American Devil

by Oliver Stark

  And now Winston Carlisle was on the sidewalk outside Manhattan Psychiatric Center with a small brown case, an address he didn’t recognize and a look of profound confusion on his face.

  The killer followed him as he walked from the hospital towards the bus stop. He took the bus into the city and the killer got on behind him and sat there. He enjoyed the feeling of following people. It was like being in a movie. You had real purpose when you were scoping out a victim. Winston got off the cross-town bus and struggled to work out the right way to go. He stared at the scrap of paper the orderly had given him and then up at the street signs. He finally just started walking.

  At the first burger joint he came to, Winston stopped and ate three hamburgers, one after the other. It was the only time he looked content. He got on his way again soon enough and even asked a passer-by about the address. Eventually he found the discreet halfway house that would be his new home.

  It didn’t surprise the killer much that characters like Winston spent their whole lives in horrible anonymity and bewilderment - moving between the ordered cleanliness of a psychiatric unit and the profound confusion of the outside world. Winston needed an escape, that was for sure. The killer just knew it.

  He was going to make Winston famous. He was going to give this nobody a profound legacy. Winston Carlisle, another nobody from nowhere, was going to be remembered, just like his victims. The killer smiled at the thought as he watched Winston enter the halfway house. Winston looked just right for the part he was going to play. But he would need some very close direction.

  The killer noted the address and went on his way. A sprinkle of New York rain was beginning to fall. He smiled. He liked the rain. It called to him. He walked down the street and hailed a cab. He spoke through the glass.

  ‘Kinsley Memorial Church.’

  He sat back, leaving his seatbelt undone. A recorded voice suddenly cut in, telling him to belt up and proudly exclaiming, ‘That’s the law in New York City.’ He pulled the belt across his chest. This was one law he was happy to oblige.

  The cab took thirty minutes to travel three blocks through a snarl-up on Second Avenue. As it passed the big yellow diggers and two blocks of orange and white plastic bollards and vehicle barriers, the cabbie complained, ‘Can you see a fucking construction worker? They close off the street and then go for a three-hour cup of coffee. No one works any more.’ The passenger in the back seat checked his watch again and nodded silently. It was ten minutes before ten.

  They turned into East 61st Street and the cab pulled up. The passenger slipped the driver a twenty-dollar bill. It was a nice neighbourhood - a quiet, residential tree-lined street. He got out and stood on the sidewalk, a man in his prime, tall, angular and athletic. He was feeling his passion now as he came closer to the girl who was number four on his list. Her time was up. She didn’t know it, but this was her last day on earth. The killer breathed deeply with the thought. There was no limit to what he could do. The gift of life or death was in his hands. God had no more power than he did. He just had different uses for it.

  The Baptist church was a surprisingly large and ornate stone building, dating back to the mid-1850s, when someone built it in honour of Wesley Kinsley, a philanthropist of vast industrial means. It was a well-attended church with a good choir, a healthy smattering of young people and a very liberal bias - they accepted everything and anything at the Kinsley Memorial and were devoutly opposed to violence, which was a shame. It was homosexual liberals against Iraq at the Kinsley.

  The morning service crowd was already sauntering through the large wooden doors. The organ inside was playing a modern hymn and the Reverend Angela Timms was greeting her flock with a smile and a wink.

  In his disguise, the killer went inside and sat, as he always did, as far from the altar as possible. From the very back row, he scanned the heads of the flock, looking for the girl he’d grown attached to, but he couldn’t see her.

  This was bad. He didn’t like disappointment. He’d already waited too long and his patience was beginning to snap. He needed someone soon. He couldn’t bear another day of imagining girl number four contorted and weeping under his hands - even one more day would be an unimaginable cruelty to himself. He needed her image. He needed her, period. The rain had whetted his appetite. Fat raindrops appeared on the dry sidewalk like drops of blood. The American Devil, he thought. He liked that. He was the sidewalk Satan. He smiled towards the altar. Would they guess that the devil was there in their flock? Sometimes, everything made sense.

  The killer had been interacting with the girl even more in the last month. She was such a prudish type, he liked to shock her. He’d Photoshopped an image of her head on a nude by Manet and stuck it to her apartment door. It was at a Manet lecture he’d first spotted her. She had long blond hair and always sat very still, listening intently to the lecturer. He liked to think they were made for each other, a prudish virgin Baptist and the American Devil. It felt perfect. She was an exceptionally pretty girl who smiled too easily at strangers and did voluntary work. Her eyes were so brightly blue that he thought she might be wearing coloured lenses - but her outfits suggested that vanity wasn’t her thing at all.

  He waited. He knew how to wait. He was concentrating on the exquisite feel of the girl’s arm as it brushed against him the previous week. He liked to get close when the time was nearing. It heightened his pleasure. He’d stepped in against her body. She’d apologized, but it was he who’d leaned in for a touch. He couldn’t contain his passion for beauty. He was a poet. He was an artist. He was doing the devil’s work. He turned as girl number four walked through the door. She looked heavenly. The killer smiled. She was just perfect.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dr Levene’s Office

  November 18, 10.00 a.m.

  Denise Levene had caught the stark headline on her way to One PP. Several people on the subway were reading a story headlined ‘Serial Killer Strikes New York’. She hadn’t heard the press conference the previous evening, so she was in the dark as she travelled in to work.

  She wasn’t usually a reader of the Daily Echo, but any mention of a serial killer got her attention and so she bought the paper from a newsstand outside the subway and read it as she walked up the street.

  The killings were suddenly being tied together. Denise felt flushed. For years, her research had sought to find a link between childhood neglect, specifically in pre-verbal children, and the propensity for violence. It wasn’t that serial killers were the only examples, but it was sometimes the extreme cases that brought new information to light. The American Devil, if this article was to be believed, was the type of killer she’d looked at many times before. A man who was clever, organized and focused, but who put all of these qualities to evil use because he lacked the sphere of influence that Freud called the superego, which she understood as the neurological pathways between empathy, self and consequence.

  She re-read the news story several more times in her office, but the details were frustratingly sketchy. A quick search of the internet led her to several other reports. She read them avidly, but there was nothing more than she’d found in Erin Nash’s article. She looked down at her watch. Tom Harper was due any minute and he would have all the detail she craved. However, she couldn’t ask. It was wrong. She was there for him, not the other way round. She’d just have to bite her lip and put it to the back of her mind.

  The day was brightening up when Harper arrived. The sun sneaked through the gaps in the dark clouds and as he sat down a sunbeam hit him directly in the eye and danced around the edges of Dr Levene’s hair, silhouetting her like an arty photograph. Harper threw another gum in his mouth and shifted in his seat.

  ‘Thanks for coming back,’ said Denise.

  ‘It wasn’t from choice.’

  ‘You looked wasted,’ she said.

  ‘Is that a pick-up line?’ said Harper. ‘I’m feeling a warm glow of appreciation.’

  Denise smiled. ‘You sleep at all?’r />
  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s keeping you up?’

  ‘Same thing that’s got you wired.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There’s a glint in your eye the size of a two-carat diamond.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said.

  ‘The story’s got to you, too, hasn’t it? Everyone’s wired.’

  ‘No, not me,’ she lied. ‘I’m just good in the mornings.’

  ‘So tell me how a well-presented woman like yourself got her fingertips so grubby.’

  Denise looked down at the newsprint on her fingers. ‘Okay, I took a look.’

  ‘You took a look? I bet. I looked you up, Dr Levene. I know your research interests. Must’ve felt like your lucky day.’

  ‘Don’t insult me, Detective.’

  ‘You saying your little heart didn’t do a flip?’

  ‘I’m interested, all right? I’ve worked these cases.’

  ‘Worked or studied them? There’s a big difference between tracking a live killer and reading the court reports.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Sure you do, you know everything.’

  ‘Stop busting my balls, Harper. I’m on your side.’

  ‘No, Doctor, you’re on your own side. If you were on mine, you’d let me get out there. There are a thousand places I’d rather be than wasting both of our time pretending you can fix people’s brains.’

  ‘You like being angry, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t think about it.’

  ‘Lisa did, is my guess. I bet she thought about it a lot. Women do.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘You lost your wife. Are you not curious as to why she fell out of love with you?’

  ‘No, I know why. My job came first, and she didn’t like that.’

  ‘That’s a nice clean theory, isn’t it? Your wife left you because you’re a dedicated public servant.’

  ‘Cop work stinks, everybody knows that.’

  ‘You buy that yourself or is it just for my consumption?’

  ‘Jesus, you don’t let up, do you? Does your husband get a word in?’

  ‘A good detective would know I’m not married.’

  ‘A great one wouldn’t give a rat’s ass about your marital status.’

  ‘And what are you, good or great?’

  ‘I’m neither, but sometimes I get lucky.’

  ‘Modest too?’

  ‘We’re a team. You don’t solve a murder as a lone wolf. There’s over a hundred detectives working the case.’

  ‘Let’s get back to the case of Tom Harper. I’ve got him down as a hero-fantasist, how does that feel?’

  ‘Like an insult that fell flat on the floor.’

  ‘Okay, we can keep this going all day, but you’ve got a problem with aggression and I can help you.’

  ‘Boxing helped me. It gave me an outlet, but I’m too old for the ring now.’

  ‘So you start on your superiors?’

  ‘He went for me first.’

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because he made fun of Lisa.’

  ‘And that got to you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Why did it matter what he thought?’

  ‘You don’t know? Come on. I loved Lisa. She left without warning. I was blown wide open. I was an explosion looking for a detonator. Cracking the Romario case should’ve been the best moment of my life, but all I got was an empty apartment and a phone message telling me not to call.’

  ‘You must’ve seen it coming?’

  ‘Every couple argues. You never know it’s terminal until too late. I thought the arguments were part of the working out, but they were more than that for her.’

  ‘And now? Angry still?’

  ‘It makes less sense the clearer I see it, so the anger seems to get worse.’

  ‘Would you like to know why she left?’

  ‘Sure would, and what she says sounds like a load of soft soap.’

  ‘What does she tell you?’

  ‘She tells me that she’s not good enough. She tells me that she can’t live up to my expectations. She tells me she thinks she makes me unhappy.’

  ‘They’re well-considered explanations. Sounds like she doesn’t want to hurt you.’

  ‘Well, she’s not doing so well at that.’

  ‘More to the point, she doesn’t know how to tell you the truth.’

  ‘So what’s the truth, Doctor?’

  ‘I don’t think you’re angry because Lisa left. I think she left because you’re always angry.’

  Tom paused. He let the idea work around his head for a moment. ‘She was scared of me?’

  ‘You’re a tough guy, you have high expectations, you work in a highly stressful environment and you don’t give yourself an inch. I’d say you were so caught up in that cycle that she became one of the wheels in your life that needed ordering about. Maybe she wasn’t scared, maybe she just felt like a piece of shit.’

  Tom’s face drained of colour. This was worse than he had imagined. He had thought the good psychologist might gently prise some truths from beneath his skin, not land a knock-out combination on his second visit. ‘She felt like shit?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m guessing, but your reaction tells me something important. You felt like you treated her badly, didn’t you?’

  Tom looked at the floor. Shit, Levene was good at this. Against his will, he nodded to the floor.

  ‘What triggers the anger, Tom? You have an idea, or you just feel it late on and it catches you out? You’ve got a quick mind, and that means you’re good at hiding the signs from yourself.’

  Tom chewed the idea over for a moment. ‘Maybe I just don’t like the way people talk about things that matter.’

  ‘You don’t think they’re free to say what the hell they like?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Not at all.’

  ‘Well, I got news for you, they are. They can say any damn thing they like, but it isn’t what they say that riles you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You like watching birds, don’t you? You ever see a hawk trying to get a lure from his flyer?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You see how the hawk will use all kinds of strategies to surprise the flyer so that he’s not seen until the last moment?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s how the mind works. It catches you out, and the anger keeps you from seeing what’s really there.’

  ‘And what’s really there?’

  ‘That’s what we’ve got to find out. But we’ve got to do it together.’ Dr Levene let the silence hang in the air. ‘You want to be helped or are you seriously just here because you need to be?’

  Harper had been thinking. He looked up at her. ‘You think you can help?’

  ‘I can try, if you’ll let me.’

  ‘I never thought I’d say this, but okay, I’ll give it a go.’

  ‘You’ve surprised me,’ said Dr Levene. ‘Why the change of heart?’

  ‘I need help.’

  ‘That’s a serious admission. I’m impressed.’

  ‘Not for me, Doctor, for chrissake, for the case. You’re good at what you do, I can see that right away. You’ve also done more research on serial killers than I’ve ever heard of and if I need to do one thing it’s to get to understand this killer’s mind. I don’t think I can do it alone.’

  ‘What are you saying? You’re asking for my help on the case?’ Denise couldn’t disguise the excitement she felt and her voice lifted an octave.

  ‘Calm down and listen. From the moment this story went to press, this just got a whole lot more difficult. The American Devil is going to be reacting to his own drives and, also, the way the press report it. And on top of that, it gets very messy with the media and politics involved, but if this guy’s going to be caught I need to see things clearly. I think you can help, Doctor - you’ve got good eyes for how people tick.’

  ‘Coming from you, that’s a real
compliment.’

  ‘So the deal is, I’ll talk about myself and do what I’m told, if you let me talk about this killer’s behaviour and tell me if I’m on the right lines, psychologically speaking.’

  Denise nodded slowly. ‘So tell me, how’s the investigation going? You got anything to go on?’

  Harper shot her a sidelong glance. ‘This won’t be a nice conversation. There’s a bitch of a killer out there and he’s beginning to feel confident. He took out a woman on a Saturday afternoon. That’s quite some self-belief he’s got. The thing is, he looks uncontrolled and random but he’s left nothing for us to go on at all. He’s actually very well organized and very smart. He seems to know exactly what a cop would look for.’

  Denise was taking notes as he spoke. Harper paused and stared at her pen. She looked up. ‘You want help, this is how I do it, on paper.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Harper. ‘Now the thing for me is that he’s focusing on rich society girls. We got a hell of a lot more groundwork to do to find out why, and time’s running short.’

  ‘What’s his motive?’

  ‘Good question.’ Harper looked up from the glass he was twisting in his hand. ‘I think his motive isn’t just to hurt these women. I don’t know. I think he wants to make a hell of a statement about something. He wants attention and he’s going to get it now Erin Nash is feeding the public, but there’s so much groundwork to do. There are hundreds of patients from Manhattan State who need to be assessed and interviewed and there are hundreds of witness statements that we’re not getting through properly. They don’t correlate. The whole thing is swimming in detail and I got to figure out one or two angles.’

  ‘What about a profile?’

  ‘Yeah, we’ve tried that. We’ve sent the packages over to the Feds for Mary-Jane and Grace and they came up with a pen portrait based on the first two victims. Then the MO changed - you know, he took someone out by day, he changed his trophy from eyes and hair to heart - and the Feds got nervous and withdrew the profile. They don’t know which way to jump, so they’re just sitting on it, afraid of getting it wrong and getting the blame. Now the press is breathing fire they’ll be even more careful.’