Outrage (10 page)

Felix was escorted back to the interview room and told to sit down. As he waited, he fidgeted and tried not to look at the mirror. He could feel eyes on him, like he was being watched from the bushes by some unseen predator.

When the door suddenly clicked and Detective Brock walked back in with another man, Felix about jumped out of his seat. He looked nervously at Brock and then at the other detective, who appeared to be younger, though he couldn’t make out his features very well due to his poor eyesight. The second detective introduced himself as Scott McCullough, but he moved around to stand behind Felix, who couldn’t see him without turning.

“Felix, we know that you attacked that young woman this morning,” Brock said matter-of-factly.

“No! That’s not true,” Felix whimpered. Frightened, he started to stand up. “I want to go home now.”

“Sit down!”
the detective behind him, McCullough, thundered. “You were just positively identified as the attacker. She even says you sound like him.”

“She’s wrong,” Felix said, trying to turn to where he could see the detective, who kept moving to stay just out of his sight. “I was just walking to the park to tell my friends about my new girlfriend.”

Brock slammed his fist on the table, making Felix jump and spin back around to face him. “Goddamn it, Felix, quit fucking lying to me. You’re just going to make it harder on yourself.”

“If I tell you I did it, will you let me go home?” Felix cried.

“Just tell us the goddamn truth!” McCullough barked.

“You’ll feel better for it, Felix,” Brock told him.

Breathing hard, his eyes bugging, Felix thought about what Brock said. He hated it when people were mad at him. He would feel better when these detectives stopped yelling at him. “Okay, I did it,” he cried out. “I attacked her. Now can I go?”

Brock looked over Felix’s shoulder at McCullough. He then looked back at Felix and smiled. “You did a good thing, Felix, to get that off your chest, but I have a few more questions I need you to answer. To start, I need you to tell me how you attacked her.”

Felix thought hard about what he’d been told. Someone had said something about a knife. “With a knife?”

“You tell me, was it with a knife?” Brock asked.

Felix read the intonation of the detective’s voice and nodded. “Yes, it was with a knife.”

“How did you get that bruise on your face?”

Again Felix recalled Brock asking him if the woman had struck him with her elbow. “She hit me with her elbow.”

Brock stood up. “When she hit you, was she standing in front of you facing you like this?” he asked, pantomiming the action. “Or were you standing behind her, with her back to you, and she hit you like this?” He then simulated her striking him with an elbow.

Felix couldn’t remember anybody saying anything about this. “She was in front,” he guessed.

Brock scowled. “Really? In front?”

Picking up on the detective’s negative reaction, Felix changed his story. “No, I meant I was behind her. She hit me like you showed me the second time.”

“That means she used her right elbow, like this,” Brock said, demonstrating, “and caught you on the right side of your face?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

Brock frowned and made a note on his pad, which at first worried Felix. But then the detective smiled and seemed to relax. His voice was nicer when he asked, “Did you say something to her when you grabbed her from behind?”

Felix was happy that the detective seemed pleased. But he wasn’t sure what was expected of him next. Then he remembered what he’d been asked to say in the other room. “I said, ‘Don’t scream,
sooka
, or I’ll cut your fucking head off. Now you and I are going to get busy.’”

Brock furrowed his brow but then shrugged. “Just like in the other room.”

“Yes.”

“What does
‘sooka’
mean? Is it Spanish? Or are you saying ‘sucker’?”

Felix had no idea what it meant, but it wasn’t Spanish. “Sucker.”

“And is that something you like to say, like when you attacked the other woman?”

Felix frowned. “What other woman?”

Brock shrugged. “You know, Dolores Atkins, the woman you killed a couple of weeks ago?”

Felix blinked. How had the conversation turned from a woman he attacked this morning to one he had killed weeks ago? “I didn’t kill a woman.”

“Sure you did, Felix,” Detective McCullough said, “and you ‘got busy’ with her.”

The detectives traded off like a pair of tag-team wrestlers. “And then you took some of her things, like her wallet and money,” Brock said. “Maybe that diamond ring we found in your wallet.”

“You know,” McCullough added, “we’ll find out if you took that ring from her.”

“I didn’t! I bought it from Al,” Felix said, first to Brock and then turning to McCullough.

“Felix, Felix,” Brock said. “There is no Al, is there? I don’t know where you got that ring, but I’m going to find out. This has got to be weighing on you, making you feel bad. All that blood. The smell. The screams, even though you had her mouth taped. Did you tell Dolores you were going to cut her fucking head off if she screamed?”

“I didn’t say that,” Felix replied, tears springing back into his eyes.

“What did you say then?” McCullough asked.

“I didn’t say anything!”

“You killed her and raped her without saying anything?”

“Yes! I mean no,” Felix said, and buried his face in his hands. “I didn’t kill anybody.”

Detective Brock suddenly stood up so quickly that he knocked his chair over backward with a loud crash. He towered above the cowering young suspect and pointed his big finger. “Felix, I thought we were done with the lying,” he said. “You just admitted that you attacked and tried to rape a young woman this morning. You killed and raped Dolores Atkins, didn’t you?”

For a moment Felix was sure that the detective was going to hit him. He just wanted the detective to back away and quit yelling. “Okay, I killed her,” he whimpered. “I killed Dolores.”

Brock leaned forward with his knuckles on the table. “Thank you, Felix,” he said. “I’m sure that felt good to get that off your chest, too. So tell me, how did you kill her?”

“What?”

“How did you kill Dolores Atkins?” Brock asked as he picked up his chair and sat down again. “Did you use your hands? A gun? Some other sort of weapon?”

Felix hesitated. He thought it might be a trick question, the sort his dad would try to catch him in to justify a beating. But the only thing that made sense was the same answer as it had been for the other woman. “A knife? Was it a knife?”

Brock tapped his notepad with his pencil. “You have to tell me, Felix. I can’t play games with you.”

“Then yes, I killed her with a knife.”

“Was it the same knife you used in the attack on the other woman this morning?”

Felix relaxed. This was much easier. He nodded. “Yes, the same one.”

“Where’s the knife, Felix? Did you hide it somewhere?”

Suddenly Felix had an idea. The walls of the interview room were closing in on him. If he could just get out of the precinct house, he’d be able to think more clearly. “I can take you there. I can show you.”

Brock looked at his partner and stood up. “Then what are we waiting for?” he said.

A
HMED
K
ADYROV TWITCHED AND SCRATCHED AT HIS
arms as he walked along Watson Avenue. He was badly in need of a fix and had come to the right place even if it was still early in the morning. The avenue, which cut through the notorious Soundview neighborhood, was the biggest open-air drug market in the Bronx.

However, he wasn’t just going to buy whatever meth one of the losers on the street was offering out of his pants pockets, cut with God knew what shit. He was heading to the apartment of a dealer one step up from the streets who sold a better product, if you were willing to pay for it. And Kadyrov was willing and able.

He felt the left side of his face—the swelling had gone down overnight but it was still tender and he had a nasty purple bruise. He’d slipped up with that bitch over near Mullayly Park. Distracted by the guy with the dog and then getting the arch of
his foot stomped, he hadn’t seen the elbow coming and it had rattled him pretty good. Stunned and panicked, he’d been lucky to get away and catch a subway into Manhattan and over to Brooklyn while he gathered his wits.

It had taken the last of his meth, which he shot up in a stall of a public bathroom along the Coney Island boardwalk, to feel right again.
Wish I’d cut the bitch
, he thought. But the next woman, a pretty Hispanic girl who’d fallen for his offer to help her move a box into her Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment, had paid the price. She’d apparently just cashed a paycheck, too, because her purse had more than two hundred dollars in it.

Although his eagerness to “help” worked with the Hispanic girl, Kadyrov had been finding it more difficult to lure young women into letting him into their confidences and apartments. Thanks to the meth he was losing both his looks and his charm.

Since the previous July, when he’d taken the violence to a whole new level—
What was her name? Oh yeah, sweet Olivia
—his life had been going downhill. He’d been arrested for an aborted snatch-and-go robbery of a Jewish diamond merchant in the subway that ended when the man’s two huge bodyguards caught him before he could get away. Along with a beating from the merchant’s men, he’d spent six months in the Tombs.

It could have been worse. In his struggle with the bodyguards, he’d managed to get rid of his switchblade by tossing it under the subway platform. Getting caught with it might have prompted some ambitious detective to try connecting him with two recent knife murders near Columbia University. But instead, he just copped a plea to two misdemeanors, petty
larceny, and possession of stolen property, and got a half year in lockup.

Forced to go cold turkey in jail, once he got out he jumped back into the drug scene. Crank made him the king of the world. When he was powering along on methamphetamine, he could stay up for days, fantasizing about all the great things he would accomplish, making grandiose plans. His self-confidence and self-esteem—neither of which existed without meth—soared; he believed that men envied him and women wanted him, and in the early days, some of them did. He was a sex machine, and his mind worked at a thousand miles an hour, displaying what he considered to be a dazzling wit and impressive intelligence, especially compared to those around him.

Crank also seemed to give him almost superhuman strength and alertness. Without it, he was depressed and just wanted to sleep all the time. He didn’t like what he saw in the mirror. Why in the hell would he want to give up meth?

When he got out in March, Kadyrov started shooting up again with a vengeance. However, the more he used, the more he needed, and the more he needed, the more he changed.

His formerly olive complexion turned sallow and his skin had a dry scaly look to it—he’d even taken to wearing a long-sleeved sweatshirt to cover the scabs from his constant scratching. He was having problems with his gums bleeding and had lost a bottom front tooth when it just fell out one morning. And his hair, which he’d once taken such pride in, was thinning and had lost its luster.

Kadyrov considered his large brown eyes one of his chief physical assets. Only now, bloodshot and yellowed by jaundice,
they burned with a sort of crazed intensity—at least when he was high—and constantly darted around, as if he expected an attack from any side.

The more significant changes, however, had been psychological, although he failed to recognize them. Speed still made him feel like he was on top of the world, but he was also more irritable and aggressive. Paranoia was a way of life. The mere sight of a cop car made him jumpy, and he suspected everyone of plotting against him. Thus he stayed increasingly to himself, except when preying on others or buying drugs.

As his physical appearance deteriorated so did the pride he once took in how he dressed, even if it had been for the purpose of luring his victims. He’d returned to his basement apartment in the South Bronx from jail only to find that his landlord had tossed all of his belongings out on the sidewalk and rented the room to someone else. That left him with the clothes he walked out of jail wearing, plus the tattered gray hooded sweatshirt he’d dug out of a Dumpster.

He lived most of the time on the streets or in various homeless shelters, so his bathing was infrequent, too. But Kadyrov didn’t care. He desired two things in life—crank and sexual killing, each having become an addiction. Only torturing and murdering young women gave him the same sort of high he got from speed; indeed, each seemed to enhance the pleasure of the other.

The craving for both had increased while he was in jail. He’d only been out for two weeks when shortly after shooting up one afternoon, he spotted Dolores Atkins as she was entering the tenement off Anderson Avenue. He’d quickly made up his
mind and bounded up the steps in time to catch the security gate before it closed and enter behind her. She was a little older than he’d thought at first glance but was a brunette and a close enough resemblance to his whore mother.

Dolores was clearly uncomfortable when he got on the elevator after her. And she avoided eye contact when he offered “please, to help” her with one of her bags. “No, thank you,” she’d said tersely.

In the past, if his efforts to charm the women into gaining access to their apartments didn’t work, he’d have moved on to a more cooperative victim. But there was something about this woman, maybe the way she summarily rejected his offer to help, that really made him angry.

He suddenly grabbed her by the throat with one hand as he held the blade of his knife to her neck with the other. Lack of proper nutrition, and a lack of interest in food when on meth, had caused him to lose weight from his already thin physique. But like many fellow users, he’d developed a sort of hard, rope-like musculature that could be astonishingly strong when he was high. He told her that they were now going to her apartment, where they were going to get busy. And if she screamed, he’d cut her fucking head off.