Gladyss of the Hunt (20 page)

At this point, the Renunciate entered, and we all closed our eyes and mouths. He took his place at the mat in the front of the class. Closing his eyes, he began his ancient chants, as though summoning
up the spirits. The breathing and the poses all started out the same as in the other classes, but here he slowly led us to positions that were far more challenging. Unlike the easier classes, he gave no explanations or advice. He simply did the moves and his students silently followed. Aside from their strength and flexibility, I strangely admired their shameless ability to fart without apology. They seemed to unfold and contort their late middle-aged bodies in ways that only the purest of heart could venture. The Renunciate finally got to the inversions. I was proud that I could hold a handstand, but looking around I realized the other yogis were actually balanced on their turbans, their arms against their sides. During final relaxation, I lay flat; this time, instead of seeing anything, I closed my eyes and wondered if the vision I'd had of the statue of Diana earlier was the sign that some divine force was telling me, per that picture on his postcard, that Nessun was our killer.

On the short walk home, the cold air gripped my hot skin like the frosted hand of God. I decided to skip dinner and, after a hot shower, barely made it to bed.

“No! Please!”

I awoke with a start. From the rhythmic thumps against the common wall, I knew Maggie was getting seriously banged. When I first became friends with her, I was going to ask her to move her bed, but I came to see the occasional rapping as a reminder that I had to start my own sex life.

“Stop it, I'm begging you!”

I sat up and wondered if I should intervene. Grabbing a glass, I pressed it against the wall to try and determine if she was okay.

“Say it!”

I clearly heard the male command and recognized the voice from somewhere. I could barely hear her reply.

“She'll never go for it.”

“Just say it, if you want me to stop,” he said in a calmer tone.

“All right! I'll do it! Stop!”

After a few more minutes I heard Maggie moaning steadily until finally it sounded like she was climaxing. Then, when I heard the man groaning, I realized who he was.

About a half an hour later, when the clock said six, I heard her door open. I was able to confirm my suspicions by looking through
the peephole. The gnarled face of Crispin Marachino flashed by as he left.

By Monday afternoon we had checked out the remaining five suspects on Bernie's list. Two had gotten permission to move out of state. Two more were keeping their noses clean, according to their parole officers' accounts, and had good alibis. Only one was a fugitive. According to his ex-wife he'd last been spotted in the state of Delaware.

At the end of the day, when we realized our suspect list was a bust, Annie said the good news was that the computer tech from One PP was finally on his way over. The Marilyn web site connection was now our best hope for moving forward. Only then did I remember that Miriam Williams had flown to Europe yesterday.

The tech support guy turned out to be Indian-American, but from his Westernized demeanor I knew he'd never practiced any form of yoga. Raj said he had done some work on the case already at Police Plaza. He had discovered that the horrific images of Jane had been sent from a computer in the Midtown Manhattan Library on Fifth Avenue at Fortieth Street, which had been open until 11 p.m. that night. He inspected Miriam's' laptop, which we had kept in Bernie's office.

“What exactly is the deal with using the library computers?” Bernie asked.

“They allow you to use them for fifteen-minutes at a time, but you have to sign in first.”

“It's probably the closest library for O'Flaherty,” I pointed out.

“Let's take a walk,” Bernie said, rising slowly onto his tricky foot and grabbing his coat.

“Are you sure you're up for this?” I asked. He had been wincing all day. But as if it were possessed, his bum foot seemed to lead him right out the door.

Halfway into our little walk, Bernie started gasping for air. When he seemed to get dizzy, I feared he was having a heart attack. On the northeast corner of Thirty-ninth and Seventh Avenue, he parked himself on a short metal platform that held a steel sculpture of an old Jewish man sitting at a sewing machine.

“Let's go back to the precinct,” I suggested.

Bernie looked up at the garment district statue he was sitting under and said: “There was a lot more jerking off around here than sewing. If they're going to put up a memorial, it should be to all the lonely guys who whacked off in the porn arcades around Times Square.”

He pulled his inhaler from his coat and took a deep suck from it, then rose to his feet and resumed walking, throwing his foot out before him like an anvil. When we got to the library, we found a dozen old PCs side by side. We carefully inspected the sign-in sheet, looking for the names of people who had used the computer at 7:45 p.m., roughly the time the jpegs had been sent in to Miriam. It proved to be useless: most of the names were illegible, and of course there were no closed-circuit cameras. Before Bernie could even begin to describe O'Flaherty, the librarian was shaking her head. Apparently she never saw anybody, ever.

“We know O'Flaherty uses the library,” I said to Bernie. “Why don't we check his withdrawal records to establish if he was here that day, and see if there's a match with the times the jpegs were uploaded.”

Bernie barely nodded. He never gave anyone any credit.

After an hour of going through various bureaucratic channels, we discovered that O'Flaherty's most recent withdrawals were all made at the Donnell branch up on Fifty-third and Fifth. I was going to suggest walking up there and checking their sign-in sheet to see if he might've logged in for any cyber-hijinks up there as well, but I didn't have the heart to put Bernie through another lengthy walk.

Not long after I got home that evening, I heard Maggie's delicate Morse code knocks at my door. We hadn't seen each other since the celebrity party at Miriam's house.

As soon as I opened the door, Maggie handed me a frosty bottle of Grey Goose vodka – I didn't know why, nor did I care. I took out two tall thin-stemmed aperitif glasses and poured us each a shot.

“I know you have a big crush on Noel Holden,” I said. “I wish I could just wrap him up and give him to you.” I was trying to give Maggie the opportunity to mention her fling with Crispin.

“Don't you want him?” Maggie asked instead.

“Maggie, he spends most of his time out in LA, and he has a million adoring fans. Even if he did sleep with me, it would only be a matter of time before he'd toss me aside for the next coat-check girl.”

“If you really feel that way, why are you seeing him?” she asked.

“I'm not. It's over.” I didn't want to explain the whole fingerprints thing.

“So you wouldn't be angry if he . . . if I . . .”

“If you what?”

“Well, if one day a miracle should occur and I got together with him.”

I stood there a moment wondering if she was insane.

“Go for it, girl,” I finally said. I shouldn't've been surprised by her reluctance to talk about Crispin. After all, this was where her crazy flag flapped out of control.

We clinked glasses and knocked back our vodka. After another drink, Maggie dashed back to her apartment—probably to watch the same dumbass TV shows as I did on the opposite side of the same wall—all alone.

CHAPTER TEN

A few days later it finally happened. At four in the afternoon Annie took a call from the “office manager” of College Girl Escorts. The madam told her a guy had just requested a “Kim Novak-sweetheart type.” He was waiting in a classy midtown hotel.

“Kim Novak was a big blonde, right?” Annie asked.

“Who knows?” Alex replied.

The suspect had said he just wanted to “sit with a girl for a while, and share a smile.” When the office manager asked for his credit card number, he offered to pay in cash. When she told him, according to the instructions we had given all the agencies, that they preferred a credit card, he gave up his number. She checked and found that the card had been canceled, but it hadn't been reported missing.

Annie instructed her to say that his Kim Novak was on her way, but he had to negotiate with the girl directly.

The office manager gave Annie his room number at the Grand Hyatt at Forty-second and Lexington, only a few blocks from the Ticonderoga, the last murder site. We had maybe twenty minutes to get across town if we were to have any hope of catching him. I said I'd change into the schoolgirl outfit I had left in my locker as quickly as I could.

“Put it on in the car,” Bernie yelled, desperate not to lose our one and only suspect. We ran outside, Annie and Alex joining us for back up.

As we barreled up to Forty-second, siren blaring, snaking over the double gold lines and in and out of opposing lanes, I frantically pulled off my clothes and squeezed into my schoolgirl outfit while rolling around in the shotgun seat.

“Pull up your shirt,” Annie said from the back. When I did so she
taped a transmission wire and microbattery pack to my ribs. For the first time I was wondering what the hell I was doing here. Instead of quietly ticketing cars with O'Ryan, I was about to get intimate with a possible serial murderer. The only problem with my little girl costume was there was no where to tuck my gun and shield. Annie held on to them.

“Now listen up.” Bernie went through the drill. “The only way you're going to get hurt is if you try pulling some kind of heroics, understand? But this guy has brutally butchered at least four women. He's not stupid and he's not compassionate.”

“I'm aware of that.”

“So you have to have
him
solicit
you
. That means even if we can't get arrest him for the murders, we'll have him for prostitution. And we can hold him while we check his alibis.”

“I understand.”

“The good news is,” Alex half-joked, “he hasn't shot or stabbed anyone.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “He only drugs, strangles, and mutilates.”

“Just don't drink anything,” Annie said.

“But if anything at all happens, we'll be in there in a matter of seconds,” Bernie insisted.

“I know,” I said, trying not to sound terrified.

“We're going to be right outside the door,” he said emphatically. “So if we suddenly don't hear
anything
, we're coming in.”

“I know, it'll be quick,” I assured him, cracking my knuckles tensely.

“What exactly are you going after?” he tested.

“Verbal contract: blow job for fifty bucks.”

“That's all you're charging?” Bernie said, as if he was about to take me up on the offer. “A BJ through an escort service has got to be at least a couple hundred nowadays.”

“Whatever,” I said tensely.

“It's important, you have to sound credible. Ask him for one fifty,” he said, like a true pimp.

When we got to the lobby of the hotel, Bernie got me to go ahead of the rest of them, just in case the suspect was scoping out the lobby. As I walked toward the elevators, Bernie identified himself to the manager at the front desk and got a passcard to the suspect's room.
By the time we took separate elevators up to the eleventh floor, the suspect had been waiting for almost thirty minutes.

Bernie had me test my transmitter one final time. As one of the hotel occupants was exiting an adjacent room, Alex flashed his shield and we all crammed inside for an instant, just in case the suspect peeked out into the hallway when I knocked on his door. Apparently this had happened to Bernie and his old partner once.

When I was ready, I finally tapped on the suspect's door. A soothing male voice called, “Come in.”

A small, well-dressed man who looked at least seventy was sitting in an armchair next to the draped windows. He didn't look anything like the image on the overexposed video footage or in the rough sketch, but that was hardly conclusive.

He looked so benign that I had to reject the urge to relax and remind myself that despite his appearance, this guy might be a crazed killer.

“All right sweetheart,” I began. “What can I do for you?”

“Oh, I'm Thad,” He introduced and extended his hand. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Okay.” I tried to hide the fact that my hand was trembling. On the bed was a paper bag from Genovese Drugs. I couldn't help but think those pharmaceuticals might be meant for me. No drinks were in view, though, nor anything that might be a weapon.

“I thought maybe we could just talk.” He had some kind of backwoods dialect and spoke very gently.

“You want to talk while I'm sucking your cock?” I asked, hoping to get things moving.

“Gosh, no. I was hoping that maybe we could just catch up on old times.”

I watched as his large hands fluttered nervously in and out of his jacket pockets.