Glenn Cooper - Secret of the Seventh Son

It boiled down to this: the victims, four males and two females, ranged in age from eighteen to eighty-two. Three were in Manhattan, one each in Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens. Today’s would be the first in the Bronx. All the M.O.’s were the same. The victim receives a postcard with a date one or two days in the future, each with a coffin drawn on the back, and winds up being killed on the exact date. Two stabbings, one shooting, one made to look like a heroin overdose, one crushed by a car that jumped the sidewalk in a hit and run, and one thrown out a window.

“And what did Mueller say about that?” Will asked.

“He thought the killer was trying to throw us off by not sticking to one pattern.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think it’s unusual. It’s not what’s in the textbooks.”

He imagined her criminology texts, passages compulsively highlighted with yellow markers, neat marginalia, tiny lettering. “How about the victim profiles?” he asked. “Any links?”

The victims appeared to be unconnected. The computational guys in Washington were doing a multidatabase matrix analysis looking for common denominators, a supercomputer version of six degrees of Kevin Bacon, but so far no hits.

“Sexual assaults?”

She flipped pages. “Just one, a thirty-two-year-old Hispanic woman, Consuela Pilar Lopez, in Staten Island. She was raped and stabbed to death.”

“After we finish up in the Bronx, I want to start there.”

“Why?”

“You can tell a lot about a killer by the way he treats a lady.”

They were on the Bruckner Expressway now, tracking east through the Bronx.

“You know where we’re going?” he asked.

She found it in her notebook. “Eight forty-seven Sullivan Place.”

“Thank you! I don’t have a fucking clue where that is,” he barked. “I know where Yankee Stadium is. Period. That’s all I know about the fucking Bronx.”

“Please don’t swear,” she said sternly, like a reprimanding middle school teacher. “I have a map.” She unfolded it, studied it a moment and looked around. “We need to get off on Bruckner Boulevard.”

They rode in silence for a mile. He waited for her to resume her tutorial but she stared at the road stony-faced.

He finally looked over and saw her lower lip quivering. “What? You’re mad at me for dropping the F-bomb, for fuck’s sake?”

She looked at him wistfully. “You’re different from John Mueller.”

“Jesus,” he muttered. “It took you this long to figure that out?”

Driving south on East Tremont, they passed the Forty-fifth Precinct house on Barkley Avenue, an ugly squat building with too few parking spaces for the number of squad cars packed around it. The thermometer was touching eighty and the street was teeming with Puerto Ricans, toting plastic shopping bags, pushing baby carriages, or just strolling along with cell phones pressed against ears, moving in and out of the grocerias, bodegas, and cheap mom-and-pop stores. The women were showing a lot of flesh. Too many heavy chicks in halter tops and short-shorts, jiggling along in flip-flops, for his liking. Do they actually think they look foxy? he wondered. They made his passenger look like a supermodel.

Nancy was buried in the map, trying not to screw up. “From here, it’s the third left,” she said.

Sullivan Place was an inconvenient street for a major murder. Cruisers, unmarked vehicles, and medical examiner vans were double-parked in front of the crime scene, choking off the traffic. Will pulled up to a young cop trying to keep one lane passable and flashed his badge. “Jeez,” the cop moaned. “I don’t know where to put you. Can you swing around the block? Maybe there’s something around the corner.”

Will parroted him. “Around the corner.”

“Yeah, around the block, you know take a couple of rights.”

Will turned off the ignition, got out and tossed the cop the keys. Cars started honking like mad, instant gridlock.

“Whaddya doing!” the cop hollered. “You can’t leave this here!” Nancy continued to sit in the SUV, mortified.

Will called to her. “C’mon, let’s get a move on. And take Officer Cuneo’s badge number down in your little book in case he does anything disrespectful to government property.”

The cop muttered, “Asshole.”

Will was spoiling for a dust-up and this kid would do just fine. “Listen,” he said, boiling over with rage, “if you like your pathetic little job then don’t fuck with me! If you don’t give a shit about it, then take a shot. Go on! Try it!”

Two angry guys, veins bulging, face-to-face. “Will! Can we go?” Nancy implored. “We’re wasting time.”

The cop shook his head, climbed into the Explorer, drove it down the block and double-parked it in front of a detective’s car. Will, still breathing hard, winked at Nancy, “I knew he’d find us a spot.”

It was a pocket-sized apartment building, three floors, six units, dirty white brickwork, slapped together in the forties. The hallway was dim and depressing, brown and black ceramic checkerboard tiling on the floors, grimy beige walls, bare yellow bulbs. All the action was in and around Apartment 1A, ground floor left. Toward the rear of the hall, near the garbage shaft, family members crowded together in multigenerational grief, a middle-aged woman wailing softly, her husband, in work boots, trying to comfort her, a fully pregnant young woman, sitting on the bare floor, recovering from hyperventilation, a young girl in a Sunday dress, looking bewildered, a couple of old men in loose shirts, shaking their heads and stroking their stubble.

Will squirmed through the half-open apartment door, Nancy following. He winced at the sight of too many cooks spoiling the broth. There were at least a dozen people in an eight-hundred-square foot space, astronomically increasing the odds of crime scene pollution. He did a quick reconnoiter with Nancy on his heels, and amazingly no one stopped them or even questioned their presence. Front room. Old-lady furniture and bric-a-brac. Twenty-year-old TV. He took a pen from his pocket and used it to part the curtains to peer through each window, a procedure he repeated in every room. Kitchen. Spic-and-span. No dishes in the sink. Bathroom, also tidy, smelling of foot powder. Bedroom. Too crowded with chattering personnel to see much except for plump dead legs, gray and mottled, beside an unmade bed, one foot half inside a slipper.

Will bellowed, “Who’s in charge here?”

Sudden silence until, “Who’s asking?” A balding detective with a big gut and a tight suit separated himself from the scrum and appeared at the bedroom door.

“FBI,” Will said. “I’m Special Agent Piper.” Nancy looked hurt she wasn’t introduced.

“Detective Chapman, Forty-fifth Precinct.” He extended a large warm hand, the weight of a brick. He smelled of onions.

“Detective, what do you say we clear this place out so we can have a nice quiet inspection of the crime scene?”

“My guys are almost done, then it’s all yours.”

“Let’s do it now, okay? Half your men aren’t wearing gloves. No one’s got booties on. You’re making a mess here, Detective.”

“Nobody’s touching nothing,” Chapman said defensively. He noticed Nancy taking notes and asked nervously, “Who’s she, your secretary?”

“Special Agent Lipinski,” she said, waving her notebook at him sweetly. “Could I get your first name, Detective Chapman?”

Will suppressed a smile.

Chapman wasn’t inclined to get territorial with the feds. He’d rant and rave, waste his time and wind up on the losing end of the proposition. Life was too short. “All right, everybody!” he announced. “We got the FBI here and they want everyone out, so pack up and let them do their thing.”