East Harlem
November 23, 6.22 p.m.
A few hours after the man in black had been rolled away from certain death, a cavalcade of red and blues screeched across the car park of the desolate halfway house up in East Harlem. The guy wouldn’t tell them where he lived, but they’d run his name through the system and in less than an hour his file came up on a screen at the NYPD database. Winston Carlisle had a record and he’d just been released into an adult housing block. The address was called through directly to Harper. He gave the order and Blue Team set off.
Winston Carlisle had been a patient at Kirby Psychiatric and Manhattan Psychiatric Center. He lived in a halfway house in East Harlem. Things were fitting together. The killings started about a month after he was moved to a non-secured room in MPC. He was free to come and go, and that’s when the killing began: a few weeks after his release from a secure ward.
The quiet parking lot up in the Heights was ripped up by the arrival of Blue Team and the rest of the task force. The halfway house was a low-roofed municipal building. The green barred door was wedged open and a nervous-looking woman sat in reception, eyes wide at the chaos of lights and activity. She’d only been in the job a week — the previous receptionist had died in a traffic accident — and was not yet used to dealing with cops.
Harper led the team through the door. The killer probably went under any number of aliases as he stalked and dated these women. He probably wore disguises. He was probably a lot smarter than he made out.
‘We’re looking for Winston Carlisle’s room,’ said Harper. The receptionist’s arm pointed towards the stairs. ‘Room fifty-two, gentlemen.’
The team made their way up to the second floor and down the corridor to the small room where Winston Carlisle lived. Eddie Kasper was at Tom Harper’s side. They’d spent the last few weeks hunting this man, terrified by his capabilities, and now they were looking at a urine-soaked bed in a six-by-nine room at the end of nowhere street. Winston Carlisle had been right. He was a nobody. A nobody who wanted to be somebody.
The two men looked at the small single bedroom and couldn’t believe that it had all started in that tiny, pathetic space.
‘So this is the home of the American Devil,’ said Kasper.
‘Looks like it,’ said Harper. He opened the brown file and read out the report from the hospital. ‘He was a patient at Kirby Psychiatric. He’s got a long record of treatment for paranoia. Get this. Numerous counts of attempted rape against young women going back a long way.’
‘Sad little bastard,’ said Eddie.
‘It’s not what I expected,’ said Harper. ‘It’s nothing like Dr Levene’s profile. She had him down as a successful guy living with someone. This is a no-self-esteem loner with a history of mental illness. Shit. He must have gone haywire. Probably stopped his medication or something. He was released from the Kirby a month before the first murder. Jesus, we should’ve checked this.’
‘That’s too cruel, man. Someone should’ve been monitoring this guy,’ said Kasper.
Harper pulled back an orange curtain that formed a makeshift wardrobe. The two detectives looked at the hoard. A tin bucket with four bloody knives. Clothes covered in blood. Enough evidence to condemn the man. It was all so casual, so pointless. So fucking avoidable.
‘He wasn’t the clinical, terrifying mastermind I’d suspected. He was a lowlife,’ said Harper. ‘How did we miss this one? Somehow, this man went under the radar. Who was checking out recently released prisoners and patients? They should’ve interviewed this man in the first few days of the investigation. What was Williamson playing at?’
Catching a killer never felt great, but it usually felt good. But this felt really bad. It just seemed so empty. Harper stood at the threshold of the room staring at the bookshelf.
‘What you thinking?’
He looked across at the graphic novels and airport trash and shook his head. ‘Nothing.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, no poetry, no art, nothing.’
‘Well, at least the women of the Upper East Side can sleep easy.’
‘Yeah,’ said Harper. ‘Did anyone make contact with Kitty Hunyardi as yet?’
‘Yeah, we got her off the subway train. She’s being debriefed by Victim Support. She’s fine, just shaken. It’s good we can tell her we’ve got the killer behind bars. She’ll be going home soon.’
‘Good work, Eddie.’
‘Press are all over the precinct, Tom. You need to avoid the front entrance.’
‘What did Lafayette tell them?’
‘We’ve arrested a suspect, nothing more, but they’re hungry as wolves out there so they’re running with any comment they can get from us.’
‘As long as that’s all they’ve got, that’s fine until we charge him.’
Harper and Kasper walked out of Winston Carlisle’s room. The forensics team were there ready to collect the evidence that would condemn him.
They were all exhausted by the events of the day as they headed back to the precinct. Most of the detectives would go home, but not Harper. He wanted to interrogate this killer until he understood what the hell had happened over the past few weeks.
It was the end of November and the team were all ready for a break. Catching the devil felt hollow now, but in a day or two the feeling of relief would come, the blondes would emerge from the shadows and New York would start to glimmer again. Glimmer and forget the horror.
On his return to the precinct, Harper got straight down to the darkened observation room. Denise Levene had been called in and she stood there with Lafayette and a couple of Blue Team, all crowding round the window watching the interview room and Winston Carlisle through the mirror. Two detectives were still going at him. Soon, it would be Harper and Kasper’s turn again.
‘Hard to believe when you get them in captivity, isn’t it?’ said Captain Lafayette. ‘He’s admitting he followed the girl, but he says he didn’t hurt anyone. He’s smart.’
Harper’s eyes found Denise. ‘What do you think, Doctor?’
‘My profile said seven things about this killer. This guy only ticks two boxes, so you know what I think. He doesn’t fit the profile. You sure it’s him?’
‘I’ve just been to his room in the halfway house. We found bloody knives in his room, the girls’ bloody clothes. Looks like it was him, Denise.’
‘Well, he doesn’t fit the usual pattern. Either I’m way off or this guy is not who he appears to be.’
‘He’s got a history of sexual assault but no murders. This seemed to come out of all those years inside Kirby.’
‘Minor sexual assault and long periods of incarceration doesn’t make a killer, does it?’
‘It could’ve been in his head a long time. You just don’t know what’s inside these guys.’
‘I do,’ said Denise. ‘I’ve spent ten years finding out.’ She walked closer to the glass and stared into the frightened face of Winston Carlisle. It wasn’t nice to be wrong, and ten years of interviewing killers was telling her she wasn’t.
Chapter Forty-Eight
Downtown Restaurant
November 23, 8.28 p.m.
Across town, Erin Nash of the New York Daily Echo was sitting in a plush restaurant dining with a deputy editor from a rival paper. Short-haired, slim and wiry, Erin was pure-bred New York stock. Her father was still a barber in Brooklyn. Her favourite colour was gunmetal grey; her favourite drink was a shot and one day she would be an editor. For now, she was intent on just getting up the first few rungs of the ladder. The editor sitting opposite thought she looked cute, like an angry little elf with big brown eyes. The Daily Post had been impressed with her crime coverage. The Echo ’s circulation was up 32 per cent on the basis of her exclusives and this impressed the
