Saints Of New York (52 page)

'A
week, Frank. I can agree to that. A week longer on this case, and then we go
elsewhere. We start looking at some of the other things that are backing up
behind us.'

Parrish
nodded and extended his hand. 'Deal,' he said. 'A week, and if we haven't
nailed McKee for
his
involvement in six murders then we'll drop the case completely.'

'You're
serious?'

'I
am.'

'Okay,'
Radick said. 'A week it is.'

They
shook. Radick leaned back in his chair. He looked out of the window for a
moment and wondered if Frank Parrish was his karma for sins in another life.

 
Parrish was home by seven. He should have
eaten but he had no appetite. Twice he picked up the phone, and twice he put it
down again. He paced the kitchen, paused ahead of the refrigerator, opened the
door and looked inside. He closed the door again and resumed pacing.

At
twenty to eight he picked up the phone once more and dialed a number. He stood
with his eyes closed as it rang. Just as he was about to hang up it was
answered.

'Hello,'
he said. 'It's me.'

There
was a hesitation at the other end, and then, 'Jesus, that voice is a blast from
the past.'

'It's
been a long time, Ro—' and then he cut himself short. No names. Not on the
phone.

'How
have you been?'

'Better,'
Parrish replied.

'And
I can only assume that the request I made last time we spoke has fallen on deaf
ears?'

'Look,
it's not that simple. I'm stuck. Really stuck.'

'As
you were last time, or have I got that wrong?'

'No,
you're not wrong. This is important—'

'You
know the deal. I helped you out last time and I shouldn't have done. Christ, I
shouldn't even be speaking to you.'

'But
it's been three . . . no, four years. You ever consider how many times I could
have called you in the last four years and I never did?'

'I
know. I understand that. But you know something? That's the way it should be.'

'I
need your help.'

'I
can't give you any help.'

'Listen
to
me ...
I
need
your help.'

There
was silence at the other end. Parrish could hear breathing, that was all.
'Look,' he went on. if I didn't think it was serious, I mean
really
serious, then I wouldn't call you. You
know that.'

'How
serious?'

'Six.
Another one imminent. I'm sure of that.'

'Men,
women—'

'Teenage
girls . . . snuff movies, I think.'

'Oh,
what a wonderful world we live in.'

'So?'

'So
what?'

'Will
you help me?'

'Depends
entirely on what you mean by
help.'

'Meet
me. An hour. Maybe less. I just need someone outside the loop to talk to. I
need to tell you what we've
got. . .
well, what we
haven't
got actually, and see if there's any way out of this.'

There
was silence once more. It seemed to go on until midnight.

'This
is not good.'

'I
know,' Parrish replied. 'I'm sorry. If there was someone else I could talk to—'

'Did
you do something that means you can't go through standard channels?'

'I
did something. It doesn't relate to standard channels. I know something that
can't go on record. It may be
nothing ...
I don
't
know what the fuck it might or might not
mean. I'm in a jam, you know? I'm in a fucking tight spot and I need to know if
there's
a
way out.'

'There
probably isn't, knowing you.'

'I
know, but I have to try.'

'Jesus
Christ, you really are—'

'I
know. A pain in the ass. A liability. I've said that if
this
doesn't
fold in a week I'm quitting.'

'Oh,
it's one of those moments is it?'

'I'm
asking you. I'm
begging
you to help me out on this.'

'Time
is it?'

'Quarter
to eight.'

'You
still live where you used to?'

'Yes.'

'Meet you at the second place we met.
Half past eight.' The line went dead in his ear.

Parrish
stood for a moment with the receiver in his hand. He could hear the thudding of
his own heart. It was another minute before he hung up.

Parrish
wondered whether he'd even visited the diner in the previous four years. He
couldn't recall, not clearly. Situated on the corner of Park and Ryerson, a
stone's throw from the expressway, it was no more than half a dozen blocks
north-east of his apartment. He walked, and even taking his time he was there
at quarter after. He took a booth in the back right-hand corner, ordered
coffee, and waited.

'I
cannot stay long,' was Ron's opening gambit.

Parrish
smiled. 'I don't expect you to stay long.'

Ron
sat down, and it was then that he perhaps first looked at Frank Parrish
properly, because he said, 'You don't look so good.'

'I've
been better.'

'You
still single?'

Parrish
nodded.

'You
need someone to take care of you, Frank. You don't look well.'

Parrish
shrugged. 'Been better, been worse.'

'You
want a refill?'

'Sure.'

Ron
beckoned the waitress, asked for coffee for himself, a refill for Parrish.

'So
whose nightmare are you chasing these days?' Ron asked.

Parrish
laid out the facts that he possessed - quickly, succinctly - and in doing so
reminded himself that he had very few facts at all.

'Sounds
like the cosmetic alterations, the hair, the nails, whatever he's doing . . .
that's your signature, right? However,
we
don't
have all the answers at the Bureau. You do know that, right?'

'I
know, Ron, I know. All I'm hoping for is perhaps a different
angle. Something I can go after
this guy with. Something that might crack the facade and get me inside.'

'There's
a lot of assumption on your part,' Ron replied. 'Sounds to me that you really
don't have anything on him at all.'

'I
get that, but I feel so certain it's—'

Ron
raised his hand. 'Looking at it purely with a view that he
is
the
guy, okay? Taking all of these six cases as victims of the same guy, he's more
than likely a commuter. He's going out to different locations to get his
victims. He does whatever he does, and then he dumps them. If he is making
films then I doubt very much that he's using his own house. He could be. A
basement maybe, an upstairs room that he considers secure, but from what you've
told me I get the impression he's not working alone.'

i
thought about that.'

'And
these girls all look similar. Blonde, pretty, slim, good- looking kids, right?'

'Yes,
they are.'

'And
what does his daughter look like?'

Parrish
shook his head. 'I actually don't know. I saw a picture of her, but it was from
a while back and it wasn't very clear.'

'Tell
you now, she's either going to look a lot like the victims or she's gonna going
to look precisely the opposite.'

'Explain.'

'Anger-retaliatory
is a tough call on this, Frank. The victim symbolizes someone, usually someone
you want that you can't have, or someone that the perp believes has wronged him
in some way. Anger-retaliatory victims are mostly unplanned and very violent.
Your guy is a planner, and as far as the violence is concerned, well, he just
doesn't make the grade. The anger- excitement thing? That comes out of a need
to terrify, to cause as much suffering as they possibly can before killing the
subject. They go at it like it's a military operation. Everything down to the
last detail. Where, when, how, everything rehearsed time and time again before
the actual event. If your guy is selecting his victims from files, especially
if he is ensuring that none of the victims can be directly connected to him from
a professional standpoint, then he is a planner. That takes it out of the realm
of anger-retaliatory.'

'You
get crossovers between the categories, right?'

'For
sure. These categories are not cast in stone, Frank, they're loose outlines.
There's no single killer that's the same as any other, believe me.'

'And
the thing you said about the daughter?'

'Well,
that would be an interesting thing to know. The possibility that he has been
filming the daughter from the crawl-space above her bedroom. He could have a fixation
on his own daughter, an incestuous thing. Well, he can't fuck his own daughter
so he goes after girls that look like her. And in order to convince himself
that he's not an incestuous pedophile, he makes these cosmetic alterations so
they look slightly different and slightly older. How old's the kid?'

'Fourteen.'

Ron
leaned back in the chair and shook his head. 'Thing is you just don't know what
the fuck is going on with these guys until you get them, and then you only get
what they want to tell you. Whatever information we have managed to collate
over the years at the FBI is bound to have questionable elements in it. After
all, we are dealing with some of the world's best liars.'

'And
what if the daughter doesn't look like the victims?'

'So
if his daughter is a bespectacled, overweight brunette, then he's upset that
she doesn't fit the acceptable social model. Maybe she's had difficulty at
school, maybe she's been excluded from things because she's not the cute blonde
that he hoped she would be. Then it becomes a matter of revenge against all
those that made her feel different and unwanted.'

'If
she looks like her mother she's going to be the former, not the latter.'

'Okay,
then he's fucking his daughter by proxy. Here we get into the destroy-what-you-have-created
thing, but at the same time empathizing enough with the victim so as not to go
overboard on the torture and pain thing. That could explain
the
rohypnol. If they're drugged they can't
fight back, if they don't fight back you don't have to restrain or hurt them.'

'I
think the first ones were hurt,' Parrish interjected.
'This
movie,
Hurting Bad -
well, I think the title gives away the
game, don't you?'

'Like
I said before, Frank, you have no way of knowing how this thing evolved. He
could have been working with someone on the first ones, and then gone solo
because he didn't like the pain thing. He could have started out hurting them
and then graduated to a more sophisticated way of doing what he needed to
do—'

'Needed
to do?'

'Sure.
It's never a want with these characters. Always a need. They can't control it.
It resolves something. Always. Beneath everything, when you get right down to
the core truth of what's going on with these guys, there's always some
difficulty, some problem, some deeply-inlaid issue that they're resolving by
doing this. And the other thing that makes me feel that we've got something
very personal going on here is the strangulation.'