Viper

13

New York City Jack seldom slept past six, so it was no chore to cross town and be at Creed's hotel before seven. He stamped snow on a large rubber mat opposite a cheap reception desk staffed by a plump woman in her forties. 'I'm looking for a guest of yours – Luciano Creed. Could you call his room for me?'

Brenda Libowicz had worked receptions in fifteen different hotels in New York City and she could smell cop all over her early morning visitor. 'NYPD?'

Jack smiled in due appreciation of her observational skills. 'Ex-FBI. Is it that obvious?'

'That it is,' Brenda smiled warmly. 'Only cops and feds get to the point that quickly. Normal people usually manage a hello, a please or even a remark about how cold it is.'

'Normal people?' laughed Jack.

'No offence. You know what I mean.'

'None taken.' He nodded at her computer. 'Any chance of ringing my Mr Creed?'

'None,' she said, flatly. 'He left town last night. We called him a cab for the airport.'

'You remember when?'

'Let's see. I think it would be about eight. Yep, that's right. JFK was still shut but Newark had reopened a runway around five.'

Jack frowned. 'Was he due to check out so soon?'

Brenda finally needed the computer. She typed an entry and pulled up his record. 'No, he was down originally for another two days. Only told us yesterday that he was leaving early.'

'Can I see his bill, please?' He stressed the please.

She pulled a printout from a tray and handed it over. Jack made a note of the home address, though he doubted it was real. There was no CAP- Codice di Avviamento Postale – the Italian equivalent of the postcode, and the province was Ogliona, which he was certain didn't exist. 'He pay cash or card?'

'Cash. Big wad of Uncle Sams.'

Jack read the rest of the bill. 'Media services. What's that, Internet?'

She shook her head. 'No. It's a nice way of billing a fella for the porn channels.'

'You know what he watched?'

'Sure. He was here four days and he bought the twenty-four-hour non-stop adult service. Watched the lot.'

Jack raised an eyebrow and passed the bill back.

'He was a real sleazeball. Gave me the shivers. He done something?'

'Not sure.' Jack glanced at the clock behind her head. 'I guess his room's not been cleaned?'

She laughed. 'You guessed right. Maid don't start til ten. You want to look, I suppose.'

'You mind?'

'Not at all.' Brenda bobbed beneath the counter and eventually produced the key card to Creed's room. 'Second floor. Number two-twelve. Stairs right behind you and to the left.'

'Thanks. I appreciate this.'

'Enough to buy me coffee sometime?'

Jack took the key, but not the bait. 'Would love to, but my wife wouldn't approve. And anyway, I really don't know if I would be safe with someone who reads people as well as you do.' He winked and headed for the stairs.

'Safe?' she shouted. 'Oh, believe me, mister, safe is the last thing you'd be!'

He could still hear her laughing when he reached the landing of the second floor and let himself into Creed's old room. It was small and stank of an unflushed toilet, old carpets and no ventilation. In the tiny en-suite bathroom he picked up a plastic waste bin. He collected another from near a big old-fashioned boxy TV that virtually rested on the edge of a sagging single bed. He pulled off a dirty duvet and emptied the bins on to the grey-white base sheet.

There were sweet wrappers, empty Coke and beer cans, a half-empty plastic bottle of hotel body lotion, numerous tissues that looked stiff from semen, several pages from magazines that had been ripped out and then torn into small pieces. Some hotel paper that had been written or drawn on had also been torn up into pieces no bigger than a postage stamp. Anything ripped this small had to be of significance.

Jack was desperate to examine the pieces of paper and magazine but had no evidence gloves. He returned to the bathroom and found what he was looking for – a shower cap. He opened it up, put his hands inside and used it like clumsy mittens.

Working through the cap, it took him almost an hour to assemble just one largish section of the hotel paper and a single page of the magazine. But what he saw was enough to convince him that Luciano Creed could indeed be everything he feared.

By the time he left the hotel, salt and grit had chewed like rats through the city's blanket of white snow. The sun was high and dazzlingly bright as traffic crawled back to normal – or as normal as New York City ever gets.

Jack holed up for a while in a nearby deli. Black coffee and a skinny blueberry muffin quelled his hunger and fed his thoughts.

'You want a refill?' The question came from a surly sumo wrestler masquerading as a waitress.

'Thanks.' Jack proffered his mug.

She walked away and he speed-dialled the cellphone of Massimo Albonetti, Direttore of Italy's Violent Crime Analysis Unit.

'Pronto, parla Albonetti,' said a deep, Roman voice. He sounded distracted, maybe even annoyed at being interrupted.

'Ciao, Direttore. Come stai?'

There was a brief pause, then an eruption of laughter. 'Jack, my friend, you speak little Italian and the few words you have learned, you murder with your horrible American tongue. How are you?'

'Vaffanculo, buddy. I'm fine.'

More Italian laughter. 'Aah, the bad words you can pronounce properly. Fuck you too! You are like a small boy, using such language. Still, it is good to hear you.'

'Thanks, but you might not think so in a minute. I'm in New York, been speaking at a crime seminar, and came across someone from your neck of the woods. Guy called Creed, Luciano Creed.'

Albonetti was on his way into a community meeting. He'd been forced by his boss to address a holy order of brothers about the changing face of criminality in modern Italy. 'This name, it rings no bells.'

'Didn't expect it to. He's from Naples. Says he's a psychologist attached to the carabinieri. Been digging into some Missing Persons files and reckons he's detected a series of murders.'

'Murders in Naples?' Massimo faked surprise as he scribbled Creed's name on the front of a stack of files he was carrying. 'Now, that's a real shock.'

'Yeah. I know they have more killings than Iraq. The local force apparently has them down as MPs but Creed's done some low-level profiling on them and it all comes up looking like a serial murder file.'

'You think so?' Massimo sounded more serious now. He nodded politely at one of the brothers entering the conference room for the planned meeting.

'It's more a perhaps at this stage. But I've seen enough to make me think there's a good chance we're not just looking at runaways. Can I give you some names?'

'Sure, shoot.'

Jack peered at the notepaper that Creed had forced on him. 'Luisa Banotti, Patricia Calvi, Donna Rizzi, Gloria Pirandello and Francesca Di Lauro.'

Massimo read them back to make sure there were no mistakes.

'Do you think you could have a little dig around and check out Creed as well?'

Massimo spelled out his name. 'C-R-E-E-D, and first name, Luciano?'

'You got it.'

'Okay. I am this second starting a meeting – with a bunch of priests, believe it or not – but I'll start digging around within the next hour or so.'

'Thanks. I've got a bad feeling about this guy. He's a bit of a weirdo and he claims to have been personally involved with the last girl to have gone missing.'

Massimo entered the room with his hand over the phone and apologized to his distinguished audience. 'Mi dispiace. Un momento per favore.' The twelve brothers seemed to understand – the officer was a busy man – they would wait patiently.

Massimo spoke to Jack again. 'You'd have him as a suspect? He claims he's working with the police, but you think he might be the offender?'

'That's too big a stretch. But he makes me uncomfortable. I found some pornography and also personal sketches he'd made. He'd ripped them up and left the pieces in the bin in his hotel room. The photographs were hard-core sadism, much edgier than your usual hand-party stuff. They showed a naked woman, cuffed to a metal pole, being whipped and branded with hot irons.'

'Mannaggia! ' The Italian's emotions made him forget the company he was in. 'God Almighty, why do people find such things a turn-on? Whatever happened to a stolen kiss, a hand on the knee and the sweet hope that it might lead to a little more?'

'Not for this guy, Mass. The sketches he'd made were of mutilated genitalia – multiple, obsessive drawings, too far out even for the Guggenheim.'

'Porca Madonna!' exploded Massimo.

The twelve holy brothers looked sharply at him and crossed themselves.

Massimo cupped the phone and whispered to Jack, 'I'll get back to you. I think I'm going to have to say an act of contrition before I start this meeting.'