Gabriel Rush made the turn into Westwood twenty minutes later.
Despite everything, nothing had changed. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose; loosely translated, the more that things change, the more they stay the same. A craggy faced Chinese woman with snowy locks, baggy black pyjamas and straw sandals shuffled through the mixed smells of ginger, cabbage, onions and urine. Behind her, her granddaughter laughed, one hand in the pocket of her C.K. jeans. A deathless man, his face bleached by years of exhaust fumes and cigarette smoke, leaned against the still dark doorway, the cigarillo hanging limply from his downturned lips. The wet broom in his hand was matted with Chinese cabbage and onion peelings brushed up from the street. The old man’s eyes followed Gabriel as drove slowly by.
Clothing Kit’s all-purpose store on the corner of Sedgewick and Columbia was open for the pre-dawn crawl. J.C. Penney’s window a lone black tooth in the smile of the street.
The smells of New York by night still drifted over the neighbourhood; not-yet-morning smells all too soon swamped by the dirty smells of the city’s dirty life.
The 1956 Black Hawk coughed out a plume of smoke as he pulled in by the fire hydrant in front of The Lotus House, its red-gold hoarding advertising Hunan Szechwan cuisine around the clock. The water dragon roared its discounts and specials. Across the four lanes of traffic the Stationhouse loomed, with its rusting fire escapes and carved seven-story facade. Abandoned patrol cars and police bikes lined the curb out front. The old green globes over the door burned dimly, the black legend POLICE faint but clear in the coming light.
Gabriel ducked past the desk sergeant as he entered the building, walked through the empty muster room and went up the stairs; a narrow, winding passage of carved wood; its majestic balustrade old and weak and riddled with woodworm; its metal-tipped steps worn shiny by the shuffling feet of a thousand cops over a hundred years.
The detective squad room could have passed for an office in any insurance company; telephones on desks, computers instead of the Naked Lunch typewriters of a year before.
It had been a long time since he’d called this room home…
The door to Mannelli’s office concealed a two-way mirror. The detention cage, crammed in a corner, sat all but empty; a wasted looking vagrant huddled up against the back bars, drying out. Steel mesh covered all of the windows. Cardboard wastepaper bins were scattered randomly about the room, the overflowing garbage topped with Styrofoam cups, empty Coke cans, pizza boxes and scrunched up bagel wrappers.
Jack Delgado sat at one of the desks, typing up a rape report with two fingers, his two-hundred and ten pounds crammed in behind the Formica, deep-set piggy eyes lost beneath the Simian concentration. Another one of New York’s finest stood at the bank of cabinets, one hand holding the line to the Assistant D.A.’s office open, the other juggling the contents of a case folder.
Delgado looked up, two fingers hovering. “Fuck me. What’re you doing here, Tonto? They kicked you off the Reservation for smoking the peace pipe again?”
“Screw you, Kimo Sabe.” Gabriel drew himself a cup of tasteless black treacle from the vending machine, knocked on Mannelli’s door and let himself in.
Second generation Italian, Dan Mannelli was a tall man blessed with a continental swath of dark features and a thick crop of Italian-black hair to match. The law man had wide shoulders made wider by the padded jacket he’d thrown on; brown leather with the faded painting of an old war girl flaking on the back. He smelled like he hadn’t slept, or washed, in a few days. Dark circles ringed his eyes.
There’s a man with the woes of the world on his back…
“Stern’s just called one in from Lexington,” Mannelli said, wasting no time on the niceties. “I want your eyes on this one, Gabe. I’ve got a bad feeling. Some of the stuff sounds… Damn it all to freakin’ hell… It sounds like he’s started pulling some freakin’ ritual shit… Started believing his own freakin’ press.”
Downing a mouthful of tepid coffee, Gabriel’s eyes drifted to the stack of well-thumbed sheets strewn across Mannelli’s desk; the coroner’s reports on The Trinity’s victims one through to five; reports six, seven and eight sat neatly stacked on the swivel chair. A New York City street map hung against the back wall. Six red-topped pins with neatly lettered dates etched on their flat heads plotted out the killer’s movements over the last three months; each silently marking off the passing of another unfortunate. Another thirty or so pins pooled in the small plastic tray beneath the map, waiting for more spent lives to mark off. A stunted aluminium Christmas tree started and finished Mannelli’s concessions to the festive season. Five leaves had browned and curled, burned by a stray cigarette.
“What have you got to go on, Dan? Same M.O.?”
“That’s just it. Killings are usually systematic. You know this shit, Gabe. They have mathematical patterns built into them, stuff for the profilers to build on. Be it how they’re chosen, killed or dumped afterwards. There’s some kind of underlying logic, but not with this guy. He’s off on his own personal vendetta that just happens to involve carving elaborate patterns all over his victims' bodies.”