Killer Heat

TWENTY-THREE

What you know about serial killers couldn't fill a thimble, Chapman." Dickie Draper had arrived twenty minutes later and joined us in the conference room.

We'd been ordered to marshal all the case evidence for the mayor's presentation. The long wooden table with elegantly carved legs that had once been the centerpiece of Teddy Roosevelt's office in his time as New York City's police commissioner was covered with DD5s and crime scene photographs.

Scully and Peterson were scrambling to notify their borough commanders. By 5:00 p.m., when the mayor would make his announcement, he would have to be able to say that he had assembled a task force to search for the killer. Officers would be pulled from squads and foot patrol to give the community the illusion of safety when the frenzy started

What I do know, Dickie, is that while you were daydreaming about your next meal, Elise Huff's killer struck again."

"What can I say? The odds were against it." The mustard from his ham and provolone sandwich was smeared on Dickie's jowls.

"We're at three and counting. That's the FBI's magic number to go serial."

"Pulp fiction. A broad can't go to the supermarket or the hairdresser without getting snatched by a lunatic if you're looking for box office dollars or best sellers," Dickie said, wiping his chin with the back of his hand. "C'mon, can you name a serial killer who's worked this city in the last five years?"

I couldn't think of a single one.

"Rapists, sure. Serial sex offenders, you probably have fifteen, twenty patterns a year in Manhattan, just like we got. Queens and the Bronx, too. I'm right about that, aren't I, Alex?"

"Yes."

It was an indisputable fact. There was never a month when the NYPD's Special Victims Units weren't looking for recidivist rapists- usually several of them at any given time. There were a hundred Floyd Warrens in this country for every serial killer, who are far more common in the pages of crime novels than in real life.

"What are we supposed to be doing here?" Dickie asked, walking around the table to look at the exhibits that had been laid out.

"Give the commissioner the answers to all the questions he'll be asked by the reporters," Mike said.

"What questions?"

"Do a full Battaglia," I said. On dozens of occasions, I had gone in with Mike and Mercer to brief the district attorney on every aspect and detail of an investigation. Before I could pause for breath, Paul Battaglia would cross-examine us about factors we had never considered. "Think of all the questions the best reporters will ask and arm him with the answers before he gets on the platform."

"Where and how have serial killers hit in this city before? Is there anything useful in the facts of those cases to help us put this one together?" Mercer asked. "Give Scully some ready answers. Separate facts from fairy tales."

Dickie grabbed the bag of chips and sat across from me. Mike's chair was at the far end, and he leaned it back and put his feet up on the table.

"Son of Sam," Mike said. "In this town, it all starts with David Berkowitz, 1976."

"No disrespect to Ted Bundy," Dickie said. "Ted just never got to Gotham, but his numbers make Berkowitz look like a piker. He put up some numbers, that Bundy kid."

"We're not talking NFL stats," Mike said. "Son of Sam."

"Your father work the case?" Mercer asked.

"The great Joe Borelli ran the show. Sure, my dad and every cop they could mobilize. One pathetic whack job and it took the department more than a year and two hundred detectives to bring Son of Sam down," Mike said. "You taking notes, Coop? Operation Omega, that's what they called it. Scully needs to give this task force a name. Something strong. That always placates people."

The Son of Sam story was a law enforcement legend. Berkowitz had been a quiet misfit who stalked and shot his victims, some on city streets and some in parked cars, killing six and wounding many others. Most were young women, either alone or caught in compromising positions on isolated lovers' lanes.

"Everybody knows the expression Son of Sam but I don't remember much about him, other than photographs in the press," I said.

Like many cops, Mike and Dickie knew the details of department cases as if they had worked the jobs themselves.

"Berkowitz had a neighbor with a black lab named Sam. Claimed it was a devil dog, possessed by Satan. When Sam howled," Mike said, "it was a message to Berkowitz to go out and kill women. All a bullshit story he admitted making up so he could use an insanity defense if he got caught."

"But they weren't sexual crimes, were they?" I asked. I didn't think Berkowitz had ever molested the women he killed.

"He didn't rape them, if that's what you mean. He and Ted Bundy were the first two serial killers ever interviewed by the FBI. Berkowitz claimed he became aroused by the act of stalking women. After he shot them, he'd often go back to the scene and masturbate. Tried to find his victims' graves for the same reason. That's got sexual sadist stamped all over it."

Dysfunction was a problem for many assailants attempting to rape or sodomize. If our killer hadn't consummated any sexual acts with our victims, the lack of DNA might be explained by his physical inability to complete the assault.

"Any other sexual history?"

"Best the shrinks could tell, Berkowitz had sex one time in his life. Got a venereal disease from a prostitute his first time out, when he was in the army."

"He had a military record?" I recalled the letters he'd written to the press, taunting them to capture him. Berkowitz had called himself "Beelzebub, the chubby behemoth."

"He didn't look the type."

"Three years. Tell Scully to keep that in mind. That flabby lunatic Berkowitz-nothing personal, Dickie-didn't fit the physical stereotype. And yes, he learned all he needed to know about guns in the army."

"You believe in the MacDonald triad?" Dickie asked Mike.

"MacDonald-the researcher who says there are three traits that are childhood predictors of a serial?"

"Pyromaniac, zoosadism, bedwetting beyond an appropriate age."

"Berkowitz set fires in the hood all the time when he was growing up." Mike and Dickie were in their own killer zone, trading perpetrator pedigree information like most boys would banter baseball batting averages. "Cruelty to animals? All his life. He even shot Sam, the dog. And bedwetting? It's still a problem for him in state prison. There's a helpful hint. Check Herb Ackerman, Coop. Maybe that's what the diapers are about."

"How'd they finally catch him, guys?" I asked. "That's the detail we need."

"Dumb luck. They had the task force working round the clock for a year, going nowhere. Then the schmuck ends up getting a parking ticket when he steps out of his car to murder somebody," Mike said. "Put a star next to that one. Our guy has to have a car or a van to move these bodies. We need scrips of vehicles, checks of E-ZPass before and after the girls were found in Queens and upstate, and parking violations. Check it all out."

"Give me another one, Chapman," Dickie said. The crumbs from the bag of chips were scattered on his tie and the shelf created by his stomach when he sat. "Who else you got?"

"The Zodiac."

"Very good, Mikey. Eddie Seda, 1989. I worked that one myself. Seven years till we got the bastard."

"I thought the Zodiac was a serial killer on the West Coast, in the Bay Area," I said.

"That's the original Zodiac," Dickie said. "Never caught that one. Brooklyn, we had the copycat. East New York, Highland Park. Ambidextrous, he was."

"Ambidextrous?"

"Whatever they call it. Killed men, killed women. I think he had some sexual identity problems. Sent a letter to the cops with all the zodiac symbols and a note-'Orion is the one who can stop Zodiac.' Mailed it with one of those LOVE stamps. Then began belting out bodies like clockwork. Libra, Taurus, Virgo, like that."

"Did you nail him, Dickie?"

"Eddie shot his sister in the ass with a zip gun 'cause he could hear her making love in the next room. Dumb luck again. Precinct guys show up at the house, take him in for questioning. While they're talking to him about the domestic, his palm prints match up to some of the case evidence. He killed more people than Berkowitz," Dickie said, licking the salt off his fingertips. "I did Rifkin, too."

"Who?" I asked.

"Joel Rifkin, 1989 to 1993. Another outer boroughs boy. Eighteen murders. Picked up his girls in the city but dumped them out by us. Hookers, mostly. Had sex with them, then strangled them to death. This one's your classic-not guns like the other two. He was the Ted Bundy kind-real hands-on stuff, strangulation, not shooting. And by the way, always after he had sex with them."

"There's the prostitute angle again," Mercer said.

"That might work for Amber Bristol, but not for the others," Mike said. "Elise Huff and Connie Wade weren't pros."

"Rifkin liked to snap their necks, those hookers," Dickie said, brushing the crumbs off his tie.

It was a sickening thought. "Why?"

Dickie looked at me as though I had two heads. "Why? I told you why. He just liked doing it, I guess. Liked the noise it made. How the hell do I know? He said he liked it."

"Your squad make the arrest?" I asked.

"State troopers."

"Now that's the last thing Scully wants to hear," Mercer said. "Troopers getting credit for the collar. The press'll jump all over that one."

"Once again, dumb luck. Routine traffic stop. Rifkin didn't have a front plate on his van. Troopers chased him and he crashed into a lamppost," Dickie said, taking a swig of his soda. "There's your sexual sadist, Alex. That's the kind of creep you're looking for."

"Kenneth Kimes. Sante Kimes," Mike said, trying to play perp catch-up with Dickie. "Manhattan, 1998."

"Mother-son grifter team. Doesn't count, Mikey. Yeah, they killed people from California to the Big Apple, but it was all about larceny. They were poking each other, that sick broad and her mama's boy. They weren't interested in sex with anybody else, just each other. Like you can't count your mutt drug dealers and your gang shoot-'em-ups. They're not serials. You got your Malvo-Muhammad nuts, too. Beltway snipers. They're spree killers, not serials. You got your mass murderers-"

"We're looking for a type like James Jones," Mercer said. "I worked that one."

"Never heard of him. He make the papers? The news never got as far as the BQE," Dickie said, referring to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. "How many'd he do?"

"Strangled five, but only two of them died. Nine-month rampage, 1995. They were all prostitutes, too."

"There you go. That's why he didn't get any press attention. I'm telling you, if this guy had just done your girl Amber, nobody would have cared. It worked for Jack the Ripper. It doesn't work anymore. They had that series of murders out near San Francisco, remember? Cops closed them all with a code: NHI."

The unsolved crimes had been back-burnered until a reporter revealed that the letters stamped on the police files were shorthand for No Human Involved. Serial killers who picked underclass victims often got a pass when there was no one in the community to pay much attention to their disappearance or ultimate fate.

"Your man Jones," Dickie asked, "he shoot 'em or what?"

"No, he used a rope."

"See? Hands-on. Just like Rifkin and Bundy. The real deal-hard to come by."

"Picked them up, took them to cheap hotel rooms," Mercer said, looking over at me. "Bound and gagged them. I mean they let him do that to them. All of the survivors admitted it. Told them he said he couldn't get off unless he did."

"You're thinking maybe Amber allowed herself to be bound?" I asked.

Mercer shrugged his shoulders. "Scully's got to consider that."

"Then he yoked the rope, this Jones guy?" Dickie asked, reaching for another sandwich.

"Last thing he did was make them each point their toes. Like a ballerina, he said. Made them point their toes, and then he killed them."

"Wasn't he the guy who worked at that lawyer's organization on Forty-fourth Street?" Mike asked.

Mercer nodded. "Yeah, Jones was smart, with a good job, actually. He was in charge of all the audiovisual programs for the Association of the Bar."

"Was there a task force?" Dickie asked.

Mercer smiled. "You know better. Not for those victims. Word was out on the street, working girls looking out for each other, like they usually do. They figured they'd find him before we would. One of the surviving vics saw him a few months after she was attacked, flagged down the RMP, and pointed him out to the two rookies in a patrol car."

"I'll be damned. Dumb luck again," Dickie said.

I could remember only one serial sadistic sex murderer who had been prosecuted since I joined the office more than a decade ago. Both Mercer and Mike had been assigned to the investigation in its later years, and I had gone to the courtroom often to watch two of my colleagues-Rich Plansky and John Irwin-try the case.

"Arohn Kee," I said.

"Worst case I ever worked," Mercer said.

Kee's attacks began with the sexual assault and murder of a thirteen-year-old girl in East Harlem in 1991. For the next eight years, his own reign of terror in that neighborhood went unchecked, and more than six other teenage girls were raped and attacked-some strangled and stabbed to death, one burned beyond recognition on the rooftop of her building-before he was identified and charged.

"He killed kids?" Dickie asked. "All kids? How come that one didn't make the news?"

" 'Cause they were black and Hispanic," Mike said. Mercer nodded in agreement. "Twenty blocks farther south, on the Upper East Side, somebody burned a white girl to death on the top of a Madison Avenue condo, every cop in the city would have been pulled out to solve it."

"That's the last serial killer we've had in Manhattan," Mercer said. "Nobody much cared at the time, 'cause the victims all lived in projects, all poor kids."

"Don't tell me you solved that one by detective work?"

"Came pretty close. Old-fashioned legwork almost paid off."

Mike interrupted Mercer's story. "Yeah. Mercer and Rob Mooney figured out who it was. Before they could get his DNA, Kee walked into a computer store with a stolen hard drive. The clerk just went to the back and called 911 and turned the kid in for some lousy misdemeanor theft charge."

"Dumbass luck, one more time," Dickie said, finally using a napkin to clean his face. "Bottom line-tell Scully to save himself the trouble of a task force. Let the troopers upstate catch the bum. Operation Dumb Luck."

"What's the trigger?" I asked. "Where does this guy come from?"

"We got SOMU working on this as soon as Elise Huff was reported missing," Mercer said.

The Sex Offender Monitoring Unit was responsible for tracking rapists who had served their time and were released to parole. New laws in every state required them to register with police agencies set up to monitor their whereabouts and alert communities where the most dangerous felons relocated.

"No one with this kind of m.o.?" Dickie asked. "Maybe he's just out of the military. Back from combat. There'll be a couple of dozen more bodies before you pry any records away from the feds, that's for sure."

"Amen to that," Mercer said. "Takes forever. And Scully's got to be prepared to deal with the question of why there isn't DNA."

"Organized serial," Mike said. "Intelligent, methodical, knowledge of forensics, keeps control of the crime scene. Abducts in one location and dumps in another."

The FBI characterized these murderers as either organized or disorganized, the latter having less intelligence and acting more impulsively.

"How about Coop's theory that our guy may be into women with uniforms?" Mike said.

"Tell it to the profilers," Dickie Draper said. "They'll have us staking out waitresses in coffee shops and Girl Scout troops and bus drivers in drag. Hold that thought, Alex, will you?"

"Here's one fact that doesn't make sense," Mercer said. "Amber Bristol's apartment-that was cleaned out. Am I right, Mike? Sanitized. All of her personal stuff gone."

Dickie shook his head. "Gives new meaning to an organized serial. They're not into housekeeping. Trophies and souvenirs, yeah, but not housekeeping."

"Maybe he had an accomplice on the first kill," Mike said. "Then he spun out on his own."

"The other vics didn't live alone," Mercer said. "Could have been his only chance to get in one of their homes."

"I'm telling you," Dickie said. "You can't go serial too early."

"What the hell do we tell Scully?" Mike said.

"Assurances. People like assurances." Dickie started to count off traits on his fingers. "The guy is young, okay? Eighteen to thirty-five, tops. Takes a lot of energy to do this shit."

I thought again about Floyd Warren, who seemed to have aged out of his serial rapist pastime.

"White," he said, holding his left forefinger with his right hand.

"Kee and Jones were black."

"Yeah, but that's unusual, Mercer. Mostly a white boy's game. Besides, gets the commish into all that ugly racial profiling stuff. Safer to say white till you know different."

He was on the third trait, double chins jiggling as he said, "And they're never Jewish. Safe bet on that, too. Not your people, Ms. Cooper."

"Berkowitz," Mike said. "Rifkin."

"Do your homework, Mikey. Berkowitz was adopted. Born Falco. Got it? Rifkin's adopted, too."

Guido Lentini opened the door and lifted his glasses to the top of his head. "Chapman, the commissioner wants to know more about the Amber Bristol scene. The old Battery Maritime Building."

Mike took his feet off the table and sat up. "What does he need?"

"Wants to know about the ferry slip. When the boats run. Where they go."

"To Governors Island."

"That's the only place, right?"

"Right. And only during the day. They don't run at night," Mike said.

"They used to go from that terminal to some piers in Brooklyn, didn't they?"

"Yeah, but not in my lifetime."

"Governors Island. It was a military post, right?"

"For two hundred years, yeah."

"What's it named for, Chapman? Governor who? They're likely to ask that, too."

"When the British took New Amsterdam from the Dutch," Mike said, "they used the island as a retreat for the royal governors. Should have stayed in school, Guido."

"You did a search over there, didn't you?"

Mike frowned and brushed his hair off his forehead. "Did I? Like personally?"

"Yes, you-Mike Chapman. The homicide squad. Somebody the commissioner can rely on."

"Bristol's body was found on this side of the water, Guido. Detectives from Night Watch went over to the island to check it out. The killer never got her there, trust me. The fire department took them all around the place."

"Scully won't like that," Guido said.

The schism between New York's Bravest, the NYFD, and New York's Finest, the NYPD, had widened after their heroic actions on 9/11. The tension between the two commissioners had intensified in the aftermath, as operative responses were more carefully defined for each of the services.

"The frigging place hasn't been inhabited since the coast guard gave it up in '96. Even an amateur would know if someone had been on the island. People work there during the day-groundskeepers and the ferry crew. But the only two guys who live on the island-I mean overnight-are firemen, for the protection of the historic buildings."

"This is going to be ugly," Guido said.

"What now?" I asked.

"You know who owns Governors Island?"

I shook my head from side to side.

"The city and the state. They've both got jurisdiction. The governor will have the place swarming with troopers by morning, and the mayor'll get to announce that the NYPD hasn't really investigated there yet," Guido said.

Mike started pacing behind my seat. "Just to add to your agita, Guido. The feds will jump in, too. The old fortress is still their property. It's a national monument."

"Then if I were you, Chapman," Guido said, checking his watch. "I'd get your ass over there on the next boat. Make the commissioner an honest man when he goes on the air at five o'clock to tell them his department is doing a thorough investigation. There's got to be something to that idea of a military nexus to the murders."

"We're moving," Mike said, looking down to meet my eyes when he spoke. "I know what's over there, Guido. It's another ghost island.