wedged in his jacket pocket.
“How’s it going?” he greeted me.
“You’re a detective?” I asked astonished. With his fuzzy post-adolescent mustache, he couldn’t have been much older than me.
“What do we have?”
“I only looked inside,” I said, in case he was testing me. “Her head is cut off, and her limbs were taped together.”
“Holy shit!” he said, then snapped a photo of the victim from the doorway. “Do we have a name?”
“Not to my knowledge. Seems like she was a hooker.”
“So how many murders does this make it?”
“You’re the detective, you tell me,” I replied. “Are you allowed to smoke in here?”
When he grinned, I realized I hadn’t been following proper procedures. I flipped open my memo book and told him that if he wanted to enter the room, he had to sign it first, since I was technically in charge of the scene. I should’ve gotten the earlier sightseers to do likewise.
“Let me finish my cig first,” he said and walked back down the stairs.
It took me a minute or two before I realized he wasn’t coming back. Whoever that kid was, he wasn’t a detective. Probably a reporter, damn it. They were constantly monitoring police radios.
Twenty minutes later, I heard coughing in the distance. The cough slowly grew louder and was accompanied by an odd thud. Finally a rugged, older man emerged from the stairway, panting for air. He walked with a distinct limp. This guy had detective written all over him.
As soon as he saw me, he nervously planted an unlit cigarette between his lips.
“My fucking foot is killing me.”
“Who exactly are you?” I asked.
He took his wallet from his pocket and flipped open his gold shield. “Detective Sergeant Bernie Farrell. Is the rest of the squad here?”
“Just me, sir.”
“Who are you again?”
“Officer Chronou.”
“First name, dear heart?”
“Gladyss, with two esses.”
“Tell me no reporters came by, Gladyss.”
“Actually this young guy just came by . . . He said he was a detective, but he kept asking me questions.”
“Make me glad, Gladyss with two esses, and tell me he didn’t snap a picture.”
“He took a picture.”
“Shit! Exactly what does ‘protect the crime scene’ mean to you?”
“I’m really sorry, sir,” I said.
“No, I shoulda told . . . See, some asshole reporter got ahold of the mugs of the last vic, as well as the crime scene of the first vic, and has been running stories on the case.”
Detective Farrell went over and stared down at the body. He hung his hand forward and pursed his lips like a gargoyle. “Shit,” he said. He walked around the room until he came to the window, then stared up at the surrounding buildings silently for several long minutes.
“Why don’t you warn him off?” I said, if only to awaken him.
“We tried, but there wasn’t a byline on the stories, they were just credited to a special correspondent,” Farrell said. “And surprise, surprise, the newspaper’s editor refused to reveal their sources.”
“The real fear,” he continued, “is that killers sometimes like to return to the scene of the crime. And this killer does this whole weird human sculpture thing.”
“I remember this guy’s face pretty clearly.”
“Well, he probably isn’t the murderer. The killer is obviously smart, or we would’ve caught him by now. And this murder officially makes him a serial killer.”
“This is the third?”
“The third that we know of, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there are others we don’t know about. Look at this weird shit.” He pointed to the corpse.
“They’re all tall with blonde hair.”
“Maybe his ex was tall?”
“I think the reason he looks for tall gals is because of this whole structure he makes.” He pointed to the bound limbs. “He wants them nice and erect.”
“She’s holding a card in her hand.”
“Yeah, the last one had an expired Metrocard, and some tacky bracelet on her other wrist, too—but it really varies here.” He pointed to the poor woman’s skull. “In the first murder, he moved the head up over there, and he carved the number 9 on the vic’s forehead. The second one, he cut the number 2 on her forehead and put the head over there.” He pointed to the right.
“It’s like some perverse work of art, isn’t it?”
“Shit! I definitely should’ve had this joint staked out.”
“How could you know he’d bring her here?”
“It’s one of the only three places he could’ve brought her.”
“Isn’t this area loaded with fleabag hotels?”
“Not anymore. Everything’s either been zoned or priced up. Ten, fifteen years ago you could rent rooms by the trick, screw, strangle, and be out in twenty. But all the streetwalkers and car johns have moved online or up to Hunts Point.”
“I’ve seen streetwalkers around here,” I said.
“Yeah, you still get a few desperadoes along Lex—but all our vics are from escort services. And the hotels around here are strictly all-night affairs. Some of the rooms are three, four times the price of the girl. But aside from being one of the cheapest, this crap-ass dive is one of the last three hotels in the area that doesn’t even have a video setup in the lobby.”
He let out a big sigh and muttered, apparently to himself. “Fuck, Bert would’ve had them all staked out—at least for a week after the last girl. Course, he had the power to authorize that and I don’t.”
“Someone must have seen something.”
“The clerk here said he had no recollection of the john, just the girl. We were luckier at the last scene. The clerk there clearly remembered the vic and her john.”
The detective pulled out a creased sketch that looked eerily similar to the one I remembered of the Unabomber. He could’ve been anywhere from forty to sixty, and wore dark sunglasses and a loose hoodie.
“How’d
