Krewe of Hunters 3 Sacred Evil (3 page)

He couldn’t be seen until the last minute. When he stepped out, it was easy to accost the man, spin him around and ascertain that a strong man could have certainly caught a woman so; he would have had to have dragged her as she bled, and thus the trail to the street.

Why leave her in the street?

So she would be found, and found as she was.

He scanned the crowd, wondering if any of the men hovering about in their business suits, construction vests, chef’s outfits, messenger tees or other attire might be a killer. He wouldn’t be bloody anymore; he’d be fitting in with the crowd.

Jude walked down the sidewalk to where the bakery manager still stood, trembling with two officers. She was shaking badly.

Dorothy Hannigan was a woman with a thin face and thinner body; she obviously did not indulge frequently in her bakery’s items. She looked at him with wide brown eyes and an expression that still denoted the horror of her discovery.

“Ms. Hannigan, I’m Detective Jude Crosby. I know you’ve already given the officers your statement, so I really just want to thank you for so quickly summoning help, and for all that you’ve done to assist us in the investigation.” She hadn’t really done anything—she’d screamed instinctively. But he had discovered that the right tone of questioning always produced more than dismissal or rudeness.

She nodded, seeming to get a bit of a grip. “Shall we have some coffee?” he asked her.

She looked nervously at the corner bakery. “I open. I gave the keys to one of the boys…but I guess no one is really going to be hungry around here for a while.”

He smiled. “They’ll be hungry,” he said.
Don’t kid yourself,
he thought.
People will be converging to talk. When the crime scene tape is gone, they’ll be fighting each other to get in the street and photograph the position where the body lay.

“But come in…the police will clear this with your boss.” He nodded to Smith, who hurried on in ahead of him. He ushered Dorothy Hannigan to a booth at the rear of the bakery. Apparently, the boy she had given the keys to had gotten things going; customers were already in the shop, but other than Dorothy Hannigan’s white face, little gave away the fact that Jude was anything other than an ordinary customer. His suit was a good one, not that a homicide detective in New York made the big bucks, but he had a great apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, thanks to his father’s savvy with real estate, and it seemed, lately, that he lived to work. That meant decent suits—and suits that blended in well with the business attire in the moneyed district where he worked.

“So, Dorothy, please, tell me exactly how you came upon the body this morning,” he said quietly. He lifted a hand so that she would wait. Officer Smith had apparently seen to it that the owner, now in, was aware that his manager was helping the police; a waiter brought them two cups of coffee and quickly disappeared. She shook her head. “I saw…the body. It was barely light, you know. And there was no traffic—no, wait, there was one car, but it was in the other lane, and it just drove on by. You can only go the one way, you know.”

He nodded, taking a sip of his coffee.

She shivered suddenly. “I come off that subway every morning. I’m the only person who gets off half the time. That could have been me.”

He set a hand on hers. “She was killed late last night, Miss Hannigan. I don’t think this killer was looking to stalk victims in the morning—someone would have come. You saw how quickly the streets got busy.”

She swallowed audibly.

“Is there someone you can ride in with for the next week or so?” he asked her.

She stared at him. “You’re going to catch this freak in a week or so?” she asked. “Half the cases go unsolved, from what I’ve heard.”

“That’s a gross exaggeration, really. Half the murder cases we go out on are—well, sadly—domestic. And they’re solved,” he said.

“But—how? There are twenty million people on the island of Manhattan on a workday—that’s the statistic I’ve heard.”

“Give or take a million,” he agreed. “Please, that’s why I’m asking you—describe exactly what you saw.”

“I was walking down the street. I saw the car go by—oh, yes, of course. I saw the body in the middle of the street because of the headlights. The car just kept going. I was afraid it might have been an old derelict, passed out in the street. I have a little laser light I carry, and a whistle—I’m not stupid, you know—and so I shone the light and hurried out, hoping that nothing was coming barreling up Broadway. And then I saw her—and then I started screaming.”

“Did you see anyone else—anyone at all? A bum, a shadow…anyone?” he asked.

She shook her head. Then she sat straighter. “Wait—there’s old Captain Tyler.”

“Old Captain Tyler?”

She nodded. “A sad case. Everyone keeps urging him to go to a shelter, but he shows up back on the streets, begging. I mean, of course, God help us, we get a lot of homeless guys down here. But Captain Tyler is kind of sweet. He’s an older fellow, Vietnam vet.”

“Did you see him this morning?” Jude asked.

“I might have.”

“You might have?”

“There was a pile of rags and a sleeping bag at the entrance to the subway. I remember thinking that it
might
have been poor old Captain Tyler. But I didn’t disturb the pile.”

He nodded. “But nothing else? No one watching you?”

She shook her head. “No, not that I noticed.” She fell silent again. “I’m going to get killed on my way in to work one of these days despite my whistle, aren’t I?”

“Come in with coworkers, Ms. Hannigan, if there’s any way. I’ll talk to your boss. It’s prudent to be extremely careful until we know what we’re up against,” he said. “I’ve got to get my men looking for Captain Tyler. Can you give me a description?”

Tyler, according to Ms. Hannigan, was tall and thin, wore a shabby army-surplus jacket and dirty denim jeans, and had long white hair and a scraggly white-and-gray beard.

“He told me once he suffered from shell shock,” Dorothy Hannigan told him. “Sad, huh? Can’t hold a job, and his benefits don’t really keep a roof over his head.” She gasped. “He couldn’t have done this, could he have?”

“If you see him, call me. I don’t think, however, that shell shock, even after years, would suddenly turn a man into a vicious murderer. But when we find him, we’ll find out what we can. We have some truly wonderful psychiatrists with the department. They’ll be able to deal with him,” Jude assured her. As he spoke, his phone rang.

It was Norton, from headquarters.

“Assistant chief wants to see you, pronto,” Norton told him.

“I’m at the scene,” Jude told him.

“I know. I told him that you’d been dispatched by orders of the lieutenant. But he says that you’ve had time to do what you can do there, and that he wants to see you about a task force.”

“No other murders today, huh?” Jude asked dryly.

“Not like this. Film is already rolling. The news is shooting through all five boroughs, the country and the world like the spew from a geyser.
Jack’s back.
That’s what they’re saying. Anyway, he wants you in here, now.”

The twenty-first-century media was amazing, Jude thought. He barely knew anything about the crime, but rumor was running rampant, and he understood that One Police Plaza wanted this solved as quickly as humanly possible.

Two other murder investigations were open on his slate; this seemed to be the one that mattered. Naturally. The other two had also been stabbed, but one had died on the way to the hospital and one had been dragged out of the river. This had been public and sensationalist. The victim was a spectacle on Broadway. They were both his cases because he worked specifically for the chief of police; he and Monty had been “detective specialists” for years, which meant they could cover all of New York City as needed.

He wished that they hadn’t been his cases; he’d gotten nowhere with them. The other two women had died quietly, apparently without friends to miss them. They hadn’t been discovered in such a bold and gruesome state, with all the world watching.

Except that he wondered if the deputy chief was thinking along the same lines that were now plaguing him. He wasn’t a Ripperologist, as Fullbright considered himself, but he did know about the case a fair amount since he’d spent the month of August in Britain last year for an experimental exchange police procedural program. The program had included a study of the Ripper files, with one of Britain’s top historians discussing police work now and then. Jude had looked at the archives available. Five victims were accepted as the Ripper’s, but the London case files had started with the deaths of two women who had been killed before what was now deemed by experts to be Ripper murders.

They had the girl from the river, and the girl who had survived her attack long enough to make it to the hospital. Neither had carried ID; neither had been reported missing. All efforts to identify the two had been to no avail. Both had come from New York or to New York…and met sad ends.

And now…

Virginia Rockford.

“I’m still at the scene, working it,” Jude said.

“Crime scene folks are there. And they’re good at what they do. That’s what the assistant chief said. Get in here.”

Jude clicked his phone closed. Great. He’d find himself besieged by the reporters stationed at “the shack” on the second floor of headquarters before he could reach the deputy chief’s office.

He wished he hadn’t been called. He wished any other cop in the city had come on for this case.

But they hadn’t; he had been on duty, and he had been specifically ordered down here.

He thanked Dorothy Hannigan and left her his card, and started out, wishing that he could look for Captain Tyler himself. But he told Smith to get more men on finding the homeless man; and he gave the officer the task of connecting with the producer for the movie being shot down the street and getting him a list of anyone involved in the production. He wanted the beat cops to keep a presence on the street and their eyes open.

There had probably been a number of young women involved in the shoot the day before; the cops could start with them. He stressed the importance of their notes, and Smith looked at him, hesitant. “Crosby, you know I’m a beat cop, right? Not the boss down here.”

“Smith, I think you’ll be fine,” he said.

He headed down Broadway. It was far easier to walk around Lower Manhattan right now than to get his car.

He managed to reach the deputy chief’s office without being waylaid. The offices were huge, and he was just lucky that the elevator he was in didn’t stop on the second floor where he might have been detained by an avid reporter.

He stood in front of the desk, but Nathaniel Green, “D-Chiefy,” as the men called him affectionately behind his back, wasn’t a browbeater. He wasn’t a political appointee, either. He’d earned his place, moving up the ranks.

Green indicated the chair in front of his desk and Jude sat.

“Are you taking me off this new case?” Jude asked him.

Green smiled grimly. “Sorry, no. But I’m giving you a team, a task force. Who do you want?”

Jude was quiet for a minute. He wanted to work with Monty, his partner of the last five years. But Monty was still in the hospital, and the last thing he needed, still clinging to life and praying to walk again, was a sensationalist murder case on his mind.

“Ellis Sayer and his group.”

“You’ve got them. You have priority access to whoever you want in the Technical Assistance Response Unit. And I’m bringing in the feds.”

“The feds? As far as I know, the killer didn’t kidnap the women and cross state lines.” Jude was truly puzzled; he wanted to believe that when it was important, law enforcement agencies did know how to cooperate. But they could also be possessive and territorial. The NYPD usually wanted to solve their own cases. They didn’t mind help from other agencies, but they wanted control.

Green grimaced dryly. “You just said women. I believe we’re thinking along the same lines.”

“That we have a killer trying to emulate one from the late 1880s? That’s a stretch.”

“We have a killer who left a woman slashed to shreds on Broadway. The other women in those two earlier cases—both seemed to have come from nowhere. They were murdered, and they’re still trying to hold on down at the morgue to see if the bodies will be claimed.” He hesitated. “Look, Jude, this is my call. The second that body was found, the media went crazy, and, before the public puts the puzzle pieces together, I want to be on it—a step ahead. Think about the way our Jane Does were ripped up.”

“
Obviously,
sir, since I arrived at the scene of last night’s crime, I’ve given it some thought. But I’ve also been trying to give the first two victims my full attention. No one seems to miss them—as you said. They appear to be lost creatures. Maybe prostitutes,” Jude said. “And maybe the three murders are all connected—at this point, we just don’t know. If you say we should bring in the feds, fine. I’m not sure I see where federal jurisdiction is warranted yet.”

“What we’re bringing in is a special federal unit. We’re not handing over jurisdiction. They’ll work with you—you work with them,” Green said.

“Sure. Though again, I’m still not seeing a federal connection. And we have FBI offices in the city. Why is a
special
unit coming in?”

Green looked at him with a certain degree of exasperation. “Jude, this is coming straight from the top brass. The mayor’s office. We can’t have tourists terrified of coming to New York City. We’ve done a good job in the past few years. Giuliani cleaned up a lot of the theater district and visitors can actually catch cabs that take them where they want to go. We don’t need a return to the seventies—or back to the days of Five Points, when a walk near where our own building stands meant tripping over the bodies of the starved, diseased—or murdered. We have to work hard and fast. The media is already having a field day with this one. If a special unit can help, I’m all for it.”

Jude winced inwardly. Special unit? He wasn’t sure what that meant. But it was fine. He was pretty damn sure that they weren’t going to find anything to point them straight to the killer. New York City cops were good; they had learned to deal with just about everything the world could throw them. But they were also faced with a population that was staggering. Finding leads was going to be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.