City of Endless Night Page 19

  He accepted the small pour of the rather young first-growth wine the sommelier offered him, swirling it around, examining its color and viscosity, then finally sipping it, aerating it over his tongue as he did so. He took a second, more critical sip. Finally, he put down the glass and nodded to the sommelier, who went off to decant the bottle. After the sommelier had returned to fill their glasses, their waiter crept forward. Longstreet ordered calves’ brains sautéed in a Calvados sauce; Pendergast in turn requested the Pigeon et Légumes Grillés Rabasse au Provençal. The waiter thanked them, then disappeared into the dim, cozy space beyond the table.

  Longstreet nodded his approval. “Excellent choice.”

  “I can never resist truffles. An expensive habit, but one I find impossible to break.”

  Longstreet now took a deeper, more contemplative sip of Bordeaux. “These murders are generating a tremendous furor—on all sides of society. The rich, because they see themselves being targeted, and the rest because of the vicarious thrill of seeing the ultra-wealthy get theirs.”

  “Indeed.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be your pal D’Agosta these days. The NYPD is catching holy hell. And we’ve not escaped embarrassment, either.”

  “You’re referring to the behavioral profile.”

  “Yes. Or, more precisely, the lack of one.” At the request of the NYPD, Longstreet had submitted the Decapitator case to the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit in Quantico and asked for a psychological profile. Serial killers, no matter how bizarre, fell into types, and the BSU had developed a database of every known type in the world. When a new killer appeared on the scene, the BSU was able to slot him into one of the existing patterns in order to create a psychological profile—his motivations, methods, patterns, work habits, even such things as his socioeconomic background and whether or not he had a car. This time, however, the BSU had been unable to profile the Decapitator; the killer fit no previously known pattern. Instead of a profile, Longstreet had gotten back a long, defensive report that boiled down to one fact: for this killer, the Quantico databases were useless.

  Longstreet sighed. “You’re our serial-killer expert,” he said. “What do you make of this one? Is he as unique as the BSU claims?”

  Pendergast inclined his head. “I’m still struggling to understand. To be honest, I’m not sure we’re dealing with a serial killer at all.”

  “How can that be? He’s killed fourteen people! Or thirteen, if you don’t count the first.”

  Pendergast shook his head. “All serial killers have at base a pathological or psychotic motivation. In this case, maybe the motivation is…relatively normal.”

  “Normal? Killing and decapitating half a dozen people? Have you lost your mind?” Longstreet almost laughed out loud. This was classic Pendergast, never failing to astonish, taking delight in confounding everyone around him with some outrageous statement.

  “Take Adeyemi. I’m quite sure she has no skeletons in her closet, no sordid history. Nor was she exceptionally rich.”

  “Then the current theory about the Decapitator’s motivation is worthless.”

  “Or perhaps…” Pendergast paused as their dinners were served.

  “Perhaps what?” Longstreet asked as he tucked into his calves’ brains.

  Pendergast waved a hand. “Many theories come to mind. Perhaps Adeyemi, or one of the other victims, was the real target all along, and the other murders are nothing more than a smokescreen.”

  Longstreet tasted his dish and was disappointed: the pale pink calves’ brains were overdone. Laying his silverware on the plate with a clatter, he summoned the waiter and sent the dish back for another. He turned to Pendergast again. “Do you really think that’s likely?”

  “Not likely. In fact, barely possible.” Pendergast paused a moment before continuing. “I’ve never encountered a case so resistant to analysis. Obviously, the heads are missing and the primary victims were surrounded by heavy security. Those are the only commonalities we have so far. That’s not nearly enough to build a case on. It leaves open a wide variety of possible motivations.”

  “So what now?” Although he’d never admit it to the man, Longstreet enjoyed watching Pendergast’s mind at work.

  “We must go back to the beginning, to the first murder, and work our way forward from there. It’s the key to everything that’s happened since, for the very reason that it enjoys the debut position. It is also the most curious of the killings—and we must understand the anomalies before we can understand the patterns in what followed. Why, for example, did somebody take the head twenty-four hours after the girl was murdered? Nobody seems troubled by this anymore, except for me.”

  “You really think it’s important?”

  “I think it’s vital. In fact, earlier today I dropped in on Anton Ozmian to get more information. Unfortunately, my usual bag of tricks didn’t get me past his retinue of toadies, lawyers, lickspittles, bodyguards, lackeys, and other impedimenta. It was with some embarrassment I was forced to withdraw.”

  Longstreet suppressed a smile. He would have loved to have witnessed Pendergast obstructed like that; it happened so rarely. “Why do I feel this is leading up to a request?”

  “I need the power of your title, H. I need the full weight of the FBI behind me in order to beard the lion in his den.”

  “I see.” Longstreet let a pregnant silence build. “Aloysius, you know that you’re still on my shit list, right? You maneuvered me into dishonoring an oath that I swore to with my life.”

  “I’m acutely aware of that.”

  “Good. I’ll do what I can to get you inside the door, then—but after that, it’s your show. I’ll come along, but only as an observer.”

  “Thank you. That will be entirely acceptable.”

  Their waiter returned with a fresh, steaming plate of calves’ brains. He slipped the plate before Longstreet, then took a step back, looking on tremulously, waiting for his patron’s opinion. The executive associate director cut a slice off one edge with a stroke of his knife, speared it with his fork, raised the jiggling mass to his mouth.

  “Perfection,” he pronounced, chewing with half-closed eyes.

  At this, the waiter bowed with mingled pleasure and relief, then turned and disappeared into the gaslit gloom.

  41

  BRYCE HARRIMAN STEPPED out onto the front porch of the small, neat-looking Colonial on a residential street of Dedham, Massachusetts, then turned back to shake the hand of the owner—a physically feeble but clearheaded man of about eighty, with a thin cap of white hair plastered to his head with brilliantine.

  “Thank you very much for your time and your candor, Mr. Sanderton,” Harriman said. “And you’re sure about the affidavit?”

  “If you think it’s necessary. It was a damned awful thing—I was sorry I had to witness it.”

  “I’ll see that a notary brings you a copy for signing by dinnertime, along with an overnight pouch to send it back to me.”

  With another thanks, and another warm handshake, Harriman went down the steps and walked toward the Uber that idled at the curb. It was already late afternoon on New Year’s Eve, and with holiday traffic it would be a bitch getting back to New York and his Upper East Side apartment. But Harriman didn’t care about that. In fact, at the moment he didn’t care much about anything except the triumph he was about to unleash.

  Harriman subscribed to the old maxim that, if one were to write to any six upstanding pillars of the community with the message All is discovered—flee at once, every last one of them would head for the hills. Dirt was what was needed here; and—save for his late journalistic nemesis Bill Smithback—nobody was better at digging up dirt than Bryce Harriman.

  His big break had occurred just after breakfast, as he was online perusing old newspapers from the Boston suburbs in which Ozmian had grown up. And, in the Dedham Townsman, he’d found what he was looking for. Nearly thirty years ago, Ozmian had been arrested for destruction of property at Our Lady of Mercy
Catholic Church on Bryant Street. That was all there was, a single item buried in an old newspaper—but it was all Harriman needed. A call to Massachusetts revealed that Ozmian had been quickly released and the misdemeanor charge dropped, but that didn’t deter him. By eleven, he was on the shuttle to Boston. By two, he had been to Our Lady of Mercy and obtained a list of people, with addresses, who had been church members at the time of the incident. And it had taken knocks on only three doors before he found someone—Giles Sanderton—who not only recalled the event but had been an eyewitness.

  And the story he had to tell was a doozy.

  As the cab made its way to Logan Airport, Harriman reclined in the backseat, going over his notes. Sanderton had been at the noon mass some three decades back—being celebrated by a Father Anselm, one of the church’s more venerable priests—when in the middle of the homily the church door opened and a teenage Anton Ozmian appeared. Without a word he walked to the front of the church, knocked over the altar table, plucked up a crucifix, swung it like a baseball bat at Father Anselm, knocked him to the floor, and then proceeded to beat the living shit out of him. Leaving the priest bleeding and unconscious at the base of the pulpit, Ozmian had dropped the bloody crucifix onto his prostrate form and, turning, strode out of the church as calmly as he had come in. There had been no sign of anger in his face—just cool deliberation. It had been months before Father Anselm could talk or walk normally again, and shortly afterward he moved into a home for retired priests, and died not long thereafter.

  Harriman rubbed his hands together with ill-concealed glee. It had all come together so fast it was almost like magic. At breakfast, he’d had nothing—and now, by midafternoon, he had proof of a story about Ozmian that was so ugly and brutal—beating a priest almost to death with a crucifix!—that it would be what he needed to force his will on Ozmian. While the man claimed to be indifferent to the world’s opinion, this horrific revelation would almost certainly provoke the board to relieve him of his position. DigiFlood had initially been backed by several top venture capital firms and hedge funds, not to mention a sizable investment from Microsoft. These companies had reputations to protect, and they held more than 50 percent of DigiFlood’s stock; yes, Harriman was sure Ozmian would be pushed out if his revelations were published.

  It was odd there had been no assault-and-battery charges, until Harriman discovered that a sizable sum of money had been “donated” by Ozmian’s family to the local parish. That was the final piece of the puzzle.

  It was perfect. Better than perfect. First, it gave him something to write about besides Adeyemi, whose enduring saintliness was proving most inconvenient. Second, this was a story that Ozmian could not afford to ignore. As the cab pulled into the airport, Harriman found himself confronted by just one question. Should he publish the story first and neutralize Ozmian that way? Or should he first take it to Ozmian and threaten to publish it, in order to force him to cancel his own blackmail scheme?

  As he mulled this over, he recalled Ozmian’s sneering words, and they still smarted as much as when he’d first heard them. It’s really quite simple. All you have to do is agree to our two conditions—neither of which is onerous. If you do, everyone stays happy—and out of prison. That settled it: he would take the story to Ozmian in person and threaten to ruin him with it. That would be poetic justice. In fact, he couldn’t wait to see Ozmian’s face when he dangled the piece under his nose.

  Harriman found himself pleased afresh with how brilliantly he had found the means to take on this captain of industry—and beaten him at his own game.

  42

  WHAT A DAY it had been for Marsden Swope. The anti-one-percenter demonstrations had really taken off, the Twitterverse, Facebook, and Instagram seething with calls for demonstrations. The biggest one had gathered around the towering new structure at 432 Park Avenue, the tallest residential building in the world, where apartments were selling for up to a hundred million dollars each. Somehow, that building—even though it was unconnected with the murders—seemed to have become for the demonstrators the very symbol of greed, excess, and ostentation, the perfect example of how the ultra-rich were taking over the city.

  So he went down to observe. And it was quite a scene: rank after rank of protestors chanting, blocking the entrances, creating gridlock all around. And then a tweet had gone out calling for eggs, instantly viral, and within minutes the protestors had emptied the neighborhood stores of eggs and were hurling them at the façade from all sides, coating the snow-white marble and lustrous glass with a dripping, slippery mess of yellow goo. The police had moved in, the area was barricaded, and Swope had barely escaped by ditching his jacket and passing himself off as a priest in his cassock and dingy clerical collar.

  More than ever, the melee had convinced Swope that violence was not the answer: that the one percenters and the anti-one-percenters were all part of the same conspiracy of hatred, evil, and violence. Swope now understood that he could wait no longer—he must act to stop the madness rising on all sides.

  It was a few minutes past one in the morning when Swope crossed Grand Army Plaza and headed into the winter fastness of Central Park. As he’d walked up Fifth Avenue, he had been forced to thread his way through knots of laughing, drunken New Year’s revelers, but now as he moved deeper into the park, past the zoo and Wollman Rink, their numbers thinned until he was left blessedly alone.

  He had a lot on his mind. With this latest murder, the city seemed to boil over. It was not just the protest at 432 Park. There were more stories of the super-rich fleeing. Some guy had started a blog that cataloged the private jets taking off from Teterboro Airport, with photos taken with a massive telephoto lens showing individual billionaires and their families climbing into their Gulfstreams and Learjets and modified B727s—hedge fund managers, captains of finance, Russian oligarchs, and Saudi princes. The demonstrations favoring the Decapitator, the “down with the one percenters” rabble, had also intensified, with one demonstration blocking Wall Street for four hours until the police finally broke it up.

  The responses to his call for a bonfire of the vanities had also swelled enormously—so many, in fact, that he had decided the time was ripe to put his plans into action. It was a true miracle—well over a hundred thousand people had responded and claimed to be on their way to New York City, or already there, awaiting his announcement of where and when. The papers were calling New York the City of Endless Night. Well, and so it was, but with God’s help he would turn it into the City of Endless Righteousness. He would show everyone, rich and poor alike, that all wealth and luxury were anathema to eternal life.

  When he reached the Sheep Meadow, he paused. Crossing it, he continued to the Mall, walked north, passed Bethesda Fountain, then skirted the mazy byways of the Ramble, deep in thought. Savonarola had held his original bonfire in the central square of Florence. That had been the heart of the city, an ideal place to broadcast his message. But today’s New York was different. You couldn’t stage a bonfire in Times Square—not only was it overrun with tourists, but the police presence was so heavy it would be over before it started. No—his ideal spot would be large, open, and easy to get to from any number of directions. His followers, carrying their luxuries to be burned in the fire, would need to have time to gather, start the bonfire, and throw in their “vanities.” It was imperative that they not be stopped too quickly.

  Stopped. Swope noticed that his own feet had stopped, as if of their own accord. He glanced around. There were only a few distant revelers visible now, hurrying out of the park and heading for home. To his left rose the dark bulk of Belvedere Castle, its battlements illuminated by the glow of Manhattan. Beyond lay the monolithic wall of Central Park West apartment buildings, marching northward in an endless procession, broken by the façade of the Museum of Natural History. And directly before him, spread out in all its glory, stretching on almost as far as the eye could see until it terminated at the dark wall of trees surrounding the reservoir, lay the Great Law
n.

  The Great Lawn. Even the name resonated deeply within Swope. This, indeed, was a spot capable of holding the multitudes that would respond to his call. This, indeed, was a central location, easily accessible by all. This, indeed, was an ideal place for a bonfire—and a place that the police would not be able to lock down and clear out.

  A great conviction rose up in his mind: as if of their own accord, guided by heaven, his feet had led him to the perfect spot.

  He took a step forward, then another; and then, charged with a sudden onrushing of emotion, he planted his feet in the grass and spoke the first words he had said aloud in more than two days:

  “Here shall be the bonfire of the vanities!”

  43

  IT HAD TAKEN Longstreet some time to make the phone calls and apply the necessary pressure, especially over a holiday, but by 1 PM on New Year’s Day, Pendergast’s Rolls was once more creeping into the underground parking garage of the DigiFlood complex in Lower Manhattan. The guards meeting their car led them to what seemed the farthest spot from the elevators, necessitating a five-minute walk back to the entrance, where they were denied access to the private elevators, and instead were required to take the concrete stairs up to street level and enter the building through the main lobby. And here they were selected for extra vetting by security. Howard Longstreet felt his annoyance rising, but he kept his mouth shut. This was Pendergast’s deal, and the special agent seemed to take it in stride, unperturbed, not remarking on the treatment that could only, Longstreet felt, be aimed at humiliating them.

  At last they cleared security and rode an elevator to the top floor. Now they were ushered into a small, windowless room, where they were seated and made to wait, watched over by an impassive young drone in an expensive suit.