Tick Tock (22 page)

The worst part of it was that it all felt almost scripted.
The people who’d been killed seemed like they’d been bought for Berger’s fifteen minutes of slimy fame.

I tried not to think about what it meant, about what kind of future the human race was heading toward. But I couldn’t help it.

Alejandra knelt in front of Berger, pointing a flashlight into his mouth.

“I take it he’s having trouble saying ah,” I said.

“You take it correctly,” she said, beckoning me over. “I think it was poison. Cyanide, I’d guess by the bright red rash, but we won’t know until the toxicology.”

She held the light over his upper back teeth.

“Check this out,” she said, directing me to peer into Berger’s pie hole. “See that molar? That’s not a cavity, Mike. It’s a fake tooth. That must be where he hid the poison. Can you believe it?”

After Berger was rolled out, I called Emily Parker at her hotel from the hallway outside the precinct detective squad room upstairs.

“If you thought the pantie bomber was crazy, have a seat,” I said when she answered.

“You found Carl?” she guessed.

“Nope,” I said. “It’s Berger. He’s gone. Killed himself. He had poison in a hollowed-out tooth, a cyanide pill most likely, like a Nazi spy. How’s this for an epitaph? ‘Lawrence Berger, weird in life, weird in death, weird in the hearts of his countrymen.’ ”

“Wait. Did you say
cyanide?
Hold on. Let me get my
notes. Crapola! He’s done it again. It’s happened before. Maggie O’Malley, a nurse dubbed the ‘Dark Angel of Bellevue,’ swallowed a cyanide pill after she was accused of some baby murders in the early nineteen twenties.”

“I need to watch more of the History Channel,” I said squeezing my temples.

A NOONTIME THREE-CAR pileup halted the traffic on Sunrise Highway two miles west of Hampton Bays, Long Island.

Behind the wheel of the Mercedes convertible, Carl Apt watched a Suffolk County Highway Patrol cruiser drive past on the grass center berm to his left, followed by an ambulance. Frowning, he slipped on his designer aviator shades. He cranked the A/C as he pressed the button for the automatic hardtop.

Why had he pushed it? he thought, watching the cop’s bubble lights spin. He knew he should have ditched the car already.

He held his head in his hands. Christ, he was exhausted. The sun was like an ice pick in his eyes. He’d had a splitting headache since four a.m., when he’d climbed from the basement through a sidewalk grate on the 70th Street side of Berger’s building.

What he wouldn’t do for one last soak in his penthouse bath.

As he waited in the dead-stopped traffic, he glanced at the motorists around him. There were a lot of Range Rovers and Cadillac sedans. What was it Lawrence had called loud-mouthed, showy people from Long Island? LIDS. Short for Long Island Dimwits.

After a few minutes, from three cars behind him, a group of lug-nut teens with gelled hair, no shirts, and bottle tans started making some noise. A painful thump of rap music bass began to emanate from their tricked-out convertible Mustang.

“Anywhere, anywhere, woo-whooo, woo-whooo,” they sang along to The Show’s instant summer classic. A fat girl wearing a bikini top and short shorts stood in the passenger seat, threw her hands above her head, and started grinding her hips.

“Real slow, real slow, woo-whooo, woo-whooo,” her mutt friends intoned.

A bead of sweat rolled down Carl’s temple as he eyed them in his rearview. He felt like taking the Steyr AUG submachine gun from under the blanket in the foot well beside him and emptying all thirty 5.56 NATO rounds into the car. Roll out, put it to his shoulder and bear down full auto with the bullpup machine gun. Gel the ginzo driver’s hair with his own blood before blowing out the bitch’s tattooed spine, ending her pole-dancing career and having her piss in a bag for the rest of her miserable life.

Why stop there? he thought. After he raked the Mustang, he could easily kill thirty or forty more people sitting in their cars before the Gomer Long Island cops down the road figured out a response. Turn the LIE into the DOA. Sounded like a plan.

Instead, he let out a breath and popped a Percocet as the traffic started to move. After another minute, he saw a cutout in the berm and spun a U-turn.

He pulled off the highway at the next exit and headed north. Strip malls began to appear, followed by box stores. He pulled into the Roanoke Plaza in Riverhead and cruised up and down the aisles of the massive parking lot.

When he found a ’90-something Buick in a Target parking lot, he squealed out of the lot. Half a mile east, he pulled back off the road into a small, dumpy-looking strip mall that had a pizza place, an optometrist, and something called Edible Arrangements. He drove around the rear of the low, decrepit building and parked the Merc beside a Dumpster.

He got out and locked up and began walking back toward the Target parking lot. Halfway there, he stopped into an Ace Hardware store and bought a set of jumper cables, a can of lighter fluid, and the largest flat-blade screwdriver he could find.

“That’ll be nineteen-ninety-nine plus shipping and handling,” the red-vested fool behind the counter said.

Carl stared at the LID without speaking.

“Just kidding,” the clerk said sheepishly as he handed him back his change.

When he got back to the Buick parked outside Target, Carl jammed the screwdriver into the slot of the window and broke it as quietly as he could. He unlatched the door and popped the hood. With the jumper cables he’d just bought, he ran a line from the positive battery node to the red coil at the back of the engine.

With the engine now powering the dash, he knelt in the open driver’s-side door and cracked the plastic steering column with the flat blade of the screwdriver. Then using the metal blade, he crossed the now-exposed terminals for the solenoid and the battery. The engine chugged for a moment and then grumbled to life.

Carl flicked glass off the seat before slipping behind the wheel and pulling out.

He drove back to the Merc, unlocked the door, and soaked the interior with the lighter fluid after he transferred his bag and the assault rifle to the Buick. He lit a book of matches. He winced as he tossed them into the beautiful, six-figure car’s front seat.

He looked around at the piece-of-crap Buick for the first time as he pulled out back toward the highway. McDonald’s soda cups everywhere. A Jets Snuggie blanket covering the rear pleather seat.

He popped another vitamin P, then thought about it and popped another. His cheeks bulged as he inhaled and let out a long, aggravated breath.

CARL PULLED OFF the Meadowbrook Parkway into East Meadow, Long Island, an hour later.

He cruised the neighborhood. Narrow streets of capes and split-levels, fast food, a driving range. His LeSabre fit right in.

It took him ten minutes to find the address and parked across the street. There it was. Twenty-four Orchard Street. It looked like just another Long Island dump, but he knew it was actually more. He knew that many women had been killed behind its walls, that their bodies had been cut up in its garage.

He’d been thinking about doing another Brooklyn Vampire murder, or maybe the Mad Bomber, but then he’d remembered Lawrence’s library and decided on a new string of killings. Lawrence was going to be so happy when he got the news.

Carl smiled as he thought about his friend. He’d killed
for his country in the Special Forces. Called in air strikes in Bosnia, shot stinking goat herders in Afghanistan from as far away as eight hundred yards. But actually killing for something he cared about was another thing entirely.

Lawrence was his soulmate, his liberator, his master entire.

They’d taken into account that he would probably be captured. But instead of abandoning their efforts, Carl was going to redouble them. Their joint homage to the great murders and murderers of New York would keep occurring in bloodier and more horrifying ways during Lawrence’s incarceration and trial. It would be the topper of the longest, most audacious crime spree of all time.

All the killing so far had been just for Lawrence. It had been Carl’s pleasure. The least he could do, after all. Twelve years earlier, Lawrence had found him panhandling on Park Avenue. He’d cleaned him up and put him through City College, where he’d studied English lit, especially the classics.

He knew all about law enforcement profiling, how he was supposed to be inadequate, looking for power, for meaning in his pathetic life. What a joke! He wasn’t doing this for himself. He was a warrior, a real catalyst for history. Besides, people like Lee Harvey Oswald really had changed the world with one pull of a trigger.

But he shouldn’t get ahead of himself. First things first, he thought as he pulled out.

It was time to put a smile on his good buddy’s face.

AFTER I PICKED UP EMILY AT HER HOTEL, we spent the morning interviewing members of Berger’s catering staff. A fruitless morning, as it turned out. All they knew about Berger were his odd eating habits. About Carl Apt, the waiters and cooks knew nothing at all.

We did manage to contact the Connecticut state troopers and have hidden surveillance put on Berger’s Connecticut estate. I didn’t think Apt was dumb enough to show up there, but you never knew.

We’d just sat down at DiNapoli’s on Madison Avenue for a breather when I saw the headline crawl beneath the Fox News Channel anchor on the bar’s muted flat-screen.

“Wealthy Murder Suspect in Police Custody Found Dead.”

I immediately lost my appetite. I didn’t need to hear or read the rest of the story to realize Lawrence Berger’s demise had hit the speed-of-light news cycle running.
Emily and I had actually been in the middle of debating how to play the media with Berger’s suicide. We’d been planning to sit on things for as long as it took to lure Apt into a trap, but as I stared at the TV, it was looking more like we were the ones who’d just gotten played.

I got a call as we were about to order. I didn’t recognize the number. I picked it up, anyway.

“Detective Bennett, I need to speak with you,” said a French-accented voice.

I realized it was Berger’s chef, Jonathan Desaulniers, whom I’d spoken to this morning.

“What’s up, Jonathan?”

“There’s a girl, Paulina Dulcine,” he said in a panicked voice. “She is a friend of mine. She would sleep with Mr. Berger on occasion. I apologize for not recalling this during our interview. It happened on and off for about three years. You mentioned Mr. Berger perhaps killing people who had crossed him, and after I spoke with you, I thought of her.”

“She crossed him?” I said. “How? What happened?”

“Well, for a long time they had a tender relationship. He would purchase fine jewelry for her. But one day he asked her to do something to him that she thought was odd, and she started laughing. He ordered her to leave him, and they never were together again. I think Mr. Berger felt humiliated.

“The reason I’m getting in touch now is that I called Paulina today. While we were speaking, I heard a scream and then nothing. She hasn’t picked up since.”

“What’s her number and address?” I said, waving for Emily to follow as I jumped up.

Twenty minutes later, we screeched up in front of a thirty-story high-rise building in Battery Park City with another team of Major Case detectives and two more uniforms.

“Paulina Dulcine. Is she home?” I yelled at the concierge as we ran inside.

The slight, effeminate black man’s jaw dropped to the collar of his black Nehru jacket.

“Paulina, um, no. I thought I saw her leaving her apartment when I was delivering dry cleaning.”

“She didn’t leave through the lobby,” said the female concierge beside him.

“She must have gotten her car in the basement garage,” the thin black guy said, opening a door.

We ran down a flight of stairs into the dim cave of the concrete garage. The concierge pointed to the crowded corner on the left.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said, pointing across the lot. “That blue car. The Smart car. That’s hers.”

We went over to the tiny car. Half a snapped key stuck in the lock. Emily knelt down and pulled a purse from underneath the driver’s door. She opened it and found a Gucci wallet.

“It’s hers, Mike,” Emily said, opening the wallet. “Paulina Dulcine’s. He got her. We’re too late.”

“YOU KNOW, there was a case of tag-team killers we learned about at Quantico,” Emily said when we got back to the squad. “It was a textbook case of these guys, Oden and Lawson. One was a psycho rapist, the other a schizophrenic. Oden raped a girl and then handed her off to Lawson, who killed and mutilated her. Each had his own thing.”

“And your point is?” I said, still stinging from our near-miss of Carl.

“In this case, Apt is just killing off Berger’s enemies in the way that Berger wanted. He was like the caterers we spoke to, following specific orders. I see all Berger here. No Apt.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Even though the murders seem sadistic, they’re really not. They’re really set pieces, like elaborate assassinations.”

“That’s it, Mike. Apt seems like an assassin, cold, calculating, competent. I still can’t figure out what’s in it for him. Money? Maybe he’s just crazy. Who knows?”

“No,” I said. “You’re onto something. There’s something in it for Apt. There has to be.”

“You sound so sure. How do you know?”

“The fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason,” I said. “Anything perceived has a cause. All conclusions have premises. All effects have causes. All actions have motives.”

“My goodness, aren’t we going all Aristotle suddenly?” Emily said, smiling for the first time that afternoon. “Or are the four folds from Thomas Aquinas, you Irish church boy?”

“Arthur Schopenhauer, actually,” I said, faking a wide yawn.

“You read Schopenhauer?” Emily said, raising an eyebrow.