“We found the hotel’s Chief of Security slumped on the desk in front of his surveillance monitors. There was a small needle mark in his neck. Of course the cameras had been disabled.”
I stare into my cup.
“It should have been me,” I say.
I can’t tell if I’ve said it loud enough for Randy to hear.
“The only question that matters now is, what do we do next?” Randy says.
I stand, start to pace. I’m more alert than I’d like to be.
“We set a better trap,” I say.
“How?”
I think: Time to come all the way clean, Cheryl.
“I saw his face,” I say. “He’ll have to come for me.”
Chapter 31
He stands in front of the television wearing nothing but boxers and a T-shirt, toes gripping at the hardwood, fingernails digging into his thighs.
“Police are not releasing the name of the Night Sniper’s first surviving victim,” Allie White announces, staring into the camera with a look that seems to Miles more silly than sultry. “A spokesperson for the task force will only disclose that the woman is in stable condition. The Sniper, it seems, misfired for the first time.”
Miles stops short of kicking in the screen.
“Do you hear that, Cheryl?” he yells. “Someone in the world thinks you’re stable. You’re hiding and telling lies.”
He switches off the TV, drops onto the loveseat, lies on his side in a fetal position. He cannot say how many hours he’s gone without sleep. Fatigue is catching up with him, violently and all at once. He shuts his eyes, sees himself kneeling over Cheryl, knife in hand, blade to her throat. He feels himself wavering, withdrawing.
His eyes snap back open.
“Pathetic,” he barks. “Ridiculous.”
He speaks the words aloud, but it is his father’s voice he hears. A voice that hounds him, scolding and berating, refusing to let Miles sleep until he understands why his blade failed to break Cheryl Mabern’s skin.
Instead of dreaming, Miles remembers.
The solid-oak sticks are barely padded. His father, seventy pounds heavier than the eleven-year-old Miles, holds nothing back. Miles blocks blow after blow until his forearms are a single, aching bruise. He falls to his knees, arms curled around his head, screams for his father to stop.
The sticks hit the ground. Miles looks up, but too late: the heel of his father’s boot catches him square on the forehead. Miles comes to lying in the same open field, his father hovering above him, the lecture already under way:
“There’s no saying uncle in war. You fight or you die. You understand?”
“But I…”
“There is no YOU. There’s only the mission. And there is no failure, only death. You think a sniper is spared hand-to-hand combat? Say the enemy spots you, shells you out of your perch, surrounds you. You want to die alone, or take a few of them with you?”
From then on, the drills come nonstop. Early mornings spent in a meat locker, stabbing at a side of beef with a hunting knife, practicing thrusts and lunges, fingers locking around the handle, frozen. His father striking his bare calves with a willow branch whenever his technique faltered.
Afternoons in the baking sun, trying again and again to slip his father’s chokehold, one leg shackled to a fifty-pound dumbbell.
Evenings blindfolded in the already pitch-black woods, listening for his father’s footsteps.
All so that when the time came he wouldn’t hesitate to see his mission through.
This morning he’d hesitated. He’d allowed a lifetime of training to be undone by whatever it was he felt for Detective Cheryl Mabern. And that after she’d already duped him, made him look like a fool.
Before Miles can continue, before his ultimate rendezvous with Cheryl, he will need to regain his confidence, prove to himself that he is worthy of his mission. His father, he is certain, would agree. Miles needs to prove that he can kill at close range.
It is Amy who, early the next morning, provides him with a plan. They are sitting in the break room, playing a hand of Rummy 500, waiting for their next call. Amy does the talking.
“Why the Astrophil?” she asks. “How many hotels do you think there are in New York? Why in the great wide world did the bastard have to go and pick the one I’m supposed to get married in?”
Miles takes a card off the deck, throws it onto the pile.
“I mean, I have to cancel now,” she continues. “The place is tainted. It might as well be haunted. Ron says I’m being ridiculous. He says the fact that the woman lived is a good sign. Like God is looking down and blessing our nuptials. Now I ask you: who is being ridiculous?”
She throws down the queen of hearts, the card Miles has been waiting for. He picks it up, lays out three of a kind.
“Well?” Amy asks. “What do you think?”
He smiles to himself, the plan already forming.
“About what?” he asks.
Amy gives a rehearsed pout.
“Should we or shouldn’t we get married in a place where that psychopath almost murdered a woman?”
Miles pauses for effect.
“I don’t think it makes a bit of difference,” he says. “I don’t think it makes a bit of difference if you get married or don’t. I don’t think who the Sniper kills or doesn’t has a thing to do with you.”
Amy looks more startled than hurt.
“What are you saying?” she asks.
“I’m saying that you can’t possibly love Ron because narcissists aren’t capable of love. And he can’t possibly love you for the same reason. I just hope that someday you’ll both grow up and realize you aren’t the center of anyone’s universe but your own.”
He could go on, but she’s already running from the room, crushing tears with her palms. The stage is set for his apology.
Chapter 32
I glance at the skyline in the Cavalier’s rearview mirror. We’re surrounded by refineries, their smokestacks spewing black. We’ve timed it right, hit the late morning gap in traffic. Randy’s going about twenty above the limit. He looks anxious, both hands on the wheel. We’re on our way to meet Alfred Jarry.
“Remind me why I’m doing this,” Randy says.
“Because I’m not fit to drive.”
“You’re also not a cop.”
“I know,” I say. “We’re going to use that.”
“Use it how?”
“You’ll see.”
He voices his objections all the way upstate, but he never turns the car around.
Jarry’s driveway might be the longest part of the trip. It’s a private paved road that keeps going and going through an autumnal forest with leaves turning every color. Randy hunches over the wheel, his jaw hanging partway open.
“Jarry owns all this?” he asks.
“His father was in steel,” I say.
Randy shakes his head.
“What does this guy know about distressed souls?”
The road cuts through a meadow now. Randy takes his foot off the gas, points.
“Jarry has his own herd of deer,” he says.
The asphalt gives way to a gravel parking area with a fountain in the middle. The fountain features little cherubic figures with their mouths open and no water coming out. Behind the fountain is a château-like mansion that looks to be closing in on disrepair—missing windows on the top floor, portico columns replaced with splintering wooden beams, stone chipping all around the facade.
“Looks like Jarry’s about tapped out,” Randy says.
Besides our Cavalier, the only car in sight is a two-door Civic from the late eighties.
“Can’t be a lot of money in snapping pictures,” I say. “The guy’s ninety-four. That’s enough years to stretch any inheritance thin.”
I figure the Civic belongs to a nurse or butler, but it’s Jarry himself who answers the door. He’s smiling and spry, like he forgot to continue aging over the last twenty years.
“Yo
u’re the officers who called,” he says. “I’m sorry, I’ve already forgotten your names.”
“Detective Hall,” Randy says, extending his hand.
“And I’m Cheryl Mabern,” I say. “I’m no longer a detective. I’m here on special assignment. That’s what we wanted to talk to you about.”
He leads us into a big open room furnished with what looks like a couch and an armchair—both are covered in white sheets like the room’s about to be painted, but the sheets are covered in years’ worth of dust.
Jarry takes the armchair. Behind him there’s a fireplace with a missing mantel and flakes of plaster where the ash should be. I imagine the chimney clogged with dead birds.
“Help yourselves,” Jarry says, pointing to a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of crackers set out on a TV tray.
Randy fills two glasses.
“Now tell me,” Jarry says.
I look him over. He’s thin but not frail, his speech slow but still sharp. He’s tall, with iron-rod posture like ancient yogis you see practicing in Columbus Park. His ring of hair is jet-black, and I wonder who he dyes it for.
Randy gives me a nod like this is my show. I lay out the major detail we’ve been keeping from the press: his photos as inspiration for the Sniper’s spree. I’m half afraid he’ll keel over with the news, but for a good while he doesn’t react at all. Then:
“Those photos were part of my personal collection. They hung in this room.”
He gestures to the walls, and I see the nail holes haven’t been plastered over.
“I never meant for anyone to set eyes on them,” he says. “But in case you haven’t noticed, I’m old. When the people from the museum came calling last spring, my vanity got the better of me. I had nothing else to give them. I haven’t picked up a camera—at least not professionally—in twenty years.”
“Why not?” Randy asks. “If you don’t mind my saying, you’re a young ninety-four.”
“Simple,” Jarry said. “I lost my sight. Most of it, anyway. I can still make out shapes. Shadowy figures.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Randy says.
Jarry shuts his eyes as though to drive home the fact of his blindness. When he opens them again, he says:
“How exactly can I help?”
I don’t pull any punches.
“We want to use you as bait,” I say.
I expect him to show us the door, but instead he leans forward, smiles.
“That’s a rare opportunity,” he says. “Few people get to be of any use at the end.”
Chapter 33
He does not ring from the lobby for fear that Amy will refuse to let him in. He has a better chance, he thinks, if he appears directly at her door, brandishing the oversized bouquet of flowers he picked up at the corner deli. He waits, drifts in with a pack of adolescents returning home from school.
He has been to Amy’s apartment once before, back when it was still just her apartment, when Ron was nothing but a blind date waiting to happen. She was new to the city, had invited staff from the ER over for a cocktail housewarming party. Miles brought a bottle of amaretto and, as a joke gift, a vintage model of the game Operation.
The evening would have been wholly forgettable had the alcohol not made short work of Amy’s inhibitions. Early on, she called him “cute” in a tone he found ambiguous. Later, as guests sat cross-legged around his gift taking turns extracting fake shrapnel with tiny pliers, he felt her thigh pressing firmly against his.
Over the following weeks, he hesitated, failed time and again to act. Before he knew it, Amy morphed into a doll programmed to say just one word: Ron.
He knocks, prepares to beg his way inside, is surprised when the door simply opens. He thinks: You can take the girl out of the heartland…
He has the impression that he is looking down on her, as though she were standing in a sunken living room, but then he realizes that he has caught her unaware: she has not had time to slip on her platform shoes. For an awkward beat, she stares at him, says nothing. Her face is flushed, her eyes red around the rims. Miles cannot tell if he woke her or interrupted a fit of crying.
“I wanted to apologize,” he says, handing her the bouquet of flowers. “I haven’t been sleeping, and I’m not myself. I didn’t mean any of what I said.”
She accepts the bouquet, but her expression remains sullen.
“I think you meant every word,” she says. “It didn’t exactly seem like something you were making up on the fly.”
He hesitates, considering which way to play it, decides to go with what she most likely wants to hear:
“I was jealous,” he says. “I am jealous.”
“Jealous?”
He drops his head in mock shame.
“Can I come in?” he asks. “Can we talk?”
She looks down at the flowers in her hand, steps aside, and waves him in.
“Have a seat while I find a vase,” she says. “Would you like some tea?”
“That would be lovely,” Miles says.
The living room is just as he remembered it: a characterless box. Her attempts to lend it character—sickly-looking plants, a West African tapestry she most likely bought on St. Marks Place—have only backfired.
The world will not miss her, Miles thinks. It will merely adjust to her absence. And yet, not so long ago, you thought you were in love with her.
No, he corrects himself. I was in love with her work. That’s an easy mistake.
“I’m just waiting for the water to boil,” Amy calls from the kitchen.
Miles has no desire to draw this out, no desire to watch her suffer. He bends forward, pulls his father’s army-issue hunting knife from an ankle holster.
“Tell me,” he says, approaching the kitchen, “when do you expect Ron home?”
“Not for at least a couple of hours,” she says.
And then she turns, sees—even before she spots the blade—that it is not Miles standing there, but rather a pitiless shell in the guise of Miles, a manifestation of evil who will not spare her life no matter how hard she begs or bargains.
Chapter 34
He expends what feels like the last of his energy wrapping Amy up in a shower curtain and setting her in the tub. He is weary, would like to sleep, but he must be alert when Ron walks through the door.
He sits back down on the couch, switches on the television. His pulse quickens to see Cheryl’s face once again taking up the screen. His bullet, it seems, did not slow her down in the least. She is standing in front of what looks like a low-rent château. An off-camera reporter holds a microphone in her face.
“It’s true,” she says, “that I’m no longer a member of the NYPD, but nothing in the terms of my suspension prohibits me from entering the private sector.”
The anonymous male reporter counters with:
“But you say your work here is linked to your work on the Night Sniper Task Force. Won’t the brass at One Police Plaza see that as a conflict?”
Cheryl flashes a condescending smile.
“I’m working security,” she says. “I’m not investigating the Sniper: I’m protecting his most likely target. The NYPD should thank me.”
“I don’t understand,” the reporter says. “The Sniper has never struck outside the city.”
And he never will, Miles thinks. You’ve gone from hot to very, very cold, Cheryl.
She speaks slowly, deliberately:
“The man who lives here is, through no fault or intention of his own, the Sniper’s inspiration. His name is Alfred Jarry. He’s a world-renowned photographer, and we have reason to believe that the Sniper is choosing his victims based on a series of photos Mr. Jarry took in the late seventies and early eighties.”
Miles is standing now, his blood pumping.
“These photos,” Cheryl continues, “focus on solitary figures in the city at night. Our fear—my fear—is that once the Sniper has run out of photos, he will come for the photographer.”
“Close the cir
cle, so to speak?” the reporter says.
“Yes. Mr. Jarry is elderly, frail. He is himself a solitary figure. I don’t plan to leave his side until the Sniper is brought to justice.”
The reporter reminds his audience that they’ve heard it here first. Miles switches off the television, grins to himself.
Invitation accepted, Cheryl.
He runs a finger along the blade of his father’s knife, willing Ron to come home early.
Chapter 35
We’ve set Jarry up at his hotel of choice, assigned Kelly to stand guard. Dennis doesn’t miss the opportunity.
“Here’s your chance, Kelly,” he says. “Widow Jarry will do quite well for herself.”
Randy’s manning headquarters back in the city, running interference with Branford. That leaves Pete, Patsy, Dennis, and me to cover ten thousand feet of crumbling château. There’s no security system. There aren’t even locks on the windows. And outside there’s a perimeter of forest—an even 360 degrees of approach points to surveil.
And of course the operation is unsanctioned. No backup. No SWAT team hiding in the trees. Patsy, Dennis, Pete, Kelly, Randy: they’ve put their faith in me, gone rogue on my account. They’re unlikely knights rallying around the disgraced princess in the dilapidated castle.
Or maybe they just want to catch a killer, save some lives. Either way, they’re risking their careers.
We sit around a fold-out table in a sprawling kitchen that’s been gutted but never renovated. We’re studying a map of the mansion, a map we drew ourselves. Twelve large and mostly empty rooms on the first floor, fifteen slightly smaller rooms on the second floor. There’s an endless unfinished basement, a loftlike attic that’s been collecting cobwebs for untold decades.
“I know it’s late to ask, but you sure this will work?” Dennis asks. “I mean, breaking in, killing at close range…the setup doesn’t exactly fit his MO.”