City of Endless Night

by Douglas Preston

  “Authorization from U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District. We’ve been after these two for a long time.”

  “That right?” D’Agosta asked. “What’d they do?”

  “Plenty.”

  “When we finish the walk-through,” said D’Agosta, “and get rid of these damn suits, I’d like you to fill us in.”

  “Glad to.”

  They walked across the open space toward a pair of ornate wooden doors, which were wedged open. Light streamed out from the interior of the inner office, and the primary color D’Agosta could see beyond was a deep crimson. There was a team inside, moving with exquisite care on mats laid down over a blood-soaked rug.

  “Oh, Jesus. Did the perp leave them arranged like that?”

  “The bodies haven’t been moved, sir.”

  The two bodies lay stretched out on the floor, side by side, arms folded over their chests, carefully arranged by the killer or killers. In the intense lights set up by the CSU team it looked fake, like a movie set. But the smell of blood was real, a mingling of damp iron and meat starting to go bad. While the sight was awful enough, D’Agosta could never get used to the smell. Never. He felt his gorge rise and struggled to calm the spastic reaction that had abruptly seized his stomach. The blood was everywhere. This was crazy. Where was the blood spatter guy? There he was.

  “Hey, Martinelli? A word?”

  Martinelli rose and came over.

  “What’s the story with this blood? This some kind of deliberate paint job?”

  “I’ve still got a lot of analysis to do.”

  “Prelim?”

  “Well, seems both the victims were beheaded standing up.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The blood on the ceiling. That’s sixteen feet. It shot straight up, arterial jetting. In order for it to reach that height, their heart rate and blood pressure must’ve been sky-high.”

  “What would cause that? The high blood pressure, I mean.”

  “I’d say these two knew what was coming, at least during the last few moments. They were made to stand up and knew they were about to be decapitated, and that produced an extremity of terror that would have resulted in spikes in both blood pressure and heart rate. Again, that’s my first impression only.”

  D’Agosta tried to wrap his head around it. “Chopped off with what?”

  Martinelli nodded. “Right over there.”

  D’Agosta turned and there it was: a medieval weapon of some kind, lying on the floor, its blade completely covered in blood.

  “It’s called a bearded ax. Viking. Replica, of course. Razor-sharp.”

  D’Agosta glanced at Pendergast, but he was even more opaque than usual inside the Tyvek suit.

  “Why didn’t they scream? Nobody heard anything.”

  “We’re pretty sure a secondary weapon was involved. Probably a firearm. Used in a threatening way to keep them quiet. On top of that, those doors are extremely thick, and the entire suite is heavily soundproofed.”

  D’Agosta shook his head. It was the craziest thing, killing the twin CEOs of a major company right in their own offices at the busiest time of day, with cameras running and a thousand people around. He looked again at Pendergast. In contrast to his usual poking and prying about with tweezers and test tubes, this time he was silent, and as calm as if he were out for a stroll in the park. “So, Pendergast, you got any questions? Anything you want to look at? Evidence?”

  “Not at present, thank you.”

  “I’m just the blood spatter guy,” Martinelli said, “but it would seem to me the killer’s sending some kind of message. The Post is saying that—”

  D’Agosta cut him off with a gesture. “I know what the Post is saying.”

  “Right, sorry.”

  Pendergast now spoke at last. “Mr. Martinelli, wouldn’t the perpetrator be covered in blood after decapitating two standing people?”

  “You’d think so. But the handle is unusually long on that ax, and if he stood at some distance, decapitated each of them with one clean swipe, and if he were agile enough to jump aside to avoid the jetting arterial blood as the bodies fell, he might just get away without being splattered.”

  “Would you say he was proficient in the use of that ax?”

  “If you look at it that way, yes. It’s not easy to decapitate someone with a single blow, especially if they’re standing up. And to do it without getting covered in blood—yeah, I would say that takes serious practice.”

  D’Agosta shuddered.

  “Thank you, that is all,” said Pendergast.

  They met up with the SEC guy in the security office in the basement. On their way down, passing through the lobby, they had seen a crowd in front of the building. At first D’Agosta thought it was the usual unruly press, and it was that, of course, but more. The waving signs and muffled chanting indicated it was some sort of demonstration against the one percent. Damn New Yorkers, any excuse to protest.

  “Chat over there?” he said, indicating a seating area in the waiting room. The NYPD techies were downloading and preparing the last of the security footage.

  “As good as any.”

  The three of them took their seats, the SEC guy, Pendergast, and D’Agosta.

  “So, Agent Meldrum,” D’Agosta said. “Brief us on the SEC investigation.”

  “Of course.” Meldrum handed over a card. “I’ll have copies of our files sent over to you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “The Burches are, or rather were, a married couple—twenty-two years. Back during the financial crisis they set up an investment scheme that took advantage of people with distressed mortgages. It collapsed in 2012 and they were arrested.”

  “And they didn’t go to jail?”

  Meldrum engaged in a mirthless stretching of the lips. “Jail? I’m sorry, Lieutenant, where have you been these past ten years? I can’t tell you how many cases I’ve worked on where, instead of prosecuting, we negotiated a settlement and levied a fine. These two swindlers got slapped on the wrist and quickly opened a new rip-off shop—LFX Financial.”

  “Which does what?”

  “Targets the spouses of soldiers and retired vets. Two basic swindling schemes. You got a soldier overseas. The spouse—usually a wife—is stateside, having a tough time economically. So you get the wife to take out a balloon mortgage on the house. Small initial payments, then the rate resets to what they can’t afford. LFX takes the house, flips it, rakes in the bucks.”

  “Legal?”

  “Mostly. Except there are special rules about foreclosing on a soldier on active duty that they didn’t follow. That’s where I come in.”

  “And the second scheme?”

  “LFX would identify the widow of a vet who’s living in a nice house, fully paid off. They’d persuade her to take out a small reverse mortgage. No big deal, done all the time. But then LFX would force a default on the reverse mortgage for some bogus reason: nonpayment of homeowner’s insurance or some other trumped-up or trivial violation of terms. Just enough of an excuse to take the house, sell it, and keep an obscene amount of the proceeds as late fees, fines, interest, penalties, and other jacked-up charges.”

  “In other words, these two were the scum of the earth,” said D’Agosta.

  “You bet.”

  “Must have had a lot of enemies.”

  “Yes. In fact, some time back there was a mass shooting in this very building—a soldier who lost his home came in and aired out the place before committing suicide.”

  “Oh yeah,” said D’Agosta. “I remember that. So you think the two were killed by a victim seeking revenge?”

  “It’s a reasonable hypothesis, and that’s what I thought when I first got the call.”

  “But you don’t think so now.”

  “No. It seems pretty clear to me it’s the same psycho who did those other three headless people: a vigilante type punishing rich dirtbags. You know, like what the articles in the Post are saying.”

&n
bsp; D’Agosta shook his head. As much as he couldn’t stand that bastard Harriman, his theory was looking more and more likely. He glanced at Pendergast and couldn’t help but ask: “What do you think?”

  “A great deal.”

  D’Agosta waited, but it was soon clear that would be the extent of his comment. “It’s insane. You got two people decapitated in the middle of the day in a busy office building. How’d the killer get past security, how’d he get into the office, how’d he kill them, cut their heads off, and get out—with nobody seeing anything? Seems impossible, like one of those locked-room mysteries by—what’s his name?—Dickson Carr.”

  Pendergast nodded. “In my opinion, the important questions are not so much who the victims were, why they were selected, or how the murder was done.”

  “What else is there to a murder than the who, why, and how?”

  “My dear Vincent, there’s the where.”

  33

  THE SOUND ENGINEER clipped the lavalier mike to Harriman’s shirt, adjusted it, and then retreated to his station. “Speak a few words, please,” he called over. “In a normal voice.”

  “This is Bryce Harriman,” Harriman said. “Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky…”

  “Okay, we’ve got good levels.” The engineer gave the producer a thumbs-up.

  Harriman looked around the studio stage. A television studio always amused him: 10 percent of it was done up to look like somebody’s living room, or an anchor’s desk, and the rest of the space was always a huge mess, all concrete floor and hanging lights and green screens and cameras and cable runs and people standing around watching.

  This was the third show he’d done this week, and each had been bigger than the one before. It was like a barometer of how successful his article, and its follow-ups, had been. First, there was the local New York station—taped, not live—that had given him a two-minute spot. Next had been an appearance on The Melissa Mason Show, one of the most popular talk shows in the tristate area. But then the news of the double murders had broken—murders that fit his predictions to a T. And now he was appearing on the big kahuna: America’s Morning with Kathee Durant, one of the biggest nationally televised morning shows in the country. And there was Kathee herself, sitting not two feet away from him, getting her face touched up during the commercial break. The Morning set was done up to look like an upscale breakfast nook, with American naive paintings on the fake walls and two wing chairs with doily antimacassars facing each other, a large-screen monitor in between.

  “Ten seconds,” said somebody from the dim recesses of the stage. The makeup person ducked away, and Kathee turned toward Harriman. “It’s great to have you here,” she said, flashing her million-dollar smile at him. “It’s such an awesome story. I mean, awesome.”

  “Thanks.” Harriman smiled back. He watched as a number counted down on a digital screen, then a red light appeared on one of the three cameras pointed at them.

  Kathee turned her dazzling smile toward the camera. “This morning we’re lucky to have with us Bryce Harriman, the Post reporter who—people are saying—has done what the NYPD could not: figure out the motivation of the killer who’s been dubbed ‘the Decapitator.’ And in the wake of the recent double murder—which fits exactly with Mr. Harriman’s theory, first described in an article he published Christmas Day—the story really seems to have touched a nerve. Celebrities, millionaires, rock stars, even mob bosses have begun fleeing the city.”

  As she spoke, the monitor between them—which had been displaying the America’s Morning logo—came alive with brief video clips of people getting into limousines; private planes taxiing on runways; familiar faces rushing past paparazzi, surrounded by security entourages. The clips were familiar: Bryce had seen them all before. He’d seen it happening in person, as well. People, powerful people, were deserting Manhattan like rats fleeing a sinking ship. And all because of him. Meanwhile, Joe Q. Public was watching it all unfold with the sick thrill of at last seeing the one percenters get theirs.

  Kathee turned to Bryce. “Bryce, welcome to America’s Morning. Thanks for coming.”

  “Thanks for having me, Kathee,” Harriman said. He shifted slightly, presenting his best profile to the camera.

  “Bryce, your story is the talk of the town,” Kathee told him. “How did you happen to figure out what has been eluding the best minds of New York’s finest for what seems like weeks?”

  Harriman felt a thrill course through him as he remembered Petowski’s words: Reporters search their entire lives for a story like this. “Oh, I can’t take all the credit,” he said with fake modesty. “Really, I was just building on the groundwork that the police had already laid.”

  “But what was the, how can I put it, the lightbulb moment?” With her perky nose and blond wave, she looked just like a Barbie.

  “Well, there were a lot of theories flying through the air at the time, you’ll recall,” Bryce said. “I just didn’t buy into the notion that there was more than one murderer at work. Once I’d made that realization, it was just a question of looking for what all the victims had in common.”

  She glanced over at a teleprompter, which was scrolling lines from Harriman’s first article. “You said that the victims were all ‘utterly lacking in human decency.’ That ‘the world would be better off if they were dead.’”

  Harriman nodded.

  “And cutting off their heads is, you believe, a symbolic gesture?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But I mean, beheading…any chance this is the work of jihadists?”

  “No. That doesn’t fit the pattern. This is the work of one man, and he’s using decapitation for reasons that are very much his own. True: this is an ancient punishment, a manifestation of God’s wrath at the sin and depravity so rampant in today’s society. Even the term capital punishment comes from caput, the Latin word for ‘head.’ But this killer is preaching, Kathee: he’s warning New York, and by extension the whole country, that greed, selfishness, and gross materialism will no longer be tolerated. He’s targeting the most predatory of the one percenters who seem to be taking over our city these past few years.”

  Kathee nodded vigorously, eyes shining, drinking in his every word. Bryce realized something: with this one story, he had become a celebrity. He’d taken the most high-profile series of murders in many years and, single-handedly, owned it. His follow-up articles, carefully scripted for maximum sensation and to polish his own image, were just icing on the cake. Everyone in New York was hanging on his every word. They wanted, needed him to explain the Decapitator to them.

  And he would be only too happy to oblige. This interview was a golden opportunity to fan the flames—and that was just what he would do.

  “But what is he preaching, exactly?” Kathee asked. “And who is he preaching to?”

  Bryce tugged self-importantly at his tie, careful not to disturb the mike. “It’s quite simple, really. Look what’s happened to our city, the corrupt wealth pouring in from overseas, the fifty- and hundred-million-dollar apartments, the billionaires walling themselves off in their gilded palaces. New York City used to be a place where everyone, rich and poor, rubbed shoulders and got along. Now the uber-rich are taking over our city, stomping on the rest of us. I think the killer’s message to them is: Mend your ways.” He gave these last words an ominous spin.

  Kathee’s eyes grew wider. “Are you saying that the Decapitator’s going to keep killing the super-rich?”

  Harriman let a long, pregnant moment pass. Then he nodded. Time to fan those flames. “I do. But let’s not become complacent. He may be starting with the rich and powerful,” he intoned. “But if we don’t heed his warning…that may not be where he stops. We’re all at risk, Kathee—every last one of us.”

  34

  THE SECURITY OFFICES for the Seaside Financial building, and LFX Financial in particular, were located in a windowless basement suite of painted cinder block and functional met
al furniture. But the actual surveillance system, D’Agosta realized as soon as they entered, was state-of-the-art, brand-new, and run by a more-than-competent group. The head of the security team, a guy named Hradsky, had sequestered all the video from the entire building and had organized and copied it onto hard drives for the NYPD tech team, who had carted it away. But D’Agosta didn’t want to wait to see it at 1PP, which would take hours, if not a day, to set up. He wanted to see it immediately. And so Hradsky had obligingly organized it and had everything ready to roll when D’Agosta and Pendergast arrived with Sergeant Curry in tow.

  “Gentlemen, come on in.” Hradsky was a small guy with black hair, a rack of dazzling white teeth, pink gums, and a big smile that was, apparently, continuously on display. He looked more like a barber than a security tech, but as D’Agosta watched the man bustle about the viewing room, switching on this, plugging in that, and tapping on this and that keyboard, he realized they were damn lucky. Most security directors were unhelpful, if not downright hostile. This guy aimed to please and clearly knew what he was doing.

  “So what, exactly, would you fellows like to see?” Hradsky said. “We have a lot of cams and over a thousand hours of video created in just the last day. We sent it all back with your people.”

  “What I want is simple. There’s a cam right outside those inner office doors. I want you to go to that feed and start at the moment the bodies were discovered—and run the tape backward at double speed.”

  “Very well.”

  It took Hradsky only a moment to set things up and darken the room. A surprisingly clear image popped up on the screen, a wide-angle view of the inner double doors and the area surrounding them, with desks on either side. It started out with the guy who found the bodies sitting with his head in his hands, while a secretary was laid out on a couch next to him. Then they staggered up, the guy dragging the lady backward into the inner office. A few moments later they came back out, walking backward, and here was the guy trying the locked door handle with the lady, and then the lady walked backward to her desk and the guy walked backward out of view and the doors remained closed while people swarmed this way and that in the outer office.