The Pride Trilogy: Kyle Callahan 1-3

by Mark McNease

  “I can’t hear you,” D would say, turning his ear to their mouths. “You’ll have to speak up.”

  He felt the old passion return as he managed to get Scott on the table and begin his inspection. Very nice specimen. He liked them in shape. Age was not a determining factor, and Scott had taken good care of himself.

  D began to take his own clothes off. There was seldom much blood; he simply liked to look at himself as he went about his favorite pastime.

  He bound Scott to the table, sorry the man was now unconscious. He would have to wake him up when the time came. He didn’t go through all this to miss the best part.

  The body slipped easily into the East River. They always did, giving out just a splash as they broke the water’s surface. D got them there in his car. It’s the only reason he kept one in the City. No one really needs a car in Manhattan, unless it’s for leaving. D chuckled as he headed back to his Lincoln. He supposed the car was for leaving, but he was not the one heading off. It was men like Scott, and Victor Someone, and Kerry and Rafael. He didn’t remember all their names. He didn’t need to. The souvenirs brought their names back to him. He always kept something, and when he took them out of his bedroom safe he suddenly remembered each and every one in detail.

  He reached into his pocket, whistling lightly as he walked. There, next to his own keys, was the set he took from Scott. Just a half dozen keys, to a half dozen locks Scott would never open again. One of them, D knew, was to the man’s apartment. It was silent now, as silent as the night. It was a silence that would never be broken again by the sound of the apartment owner walking through the door.

  Scott had proven especially defiant. It was a nice surprise; D had expected him to be one of his more pliable victims. He couldn’t say why; perhaps he’d let old stereotypes color his perception. But he had been wrong—delightfully wrong—as he’d discovered once Scott regained consciousness. It had tuned into a shouting match with only one of them shouting! No pleading, that was good, he didn’t like the simpering ones. Plenty of struggle, with Scott thrashing this way and that, calling for help, his face so red D had feared a stroke might steal the moment from him. But fortune had been on his side once again and Scott had reminded him in every sensual, psychological, physical and emotional way, why he loved what he did so much. It had been both sublime and ecstatic. The only disappointment for the nearly ninety minutes he enjoyed with Scott was that it ended.

  He felt fine as he walked to his car. Great, really. He was back in fit form. It had all gone fantastically. He would have to rethink this whole retirement business. Who retires anymore?

  Chapter 21

  Kyle had slept fitfully. The dinner had been lovely, followed by a walk around Gramercy Park and down to Union Square. He and Danny wanted to make sure Detective Linda saw plenty of sights on this trip. She hadn’t come with a list of things to see and Kyle had not suggested one. He thought the best way to experience New York City was to just show up and go where your interests took you. Their visit to the Met had been ridiculously brief and Kyle meant to ask Linda if she’d like to go back and spend an afternoon there. They only had a few more days—her flight to Phoenix was scheduled for Monday morning. And before that there was the parade Sunday. So little time.

  He’d tossed and turned most of the night, disturbed by dreams. In one he was jogging along the East River under a full moon. Jogging was something Kyle would only do in a dream. As he ran along he came upon a small child, a little girl in a frilly yellow church dress, pointing at the water’s edge. She said nothing to him, he said nothing to her. Instead he stopped jogging and walked over to the riverbank. There, floating face up, was Danny. Wearing the same clothes he’d had on last night for their walk. Kyle stood staring down into the water, unable to scream, unable to speak. And then, floating into view, coming to rest next to his husband and best friend of nearly eight years, was Detective Linda. Face up, eyes dead, bloated.

  Kyle had bolted up from the dream, sucking in his breath. He’d reached down to feel for Smelly, who always slept between them. She was there. Danny was there. They were in bed. The clock read 3:00 a.m. It was only a dream. He’d managed to fall back asleep after telling Danny, who’d woken from the sudden movement, that everything was fine. It took an hour, but the last time Kyle glanced at the clock it was just turning 4:00 a.m.. A moment later he was back asleep, this time dreaming about cats, hundreds of cats in a house of rooms.

  He finally got up as the sun began to blanket the sky with early morning light. He quietly went to the kitchen and made coffee for himself. Cup in hand, he padded quietly back to bed in his slippers, tossed them off and slid back onto the mattress. He turned the morning news on low. He knew Danny was awake, but it was one of their differences: Kyle could not stay on his back, staring at the ceiling, or on his side looking out into the dark room. Once his mind clicked on he had to move, even if he just got up for coffee and came back to bed. Danny, on the other hand, had no trouble staying put for another half hour or more.

  The familiar faces of Channel 2 filled the TV screen. Kyle had imagined for years that the TV news people were his extended family. He’d had a crush on several of them—the weatherman from Channel 4, and an anchor named George from Channel 7 who had mysteriously vanished three years ago, surfacing in a much smaller market (Kyle kept tabs on them now that the internet made anonymity nearly impossible). He was watching, sipping his coffee, when a “BREAKING” segment came on. A young Asian woman, new to the channel, was reporting live from the East River.

  Kyle immediately felt sick. He kept watching.

  The name “Melissa Pang” appeared in the left corner, identifying the reporter.

  “… the dead man has been identified as Scott Devlin. The information we have so far is that an early morning jogger noticed the body floating near the riverbank around 4:00 a.m. this morning. The jogger, whose name has not been released, immediately called police.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “What?” said Danny, sitting up to watch the news report.

  “We made a mistake. A terrible mistake.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Shhh!”

  Kyle leaned in, focusing his attention on the reporter’s words.

  “Authorities refuse to say if this is the work of the Pride Killer until further determinations can be made,” Melissa said.

  “Of course it is!” Kyle shouted at the TV.

  “That man was never caught and was believed to have died or left the area, but fear is beginning to spread in New York’s gay community. As of this morning, the hashtag #PrideKiller has been trending on Twitter. Can social media solve what the NYPD has failed to for seven years?”

  “Great,” Danny grumbled. “Everything’s a hashtag now.”

  “I wonder what he kept,” Kyle wondered aloud.

  “What?”

  “A souvenir. The Pride Killer always keeps one.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “They did a profile on him the last time, it was on NYNow. They were getting desperate, hoping to jog someone’s memory in the public—and then he stopped. Or went away, or got bored, who knows. But he kept something from all his victims.”

  “Well, they’re not going to tell you what he kept, if they even know,” Danny said. “They hold that information back, in case they have a suspect.”

  “I have to tell Linda.”

  “Let her sleep, you can’t do anything about it at this hour.”

  “No, she’ll want to know.”

  “I’m already up,” Linda said. She was standing in the open doorway, her brown bathrobe held closed with its belt. “I saw it, too.”

  There was a television in the spare room. Kyle watched sometimes when he was at his desk, and it provided company with something to watch if they wanted to be alone.

  “We should have gone.”

  “Where, Kyle?” Linda said. “Where should we have gone? What should we have done? This isn’t your fault. Y
ou had no way of knowing.”

  “But I did. I knew he kills in threes. I knew the second was coming, but not so soon.”

  Kyle hopped out of bed, sliding his feet back into his slippers.

  “Where are you going?” Danny asked. He was up now, too. Luxuriating in bed was not to be his this morning.

  “More coffee, and a plan of some kind. We have to move quickly.”

  Kyle walked past Linda and headed to the kitchen. She turned and followed him, with Smelly and Leonard bounding off the bed and giving chase.

  Kyle popped another single serving cup into the machine. “What kind do you want? We have a selection.”

  Linda stepped past him and looked at the coffee carousel on the counter, deciding between dark Columbian roast and vanilla hazelnut.

  “We need to go to that store,” Kyle said.

  “Keller and Whitman?”

  “Yes. Vic Campagna either never made it there, or he left and met his killer shortly after. Maybe he said something to the staff, gave some indication where he was going.”

  “It’s quarter after six in the morning,” Linda said. She handed him the vanilla hazelnut pod.

  “Yes, I know what time it is, and I want to be there the minute they open. In the meantime I want to watch the news, see if they come out with anything more. And I want to go online. Whoever this Scott Devlin is, he may have a website, or a profile. The more we know before we leave here, the sooner we might have some idea where to look next.”

  Linda stood quietly, letting Smelly circle her feet. She thought of the gun she’d brought with her, tucked in her suitcase. It had been her father’s gun, the one he’d left at home when he went to the store all those years ago and was gunned down outside a corner market in a botched robbery. It was his service pistol from his time as Military Police in Vietnam, a Colt .45 Series 70 government model he’d used as a Cincinnati cop. Her mother gave it to her when she joined the New Hope Police Force but she had never carried it on duty. It was too special for that. She had had kept it, cleaned it, and fired it hundreds of times at a local range, and now that she was retired it was her protection. She did not travel without it—or her permit to carry it as a retired police officer—unless she was flying. At some point soon she would need to let Kyle know she had it, especially now that she intended to bring it with her. She had not believed in putting her safety in anyone’s hands but her own since she was eight years old and learned it could be fatal.

  Chapter 22

  D ran his fingers over the keys for the hundredth time, feeling the metal with his fingertips, remembering the look of terror in Scott Devlin’s eyes as he realized he was dying at the hands of such a refined man, a man of taste who kept seventy-five-year-old Scotch and a Class A wine cellar in his basement. Meeting strangers had always been a gamble, but nothing about D made anyone think he was the least bit dangerous. That was part of the thrill, really. Appearing to be someone so completely different from who he really was. And then, near the end, revealing himself. Surprise! How’s that for failing to expect the unexpected!

  He was lying in bed, propped up on pillows against the headboard, with his favorite bamboo bed tray across his lap. He’d made his morning tea and accompanied it with buttered toast—a special treat on a special morning. He looked at the clock: 6:00 a.m. The news came on and he watched as the same reporter told the same breaking news that Kyle and Linda were watching on the other side of town. A body had been found in the East River. Speculation was rampant. Something about a hashtag. My, D thought, that was fast. Was it a good sign? A bad sign? No sign at all?

  He liked this young reporter; she was a rising star in the local TV news market and he would keep an eye on her, perhaps send her flowers when this was over and he disappeared for another year. He would be back, he had decided that. Retirement was not for him. The uneasiness he’d had after killing Victor Someone and feeling so little fulfillment had subsided. Scott reminded him how good he was at it, how much it meant to him. No, he was not going away, just taking his usual long vacation. But first, there was the spree to finish. The Pride Killer—and by day’s end everyone would be saying he’d come home to kill again—made his kills in threes. Three men. Three trips to the basement. Three bodies in the river.

  There had to be one more, and as D remembered it clearly now, the third time was the charm. In fact, the hardest part of his yearly ritual was stopping! He made it to three, he enjoyed the escalating pleasure of each kill, and then, on Sunday, he went to the parade. Hundreds of thousands of proud gay men, lesbians, allies, all letters of that ever-expanding acronym marching and hooting and hollering their way down Fifth Avenue. And D, there on a corner, so very proud himself. He belonged to them, and they certainly belonged to him. Thank you, Papa, he thought, nibbling at his toast. Thank you for the photographs and the letters I never answered. Thank you for showing me there is a different way, a better way.

  He had decided to find his third victim in a different way as well. The police would be stepping up their efforts. It did not serve the New York City tourism business to have the country’s most successful serial killer back in action during one of the biggest celebrations of the year. They would be looking at postings on websites, men seeking men for all sorts of things. And nowadays everything was spied on, everything was filtered. He wanted to do what they would least expect and find his next candidate offline. Someone he met in his everyday life, as long as it was nowhere near the store. He hadn’t cruised in a very long time, except twice his first year in Berlin when he was lonely and his mother, demented and taking much too long to die, had become insufferable. It had been more to get out of the house, away from her and the string of aides she hired and fired. He’d gone home with the men and talked, then fooled around just enough to frustrate them before heading back to the dreary reality of a dying mother.

  He would cruise again, finding his third victim on a park path or in a Chelsea coffee shop. There were still plenty of gay men in Chelsea among the baby strollers and nannies. He could meet one there. Or maybe the Met or the Guggenheim! Museums were especially fun to cruise in, pretending to look at paintings and sculpture while you were really stealing glances at men doing exactly the same thing!

  Whoever he met, and however he met him, it would need to be soon. He’d had to push up his schedule with Scott. The benefit of it was that it gave him more time. He did not have to rush now.

  He finished half his toast, leaving the second piece on the plate as he watched the weather forecast for the next five days. It was going to be a perfect weekend. He would excuse himself that afternoon, telling Jarrod, who was coming in late this morning after a doctor’s appointment, that he wanted to visit the church where his mother had loved to pray. He would light a votive candle and drop some money in the offering box. She’d never lived in New York City. There was no church, no favorite pew, no candle. Everything Jarrod knew about his boss was a lie. So he would lie again and wander out … cruise out into the world of Manhattan and see who caught his eye. Did he still have what it takes to seduce a stranger with just a smile and a wink? Why yes, he believed he did.

  Perfect weather. Perfect plan. Perfect weekend coming soon. He felt so alive, so renewed, that he took the second piece of toast and ate it after all. Why not? He deserved it, and the world deserved him. It was a match made in hell.

  Chapter 23

  Kyle still marveled at how time slowed down the faster you wanted it to move. It was now 8:30 a.m. and they had another ninety minutes before Keller and Whitman opened for business. Kyle had done some online research and found nothing about the store that wasn’t on its website. Founded in 1995, Keller and Whitman served an exclusive clientele, and also an older one. The few models on the site were mostly mature white men, with one African-American and one Asian thrown in to give it a veneer of diversity; Kyle suspected the only minorities who shopped there were moguls and bankers from Tokyo, Beijing or the safer parts of Mexico City.

  The founders of the st
ore were relatives, one Leo Whitman and his nephew Diedrich Keller III. Neither had a photograph on the “About” page, and there was a brief dedication to Leo, with the years 1944-2003 under his name. Kyle took that to mean Keller was running the store alone now. He would find out soon enough, since he and Linda planned to be the first customers through the door.

  “What if Victor Campagna never made it there?” Linda asked. They were sitting on the couch as Danny prepared to leave for Margaret’s Passion. It was a part of Danny’s daily ritual Kyle rarely got to see, since he would normally be heading to his job by now and Danny usually left later in the morning.

  “Then we’ll know something—or someone—happened to him between the time he left Cargill’s bar and the time he expected to be at the men’s store.”

  “Maybe he met someone there. Another customer, or someone outside the store.”

  The Pride Killer was not careless; he may be stalking his victims first. For all they knew, Victor had been selected days or even weeks before his murder. It could be that the killer simply bided his time until the right opportunity arose for him to act.

  “I’ve thought about that,” Kyle said. “I’m starting to think Victor was followed.”

  Linda nodded; she’d considered the same thing. “And somehow, somewhere along his path, the killer got him to take a detour.”