Carella looked across the room to where his partner stood solid and big and black against the white flakes swirling outside. Randy Flynn rose from the piano bench, placed the palms of his hands together like a guru, and bowed in transparently false modesty, accepting applause from the assembled guests. Brown’s eyes scanned the room. So did Carella’s.
Almost anyone in this room could have killed Andrew Hale.
There was no way the detectives who caught the murder down in Hopscotch could have connected it with the murders uptown. No way. The first victim uptown had been a sixty-eight-year-old white man who’d been hanged from a door hook and then transported to a bed. The second one had been a nineteen-year-old black girl stabbed in the chest with a knife grabbed from her own kitchen counter. The prior ingestion of a drug called Rohypnol was the only connecting link between them-if, in fact, it was a link and not the sort of coincidence that plagued police work.
Except when they were reading novels, the cops in this city rarely came across serial killers. Serial killers in novels were enormously popular these days, but that did not mean they were running rampant all over the United States. Current estimates maintained that only some thirty-five to fifty of them were out there loose. In order for a murderer to qualify as a bona fide serial killer, he had to have killed three or more people within a relatively short period of time. On the other hand, a serial killer was not someone who killed Uncle George and two days later killed Cousins Mandy and Maude because they’d seen him commit the first murder. That was merely a careful murderer.
The cops in this city investigated some 2,000 homicides annually.
Even if the detectives catching the downtown squeal had remotely suspected a connection between the Hale murder, the Cleary murder, and this new murder, they would not have jumped to the conclusion that a raving lunatic serial killer was loose in the city. The detectives catching the squeal early that Monday morning might have heard about the Hale murder from television, but they most certainly had not heard about the murder of an obscure little black girl in Diamondback. So it never once entered their minds that this new murder was somehow related to the previous two, serially or otherwise.
According to a birth certificate they found in a candy tin in the top drawer of her bedroom dresser, the victim’s name was Martha Coleridge and she was ninety-eight years old. A thin, birdlike creature, she lay in her nightgown at the foot of the bed, her neck apparently broken. The detectives -an experienced First named Bryan Shanahan, and a newly appointed Third named Jefferson Long-went through the lady’s belongings, sifting through browned letters and diaries, knowing they wouldn’t find any clues in all this stuff, but going through the drill anyway. What they figured was that some junkie burglar had come in here, stolen the old lady’s grocery money, and then snapped her neck for good measure. They kept looking through her old papers, tossing them onto the bed while the ME examined the body. One of the things they found was a blue binder with a typed label on it. The label read: MY ROOM by Martha Coleridge What was inside the binder looked like some kind of play or something. They tossed it on the bed with all the other crap.
The first thing that attracted the Reverend Gabriel Foster to the case was the fact that the white suspect had been released on bail whereas his black counterpart had been denied bail and remanded to the Men’s House of Detention. Same crime, same judge, two shooters, one white, one black, different disposition.
That was the first thing, but it wasn’t enough to send him running through the streets, because what he was sensing here was a change in the public mood. Whereas Maxwell Corey Blaine and Hector Milagros had at first been treated like national heroes for disposing of that vilest of human beings, the informer, they were now being pilloried as monsters or worse because a second informer-who was now a media darling and something of an instant heroine-had for a substantial reward turned in the white man, who had at once copped a plea and given up his partner, the black man who’d been denied bail. The world was full of no-good dirty rats these days, but Foster wasn’t about to take up the banner for a pair of universally reviled murderers.
Until a pair of ambitious detectives made life easier for him.
The partners were named Archie Bingman and Robert Tracey, familiarly called Bingo and Bop by the people who lived in Hightown, where Enrique Ramirez ran his pool hall and his drug operation. They had been dogging El Jefe’s tracks for the past year and a half now. Under the federal RacketeerInfluenced and Corrupt Organizations statute, murders committed in the furtherance of criminal enterprise were punishable by lifetime sentences.
