"You're right," I said. "Even though the murders seem sadistic, they're really not. The're really set pieces, like elaborate assassinations."
"That's it, Mike. Apt seems like an assassin, cold, calculating, competent. I still can't figure out what's in it for him. Money? Maybe he's just crazy. Who knows?"
"No," I said. "You're onto something. There's something in it for Apt. There has to be."
"You sound so sure. How do you know?"
"The fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason," I said. "Anything perceived has a cause. All conclusions have premises. All effects have causes. All actions have motives."
"My goodness, aren't we going all Aristotle suddenly?" Emily said, smiling for the first time that afternoon. "Or are the four folds from Thomas Aquinas, you Irish church boy?"
"Arthur Schopenhauer, actually," I said, faking a wide yawn.
"You read Schopenhauer?" Emily said, raising an eyebrow.
"Just at the beach," I said.
I was ducking a tossed empty Gatorade bottle when my boss came out of her office.
"They found her," Miriam said. "Paulina Dulcine. Get up to the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge."
She was actually under the 59th Street Bridge beside a York Avenue Mobil station. We bore right onto a little service road and down a ramp toward the East River. At the end of a parking lot beside an abandoned heliport, crime scene tape was wrapped around a chain-link fence.
Beyond the fence, half a dozen cops were spread out on the rock-piled shore. On the jogging path that ran under the bridge, a crowd had formed. I spotted a twelve-speed cyclist in a full-body Speedo beside a gaggle of Jamaican nannies leaning on their Maclaren strollers. They looked bored, like they were waiting for the good part to start.
"How did the call come in?" I said to a tall, elfish-looking young uniform working the crime scene log.
"By pay phone," the kid said.
"Amazing," I said.
"That someone called it in?" the young cop said.
"That someone actually found a working pay phone in Manhattan."
The jokes were long gone by the time Emily and I stumbled over to a yellow crime scene marker down by the water's edge. It was next to a paint can. Beside the can, a burly uniform cop was squatting on the rocks, smoking a cigarette. His dazed, despondent expression couldn't have been more disturbing.
This wasn't going to be pretty, I thought as I finally walked up to the can.
I didn't want to look down. I didn't want to add another nightmare to my list. I'd seen too many already.
But it was my job.
I looked down.
I was rocked to my center. All rationality abandoned me for the moment. The mind doesn't register such things easily.
Inside the can was Paulina's head. Her face was turned skyward, her eyes open. She looked up at me almost pleadingly. She looked like she was buried underground or like she'd been trying to climb through a ship's porthole and had gotten stuck.
Some very sick son of a bitch had somehow rammed the girl's decapitated head into the can.
Emily came over and put her hand on my shoulder.
"We need to get this guy, Emily," I said after a silent minute.
Emily suddenly whipped out her iPhone.
"What are you doing?" I asked.
She furiously pressed and rubbed at the screen, oblivious of me.
"I knew it. This is it! Joel David Rifkin. Parts of his first victim were found in the East River! It says it right here. The woman's head had been cut off very neatly and stuffed into an empty paint can."
"Who was Rifkin again?" I said.
"A serial killer in the nineties from Long Island," Emily said. "He was convicted of murdering nine prostitutes. He beat them with something heavy and then strangled them and mutilated their bodies. Some say it was closer to twenty victims. Apt is onto another New York killer."
A shadow passed over us. I looked up. It was the Roosevelt Island tram. We both watched the red cable car as it sailed precariously though the air out over the darkening water.
"Maybe there was some odd bond between Berger and Apt," I said, thinking out loud. "Like a cult sort of thing. Apt seems programmed. Berger had him completely brainwashed."
"Maybe that's a good thing," Emily said as we started for the car. "Maybe when Apt finds out Berger's dead, he'll snap out of it. Come to his senses."
"We can only hope," I said, failing to shake Paulina's face from my memory.
Chapter 83
LATE SUNDAY AFTERNOON found me on the back deck of my not-so-palatial Breezy Point vacation house. Boogie boards and blown-up flotation devices of every description were scattered around me while from the sun-bleached railing flew about as many beach towels as there were flags at the UN.
I was back in my element, my green zone.
Home Chaotic Beach Home.
In my atrociously ugly neon green surfing shorts, I sent my bare feet upward toward the bright blue sky as I lay back in my zero-gravity beach chair. I even had a half-full can of Tecate securely holstered in the drink holder. The only downside, I guess, were the bright red crime scene photos that stared up at me from the open murder folder in my lap.
I stared back, forcing myself to examine again the remains of Paulina Dulcine. The Medical Examiner's Office had said that the poor woman's teeth had been pulled out with a pair of pliers. From Emily's notes I knew Joel David Rifkin had committed the same savagery on his first victim in the early nineties. I tossed the file onto the picnic table beside me and let out a breath. Carl Apt was nothing if not a stickler for details.
As if I weren't depressed enough, one of my Major Case Task Force buddies had just texted me the latest rumor that Chief McGinnis wanted a personal who-what-when-where-how-and-why session with me and Emily about the murder of Paulina Dulcine. Another carpet call. Sounded fun, not to mention productive. I couldn't wait.
I'd just finished my beer and was having a staring contest with a shady-looking seagull perched on my rusty rain gutter when my phone rang.
I smiled as I looked at the number. It was from me, apparently. Someone inside the house behind me was playing a joke at my expense.
"Detective Bennett, NYPD. Who is this? Who's wasting my time?" I barked in my best tough cop voice.
"Yes, uh, hello, Detective," said Eddie in a low, badly disguised voice. "I'd like to report a crime."
I'd specifically told them I had to work and to leave Daddy alone, but the natives were getting restless. And who could blame them? I hadn't been around much for the past week.
I was about to hang up, when I spotted something on the picnic table beside me, and I suddenly had a better idea.
"Well, you've called the right place, sir," I said as I quietly stood, lifting the Super Soaker water gun from the table before I trotted down the deck steps. "Name the felony, please."
"Well, it's a kidnapping," Eddie said as I quickly came around the side of the house.
I stopped at the hose bib and loaded the gun with water before I hopped over the railing onto the front porch.
"Kidnapping? Well," I said as I peeked through the screen door at the backs of Eddie and a cracking-up Trent at the phone in the kitchen. "That's a serious crime. What's the victim's name?"
"Pants," Eddie said, not missing a beat. "John Pants."
Trent guffawed as he punched Eddie's leg. I had to stifle my own laugh as well. Eddie was a funny kid. Maeve and I always said we should have made Eddie's middle name Murphy. They definitely seemed to be in much higher spirits since that Flaherty kid had been put back on his leash.
"Mr. Pants. I see," I said as I silently opened the front screen door. "Now, what relation is he to you?"
"Well, he's my father, actually," Eddie said. "We haven't seen him in a few days. It's really not like him. Well, actually it kind of is. We seriously think he might be a workaholic."