Library of the Dead

JUNE 23, 2009. NEW YORK CITY

Will had a devastating hangover, the kind that felt like a weasel had woken up warm and cozy inside his skull then panicked at its confinement and tried to scratch and bite its way out through his eyes.

The evening had begun benignly enough. On his way home he stopped at his local dive, a yeasty smelling cave called Dunigan’s, and downed a couple of pops on an empty stomach. Next up, the Pantheon Diner, where he grunted at the heavily stubbled waiter who grunted back at him and without exchanging any fully formed phrases brought him the same dish he ate two to three days a week-lamb kebabs and rice, washed down, of course, with a couple of beers. Then before decamping to his place for the night he paid his wobbly respects to his friendly package store and picked up a fresh half gallon of Black Label, pretty much the only luxury item to adorn his life.

The apartment was small and spartan, and stripped of Jennifer’s feminizing touches, a truly bleak uninteresting piece of real estate-two sparse white-walled rooms with shiny parquet floors, meager views of the building across the street, and a few thousand dollars’ worth of generic furniture and rugs. Truth be told, the apartment was almost too small for him. The living room was fourteen by seventeen, the bedroom ten by twelve, the kitchen and bathroom each the size of a good closet. Some of the criminals he had put away for life wouldn’t see the place as a major upgrade. How had he put up with sharing the flat with Jennifer for four months? Whose bright idea was that?

He hadn’t intended to drink himself stupid but the heavy full bottle seemed to hold so much promise. He twisted off the top, cracking its seal, then hoisted it by its built-in handle and glugged a half tumbler of scotch into his favorite whiskey glass. With the TV droning in the background he sofa-drank, steadily sinking into a deep dark hole as he thought about his effing day, his effing case, his effing life.

Notwithstanding his reluctance to take on the Doomsday case, the first few days had been, in fact, rejuvenating. Clive Robertson was killed right under his nose and the audacity and perplexity of the crime electrified him. It reminded him of the way big cases used to make him feel, and the kicky pulses of adrenaline agreed with him.

He’d immersed himself in the tangle of facts, and though he knew that epiphanous moments were the stuff of fiction, had a powerful urge to drill down and discover something that had been missed, the overlooked link that would tie together two murders, then a third, then another, until the case was cracked.

The distraction of important work had been as soothing as butter on a burn. He started by running hot, pounding the files, pushing Nancy, exhausting both of them in a marathon of days bleeding into nights bleeding into days. For a while he actually took Sue Sanchez’s words to heart: Okay, this would be his last big case. Let’s ride this sucker out and retire with a big old bang.

Crescendo.

Decrescendo.

Within a week he’d been burnt out, spent and dispirited. Robertson’s autopsy and toxicology reports made no sense to him. The seven other cases made no sense to him. He couldn’t get any feeling for who the killer was or what gratification he was getting from the murders. None of his initial ideas were panning out. All he could fathom was a tableau of randomness, and that was something he had never seen in a serial killer.

The first scotch was to dull the unpleasantness of his afternoon in Queens interviewing the family of the hit-and-run victim, nice solid people who were still inconsolable. The second scotch was to blunt his frustration. The third was to fill some of his emptiness with maudlin remembrances, the fourth was for loneliness. The fifth…?

In spite of his pounding head and hollow nausea, he stubbornly dragged himself into work by eight. In his book, if you made it to work on time, never drank on the job, and never touched a drop before happy hour, you didn’t have a booze problem. Still, he couldn’t ignore the searing headache, and as he rode the elevator he clutched an extra large coffee to his chest like a life preserver. He flinched at the memory of waking, fully clothed, at 6:00 A.M., a third of the mighty bottle empty. He had Advil in his office. He needed to get there.

Doomsday files were stacked on his desk, his credenza, his bookcase, and all over the floor, stalagmites of notes, reports, research, computer printouts, and crime scene photos. He had carved himself walking corridors through the piles-from door to desk chair, chair to bookcase, chair to window, so he could adjust the blinds and keep the afternoon sun out of his eyes. He made his way through the obstacle course, landed hard on his chair, and hunted down the pain relievers, which he painfully swallowed with a gulp of hot coffee. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, and when he opened them Nancy was standing there, looking at him like a doctor.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine. You look sick.”

“I’m fine.” He fumbled for a file at random and opened it. She was still there. “What?”

“What’s the plan for today?” she asked.

“The plan is for me to drink my coffee and for you to come back in an hour.”

Dutifully, she reappeared in precisely one hour. His pain and nausea were subsiding but his thinking was still milky. “Okay,” he began, “what’s our schedule?”

She opened the ubiquitous notebook. “Ten o’clock, telecon with Dr. Sofer from Johns Hopkins. Two o’clock, task force press conference. Four o’clock, uptown to see Helen Swisher. You look better.”

He was curt. “I was good an hour ago and I’m good now.” She didn’t look convinced, and he wondered if she knew he was hung over. Then it dawned on him-she looked better. Her face was a little thinner, her body a little sleeker, her skirt didn’t pinch as much at the waist. They had been constant companions for ten days and he’d only just realized she was eating like a parakeet. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“Are you on a diet or something?”

She blushed instantly. “Sort of. I started jogging again too.”

“Well, it looks good. Keep it up.”

She lowered her eyes in embarrassment. “Thanks.”

He quickly changed the subject. “Okay, let’s take a step back and try to see the big picture,” he said foggily. “We’re getting killed with details. Let’s go through these, one more time, focusing on connections.” He joined her at the conference table and moved the files onto other files to give them an uncluttered surface. He took a clean pad and wrote on it, Key Observations, and underlined the words twice. He willed his brain to work and loosened his tie to encourage blood flow.

There had been three deaths on May 22, three on May 25, two on June 11, and none since. “What does that tell us?” he asked. She shook her head, so he answered his own question. “They’re all weekdays.”

“Maybe the guy has a weekend job,” she offered.

“Okay. Maybe.” He entered his first key observation: Weekdays. “Find the Swisher files. I think they’re on the bookcase.”

Case #1: David Paul Swisher, thirty-six-year-old investment banker at HSBC. Park Avenue, wealthy, all-Ivy background. Married, nothing obvious on the side. No Enron skeletons in his closet as far as they knew. Took the family mutt for a predawn walk, found by a jogger just after 5:00 A.M. in a river of blood-watch, rings, and wallet missing, left carotid cleanly sliced. The body was still warm, about twenty feet out of range of the nearest CCTV camera located on the roof of a co-op on the south side of 82nd Street-twenty goddamned feet and they would’ve have had the killing on tape.

However, they did have a glimpse of a person of interest, a nine-second sequence time-coded at 5:02:23-5:02:32, shot from a security camera on the roof of a ten-story building on the west side of Park Avenue between 81st and 82nd. It showed a male walking into the frame from 82nd turning south on Park, pivoting then running back the way he came and disappearing down 82nd again. The image was poor quality but FBI techs had blown it up and enhanced it. From the suspect’s hand coloration they determined he was black or Latino, and from reference calculations, they figured he was about five-ten and weighed 160 to 175 pounds. The hood of a gray sweatshirt obscured his face. The timing was promising since the 911 call came in at 5:07, but in the absence of witnesses they had no leads on his identity.

If not for the postcard, this would have been a street mugging, plain and simple, but David Swisher got a postcard. David Swisher was Doomsday victim one.

Will held up a photo of the hooded man and waved it at Nancy. “So is this our guy?”

“He may be David’s killer but that doesn’t make him the Doomsday Killer,” she said.

“Serial murder by proxy? That’d be a first.”

She tried another tack. “Okay, maybe this was a contract murder.”

“Possible. An investment banker is bound to have enemies,” Will said. “Every deal has a winner and a loser. But David was different from the other victims. He was the only one who wore a white collar to work. Who’s going to pay to murder any of the others?” Will flipped through one of the Swisher files. “Do we have a list of David’s clients?”

“His bank hasn’t been helpful,” Nancy said. “Every request for info has to go through their legal department and be personally signed off by their general counsel. We haven’t gotten anything yet but I’m pushing.”

“I’ve got a feeling he’s the key.” Will closed Swisher’s file and pushed it away. “The first victim in a string has a special significance to the killer, something symbolic. You said we’re seeing his wife today?”

She nodded.

“About time.”

Case #2: Elizabeth Marie Kohler, thirty-seven-year-old manager at a Duane Reade drugstore in Queens. Shot to death in an apparent robbery, found by employees at the rear entrance when they got to work at 8:30 A.M. Police initially thought she’d been killed by an assailant who waited for her to arrive to steal narcotics. Something went wrong, he fired, she fell, he ran. The bullet was a.38 caliber, one shot to the temple at close range. No surveillance video, no useful forensics. It took police a couple of days to find the postcard at her apartment and connect her with the others.

He looked up from her file and asked, “Okay, what’s the connection between a Wall Street banker and a drugstore manager?”

“I don’t know,” Nancy said. “They were nearly the same age but their lives didn’t have any obvious points of intersection. He never shopped at her drugstore. There’s nothing.”

“Where are we with her ex-husband, old boyfriends, coworkers?”

“We’ve got most of them identified and accounted for,” she replied. “There’s one high school boyfriend we can’t find. His family moved out of state years ago. All her other exes-if they don’t have an alibi for her murder, they’ve got one for the other murders. She’s been divorced for five years. Her ex-husband was driving a bus for the Transit Authority the morning she was shot. She was an ordinary person. Her life wasn’t complicated. She didn’t have enemies.”

“So, if it weren’t for the postcard, this would have been an open and shut case of an armed robbery gone bad.”

“That’s what it looks like, on the surface,” she agreed.

“Okay, action items,” he said. “See if she had any high school or college yearbooks and have all the names entered into the database. Also, contact the landlord and get a list of all her present and former neighbors going back for five years. Throw them into the mix.”

“Done. You want another coffee?” He did, badly.

Case #3: Consuela Pilar Lopez, thirty-two-year-old illegal immigrant from the Dominican Republic, living in Staten Island, working as an office cleaner in Manhattan. Found just after 3:00 A.M. by a group of teenagers in a wooded area near the shore in Arthur Von Briesen Park, less than a mile from her house on Fingerboard Road. She’d been raped and repeatedly stabbed in the chest, head, and neck. She had taken the ten o’clock ferry from Manhattan that night, confirmed by CCTV. Her usual routine would have been to take the bus south toward Fort Wadsworth, but no one could place her at the bus station at the St. George Ferry Terminal or on the number 51 bus that ran down Bay Street to Fingerboard.

The working hypothesis was that someone intercepted her at the terminal, offered her a ride, and took her to a dark corner of the island, where she met her end under the looming superstructure of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. There was no semen in or on her body-the killer apparently used a condom. There were gray fibers on her shirt, which appeared to have come from a sweatshirt type of fabric. At postmortem, her wounds were calibrated. The blade was four inches long, compatible with the one that killed David Swisher. Lopez lived in a two-family house with an extended group of siblings and cousins, some documented, some not. She was a religious lady who worshipped at St. Sylvester’s, where stunned parishioners had packed the church for a memorial mass. According to family and friends, she had no boyfriend, and the autopsy suggested that even though she was in her thirties she had been a virgin. All attempts to connect her with the other victims proved fruitless.

Will had spent a disproportionate amount of time with this particular murder, studying the ferry and bus terminal, walking the crime scene, visiting her house and church. Sex crimes were his forte. It hadn’t been his career aspiration-no one in his right mind wrote on his Quantico application: One day I hope to specialize in sex crimes. But his first big cases had serious sexual angles, and that’s the way you got pigeon-holed in the Bureau. He did more than follow his nose, he burned hot with ambition and educated himself to expert grade. He studied the annals of sex crimes sedulously and became a walking encyclopedia of American serial perversion.

He’d seen this kind of killer before, and the offender profile came to him quickly. The perp was a stalker, a planner, a circumspect loner who was careful about not leaving his DNA behind. He’d be familiar with the neighborhood, which meant he either currently lived or used to live on Staten Island. He knew the waterfront park like the back of his hand and calculated exactly where he could do his business with the least chance of being happened upon. There was an excellent chance he was Hispanic because he made his victim feel comfortable enough to get into his car and they were told that Maria’s English was limited. There was a reasonable chance she knew her killer at least by limited acquaintance.

“Wait a minute,” Will said suddenly. “Here’s something. Consuela's killer almost definitely had a car. We ought to be looking for the same dark blue sedan that crushed Myles Drake.” He jotted: Blue Sedan. “What was the name of Consuela’s priest again?”

She remembered his sad face and didn’t need to check her notes. “Father Rochas.”

“We need to make up a flyer of different models of dark blue sedans and have Father Rochas pass them out to his parishioners to see if anyone knows anyone with a blue car. Also cross-run the list of parishioners with the DMV to get a printout of registered vehicles. Pay particular attention to Hispanic males.”

She nodded and made notes.

He stretched his arms over his head and yawned. “I’ve got to hit the john. Then we’ve got to call that guy.”

The forensic pathologists at HQ had pointed them toward Gerald Sofer, the country’s leading expert in a truly bizarre affliction. It was a measure of their frustration in Clive Robertson’s death that they had sought his consultation.

Will and Nancy had frantically administered CPR on Clive’s pulseless body for six minutes until the paramedics arrived. The following morning they hovered over the M.E.’s shoulder as the coroner laid Clive’s body open and started the search for a cause of death. Besides the crushed nasal bones there was no external trauma. His heavy brain, brimming so recently with music, was thin-sliced like a bread loaf. There were no signs of a stroke or hemorrhage. All his internal organs were normal for his age. His heart was slightly enlarged, the valves normal, the coronary arteries had a mild to moderate amount of atherosclerosis, especially the left anterior descending artery, which was seventy percent occluded. “I’ve probably got more blockage than this guy,” the veteran M.E. rasped. There was no evidence of a heart attack, though Will was advised that a microscopic exam would be determinative. “So far, I don’t have a diagnosis for you,” the pathologist said, peeling off his gloves.

Will waited anxiously for the blood and tissue tests. He was hoping a poison or toxin would show up but was also interested in his HIV status since he’d done mouth-to-mouth on Clive’s bloody face. Within days he had the results. The good news: Clive was HIV and hepatitis negative. The bad: Everything was negative. The man had no reason for being dead.

“Yes, I did have a chance to review Mr. Robertson’s autopsy report,” Dr. Sofer said. “It’s typical of the syndrome.”

Will leaned toward the speakerphone. “How’s that?”

“Well, his heart wasn’t all that bad, really. There were no critical coronary occlusions, no thrombosis, no histopatho-logical evidence of a myocardial infarction. This is perfectly consistent with the patients I’ve studied with stress-induced cardiomyopathy, also know as myocardial stunning syndrome.”

Sudden emotional stress, fear, anger, grief, shock could cause sudden devastating heart failure, according to Sofer. Victims were people who were otherwise healthy, who experienced a sudden emotional jolt like the death of a loved one or a massive fright.

“Doctor, this is Special Agent Lipinski,” Nancy said. “I read your paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. None of the patients with your syndrome died. What makes Mr. Robertson different?”

“That’s an excellent question,” Sofer replied. “I believe the heart can be stunned into pump failure by a massive release of catecholamines, stress hormones like adrenaline that are secreted by the adrenal glands in response to a stress or a shock. This is a basic evolutionary survival tool, preparing the organism for fight or flight in the face of life-threatening danger. However, in some individuals the outpouring of these neurohormones is so profound that the heart can no longer pump efficiently. Cardiac output drops sharply and blood pressure falls. Unfortunately for Mr. Robertson, his pump failure combined with his moderate blockage in his left coronary artery probably led to poor perfusion of his left ventricle, which triggered a fatal arrhythmia, possibly ventricular fibrillation and sudden death. It’s rare to die from myocardial stunning but it can occur. Now as I understand it, Mr. Robertson was under some acute stress prior to his death.”

“He had a postcard from the Doomsday Killer,” Will said.

“Well, then I’d say, to use layman’s terms, your Mr. Robertson was literally scared to death.”

“He didn’t look scared,” Will remarked.

“Looks can be deceiving,” Sofer said.

When they were done, Will hung up and drank the last of his fifth cup of coffee. “Clear as fucking mud,” he muttered. “The killer bets he’s going to kill the guy by scaring him to death? Gimme a break!” He threw his arms into the air, exasperated. “Okay, let’s keep going. He kills three people on May twenty-second and he takes a breather over the weekend. May twenty-fifth our unsub’s busy again.”

Case #4: Myles Drake, twenty-four-year-old bicycle courier from Queens, working the financial district at 7:00 A.M. when an office worker on Broadway, the only eyewitness, is looking out her window and notices him on the sidewalk of John Street slinging his backpack and mounting his bicycle just as a dark blue sedan jumps the curb, plows into him and keeps on going. She’s too high up to see the license plate or credibly identify the make and model. Drake succumbs instantly from a crushed liver and spleen. The car, which unquestionably sustained some front-end damage, remains unlocated, despite extensive canvassing of body shops in the tristate area. Myles lived with his older brother and was, by all accounts, a straight-arrow. Clean record, testimonials to his work ethic, etc. No known connections to any other victims either directly or indirectly, though no one could say for sure that he’d never been to Kohler’s Duane Reade on Queens Boulevard.

“Nothing to link him with drugs?” Will asked.

“Nothing, but I remember a case when I was in law school of bike couriers supplying cocaine to stockbrokers on the side.”

“Not a bad thought-our drug theme.” He wrote: Test backpack for narcotics residue.

Case #5: Milos Ivan Covic, eighty-two-year-old man from Park Slope, Brooklyn, middle of the afternoon, plunges out of his ninth floor apartment and makes an ungodly mess on Prospect Park West, near Grand Army Plaza. His bedroom window is wide open, apartment locked, no signs of a break-in or robbery. However, several framed black-and-white photos of a young Covic with others, family presumably, are found shattered on the floor by the window. There is no suicide note. The man, a Croatian immigrant who had worked for fifty years as a cobbler, had no living relatives and was so reclusive there was no one who could attest to his mental state. The apartment was covered in only one set of fingerprints: his.

Will leafed through the stack of vintage photographs. “And there’s no ID on any of these people?”

“None,” Nancy replied. “His neighbors were all interviewed, we put out feelers among the Croatian-American community, but nobody knew him. I don’t know where to go. Any ideas?”

He pointed his palms toward the heavens. “I got nothing on this one.”

Case #6: Marco Antonio Napolitano, eighteen-year-old, recent high school graduate. Lived with his parents and sister in Little Italy. His mother found the postcard in his room and the coffin image sent her into hysterics. His family looked for him unsuccessfully all day. Police found his body later in the evening in the boiler room of their tenement with a needle in his arm and heroin works and tourniquet beside him. Autopsy showed an overdose but the family and his closest friends insisted he wasn’t a user, which was borne out by the absence of needle tracks on his body. The kid had a couple of juvies, shoplifting, that sort of thing, but this wasn’t a major bad guy. The syringe had two different DNAs, his and an unidentified male’s, suggesting someone else had shot up with him using the same works. There were also two sets of fingerprints on the syringe and the spoon, his and another’s, which they ran through IAFIS and came up empty, ruling out about fifty million people in the database.

“Okay,” Will said. “This one’s got possible linkers.”

Nancy saw them too, perked up and said, “Yeah, how about this? The killer’s an addict who murders Elizabeth, trying to knock off her Duane Reade for narcotics. He’s got a gripe against Marco and overloads a syringe, and a score to settle with Myles, who’s his supplier.”

“What about David?”

“He’s more like a mugging for cash, which also fits with an addict.”

Will shook his head with an exasperated smile. “Pretty damned soft,” he said, writing: Possibly an Addict??? “Okay, home stretch. Our man takes a two-week break then starts up again on June eleventh. Why the pause? Is he tired? Busy with something else in his life? Out of town? Back in Vegas?”

Rhetorical questions. She studied Will’s face as his mind churned.

“We’ve run down all the eastbound moving violations issued on major routes between Vegas and New York during the intervals between the postmarked dates on the cards and the dates of the murders and we’ve got nothing of interest, correct?”

“Correct,” she replied.

“And we’ve got passenger manifests for all direct and connecting flights between Vegas and metropolitan New York for the relevant dates, correct?”

“Correct.”

“And what have we learned from that?”

“Nothing yet. We’ve got several thousand names that we’re rerunning every few days against all the names in our victims’ databases. So far, no hits.”

“And we’ve done state and federal criminal background checks on all the passengers?”

“Will, you’ve asked me that a dozen times!”

He wasn’t going to apologize. “Because it’s important! And get me a printout of all the passengers with Hispanic surnames.” He pointed toward a stack of files on the floor near the window. “Pass me that one. This is where I came in.”

Case #7: Ida Gabriela Santiago, seventy-eight-year-old killed by an intruder in her bedroom with a.22 caliber bullet through her ear. As Will suspected, she hadn’t been raped, and aside from the victim and her immediate family, there were no unaccounted fingerprints anywhere. Her purse had indeed been stolen and remained unrecovered. A footprint from the earth below her kitchen window showed a size twelve distinctive waffle pattern that matched a popular basketball sneaker, Reebok DMX 10. Given the depth of the print and the moisture content of the soil, the lab techs estimated the suspect weighed about 170, roughly the same weight as the Park Avenue suspect. They had searched for connections, especially with the Lopez case, but there were no recognizable intersects between the lives of the two Hispanic women.

That left Case #8: Lucius Jefferson Robertson, the man who was literally scared to death. There wasn’t much more to say about him, was there? “That’s it, I’m fried,” Will announced. “Why don’t you sum it up, partner?”

Nancy earnestly flipped through her fresh notes and glanced at his Key Observations. “I guess I’d have to say that our suspect is a five-ten, 170-pound Hispanic male who’s a drug addict and a sex offender, who drives a blue car, has a knife, a.22 caliber and a.38 caliber gun, shuttles back and forth to Las Vegas either by car or air, and prefers to kill people on weekdays so he can kick back on weekends.”

“One heck of a profile,” Will said, finally cracking a smile. “Okay, so bring it all home. How does he pick his victims and what’s with the fucking postcards?”

“Don’t swear!” she said, playfully swatting her notebook in his direction. “Maybe the victims are connected and maybe they’re not. Each crime is different. It’s almost like they’re deliberately random. Maybe he chooses the victims randomly too. He sends postcards to let us know the crimes are connected and that he’s the one who decides if someone’s going to die. He reads about the Doomsday Killer in the papers, watches the wall-to-wall cable coverage, it’s a real power trip for him. He’s very clever and very twisted. That’s our man.”

She waited for his approbation, but instead he stuck a pin in her balloon.

“Well, you’re a real hotshot, Special Agent Lipinski, aren’t you?” He stood up and marveled how fine it was to have a clear head and a stomach that could take food. “There’s only one thing wrong with your synthesis,” he said. “I don’t believe a word of it. The only archcriminal I know who’s capable of all this evil brilliance is Lex Luthor, and last time I checked, he was in a comic book. Take a break for lunch. Come get me for the press conference.”

He shooed her away with a wink and studied her as she retreated. She’s definitely looking better, he thought.

As the case dragged into the summer, the Doomsday press updates had been stretched to weekly. Originally there were daily briefings, but that level of newsworthiness was not sustainable. Yet, the story had legs, strong legs, and was proving to be a bigger ratings draw than O.J., Jon Benet, and Anna Nicole put together. Every night on cable the case was dissected down to a molecular level by talking heads and a legion of ex-FBI and law enforcement officers, lawyers, and pundits who weighed in breathlessly with their pet theories. Of late, a common theme was emerging: The FBI was not making progress, ergo the FBI was inept.

The news conference was in the New York Hilton ballroom. By the time Will and Nancy took their positions near a service entrance, the room was three-quarters full with press and photographers and the bigwigs were settling in up on the dais. On signal, the TV lights switched on and the live feed went out.

The mayor, a natty and imperturbable man, took the podium. “We are six weeks into this investigation,” he began. “On a positive note, there have been no new victims in ten days. While there have been no arrests at this time, law enforcement professionals from New York City, New York State, and federal agencies have been working diligently, and I believe productively, in running down multiple leads and theories. However, we cannot deny that there have been eight related murders in this city, and our citizens will not feel entirely safe until the perpetrator is caught and brought to justice. Benjamin Wright, Assistant in Charge of the New York Office of the FBI, will take your questions.”

Wright was a tall lean African-American in his fifties with a pencil mustache, close-cropped hair, and professorial wire-rimmed glasses. He stood and smoothed the creases from his double-breasted suit jacket. He was at ease in front of cameras and spoke crisply into the bank of microphones. “As the mayor said, the FBI is working in concert with city and state law enforcement officials to solve this case. This is far and away the largest criminal investigation of a serial killing in the history of the Bureau. While we do not have a suspect in custody, we continue to work tirelessly and I want to make this very clear-we will find the killer. We are not resource-constrained. We are throwing everything we’ve got at this case. It’s not a matter of manpower, it’s a matter of time. I’ll take your questions now.”

The press swarmed like a disturbed hive of bees, anticipating that nothing new was forthcoming. The network and cable reporters were civil enough, leaving it to their lower-paid ink-stained brethren from the papers to throw the bricks.

Q. Was there any more information on Lucius Robertson’s toxicology tests?

A. No. Some tissue testing would take a few more weeks.

Q. Did they test him for ricin and anthrax?

A. Yes. Both were negative.

Q. If everything was negative, what killed Lucius Robertson?

A. They didn’t know yet.

Q. Wasn’t this lack of clarity bound to trouble the public at large?

A. When we know the cause of death we will make it known.

Q. Were the Las Vegas police cooperating?

A. Yes.

Q. Were all the fingerprints on the postcards accounted for?

A. Mostly. They were still tracking down some post office letter handlers.

Q. Did they have any leads on the hooded man at the Swisher crime scene?

A. None.

Q. Did the bullets from the two gunshot victims match any other crimes on file?

A. No.

Q. How did they know this wasn’t an Al-Qaeda plot?

A. There was no indication of terrorism.

Q. A psychic from San Francisco had complained the FBI wasn’t interested in speaking with her despite her insistence that a long-haired man named Jackson was involved.

A. The FBI was interested in all credible leads.

Q. Were they aware that the public was frustrated in their lack of progress?

A. They shared the public’s frustration but remained confident in the ultimate success of the investigation.

Q. Did he think there would be more murders?

A. He hoped not but there was no way of knowing.

Q. Did the FBI have a profile on the Doomsday Killer?

A. Not yet. They were working on it.

Q. Why was it taking so long?

A. Because of the complexities of the case.

Will leaned over and whispered into Nancy ’s ear, “Colossal waste of time.”

Q. Did they have their best people assigned to the case?

A. Yes.

Q. Could the media talk to the Special Agent in charge of the investigation?

A. I can answer all your questions.

“Now it’s getting interesting,” Will added.

Q. Why couldn’t they meet the agent?

A. They would try to make him available at the next press conference.

Q. Is he in the room now?

A.-

Wright looked at Sue Sanchez, who was seated in the first row, his eyes pleading for her to control her guy. She looked around and spotted Will standing off to the side; the only thing she could do was fix him with a death stare.

She thinks I’m a loose canon, Will thought. Well, it’s time to start the iron rolling. I’m the Special Agent in charge. I didn’t want the case but it’s mine now. If they want me, here I am. “Right here!” He raised his hand. He’d faced the press dozens of times during his career and this kind of stuff was old hat-he was anything but camera-shy.

Nancy saw the horrified look on Sanchez’s face, and as a reflex almost grabbed him by the sleeve. Almost. He bounded toward the podium with a wicked bounce to his step as the TV cameras swung to stage left.

Benjamin Wright could do nothing except: “Okay, Special Agent Will Piper will answer a limited number of questions. Go ahead, Will.” As the two men crossed, Wright whispered, “Keep it short and watch your step.”

Will smoothed his hair with his hand and stepped up to the podium. The alcohol and its by-products were fully out of his system and he was feeling good, even feisty. Let’s mix it up, he thought. He was photogenic, a big sandy-haired man with broad shoulders, a dimpled chin, and superbly blue eyes. Somewhere a TV director in a control room was saying, “Get in close on that guy!”

The first question was-how do you spell your name?

“Like the Pied Piper, P-I-P-E-R.”

The reporters edged forward on their chairs. Did they have a live one? A few of the older ones whispered to each other, “I remember this guy. He’s famous.”

How long have you been with the FBI?

“Eighteen years, two months, and three days.”

Why do you keep track so precisely?

“I’m detail oriented.”

What’s your experience with serial killings?

“I’ve spent my entire career working these cases. I’ve been agent-in-charge of eight of them, the Asheville Rapist, the White River Killer in Indianapolis, six others. We caught all of them, we’ll catch this one too.”

Why don’t you have a profile of the killer yet?

“Believe, me, we’ve been trying, but he’s not profilable in a conventional way. No two murders are alike. There’s no pattern. If it weren’t for the warning postcards, you wouldn’t know the cases were connected.”

What’s your theory?

“I think we’re dealing with a very twisted and very intelligent man. I have no idea what’s motivating him. He wants attention, that’s a certainty, and thanks to you he’s getting it.”

You think we shouldn’t be covering this?

“You don’t have a choice. I’m just stating a fact.”

How are you going to catch him?

“He’s not perfect. He’s left clues, which I’m not going to go into for obvious reasons. We’ll get him.”

What’s your bet? Is he going to strike again?

“Let me answer that this way. My bet is that he’s watching this on TV right now, so I’m saying this to you.” Will stared straight into the cameras. Those blue eyes. “I will catch you and I will put you down. It’s only a matter of time.”

Wright, who was hovering, practically hip-checked Will away from the mikes. “Okay, I think that’s it for today. We’ll let you know the time and location of our next briefing.”

The press rose to their feet and one voice, a female reporter from the Post, rose above the others and screamed out, “Promise us you’ll bring the Pied Piper back!”

Number 941 Park Ave was a solid cube, a thirteen-story brick prewar, its two lower floors clad in fine white granite, the lobby done up tastefully in marble and chintz. Will had been there before, retracing David Swisher’s last steps from the lobby to the precise spot on 82nd Street where the blood had drained from his body. He had walked the walk in the same predawn darkness, and lowering himself on his haunches, right on the spot-still discolored despite a good scrubbing from the sanitation department-had tried to visualize the last thing the victim might have seen before his brain went off-line. A section of mottled sidewalk? A black iron window grate? The rim on a parked car? A thin oak rising out of a square of compacted dirt?

The tree, hopefully.

As expected, Helen Swisher rubbed Will the wrong way. She had played too hard to get these past weeks with her telephone tag, her scheduling problems, her out-of-town travel. “She was a victim’s wife, for Christ’s sake,” he had vented to Nancy, “not a goddamned suspect! Show some fucking cooperation, why don’t you?” Then, while he was in the middle of being blessed out by Sue Sanchez over his Al Haig, “I’m in charge here” performance at the press conference, wifey rang his mobile just to let him know he needed to be punctual as her time was extremely limited. And the topper-she greeted them at Apartment 9B with a faraway look of condescension, like they were carpet cleaners there to roll up one of the Persians.

“I don’t know what I can tell you that I haven’t already told the police,” Helen Swisher said as she led them through a palladium arch into the living room, a formidable expanse overlooking Park Avenue. Will stiffened at the decor and furnishings-all this fineness, a lifetime’s salary shoveled into one room, decorators-gone-wild heirloom furniture, chandeliers and rugs, each the price of a good car.

“Nice place,” Will said, his eyebrows arched.

“Thank you,” she replied coolly. “David liked to read the Sunday paper in here. I’ve just put it on the market.”

They sat and she immediately began fiddling with the band of her wristwatch, a signal they were on the clock. Will sized her up quickly, a miniprofile. She was attractive in a horsey kind of way, her looks enhanced by perfect hair and a designer suit. Swisher was Jewish, she wasn’t, probably a Wasp from old money, a banker and a lawyer who met, not through social circles, but on a deal. This gal wasn’t a cold fish, she was frozen. Her lack of visible grief didn’t mean she wasn’t attached to her husband-she probably liked him fine-it was simply a reflection of her ice-in-the-veins nature. If he ever had to sue someone, someone he really hated, this was the woman he’d want.

She made eye contact exclusively with him. Nancy might as well have been invisible. Subordinates, such as the law associates at Helen’s white-shoe firm, were implements, background features. It was only when Nancy opened her notebook that Helen acknowledged her presence with a dimpling scowl.

Will thought it was pointless to start with manufactured sympathy. He wasn’t selling and she wasn’t buying. Right out of the box he asked, “Do you know any Hispanic men who drive a blue car?”

“Goodness!” she replied. “Has your investigation become that narrowed?”

He ignored the question. “Do you?”

“The only Hispanic gentleman I know is our former dog walker, Ricardo. I have no idea if he owns a car.”

“Why former?”

“I gave David’s dog away. Funnily enough, one of the EMTs that morning from Lenox Hill Hospital took a shine to him.”

“Can I get Ricardo’s contact information?” Nancy asked.

“Of course,” she sniffed.

Will asked, “If you had a dog walker, why was your husband walking it the morning he was killed?”

“Ricardo only came in the afternoon, while we were at work. David walked him otherwise.”

“Same time every morning?”

“Yes. About five A.M.”

“Who knew his routine?”

“The night doorman, I suppose.”

“Did your husband have any enemies? The kind who might want him dead?”

“Absolutely not! I mean, anyone in the banking business has adversaries, that’s normal, but David was involved in standard, generally amiable transactions. He was a mild person,” she said, as if mildness was not a virtue.

“Did you receive the e-mail of the updated victims’ list?”

“Yes, I looked at it.”

“And?”

Her face contorted. “Well, of course neither David or I knew anyone on that list!”

There he had it, an explanation for her lack of cooperation. Apart from the inconvenience of losing a reliable spouse, she loathed the association with the Doomsday case. It was high-profile but low-rent. Most of the victims were anonymously underclass. David’s murder was bad for her image, bad for her career, her Waspy partners whispering about her while they peed in their urinals and putted on their greens. On some level she was probably angry at David for getting his neck slashed.

“ Las Vegas,” he said suddenly.

“ Las Vegas,” she countered suspiciously.

“Who did David know from Las Vegas?”

“He asked the same question when he saw the postmark, the night before he was killed. He couldn’t recall anyone offhand and neither can I.”

“We’ve been trying to get his client list from his bank without success,” Nancy said.

She addressed Will. “With whom have you been dealing?”

“The general council’s office,” he said.

“I know Steve Gartner very well. I’ll call him if you like.”

“That would be helpful.”

Will’s phone started to play its inappropriate tune and he unapologetically answered it, listened for a few seconds then rose for privacy and moved toward a cluster of chairs and sofas in a far corner, leaving the two women uncomfortably alone.

Nancy self-consciously flipped through her notebook, trying to look importantly occupied, but it was clear she felt like a warthog next to this lioness. Helen simply stared at the face of her watch as if doing so would magically make these people disappear.

Will clicked off and strode back. “Thank you. We’ve got to go.”

That was it. Quick handshakes and out. Cold stares and no love lost.

In the elevator, Will said, “She’s a sweetheart.”

Nancy agreed. “She’s a bitch.”

“We’re going to City Island.”

“Why?”

“Victim number nine.”

She almost pulled a muscle snapping her neck to look up at him.

The door opened at the lobby.

“The game’s changed, partner. It doesn’t look like there’s going to be a victim number ten. The police are holding a suspect, Luis Camacho, a thirty-two-year-old Hispanic male, five-foot-eight, 160 pounds.”

“Really!”

“Apparently he’s a flight attendant. Guess what route he flies?”

“ Las Vegas?”

“ Las Vegas.”