Carter & Lovecraft
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
CARTER & LOVECRAFT.
Copyright © 2015 by St. Martin’s Press, LLC. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-06089-1 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-6665-2 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781466866652
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First Edition: October 2015
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CONTENTS
Chapter 2:
T
HE
D
OOM
T
HAT
C
AME
TO
S
UYDAM
Chapter 3:
F
ACTS
C
ONCERNING
THE
L
ATE
A
LFRED
H
ILL
Chapter 6:
T
HE
D
REAMS
IN
THE
B
OOK
H
OUSE
Chapter 8:
T
HE
H
ORROR
IN
THE
P
ARKING
L
OT
Chapter 9:
T
HE
C
RIME
OF
THE
C
ENTURY
Chapter 10:
T
HE
S
ORCERY
OF
S
TATISTICS
Chapter 11:
T
HE
T
ERRIBLE
Y
OUNG
M
AN
Chapter 15:
A R
EMINISCENCE
OF
B
ERTRAND
R
USSELL
Chapter 17:
T
HE
P
ISTOL
IN
THE
H
OUSE
Chapter 18:
T
HE
S
HADOW
OVER
P
ROVIDENCE
Chapter 23:
T
HE
W
HISPERER
IN
D
ARKNESS
Chapter 25:
T
HE
T
HING
AND
THE
D
OORSTEP
Chapter 28:
T
HE
H
UNTED
IN
THE
D
ARK
Epilogue:
T
HE
S
TRANGE
H
IGH
H
OUSE
IN
THE
M
IST
In memory of my father, Noel Howard, 1923–2014.
A better man than I shall ever be, but that’s no reason not to keep trying.
Crying and laughing, Charlie put his S&W Model 5946 between his teeth, squeezed the trigger, and excused himself from life.
Carter watched him drop, unable to comprehend what he was seeing, unable to take in that his friend had just killed himself for no reason. No reason at all.
But there had to be a reason. There’s
always
a reason. This was something to do with Suydam. This was Suydam’s fault.
Carter turned to where Suydam sat propped against the wall, sitting in a pool of his own blood and piss, but there would be no answers coming from him. His eyes were open, and he was dead. He was smiling.
When the scene came back to Carter again and again over the following months, he would always remember the
clack
of the pistol’s aluminum frame against Charlie’s teeth, the smell of blood, and the smile on dead Suydam’s face. It wasn’t a malevolent smile, that was the worst of it. It wasn’t cunning, or triumphant. It was happy. Suydam was happy Charlie had gutshot him, happy that he was dying, maybe even happy that Charlie had seen the joke, too, and followed him into darkness, a 9mm bullet as his invitation.
The kid was crying in the other room where Carter had left him, hopeless little jerking, mechanical sobs of a terror that had gone on too long. Carter looked at the bodies for a moment longer, holstered his Glock 19, and went to the boy, to stay with him until the backup arrived.
* * *
It was going to be a great day. They just knew it. It was going to be one of those Hollywood cop days when the clues line up and they’d just follow them straight to the perp. And what a perp. What an arrest it would be.
The United States had a disproportionately high number of serial killings compared to other developed countries, a result of wide spaces, ease of procuring weapons, and—just maybe—it looking so damn cool on TV and in the movies. Want your fifteen minutes? Here’s how you do it, sport. Just be sure to score at least five victims. You’re not a real serial killer unless you’ve got at least five kills, just like a World War I fighter ace. Five’s the trick, sport.
Not all at once, either. That makes you a mass killer, not a serial killer, and mass killers are just douches. Those Columbine kids? That dickwad in Norway? Fuck ’em. Delayed gratification is the mark of the intelligent mind. That’s how you get into the forensic pathology books. That’s how you get a movie made about you. Mass killers, the movie gets made about the
victims
. Fuck that. Mass killers are just children who want all the candy
now
. A serial killer is a spider in a web, see? Now
that’s
juice.
Despite which, there still aren’t enough serial killers to go around, and the FBI tends to run down the most high profile, both because serials often break federal laws along the way and because they’re the Feds. Simple as that. Even a city as large as New York doesn’t get many serial killers, but that’s largely because the higher the population density, the tougher it is to get away with a string of killings. Too many eyes, too many ears.
This one had been getting away with it somehow, though, and that made him special. He took children, always male, always between the ages of six and eleven, and chose targets purely on the basis of opportunity, according to the FBI profile. Opportunity meant that kids from poorer families, larger families that just couldn’t keep an eye on all their children, tended to be targeted. But a middle-class white-bread kid from Greenwich Village was taken, too. So, the profiler concluded, class and race were unimportant to the killer. Only gender and age.
Seven abductions over a period of fifteen months, and four bodies recovered. The CSU reports turned up little of use apart from a
modus operandi
. None of the boys had suffered sexual assault, but all had suffered amateur surgery that had ultimately resulted in their deaths. All the surgery was to the brain, and to the eyes. The techniques used showed no training whatsoever, and only the slightest understanding of the aims of brain surgery. Sections of skull were removed without reference to the structure of the plates, simply cut and torn away to reach areas of the parietal and occipital lobes. No attempt to preserve the meninges layers across the surface of the brain had been made; the perp clearly had no interest in preserving the victims’ lives post-operation.
Tox screens showed traces of Rohypnol and ethanol, presumably used as a makeshift anesthetic, but also stronger traces of amphetamines. The conclusion was that the surgery was carried out while the victim was drugged and incapacitated and, once complete, the victim was brought to a high state of awareness. Cops who had seen a lot read the reports and were silent, the kind of heavy silence made by a little bit more of a human soul dying.
The LDC had been very clear that he did not want this son of a bitch to get a name. He was not to be tagged with some cool-sounding title that the press would get ahold of and, somewhere down the line, use as the title of a best seller.
Within half an hour, the detective-investigators were quietly calling the unknown subject “The Child-Catcher.”
* * *
The Child-Catcher sucked as a surgeon, but he was doing all right for himself as killer. The abductions occurred all over the city and its suburbs, and the body dumps found so far were spread out. Analysis showed no pattern, which made the detectives think the unsub himself was analyzing possible abduction and dump sites before using them. There was
always
a pattern. Even attempts to leave no pattern left a pattern of their own. This was different; there really was nothing. All the analysis could say was that the killer was based in New York, probably. The detectives nodded slowly; they’d kind of figured that themselves.
All they could do was hope for the Child-Catcher to make a mistake, careful though he’d been up till then. Historically, all serial killers get sloppy. While their MOs might evolve, repeated success made them overconfident. Some psychologists were of the opinion that this was because they wanted to be caught, but the practical nature of the police made them think it was just likely to be human nature, the desire to do just enough and no more.
For the first crime, the unsub would pull out all the stops, cover all the bases, dot every “i.” It would be difficult and nitpicking, but they didn’t want to be caught, so they would go to any trouble. Then, if they got away with it, next time they might think—even if only subconsciously—
I didn’t need to do that one thing on the list. That didn’t make any difference.
So they skip it, and they get away with it again. With every iteration, they shave away a little bit of security, until they shave that bit too much and let the hounds have a sniff of them. Then it’s all over, even if not straightaway. The fuse is lit, though; they’re as good as apprehended.