Chapter Five

Diner, East Harlem

March 7, 8.07 a.m.

He sat in the diner in East Harlem, five minutes from the murder scene, eating a bacon and egg bagel. He was alone on a table for four but the diner was only half full at that time of day. An old lady to his right sat staring ahead, her head slightly crooked on her shoulders, wearing a pompous and refined air as if she was better than the rest, but beneath the table, she had no shoes and her bare feet were cut and rancid.

There were two cops sitting in the corner booth. He stared at them as they ate and joked. Jimmy Headless and Johnny Neckless. Every day, he imagined that this was how they started their shift – sign in, drive two blocks up from the precinct, park up and take free coffee and bagels from Enrico.

He took out a cell phone. Prepaid, untraceable. He had used it to call David Capske the night before, just after midnight. He’d told David that he had photographs of him taking cocaine. Threatened the palpitating young man that he was going to embarrass the hell out of the Capske clan and lose David his job.

David asked what he wanted. ‘Easy,’ he’d said. ‘One thousand dollars delivered tonight to a trash can on East 112th Street.’

He took the cell-phone battery from his pocket, put it back into the phone and waited for the software to load up and the satellite connection to show. He sipped some hot coffee as he logged on to a new Hotmail account and laboriously typed in the email addresses of all the networks and newspapers. Then he composed a short but important message.

He looked across to Jimmy and Johnny. Arch-morons of the modern world. Keeping up the illusion that we were all safe. He smiled at the waitress and nodded as she held up the coffee pot. He pressed send.

He sat and waited, the murder weapon still in his pocket like a memento of the kill. He remembered the feeling. He wanted to have that high again. But he couldn’t, not yet. He knew that he must remain hidden. His task was not to bathe in glory but to conquer the inferior. His task was to carry out orders.

He let the emails sail through space and time, hunting out their electronic destinations, and watched as they disappeared from the outbox.

He waited a good fifteen minutes, and then he put the phone to his ear and called 911. The tone clicked. The voice seemed small and distant. Not what you want in an emergency.

‘911, which service please?’ said the wheezy voice.

‘Police.’

‘What seems to be the problem, sir?’

‘There’s a dead body on East 112th Street, in an alleyway at Jenson House.’ He hung up, took the battery out of the cell phone and tossed it on to the floor. The phone would be wiped clean, smashed and deposited in a trash can on his walk to work.

He looked at his stopwatch and smiled at the number. His victim had taken seventy-nine minutes to die. There had been a lot of pain. That’s what he enjoyed. Pain.

He walked out past Jimmy and Johnny. ‘Hi there, fellas,’ he said, his right hand wrapped around the plastic grip of his gun, feeling the dirty excitement of flaunting it. They both looked up and nodded.

As he left, he guessed that the police dispatch would be chirping on the police radio for some squad car to go take a look. He waited in the street and, sure enough, the nearest cop car belonged to Jimmy and Johnny. They ambled out of the diner, fat and stupid, in no hurry whatsoever, and already about five hours too late.

He wanted to follow the dumb cops to observe them as they came across the corpse, to see their reaction to what he had done. He would’ve liked to have gone back to see the corpse and to take some pictures. But that was foolish. The cops would scan the scene. He couldn’t afford to be noticed.

He felt restless as he walked up the street, almost as if he’d set up a party that he wasn’t allowed to attend himself. Most of all he felt hungry for more blood. He only just realized what it was, the sudden feeling, almost unrecognized because it was unexpected.

He stared across the street. People were walking to work or to school. Then he felt it again. He thought it might have been some leftover excitement from the murder. Maybe the remembering, the sending of death messages, maybe all of the paraphernalia of the morning-after was tripping him up.

He was standing still, wearing a leather coat, a little unshaven, already late for work, his stomach warm from coffee, the blood of the dead man smeared across his chest and left to dry. He repeated the eighty-eight words as if a prayer.

If anyone wanted to know, if anyone asked now, who had killed that guy at Jensen House, he’d fucking scream from the rooftops: ‘I did, you fuckers! I did.’

He smiled at a woman approaching. He felt invulnerable, like a man on something. A blood-high, he called it, the freedom that comes from a kill.

He decided that what he was feeling could be called happiness. He hadn’t been happy his whole life long, but now . . . yes, that’s what it was, wasn’t it? That buzz of self-confidence, a sense of freedom, of optimism, of potency, of shamelessness – that was happiness, right there, sitting right there in his own heart and mind.

It was 8.22 a.m. on the streets of New York, the morning after the murder, and it came to him that he already wanted to kill again.

At first it was months before the intoxicating need filled his head, then weeks . . . now just a day. There was a feeling in his head like a ticking. Sometimes it went on for hours, like a roulette wheel slowed down. And when it stopped, then the order came.

It was ticking again.

He saw the world like never before, as if he was the central figure in his own movie and that movie had meaning. And its meaning was right there – blood on the streets, happiness, the urge to kill and a man nearly dancing with delight.