American Devil (17 page)

‘Under the revised release accreditation guidance, halfway units need to ensure secure monitoring arrangements for category three releases.’

‘We don’t worry about curfews and in-and-outs. They look after themselves.’

‘I need to see Mr Carlisle’s room and access arrangements.’

‘Well, he’s in Room 52, so go and help yourself. The access arrangements are right there.’ Her eyes fell to the desk and her extended arm pointed to the door which seemed to be permanently wedged open.

‘The
National Enquirer
more important to you than the rehabilitation of your residents?’

Miss Adams looked up. ‘Yeah, just about in every way, Doctor.’ She turned over the page.

Dr Keys was genuinely angry with her, but he wanted to keep his anger from getting spoiled, so he looked around for something. He saw her open bag and a faded Volvo key fob. He had information now. She drove an old Volvo. Information was useful. He walked to the stairs and followed a series of green plastic signs leading the way to the rooms.

At Room 52, Dr Keys stopped. Winston Carlisle’s door was wide open and he was lying on the bed staring ahead. Dr Keys entered without knocking.

‘Hello, Winston. I’m Dr Keys from the Manhattan Psychiatric Center. I need to have a conversation with you. We need to do a little work on your rehabilitation.’

Winston held out his hand without looking and Dr Keys shook it. He then leaned forward and handed Winston a small plastic vial.

‘I need a sample, Winston.’

Winston stood up without question and took the small bottle. ‘You gonna let me go back to the hospital?’ he asked as he unzipped himself and urinated into the small bottle.

‘If you’re good I will,’ said Dr Keys.

‘I’m invisible out here. No one sees me. I can just walk right through them.’

‘Well, I can make you visible again, Winston. Don’t you worry.’

Winston nodded. Dr Keys sat down on a small side table and took out a notebook. ‘I’ve got some things I need to go through with you. It’s all in the name of rehabilitation. It’s a new approach to help guys like you reintegrate. What we do, Winston, is ask you to follow some of those urges of yours under close supervision. We monitor your testosterone levels each week and see if there’s a pattern.’

‘You want me to follow my urges?’

‘That’s right, Winston. What we will try to do is watch you and monitor how you act out here in the real world. Then we can see if we understand you a little better. Are you interested?’

Winston stared for a moment and then nodded. ‘I guess.’

Forty minutes later, Dr Keys walked out of the halfway house and took a quick turn around the perimeter of the building. Winston was an obedient patient. He would do as he was told. It was looking like a very good choice. Dr Keys was pleased. Before he left, he had enough time to find the only Volvo in the parking lot and, therefore, the car belonging to Miss Adams.

He took out a small thin blade from his pocket, slipped it under the hood then yanked the engine cover open. He quickly identified the brake feed and cut a nick in the pipe. That would give her perhaps another three hours of driving before, hopefully, she paralysed herself driving across a red light.

 

H
arper and Eddie took the news from the Medical Examiner back to Williamson and the team. The cherry blossom hidden in Amy’s throat and now inside Jessica showed the killer was enjoying setting a little puzzle for the cops. Harper wondered if the killer was starting his next phase. He had started to communicate with the police and media by posing the corpse and hiding his signature cherry blossom.

Harper took the Mary-Jane file from Williamson’s desk and began looking for some evidence to back up his idea that her killing had not been planned. It took him about an hour to read through the key documents and they seemed to confirm what he’d thought. He took out the interview with Mary-Jane’s school principal. She said that Mary-Jane had left school at 1 p.m. that day, just after the end of the morning session, as she’d forgotten an essay. The killer could not have known that, could he? If he didn’t know that she was going to be home then it might have been a chance meeting. He might have been scoping out her apartment. Harper took out the report from A-Z Security, the company responsible for the elaborate entry procedure at the Samuelson building. It showed that someone entered the apartment on Mrs Samuelson’s card at 12.30 p.m., half an hour before Mary-Jane left for home.

That was the evidence he needed. The killer was in her apartment. He hadn’t followed her in. He didn’t expect her to return. This guy was an obsessive stalker with multiple targets who needed to get closer and closer to his victims just to keep the buzz alive. He felt the need to get so close that he touched them up in the street, took things they owned and even tried to snoop around where they lived and get intimate shots. Then, he took it one step further. He wanted to be in Mary-Jane’s bedroom. He needed to be there, so he broke in. Harper let the situation come to life in his mind. He had been wrong to think that the killer was stalking her that day. How else would the killer know she’d left school early? He didn’t know, did he? She came back early, he was in her room. He saw her. She screamed. He panicked and grabbed her. She had no idea he was a killer and fought hard, but he’d held her easily. He was strong. Nothing was overturned in her apartment, but she had bruises all over her body. The autopsy had found his skin under her fingernails. She had fought him.

He had to stop her or his whole plan would fail. He put his hands round her neck. He just kept them there until she stopped breathing.

Harper knew he was right. That was what happened. An accident. An unfortunate coincidence that he chose to steal into her room on the day she had forgotten her homework and slipped back at lunchtime.

An accident had triggered all his fantasies. And he’d liked it. Christ, he’d really got a taste for it.

Harper had an idea about what they might do. A long shot, but he needed to talk this through with someone who understood criminal behaviour. He needed Dr Levene’s input.

 

Forty minutes later, Harper hurried up the corridor towards Denise Levene’s office. He needed someone to show him how to unlock the symbols. He pushed straight through the office door and looked directly at her. ‘He didn’t mean to kill Mary-Jane. She disturbed him. I want to know the implications for his behaviour.’

Denise stared up at Harper with a look of surprise. She pointed across to the chair in the middle of the room. ‘I’m with a client, Tom.’

‘Did you not hear me? We need to talk now. He’s killing every couple of days. Grace Frazer on November 14, Amy Lloyd-Gardner on November 16. He killed again last night.’

‘Yeah, I heard it on the radio this morning. Can you give me a moment, Tom? I’m with someone.’

Tom moved towards her desk. ‘How is he keeping up the pace? Psychologically? Is it possible? I’ve never known anything like it.’

Denise stood up and walked round her desk. She smiled at her client, a rookie officer who was now looking more terrified than ever, and put her hand softly on Tom’s shoulder. ‘Can you just step outside for a moment and let me wrap up here?’

Tom only then noticed the cowering figure looking lost in the big black leather chair. He apologized and retreated.

Outside her office, Tom paced. The need to move was more powerful than anything else. He needed to do something. The killer needed to be engaged or flushed out. With the profiler at the New York field office going cold on the case and refusing to take a line, the team was left with old-fashioned detective work - piecing together every piece of available information and looking for something that linked the bodies and crime scenes with the identity of the unsub. But Harper knew, just as the rest of the team knew, that that took time and it was just dawning on them that time was something the killer was using against them. He was leaving them no time to assimilate and process the details before he struck again.

Harper picked up a magazine, flicked through it absently and then threw it back down on the glass table. He looked at his watch, and then, right beside it, the thick green attitude band that Denise Levene had somehow got him to agree to wear at the end of the last session. He put it on after the fiasco at Erin Nash’s apartment. Denise was right, he got angry a lot. Now he was feeling the anger burning up inside him, so he pulled the elastic back and let it slap hard against his wrist. It twanged and stung. He did it once more. Yeah, it distracted him momentarily.

Denise appeared at the door of her office with the rookie, who made a big detour as he walked away to avoid Tom Harper’s great brooding figure. Denise was feeling excited rather than annoyed. The case had been keeping her awake since Tom had talked about it the previous morning and now he was here unprompted. She’d pieced together what she knew about the killer but she needed detailed crime scene information if she was going to be able to help. Maybe Tom Harper would fill in some of the missing pieces.

She beckoned him into her office. She saw his right hand twisting the attitude band and smiled. ‘How’s the anger management?’

‘I’m still angry,’ he said.

She shook her head with mock disapproval. ‘I know what you’re going to tell me.’

‘What?’

‘You didn’t twang.’

‘I feel stupid twanging.’

‘But if you don’t twang, there’s no psychological movement. There’s no learning. Listen . . .’

Tom smiled broadly. He couldn’t help it. He liked it when she was earnest, even if he didn’t buy into all the CBT shit. Still smiling, he twanged, looking directly into her eyes. Then he twanged again.

‘Yeah, yeah, I get it, you’re thinking I’m just a quack with stupid ideas.’

‘I need to talk about the case, not myself,’ he said.

‘Okay. Talk me through the victims.’

‘He disempowers them by force or fear, then he rapes them and tortures them. His preferred method of killing them is asphyxiation. Then he takes something.’ Tom paused. ‘He took Mary-Jane Samuelson’s eyes, Grace Frazer’s hair, Amy Lloyd-Gardner’s heart, Jessica Pascal’s breasts. He poses them. Mary and Grace were posed to humiliate, with their legs apart. He posed Amy and Jessica in quasi-religious poses and added a line of poetry to each. He leaves cherry blossom at every scene. Sorry. It’s not nice.’

Levene pulled her Powerbook across the glass table and clicked a couple of times. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I want to help you get back out there and catch this monster. You know my research. We were trying to detect early neurological signs in these killers, so I spent time working with these guys.’

‘What happened?’

‘If I’m honest, I couldn’t handle seeing them close up. Hey, Tom, just so you know - I’ve got baggage that would put yours to shame. I’m just better at the makeover than you are. All I’m saying is that I got to know a thing or two about profiling killers. That’s why I took this job, to find out more about them from you guys.’

‘A profile can’t work in all cases. This guy defies profiling.’

‘Maybe, maybe not. The key is, Tom, to isolate the important points from the noise.’

‘How?’

‘Look, your killer is working on all kinds of different levels. He’s taking psychological reminders, he’s hiding himself from the victims, he’s sexualizing and degrading them, he’s also romancing them and then giving them some afterlife. It’s a lot of detail.’

‘Don’t we know it.’

‘Look, we just got to work facts and deductions from facts. Deductions, you know - necessary factual conclusions, not guesses.’

‘I get you. If you can work up a profile, we can see if we can use it. But I need something else.’

‘What?’

‘I got a strong feeling that Mary-Jane wasn’t premeditated.’ He paused and looked across to her. ‘I think he’s been getting closer to these women and he broke into Mary-Jane’s apartment to be near to her stuff, maybe even take something. But she came back unexpectedly, and then I think things went bad.’

‘In many cases I’ve studied, the killer isn’t sure what he’s going to do until he interacts with the victim. It depends on the victim’s reaction. Sometimes the killer sees no way out except by silencing them, especially if they struggle. It can trigger a very aggressive reaction. It’s self-protection.’

‘But he got a taste. He liked it.’

‘Yeah, this guy really liked it.’

‘The thing I’m thinking, Denise, is this. If I’m right, then we’ve got a piece of useful information about him. You know, something that we might use to lure him in, maybe even get him to speak to us. You think that’s possible?’

‘You want to interact with him?’

‘There’s a greater chance of finding him if we can get him to talk to us. I want to know if he’s responding to what we say. Can you help with this?’

‘Yeah, but I’ve got to understand him a little better.’

‘Okay, what do you need?’

She smiled thinly. ‘You give me the case files and as a quid pro quo I will try my damnedest to resolve your aggression against women. Not, of course, your aggression against me, which is textbook defensiveness for your psychological weakness. By the look on your face, you’d say that isn’t what’s wrong with you, but I’m here to tell you that’s what you’ve done with all that sadness. Turned it to something hard and unpleasant.’

Tom stared at her. It felt like a relief to hear someone identify things he didn’t dare identify for himself. ‘Okay. We have a deal. I’ll get you the files, but based on what you’ve heard so far, how do you read him?’

‘Well, first off, your killer is focusing on the key romantic symbols from his women. Eyes, hair, heart, breasts - they all have romantic symbolism. He’s afraid of the power that women - or a particular woman - have over him. What they make him feel. He’s afraid of the effect they have on him. If he’s a stalker, then he needs to control not only the women, but the way they excite him. He can go to them or their artefacts or pictures whenever he wants. He wants to neutralize the real threat, though, because he’s been hurt and humiliated by them. You’re looking for someone with a problem relating to strong women. If he’s in a long-term relationship it’ll be with someone weak. He’s smart, too. He’s someone who would be able to hide all of this from the person he lives with.’