“No. Charles never had a client named Gunther.”
“Well, he did,” Kepler snapped. “I just told you that.”
“What I mean is I never heard of him.”
Suddenly Kepler glanced down at her purse and saw the corner of an envelope protruding. “What’s that?”
She eased away. “Nothing.”
“Nothing? I’ll bet it’s more than nothing.”
“Just personal things.”
“What?”
“I’m not answering that. If you want ’em, get a fucking warrant.”
Kepler looked at Surani and said, “What’d we learn in detective school?”
His partner said, “Which part?”
“About when there’s been suspicion of a felony — say, breaking and entering.”
“Oh, breaking and entering an office building?”
“Yeah, exactly. That means that we can search a suspect without a warrant, right? The Constitution lets us do that.”
Surani said, “It encourages us to do that.”
“Don’tcha just love that Constitution?” Kepler mused, ripping the bag from her hands and lifting out the envelope.
Chapter 17
The Victim
5:30 P.M., SATURDAY
25 MINUTES EARLIER
The only good is what furthers my interest...
Joseph Astor recited this to himself as he carried his shopping bag toward a warehouse on the far west side of Manhattan, in the Forties. Traffic on the streets was noisy; on the Hudson River, silent.
His large form blustered over the sidewalk, and people glanced at his bulk and his dead eyes and his curly blond hair and they got out of his way. Joseph paid them no mind, after noting that none of them was a cop or other threat.
An impressive view of the Intrepid aircraft carrier before him, Joseph turned down a side street and approached the one-story warehouse. He undid the heavy Master padlock and muscled the door open, stepped in and slammed it shut. He flicked on the lights. The warehouse was mostly empty, though there were two vans parked inside, one completely useless, and sagging boxes stacked in one corner, molding into an unpleasant mass on the floor. The place was little used and typical of a thousand such buildings, two thousand, three, throughout the New York area. Small, solid structures, always in need of paint and fumigation, either windowless or with glass panes so grimy they were virtually blacked out. Most of these buildings were legitimate. But some were used by men, mostly men, who needed safe houses for certain activities — away from the public, away from the police. Long-term leases, paid in advance. Utilities paid by fake companies.
Tonight would be the last time he’d use this warehouse; he’d abandon it forever and move to the other one, similar, in SoHo, for the rest of the job, which he might have called the Gabriela Job or the Prescott Job but instead had — with some perverse humor — taken to calling Sarah’s Sleep-Away.
He took his jacket off but left on the beige cloth gloves — always the gloves. He strode to the corner of the place, a workbench. In the center of it was the windbreaker he’d showed Gabriela earlier in the day, along with a pink sweatshirt, on which Sarah was stitched across the chest. To the right were a dozen old tools and from the pile he found a large pair of clippers, like the sort used for cutting branches or flower stems. The edge was rusty, but sharp enough.
The only good...
From the shopping bag he extracted the fiberglass hand of a clothing store mannequin. He’d stolen the plastic appendage from an open loading dock behind a showroom in the Fashion District earlier that afternoon, after he’d been tailing Reardon and Gabriela near the building with the Prescott Investments sign on the front.
Gripping the clippers firmly, he cut into the dummy’s little finger at the second knuckle. This he rested in the middle of the sweatshirt and lifted out the last item in the bag, a beef tenderloin, sealed in thick cellophane. He used the clippers to snip a hole in the end of the bag and let the blood dribble onto the plastic digit and the sweatshirt. There was more liquid than expected; the result was suitably gory.
Excellent.
He bundled the shirt up with a gingham hair ribbon.
Seeing the beef blood spread, he thought: How lovely, how delicious... A line he would remember to share with Gabriela later. As he worked, he opened a bottle of his favorite beverage in the world. His Special Brew. It was virtually all he drank. Sustaining, comforting. He drank deeply.
A bottle a day...
After tidying up and putting the steak into the refrigerator in a tiny kitchen area of the warehouse, he put his handiwork into a CVS drugstore plastic bag.
He returned to the table and sat, sipping his beloved Hawaiian Punch — the original flavor, red.
Joseph wondered what the reaction would be to the memento inside the bag.
Another glance at his watch. The deadline was looming. He was thinking about Gabriela and the October List and Daniel Reardon. Joseph had met him only about six hours ago, on the street with Gabriela, and already disliked him intensely.
Then his thoughts segued to Gabriela’s friend, Frank Walsh, whom he did not know, but had only followed around and, of course, datamined. Joseph always did his homework before he went out to ply his craft.
Pudgy Frank Walsh. Nerdy Frank Walsh.
Joseph didn’t have any particular dislike for Mr. Walsh; he considered him to be a rather stupid, naive man. Pathetic.
He reflected that it was a shame Frank was going to spend his last night on earth with his mother, and not getting laid. At least, Joseph thought, sipping the sweet drink, he assumed not. Ick.
The September cold seeped in and, even though he had plenty of natural insulation on him, he shivered. Joseph was eager to get this part of the job over with and return home to Queens, where several new Netflix movies awaited, snug in their little red envelopes. Most people would probably be surprised that a man like him, who had killed twenty-two people in his life — men, women and, though only out of necessity or accidentally, children — would enjoy movies. And yet, why not? Killers were people too. In fact, he’d learned some things about his line of work from movies and TV.
The Long Good Friday, The Professional, Eastern Promises, others. The Sopranos not so much. Although he liked the acting, he wasn’t quite sure why Tony and the crew — none of them particularly clever — hadn’t been arrested and thrown in the slammer halfway through the first season.
Luck, he guessed.
No, scriptwriters.
He turned his jacket collar up and contemplated, with pleasure, returning home, sitting in front of the Sony by himself, well, with his Maine coon cat, Antonioni, and watching the latest disks. He wondered if he should take the tenderloin with him for dinner.
No, he’d do a Lean Cuisine tonight. Save the calories.
Joseph glanced at his watch. He took the CVS bag, stepped outside and locked the warehouse door.