by Mark McNease
He was tired now. He’d worked out how to get the bodies out of his house unnoticed some years ago, but he was getting older, forty-two this coming September. It wasn’t as easy as it used to be. And this one had been heavier than he’d guessed when he chose him.
Note to self: never, ever, pick a customer from the store again. No matter how cute or handsome, no matter how liquid and shining the eyes or seductive the smile. Stay online, stay hidden behind a dozen re-routers, change names each time, do not take this risk ever again.
He’d been away too long, losing his edge in his mother’s dreary Berlin apartment, saving himself for his return to the killing ground. He’d have to sharpen quickly; mistakes were something other people made. He’d made one this time—the only time in all his successes—and he would not make another one.
He would look at Victor Someone’s driver’s license in the morning. Sense memory was a beautiful thing, and nothing brought it back quite like his keepsakes. The license was his souvenir—his thirteenth. Lucky thirteen. The rest of the wallet stayed with the body. He wasn’t interested in making identification difficult. It didn’t matter if the police knew who had been killed, only that they would never find the man who did the killing.
It had been dark when he parked by the river. The new moon had worked to his favor, a first. No one had been around; he made sure no one saw a man with a heavy, strangely shaped object wrapped in black plastic trudging his way to the river’s edge. Then a simple heave and splash, and he was on his way home.
Bedtime at last. But before then, for a few minutes anyway, he wanted to go through those emails. He’d requested photos, knowing many of them would be old and meant to trick him, and that was okay. He was less interested in finding a man who looked exactly like his picture than he was in finding a man who made him want to kill. It was like falling in love with an image: he never knew which one it would be, but knew it when it happened. This one. Oh yes. This one will be here soon.
He turned off the kitchen light, took his tea cup with the little chain from the tea ball hanging over the side, and headed to his large master bedroom on the second floor. His laptop was open and waiting for him. He would sift through a dozen or so email responses and see if any of them struck his fancy. But first, the pictures of Victor. Victor Someone. He would enjoy those before sleeping. He always took pictures.
Chapter 2
Kyle Callahan loved being married, it was the getting married that had been such an ordeal. He’d been with his partner, Danny Durban, for just over seven years when they finally made it official—and legal, in the state of New York, at least. That had been one of the reasons they’d waited: neither of them would marry until they could do it in their home state. And now, with the Federal Government recognizing their marriage, there had been no reason to put it off any longer. So on May 12th, just six weeks ago, he and Danny had gone to City Hall in downtown Manhattan and gotten their license. The following Saturday they stood before seventy-five of their closest friends at Metropolitan Community Church and publicly declared their intention to spend the rest of their lives together. Danny had wanted the 12th as their wedding date, to honor the anniversary of their first meeting at the Katherine Pride Gallery, but it fell on a Tuesday. Nobody gets married on a Tuesday, at least not anyone with a mother-in-law flying in with her boyfriend from Chicago, another set of parents from Queens, siblings, nieces, bosses, and Kyle’s best friend Detective Linda Sikorsky from New Jersey, along with her own newly minted wife Kirsten McClellan.
The sheer logistics of a wedding were more than Kyle or Danny had ever anticipated. It starts out simply enough as a vision in which all these friends, relatives and loved ones magically appear to celebrate the happy couple’s bliss. In that first fantasy phase there are no hotels to recommend, no invitation list to cull, no feelings to hurt by being excluded from the guest list. And certainly no large pile of cash to drop for an affair that seemed to have $10,000 as its starting price. By the time they headed downtown for their license both men were frayed at the edges, ready to elope and send all these people a nice photograph instead. It was too late by then and the worst was over, so they went through with it and now would not have had it any other way. The cost only set them back three years’ worth of prime vacation travel, but that was okay. It had been a huge success and they were finally married.
The inevitable let-down after so much stress, planning and execution had lasted about a week for Kyle, less for Danny who was busy dealing with the imminent departure of his beloved Margaret Bowman. Margaret had started Margaret’s Passion, the restaurant Danny now owned with Kyle and Kyle’s mother Sally. She’d hired Danny almost twelve years ago, then sold the restaurant to him last year as she crept into her 80s. Now, as he had dreaded, she was preparing to move to Florida to spend her remaining days with her sister Rebecca, leaving Margaret’s Passion to Danny to fully make his own. As long as there was a Margaret’s Passion there would be a Margaret, if only in photographs on the walls with the many celebrities and politicians she’d served so well and lovingly over the decades. But the thought of her being so far away and likely never to return had left Danny in a funk for months. His wedding, despite the rigors of it, the anxiety and the stress, was a high point and a needed distraction from the loss he faced. There would only be one wedding for both men; there would only be one Margaret Bowman, too, and having her there in the front row with their parents was a memory they would cherish as much as the wedding itself.
Kyle was thinking about it all as he scanned the previous day’s mail at their kitchen table. It was his habit to get the mail when he got home in the early evening, but he’d been distracted and had forgotten, instead taking the elevator down to pick it up this morning, along with the New York Times that lay outside their door. In the age of online everything, Kyle still preferred reading the paper the old fashioned way—with pages that turned and ink that came off on his fingers.
The men lived on the edge of Gramercy Park, at Lexington Avenue and 25th Street. Danny could easily walk to Margaret’s Passion just six blocks away, and Kyle could get to the Japan TV3 offices, where he worked as the personal assistant to firebrand and borderline has-been TV reporter Imogene Landis, with an easy bus ride and a cross town stroll. Their dear friend Detective Linda (now retired from the New Hope, Pennsylvania, police force) was asleep in the spare room, turning it once again from their shared office into a guest room. She’d come into town the day before for her first Pride weekend and parade and Kyle made plans for them to see the city in much more detail than Linda had been able to on her last visit. That was in late April a year ago, and she and Kyle had been caught up trying to stop the killer Kieran Stipling as he murdered his way through a list of people connected to the Katherine Pride Gallery. Whatever sightseeing Linda had planned that visit was abandoned in the race to end the killing. Kyle intended to make up for it this time.
Danny walked in wearing the plush brown robe Kyle gave him the previous Christmas. The smell of morning coffee always brought him out of the bedroom, trailed moments later by their cats, Smelly and Leonard.
“Linda awake yet?” he asked, heading straight to the coffee pot and taking a cup from the cabinet above it. The cats took up position at his feet, expecting early morning treats.
“I doubt it,” Kyle said. “I think she was up late, I heard her talking on the phone just before I fell asleep.”
“It’s terrible about Kirsten’s mother. I wish we could see her again.”
“I’m sure Linda wishes it, too. We’re at that age, Danny …”
“I know, I know, let’s not talk about it.”
Time did not take sides, it only passed in a constant flow, and eventually the people we ride the stream with begin to fall off to the shore. Kyle’s father had been gone over fifteen years. Margaret was heading off soon for a few good years in Florida before she, too, slipped from the stream. It wouldn’t be long before their parents were gone and they took their place at the head of th
e line, saying goodbye to friends one by one—or perhaps saying goodbye themselves. Life makes no guarantees and takes no reservations.
Linda’s wife Kirsten was in Phoenix with her dying mother. The women had hastily flown her to New Jersey in March and married in a very small ceremony in Stockton with just Kyle, Danny, and the women’s mothers in attendance. It was the kind of wedding Kyle envied after the ordeal of his own. The next day Kirsten flew back with her mother and had been spending weeks at a time travelling back and forth. Her mother, Dot McClellan, had cancer metastasized throughout her body and was not expected to see the end of July. Linda’s plan was to enjoy this weekend in the city with Kyle and Danny, then head to Phoenix. It had taken a serious toll on both women, and Kyle noticed how much thinner Linda was when she’d arrived yesterday afternoon.
They’d met Detective Linda Sikorsky a year and a half ago during Halloween weekend at Pride Lodge. The Lodge sat on twenty-five acres near the Delaware River, on the Pennsylvania side. Kyle’s friend and lodge handyman, Teddy Pembroke, had been found dead at the bottom of the lodge’s empty pool, and Linda was the homicide detective investigating the death, which proved to be deliberate. Murder, it seemed, was their first commonality, but since then they’d found many more. Kyle and Linda spoke every few days, and last fall he and Danny spent a week at her small house in the woods in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. Linda had inherited the house from her aunt Celeste and, with some reluctance, moved from her longtime home in New Hope to take up residence with the deer, rabbits and strange sounds nature makes when it has no competition. The highlights of the visit were supposed to be a week of sightseeing, country living and good food at fine local restaurants; instead, it became a hunt for the killer of Abigail Creek, matriarch of CrossCreek Farm and victim of a vicious hit-and-run. Their time together always seemed to attract murderers—or the other way around—and sometimes Kyle wondered if they should just maintain a long-distance friendship, in the interest of keeping people alive.
“Did you see Vinnie when you picked up the mail this morning?” Danny asked, stirring creamer into his coffee and taking it to the table. He sat next to Kyle and picked up the mail, flipping through it so see what was his. Leonard stayed in the kitchen, staring up at the coffee pot as if he could not understand there were no treats in it for him. Smelly, the wiser of the two, followed Danny to the table and perched at his feet, knowing he would eventually relent and get the pouch of fish-flavored nuggets for her.
“Come to think of it, no. The relief guy was on duty, what’s his name?”
“Dayton.”
“Dayton? That’s an unusual name.”
The building had doormen. It was a perk Kyle had never known before moving from Brooklyn into Danny’s apartment. It took a while to get used to, but not too long. Having someone open the door for you and receive packages and visitors was luxurious without being too elitist. Vinnie—Vincent Campagna—had the overnight shift and was among the most reliable doormen the building had ever had. He was in his mid-thirties, and in ten years on the door had not been off more than three or four times. This was the second night he’d called in.
“Is Vinnie sick?” Kyle asked, scanning the paper. The city’s new mayor was making changes, many of which were controversial and demanded above-the-fold coverage.
“No, it’s some family thing,” Danny said. “Something about his brother missing, I’m not sure. There’s not that much communication between tenants and the doormen, but I’ve heard things in the elevator.”
Kyle kept reading the paper. The mayor was pushing for some new legislation, the mayor was insisting on a vote his way by the City Council, the U.S. Congress was at a stalemate again. He flipped the paper over to see what news hadn’t made it to the top … and he froze. An article just below the fold was headlined, “Man Found in East River Identified, Police Searching for Clues.”
Kyle started reading the story.
“You know, I think Smelly’s finally losing weight,” Danny said, looking down at the cat. She had been pre-diabetic for several years, but every effort at trimming her down had failed. “Maybe it’s age.”
“Shh!” Kyle said, focused on the article
“What’s so interesting that you have to ‘shhh’ me?”
Kyle ignored him, reading. “What is Vinnie’s last name?” he said after a moment.
“Campagna. Vincent Campagna.”
“He has a brother.”
“Yes.”
“A brother who’s also a doorman.”
“Yes. I think their father was, too. A family tradition I guess, like the military. What are you reading? Is Vinnie in the news?”
“No, he’s not,” Kyle said, sliding the paper to the side. “But his brother, Victor, is.”
“In a good way, I hope,” Danny said, reaching for the paper to read about it himself.
“Not at all. In a bad way. A very bad way.”
Danny read the article quickly. “Oh my God,” he said.
“Oh my God is right. Victor Campagna is the body they found in the river Tuesday morning. You saw the story.”
“It was everywhere. But nothing about it being an accident or a murder.”
“This is awful.”
Smelly began meowing, an escalation of her demands for a treat. Kyle swatted her away with his free hand.
“He’s back,” Kyle said.
Danny looked up at him. The article hadn’t named a suspect. “Who is ‘he’?”
“The Pride Killer.”
Danny remembered then. Every year for four years at Pride weekend the East River had become a depository for victims of a man—assuming it was a man—who remained uncaught. The media had dubbed him the Pride Killer, because the murders only happened that weekend in June, stopping once the festivities were over. Then radio silence. No killing, no bodies, nothing for another year, and another.
“Three years,” Kyle said, as if he’d read Danny’s thoughts. “He stopped three years ago and they couldn’t figure out why. Everyone hoped he was dead, or that he’d come to his senses, if madmen have senses.”
“But the paper doesn’t say who—”
“It’s him. The hands and feet bound, the strangulation, the location of the body. Even if it traveled in the current they’ll trace it back to the general vicinity of where this guy dumps his bodies.”
“Now we know why Vinnie hasn’t been to work,” Danny said. “He must be devastated.”
“It says the body was found two nights ago. Poor Vinnie. And his family, I can’t imagine.”
The men grew silent. Smelly, sensing something was wrong, stopped her meowing and slinked off into the living room. She would get what she wanted, but later, when moods had returned to normal. Leonard was still staring at the coffee pot.
Finally, Kyle said, “He won’t stop.”
“How do you know that, if it’s even him? He stopped for three years.”
“Because this was the first. There will be a second, and a third. That’s the way he works.”
Danny had a sinking feeling. If timing was everything, it worked against them very well. Detective Linda visiting, a body in the East River; the stars had aligned in a way most displeasing to him as he watched Kyle’s face for the telltale glazed expression, the speeding, clicking thoughts. He worried Kyle would not stay out of it, and that sooner or later something terrible would happen to them. They were married now, together forever. What happened to one of them, happened to both of them.
“Listen, Kyle …”
“Don’t worry. This is one for the police.”
Danny had the feeling he had just been lied to. Not deliberately; Kyle had every intention of staying out of it. But it was his nature to wonder—wonder who this man was taking the lives of other men, where he lived, how he found his victims. Danny knew that as much as Kyle might try to ignore this, it would take root in his mind and grow until he had to do something.
“What’s cooking?” Detective Linda said, startling them b
oth. Neither had heard her come out of the bedroom.
A sense of dread came over Danny as he blew across his coffee, cooling it. He knew Linda and Kyle would soon be lost in conversation about serial killers and floating bodies. Why can’t his husband just be an amateur photographer and a personal assistant? Why must he take it upon himself to rid the world of bad people? Sooner or later one of those bad people might rid the world of Kyle.
Chapter 3
She could hear the men in the living room ... or was it the kitchen? Living room, kitchen, entryway, they all seemed to flow into each other in Manhattan apartments, if Kyle and Danny’s was a typical example. Linda Sikorsky had no way of knowing—she had not been in any other apartments in New York City, except for the penthouse she and Kyle had burst into just in time to stop Kieran Stipling from cutting Stuart Pride’s throat. That was over a year ago, and still the memory of it gave her chills. She stretched on the sofa bed, letting the unpleasant thoughts evaporate as she reached up with her hands, stretched her arms, and pushed her toes down until they almost went over the end of the mattress.
So much had happened since those awful murders. Kyle and Danny had gotten married, an elaborate event to which Linda and Kirsten were witness along with dozens of other people. The women had stayed in a boutique hotel in Park Slope that catered to lesbians, and only overnight; they wanted the men to have time alone, as if seven years were not enough. And even though Kyle had protested, insisting they should stay a few days, Linda knew he was secretly happy to have them all gone. Weddings were intense affairs and while it had been glorious, Linda was glad she and Kirsten had taken a much more intimate approach. They’d had to; Kirsten’s mother was living on borrowed time (or, Linda thought, dying on it), and circumstances demanded they move quickly.