A dribble of beer was running down Cardozo’s cheek, and he caught it with a paper napkin before it could get under his collar. “You’re a brave journalist to throw beer at an armed man.”
“Fuck you, Cardozo.”
“Fuck you,
Vince.
Please.
Amigos
.” Cardozo lifted the empty beer mug and signaled the bartender for a refill.
The refill came and Rad Rheinhardt sat mute and withdrawn, sunk so deep in whatever he was feeling that he seemed to have lost his way in it. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet and under control.
“I’ve never denied that episode. My employer knows it. My wife knows it. The readers of every liberal-left rag in this town know it. And when they’re old enough, my little girl, Angelica, and my little boy, Scott, will know it. Yes, six years ago I was an addict. And yes, six years ago when I was an immature idiot, I supported left-wing causes and agitated for U.S. withdrawal from Central America and the Middle East. And yes, six years ago I was busted at the Disneyland Holiday Inn when I bought a half kilo of smack from an undercover agent. I’m not proud of it. I’m not proud that I almost destroyed the only mind and body I’ll ever own, I’m not proud that I advocated the destruction of the greatest country on earth—but I am proud of my recovery. And I’m proud of the example I set for others who are as needy and lost now as I was then. Because there are millions of them, and dope is the number-one problem facing this nation today, and with the grace of God and with the help of people far more understanding and forgiving than you’ll ever know how to be, I fought dope and I proved dope can be licked and I’m back.”
Sharks, Cardozo was reminded, had the biggest mouths and the smallest brains in the ocean. “All I can say, Rad, is welcome home, fuck dope, and God bless America.”
“You’re a real bastard.”
“I’m glad that’s clear, because remember, Rad, I’m in your league. That’s why I’m confident we’ll have a successful partnership.”
“A
what
ship?”
“I want the letter.”
“And if I don’t turn it over to you?”
“More people are going to get killed.”
“More people getting killed is a given of this situation.”
“You have an interesting slant on this. It’s a given that more people are going to get killed, but hey, in the meantime Rad Rheinhardt has a page-one running exclusive with a nut who enjoys getting his blow jobs from two-minute-old corpses.”
Rad Rheinhardt jerked forward an inch into complete immobility. He wasn’t even breathing, and Cardozo could feel his attention focused down to a very small, burning point, every pore in him open to receive.
“I want an exclusive on the forensic,” Rad Rheinhardt said.
“Fine, so long as he doesn’t share his letters with anyone but you. In exchange I want those letters physically in my possession the minute after they are physically in yours. Until I’ve had my look nobody else sees them, nobody else knows about them, nobody prints them. The originals stay with me. When I’m ready, you get all the copies you can eat. Till I give you your copies your lip stays zipped. I have the right to censor material that could prejudice the investigation, and you will respect this right when I invoke it.”
“Deal.” Rad Rheinhardt reached into his pocket and handed Cardozo a sheet of paper with bits of newsprint taped to it.
“Please, Rad, the next one—don’t touch it, except at the lower left-hand corner. And put it in plastic. Is there an envelope?”
Monday, May 13
“Z
IP CODE ONE OH THREE ONE FOUR
,” Ellie Siegel said, “is Fairview Avenue on Staten Island. The latest the Society Sam letter could have been mailed and still made it to the
Trib
Saturday morning is three
P.M
. last Thursday.”
Through the half-open door behind her, sounds suddenly surged in from next door: jangling phones and hunt-and-peck typing and the blare of TV newszak. Greg Monteleone got up and kicked the door shut.
“Why would anyone kill someone in Manhattan,” Sam Richards said, “and go to Staten Island to mail the note?”
“No one would go to Staten Island just to mail a note,” Greg Monteleone said.
“Maybe he lives on Staten Island,” Carl Malloy said.
Cardozo stared at the blackboard where he had block-printed the message from Society Sam. “Delancey lives in Manhattan.”
“Why does it have to be Delancey?” Monteleone folded his arms across his kiwi-green shirt. “For one thing, we know his movements last Thursday, and he wasn’t day-tripping on the Staten Island ferry.”
“Says who?” Malloy said. “I picked him up just before noon, at Archibald’s. He could have gone out to Staten Island in the morning. He could have gone out the day before.”
Cardozo sat tapping his ballpoint against the edge of the desk. “Plus—Dan Hippolito says the coring knife could have done some of the cuts on Oona.”
Monteleone turned. Amazement brushed his face. “Am I hearing you right? Delancey’s going to use a coring knife for s
ome
of the cuts? And what about the others? He takes along a grapefruit knife? A pizza slicer?”
“Dan didn’t rule out the other cuts being done with the same blade.” Cardozo shrugged. “He just said there was no way of being positive.”
THE NARROW STAIRWAY
in the converted town house gleamed with lovingly maintained woodwork, and glowing brass rods held the carpet tight to the treads. The man who opened the door on the second-story landing had ash-colored hair and a clean-shaven face with a narrow nose and an almost generous mouth.
“Vince,” he said. “Good to see you. Come on in.” Dr. Martin Wilkes spoke with an educated, slightly pampered Eastern Establishment voice that went with his comfortable WASP looks. He stood aside and Cardozo stepped into the office.
It was a cozy space, with cherry-wood paneling and deep leather armchairs and an enormous wood desk with thick, solid legs.
“How have you been feeling?”
“It’s not about me, Marty.” Cardozo handed him the report on Oona Aldrich. “This time the Department’s paying you.”
Last time Marty Wilkes had treated Cardozo for depression after his wife’s death, and Cardozo’s insurance had paid. During the course of the therapy, Cardozo had developed a distanced but genuine friendliness with his therapist.
Wilkes gestured Cardozo to take one of the two armchairs. Cardozo chose the chair that allowed him to see the window, with its view of sky glowing down on a neatly scrubbed row of Greenwich Village town houses. Wilkes sat in the other chair and read through the report.
“Two questions,” Cardozo said. “Is Oona’s murder a random hit, or could Delancey have done it? And what does the letter mean?”
“Vince, I’m not a clairvoyant.”
“You were damned good at reading my tea leaves. I know you have gut feelings and I want them. I know you have a few wild guesses and I want them too.”
Wilkes sat tapping the sheets of the report together.
“Can we start with the letter? Whoever sent it, the killer or a prankster, whether they’re sincere or deceptive, the letter still reveals the sender. And what I see in it is tremendous hatred of the rich, of rich
women.
”
Wilkes took a moment to study the photographs that had been paper-clipped to the autopsy.
“I see the same rage in the defacement of the corpse. I see it in the newspaper clipping left at the scene.”
“You’re assuming the killer left the clipping.”
“You told me to make assumptions, right? Either there’s one mind behind the killing and the clipping and the letter—or we’re dealing with two minds that just coincidentally share a mindset. Coincidence isn’t impossible, but for the moment I’m making the simpler assumption: one and the same mind behind the killing and the letter. Which brings us to the signature he’s chosen—Society Sam.” Wilkes glanced at Cardozo and glumly shook his head. “He identifies with Son of Sam. Which is very bad news for us.”
“Why?”
“Because Son of Sam was a serial killer, and most of your copycats are serial, and they’re just as wacko as the cats they’re copying. Not that we’re dealing here with an exact copycat. But he obviously feels he’s carrying on Sam’s work. Working in Sam’s tradition. It’s not unusual. A certain type of sociopathic killer models himself on established, well-known serial killers. He usually has very low self-esteem.”
Fuck this bastard’s low self-esteem,
Cardozo thought.
He’s earned it.
“Does he have to be a serial killer? Couldn’t this be a one-shot?”
“Sure, you get one-shot copycats—but they’re usually motivated, trying to disguise a murder as the work of a wacko. In which case your job is easy. Who wanted Oona Aldrich dead? That’s your killer. But to be honest, Vince, my gut feeling is—the mind that produced the killing produced the letter, and we’re looking at a worst-possible-case scenario: This is the first in a series of killings.”
Cardozo hoped he hadn’t heard correctly. But he met Marty Wilkes’s sorrowful gaze and he realized he’d heard exactly right; and it gave him just a little bit of a sick feeling.
“But there’s a light at the end of our tunnel,” Marty Wilkes said. “The Behavioral Sciences Unit of the FBI maintains a national register of serial killings. It lists data on every known serial killing committed in the United States in the last fifty years, and I can access it from that terminal.”
Wilkes nodded toward his desk, where a PC terminal sat, its screen glowing with amber print.
Cardozo stared at the wall where Wilkes had hung a diploma, dated nineteen years-ago, from Harvard Medical School. “What about the candle? Is it his?”
“I’ll make a pragmatic rather than a psychiatric inference: I can’t imagine anyone else bringing a candle into a changing room. Which doesn’t prove a thing. If there are more murders and more candles, we’ll know for sure that the candles are his and we’ll know he’s sending us a message.”
“And the message is—”
“The deep message, the private message, is in his own language, and he hasn’t given us the dictionary yet. The surface message is that he’s Catholic.”
“How does a candle make him Catholic?”
“Statistical inference. There’ve been instances of Catholic serial killers lighting votive candles at the murder scenes. Very few Protestants. It’s not surprising. Catholic liturgy and practice make much greater use of candles than Protestant denominations do.”
“Couldn’t he be Jewish?”
“Another statistical inference. Except for David Berkowitz Son of Sam, there are very few Jewish serial killers. And he was adopted.”
Marty Wilkes stared across the space that separated them, and Cardozo was suddenly aware of something pale and heatless about the doctor’s gaze. It seemed to him that Wilkes didn’t blink.
“Tell me about the girl that may have been with him,” Cardozo said.
“The black girl the witnesses reported seeing?” Wilkes shook his head. “I’d doubt she’s involved. Again, the reasoning is statistical. You very rarely see women as accomplices in serial killings. Offhand, I can’t think of any except Carol Fugate in Nebraska, and Myra Hindley, in Britain.”
Cardozo was thinking of the utter fragility of the membrane that separates daily life from free fall. “How does the killer select his victim?”
Wilkes sighed. “We don’t know yet what elements the killer is selecting out. It’s almost certainly her social standing. But it could be more—some aspect of her appearance, her speech, her behavior. We need more input—more ‘words in the dictionary.’”
“You mean another killing.”
Wilkes nodded. “One’s not enough to get a fix on these guys.”
“Care to predict when he’ll hit again?”
“By and large, serial killers show two classic patterns, and they tie in with the hormonal cycle. The mature male produces hormones in cycles that are roughly monthly—like the female’s menstrual cycle. The cycles have a collective peak point and a collective low point. There’s the max pattern, where he kills at the peak. Then there’s the minimax pattern; he kills at the low point too. In some killers the act of killing seems to accelerate the hormonal cycle, and the time between peaks or nadirs shrinks.”
“So if there’s another killing a month after the first—”
“He’s on the max cycle. And if the next killing is a half month after the first, he’s on a minimax cycle. We won’t know that till we see when he strikes next.”
“And when might that be?”
“If I were a real pessimist, I’d give him till, oh, till next Monday.”
HAPPY HOUR BEGAN, APPARENTLY
, at four, and at no time since had there been fewer than three black limousines double-parked with motors idling in the street outside Archibald’s.
Carl Malloy stood across the street, watching. On the sidewalk well-dressed women were quietly picketing in two separate circles,
NO FREEDOM FOR KILLERS
one of the signs urged,
FAIR PLAY FOR ALL
another sign answered.
A bored-looking cop stood between the two groups, keeping them apart.
Two gray-haired women came out of the restaurant and chatted their ambling way across the avenue. A TV newswoman and a man with a minicam came running after them. Malloy heard the newswoman ask where they stood on the controversy concerning the convict cook at Archibald’s.
“I think we should learn, as a society, to forgive,” one of the gray-haired women said.
“Parole hearings should be open,” the other gray-haired woman said. “Victims’ relatives should have the right to offer their input.”
“Do you have any second thoughts about patronizing Archibald’s?” the newswoman asked.
The gray-haired women looked at each other and began laughing. “Heavens no, we feel lucky to get a table!”
At ten after six the kitchen door on Seventy-fourth swung open, and Jim Delancey came out.
Malloy crossed Lexington and followed.
Delancey headed east toward Third Avenue.
The TV newswoman saw him and dashed after him. The man shouldering the minicam tried to block his way.
Malloy could see Delancey gesturing
no
over and over, refusing to be interviewed. Finally he pushed the man with the mini-cam to one side and strode past.