Carter & Lovecraft

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  In memory of my father, Noel Howard, 1923–2014.

  A better man than I shall ever be, but that’s no reason not to keep trying.

  Chapter 1

  THE KILLER IN RED HOOK

  Crying and laughing, Charlie put his S&W Model 5946 between his teeth, squeezed the trigger, and excused himself from life.

  Carter watched him drop, unable to comprehend what he was seeing, unable to take in that his friend had just killed himself for no reason. No reason at all.

  But there had to be a reason. There’s always a reason. This was something to do with Suydam. This was Suydam’s fault.

  Carter turned to where Suydam sat propped against the wall, sitting in a pool of his own blood and piss, but there would be no answers coming from him. His eyes were open, and he was dead. He was smiling.

  When the scene came back to Carter again and again over the following months, he would always remember the clack of the pistol’s aluminum frame against Charlie’s teeth, the smell of blood, and the smile on dead Suydam’s face. It wasn’t a malevolent smile, that was the worst of it. It wasn’t cunning, or triumphant. It was happy. Suydam was happy Charlie had gutshot him, happy that he was dying, maybe even happy that Charlie had seen the joke, too, and followed him into darkness, a 9mm bullet as his invitation.

  The kid was crying in the other room where Carter had left him, hopeless little jerking, mechanical sobs of a terror that had gone on too long. Carter looked at the bodies for a moment longer, holstered his Glock 19, and went to the boy, to stay with him until the backup arrived.

  * * *

  It was going to be a great day. They just knew it. It was going to be one of those Hollywood cop days when the clues line up and they’d just follow them straight to the perp. And what a perp. What an arrest it would be.

  The United States had a disproportionately high number of serial killings compared to other developed countries, a result of wide spaces, ease of procuring weapons, and—just maybe—it looking so damn cool on TV and in the movies. Want your fifteen minutes? Here’s how you do it, sport. Just be sure to score at least five victims. You’re not a real serial killer unless you’ve got at least five kills, just like a World War I fighter ace. Five’s the trick, sport.

  Not all at once, either. That makes you a mass killer, not a serial killer, and mass killers are just douches. Those Columbine kids? That dickwad in Norway? Fuck ’em. Delayed gratification is the mark of the intelligent mind. That’s how you get into the forensic pathology books. That’s how you get a movie made about you. Mass killers, the movie gets made about the victims. Fuck that. Mass killers are just children who want all the candy now. A serial killer is a spider in a web, see? Now that’s juice.

  Despite which, there still aren’t enough serial killers to go around, and the FBI tends to run down the most high profile, both because serials often break federal laws along the way and because they’re the Feds. Simple as that. Even a city as large as New York doesn’t get many serial killers, but that’s largely because the higher the population density, the tougher it is to get away with a string of killings. Too many eyes, too many ears.

  This one had been getting away with it somehow, though, and that made him special. He took children, always male, always between the ages of six and eleven, and chose targets purely on the basis of opportunity, according to the FBI profile. Opportunity meant that kids from poorer families, larger families that just couldn’t keep an eye on all their children, tended to be targeted. But a middle-class white-bread kid from Greenwich Village was taken, too. So, the profiler concluded, class and race were unimportant to the killer. Only gender and age.

  Seven abductions over a period of fifteen months, and four bodies recovered. The CSU reports turned up little of use apart from a modus operandi. None of the boys had suffered sexual assault, but all had suffered amateur surgery that had ultimately resulted in their deaths. All the surgery was to the brain, and to the eyes. The techniques used showed no training whatsoever, and only the slightest understanding of the aims of brain surgery. Sections of skull were removed without reference to the structure of the plates, simply cut and torn away to reach areas of the parietal and occipital lobes. No attempt to preserve the meninges layers across the surface of the brain had been made; the perp clearly had no interest in preserving the victims’ lives post-operation.

  Tox screens showed traces of Rohypnol and ethanol, presumably used as a makeshift anesthetic, but also stronger traces of amphetamines. The conclusion was that the surgery was carried out while the victim was drugged and incapacitated and, once complete, the victim was brought to a high state of awareness. Cops who had seen a lot read the reports and were silent, the kind of heavy silence made by a little bit more of a human soul dying.

  The LDC had been very clear that he did not want this son of a bitch to get a name. He was not to be tagged with some cool-sounding title that the press would get ahold of and, somewhere down the line, use as the title of a best seller.

  Within half an hour, the detective-investigators were quietly calling the unknown subject “The Child-Catcher.”

  * * *

  The Child-Catcher sucked as a surgeon, but he was doing all right for himself as killer. The abductions occurred all over the city and its suburbs, and the body dumps found so far were spread out. Analysis showed no pattern, which made the detectives think the unsub himself was analyzing possible abduction and dump sites before using them. There was always a pattern. Even attempts to leave no pattern left a pattern of their own. This was different; there really was nothing. All the analysis could say was that the killer was based in New York, probably. The detectives nodded slowly; they’d kind of figured that themselves.

  All they could do was hope for the Child-Catcher to make a mistake, careful though he’d been up till then. Historically, all serial killers get sloppy. While their MOs might evolve, repeated success made them overconfident. Some psychologists were of the opinion that this was because they wanted to be caught, but the practical nature of the police made them think it was just likely to be human nature, the desire to do just enough and no more.

  For the first crime, the unsub would pull out all the stops, cover all the bases, dot every “i.” It would be difficult and nitpicking, but they didn’t want to be caught, so they would go to any trouble. Then, if they got away with it, next time they might think—even if only subconsciously—I didn’t need to do that one thing on the list. That didn’t make any difference. So they skip it, and they get away with it again. With every iteration, they shave away a little bit of security, until they shave that bit too much and let the hounds have a sniff of them. Then it’s all over, even if not straightaway. The fuse is lit, though; they’re as good as apprehended.

  The thought that the Child-Catcher had probably shed several onion skins of security since his first crime gave the detectives hope. Maybe there was already a clue out th
ere. Maybe next time he would fuck up spectacularly and give himself up on a plate. They could only keep the net tight, scrape up every fragment of evidence from the first killings, look for the missing, and watch for anything new.

  “Anything new” turned out to be the eighth abduction. Detective First Grade Charlie Hammond and his partner of two years, Detective Third Grade Dan Carter, were on the scene seven minutes after the 911 came in, only thirty seconds behind the beat car. The 76th Precinct covers Red Hook, which doesn’t have the concentrations of Hispanic citizens found elsewhere in the city. The uniformed officers were trying to get the story out of the missing boy’s mother, but their Spanish wasn’t proving equal to the job.

  Charlie Hammond showed his badge and said, “Señora, ¿cuándo fue la última vez que vio a su hijo?”

  Carter thought her face would stay with him—the dull shock, the drained color, the flickers of rising panic as she realized her boy’s picture might end up on the evening news for all the wrong reasons. He thought her face would join the other flashes, other images that stick with every cop, but he was wrong. After what was to come, he couldn’t remember her face at all. When her son was returned to her later, he only recognized her in the way he might if he’d seen her in a picture.

  She replied slowly, as if just awoken. “El hombre del camión. De pronto agarró a Thiago y lo tiró por dentro.” She said it in a near monotone, as if disbelieving her own words.

  Carter’s Spanish was still at the night school stage, but he understood enough to follow the gist of it. She’d actually seen the unsub?

  She’d done better.

  She held out a crumpled and ragged piece of paper, a receipt she’d found in her pocket when she had needed something to write on in a hurry. And there it was, in jagged, anxious figures, traced and retraced over in her anxiety for there to be no mistake in their reading: a license plate number.

  * * *

  The pickup’s registered address wasn’t even a mile away. Hammond and Carter went there, leaving the uniforms with the mother, and called for backup en route.

  Hammond drove. Once Carter had put in the call, it grew quiet in the car. It wasn’t just nerves or excitement, although that was there, too. There was a strong sense that something was not right. Carter could feel it, and he was damn sure Hammond could, too. There was always the chance it wasn’t the Child-Catcher, they had to allow for that. There was always the chance it was just some happy-go-lucky pedo who’d decided to try it on when the city was on high alert for a serial child abductor.

  But neither of them believed it wasn’t the Child-Catcher for a second. Even if it wasn’t, it was still a serious crime, and they were more than happy to deal. But it was him. It so was him.

  “He’s been pretty smart up to now,” said Carter. The suspect even had a name now, but they still said “he” and knew what they meant. According to the license number, his name was Martin Suydam. He had no criminal record.

  Hammond said nothing, didn’t even grunt. Carter said nothing else.

  They traveled without lights or sirens, hopeful of catching the unsub unawares, and Hammond slowed the car a hundred yards from the address and parked out of sight. They walked the remaining distance, talking as if they were just walking around the corner to get a sandwich and a coffee, just two guys. As they walked, they covered the angles between them, looking without appearing to look, sensitive to the sight of a dark blue pickup or a man with a seven-year-old boy with him. Always at the edge of vision. Always at the corner of the eye.

  The house, when they cleared the corner, was larger than expected. It looked like it had been a hardware store at some time in the last few years, with maybe a couple of rooms to live in on the second story. Those days had gone, all the stock dispersed, and—unless the interior had seen a lot of work that left the exterior untouched—its sole current resident must have had a lot of space to call his own.

  The street corner belonging to the building was occupied by an open yard behind a chain-link fence. Sitting there was the dark blue pickup. It was out in the open, its rear plate easily readable from the street, no attempt to hide or disguise it at all. Carter wondered if maybe there was something in the forensic psychology theory about serials wanting to be caught after a while. If Suydam was their man, he hadn’t just shed a layer or two of protective caution, he’d dumped the whole thing.

  They still had no direct cause to enter the property, however, although they knew that even as they moved out of the redbrick building’s arcs of vision, a warrant was being prepared. They would just have to wait until it arrived with a whole posse of other officers, and probably a SWAT team. Of course, while all that was going on, Suydam could be quietly peeling Thiago Mata’s skull like a hardboiled egg.

  Carter and Hammond reached a side door on the alley. The same thoughts were going through both their minds, along with the same misgivings.

  “I thought I heard a kid cry out just then,” said Hammond, but he said it without emphasis. There had been no cry. “Did you hear it?”

  Carter looked at Charlie Hammond, then across the street. The place was quiet. He breathed out heavily through his nose. He didn’t want to leave the kid alone with Suydam a second longer than he had to, but if they fucked this up, the Child-Catcher might walk.

  He drew breath to speak.

  The shrill squeal of a young child in pain came to them through the door.

  * * *

  Hammond led in. There was no sign the door was reinforced, and there was no time to go around to another door in any case. He quickly and quietly tried the handle, but it was locked.

  “Knock, knock,” he said under his breath, landed a flat-footed kick against the lock that tore the striking plate clear out of the frame, and followed through immediately, allowing himself to be skylined against the daylight only for a second. Carter was next, moving across and by, into the shadows of the other side of the door.

  Their guess that the place was a former store was borne out by the open floor plan, tall shelves still in place, and an exposed area of concrete where a counter had once stood. Sunlight streamed through narrow horizontal slits left unpainted at the top of the blacked-out windows. To the left, a wide staircase angled up through a left-hand turn to the second story. They heard movement up there, feet on bare boards, and a child’s subdued sobbing.

  There was little cover on the first floor, but they should still have cleared it before moving on. Hammond wasn’t for waiting, though; their eyes had barely adjusted to the darker interior before he was moving to the foot of the stairs. There were a few crates toward the windows at the far end that it was possible somebody might hide behind. Hammond angled his head at them for a second, as if that was a good enough search. It was a fair reading of the ground that there would be no ambush from that direction, but it bothered Carter then and later that they didn’t do it by the book. No reason—there was nobody hiding there—but it bothered him. One of those little things that nags irrationally. Maybe if they’d done it properly, things would have turned out differently.

  With Carter covering him, Hammond was first up the stairs. He moved quietly, but not silently; anyone upstairs would have heard him if they were listening, and after the kicking in of the door, how could they not be listening? Carter was a few steps behind him, so he saw Suydam second.

  Hammond called, “NYPD! Drop your weapon!” and Carter knew right then that it was all going to turn to shit, though he didn’t truly know how. Not really. He expected maybe Hammond to get hit, or Suydam to be using the Mata boy as a shield or maybe even have a shotgun or an automatic weapon. He was wrong about all that.

  There was a beat. Carter paused on the stairs and looked back the way they had come, but they weren’t being ambushed. Suydam was running solo. Carter was debating whether to move forward or maybe not if it startled the suspect when Hammond fired.

  Once. Just once.

  Hammond was ex-military, and had enjoyed his time in the army. He loved his gun,
and maybe his gun loved him back for all the attention he gave it. Everything he did that related to firearms he did per doctrine. He had told Carter enough times that when he had to fire, he would always fire at least twice.

  Afterward, the single shot was another thing that would bother Carter.

  Then Hammond was moving again, doctrine in place: gun braced in both hands, stop to fire, keep moving when not firing. Carter followed him up.

  Suydam was down, sitting against the wall. They were on a broad landing that looked like it had once been another shop floor, a little smaller than the first since an area was walled off for offices and storage. Where the floor below had been abandoned even by its solitary tenant, however, it was plain that he spent a lot of time here.

  And there it was. Right there. An actual psycho wall.

  Chapter 2

  THE DOOM THAT CAME TO SUYDAM

  Suydam had done the thing real serial killers never do: he had mapped his madness onto the wall. In the experience of the police, serial killers were only marginally organized. They might have a reasonably detailed modus operandi, but then they’d erode it over time and repetition until it wasn’t worth shit. They might prepare, but only as much as they would for any hunting trip. They might keep trophies, but they tended to be small and personal, such as jewelry or a lock of hair. They might express their nature, but only as a notebook, or sometimes as paintings.

  None, as far as Carter knew, not a single fucking lunatic, would actually do the Hollywood thing and make a psycho wall. They turned up in movies and TV all the time—great, intricate tapestries of psychosis in tiny handwriting on a thousand notes pinned to a wall, or written directly onto the plaster. Random pictures, usually religious, would dot it, some things would be circled, and some things would be connected to others by hand-drawn lines or lengths of string. It all looked very good on the screen, some handsome actor examining the wall by flashlight (the psycho never has working lights), zeroing in on the single thing in the whole mass of details that would set them on the trail of the killer before he could claim his final victim: the martyrdom of Saint Anthony; the pharaonic curses; Tenniel’s illustrations for the “Alice” books. Whatever.