Glenn Cooper: Library of the Dead aka Secret of the Seventh Son

“The TV show?”

He nodded.

“I mean I’m aware of it,” she replied suspiciously.

“The people who created the show made the ground rules for the characters, and those ground rules set it apart from all the other sitcoms. Do you want to know those rules? Because they’re going to apply to you and me.”

“Sure, Will!” she said brightly, apparently ready to absorb a lesson.

“The rules were-no learning and no hugging. I’ll see you later, Nancy,” he deadpanned.

As she stood there, looking like she was deciding whether to retreat or respond, they both heard quick light footsteps approaching, a woman trying to run in heels. “Sue alert,” Will called out melodramatically. “Sounds like she’s got something we don’t have.”

Around their shop, information endowed the bearer with temporary power, and Sue Sanchez seemed to get a jazzy rush from knowing something before anyone else.

“Good, you’re both here,” she said, shooing Nancy inside the cube. “There’s been another one! Number seven, up in the Bronx.” She was giddy, borderline juvenile. “Get up there before the Forty-fifth Precinct screws it up.”

Will threw his arms into the air, exasperated. “Jesus, Susan, I don’t know a goddamned thing about the first six yet. Gimme a break!”

Bang. Nancy chimed in brightly, “Hey, just pretend this is number one! No biggee! Anyway, I’ll catch you up on the way.”

“Like I said, Will,” Sue said, cracking an evil grin, “she’s a pistol.”

Will picked up one of the department’s standard-issue black Ford Explorers. He pulled away from the underground garage at 26 Liberty Plaza and navigated the one-ways until he was pointing north, heading up the FDR Drive in the fast lane. The car was detailed and running smooth, the traffic wasn’t bad, and usually he enjoyed a nice run out of the office. If he’d been alone, he would have tuned in WFAN and satisfied his sports jones, but he wasn’t. Nancy Lipinski was in the passenger seat, notebook in hand, lecturing him as they passed under the Roosevelt Island tramway, its gondola slowly gliding high above the choppy black waters of the East River.

She was as excited as a perv at a porn convention. This was her first serial murder case, the champagne of homicides, the defining moment in her prepubescent career. She pulled the assignment because she was Sue’s pet and had worked with Mueller before. The two of them got along famously, Nancy ready and willing to fortify his brittle ego. John, you’re so smart! John, do you have a photographic memory? John, I wish I could conduct an interview like you.

Will struggled to pay attention. It was relatively painless to get three weeks of data spoon-fed, but his mind wandered and his head was still fogged up from his late night tryst with Johnnie Walker. Still, he knew he could get into the groove in a heartbeat. Over two decades, he had taken the lead in eight major serial killing cases and kibitzed in countless others.

The first was in Indianapolis, during his inaugural field assignment, when he wasn’t much older than Nancy. The perp was a twisted psycho who liked to put out cigarettes on his victims’ eyelids until a discarded stub broke the case. When his second wife, Evie, got into grad school at Duke, he pulled a transfer to Raleigh, and sure enough, another crackpot with a straight razor started killing women in and around Asheville. Nine agonizing months and five diced-up victims later, he nailed that creep too. All of a sudden, he had a reputation; he was a de facto specialist. They bumped him, messily divorced again, to headquarters to work Violent Crimes in a group headed by Hal Sheridan, the man who trained a generation of agents how to profile serial killers.

Sheridan was a cold fish, emotionally detached and tightly wound to the point where he was the butt of an office joke: if a killing spree broke out in Virginia, Hal would have to be on the hot list. He doled out the national cases carefully, matching the criminal’s mind to the mind of his agents. Sheridan gave him cases involving extreme brutality and torture, killers who directed massive rage at women. Go figure.

Nancy’s recitations began to penetrate his fog. The facts, he had to acknowledge, were pretty damned interesting. He knew the broad strokes from the media. Who didn’t? It was the story. Predictably, the perp’s moniker, the Doomsday Killer, came from the press. The Post nabbed the honors. It’s blood rival, the Daily News, resisted for a few days, countering with the header POSTCARDS FROM HELL, but soon capitulated and started blaring Doomsday all over the front page.

According to Nancy, the postcards did not have common fingerprints; the sender probably used fiber-free, possibly latex utility gloves. There were a few nonvictim, nonrelated prints on a couple of the cards, and cooperating FBI field offices were in the process of working up postal workers in the Las Vegas to New York delivery chain. The postcards themselves were plain white three-by-fives available in thousands of retail outlets. They were printed on an HP Photosmart ink-jet printer, one of tens of thousands in circulation, fed in twice to print each side. The font was from the standard Microsoft Word pull-down menu. The ink-drawn coffin outlines were probably all done by the same hand using a black Pentel pen, ultrafine point, one of millions in circulation. The stamps were all the same, forty-one-cent American flag designs, one of hundreds of millions in circulation, the backs peel-and-stick, DNA free. The six cards were mailed on May 18 and cleared through the central USPS processing center in Las Vegas.

“So the guy would have had plenty of time to fly from Vegas to New York but it would have been a stretch for him to drive or take a train,” Will interjected. He caught her by surprise since she wasn’t sure he’d been listening. “Have you gotten passenger lists for all direct and connecting flights from Vegas arriving at LaGuardia, Kennedy, and Newark between the eighteenth and twenty-first?”

She looked up from her notebook. “I asked John if we should do that! He told me it wasn’t worth the trouble because someone could have mailed them for the killer.”

Will honked at a Camry going too slowly for his liking, then aggressively passed on the right when it didn’t yield. He couldn’t mask his sarcasm. “Surprise! Mueller was wrong. Serial killers almost never have accomplices. Sometimes they’ll kill in pairs, like the D.C. snipers or the Phoenix shooters, but that’s rare as hell. Getting logistical support to set up the crimes? That’d be a first. These guys are lone wolves.”

She was scribbling.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Taking notes on what you said.”

Christ, this isn’t school, he thought. “Since your pen is uncapped, take this down too,” he said caustically. “In case the killer did do a cross-country dash, check for speeding tickets along major routes.”

She nodded, then asked cautiously, “Do you want to hear more?”

“I’m listening.”

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.”