American Devil (27 page)

‘Yeah. I think so. Imagine it, he’s watched her for a few days. He follows her into a store, sees her buy something, then he goes up and buys the same thing. He’s walking right behind her with the same item that she has. It’s a kind of weird way of connecting.’

‘Very weird,’ said Tom.

‘You’re not getting it, are you? Listen, he bought the scarf, Tom. He bought the scarf, brought it to her apartment and strangled her with it.’ She trailed off.

Harper let the idea travel once round his mind, then he nodded. ‘Yes, I get it. I think you’re right. I think he did buy it. That means we’ve got a potential point of contact. We need to find out where she bought this. But why does he do it? What’s he after, Denise?’

‘Intimacy,’ said Denise and held Tom’s stare. They both suddenly got it.

‘We’ve got to hunt the stalker, not the killer,’ said Tom ‘And now we know where he’s been stalking. The killer is very careful. But maybe the stalker isn’t.’

 

N
ick looked up at the cream ceiling of Dr Fox’s office and closed his eyes. He’d been sitting opposite his psychoanalyst for just under an hour and was feeling no better. He’d spilled his sick nightmares all over Marty’s lap but that just left him feeling confused and angry. He looked across at Marty with wide eyes.

Marty was drumming on his desk. Nick hadn’t answered his question so he repeated it. ‘How often do you dream about hurting people, Nick?’

Nick had felt bad for so long, he’d forgotten what feeling normal was like. He didn’t enjoy the dreams, no question about it. He wasn’t himself. The thing was to keep tight. When the feelings came on him, he had to concentrate real hard, but he was scared. He looked up at Marty. ‘The thing is, Doctor, I think maybe there’s a devil in us all, wanting to get out there and destroy, you know. My wife, Dee, she says I’m possessed sometimes. ’ Nick turned his eyes to the psychologist. They were rimmed with red. He had a real strange look to him sometimes. ‘It doesn’t feel like I’ve got a lot of control left. I used to be able to stop it, you know, hold it off.’

‘Hold what off, Nick?’

‘The pain in my head. I used to be able to run clear through it. Now it just continues until I just . . . I can’t stop it any more.’

‘Then what happens?’

‘I told you. I can’t remember what happens next. I black out. I wake up and I don’t know what I’ve been doing. I don’t know where I am. Sometimes, I’m wet all over. My clothes, you know, are dripping wet like I’ve been standing in a shower. What am I?’

‘I don’t know, Nick, you’ve got to tell me.’

‘I sometimes find things in my car.’

‘What kind of things?’

Nick turned away from Marty. ‘Can I tell you?’

‘Sure you can tell me.’

‘I won’t get into trouble?’

‘I can’t tell anyone anything, Nick. Not a thing.’

‘Sometimes I find things I must’ve stolen.’

‘Like what?’

‘Jewellery, clothes, shoes. Money sometimes.’

‘Where do they come from?’

‘I’m some sick bastard, aren’t I? Ever since I lost my job, I’ve been blacking out and stealing things. Haven’t I, Doctor?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, where in the hell do these things come from?’

Nick’s right hand slipped into his trouser pocket and pulled out a necklace. He held it up. A small silver crucifix studded with diamonds glinted in the light. ‘I found it yesterday. Along with over a thousand dollars in cash. I’m burglarizing people, aren’t I?’

Marty picked the necklace from Nick’s hand and held it up. ‘Looks expensive.’

‘I know I’m doing something, Doctor. Sometimes, I got scratches on my face and hands. Is it possible to rob people like that? What am I, some monster? But I don’t remember any of it. Only sometimes I see the inside of people’s cars or apartments. I guess that’s where I must steal these things.’

Marty Fox wrote
Dissociative Identity Disorder
on his pad. This guy was a potential multiple personality. Memory loss. Flashbacks. It was possible Nick had invented an alter ego. A man who gave an outlet to whatever Nick couldn’t face about himself. From Nick’s dreams, Marty guessed that this alter ego stole what he could and maybe stalked women and even mugged them. He didn’t know. This was beyond his expertise. He leaned in to Nick and spoke as quietly as he could.

‘You’re confused, Nick. Listen, it is possible that you’re suffering some kind of split personality. Sometimes a traumatic event can trigger things off, and the mind creates these alternative personalities to protect you from whatever is too difficult for you to see.’ Nick stared ahead. ‘You ever have a traumatic time, Nick, somewhere in the past?’

‘I was in love once, Doctor.’

Marty’s eyes glanced down at the personal column. He had been searching the dating ads. He couldn’t act on them any more, but he still couldn’t help himself looking. Then he looked up. ‘I like love stories, Nick - who was she?’

Nick twisted his body in his seat. ‘My first love. I was only a boy. I knew her as a friend, you know. I was a real quiet one back then. She didn’t love me, Doctor. I loved her from a distance.’

‘All sounds pretty normal to me, Nick. She was hot, was she?’

‘Like a perfect doll. But she was untouchable.’

‘So what happened with this girl?’

‘I wanted her so badly, it drove me crazy. She was just a kid, but then she started growing up herself. I couldn’t take seeing her with other boys.’

‘You were jealous?’

‘I’d say I was pretty jealous. I watched from a distance but kept it all tucked deep inside. See, she was a goddess to me. Nothing in my life was pure and perfect, Doctor. But she was.’

‘Not easy when you’re smitten.’

‘I knew the day would come. I’m not stupid. I knew that she would flower and the insects would come and feed on her. Have you ever seen how insects crawl over beautiful blossoms? I knew it would with her. I watched and things happened inside me. I couldn’t bear it.’

‘Did she date someone else, Nick?’

Nick lowered his eyes. Marty was intrigued. He liked a little
je ne sais quoi
in his sessions.

‘Someone took her. A young man who didn’t really care about her.’

‘What happened?’

‘On a summer day, he took her to the local spot. He charmed her. She was reluctant and scared. They were walking in the valley and I was following on the ridge above. Then he pressed her to the ground, kissing her. His hands started to touch her. All inside and out and where you shouldn’t. I watched like I was behind glass. He touched her. She called out for him to stop but he didn’t. He wouldn’t. He lifted her skirt and he put his hand right inside her skirt. She cried out “No”. She screamed it. She said “No” over and over but he said, “You want to make me happy, don’t you?” I wanted to help her. I couldn’t move. Why couldn’t I move, Doctor?’

‘Why do you think you couldn’t move, Nick?’

‘I was paralysed on the spot like some dumb staring animal. They wouldn’t call it rape, Doctor, but it was rape. It was ...’

‘What?’

‘After that, I couldn’t sleep. I went off the rails.’

Marty Fox liked the story. Girl and boy making out in the grass with a fierce rival staring from the ridge. The girl gets a little hands-off when it starts looking serious. Yeah, he got that story. It was a TV movie kind of story. Marty imagined it easily. Except he didn’t identify with the boy on the ridge. He identified with the boy with his hands inside the girl’s jeans. That’s where he was in the story, not with the loser. He looked at Nick.

‘The boy who raped her, Nick. Was that you?’

Nick turned his head suddenly. ‘Me? I was watching. How could it be me?’

‘Sometimes, we do things we regret. Bad things. Sometimes, we get confused over what happened because we feel so damn guilty. Sometimes we build great big barriers and when we look at the situation again, we don’t really know what happened.’

‘I loved her. I didn’t do that. I didn’t ever do that to her.’

‘Okay, let’s calm down. Why don’t we talk about processing these past events. There are details there that need drawing out. I think we need closure on the girl.’

Nick was clenching his fists and staring down at his feet. ‘What would you do, Marty? Someone killed the girl you loved?’

‘He didn’t kill her, Nick.’

‘He did kill her, Doctor. God, I miss her. When they die, you don’t half miss them.’

Marty looked at his patient. He was shaking and holding himself. It was time to refer him. Marty didn’t like serious problems and this one was beginning to feel outside his comfort zone. He drew two red lines under the session notes and wrote a note to his PA:
Transfer to Dr Bartholomew with immediate effect.

 

T
he first full freeze hit the city and coated it in a fine grainy dust. It was Thanksgiving and no one felt like celebrating. The trees and street furniture were already filling up with Christmas lights all down the avenues and the shop fronts grew brighter each day. New York looked like a child’s toy sparkling with colour and light.

Harper returned home at 8 a.m. and slept for a few hours. He woke from dreams he couldn’t remember and chose to walk down towards Madison Avenue via the meer. He had a bagful of bird seed and a growing sense that he was finally getting somewhere. The birds were skating around on the surface of the frozen lake, looking confused and lost, as if waiting for someone to come and put their world right. Harper took a handful of seed and tossed it across to the stranded ducks. In the frosted branches of the trees, the blackbirds and finches looked on with interest. Harper wandered around the circumference, breathing in the chill air and crunching the icy blades of grass beneath his feet.

He recalled that Lisa had never really liked Central Park. He sensed that she was just uncomfortable in places where people’s actions weren’t predetermined. She liked order. A cop’s life was anything but, it was reactive and random. It must’ve driven her half mad. Tom realized that it was the first thought about Lisa for nearly two days. It seemed a good sign. He looked out at the frozen landscape. There were times when he could’ve never imagined letting go of her. The connection had been too deep, but now, somehow, she was starting to fade away.

He threw the last few handfuls of seeds to the birds and made his way down through the centre of the park. It was so beautiful and peaceful that his pace slowed. At around 82nd Street he peeled off and joined Madison Avenue just above the Museum of Modern Art. After the reconstruction with Denise, he’d hit the precinct and given the task of finding the shop which sold the two gold and crimson Vivienne Laurec scarves to the two FBI agents. By the time he woke up just after 11.30 a.m., they’d called. They had found the right store. It was simple, they said, but Harper didn’t mind them showing off their skills.

Two Vivienne Laurec scarves seemed such a flimsy and weightless hook to hang an entire murder investigation on, but it was all he had. There was still, in his analytical mind, a nagging doubt about the scarves and he couldn’t quite understand why he was less than a hundred per cent about what they were telling him. Maybe it felt too easy.

The team was focused more than ever after Williamson’s murder. Whatever the captain had tried with the media, it hadn’t worked. Around the precinct, there was an hourly barrage of questions from a seemingly endless stream of newspaper journalists and TV reporters. The story was being drip-fed emotion daily with new stories from the families of the bereaved, new theories about the poems and the posed corpses. There were websites and blogs dedicated to the killer and everything about him. Whoever this killer was, Harper guessed that this was all part of his need.

Asa Shelton and Isaac Spencer, the two special agents from the FBI’s New York field office, had spent a couple of hours talking to distributors for Vivienne Laurec, then they got through to Vivienne Laurec itself. The scarf Harper had taken from Elizabeth Seale’s apartment had its own identity code, and once they had sent this over to Vivienne Laurec’s head office the company could give the Feds the life story of the scarf, from production through distribution to sale. They not only knew the store, they knew when the scarf had arrived and when it had sold.

Harper called Denise to let her know and arrived at the store about ten minutes later than he’d arranged. Denise Levene was standing at the window admiring the luxury goods. Inside the store, the two special agents were already talking to the young sales girl at the counter. Harper crossed and took up the questioning. The girl confirmed within minutes that they had sold that particular scarf. She took out the store records, which were still written down by hand in a large ledger before they were logged on the database.

‘So what’s in the big book?’ said Harper.

The girl leafed slowly though the pages. ‘Okay, I’ve got five sold this month. The gold and crimson only came in at the end of October, so that’s the whole story. Five sales.’

‘Do you have names down there?’

‘Yes, sir, they all leave their names,’ she said, and smiled. ‘That’s what we do at a store like ours.’

‘Well, I’ll know where to come next time I’ve got a hundred to spare.’

She smiled thinly and read out the names. The fourth name was male.

‘Bingo,’ said Harper as the name John Sebastian was read out. ‘Okay, let me check I’ve got this right. On November 17, Elizabeth Seale buys a crimson and gold scarf. She pays with a credit card. Right?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Then, on the same day, a “John Sebastian” comes in. What does he pay with?’

‘It was a cash purchase.’

‘No records, right.’