Kiss Me, Kill Me

Barnett leaned forward. “Is this about the Cinderella Strangler?”

Suzanne cringed at the moniker, but nodded. “We need to know who set up those parties and how the guests found out about them. Whether they were open or closed. If there’s a formal invite list. Who’s in charge. Their families deserve to know what happened.”

“I’d love to help, really-I feel rotten about those girls. But you should know the parties aren’t exactly formal. No one calls me to set them up; there’s no invite list, really nothing in writing. When someone sets up a party, word gets out and people show up.”

“How do people hear about the parties?” Suzanne asked. Though Josh Haynes had explained how information spread, she wanted Barnett’s version.

“Mostly online or text messages. Those who go know what to do, it sort of feeds on itself, they bring friends, and so on.”

“Is there a specific website?”

“No, not for all the parties. Different groups might have their own sites, you know, like a club or a fraternity or whatever. But there’s no central website for every party in the city.”

“We were led to believe that there wasn’t an underground party in New York that you didn’t sanction.”

“Whoa! I wouldn’t say that.” Barnett’s expression changed from helpful to wary. “Do I need a lawyer? My brother is a stickler about this kind of stuff. I got in trouble once for mouthing off to a cop, and I don’t want to be in trouble.”

“And I want to stop a psychopath before he kills another young woman,” said Suzanne. “I’d think you’d want the same thing. If word gets out that a serial killer is targeting your parties, attendance might drop way down.”

“Serial killer?” He looked troubled, but she didn’t know if it was an act. “I really can’t help. They’re not my parties. I just hear about most of them. Not all, certainly, but people tell me things. You know how it is.” He shrugged as if to say because I’m me.

Suzanne bit back a snarky comment and instead said, “You keep your finger on the pulse of the parties, so to speak.”

He nodded.

“How many are there?”

“A night? A week? A year? It varies. There are so many fascinating abandoned structures that are perfectly safe, left to rot by bankrupt companies or absentee owners. I’ve been buying some as I can, fixing them up, reselling or leasing them. I love the old architecture, the original designs, the fascinating history of some of these places.”

Suzanne made a note to check on Barnett’s financials. He talked a good game, but Panetta had said that big brother CJ ran the show.

“It would be helpful to us if we knew the extent of the parties. If we want to stop this killer, we need to know when and where he might strike again.”

“There are secret parties every night, most relatively small. There’s a variety of party types-the raves, the frat parties, the drug parties, the sex parties. Sometimes a combination, but then there’re also the people who go. Some are all black, some all white, some race isn’t an issue. The big parties-over maybe two hundred people-are usually on the weekends. I wouldn’t say every weekend, but close to it. There’s something for everyone-not all of the parties are drugs and drinking and dancing. There’s a large black Christian church that has a huge revival-type party once a year, gospel rock, amazing food, and totally dry. They don’t have the money to lease a place big enough, so they find a building that fits their needs.”

Every weekend? They had four dead girls in four months, but no specific pattern in location or date-only that they were killed late on a Saturday night, and the time between murders was getting shorter.

Suzanne slid across the glass coffee table a list with the locations of the bodies and the estimated day the victim was killed. “We need to know who organized these parties. We think we know who put on the parties in the Bronx and Brooklyn, but the frat party here, and then the Harlem party, we need more info. Any ideas?”

Barnett looked at the list. “The frat party is a college thing; I don’t know much about that. You should talk to Alpha Gamma Pi-they’re not the biggest frat at Columbia, but they’re on the ball.”

Suzanne made a note, though she was pretty confident that she’d read in Panetta’s reports that he’d canvassed all the frats and didn’t get anything useful.

Panetta opened a file and showed Barnett the photographs of the four dead women. They weren’t the morgue photos, but pictures provided by their families or the DMV.

“Do you know any of these young women? Maybe you met them at a party, or through business or college?”

Barnett stared at the pictures. His face was blank, almost impassive, but Suzanne noticed he swallowed several times.

He shook his head. “No,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

Suzanne would bet her pension that he knew at least one of the girls. Maybe all of them. Maybe she was facing a killer.

Panetta also picked up the strange vibes. He glanced at her and gave a brief shake of his head, and she concurred. They needed more information, and then they’d bring him in for a formal interview at the station.

Suzanne stood and said, “Thank you for your time, Mr. Barnett. If you think of anything else, or hear something that might help us narrow down which parties this murderer may be targeting, please call either myself or Detective Panetta. You have our cards.”

Outside the door, Suzanne lowered her voice. “Something’s going on. He knows at least one of these victims.”

“Absolutely. And either he’s surprised that someone’s dead or he’s surprised that we’re on to him.”

“Either way, he’s a person of interest.”

Suzanne talked Panetta into grabbing a drink at a bar to discuss the case. He agreed, provided it was near his subway stop. He called his wife and said he’d be an hour late. By the time he’d disconnected, there were two beers in front of them.

They toasted. “To catch a killer,” Panetta said.

Suzanne sipped her bottled Samuel Adams, a favorite of hers since college. Panetta drank Coors Light on tap. “Barnett,” she said.

“Ballsy. Arrogant. Until he saw the pictures.”

“Guilty?”

“Of something. But murder? He doesn’t seem the kind of guy who’d kill a girl with a plastic bag over her head.”

“He doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’d beat them to a pulp, either. Did you notice his hands?”

Panetta laughed. “Manicured.”

“Soft. No hard labor. He’s more the type of dude who’d push a girl off a bridge in a moment of rage.”

“Really?” Panetta looked at her as if she were an alien.

She shrugged. “I know, sometimes you can’t tell who’s a killer by looking at them, but I assess people by how they’d kill-if they were driven to it. He doesn’t appear to have the personality of a serial killer. But I’m going to run him up the flagpole, get a full background and psych profile on him based on what we know. Ted Bundy didn’t look like a serial killer on the surface.”

“Do you think he was feeding us a line about the fraternity? Trying to steer us away?”

She sipped her beer as she thought. “Maybe, but we need to follow up anyway. You talked to the frats, right?”

“Hicks and three officers spoke to the president of each fraternity at Columbia, and all denied that they’d organized the party. But three of the four victims were college students, two at Columbia.”

“It was the second victim who wasn’t a student, right?”

“Erica Ripley. She was twenty-one, worked at a coffeehouse.”

“Still, three of the four-”

“Underground parties are a favorite of the college crowd.”

“With how many colleges and universities there are in New York City, two of the victims were at