Rhymes With Prey (8 page)

Lucas was elsewhere, preparing.

“Doesn't look it. And what do you think?” she mused. “Half the city's watching?”

“Half the
country,
” Lincoln countered. “No good serial killers in the news lately. All the sharks want a piece of this one.”

Every media outlet except CSPAN and Telemundo, it seemed, was represented.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Markowitz began reasonably, though with a tone that suggested he actually viewed them as sharks.

He was drowned out by their shouted questions.

“What was the motive for the torture?”

“Is it significant that the victims were minorities?”

“Is there a connection between this case and the Bekker case a few years ago, involving Lucas Davenport?”

“Could you fill us in about Verlaine's sex life?”

Frenzy.

Markowitz had obviously done this before and he began speaking very softly—an old trick. Suddenly the sharks realized that they weren't going to hear anything if they kept yammering away and they spontaneously, to a fish, fell silent.

The COD gave it a beat and then continued. “As you are probably aware, a thorough examination and analysis of evidence and behavioral profiling led investigators to believe that a resident of Manhattan, James Robert Verlaine, was the perpetrator in the spate of recent killings of women in the city. Mr. Verlaine appeared to take his own life as a result of said investigation. And evidence supported that supposition.”

Lincoln muttered, “Ah, sooo pleased to see that they still teach courses at the academy in using ten words when one will do.”

Amelia laughed and kissed his neck.

“You are probably also aware that it was believed that an NYPD
detective shot and killed Mr. Verlaine and attempted to cover up the murder by making it
appear
that the death was a suicide.

“Further investigation has determined that the detective, Lily Rothenburg, was not, in fact, involved in the death of Mr. Verlaine. A person or persons intentionally planted evidence in an attempt to implicate the detective. This officer has been exonerated. It now appears, too, that Mr. Verlaine was not the perpetrator behind the murder of the women. Detective Rothenburg is once again in charge of the task force investigating the killings. We expect to have a suspect in custody soon. I have no further comments at this time.”

“Does that mean, Chief of Detectives, that Verlaine was murdered by this suspect as well? . . .”

A new microphone logo popped into sight. Telemundo had arrived.

“Can you tell us what leads Detective Rothenburg is working on? . . . Can you reassure the people of New York that no one else is at risk?”

Markowitz studied the sharks for a moment and Lincoln thought he was actually going to say, “How fucking stupid do you have to be not to understand ‘I have no further comments'?”

Instead: “Thank you.” He turned and walked off the stage.

AMELIA MADE A FEW CALLS
to the television stations, posing as an angry cop, and told them that Lily was at Lincoln's town house. “She's guilty, she's the one who did it, you got to get on her,” she told the newsies.

Within the hour, there were six news crews and fifty rubberneckers on the sidewalk outside of Lincoln's town house. One of them finally came up and pounded on the door, and Amelia peeked out and asked what they wanted.

They wanted Lily.

After some back-and-forth, Lily went out on the stoop, told them that she would make one statement for the record, and that would be it.

“I have some very clear ideas of how this may have happened,” she began.

“Are you guilty?” somebody shouted.

“Of course I'm not guilty,” Lily said. “I'm not guilty of anything except trying to track down a torture-killer. But the possibilities now are quite few: the logical possibilities. I'll knock them down one at a time, and when I'm finished, we'll have this madman. Within the next day or two. I'm confident of that.”

The press conference lasted for another two or three minutes, then she said she would not talk anymore about it, and went back inside. The news crews dispersed, with the exception of a radio reporter. The rubberneckers went with them.

An hour later, Lucas stuck his head out the door. “If you're waiting for Lily, she went out the back a half hour ago.”

At ten o'clock that night, Lucas and Lily headed over to the West Side, in the Thirties west of Ninth Avenue. They were tracked by two other cars, each with two cops in them, including Amelia.

Lily took a call, and then said to Lucas, “He's on the way. He'll get off at Penn Station and then walk over, unless he's going somewhere else.”

“I'm worried,” Lucas said. “He's nuts. If he goes off on you, I mean he could just—”

“He works at a hospital. He's unlikely to be carrying a gun. And the stuff I'm wearing is stab-resistant.”

“Nothing is stab-proof, though,” Lucas said. “What we really need to do is slow down.”

“I disagree,” Lily said. “This is hot, right now. He's got to be
feeling the street. If he has too much time to think about it, he can start covering it up. If he really thinks about it, he'd know that I'd never approach him alone. We can't let him think.”

Andy Pitt lived in a dark brownstone building that would take at least fifty yuppies and a couple of generations to gentrify, Lucas thought. They sat a block away, and the few people on the sidewalks either crossed the street or moved to the far edge of the sidewalk when they realized that there were people in the parked cars. A couple went by, and then a too-happy guy with a white dog.

Lily took a call on a police handset. “He's on the sidewalk. He's coming this way.”

“Wire is good,” Lucas said. Lily was wearing a wire over her vest, which made her look a little paunchy; but paunchy was okay, considering the alternative.

They took a call from Amelia, who was with three other cops, concealed down some cellar steps at a building on the other side of the street. “We're set here.”

A minute later she took another call: “He's across Ninth, still coming on. He's got a grocery sack.”

Another two minutes: “He's two blocks out.”

Lily said, “Let's go.”

Lily went to the stoop that led into the apartment building. The doors were locked, but the rake opened them in a moment, and Lucas stepped into the entry hall. There was a weak bare-bulb light inside, and he reached up and unscrewed it, a quarter inch at a time, because of the heat. When it went out, he unscrewed it another quarter inch, then pulled his gun, cocked it, and leaned against the wall. Lily was facing him through the glass, five inches away, and he could hear her radio. “He'll turn the corner in ten seconds. Nine. Eight.”

Lily opened the door, turned off the radio, and handed it to Lucas. They were both counting. Seven. Six. Five. Four.

Andy turned the corner. Lucas was looking past Lily's head, and he said, just loud enough for her to hear, “He's seen you. Bang on the door.”

She banged on the door.

Lucas said, “He's coming up. He's a hundred feet out.”

Lily turned away from the door, as if giving up, then saw Andy and his bag. Andy stopped under the only nearby streetlight, and Lily walked down the steps and called, “Police. Is that you, Andy? Wait there.”

If he ran, they'd have to try something different.

He didn't run. He said, “You're the cop who killed my father.”

“That's right. I have a few questions for you. We're trying to find out how a piece of brass, a shell from a nine-millimeter cartridge, got into a gun that was used in another killing. You may have heard about it. After I thought about it, Andy, there's only one way, isn't there? You picked it up. We froze the crime scene, but you were right in the middle of it, with your father. What did you do, step on it? Kneel on it? You were kneeling right next to him.”

Lucas, watching from the window, saw Andy do something with his left hand, his free hand; something in the pocket of his jacket. Couldn't see what, but Lily didn't seem worried; but then she might not have been able to see the move. She pushed him, still talking. “Found the kill room, and found some DNA that shouldn't have been there. Not much, a few flakes of skin, but good enough for us. So, I have a warrant. We need a DNA sample from you. It won't hurt. I have a kit, we need you to scrub a swab against your gums.”

“I knelt on it,” Andy said.

“What?”

“I knelt on it. The shell. I didn't try to do that, I just knelt on it by accident. When I saw what it was, I put it in my pocket.”

“And you reloaded it.”

“Of course. My pop and I reloaded everything. When you shoot a lot, you don't want to waste all that brass. We saved more than half, except that we shot more.”

“Who killed the women? You or Verlaine?”

“Not Verlaine.” Andy laughed, and dropped his grocery sack by his ankle. “We had the same interests, but he never had the guts to do anything real. He just liked to get the women in there and pose them like slave girls and make his sculptures, and then he'd go around to the S&M clubs and brag about it. But he had that room down in the basement where he kept his finished work—he had that big steel door because the metal thieves will take that bronze shit and melt it right down—but that was perfect. I'd get the girls down there and do what I wanted. What he dreamed about. You ever had a slave? There's nothing like it.”

“Why'd you kill him?”

“Because of you. I didn't even know how close you were to finding him, even with all those clues I left for you. All those brass filings. But I had that shell, and a shell is a terrible thing to waste. You killed my pop. I thought they'd put you in prison, so you'd have all that time to think about it.”

“Why those victims, Andy? Why those particular women?”

But he didn't answer, just stepped closer. Fist coming out of his pocket.

Lucas stepped through the door with his gun and shouted, “He's got something in his hand, Lily, he's got something.”

Lily jumped back, but Andy was right with her, grabbed her by the collar and yanked her back, looking around. “Stay away. Stay away,” he screamed. “I got a scalpel, I'll cut her face off.”

Amelia and the other cops emerged from the stairway across the street and spread out.

“Get away. Get away or I'll cut her throat, I swear to God, I'll cut her fuckin' throat.”

He yanked Lily backward, and Lily called to Lucas, “I can't reach my gun. It got stuck under the damn vest when he pulled me back.”

Lucas: “Can you go down?”

“Maybe.”

“Don't try anything. I just want to go away. I walk her up the block and I—”

Lily, using both hands, grabbed his knife arm and pushed it away from her, just an inch, and at the same time kicked her feet out from under herself and dropped. Amelia and Lucas fired at the same time, and Andy's head exploded.

Lily landed on her ass and rolled away from the falling body; the scalpel tinkled to the ground six feet away. “That was not optimal,” she said, as she got back to her feet and turned to look down at the body.

After that, it was mostly routine: checking the tape, calling crime scene. Andy Pitt had two bullet holes in his head, one right through the forehead and out the back, and the second in one temple and out the other.

As the scene was taped off, Lucas stepped over to Amelia and asked, “You okay?”

“I'm okay. How about you?”

“I'm okay,” he said. He looked her over and said, “Do you know that you smile when you pull the trigger?”

THEY SAT IN GOVERNMENT-ISSUE FURNITURE
and wheelchair, across from the chief of detectives. His office.

Lucas, Lily, Amelia, and Lincoln. They were here for what Lincoln joked was the post postmortem. Maybe in bad taste, but nobody was all that upset that Andy Pitt was lying in the morgue at the moment.