Oliver Stark: 88 Killer

Crown Heights, Brooklyn

March 15, 2.29 p.m.

Harper rested on a bench next to a paramedic. There wasn’t anything wrong with him physically, but he was shaken. All those dead and dying bomb victims, and then the killer’s capacity for more. It was only beginning to sink in. He stared around him and tried to remember what he had felt as he watched the cops hustle Carney into a police truck and slam the door.

He felt good. That was it.

He looked at Denise. He was holding her hand as they sat in silence and stared at the scene.

Denise was still pumping from the adrenalin rush. ‘We got him,’ she said. ‘We nailed him. This feels good.’

‘You are something else,’ Harper said. ‘I don’t know how you do it, but you do it. You nailed him, Denise. You.’

‘ We nailed him, Tom. We’re a team, right?’

‘The best,’ said Harper. ‘How did Aaron sound?’

‘Like a man waking up from a nightmare into paradise. They’re both going to be okay.’

‘He saw her?’

‘Yeah, he saw her. He’s dancing on air. He said they just hugged for the first hour. Just hugged and cried.’ Denise paused. ‘She wasn’t… the doctor told him that Carney hadn’t touched her. It’s good to know. It’ll make the recovery easier. Abby’s mother is on the way over now.’

‘He was attracted to her, right? That’s why he took her, isn’t it?’

‘Partly. She was similar to Lucy, but yeah, he desired her and he wanted to control it. Actually, he wanted to destroy it, as if he could destroy his lust by destroying the object of his lust. It’s a crazy case.’

‘People try to destroy love, right, because love makes them feel weak. It’s similar, isn’t it?’

Denise looked across the street, the carnage still in evidence everywhere. ‘I think you’re right. He loved Lucy in some way, but I guess whatever she did, he’d never felt loved, so the brutality and control started up.’

‘How did he keep it hidden for so long?’

‘Working Hate Crime, I suppose. Finding a job where he was meeting sickos like himself every day and seeing punishment every day. Maybe that’s what kept him straight for so long.’

‘You think he might’ve been doing this a lot longer if he wasn’t a cop?’

‘I think he might have cracked earlier, yeah,’ said Denise.

‘We got some details from his lock-up. I’ve just been on to Garcia. They found his boots. He didn’t ditch them. All cut up with wire. They also got some information on his case-files.’

‘What did they find?’ asked Denise.

‘He had been letting Section 88 off the hook for years, allowing them to terrorize the community while offering up half-baked investigations. He liked to meet the victims. To see the aftermath, the Jewish community in tears, in fear. Section 88 were like his own attack hounds. He let them run the streets of Brooklyn and walked after them, free of any suspicion, looking at the pain they caused.’

‘And the killings?’ asked Denise.

‘Section 88 weren’t killers. He did it all himself. He even set up that lowlife doing time for Esther Haeber’s murder. That’s going to have to be looked at again.’

‘What about Heming?’

‘Heming owed Carney, I guess, for letting his team roam the streets. Carney used him to get him barbed wire and trucks. He must’ve always figured that if we started to link the killings, then Section 88 would be the prime suspect.’

‘They were for a time. He read it all like a pro.’

‘He was trained to be a pro, that’s what kept him in the game.’

Eddie Kasper came over to them. ‘My favorite pair,’ he said. ‘I got to congratulate you two. How you feeling?’

‘Good, Eddie,’ said Harper.

‘You going to wash some time soon?’ asked Eddie.

‘Some time soon.’

‘That’s good. I like my heroes clean, Detective Harper. Nice and clean.’

‘Why did he do it, that’s what I’d like to understand?’ said Harper. ‘We all grow up with problems and we learn to fight them, right?’

‘The absence of love, Tom, that’s the breeding ground. Hated and abandoned at an early age. It makes self-hatred turn into something deeply damaged and vicious. And yeah, he’s also an alpha male, isn’t he? So he’s got all that capacity to be something but inside, he feels like a loser, a man who’ll never fit in. Such men turn to Nazism because it’s such a strong image. They need that cloak to cover up all the pain and anger. For a while, the hate makes them feel normal, like all that anger has a purpose. Self-hatred needs a hell of a lot of power and glory and murder to convince it that it’s worthwhile.’

A hand appeared on Harper’s left shoulder.

‘Sorry, Detective, sorry, ma’am, we need to talk to you both.’ Harper and Levene looked up.

‘You need to talk to us now ?’ said Denise.

Harper blinked into the sunlight. Two guys stared down on him, both over six foot, both wearing shades and dark blue suits.

‘Come on,’ said Harper. ‘They want the paperwork.’

Harper checked his annoyance. It was no good getting riled. He’d done his fighting. He had, Denise had, and they’d both come up good. Not Jack Carney, though. He’d been fighting something else. Some deep, dark inheritance. His own personality, the abuse he had suffered — his own failures, of course, but it was something bigger than that: the state-sanctioned evil that he’d inherited from reading about it in the past.

The attraction of evil had caught Jack Carney; it had caught and tangled up all the hatred he felt for himself and forced all that hatred on to another target. His life was over, but the forces that animated him were not dead. Harper looked at the blackened walls of the buildings along the street. The battles were still out there to be fought and won.

Harper stood, feeling the downside of the adrenalin kick, and let himself be led away from the chaos, still holding Denise’s hand.

He saw Captain Frank Lafayette running across, his face red and heaving. Harper smiled. ‘I got to debrief,’ he said. ‘Can the disciplinary hearing wait?’

‘Fuck that, Tom. I just wanted to… I just wanted to see my best cop. You did us proud.’

‘You’re welcome,’ said Harper. ‘Can you believe it?’

‘Which part?’ said Lafayette.

‘A cop — that part, the part that destroys the faith in the system.’

‘Cop or anything else, this isn’t about his day job. This is about a sick man who sought out the job to allow him to hunt as he worked. You don’t get much more cynical than that.’

‘You think he thought about it from the start?’

‘Yeah, I do. He abused the system, sure. He got through, sure. He’ll provoke a whole barrage of “it must never happen again” thoughts and articles. There will be outrage, disgust and pain. From the Jewish community especially. A cop who’s meant to protect, who does the opposite. The powerful using their position to abuse and murder.’

Harper glanced at Denise. ‘It’ll take decades to undo this kind of betrayal of trust. You’d think this would be a stark message to all those racists and extremists, but a few years down the line, it will happen again. We always say we’ll never forget and we always fucking do.’

‘Not everyone forgets,’ said Denise. ‘Not you. Not me. Not the vast majority.’

‘The vast majority aren’t going to bring up Becky Glass’s two kids,’ said Harper.

‘No, but they pay to keep cops like you on the streets so that degenerates like Carney get taken down.’

‘I hope they’re okay, that’s all,’ said Harper. ‘Ruth, Jerry and Abby. I just hope they can get through this. You got to have hope, right?’