The Jake Helman Files Personal Demons (3 page)

Across the street, behind a chain-link fence, schoolchildren chased each other around a playground, their joyful shouts rising above the traffic noise coming from Eleventh Avenue. Jake watched them with bleary eyes. After two years of marriage, Sheryl wanted a baby. He had shared her desire at first, but he had only been in the Special Homicide Task Force for one year then, a rising star on the prestige team. After three years in the unit, he knew firsthand that terrible things happened to children in the boroughs of New York City. Sheryl wanted to move from their one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side, in the One-Nine Precinct, to Long Island, where she believed the suburbs offered relative sanctuary from the city’s brutality. They had begun saving money for a down payment on a house, but Jake knew that children were vulnerable to predators in even the most mundane settings. His mind reconstructed the image of a photograph he had spent countless hours studying: a school portrait of a six-year-old girl named Rhonda Kelly, whose own father had—

Stop it
.

The image faded, receding into the dark corridors of his mind. His knees shook as he sucked on the cigarette; at thirty-two, he felt more like fifty.

“You Helman?” a female voice said behind him.

Jake turned toward the brick building. Two paramedics emerged behind the patrolman stationed at the front door: a Chinese man with spiky black hair and acne-scarred cheeks, and a short black woman with relaxed hair. Jake recognized them from other homicide sites, but did not know their names. He nodded in response to the woman’s query.

She lit a cigarette. “Your partner says to stop procrastinating and get your ass upstairs.”

Jake mustered a faint smile and took a final drag on his Marlboro, which he flicked into the gutter. “How bad is it up there?”

The Chinese man shook his head, his complexion matching his green Windbreaker.

“When are you guys gonna catch this freak?” the woman said. Jake shrugged. “‘Where’s Old Nick?’“

Raising her left hand, the woman showed him a palm-sized digital camera strapped around her wrist. “I took some snaps,” she said in a conspiratorial tone. “I bet I can sell copies on eBay.”

Jake didn’t respond. He had nothing against city employees scoring a little extra bread on the side, but he loathed serial killer memorabilia, the parasites who bought it, and the ghouls who pushed it.

Sensing his disapproval, the woman motioned to her partner. “Have a good one,” she told Jake. “If that’s still possible once you see the vic.”

“You, too.”

The Chinese man gave Jake a grim nod and followed the woman up the sidewalk to the EMS bus. Jake debated lighting another cigarette and decided against it. He looked up at the windows on the second floor and closed his eyes, listening to the sounds of the children across the street.

I don’t want to go up there
, he thought.
But I’ve got no choice
. When he opened his eyes, he saw the patrolman at the door staring at him.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” Jake said without conviction. Taking a deep breath, he entered the building. Another day, another corpse.

The sunlight behind Jake projected his shadow across the lobby’s dusty stairway. He felt pressure building at the base of his skull as he looked up at the second floor and heard muted voices beyond his field of vision. Reaching into the left-hand pocket of his coat, he removed a small jar of vapor rub. He popped the lid, dipped two fingers into the cold, gelatinous substance, and rubbed some inside each nostril. A tingling sensation awakened his senses: the poor man’s fix.

He grasped the banister and climbed the stairs, un-snapping his coat and tugging at the collar of his black turtleneck. Sheryl, who worked as the buyer and manager for a fashion boutique in Soho, selected all of his clothes. His fellow detectives chided him for being the sharpest dresser in his unit, but he secretly enjoyed the attention.

He turned left at the landing. At the opposite end of the narrow hall, standing before an open doorway crisscrossed with yellow crime scene tape, a uniformed officer consoled a woman with fiery red hair. As Jake approached them, he saw that the attractive woman was in her twenties. Her open coat revealed a sheer, body-hugging costume and she twisted a pair
of Playboy
bunny ears with her hands, her knuckles turning white. She’d probably just returned home from a long night of partying, Jake reasoned. She uttered a few words between choked sobs and he recognized an Irish accent.

A sudden flash of light inside the apartment, like distant lightning or the muzzle flash of a pistol, made his heart skip a beat. He found the lack of an accompanying sound unsettling. In his decade on the Job, he had never fired a gun in a crisis, though he had pulled his Glock Nine from its shoulder holster on several occasions. The queasy feeling in his stomach clawed its way up his throat.

Keep it together, Jake
.

A diminutive woman lurked in an open doorway to his left, dressed in a dirty blue robe. She had stark white hair and wrinkled, birdlike eyes. The look he shot her sent her scurrying into the bowels of her apartment. The officer nodded to him, a somber expression on his face. Jake averted his eyes to avoid the sobbing woman. He would deal with her when necessary. A second flash of light blossomed inside the apartment.

Ducking beneath the tape, he came face-to-face with another officer in the kitchen. The well-groomed PO looked fresh out of the Academy. His complexion pale, he clutched a pen in one hand and a notebook in the other.

“Detective Helman,” Jake said. “That’s with one L. You guys always get that wrong.”

“Yes, sir.” The Recorder noted Jake’s name and the time in his log.

“That the First Officer?” Jake nodded at the patrolman in the hall.

The Recorder nodded. “Yes, sir. His name is Wilkins. I’m Keller.”

Wilkins had been the First Officer on the scene. He had contacted Dispatch Control, which had then contacted Special Homicide rather than the Detective Area Task Force for Manhattan South. Entering the living room, Jake felt a stillness hanging in the air. He turned in a complete circle, feeling like an intruder as he scanned the room for details. A tall halogen lamp—common in Manhattan apartments, which often lacked overhead lighting—had been left on. Makeup, skin care products, and framed photographs covered the shelves of a cherry wood bookcase. An open doorway led into the only bedroom.

Stepping closer to the bookcase, he noted rosary beads coiled on one shelf and he studied the photographs. In one, two teenage girls stood giggling outdoors, the wind whipping their hair. He recognized the woman in the hall as the girl on the left, and connected her accent to the green landscape in the photo’s background. The girl on the right also appeared in the next photo, with her arms around the waists of a man and woman—her parents, Jake guessed—outside a Tudor-style house. The blonde had a wide smile and appeared to have lost weight between shots.

Another flash drew his attention to the sunlit bedroom. Bracing himself for the worst, he stepped through the doorway. To his left, Detective Edgar Hopkins raised a digital camera, his hands gloved in cream-colored latex. The tall black man aimed the camera at the floor on the far side of the bed, and the ensuing flash caused Jake to see spots dancing before his eyes.

Staring at the ribbons of blood radiating out from the violent splotch in the center of the bed, Jake said, “No need for Luminol here.” The phosphorous chemical caused blood traces to glow in the dark.

Edgar glanced at him with one eyebrow cocked as he lowered the camera. “It’s about time. I was about to call Missing Persons on your ass.”

“Those jokers couldn’t find me if there was only one bar in all of Manhattan.” Eyeing the swirling patterns of blood that had dried on the walls in the far corner, Jake took a pair of latex gloves from his coat pocket and pulled them on. “Happy All Saints Day, by the way.”

Edgar grunted. “You’re not religious.”

“Old habits die hard.” Through the closed windows, Jake heard the voices of the children across the street fading as they filed inside their school, which meant that the 9:00 a.m. bell had rung. He nodded in the direction of the hidden corpse. “Number six?”

Edgar nodded. “Cipher: six; Murder Police: zero. This asshole’s making us look like chumps.”

Stepping over a spotted costume tail, Jake moved around the foot of the bed. A matching pair of cat ears rested on the bureau, beside a silent boom box with a glowing red LED light. He glimpsed his reflection through streaks of blood on the bureau’s mirror, then joined Edgar and swallowed. The corpse of a young blond woman lay on the floor, nude except for her black panties. He recognized her from the photos in the living room. Her discarded shoes and clothing lay around her in disarray. Two slits, approximately two inches long, opened her throat, and clotted blood had matted her hair to the sides of her neck. More blood, thick and syrupy, covered her torso and the white shag rug beneath her, and a gold crucifix lay caked in red between her breasts. She stared at the ceiling with glazed eyes, her lips parted. Her flesh had turned blue, laced with ghastly streaks of purple, and she had soiled herself. Jake felt grateful that the vapor rub in his nostrils blocked the odors. A fly buzzed somewhere in the room, and he admired its tenacity for surviving out of season; maggots would soon follow.

‘“I could not stop for Death, so He gladly stopped for me.’“

Now Jake cocked one eyebrow at Edgar.

“Emily Dickinson.”

“I knew that,” Jake said with a straight face. “You’re not the only one who graduated from college.”

“She was a pretty girl. Our boy’s first nude. Looks like she performed a striptease for him. No telling what else she did just yet. But this is different from the others. It was no home invasion. Something consensual happened here before things turned ugly.” Edgar raised the camera and squeezed off another shot.

The close flash made Jake flinch and lingered in the pupils of the dead woman’s eyes. “Can’t you say ‘fire in the hole’ before you do that?”

Edgar pocketed the camera and took out a notebook. “Do I tell you how to do your job?”

“Every damned day.”

“That’s why you’ve made it this far.” He opened the notebook. “Meet Shannon Reynolds, age twenty-two. Moved here from Leprechaun Land two months ago.”

“Watch it…”

“Don’t get your Irish up.”

Jake snorted. His father had been German-Irish, his mother pure Irish.

“Shannon worked as a nanny for a family on West End Avenue. The young lady in the hall is her roommate, Meg Foley. Similar stats—you know how these foreign nannies like to stick together. Meg saw Shannon at breakfast yesterday morning, spent last night with her boyfriend in Williamsburg, and came home to this at 0730. This is her bedroom; Shannon slept on the sofa, at least until last night. Meg’s too broken up to tell us if anything’s missing.”

Jake frowned. He knew what the result would be once Meg had calmed down enough to inventory the apartment’s contents. Unlike many serial killers, the Cipher did not collect souvenirs from his victims, making it more difficult for the detectives to construct a psychological profile. Jake stared at Shannon’s crucifix.

Souvenirs
…

An image formed in his mind. “There are rosary beads in the living room.”

Edgar shrugged. “Yeah, I noticed.”

“She was Catholic.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Jerez and Yee were Catholic, too.”

“So? Bass was Methodist. Rosenthal was Jewish. I don’t remember what Williams was.”

“Presbyterian.”

“What’s your point? Three out of six vics were Catholic and three weren’t. That’s no pattern.”

“None of them were atheists.”

Edgar narrowed his eyes.

Jake pointed at the crucifix. “We’ve been beating ourselves up searching for a common link between the vics, and this might be it. Each one was religious, or at least subscribed to a nominal religion.”

Edgar stroked the ends of his mustache. “You think our boy has it in for the righteous? I see blood on the walls, not pentagrams.”

“I didn’t say anything about satanic rites. But look at her wounds. They’re exactly like the others: precision cuts to the jugular and carotid. No deviation.”

“Jack the Ripper was supposedly a surgeon.”

“He’s not just killing them; he’s
bleeding
them.”

“So what are you saying, that the Cipher’s been committing human sacrifices? That will go over big at the next press briefing. It will also get your ass sent back to Alphabet City.”

Recalling the frustrating two years he had served as a plainclothes detective in the Street Narcotics Apprehension Program on Avenues A, B, C, and D, Jake sighed. “These murders are orderly, possibly ritualistic.”

“How would you know? The only ritual you ever perform is kneeling at the toilet after a night of heavy drinking.”

Jake said nothing and Edgar offered him the end of a measuring tape. They measured the distances from Shannon’s corpse to the various bloodstains around the room, with Edgar recording the measurements.

“According to Meg, Shannon didn’t have any boyfriends since moving here, and she wasn’t the type to sleep around.”