Hope to Die (29 page)

And no one knows!

He scans the computer screen. At the bottom of the newsgroup window is a button that reads New Message. He clicks on it, and there's a new screen, all set up to receive a message for alt.crime. serialkillers.

On the subject line he types: BIERMAN INNOCENT VICTIM.

No, only the worst idiots use all caps like that. It's the newsgroup equivalent of shouting. He deletes it, tries again: Bierman innocent victim.

Better.

He looks at the screen, then begins to type:

Jason Bierman never killed anybody. He was artfully set up to take the rap for a killer none of you know anything about. That man's name is Arden Brill.

He deletes the last sentence and goes on:

... I am that man, and you may call me Arden Brill. I have killed five times. Bierman was my first victim, the Hollanders numbers two and three. Carl Ivanko was fourth. You have credited Jason Bierman with all of these killings, and he never even met or heard of a single one of his purported victims!

My fifth victim is Lia Parkman, and you have never heard of her, but you will. I drowned her in a tub of water, held her by her tits and watched her fight for life.

But she hadn't struggled. In fact he was not altogether sure she ever regained consciousness. Her eyes were open, but did that necessarily mean she knew what was going on? Maybe he should change that last sentence:

... I drowned her in a tub of water, held her by her sweet little tits and watched the bubbles rise to the surface as the life went out of her.

That was better. That, in fact, was exactly how it had happened. Calling her tits sweet and little was not exactly clinical, but no one could fault him for veracity.

... I do not kill for the thrill of it. I have a motive, and it is perfectly logical. I shall profit enormously from my crimes.

No, not crimes. He deleted "crimes," resumed:

... profit enormously from my actions, which may disqualify me as a serial killer. Still, for all that my work is undertaken for profit. I cannot deny that the act of killing is satisfying to me in ways I would never have anticipated. I enjoy it before the act, during the act, and after the act has been completed.

He pauses, forming his thoughts:

I have killed both men and women. Killing men, I would say, provides me with more of a sense of accomplishment. On the other hand, for sheer pleasure, there's nothing like killing a woman.

No, amend that slightly:

... nothing like killing an attractive woman.

He sits there, looking at what he has written, nodding his approval. His watch beeps, signaling that it is ten minutes before the hour.

He moves the mouse, poises the cursor over the Post button.

Oh, no. No, I don't think so.

He shifts the mouse, clicks on Cancel. The message, unsent, vanishes from the screen. A few more clicks and he's off-line, and his screensaver is back in place, lights winking on and off, on and off...

"Let's go over it again," Wentworth said. "Doc's name is Nadler?"

" Seymour Nadler."

"And he's a psychiatrist, is that right?"

"Board-certified," I said.

"A disciple of Sigmund Freud."

"That I wouldn't know."

"And maybe of Brill," he said. "A. A. Brill. Studied with him, maybe."

"The dates are wrong," I said. "Brill died in 1948."

"Was Nadler even born then?"

"No," I said. "He's around forty."

"And the gun was his, the murder weapon."

"Yes."

"Registered, and he had a permit for it."

"For his office and residence. He didn't have a carry permit."

"He bought it when, sometime last year? Did he give a reason?"

"According to him," I said, "he had a patient he was worried about."

"Makes sense," Wentworth said. "I got a patient worries me, I want a gun so I can shoot him. Why dick around with medication? I don't suppose he ever had occasion to shoot this patient."

"He said the man committed suicide."

"Shot himself?"

"Went out a window, or maybe it was off a roof."

"Story check out?"

"About the patient? I have no idea. He didn't furnish the name, and I didn't see any reason to ask it."

"You didn't suspect him."

"No, not at all. Of what, killing three people with a registered weapon and leaving it at the scene? The man had diplomas on the wall, I figured he had an IQ at least as high as his body temperature."

He started to say something, then stopped. At the corner, a vendor of soft ice cream had parked his truck, and the Mister Softee music was playing relentlessly. Wentworth said, "Excuse me," and got to his feet, striding off toward the ice cream truck.

"Man hears that music," T J said, "he just got to have it. What it is, he was conditioned as a child." He glanced across the street, raised his eyes about ten floors. "You got any trouble with the concept, Dr. Nadler be glad to explain it all for you."

We were on a bench on the east side of Central Park West, directly across the street from Seymour Nadler's building. There was a five-foot stone wall behind us, and on the other side of it was the park. I'd left word for Wentworth at the precinct, and he'd called me right after he left Kristin's house. He'd interviewed her at length, and had reinforced the advice I'd given her- don't take any calls, don't open the door for anyone. He hadn't been able to arrange police protection yet, but he had a request in, and expected it would be approved before long.

I looked over and saw Wentworth in conversation with the Mister Softee man. After a few moments the truck pulled away from the curb, crossed the intersection, and kept going for another block. Wentworth returned empty-handed, but with a look of triumph on his square-jawed face.

"Told him to take it down the road," he said. "What's the point of having a gold shield if you can't kick Mister Softee's ass off your block?"

"Who I wanted to be," T J said. "When I grew up."

"Who, Mister Softee? Or a guy with a gold shield?"

"Mister Softee. You like the Pied Piper, ring that little bell an' all the boys an' girls come runnin'."

"You'd like that, would you?"

"Thought so, when I was young. Everywhere you go, they be happy to see you."

"Not their parents," Wentworth said. "Not anybody who's trying to concentrate. Imagine sitting in the truck all day, listening to that music for hours on end." He shook his head. "Guy didn't want to move. 'But this is my spot,' he kept whining. Like nobody'll be able to find him a block away. 'This is my spot,' I said. He got the point."

"It's a small victory," I said, "but at least it goes in the win column."

"Damn right," he said. "Look at me, I put the fear of God into Mister Softee. You figure that's his wife's pet name for his thing? Jesus, let's hope not."

On the sidewalk in front of us, a girl in her early teens whizzed by on Rollerblades. "They're not supposed to skate on the sidewalk," he said, "but I'll let her go this time. I already filled my quota with Mister Softee. You want to get back to your boy Nadler?"

"Sure."

"He bought the gun last year, kept it locked away in his desk drawer. March, he and his wife are out, he comes home and there's been a burglary. He makes a report, files a claim with his insurance company. Right so far?"

I nodded.

"Then two, three days later he opens the drawer and the gun's gone. Did he say what made him look?"

"Not that I remember."

"It's not a stretch. He's at his desk, he's thinking about the burglary, thinks, Jesus, suppose I was here, what would I do, would I go for my gun? So he looks for the gun and it's missing. And he reported it, right?"

"Right."

"But didn't add it to his insurance claim."

"He didn't want the aggravation of amending the claim," I said. "And he wasn't sure it would be covered, as he'd never included it on the schedule. It didn't seem unreasonable."

"No, and it still doesn't. Plus there's the embarrassment factor. 'I bought a gun to protect myself and my family and the burglars took it away with them.' The law requires him to inform the police, but nobody says he has to put in a claim. That's up to him."

"Right."

"So we fast-forward a few months," he said, "and it's the end of July, beginning of August, and the Hollanders are killed, and the two in Brooklyn."

"Bierman and Ivanko."

"And the gun's left at the scene, as it more or less has to be if it's going to look like suicide, and a ballistics check reveals the gun is the very same twenty-two-caliber pistol stolen from the good Dr. Nadler. Was it a twenty-two? Did I get that part right?"

"Yes."

"Okay," he said, "run it by me. The gun was never stolen in the first place, right?"

"Right."

"How about the burglary? He fake the whole thing?"

"Probably not," I said. "But it's not impossible. He rides down to the lobby with his wife, then remembers he left the tickets on the dresser."

"So he goes upstairs, turns some drawers upside down, scoops up some jewelry, and what? He doesn't take it along to the theater."

"He's got it in two pillowcases he stripped off the bed," I said. "He ducks into his office, stows them both in a closet, and goes back downstairs to the lobby."

"And off to do the town. Comes home, reports the burglary. It's possible, but you don't think he did it that way."

"My guess," I said, "is the burglary happened just the way he said it did in his initial report. They went through the residence, took whatever he said they took, and carted it off in pillowcases. And two days later he realizes he's been trying to figure out how to get hold of a gun that can't be traced back to him, and here's the perfect way. He reports his own gun as stolen, and, when it is traced back to him, they say oh yeah, right, it was taken in a burglary, it was reported stolen months ago."

He nodded slowly, thinking it through. "What I like about it," he said, "is it's cute, and we already know our guy's got a weakness for being cute." To T J he said, "You ever decide to become a crook, don't be cute, okay? Three guesses what you wind up stepping on."

"On my Mister Softee," T J said.

"You think that's why he bought the gun in the first place? You think he planned it that far ahead?"

I'd wondered about that point myself. "It's possible," I said. "Say he decided he wanted a gun. He's an Upper West Side shrink, he's not going to have access to the people with unregistered guns to sell. He could cross a couple of state lines and pick up something at a gun show, but would he even think of that?"

"So he's got a use for the gun planned all along."

"If so," I said, "then he faked the burglary, because he couldn't just sit around and wait for someone to turn up right on schedule and knock off his apartment. Unless he didn't have the details worked out yet, especially the part about the suicide. If there's no weapon recovered, he doesn't have to worry about it being traced back to him."

"And then the burglary happens, and it's a gift from on high."

"What I think," I said, "is that he knew who he was going to kill and why he was going to kill them. But he didn't know how, and the burglar who knocked over his place supplied that part for him."

"Turned his registered gun into a possible murder weapon, and gave him the idea of faking a burglary to cover the killing."

"And even showed him what a burglary looked like. Using the pillowcases, for example. I thought it was a coincidence when the same MO turned up in both jobs, Nadler and Hollander. Then I thought, well, Ivanko knocked off Nadler's place, and he kept the gun, and he had it with him when he knocked off the Hollander house."

"A burglar hits him," Wentworth said, "and he borrows the guy's MO when he stages a burglary of his own. Then he uses his own gun because he's managed to turn it into an untraceable weapon. Jesus, he really is cute, isn't he?"

"Peter," he says, beaming, stepping back from the doorway. "Come in, come in. You're right on time."

"Compulsive," Peter Meredith says, grinning.

It's a reference to a joke he told the five of them several months ago in a group session. Analysts, he said, divide their patients into two categories, based on the time they arrive for their appointments. The ones who are chronically early are anxious, he explained, while the chronically late are hostile.

And then he'd waited, knowing someone would ask the question, and it had been Ruth Ann, predictably enough, who'd obliged him. What about the ones who are on time? she'd wondered. They're compulsive, he'd assured her.

He grins back at Peter, steps forward and gives him a hug. The man's girth is considerable. He hasn't lost a pound, he will never lose a pound, but his progress in every other respect is enormously gratifying.

Teach a man to lose weight, he thinks, and he will love you until he gains it back. Teach a man to love himself, however much he weighs, and he will love you forever.

And isn't that the whole point?

"Well now," he says. "Couch or chair? What do you think?"

"No, no," says Peter, always obliging, donning a Viennese accent, his thumb and forefinger caressing an imaginary beard. "Nein, Herr Doktor. Not vot do I zink. Vot do you zink?"

They laugh together, and he says, "The couch, I think. Yes, the couch today, Peter."

Peter sits on the couch, slips off his shoes, then stretches out and puts his feet up. He looks at Peter and wonders fleetingly if the couch will hold the weight, then realizes the illogic of his concern. The couch is designed so that three people may sit on it at once, three people whose total weight might be twice that of Peter Meredith. And that couch has held Peter's weight regularly for many months. He has not grown appreciably heavier, or the couch less sturdy. And yet he, the couch's owner, reacts with the same unwarranted anxiety every time Peter uses it.