The team was focused more than ever after Williamson’s murder. Whatever the captain had tried with the media, it hadn’t worked. Around the precinct, there was an hourly barrage of questions from a seemingly endless stream of newspaper journalists and TV reporters. The story was being drip-fed emotion daily with new stories from the families of the bereaved, new theories about the poems and the posed corpses. There were websites and blogs dedicated to the killer and everything about him. Whoever this killer was, Harper guessed that this was all part of his need.
Asa Shelton and Isaac Spencer, the two special agents from the FBI’s New York field office, had spent a couple of hours talking to distributors for Vivienne Laurec, then they got through to Vivienne Laurec itself. The scarf Harper had taken from Elizabeth Seale’s apartment had its own identity code, and once they had sent this over to Vivienne Laurec’s head office the company could give the Feds the life story of the scarf, from production through distribution to sale. They not only knew the store, they knew when the scarf had arrived and when it had sold.
Harper called Denise to let her know and arrived at the store about ten minutes later than he’d arranged. Denise Levene was standing at the window admiring the luxury goods. Inside the store, the two special agents were already talking to the young sales girl at the counter. Harper crossed and took up the questioning. The girl confirmed within minutes that they had sold that particular scarf. She took out the store records, which were still written down by hand in a large ledger before they were logged on the database.
‘So what’s in the big book?’ said Harper.
The girl leafed slowly though the pages. ‘Okay, I’ve got five sold this month. The gold and crimson only came in at the end of October, so that’s the whole story. Five sales.’
‘Do you have names down there?’
‘Yes, sir, they all leave their names,’ she said, and smiled. ‘That’s what we do at a store like ours.’
‘Well, I’ll know where to come next time I’ve got a hundred to spare.’
She smiled thinly and read out the names. The fourth name was male.
‘Bingo,’ said Harper as the name John Sebastian was read out. ‘Okay, let me check I’ve got this right. On November 17, Elizabeth Seale buys a crimson and gold scarf. She pays with a credit card. Right?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then, on the same day, a “John Sebastian” comes in. What does he pay with?’
‘It was a cash purchase.’
‘No records, right.’
‘No.’
‘What do you think, boys?’
Asa Shelton and Isaac Spencer both nodded. ‘We’ll check the name, but he’s not going to pay with cash just to leave his real name. Obviously Sebastian is some kind of alias.’
‘You remember the cash buyer?’ asked Harper.
The sales girl nodded. ‘Yeah, pretty much. It was only a few days ago. People don’t use cash any more, so he made a joke about it. Said his wife checked his credit card bills so he had to use cash for presents and affairs. I didn’t laugh. Why would I? Affairs aren’t that funny. He had glasses, greying a little. He had a nice smile, but he was a bit intense.’
Harper clenched his fist. They had something. The killer had purchased the Vivienne Laurec scarf the same day Elizabeth had bought hers — the sales girls had seen him. Then he had killed her with it.
It was unravelling. The killer had made a mistake. They always did at some point. He’d not been able to resist. He’d stepped off the path. He’d thought himself clever enough to get away with it. He’d coveted her possessions. And for Harper it meant that there were now two links to the stores on Madison Avenue. First with Amy Lloyd-Gardner and now with Elizabeth Seale. He needed more precise information, but he was beginning to see where the killer stalked his victims and that would give him a chance to set a trap. He looked at Denise.
‘I think you’ve got something,’ she said.
‘Yeah, I got something, but it’s gone midday already, and he could be on his way to kill any time now.’
Chapter Forty-Two
Blue Team
November 22, 3.00 p.m.
Harper went direct from Madison Avenue to Captain Lafayette. He pushed open the glass door and stood there in the doorway.
‘I can see that look on your face, Harper. What is it?’
Harper sat down on the one chair facing the desk and looked across at Lafayette. ‘We think he’s going to kill again. If he’s working a two-day cycle, then it’s going to be today. We can’t just sit on our hands.’
‘What are you suggesting?’
‘I want you to throw every officer you can on to the Upper East Side. I want to saturate the place. I want to see uniforms on every street corner. I want to make it look like there isn’t a square inch over there that we’re not watching.’
‘Shit, Harper, that’s a big ask. Overtime city. How we going to sell that?’
‘Tell City Hall that it’s got two benefits. The first is that we look like we’re doing something and it’ll give people a little peace of mind. The second is, there’s a chance it will spook him and put him off his stride. It might just save someone’s life.’
Lafayette picked up the phone. ‘OK. Let me see what I can do.’
The new information about the scarf had caused a surge of optimism and activity at Blue Team. The two federal agents, Shelton and Spencer, had already been painstakingly piecing together the movements of the women, Mary-Jane, Grace, Amy, Jessica and Elizabeth, in the last months of their lives. Using the information gathered by the team regarding cell phones and credit cards, they were able to plot an intricate and detailed picture of the women’s movements.
From the victims’ bank details and phone records alone, they could create a pretty good idea of what they were doing on any one day. There were garage receipts showing when they parked, cafe, shop and restaurant receipts showing where they’d been, and phone records showing who they had called. Putting it all together, along with statements from their friends and families, the Feds produced a document that showed their movements at almost every hour of their last two months.
Harper gathered Blue Team together to listen to the special agents’ report. Despite the recent developments, it was still sombre in the windowless investigation room and the ominous blue board with the stark and chilling pictures of the dead sat as a reminder of the need to break through.
They listened intently to the geographical profile of the victims’ movements. Spencer and Shelton stood up front and talked through their findings in a slow, methodical fashion, showing such impressive attention to detail that Blue Team was ready to give them a standing ovation.
As they concluded, Asa Shelton moved to the front spot. ‘Gentlemen, the point of all our investigation is this. We now have a geo-profile of the victims. We know that your killer was stalking them in the weeks before they died. We know, for instance, that the killer watched Elizabeth Seale buy a Vivienne Laurec scarf and then purchased an identical one which he used to decorate her dead body. We know that he watched her go into the Fullerton Lounge on at least one occasion because he knew where she was going to sit and placed himself right beside her.
‘What we have here, therefore, is not only their movements, but, somewhere, the movements of the killer. The question we have to ask ourselves is this: what is the pattern here? Where is he most at home stalking?’
Asa clicked the small control in his hand and the next slide flew in. It was a close-up of Madison Avenue. ‘These spots, highlighted in red, are the intersections of movement of three of the five women. A killer like the American Devil will probably have different phases. In the trolling phase, the killer will visit places he is likely to see victims to his taste. Trolling is a fishing term: the killer is sitting in his boat with the net out, seeing what comes his way. Now, while it’s possible that a killer will come across a victim in a place that they don’t usually frequent, it’s more likely that he’ll spot them in a place they and he go to repeatedly. You all follow? If we plotted your geo- profile, about ninety-five per cent of your movements within a set period would be repetitions. It’s likely, therefore, that the trolling spot is also the place where he stalks. Now, even if, as Detective Harper suggests, our killer knew
