He didn’t want to go over to the dumpster and look at the body. He breathed deeply as he took a step forward towards the crime scene detective in her whites.
‘Detective Harper, Homicide. What have you got?’
She didn’t look up. There was an expression of fierce concentration on her face.
‘Can’t see much. Strangled by the look of it. Raped, probably — at least, her pants and jeans are round her ankles. It’s difficult to tell.’
It wasn’t the answer Harper wanted. The American Devil raped and strangled his victims. Tom just wanted to be sure he could strike this one from his list. ‘Can I take a look?’
‘You want bad dreams? Go ahead.’
Tom walked over to the side of the big steel dumpster and looked in. The woman in white handed him a torch.
The beam of light caught the flat, smooth skin of the girl’s stomach. Tom passed the light over the rest of her body. A poor young life thrown out with the trash. He didn’t want Denise to see it. How can you look at the destruction that human hands can wreak and show it to someone else? That’s why cops got cynical. You had to keep it to yourself. Crime scenes were usually peopled by those who had been desensitized, and together they created a community of objective observers that protected everyone at the scene. Seeing Denise at the edge of the lot made him realize it was a good thing to keep outsiders away. They bring emotions and emotions create cracks in your own defences.
It brutalizes you, no doubt about it. You see things that take you down notch by notch until all you see around you is the human animal — an aggressive and dangerous beast.
Harper went over to Denise and took her to one side. He told her not to look.
‘What did you see? At least tell me.’ Her hand gripped his arm.
‘Caucasian female. Late teens. Bruising on the neck. Half undressed. Not a lot else.’
‘A sad end,’ said Denise. Then her mind started working. ‘Why did you think it might be him?’
Harper walked with her to the edge of the car park. He looked up at the grey fall sky splintered with dark slashes of storm clouds and wished he had faith in something. ‘I just can’t put my finger on it. But I don’t like the similarities.’
‘It’s not his signature, is it?’
‘No. It doesn’t look like it. It’s not his ritual. We’ll wait for the DNA analysis, see what this looks like. But he might change his style. He took out Williamson with arrows. He’s capable of anything.’
‘What’s your gut say?’
‘It’s telling me that I’m hungry.’
‘Mine too.’
Harper moved Denise across the parking lot as a CSU van pulled up. His eyes scanned the graffiti tags all over the dumpster as he passed by. ‘There’s no posing, no poem,’ he said, ‘but I want to look around a little more.’
Harper put Denise in a patrol car and sent her back to her car on Madison, while he watched the team arrive at the scene. Was it his elusive serial killer? He couldn’t tell. If it was, he’d suddenly taken a different approach. That didn’t help. Patterns caught killers.
Harper spent an hour walking around the scene trying to figure out what had happened. They should be able to ID her pretty quickly on the street if she was a hooker.
The car park was covered in a thin layer of sand and dust. He looked all over it, but there weren’t any car tracks at all. It was strange. How do you hump a dead body around one of the most populated cities in the world without getting seen? Then he saw something that could easily have been overlooked. Leading up to the dumpster were two small tracks about ten inches apart. Harper knelt by the tracks. A small trolley of some kind? He called the CSU detective across and asked her to get the tracks mapped and photographed.
As Harper was walking back to his car, he spotted something else so small that it might easily have been missed. Something on the ground in the dirt, caught in the wet along with the trash. Harper crossed and knelt by the kerb. He pulled on a latex glove and then reached down into the gutter and picked the thing up carefully between his thumb and forefinger. He put it to his eye and turned it. He knew what it was. It was a single pale pink petal. Harper felt the hairs on his neck prickle. Cherry blossom.
He scrambled to his feet and called Captain Lafayette. He was about to give him the whole scenario, but Lafayette broke in real fast. ‘Save it and get your ass back here. I’m watching the Madison Avenue feeds and I think we got ourselves a situation developing. We’ve got a high-heeled blonde and some guy in a black suit is following her.’
Chapter Forty-Five
Madison Avenue
November 23, 2.33 p.m.
On the Upper East Side, Kitty Hunyardi entered Lush amp; Low on East 67th Street. It was her weekly appointment. A salesman was blocking the entrance as he tried to get to speak to the manager. Kitty tutted loudly until he moved his large case out of the way. She moved across and sat in her favourite leather chair without speaking to anyone, placed her Gucci lizard clutch bag on her lap and clicked her bright blue snakeskin Mary Janes on the chrome foot rail. She had only to wait a few seconds before Antonio appeared behind her, his hands on her head, letting her long blond hair fall through his fingers.
The salesman turned and stared at her. It was hard not to. Kitty was the beautiful twenty-three-year-old daughter of some dead line of Hungarian aristocracy. Her family had lost its title in the forties, but they had emigrated and invested in rubber. And rubber had come good.
Across the street, a man in a black suit with grey hair stared in at the salon. Kitty didn’t notice him at first. He was just part of the background, part of the noise that she needn’t bother herself about. But there was something about him that caused her to turn and look.
As she did so he turned and walked away. Kitty had noticed some guy a couple of times now. She thought she was being followed. The night before, someone had been overly interested in her in a cocktail bar. She was sure that the same guy followed her outside and tried to get his hand in her bag as she waited for a cab in the road, but a couple of cops had been close and the guy just walked by. A week earlier, someone had been waiting around near her apartment. The first time, she’d just let it go, but now it was three times and Kitty was superstitious. She didn’t like threes. Especially not if it meant someone was stalking her.
Kitty’s instinctive reaction was that it was her father’s protectiveness again. The man in the suit was probably hired to look out for her, make sure she walked in safety at all times.
But he wasn’t quite like the bodyguards she’d known before and bodyguards didn’t swoop in so close you could smell their cologne. What was it about him? When a guy won’t let go of you with his eyes? That was it. He stared at her. She could feel it. Drilling into her. Anger? Hatred? Something that just felt wrong.
Kitty left the salon forty minutes later with her hair trimmed and blow-dried. She looked up and down the street but the black-suited man was nowhere to be seen. She looked at her diamond-encrusted watch, checked her lips in the window of the salon and walked across the street to Madison Avenue. She was due at her mother’s in an hour, enough time to see if anything caught her eye.
Kitty walked up Madison, her eyes fixed ahead, her long legs moving with practised precision and her mind far away in some fantasy land of her own making. She always imagined that the paparazzi were trailing her and she acted with the exaggerated gestures and look of disdain she’d seen in so many magazines. Only Kitty Hunyardi wasn’t famous. Not yet, anyhow. She’d talked to her PR firm that morning and they’d found a producer willing to give her a meeting. It was the first step. That’s all you ever needed. Just one step.
A distance behind her, the grey-haired man in the black suit appeared from a doorway and started to follow her. Kitty turned into the Versace store. The man in black walked straight past the boutique and stopped on the corner of East 69th Street. He waited for about ten minutes. This was how it was supposed to be. He pulled out his schedule. Following the plan was important. Keeping exactly to the plan. He knew exactly how long Kitty would spend in each shop and he waited accordingly. When people kept such rigid routines, it was easy to track
