Gladyss of the Hunt (17 page)

“But she might not be a hooker at all,” Alex added.

“Why do you say that?” Bernie asked.

“She has no record, and we haven't found anything tying her to the sex industry,” Annie said, almost happily. I remembered how bad she'd felt when we found so little at the last vic's house.

“Did the receptionist at the Ticonderoga ever see her before?”

“Nope,” Annie replied. “And she has no priors of any kind.”

“Do me a favor,” Bernie said to Alex, handing him a piece of paper with a phone number scribbled on it. “I've called them twice already. This is tech support. Can you stay on them to get us a computer
geek? I need someone to look at Gladyss's friend's laptop, check out this, uh, web site, and help determine if our guy is targeting this lady.” I wasn't sure why they would need to look at her laptop, but I didn't say anything as Alex took the paper.

With the help of last week's expanded task force, we had whittled our list of suspects down to roughly two dozen names consisting of those we couldn't find or hadn't interviewed yet and three men we had interviewed who were deemed persons of interest, worth interviewing again.

Using details from the Ticonderoga Hotel case, Bernie was now able to cut the list down further, bringing our suspects down to a baker's dozen. They consisted of eight whites, two light-skinned blacks and three Latinos, all of whom could've matched the poor-contrast image of the suspect on the washed-out Ticonderoga tape. All were relatively thin and had a history of theft, or frequenting prostitutes, and/or violence against women.

“If we can hit these guys,” he suggested, “a series of quick field interrogations should give us some idea if any of them is our boy.”

I didn't share in his optimism about detecting instant guilt. To me it was more like a big, chilly fishing expedition. Again I was teamed with Bernie. I didn't know if he took painkillers or simply wore a more comfortable shoe, but he seemed a little less angry this time. As we headed out to his car, I asked him what the plan of attack was.

“You want to know the plan of—” he caught himself. I knew he was about to say something nasty. “Okay, unless they're complete psychos—zero affect—these guys are usually right on the edge. Ready to pop. You don't have to press that hard. If they start coming apart, you lock ‘em up, sweat them, run their prints, and check their alibis for the night of the murders.”

When I asked him if he could remember his first murder case, he said it involved a drug dealer back, when he was “a ghetto cop in the Bushwhack.” It sounded like an old
Kojak
rerun.

“The difference is provincialism,” he said as we drove up Eighth Avenue. “Out there, you knew your characters and what they were up to. Manhattan is different. Everyone's just blowing through,” he said just as an arctic gust blasted down the avenue, tagging any flesh left exposed by poorly wrapped scarves and the bright pink earlobes of those who didn't pull their hats down tight enough.

“Was Youngblood just blowing through?” I inquired, remembering the geriatric tube sock hustler. Since Bernie seemed in a relatively good mood, I thought maybe he would open up a bit. But he didn't hear me.

“I was just too young to know any better,” he muttered.

“What should you have known?”

“A cute young teenager gets into drugs. The boyfriend who got her hooked leaves her. Her dealer moves up to being her pimp. To avoid going away for her third conviction, she becomes your own private ghost. I was a lonely kid—not much older than you—who made the mistake of getting too close to a beautiful, damaged girl. Same as Bert, only at his age he should've known a lot better.”

“Bert, your old partner?”

“Yeah, except he married his snitch. Mine was found in the bottom of a filthy air shaft out in the Red Hook.” He paused a moment, and I could see by the way he chewed his inner lip that he was reliving the moment. “I've had to spend the last twenty years knowing it was my stupidity that put her down there.”

Bernie's cell rang; it was Alex to say that tech support at One Police Plaza was a little backed up, but someone would definitely look into the web site by tomorrow.

Of the six remaining suspects Bernie and I were checking, we knew we'd be lucky if we got to the three most promising ones today. All had been in prison within the past five years. Two of them, Joseph Donnelly and Nessun O'Flaherty, had done time for assaulting hookers, but the last and best suspect was a pimp named Howard Sprag who went by the moniker “Hozec.” Bernie explained that this nickname was a shortening of either Whore Executive or Whore Executioner—Sprag was rumored to wring the necks of his bottom earners. Bernie seemed to have a particularly vengeful place in his heart for pimps who killed their hookers.

What's more, Sprag had also been arrested a few years ago on a murder charge involving ligature strangulation—a girl named Sally DiNasio was found with a telephone cord wrapped around her neck. She was a Garden State runaway who he'd probably recruited at Port Authority. Although the case went to trial, he got off due to insufficient evidence. He was later arrested for drug possession and did the majority of his twelve-year sentence, though he shortened it
somewhat by informing on another inmate.

According to his parole officer, Sprag worked for a few months for the Forty Second Street Partnership, a halfway house for early releases. He was one of those guys who wear a white jumpsuit and sweep the streets around Times Square. Then one day he stopped showing up for work and coming to meetings. The parole officer explained, “I have a warrant out on his ass, but haven't had time to hunt him down.”

Sprag's last known address was a transient hotel, the Lathem, at Twenty-eighth and Tenth. As we parked in front of the place, Bernie said he had interviewed another suspect here just last week during the initial dragnet. The desk clerk, a tall Indian gentleman named Lionel, recognized Bernie as he entered.

“How can I be of service, Detective?”

When Bernie asked him if Howard Sprag still lived here, Lionel paused, sighed, and responded in a watered-down British accent, “About two months ago Mr. Sprag called down to the desk saying there was a dead body in his room. I went upstairs and saw him standing in the hall smoking a cigarette. When I asked about said body, he just nodded inside his room. I went in, looked around, peeked under the bed, and told him I didn't see any dead body. ‘It's out the window,' he replied. I figured he was pulling my leg, you know. So I went back downstairs. By the time I reached the lobby someone out front was screaming. Apparently Mr. Sprag finished his fag and jumped out of the window.”

“Rest in peace, Hozec,” I muttered.

“Why doesn't his PO know this shit?” Bernie asked no one in particular.

“You're the first person who's come around asking about him,” Lionel replied.

Bernie asked when this had happened exactly, and Lionel's answer told us Sprag had been dead before the last two murders were committed.

Joe Donnelly was next up. He had briefly been a member of the infamous Irish gang the Westies, but they reportedly tossed him out when it became clear he had a greater loyalty to heroin. More recently Donnelly had been living in and out of his mother's place in the Penn South Housing Projects, Section Eight Assistance, along
Twenty-fourth and Eighth Avenue. Bernie recalled arresting him for something once before. Maybe extortion.

“So maybe he has it in for you,” I pointed out, referring to his stolen credit card.

“Maybe,” he replied.

We parked in front of the building, got in the front door without ringing, went up the stairs, and knocked on his mother's door. Bernie was a big believer in the surprise drop-in.

“In here, pronto,” a deep, hoarse voice hollered. The place was a mess, and smelled of sardines and boiled eggs. A bloated Raggedy Anne from hell seemed to be permanently parked inches in front of a loud and angry TV set; a half empty 40 of Coors and a box of saltines on a table beside her chair.

“You're not Meals on Wheels,” she growled.

“And you're not Vanessa Del Rio doing Desire Cousteau,” he replied. I had no idea who he was talking about.

“The TV is
not
loud, so don't tell me it is!” she said defiantly when we identified ourselves.

“We're not here for that,” Bernie shot back and turned it off. “We're looking for that evil shit that you let loose upon the world.”

“Ain't here.”

Bernie pulled out his pistol and kicked open her closet and bathroom doors, checking for himself.

“Joey's a good kid,” she replied. “What's he done now?”

“Killed some girls.”

“Huh?”

“Dead girls,” I repeated to her.

“When's he s'posed to have killed 'em?” she asked.

“Where the fuck is he?” Bernie shouted.

“My kidneys are killing me,” she complained. “I need dialysis.”

“Where the fuck is your kid?”

“That's what I'm trying to tell yous. He's been in Riker's for six months now—shoplifting.”

Bernie used his cell to call the prison and confirm it. Two down.

“Now can I watch the rest of my shows?” she asked, turning the TV back on.

“It's too loud,” I said, turning it down.

“I can't hear it like that.”

“Get a hearing aid,” I shouted.

As soon as we stepped into the hallway, the volume shot back up. At least I'd given her a little exercise—she'd had to lift the remote again.

When we returned to the car, Bernie looked at the info sheet for suspect number three and saw that he was still on parole.

“Christ it's dark,” I said, amazed that it was already pitch black even though it was only late afternoon. I was fired up about interrogating the other suspects but by now Bernie's foot was clearly agitating the hell out of him.

“Let's call it a night and try to reach his parole officer tomorrow,” I suggested. That was the state parole office on Fortieth Street.

“All right,” he said.

We returned to the precinct where Bernie suddenly realized he was way behind on the paperwork needed for a court case tomorrow morning. He took a Valium to handle the pain, but as soon as he sat down, he passed out with his head on his desk.

My phone rang: the lab tech with the test results I'd asked for. Noel's prints didn't match any of those found at the various crime scenes. So much for my theory.

It wasn't the end of my shift yet, so I grabbed Bernie's pen and spent the next hour and a half trying to extract vital information from him so I could finish his paperwork. Otherwise a homicide charge would get dropped the next day.

“Is this the squad that investigates Hollywood stud muffins?”

O'Ryan popped his head round the door. He told me he'd just finished logging in a box of stolen iPods in the property room downstairs. Even though Bernie was snoring away on the couch I walked out into the hall to talk with Eddie.

“My cell phone died, I'm really sorry,” he said referring to my date night with Noel. Then he asked if the actor's fingerprints had matched anything.

“No,” I replied. “But you still could've called me the next morning to see how I was doing.”

“I heard that you roughed up some boy reporter at the Ticonderoga Hotel, so I figured you were doing fine,” he replied.

Before he could get around to asking if I wanted to go to dinner, his temporary partner, Lenny, suddenly appeared and the two had to run. I headed to yoga, leaving Bernie sleeping in his office.

CHAPTER NINE

When I arrived at the precinct the following morning, Bernie was already there. I couldn't tell if he'd stayed there all night. He told me he had just gotten off the phone with Dan Rasdale, O'Flaherty's parole officer.

“He said he's been missing a couple of his boys 'cause of their work hours, and he was hoping to sneak up on them this Sunday.”

“I just hope he's better than Hozec's P.O.,” I said. “Did he tell you anything about O'Flaherty?”

Bernie read what he had wrote down: “Nessun O'Flaherty, 57 years old. Twenty-two years ago, when he was thirty-five, O'Flaherty graduated from Queens Law. But before he could take the bar exam, his wife accused him of statutory rape. He'd apparently been screwing his underage stepdaughter. He was a drunk, and during the arrest he popped a police officer, which earned him a couple of years inside. He passed the bar in jail.”

“Christ!” I said, “with a first-time statutory rape he probably would've got off with probation.”

“It gets worse. In prison he gets into a fight with another inmate and kills the guy. He gets another ten years added to his sentence, and after a series of fights and other charges, he doesn't get out until a year and a half ago. He's got fifteen months left on his parole.”

“Amazing he's managed to stay clean.”