After our erratic, erotic episode of oral gratification and role swapping, Noel drove me home. In his car, I drifted in and out of sleep as he rambled on about being back in town in a couple days for the Rocmarni Fashion Show, at which time we could “finalize things.”
“Sure, great,” I said dreamily. As he kissed me, his car screeched to a halt. I wished him bon voyage on his flight and he sped away. I floated up the stairs to my apartment and jumped into bed, where I fought to get him out of my head.
Early the next morning my phone woke me up. I would’ve let the call go, but I knew it had to be Noel calling from LA to say he couldn’t wait to be back in New York.
It was Bernie. He was with the rest of the squad at the latest crime scene. Victim number six was resting in pieces at the King’s Court Hotel, a decent, upscale place on Forty-fifth and Eighth. This was on the outer rim of the killer’s original hunting ground.
“How the hell did he pay for the place?”
“He didn’t,” Bernie said. It turned out that the killer had again changed his MO. He managed to find an empty room after the maid had cleaned it and he took the vic there. Just an hour ago, a family from Wichita had opened the door and discovered the mutilated corpse.
“Should I meet you there?”
“We’re just wrapping things up. Meet us back at the precinct.”
Showering, dressing, and grabbing a cab, I walked into the squad room just as they were returning from the scene.
“Big meeting in a half hour,” Bernie said before I could ask anything. “The captain and Chief of Detectives are going to be there. I’d appreciate everyone keeping quiet about my getting mugged.”
“‘Course.” He didn’t even need to ask.
“Why is the chief coming here?” I asked.
“These murders have put our com stat rates through the roof,” Bernie said, referring to the weekly meetings, which the mayor is known to attend, where the top brass discuss crime levels throughout the city.
“I don’t want to blame the victim,” Alex said, “but why the fuck would even the dumbest blonde hooker in Midtown go out with a john hours after the Police Commissioner issued a warning?”
“Prostituting isn’t a career choice,” Annie said. “They’re usually hooked and just trying to pay for their habit.”
“Whatever,” Bernie said.
“Did Raj trace where the photos were sent from?” Alex asked.
“A laundromat on West Thirty-eighth Street that sold five minutes of internet access for a buck. No surveillance cameras, and the attendant is an illegal who don’t remember nothing.”
“He sent pictures again this time?” I asked. “To the Marilyn web site?”
“Oh right,” Bernie said. “Yeah.”
“So that brings us to six,” Annie said.
“Mary Lynn MacArthur, Denise Giantonni, Nelly Linquist, Jane Hansen, Tabetha Sayers”—Alex intoned the roll call of the dead—“and now . . .”
“We don’t have the name of number six yet,” Annie said.
“This is getting ridiculous,” I said.
“Hey, this is nothing,” Bernie said. “Ten years ago, Bert and I did some of the post mortem investigation on the Joel the Ripper case. Rifkin killed three times as many, and no one even suspected there was a murderer at work. Hell, the moron only got caught when a state trooper smelled a decomposing corpse in the back of his pick-up.”
“This guy is deliberately doing it like this just to embarrass us,” Alex said.
“Yeah,” Annie added, “Why can’t he just quietly dump the bodies in the river like everyone else, then we’ll leave him alone.”
Instead of showing me the new jpegs, Bernie pointed to a pile of new paperwork he had saved for me. It swallowed up time until I realized everyone else had vanished. They had gone to the big meeting without even telling me.
I sneaked into the big conference room and quietly took a seat next to Annie at the round table along with Bernie, Alex, our profiler Barry Gilbert, and a couple of suits I didn’t know. They were all listening to a lieutenant I didn’t recognize, who was saying the cost of this investigation had now topped a hundred thousand dollars. He started itemizing the number of man-hours that had already been spent on the case, in addition to all the lab work and other expenses.
“It would’ve been cheaper just to pay all blonde hookers to stay home this month,” Bernie said when the lieutenant finished his tally.
On the adjacent wall one of the team had pinned up photos of the latest crime scene as well as what must be printouts of the computer images of victim number six being drugged, strangled, and mutilated. Like Jane Hansen, number six was wearing a curly blonde wig; she wasn’t really blonde either. Underneath the photos was another freaky poem the killer had posted on Miriam’s web site:
They always cry:
“Why am I being strangled!
And I reply,
“’cause I too was mangled.”
Why the knife
to my tender breasts?
’Cause my heart too
was plucked from chest,
Don’t blame me
if you’re slashed and torn!
I never wanted . . .
always hated being born!
I stared for a while at the poem trying to make sense of it. Then I looked at the jpegs and listened as Alex, Annie, Barry—in fact, everyone but Bernie—bounced theories against the facts of the latest murder to construct possible scenarios while they waited for the captain and the chief of detectives to arrive.
It turned out they had first learned of the homicide the previous night, when the pictures were uploaded to Miriam’s web site at 9:38 p.m. The email address this time was MarshalBoucicaut.@wonderlink.com. Annie had looked up the name on Wikipedia. Apparently this Marshal was a medieval French knight who founded a chivalrous order—the Order of the Green Shield with the White Lady—devoted to protecting the honor of womankind. My guess is he was never married.
“This guy’s on some kind of historical purity kick,” Alex said, recalling the earlier reference to Catherine of Alexandria, the patron saint of virginity.
Suddenly in came a short, fat man with a walrus mustache, wearing a tight, plaid suit. He mumbled his name and announced that the chief was unable to attend; he was there in his place. I confirmed later that none of us heard his name and no one dared ask him to repeat it. All I could focus on was the fact that his multiple chins bulged so low over his striped shirt collar that they completely hid the knot of his crassly colored tie. It seemed that the poorer their fashion sense, the higher up the ranks the department seemed to hoist them.
“So now he’s killing at the rate of one per day.” He finally spoke to the entire group.
Our latest victim was a short, curvy brunette, another departure from the usual tall young blondes. Since I no longer fit the victim profile, I was a little concerned that I might be taken off the case. But inasmuch as the crime scene last night was even more gruesome than number five from the day before, the focus was elsewhere right now. Instead of stabbing the latest victim from a downward angle, like he’d done yesterday night, the killer ran his knife cleanly around her breasts until he sliced them right off, like in the Jane Hansen murder. Also, unlike Tabetha with the twist-top neck, this girl’s head was still attached. The most troublesome departure from the pattern in this case was that this was the first victim who, according to the ME, had just had sex. It wasn’t clear if she had been raped. There were no signs of a struggle, nor was any sperm present. Since Hansen’s murder at the Ticonderoga Hotel, Bernie had said he suspected there was a second killer at work, but to everyone else that just seemed too unlikely. In addition to the particulars that all six murders had in common— tall blonde prostitutes who had been drugged, strangled, mutilated in the same bizarre way but not sexually violated—serial murders simply weren’t that common. Nevertheless, this case was just getting weirder.
“Any thoughts, Bern?” Annie finally asked. We were all a bit surprised by his silence.
“Yeah,” he finally said. “It’s a contest.”
“What’s a contest?”
“This whole thing . . . I mean, we had a murderer and he was doing these crazy-ass murders. Mary Lynn, Denise, then Nelly—all clearly hookers. There was something genuine about them. A little artsy with the body stacking and carved numbers—but original, real. Then suddenly the murders are getting all this press coverage and bam! These new murders start happening.”
“You mean the last three?” Alex asked.
“Not number five, Tabetha. That’s the first guy again, responding to the Jane Hansen killer. But Jane and this new one, yeah, and you know what they are? They’re bad imitations trying to pass themselves off as real, but they don’t wash with me. The first group are genuine New York murders, your usual streetwalker whores in the last of the bona fide Times Square dives. That killer knows this landscape and its characters. But these new ones, no way. The guy is a fucking tourist posing as a native, loading down peglegs,”—he meant uploading jpegs—“putting makeup on the girls, overcompensating for his ignorance. He’s trying to compete with the other guy.”
“You might be right, but if so, how can we use that to help us?” asked the walrus in the tacky suit.
“Frankly, I just wish we could keep this under wraps until we figure it out,” Bernie said.
“Bernie, you know we are obligated to warn all possible vics,” the lieutenant said.
If I’d had the courage to speak right then, I would’ve said that maybe we should be looking for a pair of ex-cons who had previously worked together. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that after spending the past week running down a whole list of suspects, we would’ve caught this by now.
“Not to discourage your theory, Bern,” said Barry, “but let’s get back to this latest vic a minute. I’m still intrigued by the fact that he had sex with her . . .”
“There were no defensive wounds.”
“Maybe she was unconscious.”
“Or maybe it was consensual,” Alex said.
“With the murderer? You think number six knew him? This late in the series?” Annie shot him down.
“Maybe six was coming from another room and was just leaving,” Bernie said. “No one even saw her come into the hotel.”
“Why do you think he sometimes removes their heads and other times their breasts?” the second to the chief of detectives asked as he stared at one of the more gruesome photos.
“Well, there might be some kind of mother fixation involved,” Barry stated.
“The two girls who he’s double mastectomied had relatively large breasts,” Alex pointed out.
“If it is the same killer,” Bernie said, stepping away from his hypothesis a minute, “It takes a lot of work to remove a head. It ain’t like popping a champagne cork. He might be getting lazy.”
“And if he didn’t even rent the room this last time,” Annie added. “he didn’t know how long he might have before someone would just walk in.”
“What did CSU find?” the lieutenant asked, flipping through the forensic reports.
“Four clear prints and two partials, along with some hairs and fibers—but as before, nothing connects to any of the previous murder scenes,” Annie said, “We suspect that most if not all of what they gathered is from prior residents of each hotel.”
“And no signs of a struggle?” the chief’s man asked.
“He drugs them all first,” Alex replied. “That’s the way he works.”
“The tox screen hasn’t come back, but the ME said he didn’t think this one was drugged,” Annie said.
Bernie started coughing and though he tried to suppress it, it soon grew violent.
“You really got the World Trade hack,” the visiting detective said. “This kind of respiratory crap is getting to more and more of the cops who worked down there.”
“It’s really just a cold,” Bernie said.
The door opened and the captain stepped inside.
“Well, if you need more cops, more anything, just tell your captain,” said the assistant to the Chief, overriding all the lieutenant’s concerns about limited resources. “We got to get this solved fast.”
He thanked Bernie and the rest of us and was led out by the captain and the lieutenant. We walked back to the squad room, where Annie immediately got on the phone and Alex retreated to his desk.
“Do you think that went well?” I asked Bernie, since it was the first time I’d ever witnessed an inspection from the brass.
“Yeah, they just want to make sure we’re not missing anything.”
“So we have to get an ID on the latest girl?” I asked.
“Funny you should say that,” Bernie said limping to his office. In the short time since I had been assigned here, I saw what a mess it had become. Boxes, bags of clothes, all kinds of clutter. Lying on the few square inches of clear desk space was a new-looking membership card for Rectangle Video, which was apparently in Union City, New Jersey. It had an ID number written on it but no name.
“It looks like the asshole grabbed her purse but dropped this at the scene.” Handing it to me, he said, “See what you can find out.” His phone rang and he took the call.
All the other squad room desks were occupied, so I plugged in a phone at Bernie’s now vacant desk in the bullpen. Crime scene photos of all the victims were taped to the glass frame bordering the hallway. Before I could make my call, Alex came over with a magnifying glass and started inspecting the photos closely.
I was about to ask what he was looking for when he turned and volunteered, “They found some kind of adhesive on vic six’s face.” He had just gotten the preliminary report.
“What would he—”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” he said, still staring into a large photo of the vic’s pale white face.
I got on the phone to Rectangle Video and explained that I was an NYPD officer working on a case. Based on the membership card number I wanted to get the identity as well as the home address and phone number of the holder.
“Her name is Caty Duffy,” he said after I read him the membership number. Then he gave me her home number and address in Union City.
“Any other names on the account?”
“Yeah, one. Frank Duffy.”
“And when exactly was the account opened?” I asked, wondering if it had taken Caty a few years to fall from suburban grace to urban prostitution.
“About three months ago. The last film borrowed was The Two Towers, just a few days ago. It’s still out.”
When I thanked him, he suddenly grew suspicious and said, “You sound pretty young to be a police officer. Do you have proof of who you are?”
I considered telling him to call me back at Manhattan South Homicide, but hung up instead.
“If this is her Rectangle Video card, our vic is Caty Duffy,” I told Bernie. “She lives in Union City. I got her address and phone number too. Should we head out there?”
“Hell, no. Give the info to the Union City PD,” he said. “Have the morgue send them a photo of her and ask them to go to her house. See if anyone’s there who can confirm her identity. Let them break it to the family. If it is her, we’ll take it from there.”
As I followed his instructions, calling the morgue to fax the photo and then notifying the Jersey police, I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to give her family the awful news. The Jersey detective asked for some details in case there might be a connection between our crimes and any of their recent unsolved murders. Then he asked me where to send the next of kin to ID the body. I gave him the morgue’s number. He thanked me and said they’d send a car to the house.
Roughly forty minutes passed before a civilian call from Union City was directed to me. Figuring it was almost certainly our latest victim’s next of, I asked Bernie if he would take it.
“You called the Jersey police?”
“Yeah.”
“So the worst is over,” he said. “Just confirm whatever the Jersey cops said and see if the next of kin works in the city. Save us a trip across the river.”
“What if he asks about her murder?”
“You don’t know shit and the detectives are out detecting.”
He never failed to make me feel like a receptionist. “Just get his contact info and tell him we’ll pay him a visit and answer his questions as soon as we can.”
“Okay,” I said and took a deep breath as I picked up the phone.
“My name is Frank Duffy,” a frantic male voice said. “She’s been missing for the past twenty four hours and a Union City officer just came to my door and . . . and told me my wife Caty was . . . murdered.” He started to weep just as Bernie began coughing in the background.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Duffy,” I said as delicately as I could. “We would’ve notified you ourselves but since you live in Jersey . . .”
Over the phone I heard convulsive gasps, the sort of primal cries you imagine someone would make when their heart is ripped out of their chest. After a few minutes of groaning, he regained a modicum of composure.
“How did it happen?”
“I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know. The lead detective and his team are out investigating.”
“What’s his name?”
“Farrell, Detective Sergeant Bernie Farrell,” I said. Then I asked, “Do you work in the city? I’ll have him call you and arrange to come see you.”
“Was she raped?”
“We don’t have any details yet, sir. We’re waiting for the medical examiner’s report.”
“Did she suffer? I mean, she had a low tolerance for pain. She would cry over a paper cut.”
“I’m sure it was quick,” I heard myself saying.
“What the hell am I going to tell our boy?” He started weeping again. I waited a bit before asking, “Should I tell Detective Farrell to come out to your house in New Jersey?”
“No, I work in Times Square.” He gave me the address. “I stayed home today because…”
“Do you have any idea why your wife was in Manhattan?” I asked softly, since I could hardly ask if she was a drug-addicted hooker.
“We both work in the city and commute.”
“So she didn’t come home last night?”
“Yeah, but that happens sometimes,” he said. “There’s a sofa in her office. But she always calls if she’s not coming home, so I knew something was wrong.”
“Where exactly did she work?”
“The Condé Nast Building on Times Square—she works for a law firm, Shades, Holts and Pierce.”
“A law firm?” I said surprised.
“Yeah, they do corporate work.”
“What did she do there?”
“She’s a senior paralegal. She’s been there for twelve years.”
“Mr. Duffy, could you give me the phone number of her office, so we can speak to whoever saw her last?”
He gave me a name, work address, and phone number with an extension.
“When is the soonest the detective can call me?” he asked.
I assured him that Detective Farrell would call him back as soon as he returned. Mr. Duffy took my name and number and said he’d call again if he could think of anything that might be helpful. I repeated my condolences and hung up, then tried not to think of the unbelievable anguish the poor man had to be experiencing.
“Remember when Alex asked why any blonde hooker would turn a trick after the Commissioner issued a warning of a serial murderer.”
“Go on,” he said, rolling his hand impatiently.
“Caty might be our first non-hooker.”
“No way.”
“Not according to her husband.”
He smiled and in a mocking tone, he said, “I got news for you. Some hookers are married.”
“She’s got a kid.”
“If all the prostitutes who had kids joined the PTA they could rename it the PPTA.”
“Her husband says she’s been working for the past twelve years as a paralegal in a corporate law firm in midtown.”
“Did you get her work number?” He was testing me more than asking me.
“Yeah, and her supervisor’s name,” I said holding up the info. “Should I call her?”
“What do you think this is, Domino’s Pizza? We have to put on our coats, go out and interview her.”
“Can’t we give Caty the benefit of the doubt that maybe she’s not a prostitute?”
“I’m not being sexist,” he said. “Serial killers usually have a strict victim profile. If she was simply abducted off the street then we are seriously fucked, ’cause it means the killer is suddenly fishing from a much wider victim pool.”
Then he asked me to call “my friend” Miriam Williams to see if she had returned to the States yet. I got her assistant Bryce, who said that she’d be back in town in four days.
When I checked my voicemail, I found my optometrist had left a message reminding me that my eye surgery was coming up that Friday—which was also the last day of my homicide assignment. I also needed to come in on Thursday to get my eyes measured before the procedure. I called back to confirm and the receptionist told me I should arrange for someone to pick me up after the surgery and take me home, because I wouldn’t be able to see straight for a while.
I spent the rest of the morning filling out a backlog of forms and reports dealing with the last two homicides. At one o’clock Bernie stopped at my desk and announced that we were going to lunch.
I grabbed my jacket and he took me to a nearby diner that was probably a real find twenty-five years earlier, when cops first started going there. Since then it had evidently degenerated into a health code nightmare. We each grabbed pathogenic plastic trays and slid them along a steamed-up glass case, conjuring up scary parochial school lunches of years gone by. Throwing all nutritional wisdom to the wind, Bernie selected a high-carb pasta dish. I moved down the line to the refrigerated area, where I selected a severely wilted arugula salad.
“Hi Glad!”
I looked up to see O’Ryan standing before me in uniform. He looked more handsome each time I saw him.
“Eddie!” It was actually nice seeing him. Since I’d started seeing Noel, I realized that simply having sex was not nearly as easy as it sounded. Pornography and even TV shows made hooking up sound so effortless, but finding someone you could feel comfortable with—and trust—took a lot of work and sheer luck.
O’Ryan gave me a warm hug followed by a surprising peck on the cheek. It made me think he had to be with some new lover.
“Who’s this?” Bernie said, suddenly showing up with his tray of baked ziti.
“Eddie O’Ryan,” I said “This is Detective Bernie Farrell.”
“How’s it going there?” Bernie asked without making eye contact.
“Yeah,” Eddie replied, absently staring at a wall. An awkward pause followed, as is common in the cop world when a female is present.
“I guess I’ll see you later then,” Eddie finally said before leaving.
Bernie led us to a booth that had just opened in the rear. Sitting down he said, “Sorry if I seemed a little grumpy back at the precinct.”
“Is your foot hurting?”
“Usually that’s what it is, but this time I’m just worried about our guy. I mean, if it is one guy, and if he really is just grabbing any women now, and not even trying to sedate them, just strangling them—not to mention raping them—then we’re in serious trouble.”
Bernie snared a forkful of ziti, shoved it into his mouth, and added, “And what the hell did he put on Caty’s face, I wonder.”
“Maybe a Santa Claus beard,” I tried to joke, since it still felt cold enough to be Christmas.
I chewed on a couple of rubbery leaves and shriveled stalks before abandoning the wilted bowl of greens. In another moment, Bernie had gobbled down all his pasta and cheese and we were out the door.
As we walked, I was about to remind him that my homicide assignment was set to expire on Friday, when a college-age kid with a clipboard stepped into our path. His wore a visored cap that read GREENPEACE.
As he started talking about saving the planet, Bernie interrupted him, “Sorry son, it’s too late for that. Have as much fun as you can, ’cause it’s only going to get worse from here.”
“That’s simply not true,” the kid replied.
Bernie took out a dollar and said, “I’ll give this to you if you don’t say another word.”
The kid took the buck.
“Hold on,” I said. I took out a five and donated it. He tried to get me to fill out some form, but Bernie wouldn’t stop, so I wished him good luck and caught up.
“I happen to think there’s still hope.”
“Sure there is,” Bernie replied. “Everyone’s going to finally wise up about global warming. Any day now they’ll replace their SUVs with bikes. And politicians will tell the corporate lobbyists who bankroll their campaigns to fuck off, and they’ll quit with the partisan bullshit and work together to fix the problems that are killing the planet and melting the polar caps. And all the pollution that’s been building up since the dawn of the Industrial Age will miraculously evaporate.”
When we reached a corner, Bernie looked up at one of the city’s latest innovations—a dark blue street sign with illuminated numbers. Rummaging through his pockets for the info sheet, he asked, “So where exactly is Caty Duffy’s firm?”
“Three Times Square.”
We walked north toward the coven of glossy new high-rises that now encircled Times Square. Soon we were back in front of the wavy new Reuters Building where we had recently interviewed the one-armed immigrant with the stolen credit card number.
“What the fuck is that?” he asked, pointing at a strange, flat object projecting from the top of the building like the edge of a giant surfboard.
“I think it’s some kind of architectural homage to the marquees that once lined the Great White Way.”
Bernie looked at the area as if seeing it for the first time. When a member of the Forty-second Street Security Team passed, he asked him which building was Three Times Square.
Instead of answering, the guard started turning clockwise and rattling off the addresses of each skyscraper in turn, “That’s number one, then four, seven, five, and three—”
“The whole point of addresses is to make the location easy to find,” Bernie interrupted. “If you’re just going to throw numbers on buildings in no particular order, you’re missing the point.”
“Hey, they don’t pay me to number the damn buildings.” the security guard shot back before walking off.
For a moment I checked out the new Condé Nast Building. It had curvy sides and unusual surfaces that made me wonder if the architect was drunk when he designed it. It rose nearly fifty stories high. Just below a giant hypodermic-like antenna were four black squares paralleling each of the building’s sides.
“There’s a reason they stopped grouping battleships together after Pearl Harbor,” Bernie muttered.
“What?”
“Putting all these skyscrapers so close together makes them all such easy targets.”
As we crossed over to the northeast corner, I asked Bernie if he knew the purpose of the four mysterious black squares on the top of the Condé Nast Building.
“Giant fly swatters . . . in case any planes come too close.”
The awning in front of the Condé Nast building looked like the shiny scoop from a monster garbage truck, ready to claw unsuspecting tourists into its lobby, which was funnel-shaped like a giant meat grinder. We entered the bright marble lobby and walked toward the wooden security desk as employees ran their magnetized ID cards over a reader before entering through a turnstile. We showed our badges to the guard on duty, who gave us adhesive labels to put over our shirt pockets and let us through a metal gate.
“The last time I was at this spot,” Bernie said. “It was 1472 Broadway—the Longacre Building. Ten spacious stories filled with waterbugs and Joe Franklin.”
I guessed Franklin was an old-time gangster.
Abruptly Bernie paused as we approached the first bank of elevators. “You didn’t happen to catch today’s safety color, did you?”
I thought he was kidding. Roughly a month ago, the newly formed Department of Homeland Security had begun issuing threat levels based on a five-color scale. I happened to remember that the most recent warning was amber, but I couldn’t remember exactly what degree of menace that color was meant to indicate.
I watched Bernie fumble through his pockets and finally pull out a orange pill container.
“Never in my fucking life did I think twice before entering a building,” he said. “It never even occurred to me that they could collapse. But after digging through layers of rubble, finding fragments of bone and pulped human flesh, it’s hard for me to ever see these buildings the same way.”
“How else can you see them?”
“Like giant Cuisinarts just waiting to slice and dice us.”
From the sweat on his brow I could see he wasn’t kidding.
“If you want to wait here,” I said. “I can go up and talk to the supervisor. It’s safe. I’ll come right back down and no one will be any the wiser.” Frankly, I was tired of dealing with him and I knew nothing dangerous would happen in this giant parked spaceship.
“I know I haven’t been very patient with you,” he said. “But you’re a good partner, Gladyss.”
It was the kindest thing he’d ever said to me. He slipped the pills back in his pocket, patted me on the shoulder, and led the way into the elevator as though walking to his death.