by Oliver Stark
The body shocked you with its nakedness and direct stare. Harper felt as though he was looking at an exhibit in some sinister museum. On the white carpet beside the bed, the girl’s clothes were laid out, the dress, the brassiere, the panties, the nylons, the jewellery and the shoes. Each item was perfectly spaced.
Harper couldn’t do any more. He needed air. He walked out of the building. On the street, the crowds and the press had all come out. It was a mass of lights and cameras and perverts and people, all there to soak up the gruesome glamour of murder. Harper knew what this killer was doing, all right. He was showing off and this was just the beginning. He had started his show, the lights were bright, the audience was set.
The circus animals were all in town.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The Bronx
November 21, 3.31 a.m.
After the main work was over, Nate Williamson left the scene. He was depressed by the whole thing and wanted to go home and hang his head. The truth was, he had nothing. There was a looming fear in his mind. He’d worked the Romario case dry and left the way open for a slick-looking hero to come in and clean up. If he came up with nothing on this one, with the city in a state of fear and the eyes of the nation on his back, then his whole career would have meant nothing. Retirement was getting closer and closer. Maybe it felt like this to everyone: time came calling and you weren’t the man you once were.
Maybe that’s all it was, the progression of time. Even so, Nate didn’t like it. Every day, the investigation grew more complex and he felt he was failing. He wasn’t just failing himself, though — that wasn’t the thing that shot him that look of hate he saw in the mirror each morning. He was failing the city. His city. He’d loved her his whole life long. He’d never once moved from the Bronx or wanted to. But now his city was turning her back. He felt it like a personal slight, like a lover saying no, like your own child pushing you away.
That’s what was eating Nate Williamson.
It was dark in the drive when he got home. Lillian, his wife, was out in Michigan visiting their daughter so the house was dark and unwelcoming. Nate thought of his daughter, Rose, a large girl with red hair. She always made him smile. She was just like him. Except she was six months pregnant. He was going to be a grandfather. Maybe that new role would save him. Maybe he should throw in the towel before the final round. He would’ve loved to drive through the night to see them both. He was smiling as he searched his pocket for his keys. The outside porch light had been broken for months. Williamson fumbled for the right key, but he couldn’t find it. He took out a small flashlight from his hip pocket and shone it into his hand.
The light hit the ground just by his feet. There was a line of small droplets on the stone. Williamson crouched and looked closer. The droplets were a dark red colour. He dipped his forefinger in one of the drops and then smoothed the liquid between his thumb and forefinger. He held his finger under the light. Blood.
Nate stood up straight and listened. The night was still. The rumble of traffic continued in the background, but closer to home he could hear nothing. He shone the torch to the left and right. The droplets continued to the right along the path that led to the side gate to the back yard. Nate moved towards the gate. Whatever it was, it was hurt. Probably a small animal, by the look of the droplets. There was a small copse behind the houses and sometimes small rodents or cats got injured on the road. But Nate feared something more. His wife’s precious cat. The droplets went directly to his front door, suggesting that the animal had tried to get in.
His wife’s cat, Emerald, was an eighteen-year-old Exotic Shorthair. She was the laziest cat you ever did see and rarely moved, but she had the kindest nature and a small grumpy face that everyone seemed to love. Lillian doted on the cat and the cat doted on Lillian. If something had happened to Emerald, it was real bad news.
The torchlight shone up towards the wooden gate. It was ajar, which was unusual, and the drops of blood continued on through the gate and beyond.
The backyard was dark, lit only by a bright, cold moon. The light wind was shaking the tops of the trees. Williamson shone the light across the lawn. At the centre was a small apple tree. The drops of blood carried on across the grass but were harder to detect. Williamson shone his light into the trees at the back of the garden. He felt suddenly alone in his own yard. Then the bright green eyes of a cat lit up in the torchlight.
‘Emerald,’ he called. He felt his heart warm to the small pudgy face of his wife’s pet. She was sitting close to the tree trembling and looking terrified, but she was alive. That’s what mattered. Nate strode across the lawn towards her. She might have been in a fight with some local cat who had no idea that Emerald wouldn’t raise a paw for a treat let alone to defend herself. She was real class. You even had to take the food out of her bowl to feed her. A true Williamson.
The grass by the tree was thick with leaves. They crunched under his feet. That was another of Nate’s failures. He hadn’t swept up the fall leaves and now they were heaped all over the yard. ‘Come here, baby,’ Nate called out but the cat didn’t move.
Nate padded round towards the tree trunk. It was very silent, but Nate could hear some creature noises and shuffling in the trees.
He took the final step to reach Emerald. His foot landed on a soft bedding of leaves, almost a small mound — not flattened like the rest. His head had just sensed this as his foot came down through the soft leaves and on to something hard. Not earth, but metal. His foot touched a wide plate.
A low creak rose from the ground followed by a horrifying clash of metal and a sudden snap as a great iron jaw sprang up and butchered his right calf like a shark bite — two huge tooth-filled jaws and a massive force.
The pain was explosive. It sent splinters into every part of his brain — horrific pain as the flesh split and the bone crushed and cracked. Nate buckled, his great weight thrown forward, and his fibula snapped at the weakest point. As his weight was falling, the bone ripped through the front of his shin. Williamson’s wild scream echoed along the back yards.
Williamson grabbed onto the tree. Against the pain, he lifted himself and looked up. He was panting. He gazed down at his leg, but was near to passing out.
What the fuck was it? Two great iron jaws clamped fast to his leg. A mantrap? A bear trap? Was this left here by accident? Surely not.
And if not, then what? Against the flood of pain from the injury and his body’s own pain-relieving releases, he managed to take out his gun. He searched around. Emerald was a foot away. He scooped her up in his arms and pointed his gun at the trees. In the corner of his eyes he saw lights flicker on in the adjacent houses. His scream had woken them.
‘Call the police!’ shouted Williamson. ‘Call 911!’ He turned back to the woods. ‘Come out and face me, you coward bastard, whoever you are!’ His courage had not faltered. He hid Emerald in the crook of his arm and stared ahead, feeling the surges of pain hit him in sudden waves, over and over.
‘Ready to die?’ a voice called from the copse.
‘Who are you? What the hell do you want?’
‘You’re a detective. Work it out.’
Williamson had heard enough. He raised his pistol and unleashed two rounds towards the voice. There was silence. Maybe he’d hit the bastard. He looked up. There was a long pause.
Then Williamson heard a strange noise. It was hardly a sound at all. Like a piece of wood twanging on a desktop. A wooden thrum. A moment later, an aluminium bolt thumped into Williamson’s chest. He cried out again. The guy had a crossbow. Williamson managed to lift his gun hand and let off another two rounds.
Then he heard a swish of air again and felt the thud of something landing in his thigh. He looked down, shocked. Another bolt was lodged deep in his leg.
‘You’re a fucking dead man!’ Nate screamed. ‘You’re fucking dead. They know I’m here, so screw you! This place will be crawling with cops.’ Williamson fired until his gun was empty, but the rounds zipped into th
e trees and no one screamed.
Again, the deep thrum of wood and an arrow hit him hard in the stomach. Then another hit his shoulder and threw his upper body backwards. Williamson was almost out. The pain and blood loss were taking his mind away. He was going to die.
Vvv-dumm, sounded the crossbow. The thrumming of the shot echoed across the backs of the houses and the bolt ripped hard into Williamson’s arm. He hardly felt it. Then he heard something moving towards him and another bolt hit him in the stomach.
The killer emerged from the shadows, his face illuminated by the white light of the moon. Williamson focused his eyes and furrowed his brow in confusion. He saw the face of his killer silhouetted against a beautiful spread of stars. He opened his mouth to speak, to plead, to talk to this man, but before he could utter a word an arrow entered his brain through the roof of his open mouth.
The American Devil smiled down at his victim. ‘You’re just not good enough, Detective Williamson. I want a better challenge. I want Tom Harper.’
PART TWO
November 21-24
‘In each human heart terror survives The ravin it has gorged’
P. B. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
Chapter Thirty-Four
East 71st Street
November 21, 10.00 a.m.
Marty Fox wore plaid suits and still smoked, which almost no one else in the world did. He was forty-one, chronically unfaithful to his wife and wanted life just as it was — comfortable. Why he slept around was because he liked it. Why else do people do things? And he liked the sensation of new flesh better than flesh he knew. What was so odd about that? It was a proven fact that new experiences produced more serotonin than habitual ones. Man was hard-wired to go somewhere new for his fun and games, and the truth was Marty was just not strong enough to override the temptation.
Man, Marty maintained, is a primitive beast wearing a civilized coat. At times, the coat must come off or man cannot operate. It was his release valve, that was all.
He’d married his wife some long-ago distant time in the past, for hell’s sake. She had been pretty and vivacious. She was a bombshell, as they used to call it in the good old days of black and white TV. All platinum blond hair and squeeze-me tits. He smiled when he thought about her back then. She could excite a man from four hundred paces. Beautiful and dirty with wide hips and a come-to-bed smile.
Yeah, he loved her still. Hell, yes, he did. He stubbed his cigarette out on the back of the packet and watched the smoke twirl in a dying flourish. He felt the scab on his lip with his tongue. It was still cracking every time he moved.
You fall in love with your libido, whatever anyone says. You want the proof? How many young bucks go head-over for an old woman? None. Only with women they want to bed. Is that coincidence or is that just the basic fact?
No one disagreed with him. He was alone in his little office, but he liked to talk to himself. He found himself interesting. He knew that he’d fallen in love with his wife because she was the woman he most wanted to screw. But he didn’t fall in love with a 45-year-old woman and that’s what he had at home now, while in his own head he was not a day older than twenty-five.
He still wanted to stay married to her, no question. Life was easy and comfortable. Like his job. His motto was: don’t succeed, as success brought responsibilities and even more work. Be a nobody and enjoy it. He lived with his wife but just had his fun elsewhere. And anyhow, women liked him. They smiled at him in the street, they giggled when he joked, they had a whole battery of alluring and suggestive looks to make it clear to him how they felt. God knows why. He was an egotistical womanizing pig and he knew it. An old-fashioned tits-and-ass guy. But it was the simplicity they liked. No messing about, no new man tagging along for the emotions and philosophical discussion. He liked them, showed them he wanted them and that was all it took — everyone wants to be wanted, right?
He also had classic good looks and knew how to make a woman howl with pleasure, so they could live with the old-fashioned attitude. When it came to a flat choice between a man who could empathize or a good time, he knew what women chose every time.
His latest affair was a 26-year-old semi-depressive office manager with nice looks, an underused libido, a quiet urban desperation and a need for self-esteem. She was a real annoying date but good in bed. What he called a dilemma-lay. You like the afters but will you sit through the main course?
It was all fine and dandy in the life of Marty Fox. All fine and dandy except for one small fact. And that was that his dear wife had caught him in bed with the office manager.
The thing was, psychologically speaking, his wife had known about his affairs for years, but they existed in some strange shadowland that she could pretend didn’t exist. The previous day she had been confronted by the sight of her loving husband slap-bang in between some strange woman’s thighs. It was a confrontation with reality that she couldn’t ignore.
This was a whole other fucking ball game. No way could she switch off the image in her head or what it released inside her. Pure, red-blooded fury. She’d punched Marty. It was the first time in her life she’d hit anything. His lip split with a dramatic flood of blood. Then she went one better and grabbed the depressed office manager by her hair and threw her out of the house. She pushed her naked into the street and threw her clothes out after her. It wasn’t going to help the poor girl’s depression or self-esteem a whole lot. Then his wife returned indoors. As Marty nursed his lip in the bathroom, she locked herself in the den and took Marty’s rare vinyl jazz records and smashed his entire collection one by one. Marty was outside scratching and pleading at the door as his cherished Art Tatum albums met the 22-ounce hammer.
The day had started nice and ended like a car wreck. All in all, it wasn’t a satisfying day. And now his wife had given him the ultimatum he’d dreaded. One more strike and you’re out.
He lit another cigarette. Was this as far as he had come in his life? From an overeager sexual teen to an overeager sexual mid-lifer? Maybe Freud was right. Sex was about it, really. All else was footnotes. He was a prize jerk. His wife was the one thing in his life not open to his child-like whims. Without her, he’d fucking die — he knew it.
A buzzer screeched on his desk. He leaned back and pressed the intercom.
‘Go ahead, Keren.’
Outside his office, his receptionist smiled up at the tall gentleman in the lobby. He smiled back, nervous and twitchy. She could tell he wasn’t used to coming to see a therapist.
‘Your ten o’clock, Dr Fox.’
‘Well, send him in,’ said Marty with a mock Southern accent. He hadn’t ever bagged his secretary and now it didn’t look as though he would. His world was turning from a land of endless opportunity to a sad landscape of things he couldn’t have. There was silence on the other end of the intercom.
Marty stood up. God, he hated clients. He wanted to drown them all. He often sat there listening to their long rambling self-indulgent diatribes imagining terrible fates for them. He pulled Nick’s file out of his in-tray and opened it.
‘Oh, yeah, Mr Nick Smith, the fantasist! Lucky me.’
As a rule, Marty preferred female clients; at least he could distract himself from their tedious problems by imagining some sordid sexual adventure. Not so with Nick with his little domestic issues and his fake surname. The tall gentleman entered. He was wearing a smart black suit. They’d had two previous sessions and were yet to feel comfortable with each other.
‘How you been, Nick?’
Nick looked up. ‘I’ve not been feeling so good, Doctor.’ He sat down heavily in the leather chair. He fidgeted with his hands as he stared out of the window in silence. It wasn’t easy for him to be there at all, really. He felt a sense of betrayal as well as fear, but he wanted to get down to business. He wanted to know what was happening to him. His visions and dreams were so vivid they terrified him. ‘Will you sit down, Doctor? I don’t know where I am. I’m feeling down and confused. I need your help.’
‘I like to float, Nick. I need to keep my mind active.’
‘Please sit down.’
Marty hadn’t heard this tone before. It was different. Military almost. He looked at his client. ‘Okay, Nick, you’re feeling fragile. That’s no problem. I’ll sit down for you. So, last week we touched on a problem you felt you have with women. Your wife and you have been having some domestic issues. You want to pick it up at that point?’
‘I have a problem respecting women. I know that.’
‘I do too, Nick.’
‘Not like me,’ said Nick.
‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ smiled Marty.
‘I’m very sure, but that’s not what I want to talk about.’
The two men looked at each other. Marty decided to let the guy twist himself up in his little world of self-importance if that’s what he wanted. The only psychological cure Marty ever really believed in was not taking yourself so goddamn seriously — but his jokes were never appreciated. Clients wanted to know that even the colour of their shit was psychologically relevant and pertinent to their current position in the world. ‘Go on, Nick, I’m listening,’ he said, smooth as silk.
‘I woke up in my car. I’d passed out again like I said happened before. I get this drumming in my head like I’m dying and then I just feel my brain squeezing tighter and tighter. The pain is too much, I guess. It’s killing me.’
‘You had this checked out with a doctor?’
‘You’re my doctor.’
‘I mean a medical doctor.’
‘No. Got no insurance or nothing like that.’
‘You have intense pain and then you black out?’
‘Yeah. Pain and white lights all across my eyes.’