Robert Tanenbaum - Outrage

“You know,” McCullough added, “we’ll find out if you took that ring from her.”

“I didn’t! I bought it from Al,” Felix said, first to Brock and then turning to McCullough.

“Felix, Felix,” Brock said. “There is no Al, is there? I don’t know where you got that ring, but I’m going to find out. This has got to be weighing on you, making you feel bad. All that blood. The smell. The screams, even though you had her mouth taped. Did you tell Dolores you were going to cut her fucking head off if she screamed?”

“I didn’t say that,” Felix replied, tears springing back into his eyes.

“What did you say then?” McCullough asked.

“I didn’t say anything!”

“You killed her and raped her without saying anything?”

“Yes! I mean no,” Felix said, and buried his face in his hands. “I didn’t kill anybody.”

Detective Brock suddenly stood up so quickly that he knocked his chair over backward with a loud crash. He towered above the cowering young suspect and pointed his big finger. “Felix, I thought we were done with the lying,” he said. “You just admitted that you attacked and tried to rape a young woman this morning. You killed and raped Dolores Atkins, didn’t you?”

For a moment Felix was sure that the detective was going to hit him. He just wanted the detective to back away and quit yelling. “Okay, I killed her,” he whimpered. “I killed Dolores.”

Brock leaned forward with his knuckles on the table. “Thank you, Felix,” he said. “I’m sure that felt good to get that off your chest, too. So tell me, how did you kill her?”

“What?”

“How did you kill Dolores Atkins?” Brock asked as he picked up his chair and sat down again. “Did you use your hands? A gun? Some other sort of weapon?”

Felix hesitated. He thought it might be a trick question, the sort his dad would try to catch him in to justify a beating. But the only thing that made sense was the same answer as it had been for the other woman. “A knife? Was it a knife?”

Brock tapped his notepad with his pencil. “You have to tell me, Felix. I can’t play games with you.”

“Then yes, I killed her with a knife.”

“Was it the same knife you used in the attack on the other woman this morning?”

Felix relaxed. This was much easier. He nodded. “Yes, the same one.”

“Where’s the knife, Felix? Did you hide it somewhere?”

Suddenly Felix had an idea. The walls of the interview room were closing in on him. If he could just get out of the precinct house, he’d be able to think more clearly. “I can take you there. I can show you.”

Brock looked at his partner and stood up. “Then what are we waiting for?” he said.

Ahmed Kadyrov twitched and scratched at his arms as he walked along Watson Avenue. He was badly in need of a fix and had come to the right place even if it was still early in the morning. The avenue, which cut through the notorious Soundview neighborhood, was the biggest open-air drug market in the Bronx.

However, he wasn’t just going to buy whatever meth one of the losers on the street was offering out of his pants pockets, cut with God knew what shit. He was heading to the apartment of a dealer one step up from the streets who sold a better product, if you were willing to pay for it. And Kadyrov was willing and able.

He felt the left side of his face-the swelling had gone down overnight but it was still tender and he had a nasty purple bruise. He’d slipped up with that bitch over near Mullayly Park. Distracted by the guy with the dog and then getting the arch of his foot stomped, he hadn’t seen the elbow coming and it had rattled him pretty good. Stunned and panicked, he’d been lucky to get away and catch a subway into Manhattan and over to Brooklyn while he gathered his wits.

It had taken the last of his meth, which he shot up in a stall of a public bathroom along the Coney Island boardwalk, to feel right again. Wish I’d cut the bitch, he thought. But the next woman, a pretty Hispanic girl who’d fallen for his offer to help her move a box into her Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment, had paid the price. She’d apparently just cashed a paycheck, too, because her purse had more than two hundred dollars in it.

Although his eagerness to “help” worked with the Hispanic girl, Kadyrov had been finding it more difficult to lure young women into letting him into their confidences and apartments. Thanks to the meth he was losing both his looks and his charm.

Since the previous July, when he’d taken the violence to a whole new level- What was her name? Oh yeah, sweet Olivia — his life had been going downhill. He’d been arrested for an aborted snatch-and-go robbery of a Jewish diamond merchant in the subway that ended when the man’s two huge bodyguards caught him before he could get away. Along with a beating from the merchant’s men, he’d spent six months in the Tombs.

It could have been worse. In his struggle with the bodyguards, he’d managed to get rid of his switchblade by tossing it under the subway platform. Getting caught with it might have prompted some ambitious detective to try connecting him with two recent knife murders near Columbia University. But instead, he just copped a plea to two misdemeanors, petty larceny, and possession of stolen property, and got a half year in lockup.

Forced to go cold turkey in jail, once he got out he jumped back into the drug scene. Crank made him the king of the world. When he was powering along on methamphetamine, he could stay up for days, fantasizing about all the great things he would accomplish, making grandiose plans. His self-confidence and self-esteem-neither of which existed without meth-soared; he believed that men envied him and women wanted him, and in the early days, some of them did. He was a sex machine, and his mind worked at a thousand miles an hour, displaying what he considered to be a dazzling wit and impressive intelligence, especially compared to those around him.

Crank also seemed to give him almost superhuman strength and alertness. Without it, he was depressed and just wanted to sleep all the time. He didn’t like what he saw in the mirror. Why in the hell would he want to give up meth?

When he got out in March, Kadyrov started shooting up again with a vengeance. However, the more he used, the more he needed, and the more he needed, the more he changed.

His formerly olive complexion turned sallow and his skin had a dry scaly look to it-he’d even taken to wearing a long-sleeved sweatshirt to cover the scabs from his constant scratching. He was having problems with his gums bleeding and had lost a bottom front tooth when it just fell out one morning. And his hair, which he’d once taken such pride in, was thinning and had lost its luster.

Kadyrov considered his large brown eyes one of his chief physical assets. Only now, bloodshot and yellowed by jaundice, they burned with a sort of crazed intensity-at least when he was high-and constantly darted around, as if he expected an attack from any side.

The more significant changes, however, had been psychological, although he failed to recognize them. Speed still made him feel like he was on top of the world, but he was also more irritable and aggressive. Paranoia was a way of life. The mere sight of a cop car made him jumpy, and he suspected everyone of plotting against him. Thus he stayed increasingly to himself, except when preying on others or buying drugs.

As his physical appearance deteriorated so did the pride he once took in how he dressed, even if it had been for the purpose of luring his victims. He’d returned to his basement apartment in the South Bronx from jail only to find that his landlord had tossed all of his belongings out on the sidewalk and rented the room to someone else. That left him with the clothes he walked out of jail wearing, plus the tattered gray hooded sweatshirt he’d dug out of a Dumpster.