Tick Tock

Chapter 82

"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. The'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.

"Just at the beach," I said.

I was ducking a tossed empty Gatorade bottle when my boss came out of her office.

"They found her," Miriam said. "Paulina Dulcine. Get up to the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge."

She was actually under the 59th Street Bridge beside a York Avenue Mobil station. We bore right onto a little service road and down a ramp toward the East River. At the end of a parking lot beside an abandoned heliport, crime scene tape was wrapped around a chain-link fence.

Beyond the fence, half a dozen cops were spread out on the rock-piled shore. On the jogging path that ran under the bridge, a crowd had formed. I spotted a twelve-speed cyclist in a full-body Speedo beside a gaggle of Jamaican nannies leaning on their Maclaren strollers. They looked bored, like they were waiting for the good part to start.

"How did the call come in?" I said to a tall, elfish-looking young uniform working the crime scene log.

"By pay phone," the kid said.

"Amazing," I said.

"That someone called it in?" the young cop said.

"That someone actually found a working pay phone in Manhattan."

The jokes were long gone by the time Emily and I stumbled over to a yellow crime scene marker down by the water's edge. It was next to a paint can. Beside the can, a burly uniform cop was squatting on the rocks, smoking a cigarette. His dazed, despondent expression couldn't have been more disturbing.

This wasn't going to be pretty, I thought as I finally walked up to the can.

I didn't want to look down. I didn't want to add another nightmare to my list. I'd seen too many already.

But it was my job.

I looked down.

I was rocked to my center. All rationality abandoned me for the moment. The mind doesn't register such things easily.

Inside the can was Paulina's head. Her face was turned skyward, her eyes open. She looked up at me almost pleadingly. She looked like she was buried underground or like she'd been trying to climb through a ship's porthole and had gotten stuck.

Some very sick son of a bitch had somehow rammed the girl's decapitated head into the can.

Emily came over and put her hand on my shoulder.

"We need to get this guy, Emily," I said after a silent minute.

Emily suddenly whipped out her iPhone.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

She furiously pressed and rubbed at the screen, oblivious of me.

"I knew it. This is it! Joel David Rifkin. Parts of his first victim were found in the East River! It says it right here. The woman's head had been cut off very neatly and stuffed into an empty paint can."

"Who was Rifkin again?" I said.

"A serial killer in the nineties from Long Island," Emily said. "He was convicted of murdering nine prostitutes. He beat them with something heavy and then strangled them and mutilated their bodies. Some say it was closer to twenty victims. Apt is onto another New York killer."

A shadow passed over us. I looked up. It was the Roosevelt Island tram. We both watched the red cable car as it sailed precariously though the air out over the darkening water.

"Maybe there was some odd bond between Berger and Apt," I said, thinking out loud. "Like a cult sort of thing. Apt seems programmed. Berger had him completely brainwashed."

"Maybe that's a good thing," Emily said as we started for the car. "Maybe when Apt finds out Berger's dead, he'll snap out of it. Come to his senses."

"We can only hope," I said, failing to shake Paulina's face from my memory.