The thought that the Child-Catcher had probably shed several onion skins of security since his first crime gave the detectives hope. Maybe there was already a clue out there. Maybe next time he would fuck up spectacularly and give himself up on a plate. They could only keep the net tight, scrape up every fragment of evidence from the first killings, look for the missing, and watch for anything new.
“Anything new” turned out to be the eighth abduction. Detective First Grade Charlie Hammond and his partner of two years, Detective Third Grade Dan Carter, were on the scene seven minutes after the 911 came in, only thirty seconds behind the beat car. The 76th Precinct covers Red Hook, which doesn’t have the concentrations of Hispanic citizens found elsewhere in the city. The uniformed officers were trying to get the story out of the missing boy’s mother, but their Spanish wasn’t proving equal to the job.
Charlie Hammond showed his badge and said, “
Señora, ¿cuándo fue la
última vez que vio a su hijo?
”
Carter thought her face would stay with him—the dull shock, the drained color, the flickers of rising panic as she realized her boy’s picture might end up on the evening news for all the wrong reasons. He thought her face would join the other flashes, other images that stick with every cop, but he was wrong. After what was to come, he couldn’t remember her face at all. When her son was returned to her later, he only recognized her in the way he might if he’d seen her in a picture.
She replied slowly, as if just awoken. “
El hombre del camión. De pronto agarró
a Thiago y lo tiró
por dentro.
” She said it in a near monotone, as if disbelieving her own words.
Carter’s Spanish was still at the night school stage, but he understood enough to follow the gist of it. She’d actually seen the unsub?
She’d done better.
She held out a crumpled and ragged piece of paper, a receipt she’d found in her pocket when she had needed something to write on in a hurry. And there it was, in jagged, anxious figures, traced and retraced over in her anxiety for there to be no mistake in their reading: a license plate number.
* * *
The pickup’s registered address wasn’t even a mile away. Hammond and Carter went there, leaving the uniforms with the mother, and called for backup en route.
Hammond drove. Once Carter had put in the call, it grew quiet in the car. It wasn’t just nerves or excitement, although that was there, too. There was a strong sense that something was not right. Carter could feel it, and he was damn sure Hammond could, too. There was always the chance it wasn’t the Child-Catcher, they had to allow for that. There was always the chance it was just some happy-go-lucky pedo who’d decided to try it on when the city was on high alert for a serial child abductor.
But neither of them believed it wasn’t the Child-Catcher for a second. Even if it wasn’t, it was still a serious crime, and they were more than happy to deal. But it was him. It so
was
him.
“He’s been pretty smart up to now,” said Carter. The suspect even had a name now, but they still said “he” and knew what they meant. According to the license number, his name was Martin Suydam. He had no criminal record.
Hammond said nothing, didn’t even grunt. Carter said nothing else.
They traveled without lights or sirens, hopeful of catching the unsub unawares, and Hammond slowed the car a hundred yards from the address and parked out of sight. They walked the remaining distance, talking as if they were just walking around the corner to get a sandwich and a coffee, just two guys. As they walked, they covered the angles between them, looking without appearing to look, sensitive to the sight of a dark blue pickup or a man with a seven-year-old boy with him. Always at the edge of vision. Always at the corner of the eye.
The house, when they cleared the corner, was larger than expected. It looked like it had been a hardware store at some time in the last few years, with maybe a couple of rooms to live in on the second story. Those days had gone, all the stock dispersed, and—unless the interior had seen a lot of work that left the exterior untouched—its sole current resident must have had a lot of space to call his own.
The street corner belonging to the building was occupied by an open yard behind a chain-link fence. Sitting there was the dark blue pickup. It was out in the open, its rear plate easily readable from the street, no attempt to hide or disguise it at all. Carter wondered if maybe there was something in the forensic psychology theory about serials wanting to be caught after a while. If Suydam was their man, he hadn’t just shed a layer or two of protective caution, he’d dumped the whole thing.
They still had no direct cause to enter the property, however, although they knew that even as they moved out of the redbrick building’s arcs of vision, a warrant was being prepared. They would just have to wait until it arrived with a whole posse of other officers, and probably a SWAT team. Of course, while all that was going on, Suydam could be quietly peeling Thiago Mata’s skull like a hardboiled egg.
Carter and Hammond reached a side door on the alley. The same thoughts were going through both their minds, along with the same misgivings.
“I thought I heard a kid cry out just then,” said Hammond, but he said it without emphasis. There had been no cry. “Did you hear it?”
Carter looked at Charlie Hammond, then across the street. The place was quiet. He breathed out heavily through his nose. He didn’t want to leave the kid alone with Suydam a second longer than he had to, but if they fucked this up, the Child-Catcher might walk.
He drew breath to speak.
The shrill squeal of a young child in pain came to them through the door.
* * *
Hammond led in. There was no sign the door was reinforced, and there was no time to go around to another door in any case. He quickly and quietly tried the handle, but it was locked.
“Knock, knock,” he said under his breath, landed a flat-footed kick against the lock that tore the striking plate clear out of the frame, and followed through immediately, allowing himself to be skylined against the daylight only for a second. Carter was next, moving across and by, into the shadows of the other side of the door.
Their guess that the place was a former store was borne out by the open floor plan, tall shelves still in place, and an exposed area of concrete where a counter had once stood. Sunlight streamed through narrow horizontal slits left unpainted at the top of the blacked-out windows. To the left, a wide staircase angled up through a left-hand turn to the second story. They heard movement up there, feet on bare boards, and a child’s subdued sobbing.
There was little cover on the first floor, but they should still have cleared it before moving on. Hammond wasn’t for waiting, though; their eyes had barely adjusted to the darker interior before he was moving to the foot of the stairs. There were a few crates toward the windows at the far end that it was possible somebody might hide behind. Hammond angled his head at them for a second, as if that was a good enough search. It was a fair reading of the ground that there would be no ambush from that direction, but it bothered Carter then and later that they didn’t do it by the book. No reason—there was nobody hiding there—but it bothered him. One of those little things that nags irrationally. Maybe if they’d done it properly, things would have turned out differently.
With Carter covering him, Hammond was first up the stairs. He moved quietly, but not silently; anyone upstairs would have heard him if they were listening, and after the kicking in of the door, how could they not be listening? Carter was a few steps behind him, so he saw Suydam second.
Hammond called, “NYPD! Drop your weapon!” and Carter knew right then that it was all going to turn to shit, though he didn’t truly know how. Not really. He expected maybe Hammond to get hit, or Suydam to be using the Mata boy as a shield or maybe even have a shotgun or an automatic weapon. He was wrong about all that.
There was a beat. Carter paused on the stairs and looked back the way they had come, but they weren’t being ambushed. Suydam was running solo. Carter was debating whether to move forward or maybe not if it startled the suspect when Hammond fired.
Once. Just once.
Hammond was ex-military, and had enjoyed his time in the army. He loved his gun, and maybe his gun loved him back for all the attention he gave it. Everything he did that related to firearms he did
per doctrine
. He had told Carter enough times that when he had to fire, he would always fire at least twice.
Afterward, the single shot was another thing that would bother Carter.
Then Hammond was moving again, doctrine in place: gun braced in both hands, stop to fire, keep moving when not firing. Carter followed him up.
Suydam was down, sitting against the wall. They were on a broad landing that looked like it had once been another shop floor, a little smaller than the first since an area was walled off for offices and storage. Where the floor below had been abandoned even by its solitary tenant, however, it was plain that he spent a lot of time here.
And there it was. Right there. An actual psycho wall.
Suydam had done the thing real serial killers never do: he had mapped his madness onto the wall. In the experience of the police, serial killers were only marginally organized. They might have a reasonably detailed
modus operandi
, but then they’d erode it over time and repetition until it wasn’t worth shit. They might prepare, but only as much as they would for any hunting trip. They might keep trophies, but they tended to be small and personal, such as jewelry or a lock of hair. They might express their nature, but only as a notebook, or sometimes as paintings.
None, as far as Carter knew, not a single fucking lunatic, would actually do the Hollywood thing and make a psycho wall. They turned up in movies and TV all the time—great, intricate tapestries of psychosis in tiny handwriting on a thousand notes pinned to a wall, or written directly onto the plaster. Random pictures, usually religious, would dot it, some things would be circled, and some things would be connected to others by hand-drawn lines or lengths of string. It all looked very good on the screen, some handsome actor examining the wall by flashlight (the psycho never has working lights), zeroing in on the single thing in the whole mass of details that would set them on the trail of the killer before he could claim his final victim: the martyrdom of Saint Anthony; the pharaonic curses; Tenniel’s illustrations for the “Alice” books. Whatever.
In reality, serial killers were rarely as imaginative as screenwriters. They just wanted to kill people, and then masturbate themselves raw afterward. They had no handbook telling them that they had to be themed, had to leave clues, had to present a puzzle. In the police’s experience, these people were only special in their own minds. “Well, fuck you, buttercup, and get over yourself” was the unofficial mind-set.
Hammond was not an imaginative man. The psycho wall did not distract him for a second. Instead, he moved to where Suydam sat, blood leaking out of him in lazy pulses, and kicked a gun away. It skittered across the bare floorboards and stopped near Carter as he reached the top of the stairs. He saw it was a strange little thing: a Taurus PLY, its barrel reaching no farther than the end of the trigger guard. CSU later identified it as the smaller caliber .22 model rather than the .25. It was another thing wrong with the day. Suydam’s last line of defense was a tiny holdout pistol intended for concealed carry. It wouldn’t even take hollow points. Carter’s own backup pistol was a Ruger LCR-357, and he was content to bet his life on it. The Taurus was a dissuader, in his opinion, not a killer. It was a strange choice.
Of course, it turned out it didn’t matter at all. CSU also discovered the Taurus wasn’t even loaded.
Carter angled around the floor himself, since Hammond was staying by Suydam, but the area was obviously clear. The staircase opened into the middle of the floor, with a wooden railing guarding the well. There was nothing else in the room, no furniture, no crates, nothing. Just Carter, Hammond, Suydam, and the big end wall covered in crazy. Carter spared it a glance then.
The left end of the wall looked like the Hollywood version, all notes and pictures. The other three-quarters of the wall, however, was something else again. When Carter had been a kid, his mother had taken up a craft hobby. She would take corkboard and cover it with cloth, usually black, mount pins into it, and then spend hours running colored embroidery floss between the pins, back and forth, until the picture picked out by the pins became apparent. At the time, he’d called it lame, but that was just because of where he was in his life. He’d actually kind of liked watching the pattern form as she worked on her pin art, more than when it was finished.
The wall was the biggest piece of pin art he’d ever seen. Every pin was labeled with a small slip of paper that had been printed out, clipped, and glued up there. There was no pattern he could see in the labels. Some were locations, some were names, others were numbers, and others were even abstract nouns like “Desperation” and “Unawareness.” While he could see no pattern in them, there was clearly one in the great loom of crisscrossing lines. It wasn’t much of a pattern, to be sure. No inverted cross or pentacle for the forensic psychologists to get excited about. Just a thick, even field of colored strings, with a distinct thickening in the density of intersections running from the upper right down to about a third of the way along from the bottom-right corner on the lower edge.
“Where’s the boy?” asked Hammond.
“This”—Suydam shifted where he sat, as if trying to make himself more comfortable, and flinched slightly—“hurts more than I thought it would.” He raised the hand he’d been holding to the wound and examined it. A drop of blood fell from the dark red fingers and palm. His expression was as though he were considering an unpleasant thought rather than watching his life leak out of him.