First thing, I investigated the Upper West Side address where the second body was found. An alley ran behind the apartment building making it easy for someone to park as close as thirty feet from the building’s dumpsters. If the body was wrapped in plastic, one person would’ve been able to drag it over easily enough.
The dumpster that the body had been left in was closest to the alley, and was four feet high, opening at the top. According to the initial medical examiner’s report, the victim was five foot eight inches tall and a hundred and sixty-four pounds. Two men would be able to get the body inside that dumpster fast and easy; one person would be able to do it if he could lift the body high enough so it leaned over the edge of the dumpster. Then it would just be a matter of lifting the body up until it fell in. Forensics wasn’t able to find any of the victim’s blood on the outside of the dumpster, so the perp either washed down the container walls with chemicals or, more likely, kept the victim wrapped in plastic until he had it in the dumpster, then went in after it to remove the plastic wrapping and cover the body with enough garbage to hide it from sight.
I walked back to the part of the alley where the perp had most likely parked and, while timing it, played out in my mind how the disposal of the body would’ve taken place. One person could’ve managed it in less than three minutes, and if it was done between one and four in the morning, that would explain why he wasn’t spotted. The perp must’ve known about the dumpster and the easy access to it before the killing. Maybe he lived here once, or had a friend or relative who did, or maybe he spent time searching out locations. Hell, he could even have worked for the waste disposal company that serviced the building. These murders weren’t spur of the moment. The killer spent time planning them, both the sequence of the murders and the signature he left us. He orchestrated Gail Laurent’s murder to leave us wondering whether it was a brutal street killing or something else, knowing that once we found the second body we’d have our answer that we were dealing with something more ominous.
I walked through the alley slowly as I searched it, then circled around the building trying to get a sense of anything that could help us. I came up empty. After that I talked with the doorman. His shift ran from midnight to eight, so he would’ve been working when the body was dumped. A detective from the precinct had already interviewed him—from the doorman’s description it must’ve been Jack Hennison. He hadn’t seen or heard anything that night, and didn’t remember anyone suspicious hanging around the building beforehand. There were security cameras on both sides of the building, but they wouldn’t have captured the dumpster, and even if they did, the tapes were rotated after twenty-four hours so Wednesday’s tapes were already history.
The doorman took a sip of the coffee I had brought him, then to lighten the mood asked, “How about that game the other night? Nineteen to eight, damn. Those Yankees are something else, huh? Steamrolling right over those Red Sux.”
I wasn’t in any mood to trade small talk about the game. I nodded and walked away, probably leaving him thinking I was one of the legion of masochistic Red Sox fans.
I turned my cell phone on to listen to Phillips’s message from the other day. It was about what I expected: him warning me to get my ass back up there or face disciplinary actions. There were other messages waiting for me also. Agent Jill Chandler—the FBI profiler who had reminded me so much of Helen Hunt—had called two hours after Phillips. She wanted to talk with me on Sunday if possible to pick my brains on any thoughts or feelings I might have about the case. Bambi also left several messages. She called first at seven thirty to tell me that she was back at the apartment and wanted to know when I’d be there. She sounded timid in her message, maybe even a bit vulnerable, and told me she was going to be making us tequila sunrises. After that she left another message at nine, and a third one an hour later. I guess she had gotten tired of waiting because with each successive call her voice showed more of the effects of the tequila. The last message waiting for me was from Cheryl. She had called after midnight. Her voice was so strained I could barely hear her. She wanted to let me know how sick she was of how I was treating our kids, and how she was going to see her lawyer about changing our agreement—that as far as she was concerned all I was doing was damaging both Emma and Stevie, and that I deserved no further contact with them.
I replayed that last message several times and stood motionless as I listened to it. A slow simmer of anger burned inside, and I could feel the heat of it rising up my neck. Some of my anger was at her; most of it, though, was directed at myself. For several minutes I didn’t trust myself to move. When I did I decided to take my anger out on Phillips. He was going to threaten me with a disciplinary hearing for wanting to see my kids on my day off? Fuck him. My hands shook as I called his home number. It was a quarter past seven on a Sunday morning. I knew he’d be asleep, and when he answered the phone I could hear the grogginess in his voice. I could also hear his wife next to him complaining about being woken up.
“Who’s this?” he croaked.
“Detective Green.”
“Wha—? Chrissakes, what are you calling for this early on a Sunday morning?”
“I got your message from yesterday,” I said, my teeth clenched to the point where my jaw ached. “I want to know if you’re planning to file disciplinary charges against me.”
“Are you out of your fucking mind? You’re waking me up on a Sunday morning to ask me that?”
“That’s right. I’m working on the case right now, and I’ve got Jill Chandler at the FBI wanting to meet with me, and Gail Laurent’s funeral later this afternoon. If I’ve got my shift captain trying to put me out on the street, then I don’t see much point in doing any of that, especially on my day off.”
I stood listening to Phillips’s ragged breathing over the phone. He told me in a tight, barely controlled voice that he wasn’t going to be putting me up for disciplinary actions, that Joe Ramirez explained the situation to him later.
“Hennison’s been made lead detective for these murders,” he added. “You’re still assigned to the case, and I still want your best effort on it. I also don’t want you ever calling me again this early on a Sunday morning for something like this. Understood?”
“Captain, if you’re going to leave that type of message on my cell, you should expect me calling to clarify the situation.”
He hung up on me.
The call helped. I could breathe easier, some of the pressure building up in my chest having been released. I found a diner near Union Square and had a breakfast of bacon and eggs and pancakes, and after lingering a bit over the coffee I headed to St. Vincent’s to visit Rich. He looked more shriveled than he had even the other day and there was something not quite right about his eyes, and he also kept pressing a button to increase his morphine dosage. We traded a few good-natured cracks about each other’s appearance, but it seemed forced on both our parts. I told him about the second murder and that interested him until the morphine took effect and he drifted off. I waited for him to wake up, but when he did he was too drowsy to do much more than keep his eyes half-opened. I promised him I’d bring a Toscone sausage sandwich next time I saw him, and that barely sparked a smile from him.
After leaving St. Vincent’s I went to the precinct. Jack Hennison was there, which surprised me since he usually made Sundays off-limits. He looked like he hadn’t slept much the night before with thick grayish bags under his eyes and an unhealthy pallor to his skin. Of course, he was probably noticing the same about me. He pulled a chair up to my desk and, after perching on it like a hawk, told me about him being made the lead for the case. I could tell he was trying to gauge my reaction to that, and I told him it didn’t much matter to me, which was mostly true. Hennison was a solid detective, and I doubted he’d do anything to get in the way of the investigation.
He had brought a file with him and, while consulting it, filled me in on what they had discovered since the meeting the other day. The victim had been identified as Paul Burke. He was thirty-one, lived alone in a co-op apartment in the West Village, and worked as a financial analyst for one of the Wall Street firms. The last anyone saw of him was midnight when he left his office. They were concerned about him at work when he didn’t show up Wednesday morning, and his boss had called the police then and again on Thursday and Friday, convinced that something must’ve happened to him, that only death or a serious injury would’ve kept him out of the office. Hennison showed me a photo of the victim taken recently at a company event. He was a good-looking man—athletic, strong chin, with dimples showing in his cheeks as he smiled for the camera. It would have been near impossible to match that photo with what had been left in the dumpster. So far no connection had been found between the two victims.
“Gail Laurent’s husband was a financial analyst,” I said.
Hennison’s eyes glazed as he stared at me. “Yeah, so?” he said. “So are probably fifty thousand other people who work in New York. They worked for different firms. The daughter didn’t recognize Burke’s name. There’s no connection.”
“I was just pointing it out,” I said. “Did you find where he was killed?”
“We’re still looking.”
“You search his apartment yet?”
Hennison made a face at that question, not bothering to mention the obvious, that not only had they searched it but had found nothing helpful. After waiting for him to answer me and getting annoyed that he wasn’t going to, I asked whether there was any chance Burke was murdered there.
He scowled at the idea. “None. They have a doorman, and the guy didn’t see Burke come home Tuesday night. Forensics went over his apartment and found nothing, no blood traces, no gunpowder residue, no recent heavy cleaning. Zero footprints that a shooting could’ve happened there.”
“You check whether his mail was picked up?”
“Yeah, it hasn’t been since last Monday. I’m telling you, the guy never made it home Tuesday night.”
“You’ve been busy.”
“You’re fucking right I’ve been.”
An obvious thought stopped me. “Burke didn’t have a girlfriend, did he?” I asked.
Hennison understood the ramification of that—because if the guy did, why didn’t she get worried about him being missing and call us. He shook his head. “No sign of one from his apartment. According to his buddies at work he was straight but too much of a workaholic to get involved in a relationship. Instead, he was into hookups. Quick, easy sex. Supposedly he was pretty active.” A thin smile replaced the scowl on Hennison’s face, and it tightened to the point where it looked etched on. “It’s going to be a pain in the ass tracking down all his partners. His buddies gave us some club names, but that’s all we’ve got right now until the FBI can crack into his laptop. The guy had to password-protect the damn thing up the wazoo.”
My gut was still that both murders were the random work of a psychopath, and I told Hennison that. “It’s not going to help knowing who Burke’s been in bed with. He worked on Wall Street, lived in the Village. What’s going to help is knowing why his body was dumped where it was on the Upper West Side.”
“Ramirez told me your theory,” Hennison said. “I don’t know if I buy it yet. If this guy was hopping around from bed to bed as much as it sounds like, we’ve got a lot of potential boyfriends and exes we’re going to have to look at. Laurent’s murder could’ve been done for no other reason than to confuse us about this one.”
“Jack, take another look at Gail Laurent’s crime scene photos. Tell me this guy wasn’t getting off on what he did.”
“I’ve seen them,” he said. “And I’m not convinced of that.” He gave me a cautious look. “Ramirez told me you were planning to go to Laurent’s funeral today. You still doing that?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Just asking.”
“You don’t have to worry about me, Jack. I’m happy you’re the lead on this. I don’t need the headache right now. And yes, I’m going to the funeral and I’ll be bringing Zachary Lynch with me. He claims if the killer shows up he’ll be able to recognize him.”
“Fuck,” Hennison said, his face reddening at the thought of Lynch. “If this guy wasn’t loony tunes, we’d be somewhere right now instead of wandering around with our heads up our asses. I’m putting together lists of people we need interviewed. When you’re done with the funeral, if you want more overtime today see me. I’ll be living here until we get somewhere with these murders.”
I told him I’d probably take him up on that. He gave me a tired nod, his expression softening.
“I’m glad you’re taking this the right way,” he said. “I had nothing to do with me being made lead. Phillips has his reasons, whatever the fuck they are, but you know I wouldn’t screw over a fellow Brooklyn guy.”
I couldn’t help smiling over that comment. Yeah, we were both from Brooklyn, but he grew up in the Williamsburg area, which was a different world as far as Flatbush went. As a kid growing up, the only thing I remembered about kids from Williamsburg was that whenever I ran into one I would always seem to end up in a fist fight—usually the other kid’s decision, not mine. I doubted any of them would lose sleep from screwing over a guy from Flatbush.
My cell phone rang. Hennison used that as an excuse to get back to making his lists. I waited until he was out of sight before answering my phone and hearing Bambi on the other end. She wanted to know why I didn’t wake her the other night.
“I know you came home,” she told me. “I saw that you cleaned up in the kitchen. Thanks for that by the way.”
“I thought you needed the sleep,” I said.
“You could’ve woken me,” she said, and from her tone I could picture her exaggerating her pout. “I stayed up until two last night waiting for you. I guess I dozed off. Where were you?”
“At Pinstripes watching the game. I hung around afterward. I don’t know, I guess I just didn’t feel like going home to an empty apartment. I got back sometime after three thirty.”
“Oh, okay.” She hesitated, then “Stan, why’d you have your cell phone off?”
“Phillips had been calling me to give me shit. I didn’t feel like taking any more of his calls last night.”
“Really?” A bit of a chill entered her voice. I knew that she wanted to say something about how I had no problem turning off my cell phone last night but had to keep it on during our big night out last Wednesday. She held it back though and instead asked me how my night was.
“The Yankees won big,” I said, as if that answered what she was asking. “Look, I’ve got a call I need to make. We’ll talk later.”
“Don’t you want to know where I was the last two nights?”
“That’s your business.”
“I was with my friend Angela.” Her normally tough bluster was gone. I heard her exhale a lungful of air, then add, “I was just so mad at you for leaving me alone in that hotel. I know, I know, you couldn’t do anything about it, but I needed a chance to cool off. Maybe I was trying to get you to miss me a little also. But I wasn’t sleeping with anyone if that’s what you were thinking. You can call Angela and ask her if you’d like. And I’m sorry about that crack I made about that desk clerk.”
I hated hearing that vulnerability in her voice. The suggestion to call her friend was childish—as was the idea that her friend wouldn’t just repeat whatever Bambi wanted her to. Still, my gut feeling was that Bambi was telling me the truth. I decided if she wasn’t it didn’t really matter.
“I’m sorry too,” I said.
“Will you be home later?”
“By seven o’clock. I promise.” I hesitated for a moment, then added, “You went through a lot trouble. Packing up those boxes and carting them out, only to bring them all back two days later.”
“I know,” she agreed. “I guess I was trying to get your attention. I’ll see you at seven.”
She hung up. I sat for a moment, losing my train of thought. The little sleep I’d had over the last three days left me with both a headache and this fuzziness in my brain. I got up and poured myself a cup of the mud that we have masquerading as coffee at the precinct. After several sips of that, I called the number Jill Chandler had left. She answered on the first ring and insisted she’d been up since six going over reports on both murders, so there was no chance that I had woken her. Her apartment was on East Houston, only ten minutes away. We arranged to meet at my desk in a half hour.
Jill Chandler showed up on time, carrying a bag from Katz’s Deli. She looked softer than she had the other day. Instead of pulling her hair back tightly she had let it down, and instead of the dark blue suit and sensible shoes that marked her as FBI, she wore a thick white cotton sweater, jeans, and tennis sneakers. Maybe it was also the way the late morning light hit her, or maybe it was the sleep-deprived fuzziness clouding up my head, but I didn’t see any of the harsh angles to her that I thought I’d seen the other day. When she took two bagels with cream cheese and lox out of the Katz’s Deli bag and handed me one, I began to think I might like her. Any lingering doubt was removed when she also took out two black coffees. Thick slices of Bermuda onion and tomato had been wrapped separately, and I added them to my sandwich and took a healthy bite of it. It had been a while since I’d visited Katz’s. We ate in silence, with Jill Chandler putting her sandwich down first.
“That was quite an exit you made yesterday,” she said after wiping a small smudge of cream cheese from the side of her mouth, an amused smile twisting her lips. “I don’t think your boss was too happy about it.”
“He wasn’t,” I agreed.
“I’m guessing from the brevity of your comments at yesterday’s meeting that you had somewhere else you badly needed to be.”
From the way she looked at me I could tell she was curious to know my story. For some reason I didn’t want her to think of me as someone who would let down on the job, but I also didn’t want to get into my divorce, my relationship with my kids, or how damn impotent I ended up being the other night, so I just shrugged and told her that, yeah, I had someplace else I needed to be. I knew that she wanted to probe the subject further—probably her years of profiling had left her hating open questions—but she left it alone.
“I’d like to hear your thoughts on these murders,” she said. “You’ve been the closest to them, at least Gail Laurent’s, and I’d like to know what you think we’re dealing with.”
“Pretty much what I said yesterday. Our guy’s having fun. He’s cutting off fingers and blowing off his victims’ faces partly as a signature to us, and partly because he’s enjoying what he’s doing. And there are more than just those two bodies.”
“Why do you say that?” she asked, her lips pursed.
“I’m guessing you’ve seen the videotape of our witness stumbling onto Gail Laurent’s murder?”
She nodded. “It was shown after you left.”
“Then you know that our guy tried to shoot Lynch and the only reason he didn’t was he was out of bullets. So far seven rounds have been accounted for. Our guy’s carrying a .40 caliber, which is going to hold either ten or fifteen rounds, and double that if he’s got two magazines. Odds are he was fully loaded before he went out hunting last Wednesday. So what happened to the rounds we haven’t accounted for yet?”
“Zachary Lynch didn’t fit the profile of the other two victims,” she said, confidently. “They were both well-off, and dressed in a way to indicate that. Mr. Lynch, to put it politely, looked like he could’ve been living out on the streets. More likely, our killer was only trying to scare him away.”
“I don’t think so. Our perp would’ve thought that Lynch would be able to identify him.”
“Not if he was in disguise. He could’ve even been waiting for a witness to come along.”
Jill Chandler was looking pleased with herself over that idea. I didn’t buy it. That our guy would be waiting for a witness or disguising himself smelled wrong to me. If I could trust Lynch and his claims that he saw objects normally, just not people, then he would’ve noticed if our killer had been wearing a mask. No, it was just dumb blind luck on both their parts: Lynch, that he wasn’t shot, and our killer, that Lynch couldn’t identify him.
I picked up what was left of my sandwich and chewed it slowly, all the while Jill Chandler smiling to let me know how very pleased she was with herself. When I was done I asked her why she really wanted to meet me because I knew it wasn’t to get my “thoughts” on the killer. From the way she blushed, it occurred to me that her agenda might’ve been of a more personal nature, or at least partially so. She lowered her eyes for a moment and nodded.
“Very good,” she said. “You caught me.”
“Yeah, well, I might not have a degree in psychiatry or be a trained profiler, but you learn something after fifteen years on the job. So what do you really want?”
“I asked Mr. Lynch yesterday about hypnosis and he was strongly against the idea. I could try scaring him by threatening a court order, but from his reaction I doubt that would work, and I also doubt we’d be able to find a judge who would support us. You’ve already established a relationship with him. I’d like you to talk to him for us.”
“It won’t do any good,” I said. “There’s nothing I could say to him that would change his mind. He doesn’t want anyone else knowing what he sees.”
She smiled at that. “Why would he be so private about his hallucinations?”
I scratched my jaw as I thought about it. “He doesn’t believe they’re hallucinations. I’m not sure what he thinks they are, but whatever it is he’s not sharing.”
Her smile dulled enough to show she didn’t believe that. “You will talk to him for us?” she asked.
I told her I would, for all the good I thought it would do. It was getting about time for me to head out for Gail Laurent’s funeral, and I asked Jill if she had anything else she’d like to discuss. There was a slight hitch to her mouth as she told me there wasn’t, at least not at that moment. It was clear there was something else on her mind, but she was going to keep it to herself. I thanked her for the bagel and watched as she gathered up her stuff and left.