American Devil (49 page)

He came to the steel bars of the caged prison in the depths of the plant. In there, he would keep Denise. He barged the door open with his shoulder. It took him three attempts and then he took her into her new home, laid her down on her bed and looked down on her face. Like a sleeping princess.

He left her and closed the steel door. The heavy metal clunked in the darkness and Sebastian trudged back up the tunnels like the Minotaur of old myth.

But those old myths weren’t true, were they? Minotaurs taking young maidens into the labyrinth to devour them. They were just stories, right? Just old stories.

 

E
very few seconds a drop of water hit the ground. In the brick cell, the hollow drip of the water on the wet floor echoed, and then silence returned. Silence and absolute darkness.

Denise woke. It was pitch black. She was lying on her back. Where was she? She lay still for a moment. The events returned to her mind. Her heart thumped and thumped. The evening with Tom. The shower. The American Devil. Fear. Horrible fear. A knife slashing at her. She sat upright. Was he watching her? She couldn’t hear a thing, just the dripping water. No, wait. There was something. There. What was it?

A mechanical sound.

Yes. A faint mechanical sound in the distance. She couldn’t make it out, though. It was so dark. So very, very dark. It was hard to focus, to get your bearings. There was no point of reference. She closed her eyes. That was better.

Her hands reached down. She was naked. She had bandages on her arms. She felt bruising on her lower back as if she had been dragged over something. Perhaps down stairs. And she was stiff all over. Arms and shoulders and legs. Very stiff.

She opened her eyes again. Still darkness. So much darker when you open your eyes. So dark it swallows you. It seemed to swarm about her. A darkness within the darkness. She listened. The mechanical noise had stopped. She was lying on a bed of some sort with a coarse blanket. A blanket like they used to give you at camp. She turned her head and smelled it. The dusty mouldy smell overwhelmed her.
I may not be able to see but I have a sense of smell. I have memory. Yes, Denise, think about camp. Tell me what you can remember.

Past images swarmed through her mind. The drips fell again and again and echoed against the hard cold walls.

Her hand reached out to her right, but there was only space. She reached out to her left and felt a wall. Her fingers touched it gently. Cold. She felt the groove of mortar. A brick wall. Smooth. The water dripped again. The smell of damp rising from the stone floor filled her nostrils.

Slowly, she was piecing things together. She was in a building. A cold, wet basement. There was something mechanical in the building. A dripping tap somewhere close. The brick wall suggested something industrial. But it might be somewhere that people were near. That comforted her.

She remembered all the tricks her father had told her. She had never imagined that his years in prison would be of use to her. All those hours and days spent chatting away across a scarred blue table.

‘Daddy,’ she said aloud into the darkness, ‘I will be all right, won’t I?’

She heard his voice in her head as clear as if he was right next to her.

‘Course you will, my little sparkler. I carry you in my cell and whenever I’m scared I light you up and you burn so brightly and so fiercely that I can see for miles and miles and miles. My fantastic sparkler.’

She could light a fantastic sparkler any time she wanted to. She would, too. When she needed to. And she would see everything and see for miles and miles and miles.

‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ he’d asked her.

‘I don’t know.’

‘The worst is they could hurt you, but the most hurt they can do to you is make you afraid. There’s no worse hurt than afraid. Hurt doesn’t last, but fear has you to himself all night long.’

Yes, she remembered it now.
There’s no worse hurt than afraid
.

Denise clenched her fists. She shouted at the top of her voice: ‘I’m not scared of you!’

Out of the near darkness, close enough to terrify, came a low, long whistle. The sound echoed around the room and into some spaces beyond.

The fear came rushing back.

 

N
ewsflashes and breaking news bulletins over the networks and the internet talked in serious tones about the psychologist and profiler kidnapped by the serial killer. Tom Harper and the rest of the world watched the rolling tickertape at the bottom of the screen.
American Devil returns
. . .
Serial killer kidnaps police psychologist
. . .
Victim feared dead . . .

The horrible carnival of the media rolled on to the screens. The pictures of the seven dead girls. The endless theories. The old experts rolled out to give their thoughts. The recriminations. The hypnotic pace and endless repetition. Then the pictures of Denise Levene smiling at graduation with a voice-over about a bloody shower scene, ‘like something outta
Psycho
’.

Denise Levene had entered the public arena. She belonged to them now. Inside the electronic world. Nothing was personal; everything was in the public interest and appetites were vast. You just couldn’t satisfy the machine. They wanted more and more. It didn’t matter if it was useful or trivial. Even now, there was a high school friend of Denise’s from Chicago saying how sad she was and how Denise was such a great student.

There would be more. Many more.

Harper turned round to Blue Team. The faces were all tight-jawed and determined. Harper felt the weight of their indignation and anger. She might not walk the front line as a psychologist, but Denise was one of them and the American Devil had made it very personal. He wanted to hurt Harper. The question was - why?

Harper breathed deeply and kept his hands flat on the desk in front of him. ‘I know how you’re all feeling, guys, so I’ll keep this brief. We need to put a lid on our emotions here. Denise deserves our best efforts.’ He looked from man to woman across the team. They all nodded.

‘Okay. Here’s where we are: Maurice Macy is not, and never was, the American Devil. We just have to accept that we don’t know if and how Macy and Sebastian might be linked, but the links keep coming. The man who has kidnapped Denise Levene has killed seven women and he has also killed Detective Williamson and Senator John Stanhope. He will not baulk at killing Denise or any one of you. He is ruthless and determined. He’s spreading his wings, too: his targets are getting more and more risky. Just before Denise was taken, I received a threat. The letter’s on Denise’s board. For some reason he’s taken Denise to punish me. We need to figure out the reason for this. We’ve got nothing from the concierge at Denise’s building, but one sighting from the street. A man was dragging a suitcase on wheels along the sidewalk outside her apartment. It was late, so it was a strange sight.’

‘Just like with Lucy James,’ said Eddie.

‘Yeah, that’s right. Another of the links between these two men. Also, about the profile - Denise told me to take off the four-day period related to Lottie and ask the papers to re-release the profile. Can you get that done, Eddie?’

‘Sure thing,’ said Eddie.

‘Then we’ve got to clean up this photofit. We’ve got plenty of sightings. The guy was spotted during the stalking and just prior to the murders of Amy, Elizabeth, Jessica and Rose. We’ve got the FBI working on these images, taking off the disguises, trying to work the best fit between the various sketches. They’re going to give us a picture that they think is a good fit to the killer. We’ll put this out with the profile while the story is still hot. The networks will flash the killer’s image all over the world.’

‘Is she likely dead already?’ asked someone from the back.

Harper paused as if the thought hadn’t even occurred to him. ‘No. We’re working on the assumption that she’s alive, but that gives us forty-eight hours maximum. He didn’t kill her and leave her body at the apartment, like the others. There’s a reason why he didn’t do that. He wants to try to get to me. Let’s not think the worst, let’s think about how to catch him. He must have taken Denise somewhere, so he maybe has a lair of some kind.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘We go back through every case and see if we’re missing something. We’ve got the guy from the botanical department at Columbia looking at our flowers. He thinks the cherry blossom came from a winter-flowering cherry and there ain’t that many in New York. We’re getting notices out to all the gardening organizations. It might be one small detail that nails this guy. And we’ll need detectives manning the phones. The profile is good, people. It’s Denise’s work, so let’s listen carefully out there. And think lucky. We need a break and we need one soon.’

The investigation team scattered. Detective Lassiter patted Harper on the back. ‘You sure you don’t want the lead? I’m happy to stand aside.’

‘No, but thanks. I’m better on my own. I need to be out there, not in here organizing the interior. I need to get across to the FBI. They think that they’ve traced the psychologist who called in the Rose Stanhope lead. We’re going upstate to find him. It was a helluva task finding this one analyst. You have no idea how much therapy this city needs.’

‘Hope it falls for you.’

Harper thanked him and walked up to Denise’s board. A photograph of a bloody shower cubicle. Denise’s police photograph. The letter. ‘Why are you after me and Denise, you bastard? What is it that we’ve done? What the fuck flicked your switch?’

 

D
enise tried very hard not to think about Daniel. It was just pointless. Thinking of him just made her feel sad that she couldn’t control her thoughts. It made her despair, and despair would not help her win this fight for her life. It would not help her survive and that was all she wanted. To survive this. To do all that she could to help Tom find her before Sebastian killed her.

Silence again.

Perhaps this was it, though. This was goodbye. Dying in the darkness for no purpose, without anyone seeing or knowing. Yes, Sebastian was capable of that. Absolutely. She wasn’t sure why he hadn’t killed her already. That’s what really frightened her. She lay back against the hard mattress.

Then out of the darkness, the whistle again. The low, long whistle. Near and now further away . . . moving away. Her flesh bristled with fear.

She had been gnawing at her thumb, nibbling it with her teeth and rocking, like one of those little Rhesus monkeys the psychologists had deprived.

At university, she’d learned about a lot of cruel psychological experiments. Two sets of Rhesus monkeys were put in very similar cages after birth. In one cage was a plastic milk bottle and access to food. In the other was one simple but significant difference - the plastic milk bottle was covered in fur, to simulate the warmth of the mother’s body.

That was the only difference - the presence of monkey fur. Given time, the welfare of each set of monkeys was entirely different.

The baby monkeys with the fur bottle were happy, healthy and playful. Then you looked into the cage without the fur. The Rhesus monkeys were all rocking like psychiatric patients, some on their own like lost shadows, others clasped together in lines and rocking as one. And like her, they gnawed their little monkey arms right down to the bone.

Poor monkeys. For want of a scrap of comfort, a pretend mother, they’d started to destroy themselves with the anxiety. Like her, gnawing her thumb. She could taste blood. It was comforting to taste blood. Why was that? Was it food? Or was it company?

Then there was a noise. It was a different noise. Suddenly, she was alert. It was a clanking sound. Like metal on metal. Then a creak. Then a bang.

A door!
There’s a door out of the Kingdom of Darkness.
Hope swelled in her chest. Then fear pushed it back down to her stomach.

Footsteps now. They were definitely footsteps. It didn’t seem to matter to her then whether it was the killer or not. At that point, the killer was her saviour.

Someone was at the door of her dark cell. She scrambled her way to a corner. There was the sound of a key in a lock. Then the sound stopped.

Suddenly, a loud click and the room burst into light. Bright, bright light - as fierce as the midday sun. Her eyes burned and her hands rose to cover her eyes. Then he was there. In the same instant.

Something was put over her head. It felt like a tight fitted hood. She could smell it. It was made of new leather. Was he just going to kill her like that? Not a word. The hood was pulled tight and fastened below her chin. Then his hands moved away. She was so weak and disorientated that there was no fight in her.

He was behind her, lifting her to her feet. His hands found her bare neck. She was thinking about dying. She didn’t mind now. Best to go quickly and quietly.

How long can a body go without air? It’s a matter of minutes and seconds. There’s such a fine line between life and death, between the infinite variety of being and the singleness of non-being. Why was she thinking these poetic things? The stranger was lifting her off her feet. His forefinger and thumb pressed against her arteries. Her body fought for blood and air, desperate sudden lunges rising up through her muscles, the terrible clawing agony in her lungs, in her veins. Then she relaxed into his body. A scrap of fur, any fur, even pretend fur. Even killer fur.