“And then what to whip.”
“So the S&M hunch paid off?”
“Big-time. He’s the S all the way. Wants to be the hurter, not the hurtee.”
Lily explained about his personal Pinterest album. “Jesus, took all my willpower not to kick him in the balls. You should’ve seen what he did to some of those women.”
“He pressure you two lovely ladies to go home with him?” Lucas asked.
“Sure, but we had to postpone our threesome. Somehow his glass kept getting refilled. He was in no shape to tie anybody up after that much bourbon. I was tempted to let the asshole stagger home and hope some mugger beat the crap out of him. But Amelia was the mature one and we got him into a cab.”
Sachs glanced at the plastic bags. “What does the evidence say?”
“Just getting it now,” Lincoln told her, and grumbled, “Right, Mel? It seems to be taking forever.”
Mel Cooper, hunched over a computer monitor, didn’t respond. He shoved his glasses higher on his nose and said, “Interesting.”
“That’s not a useful term, Mel,” Lincoln snapped.
“I’m getting there. Lucas collected five different kinds of bronze from Verlaine’s. One is typical modern formula: eighty-eight percent copper and twelve percent tin. Then alpha bronze, with about four to five percent tin.
“Some other samples have a higher concentration of copper and zinc and some lead — that’s architectural bronze. Others are bismuth bronze — an alloy that’s got a lot of nickel, and traces of bismuth. One sample surprised me — it had a Vickers hardness value of two hundred.”
“That’s the bronze used in swords,” Lucas said.
They all looked at him. “For the role-playing games I write. Helps to know about old-time weapons. Roman officers had bronze swords; foot soldiers had iron.”
Amelia asked, “You think he uses bronze as a weapon?”
Lucas shook his head. “No, I think what it means is that he gets his materials wherever he can find them. Probably from dozens of junkyards and construction sites.”
“I agree,” Lincoln said.
Cooper added, “And there’s triethanolamine, fluoroboric acid, and cadmium fluoroborate.”
“That’s flux — used in brazing and soldering,” Lincoln said absently.
“Okay, the big question: any associations, Mel?” Lucas asked.
In crime scene work, very few samples of evidence actually “matched,” meaning they were literally the same. DNA and fingerprints established true identity but little else did. However, samples of evidence from two scenes could be “associated,” meaning they were similar. If close enough, the jury could deduce that they came from the same source. Here, the team had to show that the shavings found in the first victims’ bodies could be closely associated with those Lucas had collected from Verlaine’s studio.
Cooper finally pushed back from the screen. He didn’t seem happy. “Like the concrete, the flux and welding rods are close to the trace from the earlier crime scenes.”
Lincoln’s face tightened into a frown. “But those are used by anyone brazing, welding, or working with bronze. I want to establish identity with the bronze scraps themselves.”
“Understood. But that’s more of a problem.” He explained that four of the bronze samples at the first crime scene were completely different from any of the metal collected by Lucas. One sample Lucas had collected that night had the same composition as several fragments in the first scenes. The others were similar but had “some compositional differences.”
“How similar?” Lincoln snapped.
“I’d feel comfortable testifying that it was possible the scraps embedded in the victims came from Verlaine’s loft. But I couldn’t do better than that.”
The evidence suggested but didn’t prove that Verlaine was the killer.
“Same with his behavioral profile and his history of sex offenses,” Lily added. “The S&M. It’s likely he’s antisocial enough to kill. But that ain’t enough to swing the jury.”
That irritating little “beyond a reasonable doubt” requirement.
Lucas told the women about the mysterious door to the basement. “I’m betting there’s something incriminating down there, but without a warrant, we’re not getting in.”
Cooper now put the pictures of the necklaces up on the high-def TV. “Trophies, I’m betting,” Lucas said.
“Crosses mostly,” Lincoln observed. “Hell, that means there are seven or eight more victims out there. Nobody’s found the bodies yet.”
“Or,” Lucas said, “that those are for vics he’s got coming up?”
Lily said angrily, “We’ve gotta stop this fucker. I mean now!”
“Trophies, some evidence, a behavioral profile that’s in the ballpark,” Amelia summarized. “He’s gotta be the one, even if we can’t make a case just yet. But the good news is if he’s the one, nobody from the department is involved. Verlaine’s just some lone psycho.”
“Wouldn’t be too sure about that,” Lucas said. “There’s another possibility.”
Lincoln understood. “Could be that Narcotics Four has been using Verlaine to torture and kill the women to get leads they could use.”
“Exactly.”
Amelia scowled. “Sure. Verlaine’s been a bad boy. Maybe somebody from the drug detail’s been extorting him to get information from the women. That way the cops’ll keep their hands clean.”
Lily sighed. “I’ll take the hit on this one.”
They looked at her.
“We’ve got to tell Markowitz the news: A, we don’t have enough evidence to collar our favorite suspect. And B, his world-famous drug detail isn’t in the clear, either.” She looked over her teammates. “Unless, of course, somebody else’d rather have that little chat.”
They all smiled her way.
“We’ve caught another one, sir. Woman, twenties.”
It was eight thirty the next morning and COD Stan Markowitz was sipping his first coffee of the day, in one of the old-time containers, blue with Greek athletes on it. But hearing this news he lost all taste for java. And for the bagel sitting in front of him, too.
It took a fuck of a lot for him to sour on walnut cream cheese.
The chief of detectives snapped, “In her twenties? Or in the twenties?”
The young detective, a skinny Italian American, said, “She was twenty-nine. Latina. Found the body in a vacant lot in NoHo.” He was standing in the doorway, not in or out, as if Markowitz might decide to fling a stapler at him. It’d happened before.
“I don’t like the name NoHo. It’s not a real place. I can live with SoHo but even TriBeCa’s pushing it.”
The kid didn’t respond but there was really nothing to respond to.
“Crime Scene’s on it now,” he said.
Markowitz stroked his round belly through the striped white shirt the wife had laid out for him that morning. He wadded up the oozing bagel and pitched it emphatically into the wastebasket. It landed with a surprisingly loud thud; this was the first entry of the morning.
“TOD?”
“Examiner’s saying about midnight,” the detective said. “No specific leads yet. No wits. Same as the others: she was a user, crack and smack. Found in a lot known for drug activity.”
“He’s a psycho, that’s what he is. It has nothing to do with the drugs. Don’t get that rumor started.”
“Sure. Only—”
“Only what?”
A hesitation at this. “All right.”
Markowitz glanced down at a file on his desk.