Thrilling Thirteen

by Ponzo, Gary

  And that’s all we knew when we sat down with Chief of D’s Sonellio and psychologist-cum-detective, Lou Strassman. Chief Sonellio’s appearance belied his capabilities. Too many years of smoking and drinking had wreaked havoc on the man’s skin. It was pallid and gray. His fleshy cheeks appeared puckered, sort of how Dean Martin looked toward the end. Every once in a while, Sonellio would rattle out a cough. He hadn’t smoked in years, but the damage was already done. He was sharp though. There was no denying that the man still had a keen mind.

  Lou Strassman had honed his demeanor over the span of his prior career as head of social work services at Saint Francis Hospital. I always felt relaxed in his presence. Ten minutes with Strassman and your eyelids grew heavy—he was the psychological equivalent of Sominex. He had come in just for this meeting and was wearing a light sweater and khaki pants. He held a pipe which I prayed he wouldn’t light up.

  Sonellio listened to our entire dissertation. We took him through the chain of events exactly as they had occurred. “So this loser knows his way around gadgets,” Sonellio offered. “He hot-wired the elevator and knew how to park the tram car. That should prove helpful to the investigation.”

  “What you’re saying about the elevator is true. I understand that it’s still out of order. The tram is different,” I began to explain.

  “How’s that?” Sonellio asked.

  “I did some research—the tram’s computerized. The conductor’s supposed to initiate the speed reduction setting just before the tram hits the guiderails, but if he doesn’t, the computer takes over.”

  Strassman pointed his pipe at me. “He’d still need to know that.”

  “True, but all he’d need to do is ask a few questions. From the little I’ve seen, the tram conductors are viewed as if they’re operating an amusement ride. They seem pretty chatty,” I replied. “It was something I was curious about myself. I thought there might be a dead-man’s control like in the subway, but there isn’t. A subway conductor has to keep constant pressure on the hand control to keep the train moving; not so with the tram.”

  The chief had ordered us coffee from the deli around the corner. It wasn’t Starbucks, but it wouldn’t peel paint either. Strassman offered to pay. He reached into his pocket and accidentally dropped some change on the floor. I wasn’t wearing a skirt so my opinion of the man stands.

  I poured Sweet’N Low into the cup and used one of those portion-sized containers of half-and-half. After listening to Strassman for thirty minutes, I needed caffeine badly. It was analogous to when Dorothy stumbled through the poppy field in The Wizard of Oz. “So what makes this guy tick, Lou?”

  Strassman was still making fine adjustments to his coffee. He was adding sugar and half-and-half between sips. You’d think he was preparing solid-state rocket fuel for the next shuttle launch. We waited while he fine-tuned his cup of java. Satisfied, Strassman finally picked up his coffee and pipe. Leaning against the table, he was now the center of attention. “The clues, in this case, the note and computer message, are well thought out. Psychopaths want to be caught.” I knew that. “They want to be punished.” I knew that too. “But our guy is a little different.” Huh?

  “What makes our perp so special?” Lido asked. His coffee cup was already empty.

  Sonellio looked on with interest. He had been a detective during the Son of Sam investigation. “Our perp is taunting us,” Strassman said in a matter-of-fact way. “Many psychopaths leave very subtle clues. In fact, sometimes the killers are not aware that they’re leaving clues at all. The desire to be caught is often subconscious. But our guy is throwing the clues in our face. Look back! Are you looking back? He’s almost indignant about the damn thing. What’s the matter? Aren’t you smart enough to catch me?”

  Great. Nothing like a perp with attitude.

  “Any fingerprints?” Sonellio asked.

  “Forget about it!” Lido announced. “There’s a billion sets of prints on the tram. It’s useless information.”

  I’m sure our perp knew this. I was also sure that he hadn’t left any prints of his own. I was starting to develop a character composite of this guy. He wanted us to follow his clues. He was choreographing the entire affair. By the way, notice how I keep calling the perp a guy. One woman wouldn’t suffocate another, scratching her eyes out would be more like it. Poison is the most likely lady-killer scenario. Besides, our perp had to be strong enough to take Wendell Johnson clean off his feet and ram him into a concrete wall. Of course I’m not saying that women can’t be strong. Ever see that Zena Warrior Princess chick or Chyna, the female wrestler? Women can be strong, unattractive perhaps, but strong. There’s nothing like a woman on anabolic steroids.

  “Nothing on the victims?” Sonellio asked.

  “Zilch,” I replied. “Our perp’s too clever for that. The forensics specialist did find some unusual yellow fibers and metal strands on the clothing of the two male victims, but nothing on the women.”

  “Based on where these particles were found, we believe that the murder weapon came in contact with these substances. Perhaps the rifle was contained or wrapped in them,” Lido explained.

  “There’s something about suffocation, about the psychology of it, that sets it apart from the norm. Our man is killing his victims by depriving them of the life-giving air they need to breathe.” Strassman looked around the room. “It’s even different from strangulation. There’s little pain involved. He wants to see his victim struggle for breath. Necessary air is right there, all around his victim, just an inch away. He wants the victim to know that he’s in control of their outcome. He’s got his victim’s life in his hands. It’s all very personal.” Strassman laid his pipe down on the desk. “It’s sadistic in the most intrinsic sense.”

  “What does the press know?” Sonellio asked.

  “They know what happened on the tram. By noon, the deaths of Samantha Harris and Victor Alamento will hit the airwaves and the public will start putting two and two together,” Lido stated.

  “That’s if the press doesn’t put it together for them,” I added.

  “This is a goddamn mess!” Sonellio swore. He paced around the room a bit, rubbing his chin. “I’m going to call the commissioner and the mayor. I’m going to put the entire borough on alert and request reinforcements from neighboring precincts. I can’t believe the audacity of this slug, committing two double homicides just blocks from one another.” He turned to Strassman. “You’re right, Lou, the son of a bitch is taunting us.” He turned back to me. “I want this to end right now. I’m going to dump every available man on the street. You and Lido are in charge of the effort. I’ll okay overtime, money for stoolies . . . whatever it takes. This prick’s not going to grab me by the balls; no way!”

  I told you Sonellio was a good guy. He was really worked up. It was personal with him. A perp had singled out his precinct and he didn’t like it. “I’m going to pull the entire detective’s squad in for a meeting at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. Stephanie. Gus. You two represent the best and the brightest, but neither of you has much experience with psychopaths. I’m going to make sure you get all the help you need.” He winked at us, “Capisce?”

  I winked back at him. “No problem.”

  “That goes for me too,” Lido added.

  It was a beautiful moment: officers of law and order vowing to rid the city of evil—a roomful of good intentions. All we had to do now was catch the filthy bastard.

  Chapter Eleven

  I surfed every channel on the tube, one hundred and twenty-one of them, and I couldn’t find a single thing to watch except MTV. A video was on. I was pretty sure I’d seen it before. I think the title was “Slut of the Century.” I can’t be quite sure. It could have been the singer’s new one, “Millennium Nymph.” It’s a little hard for me to tell, but I think she wore panties in the original. It galls me to think that someone with God-given talent has to come off as a scantily clad trollop in spike heels in order to sell CDs and gain popularity. Se
x sells. What can I tell you?

  To tell you the truth, very little was going to please me just now. It was two in the morning. I was exhausted and my heart was still pounding like mortar shells landing on Omaha Beach. The goddamn nightmare had come back again, the one I described to Isaacs, the therapist. The horrible dream was awakening me more and more often.

  I ran my left hand along my right arm and then did the same to the other. My arms were burnt in the nightmare, not lightly burnt, but third degree. They were bloody and charred. I could almost feel the roasted flesh hardening around me, cracking, tightening, and oozing serum. Not a pretty sight. And there were those two faces, those frightened, panicked faces: a doctor and a nurse. The horror in their eyes was worse than the sight of my own burnt flesh. What did they see? What could have such an effect on emergency room personnel, people who had seen tragedy of every shape and form?

  I was hoping that Isaacs could help me figure it out. Would I be able to handle the truth once it was revealed? It frightened me more than anything I had seen on the streets. Why was I being rolled into the ER? What had caused them? Was I pregnant? I had to know. I rubbed my stomach, tenderly embracing the pregnancy fantasy.

  I grabbed the phone and punched in Len Isaacs’s phone number and left a message stating that I’d like to see him in the morning. I instructed him to text me. I wasn’t going to take a chance on having him call me at the station house while my peers surrounded me. Perhaps if he helped me with my nightmare, we’d deal with the paranoia next. I prefer death to humiliation. I couldn’t bear the thought of one of the squad clowns hearing that I was seeing a shrink.

  Speaking of crazy, I was starting to think about the case again. I wondered where our homicidal maniac was just about now and what he was doing. Was he watching music videos like me, unable to sleep, or was he plotting his next murder? I was sure he was sitting up in bed and gluing photos of his next victim to the wall. I know that sounds pretty cliché, but I’d take a bet that it wasn’t terribly inaccurate. If the pattern continued, there’d be another dead woman in the morgue very soon.

  Our slug was a stalker. It appeared that he had selected his victims with great care. What was the connection? What was it about Ellen Redner and Samantha Harris that made our perp want to kill? Was it the color of their hair, perhaps the way they walked? They were of similar age and lived in the same geographical proximity. They were both attractive, intelligent women, and both were successful. None of those similarities told me why they were both dead. There could have been a hundred connections. They both could have dated him or pissed him off. They might have passed him on the street and ignored his glance. It could have been as simple and seemingly innocent as that, but I didn’t think so. The perp had left us clues: Look back, and Are you looking back? We were looking back, but were we looking back in the right direction? We were looking for priors that matched our killer’s MO, killers with technical training. Was that the right direction? I’d begin looking into the backgrounds of each of the victims in the morning. Perhaps that’s what he meant.

  It was almost bizarre that two men had died in the process. The two incidental mortalities demonstrated that our perp had absolutely no respect for human life. I wondered how much insight Lou Strassman could shed on our perp’s raison d’être. Strassman had oodles of psychological training, but did he know this particular criminal mind? Our perp was a real nut job and yet he was intent and purposeful. His homicides had been planned and carefully calculated. What drew people to like Marilyn Manson? Why was I watching Mariah Carey in the middle of the night? It really is a crazy world.

  A new video came on. Toni Braxton sang “Un-break My Heart” and smooched with that hunk Tyson Beckford. Now, he was all right! The video was romantic and Ms. Braxton can sing like nobody’s business. Thirty seconds into the video, I started to forget about my nightmare and New York’s maniac-come-lately.

  I walked into the kitchen and started poking around. One of my neighbors had sent me a box of Godiva chocolates for Easter. It had been sitting unopened in the kitchen cabinet for months. It called out to me on occasion: “I’m in here, Steph! Come and get me.” I was feeling a bit weak so I opened the cabinet and stared at the box, hoping that the chocolate had somehow mysteriously disappeared, sublimed right out of the box like snow on a sundrenched mountainside. I was really tempted to have one. I could almost taste the chocolate. Two more seconds and I’d start drooling. Ah hell!

  I tore open the box, grabbed the least dangerous looking confection and plopped it into my mouth. The chocolate melted all over my tongue. I covered the box and shoved it into the trash bin at the same time as I attempted to savor the luscious treat. I couldn’t stand the guilt or the thought of insulin injections. I decided to get up a half hour earlier and spend the extra time in the gym. It was so unfair, it took fifteen minutes on the Stairmaster to burn the calories contributed by one medium-sized truffle.

  It really wasn’t worth it. Reminded me of this guy I once dated, my satisfaction always came up short. Somehow, the anticipation was always better than the actual reward. He was good-looking and well built but he was no Carl Malone. You know Carl Malone, the pro basketball player they call the Mailman. Well, unlike Carl Malone, my old boyfriend never delivered.

  Anyway, the night had disaster written all over it. It was now three in the morning. I had eaten chocolate, which in my mind was tantamount to committing a cardinal sin. I had watched adolescent videos in order to forget about my horrible nightmare. I was going to be tired in the morning, which wasn’t going to help me catch New York’s newest and most wanted psychopath. Who was next? Despite the beefed-up police coverage, we all knew that a committed killer could and would strike again unless we found him first. Look back! Are you looking back? What the hell did all that mean?

  Chapter Twelve

  The streets were giving us nothing. We had been at it all day long, talking to Samantha Harris’ neighbors, storeowners on Second Avenue, and almost anyone else we could think of. We had obtained a list of everyone who had made a delivery to the building on Friday and Saturday and checked out each and every one. None of the utility companies had been there, no one from Manhattan Cable and no delegates from the Villains, Thieves, and Scoundrels Union. Sorry, Boris and Natasha.

  The computer run had come back and as per our expectations, provided us with a ton of possibilities to run down. The 9mm was an extremely popular caliber and as such there were over five hundred open priors on file for shootings with a 9mm. Sonellio had delegated that list to others in his command. As I said before, it was my opinion that Balto’s and Alamento’s shootings had been incidental, two poor stiffs who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Putting time and effort into that list was like pissing into the wind.

  There had been only one hundred eighty-four deaths by suffocation in the prior twelve months. Sadly, many on that list were small children who had ingested toys or gotten their little hands on something they shouldn’t have. Only forty-three on the list were adults; of the forty-three, only eighteen were women.

  We were running a report on all single women between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five living between Fifty-third Street and Seventy-second Street, between the East River and Fifth Avenue. The number crunchers had promised me a full report by eight in the morning.

  There were one hundred thirty-three thousand residents living within our hot zone. If we were lucky, the composite profile would reduce our list of possible next victims to fewer than ten thousand. All the victims had been Caucasian. That might chop a few thousand or so off the list as well.

  So what was going on? Of course, our perp could have been one of those territorial nuts. The files were full of crazies who hunted only within a tight geographical area, marking their territories like dogs, or more appropriately, wolves, killer wolves. I was not thinking along those lines. As Strassman had so aptly pointed out, our killer was taunting us with his messages. This crazy SOB was jabbing his finger into our chests, d
aring us to find him.

  It had been a muggy day, an unseasonably warm eighty-five degrees with humidity up around a hundred. The sky had that foreboding look to it, as if a storm might erupt at any moment. The storm never came but the foreboding clouds continued to hang above the city. I for one was thrilled and amazed that my hair hadn’t frizzed.

  And what of our psychopath? The air of his insanity hung around us like a deadly shroud and yet, no new information had come forth. He was out there, planning his next act of insanity, coolly calculating who would be next and under which particular circumstances he would carry out his deed.

  It was after eight when we arrived at Scores. The guy at the door, a dark, hulking fellow named Vincent, gave me the once over three or four times. With all the pretty ladies about I was surprised that he gave me so much attention. “You here for an audition?” he grunted.

  I flashed him my hottest and most provocative smile. “Sure. Got any experience? Jump up on the counter and drop your pants.” I winked at him. He smiled and turned beet red.

  I flashed my detective’s shield. Lido did the same. “There was a murder committed on the tram Friday night at about three in the morning. We’d like to see if anyone in the club saw our perp come scrambling out of the tram station.”

  “No shit! Someone got killed up there?” Tall, dark, and vacuous looked up at the tram cabin that was passing by overhead. “Wow.” Vincent seemed really taken aback. “Come inside. I’ll get the manager.”

  We were led into the sanctified establishment. Everyone in the tri-state area knew that Scores was considered the premiere men’s club in Manhattan. The girls were the crème de la crème of exotic dancers; no skanks or sleaze bunnies. It was sort of like Disney World with giant augmented boobs.

  By the way, did I mention that I was wearing this absolutely adorable denim dress, a Guess? Not as in conjecture, but as in the brand. It’s sleeveless with a deep V-neck. It’s about as daring an outfit as I ever wear on the job, but there’s no way in hell that I was going to kowtow to any of those augmented pixies. I’m a whole lot better off for not having had my precious body sliced and stuffed like a Vienna sausage.