88 Killer (3 page)

Chapter Four

Apartment, Lower Manhattan

March 7, 7.04 a.m.

D
enise Levene lay alone in her bed, staring up at the ceiling. Everything about her had changed. She used to leave her clothes all over the room, for one, but now her whole apartment was obsessively neat; even her shoes stood in an orderly line in the closet and there wasn’t so much as a sock on the floor.

It suggested an ordered mind. And that’s how she wanted it to look.

She felt just like a dam wall trying to stop the waters from breaking through. She knew she could neither fight nor outrun the panic attacks. The best she could do was to try to distract herself. But she could feel fears looming – the black thoughts that had started to seep through from her dreams into the new day.

She held the memories at bay for several minutes. Then a half-thought appeared.
His face in the shadows
. And suddenly she was in the dungeon again and the whole fragile world seemed in danger of splitting open.

Denise threw back the duvet and stood up. Movement helped. She rushed through to the utility room, took her sweat-pants from the basket and pulled them on, then an old tank top. She put on a hoodie and her old sneakers and ran out of the apartment, slamming the door, heading fast down the eight flights of stairs.

Then she was out in the street gulping air. The sense of terror was intense; she felt a momentary release, but she had only avoided it for a moment – the panic was still chasing her down. She felt the thoughts hiding somewhere in her mind, just behind her eyes, waiting.

Denise sprinted up the street, avoiding the look of anonymous faces, hearing only the rumble of the city and feeling only the morning chill. Her feet pounded with long strides and her heart raced. She turned south and headed across the Brooklyn Bridge, out to the projects – the destitute parts of Brooklyn where she had grown up.

On the street her head continued to swarm with dark thoughts. The fears returned, but so did the image of Tom Harper, the man she’d once admired. She could no longer deal with him in the aftermath – and as much as he tried to contact her and talk, she just flat out refused. Tom Harper had been cut off. Daniel, her boyfriend, was another casualty. He’d stayed around long enough to know she had changed, then he took the dog and moved someplace else. Denise didn’t feel much about it.

She hit the ground hard, pushing her muscles as far as she could, and kept it going, thirty seconds, forty seconds, a minute . . . her heart rate soaring, her mind blank. It was working. She kept it up for another minute and then slowed her pace and settled into a rhythm, feeling the sweat start to form around her hairline and down her back.

Her therapist called it ‘acting out’. To escape the panic, she had to put herself in danger out there on the streets. Because the danger made sense, and the fear of the outside world didn’t seem as bad as the terror inside. The pain of burning muscles was nothing to the memories that left her choking on her own silence.

She knew the theory. As a psychologist herself, she had trained and taught at Columbia, then re-trained as a police therapist for the NYPD. She knew far too much about radical trauma and its manifestations. In medical terms, she knew what she was. In layman’s terms, she was a basket case, running away from fear, losing touch with everything and everyone.

She ran for an hour then arrived back exhausted but calmed. She stopped across the street and stared at a car outside her building. It wasn’t one she’d noticed before. She saw the window ajar and smoke twirling from inside and felt a stab of panic.

‘You’re being a freak, Denise. Stop it. It’s just a car.’ She tried to move but her limbs refused to obey. She looked around, feeling self-conscious as she stood paralyzed on the sidewalk, the sweat beginning to roll off her.

Two long minutes passed. Denise could make out two forms in the car. Two men, possibly. She twisted her fingers together as she looked at the door to her building. The car was parked illegally. She could see the two men looking around. They were waiting for somebody. She had to do something about this debilitating fear. After the abduction, Harper had given her the name of a specialist – a guy called Mac who he said could help her. She’d dismissed it at the time, but she’d always kept his number. Denise pulled out her cell phone and dialed. There was just an answerphone message giving the times of the classes and the address.

Denise had wanted to speak to a person. She needed help. She’d done so much herself and come a long way, but she needed to walk around without fear. She finally talked herself into crossing the street. She planned to keep her head straight, keep tight to the building and make her way inside immediately.

As soon as she started to walk past the car, the two doors opened. They must have been checking their mirrors. Denise jerked to a halt. She wanted to react well, to appear normal, but it sent a shiver right through her and her eyes shifted about for an escape route.

The two people were out of the car quickly, both medium height, purposeful, tidily dressed. Their quick eyes and languid movements told her that these were cops or gangsters, but most likely cops.

‘Miss Levene,’ said one of them.

Denise didn’t speak, she just nodded slightly.

The first cop held out his shield. He had obviously sensed her apprehension.

‘Sorry to jump out like that. Detective Munroe, Missing Persons.’

Denise looked at the second officer. She’d been wrong. It wasn’t a man, but a tall athletic woman with broad shoulders.

‘Detective Gauge,’ she said, smiling.

Denise was standing and sweating, aware that she looked like a car-crash victim.

‘What do you want?’ she said firmly.

‘You’re hard to get hold of, Miss Levene.’

‘Am I?’

Detective Sarah Gauge had warm brown eyes and a way of holding people’s attention. She stepped forward, her gestures open and non-aggressive. ‘I failed, if the truth be told, Miss Levene. I tried calling you, but you never pick up. I came round here three times, you never answer your buzzer.’

Denise Levene stared at them both. Still distrustful. ‘I wondered who was calling,’ she said. ‘Most people stopped trying a month back. I don’t socialize much.’

‘We need to talk to you,’ said Detective Munroe. ‘If that’s possible.’

‘About what? I’m not a missing person, I’m just not very good company.’

Detective Munroe opened his hands, showed both palms. ‘We just need your help. Can we come inside, Miss Levene? It’d be good to talk to you.’

‘It’s Dr Levene, for the record.’

‘We’re aware of your academic qualifications, Doctor. My apologies.’

‘You must be desperate to look me up. Someone at the NYPD send you?’

Munroe shook his head. ‘We can tell you more inside.’

Denise tried to imagine why they were there. ‘You’re both from Missing Persons?’

‘Right.’

Denise looked up. The city was concrete gray under a pale blue sky. The traffic was rushing by in a frenzied continuous strain. The sweat was turning cold on her skin. She turned back to Sarah Gauge. ‘So, who’s missing?’

Gauge glanced at Munroe then cleared her throat. ‘You heard of Abby Goldenberg? The missing schoolgirl, Abby?’

‘No,’ said Denise. ‘Should I have?’

‘It’s been on the news. She went missing a week ago.’

‘I don’t watch much TV.’ Denise hadn’t heard of Abby, but the name Goldenberg rang a bell somewhere in her memory.

‘Kind of cut yourself off,’ said Munroe. He pushed a finger in one ear and scratched. ‘It’s not a solution.’

‘You’d know this?’ said Denise. ‘Because you’re a psychiatrist, right? Forgive me, I didn’t realize.’

Munroe’s lips formed a half-smile. ‘No, lady, I’m no shrink. It’s common sense. No one learned to ride again by hiding from a horse.’

‘Yeah, well, what I do is up to me, right?’ said Denise.

‘Sure, but—’

She held up her hand, cutting him off. She walked past both detectives and opened the heavy glass door of her building. Munroe and Gauge followed her in. ‘I apologize for being so persistent,’ said Munroe, ‘but a girl’s life is at stake here. We need your help.’

‘I’m on the eighth floor. You can take the elevator. I’ll meet you there.’ Denise went towards the stairs.

‘You’re taking the stairs eight floors?’ said Gauge. ‘You on some fitness program?’

‘I don’t take elevators,’ said Denise. The door to the stairway closed behind her. She was sheeted in sweat. The brief conversation had not been easy for her. The two cops looked at each other and Munroe pressed for the elevator. ‘What’s with her?’ said Gauge.

‘The killer held her underground for two days,’ said Munroe. ‘Only way in or out of her prison was an elevator shaft.’

Chapter Five

Diner, East Harlem

March 7, 8.07 a.m.

H
e 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.