The Postcard Killers (2 page)

Mac sighed theatrically and put a hand to his forehead. She sidled up to him and cooed, “I think Dior on Montaigne is still open.”

“This is going to be
expensive,
” Mac groaned.

The British pair laughed out loud.

They took a taxi to Avenue Montaigne. Mac and Sylvia didn’t buy anything, but the Brit pulled out his credit card and bought a hideous silk shawl for his new wife. Mac settled for a couple of bottles of Moët & Chandon from a nearby wineshop.

Out in the street again he took out a joint, lit it, and passed it to the Englishwoman.

Sylvia put her arms around the Englishman’s waist and looked him deep in the eyes.

“I want,” she said, “to drink these bottles together with you. In your room.”

The Brit gulped audibly and looked at his wife.

“She can play with Mac at the same time,” Sylvia whispered, and kissed him on the lips. “It’s perfectly all right with me.”

They hailed another taxi.

Three

THE CENTRAL HOTEL PARIS WAS a clean, simple spot in Montparnasse. They took the lift to the third floor and tumbled, giggling and slightly stoned, into the room, which looked out on the Rue du Maine.

The walls were sunshine yellow. In the middle of the thick sky blue carpet was an enormous double bed.

“I’ll get this bubbly stuff opened at once,” Mac said, taking one of the bottles of champagne into the bathroom. “No one go anywhere.”

Sylvia kissed the Englishman again, more seriously this time, using her tongue. She noticed his breathing get quicker. He probably had a full erection already.

“I expect you’re a big boy, aren’t you?” she said in a seductive voice, her hand moving along his leg, up toward his crotch.

She could see the Englishwoman was blushing, but she said nothing to stop this from proceeding.

“Bottoms up!” Mac said, coming back into the room with four improvised champagne glasses on the tray that had held the toothbrush glasses.

“Here we go!” Sylvia cried, swiftly taking one of the glasses and knocking it back.

The British pair were quick to follow her example. Mac laughed and went around refilling the glasses.

Then he lit another joint, which was perfectly rolled.

“How long have you been married?” Sylvia asked, inhaling and passing the marijuana cigarette.

“Four weeks,” the woman said.

“Just imagine,” Sylvia said, “all those lovely nights ahead of you. I’m jealous.”

Mac pulled the Englishwoman to him and whispered something in her ear. She let out a laugh.

Sylvia smiled. “Mac can keep going for ages. Shall we try to beat them? I think we can.”

She leaned over and nibbled at the man’s earlobe. She noticed his eyelids were already drooping. The Englishwoman giggled, a low, confused sound.

“Only a minute or so now,” Mac said. “We’re close now.”

Four

SYLVIA SMILED AND SLOWLY UNDID the man’s shirt. She managed to get his shoes and trousers off before he collapsed on the bedspread.

“Clive,” the woman slurred. “Clive, I love you forever, you know that…”

Then she, too, fell asleep.

Mac had managed to take all her clothes off — apart from her underwear. He removed the underpants now, carried her to the bed, and laid her down next to her husband. Her hair, a little shorter than Sylvia’s but more or less the same color, spread out like a fan.

Sylvia picked up her purse. She riffled quickly through the credit cards, then looked more closely at the passport.

“Emily Spencer,” she read, checking the photo. “This is good, we look similar enough. That makes it easier.”

“Do you think she’s related to Lady Di?” Mac said, as he pulled off her wedding ring.

Sylvia gathered together Emily Spencer’s clothes, valuables, and other important belongings and stuffed them in her backpack.

Then she opened the bag’s outer pocket and pulled out latex gloves, chlorhexidine, and a stiletto knife.

“Mona Lisa?”
she asked.

Mac smiled. “What else? Perfect choice. Help me with the cleaning first, though.”

They pulled on the gloves, got some paper towels from the bathroom, and set about methodically wiping down everything they had touched in the room, including the two unconscious figures on the bed.

Sylvia stared at the man’s genitals.

“He wasn’t that big after all,” she said, and Mac laughed.

“Ready?” she asked, pulling her hair up into a ponytail.

They took off their own clothes and folded them and put them as far away from the bed as possible.

Sylvia started with the man, not for any sexist reasons, just because he was the heavier of the two. She sat behind him and hauled him into her lap, his slack arms flopping by his sides. He grunted as though he were snoring.

Mac straightened the man’s legs, crossed his arms over his stomach, and handed Sylvia the stiletto, which she took in her right hand.

She held the man’s forehead in the crook of her left arm to keep his head up.

She felt with her fingertips for the man’s pulse on his neck and estimated the force of the flow.

Then she thrust the stiletto into the man’s left jugular vein. She cut quickly through muscle and ligaments until she heard a soft hiss that told her that his windpipe had been cut.

Five

UNCONSCIOUSNESS HAD LOWERED THE BRIT’S pulse and blood pressure, but the pressure in his jugular still made the blood gush out in a fountain almost three feet from his body.

Sylvia checked that she hadn’t been hit by the cascade.

“Bingo,” Mac said. “You hit a geyser.”

The force of the flow soon diminished to a rhythmic pulsing. The bubbling sound as the air and blood mixture seeped from the severed throat gradually faded away until finally it stopped altogether.

“Nice work,” Mac said. “Maybe you should have been a doctor.”

“Too boring. Too many rules. You know me and rules.”

Sylvia carefully moved away from Clive, propping him against the cheap headboard. She got blood on her arms when she arranged the man’s hands on his stomach, right on top of left, but didn’t bother to wash it off yet.

“Now it’s your turn, darling,” she said to the doped-up Englishwoman.

Emily Spencer was thin and light. Her breathing had almost stopped already. Her blood scarcely spurted at all.

“How much champagne did she actually drink?” Sylvia asked as she arranged the woman’s small hands on her stomach.

She looked down at her bloody arms and went into the shower. Mac followed her.

They pulled off the latex gloves. Carefully they soaped each other and the stiletto, rinsed themselves off, and left the shower running. They dried themselves with the hotel’s towels, which they then stuffed into the top of Sylvia’s backpack.

Then they got dressed and took out the Polaroid camera.

Sylvia looked at the bodies on the bed, hesitating, deciding if the look was right.

“What do you think about this?” she asked. “Does it work?”

Mac raised the camera. The brightness of the flash blinded them momentarily.

“Works pretty damn well,” he said. “Maybe the best one yet. Even better than Rome.”

Sylvia opened the room’s door with her elbow and they stepped out into the corridor. No security cameras, they’d made sure of that on the way up.

Mac pulled his sleeve down over his fingers and hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign outside the door. The door closed with an almost inaudible click.

The sounds of the night faded into silence. The gentle patter of the shower inside the room could just be heard above the hum of the ventilation system.

“Stairs or elevator?” Mac asked.

“Elevator,” Sylvia said. “I’m tired. Murder is hard work, darling.”

They waited until the doors had closed and the elevator was descending before they kissed.

“I love being on honeymoon with you,” Sylvia said, and Mac smiled brilliantly.

Part One

Chapter 1

Thursday, June 10
Berlin, Germany

THE VIEW FROM THE HOTEL room consisted of a scarred brick wall and three rubbish bins. It was probably still daylight somewhere up above the alley, because Jacob Kanon could make out a fat German rat having itself a good time in the bin farthest to the left.

He took a large sip from the mug of Riesling wine.

It was debatable whether the situation inside or outside the room’s thin pane of glass was more depressing.

He turned his back on the window and looked down at the postcards spread out across the hotel bed.

There was a pattern here, wasn’t there, a twisted logic that he couldn’t see.

The killers were trying to tell him something. The bastards who were cutting the throats of young couples all over Europe were screaming right in his face.

They were shouting their message, but Jacob couldn’t hear what they were saying, couldn’t make out their words, couldn’t understand what they meant, and until he could work out their language, he wouldn’t be able to stop them.

He drank the rest of the wine in his mug and poured some more. Then he sat down on the bed, messing up the order he had just arranged for the postcards.

“Let’s look at it this way, then. Let me see who you are!”

Jacob Kanon, a homicide detective from the NYPD’s 32nd Precinct, was a long way from home. He was in Berlin because the killers had brought him here. He had been following their progress for six months, always two steps behind, maybe even three or four.

Only now had the magnitude of their depravity started to sink in with the police authorities around Europe. Because the killers carried out only one or two murders in each country, it had taken time for the pattern to emerge, for everyone except him to see it plainly.

Some of the stupid bastards still didn’t see it, and wouldn’t take help from an American, even a fucking smart one who had everything riding on this case.

He picked up the copies of the postcard from Florence.

The first one
.

Chapter 2

THE POSTCARD SHOWED THE BASILICA di San Miniato al Monte, and on the back was the now familiar quote. He read the lines and drank more wine, then let the card fall and picked up the next one, and the next, and the next.

Athens:
a picture of the Olympic Stadium from 2004.

Salzburg:
an anonymous street scene.

Madrid:
Las Ventas.

And then
Rome,
Rome,
Rome…

Jacob put his hands over his face for a few seconds before getting up and going over to the rickety desk by the wall.

He sat down on the Windsor chair and rested his arms on his notes, the notes he had made about the various victims, his interpretations, the tentative connections he had made.

He knew very little about the Berlin couple yet, just their names and ages: Karen and Billy Cowley, both twenty-three, from Canberra in Australia. Drugged and murdered in their rented apartment close to Charité University Hospital, for which they had paid two weeks in advance but which they hadn’t had the chance to fully enjoy. Instead, they had their throats cut and were mutilated on their second or possibly third day in the apartment.

It was four days, maybe five or six, before they were even found.
Stupid, arrogant German police! Acting like they knew everything, when they knew so little.

Jacob got up, went over to the bed again, and picked up the Polaroid picture of the couple that had been posted to the journalist at the
Berliner Zeitung.
This was the point where his brain had reached the limit for what it could absorb.

Why did the killers send first postcards and then grisly photographs of the slaughter to the media in the cities where they carried out their murders?

To shock?

To get fame and acclaim?

Or did they have some other intention? Were the pictures and postcards a smoke screen to conceal their real motive? And if so, what the hell might that be?

What the hell, what the hell, what the hell?

He examined the photograph, its macabre composition. There had to be a meaning, but he couldn’t see what it was.

Instead, he picked up the picture of the couple from Paris.

Emily and Clive Spencer, just married, propped up next to each other against a pale-colored headboard in a Montparnasse hotel room. They were both naked. The streams of blood that covered their torsos had gathered in congealed little pools around their genitals.

Why?

Chapter 3

JACOB REACHED FOR THE WEDDING photograph he had asked Emily’s mother to send him.

Emily was only twenty-one years old. Clive had just turned twenty-six. They were a stunningly beautiful couple, and the wedding photo radiated so much happiness and romance. Clive was dressed in tails, tall and handsome. Maybe a touch overweight, but that suited his status as a stockbroker in the London markets.

Emily looked like a fairy-tale princess, her hair in big ringlets framing her head. Slim and fragile, she looked quite enchanting in her ivory dress. Her eyes shone at the camera.

They had met at a mutual friend’s New Year’s party in Notting Hill, in one of those narrow trendy houses where the film with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts had been shot.

Emily’s mother hadn’t been able to stop crying when Jacob talked to her on the phone.

He could neither comfort nor help her. He wasn’t even formally involved in the case, after all. As an American police officer, he had to be careful not to get involved in the work done by the authorities in other countries.

That could have diplomatic consequences and, even worse, could lead to his expulsion from the country.

A wave of despondency washed over Jacob with a force that took his breath away and made the mug of wine in his hand shake.