance to calm himself down and fine-tune his story. If I called Bambi without being able to give her a definitive time of when I was leaving, I knew she’d put me through the wringer. I wasn’t up for her games right then.

  I was pouring myself a cup of what had to be New York’s worst brewed coffee—something my station house specialized in—when Joe Ramirez came by to let me know that the canine team found the other three fingers in a sewer grate off of Church Street not too far from Chambers. Joe was a few years older than me and he looked about as tired as I felt, his eyes puffy and bloodshot, his suit appearing as if it had been slept in. I knew he hated this late shift, especially having to deal with the type of crimes that come at night. Early on before his promotion we were partnered together for a few years. I liked the guy.

  I asked, “Did he pull jewelry off them, or was he just fucking with us?”

  Joe made a face at that. “Forensics found skin abrasions consistent with something tight like rings being pulled off of them. Same as with the first finger found. How about you, anything show up on your videotape?”

  “Yeah, I found myself a witness.”

  He raised an eyebrow at that. I brought him back to my desk and played him the videotape, then showed him the blown-up photos I had printed out. His eyes narrowed as he studied them.

  “Any idea who he is yet?” he asked.

  “Jones is running a match against the DMV database. We’ll see what he finds.”

  “Send these to the FBI,” Joe said. “They might have him in their system. And let’s get this out over the news.”

  “I’d like to wait on that,” I said. “How about giving me some time to find him on my own? Maybe the killer didn’t get a good look at him.”

  “How wouldn’t he have? He pointed a gun right at him!”

  “Maybe. We’re guessing that from the videotape. But I’d just as soon not let our perp know we’re looking for this guy, or give him a better idea of what the guy looks like. I don’t want to turn this into a race. I want to find our witness in one piece.”

  Joe gave me a look as if I was nuts, but he told me he’d give me twenty-four hours. “If you don’t know who he is by then we’ll have to get him on the news tomorrow night. You going to be hanging around any longer tonight?”

  I shrugged, told him I was going to have to. “I want to ID the victim if I can,” I said. “Forensics is working on a drawing of what she would’ve looked like if she still had her face intact. Game plan is to get the drawing on the news and see what happens. I’m also keeping my fingers crossed that we get something from expanding the canvass.”

  “Might as well uncross them. Martin called in a half hour ago. He and Schaefer found nothing at the subway stations. I’ve already reassigned them.”

  “Fuck.”

  “That was a long shot at best,” he said.

  “Yeah, I know, but you can’t blame a guy for hoping.
I’m still going to be hanging around, though, as long as you sign off on the overtime. I want to see what happens with the drawing forensics comes up with. Who knows, maybe our witness calls in the meantime. Or maybe someone else. When I get that drawing out over the news, how about some help chasing down leads?”

  Joe shook his head, his thick eyelids half-closed. “Sorry, Stan, I’m squeezed tight as it is tonight. You’re on your own with this. No problem as far as the overtime goes. Maybe you can get Phillips to assign you some help tomorrow.”

  We both knew there was little chance of that unless our perp slaughtered more people—or our victim turned out to be someone with a high enough profile. Until then I was going to be pretty much on my own.

  After Joe left I received a call from the medical examiner’s office. Cause of death was either of the two bullet wounds to the chest. The gunshot to the back of the head was done postmortem. I asked her what was used to cut off the fingers.

  “A serrated blade,” she said. “Something very sharp. The fingers were sliced off cleanly. Right now I’m guessing something military, but we’ll be narrowing it down to a make and model, if possible.”

  The rest of what she told me was what I had already guessed—that the victim was initially shot from in front and had landed on her back; that death had been instantaneous with one hollow-point rupturing her heart, the other obliterating nearly both her lungs; that she appeared to be in her early fifties; and that no blood, hair samples, or skin other than from the victim was found. She told me she’d call back when she identified the type of knife that was used.

  A half hour later Thomas Jones called to tell me he was having no luck matching my witness against anyone in the DMV database and that he was calling it quits for the night. During the next hour while I waited for the facial reconstruction drawing I followed the Yankees game over the Internet and thought about giving Mike a call. I knew he’d be sitting alone in his empty studio apartment watching the game, and the thought of that bothered me, but I didn’t call him. By the time Albert Milanaski from forensics delivered me the drawing the good guys were up two to zip.

  The drawing was of an attractive woman with a slender face and almond-shaped eyes. Her nose, which had been almost completely missing from the corpse, was narrow and somewhat longish, and her mouth, which also had been blown off the corpse, was drawn as wide and full. The drawing reminded me of Helen Mirren from the British series Prime Suspect. The drawing also included the height and weight of the victim: five foot three inches and a hundred and seven pounds. As small as she was, when I had seen her body lying torn and bloodied on the sidewalk I’d had the impression of her being even smaller. Death has a way of diminishing a person.

  I faxed the drawing to the local stations and then got on the phone with each of their news directors and was told they’d be using it as well as displaying the tip number that had been set up. That number ended up generating twenty-seven calls—God knows how many we would’ve gotten if most of New York hadn’t been tuned in to the baseball game. I was left by myself to check them out. It took me more than two hours and none of them led anywhere. By the time I was done it was one thirty, and the only thing positive from the night was that the Yankees had won three to one and were up two games to none in the series.

  It was one forty-six by the time I got back to my hotel room. An empty bottle of champagne had been left on the carpet, and the remains of a beef tenderloin dinner and what looked like an untouched platter of caviar were on a small table that had been rolled in and set up with a silk cloth and a single red rose in a crystal vase. I picked up the Champagne bottle, rolled the table out of the room, and left it all in the hallway. Bambi was out of it as she lay curled up in bed. I got in and joined her. The bed was about as comfortable as any you could ever imagine and I was tired as hell, but my mind was racing too much for me to get much sleep. I kept playing back that videotape and the look of absolute horror that formed over my witness’s face as he stopped dead in his tracks. I also kept seeing the victim lying crumpled on the sidewalk. And I kept wondering when more bodies were going to be found, because I knew our guy wasn’t done, not by a long shot. Maybe I ended up getting a total of a half hour’s sleep, maybe less. By six o’clock next morning I was both exhausted and wide awake. I was also antsy to get back on the job. Bambi was groggy and still mostly out of it. I took a quick shower and instead of trying one of the hotel’s three-hundred-dollar omelets, I grabbed a bagel and cream cheese on the way to the precinct.

  Chapter 5

  Dozens more calls about the dead woman had come in overnight and it took me until eleven to track them down, but none of them led anywhere. After I finished up with that I went through the list of bookstore employees that I was given, but none of them saw anything, at least that’s what they were telling me. Bambi called once to tell me I was an asshole and that she was at that moment enjoying a five-hundred-dollar breakfast and I could go fuck myself for not being there with her. Before I could say a word she hung up on me. I thought about heading back to the hotel but I wasn’t up to the icy welcome that she would’ve had waiting for me, and at the time I still had more leads to look into. Later that morning the ME’s office called to tell me they were able to identify the make and model of the knife that was used. It probably would be of little help in tracking down the killer since according to the woman I was talking to it was a popular brand with probably thousands sold over the Internet, and more sold at stores and pawnshops, but when we found our guy and he still had the knife on him it would help with a conviction. I called Phillips to give him the information. He didn’t seem too optimistic about it.

  I took my lunch break at noon and visited Rich Grissini at St. Vincent’s, bringing him an Italian sausage hero slathered in onions and peppers from his favorite takeout place, guessing that at this point he’d be sick of hospital food and badly in need of some unhealthy grease in his system. He looked in pretty rough shape lying in bed in his hospital gown, both eyes blackened as if he’d been in a brawl, his skin tinged a sickly yellow and sagging loosely around his jowls. He peered at me through thin slits, the whites of his eyes bloody. He tried to grin but it was a feeble attempt.

  “Hey, look who the cat dragged in,” he said in a thin voice, his lips moving about as much as a bad ventriloquist’s. “You ain’t lookin’ so hot. Whatsa matter, you didn’t sleep so good last night?”

  “How could I, worried about you?”

  That got a weak chuckle out of him. I pulled a white plastic hospital chair up next to his bed and unwrapped his sandwich. He licked his lips and asked whether it was from Toscone’s.

  “What do you think?”

  “Fuck, I can’t eat it, Stan,” he croaked, disappointment settling over his features. “I can’t eat nothin’. They got me under the knife at seven. My right hip’s fractured in three places and they’re going to try to repair it. I’m just hoping I don’t need an artificial one, not at my age. You eat the sandwich. It would break my heart for a Toscone sausage hero to go to waste.”

  My stomach was making noise again. It had been almost five hours since that bagel and cream cheese, and that had been all I’d eaten that day. I took a halfhearted bite out of the hero and chewed it slowly. Rich was six feet and two hundred and ten pounds, but I couldn’t believe how shrunken he looked lying there. I couldn’t believe how much older he looked either. Christ, he was only five years older than me, but right then you’d never have been able to guess that.

  “It hurts pretty bad, huh?” I asked.

  He shook his head from side to side an inch or so. “They got me so pumped up with morphine that it ain’t so bad. My head hurts more than anything. Fucking concussion. Anyone call in the sumabitch who hit me?”

  “Not since I checked. You don’t remember make and model, huh?”

  “I never even saw the sumabitch coming. Damn bastard nailed me out of nowhere.” He shifted his eyes away from me for a moment. “Last I remember I was chasin’ some purse snatc
her across Seventh when bam, lights out. Then I woke up here.”

  We both knew he was lying. Even if I didn’t know him well enough to know what that hard smirk twisting up his lips meant, I’d been partnered with him long enough to know that his favorite pastry shop was on the same block on Seventh where he had been hit. At that time of day he would’ve been heading over there for a cannoli and an espresso.

  “Sorry I couldn’t cover for you,” he said, his smirk fading and his mouth dropping loosely open. His eyes shifted back to me. “Phillips chase you down yesterday?”

  I nodded and went over the Chambers Street shooting, giving him everything I had.

  “Sounds like the first of many until you catch the ass-hole,” Rich said. “Fuck, though, at least you got a witness. What do you think happened? Perp shoot at him and miss?”

  “Hell if I know. We only found three shell casings at the scene, which is how many bullets the victim took. I guess it’s possible he picked up one of the casings to try to keep us from knowing there was another shot fired, but everyone I talked to only heard three shots.”

  His eyes glazed as he thought about that. “Whole thing sounds so savage,” he said. “Cutting off her fingers … ripping earrings off her ears … blowing her face off … I don’t know …” His voice trailed off. Then his eyes focused back on me, a glum smile showing. “Stan, you should put in for another partner. Even if my surgery goes well, I’m going to be bedridden for months, and I don’t think I’m going to be coming back. Right now I’m thinking about putting in for disability and calling it a career.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “We’ll talk about this again after you’re on your feet again, okay?”

  He shrugged and seemed to sink deeper into his bed. “I’m kind of tired, Stan. But before you go at least finish that sandwich. Let me get some pleasure from it.”

  I was hungry so I ate the rest of the sausage hero. I told him I’d check up on him later, and I was three steps out of St. Vincent’s when Phillips called. He had an ID for the dead woman. Her name was Gail Laurent. She was fifty-two, had a home address in Princeton, New Jersey, and was widowed. Her husband had worked as a financial analyst in one of the Twin Towers and died on 9-11 with three thousand other New Yorkers. A daughter of Laurent’s, also from Jersey, became concerned when she couldn’t get a hold of her mother this morning and contacted the Princeton police, who were on the ball enough to check Laurent’s driver’s license against the drawing we had put out. Phillips told me the daughter was on her way to the precinct, and it would be best if I got my ass back there pronto, although he didn’t say it quite that politely.