This, he tells her, is my true calling.
The events and circumstances of his life, those sad childhood years on the compound, carved for him a singular purpose. As a surgeon, he possesses certain skills and is perhaps more gifted than most—but there are other surgeons. Should his vision blur or his nerve waver, who would step forward to take his place in this?
Amy is not convinced; his smile fails to reassure her. Miles watches as her uncertainty morphs into horror at what he’s done. She steps back, holds up a hand.
Amy, wait, he says. Please.
He explains it all to her—slowly, painstakingly—as though everything depends on her understanding. She is his inspiration, he tells her. But that pain she makes disappear every time she draws the mask down will return, perhaps with greater force. Not the physical pain, but the deeper pain behind it. The pain steeped in fear and rage. The pain we’re taught to conceal.
I’m fighting a war against pain, he tells her. Rooting out those who suffer it most acutely.
Little by little, she comes around. She nods, moves closer to him. She’s struck by the beauty of Jarry’s work—the beauty of his work. Her eyes well up.
Come now, Miles says. As my muse, it’s only right that you choose the next soul.
He follows her from photo to photo, watches as she studies each image, measures each subject’s need for release. She takes the responsibility seriously, will make a worthy partner. In time, she might come to think of him as more than a partner. In time, she might forget her precious little assistant district attorney.
Miles winks at the guard on his way out, but the man’s eyes remain fixed on the phone in his palm.
Chapter 5
We break up into pairs, spend the day tracking down local marksmen. Kelly and Dennis take the army post in Fort Hamilton; Pete and Patsy take Homeland Security. Randy and I head out to Rikers, check the correctional snipers’ psych evals, interview the warden. We come away with nothing. The others come away with slightly less.
Later, the six of us sit around a fold-out metal table in the Lower East Side station house, brainstorming.
“It’s gotta be somebody who knows the city,” Patsy says. “I’m guessing someone who grew up here.”
“Someone with a grudge,” Pete says. “Someone who’s taking vengeance on the city itself.”
“So we’re looking for a pissed-off native,” Dennis says. “That narrows it down.”
There’s a prolonged quiet—a lot of throat-clearing and bodies shifting in their seats.
“What about the street cameras?” I ask.
“We’ve got a small army of uniforms poring over footage from every camera within a mile of every scene,” Randy says. “So far, nothing.”
It’s going on 10:00 p.m. The group is starting to fade. You can tell we’re all hoping for that one great idea that will galvanize us, spur us on.
It doesn’t come.
“We should break,” Randy says. “Get some rest.”
“What’s Branford’s plan for tonight?” Patsy asks.
“He’s holding off on the curfew, but the governor’s called in the National Guard. The city is flooding the streets with prowl cars.”
“Great,” Dennis says. “The Sniper’s next target will be wearing a uniform.”
Kelly gives Dennis a quick smack across the back of the head.
“Keep your phones on,” Randy says.
The room empties down to just the two of us. Randy stands there, giving me the twice-over.
“You have a place to stay?” he asks.
“I lost my apartment when I checked myself in,” I say. “I’ll crash in the bunk room for now.”
I can see he wants to offer me his fold-out, but he’s wary of the hell he’d catch from his wife: Deb never liked him partnering with a woman.
“I know I’m throwing you into the fire,” he says.
I wave him off.
“This is where I belong,” I say.
“You sure?”
I can’t tell if he’s asking on his own, or if he’s following Branford’s instructions.
“I’ve only ever had one purpose,” I say. “Besides, what trouble can I get into in a station house?”
“It’s the pharmacy across the street I’m worried about.”
“I can’t score at a pharmacy,” I say.
“It’s a metaphor.”
I smile, show him my middle finger.
The bunk room is as spare as spare gets—just four walls lined with double-decker beds. The space feels like a neglected public school classroom. Every so often baby roaches come pouring out of the radiator. Tonight, I’ve got the place to myself. Hardly anyone ever stays here of their own free will.
I dump my duffel bag on the floor, take a fitted sheet from a filing cabinet in the hall, and make up one of the bottom beds. I shut the light, lie on my back. Five minutes in, it’s clear I won’t be sleeping. I’ve gotten used to my roommate’s mousey little snores, used to knowing exactly what will happen when I wake up in the morning. I feel a slight panic wondering what I’ll eat for breakfast.
And then there’s the adrenaline. I’m itching to hit the street. The competitive juices that made me a great cop and a lousy person are flowing again, and there’s no way I’m strong enough to calm them.
It’s got to be me who finds him.
Lying there in the dark, I already see the headline: Child Killer Saves the City. I’m already drafting the article about flawed heroes and second chances.
I tell myself I might as well do something useful. I’ve never been very good at sleeping anyway.
I get up, walk down the hall to the women’s locker room, splash water on my face, swish around some Listerine. I fetch my camera from my duffel bag, then head downstairs to the sergeant’s desk, where I check out one of the unmarked Cavaliers. Sergeant Teddy Romanski, ruddy-faced uncle to everyone in the squad, tells me I’d better be careful out there.
“Haven’t wrecked one yet,” I say.
He gives me a craggy scowl.
“That ain’t what I meant,” he says. “There’s a vest in the trunk. You wear it, you hear me?”
“Teddy,” I say, “those vests put ten pounds on a girl’s figure.”
He looks like he’s going to lunge over the desk.
“I’m kidding,” I say. “Only kidding.”
But of course I don’t wear the vest. Like everybody else in this city, I put my chances somewhere around one in eight million.
Chapter 6
I drive out to the first crime scene. I need to see it the way the killer saw it—at night, with the street lamps acting like stage lamps and the occasional pedestrian casting a long shadow.
Because, I tell myself, this has to be about place.
An elderly Chinese restaurateur, a thirty-something black doorman, a middle-aged female night stroller on the Brooklyn Bridge: there’s no pattern, no connection between the dead. But not every aspect of the killings can be random—at least not for the killer. Even a disordered human mind makes connections.
So where is the logic? Take away people and you’re left with place. Spend time at the scene and an impression will start to form. Stay with that impression, and you’ll find your window into the killer’s mind.
At 11:30 p.m. I pull up in front of the first victim’s restaurant, on Northern Boulevard in Queens. I step out with my camera bag slung over my shoulder, looking like a tourist.
The restaurant is closed. The iron grid is covered with graffiti, most of it scrawled in Chinese. There’s a sizable display of wreaths, teddy bears, and balloons on the sidewalk out front in memory of the victim, Mr. Zheng. Up and down the block, I see nothing but gaudy neon signage. Traffic remains steady on the boulevard. An ancient-looking man and his paramour huddle under a bus stop canopy. It’s New York: even the elderly never sleep.
On the other side of the boulevard, there’s an apartment complex: identical eight-story brick rectangles, one-time projects converted to
livable homes for the middle class. CSI determined the bullet came from the roof of the building directly opposite the restaurant. I start across, catch a string of staccato honks from a cabbie who’d rather not use his brake.
I walk the complex grounds, taking in the lay of the land. There are four sets of fire escapes per building, two in the front and two in the rear. The killer wouldn’t have to be very tall to reach one of the ladders. He’d be taking a risk passing by the tenants’ living room windows, but at 3:00 a.m. the risk would be minimal. Besides, if the task force’s working theory is correct—if he is ex-military looking to replicate his wartime experience stateside—then risk would make for part of the rush: stealth would be part of the skill set he was looking to revive.
Military or not, I think, he’s fighting his own war.
It goes without saying that he’s cast himself as the good guy. The question is: who has he cast in the role of villain?
My own stealth skills are lacking, so I walk back around to the front, stand in the entryway with my shield hanging from my coat pocket, and wait until a departing resident lets me in. The lobby is all marble and mirrors. The day’s smells are starting to stagnate: ammonia, cabbage, an overly sweet tobacco.
I take the elevator to the eighth floor, then climb the last flight to the roof. There’s a sign in Chinese and another in English saying that roof access is prohibited, but I find the door unlocked. On the roof itself I find a long strand of balled-up police tape. There are lawn chairs scattered around, cigarette butts, empty bottles. There’s even a small grill. I’m surprised by how much of the Manhattan skyline is visible—a clear vista from the spike of the Woolworth Building north to the blunt angles of the MetLife Building.
I screw a telescopic lens onto my Nikon, pull up one of the lawn chairs, sit watching the street below. An elderly Chinese man pushing a shopping cart full of plastic bottles stops in front of the pile of wreaths, bends over and begins to root through them, no doubt hoping someone memorialized Zheng with an object he might pawn. I capture him in a few hundred shutter shots, imagine my lens is the Sniper’s scope. A woman leans her head out of a second-story window, screams at the man until he wanders off. I snap pictures of her, too.
By all accounts, Zheng was a beloved figure. He fed the homeless out of the restaurant’s back door, employed local kids as waiters and busboys, catered neighborhood weddings and funerals on a generously sliding scale. According to the case file, detectives couldn’t get through an interview without handing over the Kleenex.
But none of that matters, I remind myself. At least not to the investigation. The killer didn’t know Zheng; for him, Zheng was just a prop. What I need to pay attention to here isn’t the details, it’s the larger impression. Why did the killer pick this scene? What did he see when he looked down at the street below?
An hour goes by, then another, before the impression crystallizes. I don’t feel lonely so much as alone. The solitude is all the more cutting because I know there are eight million people hidden in the cityscape laid out before me.
I can’t deny it: I want a benzo and a bourbon chaser. Or maybe codeine. Or Demerol. Anything to slow the world down, soften its edges.
But for the first time in a while I have a solid reason to stay clean.
The hunt is under way.
Chapter 7
Their shift is slow—maybe the slowest in Miles’s ten years working the ER. News of the shootings has broken. Sure, there are still accidents that occur within the home, heart attacks, strokes. But unusually for this city, people are staying indoors. A little after 11:00 p.m., a teenage babysitter carries in a four-year-old boy who cracked his head open on a coffee table; at midnight, an addict comes in with a broken arm. That’s it.
Miles has shut down five boroughs with four bullets.
“This lunatic’s actually made the city safer,” Amy says. “He’s going to put me out of a job.”
They’re sitting in the break room, sipping coffee and waiting to be summoned via the hospital loudspeaker.
“Maybe NYPD should hire him,” Miles says. “Find a way to keep people indoors after dark and you save the city a fortune.”
Amy frowns.
“Don’t say that. Someone’s bound to take you seriously.”
Miles bites his tongue, reminds himself to go slow: it’s okay that she considers him a lunatic…for now.
“They’re calling him the Night Sniper,” Amy says. “Makes him sound like a comic book villain.”
Miles looks at her with interest. “Who’s calling him the Night Sniper?” he asks.
“The DA, the mayor’s office, the cops. They’ve assigned six hotshot Homicide detectives to the case. The Night Sniper Task Force. Ron told me.”
A situation Miles hadn’t anticipated—Amy as his pipeline.
“The Night Sniper, huh?” he says.
It’s catchy, but it reduces him to what he does and when he does it. For Miles, all that matters is the why.
“What else did Ron tell you?” he asks.
He spends the ride out to Queens studying the photo behind tonight’s mission. He holds the image frozen in his mind like a slide on a stalled viewfinder. It’s by far Jarry’s most skillful shot—a male passenger glimpsed through the window of a moving subway car, colored light cutting diagonals across the composition. The man wears a baggy suit and trench coat, holds a paper bag in his lap. His face is a blur; his slumped posture suggests that he is alone, unaware anyone might be watching. Jarry snapped the photo from somewhere above as the train sped by. The timing had to be impeccable; no doubt Jarry’s success was preceded by a slew of failed attempts. Miles won’t have that luxury.
He exits at Thirtieth Avenue. Members of the National Guard stand with machine guns at either end of the elevated platform. They are young, well-groomed, self-important. Their camouflage uniforms look absurd here in the city. Miles remains the picture of calm as the tallest of them—a boy likely working his way through college, his pimples burning red against his almost translucent skin—asks to look inside the guitar case.
Miles pops it open.
“Just coming home from a gig,” he says.
The boy stares down at the sunburst facade.
“Beautiful instrument,” he says. “What’s your genre?”
“Jazz, mostly.”
The boy whistles with genuine admiration.
“I tried playing trumpet,” he says, “but I can’t keep time to save my life.”
“You’re young,” Miles tells him. “Maybe you should try again.”
He follows the elevated tracks for five blocks, then heads down a residential street and cuts into a narrow alley. The lights are off in the windows above. He selects a four-story building with a Dumpster parked under the fire escape, straps the guitar case across his back, and begins the climb. He imagines he is his father scaling a palm tree in the Mekong Delta.
His father: the distressed soul Miles failed to liberate, though he is making up for it now.
On the roof, he drops to his stomach and crawls to the ledge facing the street. His view of the tracks is not ideal: the angle is steeper, the distance less pronounced than in Jarry’s photo.
But of course Miles can’t be expected to replicate every detail. What matters is the essence.
Chapter 8
I get back to the station at a little after two in the morning. Randy and Pete are already there. Patsy, Dennis, and Kelly aren’t far behind. We brew some coffee and sit in the conference room, all of us quiet, waiting.
It starts to look like the city might reach daybreak unscathed. Crime is down across the boroughs, and for the first week all year there hasn’t been a single reported shooting. Even the gangs are inside. But it turns out that even if no one’s there to hear it, the tree really did make a sound. The call comes in at 5:30: an MTA cleaning crew found the vic at a rail yard in Sunnyside, Queens. The train conductor had no idea he’d been chauffeuring around a corpse.
“The MTA’s got a
cleaning crew?” Dennis says.
Kelly gives him a smack.
We drive out to Sunnyside in two separate cars. The ME and his team are already there; the uniforms have unspooled a good mile of yellow tape. Branford’s public announcement unleashed the media. TV crews and newspaper reporters are gathered around the periphery, chomping at the bit.
The DOA lies facedown on the floor of the train’s center car. Bald crown, scuffed shoes, off-the-rack suit—a civil servant somewhere north of fifty. The blood outlining his torso is crusting over in the cool morning air. The ME puts the time of death around 3:30 a.m.
“Someone must have seen something,” Randy says.
I point to a bullet hole in the opposite window.
“The shot came from outside,” I say. “The vic probably had the car to himself. That time of the morning, with the city on high alert and people sticking indoors, a corpse could have coasted into the yard without anyone noticing.”
Dennis takes a closer look at the bullet hole, smacks his lips together.
“Damn, this guy’s one hell of a shot,” he says. “He should give seminars at the academy.”
“His first moving target,” Patsy says.
“Maybe degree of difficulty is his form of escalation,” I say.
The ME snaps a few pictures, nods for his lackeys to flip the body. Randy slips on a pair of latex gloves, crouches down, goes through the man’s pockets.
“Well,” he says, “someone saw this guy after he died. No wallet, no phone.”
“If the shot came from outside, then it wasn’t the killer who robbed him,” Kelly says.
“Probably a bum riding for shelter,” Randy says. “Finding him is our first priority.”
“He won’t have seen anything,” I say. “Nothing more than that jogger on the bridge. A guy grabs at his chest and falls over. If it was a bum, he probably thought Christmas came early.”