88 Killer (5 page)

Chapter Nine

East 112th Street

March 7, 9.28 a.m.

H
arper spotted his team further up the alleyway, congregating as close to the corpse as possible, as if the lifeless body would somehow reveal the secrets of the crime as long as they got in tight enough. Harper knew that they weren’t just clinging to the case, but that they were standing around the corpse clinging to the fragments of the victim’s humanity.

Detectives Garcia, Greco, Ratten and Swanson, the other four members of Blue Team, were talking in brief sentences and looking around. No detailed forensics work going on – just experienced cops getting a feel for what had happened. Looking for the story, talking down options, trading insults and jokes. Each of them opening their account on the next dead body.

Harper moved towards his team. ‘They’re going crazy over there,’ he said. ‘The media said this is Judge Capske’s son David. Has anyone ID’d our victim?’

‘Can’t do it. Take a look for yourself. Can’t tell who it is.’

Garcia stopped as he saw Harper’s face. ‘Lafayette gave you the lead looking like that? You look like shit,’ he said. ‘And for the record, you fight like shit.’

‘I’m leading this, that’s right,’ said Harper. It was going to be a day of soaking up the jibes and jokes.

Harper looked at the ground. There was a spread of white powder on the wet asphalt, with three or four small wraps, torn open. ‘The email to the networks said this is a political statement. That might or might not be true. Could be drug-related. A gang maybe? You know of any gangs with a barbed-wire calling card? Maybe it’s some anti-drug thing. Vigilantes? Who the hell does this?’

‘Never heard it used,’ said Garcia, ‘but, who knows, there’s new gangs forming all the time.’

‘Anyone going to ID this corpse?’ said Harper. ‘The reporters are going to break through sooner rather than later.’

‘We can’t get near the body. It’s wound up tight. Crime Scene are just finished and the Deputy Coroner is on his way.’

Harper looked down the alleyway. ‘I’m going to take a look.’

‘Has anyone checked whether the body is infected?’ Eddie joked. ‘Our lead detective is carrying open wounds.’

Harper and Eddie walked towards the corpse, looking down at the body covered with a bloodstained sheet, the breeze lifting the edges and rippling the white cotton. A pair of bright white sneakers, spotted with black circles of dried blood, stuck out from under the sheet.

‘Small feet,’ said Eddie. He turned to Harper. ‘How you feeling?’

‘Don’t ask. Let’s take a close up.’

‘Out of the way, people, we got the Cyclops coming through.’

‘Concentrate, Eddie,’ spat Harper.

‘The humor is medicine, man.’ Eddie patted Harper’s back. ‘Humor is the door out of the dungeon, that’s all it is.’

Harper moved towards the body. ‘Gerry,’ he shouted. ‘Get back to the precinct and find out everything you can about Judge Capske.’

Gerry Ratten nodded. ‘Already done a quick search on my phone. He’s the judge who shut down that New York local radio station after one of the shock jocks made death threats against the anti-gun lobby.’

Harper considered it. ‘So this could be a political hit. We need to know more. Go and dig, Gerry. Find out what you can about David Capske too. Call me the second you got something. We’re going to have to speak to the press within the hour.’

‘I’m on it,’ called Gerry, heading towards his car.

Harper glanced about. ‘Garcia. Go and question the networks. I need to know what time the information came in. The exact message. Get me what you can.’ Harper paused. ‘Jesus.’

‘What is it?’ asked Garcia.

‘Looks like some Colombian drug deal gone wrong. We’re in fucking East Harlem.’ He stared down at the wraps. ‘Not enough to kill for, surely, but maybe they’re just trying to smear Capske’s family. Shit, if this is a political execution, then the organization responsible wants it known. Garcia, find out if any political organization has made any previous statement against Judge Capske.’ Harper felt nauseous as he stared across the bloody asphalt. The whole alleyway was a big stage for someone’s hatred. ‘This set-up is too good for some gangbangers,’ he said to Eddie Kasper.

‘Premeditated,’ said Eddie. ‘Unless the gangs have started to carry barbed wire around with them.’

Harper stood for a moment in the dark of the alley trying to readjust his sight. He looked at the water that was still pooled in parts of the ground. ‘Was it raining last night?’

‘Yeah, some time early morning. Why do you ask?’

‘Just find out for me. It’s still wet in here, but the streets out there are pretty dry.’

‘Not much of a breeze to dry it off down here.’

Harper stared at Eddie, then he noticed something. ‘You were in those clothes at the fight. Same stupid T-shirt.’

‘They make a good outfit,’ said Eddie. ‘Tried and tested.’

Harper nodded. Then he recalled the blanket on his armchair in the apartment. ‘You didn’t go home, did you? You were sitting in my apartment all night.’

‘Hey, Harps, don’t go fantasizing! I got a life to lead,’ Eddie said and flapped a hand in the air.

Harper smiled briefly, then looked at the scene in front of him. Two different stories were forming in his head. The location, presence of drugs, reported gunshot and the victim’s white sneakers all pointed to a gangland drug shooting. The barbed wire and the presence of the TV crews, the possible killing of a judge’s son, all suggested someone with a bigger and possibly political agenda. But there was a third story forming in his head and it was an even worse one.

In the alley, the rain still sat in droplets all over the plastic trash sacks. Harper looked down at the body, at the shoulder of the victim peeping out from under the red and white sheet. The jacket hadn’t dried off, either. Harper kicked a piece of trash away from the victim’s legs and then reached out and pulled off the white sheet.

Harper stared down at the strange sight. The body had been tightly wound in barbed wire; it was so thick that most of the man within was hidden. There were so many cuts that the victim’s clothes were all completely dark from the blood. The barbed wire continued over the victim’s face and head. Harper moved in close with a flashlight. Many of the barbs were bent.

‘That’s some cruel work,’ he said to Eddie. ‘And the body’s been rolled about, by the look of things.’ He snapped the latex glove on his right hand and crouched by the corpse. He touched the barbed wire, its metallic surface hard against the softness of flesh. He spanned his hand between the barbs. ‘Galvanized steel. The barbs are approximately seven and a half centimeters apart; each barb is two centimeters long. Nasty. He’s got to be full of hundreds of holes.’

Through the gaps in the wire, Harper could see how the barbs had gone in deep and torn the flesh. The ground was covered in blood, seeping in every direction, smeared as the body was rolled or moved. The victim had clearly been alive for most of this ordeal, while his poor heart kept pumping fresh blood to the wounds. Someone was pushing this body around, possibly enjoying hearing the victim’s cries of pain.

Harper tried to understand. He searched Eddie’s face. ‘This is some mean bastard. Are we sure that no one heard this? This victim must have been in excruciating pain. Eddie, I want a ground team talking to every person in these blocks. Someone heard this man dying. Probably lots of them heard it. Shake these people and shake them hard. I don’t want any of the usual shit. Someone heard this man and I need to know about it.’

Eddie nodded and walked across to a heap of trash sacks. ‘I’ll set it up. Hey, Harper, have a look at these trash bags. Might just be some hobo, but it looks like someone’s been sitting here.’

Harper looked around. ‘Sitting and watching, maybe. Why? Torture? Punishment?’ He let the thoughts move around his mind. Felt something come to the surface. ‘It’s like a body-cage, isn’t it? Close containment, right?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Once the vic is wrapped in wire, he’s absolutely powerless. Our killer or killers might have enjoyed the complete control. Enjoyed watching the victim suffer. Sitting there, shining a light, maybe, waiting until he bled out.’

Harper found a patch of skin close to the temple that was not covered with blood. ‘Whoever it is, they’re Caucasian,’ he said. ‘I can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman.’

Harper’s sight wasn’t great, with his bruised eye, but he slowly moved his good eye over the barbed wire, seeing if there was anything more he could detect. He was looking for the gunshot. At the forehead, he stopped.

‘The wire’s broken here. It’s pretty blackened but I think I’ve found an entrance wound. Small caliber. Maybe nine millimeters.’ Harper looked at the hole. Something wasn’t quite right about it. ‘Very clean wound,’ he said. ‘Lots of gas burn. The barrel was pretty tight to his head.’

Eddie came across and leaned over Harper’s shoulder. ‘What’s your story so far?’

Harper thought for a moment. ‘No question about whether the vic was killed here. The killer rolled the body, kicked it about, watched the vic die slowly, waited for the blood loss to take him to the very edge, then shot him to make sure. That’s how it looks to me.’

Harper looked around. The ground was marked with the scrapings of metal on asphalt. ‘We could probably get some sense of what happened if we tracked these scratches and blood smears. Looks like he rolled the body the whole way down the alley. He starts bleeding about a third of the way in and with each roll, more of the barbs dig in.’

As Harper knelt again and cast his eyes up the alleyway, Swanson walked across. ‘Never seen nothing like this before, Harper.’

‘Me neither. He might have taken the victim out of the trunk of a car, but he rolled him in the alley. You can see the marks left by the barbs. Some business, that.’

‘Soles of his shoes will be cut up, right? He can’t have been using his hands, can he?’

‘Right. Eddie also thinks that he was sitting on the trash bags.’

‘Cold bastards,’ said Swanson. ‘One guy couldn’t do this. This is a two- or three-man job.’

Harper thought for a moment. ‘Could be, but I got a single gunshot wound to the forehead. My take is that the killer sat waiting, watching his victim cry out in pain, then, at some point, executed him.’

‘
Killers
, don’t you mean?’

‘I don’t see any evidence of multiple killers but I’m not ruling anything out.’

‘To roll a man in barbed wire would take a team of men.’

Harper scanned the scene. ‘You could be right. Let’s see what Crime Scene can tell us.’

‘Shit,’ said Eddie. ‘I hate it when you get all mystical. Is Swanson right or not?’

‘This is the thing,’ said Harper. He took a moment, as if allowing his thoughts to settle into some kind of order. ‘It could be a hit, it could be a drug shooting or it could be some political revenge. There’s a lot of overkill. There’s passion and hatred here.’ He tried to imagine the killer, working at night, a roll of barbed wire at his side, a man screaming in pain, a maniac sitting on some wet sacks watching.

‘Drug wars? Some kind of revenge gang kill? Trying to make out they’re fearless?’ asked Swanson. ‘You know how it goes, building a reputation.’

‘Maybe, but the body’s white, there’s drugs left all over the ground, and look at those hands, too. Not someone who’s done much manual work.’ Harper leaned further down and looked at the four fingers of the right hand. He lifted them and then looked up. ‘Index finger shorter than the ring finger. Probably a male victim. Whoever did it is a sadist, for one thing. He’s theatrical, for another. And this isn’t his first kill.’ Harper sniffed. ‘I don’t think he or they are finished, do you?’

He put his hand under the corpse. The ground was dry. Harper started to calculate. The dry ground and wet clothes gave them a timeframe. It depended on when the rain started. ‘We need to officially ID this body,’ he said. ‘Check that Crime Scene have finished, Eddie, and get some wire cutters.’ Eddie moved off down the alleyway, leaving Harper and Swanson.

Harper kept re-telling the story from different angles. But every time, there was something missing. It was Harper’s way – you tell the best story you can, then you pull the story to pieces. Then you start again. Over and over until some threads remained.

Eddie reappeared with wire cutters, the Deputy Coroner with him. The latter shook his head. ‘Some business.’ He knelt down. ‘CSU have cleared the scene. If you want to find out his ID, we need to cut this wire.’

‘We’d appreciate it,’ said Harper. ‘Press have already been given a name.’

They watched as the DC snapped at the wire around the head of the corpse. With each cut, he carefully pulled back the wire. After a few minutes he’d exposed a blackened and bloody face. ‘It’s a guy,’ he said.

The men stared in silence, an acknowledgment of the pain etched on the young man’s face. The DC cut a line down to the chest. He pulled back the wires and reached into the jacket pocket. He fished out a wallet. ‘We’ve got something here,’ he said and passed it to Harper.

Harper opened up the wallet, which held one thousand dollars in fifties. He picked out a driver’s license. The photograph showed a cheerful face surrounded by a mop of black curly hair. Then he saw the name.

‘Okay,’ said Harper. ‘It’s David Capske, which means that we have got to work fast. This has been labeled political so the Feds and Counter-Terrorism will already be applying pressure at Headquarters trying to pull this from us. Everyone’s going to want to know what happened here and why.’

‘What do you need from me?’ asked the DC.

‘Can you give this top priority for me? I want the autopsy within the next few hours. I need that bullet and anything else you can tell me.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said the DC. ‘Dr Pense will handle it.’

Harper looked at the black curly hair sticking out between strands of barbed wire. ‘Someone’s tortured and executed the son of a judge and they’re very proud of themselves. It’s not going to end here.’

Chapter Ten

East New York

March 7, 10.22 a.m.

T
he drive took forty-five minutes in all. Denise sat in silence, ignoring the ramblings of the cab driver. She was unable to explain why she was still feeling so scared. Her therapy wasn’t giving her what she wanted. Tom Harper had made the suggestion about Mac right after her ordeal. It had seemed stupid at the time. It had made her angry. Three months later, still terrified by people at her own apartment and unable to answer her own door, Denise needed to move on.

Tom had wanted to help, not with fancy theories but in a practical way. Denise stared ahead as the cab turned off the street. The out-of-town warehouse in the timber yard was at the end of a pitted road. The car rocked from side to side.

The cab pulled over. The whole place was deserted. There was no sign over the door and no indication of what this place was. ‘This is the address you gave. You sure this is where you want to go?’

Denise pushed a twenty through the glass and nodded. She got out of the car and stood on the rough ground. As soon as she was out, the cab driver put his car into gear and drove away.

Denise watched the car’s brake lights as it slowed at the junction and then headed into the distance. She breathed as she’d taught herself and looked around. It was an open space in the middle of unfamiliar and run-down buildings. She didn’t feel good at all. And there was only one way out – through the unmarked black door. The cab had gone, there was nowhere else to go.

She knew Harper must have felt secure about this place and with that knowledge she started towards the door. The fear was growing inside her, a dark anxiety that had felt so close for months now. She tried to hold it back and looked up ahead.

There was no bell or buzzer, just a sheet of steel in peeling black paint. She pulled it open. It grated on an old metal runner. The sound shot right through her. Metal on metal. She knew that from the dungeon. She held the door and her breath.

There were no lights in the corridor, so she walked in and followed a narrow path around to the right. She stared ahead, where two dim yellow lamps lit the way. By the time she made it to the end of the corridor, Denise’s heart was pounding. She came to another door and pulled it open.

A line of steel steps led down to a large warehouse space. In the strange space, there was a car parked next to a van, a small gym set up on one side, a few concrete stairs leading nowhere and a doorway just like in a house. All around were different scenes that looked like some fire sale from a film set. She looked at each in turn. The mood was strangely foreboding.

Denise descended the steps and called out, ‘Hello?’ Her voice echoed against the huge tin roof. From a door across the room, a man appeared. He looked up at Denise. He took her in slowly.

‘I’m D—’

‘Don’t tell me a thing.’

‘Tom Harper gave me your name.’

‘I said not a thing. You don’t owe me an explanation.’

Standing on the last step, Denise stared back at him. The man was rough-looking. About five feet eight in height, big and strong across the shoulders, hands like spades and a mean look in his eyes. She didn’t like him. He was tattooed across his biceps and neck.

‘Get in here.’

He walked back through the door. Denise stood for a minute. She climbed back up the stairs, took three or four paces and then stopped again. What was she going to do? Sit in the yard and cry? She knew that she couldn’t be in danger. Tom would never send her into that kind of situation. She turned round and felt the steel under her feet as she made her way down.

Across the floor, the door was half open. She opened it and looked in. The short guy with the attitude was sitting on an old pommel horse in front of a group of seven women and one man. They were all hunkered down on the floor. The guy on the pommel horse pointed to the floor. Denise walked across and sat down.

‘First things first. You never trust me, ever.’ The guy jumped down off the horse and addressed his little group. ‘Welcome, victims. I don’t know why you’re here or what happened to you, but I know by looking into your sorry faces that you have ignored your birthright.’

The guy stepped towards the group. They shied away in unison. ‘You, lady,’ he said, pointing at Denise. ‘Stand up.’

Denise stood. This was clearly some kind of self-help group. Not the sort of thing she thought Harper would have been involved with.

‘Where are your eyes, victim?’

‘I don’t understand the question.’

The guy moved two fingers up to her eyeballs. ‘Where are my fingers coming from?’

‘In front of me.’

‘And what if I come from here?’ He moved his hand round behind her ear.

‘I can’t see them.’

‘Here?’ he said again, moving his hand behind her head.

‘I can’t see them.’

‘So tell me, victim, if you were meant to be scared of predators, where the hell would God put your eyes?’

‘The side of my head so I could see them coming.’

‘Fucking exactly. Go to the top of the class.’

‘Can I sit down?’

‘No, victim, you cannot.’ He leaned in close. He smelled of two-day-old sweat and stale beer. Denise veered away.

‘You don’t like my smell?’

‘No.’

‘You think a rapist is going to smell sweet? Going to get all washed and put on his best cologne? You better get used to the thing you’re going to learn to fight.’

Denise couldn’t speak.

‘I’m a pig, because that’s what you’ve come to me for – to get rid of that stench he left on you. Am I right?’

Denise stared ahead.

‘I said, AM I RIGHT?’ He shouted hard, close up to Denise.

‘Yes,’ she said and looked down at her feet, her heart thumping.

‘Sit back down, victim.’

He walked around the group, his eyes moving from person to person. ‘We got work to do, victims. A lot of work. But you’ve all come here from something bad and you all don’t like where it left you and I’ll tell you why you don’t like it. You’re not prairie rabbits. You’re not cattle or deer or ducks. You don’t like being victims, people, because you are not
made
to be victims. You know what you are, people? No? I didn’t think so. You’re
predators
. Each and every one of you. Predators who have nothing to fear in the world but other predators. And you know what? Predators shouldn’t ever be afraid. That’s why your eyes sit right up there on the front of your skull. Front and center, to measure the distance between you and your prey accurately. You’re made to hunt and kill and cause fear and maximum damage. You’re not made to anticipate attacks and defend yourself. So I’m here to turn you back into predators. You understand? So sit down, listen and learn.’

Mac turned back towards the pommel horse, then stopped and faced the group. ‘People who come here want to learn how to survive. Well, this is the right place. Welcome to Predator Class, victims.’