"Who?" I asked.
"Joel Rifkin, 1989 to 1993. Another outer boroughs boy. Eighteen murders. Picked up his girls in the city but dumped them out by us. Hookers, mostly. Had sex with them, then strangled them to death. This one's your classic-not guns like the other two. He was the Ted Bundy kind-real hands-on stuff, strangulation, not shooting. And by the way, always after he had sex with them."
"There's the prostitute angle again," Mercer said.
"That might work for Amber Bristol, but not for the others," Mike said. "Elise Huff and Connie Wade weren't pros."
"Rifkin liked to snap their necks, those hookers," Dickie said, brushing the crumbs off his tie.
It was a sickening thought. "Why?"
Dickie looked at me as though I had two heads. "Why? I told you why. He just liked doing it, I guess. Liked the noise it made. How the hell do I know? He said he liked it."
"Your squad make the arrest?" I asked.
"State troopers."
"Now that's the last thing Scully wants to hear," Mercer said. "Troopers getting credit for the collar. The press'll jump all over that one."
"Once again, dumb luck. Routine traffic stop. Rifkin didn't have a front plate on his van. Troopers chased him and he crashed into a lamppost," Dickie said, taking a swig of his soda. "There's your sexual sadist, Alex. That's the kind of creep you're looking for."
"Kenneth Kimes. Sante Kimes," Mike said, trying to play perp catch-up with Dickie. "Manhattan, 1998."
"Mother-son grifter team. Doesn't count, Mikey. Yeah, they killed people from California to the Big Apple, but it was all about larceny. They were poking each other, that sick broad and her mama's boy. They weren't interested in sex with anybody else, just each other. Like you can't count your mutt drug dealers and your gang shoot-'em-ups. They're not serials. You got your Malvo-Muhammad nuts, too. Beltway snipers. They're spree killers, not serials. You got your mass murderers-"
"We're looking for a type like James Jones," Mercer said. "I worked that one."
"Never heard of him. He make the papers? The news never got as far as the BQE," Dickie said, referring to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. "How many'd he do?"
"Strangled five, but only two of them died. Nine-month rampage, 1995. They were all prostitutes, too."
"There you go. That's why he didn't get any press attention. I'm telling you, if this guy had just done your girl Amber, nobody would have cared. It worked for Jack the Ripper. It doesn't work anymore. They had that series of murders out near San Francisco, remember? Cops closed them all with a code: NHI."
The unsolved crimes had been back-burnered until a reporter revealed that the letters stamped on the police files were shorthand for No Human Involved. Serial killers who picked underclass victims often got a pass when there was no one in the community to pay much attention to their disappearance or ultimate fate.
"Your man Jones," Dickie asked, "he shoot 'em or what?"
"No, he used a rope."
"See? Hands-on. Just like Rifkin and Bundy. The real deal-hard to come by."
"Picked them up, took them to cheap hotel rooms," Mercer said, looking over at me. "Bound and gagged them. I mean they let him do that to them. All of the survivors admitted it. Told them he said he couldn't get off unless he did."
"You're thinking maybe Amber allowed herself to be bound?" I asked.
Mercer shrugged his shoulders. "Scully's got to consider that."
"Then he yoked the rope, this Jones guy?" Dickie asked, reaching for another sandwich.
"Last thing he did was make them each point their toes. Like a ballerina, he said. Made them point their toes, and then he killed them."
"Wasn't he the guy who worked at that lawyer's organization on Forty-fourth Street?" Mike asked.
Mercer nodded. "Yeah, Jones was smart, with a good job, actually. He was in charge of all the audiovisual programs for the Association of the Bar."
"Was there a task force?" Dickie asked.
Mercer smiled. "You know better. Not for those victims. Word was out on the street, working girls looking out for each other, like they usually do. They figured they'd find him before we would. One of the surviving vics saw him a few months after she was attacked, flagged down the RMP, and pointed him out to the two rookies in a patrol car."
"I'll be damned. Dumb luck again," Dickie said.
I could remember only one serial sadistic sex murderer who had been prosecuted since I joined the office more than a decade ago. Both Mercer and Mike had been assigned to the investigation in its later years, and I had gone to the courtroom often to watch two of my colleagues-Rich Plansky and John Irwin-try the case.
"Arohn Kee," I said.
"Worst case I ever worked," Mercer said.
Kee's attacks began with the sexual assault and murder of a thirteen-year-old girl in East Harlem in 1991. For the next eight years, his own reign of terror in that neighborhood went unchecked, and more than six other teenage girls were raped and attacked-some strangled and stabbed to death, one burned beyond recognition on the rooftop of her building-before he was identified and charged.
"He killed kids?" Dickie asked. "All kids? How come that one didn't make the news?"
" 'Cause they were black and Hispanic," Mike said. Mercer nodded in agreement. "Twenty blocks farther south, on the Upper East Side, somebody burned a white girl to death on the top of a Madison Avenue condo, every cop in the city would have been pulled out to solve it."
"That's the last serial killer we've had in Manhattan," Mercer said. "Nobody much cared at the time, 'cause the victims all lived in projects, all poor kids."
"Don't tell me you solved that one by detective work?"
"Came pretty close. Old-fashioned legwork almost paid off."
Mike interrupted Mercer's story. "Yeah. Mercer and Rob Mooney figured out who it was. Before they could get his DNA, Kee walked into a computer store with a stolen hard drive. The clerk just went to the back and called 911 and turned the kid in for some lousy misdemeanor theft charge."
"Dumbass luck, one more time," Dickie said, finally using a napkin to clean his face. "Bottom line-tell Scully to save himself the trouble of a task force. Let the troopers upstate catch the bum. Operation Dumb Luck."
"What's the trigger?" I asked. "Where does this guy come from?"
"We got SOMU working on this as soon as Elise Huff was reported missing," Mercer said.
The Sex Offender Monitoring Unit was responsible for tracking rapists who had served their time and were released to parole. New laws in every state required them to register with police agencies set up to monitor their whereabouts and alert communities where the most dangerous felons relocated.
"No one with this kind of m.o.?" Dickie asked. "Maybe he's just out of the military. Back from combat. There'll be a couple of dozen more bodies before you pry any records away from the feds, that's for sure."
"Amen to that," Mercer said. "Takes forever. And Scully's got to be prepared to deal with the question of why there isn't DNA."
"Organized serial," Mike said. "Intelligent, methodical, knowledge of forensics, keeps control of the crime scene. Abducts in one location and dumps in another."
The FBI characterized these murderers as either organized or disorganized, the latter having less intelligence and acting more impulsively.
"How about Coop's theory that our guy may be into women with uniforms?" Mike said.
"Tell it to the profilers," Dickie Draper said. "They'll have us staking out waitresses in coffee shops and Girl Scout troops and bus drivers in drag. Hold that thought, Alex, will you?"
"Here's one fact that doesn't make sense," Mercer said. "Amber Bristol's apartment-that was cleaned out. Am I right, Mike? Sanitized. All of her personal stuff gone."
Dickie shook his head. "Gives new meaning to an organized serial. They're not into housekeeping. Trophies and souvenirs, yeah, but not housekeeping."