Sworn to the Night (The Wisdom's Grave Trilogy Book 1) Page 4

  Marie’s phone buzzed against her hip. She pulled it out, shooting Janine a look.

  “Tabling discussion of your petty larceny for a later date.” She thumbed the screen and put the phone to her ear. “Reinhart.”

  “Detective,” said the woman on the other end, her aged voice tinged with a faint Irish brogue, “it’s April Cassidy. Is this a bad time?”

  Marie was on her feet in an instant, cupping her hand over the phone as she moved to her bedroom door.

  “Not at all, Doctor. Thanks for calling me back.”

  “It’s my pleasure. I had a chance to look over those reports you sent me.”

  Cassidy had been a founding member of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, a Bureau superstar—at least until a killer with an ax put her in a wheelchair. She’d been in private practice ever since. Reaching out to her had been a long shot. Marie had been surprised April even answered her first e-mail, let alone offered to help.

  “That means a lot to me. I tried getting the BAU involved, but—”

  “But your superiors are loath to speak the dread words ‘serial murderer’ within earshot of the press, knowing the firestorm they’ll invite. And kowtowing to federal agents is no one’s idea of fun.” April chuckled lightly. “I assure you, Detective, I’m very familiar with your plight. I’m happy to do what I can to help, though I wish I had better news for you.”

  Marie shut the door behind her. Her room was barely bigger than her single bed, with a razor-thin closet and a low bookcase stuffed with paperbacks. A European longsword, dull-bladed and bought off the Home Shopping Network after a night of too much chardonnay, hung on one wall. On the other, a print from the cover of her favorite novel: a woman in polished green steel sitting astride a warhorse, a long spear dangling in her grip as shadows drooped toward a hulking, shapeless behemoth on the horizon’s edge.

  “What’s your take on the case?” Marie asked.

  “Well, I concur. You’re dealing with a single perpetrator in all three crimes. Possibly all four, assuming the latest abduction is related, and there’s ample reason to think so. I believe you’re looking for a sociopath. He’ll be narcissistic, superficially charming, and have access to money and a secure vehicle. Likely, he’ll have some form of an Axis Two antisocial personality disorder.”

  “Antisocial? Didn’t you just say he was charming?”

  “It doesn’t have the same meaning in a psychological context. People with specific Axis Two disorders have a damaged sense of empathy for other human beings. Antisocial, in that sense, means an inability to be socially integrated. They tend to have a grandiose sense of their importance and treat everyone else as a means to their own ends. Often they’re married and may have children, but their spouses and offspring are just props to create a facade. He likely greeted his victims with a winning smile and they had no idea what they were dealing with.”

  Marie shook her head. “I’ve talked to the girls the victims worked with, out on the street. Spend enough time on the stroll and they can sniff out a weirdo or a cop from three blocks away. None of the victims were careless, at least that’s what their friends told me.”

  “Suggesting he takes his time and builds rapport. I think they knew him, Detective. He likely visits them a few times, building their trust, becoming a regular. When he finally convinced them to bend from their comfort zones, he’d done half the work already. Once he got them to an unfamiliar location, one under his control, he could force their compliance.”

  A repeat customer. Marie’s thoughts jumped to Eddie Li.

  “What about the holding period?” Marie asked. “Why doesn’t he kill them right away?”

  “I believe you’re dealing with a power motivation. He wants something from these women. Perhaps he frames it as love, or affection, or even worship, but ultimately it comes down to the same thing: he has a deep-seated insecurity complex and craves validation.”

  “Which they don’t give him.”

  “Precisely,” April said. “They probably play along once they realize they’re in the hands of a killer, but eventually they’ll say the wrong thing or try to escape. Then he feels lied to. Betrayed. And he retaliates.”

  Marie didn’t have to look at the photographs anymore. Each crime scene was seared onto the backs of her eyelids. Bodies in garbage cans, chopped like mincemeat. Savaged.

  “Hence the overkill,” she said.

  “An explosion of bottled-up rage. After the kill, he’ll be pacified, probably even remorseful…for a little while. But then the urge returns. He’ll need a relatively secure place to hold these women, again pointing toward affluence. If he’s single, he’ll keep them in his home, probably a basement. If he has a family, he’s holding them somewhere remote. A rented storage unit, perhaps.”

  “Or a house out in the sticks.”

  “Or that. I heard about an altercation on the news. Is it reasonable to assume you were involved?”

  “That was me, yeah.”

  “And the gunman?” April asked. “Your perpetrator?”

  “Two gunmen, and no.” Marie took a deep breath. She sat down on the edge of her bed, curling her free hand into a frustrated fist. “I think they’re connected somehow, but…no. My guy is still out there. And he’s still holding on to victim number four. Doctor, these freaks, do they ever team up?”

  “How do you mean?”

  Marie didn’t answer right away. She was breaching all kinds of protocol just by talking to April, let alone laying her last card on the table. She did it anyway.

  “It’s not public yet, but there was a body in that house. A man, tortured to death with surgical instruments. The house is connected to my perp somehow, but that’s not his kind of victim and that’s not how he kills. Do serial killers ever, you know, get together? Cover for each other?”

  “Not in my experience,” April said. “While cases of collaboration do exist, it’s almost always a dominant partner being assisted by a weaker, bullied one. They share the dominant killer’s victim preference and killing style. I’ve only seen one exception to that rule, and it was a…special circumstance.”

  “Which was?”

  “A cult,” April said. “But cult killings are rarely directed against outsiders. They tend to transgress against people they’ve already isolated and cut off from their families. Easier prey.”

  Maybe it was street experience, maybe intuition, but Marie’s instincts were tingling.

  “All the victims in this case are street-level sex workers. Isn’t that just as easy? I mean, they’re already alienated and isolated by their profession.”

  “It’s possible,” April said. “Stick a pin in that theory. But everything you’ve shown me suggests this string of killings has one perpetrator in common.”

  Marie rested her chin on her curled knuckles. “Then I’m back at square one.”

  “You’re fighting the good fight, Detective. Don’t give up.”

  Marie swallowed a bitter laugh as she hung up the phone. Giving up was the last thing on her mind. Good fight or not, though, she couldn’t box a phantom. And until she found a better lead, that was exactly what she was doing: standing alone in the ring, throwing mad punches at her own shadow.

  She had a rainy-day bottle of Glenlivet stashed over the kitchen sink, and Janine was game to share it with her. Her mind was racing too fast for sleep, but two shots of scotch—then another two, and one more for the road—helped to ease her down.

  She dreamed about Baby Blue. Standing on the edge of a dark country road, her thumb held out for a ride. Waiting.

  * * *

  The first ray of sunrise glinted off the cherry fire escape, sending a slow finger of dusty light across the apartment floor. Marie was back on the futon, back on the hunt, poring through the real estate listings again.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” she muttered.

  Janine trudged across the room with an electric toothbrush jammed in her mouth. Cartoon cats batted a ball of yarn across the front of
her pink nightshirt. She glanced Marie’s way, mumbling what sounded like a question around the whirring brush.

  “Roth Estate Holdings,” Marie said. “Their entire portfolio is high-end property. Mostly rentals, a few outright sales, but it’s all really expensive stuff. Except for this one plot. Why does a company that makes bank selling midtown Manhattan condos to the rich and famous own a condemned house on a shitty little scrap of woodland outside Monticello?”

  Janine leaned over the kitchen sink and spat toothpaste. She fumbled for a smudged glass and squinted, bleary-eyed, as she filled it with tap water.

  “The real question is, how much did we drink last night, and how are you this awake right now?”

  “That’s two questions. A, we finished the bottle, and B, I’ve got work to do.”

  Janine leaned back against the kitchen nook’s tiny counter. “No, I have work to do. You have a four-day mandatory vacation. Why are you even out of bed?”

  “Clock’s ticking.” Marie shut the laptop and set it on the futon beside her. “I’m heading out. Don’t wait up.”

  “You know you don’t have a badge at the moment, right?” The front door jangled in Marie’s wake, rattling on old hinges. “Or a gun? These are important things to have, Mar—you know what? Never mind. Just don’t do anything stupid, okay? Rent’s due next Tuesday.”

  Six

  Marie strode through the precinct house like she belonged there. Just another day at the office, metal-bladed ceiling fans pushing sluggish air around and humming over the din of ringing phone, with too many people crammed into the bullpen and not enough desks. A row of hard-eyed kids sat cuffed on a wooden bench, waiting their turn for processing. Marie skirted past her own desk, a fat metal brick from the seventies with a swivel chair that drooped on one broken wheel. She poked her head into the break room.

  Helena Gorski ran her fingers through her razor-cut hair and swore a blue streak under her breath. The light inside the snack machine flickered as the dented casing met the wrath of her steel-toed boot.

  “Swear to God, if they don’t fix this—” She paused, glancing toward the doorway. “Reinhart? The hell are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you. Any idea who caught the Monticello case?”

  “Yeah. Monticello PD. News flash: not our jurisdiction. I have been assigned as a courtesy liaison though, so thanks for that. I needed more work on my plate this week.”

  Marie stepped into the break room, shooting a quick look over her shoulder.

  “So they’re not connecting it to my case?”

  “On what grounds? You’ve got a john who says one missing hooker—who you haven’t connected to the other dead hookers—might have been at that house, once. They’re a little more concerned about the corpse in the basement and, oh yeah, the boxes and boxes of drugs. Hell, we’ve been trying to find the ink pipeline for months. Everybody’s dealing it, but nobody’s got a name.”

  “Have they got an ID on anybody yet?”

  Helena fed a dollar bill into the machine. It sucked it down halfway, sputtered, and spat it out again. She yanked it out and smoothed it between her fingers.

  “Son of a—no, not yet, not the vic or the two shooters. House full of ghosts.”

  “What about the owner? This ‘Roth Estate Holdings,’ anybody looking at them?”

  “Me,” Helena said, “since they’re a local outfit and the Monticello boys don’t want to drive two hours to check it out. It’s a dead end, anyway. Roth called us, about an hour after the shooting hit the news. Super happy to volunteer any help they can give us, long as we keep their name out of the press. According to the company, that property’s been abandoned for years. The shooters weren’t tenants, they were squatters. Company’s owner is a guy named Richard Roth. I’m supposed to drop by and take a look at his records just to follow up and dot the i for the final report. You know, in my copious free time.”

  A shadow loomed at Marie’s shoulder.

  “Reinhart?” Captain Traynor asked. “Was there some confusion about the concept of ‘administrative leave’?”

  Marie spun on her heel, fumbling for an excuse. “Just…picking up some paperwork from my desk, sir.”

  He spread his hands. “This doesn’t look like your desk.”

  The vending machine finally swallowed Helena’s dollar. Behind the scratched Plexiglas, a bag of corn chips slowly edged toward the brink—then hung there, refusing to drop. The plastic rattled under Helena’s bare-knuckled punch.

  “Oh, you evil bitch—”

  “Gorski,” Traynor said, “stop assaulting the vending machine and get out there. I need everybody’s ears for a minute. Reinhart, grab whatever you came for and go home. I don’t want to see your face around here until I call you and tell you otherwise, understood?”

  Marie started to reply but he was already gone, cutting waves through the crowded bullpen. She drifted in his wake and stood on the edge of the crowd next to Helena, watching as Traynor called for attention. The room fell into a curious hush.

  “Listen up,” he said. “By now, you’ve all heard about the bust up in Monticello. Most of you didn’t wear a badge in the eighties—hell, half of you are too young to remember the eighties—but I was here. I saw what crack cocaine did to New York, firsthand. And this ‘ink’ shit is spreading even faster. We’re not letting it happen again. Not here. Not in our city.”

  He walked to a corkboard. His knuckles rapped dead, pale faces, photographs of the shooters’ corpses.

  “Finding a link to the distribution pipeline is the biggest break we’ve had yet. I want an ID on these guys, and I want it yesterday. I want to know who they worked for, where they came from, who they supplied, and who was supplying them. Talk to your CIs. Squeeze ’em until they pop, if you have to. Somebody knows something.”

  Marie leaned close to Helena, murmuring soft. “You want to shut the ink pipeline down? Make a major bust or two?”

  “Getting hard just thinking about it, metaphorically speaking.”

  “Let me take some weight off your shoulders, then. I’ll talk to Richard Roth for you.”

  Helena gave her the side-eye. “You’re on admin leave. And it’s a waste of time, the guy’s clean. Why stick your neck out for nothing?”

  “Nobody has to know.” Marie nodded back over her shoulder. “We’ll keep it between you, me, and the vending machine.”

  Helena thought about it, but not for long.

  “Anybody finds out about this,” she said, “I had no idea. It’s all on you.”

  Marie clapped her back and gave it a hard rub.

  “Your hands are clean. Go get ’em, tiger.”

  * * *

  “You want to do what?” Tony shouted. Marie had to pull the phone away from her ear. She stood on the hot sidewalk, pacing, a gust of wind ruffling her already-unkempt mop of hair.

  “I want to take a run at the owner. It doesn’t make sense, Tony. There’s no reason Roth Estate Holdings even owned that land in the first place. The puzzle piece doesn’t fit.”

  “Maybe you forgot, but we’re on leave. No badges. No authority. And also it’s not our case.”

  “It’s all connected,” Marie said. “It has to be. Baby Blue was at that house. Those psychos had something to do with our perp.”

  “And you want to go after the guy who runs the real-estate company that owns the house. Who already said the place was supposed to be empty. And the only thread connecting any of this is Eddie Li—not exactly a model citizen himself—saying he thinks the vic was going to a sex party at that address, because he was stalking her. Are you hearing yourself right now? You realize how flimsy this is?”

  Marie froze on the sidewalk. She took a deep breath, trying to steady herself.

  “It’s all I’ve got, okay? There aren’t any other leads. Just…just this one thing, this one piece that doesn’t fit. I’ve got to check it out.”

  “You realize how much shit we could land in if anybody finds out we were working a
case while we’re supposed to be on leave? People lose their jobs for less than this, Marie.”

  “This guy keeps his victims for two weeks before he kills and dumps them. Two weeks, at best. She’s running out of time.” Marie shook her head. “I’m going to talk to Richard Roth. You don’t have to come, and I don’t blame you if you say no. But I’m going.”

  A long silence. On the other end of the line, Tony let out an exasperated sigh.

  “Fine. I’m in.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” Marie told him. “I’m standing outside your building.”

  On the third floor, a curtain ruffled aside. Tony squinted into the hard morning light. From the sidewalk below, Marie looked up and curled her fingers in an awkward wave.

  * * *

  Their unmarked car was totaled and they couldn’t requisition a new one until they’d been cleared for duty. So they hoofed it the civilian way: a crosstown train, then a city bus, making their way to the West Village. A quick call to Helena confirmed the address. Tony whistled low and stared up at the brownstone.

  “Swank digs,” he said. “I could afford about one square foot of this place.”

  “Sure.” Marie stepped forward and rang the doorbell. “But the taxes would kill you.”

  A woman in her fifties, dressed in a demure maid’s uniform, answered the door. Marie gave her a confident smile, inwardly praying she didn’t ask to see their badges.

  “Good afternoon, ma’am. Detectives Reinhart and Fisher, here to see Mr. Roth. I believe our colleague, Detective Gorski, called ahead?”

  She ushered them inside, under the shadow of a crystal chandelier, down a hallway with floor planks stained mahogany-dark, and into a cold, austere dining room with a long glass table. They didn’t have to wait very long. Richard Roth swept through the wide and open archway with a fat binder under one arm of his tailored blazer. He sported pristine teeth, a four-hundred-dollar haircut, and the kind of rugged physique only earned from putting in serious time at the gym with a personal trainer.

  “Detectives, hey, hello,” he said, setting his binder on the table and pumping their hands. His handshake was too hard, calculated to be too hard, laying down his alpha-male credentials right up front. Marie put her irritation aside and tried to study him unemotionally, like a scientist peering at a particularly interesting sample of fungus.