by Harker Moore
“That’s so you can really get a good look,” he explained. “We can ask them to step forward or turn…. Whatever you think will help. And if you need to hear a voice, we can get them to say whatever you want.”
She nodded, then surprised him by walking right up to the glass. She moved the length of the line, one through five, and back again. He remembered she had told him she’d seen this on the cop shows.
“You know, I never actually saw his face.” She had turned to him.
He nodded and hit the button. “Hats and sunglasses, please.”
The men had been instructed on this earlier. In order to insure due process, no subject in a lineup could favor a witness description more than any other. All five took Yankees caps and sunglasses from the pockets of their jackets. Put them on.
Tiffany worked her way down the line again. “You said I could ask them to say something?”
“That’s right.”
“One and four,” she said to him. “‘Just a cup of coffee.’”
He hit the button again. “Numbers one and four. Step forward and say the phrase: Just a cup of coffee.”
“Could they say it with their jackets off?”
He nodded and relayed the instructions. Her face was completely earnest now, scrutinizing the two men.
“Let’s hear that phrase again,” he said, directing the men to repeat it a third time.
She listened with her head cocked, the ponytail swinging, then walked back over to him. She really was model tall, and the silly shoes put them on a level, eye to eye. Hers registered disappointment.
“I’m awfully sorry, Detective Talbot,” she said to him. “I really wanted to help. I mean, it could be one of them … especially number four. But his voice doesn’t sound right.” She shook her head for emphasis. “I just can’t be sure.”
He smiled. “It’s okay, Ms. Jameson. We appreciate your coming in. Detective Johnson’s out there. She’ll see you get downstairs.”
She smiled back at him, and the midwestern wholesomeness showed through the trendy clothes. “It’s Tiffany,” she said. The doe look widened in her eyes, and then she was gone.
Sakura walked over.
“Sorry, Lieutenant.” He shook his head.
“You did a good job, Walt. Sometimes it just doesn’t happen.”
Kelly poked his head in. “The bartender’s here.”
“I’ll take it,” Sakura said, “but stay here, Walt.”
Jack Trehan walked in with an attitude, like the hallway was the real stage. He glanced briefly at the five men who were still in the box, then back to Sakura. “Hi, Lieutenant. Glad to be of service.”
“This is Detective Talbot.” Sakura introduced him.
A quirk of the smile. “These the guys?” Trehan was looking at the men now, still in the caps and dark glasses.
“Number four,” he said, even before Sakura could answer the obvious.
“You need to be positive, Mr. Trehan,” Sakura said mildly. “In your statement you said that you’d only seen the man who sat next to Westlake for a very short time. The bar was not well lit …”
Trehan turned away from him, looking back at the lineup. “Number four,” he insisted.
This second time out in the lineup, position four was Graff.
Celia Mancuso was a ball of misery. She sat straight enough on the cold cement bench. But in her mind she was coiled tight, head down, legs drawn up to her chest, arms wrapping beneath her knees, hands anchored and clutching at her elbows. It was the posture she’d adopted for the last five days. As a physical fact within her room. Inside herself when anyone could watch, like this morning at Lucia’s funeral.
What she wanted was to disappear. Or at least to be invisible.
“CeCe … CeCe,” her cousins were calling. “Come on, CeCe. We’re going high!”
Laura and Julia, bundled in their thick quilted jackets, were moving in tandem on the swings. Twin heads dipping and rising, their dark bobs flying out behind them, then parting and rushing like tasseled silk to sweep against their faces. Across the park her aunt Roslyn was occupied with the baby, that and gossiping with some friend.
“Be careful,” she heard herself calling to the girls, and felt the black twinge inside. Stupid to be sent here to help watch her cousins. She hadn’t saved Lucia.
“Hi.”
She hadn’t seen the girl approach, but she hadn’t been paying attention. Seeing, but not seeing, as if the world, not herself, were fading.
“Hello,” she answered to be polite. The girl, in jeans and jacket over a neighborhood high-school sweatshirt, was older than she’d thought at first.
“I grew up right down that street,” the girl said, pointing. She sat down with her on the bench. “You live around here?”
She shook her head. “I’m visiting my cousins.” She looked over to where the girls were still playing on the swings. Come to earth now, but twisting the chains and spinning.
“They’re cute.”
She smiled. The girl beside her was beautiful. She could look like a movie star, dressed right. “Your hair’s really pretty,” she said to her. It felt good to say something nice like that.
“Thank you. Yours is pretty too. In fact, you’re pretty …?”
“Celia.”
“Neat name. But you look sad, Celia. Is something wrong?” The soft eyes probed her face.
She started to say no, that there was nothing, but the lie stuck in her throat. She didn’t answer, looking over at her cousins instead. They were on the slide now. Laura climbing. Julia, already at the top, arms pointing straight, poised for the rush to the ground. Aunt Roslyn, still chatting away, was changing the baby.
She turned back to he girl. “Do you have a boyfriend?” The words came out of her mouth.
“I did.” The girl’s lips twisted. “We broke up…. What about you, Celia? I’ll bet you have a boyfriend.”
“Kinda …”
“What’s his name?”
“Pete. Pete Fazio.” And then without meaning to at all, she told the girl everything. About Lucia. About the necklace and how she had lied. Because Pete had given her the locket. The locket she had lost before she’d even had a chance to put his picture inside. Lost it the day they’d left the playground to sneak into the basement of the rectory.
It wasn’t a sin, the girl said, if you really loved the boy to let him kiss you. And if Pete had tried to feel her up—well, that was just the way guys were, and she’d been exactly right to push him off and run away.
But what about the lie she had told the police? Saying that the necklace was Lucia’s, to keep her papa from finding out about Pete. Her sister was dead, and she couldn’t stand for Papa to hate her any more than he already did for catching the flu and letting somebody get Lucia.
The girl had been really nice and it had been good to cry. The girl had cried a little too and had said it was okay. And that she was sure that her papa loved her and didn’t blame her at all for what some sick man had done to her sister. Only she hadn’t said man, but a bad word. But that was okay too, because what had happened to Lucia made you want to say bad words like that.
The girl had hugged her before she left. And looked so pretty with her blond hair bouncing as she walked away, that for a little while she forgot to be sad. And only later felt guilty.
“Yes?” Adrian Lovett smiled vaguely at the stranger standing on his landing and watched as he shook off the rain that had just started to fall outside.
“Adrian Lovett?”
“Yes. May I help you?”
“Detective Pete Handy.” The man flashed his NYPD badge. “I see you’re headed out.” He motioned toward the jacket he was holding. “Can I have a few words with you first, Mr. Lovett? I’ve missed you several times.”
“Sure.” He stepped aside, letting in the short stocky policeman, the wet still peppering the shoulders of his ancient overcoat. “I was just going out to pick up something to eat.”
“This is som
e place you’ve got here.” Handy moved in, looking in all directions at once. “I’ve never been in one of these renovateds. Do the work yourself?”
“Most of it was already completed before we moved here.”
“We?”
“My wife and I.”
Handy nodded, walked up to one of the walls that split the large loft into a maze. “This wouldn’t be her?”
“Actually, yes.”
The cop’s pug eyes traveled over the black-and-white photograph. The naked woman appeared to be flying, her long legs split into a dancer’s arabesque. Her arms, tangled in long curling hair, rose over her head in the unfinished circle of a half-moon.
“Beautiful woman.”
“Yes, she was. She died some time ago.”
“What a waste. Beautiful woman like that.”
“Did you want to ask me something?”
“Oh … yeah.” Handy turned from the dead wife’s image, extracting a small notebook from the inside pocket of his coat. He flipped open the pad and pulled out a ballpoint. “This the kind of thing you show at the Milne gallery?” He pointed back at the portrait.
“Milne gallery …? Is this about David’s murder?”
“Just routine.” The officer smiled. “Your name appeared on the gallery’s list of artists. We’re questioning everyone who might be able to shed some light on how Mr. Milne got to be one of this killer’s victims.”
“I have no idea. The newspapers say he’s targeting gay men…. David was fairly well known.”
“Do you know if Mr. Milne knew any of the other victims?”
“No, I wouldn’t know that.”
“How well did you know Mr. Milne?”
“I knew David professionally. I’ve exhibited at his gallery over the years.”
The cop nodded, making notes. “Can you think of anything at all that might help us, Mr. Lovett?”
“No…. I thought someone was in custody.”
“Not in custody. But we do have a numero uno suspect.”
“That priest.”
“Like I said, I’ve missed you several times and I need to tie up loose ends.” Handy grinned. “You know how it is.”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “I wish I could help. I liked David.”
“Well”—Handy snapped shut the notebook, passed him a card— “call me if you think of something.”
He nodded, walking the policeman to the door. He could hear Handy’s heavy footfalls as he moved across the short landing down the hall. Unconsciously, he’d been holding his breath, until he heard the swoosh of the elevator’s gears, carrying the cop down to the ground floor.
Willie felt that the storm was inside her. Boundaries dissolving in explosions of lightning that boomed and crackled at the high-rise windows, igniting the bedroom into flashbulb brilliance that faded as quickly to black. And Michael, silhouetted above her, a shadow beating within.
She locked her legs around him, her hands against his chest, wanting to feel him solid. She felt his own grip tighten on her shoulders, heard him cry out. As the pleasure, unstoppable now, exploded in her spine, like weightlessness taking hold. A beast that shook her in its jaws.
For as long as she could, she lay still, waiting for a lightning flash to penetrate her lids, counting the seconds, listening for the thunder to crash and roll away. It was a game to fill her mind till she was ready to move, easier than listening to his breathing.
At the moment when she thought that he would reach for her again, she got up and walked to the chair where earlier she’d tossed her purse. She fished inside it for the aspirin. The headache she’d been fighting throbbed behind her eyes.
She swallowed the tablets dry. She hadn’t looked at Michael yet, but she could feel him watching her from the bed, ready again to make love, or whatever he called what they were doing. It was amazing, his ability to perform again and again, each time with more intensity. Tempting to let herself believe that she was its inspiration.
Her clothes hung over the chair. She picked up her slip and pulled it on before she turned back to the bed. Michael was sitting up against the pillows, smoking. The glowing tip of his cigarette moved slowly from his lips to his knee.
She sat down and switched on the lamp. She could see him better now. The blue eyes still startling in the Mediterranean face.
“Are you going back?” he asked her.
“You mean back to my job?”
“To Quantico. Yes,” he said.
“Are you asking me if I’m convinced this investigation is over?”
“I guess that’s what I’m asking.”
“Graff’s photo of the roommate links him at least indirectly to Pinot, and the bartender positively ID’d him as the man who left Marlowe’s with Westlake.” She said it as an answer.
Michael took a drag on the cigarette. “The bartender wanted his face on TV.”
No arguing with that. Since the lineup today Trehan had wasted no time giving interviews to anyone who’d listen. And leaks had begun to surface immediately that the man the bartender had identified as leaving with Westlake on the night of the murder was one and the same “Porno Priest” of the Post’s earlier exclusive. Negotiations were still under way with the Church, but it was pretty much understood that Thomas Graff would surrender himself to police custody sometime before the official announcement of his arrest was made. An announcement that was now set for the press conference on Monday.
“The suits are getting ready to take their bows”—Michael was apparently reading her mind—“but it’s Jimmy who’s going to be the scapegoat if another body turns up.”
She sighed. She had her own misgivings.
“Life in the NYPD is shit,” he said.
“You liked it once,” she said to him. “You told me that you became a cop because the street was closer to the action.”
“Yeah, battling evil.” He reached over and crushed out his cigarette in the ashtray on the nightstand. “Isn’t that what your work at Quantico is all about?”
“I don’t think of it like that.”
“How do you think about it?”
There was a darkness in his eyes that had deepened. She tried to remember what he looked like when he smiled.
“Protecting people … stopping the killing,” she answered him. “I’m hoping we’ll learn enough about the development of serial murderers so we can detect them while they’re still young.”
“You don’t actually think you can cure them?”
“Not cure, exactly. But if we could catch them in time. Break the pattern—”
“What if they’re just evil?”
“They’re sick, Michael.”
“Sick,” he repeated. “Don’t you believe in good and evil?”
She took a breath. How had they started this? “The universe is neutral,” she said. “Good and evil are human constructs.”
“So this killer we’re hunting isn’t really evil?” His tone antagonistic.
“Ethically speaking, he is, Michael. I’ll grant you that. But ethics only applies to human behavior. I don’t believe that serial killers are fully human. Their brains don’t develop normally, don’t operate in the same reality….” She stopped.
“What is it?” he asked. He had heard the hesitation in her voice.
“It just occurred to me,” she said, “that LSD breaks down what we think of as normal consensus reality, that picture of the world we all agree on more or less.”
“You told Jimmy that the killer was using the drug to try to re-create his fantasy inside the victims’ minds.”
“I still believe that. I’m just seeing why he’s doing it from a slightly different angle.”
He was waiting for her to explain.
“The killer’s fantasy is like an adaption,” she went on, “a substitute for the normal psychosexual models that develop in a healthy mind. The serial’s way of relating to other human beings unfortunately involves killing them.”
“A hell of a relationship.�
�� His words still caustic.
“Don’t you see how pathetic it is?” she tried again. “A serial knows by observing other people’s emotional responses that something is missing in him. Our killer is intelligent enough to understand that he doesn’t really fit into our world. But with the LSD he can try to bring some of us into his.”
“He’s killing people, for chrissake.”
“I know….” She fell silent. There was a void that trembled between them that words would never bridge. She turned off the light and went back to join him in the bed.
The room was cold and full of shadows, but the storm that battered Manhattan was miles away, and enough moonlight seeped through the curtained windows that he didn’t need the lamp to write. Thomas Graff stared at the blank sheet of stationery he had found in the drawer of the bedside table, then dashed off the words. They seemed fuzzy on the page, indistinct. Not the bold scrawl he’d intended. He turned the page on its side, preparing to tear it in two, to obliterate what was at best insincere, at worst an unintended commentary on himself.
A picture flashed in his head. So clear. Kaitlyn speaking the fatal words.
I’m sorry, Thomas. It’s for the best.
He could still see her face as she’d put the ring in his hand. That perfectly flawless face, which he’d thought to be his salvation. His mind had been racing as he’d looked at her, trying to figure it out, trying to understand who could have told her. He had always kept that part of himself so scrupulously separate from his normal life. And that last affair with the busboy had been over for a month.
“I’ve changed, Katie,” he said. “You’ve changed me. You’re my future.”
“I know you believe that.”
“It’s true. I love you.”
“I love you too. That’s why I’m doing this, Thomas.”
He hadn’t believed her then. He’d been too angry. But she had been right. Even Katie in all her perfection could not have saved him. He understood that now, at least. He’d never learned who had told her. Maybe she had guessed that something was wrong and had set out to find the truth herself. He had been too arrogant then to believe that his cover was not perfect. So sure that his secret life was not his real one, its existence no more than an aberration to be controlled by an act of will.