Gladyss of the Hunt (16 page)

“Maybe the killer knows Gladyss,” Alex said.

“Miriam's rich,” I pointed out. “Didn't Barry profile our killer as some poor guy?”

Staring at me suspiciously, Bernie asked, “How exactly did you happen to meet this rich woman who runs this web site?”

“She's a friend of a friend. I only met her a few hours ago,” I said simply, not wanting to open up the whole can of worms involving Noel Holden.

“It's one fuck of a coincidence,” Bernie said, giving me a fish eye.

I had a growing belief that my Kundalini studies had played a role in this “coincidence,” but knowing that Bernie was such a philistine, I didn't dare mention it.

“Maybe
she
did it,” Alex said, grinning at me.

I recalled something that had come to me on the cab ride down from Miriam's house. “You know, the first names of the first victim—Mary Lynn MacArthur—are very similar to Marilyn.”

“I'm more impressed that you just happened to stumble across this lady with the spider web site.” Bernie was not quite comfortable with the latest computer terms; I made a mental note to set him straight the next time we were on our own.

“She's leaving town in a few days so we have to interrogate her quickly.”

“Did you take advantage of the occasion by asking her if she had any idea who it could be?” he asked with his usual surliness.

“Actually I did,” I snapped back.

“What'd you say?”

“I asked her if she knew any Marilyn-obsessed fans who were nuts, or violent, or previously incarcerated,” I replied.

“And did she?”

“She said the only ex-cons she knew were tax cheats.”

“Good for you.” He sounded earnest this time. “I don't mean to be an asshole, but I just don't have the energy to break in any more rookies.”

“Is there anything else I can do here?” I asked, tired of his shit.

“No, Alex and Annie are interviewing everyone here. You've had a long day. Go home, get some sleep. I'm going to need you fresh in the morning.”

With the wind chill it was about twenty degrees outside. As I walked past Matt's patrol car, I could see the cuffed reporter hunched forward in the backseat shivering his ass off.

I was about to grab a cab home, but I was still wide awake. Flipping open my cell phone I called Noel.

“This isn't my missing press agent, is it?” he answered.

“No it's last night's date. I was just leaving my latest crime scene and thought I'd . . .”

“Need a ride home?”

“I can just cab it,” I said, since he sounded slightly intoxicated. “I just wanted to tell you I had a great time and wish you a good night.”

“I'm literally getting into my car now,” he said. “Where are you?”

“Thirty-seventh and Lex, northeast corner.” Most of the emergency
vehicles had gone, and traffic was flowing downtown again.

“You were a big hit,” Noel said. “Miriam loved you.”

“I didn't do anything.”

“She loved the whole act.”

“What act?”

“The whole police thing.”

“It's not an act! Although, frankly, I'm a little new at it myself,” I confessed. “I don't know all the cool jargon, and my partner keeps saying that all my insights are obvious.”

“Nonsense, you're Oscar caliber,” he replied. “Listen, I've got an important cameo in the upcoming Julia Roberts film,
Pretending To Speak French
. It's premiering in about a week. Would you join me as my date?”

“I've been working a lot in the evenings,” I said, trying to spare his feelings.

“You sure? Cause I can send another car to your corner on that night, around seven.”

Before I could reply, his car pulled up in front of me. He got out and gave me a hug, then held the door as I climbed in. I wiped my cell phone against my jacket sleeve and dropped it beside me on the seat. As he drove, Noel's hand slid up my arm and he idly caressed my bare shoulder. We chatted about the delightful party, and then the grim crime scene.

“Usually girls I date either fawn all over me, or they act like Venezia—total prima donnas,” he concluded. “But you and I make a great team. I mean, I really enjoyed myself.”

“I enjoyed yourself too.”

“Then why don't we go on a second date?”

His car pulled up in front of my building. I open my door and stepped out, but before closing it I leaned back in.

“I'm kind of seeing someone right now.”

“Ah.”

“Sorry . . . Oh, I dropped my cell.”

Noel snapped it up from the seat and handed it back, looking up at me as he said, “Well, you have my number if things don't go well.”

I took the phone by its short stubby antenna, slipped it back into my bag, and thanked him again for a marvelous time.

When I arrived upstairs, I dropped the cell phone into a baggie. I
called O'Ryan on my home phone, just to let him know that I had just got home unmurdered. The call went straight to his voicemail. So much for him having my back.

As I readied myself for bed I thought of Maggie, who was probably still gathering up half-finished plates and glasses, then cleaning up at Ms. Williams's mansion-apartment. Considering all the times I'd waved her over to me at the party, only to have people simply pick food off her platter and make annoying remarks, it must have seemed like I was deliberately trying to embarrass her.

I lay in bed awake for a while, half-hoping to catch her when she came home, so I could explain my honorable intentions. Eventually though, I was just too tired and sleep overtook me.

Some time later I awoke with a start. The door of the adjacent apartment had slammed shut—Maggie had finally returned. I listened for her TV; it was her habit to flip it on as soon as she came in, day or night. Instead I heard a garbled male voice, quickly followed by the frantic rhythms of fucking. She must've got lucky again with non-boyfriend/bartender, Rick.

Unable to return to sleep, I finally turned on my old Dell and Googled “Marilyn Monroe.” I wanted to read up on Marilyn, but I also wanted to check out other Marilyn fan sites, to see if the killer had posted his murder jpegs and psycho poems there too. Eighty-two pages of Marilyn references came up, offering everything from her alleged stag film (accessible with a credit card payment) to Slavic language chat rooms devoted to her.

Though the platinum bombshell had other fan sites, I didn't see options for uploading pictures or poems on any of them. What I did see was how the internet fragmented Marilyn's life like a shattered mirror. Her abused childhood was rarely mentioned, and if it was, then only briefly, while her adult life—the years of her celebrity—was redundantly cross-referenced. For an hour I sifted through the lurid gossip surrounding her brief existence: chatter about sexual favors she possibly performed in exchange for film roles; details of her failed marriages to Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller as well as her flings with other celebrities, which allegedly included every bad boy of the day from Brando through Elvis and the glamorous Kennedys to a young Rip Torn.

As I read one article that described the constant flow of pills and
alcohol she had consumed, not to mention the leaning tower of fame built upon her emotionally unstable childhood, I realized it was a miracle that she had lasted as long as she did.

As an afterthought I remembered that Bernie wanted me to check out the name, CathyofAlexandria, the email address attached to all the homicidal documentation. It turned out Catherine of Alexandria was a saint who had been tortured to death by a pagan Roman emperor rather than renounce her Christianity. Eventually the emperor had her beheaded—which seemed ironic, since this latest victim was the first our killer
hadn't
beheaded.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Early the next morning, I was awakened by a phone call. It was my brother.

“Turn on the TV, quick!”

“Hold on!”

Assuming it had something to do with my murder case, which he knew I was assigned to, I put on my glasses and flipped it on.

“What happened?” I asked him groggily, nervous that the killer had struck yet again while I slept. But onscreen I saw Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, speaking in a large auditorium filled with suits.

“What the hell is this?”

“Powell is at the UN, making a case for war so that we'll invade Iraq.”

“Carl, I was sleeping!”

“We're being pushed into a war for absolutely no reason. Doesn't that bother you?”

“There's no draft, Carl,” I said, turning the TV off. “It's not like Vietnam. No one's going to be forced to fight if they don't want to.”

“How about the Iraqi people?” he shouted.

“I gotta go,” I said, not caring to debate this bullshit any further.

“Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?” he said.

“I'm still a virgin, okay?” I said.

“How's the OCD?”

“All cleared up,” I said and hung up. I lay back down. This was why I was glad Carl was no longer living in the city. He'd be breathing down my neck every second, trying to control my life. But I was always worried about him.

I closed my eyes, breathed steadily and tried to push all concerns out of my head The only thing that stuck in my mind was the vision
I'd had in yoga the other day—a tall, slim, shimmering woman holding a bow and arrow. After a while I showered, dressed, and went off to work. When I arrived, Bernie was sitting at his old partner's desk, resting his head against a cardboard box in front of him.

I peeked to make sure that his shoe was still on, then approached him. “You didn't call One PP about the Marilyn web site, did you?”

“Yep,” he said, without making eye contact.

I didn't need the crisp morning light to see that Bernie needed a shave and a change of clothes. He looked haggard. Finally he sat up in his chair, swallowed down whatever bile had risen in his throat and said, “Last night after the credit card theft, I figured that this guy might be targeting me. So I've spent the last eight hours going through all my cases over the last fifteen years.” He hit his head against the cardboard box. There were several more on the floor behind the desk.

“Those are all your cases?”

“Decades of pulling rats out of glue traps and putting them into tiny cages upstate. But I came up with nothing.”

“So what now?”

“The problem with this business isn't running out of ideas, it's having too many of them. Bert used to say that.”

“What ideas?”

He opened the file in front of him. It was our case. Aside from various reports, I saw a stack of crime photos. Close ups of severed heads. Detailed pictures of wrists and ankles splattered with blood and taped together. Single digit numbers carved painfully into soft flesh.

“I'm sure you noticed that all the numbers cut into the vic's limbs correspond with the numbers cut into prior vics . . .” I again made the mistake of stating the obvious.

“Yeah, yeah. The way the bodies are positioned, the numbering on the limbs, the crap he shoves into their hands—all that shit. If you can figure out what it means, I'll give you ten bucks. Otherwise . . .” He made a zipper gesture over his mouth. All these dead ends were evidently driving him nuts.

“The thing I find most interesting is the actual taping,” Bernie finally said. “It must be really hard to get their limbs like that and balance them all to stay upright.”

“Maybe the guy worked for Mailboxes Etc.”

“And why is this the only victim he didn't decapitate?”

“Yet he still did the numbering and taping,” I pointed out.

When I looked at the Polaroids of our latest Jane Doe, I gasped. The killer had been so violent that even her implants were sliced apart. Also, unlike the other girls, she had a tattoo on her back—a coiled and sleeping dragon.

“What now?” I asked.

“I'm going to shave, change my shirt, and get a coffee. Then we'll go back to the list.”

I used the recess to dash to the lab, where I gave my baggied cellphone to a techie and asked him to lift Noel's prints from it, then run them through the file to see if they matched any we had found at the other crime scenes. He told me the CSI techies had found two new fingerprints at last night's crime scene that they were pretty certain belonged to the killer.

As I got back to the squad room, Alex and Annie arrived, both at the same time. Just when I began to wonder if they were sleeping together, Bernie explained that they had gone out to Brooklyn to check up on some possible leads regarding the latest victim. A wonderful way to spend a Saturday morning, considering they both had families.

“Find out anything?”

“Her real name was Jane Hansen, nickname Minty,” Annie said, reading from her notepad. “She lived in Greenpoint with her cat Angus. Went to NYU film school, and was still paying off her student loans. She's the first vic who doesn't seem connected to any escort service, though I guess she might be a freelancer.”