Prey (24 page)

The interview room fell silent. Winter could hear breathing, and air being pushed through the vents, but they were the only sounds. On the other side of the walls thousands of prisoners were going about their day-to-day business, and thousands of guards were keeping an eye on them, but it was like they didn’t exist. There was a tickle of panic in his stomach. The idea that he’d missed something significant was running around inside his head.

‘Don’t play games,’ said Mendoza from the next seat.

McCarthy ignored her. He was staring across the table at Winter, his eyes cold and unforgiving. The grin had disappeared and for the first time since they got here, Winter could believe that he was looking at someone who was capable of hacking someone to pieces just for the fun of it.

He’d seen this sort of transformation before. Highly organised serial killers were masters at hiding in plain sight. They created personas to disappear behind, friendly non-threatening ah-shucks disguises that were designed to disarm. And the thing was, it worked. John Wayne Gacy used to dress as a clown for fundraisers, parades and parties. None of his friends or neighbours had any idea that he’d murdered more than thirty people. And Winter knew how charming his own father could be. He’d seen this side of his personality whenever they were out in public. Albert Winter had always been quick with a smile and a joke. If you’d got into a tight spot he would have been more than happy to help you out.

And if you were a young woman who fitted his victim profile he’d have been more than happy to take you into a forest under a killer’s moon and hunt you down with a high-power rifle.

That was the thing with these disguises. Scratch hard enough at that veneer and the killer’s true nature would eventually surface. Like now. On the other side of the table, McCarthy smiled again.

‘Okay, here’s how I see things. I’ve got something you want, you’ve got something I want. I need assurances that I’m not going to be moved out of protective custody. And I need access to any books I want from the library. No waiting list. No vetting.’

‘Why do you care?’ asked Mendoza. ‘If I was in your shoes, being moved into the general population and ending up stabbed would be a blessing. As for the books? Why would you want to read about a life you’re never going to see again?’

He shook his head. ‘But you’re not me. You see, I’m a hopeful kind of guy. My glass is always half full.’

‘Even in here. I don’t think so.’

‘You’ve got a deal,’ Winter told him. Mendoza glared at him, no doubt wondering what the hell he was up to now. He ignored the dirty look and added, ‘You tell us what we want to know and you get to read all the airport thrillers and romances you want. That works for me.’

‘How can I trust you?’

‘That strikes me as incredibly cynical, particularly coming from someone who claims their glass is half full.’

McCarthy said nothing.

‘Okay, how about this? The idea of you rotting away in a cell for the next fifty years appeals to me more than the idea of you getting shanked in a shower.’

‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’

‘As a heart attack.’

McCarthy looked at him over the table, sussing him out, weighing up his options. ‘You think I’m sick in the head, well, I’m telling you this for nothing, I’ve got nothing on Maddie. That girl is a whole new brand of crazy.’

‘All well and good, Ryan, but we need specifics.’

‘Earlier you were talking about how Maddie and me were dancing together in that chat room. You wanted to know who was leading the dance, right?’

Winter nodded for him to go on.

‘You were right. It was Maddie. She initiated our first conversation, and pretty much led things from there.’

Mendoza laughed. ‘Of course he’s going to say that. He’s angling for a reduction in his sentence on the grounds of diminished responsibility.’ She leant across the table and waited for McCarthy to meet her gaze. ‘It’s not going to work. You’re going down for the rest of your miserable life.’

‘Is that what’s going on here?’ Winter asked. ‘Are you really trying to pull the diminished responsibility card? Are you trying to play me, Ryan?’

McCarthy shrugged. ‘I am not trying to play you. Why would I do that?’

Winter leant forward, edging towards McCarthy’s personal space. He heard Mendoza shift in the seat beside him. ‘Okay, I’m listening.’

‘It was Maddie who suggested we meet. I didn’t want to at first, but she can be very persuasive. So we met up in a bar and hit it off straightaway. She really got me. Got me in a way nobody ever had before?’

‘No she didn’t.’

McCarthy went to fold his arms and the handcuffs rattled tight. The spark of rage that flashed in his eyes was there and gone in seconds. He leant forward, moving towards Winter, and put his hands back on the table. ‘So you say.’

‘Let me guess how it went down. You both loved the same movies, the same music, the same TV shows. Right?’

McCarthy stared across the table, eyes narrowed. His small pink tongue snaked out and moistened his lips.

‘She was mirroring you, Ryan. You’d tell her that you loved
The Sopranos
, and she’d come back telling you that was her favourite series too. So she takes that on board and a little while later she tells you that one of her favourite movies was
The Godfather
, just slides it into the conversation real casual. No bite there, so she tells you that she loved
Goodfellas
too, and you’re all,
Oh my god that’s my favourite movie in the whole universe.
Now chances are she hated the film, but that doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you loved it, and you think that she loves it. So what’s your favourite movie?’

‘It’s not
Goodfellas
, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

‘No it’s not. It’s either
The Usual Suspects
or
The Shawshank Redemption
.’ Winter was watching McCarthy closely. ‘
The Shawshank Redemption
it is then. But that’s only just moved up to the number-one spot, hasn’t it? For obvious reasons.’

McCarthy scowled. His lips were pressed hard together, turning them into two narrow strips. ‘What me and Maddie had was special. I don’t care what you say.’

Winter shook his head. ‘You were in love with her, weren’t you?’

McCarthy said nothing.

‘Oh this is priceless. She really got you good, didn’t she?’

McCarthy’s cheeks turned red and he went to stand up.

‘Sit down,’ said Mendoza.

They were all staring at each other. Winter counted off thirty-three seconds before McCarthy sat back down. Mendoza let him settle, then said, ‘Help me out here, Ryan. I thought you were gay.’ When McCarthy didn’t respond she turned to Winter. ‘So what? He’s bi?’

Winter aimed his answer at McCarthy. ‘This isn’t about sexuality, it’s about power. Isn’t it, Ryan? When those men were begging for their lives I bet it felt so good, didn’t it? I bet you felt like a god. But what you had with Amelia, that was love, wasn’t it?’ Winter shook his head. ‘Except it wasn’t. You believed that she loved you, and she let you believe that. Because she was the one who held all the power, right? It’s like you said, she was leading the dance. You might want to believe that it was the other way around, but it wasn’t. And do you want to know something else? She’s still leading it. Think about it. While you’re stuck in here, she’s out there living it up. I doubt she even thinks about you these days. That’s how much she loved you, Ryan. You know, when you get right down to it, she has as much respect for you as you had for your victims.’

‘We’re done here,’ McCarthy said.

‘Yeah, you’re right. We’re done.’ Winter did another quick
rat-a-tat-tat
on the table top, then got up and headed for the door. He banged on it hard and a couple of seconds later there was a heavy clunk as the lock released. The door swung open and the same guard as earlier was standing there filling the doorway. Mendoza went out first, but Winter didn’t follow straightaway.

‘One last thing, Ryan. Where did you and Maddie stay when you were hanging out together?’

‘My place.’

‘No you didn’t. You suggested it, but she didn’t take you up on the idea. No offense, but she’s much cleverer than you. And she’s a planner. She wouldn’t have wanted there to be anything to connect her to your life. So there’s no way she would have gone to your place where your neighbours would have seen her. Secondly, it would have put her at a psychological disadvantage. Your place, your rules. No way would she have gone for that. So try again, but this time imagine how uncomfortable I could make things if you lie.’

For a moment he was convinced that McCarthy wasn’t going to respond. He looked broken. Winter had a sudden flash of what his relationship with Amelia had been like. In his own way he’d loved her but she would have kept him at arm’s length. She would have given him enough attention to keep him interested, but not too much because she wouldn’t have wanted him getting too comfortable. She was in charge. She held the power. That was one of the big problems with love. There was no guarantee that it would be reciprocated to the level you needed. McCarthy had learned that the hard way.

‘We stayed at a hotel,’ McCarthy said softly.

‘The same one each time?’

A nod. ‘The Hyperion. It’s on the Upper East Side.’

They stepped out into the early evening sun and just stood there for a moment breathing in freedom. Winter lit a cigarette and took a drag. His exhale was part sigh, part smoke. He hated prisons. The way the walls pushed in on him made him feel claustrophobic. His father had been in prison for two decades, most of that on Death Row. Every day the same, your world defined by the walls and the bars. Hour after hour, day after day, year after year, and the only thing you have to look forward to at the end of it all is your execution. Ryan McCarthy said his glass was half full, but Winter didn’t believe that. How could it be in a place like that?

He took another drag and looked out over the water at the ghost city rising from the mist and thought about the interview with McCarthy. Then he thought about the photograph. Amelia had left it on Eugene’s body for them to find, which meant that she wanted them to head straight to Riker’s to question McCarthy. And she knew McCarthy well enough to know how he’d react and that he would eventually cave in and give them the name of the hotel.

’We need to go to the Hyperion,’ he told Mendoza.

‘Why? Amelia’s not going to be there.’

‘Agreed, but I’m betting she’s going to be somewhere close by, watching. She’s laid her trail of breadcrumbs and this is where she wants us to go next.’ Winter took a final drag and crushed the cigarette out under his boot heel. ‘Amelia is a textbook psychopath. She’s sitting right up there at the top of the psychologists’ charts. Now, the one part where her score is off those charts is the section that deals with the Machiavellian traits. Look at how she operates. With McCarthy she pulled the strings then stood back and watched. I’m betting she did the same thing with Nelson. She wasn’t hiding in the shadows on the night the Reeds were murdered, she was out there front and centre, cheering her brother on. That’s what she does. She jerks the strings and makes those puppets dance.’

‘She’s making us dance too. You realise that, don’t you?’

‘She’s trying.’

‘She’s doing more than that, Winter. Think back to that first time you saw her in the diner. She knew who you were, she chose the venue. Basically, she was running the show, even back then. She left the newspaper behind knowing you’d go charging up to Hartwood, and she left the photograph of her and Ryan because she knew we’d come here. Which brings us back to our earlier question: why you?’

Winter stared out over the city, looking for answers in the tall towers, concrete and steel. He smiled to himself as another piece of the puzzle finally dropped into place. ‘It’s all about revenge, and that’s one of the oldest stories there is. I helped catch Ryan McCarthy and she wants payback.’

‘Yeah, that makes sense. She’d invested in him and he was doing what she needed, and then he got caught. No Ryan McCarthy, no more games. So she went looking for a new game.’

Winter nodded. ‘She’s
mightily
pissed off, but open warfare isn’t her style. We’ve seen that. So she took a long, deep breath and pushed the anger down, and kept doing that until she was thinking clearly again. Then she worked out what she could do to redress everything she perceives as being wrong in her world. McCarthy is history and there’s nothing she can do about that, but she can affect the future. That’s where I come in.’

He stopped talking and looked out over the water at the misty city again. Noises filtered in from all directions. The industrialised clang and bang of the jail behind him, the distant clatter of the city in front, the screeching of some high-wheeling birds. Everything seemed dull, like the fog was acting as a muffler. The sharpest, most defined sound was the sound of Mendoza breathing less than a yard away. A light breeze was blowing in from the water, bringing an unpleasant smell that was difficult to categorise.

‘Clarity,’ he said finally. ‘That’s important to her. She doesn’t act unless she sees the board clearly. So when the anger and disappointment finally fade, what does she see?’

‘She sees that everything has gone to hell, so she starts looking around for someone to blame.’

‘Exactly. She knows that the cops are responsible for spoiling her fun, but she can’t go up against the whole of the NYPD. She needs the target to be more specific. So she does a bit more digging and my name comes up in connection with the investigation. Now she has someone she can target.’

Mendoza went quiet while she considered this. ‘It’s all about control,’ she said. ‘Or to be more precise, it’s all about the loss of control and doing whatever she needs to do to get that back. So here’s a question: how do we take control of the board?’

It was Winter’s turn to fall quiet. ‘Her overconfidence is her biggest weakness. That’s how we’re going to catch her. We’re going to follow the breadcrumbs, but we keep our eyes wide open. At some point she’s going to make a mistake. When she does we need to be ready.’

They walked back to the parking lot where they’d left the car. Mendoza went around to the driver’s side and stood there expectantly with her hand held out. ‘Key, please.’

‘But I’m a much better driver than you are.’

‘The deal was that you drove back to New York. We’re in New York, so hand over the keys, or I will shoot you.’

‘A threat is only effective if the person being threatened thinks it might be carried out.’

Mendoza unbuttoned her jacket, took out her gun and aimed at his head. ‘Give me the key.’

Winter craned his head around so he could see the side of the gun. ‘The safety’s still on.’

‘Don’t push it. Just give me the damn key, Winter.’