American Devil th&dl-1

by Oliver Stark

  ‘You’re confused, Nick. Listen, it is possible that you’re suffering some kind of split personality. Sometimes a traumatic event can trigger things off, and the mind creates these alternative personalities to protect you from whatever is too difficult for you to see.’ Nick stared ahead. ‘You ever have a traumatic time, Nick, somewhere in the past?’

  ‘I was in love once, Doctor.’

  Marty’s eyes glanced down at the personal column. He had been searching the dating ads. He couldn’t act on them any more, but he still couldn’t help himself looking. Then he looked up. ‘I like love stories, Nick — who was she?’

  Nick twisted his body in his seat. ‘My first love. I was only a boy. I knew her as a friend, you know. I was a real quiet one back then. She didn’t love me, Doctor. I loved her from a distance.’

  ‘All sounds pretty normal to me, Nick. She was hot, was she?’

  ‘Like a perfect doll. But she was untouchable.’

  ‘So what happened with this girl?’

  ‘I wanted her so badly, it drove me crazy. She was just a kid, but then she started growing up herself. I couldn’t take seeing her with other boys.’

  ‘You were jealous?’

  ‘I’d say I was pretty jealous. I watched from a distance but kept it all tucked deep inside. See, she was a goddess to me. Nothing in my life was pure and perfect, Doctor. But she was.’

  ‘Not easy when you’re smitten.’

  ‘I knew the day would come. I’m not stupid. I knew that she would flower and the insects would come and feed on her. Have you ever seen how insects crawl over beautiful blossoms? I knew it would with her. I watched and things happened inside me. I couldn’t bear it.’

  ‘Did she date someone else, Nick?’

  Nick lowered his eyes. Marty was intrigued. He liked a little je ne sais quoi in his sessions.

  ‘Someone took her. A young man who didn’t really care about her.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘On a summer day, he took her to the local spot. He charmed her. She was reluctant and scared. They were walking in the valley and I was following on the ridge above. Then he pressed her to the ground, kissing her. His hands started to touch her. All inside and out and where you shouldn’t. I watched like I was behind glass. He touched her. She called out for him to stop but he didn’t. He wouldn’t. He lifted her skirt and he put his hand right inside her skirt. She cried out “No”. She screamed it. She said “No” over and over but he said, “You want to make me happy, don’t you?” I wanted to help her. I couldn’t move. Why couldn’t I move, Doctor?’

  ‘Why do you think you couldn’t move, Nick?’

  ‘I was paralysed on the spot like some dumb staring animal. They wouldn’t call it rape, Doctor, but it was rape. It was…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘After that, I couldn’t sleep. I went off the rails.’

  Marty Fox liked the story. Girl and boy making out in the grass with a fierce rival staring from the ridge. The girl gets a little hands-off when it starts looking serious. Yeah, he got that story. It was a TV movie kind of story. Marty imagined it easily. Except he didn’t identify with the boy on the ridge. He identified with the boy with his hands inside the girl’s jeans. That’s where he was in the story, not with the loser. He looked at Nick.

  ‘The boy who raped her, Nick. Was that you?’

  Nick turned his head suddenly. ‘Me? I was watching. How could it be me?’

  ‘Sometimes, we do things we regret. Bad things. Sometimes, we get confused over what happened because we feel so damn guilty. Sometimes we build great big barriers and when we look at the situation again, we don’t really know what happened.’

  ‘I loved her. I didn’t do that. I didn’t ever do that to her.’

  ‘Okay, let’s calm down. Why don’t we talk about processing these past events. There are details there that need drawing out. I think we need closure on the girl.’

  Nick was clenching his fists and staring down at his feet. ‘What would you do, Marty? Someone killed the girl you loved?’

  ‘He didn’t kill her, Nick.’

  ‘He did kill her, Doctor. God, I miss her. When they die, you don’t half miss them.’

  Marty looked at his patient. He was shaking and holding himself. It was time to refer him. Marty didn’t like serious problems and this one was beginning to feel outside his comfort zone. He drew two red lines under the session notes and wrote a note to his PA: Transfer to Dr Bartholomew with immediate effect.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Upper East Side

  November 22, 12.12 p.m.

  The first full freeze hit the city and coated it in a fine grainy dust. It was Thanksgiving and no one felt like celebrating. The trees and street furniture were already filling up with Christmas lights all down the avenues and the shop fronts grew brighter each day. New York looked like a child’s toy sparkling with colour and light.

  Harper returned home at 8 a.m. and slept for a few hours. He woke from dreams he couldn’t remember and chose to walk down towards Madison Avenue via the meer. He had a bagful of bird seed and a growing sense that he was finally getting somewhere. The birds were skating around on the surface of the frozen lake, looking confused and lost, as if waiting for someone to come and put their world right. Harper took a handful of seed and tossed it across to the stranded ducks. In the frosted branches of the trees, the blackbirds and finches looked on with interest. Harper wandered around the circumference, breathing in the chill air and crunching the icy blades of grass beneath his feet.

  He recalled that Lisa had never really liked Central Park. He sensed that she was just uncomfortable in places where people’s actions weren’t predetermined. She liked order. A cop’s life was anything but, it was reactive and random. It must’ve driven her half mad. Tom realized that it was the first thought about Lisa for nearly two days. It seemed a good sign. He looked out at the frozen landscape. There were times when he could’ve never imagined letting go of her. The connection had been too deep, but now, somehow, she was starting to fade away.

  He threw the last few handfuls of seeds to the birds and made his way down through the centre of the park. It was so beautiful and peaceful that his pace slowed. At around 82nd Street he peeled off and joined Madison Avenue just above the Museum of Modern Art. After the reconstruction with Denise, he’d hit the precinct and given the task of finding the shop which sold the two gold and crimson Vivienne Laurec scarves to the two FBI agents. By the time he woke up just after 11.30 a.m., they’d called. They had found the right store. It was simple, they said, but Harper didn’t mind them showing off their skills.

  Two Vivienne Laurec scarves seemed such a flimsy and weightless hook to hang an entire murder investigation on, but it was all he had. There was still, in his analytical mind, a nagging doubt about the scarves and he couldn’t quite understand why he was less than a hundred per cent about what they were telling him. Maybe it felt too easy.

  The team was focused more than ever after Williamson’s murder. Whatever the captain had tried with the media, it hadn’t worked. Around the precinct, there was an hourly barrage of questions from a seemingly endless stream of newspaper journalists and TV reporters. The story was being drip-fed emotion daily with new stories from the families of the bereaved, new theories about the poems and the posed corpses. There were websites and blogs dedicated to the killer and everything about him. Whoever this killer was, Harper guessed that this was all part of his need.

  Asa Shelton and Isaac Spencer, the two special agents from the FBI’s New York field office, had spent a couple of hours talking to distributors for Vivienne Laurec, then they got through to Vivienne Laurec itself. The scarf Harper had taken from Elizabeth Seale’s apartment had its own identity code, and once they had sent this over to Vivienne Laurec’s head office the company could give the Feds the life story of the scarf, from production through distribution to sale. They not only knew the store, they knew when the scarf had arrived and when it
had sold.

  Harper called Denise to let her know and arrived at the store about ten minutes later than he’d arranged. Denise Levene was standing at the window admiring the luxury goods. Inside the store, the two special agents were already talking to the young sales girl at the counter. Harper crossed and took up the questioning. The girl confirmed within minutes that they had sold that particular scarf. She took out the store records, which were still written down by hand in a large ledger before they were logged on the database.

  ‘So what’s in the big book?’ said Harper.

  The girl leafed slowly though the pages. ‘Okay, I’ve got five sold this month. The gold and crimson only came in at the end of October, so that’s the whole story. Five sales.’

  ‘Do you have names down there?’

  ‘Yes, sir, they all leave their names,’ she said, and smiled. ‘That’s what we do at a store like ours.’

  ‘Well, I’ll know where to come next time I’ve got a hundred to spare.’

  She smiled thinly and read out the names. The fourth name was male.

  ‘Bingo,’ said Harper as the name John Sebastian was read out. ‘Okay, let me check I’ve got this right. On November 17, Elizabeth Seale buys a crimson and gold scarf. She pays with a credit card. Right?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Then, on the same day, a “John Sebastian” comes in. What does he pay with?’

  ‘It was a cash purchase.’

  ‘No records, right.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What do you think, boys?’

  Asa Shelton and Isaac Spencer both nodded. ‘We’ll check the name, but he’s not going to pay with cash just to leave his real name. Obviously Sebastian is some kind of alias.’

  ‘You remember the cash buyer?’ asked Harper.

  The sales girl nodded. ‘Yeah, pretty much. It was only a few days ago. People don’t use cash any more, so he made a joke about it. Said his wife checked his credit card bills so he had to use cash for presents and affairs. I didn’t laugh. Why would I? Affairs aren’t that funny. He had glasses, greying a little. He had a nice smile, but he was a bit intense.’

  Harper clenched his fist. They had something. The killer had purchased the Vivienne Laurec scarf the same day Elizabeth had bought hers — the sales girls had seen him. Then he had killed her with it.

  It was unravelling. The killer had made a mistake. They always did at some point. He’d not been able to resist. He’d stepped off the path. He’d thought himself clever enough to get away with it. He’d coveted her possessions. And for Harper it meant that there were now two links to the stores on Madison Avenue. First with Amy Lloyd-Gardner and now with Elizabeth Seale. He needed more precise information, but he was beginning to see where the killer stalked his victims and that would give him a chance to set a trap. He looked at Denise.

  ‘I think you’ve got something,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, I got something, but it’s gone midday already, and he could be on his way to kill any time now.’

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Blue Team

  November 22, 3.00 p.m.

  Harper went direct from Madison Avenue to Captain Lafayette. He pushed open the glass door and stood there in the doorway.

  ‘I can see that look on your face, Harper. What is it?’

  Harper sat down on the one chair facing the desk and looked across at Lafayette. ‘We think he’s going to kill again. If he’s working a two-day cycle, then it’s going to be today. We can’t just sit on our hands.’

  ‘What are you suggesting?’

  ‘I want you to throw every officer you can on to the Upper East Side. I want to saturate the place. I want to see uniforms on every street corner. I want to make it look like there isn’t a square inch over there that we’re not watching.’

  ‘Shit, Harper, that’s a big ask. Overtime city. How we going to sell that?’

  ‘Tell City Hall that it’s got two benefits. The first is that we look like we’re doing something and it’ll give people a little peace of mind. The second is, there’s a chance it will spook him and put him off his stride. It might just save someone’s life.’

  Lafayette picked up the phone. ‘OK. Let me see what I can do.’

  The new information about the scarf had caused a surge of optimism and activity at Blue Team. The two federal agents, Shelton and Spencer, had already been painstakingly piecing together the movements of the women, Mary-Jane, Grace, Amy, Jessica and Elizabeth, in the last months of their lives. Using the information gathered by the team regarding cell phones and credit cards, they were able to plot an intricate and detailed picture of the women’s movements.

  From the victims’ bank details and phone records alone, they could create a pretty good idea of what they were doing on any one day. There were garage receipts showing when they parked, cafe, shop and restaurant receipts showing where they’d been, and phone records showing who they had called. Putting it all together, along with statements from their friends and families, the Feds produced a document that showed their movements at almost every hour of their last two months.

  Harper gathered Blue Team together to listen to the special agents’ report. Despite the recent developments, it was still sombre in the windowless investigation room and the ominous blue board with the stark and chilling pictures of the dead sat as a reminder of the need to break through.

  They listened intently to the geographical profile of the victims’ movements. Spencer and Shelton stood up front and talked through their findings in a slow, methodical fashion, showing such impressive attention to detail that Blue Team was ready to give them a standing ovation.

  As they concluded, Asa Shelton moved to the front spot. ‘Gentlemen, the point of all our investigation is this. We now have a geo-profile of the victims. We know that your killer was stalking them in the weeks before they died. We know, for instance, that the killer watched Elizabeth Seale buy a Vivienne Laurec scarf and then purchased an identical one which he used to decorate her dead body. We know that he watched her go into the Fullerton Lounge on at least one occasion because he knew where she was going to sit and placed himself right beside her.

  ‘What we have here, therefore, is not only their movements, but, somewhere, the movements of the killer. The question we have to ask ourselves is this: what is the pattern here? Where is he most at home stalking?’

  Asa clicked the small control in his hand and the next slide flew in. It was a close-up of Madison Avenue. ‘These spots, highlighted in red, are the intersections of movement of three of the five women. A killer like the American Devil will probably have different phases. In the trolling phase, the killer will visit places he is likely to see victims to his taste. Trolling is a fishing term: the killer is sitting in his boat with the net out, seeing what comes his way. Now, while it’s possible that a killer will come across a victim in a place that they don’t usually frequent, it’s more likely that he’ll spot them in a place they and he go to repeatedly. You all follow? If we plotted your geo-profile, about ninety-five per cent of your movements within a set period would be repetitions. It’s likely, therefore, that the trolling spot is also the place where he stalks. Now, even if, as Detective Harper suggests, our killer knew victims one through three, it makes no difference. We want to know where he stalks so we can set a trap. Our best bet, therefore, is public locations that these women visited frequently. So, for Amy Lloyd-Gardner, we’ve got Madison Avenue. She was a shopper through and through. Jessica Pascal went to two places most frequently, the Baptist church and the campus at Columbia University, but she walked home via Madison Avenue. We’d suggest the Baptist church is not a good trolling area, although he certainly stalked her there, so with her we red-spot Columbia and Madison. Elizabeth Seale has the widest geo-profile. She’s all over the city, but she was, on three occasions, on Madison Avenue. Her most frequent spot, though, was the airport, LaGuardia. Grace was at LaGuardia four times and also at a shop on Park Avenue, just around the corner from Madis
on. Even Mary-Jane travelled via LaGuardia once. See the two red spots? Madison and LaGuardia. It may be, gentlemen, that this is a map of your killer ’s trolling and stalking zones.’

  He continued. ‘We also came up with something interesting. The Triborough Bridge toll road that runs through Ward’s Island connects in the north to the Major Deegan Freeway, which takes you up to the Bronx, and in the south to Grand Central Parkway, which takes you direct to LaGuardia. The east side of Manhattan is only a few minutes’ ride. That’s the killer ’s stretch of road.’

  ‘That’s interesting, guys. That’s great work,’ said Harper. ‘Did you find any place they might have met the same employees? We’re guessing that the first three knew him through his work. Is there anything to connect them?’

  ‘Not a single place. Every victim in the last month visited numerous clothes stores, coffee shops, hairdressers and beauticians, but we know which stores they went into and there’s no crossover at all. Unless the killer himself moves between these stores.’

  ‘Is that possible?’

  ‘Well, we can look into it, Detective, but it’ll take a little time.’

  ‘Do that. That’s good. So what do we do with this information?’

  ‘Given our two points of fixed information, the proximity to his primary route and the crossover of victims, I’d suggest we set up observation posts at Madison Avenue and LaGuardia.’

  ‘Stakeout?’ said Kasper. ‘In New York City? At LaGuardia Airport? In Madison Avenue on Thanksgiving?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘How the fuck are we going to find a nondescript man like that? He’s clever; we don’t know if he’s going to show. It’ll be like searching for a snake in a snakepit.’

  ‘Any action we take that might find this killer is likely to be high-risk, labour-intensive and painstaking,’ said Harper. ‘I think we’ve got to do it.’

  It felt like something. Harper went straight back up to see Captain Lafayette. Lafayette smiled. ‘They went for it, Harper. And they want you to get out there and brief the press. They won’t saturate the area, but they’ve given us an extra forty patrolmen, so it’s going to feel different.’