The film was for David to ponder over, to wonder about, and, hopefully, to eventually score.
Lawrence knew he was no Spielberg, no Scorsese or Coppola, but perhaps when all was said and done, his brother might one day come to understand that he, Lawrence, had a little talent, too.
Was that too much to ask?
Chapter 76
BERGER SNAPPED OUT of his reverie when his longtime lawyer, Allen Duques, opened the door to the holding cage.
Duques, a partner in a global 100 Lexington Avenue corporate firm, handled all of his dealings. The stocky, aristocratic-looking, middle-aged lawyer looked positively lost when he spotted Berger behind the mesh. The attorney screeched a folding chair over in front of the cage’s wire and hesitated before sitting, as if reluctant to muss his immaculate blue serge suit.
“Tell me it isn’t true what the authorities are saying, Lawrence,” the preppy gray-haired attorney said, thumbing off his BlackBerry. “These killings and the Grand Central bombing—you’ve admitted your involvement? I don’t understand.”
Berger’s basset-hound jowls jiggled as he shook his head.
“I’ll try to explain in a moment, Allen, but first, did you bring it? The caviar?” Berger asked hopefully.
He’d been devouring tin after tin of Iranian Special Reserve in bed right before he’d been arrested. The thought of lighting into one last can of black gold had been girding his spirits.
“Of course, Lawrence, but unfortunately they searched my attaché when I came in. It was confiscated, I’m sorry to say. I’d say it had to do with that policeman who lost his life in the Grand Central bombing. You’ll find no friends here, I’m afraid.”
Berger immediately began to cry. In his mind, he pictured Dali’s Christ of St. John of the Cross, Jesus on the cross as seen from above in a darkened sky, hovering over a body of water.
“Lawrence, are you okay?” Duques said. “I think we should seriously consider an insanity defense. I’m quite… worried about you.”
“Can we talk about it tomorrow at the arraignment, Allen?” Berger said when he finally managed to pull himself together. “I’d really like to be alone now, please.”
Berger rolled back toward the wall after his lawyer promptly left. As he grimly perused the primitively sketched genitalia and plethora of four-letter words scratched into the plaster, he heard a sudden clapping. From somewhere beyond the closed metal door, a television was playing a sporting event. He could hear a crowd cheering, an announcer’s excited voice, more clapping and euphoria.
A sudden cold pierced the center of his chest like a bayonet. He thought about his life. What he had done to himself. What he had done to others.
He put his right thumb and index finger into his mouth like he was going to whistle. Instead, he thumbed off the cap of one of his molars, the third in on the top left, and carefully slipped out something from the hollow of it.
Up to the light, he held what looked like a small red jelly bean. It was a special gel sac with liquid inside it. It was actually a poison pill, an extremely lethal cocktail of cyanide and codeine.
It was time for his contingency plan. The one that even Carl didn’t know about.
It was over for him, Berger thought, looking at the pill. In the sanctity of his citadel, he’d imagined that he could stare society coldly in the eye and laugh. Faced with actually doing it, he knew there was no way.
He thought about how disappointed Carl would be in him. Because the plan they’d agreed on wasn’t actually over. All that had happened so far was supposed to be only phase one.
Once Berger was dead, his will would immediately be contested by his sister in Minnesota. All of his assets, including the murder slush fund he’d given Carl access to, would immediately be frozen. Carl, perhaps the only real friend he’d ever had, would be hung out to dry.
It couldn’t be helped, Berger thought, quickly putting the pill into his mouth.
Berger surprised himself. Instead of his usual waffling, he bit down and swallowed readily. He thought he might throw up again at the sudden bitterness, but he breathed slowly and carefully until he felt better and the room began to dim.
Chapter 77
EVERYONE WAS ASLEEP when I came home after midnight, and they were still snoozing when I came out of my bedroom dressed for work at the ungodly hour of five a.m.
Well, almost everyone, I thought, spotting a light coming from the living room. I went in and saw the lamp on by the empty reading chair in the corner. I was about to click it off when I heard some giggling from behind the chair.
I leaned over. It was Bridget. In her Phineas and Ferb pajamas she was sitting Indian-style on her pillow with the latest 39 Clues book open in her lap.
“Hey,” I whispered.
“Hey, Dad,” she said without looking up.
“Um, what are you doing out of bed so early?”
“Reading,” my daughter said, a tacit “duh” hanging in the air.
“Don’t you want to sit in the chair?”
“I can’t,” Bridget said, turning the page. “I have to read in secret because of Fiona. MC is sponsoring a contest to see who can read the most books by the end of the summer, and I think I’m one ahead of Fi-Fi. If she sees me reading, she’ll try to catch up. I want to lull her into a sense of complacency.”
I blinked and nodded. Of course. Even reading was competitive in a family of ten. Well, at least in a family of ten as crazy as mine.
“What do you get if you win?” I asked.
“Dinner and a movie with Mary Catherine. Just the two of us.”
Sounded good, I thought. I made a mental note to swing by the library on the way home.
“Well, carry on with your lulling,” I said as I smooched the top of her head and headed for the front door. “Good luck. I think.”
It was still dark when I climbed into the car and drove away from the house. Somewhere around the Brooklyn-Queens border, I pulled off the expressway and got some takeout from a diner. Back outside, surrounded by rumbling semis in the darkened parking lot, I checked in to the squad from my car.
There was no news, which in my high-profile case was actually bad news, since it meant Berger’s buddy, Carl Apt, was still missing. There still wasn’t sign one of Apt or of the Mercedes convertible Berger kept in a garage around the corner from his apartment.
Worst of all, there were no records of a Carl Apt in any of the city and state databases, no last-known address, no Social Security number, no driver’s license. Nada. Maybe I should start reading the 39 Clues, I thought as I restarted the Chevy’s engine, because no matter what we did, this ugly, baffling case just didn’t want to die.
I was up on the elevated expressway with the sun finally coming up over the decrepit Queens skyline on my right when I got a call. It was from Steve Makem, the desk sergeant at the Nineteenth Precinct.
“What’s up, Sarge?”
“You’re the primary on Berger, right? Well, heads-up. They just went in to take him to his arraignment and found him in the holding tank, unresponsive.”
I was having trouble absorbing what I was being told. Remembering my recent near-death driving-while-phoning experience, I lowered my cell as I pulled over onto the right-hand shoulder.
“Hit me again there, Steve,” I said.
“EMTs are inbound, but I saw him, Mike. Humpty had a great fall out of his stretcher. His face is a bright strawberry red like I’ve never seen before. I don’t know what, but something happened. Something bad.”
Chapter 78
SOMETHING BAD HAD HAPPENED, indeed, I thought, twenty siren-blaring minutes later as I burst into Berger’s holding cell in the back of the precinct.
Berger had fallen out of the bed. Also, his butt had fallen out of his sheet again, I couldn’t help but notice, to my horror.
The EMTs were long gone, replaced by the thin, birdlike female Medical Examiner I’d worked with before named Alejandra Robles.
As Alejandra went through her rou
tine, I stared down at the massive dead man. He’d had everything—education, wealth, the coolest apartment in Manhattan—and decided on this? Setting off plastic explosives? Killing children? Committing suicide? He was the most inadequate person I’d ever come across, and that was saying a lot.
The worst part of it was that it all felt almost scripted. The people who’d been killed seemed like they’d been bought for Berger’s fifteen minutes of slimy fame.
I tried not to think about what it meant, about what kind of future the human race was heading toward. But I couldn’t help it.
Alejandra knelt in front of Berger, pointing a flashlight into his mouth.
“I take it he’s having trouble saying ah,” I said.
“You take it correctly,” she said, beckoning me over. “I think it was poison. Cyanide, I’d guess by the bright red rash, but we won’t know until the toxicology.”
She held the light over his upper back teeth.
“Check this out,” she said, directing me to peer into Berger’s pie hole. “See that molar? That’s not a cavity, Mike. It’s a fake tooth. That must be where he hid the poison. Can you believe it?”
After Berger was rolled out, I called Emily Parker at her hotel from the hallway outside the precinct detective squad room upstairs.
“If you thought the pantie bomber was crazy, have a seat,” I said when she answered.
“You found Carl?” she guessed.
“Nope,” I said. “It’s Berger. He’s gone. Killed himself. He had poison in a hollowed-out tooth, a cyanide pill most likely, like a Nazi spy. How’s this for an epitaph? ‘Lawrence Berger, weird in life, weird in death, weird in the hearts of his countrymen.’ ”
“Wait. Did you say cyanide? Hold on. Let me get my notes. Crapola! He’s done it again. It’s happened before. Maggie O’Malley, a nurse dubbed the ‘Dark Angel of Bellevue,’ swallowed a cyanide pill after she was accused of some baby murders in the early nineteen twenties.”
“I need to watch more of the History Channel,” I said squeezing my temples.
Book Three
THAT’S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR
Chapter 79
A NOONTIME THREE-CAR pileup halted the traffic on the Sunrise Highway two miles west of Hampton Bays, Long Island.
Behind the wheel of the Mercedes convertible, Carl Apt watched a Suffolk County Highway Patrol cruiser drive past on the grass center berm to his left, followed by an ambulance. Frowning, he slipped on his designer aviator shades. He cranked the A/C as he pressed the button for the automatic hardtop.
Why had he pushed it? he thought, watching the cop’s bubble lights spin. He knew he should have ditched the car already.
He held his head in his hands. Christ, he was exhausted. The sun was like an ice pick in his eyes. He’d had a splitting headache since four a.m., when he’d climbed from the basement through a sidewalk grate on the 70th Street side of Berger’s building.
What he wouldn’t do for one last soak in his penthouse bath.
As he waited in the dead-stopped traffic, he glanced at the motorists around him. There were a lot of Range Rovers and Cadillac sedans. What was it Lawrence had called loud-mouthed, showy people from Long Island? LIDS. Short for Long Island Dimwits.
After a few minutes, from three cars behind him, a group of lug-nut teens with gelled hair, no shirts, and bottle tans started making some noise. A painful thump of rap music bass began to emanate from their tricked-out convertible Mustang.
“Anywhere, anywhere, woo-whooo, woo-whooo,” they sang along to The Show’s instant summer classic. A fat girl wearing a bikini top and short shorts stood in the passenger seat, threw her hands above her head, and started grinding her hips.
“Real slow, real slow, woo-whooo, woo-whooo,” her mutt friends intoned.
A bead of sweat rolled down Carl’s temple as he eyed them in his rearview. He felt like taking the Steyr AUG submachine gun from under the blanket in the foot well beside him and emptying all thirty 5.56 NATO rounds into the car. Roll out, put it to his shoulder and bear down full auto with the bullpup machine gun. Gel the ginzo driver’s hair with his own blood before blowing out the bitch’s tattooed spine, ending her pole-dancing career and having her piss in a bag for the rest of her miserable life.
Why stop there? he thought. After he raked the Mustang, he could easily kill thirty or forty more people sitting in their cars before the Gomer Long Island cops down the road figured out a response. Turn the LIE into the DOA. Sounded like a plan.
Instead, he let out a breath and popped a Percocet as the traffic started to move. After another minute, he saw a cutout in the berm and spun a U-turn.
He pulled off the southbound highway at the next exit. Strip malls began to appear, followed by box stores. He pulled into the Roanoke Plaza in Riverhead and cruised up and down the aisles of the massive parking lot.
When he found a ’90-something Buick in a Target parking lot, he squealed out of the lot. Half a mile east, he pulled back off the road into a small, dumpy-looking strip mall that had a pizza place, an optometrist, and something called Edible Arrangements. He drove around the rear of the low, decrepit building and parked the Merc beside a Dumpster.
He got out and locked up and began walking back toward the Target parking lot. Halfway there, he stopped into an Ace Hardware store and bought a set of jumper cables, a can of lighter fluid, and the largest flat-blade screwdriver he could find.
“That’ll be nineteen-ninety-nine plus shipping and handling,” the red-vested fool behind the counter said.
Carl stared at the LID without speaking.
“Just kidding,” the clerk said sheepishly as he handed him back his change.
When he got back to the Buick parked outside Target, Carl jammed the screwdriver into the slot of the window and broke it as quietly as he could. He unlatched the door and popped the hood. With the jumper cables he’d just bought, he ran a line from the positive battery node to the red coil at the back of the engine.
With the engine now powering the dash, he knelt in the open driver’s-side door and cracked the plastic steering column with the flat blade of the screwdriver. Then using the metal blade, he crossed the now-exposed terminals for the solenoid and the battery. The engine chugged for a moment and then grumbled to life.
Carl flicked glass off the seat before slipping behind the wheel and pulling out.
He drove back to the Merc, unlocked the door, and soaked the interior with the lighter fluid after he transferred his bag and the assault rifle to the Buick. He lit a book of matches. He winced as he tossed them into the beautiful, six-figure car’s front seat.
He looked around at the piece-of-crap Buick for the first time as he pulled out back toward the highway. McDonald’s soda cups everywhere. A Jets Snuggie blanket covering the rear pleather seat.
He popped another vitamin P, then thought about it and popped another. His cheeks bulged as he inhaled and let out a long, aggravated breath.
Chapter 80
CARL PULLED OFF the LIE into East Meadow, Long Island, an hour later.
He cruised the Hempstead Turnpike. Narrow streets of capes and split-levels, fast food, a driving range. His LeSabre fit right in.
It took him twenty minutes to find the address and parked across the street. There it was. Twenty-four Orchard Street. It looked like just another Long Island dump, but he knew it was actually more. He knew that many women had been killed behind its walls, that their bodies had been cut up in its garage.
He’d been thinking about doing another Brooklyn Vampire murder, or maybe the Mad Bomber, but then he’d remembered Lawrence’s library and decided on a new string of killings. Lawrence was going to be so happy when he got the news.
Carl smiled as he thought about his friend. He’d killed for his country in the Special Forces. Called in air strikes in Bosnia, shot stinking goat herders in Afghanistan from as far away as eight hundred yards. But actually killing for something he cared about was another thing entirely.
&n
bsp; Lawrence was his soulmate, his liberator, his master entire.
They’d taken into account that he would probably be captured. But instead of abandoning their efforts, Carl was going to redouble them. Their joint homage to the great murders and murderers of New York would keep occurring in bloodier and more horrifying ways during Lawrence’s incarceration and trial. It would be the topper of the longest, most audacious crime spree of all time.
All the killing so far had been just for Lawrence. It had been Carl’s pleasure. The least he could do, after all. Twelve years earlier, Lawrence had found him panhandling on Park Avenue. He’d cleaned him up and put him through City College, where he’d studied English lit, especially the classics.
He knew all about law enforcement profiling, how he was supposed to be inadequate, looking for power, for meaning in his pathetic life. What a joke! He wasn’t doing this for himself. He was a warrior, a real catalyst for history. Besides, people like Lee Harvey Oswald really had changed the world with one pull of a trigger.
But he shouldn’t get ahead of himself. First things first, he thought as he pulled out.
It was time to put a smile on his good buddy’s face.
Chapter 81
AFTER I PICKED UP EMILY AT HER HOTEL, we spent the morning interviewing members of Berger’s catering staff. A fruitless morning, as it turned out. All they knew about Berger were his odd eating habits. About Carl Apt, the waiters and cooks knew nothing at all.
We did manage to contact the Connecticut state troopers and have hidden surveillance put on Berger’s Connecticut estate. I didn’t think Apt was dumb enough to show up there, but you never knew.