Tick Tock Read online

  He turned as an unshaven bubble-butted old white guy knocked on his window. Berger thought it was a homeless person until he realized it was one of the car wash employees.

  “What?” the guy asked in a Russian accent as the window buzzed down.

  “The works,” Berger said, handing him a crisp twenty.

  “Interior vacuum, too?” Gorbachev wanted to know.

  “Not today,” Berger said with a grin before zipping the window back up.

  Berger sighed as the machinery bumped under the car and began towing him through the spinning brushes and water spray. What a bust of a day.

  The girl wasn’t supposed to die. The plan had been to torture the parents over a two-day period with the ruse of a ransom and then kill her. But that was all blown to shit now, wasn’t it?

  It had been the Valium. The girl had had some kind of allergic reaction as he was taking her from the taxi to the Mercedes that he had parked in Brooklyn Heights. By the time they were back in Manhattan, she was gone. He’d screwed up, made his first mistake. He could kick himself.

  Oh, well, he thought, as the lemony scent of soap filled the car. He had to stop beating himself up about it. No mission went perfectly. He smoothed out the fiber-optic camera cord sewn into the lining of his jacket. At the very least he’d gotten a little more footage.

  Anyway, he didn’t have time to dwell on his failures. So much to do, so little time to do it. He’d just have to go on to the next thing. He needed to keep heading in his two favorite directions, onward and upward, and hope it would all come out in the wash.

  As the car wash spat him back out into the driveway, he rolled down the window and tossed something into the trash can by the fence.

  The Elmo juice box spun as it arced lazily into the can’s exact center. Boots the Monkey followed.

  “Swish! Nothing but net, and the crowd goes wild,” Berger said as he popped the clutch and squealed the Merc out into the street.

  Chapter 53

  AFTER HIS PRELIMINARY, the ME took me aside by a stack of Buzz Lightyears and said it looked like an overdose of some kind. I turned away as a crying female ME assistant knelt by Angela, getting ready to move her. Her father, mercifully sedated, was out in an ambulance on East 58th. I wished I were as well.

  “What do you think?” I said to Emily as we stepped along the rows of toys for the exit. “Does this dump fit in with the Fish case in some way?”

  “No, actually,” Emily said. “They found his victim’s remains in an abandoned house upstate. My gut says our unsub screwed up, probably botched the dosage, trying to keep her quiet.”

  “Sounds about right,” I said as we arrived back out in the street. I was hoping the outside air would make me feel better, but the crowds and heat only made me feel shittier.

  “Guess our copycatting friend isn’t Mr. Perfect, after all,” I said.

  We left the agonizingly sad and angering crime scene about an hour later. I took Fifth Avenue south from FAO Schwarz and hooked a right at 34th, by the Empire State Building.

  “It’s weird,” Emily said, squeezing the empty water bottle in her hand as she stared at the sketch. “He’s definitely culturally sophisticated and yet he also has military training, judging by his bomb-making skills. Interesting combination.”

  “Don’t forget. He’s also quite the New York City crime buff,” I said.

  “Speaking of which,” Emily said, turning and taking out a folder from her bag.

  “You guys probably thought of this, but before I hopped on the train, I printed out a custom map for all the crime scenes of the Mad Bomber and the Son of Sam that I could scratch together off the Web. There are dozens in Manhattan, the Bronx—everywhere except Staten Island. It’s a long shot, but beefed-up patrols at some of these potential target neighborhoods might get us some luck.”

  I smiled at the neat Google pin-pointed map and then at Agent Parker. Emily was exactly what this case needed: a new set of eyes, some new blood, some enthusiasm.

  Back at the office, a stocky, young black detective dressed like Gordon Gekko all the way down to a pair of silk moiré suspenders, almost tackled us as we got off the elevator. His name was Terry Brown, and he was the squad’s latest rookie out of Narcotics.

  “Mike, finally,” Terry said, waving for us to follow him. “I just got through the toy store security tape. I think I might have something. You have to see this.”

  We followed Terry down the hall and into one of the tiny interview rooms where he was banished until Maintenance found him a desk. Through a corridor of stacked file boxes, we huddled together at a folding table as he pressed the play button on his laptop.

  He fast-forwarded through people browsing among the toy-filled shelves and then hit pause as a man with a stroller entered the frame.

  “There he is. Now watch.”

  The man came closer, pushing the same pink Maclaren stroller Angela was found in. I let out a whooshing breath. He was wearing a Yankees cap and a pair of aviator shades, but it was him, the guy from the sketch! For the first time, I was actually face-to-face with the man who was responsible for killing eight people over the past few days and terrorizing another eight million.

  He wheeled her into a corner. He took a cell phone out of his pocket and actually took a picture of her with it. What really burned my ass was how he actually stopped then and glanced up at the security camera and smiled as he left the store.

  “That son of a bitch,” I said. “He knew the camera was there. He’s taunting us now.”

  We played it over and over again, trying to get the best shot. It turned out to be the one of him smiling.

  “I did good?” Terry Brown asked hopefully.

  “You keep this up, Terry,” I said to the pup, pumped for the first time all day, “not only will I get you a desk, I might even throw in a chair.”

  Chapter 54

  AFTER FIRING OUR LATEST FINDING to the AV guys on the third floor, they blew up the image and did a terrific side-by-side with the sketch. Even better, the Public Info Office said they’d hustle and get it into today’s evening news cycle.

  We left headquarters around six, and I took Emily over to her hotel to check in. It turned out there was a rooftop bar and lounge at the Empire Hotel on West 63rd, where she was staying, so we decided on an early supper. While she freshened up, I went and had a drink at the spectacular outdoor bar.

  As I waited, I leaned against the roof railing and texted the latest happenings and progress to my boss, Miriam. I was even feeling enough compassion to let Cathy Calvin in on the latest development, along with explicit instructions that she didn’t hear it from me, of course.

  I put away my phone and from twelve stories up watched the lights of Lincoln Center and upper Broadway come on as the paling sky went dark. I stared down on the corner, where a couple of hard hats were feeding fiber-optic cable into a manhole. I envied how perfectly content and oblivious of the world’s problems they seemed. No psychos to worry about, no dead kids, no bosses or papers or mayor asking for their heads on a plate. Probably making time and a half, too, I’d bet. Was the phone company hiring? I wondered.

  I spotted Emily as she came out onto the patio. She’d taken off her jacket and let her hair down.

  We grabbed a table in a quiet corner and ordered off the bar menu.

  Over some Kobe Sliders and ice-cold Brooklyn Lagers, we caught up with each other. Emily told me about her daughter’s trials and tribulations over learning how to swim at her town pool. I was going to tell her about the ancestral Irish feud my family was engaged in out in Breezy Point this summer, but I decided it was better if she thought I was at least a little bit sane.

  I pulled my chair over to Emily’s side of the table as we showed each other cell-phone pictures of our kids.

  After another round of Brooklyns, I told her about my meeting with the Son of Sam.

  “Do you really believe he doesn’t know what’s going on?” Emily asked.

  “If he’s a b
ullshit artist, he’s a good one.”

  “Better than you,” Emily said, smiling over the rim of her beer bottle.

  “Heck, probably even better than you,” I said, smiling back.

  Our conversation went back and forth smoothly, almost too easily. Were there some sparks between us? I’d say so, considering I felt like I could have sat on that patio drinking beer and staring out at the bright city lights with Emily for about the rest of my life. I wanted to arrest the waiter when he came over with the check.

  Reluctantly back in the elevator, we stopped at the seventh floor for her room.

  “See you tomorrow, Mike,” she said after an awkward moment in which I probably should have said something like, “Hey, how about a nightcap in your room?”

  “Tomorrow it is,” I said.

  She tugged my tie before bailing out into the corridor.

  Idiot, I screamed at myself in my mind.

  “Em,” I said, painfully stopping the sliding elevator door with the back of my head.

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “Oh, believe me,” I said. “You have.”

  Chapter 55

  I WASN’T SURE what time it was when I woke up, sweating in the pitch black of my beach house bedroom. It was early. Way too early, in fact.

  After a few minutes, I knew there was no way I was getting back to sleep, so I decided to make use of my brain being on and sneak back into work while everyone was still asleep. Besides, it was Friday, and it would give me a chance to finish up early and beat the weekend traffic back. That was my story, anyway, and I was sticking to it.

  The sun was just coming up behind me as I rolled into lower Manhattan. Beside a newsstand I saw that the cover of the Post showed the security video shot of our suspect under the headline “THE FACE OF EVIL.” For once, the press had gotten it right. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

  It was so early, there was actually a complete lack of press corps outside HQ. The early bird outsmarts the worms, I thought, as the groggy security guard lifted the stick to the parking lot.

  In the empty squad room, I found a stack of messages on my desk, left there by the night shift. I was hoping for a tip from posting the security footage and sketch on the news, but there were just fifteen crackpot confessions and two psychics offering their help.

  I moved them to my circular spam file in the corner of my cubicle where they belonged, then made a few quick calls to the cops we’d posted at all the previous crime scenes.

  There was no traction there, either. The killer hadn’t come back. When I clicked open my e-mail, I learned that forensics had been unable to pull any latents off the stroller poor little Angela was found in. Despite our progress, it seemed we were still far out in the weeds on this one.

  As I looked around the empty office, I decided to do something smart. I sat and tried to think of what Emily Parker would do. I decided that she’d take a deep breath and look at the whole thing patiently, clinically, and without frustration. Though it seemed like a pretty impossible task, I decided to give it a shot. I put on a fresh pot of coffee and came back and cleared my desk.

  The first thing I did was slip on my reading glasses and go through the files that Emily had compiled for me on copycat killers. One of them stood out prominently, a copycat serial killer in New York City during the early nineties.

  His name was Heriberto Seda, and he was a deranged young man from East New York, Brooklyn, who had killed three and wounded four others with homemade zip guns. Notes to the police found near the victims claimed that he was the famous San Francisco Zodiac killer from the sixties transplanted to New York. When he was finally caught, he told police that he identified with the Zodiac because he’d terrorized a city and never been caught.

  “I needed attention,” Seda said. “For once in my life, I felt important. I was lonely, in pain. I have no friends.”

  With that premise in mind, I got a fresh cup of coffee and laid out the case files for the six incidents. Four of them had been in the mode of George Metesky, the Mad Bomber. Two of them had been approximations of the Son of Sam, and the latest had copied the Brooklyn Vampire, Albert Fish.

  Could our guy actually identify with all three? I wondered.

  I sipped coffee and sat back in my office chair, staring up at the drop ceiling and thinking about it. It didn’t seem likely. It seemed to me that although all three were violent weirdos, each was deranged in his own special way. The Mad Bomber had been a disgruntled employee of Con Edison, mostly seeming to seek revenge. The Son of Sam was more like Seda, a low-status publicity seeker who killed out of a twisted sense of empowerment, craving fame and attention. Albert Fish was more along the lines of a classic sadistic psychopath, like Ted Bundy, with no real interest in fame and who got off sexually on inflicting pain.

  I lifted a pencil and twirled it between my fingers. How could one person not only seek revenge and twisted, freaky peekaboo thrills but also relish inflicting pain all at the same time?

  He couldn’t, I thought, as I tried to stick the pencil into the ceiling and missed. It didn’t make any goddamn sense.

  Chapter 56

  THAT’S WHEN I PULLED the second-smartest move of my morning. Instead of just thinking like Emily Parker, I took out my cell and called the real McCoy.

  “Hey, Em. Sorry to call you so early,” I said when she picked up. “I’ve been looking at your notes on that copycat Seda. He ID’d himself with the Zodiac, right?”

  “Uh-huh,” Emily said, still groggy.

  “Well, if our guy is doing the same thing, how can he feel empathy with all three New York nuts? I mean, one’s an organized technician, and one’s a disorganized catch-me-if-you-can loon. And the third one is a classic violent sadist. How can that be?”

  “That is weird,” she agreed. After a yawn she said, “Maybe two of the modes are just a smokescreen for the real one.”

  “But which one is real and which are the smoke?” I said.

  “The only communication he made with you was about the bombings, right?”

  “You’re forgetting the Son of Sam letter he sent me.”

  “True, but that was almost a photocopy of Berkowitz’s letter.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Also, since we haven’t even seen any publicity-seeking taunts or manifestos sent to the media, I don’t think his heart is in copying Berkowitz.”

  “I’d lean toward Metesky, too,” Emily said. “Our guy is definitely detail-oriented, and not only was the library bomb the first crime, it was the only one that didn’t have a copycat message.”

  “It’s revenge, then?” I said. “This guy is trying to get back at the world for Lawrence? But what about the social skills that Cavuto attributed to him during their meetings? Berkowitz and Metesky were loner, loser types, while Fish was a married guy who was sly, manipulative, and charming. If someone is capable of channeling Cary Grant, how do they become a wound-up, light-’em-and-run sneak creep like Metesky?”

  “But he has to be somewhat of a loner,” Emily argued. “How does Mr. Life of the Party prepare his bombs and clean his collection of vintage weapons without friends or family getting suspicious?”

  I slumped in my chair. Trying to figure this guy out was like trying to build a castle with quicksand. Yet we were almost onto something. I could feel it.

  My office chair made a snapping sound as I suddenly sat straight up.

  “Wait a second. He is detail-oriented, isn’t he? This guy is all about the details. That’s about the only thing we know about him.”

  “Yeah, and?”

  I pulled out the sheets that showed the addresses of the historical crimes and compared them to the locations of the present spree.

  “Emily, you know what I think? I think our guy is meticulous enough to have copied these crimes even better than he has. If he wanted to just reenact the crimes, he could have done the exact same thing at the exact same locations, bu
t he didn’t.”

  “Why not?” Emily said.

  “Maybe it’s not about the copying at all,” I offered. “Maybe the copycatting concept itself is the smokescreen. We need to take another look at the victims. Maybe the connection is with them.”

  Chapter 57

  THE REST OF MY DAY was nasty, brutish, and long.

  Running with our new theory to find some connection between the victims, Emily and I split up and proceeded to try to interview as many of the victims’ families as we could. Every session had been grueling. All the family members I sat down with were still confused and angry, raw with loss and grief. Laura Habersham, the mother of the girl who’d been killed in the Queens lovers’ lane double murder, actually cursed me out before collapsing onto her knees in tears at her front door.

  I didn’t blame her in the slightest. I just helped her up and asked my questions and went on to the next poor soul on my list.

  By the time I was finished, I’d spent twelve hours driving hither and yon through NYC’s gridlocked outer boroughs and only managed to track down the families of four of the eight victims. Even so, it was a ton of data to crunch, a ton of potential connections. That was police work in a nutshell—too little or too much info.

  Around ten p.m. that night, sweating, bone tired, and yet unbowed, I cornered 91st Street onto steamy West End Avenue. Stumbling over the opposite curb in the dark, I just managed to catch the sliding Chinese takeout and six Dos Equis I was balancing on top of the file box I was lugging. When my phone went off in my pocket, instead of stopping to answer it, I continued to soldier on toward the awning of my apartment house a block and a half away. Beat-ass tired cops in motion tend to stay in motion.

  Since there was no way I could make it out to Breezy tonight alive, I’d have to make the best of it, crashing in my apartment alone.