The Killer in My Eyes (28 page)

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pounded uninterruptedly in his throat and chest.

As if surprised by his own gesture, the man hurriedly rolled down the sleeve of his tracksuit and partly closed the trunk, leaning his body on it. Through the crack, Alex saw him bend double, clutching his arm as if the pain was very strong. A bloodstain was spreading over his sleeve.

At that moment, from some vague point in the darkness, came a voice.

‘Hey, what’s going on? Who are you? How did you get in here?’

The weight on the trunk eased and the lid, freed from the man’s body, went up slightly. The suspension gave a jolt, and the torch fell from the roof of the car and went out.

Alex heard steps rapidly approaching, then the sound of other steps on gravel as his abductor moved away from the car.

‘Hey, you! Stop where you are!’

There was the sound of running feet coming past the car, and he surmised that his abductor had run away and the new-comer was running after him. The echo of the two men’s steps faded in the distance.

Silence.

Alex raised his head and pushed the half-closed lid up with his forehead until it opened completely and he was at last able to see where he was. It was a large, dimly lit open space. To his left, in the distance, perhaps on the other side of the river, were the familiar lights of New York. To his right, on the edge of his field of vision, were streetlamps and buildings and a road running alongside a metal fence.

Those lights and those buildings meant that there were cars, people, help.

Life.

Pressing his legs against the wall of the trunk, he managed with difficulty to turn and sit up. With equal difficulty, he raised his bound hands to his mouth and pulled off the tape. He sucked at the damp night air as if it was his mother’s breast. His heart was still pounding in his chest. He felt as if it might explode at any moment and transform his naked body into a shower of bloody fragments.

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Trying not to hit his head on the lid that swayed over him, Alex awkwardly turned and got on his knees. Supporting himself with his hands on the edge of the trunk, he managed to climb out, leaving his soiled and torn clothes behind.

He took a few hesitant steps towards the distant lights, heedless that he was walking on the rough surface of an unpaved street. He did not even glance at the warehouse outside which the car had parked. All that mattered were the lights he could see ahead of him, which right now represented his only hope of survival.

In a flash, he remembered the bloody tattoo he had glimpsed in the torchlight. Alex knew who the man was, and he knew what he would be capable of doing to him if he came back, even though he didn’t know why.

This thought added terror to terror and gave his brain the nervous energy he needed to order his numbed legs to move.

In panic, he started running towards those lights, a dull pain still throbbing in his ears and chest

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not even noticing that his bare feet were leaving bloody prints on the rough ground.

The police car, a blue and white Ford Corona, slowly descended the ramp from the Williamsburg Bridge and turned right. This area was mainly inhabited by Orthodox Jews, with their hats, beards and long side-locks, but at this hour there was almost nobody about. The lights in the kosher butchers’ shops and supermarkets were off and the shutters down.

Manhattan with all its colours was far enough away to make this area seem like a different world entirely. There were only a few cars passing. Officer Serena Hitchin, a pretty twenty-nine-year-old black woman, was at the wheel and Lukas Furst, her partner, was sitting beside her, smiling and beating a somewhat unsteady rhythm with his hands on the plastic dashboard.

‘Is this how it’s supposed to go?’ he asked.

Serena had for some time been in a relationship with a member of the cast of
Stomp
, the musical that had been playing for a number of years at the Orpheum, a theatre on Second Avenue. Lukas knew how important the relationship was to her but never lost an opportunity to tease her good-naturedly about it.

Serena laughed. ‘You really don’t have any ear for music, Luke.’

Lukas leaned back in his seat, a smug expression on his face. ‘Is that so? You may like to know I was in the church choir when I was a kid.’

‘That must have been before God appeared during the service, pointed to you and said, “Either he goes or I do”.’

Lukas turned towards her with his index fingers crossed, as if Serena were a vampire. ‘Silence, blasphemer. If that had really happened, the Almighty would have pointed me out to everybody and said, “This is My masterpiece. One day this man will be great”.’

Serena chuckled, showing white, regular teeth. ‘You’re really crazy, you know. Still think that, huh?’

‘Of course I think it. It’ll happen sooner or later, you’ll see. My name in lights on Broadway, and then I’ll show up at the precinct in a car that’ll turn you all green with envy. Look what happened to Captain Schimmer . . .’

Lukas Furst was a handsome young man, who looked especially good in uniform. He had indulged his passion for showbusiness – and a certain talent – by attending a whole series of acting classes, and every now and again played walk-on parts in movies or TV shows. At the precinct, everyone still remembered the pride with which he had announced that he was appearing in a Woody Allen film. He had dragged them all to the movie theatre, and when the scene had finally arrived they had seen him from the back for about two seconds. The teasing had continued for days.

Lukas opened a window to light a cigarette. By a tacit agreement with his partner, that was the only way he was allowed to smoke.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the captain made it. He got the break.’

The Captain Schimmer he was talking about had become a police consultant on movies and, when he had retired, still quite young, had delved further into that world and now often appeared on screen playing cop roles in movies and TV shows.

‘Your break was to join the police, Luke,’ Serena said. ‘I don’t think you’d ever leave this job. You like it too much.’

Lukas took a last puff and threw his cigarette out the window. Then he turned to Serena. ‘Of course -– I was born to be a police officer. But I also like the idea that I was born to win an Oscar one day. And when I do, I’ll thank my ex-partner Serena Hitchin, who with her faith in me and her support helped me to achieve my goal.’

It was a quiet night, they got along well, they were pleased with their lives and their work, and there was no valid reason not to joke between themselves.

But as always happens, the valid reason soon presented itself.

The radio started crackling and immediately afterwards a voice emerged.

‘Calling all cars. Maximum alert from Headquarters. A male Caucasian named Alex Campbell has been abducted, and it’s possible that the man who abducted him is the killer of Gerald Marsalis and Chandelle Stuart. Alex Campbell is about thirty years old, six feet tall, with thin brown hair. The abductor is driving a very old Dodge Nova with marks of filler on the bodywork. I repeat, maximum alert.’

Lukas let out a whistle. ‘Jeeze. With all the secrecy there’s been about this case, putting out a message like that on the normal frequency must mean they’re shit-scared.’

‘So would you be if you were the Mayor of New York and your son had been killed like that.’

‘I guess so.’

As they spoke, they had turned right at the beginning of Roebling Street onto the street that led down to the East River. They crossed White Avenue and found themselves at the end of Clymer Street, facing the sign of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Beyond the rust-coloured perimeter fence that marked off the area, the outlines of old subway cars could be glimpsed, heaped up and waiting to be turned to scrap. In the darkness, a few tall dark brick buildings, many of them dilapidated and abandoned, loomed over the street.

Serena turned left and drove at moderate speed along Kent Avenue, heading south towards Brooklyn Heights. They passed the pound where confiscated cars were kept, to be auctioned after a fixed period. For a moment, Lukas allowed his attention to wander as he looked at all those vehicles waiting for new owners. Then:

‘Holy shit! Who the fuck’s that?’

Hearing Serena’s alarmed voice, Furst turned his head abruptly towards the street.

In the dim light cast by the streetlamps, a man had come out through an open gate in the perimeter fence and was running towards them with his hands up. Apart from a few scraps of clothing around his shoulders, he was stark naked and was moving as if every step cost him a huge effort. When he realized that theirs was a police car, he stopped, lifted his hands to his chest, slid slowly to his knees, and remained in that position, motionless, in the middle of the roadway.

Serena stopped the car and she and Lukas got out, leaving the doors open. As they approached, Serena noted out of the corner of her eye that her partner had taken his gun from his holster.

They reached the kneeling man, who was breathing with difficulty and looking at them with incredulous tears rolling from his eyes, as if he was witnessing a miracle. In the light of the headlamps, they finally managed to make out his features.

‘Serena, the description matches the one we just heard.’

‘OK, keep your eyes peeled, Luke.’

While Lukas remained standing, with his gun at the ready, Serena kneeled next to the man, who was looking at them in silence, both his hands pressed to his chest. His breath was a kind of wheezing, and there was a strong smell of excrement about him.

‘Are you Alex Campbell?’ Serena asked.

The man nodded wearily, then closed his eyes and keeled over. Ignoring her revulsion at the stench, Serena quickly moved to support his head and stop it hitting the ground.

She placed her fingers on his neck and found the pulse.

‘His heart’s beating like crazy. I think he’s having an attack. We need an ambulance.’

Still keeping his eyes on the surrounding area, Lukas started retreating towards the car. A moment or two later Serena heard his voice contacting Headquarters and asking for medical assistance and backup.

She turned her attention back to the wretched heap of fear and shame and pain into which someone had transformed Alex Campbell.

The man looked up. His voice was a mere breath emerging with difficulty from his body. Serena heard him whisper some words too soft to be heard.

‘What did you say? I didn’t understand.’

Alex Campbell lifted his head an inch, a movement that seemed the result of an enormous effort. Serena slipped a hand under his head to support it and moved her ear closer to his mouth, but his feeble words were almost lost in the noise of Lukas’s footsteps as he came running back.

‘The ambulance will be here s—’

Serena looked up and said urgently, ‘Shut up a minute!’ She again leaned towards the man, but darkness was gradually invading his eyes. The words that emerged from his half-open mouth were his last.

Serena could immediately see that help was pointless. Under her fingers, the fragmented heartbeats slowed down, grew weaker, then disappeared entirely.

Serena Hitchin felt a sense of loss, the same she always felt when she was forced to be present at the extinction of a life. She didn’t think it would ever get any easier, even after many years of service. Gently, she raised a hand and closed the dead man’s eyes.

The real struggle was against time.

Sitting in the passenger seat as they drove through the streets of New York, Jordan looked straight ahead of him. The lights and the shadows flashed by as if they, rather than the vehicle in which he was travelling, were in movement. He felt as if he was in one of those primitive special effects from the days of silent movies, when the actors kept still and a painted panorama revolved behind them.

And maybe that was how it was.

Every person involved in this case thought he was moving forward, whereas the world was rushing past them, mocking their paralysis.

Jordan knew why he was feeling this way: he was certain that he had failed.

In the back seat was Maureen Martini, silent and alone. Jordan admired the woman’s strength of mind, torn as she was between rationality and something that
had
no rational explanation. Few people would have been able to accept what was happening to her, but she was sustained by an unshakeable belief that she was not crazy.

Thanks to her, they had identified Snoopy. When it had happened, they had all been in too much of a hurry to stop and wonder how she had done it. They had called Alex Campbell but nobody replied. His cellphone was off. A quick internet search had yielded the name of his literary agent, Ray Migdala, who told them Campbell had just landed at JFK and was on his way home. Jordan had informed Burroni and immediately afterwards he and Maureen had rushed in the police car from Gracie Mansion towards the address that Migdala had given them.