Oliver Stark - American Devil

It didn’t surprise the killer much that characters like Winston spent their whole lives in horrible anonymity and bewilderment — moving between the ordered cleanliness of a psychiatric unit and the profound confusion of the outside world. Winston needed an escape, that was for sure. The killer just knew it.

He was going to make Winston famous. He was going to give this nobody a profound legacy. Winston Carlisle, another nobody from nowhere, was going to be remembered, just like his victims. The killer smiled at the thought as he watched Winston enter the halfway house. Winston looked just right for the part he was going to play. But he would need some very close direction.

The killer noted the address and went on his way. A sprinkle of New York rain was beginning to fall. He smiled. He liked the rain. It called to him. He walked down the street and hailed a cab. He spoke through the glass.

‘Kinsley Memorial Church.’

He sat back, leaving his seatbelt undone. A recorded voice suddenly cut in, telling him to belt up and proudly exclaiming, ‘That’s the law in New York City.’ He pulled the belt across his chest. This was one law he was happy to oblige.

The cab took thirty minutes to travel three blocks through a snarl-up on Second Avenue. As it passed the big yellow diggers and two blocks of orange and white plastic bollards and vehicle barriers, the cabbie complained, ‘Can you see a fucking construction worker? They close off the street and then go for a three-hour cup of coffee. No one works any more.’ The passenger in the back seat checked his watch again and nodded silently. It was ten minutes before ten.

They turned into East 61st Street and the cab pulled up. The passenger slipped the driver a twenty-dollar bill. It was a nice neighbourhood — a quiet, residential tree-lined street. He got out and stood on the sidewalk, a man in his prime, tall, angular and athletic. He was feeling his passion now as he came closer to the girl who was number four on his list. Her time was up. She didn’t know it, but this was her last day on earth. The killer breathed deeply with the thought. There was no limit to what he could do. The gift of life or death was in his hands. God had no more power than he did. He just had different uses for it.

The Baptist church was a surprisingly large and ornate stone building, dating back to the mid-1850s, when someone built it in honour of Wesley Kinsley, a philanthropist of vast industrial means. It was a well-attended church with a good choir, a healthy smattering of young people and a very liberal bias — they accepted everything and anything at the Kinsley Memorial and were devoutly opposed to violence, which was a shame. It was homosexual liberals against Iraq at the Kinsley.

The morning service crowd was already sauntering through the large wooden doors. The organ inside was playing a modern hymn and the Reverend Angela Timms was greeting her flock with a smile and a wink.

In his disguise, the killer went inside and sat, as he always did, as far from the altar as possible. From the very back row, he scanned the heads of the flock, looking for the girl he’d grown attached to, but he couldn’t see her.

This was bad. He didn’t like disappointment. He’d already waited too long and his patience was beginning to snap. He needed someone soon. He couldn’t bear another day of imagining girl number four contorted and weeping under his hands — even one more day would be an unimaginable cruelty to himself. He needed her image. He needed her, period. The rain had whetted his appetite. Fat raindrops appeared on the dry sidewalk like drops of blood. The American Devil, he thought. He liked that. He was the sidewalk Satan. He smiled towards the altar. Would they guess that the devil was there in their flock? Sometimes, everything made sense.

The killer had been interacting with the girl even more in the last month. She was such a prudish type, he liked to shock her. He’d Photoshopped an image of her head on a nude by Manet and stuck it to her apartment door. It was at a Manet lecture he’d first spotted her. She had long blond hair and always sat very still, listening intently to the lecturer. He liked to think they were made for each other, a prudish virgin Baptist and the American Devil. It felt perfect. She was an exceptionally pretty girl who smiled too easily at strangers and did voluntary work. Her eyes were so brightly blue that he thought she might be wearing coloured lenses — but her outfits suggested that vanity wasn’t her thing at all.

He waited. He knew how to wait. He was concentrating on the exquisite feel of the girl’s arm as it brushed against him the previous week. He liked to get close when the time was nearing. It heightened his pleasure. He’d stepped in against her body. She’d apologized, but it was he who’d leaned in for a touch. He couldn’t contain his passion for beauty. He was a poet. He was an artist. He was doing the devil’s work. He turned as girl number four walked through the door. She looked heavenly. The killer smiled. She was just perfect.

Dr Levene’s Office

November 18, 10.00 a.m.

Denise Levene had caught the stark headline on her way to One PP. Several people on the subway were reading a story headlined ‘Serial Killer Strikes New York’. She hadn’t heard the press conference the previous evening, so she was in the dark as she travelled in to work.

She wasn’t usually a reader of the Daily Echo, but any mention of a serial killer got her attention and so she bought the paper from a newsstand outside the subway and read it as she walked up the street.

The killings were suddenly being tied together. Denise felt flushed. For years, her research had sought to find a link between childhood neglect, specifically in pre-verbal children, and the propensity for violence. It wasn’t that serial killers were the only examples, but it was sometimes the extreme cases that brought new information to light. The American Devil, if this article was to be believed, was the type of killer she’d looked at many times before. A man who was clever, organized and focused, but who put all of these qualities to evil use because he lacked the sphere of influence that Freud called the superego, which she understood as the neurological pathways between empathy, self and consequence.

She re-read the news story several more times in her office, but the details were frustratingly sketchy. A quick search of the internet led her to several other reports. She read them avidly, but there was nothing more than she’d found in Erin Nash’s article. She looked down at her watch. Tom Harper was due any minute and he would have all the detail she craved. However, she couldn’t ask. It was wrong. She was there for him, not the other way round. She’d just have to bite her lip and put it to the back of her mind.

The day was brightening up when Harper arrived. The sun sneaked through the gaps in the dark clouds and as he sat down a sunbeam hit him directly in the eye and danced around the edges of Dr Levene’s hair, silhouetting her like an arty photograph. Harper threw another gum in his mouth and shifted in his seat.

‘Thanks for coming back,’ said Denise.

‘It wasn’t from choice.’

‘You looked wasted,’ she said.

‘Is that a pick-up line?’ said Harper. ‘I’m feeling a warm glow of appreciation.’

Denise smiled. ‘You sleep at all?’

‘No.’

‘What’s keeping you up?’

‘Same thing that’s got you wired.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There’s a glint in your eye the size of a two-carat diamond.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said.

‘The story’s got to you, too, hasn’t it? Everyone’s wired.’

‘No, not me,’ she lied. ‘I’m just good in the mornings.’