Secret of the Seventh Son (4 page)

Will struggled to pay attention. It was relatively painless to get three weeks of data spoon-fed, but his mind wandered and his head was still fogged up from his late night tryst with Johnnie Walker. Still, he knew he could get into the groove in a heartbeat. Over two decades, he had taken the lead in eight major serial killing cases and kibitzed in countless others.

The first was in Indianapolis, during his inaugural field assignment, when he wasn't much older than Nancy. The perp was a twisted psycho who liked to put out cigarettes on his victims' eyelids until a discarded stub broke the case. When his second wife, Evie, got into grad school at Duke, he pulled a transfer to Raleigh, and sure enough, another crackpot with a straight razor started killing women in and around Asheville. Nine agonizing months and five diced-up victims later, he nailed that creep too. All of a sudden, he had a reputation; he was a de facto specialist. They bumped him, messily divorced again, to headquarters to work Violent Crimes in a group headed by Hal Sheridan, the man who trained a generation of agents how to profile serial killers.

Sheridan was a cold fish, emotionally detached and tightly wound to the point where he was the butt of an office joke: if a killing spree broke out in Virginia, Hal would have to be on the hot list. He doled out the national cases carefully, matching the criminal's mind to the mind of his agents. Sheridan gave him cases involving extreme brutality and torture, killers who directed massive rage at women. Go figure.

Nancy's recitations began to penetrate his fog. The facts, he had to acknowledge, were pretty damned interesting. He knew the broad strokes from the media. Who didn't? It was
the
story. Predictably, the perp's moniker, the Doomsday Killer, came from the press. The
Post
nabbed the honors. It's blood rival, the
Daily News
, resisted for a few days, countering with the header
POSTCARDS FROM HELL
, but soon capitulated and started blaring Doomsday all over the front page.

According to Nancy, the postcards did not have common fingerprints; the sender probably used fiber-free, possibly latex utility gloves. There were a few nonvictim, nonrelated prints on a couple of the cards, and cooperating FBI field offices were in the process of working up postal workers in the Las Vegas to New York delivery chain. The postcards themselves were plain white three-by-fives available in thousands of retail outlets. They were printed on an HP Photosmart ink-jet printer, one of tens of thousands in circulation, fed in twice to print each side. The font was from the standard Microsoft Word pull-down menu. The ink-drawn coffin outlines were probably all done by the same hand using a black Pentel pen, ultrafine point, one of millions in circulation. The stamps were all the same, forty-one-cent American flag designs, one of hundreds of millions in circulation, the backs peel-and-stick, DNA free. The six cards were mailed on May 18 and cleared through the central USPS processing center in Las Vegas.

"So the guy would have had plenty of time to fly from Vegas to New York but it would have been a stretch for him to drive or take a train," Will interjected. He caught her by surprise since she wasn't sure he'd been listening. "Have you gotten passenger lists for all direct and connecting flights from Vegas arriving at LaGuardia, Kennedy, and Newark between the eighteenth and twenty-first?"

She looked up from her notebook. "I asked John if we should do that! He told me it wasn't worth the trouble because someone could have mailed them for the killer."

Will honked at a Camry going too slowly for his liking, then aggressively passed on the right when it didn't yield. He couldn't mask his sarcasm. "Surprise! Mueller was wrong. Serial killers almost never have accomplices. Sometimes they'll kill in pairs, like the D.C. snipers or the Phoenix shooters, but that's rare as hell. Getting logistical support to set up the crimes? That'd be a first. These guys are lone wolves."

She was scribbling.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Taking notes on what you said."

Christ, this isn't school, he thought. "Since your pen is uncapped, take this down too," he said caustically. "In case the killer did do a cross-country dash, check for speeding tickets along major routes."

She nodded, then asked cautiously, "Do you want to hear more?"

"I'm listening."

It boiled down to this: the victims, four males and two females, ranged in age from eighteen to eighty-two. Three were in Manhattan, one each in Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens. Today's would be the first in the Bronx. All the M.O.'s were the same. The victim receives a postcard with a date one or two days in the future, each with a coffin drawn on the back, and winds up being killed on the exact date. Two stabbings, one shooting, one made to look like a heroin overdose, one crushed by a car that jumped the sidewalk in a hit and run, and one thrown out a window.

"And what did Mueller say about that?" Will asked.

"He thought the killer was trying to throw us off by not sticking to one pattern."

"And what do you think?"

"I think it's unusual. It's not what's in the textbooks."

He imagined her criminology texts, passages compulsively highlighted with yellow markers, neat marginalia, tiny lettering. "How about the victim profiles?" he asked. "Any links?"

The victims appeared to be unconnected. The computational guys in Washington were doing a multidatabase matrix analysis looking for common denominators, a supercomputer version of six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but so far no hits.

"Sexual assaults?"

She flipped pages. "Just one, a thirty-two-year-old Hispanic woman, Consuela Pilar Lopez, in Staten Island. She was raped and stabbed to death."

"After we finish up in the Bronx, I want to start there."

"Why?"

"You can tell a lot about a killer by the way he treats a lady."

They were on the Bruckner Expressway now, tracking east through the Bronx.

"You know where we're going?" he asked.

She found it in her notebook. "Eight forty-seven Sullivan Place."

"Thank you! I don't have a fucking clue where that is," he barked. "I know where Yankee Stadium is. Period. That's all I know about the fucking Bronx."

"Please don't swear," she said sternly, like a reprimanding middle school teacher. "I have a map." She unfolded it, studied it a moment and looked around. "We need to get off on Bruckner Boulevard."

They rode in silence for a mile. He waited for her to resume her tutorial but she stared at the road stony-faced.

He finally looked over and saw her lower lip quivering. "What? You're mad at me for dropping the F-bomb, for fuck's sake?"

She looked at him wistfully. "You're different from John Mueller."

"Jesus," he muttered. "It took you this long to figure that out?"

Driving south on East Tremont, they passed the Forty-fifth Precinct house on Barkley Avenue, an ugly squat building with too few parking spaces for the number of squad cars packed around it. The thermometer was touching eighty and the street was teeming with Puerto Ricans, toting plastic shopping bags, pushing baby carriages, or just strolling along with cell phones pressed against ears, moving in and out of the grocerias, bodegas, and cheap mom-and-pop stores. The women were showing a lot of flesh. Too many heavy chicks in halter tops and short-shorts, jiggling along in flip-flops, for his liking. Do they actually think they look foxy? he wondered. They made his passenger look like a supermodel.

Nancy was buried in the map, trying not to screw up. "From here, it's the third left," she said.

Sullivan Place was an inconvenient street for a major murder. Cruisers, unmarked vehicles, and medical examiner vans were double-parked in front of the crime scene, choking off the traffic. Will pulled up to a young cop trying to keep one lane passable and flashed his badge. "Jeez," the cop moaned. "I don't know where to put you. Can you swing around the block? Maybe there's something around the corner."

Will parroted him. "Around the corner."

"Yeah, around the block, you know take a couple of rights."

Will turned off the ignition, got out and tossed the cop the keys. Cars started honking like mad, instant gridlock.

"Whaddya doing!" the cop hollered. "You can't leave this here!" Nancy continued to sit in the SUV, mortified.

Will called to her. "C'mon, let's get a move on. And take Officer Cuneo's badge number down in your little book in case he does anything disrespectful to government property."

The cop muttered, "Asshole."

Will was spoiling for a dust-up and this kid would do just fine. "Listen," he said, boiling over with rage, "if you like your pathetic little job then don't fuck with me! If you don't give a shit about it, then take a shot. Go on! Try it!"

Two angry guys, veins bulging, face-to-face. "Will! Can we go?" Nancy implored. "We're wasting time."

The cop shook his head, climbed into the Explorer, drove it down the block and double-parked it in front of a detective's car. Will, still breathing hard, winked at Nancy, "I knew he'd find us a spot."

It was a pocket-sized apartment building, three floors, six units, dirty white brickwork, slapped together in the forties. The hallway was dim and depressing, brown and black ceramic checkerboard tiling on the floors, grimy beige walls, bare yellow bulbs. All the action was in and around Apartment 1A, ground floor left. Toward the rear of the hall, near the garbage shaft, family members crowded together in multigenerational grief, a middle-aged woman wailing softly, her husband, in work boots, trying to comfort her, a fully pregnant young woman, sitting on the bare floor, recovering from hyperventilation, a young girl in a Sunday dress, looking bewildered, a couple of old men in loose shirts, shaking their heads and stroking their stubble.

Will squirmed through the half-open apartment door, Nancy following. He winced at the sight of too many cooks spoiling the broth. There were at least a dozen people in an eight-hundred-square foot space, astronomically increasing the odds of crime scene pollution. He did a quick reconnoiter with Nancy on his heels, and amazingly no one stopped them or even questioned their presence. Front room. Old-lady furniture and bric-a-brac. Twenty-year-old TV. He took a pen from his pocket and used it to part the curtains to peer through each window, a procedure he repeated in every room. Kitchen. Spic-and-span. No dishes in the sink. Bathroom, also tidy, smelling of foot powder. Bedroom. Too crowded with chattering personnel to see much except for plump dead legs, gray and mottled, beside an unmade bed, one foot half inside a slipper.

Will bellowed, "Who's in charge here?"

Sudden silence until, "Who's asking?" A balding detective with a big gut and a tight suit separated himself from the scrum and appeared at the bedroom door.

"FBI," Will said. "I'm Special Agent Piper." Nancy looked hurt she wasn't introduced.

"Detective Chapman, Forty-fifth Precinct." He extended a large warm hand, the weight of a brick. He smelled of onions.

"Detective, what do you say we clear this place out so we can have a nice quiet inspection of the crime scene?"

"My guys are almost done, then it's all yours."

"Let's do it now, okay? Half your men aren't wearing gloves. No one's got booties on. You're making a mess here, Detective."

"Nobody's touching nothing," Chapman said defensively. He noticed Nancy taking notes and asked nervously, "Who's she, your secretary?"

"Special Agent Lipinski," she said, waving her notebook at him sweetly. "Could I get your first name, Detective Chapman?"

Will suppressed a smile.

Chapman wasn't inclined to get territorial with the feds. He'd rant and rave, waste his time and wind up on the losing end of the proposition. Life was too short. "All right, everybody!" he announced. "We got the FBI here and they want everyone out, so pack up and let them do their thing."

"Have them leave the postcard," Will said.

Chapman reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a white card inside a Ziploc bag. "I got it right here."

When the room was clear, they inspected the body with the detective. It was getting toasty in there and the first whiffs of decay were in the air. For a gunshot victim, there was surprisingly little blood, a few clots on her matted gray hair, a streak down her left cheek where an arterial gush from her ear had formed a tributary that tracked down her neck and dripped onto moss-green carpet. She was on her back, a foot from the floral flounce of her unmade bed, dressed in a pink cotton nightdress she had probably worn a thousand times. Her eyes, already bone dry, were open and staring. Will had seen innumerable bodies, many of them brutalized beyond recognition of their humanity. This lady looked pretty good, a nice Puerto Rican grandma whom you'd think could be revived with a good shoulder shake. He checked out Nancy to gauge her reaction to the presence of death.

She was taking notes.

Chapman started in, "So the way I figure it--"

Will put up his hand, stopping him in mid-sentence. "Special Agent Lipinski, why don't you tell us what happened here?"

Her face flushed, making her cheeks appear fuller. The flush extended to her throat and disappeared under the neckline of her white blouse. She swallowed and moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. She began slowly then picked up the tempo as she assembled her thoughts. "Well, the killer was probably here before, not necessarily inside the apartment but around the building. The security grate on one of the kitchen windows was pried loose. I'd have to take a closer look at it but I'll bet the window frame is rotted. Still, even hiding in the side alley, he wouldn't have gambled on doing the job all in one night, not if he wanted to make sure he hit the date on the postcard. He came back last night, went into the alley and finished pulling the grate off. Then he cut the window with a glass cutter and undid the latch from the outside. He tramped in some dirt from the alley onto the kitchen floor and the hall and right there, and there."

She pointed to two spots on the bedroom carpet, including one smudge that Chapman was standing on. He stepped away like it was radioactive.