New York quota, maybe he was on his way to El Paso. If so, he’d be out of our hair. I’d got an echo then, but hadn’t been able to hold on to it.
“Worst-case scenario, he was somebody else’s headache,” Went-240
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worth said, finishing the thought. “One thing never even crossed my mind was he might come back.”
I’d called the two of them, Sussman and Wentworth, and we were all gathered in our living room. There was a carafe of coffee on the table, along with a little cream pitcher and a sugar bowl and a dish containing envelopes of artificial sweetener, both pink ones and blue ones. For boy babies and girl babies, I suppose. There was a plate of cookies, too. No one had touched the cookies, or used cream or sugar, but Wentworth had already had two cups of coffee.
There were other cops I could have invited to the party. There was Ed Iverson, from Brooklyn, who’d investigated the apparent murder and suicide on Coney Island Avenue. AB had staged that one, making it look as though Jason Bierman had killed first Carl Ivanko and then himself, effectively closing the book on the Hollander murders. There was Dan Schering, who’d had the Hollander case until Homicide North claimed it as their own. And I could think of a few others, cops from Homicide and from the Two-Six, along with a fire inspector out in Bushwick, but I’d have been hard-pressed to come up with their names, let alone guess where to reach them.
Wentworth said, “What’s it been, four years? Not hard to guess what he’s been doing to get through the days.”
“Been killing people,” TJ said.
“Four that we know of,” Wentworth said. “No, make that five.”
“Who besides Monica?” Elaine wanted to know.
“Your friend is one. Plus three boys in Virginia, unless there’s anyone here who doesn’t think our guy and Abel Baker and Arne Bodinger are one and the same.”
“Bodinson.”
“I stand corrected. Same guy, right?”
“Has to be,” I said.
Sussman agreed, but wondered how that meant he’d killed the boys in Richmond. Wasn’t the evidence ironclad against Preston Applewhite?
“Evidence,” Wentworth said, “would seem to be a specialty of this guy’s. The Richmond killings were done with a knife, if I remember All the Flowers Are Dying
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right. And the knife was recovered, it was part of the evidence. And our guy does seem to have a fondness for knives.”
“He strangled the Korean masseuse,” I reminded him. “And he used a gun to kill Bierman and Ivanko and Byrne Hollander.”
“You don’t think he did the three kids in Richmond?”
“I’m sure he did,” I said, “and I agree he likes knives, but he doesn’t limit himself.”
Elaine said, “Weren’t the boys molested? Sexually, I mean.”
“So?”
“So I thought he was straight, that’s all. ‘Nothing queer about Chumley.’ You remember that joke?”
Wentworth said, “About buggering an elephant, wasn’t it? ‘Male or female elephant?’ ‘Why, female elephant, old man, nothing queer about Chumley.’ ”
“But those boys were killed years ago,” Sussman said. “Virginia’s quicker than most states, they move that appeal process right along, but even so he’d have had to put it all in motion way back when.”
“He’s a patient man, Mark. And he probably found other ways to pass the time. There’s a whole lot of people get killed every year, and plenty of the killings go unsolved. And you don’t have to limit yourself to the unsolved ones, either. I mean, the Richmond murders, the cops down there put that one in the Wins column. Case closed, right? Same as we closed the books on all the people he killed here.”
“I don’t know,” Sussman said. “What do we do now, call Richmond?” They went back and forth on that one. On the one hand, the Richmond murders were a can of worms; on the other, the can was already open. Either way, the main thing to concentrate on was catching the son of a bitch, and if you brought in Richmond and the Bureau, were you increasing the odds of nailing him or setting yourself up for the Too Many Cooks syndrome?
There was a lull, and Elaine said, “You said five.”
“How’s that?”
“You said five killings,” she said to Wentworth. “Monica is one, and the three boys in Richmond. That makes four. Who’s the fifth?” 242
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“Applegate, except that’s not his name. I said it a minute ago. What the hell is it?”
“Applewhite.”
“There you go. Applewhite got a hot shot from the state of Virginia, but our friend was there to see him get it, and he’s the one who put him on the gurney in the first place. He’s not going to get indicted for that, and there’s plenty of other things to hang him for instead, but wouldn’t you say he was as much the cause of Applewhite’s death as the chemicals they pumped into him? And wouldn’t you call that murder?” If the Richmond cops and the FBI came in, the whole thing turned into a media circus overnight.
