Good Day to Die (8 page)

“Anybody particular in mind?’ he asks.

“‘Yeah,’ she says, ‘Mean Mister Means.’”

“Just like that?” I demanded. “Just like that? She said, ‘Mean Mister Means’? Bullshit.”

He slid forward and tapped me on the chest with the tip of a pudgy forefinger. “As God is my witness, Means. And Bowman knew just who she meant. How does it feel to be a legend?”

I didn’t bother to answer and he let me stew for a minute before he tapped me again.

“Hey, Means, What do you call a Somali with a swollen toe?”

“I don’t know, Pooch. I really don’t.”

“A golf club.”

M
EAN MISTER MEANS. IT
was an honor, in a way. The nickname had been given to me by some vicious street mutt with a penchant for rhyme. It’d gotten back to my brothers on the Vice Squad through their snitches and naturally become the vehicle of endless mindless jokes. Cops don’t like to work with hotdogs, and I can’t say that I blamed them, even at the time. But that doesn’t mean I stopped, either. As I said, I came to New York to hunt, not to be one more anonymous soldier in what amounted to a twenty-seven-thousand-man army. Anyone who didn’t like that could, as far as I was concerned, kiss my sweet red ass.

But they didn’t kiss my ass, sweet or sour, red or its actual beige. The job has its own remedies for cops with Rambo mentalities, ballistics being one of them. Outright dismissal being another.

It was the dismissal part that bothered me as I sat in front of a desk contemplating the very large box of assorted reports that Pooch had thoughtfully prepared for me. If ranking officers as high as Deputy Chief Bowman were out to bury Captain Vanessa Bouton, they’d sacrifice Detective/First Roland Means in a hot second. Which meant Bouton’s promise of protection carried all the force of a politician promising to end the budget deficit.

There’s nothing more embarrassing to a hunter than blundering into his own snare. I’d jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire (actually, it was more like out of the refrigerator and into the freezer), but that didn’t mean I had to stay there. If you stepped into a bear trap, would you scream “ouch, ouch, ouch” until you bled to death? Or would you find a way to pry open the jaws of the trap and deal with your wounds?

There was no going back. The first thing I had to do was please Vanessa Bouton. If I could keep her going for a few weeks, I might find a way to distance myself from the awful thud she was going to make when she fell on her face. I might, for instance, look up Deputy Chief Bowman and offer to be his eyes and ears. In return for a little consideration when it came time for the sentencing.

That doesn’t sound nice, does it? But it wasn’t altogether nice of Vanessa Bouton to use me for cannon fodder, either. It’s one thing to risk your own ass for a worthy cause; it’s quite another to lure some poor innocent out of ballistic hell to aid you in committing suicide.

In any event (even without a definite, long-term plan of action), I was considerably cheered by the fact that I already had my angle. It’d come to me while I was sparring with Pooch. Assuming Bouton was right in her assessment of the case (a position I was forced to take), neither of the first three victims could have been the primary target. The killer would have had to wait until the media put it together, until the cops were committed to the search for a serial killer, before he made his move.

But once his intended scenario was established, he would have had to act fairly quickly. He couldn’t risk having to abandon the field because of a close call. That close call might take any number of forms. An intended victim could escape or another cruising whore come up with a partial license plate or an accurate description. Any close call would either subject the killer to extreme risk or force him to give up before he’d accomplished his actual objective.

What it came down to was victim number four or victim number five. Which was just as well, because Pooch had given me something over six hundred pages of documents to peruse. There was no way two cops (one of whom was almost certain to prove something less than proficient at street investigation) could even begin to penetrate that mass. Reducing the number of targets by five, on the other hand, would provide Bouton and myself with a few weeks of serious work, followed by a few months of bullshit repetition. After which, we could abandon the field secure in the knowledge that we’d given it the old college try.

I began to sift through the evidence, starting with the autopsy reports and the crime scene photos. The bodies were gruesome enough. The eyelids, eyebrows, and nipples had been carefully removed. The instrument, according to the autopsy notes, had been a thin, very sharp knife, perhaps a filleting knife of the sort commonly used by fishermen. The torsos, on the other hand, had been stabbed numerous times with a much longer, much thicker blade. Ribs had been snapped by the force of the blows, suggesting a survival or hunting knife. The genitals were untouched, except for deep grooves where the killer had wrapped the penis and testicles with a strip of leather. All of this, of course, had taken place after death. The cause of death for each victim was listed as a single shot to the back of the head from a .22-caliber pistol.

Toxicology reports showed the presence of various intoxicating substances in the victims’ bodies. Most of them had had some alcohol in their systems, but not all. Four had tested positive for cocaine, two for heroin, two for barbiturates. One of the things that interested me (as it had the other six hundred cops who’d investigated the case) was how the killer controlled his victims until he was ready to kill them. He’d taken them off crowded streets and, therefore, was not likely to have dispatched them immediately, not with a gun.

Of course, he might have used a silenced automatic or soundproofed his van, but several other factors indicated that he’d controlled each victim for some time before administering the
coup de grace.
For instance, the .22 had been only three inches from the back of the skull when Thong pulled the trigger. (The carefully photographed scalps were severely charred by the resulting powder burns.) Plus, all the entry wounds would easily fit into a two-inch circle. And not one of the victims, as far as forensics could tell, had resisted his attacker. There was no tissue under the fingernails. No evidence of defensive wounds.

I found myself absorbed in the material despite my carefully professed cynicism. Getting the victim away from the pickup area would have been fairly easy. Most street whores, male or female, prefer car tricks to hotel tricks because there’s enough risk of exposure in a car to keep the johns from lingering over their purchases. Anal and vaginal sex are equally difficult in a car (less so, admittedly, in a van), making quick, neat blow-jobs the order of the day. In and out; one, two, three; take the money and run.

But getting the victim away from the stroll was only the beginning for the killer. In each case, he had to find a quiet place to park, convince his victim to turn away from him, then pull the trigger before his victim could react. I don’t deny that it’s possible to intimidate someone into dying passively, but when you’re talking about seven victims, it seems unlikely that one or two wouldn’t fight back. Or at least move his head enough to change the position of the entry wound.

Drugs could have been the answer, if there had been any evidence of recent drug use. Johns commonly offer cocaine (along with money, of course) as an inducement to especially adventuresome sex. The killer might have concocted his own mixture of heroin and cocaine, worked his target into a stupor, then fired the fatal bullet. That hadn’t happened. The stomachs and nostrils of each victim had been carefully examined for drug residue. The skin had been inspected for any sign of recent puncture marks. All with negative results.

If Thong hadn’t controlled his victims with drugs, how had he controlled them? For some reason, the answer didn’t leap, full-blown, into my consciousness. But it was another thing I could use on Bouton, another angle to pursue. Wasn’t it possible, for instance, that King Thong was two little monkeys instead of one giant ape? Perhaps the trigger man snuck up behind his working (i.e., kneeling) target and pulled the trigger just at the moment of orgasm?

Or maybe each victim had been offered a cash inducement to wear a blindfold and play the passive partner in a round of anal sex. The killer had approached his naked, prone victim from the rear, but instead of slamming his penis into the proffered butt, he’d slammed a .22-caliber bullet into his playmate’s skull. Blindfolds are not uncommon in the sewer of New York prostitution. Not for boys—or for girls, either. I noted that wood fibers had been found all over the bodies. The fibers had come from a sheet of unstained, unpainted plywood, and the prevailing theory was that it had been used to line the bottom of a commercial van. I had to presume the area surrounding the eyes had also been examined for fibers of material or for any chemical residue that might have been transferred from a leather mask. But there was nothing definite in the autopsy notes, and a blindfold theory could and would be offered to Vanessa Bouton as another proof of Detective Means’ enthusiasm.

Aside from the wood fibers, the only other physical evidence found on the victims were the long, irregular strips of leather that’d earned Thong his name. They were not made from cowhide; the strips had originally been part of a deer. (This fact, along with a number of others, like the stab wounds and the removal of the eyebrows and eyelids, had been withheld from the public.) The deerskin strips must’ve seemed like a great lead to the original investigators, but the fact is that approximately six million hunters kill approximately one million deer in New York and surrounding states each November during the short hunting season. Most of these hunters have the heads mounted and the hides tanned in order to display their stupid macho prowess for their equally stupid macho friends.

As I said, I hunted all through my childhood, but for me hunting was never a way of proving my virility. It was not an aphrodisiac. Mom had a way of spending every penny that came into the house. She liked going to greaser bars (that’s where the “uncles” came from), but she’d buy gallons of cheap wine if times were tough. The state, perhaps in recognition of my childish vulnerability, included food stamps in Mom’s welfare package. Food stamps Mom sold at a fifty percent discount to a local grocer named Pierre DeGaul. The point, of course, is that I hunted in order to eat. I never equated dropping the sights of a 30-30 onto a grazing deer’s shoulder with personal bravery.

Still, there was nothing in the FBI’s profile to indicate the killer ever hunted anything but humans. The profile imagined Thong to be a fussily dressed executive type. It was hard to picture him crawling through a muddy forest. Or bloody to the elbows, skinning and gutting the still-hot carcass of a freshly killed deer. One more item to call to Vanessa Bouton’s attention.

I moved on to the rest of the material Pooch had culled from the files. Theoretically, Pooch had excluded anything connected to the serial killer theory, especially information developed through the hotline or the profile. Included were interviews with friends, coworkers, relatives, etc. Just for the hell of it, I picked up the packet on victim number four and compared it with the packet on victim number one. Number one’s file was at least five times as thick as that of number four. Clearly, once the serial killer theory had been established, standard procedure had gone out the window.

I removed the files on victims number four and five, laid them out on the empty desk, then took their autopsy reports and put them down next to their respective packages.

Victim number four was named John Kennedy. Called John-John, though his middle name was Anthony and not Fitzgerald. He’d been twenty-three years old when he’d run into Thong. Twenty-three years old; five-foot-ten; a hundred and forty pounds. No scars, no birthmarks, no tattoos.

He’d emigrated to New York from the upstate hamlet of Owl Creek six months before his murder and been arrested twice for prostitution, which meant he’d probably gotten into the life shortly after his arrival. Both arrests had been made on Fifty-third Street, better known as “the strip,” an area commonly used by teenage male prostitutes. His last known address was The House of Refuge, one of many nonprofit organizations providing temporary shelter for young runaways. John-John had been taken by Thong in April of last year, April 10 to be exact. His body had been found the next morning in a parking lot on Forty-seventh Street.

I picked up a crime scene photograph showing the body as it’d been discovered and examined it carefully. John-John Kennedy had been propped up against a wall at the rear of the lot. He was entirely naked except for the infamous leather strip holding his thoroughly gray penis erect.

On impulse, I plucked a second photo (this one snapped in happier times) from the file and laid it next to the crime scene photo. Despite the removal of the eyelids and eyebrows, Kennedy’s almost girlish face was clearly recognizable in both photographs. The killer had ripped his chest and abdomen to pieces; chunks of bone were visible through ragged tears in the flesh. Yet the face had been, at least in terms of potential identification, virtually untouched. Of course, Kennedy, with his police record, would have been identified through his fingerprints, but the killer couldn’t have known that. Just as he’d wanted the bodies to be discovered, he’d wanted them to be identified.

I skimmed through the DD5’s, hoping to find the name of John-John Kennedy’s pimp, assuming he had one. Coworkers put Kennedy on the stroll at the time he was taken, but nobody had seen him at the point of contact. The name of his pimp wasn’t there, either. In fact, it didn’t look like the investigating detectives had any interest in Kennedy’s pimp. They were looking for that license plate I mentioned earlier. That physical description of the killer.

It wasn’t exactly by-the-book police work. In fact, it was piss poor. I didn’t believe in Bouton’s theory, but I found myself offended by the reports I held in my hand. It was easy to imagine several dozen field investigators chasing after leads generated by a hotline and filtered through a profile. One gigantic, vulgar circus, with the cops occupying center ring, the reporters and politicians as ring masters, and the public for an audience.