Deadly Rich (75 page)

“Who built the diary out of those outtakes?”

Kristi slipped her foot back into the shoe and took two testing steps. “I had nothing to do with reshaping the outtakes.”

Cardozo just stood there. In a casually understated manner he was blocking her way.

“I honestly
don’t
know who wrote the diary,” she said. “Not for sure.”

His lack of expression, his lack of movement made it clear he was willing to wait there, blocking her, for the next ten seconds or the next ten days, however long it took.

And meanwhile that rap music was rapping.

Kristi opened her hand and let the soiled Kleenex drop into a standing bronze ashtray. “I messengered the pages to Nancy Guardella’s office in U.N. Tower. If you want to know who forged the diary, ask her.”

“One last question.” Cardozo was still blocking her way. “Did you rewrite ‘Socialites in Emergency’ at Nancy Guardella’s request?”

“She asked me to drop any mention of the lawsuit.”

“Why was that?”

“Because the lawsuit was brought by one of her operatives and it could have exposed an on-going sting.”

Cardozo frowned as though something was not computing. “You’re sure she said one of
her
operatives?”

“Lieutenant, my lawyer told me to tell you the truth. His advice is much too expensive to disregard. And yes, I’m sure.”

Saturday, June 22

“T
HERE ARE TWO LETTERS IN THE BOX.
” The background noise behind Greg Monteleone’s voice on the phone was a mix of indoor-outdoor: screeching salsa and screeching traffic. “But no one’s come for them. Know what? I think Martinez’s mailbox is as dead as he is.”

“Blue Cross sends checks to that box,” Cardozo said. “The checks are negotiable. Somebody’s going to pick them up.”

“Vince, this work is very boring. And I hate this music. And it never stops.”

“Buy some earplugs. Watch the box till Mailsafe closes shop. If no one comes today, go back Monday.”

Without waiting for Monteleone’s protest, Cardozo broke the connection and hung up the phone. He picked up Lou Stein’s report on Society Sam’s fifth letter. He speed-read the inventory of letter sources.
This doesn’t tell me anything I don’t already know
, he thought.

The phone rang. Cardozo braced himself for an angry Monteleone. “Cardozo.”

“You are fucking not going to believe this,” a male voice rasped.

“Who is this?”

“What’s the matter, are we strangers today? This is Rad, Rad Rheinhardt, who do you think?”

Cardozo drew a deep, ragged breath. “Hello, Rad, what’s happening?”

“What do you think’s happening? We got another Society Son of Sam letter. It just came in the mail. Postmarked yesterday.”

“Yesterday.” Cardozo’s chest felt hollow. “Messenger it to me right away, will you?”

THERE WAS A KNOCK ON THE DOOR.
“Come in,” Cardozo called.

A gray-haired man well past old age stood in the doorway breathing heavily. He wore a
New York Trib
T-shirt and what had begun as half-moons of sweat under his arms had become full moons that collided over his ribs.

“What have you got for me?”

The old man handed Cardozo a chit of paper to sign and then handed over a reinforced bubble envelope.

“Just a minute.” Cardozo gave him five dollars, and the old man thanked him with a crooked smile.

Cardozo began carefully tearing the outer envelope open along the line marked
tear here.
Ellie came and watched over his shoulder.

He studied the envelope inside the cellophane. The address was typed and the capital
R’s
in the
Rad
and the
Rheinhardt
looked out of whack in the same way as the
R’s
on the others. There was no return address, and the zip code in the postmark was a brand-new one.

“Oh-oh-five.” Ellie Siegel was frowning at the postmark. “Wall Street.”

Cardozo pulled open a desk drawer, took out a pair of throwaway evidence gloves, and slipped them on. He reached inside the cellophane and inside the envelope and drew out Society Sam’s latest.

Breathing slowly, he laid the letter flat on the desk, centered in the milky gray light of the failing fluorescent desklamp. As before, single letters and parts of words and sometimes entire words had been clipped from an astonishing variety of print sources, producing a dismaying babel of fonts and typefaces.

HOW CAN SAM SINK WITHOUT SEX

SET WITHOUT TWEET

SHE SPENT HER LAST

SHES THRIFTY NOW

FINDER KEEPER WEEPER

KISSES SOCIETY SAM

“Ellie, I hate to ask—but could you get down to oh-oh-five? Check the mailboxes? Check the pickup times?”

Ellie gave him a long gaze, just seeming to weigh the proposal. “Vince, how important is this?”

“It’ll be pretty damned important if it turns out he killed someone else before he died.”

The touch of her attention was skeptical. “Isn’t it standard operating procedure in these days of manpower shortage to wait for the corpse to come to us?” She glanced down at the files and diagrams spread across his desk. A look crossed her face. “Vince, what is this workaholic’s compulsion you have to torture yourself about something that’s just been officially declared a nothing?”

“It’s not nothing,” Cardozo said, “and I’m not torturing myself.”

“I’ll rephrase that. Why are you torturing
me
with a closed case?”

The phone rang. “Cardozo.”

“Vince, it’s Marty Wilkes.” He sounded in a panic.

“Yes, Marty.”

“I’ve got to talk to you right away.”

“
LET’S START WITH THE LINE
from the third letter,” Marty Wilkes said. “Sex to end all sex, is there anything else in your perverted world view.”

Wilkes sat at his computer terminal and tapped an instruction into the keyboard. A line split the display screen. The quote from Society Sam appeared in the space above it. A moment later, below the line, a longer document unscrolled.

“Can you read it?” Wilkes asked.

Cardozo leaned toward the screen and squinted.

The West fixates on the search for the wealth to end all wealth, the power to end all power; for the high to end all highs, the sex to end all sex: is there anything else that can more quickly pervert the worldview of the spirit than the ceaseless recourse to material measures of transcendence?

“Who wrote that?”

“Believe it or not,” Wilkes said, “it’s a letter Rumford Haynes wrote to the Rahway, New Jersey, police in April 1964. Rumford Haynes was a handyman who read a lot. Between January 1964 and August 1965 he raped one hundred twenty-three women and murdered twelve.”

“Where did you access the letter?”

“The BSU keeps a file of letters from serial killers. They also keep a concordance to the letters.”

“Concordance,” Cardozo said. The idea struck him as bizarre. “Like in the Bible?”

“Exactly. Ask the concordance for the word
worldview
, and you learn it’s occurred only this once in BSU history.”

“Okay. Whoever wrote the Society Sam notes dipped into the database for his raw material. But why did that
sex to end all sex
phrase show up four years earlier in the forged Kohler diary?”

“The same passage is cross-referenced on the database under
obsessive personality disorder.
Maybe the diary was meant to prove Kohler was a sexual compulsive.” Wilkes cleared the screen. A quote from the first note appeared above the split:

SAM SAM THANK YOU MAAM

KILL THE GIRLS AND MAKE THEM CRUMB

BYE BYE SOCIETY SCUM

Below the split a new document unscrolled:

Slam bang thank you ma’am

kiss the girls and make them cum

bye bye human scum

“The author’s name,” Wilkes said, “was Nelson MacIntyre. San Diego, November 1972. Eight victims.”

Another Sam quote, this time from letter four:

ME OW AND THE POODY TAT

OW CAN YOU SEE

HUMPTY DUMPTY GOT THE BUMPTY

And below the split:

The owl and the pussy cat want to see Humpty Dumpty get the humpty.

“Carla Fugazy and Charles Strickland—Billings, Montana, May 1981. A team effort. One of the few instances of a female serial killer. They called themselves the owl and the pussy cat. Carla was the owl and Charles was the pussy. They scored seven victims that we know of.”

A quote from letter six:

WEEP NO TEARS FOR CUT UP CUT OUTS

Below the split:

cut in, cut up, cut out

“Lance Mitchelmore, Seattle, Washington, February 1984. He killed eight women with his mother’s pinking shears. Always sent the same note.”

From the seventh note:

HOW CAN SAM SINK WITHOUT SEX SET WITHOUT TWEET

Below the split:

pas de cinq sans six

pas de sept sans huit

“Hidalgo Beausoleil, Bangor, Maine, October 1979. Killed seven prostitutes. He wrote his letters in French, always
un-deux-trois
stuff.” Marty Wilkes shook his head with a ruefulness that seemed to say all human suffering was a single self-inflicted hurt. “I doubt there’s a single phrase in Society Sam’s letters that we couldn’t dig up in the concordance. And that thought made me question an assumption I’d made. I’d assumed that Society Sam was a person.”

There must have been something amusing in the idea, because Wilkes smiled, and Cardozo had the impression that his own universe and the world of clinical psychology rotated around distinctly different axes.

“Look at the dates of Society Sam’s hits.” Wilkes tapped an instruction into the keyboard. “See anything odd?”

Seven familiar dates scrolled up the screen.

“The oddity,” Wilkes said, “is that there’s no oddity. They’re spaced at exactly descending time intervals—eleven days, nine days, seven, five, three, one. Most serial killers’ hits approximate a time formula—but Sam’s hits don’t approximate a formula, they
are
a formula.”

“I told you they were too good to be true.”

“The killings seem to have been scheduled to fit the database.”

“So whoever scheduled them was able to access the BSU files?”

Wilkes nodded. “Now in the database there’s no concordance to serial killings. But there is an index. For example, the markings on the bodies resembled flags. So we search the index for every occurrence of
flags
.”

Wilkes typed an instruction. A list of twenty-seven names came up on the screen.

“And you’ll notice,” Wilkes said, “La Rue Newton heads the list. Let’s consider another aspect of the killings. Location. Obviously
street
and
stairway
are going to turn up a lot of examples. So let’s look at something more unusual—
boutique.
”

Wilkes typed in the word
boutique.

“Three,” Cardozo observed.

“Let’s look at instance number one. The unsolved murder of Minnie Wells in the Marcella Lambiani Boutique, San Francisco, May 1983.” As Wilkes spoke, the data scrolled up the screen. “The victim was murdered in a changing room. The suspected assailant carried a boom box, and he played a rap music tape. Is the tune familiar? Okay, let’s ask the index about clippings.”

Wilkes typed the word
clippings
on the keyboard. The computer flashed the message
One Moment Please
, and ten seconds later an endless page of amber print scrolled up the screen. “There’ve been over two hundred documented instances of newspaper clippings left at the murder scene.”

“How many were society columns?”

“Four. Now here’s the big one. Candles.” Wilkes typed the word and pressed the Enter key. A river of print began climbing up the screen—and up, and up. “We’re dealing with close to a thousand instances of candles.”

“Semen,” Cardozo said.

“With semen you hit the jackpot. Practically ninety percent of serial killings involve the transfer of semen.”

“Ever had a killer who syringed his own semen into his victims’ mouths? Or dropped in pubic hair from a collection that wasn’t even his?”

“Not till Society Sam,” Wilkes said, “and believe me, he’ll be a fresh entry in the database: the first serial killer totally synthesized from the literature.”

Cardozo had a sudden, almost drugged awareness of another reality co-existing within the one he was sworn to uphold and protect—and totally opposed to it. “Could a United States senator access this material?”

Wilkes looked over at Cardozo and his mouth shaped a grim smile. “Anyone in a government office would be able to. A cleaning woman could do it. None of this stuff is classified.”

Sunday, June 23

T
ERRI STOOD BY THE STOVE,
breaking eggs into a mixing bowl. “Did you know the city has a museum of old fire trucks?”

Cardozo shook his head. He’d spent the night tossing, too restless to sleep, and now he felt too unrested to wake up. “I think I read about it.”

“Does it interest you? Because Josh is a fire-truck nut and we’re going this afternoon. He thought you might like to come along.”

“
He
thought?”

She looked over at him. “Something wrong?”

“It seems funny
you
didn’t think I might like to come along.”

Her face crinkled. “I just thought you might like to meet Josh. Or have you lost interest?”

“Not if you haven’t.”

“I don’t know.” She beat the eggs with a fork. As she tipped them into the frying pan they made a hiss. “Josh gets excited about a lot of so-what things. Like old fire trucks.”

Cardozo took a long swallow of coffee and waited for it to pry his senses open. “Maybe we could skip the fire trucks and Josh could come over for lunch.”

“Today?”

“Why not? I’m home.”