Gladyss of the Hunt (15 page)

While I was looking for Bernie, I spotted one of the elderly residents sitting in the lobby. His hair was dyed shoe-polish brown in front, while the back of his head, presumably not visible in his bathroom mirror, was downy white. He was talking to one of the investigators, a young man with a peach-fuzz mustache.

“Getting anything interesting?” I asked, sidling up to him.

“I've got things covered here,” he said, not even looking at me.

I grabbed the little shit's left wrist and twisted it behind his back, then tossed him against a column. He missed it and fell to the floor.
Everyone in the place looked over at me. I started reading him his rights.

“What's up?” one uniform asked as I tightened the handcuffs on the kid's bony wrists, then began to search his pockets. As I saw Bernie slowly limping over, I said, “Meet the reporter who photographed your last crime scene. And he's still posing as a cop.”

“Where's his shield?”

I handed it to him. Bernie led the cuffed reporter past everyone else to the front door; I stayed within earshot. Bernie reached into the kid's front pocket and pulled out his wallet. He flipped it open and took out his press card.

“You know what I really hate,” he began. “I hate it when some fucking asshole thinks he's smarter than everyone else. 'Cause then I got to deal with his stupidity, but also with the insult that he actually thought I was dumber than him.”

The reporter ignored this and asked, “Don't you think the public deserves to know when a serial murderer is hunting them?”

“Shut the fuck up, you moron!” Bern shouted. His nostrils flared and his eyes glazed over. The guy began to look nervous as he realized Bernie was clearly unsound and might lose control. I stepped closer in case things started going south. Perhaps my sudden proximity made him aware of his temper, because the old cop suddenly threw his hands up and said, “I went through this whole freedom of the press bullshit with this guy's editor ten years ago. Some things just don't change.”

“Come on, we're on the same side,” the reporter made the mistake of saying.

“You used a fake ID to gain access to
my murder scene
, then you published vital information about an active investigation,” Bernie responded, visibly restraining himself. “We got someone much crazier than me who is butchering women limb from limb. And you've given out details that only the killer would know, blowing several ways we might've tracked him . . .”

“I was just trying to warn the public . . .”

“Guess what?” I said to him as Bernie limped over to Officer Pattingly. “
We
do that. We're a full service police force.”

The huge patrolman returned with Bernie, who told the reporter, “You're under arrest for obstruction of justice. This officer will take
care of you.”

Pattingly recited him his rights a second time as he walked him out to his patrol car. Bernie and I went over to the elevator.

“You're a little overdressed, aren't you?” he noticed.

“Like I told you, I just came from a party. What are you going to do with the kid?”

“I'll cut him loose soon enough,” Bernie said as we stepped onto the elevator. “But first he's gonna get a little time-out.”

“You're putting him in the back of a patrol car,” I deduced.

“Thirty minutes cuffed in the backseat and he'll always remember the night his balls froze solid.”

“Just arrest him,” I said. After all, the guy had given our killer a peephole into our investigation.

“It's better this way. No paperwork.”

The elevator opened at the sixth floor and Bernie led me to the room. From the wild swing followed by a gentle release he took with each step, I could see his foot was acting up. Between the crime scene people scouring the bloody carpet and the other technicians taking photos and otherwise documenting the scene, it was difficult to even see the vic—which was fine with me, because the killer had really done a number on her. Bernie made a couple of observations about the double mastectomy then hopped back into the hall. I was glad to follow. When someone pushed open a large metal door leading to the stairwell, Bernie caught it and led me into the solitude of the brightly lit landing.

“So where are these computerized pictures?” he asked, slowly sitting on a step. I gave him Miriam's manila envelope.

“Wow,” he said. “This is a new one for me.”

“What is?”

“Did you see the body just now?” he asked.

“Yeah, so?”

“Did she look like this?” He held up the last of the death scene photos for me.

“I guess so,” I replied tiredly. With all the commotion and the blood, I hadn't actually retained much.

“You guess so?” he grinned. He had barely had time to glance at the scene himself, so I found his question typically patronizing.

Silently I pushed open the stairway door, crossed the hall, and
went back to the crime scene. I stepped past the techies and stared at the poor woman, still profanely exposed, taking in all the gory details. Sure enough, she looked different now than in the pictures. The killer had washed her down. She had a slim wish bracelet around her left wrist and a glossy credit card in her right hand, but there wasn't a trace of the red lipstick. And her blonde hair was a wig—it had popped off the crown of her skull like a shaggy yellow rag. When I left and pushed open the door to the stairwell, a pungent stink slapped me across the face.

“Jesus, it smells like she was killed in here.” I pinched my nostrils.

Bernie had removed the shoe from his aching foot, releasing a truly evil odor.

“Sorry,” he muttered, rubbing the circulation back into his extremity, which was black, blue, and swollen. Fresh scars crisscrossed it.

I remained silent as he delicately pulled his sock on and tenderly inserted his foot back into his shoe.

“The last podiatrist I showed it to recommended I have it chopped off,” he commented.

“There's got to be someone who can help you,” I said.

As he loosely knotted the shoelace and slowly struggled to his feet, I reported what I had just seen and added, “If this is our killer he's broken out of his old hunting ground.”

“That's obvious. I want you to try to focus on what's not obvious, like the fact that this girl looks different than his other victims.”

“Physically she's shorter and rounder,” I said.

“Again, that's obvious. What would've impressed me is if you'd pointed out that she has a different look. She's cleaner. Takes better care of herself. Has a style. Big colorful tattoos. More of a downtown type.”

“So she's a downtown hooker,” I said.

“Annie just told me that the clerk at the desk didn't remember her coming in blonde. She was a brunette, which means she put the wig on in front of him.”

“Or maybe he put it on her. And that would be a big departure for him.”

“Maybe. And instead of chopping her head off, he gave her a double mass,” I added.

“We'll get a lot more done if you stop stating the obvious,” he chided.

“I guess it would be obvious that this is the first time he's photographed a vic and posted it on the internet prior to the discovery.”

He ignored me and just stared at the photo with the bright lipstick smeared on the mouth of our latest victim. I remembered the lipstick I had found on the corner of the Blank Hotel.

“I wonder if he took lipstick from the last victim and put it on this one.”

“No,” Bernie said simply. “What we have here is an entirely different killer.”

“But there's so many similarities with the other murders,” I said. “Maybe something happened that made him change what he does.”

“I hope you're right,” he said. “It's difficult enough finding one serial murderer; two is going to be a bitch.”

“At least we have a picture of the knife,” I said, pointing to the computer printout. “At least, the knife handle.”

“Tell me again about this porn site.”

“It's a
fan
site, devoted to Marilyn Monroe.”

“Maybe he's sent the pictures to other Marilyn sites too. We'll have to check.”

“He's also sent poetry about Marilyn being his mother.”

“A killer who writes poetry?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “We don't get a lot of verse in this business.”

“It's in the envelope too.”

He slid it out and I saw his lips moving as he silently read it.

“Who the fuck is CathyofAlexandria?” he asked, seeing the email address.

“No clue.”

“Check her out, will you?”

“Okay,” I said, scribbling it into my notebook.

“Did Marilyn Monroe ever have a child?”

“I don't think so,” I replied and asked back, “Do they know exactly when this girl was murdered?”

“The desk clerk said she got here at six, and her body was found around eight.”

It was at about six that I got picked up by the Lincoln Town Car, which prompted me to remember that Noel
wasn't
in it.

Alex suddenly appeared and announced: “They just took the surveillance video to the tech van out front.”

The NYPD's answer to the space shuttle, a state of the art technical support van had landed. A Pakistani-American techie who introduced himself as Winston had been looking at the footage from the lobby in a high-tech video machine.

When Bernie asked Winston how the tape looked, he simply pushed a button, and the reason for his reticence became obvious. People looked like ghosts; they were only slightly more discernible if they were large and dressed in dark colors. Bernie got the techie to fast-forward the tape till the time stamp in the bottom left corner showed just before six. After a couple of minutes we saw two dark fuzzy figures who had to be Jane Doe, our call girl, and her killer. They went to the front desk, where she signed in, then they turned and vanished at the elevator bank. Most of the time the suspect had his back to the camera.

“Shit! He must've known the camera was there,” Bernie said, “which means he'd probably scoped the place out earlier.”

For a brief second, though, the suspect turned to the right in a well lit spot, so that he was staring directly into the camera. But it didn't matter: all his details—race, age, even height—were washed out. He was little more than an outline, a terrifying specter.

“I see this shit all the time,” Winston moaned. “Instead of dropping a couple bucks each year on a new tape, they use the same one over and over. Just rewinding and pushing record every eight hours until the fucking thing loses all its magnetic properties.”

To the tech's credit he had been working at enhancing and enlarging the image, but he hadn't gotten very far. Our suspect was probably a Caucasian male. Maybe a little younger than the figure in the earlier “Unabomber” sketch.

“Bad news is the clerk remembered the girl, not the guy,” said Bernie.

Suddenly the door of the van opened and Alex entered. He put his large hand on Bernie's shoulder and announced, “Good news, everybody—we caught our killer.”

“Just tell me,” Bernie said, in no mood for clowning.

“It's you, pal.”

“What's me?”

Alex held up a credit card in a plastic evidence bag.

“Plucked from the cold fingers of the vic's right hand.”

He also handed me a credit card receipt for the room rental. I felt a chill as I read, under cardholder's name, “Bernard P. Farrell.”

“We're waiting for your credit card company to get back to us, but it looks like he also paid for the girl with it.”

Bernie inspected the receipt carefully. He pulled out his wallet and went through it, looking for the card. “I didn't even notice it missing. It must've been the night I got mugged! Fuck!”

“How could the killer know you were on his case?” Alex asked.

“Bernie was mentioned in the papers,” I reminded him.

“Where is that fucking kid!” Bernie shouted. Suddenly he broke into a coughing fit.

“He's playing us,” Alex said.

“He's playing
one
of us, anyway,” I muttered, looking at Bernie.

“He targeted your fucking
friend
, asshole,” Bernie shot back angrily. “Maybe he's targeting
you
.”

“All right, calm down,” Alex said.

“Who is this Marilyn nut anyway?” Bernie asked me.

“What Marilyn nut?”

“The one who runs this Marilyn computer thing? Why does she do that?”

“Miriam Williams. She produced a Marilyn biopic a few years back and became a huge fan. And I met her through a friend.”

“Hell of a coincidence, that you happen to have a friend who knows her,” Bernie said.