Small Town

Shortly after three, he donned the backpack and slipped out the door, careful not to let the cat follow him out. He locked the door behind him, and made his way silently down the two flights of stairs. No light was visible under the doors of his neighbors on the lower two floors. He guessed they were sleeping soundly, and was careful not to interrupt their sleep.

Baltic Street was quiet and deserted when he let himself out the front door. He walked to Smith Street. There was a subway entrance three blocks to his right, at Bergen Street, and another at Carroll Street, six blocks in the other direction.

It was a nice night for a walk, and he was in no hurry. He turned left, and walked at a brisk but unhurried pace through the summer night. The backpack, he decided, was better than a suitcase, better than a tote bag or shopping bag. It left his hands free, and seemed less a burden altogether. He was glad he’d noticed it in the closet, glad he’d decided to put it to use.

Just a few more weeks, he thought.

Waiting on the deserted subway platform, he tried to think what he would do — not right away, but when it was time. The Carpenter’s final action, the triumphant event in which he was part of the sacrifice, was his bid for greatness, and he couldn’t think what it might be. He knew when it would happen, but not what form it would take.

But it wasn’t something you could think of, was it? He had a seat on a bench, folded his hands in his lap, and, waiting for his train, he waited, too, for the answer to be revealed to him.

twenty-three

For the first time, the Carpenter had signed his work.

The Post called it a direct response to their headline. They’d depicted him with a nail in his forehead, and he’d left his latest victim mutilated in just such a fashion. While quick to take credit, if that’s what it was, the newspaper was just as quick to absolve itself of any responsibility in the matter. Medical evidence, they pointed out, established beyond question that the woman had lain dead for days in that tub of ice water before her killer had added his final grisly touch.

The News called it a challenge to the authorities. The Carpenter was taunting the police, daring them to catch him. No doubt he blamed the police for failing to prevent the 9/11 tragedy that took his family from him, and this was his revenge.

The Times interviewed a forensic psychiatrist, who pointed out that the Carpenter, who had always sought anonymity in the past, had now gone public, seeking the credit for his latest murder. He had now reached the stage where he actively desired to get caught, and would no doubt behave accordingly, taking greater risks, making less effort to avoid arrest, and very likely raising the stakes by committing crimes on an increasingly grand scale.

Fran Buckram first learned of the Boerum Hill murder from a TV newscast. He went out and bought all three papers and read the coverage in each, then turned on New York One to see if there’d been any further developments. There were none, then or in the days that followed, but the story continued to get a lot of play in the media despite the lack of anything you could call news.

Different experts contributed theories and observations, and reporters polled ordinary citizens throughout the metropolitan area to get their remarkably uninformed opinions. Everyone with even a passing acquaintance with Evelyn Crispin, at the law firm where she’d worked and in her Boerum Hill neighborhood, was encouraged to offer an appraisal of the woman’s character and lament her horrible death.

How had the Carpenter picked her? What was it in her life that made him choose to end it? Why, having evidently killed the woman immediately upon gaining access to her apartment, had he cohabited with her corpse for well over a week? (This had not been intended to infer, the Times explained the following day, that there had been any sexual contact between Ms. Crispin and Mr. Harbinger, either before or after her demise, such contact having been specifically ruled out by postmortem examination. The day after that, the paper printed a second Corrections notice, stating that the word infer in the previous day’s follow-up should of course have been imply.)

Buckram, who made it his business to read everything printed on the subject, thought that they were missing the point. He had a pretty good idea how the Carpenter had selected his victim. He hung out in the neighborhood and kept his eyes open, which seemed to be something he was good at, and painstaking about. He looked for someone who lived alone, whose apartment he could go to and from without passing through a lobby. He’d picked her out for convenience, and had killed her not because her death was part of his plan (whatever his plan might be), but because he wanted her apartment.

So he could hide out in it.