Tick Tock mb-4 Page 12

  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 bullshit 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 b
een 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, but 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.

  My building's front door was locked when I arrived. Which was sort of aggravating considering how much my pricey prewar building charged for twenty-four-hour doorman service. Instead of putting down the heavy box, I turned and knocked on the thick glass with the back of my thick skull.

  I almost fell down when the door was flung open suddenly two long minutes later.

  "Mr. Bennett. I'm so sorry," Bert, the whiny evening-shift doorman, said hastily, tightening his loose tie. "Everyone else in the building is marked in, or I would have been standing right here at my post as usual. I thought you and the kids were away. We weren't expecting you back until next week."

  I watched the short, old doorman yawn as he continued to make no attempt to help me.

  "Yeah, well, you're looking at what they call a working vacation, Bert," I said as I walked around him.

  Bert actually stopped me again halfway to the elevator to load me down even more with piled-up mail and packages.

  "Don't worry, Mr. B. Your secret is safe with me," the old codger whispered, winking at my six-pack of suds. "I've been reading about your case in the Post. Who could blame you for hitting the sauce a little?"

  I rolled my eyes as the door finally slid shut and the elevator began to take me upstairs.

  Just what I didn't need in my life, another elderly wiseguy. And I was looking forward to a Seamus-free night, too.

  Chapter 58

  I dropped the file box of victim data with a thud in the stuffy air of my apartment foyer and stood for a strange moment, just listening. After the usually thunderous chaos in our rambling three-bedroom apartment, silence was an almost unique experience.

  Sorting through the mail, I smiled at the return address of a cardboard tube that had arrived. I went into the big boys' room and put up the action-shot Mariano Rivera Fathead that I'd gotten for my son Brian's birthday. Brian was going to go nuts when he saw it.

  "Just me and you tonight, Mo," I said to the life-size wall cling as I left. "Welcome to old guy's night in."

  I proceeded to turn on all the window air conditioners to high. Coming back through the living room, I lifted what looked like a plaid horseshoe off the floor. It was one of the girls' Catholic school headbands, I realized. I twirled it in my hand before placing it on a coffee table littered with Jenga pieces and Diary of a Wimpy Kid books.

  Taking a load off on my beat-up couch, I reflected on all the craziness of the past fifteen years of family life. It was a blur of big wheels and videos and kitchen tables covered in Cheerios, a lot of tears, more laughter. We'd converted the three bedrooms into five by using the high-end apartment's formal dining room and half of the large, formal living room. Formal anything pretty much sailed out the window onto tony West End Avenue for Maeve and me once our incredible expanding family moved in.

&nbs
p; The funny thing was, I wouldn't have had it any other way.

  How I'd gotten my guys this far while putting away bad guys and keeping my job and a sliver of my sanity, I'd never know. Actually, I did know. Their names were Maeve, Mary Catherine, and, as much as I hated to admit it, Seamus.

  Back inside my bedroom, I listened to the string of messages on the answering machine. The most recent one was by far the most intriguing.

  "Yes, um, eh, he-, hello? Mary-Mary Catherine?" some fellow with a charming English stammer said. "It's Jeremy Griffith. I, um, spoke at your class? I, um, do hope you don't mind that I hunted down your number from the instructor. I don't normally do things like this, but I-well, I'm here at this atrocious party, and I couldn't stop thinking about those insightful links you made between German Baroque and Nordic Classicism. To be honest, I can't remember the last time I met someone who actually knew who Ivar Tengbom was, let alone would admit to being his number-one fan. Anyway, are you doing anything this week? I have another dinner with some MOMA people coming up on Friday and thought, eh, maybe you'd like to, uh, tag along. There, I've said it. If you can make it, wonderful. If you can't, well, my and Ivar's loss. Here's my number."

  "Sorry, old chap," I said, immediately deleting with extreme prejudice Mary Catherine's Hugh Grant-like suitor. "Looks like you're going stag."

  Was that wrong? I wondered, staring at myself in the mirror. I turned away. It most certainly was, and I most certainly didn't care.

  Chapter 59

  I showered, tossed on some shorts, and brought a beer and my phone back into the living room.

  "Hey, Mike," Mary Catherine said when I called Breezy. "I was just about to call you. You're not going to believe this. No Flaherty incidents, no stitches, no one even got sunburned. Even Socky the cat seems ready to twist by the pool tonight. How are you holding up? Are you on your way? I'll save you some pizza."