American Devil (45 page)

He wandered over to where she lay on the floor, pulled her up and threw her body on to the bed. Lucy’s eyes were open now. He sat on the edge and stared into her terrified eyes. The small, innocent face of Lucy James looked back at him.

‘You’re not a hooker, are you, sweetheart?’ Sebastian said. ‘I made him promise only hookers, cos that way the cops couldn’t care less, but you’re worth more than that, aren’t you?’ Lucy stared in fear. ‘Only hookers. Only hookers. What a fucking mess!’

Mo reappeared at the door holding a set of keys. ‘I got the van for you, Nick.’

‘That’s a good boy, Mo. Well done.’

The two men looked at each other. Sebastian saw Mo looking down at Lucy. ‘You like this one, don’t you?’

Mo nodded, his eyes heavy with pain.

‘She’s not a hooker, Mo. That’s why the cops are chasing you.’

Tears welled in Redtop’s eyes, and he started to cry like a baby, big fat tears rolling down his face. ‘Please can I keep her, Nicky? Just for one more night?’ Behind Sebastian, Lucy looked on in horror.

Sebastian moved across to Mo. ‘Hey, big feller, maybe we’ll get you another soon. This one’s had her stroking. They go bad if you keep them long. She’ll be mean to you just like Lottie, and the cops will be hunting this one. You got to let me take her away, just like I did with Lottie.’ He led Mo to the door. ‘Now quit crying, go and get me an outfit and I’ll take care of this. We’re going to have to move her right now. Get some clothes for me and I’ll tell you what we’re going to do.’

Mo opened the door and left. As the door shut, Sebastian shivered. Alone with a girl. He walked across to her and pulled up her dress. Lucy didn’t move. She was just like a princess. It was uncanny how they all looked like one of his princesses. Uncanny. He touched the girl’s face, softly. Stroked her long hair.

‘You’re pretty,’ he said and her eyes, dark and intense, stared at him. Sebastian found his trousers on the floor and pulled out a plastic bag from his pocket. His appetite seemed to be growing. He moved on top of her.

Lucy stared up at the man moving above her. He had a handsome face, but his eyes were dead. She was dreaming, perhaps. She tried to move, but like in a dream found she couldn’t move her limbs. He had her pinned down. She was utterly helpless.

The man calmly lifted her head and pulled the bag down over her face. Breathing became more difficult as the bag kept being drawn into her mouth, but if she breathed slowly she could still get some air.

She was keen to wake up from her nightmare now. Very keen. This was wrong. This was all wrong. Wake up, she was shouting, wake up. But she didn’t. She didn’t wake up at all. She tried to remember how she woke herself up in her dreams, but none of it worked.

Through the crumpled bag she watched him looking down at her body, then at her eyes. He was looking deep into her eyes and seemed to be transfixed.

His hand came forward and closed the bag around her neck. She gulped for air. Her body was young and not ready to die. It didn’t want to. Every fibre kicked out against it. Every atom and every molecule wanted to carry on. To live. She bolted and tugged and kicked, but she was held tight and the man rested his body on top of hers, pushing the last breath from her lungs.

 

H
arper and Denise arrived at East 126th Street and parked up. They saw Marconi’s truck sitting on the side of the street. High up in the building, one of the boarded windows glimmered with light.

‘He’s in. We’ll wait for the other guys.’

On the way over, Harper had called up Eddie. Kasper had, in turn, called in the Feds working the task force. They might need to have people with Federal jurisdiction. They were all heading over. This had to end tonight. There was no time for convincing Lafayette, no time for the deputy DA and no time for any warrant. They had to take Redtop out and try to save Lucy James.

In the apartment building, Sebastian was dressed in one of Mo’s shirts. He’d rolled the dead girl in a sheet and already put her in the back of Marconi’s truck along with two canisters of gasoline. Mo knew what to do. Mo should’ve left already but he couldn’t stop crying. He’d loved Lucy and now Nick had taken her away. He was crying so much that Sebastian was afraid he’d draw attention to himself. It took him nearly half an hour to calm Mo down. In the end, Sebastian promised him another girl. Promised him a keeper if he did a good job getting rid of Lucy. Mo packed a small bag and left the apartment, for the farm he knew from a long time ago.

Across the street, three unmarked cars sat waiting for Redtop to make a move. Eddie Kasper had turned up with another couple of detectives, Garcia and Mason. Harper got in with Eddie and Denise left for home. The third car contained Special Agents Asa Shelton and Isaac Spencer.

The pack didn’t have to wait long before Redtop appeared at the fence to the disused schoolhouse. He pushed the fence aside and got into the van.

Harper looked up at the building. ‘You think someone else is in there?’

‘I think the body’s in the van,’ said Eddie. ‘If he’s going out of the city, then he’s already killed her.’

Harper looked again at the light. Something wasn’t right.

‘Let’s go, man,’ Eddie urged. ‘We’ve got to find his dumping ground.’

Maurice didn’t give Harper any more time to think. He pulled away from the kerb and drove off. After a few seconds, the three cars followed.

 

The journey upstate was slow. Maurice was driving carefully. Kasper hadn’t told Lafayette until they were on their way. He would’ve stopped them, no doubt, but now it was too late.

Lafayette was covering his back lately and always went straight up the chain of command. The top brass wanted to know every development in this case. He had to tell them that Tom Harper was with Kasper in the chase. He had to reinstate Tom Harper in his absence. Then he had to run for cover - if this fucked up, Lafayette was staring down a serious barrel of shit. They’d got the wrong man once; it didn’t bear thinking about what would happen if they got the wrong man twice.

They followed Maurice upstate, the three cars taking turns to lead and fall back. They were heading north on Interstate 87, travelling up past the Catskill State Park. After forty minutes they turned off and within an hour were driving through the dark in some slow, narrow rural roads.

The woods and trees of New York state loomed in the shadows and darkness at the side of the road. They might be driving half the night. Eddie focused on the road ahead. On the winding rural roads, keeping a distance was hard and keeping hidden was harder. If Maurice had a body in the car and he got a sense that he was being followed, then he could easily disappear into the hillside, switch off his lights and they’d be none the wiser.

‘You regret not checking the apartment?’ said Eddie.

‘I will if Lucy James isn’t in that truck, but I think she is,’ Tom replied.

‘You’re sure?’

‘No.’

‘We’ve got a lot riding on this one. I can call Lafayette and get them to take a look, what do you say?’

‘Yeah, you do that.’

‘Shit, we think this guy’s carrying a carcass, but if he’s not?’

‘Then I’ve just signed myself off the NYPD for life.’

As they got further and further from civilization, it became clear that Redtop knew exactly where he was going. It was hard going, all right. And then it got harder. Maurice’s truck disappeared.

 

The three following cars stopped. Mo’s van had just vanished. The drive back to the Interstate would take an hour, then it would take another hour to find a motel. It wasn’t on the agenda. Kasper led the cars about three miles up the road and the three dark saloons pulled into a yard on the edge of a pine wood. It was a working yard with a yellow digger and a hut of some kind.

The six men got out. It was cold. It was coming on for midnight and the chill was creeping deep beneath their clothes. They hadn’t dressed for a night on the mountains.

‘What are you two guys thinking?’ Kasper shouted across to Asa Shelton. They shook their heads and looked around.

‘Either he pulled off the road or he cut his lights and kept on going.’

‘You think someone could drive on these roads without lights?’ Kasper asked.

‘Maybe, if he knows the roads.’

Harper walked over to the wooden shack and took out a screwdriver. With a small torch, he unscrewed the padlock plate and opened the door. Outside, the other five men looked on as a light went on inside.

A minute later, all six men were in the wooden shack. It was a sizeable working hut, with a small stove, a table and some hard hats and logging gear. Kasper was going through the cupboards looking for food and the two Federal agents had set up their laptops. ‘I can’t believe we came out here with nothing to eat. It’s fucking unbelievable.’

Harper was standing by the large old map of the region on the board. ‘This is useful. Come take a look.’ The guys crowded around the map. ‘Here we are in this cut just under the mountainside. There’s one road going through the hill, so he’s got to be up here for only one reason. There’s a pig farm up the road. Looks a small operation. I say that’s where he’s heading. There’s nowhere else this road leads to. What do you say?’

They all nodded quietly. Harper was still one of the most respected detectives on the force.

‘Okay, then,’ said Harper. ‘If he saw our headlights in his mirror then he might have taken one of these old tracks. It takes him way off track but if he follows it round, it’ll come back to the farm. I think he’s got scared and taken the long road. So what I suggest we do is get ourselves up to the farm and dig in. If he’s coming, he’ll take a couple of hours to get around the mountain.’

‘Okay,’ said Eddie. ‘Let’s go watch some hogs!’

 

W
hen they arrived at the pig farm, the teams hid their cars up in the trees behind the farm and scoped out their positions. Harper and Kasper set up about two hundred metres above the hog field, looking down a gentle slope. The hog field was an enormous brown enclosure where the pigs churned up the earth as they ran around freely and lolled about in patches of mud.

There could have been a hundred bodies in that muddy mess and you’d never find them. At night, it appeared the hogs all went into the great barn at the end of the field. Eddie and Tom stared out into the darkness. It was a quiet, starlit night. The big old moon was full.

‘You think he’ll come?’ Tom asked.

‘He’s maybe sitting and watching. He’s a nervous cat,’ said Eddie.

‘Or he’s spending one more night with her,’ said Tom.

‘Jesus, is this not bad enough without imagining him fucking a corpse?’

‘The guy likes these bodies,’ said Tom.

‘I guess he does, but we don’t need to hear about it.’

Harper nodded. They both looked down over the darkened hillside.

Beside the barns were the two holding ponds. These great round vats of slurry and blood were as much as thirty feet deep and contained excrement, blood, old carcasses, afterbirth, urine, chemicals and drugs. They were a horrible cocktail of thick, viscous shit. And sitting above them in the hills, Harper knew that they stank to high heaven.

 

A couple of hours later Harper was standing on the edge of a clump of trees, staring up at the fading stars. Eddie was sitting on the ground with his eyes closed and a blanket around his shoulders. Every few minutes Harper took a look round with the binoculars.

A faint purple glow on the hillside opposite suggested dawn was not far away. The silence was more or less complete, with hardly a breeze. Then, in the distance, headlights appeared on the road.

Heart in his mouth, Harper raised the binoculars to his eyes and looked. He couldn’t make anything out except the lights and the fact that the vehicle was moving slowly. He radioed the other team members.

‘You seeing this?’

‘We’re seeing it.’

‘What you thinking?’

‘Could be our man.’

Tom looked again. Up ahead of the vehicle, the road split, with the dirt track leading to the hog field and the road heading on to the farmhouse.

‘How much you want to put on the high road?’

Garcia came back, ‘I’ll put a fifty on the high road.’

Shelton chipped in, ‘I’ll take some of that, Harper. A hundred on the high road.’

Harper smiled to himself. They all wanted this to work. ‘I’ll take your bets, gentlemen. This one’s coming our way.’

Three sets of binoculars were trained on the vehicle as it approached the fork in the road. If it did go low, they only had a few minutes to prepare. If high, they could all relax and Harper could go back to watching as a poor man.

The fork approached. The car ground to a halt. They stared in absolute silence. Was the driver looking for the right road or was it something else?

A minute passed.

‘Perhaps they’ve seen something,’ said Garcia.

They looked around. Harper spotted it first. There was a torch lying on the ground near to the two detectives. It glowed faintly in the grass.

He radioed quickly. ‘Garcia, for fuck’s sake, you’ve got a flashlight on over there. He’s looking at the light.’

The torch went out and they all waited with bated breath as the car sat five hundred metres away at the fork in the road. Would it put him off? Did he see it? It was only a faint glow. But he hadn’t driven on. He was cautious.

Harper knew in his gut it was him. Redtop. And Redtop didn’t know what to do. He was an indecisive soul and now he had seen something that raised enough of a question to throw him. He was probably waiting now. Seeing if the light went on again.