Heather Graham - Sacred Evil

She stared at him. “You’re going to catch this freak in a week or so?” she asked. “Half the cases go unsolved, from what I’ve heard.”

“That’s a gross exaggeration, really. Half the murder cases we go out on are—well, sadly—domestic. And they’re solved,” he said.

“But—how? There are twenty million people on the island of Manhattan on a workday—that’s the statistic I’ve heard.”

“Give or take a million,” he agreed. “Please, that’s why I’m asking you—describe exactly what you saw.”

“I was walking down the street. I saw the car go by—oh, yes, of course. I saw the body in the middle of the street because of the headlights. The car just kept going. I was afraid it might have been an old derelict, passed out in the street. I have a little laser light I carry, and a whistle—I’m not stupid, you know—and so I shone the light and hurried out, hoping that nothing was coming barreling up Broadway. And then I saw her—and then I started screaming.”

“Did you see anyone else—anyone at all? A bum, a shadow … anyone?” he asked.

She shook her head. Then she sat straighter. “Wait—there’s old Captain Tyler.”

“Old Captain Tyler?”

She nodded. “A sad case. Everyone keeps urging him to go to a shelter, but he shows up back on the streets, begging. I mean, of course, God help us, we get a lot of homeless guys down here. But Captain Tyler is kind of sweet. He’s an older fellow, Vietnam vet.”

“Did you see him this morning?” Jude asked.

“I might have.”

“You might have?”

“There was a pile of rags and a sleeping bag at the entrance to the subway. I remember thinking that it might have been poor old Captain Tyler. But I didn’t disturb the pile.”

He nodded. “But nothing else? No one watching you?”

She shook her head. “No, not that I noticed.” She fell silent again. “I’m going to get killed on my way in to work one of these days despite my whistle, aren’t I?”

“Come in with coworkers, Ms. Hannigan, if there’s any way. I’ll talk to your boss. It’s prudent to be extremely careful until we know what we’re up against,” he said. “I’ve got to get my men looking for Captain Tyler. Can you give me a description?”

Tyler, according to Ms. Hannigan, was tall and thin, wore a shabby army-surplus jacket and dirty denim jeans, and had long white hair and a scraggly white-and-gray beard.

“He told me once he suffered from shell shock,” Dorothy Hannigan told him. “Sad, huh? Can’t hold a job, and his benefits don’t really keep a roof over his head.” She gasped. “He couldn’t have done this, could he have?”

“If you see him, call me. I don’t think, however, that shell shock, even after years, would suddenly turn a man into a vicious murderer. But when we find him, we’ll find out what we can. We have some truly wonderful psychiatrists with the department. They’ll be able to deal with him,” Jude assured her. As he spoke, his phone rang.

It was Norton, from headquarters.

“Assistant chief wants to see you, pronto,” Norton told him.

“I’m at the scene,” Jude told him.

“I know. I told him that you’d been dispatched by orders of the lieutenant. But he says that you’ve had time to do what you can do there, and that he wants to see you about a task force.”

“No other murders today, huh?” Jude asked dryly.

“Not like this. Film is already rolling. The news is shooting through all five boroughs, the country and the world like the spew from a geyser. Jack’s back. That’s what they’re saying. Anyway, he wants you in here, now.”

The twenty-first-century media was amazing, Jude thought. He barely knew anything about the crime, but rumor was running rampant, and he understood that One Police Plaza wanted this solved as quickly as humanly possible.

Two other murder investigations were open on his slate; this seemed to be the one that mattered. Naturally. The other two had also been stabbed, but one had died on the way to the hospital and one had been dragged out of the river. This had been public and sensationalist. The victim was a spectacle on Broadway. They were both his cases because he worked specifically for the chief of police; he and Monty had been “detective specialists” for years, which meant they could cover all of New York City as needed.

He wished that they hadn’t been his cases; he’d gotten nowhere with them. The other two women had died quietly, apparently without friends to miss them. They hadn’t been discovered in such a bold and gruesome state, with all the world watching.

Except that he wondered if the deputy chief was thinking along the same lines that were now plaguing him. He wasn’t a Ripperologist, as Fullbright considered himself, but he did know about the case a fair amount since he’d spent the month of August in Britain last year for an experimental exchange police procedural program. The program had included a study of the Ripper files, with one of Britain’s top historians discussing police work now and then. Jude had looked at the archives available. Five victims were accepted as the Ripper’s, but the London case files had started with the deaths of two women who had been killed before what was now deemed by experts to be Ripper murders.

They had the girl from the river, and the girl who had survived her attack long enough to make it to the hospital. Neither had carried ID; neither had been reported missing. All efforts to identify the two had been to no avail. Both had come from New York or to New York … and met sad ends.

And now …

Virginia Rockford.

“I’m still at the scene, working it,” Jude said.

“Crime scene folks are there. And they’re good at what they do. That’s what the assistant chief said. Get in here.”

Jude clicked his phone closed. Great. He’d find himself besieged by the reporters stationed at “the shack” on the second floor of headquarters before he could reach the deputy chief’s office.

He wished he hadn’t been called. He wished any other cop in the city had come on for this case.

But they hadn’t; he had been on duty, and he had been specifically ordered down here.

He thanked Dorothy Hannigan and left her his card, and started out, wishing that he could look for Captain Tyler himself. But he told Smith to get more men on finding the homeless man; and he gave the officer the task of connecting with the producer for the movie being shot down the street and getting him a list of anyone involved in the production. He wanted the beat cops to keep a presence on the street and their eyes open.

There had probably been a number of young women involved in the shoot the day before; the cops could start with them. He stressed the importance of their notes, and Smith looked at him, hesitant. “Crosby, you know I’m a beat cop, right? Not the boss down here.”

“Smith, I think you’ll be fine,” he said.

He headed down Broadway. It was far easier to walk around Lower Manhattan right now than to get his car.

He managed to reach the deputy chief’s office without being waylaid. The offices were huge, and he was just lucky that the elevator he was in didn’t stop on the second floor where he might have been detained by an avid reporter.

He stood in front of the desk, but Nathaniel Green, “D-Chiefy,” as the men called him affectionately behind his back, wasn’t a browbeater. He wasn’t a political appointee, either. He’d earned his place, moving up the ranks.

Green indicated the chair in front of his desk and Jude sat.

“Are you taking me off this new case?” Jude asked him.

Green smiled grimly. “Sorry, no. But I’m giving you a team, a task force. Who do you want?”