James Patterson - Tick Tock

In the empty squad room, I found a stack of messages on my desk, left there by the night shift. I was hoping for a tip from posting the security footage and sketch on the news, but there were just fifteen crackpot confessions and two psychics offering their help.

I moved them to my circular spam file in the corner of my cubicle where they belonged, then made a few quick calls to the cops we'd posted at all the previous crime scenes.

There was no traction there, either. The killer hadn't come back. When I clicked open my e-mail, I learned that forensics had been unable to pull any latents off the stroller poor little Angela was found in. Despite our progress, it seemed we were still far out in the weeds on this one.

As I looked around the empty office, I decided to do something smart. I sat and tried to think of what Emily Parker would do. I decided that she'd take a deep breath and look at the whole thing patiently, clinically, and without frustration. Though it seemed like a pretty impossible task, I decided to give it a shot. I put on a fresh pot of coffee and came back and cleared my desk.

The first thing I did was slip on my reading glasses and go through the files that Emily had compiled for me on copycat killers. One of them stood out prominently, a copycat serial killer in New York City during the early nineties.

His name was Heriberto Seda, and he was a deranged young man from East New York, Brooklyn, who had killed three and wounded four others with homemade zip guns. Notes to the police found near the victims claimed that he was the famous San Francisco Zodiac killer from the sixties transplanted to New York. When he was finally caught, he told police that he identified with the Zodiac because he'd terrorized a city and never been caught.

"I needed attention," Seda said. "For once in my life, I felt important. I was lonely, in pain. I have no friends."

With that premise in mind, I got a fresh cup of coffee and laid out the case files for the six incidents. Four of them had been in the mode of George Metesky, the Mad Bomber. Two of them had been approximations of the Son of Sam, and the latest had copied the Brooklyn Vampire, Albert Fish.

Could our guy actually identify with all three? I wondered.

I sipped coffee and sat back in my office chair, staring up at the drop ceiling and thinking about it. It didn't seem likely. It seemed to me that although all three were violent weirdos, each was deranged in his own special way. The Mad Bomber had been a disgruntled employee of Con Edison, mostly seeming to seek revenge. The Son of Sam was more like Seda, a low-status publicity seeker who killed out of a twisted sense of empowerment, craving fame and attention. Albert Fish was more along the lines of a classic sadistic psychopath, like Ted Bundy, with no real interest in fame and who got off sexually on inflicting pain.

I lifted a pencil and twirled it between my fingers. How could one person not only seek revenge and twisted, freaky peekaboo thrills but also relish inflicting pain all at the same time?

He couldn't, I thought, as I tried to stick the pencil into the ceiling and missed. It didn't make any goddamn sense.

That's when I pulled the second-smartest move of my morning. Instead of just thinking like Emily Parker, I took out my cell and called the real McCoy.

"Hey, Em. Sorry to call you so early," I said when she picked up. "I've been looking at your notes on that copycat Seda. He ID'd himself with the Zodiac, right?"

"Uh-huh," Emily said, still groggy.

"Well, if our guy is doing the same thing, how can he feel empathy with all three New York nuts? I mean, one's an organized technician, and one's a disorganized catch-me-if-you-can loon. And the third one is a classic violent sadist. How can that be?"

"That is weird," she agreed. After a yawn she said, "Maybe two of the modes are just a smokescreen for the real one."

"But which one is real and which are the smoke?" I said.

"The only communication he made with you was about the bombings, right?"

"You're forgetting the Son of Sam letter he sent me."

"True, but that was almost a photocopy of Berkowitz's letter."

"You're right," I said. "Also, since we haven't even seen any publicity-seeking taunts or manifestos sent to the media, I don't think his heart is in copying Berkowitz."

"I'd lean toward Metesky, too," Emily said. "Our guy is definitely detail-oriented, and not only was the library bomb the first crime, it was the only one that didn't have a copycat message."

"It's revenge, then?" I said. "This guy is trying to get back at the world for Lawrence? But what about the social skills that Cavuto attributed to him during their meetings? Berkowitz and Metesky were loner, loser types, while Fish was a married guy who was sly, manipulative, and charming. If someone is capable of channeling Cary Grant, how do they become a wound-up, light-'em-and-run sneak creep like Metesky?"

"But he has to be somewhat of a loner," Emily argued. "How does Mr. Life of the Party prepare his bombs and clean his collection of vintage weapons without friends or family getting suspicious?"

I slumped in my chair. Trying to figure this guy out was like trying to build a castle with quicksand. Yet we were almost onto something. I could feel it.

My office chair made a snapping sound as I suddenly sat straight up.

"Wait a second. He is detail-oriented, isn't he? This guy is all about the details. That's about the only thing we know about him."

"Yeah, and?"

I pulled out the sheets that showed the addresses of the historical crimes and compared them to the locations of the present spree.

"Emily, you know what I think? I think our guy is meticulous enough to have copied these crimes even better than he has. If he wanted to just reenact the crimes, he could have done the exact same thing at the exact same locations, but he didn't."

"Why not?" Emily said.

"Maybe it's not about the copying at all," I offered. "Maybe the copycatting concept itself is the smokescreen. We need to take another look at the victims. Maybe the connection is with them."

The rest of my day was nasty, brutish, and long.

Running with our new theory to find some connection between the victims, Emily and I split up and proceeded to try to interview as many of the victims' families as we could. Every session had been grueling. All the family members I sat down with were still confused and angry, raw with loss and grief. Laura Habersham, the mother of the girl who'd been killed in the Queens lovers' lane double murder, actually cursed me out before collapsing onto her knees in tears at her front door.

I didn't blame her in the slightest. I just helped her up and asked my questions and went on to the next poor soul on my list.

By the time I was finished, I'd spent twelve hours driving hither and yon through NYC's gridlocked outer boroughs and only managed to track down the families of four of the eight victims. Even so, it was a ton of data to crunch, a ton of potential connections. That was police work in a nutshell-too little or too much info.

Around ten p.m. that night, sweating, bone tired, and yet unbowed, I cornered 91st Street onto steamy West End Avenue. Stumbling over the opposite curb in the dark, I just managed to catch the sliding Chinese takeout and six Dos Equis I was balancing on top of the file box I was lugging. When my phone went off in my pocket, instead of stopping to answer it, I continued to soldier on toward the awning of my apartment house a block and a half away. Beat-ass tired cops in motion tend to stay in motion.

Since there was no way I could make it out to Breezy tonight alive, I'd have to make the best of it, crashing in my apartment alone.