Phase one was the quiet time, when you tried to get a lead. Now it was the public phase. And the media would be hunting for every scrap of information and raising fear levels by a factor of about a thousand.
Chapter Sixteen
Ward’s Island
November 18, 8.35 a.m.
From a distance, the killer watched the release. They always threw them out early in the day. Winston Carlisle was a sad case. He was thirty-six years old, his family had abandoned him at an early age and he had stalked and attacked pretty young girls once too often. He’d never actually raped any of the girls. He liked following them and had groped them, pushed them to the ground, threatened them with a knife and exposed himself to them. He didn’t seem able to go further. His records showed that he was arrested for attempted rape at the ages of twelve and fourteen, twenty-two and twenty-nine. However, not one of these attacks resulted in a court case. Instead, because he was delusional, Winston was given treatment. He’d been in and out of institutions his whole life.
And now Winston Carlisle was on the sidewalk outside Manhattan Psychiatric Center with a small brown case, an address he didn’t recognize and a look of profound confusion on his face.
The killer followed him as he walked from the hospital towards the bus stop. He took the bus into the city and the killer got on behind him and sat there. He enjoyed the feeling of following people. It was like being in a movie. You had real purpose when you were scoping out a victim. Winston got off the cross-town bus and struggled to work out the right way to go. He stared at the scrap of paper the orderly had given him and then up at the street signs. He finally just started walking.
At the first burger joint he came to, Winston stopped and ate three hamburgers, one after the other. It was the only time he looked content. He got on his way again soon enough and even asked a passer-by about the address. Eventually he found the discreet halfway house that would be his new home.
It didn’t surprise the killer much that characters like Winston spent their whole lives in horrible anonymity and bewilderment — moving between the ordered cleanliness of a psychiatric unit and the profound confusion of the outside world. Winston needed an escape, that was for sure. The killer just knew it.
He was going to make Winston famous. He was going to give this nobody a profound legacy. Winston Carlisle, another nobody from nowhere, was going to be remembered, just like his victims. The killer smiled at the thought as he watched Winston enter the halfway house. Winston looked just right for the part he was going to play. But he would need some very close direction.
The killer noted the address and went on his way. A sprinkle of New York rain was beginning to fall. He smiled. He liked the rain. It called to him. He walked down the street and hailed a cab. He spoke through the glass.
‘Kinsley Memorial Church.’
He sat back, leaving his seatbelt undone. A recorded voice suddenly cut in, telling him to belt up and proudly exclaiming, ‘That’s the law in New York City.’ He pulled the belt across his chest. This was one law he was happy to oblige.
The cab took thirty minutes to travel three blocks through a snarl-up on Second Avenue. As it passed the big yellow diggers and two blocks of orange and white plastic bollards and vehicle barriers, the cabbie complained, ‘Can you see a fucking construction worker? They close off the street and then go for a three-hour cup of coffee. No one works any more.’ The passenger in the back seat checked his watch again and nodded silently. It was ten minutes before ten.
They turned into East 61st Street and the cab pulled up. The passenger slipped the driver a twenty-dollar bill. It was a nice neighbourhood — a quiet, residential tree-lined street. He got out and stood on the sidewalk, a man in his prime, tall, angular and athletic. He was feeling his passion now as he came closer to the girl who was number four on his list. Her time was up. She didn’t know it, but this was her last day on earth. The killer breathed deeply with the thought. There was no limit to what he could do. The gift of life or death was in his hands. God had no more power than he did. He just had different uses for it.
The Baptist church was a surprisingly large and ornate stone building, dating back to the mid-1850s, when someone built it in honour of Wesley Kinsley, a philanthropist of vast industrial means. It was a well-attended church with a good choir, a healthy smattering of young people and a very liberal bias — they accepted everything and anything at the Kinsley Memorial and were devoutly opposed to violence, which was a shame. It was homosexual liberals against Iraq at the Kinsley.
The morning service crowd was already sauntering through the large wooden doors. The organ inside was playing a modern hymn and the Reverend Angela Timms was greeting her flock with a smile and a wink.
In his disguise, the killer went inside and sat, as he always did, as far from the altar as possible. From the very back row, he scanned the heads of the flock, looking for the girl he’d grown attached to, but he couldn’t see her.
This was bad. He didn’t like disappointment. He’d already waited too long and his patience was beginning to snap. He needed someone soon. He couldn’t bear another day of imagining girl number four contorted and weeping under his hands — even one more day would be an unimaginable cruelty to himself. He needed her image. He needed her, period. The rain had whetted his appetite. Fat raindrops appeared on the dry sidewalk like drops of blood. The American Devil, he thought. He liked that. He was the sidewalk Satan. He smiled towards the altar. Would they guess that the devil was there in their flock? Sometimes, everything made sense.
The killer had been interacting with the girl even more in the last month. She was such a prudish type, he liked to shock her. He’d Photoshopped an image of her head on a nude by Manet and stuck it to her apartment door. It was at a Manet lecture he’d first spotted her. She had long blond hair and always sat very still, listening intently to the lecturer. He liked to think they were made for each other, a prudish virgin Baptist and the American Devil. It felt perfect. She was an exceptionally pretty girl who smiled too easily at strangers and did voluntary work. Her eyes were so brightly blue that he thought she might be wearing coloured lenses — but her outfits suggested that vanity wasn’t her thing at all.
He waited. He knew how to wait. He was concentrating on the exquisite feel of the girl’s arm as it brushed against him the previous week. He liked to get close when the time was nearing. It heightened his pleasure. He’d stepped in against her body. She’d apologized, but it was he who’d leaned in for a touch. He couldn’t contain his passion for beauty. He was a poet. He was an artist. He was doing the devil’s work. He turned as girl number four walked through the door. She looked heavenly. The killer smiled. She was just perfect.
Chapter Seventeen
Dr Levene’s Office
November 18, 10.00 a.m.
Denise Levene had caught the stark headline on her way to One PP. Several people on the subway were reading a story headlined ‘Serial Killer Strikes New York’. She hadn’t heard the press conference the previous evening, so she was in the dark as she travelled in to work.
She wasn’t usually a reader of the Daily Echo, but any mention of a serial killer got her attention and so she bought the paper from a newsstand outside the subway and read it as she walked up the street.
The killings were suddenly being tied together. Denise felt flushed. For years, her research had sought to find a link between childhood neglect, specifically in pre-verbal children, and the propensity for violence. It wasn’t that serial killers were the only examples, but it was sometimes the extreme cases that brought new information to light. The American Devil, if this article was to be believed, was the type of killer she’d looked at many times before. A man who was clever, organized and focused, but who put all of these qualities to evil use because he lacked the sphere of influence that Freud called the superego, which she understood as the neurological pathways between empathy, self and consequence.
