American Devil (53 page)

Harper got back on the phone to Garcia. ‘Mark, that report we got into Macy’s background. We got nothing on the guy, right? Get it out for me, will you?’

‘Sure. But we got nothing beyond the hospital records.’

‘Then we’re going to have to look again. I need to know if he’s got relatives. Anyone at all. Can you go back to the beginning with him? You know, starting with where the bastard was conceived?’

‘It’ll take me a little time, but head back over here and I’ll try to have it ready for you.’

‘I’ll see you in twenty,’ said Harper.

 

N
ick was upset. He wanted to escape the nightmare. He wanted to forget the fishing cabin, the fear. He wanted most of all to forget Mr Hummel. Yes, Mr Hummel. He wanted to forget him. He hated him. He wanted to break him. Sebastian was there with him now. Inside him. Co-existing, but not yet in control. Nick had to keep him back.

He snapped his elastic bracelet. What had brought Sebastian out? Yeah, it was thinking of Daddy and the girls. He didn’t really mean to hurt them. He didn’t know what he was doing. It was Sebastian, not him. Sebastian clawed at Nick’s thoughts.

He told himself to keep going. Keep watching. What’s the baserock of it all? Did anything have a baserock? He wanted to know. Sebastian was telling him he would be famous now. Everyone would know how clever he was, how powerful . . . but most of all wasn’t this the thing, his mojo, his heart of hearts? Wasn’t it that Nick wanted people to see how diseased he was, how bad? That’s why he let Sebastian do those things - to shock, to show the very worst of himself that he felt. Was it that? Sebastian continued to whisper. He was an evil, evil boy. A disease.

Kimberly was sitting about four feet from him. She was on a bar stool, as was he. He could feel her there. He had this sense about people, too. He could tell that she was on edge. Maybe something had happened to her. She wasn’t her usual cheery self.

Sebastian had followed the same pattern. Spot a mark. Trail her for a month. See if she was good enough for his sculpture. Kimberly had been in the running for a while. Sebastian had trailed hundreds of women to find the special seven that he finally decided upon. Now the sculpture was complete, he was tying up loose ends. Other people’s pain was what he was after now and Kimberly could show him a lot of that.

He’d spotted Kimberly at the airport on the way back from a trip to Texas. He was tired from the flight and feeling horny. There was something about travelling that got him excited. It was suspended animation. He had time to think bad thoughts.

It was her shoes he noticed first: green, elegant and expensive. Her face was pretty too - long and narrow with clear bones. He was expected at home but the thought of a new mark excited him, so he walked up close to her as she was waiting for a cab. As she was distracted on her cell phone, he swiped her case.

People wrote their names and addresses on their cases. He took her case and fell in love with Kimberly mostly through her delicate clothes. They were like stolen treasure to him. The secret life of things he was never allowed access to.

He was so aroused that he was shaking. First, the aroma of her. It was the faint smell of perfume mixed with the smell of the various fabrics. Beautiful. So very beautiful. He had picked up each item in turn and touched it lovingly. Laid it all out on his bed. Each thing was impossibly fragile and delicate, like webs of gossamer, but so silky to the touch.

But it was the knowing that this was wrong that really rocked his boat. This was a perverted pleasure and he liked the powerful secrecy of the taboo.

For days, the clothes had been enough. Just like with Elizabeth. He’d been satisfied with the weeks of trailing, buying the clothes she wore and the photographs. But these surrogates no longer sustained his deeper urges.

He wanted to take her. He had an inalienable right to her.

Kimberly sipped on a margarita. Why was she alone? Her fiancé was fucking around, that’s why. She was hurt. He liked that. The beautiful clothes and the pain. The motto of St Sebastian -
Beauty constant under torture
. He licked his lips. He turned to her and raised his glass. She smiled.

Nick was losing it. Here he was in a bar he didn’t recognize and Sebastian was hunting. It was too powerful.

Sebastian laughed and moved into the limelight. Nick was too weak. Sebastian felt the power of Nick’s body, flexed his muscles and smiled back at Kimberly.

A couple of drinks later, Sebastian and Kimberly were deep in conversation. It’s so easy to seduce when you’ve been stalking someone. You know what they like, what they feel. People are simple - you reflect back what they want to know about themselves and bingo!

‘You know what it is, Kimberly? Good people attract bad people. That’s because bad people want to be good but they don’t know how, so they use you as a model. But then they find they can’t be as good as you and they resent it. Then they punish you.’

She nodded. ‘Are you bad, then?’

The alcohol had changed her approach. He’d been working her throughout the conversation, dropping little trigger words like ‘punish’, ‘rights’, ‘revenge’ and ‘self-esteem’.

She was taking his lead so easily he was inwardly proud of himself.

‘I’m good at being bad, if that’s what you mean.’

In Sebastian’s blue Mercedes, they drove in the dark. He was talking like a man on uppers. Kimberly had sobered up a little on the journey out to her home. What was she doing? Her head was slightly fuzzy and she was in the car of a man she didn’t know, letting him drive her home. He was nice. Sweet. A little overbearing, but he seemed okay. Or was he? Who knew these days?

In the bar, to be honest, she wanted to forget all about it - all about Ray and his mistress; she wanted a bit of company. He was there. What was wrong with that? As she reclined in the leather seat of his car, she knew exactly what was wrong with that - he was after only one thing and she was about to be used like a piece of trash.

She was disappointed in herself. There was one rule in life, and that was don’t leave with less than you came with. It was her motto in business and in her personal life. She knew if she let this guy into her house she would come out with less rather than more. Less self-respect, less moral righteousness, less power, less integrity. She now had to think about how to extricate herself from what he might have interpreted as a dead cert.

Sebastian was thinking of getting her inside her room. He patted his side pocket. The plastic bag. He could see her face contort with surprise, shock and pain. He could take what he wanted, how he wanted. Kill. Hold. Rip.

Twang! Twang! Twang!
Nick was there in the darkness of his mind, twanging at every violent thought.

The car stopped outside her apartment.

‘Hey, look, I might just turn in,’ she said. ‘I’ve had a great night, though. You’ve been really kind.’

Bitch, thought Sebastian. Trying to turn this around. He wasn’t going to let that happen. Kill her now. In the car. Her body hot against the seat. Kill. Hold. Rip.

Suddenly it was Nick holding on to the steering wheel with all his might. He was breathing erratically.

‘Get out, just get out!’

‘What’s wrong? I’m sorry if I upset you.’

Nick felt Sebastian pulling back. ‘Just fucking leave or you’ll die!’

Kimberly stared at Nick and saw the anger smoking in his eyes. She got out and ran up her drive. Alone, Nick slammed the car into gear and put his foot on the gas.

He smiled. It had worked. He had made himself heard. He had regained control. He had won. Kimberly was alive. He couldn’t wait to get back to Denise to tell her. He drove off with a schoolboy smile, ready to show his teacher.

 

H
arper was unshaven, sitting in front of a wall of sketches. He found it reassuring to sketch Denise’s face from memory and photographs. It kept her alive. There were sixteen of them now. He’d been sitting and waiting too long. Sixteen pencil sketches of a woman who was probably dead or a day away from dying. Finally, Mark Garcia brought his information across.

‘I’ve assembled everything I could get on Macy. It was a difficult history to plot. He’s got so many holes. After his arrest in 1998, he was in a variety of psychiatric units, mainly in New York.’

‘What about before 1998?’

‘His parents must’ve died or abandoned him when he was a kid. He was fostered all over. Twelve different homes is what it says on his record from the MPC and that’s not the lot.’

‘Where?’ said Harper.

‘It doesn’t say. It says he was born in West Virginia, so you got to presume he was all over the state,’ said Garcia.

Harper felt himself getting nearer. ‘If he was born in West Virginia, he would’ve been there in 1982?’

‘So?’

‘I’ve just been on the phone about a 1982 murder in West Virginia. Looks like Sebastian’s work.’

‘Shit. You think they knew each other back then?’

‘It’s possible. There’s a lot of similarities stacking up. What else have you got?’

‘There’s nothing. We haven’t even got addresses in West Virginia. If they’ve got records from the ’70s they’ll be on paper. We’d have to knock on doors to get them.’

‘Look into it, Garcia. We might need those addresses.’

‘All right. I’ll call around.’

Harper went back to his desk and took a call he’d been waiting for from the guys at the FBI New York field office. Harper wanted to know how long Denise could count on. The Feds had the file on screen. Tom could hear them tapping out details, cross-referencing cases. There were two of them at the other end of the line. He could discern their low, barely verbal communications - a sigh, a grunt, an uh-huh.

They came back on the phone. ‘Look, Detective, we’ve got bits and pieces to go on - nothing but surmise, you know.’

‘Just give me the time frame.’

Harper had asked them one question. What was the average length of time a kidnap victim stayed alive when the kidnapper was a known and lethal serial killer?

‘Okay,’ said one of the agents, ‘we’ve got three point four days. But listen, that isn’t an entirely accurate figure. I mean, eighty-four per cent of victims are dead within twenty-four hours, ninety-five per cent dead within forty-eight hours. If they survive forty-eight hours, then the story is a little different. It can go to weeks. You know. Some of these guys keep them for months.’

Denise had been missing for just over twenty-four hours. That gave him another day, tops. Tom felt hope try to scramble and leave, but he wouldn’t let it. He knew that Sebastian wanted games. Denise was his kind of girl, but was the game more important? He wanted someone to suffer. He wanted to punish Harper. He wouldn’t kill her until he had seen Harper suffer. Harper felt that strongly. He would have a game plan in mind. He’d keep her alive, but what for?

The Feds had taken the lead on the task force since the kidnapping, but the NYPD were still heavily involved in the case. Tom thanked them and put the phone down. He picked up the silver shield and looked at it. It was what he stood for - once. He put it in his jacket pocket and then picked up the Glock.

It felt good in his hand. He held it up, looked down the barrel out of his window to the windows opposite. He felt no twinge, only the need to find and face Sebastian. He lowered his gun and took the clip from his desk and pushed it in. It clicked. He holstered his pistol. He wanted to fight. More than anything else, he wanted a fair shot at this guy.

At 11.40 p.m. he took a call from a very disappointed Eddie, who had been looking through the old yearbooks of Meadow Trail High School, from Chloe’s year and upwards. He had found nothing at all. Not a single photograph that looked like Sebastian. Not a single name that triggered off his thinking. It drained him and he was on his way back to New York empty-handed.

In the investigation room, Tom and the team were going through the calls. The search for Denise Levene was in danger of getting lost under a sea of good intentions. Her kidnap had captured everyone’s attention nationwide, but in New York the feeling was tangible. They knew an innocent, beautiful woman was somewhere on the small outcrop of rock called Manhattan and they knew that a deranged sexual predator was with her. They were getting hundreds of tip-offs each hour.

Elaine Fittas crossed to Harper in the investigation room and put her hand on his shoulder.

‘She’ll be all right, Harper. She’s tough.’