American Devil (37 page)

‘It’s Eddie,’ he said.

‘Where is he?’

‘He’s inside pretending he loves art. It’s a surefire way to get a date.’

‘What happened to the last love of his life?’

‘Like a firework - they burn bright, but die out quick.’

Tom and Denise waited in the lobby until Eddie Kasper drifted across in a sports jacket. He was smiling.

‘Look the fuck at this,’ he said, holding up a small piece of paper. ‘I got three numbers here inside of ten minutes. This place is like some secret garden of available hotties. Why you never tell me about this place, Harps?’

‘Just as long as they didn’t ask you about the paintings,’ said Tom.

‘Fuck that, I’ve got that critical look down to a fine art. I suck my cheeks and say, well, you know, you got to ask yourself, what was the artist trying to say, you know, we got to throw our minds way back to understand all of this.’

‘Nice threads,’ said Denise, smiling at the jacket.

‘You offering your number too?’ Eddie held out his scrap of paper.

‘Only when you need therapy, which is going to be soon.’

They walked across the polished stone floors until they found a quiet room, where they sat in a line on the bench.

Harper shuffled for a moment. ‘Thanks for hearing me out a moment. Denise has been researching and working up a profile.’

Kasper nodded, ‘Least someone has. FBI profilers say that our pattern killer is too indistinct. They won’t give us a line in case it’s wrong and we point the finger their way. There’s nothing they say we can go public on. And we’ve got nothing new on the case down at the station house. The new lead, Detective Lassiter, is still clearing his throat.’

Harper half smiled. ‘Listen, they’re wrong. Denise has a profile of the guy. It’s very good. It’s based on his behaviour patterns. Imagine what his wife would see and you’ll get the picture. She’ll see a violent, preoccupied and secretive husband who shows small signs of the kills. He’ll have dirty fingernails, scratches, blood stains, and he’ll make frequent changes of clothes and stay away from home.’

Eddie looked hard at Tom. ‘You serious, Tom?’

‘Yeah, it’s a good profile.’

‘No, I mean about praising someone else for casework? Are you ill or something?’

‘Hey, I praise when it’s due, which isn’t often.’

‘Denise,’ said Eddie, ‘you need a medal for getting a good word out of this sonofabitch. Can I be the first to congratulate you?’

‘Knock it off, Eddie. Just tell us - do you think you can get Lafayette and Lassiter to go public with this? The killer’s wife knows him. She’ll recognize him. It’s a chance.’

‘We publish these telltale signs of the killer and wait until she calls? Is that what you’re saying?’ said Eddie.

‘Yeah. Exactly.’

‘I’ll try for you both. You know Lafayette thinks Denise is a good thing and Lassiter will want to look like he’s making a difference, so it might be okay.’

‘We also think that there’s more to find out about where Lottie was held for four days before she was murdered. I want to look into it,’ said Tom.

‘Why? Lottie Bixley’s got nothing to do with Sebastian.’

‘We don’t know that for sure. I found cherry blossom at the scene, which is something. In the profile, we suggest that maybe the family were away from home for the four days Lottie was held.’

‘That’s a long shot,’ said Eddie.

‘Just go with it,’ said Tom. ‘Listen, I went back through the case in my mind and we didn’t even start to do work on Lottie’s murder. We were preoccupied with the Kitty situation. Things got messy and then I was off the case. We need to speak to some people who knew Lottie. There might be some play in checking out her last movements.’

‘Maybe,’ said Eddie. ‘Denise, what do you think?’

‘We need to look into it,’ said Denise. ‘My take is that Lottie might have been an opportunity he couldn’t bear to miss, so he may have made mistakes there that we haven’t spotted.’

‘Okay,’ said Kasper. ‘I get it that Lottie is a different package. You’re saying it’s like someone likes real fine food but sometimes they just want a good old hamburger.’

‘Yeah, something like that,’ said Denise.

‘For some reason,’ said Tom, ‘whoever killed Lottie held her for four days and then discarded her quickly. We got to figure what happened.’

‘So we need to go speak to some hookers,’ said Eddie. ‘See if we can get anyone talking.’

 

On the way over to Lottie Bixley’s last known location, Eddie Kasper stopped at the station house to pass Denise’s profile to Lafayette at Blue Team. Captain Lafayette looked at it gratefully and promised to consider it carefully. He agreed that they needed something to big-up the department’s efforts after the débâcle with Winston Carlisle and this would keep the hungry mouths at One Police Plaza quiet for a day or two.

If Lafayette could get the executives to agree to the profile, every newspaper would run the short 500-word description covering her key points. The headline would read: ‘Is This Your Husband Or Boyfriend?’ There would be many across New York having sleepless nights.

 

M
arty Fox sat in his bedroom waiting for his wife to emerge from the bathroom. He’d set up a nice early lunch for them both in a quiet restaurant that he knew she liked and now they were going to do something they hadn’t done in about ten years - slip off into bed for the afternoon. Marty drank a few glasses of good wine with his meal and their conversation had turned all nostalgic - there was a time when the only woman he wanted was her, and somehow he’d remembered it as they sipped their red wine and talked about the years of struggle and good fun. Good years. Very good years. Just a little distant now.

Sitting alone, Marty was finding it difficult to concentrate. The photograph in the paper shocked the life out of him. Kitty Hunyardi, her name was, but Marty was sure it was the same girl that he’d seen on Nick’s cell phone. What the hell did it mean? He felt terrified by the prospect that Nick was involved in Kitty’s death somehow, but he kept on trying to convince himself he was mistaken. The last session with his patient, Nick had been too fucking weird. Maybe his memory was confused. Marty didn’t like weird. He liked categories so that he could file these things away, far away from his conscious mind. But he couldn’t file Nick. All that stuff about the girl called Chloe and her apparent murder. The photographs of Kitty. It was too much for Marty. Way too much. Fantasy or reality? Marty didn’t know. And then the reports of Kitty’s murder in the papers and on the news, and suddenly everywhere he fucking looked, he could see the news about a guy who stalked and followed women. A guy who was unstable. A guy who could be Nick.

Marty Fox stroked his forehead slowly. The word ‘coincidence’ was a very reassuring one in these circumstances. Yeah, he’d been running that same word around his head for a few days now. Sure, a coincidence: two unrelated events that seem connected but are only similar by chance. That’s all it was. An alignment of unconnected events. They must happen a million times a day. It was nothing at all to worry about. Nothing.

Marty started to yank off his socks. His feet had that yellowing look of a life spent too long in the dark. He looked up at the décor. Wallpaper borders of twisting roses and fake brass wall lamps. His wife’s taste was not his own, for sure, but he’d let her indulge herself. He’d passed on the responsibility. Maybe he shouldn’t have given up like that - let her have the house. Maybe that was where they began going their separate ways. Sitting there with his yellow feet, and the dizzy feeling of being overfed under the light of fake brass lamps, he felt like a failed car salesman having a bad day at a cheap motel.

Life had become a series of disappointments welded together with the hope of an affair. That’s what Marty had done to himself. Sure, for a long time he’d thought he was a smart ass to be getting so much off-limits sex, he’d even enjoyed fooling his wife, but all he was doing was pouring good old gasoline into a leaking tank.

He’d loved her so much, too. She’d been able to funnel the idiot inside him somewhere good. Without her, there was no way he would’ve got his qualifications let alone set up his practice in New York City.

Why had he thrown it away? Or, moreover, when had he thrown it away? The shock of Nick had made Marty melancholy. It’d also made him run to the one place he’d only ever wanted to be.

‘I never was good enough for you, babe,’ he said to himself in the room. ‘Maybe I just became the asshole I always thought I was.’

Marty wondered for a moment if anything in life was really and truly redeemable. If the betrayals could be undone, somehow, his failures and mistakes wiped away with a gleaming new beginning. He pulled off his trousers. He didn’t think so.

The worst thing was the fact that while his beautiful, far-too-good-for-him wife was refreshing herself in the bathroom, approaching their promised intimacy without bitterness or recriminations, all he could think of was Nick and a girl called Kitty.

Maybe Nick just happened to be around the same Kitty, maybe he wasn’t a psycho killer. Marty had even considered going to the cops. Yeah, and getting caught up in a whole world of shit he’d rather keep clear of. Instead of going to the cops, he did a little research. He wanted to know more about the girl called Chloe. He didn’t know whether Nick had somehow been involved in Chloe’s murder or if he’d grown up near to it and kind of fantasized about it. His curiosity had got the better of him, though. He’d spent a few hours looking up the case on the internet. He wished he hadn’t. It took him a while to track it down, but he found it in the archives of the
New York Times
. The story had hit the nationals it was so gruesome. And that was when the tension really started to get to Marty.

The murder of Chloe Mestella was real all right. She was a beautiful young West Virginian prom queen from a wealthy farming family and she’d been raped and murdered in her own bedroom while her parents entertained downstairs. It was a savage murder. Marty had read the details and winced. She was real. Chloe was a real girl, not a character from Nick’s imagination. She was real and she was dead and Nick was still not over it. Marty had to consider why that might be.

He tried to forget about it, but his curiosity and the media’s obsession with a rubber heiress called Kitty who was stalked on the day that Nick turned up with her photograph on his phone wouldn’t let him. He couldn’t get to grips with what he was thinking. Maybe, Nick had killed Chloe out of rage and jealousy. Maybe Nick had killed Kitty. He couldn’t be sure: Nick was a delusional paranoid - fantasy was his modus operandi. It was all just coincidence, right?

Marty felt better when Nick didn’t turn up for his session. But later even that got to him. What if Nick was watching him? Marty was a self-confessed, T-shirt-wearing coward. He wanted to run away and hide. He wanted to tell his wife. He wanted her to look after him again, to sort out the big problems.

His wife appeared from the bathroom. She was smiling as she struck a pose in her underwear. She was still gorgeous to look at - all dark eyes and lush dark hair. He’d just stopped seeing it. Somehow, the woman that all other men would still drool over had become too available to him. His eyes had glazed over.

He smiled up at her and put his arm round her waist. She moaned a little as he moved his hands over her soft skin. This was just what he needed, a little afternoon of relaxation. He kissed her stomach as she ran her fingers through his thinning hair.

She pushed him back on the bed. She wanted to please him. That had been her undoing. Wanting to please a guy like Marty. It had spoiled him, no question. She unbuckled his belt with a flourish and unzipped him. A minute passed and her expression changed from that of a sultry mistress to sadness and disappointment. Marty lay there feeling a sweat form on his brow.
What the fuck is happening
, he was thinking as he tried to bring to mind all the sexy things he’d ever thought, but all he could see was Chloe and Kitty Hunyardi.
Fuck!
This hadn’t happened before. Not ever!
Fuck me
, he pleaded,
not with her, it’s not fair.

His wife raised her head. Her face was a picture of self-loathing. ‘I just don’t attract you any more, do I, Marty? I’m sorry.’

Marty looked at her in despair and shook his head. ‘You do, I promise you, you do. I’m just ...’ He reached out to her and tried to hug her, but she pulled away.

‘I bet this doesn’t happen with your lovers, does it?’ She stared at him and he had nothing to say. The look of disgust on her face would remain with him for life.

 

T
he air outside had dipped a few degrees and the sky had darkened. In the gloom, Harlem looked more deserted than ever. Only a few stragglers were about, propped up by steel fencing posts and drinking direct from the bottle.

Tom Harper and Eddie Kasper drove to the 7-Eleven. This was Lottie Bixley’s last known location. According to the statement of Lottie’s brother, she had left her two young children in the apartment while she went out to get cigarettes. It was only a five-minute walk on foot, through some dangerous territory if you were the wrong type of person or just happened to meet the wrong type of person. If Lottie Bixley had been in a hurry, she might have taken one of the many side alleys and who knows who she might’ve met.

‘What do you make of it, Eddie? How did Lottie’s killer take her? What’s his style?’ asked Harper, tapping on the Buick’s cheap plastic dash.

‘Posed as a john, probably.’

‘Dangerous for the kids, isn’t it?’ said Harper. ‘Given that she wanted to clean up her act. She would’ve returned home if she could have. The 7-Eleven was a short walk. If she’s going to jump in a car with a trick, she’s going to make sure someone is with the kids, and she’d thrown Carl out.’