Compromised (20 page)

“Stop ranting,” he insisted. “There aren’t many people who understand you as well as I do. Trust me, I know what makes you tick, but you must see how bizarre your behavior was. You could’ve been lying in an alley, beaten or worse, and twitching like a kipper with a seizure. Do you know how cruel it was to abandon your family under those circumstances?”

“Did you say kipper?”

He glared at me. “Be
serious
.”

“Easy, Nigel. I understand . . . but at the time I was jumping out of my skin. Did I act irrationally? Yeah, I guess I did, but everyone knows that I’m more than capable of taking care of myself. I’m a sturdy little cop.”

“Knock it off, Stephanie. You took a crazy risk, and you know it.” He narrowed his eyes. “Do you have any idea what
they
thought?” he asked gesturing toward the kitchen.

Oh my God. What could possibly make this any worse?

He took a moment before continuing. “They were worried that Zachary Clovin’s genes had kicked in, and that a serious mental disorder was emerging.”

I recoiled at the comment. “That’s just plain stupid. My biological father was a lab rat who willingly participated in hallucinogenic experimentation. Psychopathy isn’t hereditary. It’s a result of traumatic circumstances.”

“That’s what the great minds used to believe, but it has recently been demonstrated that there are biological factors at work in the development of the psychotic mind, and some of those factors are strong contributors to many of the more serious character disturbances.”

“Really, Nigel, that’s what you’re telling me? As if I don’t have enough shit to worry about, I can now add to the list that I may go as bat-shit crazy as my biological father?”

“Calm down. Calm down.” He took my hand in his. “I’m sure you’re just fine. I’m just trying to elucidate upon the risk you took and the effect it had on your loved ones.”

“Job well done, Nigel.” I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m trying to calm down before I short out my brain wiring,” I said. “All this tough love is giving me a huge headache. Figuratively that is. I don’t want everyone to freak out and rush me back to the hospital.”

“Point well taken,” he said. “Still, I think the two of us should have a few sessions together.”

“I understand now, and I
won’t
do it again.”

“It’s healthy therapy, Stephanie, and it just makes good common sense. Promise you’ll come see me.”

“After I close these cases.”

He smiled. “That’s all I can ask.”

As I mentioned, in addition to being a caring friend, Nigel was the be-all and end-all of psychological geniuses. He was an authorized NYPD consultant, so we were able to share our case information with him over dinner in order to gain insights into the murderer’s psyche.

Many of the behavioral analysis axioms once considered unshakable were now widely considered myths. Myth: All serial killers are dysfunctional loners. Myth: All serial killers are white males. Myth: All serial killers are motivated by sex. Myth: All serial killers are insane or evil geniuses. Myth: All serial killers want to get caught. I fully understood that there were now holes in the old maxims, but the operative term in these newly listed myths was the word
all
. Granted, there were no absolutes, but the bulk of the psychopaths that had been, are, or ever will be, adhere to these five tenants I’d listed, and Nigel had been hard-pressed to argue differently.

Gus’s cell phone was buzzing as he approached the table with a Trader Joe’s Chocolate Brooklyn Babka, which was the baked goods equivalent of crack cocaine to a chocolate addict like me. He placed the loaf of chocolaty goodness in front of me and answered his phone. “Really?” He glanced at me with wide eyes, and I knew that something really big had just happened. “When? Uh-huh.” He yanked out a pen and scribbled on a napkin. “Address? Okay. I’ll be right there.” He disconnected. “Cut yourself a slice and eat it on the run,” he said. “Reggie Coffer was just found dead.”

“Is that him?”

“Was,”
Gus corrected. “As in past tense. Expired. Kaput. Is no more.”

“Are you a homicide detective or a friggin’ thesaurus?”

“How dare you stifle my creative energy,” he chuckled. “What’s a matter, don’t like the new intellectual me?”

“I prefer the old, savage va-jay-jay-pounding you.”

“I think that abstinence has made me smarter.”

“Easy, Costanza, that was an old
Seinfeld
episode. Word spreads about this, and you’ll get hit with a theft of intellectual property suit.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right, the one where George becomes superintelligent and Elaine turns into a blithering idiot.”

“Correct. Be that as it may, I can’t wait to get the all clear from the doc and bang your brains out.”

“Damn it, but you’re adoringly superficial.”

“Deal with it. All right, Stephen Hawking, apply that big brain of yours to the task at hand. Solve something . . . anything.”

Crime scene activity had wound down by the time we arrived, which was fortunate, because the superintendent’s apartment was tiny—a basement hovel buried beneath tons of prewar concrete and brick—a bunker if you will with barely enough room for the few of us there.

Coffer certainly hadn’t been a neat freak. There was stuff piled everywhere. In his defense, he’d only been living there a short time and probably hadn’t had time to organize. What’s more, it was somewhat obvious that a struggle had taken place. A telltale floor lamp had been knocked over, and the lightbulb had shattered. The Sheetrock was fractured where someone had likely slammed into it, and the wall was stained with blood.

It appeared that Reggie had been beaten to a pulp. His face was bloody, but it was not swollen, which meant that his assailant had continued to pound his face after he’d expired. Or as the ME would put it, he’d been beaten postmortem.

“Someone got a good ass kicking,” Gus said.

The back of Reggie’s head was bloody. I pointed to the broken and bloodstained wall. “It looks like Reggie’s head might’ve slammed into the wall during the scuffle.” Wearing gloves, I rapped on the wall in the vicinity of the bloodstain. “Uh-huh, there’s a beam behind here. Reggie probably lost consciousness after his head hit the wall, causing him to fall to the floor where he was beaten to death by an emotionally charged assailant.” Of course, there could’ve been other factors contributing to his demise, but they weren’t apparent to the naked eye and would have to be determined in the morgue.

The carpeting looked as if hadn’t been replaced in decades. It was worn and badly stained, and it squished as I approached the bathroom, something that really skeeved me out.

I thought about taking a pass on Reggie’s shitter but persevered. Something gave me the impetus to continue, so I ventured where no health-conscious woman would dare to tread. The condition of the bathroom was an assault on the senses. I mean, it was gross: dirty, dusty, and damp, with mold and God knows what else growing on the wall beneath the sink.

Like the rest of the apartment, the john was small and utilitarian. I spotted plaster dust and sawdust on the sink ledge.
What happened here?
I opened the medicine cabinet for a look-see. It contained standard bathroom articles—an electric razor, Band-Aids, and what have you. The shelves were full except for the space directly in front of the razor-blade slot.
He used an electric razor,
I thought.
Why’d he need easy access to the blade slot?
Modern-day vanities no longer have them, but in the old days, medicine cabinets, as they were called, were all manufactured with a narrow cutout through which worn razor blades could be discarded. The blades would fall through the slot into the wall cavity, where they’d remain forever out of harm’s way. My mind flashed back to the night I chatted with Jack Burns at the local bar, and a portion of the conversation we’d had.

“Just come from doing a job?”

“Yeah. Bathroom leak.”

“Get it squared away?”

“Yeah, I got lucky. The leak was from the cold-water pipe, but I was able to get to it by taking out the medicine cabinet and didn’t have to chop up the wall. Saved me a lot of wear and tear, but the place will still need fresh Sheetrock and new tile under the sink. It was leaking for a long time and you know how it gets—everything got yellowed and rotted. Stunk like hell. I should’ve been called much sooner.”

“Son of a bitch!” It had been dark when we arrived at Coffer’s building and I rushed in without checking the street. Something clicked in my brain.
This building . . . it’s the one I saw Burns leaving the night I talked to him in the bar.

Emerging from the bathroom, I called out to Gus, “I need a Phillips head screwdriver and two strong arms. Stat!”
I’ve got this,
I thought.
The bullet may have set me back, but it didn’t mess with this detective’s nose for crime. I’m still one hot-shit investigator.

I cleared the contents from the medicine cabinet, and then Gus stepped in and put his massive forearms to work.

“You want to explain why we’re doing a remodeling project during an active homicide investigation?” Gus asked as beads of sweat appeared at the edge of his hairline.

The small room was woefully ventilated. I leaned over the tub and past bottles of dandruff shampoo to crack open the window. “The place reeks like a cesspool. I’m guessing old Reggie didn’t have many lady callers.”

Despite the fact that the screws were old and rusted, Gus was able to remove them with relative ease, and I was pretty sure I understood the reason why. He pulled on the corners of the cabinet and it came free from the wall without the expected crackle of years of caked-on paint, caulking, and plaster giving way as they should have.

“Now what?” Gus asked.

I almost retched as I leaned forward over the crusty toothpaste and spit-laden sink to look into the wall cavity with my flashlight. I was up on my toes but couldn’t rise high enough to look down between the wall beams. I handed the flashlight to Gus. “You’ve got a good six inches on me. Look down into the wall and tell me if you see anything.”

“Got a hunch about something?”

“Yup. Put that six-foot-two-inch frame of yours to work, Detective.”

Gus leaned over the sink, braced his forehead on the wall just above the cutout, and peered downward with the flashlight. He studied the wall cavity for a moment, then turned back toward me with a grin. “You’re spooky, you know that? You’re one hundred percent spooky.”

“You see something down there other than discarded razor blades?”

“I do indeed. There’s a crossmember just a foot below the opening.” He reached in with his gloved hand and pulled out a small pile of cards. The one on the top of the pile was Serafina Ramirez’s city bus pass.

Gus smiled at me.
“Stephanie, you just blow my mind. How in the world did you know there was something hidden behind the medicine cabinet? I wouldn’t have thought to look there in a million years.”

“It was something Jack said the other night. He told me that he fixed a bathroom leak and that he got lucky because he was able to get to the pipe by taking out the medicine cabinet.” I pointed to the copper water pipes running behind the wall. One of them looked as if it had recently been repaired. The old oxidized pipe had been cut and repaired with a shiny copper pressure coupling and solder. “This is the pipe he fixed—Reggie’s. That’s why you were able to get the old rusty screws out so easily. Jack had removed them just days before.”

Gus’s eyes flashed. “He must’ve seen these cards while he was doing the repair, put two and two together, and realized that Reggie had killed Serafina. He probably left them here so that Reggie wouldn’t know that he’d been found out. That’s why he was so worked up when you saw him the other night and why he headed straight for the bar to get drunk.”

“Yeah. That pretty well explains it.”
Shit! It also makes Jack the prime suspect in Reggie’s murder
. I felt sick to my stomach. Jack Burns was barely capable of keeping his own shit together and finding out the identity of his daughter’s killer must have pushed him over the edge. I felt certain of the premise and pitied him for the consequences that would likely befall him. “That poor guy. He just can’t seem to catch a break.”

I wanted to tell Gus that it was time for me to step back from the case because my time would be better served tracking down Yana’s assassin, a matter that was surely unrelated to Serafina Ramirez’s death.

I was about to open my mouth when one of the crime scene investigators appeared in the doorway. He held out a clear plastic evidence bag, which contained a key attached to a paper identification tag. “I found this in a sugar bowl in the kitchen.” It looked like a common padlock key, and the tag identified it as belonging to unit 611 at Mott Street Storage in lower Manhattan.

“Wonder what we’ll find there.” Gus said.

Might as well see this thing through to the end,
I thought, just as my cell phone buzzed. “It’s Nigel,” I announced. “I’ll make it quick.” I hit the “Accept” icon. “Dr. Twain, what a pleasant surprise. I’m at an active crime scene and—”

“I don’t mean to interrupt, love, but something occurred to me. I was thinking about this killer’s MO and how he bound these women to trunks and raped them.”

“Yes?”

“Well, his last name, love. It’s Coffer. It’s not just his name. It’s a psychotic double entendre. Coffer is a synonym for a box or, more to the point, a trunk. His name and his MO are one and the same.”

“Ah,” I gasped. “That’s brilliant, doctor, and the good news is that I have eyes on him as we speak.”

“He’s under arrest?” Nigel queried.

“It goes well beyond that, Nigel. Let me put it this way. He’s got just one more box in his future, and it’s a coffin.”

In all, five identification cards were found in the wall cavity in Reggie Coffer’s bathroom.
We found Serafina Ramirez’s bus pass, Lara Eldridge’s student union card, and the driver’s licenses of Nina Stoffer and two other women. Using the mobile computer in the car I discovered that the two new names were found in the NMPDD, the FBI’s National Missing Person DNA Database. We now knew with reasonable certainty that they too had been Reggie Coffer’s victims. One of the women had disappeared a year prior to Nina Stoffer’s murder. The other woman went missing a year before that. It now appeared that Reggie Coffer had taken at least one life a year for the past five years, on dates that roughly coincided with his birthday.