Deluge (CSI: NY)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Now it lay next to Mac Taylor, who had found enough blood on the blade to make a type match to Byrold. There was even more blood from another source. Mac assumed it was the injured boy. He called the hospital in Queens to check on his type, was told it was a match, and that the boy’s toe had been successfully reattached.

  “Kid says he wants the knife,” the nurse Mac talked to said. “Says he found it and it’s his.”

  “Tell him it’s evidence in a murder case,” said Mac.

  Mac was definitely tired, but there was no going home. Nothing waited for him there but troubled sleep. Out there a man named Keith Yunkin who walked with a limp and had murdered three people was seeking a fourth victim before midnight, before the anniversary of his brother’s death was over.

  Mac checked the preliminary autopsy reports on the three murder-mutilations. The data on the cleanest wounds, the initial ones under the victims’ armpits, did not match. He checked again. The difference was small, but it was there. Mac was sure they were accurate. Sid wouldn’t make a mistake like this, not even a small one.

  He picked up the phone and called the medical examiner’s cell phone.

  “Sid?”

  “Mac.”

  “Where are you?”

  “With friends,” said Sid. “Colleagues who have a few beers and stronger fare and share tales of the dead.”

  He wasn’t drunk, but he had managed to take the edge off.

  “The three you did today—”

  “Excluding the teacher with the punctuation marks in his neck and eye?”

  “The other three,” said Mac.

  Someone called Sid’s name. Sid covered the phone and Mac could hear him say, “I’ll be right there.”

  “Could all three have been killed by different weapons?” asked Mac.

  “Interesting question,” said Sid. “There was a slight difference in the shearing from the wounds under the arms. I attributed that to—”

  “He could have sharpened the knife after each murder,” Mac supplied.

  “Right,” said Sid. “Or the tissue of each victim could have accounted for a difference in shearing, but…now that you mention it. I think I’ll go back and take another look at the departed.”

  “It can wait till tomorrow,” said Mac.

  “I can’t,” said Sid.

  He hung up and Mac sat back.

  A clean, new, scalpel-sharpened knife for each victim. Ritual execution? No ripping. Methodical. Not simple revenge. He’s ridding the world of sexual predators. And there’s no reason to think he’ll stop at four or stop at the end of today.

  11

  THE MAN SAT AT THE BACK of the subway car, his lips moving, making no sound. He wore a poncho and hood. The hood was drawn forward. His face wasn’t visible. His hands were plunged into his pockets.

  There weren’t many people on the train, not at this hour, not heading back into the city, not on a system that had been damaged by stalling and flooding.

  What few people were on the train sat away from the hooded man who held one leg out awkwardly, bouncing nervously. They were New Yorkers. They were familiar with the crazies who talked to themselves and to people and creatures who were not there. As long as they didn’t talk to you, you could live with it.

  The hooded man’s voice could now be heard but only when the train came to a stop at a station. What he said made no sense, though the word “kill” was heard by some.

  Two people got off at the next stop even though it wasn’t theirs. They would wait for the next train, though it might take an hour, and hope that those aboard it were reasonably sane and safe.

  On the train, the man in the hood grew more restless and angry at whatever ghost or demon with which he argued.

  Edward Bender, tired before he even began his night shift at the Colston Hotel, was getting increasingly aggravated by the mumbling man, but he wasn’t sure what he could do about it.

  Suddenly the hooded man rose with a roar and started down the aisle, moving awkwardly. A heavy white woman cried out something in a language Edward didn’t understand.

  The hooded man had a knife in his hand. It didn’t have a long blade, but the blade did glisten in the flickering subway light. The train swayed and the hooded man started up the aisle. Edward rose, threw his magazine on the seat. The hooded man was as tall as Edward and younger, but Edward no longer gave a shit.

  Passengers were cringing against the windows, covering their faces with their arms or closed umbrellas.

  “Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?” the hooded man asked Edward. The man was no more than a few yards from Edward, who said nothing. The man’s right arm rose, clutching the knife. He lunged forward at Edward and fell to the floor. Edward stomped on his hand. The knife slid down the aisle.

  “Oh, thank God,” someone said.

  Edward looked at the man seated on the aisle. The man’s leg was still in the aisle. He had tripped the hooded man and possibly saved the life of Edward Bender.

  “Thanks,” said Edward, a foot on the neck of the hooded man who screamed, “We’ve all had enough. The deluge. No time for an ark.”

  “I’ll stop the train at the next station,” Edward said. “You find a cop.”

  Keith Yunkin, who had tripped the hooded man, nodded, got up and moved to the door just as the train pulled into the station. He stepped out onto the platform.

  It would take him a little longer to get to Ellen Janecek, but he had a few hours. It would be enough.

  He moved toward the exit. He had no intention of finding a policeman and he hoped that no policeman would find him.

  Lindsay should have been home taking a hot bath and eating one of the ripe peaches she had set aside for herself. Instead, she sat before a monitor in the CSI lab looking at this morning’s surveillance tapes of the Wallen School. A cup of chili and a Diet Coke rested next to the monitor.

  She looked at everything, paying particular interest to the images of the corridor outside the chemistry lab. This was the fourth time she had scanned the tape looking for—she didn’t know what she was looking for. It was a feeling. She had feelings like this from time to time. Sometimes she was right about them. The Loverton poisoning the first week she came to New York was one example. Most of the time the feeling didn’t pan out, either because she couldn’t find the forensic evidence or she was simply mislead by her instincts. This effort with the tapes looked as if it wasn’t going to pan out.

  Then the glitch. She saw it and knew even before she proved it to herself. Lindsay saved the screen and opened a word processing program. She typed in the sequence of the camera shots, the order in which the camera picked up the images. There were sixteen surveillance cameras randomly programed but carefully positioned in the Wallen School. Lindsay typed in data on all sixteen. She didn’t have to check to be sure she was right, but she did check.

  She went back to the morning tapes, pausing to wolf down spoonfuls of chili and wash them down with Diet Coke. No doubt about it. The corridor outside the chem lab was not in the tenth sequence. She went through the next sequences looking for the corridor in each one.

  The corridor was missing in the eighteenth sequence.

  It hadn’t been a mystical feeling. She had seen and sensed that something was not right in the tapes. Now she had proved it.

  Each sequence had a time in white letters on the first image. The tenth sequence read: 8:40 a.m. The eighteenth sequence read: 10:50 a.m.

  The missing video of the corridor was from ten minutes before Alvin Havel’s last class to a few minutes after the class ended.

  She had questions to ask now. Who had access to the monitor security room? Who had the expertise to erase and manipulate the tape? What had been deleted and why?

  Lindsay finished the chili, threw the empty carton in the nearby trash, took her Diet Coke and headed home where she planned to reward herself. She would dare to eat a peach.

  Driving to Queens was a nightmare. Taking the subway would probably ha
ve been worse. Flack had listened to the police band reports. Just a few minutes earlier a train had been stopped on the way in from Queens when one of the passengers tried to attack the others with a knife. The passengers had subdued him, but the line was delayed for almost thirty minutes while police made their way to the scene.

  Flack shook his head. This trip might lead to nothing, but what else did they have? He had an address for Dexter, the Umbrella Man. He had a full name, Dexter Hughes. Dexter lived in Queens with his sister, Larissa, an LPN and a gospel singer with a bit of a local reputation.

  This had been told to him by Alvino Lopez, who owned the garage on 101st Street where Dexter got his umbrellas. Alvino did not know Dexter’s address, but that had been no problem for Flack. The problem had been that no one had answered the phone at the unlisted number of Larissa Hughes, which meant a trip to Queens.

  Roads were leading to Queens. Dexter. The boy who lost his toe. The knife that took it that Mac said was the murder weapon. No, alter that. It looked now, according to Mac, as if it was one of the murder weapons. Keith Yunkin seemed to have an arsenal of sharp and deadly knives.

  Flack arrived at the small frame house a few minutes after ten. Just about that time Keith Yunkin was getting off the subway at the Thirty-fourth Street stop, four blocks from the hotel where Ellen Janecek was patiently checking her makeup for the fifth time in the past hour.

  “You all right?” asked Stella.

  “I’m all right,” said Hawkes. “A few bruises. What have we got?”

  “Dead people,” she said.

  They were in the crime scene lab, papers neatly overlapping and laid out, an image on the monitor, a simplified room with four thick, black supports in each corner. Three shapes were placed inside the room. Two together in the middle, another at the far right. Two others were placed outside the room on the left.

  “That’s the cook on the right,” said Stella, moving the arrow to the figure.

  Stella maneuvered the arrow on the screen with the mouse and said, “The beams in each corner of the room went together. TNT.”

  An animated spark flashed. Hawkes nodded.

  “Beams buckled, ceiling collapsed,” she said.

  With that the ceiling of the room on the screen fell and covered the shapes in the room.

  She clicked again and the already bent and twisted support beams buckled and collapsed. The three figures were gone.

  “FDNY arson investigator says the placement of the bombs was perfect, professional,” Stella said. “But the kind of material used, the amount, suggested an amateur.”

  “Someone wanted it to look like the work of an amateur, but they also wanted to be sure Doohan’s and everyone in it went down,” said Hawkes. “Why? Custus looks like a professional. Some of those scars on his chest and arms are twenty-five years old at least. Question is still there. Why pretend to be an amateur?”

  “I don’t know,” said Stella. “I’m running DNA on everyone who died in Doohan’s and on Custus. Maybe we’ve got a bomber besides Custus.”

  “Two in one building at the same time,” said Hawkes. “Quite a coincidence.”

  “Don’t believe in them,” Stella said.

  She turned back to the computer screen and began typing.

  “Okay, all three people in the bar look up.”

  The stick figures on the screen moved their heads.

  “Then Doohan and Custus come in.”

  Two stick figures enter the image from the left. The first figure falls. The ground opens and swallows the second figure.

  “Powder, explosive burns and residue on Custus,” said Hawkes. “He shot Doohan, fell into that pit.”

  “Doohan has powder burns on his hand too,” she said.

  “Whose gun is it?” asked Hawkes.

  “Street gun. Registered to a pawn shop owner in Dearborn, Michigan,” said Stella. “Reported stolen five years ago.”

  “Street gun,” said Hawkes.

  “How do you see it?” Stella asked.

  “More questions. If Custus planted those bombs, and it’s pretty clear he did, what was he doing standing around outside the bar just before he detonated? He could have been killed.”

  “And,” added Stella, “what was he talking to Doohan about and why did Doohan run into the bombed-out bar? Did Custus shoot him? Did Doohan shoot himself? Why?”

  They sat looking at the screen. Then Hawkes flipped through the lab reports.

  “We can ask Custus,” he said.

  “He’ll tell you?”

  “He thinks he’s smart,” said Hawkes.

  “Is he?”

  “Yes, but maybe he can be fooled. We’ve got something on our side he doesn’t have.”

  “What’s that?” asked Stella.

  “Science.”

  The woman was tall, round, and black with smooth skin and glasses at the end of her nose. She could have been any age between forty and seventy. Flack thought that “handsome” would be a good word to describe her.

  She stood blocking the door, arms folded. He showed his identification. She did what few people did. She checked the photograph, looked at him and then back at the photo before nodding her head to show that she was satisfied.

  “Larissa Hughes?”

  She nodded again.

  “You know why I’m here, don’t you?” he said.

  “Pretty sure,” she said, “but I’d like you to tell me so I don’t step in a hole I didn’t have to dig.”

  “Your brother, Dexter,” said Flack. “Can I come in?”

  She stepped out of the way.

  “Prying eyes,” she said. “Good-looking white man comes calling at night on a weekday and people will talk. Fewer who see you the better.”

  He stepped in. She closed the door behind him.

  “Dexter’s in the living room pretending he’s watching girls playing softball.”

  Flack followed her through a door on the right and found himself looking at a thin black man, seated on a sofa, his head cocked to one side, a gun in his hand.

  “It’s not him,” Larissa said.

  “I know, but maybe he sent him,” said Dexter, aiming the gun at Flack. “Don’t move fast and don’t reach under that jacket. I’ve been through two wars, lost one eye and plan to live to sell a lot of umbrellas.”

  “He’s the police,” said Larissa.

  “Sure?”

  “Certain,” she said. “Put the gun away.”

  He slowly placed the gun on a table next to the sofa.

  “You saw the man who killed Patricia Mycrant.”

  “Who?”

  “Woman murdered on the roof above the Brilliance Deli.”

  “Shit,” said Dexter, turning away and shaking his head.

  “Tell the man, Dexter,” his sister said.

  “Man’s crazy. I talk, he finds out who I am. He comes over here and slices me unless I get lucky and blow him all to shit. I’m not feeling lucky.”

  “You know who he is?” asked Flack.

  “I know,” Dexter said with a sigh. “I don’t know his name, but I know.”

  “How do you know him?” asked Flack.

  Dexter hesitated.

  “He’s killed three people,” said Flack. “We’ve got a lot of reasons to believe he plans to kill another one tonight.”

  “Seen him coming out of the building with all the apartments,” said Dexter. “The yellow one with the dirty bricks, the one your friend said the face of Jesus was on in the dirt. No one believed her.”

  “Dorothy is harmless,” said Larissa. “Tell the man what he needs to know.”

  “I just told him. I seen the man coming out of there maybe ten, fifteen times, maybe more.”

  “Where is the building?”

  “Three blocks down,” said Larissa.

  “Take him out and put him away,” said Dexter. “If he sees me again, one of us is going to die and the odds are good it won’t be him. I’m sixty, shaky and one-eyed. He’s young and limpy and I
won’t be easy to catch, but he’ll just keep coming. He’s…What do you call it when you see in someone’s eyes that he won’t give up till you put a silver bullet through his heart?”

  “Relentless,” said Larissa.

  “Right,” said Dexter. “Relentless.”

  Lindsay and Danny sat in a narrow pizza shop that promised Chicago-style pizza. In Chicago they promised New York–style pizza. In Boston they promised Philadelphia-style pizza.

  “Can’t be sure it was a girl,” said Lindsay.

  They were sharing a small sausage pizza.

  “No,” said Danny seriously. “After all, his friend Wayne O’Shea caught him coming out of the closet.”

  “Funny,” she said, grabbing the last pizza slice.

  “Want another one?” he asked.

  “You?”

  “Let’s live dangerously.”

  “My treat,” she said, getting up.

  “Only fair,” he said. “You eat twice as much as I do.”

  When she got back, he reached for a slice before she could place the pan on the table. He grinned and adjusted his glasses. They were the only customers. The place smelled of grease and grilled meat. Danny felt at home.

  “Have you talked to Hawkes?” Lindsay asked.

  “Just for a minute. He sounds fine. Tired.”

  “He’s not the only one. We should both get some sleep,” Lindsay said.

  “I forgot,” said Danny. “Back in Montana you get up before the cows.”

  Lindsay began working on a pizza slice and said, “We get a lot done while you’re still sleeping. You want to go back and go over the files again?”

  Danny shrugged.

  “One of those kids knows who was in that closet,” he said. “So…”

  “We look for boyfriends, girlfriends, angry parents, brothers, sisters,” she said. “Long list.”

  “We look for anyone who has residue glass in their palms,” he said.

  “Let’s go back and make a list,” she said.

  “Bring the rest of the pizza with,” Danny said.

  “A party.”

  “Not exactly,” he said.

  Lindsay had a vivid moment of recall, the dead teacher with the pencils protruding from his neck and eye. Then, another image, an older one from before she had come to New York, an image that came unbidden.