American Devil th&dl-1

by Oliver Stark

  When Harper arrived in the gym Lafayette was alone. Everyone else was out hunting down witnesses and following up vague possibilities. Lafayette was on the weights. He saw Tom and huffed through another five repetitions. Always one to make people wait.

  ‘Heard you showed up at the crime scene. I was first down there. Worst I’ve come up against. How about you?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s brutal.’

  ‘Serial homicides usually escalate like this, Harper?’

  ‘No. Not quite so quickly, but there are no fixed patterns. They usually take a longer cooling off period between kills. For some reason, the killer got hungry real quick this time.’

  ‘Same guy, right?’

  ‘Almost certainly. As long as you keep the specific injuries and the cherry blossom detail out of the press, we should avoid copycats.’

  ‘What’s wrong with plain old-fashioned murder? You want to kill someone, take a gun. One shot. Be tidy, you know.’ The chief towelled his shoulders dry. His thick moustache was also dripping. He licked the sweat off the bristles and then towelled his face. ‘Offer still stands, Harper. Where are you now?’

  ‘You’ll have to be more specific.’

  ‘Look, I can be specific. Do you want to try to save any part of your career by taking the clean slate and helping us nail this case? You’d have to apologize and sign up to some therapy for the aggression, just to keep ourselves in the clear. Rainer is gunning for you, Harper. You need to know that I had to go over his head for this one.’

  ‘Thanks, Captain. I appreciate your faith in me.’

  ‘Fuck faith, Harper. I looked up the stats. You’re a closer. The best we got.’

  Harper looked around him. ‘I’m not sorry for what I did to Lieutenant Jarvis. He called Lisa a slut, and everyone knows I’ve got a short fuse. He knew what he was doing.’

  ‘I know, I know. Divorce is a pig of a business. He said the wrong thing. Listen, one day he’ll realize what an ass he is, but until then you’ve still got a life to lead. Look, I can probably apologize on your behalf, but will you help us stop this scum from terrifying half of New York?’

  ‘What do they want from me? They’re not going to rip up the charges, are they? And Jarvis won’t like it, either. He’ll take it as far as he can.’

  ‘Jarvis will hate it, but let me worry about him,’ the captain said. ‘He’s got his own troubles. A lot came to light during the internal investigation — he’s been intimidating the new recruits and anyone else not able to stand up to him. He’ll be lucky to keep his own fucking job. And as for the charges, we can maybe get away with a Letter of Instruction. With psychological assessment and therapy for that temper of yours, I think we can get that signed off by the deputy commissioner.’

  Harper rose. ‘I can do without the psychological assessment. ’

  ‘Just go through the motions for me, will you? It’s part of the deal.’

  ‘I got my own way of handling it.’

  ‘I know, and look how successful it is. Come on, give yourself a break. Jump on board. You could do with the focus.’

  Harper stood silently, then nodded once and the two men shook. ‘Good to have you back on the team, Detective Harper. You get signed up to the department shrink and you’re back on Blue Team. Dr Levene works at headquarters. She knows you’re coming. Just don’t take a pop if things get tough. Keep your fucking hands in your pockets, Sugar Ray.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Harper. ‘If people lay off me, I’ll lay off them. Simple laws of physics, Chief.’

  Chapter Ten

  Blue Team Major Investigation Room

  November 16, 11.15 p.m.

  For the first twenty-four hours of each homicide, the focus was on three main points of investigation — victim identification, witness search and forensic leads. Back at Blue Team, Tom Harper went straight from the gym to his old desk and started working on victim ID. He’d not been happy with the speed of ID on the previous victims. It took them eight hours to ID the Ward’s Island corpse as Grace Frazer and those eight hours were lost hours.

  Harper insisted on going through the CCTV images himself. He knew two things for certain from his visit to the crime scene: one, the woman in the parking lot drove there in a car, and, two, that car had disappeared. Simple conclusion was that the killer didn’t use his own car. He’d gone to the lot on foot and after the murder he’d driven the victim’s car out of there. It was the only way he could’ve left in such a bloody state without being seen.

  It only took an hour of searching the tape before he spotted the victim’s car arriving in the lot. He paused on a single frame and wrote down the licence plate on a brand new silver Mercedes SUV. He called it through and within a few minutes he was looking at the victim’s ID. She was called Amy Lloyd-Gardner, and she was twenty-four years old. A quick check on the various databases showed she was a PR executive married to a wealthy young banker.

  Tom pulled up a photograph of Amy Lloyd-Gardner from a social networking website and leaned back into his seat. He stared at her face. She was another beauty with long blond hair, similar in looks to Mary-Jane and Grace. The killer was fixated on a certain kind of look and this was his trigger: a bright-eyed, blond-haired innocence.

  Harper turned round to look at the room full of officers working methodically through the case details. Somewhere out in the city, Amy’s husband was waiting up for her, as yet unaware that his young wife was a murder victim.

  She had been on a lazy afternoon shopping trip. She would’ve had no idea as she wandered around the shops that there was a killer tracking her and waiting for an opportunity. No idea at all. Her car, her clothes, her shopping had all disappeared. That meant that the killer had taken everything away in the silver Merc. But the killer didn’t take the body and he didn’t need to take the clothes. He wants to keep the clothes, Harper thought, and added it to a growing list of the killer’s predilections. He called across to one of the detectives and asked him to get the car details sent out to the team and called through to patrol. Within minutes, the car’s plate and description was radioed all across Manhattan and New York State. Finding the big shiny car was just a matter of time.

  Harper walked through to Williamson to give him the heads-up on the ID. Williamson took the printout. ‘Thanks, Harper. Listen, I’ll take Garcia and go and see Mr Lloyd-Gardner myself. Shit, what a night call this is going to be.’

  Harper was pleased that Williamson would take this one. He needed more time to go through the information from the crime scene. When he returned to his desk, his email blinked with a new arrival, from the guys at the crime scene lab. Harper had requested the photographs as soon as they’d been downloaded and categorized. He clicked through the images one by one. The story retold itself on his computer screen. A sad end to life in a grey concrete garage. The violence of the poor woman’s end was there before him in cold close-up. He felt the anger rising and took a moment to detach himself.

  He clicked backwards and forwards through the pictures of the corpse. From a certain angle, the naked body with the skin stretched out either side of her torso looked like some kind of butterfly. Was that accident or design? He stared at the screen. Amy’s toenails were painted red, and there was a little black ace of spades on her left hip. Her eyebrows had been plucked thin and then drawn in pale eyebrow pencil, and her lips still retained a translucent pink lip gloss. Even on a mutilated corpse, the little marks of recognition and individuality demanded to be known. Harper noticed a mark just below her lips. Smudged lipstick. Maybe the killer had left a print. He zoomed close to her lips, until they covered the entire screen. It wasn’t a fingerprint. A faint outline of a kiss lay half across her lips in her own lipstick. The killer must have kissed her, coated his lips in her lipstick and then kissed her again. There was a half-print of the killer’s lips sitting right there.

  He gave Latent Prints a call and suggested they get a print. Everything needed to be processed, every tiny detail. He never knew, down the line, what would
help him nail this bastard and get him locked up. Sometimes it was a single hair, sometimes a significant coincidence, sometimes a cell phone call that put the killer at the scene, sometimes something as simple as a kiss.

  What were they dealing with? A sociopath? A thrill seeker or a sexually sadistic serial killer who wouldn’t stop until someone stopped him? The team didn’t talk much as they wandered in and out of the precinct late into the night. Not even the jokes were flowing yet, just the grim sense of a difficult journey and the knowledge of how much pain and suffering these victims had been through.

  Harper picked up the congealed dinner of chicken noodles that had been half eaten a few hours earlier. He was halfway through the first mouthful when he caught the image again in his mind’s eye.

  Harper moved back to his desktop and clicked on her photographs again. The hands in prayer, he was thinking. That little detail from Grace Frazer’s murder was sitting right there in Harper’s mind and the link to the parking lot killing flashed into his mind. He found the image he wanted. The woman’s corpse was shining bright. Her skin was so pale it was almost iridescent, the wings were blood-dark, and the fluorescent lights glistened gold on the bloody circle around her head.

  Harper stopped mid-chew. A halo?

  Yes, he knew that there was something in that image, something that connected it to Grace Frazer. The killer had started to express himself, let himself be known a little. First a woman with her hands in prayer and now he’d made wings and a halo. Amy looked like an angel with her heart torn out.

  Harper was fired by the thought and quickly printed three photographs, one of Mary-Jane Samuelson, one of Grace Frazer and one of the Angel. He went up to one of the big boards that had been set up in the investigation room and pinned the pictures side by side. Garcia looked across from the computer he was working at. ‘What you looking at, Harper?’

  ‘He’s signing his corpses.’

  Harper picked up his coat and walked down the stairs. He needed some fresh air and a chance to think. A killer’s MO was one thing — it was what he needed to do to kill — but an MO could change, as it had in this case. He had cut them to different degrees, but the signature was what he needed to do to fulfil himself, what he couldn’t kill without doing. The angelic wings and the hands in prayer were part of a ritual, just like the cherry blossom, which struck Harper as almost bridal. The killer needed to pose his corpses like dead angels. Harper felt that he knew something about the killer now. He hated goodness and religion. Like a devil, he needed to degrade it all.

  Harper stepped across the street towards a coffee shop. It was close to midnight. Outside, the air was good and cool. The winter migrants who had stayed in New York would appreciate the break from the harsh cold wind. Harper’s footsteps echoed in the quiet night air. Then he spotted a guy up ahead staring at him.

  Harper turned and behind him saw two more big guys walking towards him. All three were over six foot and burly. They looked like security guards, or maybe even police.

  ‘I guess this isn’t social, so what do you want?’ Harper said, cold-eyed.

  ‘Into the alley,’ said one of the guys. His face looked like the side of a mountain.

  ‘Read the shield, gentlemen,’ said Harper, flashing his ID. ‘I’m a cop, so you might want to avoid trouble and get yourselves home to bed.’

  They didn’t move, but looked down into the dark alley. Harper thought they were motioning for him to make a move, but from the alley he heard footsteps. His eyes twisted towards the sound and he saw the problem. Its name was Lieutenant Jarvis, and everything suddenly clicked into place.

  Jarvis’s jaw was no longer wired up but his face was still misshapen down one side. ‘Detective Harper,’ he said in a slow slur. ‘I thought your police time was over. Now someone tells me I’ve got to eat humble pie while you get the glory spot. After you leaping on me with those fists of yours, doesn’t sound fair, does it?’

  ‘No, Lieutenant, it doesn’t sound fair.’

  ‘So, what was it you objected to, Harper? You didn’t like my insinuations?’

  ‘I didn’t like any part of it at all,’ said Harper, ‘or your tone of voice.’

  ‘Really. My tone of voice. Hey, guys, he doesn’t like my beautiful voice.’

  They laughed like eager sycophants. Harper looked around quickly. This wasn’t good news. These four guys were all strong, and people fighting together tended to get all excited like a pack of hounds and do real damage. They could bust him up pretty bad. He couldn’t see a way out. There were too many of them. He let his arms hang down by his sides.

  ‘These your men, Lieutenant?’

  ‘These guys are just visiting the city. They stopped by and offered me a helping hand.’

  ‘Let it go, Jarvis. I hit you because you called my wife a whore.’

  ‘I still say she’s a whore. She’s shacked up with a lawyer over in New Jersey. She made that move real quick. Makes you think, doesn’t it, Harper? I heard the reason she left is because you used those fists of yours once too often. Well, me and my boys are going to make it hard for you to ever use those fists again. In the name of public safety and women’s liberation.’

  Harper bristled. But it was just what Jarvis wanted. The bad cop throwing a punch.

  ‘Didn’t you hear me, Harper? Lisa Vincenti was fucking every guy in the department while you were out all night chasing Eric Romario. She got real lonely. Liked it every which way, I heard. Now she’s done with the department and has moved on to the courts.’

  Harper’s two hands were fists now, and the anger was rising. He took a step forward. Then stopped. ‘I ain’t gonna rise to it.’

  ‘You don’t need to,’ Jarvis spat.

  One of the three gorillas stepped forward, then another. They grabbed Harper at each elbow and shoulder and marched him down the alleyway. The third gorilla opened a long canvas bag that was sitting by the dumpster and took out a serious-looking sledgehammer. Harper was held fast as Jarvis moved in.

  ‘You know what this is, Harper?’

  ‘I know what it is and I know what you are — a fucking coward. You do this, Jarvis, and I’ll hunt you down.’

  ‘With what? You going to slap me with your big flat hands?’

  ‘I’ll hunt you down, Jarvis, and every one of these monkeys.’

  ‘You do that. I just want you to remember the last person you hit with those fists and what a stupid thing that was.’

  ‘Jarvis, this is way beyond necessary. I’m working the case because they need me. There’s a killer out there.’

  ‘Put his arm on the dumpster,’ called Jarvis.

  Harper resisted and strained with all his strength as the three men held him and prised his arm from his side, but they were too strong. Against three of them he couldn’t do anything, not with his hands held firm.

  They held his wrist down on the lid of the dumpster, so that his fist was lying ready to be mashed to pieces. Jarvis picked up the big carbon-steel sledgehammer. ‘Let this be a lesson you don’t forget.’

  He pulled the long handle up over his head and then held it for a moment. ‘Ready?’ The hammer flew down at speed. Harper’s skill, learned from hours in the ring, wasn’t just in the extra pound per inch he could force down those four knuckles, it was in the ability to keep his eyes open when facing danger and to make split-second decisions.

  As the hammer fell, the three gorillas closed their eyes and leaned away from the point of impact. It was the natural thing to do. The gorilla holding his wrist even moved his hand up Harper’s forearm.

  It was a tiny miscalculation on their part, but enough. Harper watched the sledgehammer fall and twisted his wrist and hand about three inches to the right. It was enough to move out of the line of the hammerhead, which thudded with a massive shock into the steel dumpster, the loud bellow of sheet metal against carbon steel echoing both ways down the alley. The four assailants flinched in the aftermath and gave Harper enough of an opening. Harper pulled his left
arm free. He already had his targets mapped out. Four blows. He could get four shots off in under two seconds. Trained to do it.

  At his best, Harper could throw a punch at around ten metres per second. None of the four guys was more than a metre from him, which gave the first about a tenth of a second to see the straight left coming at him and parry or duck. He had barely clocked it when the full force of Harper’s 300 kilograms of pressure burst on to his jaw in the form of a clenched fist. His head flew back, his neck jolted and he was flat on his back, out cold.

  The second guy had a little longer, but Harper turned with a right hand uppercut which hit the point of his jaw and lifted him to the tip of his toes.

  The third guy was now backing off, which was a damn good thing because Harper hadn’t held back with the power and was pretty sure he’d broken bones in both his hands. He turned to Jarvis.

  ‘This time I’ll forgive you out of respect for your stupidity, but play a trick like that again and I’ll hurt you. Do you understand?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ said Jarvis, picking up the sledgehammer. It was about as stupid a move as he could’ve made. With both hands wielding the hammer, he was a sitting duck. Harper moved his torso out of the way, bounced back on to his front foot and gave Jarvis a repeat performance, this time with the full force of his elbow. Jarvis’s jaw shattered like glass for the second time and the sledgehammer clattered to the ground.

  Chapter Eleven

  Precinct House

  November 17, 6.20 a.m.

  After a four-hour sleep in the bunkhouse and a trip to the department doctor, Harper took his bruised but unbroken knuckles back up to the precinct house. His role in the investigation was to find a way into the case, which meant getting to know the killer, and he had some catching up to do. He wanted to see the crime scene for Mary-Jane’s murder and called Eddie Kasper at home. ‘You need to take me through the reports of victim number one. I know the basics — I’ve got the autopsy protocol right here. I know what he did to her, I just want to see how it happened. This first kill triggered off the next two, that’s my thinking.’