FaceOff

by Lee Child

  “Who is he?”

  “Sculptor. Lives downtown. And the evidence is solid.”

  “Listen, Stan,” the commissioner said, back to whining, “there is way too much flak hitting the fan.” Patrick O’Brien would rather butcher a figure of speech than utter an expletive. “Make it work.”

  “Uhm, what, Pat?”

  “Wouldn’t the citizens of New York love to read that we have a suspect?”

  “Well, Pat, we do have a suspect. Just not enough for a warrant. Or an announcement in the press.”

  “You said the evidence was solid. I heard you say that. The citizens of the city’d feel so much better knowing that we’re on top of it. It’d be great if they could read that by the time the Times online got updated in the next cycle.”

  Which was about every half hour.

  “And I’d feel better too, Stan.”

  Despite the COD’s dozen-year track record, the commissioner could drop him to a low-level spot in public affairs in the time it took to microwave a Stouffer’s lasagna. “All right, Pat.”

  After organizing his thoughts, Markowitz picked up his cell phone. Hit a number.

  “Rothenburg.”

  “I just heard, Detective. Another one.”

  “That’s right, Stan. We’re at the scene. Amelia’s running it now. The vic was tortured first, just like the other ones.”

  “I wanted to let you know you’re going to hear in the press that we have a suspect.”

  After a dense pause, Lily said, “Who?”

  “Well, the sculptor, Verlaine.”

  “He’s our suspect, Stan. He’s not the press’s suspect. There’s a big difference. Verlaine’s not for public consumption at this point.”

  “What does your gut tell you, Lily?”

  “He’s an asshole, he’s a sadist. And he’s the doer.”

  “What’s the percentage?”

  “Percentage? Christ, I don’t know. How does ninety-six and three-tenths percent sound?”

  The COD let the irrelevance pass.

  “It’s going to put people at ease, Lily.”

  Silence, presumably as she tried to process why they needed to put people at ease. “That’s not in my job description, Stan. My job is catching assholes and putting them in jail.”

  He looked up. He noted a woman in a suit, standing in his outer office, waiting. She was the one he’d texted fifteen minutes ago.

  Markowitz said, “And I’ve looked into your other theory.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, an edge to her voice.

  “What you told me last night. That somebody, maybe from Narcotics Four or someplace else in the department, was using Verlaine to kill the women. Don’t waste time pursuing that.”

  “Why not?”

  Now his voice was hard as a metal file. “Because, Detective, I was profiling perps when you were getting your knuckles rapped for mouthing off in class. Verlaine’s a single operator. His psych profile is as obvious as the front page of the Post. Now make the case against him. STAT.”

  “What part are you missing, Stan? If you announce, he burns his fucking apartment down, there’s no evidence left, and the case goes to shit. He gets off . . . and goes on to kill somebody else.”

  The thing about nut cutters is they sometimes cut any nuts in their path, not just the ones you want them to.

  “Detective,” he snapped. “You’re going to hear on the news in a half hour that we have a suspect in the serial killing of those women. If that means you’ve gotta get your ass in gear and work faster and harder—then do it!”

  Click.

  He looked into the outer office and nodded. The stocky woman was in her forties, blond, and with a dry complexion and eyes that suggested she’d never laughed in her life. Her clothes were dowdy.

  She looked around to make sure they were alone. Markowitz nodded at the door. Detective Candy Preston swung it shut.

  He whispered, “We’ve got some problems.”

  “I heard.” The woman was a nut cutter, too. But she had the most melodious voice. He could hear her reading stories to children.

  “I need you to move forward with what we talked about.”

  “Now? I thought we were taking things slow.”

  “We don’t have the luxury of taking things slow.” The chief of detectives unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk and handed her an envelope. It was thick but not as thick as you’d think. Fifty thousand dollars, in hundreds, really doesn’t take up a lot of space.

  “I’ll do it now,” said Preston. She was one of the senior members of the Narcotics Unit Four detail. She slipped the money into her purse and rose, walked to the door. Her feet, he noticed, were as delicate as her voice.

  Just before she touched the knob, Markowitz said, “Oh, some advice, Detective?”

  She frowned at the implication that she was green. Stiffly she said, “I’ve handled things like this in the past, Stan. I know—”

  “That’s not my advice. My advice is don’t fuck up.”

  AMELIA WAS SWITCHING BACK AND forth between WABC and WNBC and said, before anyone else did, “We’re screwed.”

  “Maybe,” Lucas said. He turned to Lincoln: “I understand from my BCA people that fires mess up DNA?”

  “That’s right,” Lincoln said. “Theoretically, if he dumped a few gallons of gas down that basement—if the basement is the kill room—he could wipe out the most critical evidence. We wouldn’t get DNA unless we found an actual body.”

  Lucas said to Lily, “You know what I think. If those are trophies hanging on his wall—”

  “They are,” Lincoln said.

  “Then we’re dealing with a lot more than four dead. Even if we don’t have what we need for a search warrant, we need to go in there anyway.”

  Lily shook her head. “We need a warrant.”

  Lucas turned to Lincoln. “Help me out here.”

  Lincoln said, “We took samples from the poured concrete steps outside the building, for which we didn’t need a search warrant, and we found that the concrete matched the flecks of concrete in the victims’ backs. We also found flecks of bronze which are chemically identical to the bronze found in the victims’ backs.”

  “But—” Amelia said.

  Lincoln raised his hand. “Quiet.”

  “That’s certainly enough for a warrant,” Lily said. “At least, if I go to the right judge, and I will. If you’ll write out the specs for the application, I can have it in an hour.”

  “I’ll do that,” Lincoln said. And to Lucas: “If you’ll go back to the building with a couple of collection pads, get those samples for me. Backdate them to this morning. There may not be any bronze, but we’ve got a fair collection of it now. Take a few flecks with you. You know. Just in case.”

  They all looked round at each other, then Lucas said, “At least a dozen trophies.”

  “After you make the collection, just wait there,” Lily said. “I won’t be long behind you.”

  “I’ll go with Lucas,” Amelia said. “If we need to block the back of the building, or he needs backup while we’re there.”

  “You might want to bring an entry team,” Lucas said to Lily.

  “Entry team? I’m bringing everybody. I’ll make a courtesy call to the FBI, they’ll want to have an observer.”

  “I’ll be there,” Lincoln said. “I don’t want your entry team trashing my evidence.”

  They took Amelia’s car, a maroon 1970 Ford Torino Cobra, heir to the Fairlane, kicking out nifty 405 horsepower, with 447 pounds of torque. They made the twenty-minute trip in twelve minutes. Eight minutes out, she looked at Lucas and said, “You’re not holding on to anything.”

  “You know what you’re doing,” he said. “You’re almost as good as I am.”

  She snorted: “What do you drive?”

  “A 911.”

  “I always heard”—she paused in her comment to chop the nose off a town car as she took a left turn—“that 911 drivers—”

/>   “Have small penises. I know. Every time I meet somebody who can’t afford a 911, I get the ‘small penis’ line. So I ask them how large a sample they’ve looked at.”

  She grinned as she said, “I’ll tell you what, though: in a fair run, I’d eat your 911 alive.”

  “I don’t like the word ‘fair,’ ” Lucas replied. “ ‘Fair’ always means, ‘to my advantage.’ If it’s not to my advantage, it’s ‘unfair.’ If you guys ever get to Minneapolis, bring your car. I’ve got a run just across the border, in Wisconsin. Narrow blacktop, blind hills, twenty miles long, maybe two hundred braking curves.”

  “That’s not fair,” she said, but she grinned again, and threw the Cobra down an alley, the walls whipping by, two feet away on each side, six inches from Lucas’s window when she dodged a trash can. Lucas yawned and said, “Wake me up when we get there.”

  He tilted back in his seat and then said, “By the way, I’m one of the best action shooters around.”

  Amelia dropped off Lucas, who was dressed in jeans, a polo shirt, and running shoes, at Verlaine’s apartment. He was carrying a backpack loaned to him by Amelia. There were four men on the long block, two on each side, each one by himself.

  Amelia was headed around the block, where she could watch the back of the building. Lucas sat on Verlaine’s stoop; he was too well fed to be a street person, but from a distance, with the pack by his feet, he could pass. They’d put a few bronze flakes in the bags with the sampling pads before they left, and now he took them out, one at a time, trying to look like he was shaking cigarettes out of a pack, and pressed them into the stoop. When he had five samples in place, he put them in the pack and zipped it up.

  That done, he stood and ambled up the block, took out his cell phone, and called Lily, Lincoln, and Amelia, and said the same thing to all of them: “We’re good to go.”

  Lily said, “Forty minutes.”

  “What’s taking so long?”

  “Nothing. You just got there quicker than you should have. I’ve got the application, I’m seeing the judge in about two minutes, and the entry team is gearing up. So, easy, boy.”

  Lucas continued up the block, and on to the next block, and then walked back, and finally, with nothing at all going on at Verlaine’s building, he turned the corner and walked around the block, where he found Amelia’s car, parked, with Lincoln’s Chrysler van right behind it. Amelia climbed out of the passenger’s side: “Want to leave the pack?”

  “Yeah.” He looked at his watch. “Half an hour, yet. I’ll find another place to sit.”

  “Stay in touch,” Lincoln said, from the back.

  Lincoln’s aide, Thom, who was driving, said, “I brought some sandwiches along. These two can spend hours at a crime scene. If you want a ham-and-cheese—”

  “I not only want one, it’ll give me something to do while I’m watching,” Lucas said. “Some reason to be sitting there.”

  Lucas ambled back around the block, carrying his brown-paper sandwich bag, and found a stoop fifty yards down the block from the entrance to Verlaine’s studio. He sat down, took Thom’s ham-and-cheese out of the sack, took a bite, and said, aloud, “That’s a great ham-and-cheese.”

  He was thinking about the fact that you almost couldn’t buy a great ham-and-cheese in the Twin Cities, and why that might be, but that you could get a great one in Des Moines or Chicago, and then thought about Chicago being the “hog butcher to the world,” when a man stuck his head out of the door behind him and said, “This look like a fuckin’ cafeteria? Hit the road, asshole.”

  Lucas chewed and swallowed, then shook his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed Lily, ostentatiously pushed the speakerphone button, and, when she answered, said, “I’m being hassled by a guy across the street from the target, at 219—how long would it take to get, say, a half dozen building inspectors here? The place doesn’t look so sturdy.”

  “I could have them there in an hour,” Lily said.

  Lucas looked at the guy in the doorway. “An hour good for you?”

  “Stay as long as you want,” the guy said, and eased the door shut.

  Five minutes after that, a white van drove by Verlaine’s building, and the guy in the passenger’s seat took a close look at Lucas, and then nodded to him. Lucas nodded back. The van reappeared another five minutes later, going in the opposite direction, and this time the driver nodded to him.

  Ten minutes after that, Amelia called: “We got the blocking squad here. Lincoln and I are coming around.”

  And Lily: “One minute.”

  The entry team arrived in two white, unmarked vans, closely followed by Lily in an unmarked car, another unmarked car, Amelia’s car, and two patrol cars. Behind them all, Lincoln’s van turned the corner. Lucas jogged down the street toward them as the vans stopped directly in front of Verlaine’s stoop and two guys carrying an entry ram hustled up to the door; four cops in armor were right behind them, and as Lucas came up, the ram handlers smashed the door open, and the armored cops went in.

  Lucas was right there with Lily, and as they piled into the entryway, the team suddenly stopped, there was some milling, and the team leader called, “We got a body.”

  Lily and Lucas shouldered their way from behind through the crowd, with Amelia a step behind, and they turned the corner at the door that went into the studio.

  Verlaine was there, staring sightlessly at one of his sculptures. His head was a bloody mess, and a semiauto pistol lay on the floor by his fingertips.

  “Got some brass,” Amelia said; she sounded like a professor of murder, her voice cool and analytical. Lucas saw the shell sitting by Verlaine’s foot. Then Amelia turned to the entry-team leader and said, “We’ve got to clear the building. But just two guys on this floor, and stay out on the perimeter, away from the kill site.”

  The team leader nodded, and started calling names.

  Lincoln pushed through the crowd in his chair, saw the body. Lily said to him, “This could solve a lot of problems.”

  “Yes, it could,” he said. “But the statistics say that it probably won’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Serial killers don’t often commit suicide. They like the attention they get from us. The spree killers, who are going through a psychotic break. They’ll kill themselves almost every time, if you give them a chance. It’s either a problem or an opportunity,” Lincoln said.

  “Opportunity?”

  “If he didn’t kill himself, it’s a problem,” Lincoln said. “If he did, I might get a nice paper out of it.”

  “HOW BAD IS IT, SACHS?”

  Looking over Verlaine’s apartment, she said, “Seen worse.” She was speaking to Lincoln, who was outside on the street in front of the place. They were connected via a headset and stalk mic.

  Her judgment had nothing to do with the unpleasant detritus of gore and bits of bone littering the sculptor’s floor near the body (in fact, head wounds produce minimal blood flow). What she meant was that the place was relatively uncontaminated. If scenes were left virgin after the crime, forensic teams would have a much easier time processing the evidence. But that rarely happened. Bystanders, souvenir hunters, looters, grieving family members would pollute the scene with trace evidence, smear fingerprints, and walk off with everything from telltale epidermal cells to the murder weapon itself. And some of the worst offenders were the first-responders. Understandably, of course; saving lives and clearing a scene of the bad guys take priority. But leads have been destroyed and suspects found not guilty because otherwise solid evidence was destroyed by tactical teams and EMTs.

  Here, though, once it looked like Verlaine had offed himself, the entry team backed out and let Lily and Amelia, armed with their Glocks, clear the place. They were careful not to disturb anything.

  Then Lily backed away and let the expert do her thing. Now in her crime scene unit overalls, booties, and hood, Amelia was walking carefully through the fifty-by-fifty open space.

  “It’s like a
junkyard, Rhyme.”

  Workbenches were littered with tools and slabs of metal and stone and instruments, welding masks, gloves, and leather jackets so thick they seemed bulletproof. The floor was equally cluttered. Rough-hewn wooden boxes holding ingots of metal. Pallets loaded with stone and more scrap. Gas tanks filled one wall. Hand trucks and jacks. Electric saws and drill presses. Overhead, a series of rails and tracks ran throughout the space at ceiling height, about fifteen feet up. These held electric pulleys and winches for transporting loads of metal and the finished sculptures throughout the space. Rusty chains and hooks dangled.

  How homey, Amelia thought.

  And everywhere: Verlaine’s sculptures, made of metal sheets and bars and rods, welded or soldered or bolted together. Bronze mostly, but some iron and steel and copper. It was as if he couldn’t bear to have a space in his studio not presided over by one of his ladies.

  And ladies in extremis.

  Though the works were impressionistic, there was no doubt what each one depicted, a woman in pain, just as horrific as Lucas Davenport had described. Bent over backward, on all fours, tied down on their backs, crying in agony, pleading. Some were pierced by lengths of rebar reinforcing rods.

  She forced herself to look past the disturbing sculptures and get to work. Just because Verlaine apparently killed himself, Amelia didn’t search any less carefully. After all, suicide is technically a homicide. That the perp and the vic are the same simply means the investigators don’t have to hump as hard as in murder. But they still have to hump.

  And in this case, of course, there was a lot at stake, even after Verlaine’s death. She was well aware that the sculptor might’ve kidnapped and stashed another victim somewhere else, chained underground, with only a few days to live before she died of thirst or bled out—if he’d been having some of his sick fun with her.

  Amelia searched the hell out of the scene.

  First, she processed the body, photographing and filming, then clearing and bagging the Glock he’d used, collecting the one spent nine-millimeter shell, swabbing his hands for gunshot residue and wrapping them in plastic bags as well.