by Oliver Stark
He’d spotted Kimberly at the airport on the way back from a trip to Texas. He was tired from the flight and feeling horny. There was something about travelling that got him excited. It was suspended animation. He had time to think bad thoughts.
It was her shoes he noticed first: green, elegant and expensive. Her face was pretty too — long and narrow with clear bones. He was expected at home but the thought of a new mark excited him, so he walked up close to her as she was waiting for a cab. As she was distracted on her cell phone, he swiped her case.
People wrote their names and addresses on their cases. He took her case and fell in love with Kimberly mostly through her delicate clothes. They were like stolen treasure to him. The secret life of things he was never allowed access to.
He was so aroused that he was shaking. First, the aroma of her. It was the faint smell of perfume mixed with the smell of the various fabrics. Beautiful. So very beautiful. He had picked up each item in turn and touched it lovingly. Laid it all out on his bed. Each thing was impossibly fragile and delicate, like webs of gossamer, but so silky to the touch.
But it was the knowing that this was wrong that really rocked his boat. This was a perverted pleasure and he liked the powerful secrecy of the taboo.
For days, the clothes had been enough. Just like with Elizabeth. He’d been satisfied with the weeks of trailing, buying the clothes she wore and the photographs. But these surrogates no longer sustained his deeper urges.
He wanted to take her. He had an inalienable right to her.
Kimberly sipped on a margarita. Why was she alone? Her fiance was fucking around, that’s why. She was hurt. He liked that. The beautiful clothes and the pain. The motto of St Sebastian — Beauty constant under torture. He licked his lips. He turned to her and raised his glass. She smiled.
Nick was losing it. Here he was in a bar he didn’t recognize and Sebastian was hunting. It was too powerful.
Twang! Twang! Twang!
Sebastian laughed and moved into the limelight. Nick was too weak. Sebastian felt the power of Nick’s body, flexed his muscles and smiled back at Kimberly.
A couple of drinks later, Sebastian and Kimberly were deep in conversation. It’s so easy to seduce when you’ve been stalking someone. You know what they like, what they feel. People are simple — you reflect back what they want to know about themselves and bingo!
‘You know what it is, Kimberly? Good people attract bad people. That’s because bad people want to be good but they don’t know how, so they use you as a model. But then they find they can’t be as good as you and they resent it. Then they punish you.’
She nodded. ‘Are you bad, then?’
The alcohol had changed her approach. He’d been working her throughout the conversation, dropping little trigger words like ‘punish’, ‘rights’, ‘revenge’ and ‘self-esteem’.
She was taking his lead so easily he was inwardly proud of himself.
‘I’m good at being bad, if that’s what you mean.’
In Sebastian’s blue Mercedes, they drove in the dark. He was talking like a man on uppers. Kimberly had sobered up a little on the journey out to her home. What was she doing? Her head was slightly fuzzy and she was in the car of a man she didn’t know, letting him drive her home. He was nice. Sweet. A little overbearing, but he seemed okay. Or was he? Who knew these days?
In the bar, to be honest, she wanted to forget all about it — all about Ray and his mistress; she wanted a bit of company. He was there. What was wrong with that? As she reclined in the leather seat of his car, she knew exactly what was wrong with that — he was after only one thing and she was about to be used like a piece of trash.
She was disappointed in herself. There was one rule in life, and that was don’t leave with less than you came with. It was her motto in business and in her personal life. She knew if she let this guy into her house she would come out with less rather than more. Less self-respect, less moral righteousness, less power, less integrity. She now had to think about how to extricate herself from what he might have interpreted as a dead cert.
Sebastian was thinking of getting her inside her room. He patted his side pocket. The plastic bag. He could see her face contort with surprise, shock and pain. He could take what he wanted, how he wanted. Kill. Hold. Rip.
Twang! Twang! Twang! Nick was there in the darkness of his mind, twanging at every violent thought.
The car stopped outside her apartment.
‘Hey, look, I might just turn in,’ she said. ‘I’ve had a great night, though. You’ve been really kind.’
Bitch, thought Sebastian. Trying to turn this around. He wasn’t going to let that happen. Kill her now. In the car. Her body hot against the seat. Kill. Hold. Rip.
Twang!
Twang!
Twang!
Suddenly it was Nick holding on to the steering wheel with all his might. He was breathing erratically.
‘Get out, just get out!’
‘What’s wrong? I’m sorry if I upset you.’
Nick felt Sebastian pulling back. ‘Just fucking leave or you’ll die!’
Kimberly stared at Nick and saw the anger smoking in his eyes. She got out and ran up her drive. Alone, Nick slammed the car into gear and put his foot on the gas.
He smiled. It had worked. He had made himself heard. He had regained control. He had won. Kimberly was alive. He couldn’t wait to get back to Denise to tell her. He drove off with a schoolboy smile, ready to show his teacher.
Chapter One Hundred and Three
Blue Team
December 3, 11.20 p.m.
Harper was unshaven, sitting in front of a wall of sketches. He found it reassuring to sketch Denise’s face from memory and photographs. It kept her alive. There were sixteen of them now. He’d been sitting and waiting too long. Sixteen pencil sketches of a woman who was probably dead or a day away from dying. Finally, Mark Garcia brought his information across.
‘I’ve assembled everything I could get on Macy. It was a difficult history to plot. He’s got so many holes. After his arrest in 1998, he was in a variety of psychiatric units, mainly in New York.’
‘What about before 1998?’
‘His parents must’ve died or abandoned him when he was a kid. He was fostered all over. Twelve different homes is what it says on his record from the MPC and that’s not the lot.’
‘Where?’ said Harper.
‘It doesn’t say. It says he was born in West Virginia, so you got to presume he was all over the state,’ said Garcia.
Harper felt himself getting nearer. ‘If he was born in West Virginia, he would’ve been there in 1982?’
‘So?’
‘I’ve just been on the phone about a 1982 murder in West Virginia. Looks like Sebastian’s work.’
‘Shit. You think they knew each other back then?’
‘It’s possible. There’s a lot of similarities stacking up. What else have you got?’
‘There’s nothing. We haven’t even got addresses in West Virginia. If they’ve got records from the ’70s they’ll be on paper. We’d have to knock on doors to get them.’
‘Look into it, Garcia. We might need those addresses.’
‘All right. I’ll call around.’
Harper went back to his desk and took a call he’d been waiting for from the guys at the FBI New York field office. Harper wanted to know how long Denise could count on. The Feds had the file on screen. Tom could hear them tapping out details, cross-referencing cases. There were two of them at the other end of the line. He could discern their low, barely verbal communications — a sigh, a grunt, an uh-huh.
They came back on the phone. ‘Look, Detective, we’ve got bits and pieces to go on — nothing but surmise, you know.’
‘Just give me the time frame.’
Harper had asked them one question. What was the average length of time a kidnap victim stayed alive when the kidnapper was a known and lethal serial killer?
‘Okay,’ said one of th
e agents, ‘we’ve got three point four days. But listen, that isn’t an entirely accurate figure. I mean, eighty-four per cent of victims are dead within twenty-four hours, ninety-five per cent dead within forty-eight hours. If they survive forty-eight hours, then the story is a little different. It can go to weeks. You know. Some of these guys keep them for months.’
Denise had been missing for just over twenty-four hours. That gave him another day, tops. Tom felt hope try to scramble and leave, but he wouldn’t let it. He knew that Sebastian wanted games. Denise was his kind of girl, but was the game more important? He wanted someone to suffer. He wanted to punish Harper. He wouldn’t kill her until he had seen Harper suffer. Harper felt that strongly. He would have a game plan in mind. He’d keep her alive, but what for?
The Feds had taken the lead on the task force since the kidnapping, but the NYPD were still heavily involved in the case. Tom thanked them and put the phone down. He picked up the silver shield and looked at it. It was what he stood for — once. He put it in his jacket pocket and then picked up the Glock.
It felt good in his hand. He held it up, looked down the barrel out of his window to the windows opposite. He felt no twinge, only the need to find and face Sebastian. He lowered his gun and took the clip from his desk and pushed it in. It clicked. He holstered his pistol. He wanted to fight. More than anything else, he wanted a fair shot at this guy.
At 11.40 p.m. he took a call from a very disappointed Eddie, who had been looking through the old yearbooks of Meadow Trail High School, from Chloe’s year and upwards. He had found nothing at all. Not a single photograph that looked like Sebastian. Not a single name that triggered off his thinking. It drained him and he was on his way back to New York empty-handed.
In the investigation room, Tom and the team were going through the calls. The search for Denise Levene was in danger of getting lost under a sea of good intentions. Her kidnap had captured everyone’s attention nationwide, but in New York the feeling was tangible. They knew an innocent, beautiful woman was somewhere on the small outcrop of rock called Manhattan and they knew that a deranged sexual predator was with her. They were getting hundreds of tip-offs each hour.
Elaine Fittas crossed to Harper in the investigation room and put her hand on his shoulder.
‘She’ll be all right, Harper. She’s tough.’
‘She doesn’t look that tough,’ Harper replied, staring at her photograph.
‘She’s a woman. She’s made of strong stuff. You’ll get him. Keep the faith.’
Harper looked up at her. ‘Thanks, Elaine. You know what? Maurice Macy still doesn’t make sense to me. Why would he kill these girls if he just liked to pet them? And you know what else doesn’t make sense? Lucy James didn’t just die, she was killed — asphyxiated with a plastic bag. It’s Sebastian’s style. You think they could’ve been working together? If so, why would Sebastian kill Mo’s girls?’
Elaine looked up. ‘Maybe he loved him.’
‘What do you mean?’ asked Tom.
‘I mean, maybe Sebastian killed the girls because he wanted to protect Maurice.’
Harper nodded. Just then, Sergeant Dan Webster appeared at the door. ‘Harper,’ he called. His voice couldn’t disguise his anxiety.
‘What is it?’ said Harper. He stared at Dan Webster’s face and felt the fear arrive in thick noxious waves. There was a silence around the room. Then the voice came back. ‘There’s a body in the basement of your building, Tom. Female. Blond hair. Wearing Denise’s suit.’
Chapter One Hundred and Four
East Harlem
December 3, 11.55 p.m.
The rush through the traffic with fear gripping his throat was something Tom would always remember. The happy energetic college students, out late and drunk, and the romantic couples in units, all living in their little bubbles away from the horror that everyone fears, seemed a world away from what he was experiencing.
Harper arrived at his apartment block out of breath. He had jumped the car two blocks away because of some red lights and just run. His limbs needed to do something. His mind had reached its own red line.
Then the building came in sight and it terrified him. He had been so quick to try to get there and now he wanted to hold back. An ambulance, two squad cars. Yellow crime scene tape across the entrance to his building.
Two cops stood at the entrance to the basement, lips compressed as they tried to brush off the awkwardness. Harper was lost inside his own head, preparing himself internally for what he might have to face. He walked past them and went down the steps into the basement and on into the laundry room.
Another cop was standing at the door, waiting for Crime Scene to seal the scene. Just three uniformed cops and a waiting ambulance.
Tom nodded at the cop and looked down to the floor. Dan Webster had told him all they knew. The body of a blonde woman had been found in Harper’s basement.
The upper body was wrapped in a white, heavily blood-stained sheet. Only the hair, the legs and Denise’s skirt were visible.
Harper shuddered. ‘Anyone taken a look?’ he asked.
The cop shook his head. ‘Just waiting for the Medical Examiner and Crime Scene. We can’t touch it.’
Tom needed to see beneath the white bloody shroud. He looked round the room. There was no blood anywhere else. So the killer had killed her somewhere else and then transported her to his basement. No easy thing to do — carry a bleeding corpse through the streets of New York. Harper looked down and saw the tracks of two wheels in the blood. Suitcase wheels. Sebastian.
‘I need to take a look,’ said Tom.
‘No can do,’ said the officer. ‘Got to keep it as we found it.’
‘I need to take a look,’ Harper repeated.
‘I’m sorry, man, I’m sorry, but you got to hold off,’ said the officer.
Harper moved towards the corpse. The officer was a big guy and he wasn’t smart either. He took a step forward.
‘No can do, Detective,’ he said and put his big arm out. Harper stood and looked at him. He could take him down and risk being thrown out of the NYPD, or he could wait.
Lafayette walked in and saw the two men squaring up to each other.
‘Tom. ME’s arrived, CSU are here. It won’t be long’
Harper moved away from the officer, crossed to the side of the room and waited, his eyes firmly fixed on the white sheet, his heart beating so fast that he was feeling high. He looked at the whitewashed wall, where something was written. A single word.
Abaddon.
‘What the hell does that mean?’ he said.
He watched for forty-five minutes as the Crime Scene detectives tagged and photographed and swept the scene, not knowing whether Denise was alive or dead. Not knowing what to feel. Limbo. His life was just in limbo all over again.
He watched as the Medical Examiner slowly moved in on the body and it was time.
Tom’s throat closed tightly as two assistants in white overalls each took an edge of the sheet and pulled it to one side.
The sheet was so wet with blood it stuck to the corpse’s face and chest. It made a low ripping sound as the material was lifted from the sticky wet flesh.
They all looked down. Lafayette stood behind Harper, his arm on his shoulder, squeezing hard.
‘Is it her?’ he asked.
‘Sick fucking bastard,’ Harper whispered.
Lafayette looked down at the body. The beautiful blond hair formed a halo around her head. Her body was dressed and covered in blood.
But the face had been completely removed.
Chapter One Hundred and Five
Mace Crindle Plant
December 4, 1.12 a.m.
The silence was more horrifying than anything else in the dungeon. Denise knew he was coming back and the hardness of the thick brick walls was hurting her fists as she beat against them, trying to find an escape.
Poor, poor girl. She thought it over and over again. Poor, poor girl. Please protect her from Se
bastian.
She hadn’t prayed since she was fourteen years old but for hours Denise continued to pray and hope. She then lay on her side and wept for the girl whose life was in danger. And wept, a little, for herself.
It had gotten very cold all of a sudden. She had no food and her stomach and bones ached. She was in a state of half-sleep when she heard the noise of the metal bolt.
She sat upright. ‘Tell me she’s all right! Please.’
She heard footsteps coming towards the door of her prison. She saw him at the bars. The light above him clicked on and bathed him in shadow. He sat down on a small stool he had carried with him.
The silence was so tense she was sweating even in the cold of the cell.
‘Is she all right?’ Denise asked. ‘Is the girl all right?’
‘I think you’ll be pleased with Nick. I think he managed to save one of them.’ It was Sebastian’s voice. ‘I should think you will be famous for your techniques, Dr Levene.’
‘Well done, Nick! Well done! I’m amazed. Delighted. She’s okay? Well done.’
‘It was your doing.’
‘The band?’
‘My wrist hurts there was so much twanging. Nick must’ve been twanging like a lunatic. There’s a red mark all the way round.’
‘Tell me, please. Tell me.’
‘I wanted to possess her. Of course I did. She was perfect. Unique. Quite self-assured. I wanted just to grab her and take her, but Nick didn’t let me. He kept me inside. I couldn’t gain control.’
‘Jesus! She’s alive… Thank you.’
‘You know, Doctor, I am quite easy to upset. I seem to have a high degree of vulnerability, which is bizarre when you think I could kill these people without a second thought.’
‘That’s what the killing is for — to hide the vulnerability, to lock it away… to disguise it with the most potent thing there is, the power of life and death.’
‘I like killing. Like it like nothing else. It’s better than cocaine. It’s like cocaine but with all your faculties absolutely intact. It’s not false. It’s a perfect expression of human emotion. Killing, raping, ripping.’