CHAPTER 37

 

Mitchell and Lumley picked up Slater at eight o’clock in the morning, handcuffed him and drove him to the police station. They didn’t say anything to him and he didn’t attempt to initiate a conversation. They took him straight to an interview room where Lumley took off the cuffs and told him to sit down. “Why so serious, Detective Lumley?” asked Slater.

“It’s over, Slater,” she said, sitting down opposite him. “Your sick, evil little game has come to an end. And now it’s time for you to pay the piper.”

Mitchell sat down next to her.

Slater took out his cigarettes. “Can I smoke?”

“It’s a public building, of course you can’t fucking smoke,” said Lumley.

“It relaxes me. Nicotine is my drug of choice and smoking apart it’s not illegal. Depriving me of my nicotine is against my human rights, surely.”

“It’s against the law,” said Lumley.

Slater put the cigarettes away and folded his arms. “So what is this, Good Cop and Stupid Cop?” he said. “It’s not a combination I’ve come across before. Does it usually work for you?”

“Did you kill Jenny Cameron?” asked Mitchell.

“Is that what passes for interrogation in New York City?” said Slater. “How do you think I’m going to answer a question like that?” He held out his hands. “You got me, Detective Mitchell. I confess. Lock me up and throw away the key, why don’t you?”

Mitchell pointed a finger at Slater. “You’ve got a very funny mouth, Slater,” he growled.

“Yeah, but you can’t charge me with that, can you.” He looked at his watch. “And if I’m not charged then I can go whenever I want to. So are we done? Or do you have some more insightful questions to get me quivering in my boots?”

“Do you know where Jenny Cameron is?” asked Lumley.

“Why would I? I’m not her father.”

“But you are her lover, right?” said Mitchell.

“See, now you’re getting your tenses all mixed up,” said Slater. “If she’s dead then I can’t be her lover in the present tense. You are saying she’s dead, right?”

“You don’t seem surprised,” said Mitchell. “Or sorry.”

“Because I’m confused,” said Slater. “And the reason I’m confused is because your line of questioning is so random.”

“How do you explain her disappearance?”

Slater shrugged. “She wasn’t doing well on the course. Maybe she realized that she wasn’t cut out to be a writer and went home.”

“We checked with her parents,” said Lumley. “She hasn’t gone home. They haven’t heard from her in two weeks.”

“Her fingerprints were on the boat,” said Mitchell. “And we found hairs on a brush with her DNA. Perfect match to the DNA in the blood we found in her bathroom. And we found epithelials on your sheets.”

Slater frowned. “Epithelials? You mean skin cells?”

“Jenny Cameron’s skin. She was in your bed.”

“So?”

“You were lovers?”

“I wouldn’t say that.”

“What would you say?” asked Mitchell.

“Friends.”

“Friends with benefits?” said Lumley.

“Just friends,” said Slater.

“You never had sex with her?” asked Mitchell.

“She came on the boat. She felt a bit queasy. She lay down for a bit. She left. There was no sex involved. I took her sailing. We had some wine. We watched the sun go down. Yada yada yada.”

“Yada, yada, yada?”

“Yeah. It means nothing happened.”

The two detectives looked at Slater for several seconds without saying anything.

“The silent treatment?” said Slater. “That’s not going to work either.”

“You ever hear about a book called Masquerade?” asked Lumley.

Slater shrugged. “It doesn’t ring a bell.”

“You sure about that?”

“What is it? A thriller?”

“No. Definitely not a thriller.”

“There was a movie called Masquerade, right? With Rob Lowe?”

“This was a book. By an English guy, Kit Williams. It was a sort of fairy story, but there were clues in it that would lead the reader to find some hidden treasure.”

“You’ve lost me, Detective. Sorry.” Slater sat back in his chair and folded his arms.

“The book was based around a series of fifteen paintings. In the paintings were clues that pointed to the location of a golden hare. Hare as in a rabbit.”

“I’m still not following you,” said Slater.

“It was published in 1979. Huge fanfare, I’m told. People all over the world bought the book and started looking for the treasure. The golden hare was worth tens of thousands of dollars and treasure hunters started digging holes all over the place.”

“Sounds like a good way of boosting sales, what do you think, Mr Slater?” asked Mitchell.

Slater shrugged but didn’t say anything.

“So you never heard of this book?” asked Lumley.

“Like I said, it doesn’t ring a bell,” said Slater.

“Because it got me thinking, about your book. The Bestseller. There are lots of numbers in it.”

“There’s some.”

“No, there’s a lot. Phone numbers, apartment numbers, zip codes, car registration numbers. More than you’d normally find in a novel.”

“I’m not sure that’s true.”

Lumley nodded. “Oh, it’s true. Lots of numbers. And that got me thinking. Maybe the numbers are there for a reason.”

Slater’s jaw tensed and his eyes hardened. His right hand clenched into a tight fist.

“You see, we were going about it the wrong way. We were looking for clues in the story. I mean, you talk about choosing the victim and how you were going to kill her and dispose of the body. But the clues aren’t in the words, are they? They’re in the numbers.”

Slater said nothing.

“And you’re a sailor. Sailing is all about navigation. GPS coordinates. Latitude and longitude. It’s all in the numbers isn’t it? Crack the code and we’ll find the body. Or the bits of it. Am I right?”

“Do you think I’m crazy, Detective Lumley? Do you think I’d cut up a body and bury the parts in some sort of crazy treasure hunt? Why would I do that?”

“The clue’s in the title. The Bestseller. You want to be famous. And I think you’ve realized that your writing isn’t good enough to get you noticed. You need a gimmick. A USP. A unique selling point.”

“And you think a book that says that I’m going to kill a girl and then highlight where the body’s buried is a good way to get onto the bestseller list?”

“Don’t you?”

“I think it’s a surefire way of ending up in jail. Or the electric chair. You’ve got the death penalty in New York, haven’t you?”

“It’s been declared unconstitutional,” said Mitchell “But you never know.”

“Death penalty or not, I’d be pretty stupid to tell everyone in advance what I was doing, wouldn’t I?”

“You don’t see it that way, though, do you?” said Lumley.

“What do you mean?”

“You think you’re smarter than the rest of us. It’s clear from the way you talk, your body language, everything you do, that you regard us all as intellectually inferior. Am I right?”

Slater sighed. “I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of agreeing or disagreeing,” he said.

“You know what I think, Slater? I think you’re a sociopath. I think you’ve decided that you want to be a famous writer and that you’ll do whatever it takes to achieve that objective. But you’re right, I don’t think you’re stupid enough to tell people where you buried the body parts. You weren’t planning to tell anyone, were you? It was going to be your secret.”

Mitchell nodded slowly. “Serial killers take trophies, you know that? They keep a little something so that they can relive the experience. A piece of jewelry, bit of clothing, a photograph maybe. But you, I think you found some other way of getting off on the murder. You left clues in the book, clues that only you would ever know about. And reading that book and knowing that the clues are there is what will get you hard.”

Slater swallowed nervously and looked at the two detectives in turn. Then he slowly smiled. “Nice try,” he said. “But if that was true then you’d have the body parts and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“And you never read that book? Masquerade?”

Slater shook his head.

“That’s real strange,” said Mitchell. “Because your father had the film rights at one stage.”

“Is that right?”

“Apparently so. He was working on a script, based on the book and the search for the hare. You’d be just a kid at the time but he’d have had a copy, for sure.”

“My father didn’t usually talk about his work with me.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” said Mitchell. “Kids always want to know about their father’s work.”

“Yeah? Was your father a cop, Sergeant Mitchell? Did you learn interrogation techniques at his knee?”

Mitchell glared at Slater but before he could reply, Lumley began to speak. “We’re giving you the opportunity of putting an end to this,” she said. “Let Jenny’s parents have her body so that they can give her a proper burial. And we can get you the treatment you need.”

“Since when have cops cared about treating people?”

“You’re sick, Adrian. You know you’re sick. You can’t control yourself and you’re going to keep killing until you get caught. It’ll go a lot easier for you if you put an end to it now.”

Slater nodded slowly as he stared at the detective. “How do you know so much about it?”

“You’re not the first person we’ve had in here with your problem, Adrian.”

“Is that what it is, a problem?”

“It’s not normal, is it?” said Lumley. “You know that. That’s why you need help. And we can help you. If you cooperate with us now we’ll be in your corner. We’ll do what we can to make things easier for you. But if you fight us, we’ll take you down and we’ll take you down hard. Do you understand?”

Slater nodded.

Lumley reached over and patted the back of his hand. “So tell us, Adrian. Tell us where the body is so that we can bring this to an end. We need closure. And so do you.”

Slater looked at Lumley, then turned to look at Mitchell. Mitchell was holding his breath as he stared expectantly at Slater.

“There’s one thing you can do for me, Joe,” said Slater, his voice hardly more than a whisper.

“What?” she asked.

He turned his hands over and held her by the wrists. “A blow job,” he said. “Give me a blow job and I’ll give you closure, all over your pretty little lips.”

Lumley tried to pull away from him but he tightened his grip.

“You bastard!” she shouted.

Mitchell stood up so quickly that his chair fell back and hit the ground with the sound of a gunshot.

Slater grinned at Lumley. “Come on, Joe, you know you want to.”

Mitchell grabbed Slater by his shirt and pulled him to his feet. Lumley pushed her chair back, a look of disgust on her face. Mitchell drew back his fist and Slater’s grin widened.

Mitchell’s fist began to shake as he struggled with himself.

“Go on, Ed, you can do it,” said Slater. “You know you want to.”

Mitchell roared and pushed Slater back. Slater stumbled over his chair and fell to the floor. His head banged against the wall and he lay still.

“Ed!” shouted Lumley. She stood up and went over to the Sergeant. “What have you done?”

“He fell,” said Mitchell.

She looked down at Slater. “He hit his head. Ed, you could have killed him.”

“He’s playing possum,” said Mitchell. He bent down and shook Slater’s shoulder. “He assaulted you. He grabbed you and made an indecent suggestion.”

“He’s not moving, Ed.”

Mitchell shook Slater again. His eyes were closed and Mitchell couldn’t see his chest moving. He knelt down and felt for a pulse in Slater’s neck.

“Should I call for a medic?” asked Lumley.

“A lawyer would be more use,” said Slater, opening his eyes. Mitchell pulled back his hand as if he’d been stung. “Gotcha,” grinned Slater. “Can I go now? Or do we get a lawyer in here and show him my bruises? I’m easy either way.”

Lumley’s cell phone rang and she took the call. She listened intently, and then a smile slowly spread across her face. She put the phone away and pointed a finger at Slater. “Game over,” she said. “We’ve got you.”