“You weren’t very kind to me,” a garbled voice says. I can’t tell if he’s using a voice distorter or just talking with his tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth.
I put a hand over the receiver, whisper: “Start the trace.”
Chapter 13
He stands in Times Square during the lunch hour, stares up at the vertical triptych of neon screens. News of the Night Sniper scrolls across the bottom of an ad for a revival of Cats: City Hall has proposed a curfew; the NYPD is offering a six-figure reward for viable information. Miles tugs on the brim of his hat, pulls his scarf farther up the bridge of his nose, smiles to himself.
He takes the last unoccupied table in the narrow outdoor seating area, lifts the burner phone from his jacket pocket, and sets it in front of him. He is in no rush. More than ever, this is his city. The people swarming on every side might pretend otherwise, but they are thinking only of him. Why not bask a little?
A few hours at the library revealed that Detective Cheryl Mabern has made the news on more than one occasion. Heroine turned villain, she is now NYPD’s blackest sheep. Miles feels prepared, back in control. With gloved hands, he dials the Seventh Precinct.
He is transferred twice: once by a gruff-sounding desk sergeant, once by a woman who answers “Detective Squad” but otherwise does not identify herself. On the third try, Mabern picks up:
“Task force,” she says.
Two short words and Miles recognizes the voice that’s been playing in his head since early this morning. His pulse remains steady. He draws his scarf tight across his lips, assumes a deeper register.
“You weren’t very kind to me,” he says. “I mean in your interview this morning.”
“You haven’t been doing very kind things,” Mabern says.
As though she were talking to a child! Miles holds the phone away for a beat, reminds himself that Mabern is lost. Her attempts to humiliate him are nothing more than a masked plea.
“On the contrary,” he says, “I’ve been doling out the ultimate kindness.”
Mabern laughs.
“Well, you know what they say? You have to be kind to yourself before you can be kind to others.”
Miles takes a breath. He will not be rattled. He will draw her to him, give her what she believes she wants.
“That wouldn’t suit either of us, Cheryl,” he says. “You need me. I’m your chance at redemption.”
“Funny, I never thought Jesus would come back as a serial killer.”
Miles grins despite himself.
“I mean in this life,” he says. “Capture me and the city forgets about that poor dim-witted child you shot in the projects. What’s his name? Oh yes, Jesse Smits. Tell me, are you hoping he does or doesn’t wake from his coma?”
Miles takes her momentary silence for victory.
“You’re taunting me,” Mabern says. “Trying to give back a little of what I gave you.”
“Wrong again. I want to help you.”
“So turn yourself in.”
It’s Miles’s turn to chuckle.
“No,” he says, “that wouldn’t do. You have to work for it. You need to be good, not lucky.”
“Then how are you going to help me?”
“I’ll give you a hint.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” Mabern says. “How about you just don’t kill anyone else?”
“But then you’d never find me.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
There’s another pause. Miles senses her changing tack.
“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” Mabern asks.
“I’m a studious chimpanzee,” Miles says. “And you’re transparent.”
“Transparent?”
“You want to keep me talking while your colleagues trace this call. Let me save you the effort: I’m in Times Square. I’m the guy on his cell phone.”
He hangs up. All in all, he feels pleased with himself. Mabern knows now that she underestimated him. He is not that simpleton Bryzinski, acting out some trite revenge.
Miles stands, adjusts the angle of his hat. The wool scarf is wreaking havoc with his skin, but he will not remove it until the cameras are behind him.
He walks downtown at a brisk clip, enters Macy’s from the north side, takes the elevator to the ninth floor. The men’s room is crowded. He waits in a stall until he is certain the clientele has changed over several times, then exits, leaving behind his scarf and straw hat. He dumps the phone in a trash can on the first floor near the women’s perfume section.
He starts back to Times Square, anxious to watch Detective Mabern at work.
Chapter 14
He’s leading us by the tail,” Dennis says.
The trace confirmed the Sniper’s location. Dennis, Patsy, and I are standing at the center of Times Square, hoping to find something that hasn’t been trampled over a thousand times.
“He’s probably watching us from the bar at the Marriott,” Patsy says.
“Of course he’s watching us,” Dennis says.
I have a moment where I think everyone I see is him: the shirtless mime in silver body paint; the guy in the Raggedy Ann outfit who’s handing out flyers for an adult-themed ice cream parlor; one of the countless hucksters drumming up business for theaters on and off Broadway—people who’d stand out anywhere but here.
We slip on elbow-high latex gloves, start rummaging through a row of garbage cans, our badges hanging from our pockets. No one in the horde of pedestrians seems to notice us. If we’re lucky, we’ll come up with a phone. If we’re really lucky, we’ll get a print off that phone.
Randy, Pete, and Kelly are rounding up surveillance footage from local businesses and city cameras. There isn’t much more we can do. We can’t canvass for witnesses. What would we ask them? What would they have witnessed? A guy on his phone at midday in Times Square? Camouflage doesn’t come any thicker. Still…
“There has to be a reason he led us here,” I say. “Why not Grand Central, or…”
“You mean there has to be a reason he led you here,” Dennis says. “We’re just your merry band.”
The smart move would be to ignore him, but I can’t help myself:
“You don’t seem that merry to me,” I say.
Patsy grins.
“Maybe he plans to make his next kill here,” she says.
“I doubt it,” I say. “The only thing his victims have in common is that they were all alone when he shot them. Even at four in the morning, this place is crawling with tourists.”
A middle-aged Hispanic woman dressed for office work stands a few feet away and stares at me. She sees me looking back but waits for Dennis and Patsy to take notice.
“Can I help you?” I ask.
She folds her arms across her chest, squares her shoulders.
“I’d rather have him out there than you,” she says.
Dennis steps forward, looking like a watchdog who’d been dozing but is suddenly poised to attack.
“You had your moment,” he says. “Now take your self-righteous smirk and move along.”
She doesn’t budge.
“I make it my business to speak for people who can’t speak for themselves,” she says.
“Yeah, you’re doing God’s work,” Dennis says. “I’m sure you’re anxious to tell your friends all about it, so don’t let us keep you.”
He’s in her face now, veins popping on his neck. I try to pull him back. There’s a small crowd gathering. Some of the onlookers might recognize me. Some just want to see what people are watching. A bike messenger in a skull cap and spiked leather gloves starts filming us on his cell phone. Dennis and Patsy spot the guy at the same time. Dennis heads straight for him. Patsy grabs the woman’s arm—hard. The woman grimaces, struggles, can’t break away.
“Did someone put you up to this?” Patsy asks.
“What are you talking about?”
“Did a man pay you to confront Detective Mabern?”
It’s a good
question. The Sniper knew we’d be here. He has every motive to humiliate me, and he craves the big stage.
“What man?” the woman says. “Let go of me.”
I stand on a bench, scan the mass of people moving in every direction, hoping that somehow I’ll be able to pick him out. Instead, my eyes are drawn upward to that gaudy trio of neon screens. There’s a pubescent pop star I don’t recognize drinking from a can of carbonated sugar water while he dances to a song we can’t hear. And underneath, a news scroll: stock quotes, then weather, and then this, in flashing red letters:
ATTENTION! The city remains on high alert following four consecutive early morning attacks by the killer dubbed NIGHT SNIPER. Police have no leads. Citizens are urged to stay indoors…
He came here to soak it all in, to stand at the center of his own spectacle.
The woman is screaming now. Patsy reaches for her cuffs with her free hand. I lean forward, whisper in Patsy’s ear:
“She’s not involved.”
Patsy whips her head around. I nod to the screen. She looks up.
“He wanted to watch his own movie,” I say. “He wanted us to know he’s a star.”
Patsy releases the woman’s arm, watches her scurry off, cursing over her shoulder. Onlookers fade into the larger crowd.
Dennis comes back.
“The kid’s clean,” he says.
“I thought he might be,” I say.
Chapter 15
Back at the station, we break into pairs and start combing over the surveillance footage. Randy pairs me with Pete. I let myself believe this is at Pete’s request.
We sit side by side in front of a flat-screen monitor, looking for a man who stands in one place while talking into his phone. We’ve cut the footage down to the time of the Sniper’s call: between 12:45 and 1:00 p.m.
Pete and I have been assigned to the outdoor seating area, a small island of red folding tables and chairs accented with outsize flower pots. I’ve always wondered why anyone would sit there, walled in by traffic on one side and bodies on the other, prey to the advertisements looming over you and the hustlers pushing up against you. It’s like laying out a picnic blanket in the center of a battlefield.
The camera, perched on a streetlight, gives us a bird’s-eye view, but the sky is overcast, the film grainy, and it’s impossible to make people out beyond a ballpark description: thin or fat, tall or short, wearing bright or dull clothing. And even with the camera focused on a single area, there are so many people coming and going, cutting into and out of the frame, that it’s hard to know where to look.
“I think that woman in the green jacket just picked that fat guy’s pocket,” he says.
“Is the fat guy on a cell phone?” I ask.
“No.”
“Then we’re not allowed to care.”
We reach the end, hit rewind, start over.
“It’s like Where’s Waldo?” Pete says.
“Yeah, only we have no idea what Waldo looks like,” I say.
We watch the same fifteen minutes of film a dozen or more times. With each pass I focus on a new cross-section. At the northern end of the area there’s a man in a gold cape and white gloves performing what looks like made-up tai chi. People sit with their backs to him. Now and then a pedestrian stops to watch, but no one drops money in his bucket.
A little farther on, girls in bikinis work the tables, soliciting men to smear body paint on their bare stomachs. The mayor has sworn to drive them from the area. It’s forty degrees out. I can only think how much the girls must hate restaurant work.
There are at least twice as many tourists with cameras as commuters with cell phones.
“So why is it,” I ask Pete, “that I can never get away from the guy spilling his life story into a Samsung?”
Pete pushes back in his chair.
“Yeah,” he says. “This is a bust.”
“Let’s give it one more pass,” I say.
But our eyes are glazing over, our minds starting to drift. Pete turns chatty. He asks me again about Bryzinski.
“Why not just read the file?” I ask.
“I’m not much of a reader,” Pete says. “So how’d you catch him?”
I keep my eyes on the monitor.
“We set up a sting,” I say. “We tracked each of the cons Bryzinski killed back to Rikers. They’d all done recent stints. Rikers releases its prisoners at Queens Plaza. A white-and-blue bus pulls up by the pylons and spits them out.”
“You figured Bryzinski was going right to the source?”
“Had to be,” I say. “So we swapped out a busload of prisoners for a busload of undercovers.”
“Clever,” Pete says. “That your idea?”
I nod. I like that he thinks I’m clever. I start to lay it on thick.
“It was about this time last year,” I say. “The bus rolls up at a little before sunrise—early enough so the cons don’t mix with the workadays. I was parked in an unmarked car a block away. I remember there was frost on the windows. Each undercover had a tracking device in his belt buckle and a piece strapped to his ankle. We had helicopters on standby and about a thousand uniforms ready to swarm.”
“All for one guy?” Pete says.
“All for one guy.”
I let my voice trail off, wait for him to ask another question.
“So what happened?”
I tell him what I didn’t know until afterward: that Bryzinski was there waiting for the bus, leaning against a lamppost and smoking a cigarette. He picked out his inmate, flashed the prison tat on his right forearm, played sympathetic ex-con—the type who turned his life around and wants to lend a hand: How about a ride on the house? Anywhere you want to go.
What I don’t tell Pete—what I can’t tell him—is that Randy was one of the undercovers, and that Bryzinski picked him. Somehow Randy tipped his hand. Bryzinski saw right through the whole operation.
I’m about to take a shortcut to the end when Pete jolts forward in his seat, presses a finger against the monitor.
“How’d we miss him?”
“Miss who?” I ask.
He rewinds, keeps his finger glued to the spot he wants me to watch. All I see is a group of tourists in windbreakers huddled around what must be a map. But then they move on, and I see the guy Pete’s talking about. He’s seated at the last table, wearing a big straw hat and talking into a cell phone. He’s on screen for just a flash before a fresh group of pedestrians blocks our view.
“Can we get a close-up?” I ask.
Pete rewinds, hits pause, zooms in. The image is fuzzy, but we can see the man’s wearing a hat, gloves, and sunglasses. A scarf covers his face from the bridge of the nose down. We glimpse just enough skin to tell he’s white.
“It’s him,” Pete says.
I nod. It has to be.
“Damn,” I say. “I thought for sure Raggedy Ann was our guy.”
Pete throws me a blank stare. I stand up, wave for Randy to join us.
Chapter 16
Miles, decked out in surgical mask and gloves, leans over a twenty-two-year-old male cyclist who collided head-first with the scaffolding just outside the hospital’s west wing. Knocked from his bike, he landed on the jagged end of a broken beer bottle.
The young man’s wiry frame and taut muscle appear in stark contrast to his rotting teeth. A heroin addict, hooked in his early teens. The normal dose of anesthetic produced no effect—Amy had to adjust for tolerance.
Miles is distracted, cannot stop replaying his brief conversation with Mabern even as he removes shards of glass from the young man’s upper back. Later, in the break room, he finds himself alone with Amy. She’s been to a chic salon, had her shoulder-length hair sheared to just above her jawline. Ron, her assistant district attorney boyfriend, has been summoned—plus one—to dinner at Gracie Mansion. Amy bought a new dress to go with the new coif.
She turns her head first left, then right, inviting Miles to study her altered profile.
?
??You like it?” she asks.
He doesn’t. The length is too uniform, the bangs cut too straight across her forehead. From either side, it looks like she’s wearing a helmet; from the front, she looks like a Dutch schoolboy. Everything about her seems suddenly juvenile to Miles.
“It’s nice,” he lies.
“That doesn’t sound convincing.”
“I’m tired.”
In truth, he feels wide-awake. He is simply weary of talking, wishes he were alone to contemplate his next early morning excursion. He steers the conversation toward the only topic that interests him:
“Does Ron have any intel on the Night Sniper?”
“Intel?” Amy mocks. “Listen to you, Mr. Bond.”
Listen to you! She’s even taken on the cadence of a schoolgirl.
“I mean have there been any developments,” Miles says.
Amy turns serious.
“Ron’s worried,” she says. “He didn’t want me to come to work today. Our shift ends around the time this lunatic starts killing.”
“But it sounds like the police are making progress,” Miles says, fishing. “I hear they might even have a suspect.”
“That’s what they want you to believe, but Ron doesn’t have a lick of faith in the task force. No one in the DA’s office does.”
“Why is that?” he asks, trying not to sound overanxious.
“Apparently, one of the lead detectives is unstable. There’s a rumor they pulled her from a nuthouse so she could work the case. Ron says he wishes the Sniper would make his next kill in Jersey, across state lines. Then they’d have to call in the FBI.”
Nuthouse? Miles pictures Detective Mabern in a straitjacket, feels a glimmer of compassion. He thinks: There is nothing quite like the bond between adversaries.
Adversaries in circumstance, but allies in suffering.
This, he realizes, is the trouble with Amy: she has not suffered. So much of what he believed he saw in her was mere projection. Amy cannot understand the import of her work because she has never suffered herself, does not know what it is to need a reprieve, let alone permanent release. She’s a technician. Nothing more. In a few years, she and Ron will move to Westchester, commence breeding.