A Killer's Essence

by Dave Zeltserman

  I thanked her for the information. I could tell she wanted to ask if this was related to the killings we had in Manhattan, but instead she gave me a tired smile and walked back to join her team. Anyway, she’d know the answer to that before I would from the ballistics testing.

  Hennison had driven us to the site and had left his car in the left lane of the Expressway that had been cordoned off for the police. Once we got back in his car, he proceeded to navigate so we could cross the Queensboro Bridge and get back to Manhattan. At first he seemed too preoccupied to notice much more than the traffic, but after a while he called Central over his two-way to ask whether any calls were placed over the last week about gunfire near the Steinway Street overpass. The dispatcher put him on hold for several minutes to check before coming back to tell him there hadn’t been.

  “I can’t believe no one heard those gunshots,” Hennison muttered to himself. “A .40 caliber is going to sound like a fucking cannon.” His eyes shifted sideways toward me. I think up to that point he had forgotten I was in the car next to him.

  “It’s the same guy,” he said.

  “Yeah, I’d bet that also. But we’ll see what ballistics comes up with.”

  He nodded, his lips pressed into tight bloodless lines and his eyes hard marbles as he stared ahead. “What do you think this fucker did? Round up three strays just to bring them there and shoot them? Christ, that would be a tough act. You’d think after the first shot, the other two dogs would be hightailing it away.”

  “Maybe he drugged them first,” I said. “Or put some stakes in the ground so he could tie them down.”

  Hennison shook his head angrily. “Goddamned psycho,” he spat out. “I hope that is his blood and one of those dogs bit his fucking balls off.”

  “It would make our life a hell of a lot easier if that’s what happened.”

  “Fuck yeah, it would. I still can’t believe no one called us on the shooting. Someone must’ve seen or heard something. Goddamn it, what was the point of shooting these dogs?”

  I didn’t bother answering. We both knew it could’ve been for any number of reasons. Most likely, though, our killer was testing out his gun and wanted to see firsthand how much damage a .40 caliber hollow-point would do. Even if I had answered, I don’t think Hennison would’ve noticed. He was too distracted to pay much attention to anything I said. As we got onto the Queensboro Bridge, his eyes showed a glint of life. Smiling grimly, he said, “What I’m thinking is after the ME gives us a time of death for these dogs, we see if we can get the story played up big by the news stations. Maybe it will flush out a witness.”

  “It’s worth a shot,” I said. “As long as Phillips goes along with it.”

  “He’ll go along with it,” Hennison insisted under his breath, but we both knew that wasn’t necessarily true. The problem with playing up the story would be that a reporter might end up connecting it to Gail Laurent or Paul Burke or, worse, to both. Hennison again fell deep into his own thoughts. When he pulled onto the next street, he started chuckling to himself.

  “What theory do you think our FBI profiler comes up with to explain our perp shooting off only one of these dogs’ faces?” He was laughing harder now and had to wipe a few tears from his eyes. “I bet she claims deep down he’s a dog lover, and was too traumatized after seeing what he did to do the same to the other two dogs.”

  “How much you want to bet?”

  He peered at me sideways, a shit-eating grin stretching across his face. “Fifty bucks,” he said.

  “You’re on.”

  We shook hands.

  “You just lost yourself fifty bucks, pal,” he said. “The broad’s a flake, although a damn nice-looking one. I’d let her profile me anytime she wants.”

  I was about to give him some shit, pretending I didn’t catch his intended meaning of profile, and instead outline all of the borderline antisocial tendencies a psychological profile of him would disclose. A thought stopped me. Why did our perp only shoot one of those dogs in the back of the skull? You would’ve expected him to have shot all three of them that way. I started wondering if maybe he had been interrupted. Maybe someone heard the gunfire and stopped to investigate. An adrenaline rush hit me as I mulled that over because it made so much sense, especially explaining the blood that was found where it wasn’t expected. If a passerby had stopped, we’d have another body somewhere else. I told Hennison my idea.

  “Fuck,” he swore after he digested what I said. He got on his two-way again to Central, this time asking if any abandoned vehicles had been found near the Steinway Street over-pass area. If our perp shot and killed someone stopping because of the gunfire, and he was intent on hiding this from us, he’d have to dump the person’s vehicle in a neighborhood close enough so he’d be able to walk back and retrieve his own car.

  “You’re wasting the dispatcher’s time,” I told Hennison while we waited for Central to get back to him. “Any vehicle abandoned in that area would be gone within an hour.”

  Hennison didn’t bother responding.

  “You want to pay me the fifty bucks now?” I asked.

  “I’ll wait,” he said. “I still have faith in our profiler.”

  My cell phone rang. The caller ID showed a White Plains phone number I didn’t recognize. The moment I heard Mary Grissini’s voice I knew what had happened. I sat quietly as she told me how Rich had died early that morning. Without her mentioning it, I knew what time it had happened, that that was why I had woken up early with that uneasiness.

  When my dad died it hit me hard, and it took a long time for me to come to terms with it. After that, as more people I knew passed away, I seemed to grow more callous with each successive death. None of these people were close friends or immediate family, but still, these were uncles and aunts that I’d see at family gatherings, guys I grew up with in the neighborhood, and fellow officers who had gone with me to the academy. Over the last few years these deaths barely made an impact, and it left me wondering how much the job and all the death I was constantly around had changed me, and how much of myself had been lost. Hearing about Rich hit me harder than I would’ve imagined. I started choking up but fought back the tears. I’d be damned if I would start sobbing in front of Hennison. I heard a hitch in my voice as I asked Mary if she’d like me to come over.

  “No, that’s not necessary,” she said. “I’ve brought the boys to my parents. We’ll all be staying with them for the next few days. The wake is this Wednesday and the funeral is Friday. I thought you could pass it on to the department.”

  She gave me the time and place for both. I sat and listened numbly. It took a long moment before I could talk again, and when I could I told her how sorry I was.

  “I know,” she said. “Rich always thought of you more as a brother than a partner. Stan, I hope you know that.”

  Fuck. More than anything I didn’t want to break down right then, but it was a struggle. I could hear the hitch again in my voice as I told her how I’d felt the same about Rich and if there was anything I could do for her to call me.

  “I know that,” she said.

  After she got off the phone, I just sat numb. I barely noticed when Central called back to tell us that no abandoned vehicles were reported near the area Hennison had asked about. At that moment not much seemed to matter.

  “Was that about your partner, Grissini?” Hennison asked.

  I nodded, not trusting myself to talk.

  “He just had surgery, right? How’s he doing?”

  I couldn’t answer him, at least not then, and he didn’t press me. Later, when we were pulling up to the precinct, I told him Rich’s wake would be this Wednesday.

  Chapter 16

  I met with Phillips to relay to him the information concerning Rich’s wake and funeral. He stared at me stone-faced while I told him this, and then told me that he’d make sure to pass it on to the department. After that I sat at my desk and waited for the ballistics and medical examiner’s reports. Word spread q
uickly about Rich, and detectives in the department came over to offer their condolences and ask about what happened. I wasn’t much in the mood to talk. Right then I needed more than anything to focus on the job if I was going to make it through the day, so I kept it short, mostly just telling them when the wake and funeral were, and then turning back to whatever piece of paper I was trying to make sense of.

  The ballistics information came first. The bullets were .40 caliber hollow-points, and they were from the same gun used in the other two shootings. Not that that was much of a surprise. The medical examiner’s office called shortly after ballistics. The dogs were all fed barbiturate-laced meat before being killed. As far as when they were shot, the best they could come up with was that the animals had been dead five to seven days. A total of eight bullet wounds were located on them. The bigger news was that the blood found on the edge of the grass was human, and it didn’t match the earlier victim, Paul Burke.

  “Any of these dogs bite someone?” I asked.

  “Impossible to tell with one of them, but the other two, no.”

  “What breed were they?”

  “I think one was a pitbull mix; the other two, I don’t know. I’ll have a veterinarian take a look at them and get back to you.”

  “How about sending photos?”

  “Sure, I’ll send you what I have, but I’m not sure how much they’ll help given the condition they were left in. Scavengers and the rain the other day did a number on them.”

  I thanked him for the call, then relayed the information to Hennison, suggesting he have the FBI try to match the blood against the DNA samples in their CODIS system. He told me he’d bring that up at a briefing meeting he’d scheduled for two o’clock to bring the other members of the team up to speed with the recent developments. “I’m going to need someone calling hospitals about dog bite victims,” he complained. The odds were the human blood left at the scene wasn’t from a dog bite to the perp but from a third party wandering onto the scene and being greeted by one or more .40 caliber slugs. Still, the former possibility was going to have to be checked into, and God knows how many dog bites New York City had in any given week.

  While I waited for the two o’clock meeting, I started on the list of knife purchases. I was mostly on automatic pilot as I called people and tried to verify their whereabouts at the time Gail Laurent was murdered. Those that were able to give me something definitive, I would try later to verify their alibis, those that gave me something too vague to check, I arranged for them to come to the precinct to meet with me. All of them sounded indignant at this intrusion. With some it sounded genuine; with most, though, it was forced. I was surprised at how many of them I was able to contact. I guess a lot of these guys buying military knives over the Internet didn’t have day jobs.

  At a quarter to two, Joe Ramirez wandered over to my desk. By then I’d been able to get through half of the list. He put a hand on my shoulder and told me how sorry he was to hear about Rich.

  “They know what happened?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t press Mary about it when she called, but he didn’t seem right after his surgery.”

  “How’d she sound?”

  I shrugged. “About what you’d expect.”

  “Christ,” Joe said, shaking his head. “You don’t expect to drop dead after a hip operation. Fucking world, huh? Rich was a good man, he’ll be missed.”

  “Yeah, he will be.”

  Joe took a deep breath and let it out noisily through his mouth, and then we were back to business. “Those dogs that were shot …” he started.

  “Same guy,” I said. “Ballistics verified the same gun was used.”

  “Chrissakes,” he said. “What’s this guy gotta be shooting dogs for?”

  “He probably shot more than just dogs at the scene. Human blood was found also. A lot of it.”

  “I didn’t hear that.” Joe’s gaze lowered as he considered that piece of news. “Jesus, we can at least hope it’s the perp’s own,” he said. “Maybe one of those dogs bit him.”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “Except they were all drugged with barbiturates, probably before he ever got them there.”

  “So whose blood is it?”

  “Could be the perp’s, could be someone else’s. I guess we’ll find out.”

  I checked my watch, saw it was a couple of minutes to two, and got out of my chair. While we headed to the meeting, Joe asked me how it went taking my kids to the baseball game. I told him I never made it, that by the time I left Friday’s meeting it was too late.

  “Ah, shit,” he said, “I’m sorry to hear that. But it’s just a baseball game. Your kids will get over it.”

  I nodded and told him he was probably right, not that I believed it.

  Phillips wasn’t attending the meeting, but the rest of the team was already waiting in the meeting room, including Jill Chandler and her fellow FBI agents. Jill had the same sharper look that she had in the first meeting, with no makeup, her hair pulled back tightly, and an unflattering blue suit and flat-heeled shoes. Her look softened, though, as our eyes momentarily met and she gave me a wisp of a smile touched with sadness. From the overall somberness in the room, word about what happened to Rich must’ve spread to her and the other FBI agents.

  Joe and I took our seats, and Jack Hennison spoke up to go over the morning’s discovery in Queens, as well as giving a rundown of what we’d gotten from the medical examiner’s office. When he finished, he asked the FBI agents if they could help in matching the human blood found against the DNA samples in CODIS. Agent Thorne, the thick-shouldered linebacker type, told Hennison he’d take care of it, but that it would take forty-eight hours to get the results back.

  “I’ll arrange for the animal carcasses to be sent to our lab,” Thorne added. “They should be able to provide us a narrower window for when the shootings happened.”

  Hennison looked eager to wrap up the meeting and asked if there were any questions. When there weren’t, he stood up, palms flat on the table so he could lean forward and look around the room. “That’s what we got,” he announced, his voice raspy, not much more than a growl. “We have no idea yet whether the other blood found at the scene is our perp’s or someone else’s, but until another body is found, we need to assume both are equal possibilities.”

  “Not equal by any means,” Jill Chandler said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Our killer is obsessed with obliterating his victims. That’s why he uses a .40 caliber pistol and hollow-points, as well as shooting them post-mortem with the gun muzzle directly against the victim’s skull. Something unexpected happened that made him change his plans; otherwise he wouldn’t have altered his routine.”

  Hennison stood for a moment scratching his jaw, then shifted his gaze away from her. “Any chance he could’ve just been upset seeing what he did to that other dog?” he asked.

  She looked at him like he was an idiot. “No,” she said.

  Hennison’s eyes dulled, his skin color dropping a shade. He was fuming, realizing he’d lost fifty bucks to me on a stupid bet. From the look on his face, it was also clear he was trying to come up with a good crack back at her. Joe pulled the attention of the room away by asking her why our guy wanted to kill those dogs and why he chose a place as public as the grassy area between two highways.

  “I first thought there might’ve been a socioeconomic basis for these murders,” Jill told him. “But not now. I’m convinced that what we’re dealing with is a full-blown narcissistic personality. What’s driving him is his message. This person is working from a carefully developed script, at least in his mind, and this script is sacrosanct and can’t be deviated from. This is why he didn’t shoot Mr. Lynch”—she flashed me a thin smile—“and why he had to remove the body of whomever he shot from that grassy area. While he certainly enjoys killing, it’s his message—his story, so to speak—that’s most important to him, and for whatever twisted reason, those dogs and where he left
their bodies are all part of this story that he’s so intent on telling us.”

  “What a load of crap,” Hennison muttered loud enough for the rest of the room to hear.

  She turned to face him, a patient smile showing. “What is your theory, detective?” she asked.

  “I don’t have one,” Hennison said. “I’m not a trained FBI profiler. But I’d have to think this asshole is just trying to fuck with us, see how many hoops he can make us jump through. I’d bet, though, he brought that blood with him to dump where he did. I don’t care how late at night it was. If he shot someone on the edge of the West Brooklyn-Queens Expressway someone would’ve seen it.”

  Hennison was determined not to give up on our fifty dollar bet. He lowered his eyes from her and added without much enthusiasm, “I still think he stopped after the first dog only ’cause he didn’t have the stomach to shoot the faces off the other two. The guy’s probably deep down a dog lover.”

  Jill Chandler couldn’t help laughing at that. It was a short burst that exploded out of her, and she covered her mouth with her hand to quiet herself. At the sound of it, Hennison eyes jerked toward her, his ears quickly glowing a bright red. The rest of his face turned just as red as he looked around the room and saw the other two FBI agents, as well as several detectives, barely able to suppress their own grins. Christ, I almost felt sorry for him. Grumbling something under his breath about the meeting being over and us needing to get our asses back to work, he left the room steaming. The rest of us followed, although at a more leisurely pace.

  On the way back to my desk I stopped to pour a cup of coffee. While I was adding enough sugar to make it drinkable, Jill Chandler came up next to me. Even with my eyes fixed on my coffee, I knew it was her simply from the electric feel of her hip momentarily brushing against mine. Her hand touched my arm, and she told me how sorry she was to hear about my partner. I nodded and thanked her for that. We stood quietly for several moments. Then, as I was fumbling for another sugar packet, she asked how much I won. I turned to see her grinning at me, very pleased with herself.