Seven Ways to Die (32 page)

He was ready.

The crowd in front of the Plaza Hotel was so thick that for a moment, Cody lost sight of his quarry on Central Park South.

And Charley lost the scent in the onslaught of horse manure from the lined-up tourist carriages.

But it wasn’t long before Charley got them back on track, picking up the man’s scent again on the north side of CPS. Cody had to race to keep up with the big shepherd, who was leading him to the entrance to the Park that Hamilton had chosen.

Δ

The moment they entered the Park, he heard the call.

“Oo-oo-whoee,” the owl cried twice.

It will rain. Soon.

Cody could smell rain in the air. He glanced at the sky. Storm clouds were indeed gathering.

They were now walking alongside the Pond, the dilapidated fence around it marred by jagged gaps because the city couldn’t afford to keep it in repair. At its northwest branch, they lost sight of Hamilton again.

As Charley sniffed back and forth at the fence, bewildered, Cody squatted down to figure out how Hamilton had disappeared before their eyes.

If you are not sure which trail to take, think about who you are. Think of it as a crossroads with four directions. Maybe a creature will talk to you.

High in the air above him, the peregrine falcon issued a screech, and Cody looked up and listened, seeming to understand. “Listen with your eyes,” he repeated Old Man’s words from his boyhood—the words that had led to his career as the most successful detective in New York.

“Thank you, brother falcon,” he said.

Then he felt Charley pulling at the leash, wanting to go through the gap in the fence.

The falcon shrieked again, and Charley pulled all the harder.

The creatures talk to each other,
Cody remembered, his eyes continuing to scan every inch of the terrain.

Then he saw them.

They were tucked beneath a low-lying bush: Hamilton’s highly-polished black shoes. The writer had crossed the wire fence, left his shoes where they would stay dry, then continued to skirt the circumference in his stocking feet.

Cody knelt to study the footprints in the nearly-dried mud. He brushed the leaves away from the faint tracks.

His pulse quickened as he spotted the miniscule green fiber left behind in one of the prints.

Hamilton wasn’t in stocking feet; he was wearing surgical booties stolen from the Bellevue supply closet where Kate and Rizzo found the body of Dr. Song Wiley.

Now Charley was on the hunt in earnest, heading north to the end of the Pond.

Suddenly the wolves howling from the zoo added eeriness to the dark night that was filled with the shadows of Halloween revelers haunting the Park in all directions.
They are telling us we’re on the right track,
Cody thought.

Cody’s eyes picked up Hamilton’s faint footprints as they turned into a narrow path into the heavy brush.

Charley was barking, and nothing Cody could do would stop him until he was satisfied Cody got his message.

Another set of footsteps, these significantly shorter and smaller, mixed with Hamilton’s. Cody’s hunch was right. Victoria had arrived in the Park to join her lover. Tonight would be two for the price of one.

Somehow Cody could interpret Charley’s excited low growl to mean that his sensitive nose had picked up this second scent before. It would have to be the same scent he’d followed to La Venezia’s parking lot on the morning after Uncle Tony’s murder.

Charley stopped barking and looked at Cody to follow.

Cody’s eyes
listened
to the footsteps.

The larger ones were slightly fresher than the smaller. The woman’s prints were firmly set, and dryer; whereas minute water bubbles were still seeping into the man’s.

The two people whose trail he and Charley were following were
not
walking together.

Ward Lee Hamilton was tailing Victoria Mansfield, the larger prints trailing behind the smaller.

Judging from the prints, about eighty feet behind. Stalking her!

There was no longer a single doubt in Cody’s mind that Androg had been the two of them, working together.

And that now their deadly game had turned into a final stalking contest in Central Park! 

The detective well knew the TAZ procedures. After all, he had written them.

He knew he should call for backup.

He pulled his cell phone from his jacket pocket.

And turned it off.

Because the warrior also recognized that this was personal.

The murders had been orchestrated specifically to test him.

Δ

As they moved from the bushy terrain into a tiny clearing Charley’s barking reached a new peak of intensity.

From the east and uptown, the wolves howled in response.

Cody studied the ground until he saw what they were telling him.

The tracks were diverging. Ward was no longer following Victoria. His moved off to the right as hers continued to the left.

What did that tell him?

He stood still for a moment, breathing in the sensations of the night—the distant cacophony of traffic, the slight rustle of leaves, the earthy smell of foliage greeting ozone—allowing his instincts to sharpen.

He made his decision.

He followed the woman’s tracks, careful to keep eyes in back of his head as he moved forward. If he was flanking his lover, Cody would encounter them both at the ambush.

Or be lured into a pincer trap.

A surprise is not a surprise if you know about it in advance.

Cody thought of signaling Larry Simon for backup, but, once again, left his phone in his pocket.

He would finish this alone.

For this game of stalking was meant to involve him as well as them.

If he was right about Androg’s m.o., Number One was Raymond Handley, not Melinda Cramer; she was nothing more than practice. Androg’s numbering system was meant to be sequential, an Unholy Week of Death. Number Two was Uncle Tony, Number Three Steamroller Jackson, Number Four Song Wiley, and Numbers Five, Six, and Seven? Well, Cody himself would probably count for one of them in Androg’s demented calculus that, like it or not, Androg had involved him in.

The next victim could be Cody, or one of them. He reached inside his pocket and ran his finger along the edge of his knife. It was razor sharp.
A dull knife’s about as a good as a broken leg
.
 

Sometimes the hunter is better served by waiting than by chasing.

But who was the hunter here?

Was Hamilton waiting, waiting for his prey, expecting him—or his lover—to follow. Expecting them to walk into his trap?

The tracks had been almost too clear, too easy.

Maybe he was the cheese in the trap, and Hamilton was circling behind him—stalking into the mouth of death?

Both bent on making Cody Number Five.

He was confusing himself, forced himself to stop thinking. To see, hear, smell, taste, touch—nothing else.

Victoria’s tracks led to an opening burrowed beneath an arcing tupelo about ten yards away.

He waited. Listened. Reached his hand out to touch the oak’s dry bark which was thirstily enjoying the winter rain.

Patience is the virtue of the hunter.

He waited while above him storm clouds continued to gather. Though it must be near dawn by now, it was getting even darker.

A massive jagged flash of lightning was followed by a loud crack of thunder so close it startled even the flapless Cody. He was sure it must have hit a tree nearby.

But he kept his focus on the hole.
Perhaps the rabbit had left her house? Perhaps he was wasting his time.
But his instincts told him the rabbit was waiting patiently for the fox. If he waited, he would catch them both.

Then he heard a sound.

The rabbit peered over the edge of the hole. Victoria looked around, stuck her head up a little farther. He could see her now clearly above the hole.

He waited. A minute, two minutes passed. Then the woman rose up just a little farther, and he could see the flash of bright satin red from her costume as she crawled out on her hands and knees.

Was she another devil?

And stood up.

But then why was her right breast bare?

She reached for her quiver, and Cody pulled his hunting knife.

The wolf howled soulfully, as though it were not far off. She and Cody both reacted.

In the same instant, they both heard the subtler sound as the arrow whirred toward its target.

Victoria turned her head sharply.

But she was too late.

Hamilton’s arrow had already found its mark. It pierced his lover’s neck, pinning her to the ground at the edge of the hole.

Marking the direction from which the arrow originated, Cody rushed forward.

He had no doubt it was Victoria, her face pressed into the damp earth.

The arrow was embedded up to its shaft in the back of her neck—an almost superhumanly perfect shot, between the occiput and C-1, cleanly severing the spinal cord. Cleanly transecting the heart-shaped tattoo.

Cody did not expect to find a pulse, and in fact did not.

Victoria Mansfield had died instantly.
She
was Number Five!

He thought of turning her over, but knew that he’d never hear the end of it from Wolfsheim—or Kate, for that matter—for disturbing the victim’s body. He could see from the side that the nipple on her exposed perfect breast was hard as a pebble.

And that the costume she was wearing was not that of a devil after all, but more likely that of an Amazon. That would explain the exposed breast.

The perfect evening wear for death by archery.

The arrow could only have issued from a cross-bow like the one he found next to her body.
She had been lying in wait—for Ward Hamilton? Or for him?

Cody noted that the flap button on the woman’s sheaf was opened.
She was about to reach for an arrow of her own—too late—when she was struck.
Cause of death: Slashing/stabbing/puncturing with a sharp instrument?

Or did Hamilton’s arrow only conceal another mechanism of death?

Exactly what kind of satanic game was this he’d found himself in the middle of?

Cody had concluded that the socialite and the writer were just a pair of self-infatuated lovebirds, their own dual species of creatures of the night.

Now it appeared what they had constructed was an autoerotic euthanasia pact.

Δ

He trotted toward where he’d marked Hamilton’s ambush position through the thick brush—deeper into the unforgiving wilderness in the darkest heart of this untamed city.

He came to the cold stream that fed the Pond.

Listen. Sometimes when you are alone it is okay to think about what has gone before. In your life, I mean. To understand why the past has become the present. Sometimes it is okay to think about where the trail will lead you, and why you are following it at all.
Old Man’s words haunted him.

But Cody was too focused for further reflection. Tonight he was hunting in earnest, hunting for a hunter who enjoyed the hunt.

He followed the invisible trail, the only clues instinct alone. Ahead of him he could hear a waterfall, and moved faster through the trees. His instincts led him downward, into a small ravine. His night vision was sharper than ever, no need for infrared.

It was beginning to rain.

He would have to find a decent shelter. A cave, perhaps, to keep the weather at bay.

Any tracks he might have detected were now disappeared with the rain.

Charley was whimpering. Charley didn’t like the rain. It rendered his prodigious nose impotent.

Counter-intuitively, Cody decided to follow the stream farther down the hill. His eyes moved constantly in the darkness as he trotted through the woods.
Always walk an inch off the ground so nothing will hear you.

Charley barked, his whine becoming eager again. He pulled Cody toward the stream, which was at this point barely three feet wide. They both leaped across, Charley returning his nose to the ground.

Cody knelt down to inspect the rock. No footprints, but a tiny fiber caught in a fissure so small only a nose like Charley’s could have found it. A blue-green fiber.
 

Barely visible, beneath a fallen elm a few yards away, he saw where Charley was heading. Nearly concealed by the elm and the surrounding brush, was an opening under an overhang.

It was the entrance to a cave. Charley made a bee-line for it, but Cody held him back.

He pulled his knife out. And signaled Charley for silence.

Listen. Patience is the virtue of the hunter.

There was a rumble of thunder. Cody watched the cave opening. Perhaps Charley was wrong. But Charley strained at his leash, not to be dissuaded.

In the distance, the wolves resumed their warning howls.

Charley responded with a low howl of his own. When Cody moved toward the entrance, Charley held his ground. He had mistaken the shepherd’s signals as urging him to go in. Instead, Charley was trying to keep him back, trying to protect him from what lay in wait inside the cave.

But the warrior would not be deterred. “Stay,” he commanded.

Charley whined in protest, but obeyed his master, hunkering down to wait beneath the sheltering tree.

Δ

The opening was small but large enough to crawl through. On his hands and knees, he entered the cave. He looked in, sniffing the stagnant air.

Once he’d cleared the entrance, he found the cave enlarged. It was almost tall enough to stand, so Cody moved to a half-upright crouch as he headed forward into the pitch darkness.

The odor was feral, but the cave was too dark even for his sharp eyes. He sniffed the air again.
Was it fur? A fox perhaps? Was he intruding on its domain?

The cave was long and Cody was walking into its inky recesses blind, and even more vulnerable because he was backlit by a distant light in the Park.