by David Salkin
something”
“Yeah.”
“What the fuck did I do?” asked Roy.
“You made the captain open up this missing persons file.”
• 43 • “You told me to!”
“Yeah.”
Roy leaned back against the headrest and shook his head. “Great.” Joe began to speak, this time being serious and choosing his words
carefully. “Remember how we talked about a serial killer, and when we mentioned it to the captain, he got pissed?”
“Yeah. Same shit happened over at the sixth.”
“Yeah, well—I think we may have to rethink that.”
“Oh shit, man. Am I going to be walking into some kind of bloody mess?”
“Nope. No blood. Not much of a mess really at all. But somebody did something really ugly and covered his tracks. I’ve got forensics over there taking pictures now.”
They drove a few minutes in silence when Roy said, “My third grader got a note sent home from school the other day.”
“Yeah? What did he do?”
“Taking a test on New York. Teacher asked him how many people lived in New York City, and my kid says, ‘too fucking many, and they’re driving in front of me’. He was quoting his father, evidently.”
His lieutenant roared. They pulled over in front of a building where two squad cars and two unmarkeds sat out front. A patrolman was standing at the doorway taking notes from a very upset looking older man. Joe pointed to the older civilian.
“So that guy goes into the warehouse. He’s a realtor. Trying to sell this old warehouse to a guy that wants to convert it to high-end residential units. He says he smelled something burning, and he walks around until he finds an old furnace. It’s an ancient commercial boiler setup hooked up to the garbage shoot. He opens the door and makes a little discovery.”
Forever Hunger • 45 “Oh shit.”
“Yeah.”
They got out of the car and walked into the building where a
medical examiner and a field technician were taking pictures, dusting for prints, and looking for evidence. Roy followed Joe to the furnace and Joe pointed with his thumb. Joe leaned in closer and got a whiff of burnt wood mixed with burnt human. He looked inside and saw three human skulls. One of them was broken up pretty badly, but two were still easily identifiable as human.
“Oh Jesus,” he said quietly.
“He’s not a suspect,” said Joe.
“Who?” asked Roy, visibly shaken by what he was looking at. “Jesus. We ruled him out. He was more of a ‘love your brother’ kind
of guy. Not a ‘kill your brother and burn him up’ sort of dude. You okay?”
“Yeah. Shit.”
The lieutenant pulled a zip-lock baggie out of his pocket. There was a sterling silver bracelet in it with a heart charm attached to it.
“Whatcha’ got?”
“This is a Tiffany bracelet. Silver bracelet with a heart charm that is engraved with ‘Tiffany’ on it. Star had given me a description of this piece when I interviewed her. Said she gave it to Tiffany as a present last year. I’ll show it to her. Probably a million of these things floating around the city, but its something, anyway.”
“You pull that out of the fireplace?”
“No. If it had been in there, doc says it would have melted. Most of the bones are charred pretty good. It was a hot fire. The guys found it over by some pallets. They are still looking for hair and fibers.”
“You think he killed three people at the same time and burned the bodies, or you think it’s a dumping ground?” asked Roy.
“Not one hundred percent sure, but we think a dumping ground. I spoke to the M.E. and he says that the skulls were burned to different degrees. One of them had been there for longer than the other two, we’re guessing. The other two are pretty similar in fire damage.”
“But it isn’t a serial killer,” said Roy softly to no one in particular.
“Not until the chief says so. But I tell you what—this is some fucked up shit.”
Nine
VWX
Columbus Circle
Roy was standing in his uniform drinking a “Venti”—fancy name for an entire pot of coffee poured into a cup for one person. He had another sitting on the small counter for his blind date. He didn’t pay much attention when the extremely obese man entered the Starbucks. The fat man walked directly towards him. Roy was thinking it was a tourist spotting him in uniform and about to ask for directions or something when the man extended a huge right hand and asked, “Ruiz?”
Roy looked at him and smiled. “I take it you are the Italian Stallion?” “Well, you’re half right, and we’ll just leave it at that. That mine?” he asked, pointing to the huge coffee.
“Yeah. I guess I should have gotten some doughnuts too, huh?”
• 47 • “Hey! No fat jokes. It’s a medical condition.”
“Yeah? Sorry.”
Rosetto laughed. “Yeah, I have a pasta allergy. It makes me blow up
like a fucking blimp, but I can’t stop eating it.” He laughed at his own bad joke and Roy just stared at him, amazed at his size. “I got a break in the case I’m working on. Let’s take these and walk,” he said, not wanting to talk in front of anyone. He looked at the big man and wondered if he could walk. It was like Tim read his mind.
“I know what you’re thinking—when I haul ass I have to make two trips—but don’t let the size fool ya’. I can still move when I have to.”
Roy said nothing and walked out into the street with Mr. Goodyear behind him. They walked, carrying their gallon cups of coffee (into which Tim had poured four sugars and a bottle of light cream).
“Yesterday I got called out to a warehouse. Forensics is still finishing their report, but we have at least three DB’s in there. Well, sort of.”
“How do you sort of have three dead bodies?” asked Tim, sipping his coffee.
“They had been packed into a furnace and burned.”
“Managia,” he cursed in Italian. “I hope they were dead first.”
Roy’s hair stood up. It had never occurred to him that they might have been alive. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Anyway, we think one of the bodies may be a Jane Doe we are looking for. The last one that just came in. This hooker named Tiffany. She had a Tiffany bracelet when last seen, and one that matches the description was found at the scene.”
“What about the other two?”
“Nothing. And dental records probably won’t help. They were in bad shape. The rest of the scene looks pretty clean. We have a few partial prints off the door of the furnace, but they might not even be the killer’s.”
“Well, at least you have something. You started looking at this stuff when?”
“Just a couple of days ago.”
“Yeah, well, you’re a lucky son of a bitch. I’ve been busting my ass on this missing hooker file for months and I got ‘gotz’—nuthing!”
“Yeah, well, I’d rather be lucky than good. May not even be our missing Jane, but I am thinking it probably is. I stopped by the lab late yesterday. The doc I spoke to gave me some unofficial skinny, but it’s fucked up, man.”
“Yeah, well, ‘fucked up’ started when he put three bodies into a furnace and burned them,” said Tim.
“The doc said our killer must have had a dog or something with him. Like…” he paused and looked around, feeling disgusting even speaking the words, “Like, he may have fed the parts to his dog before he burned them.”
Tim lowered his coffee and made a sick face. “He what?”
“There were some large teeth marks on some of the bones, but they weren’t human teeth. More like large fang marks or something. Like a real big dog or wolf or something. The doc was comparing the bite marks against a pretty big library of teeth impressions, and he said it was bigger than an average sized dog. Maybe the killer has a pet wolf or tiger or some shit. Doc never saw anything like it before. And this is coming from a guy that’s been in the Big A
pple for twenty years—he has seen some shit, know what I’m sayin’?”
“Yeah—whatever they pay the guys down the basement ain’t enough. Bad enough we have to find some of the shit we see—but those guys have to touch it and take it apart. Who wants that job, anyway?”
“I hear ya’. Just seeing the furnace was enough to keep me up last night. I kept wondering what he had done to the three people before he burned them up. When I heard that shit about the teeth marks, it got to me, man.”
They had crossed the street at Columbus Circle and sat down on a bench at the south end of Central Park. Tim took up half the bench.
“How many years you on?” asked Tim, watching a horse and buggy full of tourists trot by.
“Thirteen. You?”
“Almost twenty. Been a homicide detective for eleven. Let me tell ya’, Roy—I have seen some fucked up shit in this city. I had a serial rapist-slash-killer about five years ago. He was a sick sonofabitch. He sexually assaulted and raped seven women before strangling them to death. I had the privilege of catching him in the act on a stakeout. It was only the second time I had ever fired my weapon. I just about blew that piece of shit’s head off. Really shook me up when it happened. The girl was totally freaked. She was naked, beaten up pretty good. It wasn’t until DNA came back that confirmed he was the same guy in the other attacks that I could sleep again.”
Roy listened, sipping coffee, not really sure why Tim was telling him all this.
“Anyway, after that, I never thought I’d be able to draw my weapon again, ya’ know? Even though that prick deserved what he got, I had actually killed somebody, and it was hard to shake off. I put on a hundred pounds after it happened. I guess you call it food therapy.”
“At least you ain’t an alcoholic like most of the guys I know,” said Roy, trying to make light.
“Yeah—I guess that was the choice—eat or drink my way through it. Somehow hot fudge sundaes were better than booze. I would have fucked my way through it, but my wife split after it happened. Said ‘I changed’. Apparently I wasn’t that much fun to be around.”
Roy grunted. Most of his cop friends were divorced or on marriage number two or three. He fit in category one.
“Anyway, my point is this,” said Tim, leaning closer to Roy. “I didn’t think I’d ever be able to pull my gun again.
Ever . But if I ever catch a guy who kills dozens of women, feeds them to his dog, and burns them after—I’ll blow his fucking head off.”
“Amen, brother,” said Roy quietly.
Ten
VWX
Adam
Adam opened his eyes and looked around his studio apartment. It was Sunday afternoon, and he could hear the soft chiming of bells. Adam walked to his window and looked out on the city. It was quiet in terms of street traffic, but the weather was nice and there were lots of pedestrians about. He looked out towards Central Park and decided early evening would be a nice time to go outside and “people watch”.
Like many humans, Adam was often entertained by watching people go by on the street. He had a few cafes where he would order espresso and sit outside. While he never drank his coffee, he would sit for an hour or more and wonder about the people that hustled by. New Yorkers were an exciting breed. They walked faster than any
• 52 • other humans on the planet, always in a hurry, always avoiding eye contact lest someone say “hello” and pose a huge threat. He found it curious, but interesting. Sometimes he would inhale the scent of various passersby, and know which ones were sick, which ones had had sex recently and not showered, which ones used expensive perfume. It was a game he played to pass the time, and time had become an interesting concept.
Many days were spent wondering about time. Day and night made no difference to him, and he had no internal clock that signaled sleep when it was dark outside. But it wasn’t the days and nights he wondered about—it was the decades and centuries. How old was the creature that bit him in Jena? Why did it die? Did he also have a lifespan like humans, and if so, how long? Why did the creature that killed him die—was it the many wounds it had suffered during the battle?
In all of the time Adam had spent in the world, he still had not answered the majority of his own questions. He had on occasion read up on vampires, the hereafter, supernatural powers—the topics were endless, especially since the advent of the internet and access to infinite information. He found almost all of it to be fictional bullshit. While he was intrigued at the idea of Dracula and other vampire stories he read, he laughed at so much of it. He couldn’t turn into a bat no matter how hard he tried. He didn’t sleep in dirt or in a coffin and found the idea ludicrous. Warm soft sheets, preferably warmed by a female body before a meal would be his ideal place to sleep—not in some death box.
That last thought, while sitting at a café later that afternoon, blended into a woman walking by in a beautiful fur coat. It wasn’t particularly cold, but in New York City, nothing was ever out of place. He remembered sleeping on a bear rug once a hundred years earlier while in France, and had a nostalgic moment. He decided he wanted a fur coat—either to wear or to sleep on, he hadn’t decided yet, but he would have a fur coat.
He left a few dollars for the waiter and got up, walking quickly until he caught up with the pretty woman in her long gray fur. Adam never felt cold, really. Simply put, he was always cold. And quite dead. It wasn’t until he fed and pints of hot blood rushed into his body that he felt “different”, which was to say, “warm”. At those moments, with a body full of blood pumping through his own heart, he felt alive again and something that could be almost called “happy”. He wanted to be happy again.
He walked for quite a while, following the woman uptown towards the Museum of Natural History. When she got close to the museum, she turned right into Central Park, and Adam smiled to himself. In his mind, he made a wager with himself that she was heading across the park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She had that New York City walk, confident, and her hair probably cost her a few hundred dollars at some salon uptown. As he got closer, he could smell perfume that was no doubt very expensive. He still hadn’t seen her face, and was getting curious. The coat was, however, beautiful. He was sure it would feel very soft under his naked dead body.
He walked slower and allowed her to get ahead, avoiding any suspicion. When she walked out of the park and headed towards the huge steps of the MET, he smiled wickedly. Of course—where else would this snotty little bitch be going?
He walked faster and followed her in. She was checking her coat, which was unexpected and for some reason made him very angry. He didn’t want other hands on it. (It was already his, as far as he was concerned.) He managed to keep the animal inside—under control, and quietly followed the woman into the gallery. She got in line to pay for admission with Adam behind her. She felt him behind her and turned around, catching him off guard with a beautiful smile framed with deep red lipstick. Her teeth were white and perfect, and her own green eyes twinkled. If he had a heart that beat, it might have skipped one.
“Are you here for the Gellman exhibit?” she said with a sweet voice that was not bitchy at all—in fact, it was clear and crisp and sweet to his sensitive ears.
“Of course,” he said, his own silvery eyes shining with a hunger she could not guess.
“I was so excited when I heard they’d have an exhibit here this week,” she said.
In over a hundred years in New York, this was the first friendly face of innocence he had seen that actually caused him to feel sadness at not being human. He was staring at her, taking her in, smelling her, listening to her blood rush back and forth in her arteries when a nasty woman behind the counter shouted, “Next!”
She turned to pay for her ticket, but Adam quickly rushed up next to her and said, “Two, please.”
She looked up at him and gave him another huge smile. “Don’t do that!” she said. “I’ll pay for my ticket—“
“Please,” he said softly, in his most d
isarming voice, “It would be my great pleasure.” He handed the woman a crisp hundred dollar bill, one of several he had taken off of the last dead whore he had eaten, and took the two tickets. “Would you do me the honor of walking through the exhibit with me? If you are an expert of Gellman, I’d love to learn more about him.”
“Really,” she said sarcastically. Her innocent face went sour.
“What? Have I offended you?” he asked.
“No. But I am pretty sure you offended Lisa Gellman.”
If he had any blood inside his body, he might have blushed. “Ah. Mr. Gellman is a Mrs. So you see how little I know of her work.”
“Um hmm,” she said, with a suspicious smile.
“Will you walk the show with me for a bit?” he asked again, surprising himself that he actually cared. A moment ago, all he wanted was her soft coat that smelled like expensive perfume, and perhaps all of her bodily fluids. Now he actually wanted her company. Strange.
“For a bit,” she said warily. The New Yorker in her was creeping out. They were a jaded bunch, and she had already been friendlier than any he had met that weren’t drunk at a bar.
They walked in silence towards the hallway leading to the exhibit until she finally blurted, “So—what’s your name?”
He stopped and smiled. He hadn’t given his name to anyone in so long he almost said Olmer, but extended his hand and said, “Adam. Adam Priest. So very pleased to make your acquaintance.”
She shook his hand, with a womanly grip that was firm enough to show confidence but still feminine. “Sara Lockhart. Nice to meet you, Adam.” She smiled, a little flirt in it, and began walking again.
They entered the gallery where Lisa Gellman’s work was being displayed, and Adam was surprised to see they were photographs, not paintings. Most of her portraits were done in black and white, although she had some very large color shots hanging as well. They walked together without speaking until they approached her first series of pictures, hung together of the same nude model. It was a young woman in black and white, and none of the shots showed her face. The photographer had seemed most interested in the figure’s lower back and buttocks, which were shown arching, two of the pictures including the back of her head with very long dark hair sprayed across her very white skin.