James Patterson - Tick Tock

He cruised the Hempstead Turnpike. Narrow streets of capes and split-levels, fast food, a driving range. His LeSabre fit right in.

It took him twenty minutes to find the address and parked across the street. There it was. Twenty-four Orchard Street. It looked like just another Long Island dump, but he knew it was actually more. He knew that many women had been killed behind its walls, that their bodies had been cut up in its garage.

He'd been thinking about doing another Brooklyn Vampire murder, or maybe the Mad Bomber, but then he'd remembered Lawrence's library and decided on a new string of killings. Lawrence was going to be so happy when he got the news.

Carl smiled as he thought about his friend. He'd killed for his country in the Special Forces. Called in air strikes in Bosnia, shot stinking goat herders in Afghanistan from as far away as eight hundred yards. But actually killing for something he cared about was another thing entirely.

Lawrence was his soulmate, his liberator, his master entire.

They'd taken into account that he would probably be captured. But instead of abandoning their efforts, Carl was going to redouble them. Their joint homage to the great murders and murderers of New York would keep occurring in bloodier and more horrifying ways during Lawrence's incarceration and trial. It would be the topper of the longest, most audacious crime spree of all time.

All the killing so far had been just for Lawrence. It had been Carl's pleasure. The least he could do, after all. Twelve years earlier, Lawrence had found him panhandling on Park Avenue. He'd cleaned him up and put him through City College, where he'd studied English lit, especially the classics.

He knew all about law enforcement profiling, how he was supposed to be inadequate, looking for power, for meaning in his pathetic life. What a joke! He wasn't doing this for himself. He was a warrior, a real catalyst for history. Besides, people like Lee Harvey Oswald really had changed the world with one pull of a trigger.

But he shouldn't get ahead of himself. First things first, he thought as he pulled out.

It was time to put a smile on his good buddy's face.

After I picked up Emily at her hotel, we spent the morning interviewing members of Berger's catering staff. A fruitless morning, as it turned out. All they knew about Berger were his odd eating habits. About Carl Apt, the waiters and cooks knew nothing at all.

We did manage to contact the Connecticut state troopers and have hidden surveillance put on Berger's Connecticut estate. I didn't think Apt was dumb enough to show up there, but you never knew.

We'd just sat down at DiNapoli's on Madison Avenue for a breather when I saw the headline crawl beneath the Fox News Channel anchor on the bar's muted flat-screen.

"Wealthy Murder Suspect in Police Custody Found Dead."

I immediately lost my appetite. I didn't need to hear or read the rest of the story to realize Lawrence Berger's demise had hit the speed-of-light news cycle running. Emily and I had actually been in the middle of debating how to play the media with Berger's suicide. We'd been planning to sit on things for as long as it took to lure Apt into a trap, but as I stared at the TV, it was looking more like we were the ones who'd just gotten played.

I got a call as we were about to order. I didn't recognize the number. I picked it up, anyway.

"Detective Bennett, I need to speak with you," said a French-accented voice.

I realized it was Berger's chef, Jonathan Desaulniers, whom I'd spoken to this morning.

"What's up, Jonathan?"

"There's a girl, Paulina Dulcine," he said in a panicked voice. "She is a friend of mine. She would sleep with Mr. Berger on occasion. I apologize for not recalling this during our interview. It happened on and off for about three years. You mentioned Mr. Berger perhaps killing people who had crossed him, and after I spoke with you, I thought of her."

"She crossed him?" I said. "How? What happened?"

"Well, for a long time they had a tender relationship. He would purchase fine jewelry for her. But one day he asked her to do something to him that she thought was odd, and she started laughing. He ordered her to leave him, and they never were together again. I think Mr. Berger felt humiliated.

"The reason I'm getting in touch now is that I called Paulina today. While we were speaking, I heard a scream and then nothing. She hasn't picked up since."

"What's her number and address?" I said, waving for Emily to follow as I jumped up.

Twenty minutes later, we screeched up in front of a thirty-story high-rise building in Battery Park City with another team of Major Case detectives and two more uniforms.

"Paulina Dulcine. Is she home?" I yelled at the concierge as we ran inside.

The slight, effeminate black man's jaw dropped to the collar of his black Nehru jacket.

"Paulina, um, no. I thought I saw her leaving her apartment when I was delivering dry cleaning."

"She didn't leave through the lobby," said the female concierge beside him.

"She must have gotten her car in the basement garage," the thin black guy said, opening a door.

We ran down a flight of stairs into the dim cave of the concrete garage. The concierge pointed to the crowded corner on the left.

"It doesn't make sense," he said, pointing across the lot. "That blue car. The Smart car. That's hers."

We went over to the tiny car. Half a snapped key stuck in the lock. Emily knelt down and pulled a purse from underneath the driver's door. She opened it and found a Gucci wallet.

"It's hers, Mike," Emily said, opening the wallet. "Paulina Dulcine's. He got her. We're too late."

"You know, there was a case of tag-team killers we learned about at Quantico," Emily said when we got back to the squad. "It was a textbook case of these guys, Oden and Lawson. One was a psycho rapist, the other a schizophrenic. Oden raped a girl and then handed her off to Lawson, who killed and mutilated her. Each had his own thing."

"And your point is?" I said, still stinging from our near-miss of Carl.

"In this case, Apt is just killing off Berger's enemies in the way that Berger wanted. He was like the caterers we spoke to, following specific orders. I see all Berger here. No Apt."

"You're right," I said. "Even though the murders seem sadistic, they're really not. The're really set pieces, like elaborate assassinations."

"That's it, Mike. Apt seems like an assassin, cold, calculating, competent. I still can't figure out what's in it for him. Money? Maybe he's just crazy. Who knows?"

"No," I said. "You're onto something. There's something in it for Apt. There has to be."

"You sound so sure. How do you know?"

"The fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason," I said. "Anything perceived has a cause. All conclusions have premises. All effects have causes. All actions have motives."

"My goodness, aren't we going all Aristotle suddenly?" Emily said, smiling for the first time that afternoon. "Or are the four folds from Thomas Aquinas, you Irish church boy?"

"Arthur Schopenhauer, actually," I said, faking a wide yawn.

"You read Schopenhauer?" Emily said, raising an eyebrow.

"Just at the beach," I said.

I was ducking a tossed empty Gatorade bottle when my boss came out of her office.

"They found her," Miriam said. "Paulina Dulcine. Get up to the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge."

She was actually under the 59th Street Bridge beside a York Avenue Mobil station. We bore right onto a little service road and down a ramp toward the East River. At the end of a parking lot beside an abandoned heliport, crime scene tape was wrapped around a chain-link fence.

Beyond the fence, half a dozen cops were spread out on the rock-piled shore. On the jogging path that ran under the bridge, a crowd had formed. I spotted a twelve-speed cyclist in a full-body Speedo beside a gaggle of Jamaican nannies leaning on their Maclaren strollers. They looked bored, like they were waiting for the good part to start.