City of Endless Night Page 12

  So he was home. Too bad. “Mr. Terence Lasher?”

  “Yes?”

  “Detectives Lopez and Hammer of the New York City Police Department. We’d like to come up and ask you a few questions.”

  Without a response, the door buzzed open. Lopez looked at Hammer and shrugged. This was unusual: normally, there would be a whole bunch of questions after they identified themselves.

  They started up the dingy staircase. “Why is it always the top floor of a walk-up?” wheezed Hammer. “Why can’t they ever live in the basement?”

  Lopez didn’t say anything. Hammer was overweight and didn’t work out, while Lopez was lean and fit and got up at five thirty every other morning to hit the gym. While he liked Hammer—the guy was easygoing—he was a little sorry to have drawn him as a partner, because the guy slowed him down. And he always wanted to stop for doughnuts. As a cop, Lopez wouldn’t be caught dead in a doughnut shop.

  They trudged up the stairs. There were two apartments per floor, one in the front and one in the back. Apartment 5B was in the rear of the building. They arrived on the landing, and Lopez gave Hammer a few minutes to recover his breath.

  “Ready?” Lopez asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Lopez knocked on the door. “Mr. Lasher? Police.”

  Silence.

  Lopez gave it a harder rap. “Mr. Lasher, may we come in? It’s the police. We just have a few questions, no big deal.”

  “Police,” came the whispery voice from behind the door. “Why?”

  “We just want to ask you a few questions about your former position with Sharps and Gund.”

  No reply.

  “If you wouldn’t mind opening up,” Lopez continued, “this won’t take long at all. Totally routine—”

  Lopez heard the faint, metallic click of a break-action shotgun being closed and he screamed “Gun!” and hit the floor just before a massive blast tore a hole in the door. But Hammer was not so fast and took the charge squarely in the gut, the force of it punching him backward into the opposite wall, where he slumped down.

  Scrambling to his partner, Lopez heard a second blast, hitting the wall above him. He grabbed Hammer under the arms and dragged him to safety out of the line of fire, around the corner to the landing, while at the same time unholstering his radio.

  “Officer down!” he screamed. “Shots fired, officer down!”

  “Oh fuck,” said Hammer, gasping, holding his hands over the wound.

  The blood was just pouring out from between the man’s fingers. Lopez, crouching over his supine partner, pulled out his Glock and aimed it at the door. He almost pulled the trigger but stopped himself; firing blindly through a closed door into an unknown apartment was a violation of departmental rules of engagement. But if the motherfucker opened the door or fired again, he would take him down.

  Nothing more happened; there was silence on the other side of the two dark ragged holes in the door.

  Already he could hear sirens.

  “Oh Jesus,” groaned Hammer, gripping his abdomen, crimson blossoming across his white shirt.

  “Hang in there, partner,” Lopez said, pressing down on the wound. “Just hang in there. Help is coming.”

  23

  VINCENT D’AGOSTA STOOD on the corner of Ninth Avenue, looking down Fourteenth Street. It was a madhouse. The entire neighborhood had gone into lockdown, the target building evacuated; they had the ESU team and had deployed two negotiators, an armored cherry-picker, a robot, a K-9 unit, and a bunch of snipers, with a chopper circling above. Beyond the police barricades was practically the entire press contingent of the city—network television, cable, print media, bloggers—everyone. The shooter was still holed up in the apartment. So far they hadn’t been able to get a peep out of him, or even a glimpse. The armored cherry-picker was maneuvering into position and would soon have a clear shot, and four guys were on the roof, laying down Kevlar mats and punching holes through the membrane to lower cameras inside.

  D’Agosta was coordinating the assault by radio, choreographing it like a ballet, with multiple lines of action, each one of which could resolve the standoff. The rational part of him wanted to take Lasher alive. He had gone from a person of interest to suspect number one in the Cantucci killing, and dead he’d be a lot less useful. On the other hand, the motherfucker had shot a cop. The primitive part of D’Agosta’s brain wanted to take the bastard out. Hammer was in surgery, critically wounded, might not even pull through.

  What a disaster. Singleton had gotten his “progress,” all right. Who would have guessed that a relatively routine assignment would turn into this? He wondered what kind of shit rain was going to come down on him now; but he quickly shook off those thoughts. Just get through this with a successful outcome—then worry about fallout.

  The sun had set hours before and a brutal wind was howling off the Hudson and blasting down Fourteenth Street, the temperature plunging. His radio crackled to life. It was Curry. “The negotiator has made contact. Channel forty-two.”

  D’Agosta adjusted his headset to channel 42 and listened. The negotiator, speaking from behind a bulletproof shield, was talking to the shooter through the door. It was hard to pick up what Lasher was saying, but as the negotiation continued D’Agosta gathered pretty quickly that Lasher was one of those anti-government types who believed that 9/11 was perpetrated by the Bushes, that the Newtown massacre was a hoax, and that the Federal Reserve and a cabal of international bankers secretly ran the world and were in a conspiracy to take away his guns. For these reasons he didn’t recognize the authority of the police.

  The negotiator was speaking in a calm voice, going through the usual routine, trying to get him to give up and come out, nobody was going to hurt him. Thank God the guy was alone in the apartment and didn’t have a hostage. Snipers were in place but D’Agosta had resisted his impulse to give them the order to shoot on sight. He could feel the pressure all around him to put into motion the string of events that would result in Lasher being killed. That would be easy enough, and no one would second-guess him.

  Another ten minutes passed. The negotiator was getting nowhere: this guy Lasher had drunk the anti-establishment Kool-Aid, and he was convinced that if he surrendered they would kill him. They wouldn’t let him live, he told the negotiator—he knew too much. He alone knew what they were up to, he knew their evil plans, and for that they would execute him.

  There was no reasoning with the son of a bitch. D’Agosta was getting colder and more impatient by the minute. The longer this went on the worse he would look as commander.

  “All right,” he said. “Retire the negotiator. Get ready to drop a flash-bang through the roof and go in through the door and the wall simultaneously. On my orders. I’m coming up.”

  He wanted to be on-site; he didn’t want to coordinate this from afar. He walked down the block and went into the shabby building, passing the ESU, the K-9 team, the heavy trucks and armored cherry-picker. They really liked their toys, he thought with a certain affection, and brought them out at every opportunity.

  He climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, one below the action. He confirmed that the four men on the roof had carefully and silently opened a hole right down to the drywall ceiling of the apartment, and that it was ready to be punched through and a flash-bang dropped. The two A-Team units on the fifth floor both confirmed they were in position and ready to roll.

  “Okay,” said D’Agosta into the radio. “Proceed.”

  A moment later he heard the sharp crack-boom of the stun grenade, followed by the double crash of the A-Team units simultaneously breaching the door and wall and storming the apartment. A shot rang out from inside, followed by another and another—and then it was over.

  “Disarmed and apprehended,” came the announcement over the channel.

  D’Agosta ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and entered the apartment. Here was Lasher, on the floor, cuffed, with two cops on him, in the middle of a tiny, messy, and malodorou
s hole of an apartment. They hauled him to his feet, whimpering. He was about five foot three, skinny, with acne and a wisp of a goatee. He was bleeding profusely from both the shoulder and the abdomen.

  This is Lasher?

  “He fired at us, sir,” one of the officers said, “justifying return fire to disarm him.”

  “Good.” D’Agosta stepped aside as a medic came in to treat the gunshot wounds.

  “You hurt me!” Lasher blubbered, and D’Agosta saw he was pissing himself.

  D’Agosta scanned the room. There were posters for death-metal groups on the walls, a disorganized scatter of guns in a corner, half a dozen disassembled computers and heaps of other electronic devices of unknown function. The whole place was comico-absurd-frightening, like a dystopian movie set. This level of weirdness wasn’t what he’d been expecting. Looking at Lasher, his hair full of plaster dust, blood ponding across the littered floor, his skinny body shaking—well, was this really the guy who stalked and killed Cantucci with such ruthless precision? He just couldn’t see it. Then again, there was no denying the little prick had just shot a cop with a sawed-off shotgun…and then tried to kill some more.

  “It hurts,” Lasher said more faintly, then slipped out of consciousness.

  “Get him to Bellevue.” With a deep sigh, D’Agosta turned away. He would question the bastard once he was stabilized—his wounds were severe, but maybe not fatal. But not tonight. He needed to get some sleep—and the paperwork just kept piling up.

  Christ, what a headache he had.

  24

  AT FIVE O’CLOCK in the morning of December 24, about an hour before dawn, Special Agent Pendergast appeared at the door of apartment 5B in the building at 355 West 14th Street. He found the lone cop guarding the scene of the crime—the CSU had already finished—who was almost, but not quite, dozing in his chair.

  “I’m so sorry to trouble you,” Pendergast began as the man leapt to his feet, the cell phone he’d been holding in his hand dropping to the floor.

  “I’m sorry, sir, I’m—”

  “Please,” said Pendergast in a soothing voice, sliding out his FBI shield and letting it fall open. “Just going to have a peek—if that’s all right with you, of course.”

  “Oh sure,” said the cop, “of course, but do you have the authorization…?” His face fell slightly as Pendergast shook his head gravely.

  “At five in the morning, my good friend, it is hard to get a signature. However, if you think you should call Lieutenant D’Agosta, naturally I’d understand.”

  “No, no, that’s not necessary,” he said hastily. “But you are already authorized on the case—?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, then, I guess you can go ahead.”

  “Good man.” Pendergast sliced the crime scene tape from the door, broke the seal, and slipped into the apartment, turning on his light and easing the door shut behind him. He did not want to be disturbed.

  He shone the light around the miserable space, pivoting as he did so, taking everything in. The light lingered on each poster, then moved to the scatter of guns on a piece of dirty carpet on the floor, the heap of computer equipment, circuit boards and old CRTs, now spattered with blood. His gaze roved over a crude workbench hammered together out of deal lumber, its top scarred and burned; the wall behind it hung with tools. It moved to the rumpled bed, across the kitchen nook, unexpectedly tidy—and all the way back around to where it had started.

  Now he moved toward the workbench. This was his focus of interest. He inspected it from left to right, examining every last thing with the flashlight and occasionally a loupe, now and then picking up something with a pair of jeweler’s tweezers and slipping it into a test tube. His pale visage, illuminated by the reflected flashlight, floated like a disembodied face, silvery eyes glittering in the darkness.

  For fifteen minutes he performed his examinations until suddenly he froze. In the corner where the rough deal table had been pushed up against the wall, his light had illuminated what appeared to be two grains of yellowish salt. The first one he picked up in his fingers; he rubbed it, examined the resulting whitish dust on his fingertips, sniffed at it, and finally tasted it with the tip of his tongue. The second grain he picked up with the tweezers and dropped into a tiny ziplock bag, sealing it and slipping it back into his jacket pocket.

  He turned and left the apartment. The policeman on duty, waiting with rigid attention, rose. Pendergast took his hand warmly. “I thank you, Officer, for your help and attention to duty. I shall certainly mention it to the lieutenant when I see him next.”

  And then he slipped down the stairs as silently and smoothly as a cat.

  25

  ALMOST EXACTLY TWELVE hours after Pendergast left Lasher’s apartment, Bryce Harriman was pacing restlessly through his one-bedroom apartment on Seventy-Second and Madison. The apartment was in a converted prewar building, and the conversion had given the apartment a bizarre layout that allowed for a true circuit: from the living room, through the kitchen, into one door of the bathroom, out the other door into the bedroom, and then from the bedroom through a short, closet-lined hallway that led back to the living room.

  The building had high ceilings, a posh lobby, and twenty-four-hour doormen, but the apartment was rent-stabilized and held under the name of Harriman’s aunt. When she passed away, which would probably be fairly soon, he’d have to leave and find someplace more in keeping with his salary. Just one more example of the fading fortunes of the Harriman family.

  It was furnished in an eclectic style of cast-off pieces left to him by elderly relations, now departed. Many of them were valuable, and all were old. The only new thing in the entire apartment, outside of the kitchen appliances, was the laptop that sat on a Queen Anne table of figured Brazilian maple with cabriole legs—once in the possession of Great-Uncle Davidson, now these ten years under the earth.

  Harriman paused in his pacing to approach the table. Besides the laptop with its glowing screen, there were three piles of paper, one for each murder, the sheets covered with notes, scrawls, doodles, rough diagrams, and the occasional question mark. He shuffled through them restlessly for a moment, then resumed his pacing.

  That nagging frisson of professional anxiety, which had subsided somewhat after his coup with the Izolda Ozmian interview, had surfaced once again. He knew, he knew, what great stories these murders could be—but he was having his share of problems covering them. One difficulty was that his police sources weren’t that good, and they were not eager to help him out. His old archrival Smithback had been a master at cozying up to cops, buying them drinks, buttering them up, and cadging stories out of them. But, although he hated to admit it, Harriman just didn’t have the knack. Maybe it was his WASPy upbringing, the years at Choate and Dartmouth, growing up with the yacht-club-and-cocktail set—but whatever the reason, he just couldn’t relax with cops, couldn’t talk their talk. And they knew it. His stories suffered as a result.

  But there was an even bigger problem here. Even if he was buddy-buddy with all the cops on the force, Harriman wasn’t sure it would help him this time around. Because they seemed as confused by these killings as he was. A dozen different theories were circulating: one killer, two killers, three killers, a copycat killer, a lone killer pretending to be a copycat. The theory du jour was that the Ozmian girl had been killed by one murderer, then decapitated later by somebody who had gone on to do more copycat killings. The cops wouldn’t say exactly why they thought the second and third killings were connected, but from what Harriman had been able to dig up it looked pretty clear the modus operandi was similar in both cases.

  So in the wake of the Izolda Ozmian interview, he’d dutifully banged on all the doors, shown up at all the scenes, and coughed up the best stories he could. He’d made himself as visible during the press conference two days before as he possibly could without holding up a neon sign. But he wasn’t fooling himself: visibility alone didn’t sell papers, and these new stories of his wer
e long on innuendo but short on facts and evidence.

  He made two more perambulations of the apartment and stopped once again in the living room. The laptop sat there, word processor open, cursor blinking at him like a taunting middle finger. He looked around. Three walls of the room were covered with half-decent oils, watercolors, and sketches he’d inherited; the fourth wall was devoted to pictures of his deceased girlfriend, Shannon, as well as to a few plaques and awards he’d received for his work on spotlighting cancer research. The most prominent plaque was for the Shannon Croix Foundation, a fund he had set up in her name to gather money for medical research into uterine cancer. He had accomplished this with the help of the Post, which from time to time did charity drives in coordination with a series of articles. The foundation had become modestly successful, having brought in several million dollars. Harriman was on the board. There was nothing he could do to bring Shannon back—but at least he could do his best to ensure her death had not been entirely in vain.

  With a sigh, he forced himself to take a seat at the table and shuffle through the three piles again. It was strange as hell—three beheadings, all in the same area, all within less than two weeks—but with no clear connection between them. Here were three people from different backgrounds, of different social strata, of different ages, professions, and proclivities. Different everything. It was crazy.

  If only there was a commonality, he thought. Now, wouldn’t that be something? Not three stories, but one. One huge story. If he could find some common thread running through these murders, these three piles of paper…It could be the story of a lifetime.

  He leaned back in his chair. Maybe he ought to head down to the precinct again, try to get some more info about the shootout the night before. They’d really called out the cavalry for that one. He knew it involved a person of interest in the Cantucci murder. But that’s all he could find out.

  He just didn’t buy into these complex theories of copycats and multiple killers and conflicting motivations. His gut told him it was one killer. And if so, the killings had to have something in common besides the decapitations—a common motivation. But what? After all, here were three disgustingly rich scumbags who had never even met one another, and yet…