Small Town

Small Town Page 53

He could picture Carlos on Live at Five, interviewed by a vacu-ous reporter on the steps of the Baltic Street house. He hadn’t seen Carlos, hadn’t even tried to look through the peephole at him, but he was sure he knew what he looked like—short, stocky, a full head of curly black hair, pockmarks on his cheeks. “I go and check on her, you know? And he tells me he’s her friend, she went home on account of her aunt died, he’s staying there to feed her cat. And it sounds okay to me, you know?”

Yes, let them find his prints. Let them dread the Carpenter. It wouldn’t make things that much more dangerous for him, and he didn’t have to stay away from them for that much longer.

It was already well into August.

I N T H E M O R N I N G , H E thought, Carlos would start to wonder. Perhaps he should meet Evelyn Crispin’s friend face to face, instead of having to talk with him through a door.

Time to be going.

He undressed, and put all of his clothes in her washing machine, sitting patiently at the window until it was time to switch them to the dryer. When they were dry he laid out the clothes he would put on when he awoke, packed the rest into a navy-blue backpack he’d found in one of the closets.

One of the small drawers in the kitchen held hardware—pliers, regular and Phillips-head screwdrivers, a hammer, a tape measure, a jar full of assorted nails and screws. He took out the hammer, and went through the jar to select the largest nail. It was a formidable thing, three inches long, and thick. He put the hammer and nail on the kitchen counter and closed the drawer.

The freezer had done its work, and the ice cubes had hardened.

He collected the cubes in a bucket, refilled the trays, dumped the bucket in the bathtub. He wet a washcloth and gave himself a sponge bath, then got into her bed. The air conditioner, running full blast, had the room like an icebox, and he used both blankets.

He awoke at a quarter after two, dressed in the clothes he’d laid out, moving quietly to avoid disturbing the neighbor a flight below. The cat, whom he’d locked out of the bedroom, was busy rubbing against his ankles, signaling its hunger. He glanced down at the cat, then over at the hammer he’d left handy on the kitchen counter.

He opened a can of cat food, fed the animal, and had a look at the ice cube trays, but the thin skin of ice yielded to his fingertip when he tested a cube.

He watered the plants, except for the one that showed signs of overwatering, and freshened the water in the cat’s bowl. Then he picked up the hammer and the nail and went into the bathroom, where Evelyn Crispin lay faceup in a tub of water in which some ice cubes, still not entirely melted, lay floating. He’d started with bags of ice from a bodega on Nevins Street, supplemented with his own ice cubes as fast as the freezer could make them, and, with both air conditioners running night and day, it had worked well enough. But it was a holding action at best, and he sniffed the air and knew it would have been time to leave whether or not Carlos had come knocking at the door.

There were bruises on Evelyn Crispin’s cheek and temple, where he had struck her, and marks on her neck, where he had strangled her. He gazed down at her and felt something for her, but he couldn’t say exactly what it was. Pity? Perhaps.

He knelt at the side of the tub, and his lip curled in distaste for what he was about to do. He took no joy in the act, but, like everything he did, it was not without purpose.

He pounded the nail into the very center of her forehead.

Shortly after three, he donned the backpack and slipped out the door, careful not to let the cat follow him out. He locked the door behind him, and made his way silently down the two flights of stairs. No light was visible under the doors of his neighbors on the lower two floors. He guessed they were sleeping soundly, and was careful not to interrupt their sleep.

Baltic Street was quiet and deserted when he let himself out the front door. He walked to Smith Street. There was a subway entrance three blocks to his right, at Bergen Street, and another at Carroll Street, six blocks in the other direction.

It was a nice night for a walk, and he was in no hurry. He turned left, and walked at a brisk but unhurried pace through the summer night. The backpack, he decided, was better than a suitcase, better than a tote bag or shopping bag. It left his hands free, and seemed less a burden altogether. He was glad he’d noticed it in the closet, glad he’d decided to put it to use.

Just a few more weeks, he thought.

Waiting on the deserted subway platform, he tried to think what he would do—not right away, but when it was time. The Car

penter’s final action, the triumphant event in which he was part of the sacrifice, was his bid for greatness, and he couldn’t think what it might be. He knew when it would happen, but not what form it would take.

But it wasn’t something you could think of, was it? He had a seat on a bench, folded his hands in his lap, and, waiting for his train, he waited, too, for the answer to be revealed to him.

twenty-three

FOR THE FIRSTtime, the Carpenter had signed his work.

The Post called it a direct response to their headline. They’d depicted him with a nail in his forehead, and he’d left his latest victim mutilated in just such a fashion. While quick to take credit, if that’s what it was, the newspaper was just as quick to absolve itself of any responsibility in the matter. Medical evidence, they pointed out, established beyond question that the woman had lain dead for days in that tub of ice water before her killer had added his final grisly touch.

The News called it a challenge to the authorities. The Carpenter was taunting the police, daring them to catch him. No doubt he blamed the police for failing to prevent the 9/11 tragedy that took his family from him, and this was his revenge.

The Times interviewed a forensic psychiatrist, who pointed out that the Carpenter, who had always sought anonymity in the past, had now gone public, seeking the credit for his latest murder. He had now reached the stage where he actively desired to get caught, and would no doubt behave accordingly, taking greater risks, making less effort to avoid arrest, and very likely raising the stakes by committing crimes on an increasingly grand scale.

Fran Buckram first learned of the Boerum Hill murder from a TV newscast. He went out and bought all three papers and read the coverage in each, then turned on New York One to see if there’d been any further developments. There were none, then or in the days that followed, but the story continued to get a lot of play in the media despite the lack of anything you could call news.

Different experts contributed theories and observations, and reporters polled ordinary citizens throughout the metropolitan area to get their remarkably uninformed opinions. Everyone with even a passing acquaintance with Evelyn Crispin, at the law firm where she’d worked and in her Boerum Hill neighborhood, was encouraged to offer an appraisal of the woman’s character and lament her horrible death.

How had the Carpenter picked her? What was it in her life that made him choose to end it? Why, having evidently killed the woman immediately upon gaining access to her apartment, had he cohabited with her corpse for well over a week? (This had not been intended to infer, the Times explained the following day, that there had been any sexual contact between Ms. Crispin and Mr.

Harbinger, either before or after her demise, such contact having been specifically ruled out by postmortem examination. The day after that, the paper printed a second Corrections notice, stating that the word infer in the previous day’s follow-up should of course have been imply. )

Buckram, who made it his business to read everything printed on the subject, thought that they were missing the point. He had a pretty good idea how the Carpenter had selected his victim. He hung out in the neighborhood and kept his eyes open, which seemed to be something he was good at, and painstaking about.

He looked for someone who lived alone, whose apartment he could go to and from without passing through a lobby. He’d picked her out for convenience, and had killed her not because her death was part of his plan (whatever his plan might be), but because he wanted her apartment.

So he could hide out in it.

You didn’t need to be a Feebie profiler in a cheap suit or a Freudian with a Viennese accent to work it out. You didn’t have to think like a psychopath, either. It was, as far as he could make out, pretty much a matter of common sense. The son of a bitch was so hot he was on fire, with a whole police force turning the city inside out looking for him. They’d found his bank account and frozen it, found his storage locker and cleaned it out. He had no access to money or possessions, and nowhere to sit down and think about it.

The birds of the field had their nests, but a police task force was making sure the son of a bitch had no place to lay his head. Every desk clerk in every flophouse and cheap hotel had his picture, and got frequent follow-up visits from the cops. Homeless shelters, lounges at all three New York airports, waiting rooms at Penn Station and Grand Central—all were under close police scrutiny.

Transit cops checked the benches on the subway platforms and went from car to car through the trains, eyeballing the sleepers.

Even the drunks and druggies sleeping it off on sidewalks, normally regarded as part of the urban landscape, got a second look these days.

So he’d found an apartment to sublet. He couldn’t do it the usual New York way, by checking the ads in the Voice or paying a broker or bribing a super, so he’d improvised, picking out some poor lonely Eleanor Rigby type, following her home, and throt-tling her. He’d fed the cat because that was simpler and quieter than killing it, and he’d watered the plants—well, who knew why he’d watered the plants? Maybe he just liked plants. The ice water bath, which puzzled some analysts while others saw it as some exotic form of torture, was just the guy’s way of keeping the apartment livable. The ice helped to keep the stink down.

And the nail in the forehead?

Well, that was puzzling. No getting around it, that was a poser.

If it was anything other than a signature, a way to claim this death as one of his own, Buckram couldn’t think what it might be. And why would he want to do that?

To play a game with the police?

He didn’t think so. The man had suffered extraordinary losses.

His whole family had vanished in the blink of an eye, and not in a fire, not in an auto accident, not in a train wreck or plane crash, but in the course of a deliberate attack upon the entire city. That didn’t seem likely to turn a quiet gentleman, almost reclusive in his retirement, into some cackling schemer intent upon making fools of a police department. No, Harbinger had a purpose. It might not be rational, couldn’t be rational, but there was probably logic to it. Not that anybody could crack the code from a distance and read the poor bastard’s mind.

As far as the tabloids were concerned, he was evil. Sick, twisted.

And his acts were evil, no question about it, but something in Buckram resisted the demonization of the man. He’d run across a lot of people over the years who’d done evil things, and some of them knew their deeds were evil, but others did not. The woman who smashed her daughter’s skull because she was sick of changing diapers was categorically different from the man who sat on his son’s chest, effectively crushing the boy to death, because that was the only way he could think of to expel the devil that made the child cough all night long. Both were criminally unfit parents, and both could be placed in a space capsule and rocketed into orbit without making the world a poorer place for their absence, but one was evil in a way that the other was not.