by Mark McNease
They had not seen Jarrod enter the store just a few minutes after they’d left. And if they had, they would only think he was another customer. His luck was holding out and he tried to be soothed by it, even as an unfamiliar nervousness took root in him.
Diedrich Kristof Keller III believed himself destined to be remembered as the Pride Killer, among the most successful killers America has ever known. But unlike its most famous celebrity killers, he would not be caught. His murders would go unsolved. He would be the modern Jack the Ripper, as well known as any Hollywood star or politician, and with a reputation far outlasting most.
He had only been questioned once before, after his first victim. He’d met the young man through an advertisement in one of the gay newspapers that were stacked outside the bars. David was his name (a killer remembers his first victim the way he remembers his first love; they may well be the same). He called himself a “body worker” and only did outcalls. D thought at the time David probably lived at home with his parents, or a lover. For whatever reasons, he did not want his clients coming to his home, so he headed off to the Upper East Side to an address D had given him several blocks from his townhouse. When David arrived and was understandably surprised to see the man he knew as Leo waiting for him in front of an abandoned jewelry store, D told him it was a precaution. Body workers were not the only ones who took measures to protect themselves. Come, let’s walk, D had said. Tell me about yourself. This way he had a chance to take the measure of this man and to keep him from knowing where he was really going. David might write down the addresses of his customers and D wanted no trail that could lead directly to him.
The questioning had been by accident. Two detectives, frustrated at a lack of progress, had canvassed the area where the cabbie said he’d dropped David off. Despite being several blocks away, they knocked at D’s townhouse as they went door to door asking if anyone had seen the young man. No, D told them, he had not seen the man he had recently killed in his basement (leaving out that detail). Perhaps his wife had seen him, but she was gone at the moment with their daughter at an orthodontist appointment. Should he call her? They told him not to trouble her and headed on to the next building. That was as close as D had ever come to being found out, which was not close at all. Until this morning. Until the man and woman came into his store.
“I’ve seen flyers,” Jarrod said. He was behind D, opening a shipment of cufflinks that had arrived late the previous afternoon.
It startled D out of his reverie. He turned around. “Pardon me?”
“Flyers, Mr. K, of that young man they found in the river. I saw several posted around the area.”
This was news to D—bad news. It must be the man’s family. They’d done it before, several times over the four years he’d been active before going to Berlin. Desperate posters with the faces of missing men and a toll-free number to call. All of them had taken their last breaths as he watched them, their eyes bulging out, their bodies convulsing. He had not seen these latest flyers and was worried now. He may need to think of moving after this. Yes, Keller and Whitman may need to close, the townhouse may need to be sold, and D may need to relocate to another large city. Maybe take a year off, then resume his trade. He would have to think it all through very carefully.
“I’m not feeling well, Jarrod,” he said.
“Again? You might want to see a doctor, Mr. K.”
“I’ll be fine. I just need to go home and rest. I haven’t been sleeping well. I’m just tired, really.”
“By all means go home and lie down then. I’ve got the store.”
“You always do, Jarrod. I’ve counted on you for a long time now, and you have never let me down.”
D prepared to leave.
“What if someone comes in here asking?” Jarrod said.
“About what?”
“About that young man.”
D stared at him. “What young man is that, Jarrod?”
“The one who’s missing. The one on the flyers. I’m sure he was in here.”
“Oh,” said D, in as cold and flat a voice as his assistant had ever heard. “They were already here. I told them the young man had come in looking for a suit but had not seen anything to his liking.”
“But I thought …”
“What, Jarrod? What did you think?”
A chill ran through Jarrod that froze his blood. He clearly remembered his boss talking to the young man, and in a very friendly tone. He hadn’t heard their conversation, but he could swear the young man, the one whose face was now on flyers being put up around the area, had said, “See you later.”
“Nothing,” Jarrod said. “Nothing, Mr. K. I’m glad you told them whatever they needed to know. I won’t worry about it. Now you just go home and rest. Take the day if you need to, I’ll be here till closing.”
“That’s a good man. I’ll call you if I’m coming back.”
“No need to call. Just surprise me.”
Oh, I’ll surprise you, D thought. When this is over, when it’s time for me to quickly and quietly disappear, I’ll have a very big surprise for you.
“See you later then,” D said. “Or maybe not. It will be a surprise.”
D left the store, looking down the sidewalk as he did to see if the man and woman were still there. They were not.
Jarrod stood behind the counter absent-mindedly fingering the cufflink boxes. For the first time in his years of working for Diedrich Keller he had the sense that he did not know the man at all … and that he did not want to. Something was not right. He began to hope the police would come by again. He would be a good citizen, even though he knew there was nothing untoward about Mr. K’s encounter with the dead man. He may have misheard their conversation. The young man may not have said, “See you later.” But he would tell them and let them decide. He was just a sales clerk, a retail assistant. He did what he was told. Mr. K had not told him to not say anything. He decided he would pass on what he had heard and seen, if they came back. He would not seek them out. He would not call the police, but if they came in asking questions again, he would just politely tell them about Monday afternoon. There would be no harm intended, and surely none caused, but the man’s family must be frantic by now to learn anything about his disappearance. Mr. K surely had nothing to do with that, but if Jarrod could help them in their search, then that was his duty.
CHAPTER Twenty-Nine
It was nearly noon and Kyle and Linda had managed to cover five blocks, stopping and asking store owners if they had seen Victor Campagna walking by on Monday afternoon. As he had feared, Kyle soon discovered how little attention people paid to each other in their daily routines. Most of the shop staff did not spend much time looking out their windows—they were busy watching the customers who’d come in, offering to help them find what they were looking for, or hovering nearby to make sure they didn’t steal anything. They struck out at the dry cleaners, the shoe repair store, two diners, and a newly installed pinball arcade where the machines were for sale as well as play.
“I’m beginning to think he never left the bar,” Linda said, as they walked north on Lexington just a block from Keller and Whitman.
“Or he didn’t get very far from it.” Kyle was disappointed, too, having placed his hopes on a sighting by someone along the avenue.
“Keep in mind it was the afternoon. People pay less attention then. They’ve been at work all day, they want to go home or out to play. They’re thinking of themselves more than they are of passersby.”
“True,” said Kyle. He was feeling glum. There had already been a second victim, ahead of schedule. For all they knew the third victim was selected and might be heading to his death right now. The thought depressed and angered him. He kept thinking they’d missed something, that if they’d asked a different question at Cargill’s, or in any of the businesses they’d stopped in, they could have jogged someone’s memory.
“Should we keep going?” Linda asked. “We backtracked. Should we move forward now, s
top in all the shops heading uptown?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
There was a newsstand a half block from Keller and Whitman’s. Just a hole in the wall, a narrow box of a shop where the owner sold a dozen newspapers, gum, candy, and sodas from a small back cooler. “Let’s stop in here,” Kyle said.
“Who reads newspapers anymore?” Linda asked as they entered the small store. She, like everyone she knew, got her news online now. She barely used her smartphone as a phone, except to call Kirsten. “Shit!” she blurted.
“What?” Kyle said, startled.
“I forgot to call Kirsten this morning. Listen, you talk to this guy and I’ll wait outside. I call her every day. She’ll be wondering what’s wrong.” She pulled her phone out of her purse. There were two messages in her voicemail. “Too late. She’s called me. I had the damn thing on silent mode.”
“Go,” Kyle said. “I’ll meet you outside.”
Linda left the store to make her phone call. Kyle walked up to the man seated on a stool behind the counter. He’d watched them when they’d come in but had said nothing.
“No more cigarettes,” the man said.
Kyle looked at the wall behind the man and was surprised to see an empty cigarette rack. “I don’t smoke,” he said.
“Gum? Candy? Not too many newspapers left, they go fast.”
“Actually,” Kyle said, taking out the photograph of Victor, “I was hoping you may have seen this man. Monday afternoon.” He handed the picture to the shop owner. “What’s your name, by the way?”
“You first.”
“Kyle. Kyle Callahan. I’m trying to find my friend.”
“Omar. I’m the owner here, twenty years. Everybody else come and go, but Omar stays.”
The man took a pair of glasses from under the counter and perched them on his nose. He stared at the picture. “This is the one they found in the river, yes?”
“Yes, I’m sorry to say.”
“Then you found who you are looking for.”
Kyle couldn’t tell if the man was being facetious or just literal. “Okay, then, I’m trying to find out where he went before they found him in the river. He was last known to be in this area.”
The man peered again at the picture, then handed it back. Kyle felt his disappointment rising. He expected to hit another dead end among too many that day.
“Sure, I saw him.”
“Really?”
The man, who Kyle now knew was named Omar, scowled at him. “What, you think I’m just saying it?”
“No, no, I believe you.” Kyle glanced out the window and saw Linda talking on her phone. He wished she was with him to hear this.
“I was outside smoking—I smoke them, I just don’t sell them—and I saw him come out of the store.”
“Which store is that?”
“The men’s store, the snooty one. Their customers never come in here. That’s why I notice him. He leaves the men’s store and comes in here to buy gum. He speaks to me. Not everybody does. Most just put what they buy on the counter, pay and leave. But this young man, he was very nice.”
“What did he say?” asked Kyle.
“He say he’s feeling lucky, or it was his lucky day, something like that. Maybe he felt lucky because he didn’t buy a suit. Very overpriced, that place, I went there once. My brother’s a tailor. You need a suit, I get you a good one at half what you pay there.”
“Thank you, Omar. I don’t need a suit but I’ll keep it in mind.”
Omar handed the photograph back. “I’m sorry about your friend,” he said. “I guess it wasn’t his lucky day after all.”
Kyle took the picture and slipped it back in his pocket. He quickly picked out a pack of spearmint gum and tossed a ten dollar bill on the counter. Omar rang up the purchase and was taking out the change when Kyle said, “Keep it,” and hurried out of the store.
Linda was saying goodbye as Kyle came out on the sidewalk.
“How’s Kirsten and her mother?” Kyle said.
“I can’t say fine. Dot’s in the final stages, but they’re keeping her comfortable. Kirsten thinks we’re looking at a week, two at the most.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“It happens … to all of us. Some people just have the misfortune of dying in pain. My concern is getting Kirsten through this. I didn’t tell her about the Pride Killer, that’s not something she needs on her mind.”
“Right.”
“How did it go in there? Nothing helpful?”
“Oh,” said Kyle, “to the contrary. It was very helpful. He saw Victor Campagna. They spoke.”
“What did they say?”
“Omar didn’t say anything, as far as I know. But Victor told him it was his lucky day.”
It was an odd thing to tell a stranger, unless you’d just had a nice surprise. “I wonder what he meant by that.”
“I don’t know, but I know someone who might. Someone who told us he’d never seen Victor.”
“Diedrich Keller.”
“You guessed it. Omar—that’s the store owner—said Victor had just come out of Keller and Whitman. He was there, and something happened that put him in a very good mood.”
“I think it’s time to pay another visit,” Linda said. She slipped her phone back in her purse and the two of them began walking toward the men’s store.
Kyle wondered what Diedrich Keller would tell them this time. Whatever it was, he knew it would be a lie.
CHAPTER Thirty
D had never suffered from claustrophobia and could not even define it, other than as the fear of confined spaces. Whatever people afflicted with it experience, he imagined it to be what he was feeling now: confined, boxed in, with the walls seeming to close in on him. He had miscalculated badly. He blamed it on being out of the game for three years—damn his mother! Damn Berlin! He had gotten cocky on his return, assuming his ability to remain not just un-captured, but unsuspected all these years, was the natural order of things. He felt invisible, as if he could simply choose his first victim from any man he met on the street, as if he could say to the world, Look, I am invincible, you see me but you don’t! I can do this with impunity. And so he had chatted up Victor Campagna when he came into the store, giving no thought at all to Jarrod observing from the counter or across the room. Giving no thought to Victor leaving any kind of trail, no thought whatsoever to the police following that trail, and certainly no thought to a stranger and his sister coming in to ask questions.
Think, Diedrich, think clearly, he mumbled to himself as he paced his living room. They may have their suspicions, but what could they really know? No one on the police force had come to see him. No questions had been asked, except by the man and woman in the store that morning. There was no proof. He was overreacting. He needed to relax. He went to the liquor cabinet and poured himself a small snifter of brandy. Drinking was not something he allowed himself during the day, but his nerves were on edge and he needed to slow down, to relieve the sense that everything was about to come crashing down on him.
He was a world traveler. He had a valid passport, with stamps from a dozen countries. He could always go back to Germany. He’d learned enough of the language to get by for the time it would take to establish a new identity. And while he hated the time he’d spent there, it was just the sort of place he could vanish. He took his snifter to the couch, sat down and enjoyed the warmth of the brandy spreading through him.
A few minutes later he was slumped on the couch, enveloped by the cushions. So comfortable, so comforting. He’d finished his brandy and was contemplating a second glass as he let his memories wash over him. Each of his fourteen victims had sat on this couch. Each had been happy to have met such a nice man, such a refined man, who welcomed them into his home. Each had relaxed as he now relaxed, and soon, after a drink of their own, each had gone to his basement for the biggest, most spectacular and final surprise of their lives.
You knew it had to end sometime, Diedrich,
he thought. Even the best dreams end with the opening of an eye, the dull workaday world coming back into focus as the sweet dream recedes. It won’t be long. Do what you need to do, then dream again.
All would be well, he knew that now. The mind, once calmed, is the most powerful thing on Earth. Everything man has accomplished began in his mind. Every vision made reality, every towering achievement, every work of art. His life was a work of art, he believed that with all his heart. There had never been one like him, and there would never be one like him when he was gone. And he would go. He knew that now, too, in the clear calm of his soothed mind. It was all a fiction anyway, was it not? The townhouse, the paintings, the appearance of a life he’d built here, even the store. All of it had been manufactured to serve his one true purpose, and that was the only thing he lived to fulfill.
He was hungry now. He decided to have just a few more drops of the brandy, then head out for a nice meal. The only thing that eased a troubled soul more than a good stiff drink was fine food. He wanted some. He stood from the couch just a tiny bit unsteadily and headed back to the liquor cabinet. One more taste, one more slow, luscious swallow of the hot powerful liquid, and he would leave the townhouse. He would take a taxi, give the man directions, and head south.
CHAPTER Thirty-One
Jarrod saw the couple through the store window as they approached the door. The woman was taller than the man and quite striking, with her long hair and her navy jacket. They were deep in conversation and Jarrod wondered what they were talking about. He’d entertained himself for years by making up stories about people he saw, strangers, and the conversations they had with themselves. He imagined they were talking about a wedding they were planning to attend. The man needed a suit for the wedding but hated wearing suits. He did not strike Jarrod, upon first impression and from a distance, as the type who dressed up unless he had to. But weddings were special events, and the woman was telling him he had no choice. This was her brother’s wedding—to a man, no less, something that gave Jarrod a special tingle while stirring his own sad longing for love. (He’d thought when he first met Mr. K there might be something there, but he’d been wrong and quickly let it go.)