by Oliver Stark
‘It’s pretty stuff, Harper, and it’d make a nice little story, but how the hell does this help us find the sick bastard who cut her?’
‘It doesn’t - yet.’
‘Ex-fucking-actly!’ Nate Williamson slapped his hand on the desk as if to call the meeting to a close. ‘We got to try to get something more from the witnesses and this composite drawing. And if that fails, Harper, how about we’ll call up the Catholic Church and see if any angels are missing from heaven?’
Harper didn’t say anything. There was no need. He wasn’t playing Nate’s game - he saw straight through the old man’s bluff and anger. Williamson was afraid of losing his potency again, afraid of being found out for not being quite as good as people imagined he was. Well, thought Harper, who wasn’t?
As the team dispersed, Harper walked up to the photographs of the corpses. Each time, they blossomed to life afresh on the static image that was already in his mind. It was a strange sensation, as if the image was layering in his consciousness and becoming more and more detailed.
On the board were ten close-up shots of each of Amy’s toes. The nails were red, but underneath the polish on each there was a faint outline of some other design. The forensics boys had X-rayed the images. He looked closer. A spider and web on an orange background, a Playboy bunny on purple with a crystal eye, two yellow-eyed daisies, a tropical sunset, a set of hotrod flames.
He looked again at the nail art. ‘Williamson,’ he called. Williamson turned and gave him a long cold stare. ‘Maybe I got something here.’
Nate lumbered across and pinched his nose in a gesture of nonchalance. ‘More spirit guidance?’
Tom tapped the photographs of the girl’s toes. ‘Amy’s toes were painted with different designs. You need to find out which nail bar does these. It might be a point of contact for the killer. Maybe one of the places he scopes his victims.’
Nate Williamson was staring hard at Harper. He flicked a glance at the nail designs. Harper tried again. ‘Your investigation needs a lead. I’m throwing you a bone, Nate. Pick it up, for chrissake.’
Chapter Fourteen
The Lair
November 17, 4.34 p.m.
There was no doubting any longer that he was an artist. He could feel it more than anything else. It had become as real as the sky and the moon. He was the artist, the creator, the great artisan. The creative flow had just kept coming, bursting out of him like a fountain from a snapped hydrant. His masterpiece was finally coming together. Twenty-five years in the making. Twenty-five years of slow-burning these images and ideas inside his mind. He had waited and waited and now he was emerging from the close sweaty chrysalis of patience with great wings and enormous power.
He rested his arms either side of the table to steady himself and looked down at the evidence. Amy Lloyd-Gardner’s small dark heart rested in a shallow aluminium tray. It had all happened, every moment. It really had happened. The girl’s heart had been steeping in the formaldehyde solution for nearly sixteen hours. The killer wanted to preserve it just as it was, full of beauty and mystery, but it wasn’t easy. He’d already filled each of its chambers with wax to keep the full rounded shape of the muscle; then he’d injected the tissue itself with a concentrated formaldehyde solution. He was desperate for it to work, but he was still experimenting and couldn’t tell whether the heart would disintegrate or hold its shape.
He’d used small animals to test various ways of preserving specimens and thought he had his technique just about right: injecting the tissue with the right solution of formaldehyde, then steeping the organs in the chemical solution so that it entered every cell and stopped the process of decomposition. It sometimes worked well, but other times it didn’t. He didn’t know why. After all, he wasn’t a scientist, he was an artist.
Still, it was the overall effect of his sculpture that would make his name, not the small, less-than-perfect parts. He looked across to the small glass vitrine that contained Mary-Jane’s two eyeballs. They were less than perfect too. The dazzling blue that had drawn him to her in the first place had turned cloudy. That was what was so interesting about sculpting with real human remains: you couldn’t always get it the way it was in your head. You had to work harder and harder to bring off the things you had seen in your daydreams.
Still, when he looked into Mary-Jane’s dull eyes through the carefully made solution, he recalled the moment of her death with perfect clarity. Her look of fear, the slow, tormented cry and guttural pleas. He wanted to relive it all. He wanted every acknowledgement of his sick transgression locked into his little glass cages and preserved in formaldehyde. It was his museum of experiences: the artistic impression of his own dead heart.
After Amy, the killer had cleaned himself up, dumped the car, then gone home and crashed for twelve hours solid in a deep, dreamless sleep. The kills really took it out of him. He felt like a victim in the warm aftermath of a car crash when you sit there flooded with every chemical the body can throw at you, your pants warm from your own urine, your vision crystal clear and images racing at different speeds through your shocked mind. God, it felt good. And then, what’s even more thrilling is that you realize you’re still alive and the crash wasn’t an ending, but a beginning, and you can do it all again. It was like being reborn with more power than ever before.
After Mary-Jane, fear was something he knew about only from memory. He no longer felt it. The killer moved along his gallery to Grace’s long golden tresses. He passed his hand over the silky fine hairs, stroking them slowly and tenderly. He felt the moment of her capture with a shiver of excitement.
Early that day, he had scoped another of his targets. He’d watched her for a while in Central Park, staring through his binoculars. She was sitting with her friends, chatting and laughing. A good student. A real grade-A brain. She was rich and well connected but slumming it with the real students out in Yorkville. He only ever wanted the best. She was a smart cookie, but even she didn’t know that he’d been watching her for eight months, ever since she’d caught his attention at one of the art history lectures he’d attended.
He’d been searching out and following his girls for years. He had seven of them now. Seven girls all with the same look, the same smell of money about them, the same wide blue eyes with their look of endless innocence.
He’d been scoping them for a long time. His little lair was plastered with their pictures. He liked to watch them grow up, he liked to see the way their hair changed over the years, their clothes too. He liked to know just about everything about them, even how they responded to threat. He tested them out with all kinds of little things. A dead rat on a car seat, a nasty grope on the subway, threatening graffiti, and sometimes just plain old-fashioned love letters. He liked to watch them as he interfered with their lives. They were his puppets. All along, he knew he was watching dead people. It was just a matter of time, and now the time had come. It was time to reap.
Three of the specimens were now dead. He had the evidence right there: eyes, hair, heart. Four more girls and he could construct the image that had been with him for so long.
He’d soon have every last one in his gallery. Seven body parts to shape his sculpture. The world would see his talent, his brilliance. They’d hate him, he knew that, but they’d have to admit his brilliance. The daring nature of his scheme.
He was going to complete his masterwork and then open his gallery to the world. He called it The Progression of Love. Each time he killed, he felt invigorated, and his sculpture was growing.
The killer looked over at the newspapers he’d bought. He needed the headlines and stories for his gallery. It showed how the world was already responding to his work. His reviews. He sat down and started clipping out the pictures and articles and pasting them on the cold stone walls of his lair. He was a little disappointed in the press coverage. They’d not really grasped the significance of what was happening to the city. They didn’t seem to get it. They even dared to suggest that Mary-Jane’s murder was a break-in gone wrong.
How many thieves would take a girl’s eyeballs and pose her like that? It took inspiration to work a body like he did, inspiration and hours of mental preparation. It wasn’t a random strike, it wasn’t anger: it was a culmination of everything he’d ever felt.
Chapter Fifteen
East Harlem
November 17, 6.06 p.m.
Eddie Kasper wasn’t smiling when he entered the big open-plan room of the station house just before the evening briefing. He laid an armful of papers down on Harper’s desk.
Harper was staring out of the window. He’d spent the last few hours piecing together his theory that this killer had been scoping each of his victims and interacting with them. Mary-Jane’s diary was a good place to start and gave him the idea, but the thought that this killer had watched the girl for months before striking was terrifying. Grace Frazer had called the cops about someone hanging around her apartment, but, as yet, Tom had nothing on Amy Lloyd-Gardner. If this guy was stalking them all over an extended period, then there ought to be something. He’d spoken to her husband and family earlier that day and they could think of nothing. The kill was so personal, though, Harper’s thinking was that he had interacted with her somehow. He just needed to find out how.
‘You heard yet?’ asked Eddie, tossing a paper across to him.
Tom looked up. ‘I’m just trying to imagine how I’d follow a rich shopaholic. Maybe Amy didn’t notice things around her. Or the killer got too close with Mary-Jane and Grace and he watched Amy from a distance. What do you think?’
‘You really haven’t heard, have you?’
Tom turned the paper towards him. ‘What?’ He looked at the story in the Post. The NYPD had done a good job of keeping the press from linking the killings. There was enough heat after Mary-Jane’s murder, and they were already getting over fifty confessions a day. They didn’t want this to escalate. They’d be swamped. Tom read the small story about Amy Lloyd-Gardner in the paper. Another murder. The reporter had none of the gruesome details. He’d presumed a robbery and the interest level dipped to monotone prose.
‘I’ve seen this,’ said Harper. ‘If we can keep it like this, it’s good news.’
‘Yeah, that’s right, but it’s not going to stay that way,’ said Eddie.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Lafayette’s just gone in. We need to get to the briefing. Harps. You’re not going to like this.’
Tom and Eddie got to the briefing room and found a spot amongst the other detectives working the heart of the case. Lafayette was sweating. His red face looked agitated. Williamson wasn’t looking the audience in the eye. What the hell had happened? Not another body?
Lafayette craned his neck and the room slowly went quiet. ‘Okay, people. We’ve got a problem. This has been running since early this morning and we’re getting nowhere with it. I just want you all to know, we’ve been down at One PP all day using any leverage we can get and they won’t budge. Not an inch.’
‘Not an inch,’ said Williamson. ‘I’ve got a copy made, so pass these around.’ He handed a thick ream of paper to the end of the row. The pile made its slow route around the room.
‘What is it, Eddie?’
‘I ain’t gonna tell you, Tom. I don’t want to be in the firing line.’
Tom watched the pile moving up the rows.
‘Just to paint the picture,’ said Lafayette. ‘The New York Daily Echo did us the courtesy of sending across the copy this morning. They informed us that they intend to go to print tomorrow morning. They asked if any of the details in the story are inaccurate. We’ve been at them all day. Our lawyers have been trying to get this stopped, but it looks like we’ve got nothing.’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Harper.
‘Read the paper, big guy. If you can’t do the long words call me over. We can sound them out together and wiki them online. Then again, it’s the Daily Echo, four syllables bad, two syllables good - one syllable even fucking better - so you should be all right. You know why they call it the Daily Echo? Once they start blabbering about something, you can never get them to shut up.’
‘What am I looking for?’
‘Read the report by Erin Nash. She’s an investigative reporter who has just blown our case wide open. She seems to have some hotline to the heart of the case.’
Harper had been through the papers that morning. Most of them gave the basic story about Amy Lloyd-Gardner, reflecting what the NYPD had decided to tell them. A homicide in a parking lot in suspicious circumstances. Another woman found dead. Police yet to comment. No one, so far, was linking Mary-Jane, Grace and Amy, and the cops hadn’t released any of the details. The pile of tomorrow’s paper then arrived in Harper’s hand. He took one and passed the pile to Eddie. He stared down at the Daily Echo. The headline kind of spat at you in large red and black print.
SERIAL KILLER STRIKES NEW YORK
AN AMERICAN DEVIL’S CAMPAIGN OF SLAUGHTER
by Erin Nash
New York detectives are investigating the gruesome murder of a young woman whose naked and mutilated corpse was discovered yesterday afternoon lying in an upmarket underground parking lot on East 82nd Street, a police source said.
A female shopper returning from a Park Avenue shopping spree discovered the unidentified corpse at 3.15 p.m. lying flat on its back on the dirty asphalt in a pool of blood, said the source.
The victim, described only as a wealthy white woman in her early twenties, had such severe injuries that police detectives were stunned by the extent of the overkill. The medical examiner is yet to determine the cause of her death.
A source close to the NYPD’s elite Blue Team said that the victim had been brutally raped before her chest was cut open and her heart removed. It is said that the killer pushed cherry blossom down the victim’s throat.
The corpse is the third young female victim to be found in Manhattan in the last two weeks. Detectives are speculating that the murders, all occurring in the east of the city, are the work of a single man, a serial killer dubbed the American Devil because of the way he poses his victims in religious postures.
The killer appears to be targeting rich, white women in the Upper East Side region. His aim is unclear, but is sure to strike terror into one of the world’s wealthiest and most established communities.
Harper sat up straight in his chair. Everyone had absorbed the information. There was a long silence. Every one of the cops in the room who’d worked a high-profile case knew the impact the story would have. It was like standing in front of a derelict building, with the wrecking ball about to fall. ‘They’re going to print it?’ he asked. ‘That’s the bottom line?’
‘That’s the bottom line, Tom. This goes to press in the next couple of hours. It’ll be on the newsstands tomorrow first thing, then the world and his nephew is going to come calling. And you know what they’re going to say, don’t you? They’re going to start pointing and asking why the hell didn’t Homicide let anyone know?’
‘Who the fuck is Erin Nash? And how has she got this information?’
‘We don’t know, Tom. We have no idea. The paper is keeping her well protected. We haven’t been able to speak to her.’
‘Do we even know this shit?’ said Tom. ‘It says the victim had cherry blossom in her throat.’
‘Yeah, it’s true. The Medical Examiner confirmed it. The report went up to Williamson this morning.’
‘Who did you share it with, Nate?’
‘Not a soul,’ said Nate. ‘Soon as it came in, I got pulled out and taken down to headquarters to try to talk these newspapers into sense.’
‘So how many people knew about the cherry blossom?’ asked Tom.
‘The Medical Examiner and her team. Me and the captain. A couple of other administrative staff.’
‘You think one of us is briefing the gutter press, Nate?’
‘No. No one in Blue Team would piss on his own floor. Either this is a very good investigative reporter piecing together fragments, or
else I don’t know how she knows.’
‘They’re going to be all over this now,’ said Eddie. ‘She’s called him a serial killer, she’s given him a moniker. Hell, where did that name come from? The American Devil?’
‘She probably made it up,’ said Williamson. ‘Creative types do that. Make up names to scare people.’
‘What’s the plan?’ Harper asked.
‘We got a few hours to put out our own story. That’s all. We’ve got to take the initiative and roll this out ourselves. We’ve got a press conference in a couple of hours.’
‘And what about the scale of the operation we’re going to need?’
‘It’s being agreed,’ said Lafayette. ‘We’re going to double the team, keep the press pack away from you guys. I want you to keep working the case, not the fucking media.’
Harper was working the case, but his question was all about Erin Nash and where she got that privileged information. He looked at the apprehension in the faces around him. The investigation had just entered phase two. Phase one was the quiet time, when you tried to get a lead. Now it was the public phase. And the media would be hunting for every scrap of information and raising fear levels by a factor of about a thousand.
Chapter Sixteen
Ward’s Island
November 18, 8.35 a.m.
From a distance, the killer watched the release. They always threw them out early in the day. Winston Carlisle was a sad case. He was thirty-six years old, his family had abandoned him at an early age and he had stalked and attacked pretty young girls once too often. He’d never actually raped any of the girls. He liked following them and had groped them, pushed them to the ground, threatened them with a knife and exposed himself to them. He didn’t seem able to go further. His records showed that he was arrested for attempted rape at the ages of twelve and fourteen, twenty-two and twenty-nine. However, not one of these attacks resulted in a court case. Instead, because he was delusional, Winston was given treatment. He’d been in and out of institutions his whole life.