Hack (26 page)

Izzy was unhappy. He had placed a call to the
New York Mail
demanding to speak to the publisher, Trevor Todd, only to be informed that the billionaire had jetted off to New Zealand in his private plane.

“As long as the only evidence I have on Don Badger points to a robbery homicide, we are stalled,” Izzy complained.

“What’s your guess?” I asked him.

“Izzy does not guess,” Phil interjected. “He
theorizes
.”

“Right,” I said. “What’s your theory?”

“I think the big bad guys bumped off the little bad guys, took off and left me holding an empty sack,” Izzy said. “The DA says the prosecution of Badger is moot and they can’t do a fucking thing to Lucky Tal—unless or until he fails to show up for his next court date, which is next month.”

“Moot?” I asked.

“Lawyer word for ‘pointless,’” Phil said.

“Oh, right.”

“I have
some
news,” Izzy said. “The CSI guys, always eager to live up to the high standard of their TV counterparts, have done a Sherlock. They matched the soles of the shoes Jack Leslie was wearing when he died with footprint casts taken from the scene of Pookie Piccarelli’s murder in Central Park.”

“That is good news,” I said. “So you can tie them to at least one of the killings.”

“Yep. They have another set that may be Matt Molloy’s but he and his shoes are not available for comparison. Yet. That reminds me. You, your cameraman and your girlfriend need to give us the shoes you were wearing at the scene—so the techies can eliminate them.”

“They need our shoes?”

“Yeah, easier that way. Ask your girlfriend and the
Mail
photographer.”

“I don’t work there anymore. He’ll be the giant footprints.”

“Okay, thanks for not making me get a warrant.”

“No problem,” I said, yawning. “You see Trevor Todd’s printed statement in the
Mail
today?”

“He said he knows nothing about nothing,” Izzy scoffed. “That’s not what their own memos say. The lawsuits are already starting.”

“It will be a tsunami,” I predicted.

“That’s probably why they’ve all fled the jurisdiction,” said Phil.

“What have you got on Don Badger’s murder?” I asked.

Izzy pulled out a file and spread several glossy eight-by-ten photographs across his desk. They showed Badger on his back on a dirty pavement, a yawning gap at the base of his throat. He was covered in blood. Everywhere, as if someone had poured buckets of it onto him. His usual smirk was fixed forever.

“It’s sort of like Neil Leonardi and Nolan Cushing,” I said. “But bloodier.”

“Sort of. Different weapon, though,” Izzy said.

“Who says?”

“The M.E. He says number one and number two—Leonardi and Cushing—were killed with identical edged blades but number three—Pookie Piccarelli—was different. And Don Badger was killed with yet another type of blade, but similar to that used on Piccarelli. That is, if you believe they can guess a weapon from the wound.”

“Can they?” I asked.

Izzy and Phil both shrugged.

“Who knows?” Izzy said. “It’s whatever you can get a jury to believe. The commissioner—who reads the papers and watches too many movies—wants us to psychologically profile the Hacker. He actually wants to invite the freaking FBI in to put the killer on the couch.”

“You don’t believe in profiling, I take it?”

“It’s a crock of shit,” Izzy snorted. “Fortune telling. Never caught a single fucking killer. Not one. Makes great TV, though.”

“The killer is disturbed and resentful,” Phil intoned in a goofy voice. “He is a male between the ages of twenty-one and ninety-nine, living in America, who likes to kill people. You can’t miss him.”

“I will believe profilers when they give me the name and address of a killer,” Izzy declared. “Or winning Lotto numbers.”

“So, what you’re saying,” I said, “is that profiling is moot.”

We all laughed but not for long.

“I don’t see any Altoid next to Badger in this shot,” I said.

“Nope,” said Izzy, “that’s another difference. But they’re small things. Maybe the CSIs on the scene missed it because they had no idea at the time that the death was linked to the Hacker case. Badger wasn’t identified until later.”

“Is his blood work back yet?” I asked.

“Preliminary,” Phil said. “No indication of drugs, but he had been drinking. His B.A.C. was point two nine. Drunk. Full tox will take longer.”

“So,” I ventured, “victims one and two were killed indoors and they were doped up. Either they took it themselves or someone drugged them, right?”

“Right,” Izzy replied.

“But victims three and four were outside and not so drugged, just hacked,” I said.

“Uh-huh. Maybe the later murders were rushed because it was in public,” Izzy replied.

I thought about it. They thought about it. I looked at the pictures. Izzy told me he and Phil had places to go and people to see. We walked out of the precinct together. It was raining lightly and a steamy gray breeze was pushing dirt around. A pedal-cab rickshaw rolled by, pulled by a wiry guy in red, white and blue coveralls. Two Asian tourists in the back took our photos on separate cameras.

“Can I ask a dumb question?” I asked.

“That was a dumb question,” Phil chuckled.

“Seriously,” I continued, “just for the sake of argument, what if the last two killings, Pookie and Badger, were done by different people?”

Izzy and Phil looked at each other.

“That wasn’t dumb, it was sadistic,” Izzy moaned.

“Because it would mean three different killers, the Hacker, plus the Molloy/Leslie double act. Or five, counting the gunmen—Erdem Bayrak and Arhan Terzi—at my place. Maybe Badger wasn’t killed by Molloy. What if what Bayrak said about Badger hiring him was a lie? Maybe he was hired by someone else higher up the tree to kill Badger first, then me? Do Badger and make people think I did it, then waste me and blame it on Islamic extremists, case closed?”

“You’re complicating things,” Phil said. “Jack Leslie and probably his partner, Matt Molloy, were at the Pookie Piccarelli scene, and there’s a video that appears to show them taking her off the street. They killed Pookie in a manner similar to the previous two Hacker homicides, which they also committed. If we assume that the Human Resources crew killed three celebs to boost circulation, it fits. They then tried to do you, because you were onto them, but Leslie got dead and Molloy vanished. His disappearance after trying to snuff you demonstrates consciousness of guilt. The Hacker murders are over. The attempted hit on you was to shut you up and cover up the motivation behind the Hacker killings, as was the murder of Don Badger, which was probably Molloy. It didn’t matter if Don Badger was killed in a different way—it was meant to look like a mugging, not fit in with the Hacker deaths. So the score is three dead Hacker victims, Leonardi, Cushing and Piccarelli, probably by Leslie and Molloy, two missing bad guys—Molloy and Edgar, and three dead bad guys—Arhan Terzi, Don Badger and Jack Leslie. And Erdem Bayrak in custody.”

It was the most I had ever heard Phil talk at a stretch. “Does that mean the good guys are winning?” I asked.

“Right now, it looks like the game is just postponed because of rain,” Izzy said.

“What if the DA called Tal Edgar back into court on Monday?” Phil asked. “You know, call an unscheduled bail hearing, try to get it revoked based on new evidence?”

“To find out where he is before a month goes by?” I asked.

“I like that idea,” Izzy brightened. “We ask a judge to up his bail or revoke it because we uncovered new evidence.”

“Yes,” Phil agreed.

“What new evidence?” I wondered.

“We could RICO them,” Phil suggested.

“I love it,” Izzy grinned. “If he doesn’t show up, we get a warrant. If he does, we can have the DA put him in front of a grand jury. He can either testify or plead the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. Beautiful.”

My confused expression amused the detectives.

“RICO is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act,” Izzy explained. “We use it to go after the mob.”

“You’re going to say in court that the
New York Mail
is like a Mafia family?” I asked.

“If the DA will agree,” Phil said.

“Has this ever been done before?” I asked.

They both shook their heads and laughed.

“They are running an illegal scheme in which they are killing people for profit and to silence them. Sounds like wiseguys to me,” Izzy concluded.

The pen is mightier than the sword.

I spent the weekend with Jane and Skippy, just living. There were no more murders or breaking developments, much to the disappointment of my new editor at the
Daily Press
, a red-faced fireplug of a guy named Barney Blood. But Blood was content with the almost endless supply of scandal from the
Mail
files I had obtained, courtesy of the memory stick Izzy slipped me. Jane and I walked Skippy together, stayed up late, went out to eat. We drank too much, fooled around a lot and slept in.

“I’m a vet,” Jane said, as we lounged in bed. “My diagnosis is we are eating like pigs, drinking like fish and fucking like bunnies.”

She giggled at her own joke.

“How do you know fish drink?” I inquired. “Have you ever seen one with a glass?”

“They do nothing but drink. They are in the drink.”

“You’ve got me there, Doc.”

“No, I’ve got you here,” she said, hoisting me by my own petard.

I looked up the expression online and discovered that it was about demolition men in the Middle Ages, who used gunpowder in big pots to blow open castle doors but sometimes used too much powder and became dead projectiles.

Later, as we got sleepy, we hugged and Jane asked me something so quietly I had to ask her to repeat it.

“I said ‘is it over?’”

“You mean the case?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know. No. Not yet.”

“I wish it were,” she said dreamily. “Neil was a slimeball. Cushing was a vile human being. I can understand why somebody wanted to kill them but that idiot girl, Porkie?”

“Pookie,” I corrected her. “Relax, we’re safe.”

“That’s only part of it,” she said.

“What else?”

But she was asleep and breathing softly on my chest, the distant, pleasant aromas of her perfume and the Bordeaux from dinner scenting our bed. Wine and roses. I could get used to this.

* * *

On Monday, I tried to figure a way to end it, to figure it out. Barney Blood had assigned half the
Daily Press
reporters to work on leads from my documents and Ginny was zooming all over town, interviewing people who had been screwed over and spied upon by the
Mail.
To me, it was a pile-on, more of the same, just different names but the professionals didn’t agree. When I got bored, I told them I was working on another part of it. They kept my name on the stories and left me alone. Ginny was happy to get more ink. There was no sign of Molloy or Lucky Tal.

* * *

On Tuesday, Lucky Tal failed to show up for his RICO court hearing. The District Attorney had told the judge that they were investigating the
New York Mail
as a possible Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization and demanded that Lucky Tal appear and respond to the charges. He didn’t. The judge issued an arrest warrant—just like in Aubrey Forsythe’s case.

I remembered my dumb question about whether several different people had committed the murders and thought of another dumb question. Why hadn’t Aubrey come out of hiding? First, the
Mail
blamed the killings on me, then the
Daily Press
—with actual evidence—blamed them on the
Mail.
You would think Aubrey would have come forward and declared his innocence. But, with a text, he had called me to the second murder, the foreclosure on Cash Cushing, so he must have done at least that one.
If
he was the one using his phone to send the text. I still didn’t think he had killed Neil and we knew Leslie and Molloy had probably killed Pookie. They had texted me on a new phone, pretending to be Aubrey. What if they had kidnapped Aubrey, like they tried to do to me, and used his phone to text me an invitation to Cushing’s murder as well? That would mean they had Aubrey and were using him as a fall guy. Was he still alive? Maybe Matt Molloy and Lucky Tal Edgar were playing cards somewhere, with Aubrey tied up in a back room. But, if they would kill all these people, including me, why would they let Aubrey live?

Aubrey was probably dead, I decided. My HR pals must have committed Hacker murders two and three, Cushing and Pookie, pinning them on Aubrey, the fugitive. But it seemed unlikely they had killed Neil Leonardi. The
Mail
had had no exclusive—until I gave it to them, purely by chance. If you kill for circulation, obviously you have the exclusive. Maybe Neil’s murder had been committed for more personal reasons and the
Mail
just jumped on the bandwagon to cash in on the story for the second and third killings? So who really killed Neil Parmesan?

I called Izzy with my new theory. He disagreed.

“The first one is like the second but not the third,” he said. “The first two seemed more… controlled. But I like the part about Leslie and Molloy using Aubrey Forsythe’s phone to contact you. That’s good, thanks. We can theorize that Molloy also killed Forsythe. The DA might like that. Maybe it was a big murder club, like the sex club on Pookie’s show.” He laughed.

“Sex club?” I asked.

“You never watched
Bitch Blanket Bimbos
?” Izzy asked.

“Never saw any of the victims’ shows,” I said proudly.

“You never saw
You’re Foreclosed
or
Food Fight
?”

“Nope.”

“You’re kidding. Got Netflix?”

“Yep.”

“You gotta treat yourself.”

I did. I had nothing else to do.

Jane did not have Netflix, so, when she went to work the next morning, Skippy and I went back to my place. I didn’t have to look far to find what I was searching for.
Bitch Blanket Bimbos
was near the top, listed as “Popular on Netflix,” and, as advertised, the show did have a “sex club.” The show itself consisted mostly of drinking, loud arguments, sex and vomiting by high-school dropouts from New Jersey. It turned out Pookie wasn’t quite Italian-American at all. She was a Balkan refugee who was adopted by an Italian family. The sex club involved Pookie playing a different version of beer pong and then asking some strange guy in a beach bar to show her his “club,” after which they would have sex, usually in public, often with other “dudes” and “babes” joining in the fun, with body parts blacked out and discreet cutting. The drunken guy would then be added to an online interactive gallery of sex club members, on whom the audience could vote and rate their prowess and other qualities, like staying power—of his hair gel. Over eight long hours, I learned a great deal about the abilities of the late Miss Pookie Piccarelli, but little else. I did a lot of fast-forwarding but never saw Jack Leslie or Matt Molloy join her club, or anything else remotely resembling a clue to her killing. Fortunately, there was only one season made up of twenty half-hour episodes to watch or I would have committed suicide. The girl was a jerk with a drinking problem but she did not deserve to be butchered. I called it a day and Skippy and I went back to Jane’s.