Small Town

You didn’t need to be a Feebie profiler in a cheap suit or a Freudian with a Viennese accent to work it out. You didn’t have to think like a psychopath, either. It was, as far as he could make out, pretty much a matter of common sense. The son of a bitch was so hot he was on fire, with a whole police force turning the city inside out looking for him. They’d found his bank account and frozen it, found his storage locker and cleaned it out. He had no access to money or possessions, and nowhere to sit down and think about it.

The birds of the field had their nests, but a police task force was making sure the son of a bitch had no place to lay his head. Every desk clerk in every flophouse and cheap hotel had his picture, and got frequent follow-up visits from the cops. Homeless shelters, lounges at all three New York airports, waiting rooms at Penn Station and Grand Central — all were under close police scrutiny. Transit cops checked the benches on the subway platforms and went from car to car through the trains, eyeballing the sleepers. Even the drunks and druggies sleeping it off on sidewalks, normally regarded as part of the urban landscape, got a second look these days.

So he’d found an apartment to sublet. He couldn’t do it the usual New York way, by checking the ads in the Voice or paying a broker or bribing a super, so he’d improvised, picking out some poor lonely Eleanor Rigby type, following her home, and throttling her. He’d fed the cat because that was simpler and quieter than killing it, and he’d watered the plants — well, who knew why he’d watered the plants? Maybe he just liked plants. The ice water bath, which puzzled some analysts while others saw it as some exotic form of torture, was just the guy’s way of keeping the apartment livable. The ice helped to keep the stink down.

And the nail in the forehead?

Well, that was puzzling. No getting around it, that was a poser. If it was anything other than a signature, a way to claim this death as one of his own, Buckram couldn’t think what it might be. And why would he want to do that?

To play a game with the police?

He didn’t think so. The man had suffered extraordinary losses. His whole family had vanished in the blink of an eye, and not in a fire, not in an auto accident, not in a train wreck or plane crash, but in the course of a deliberate attack upon the entire city. That didn’t seem likely to turn a quiet gentleman, almost reclusive in his retirement, into some cackling schemer intent upon making fools of a police department. No, Harbinger had a purpose. It might not be rational, couldn’t be rational, but there was probably logic to it. Not that anybody could crack the code from a distance and read the poor bastard’s mind.

As far as the tabloids were concerned, he was evil. Sick, twisted. And his acts were evil, no question about it, but something in Buckram resisted the demonization of the man. He’d run across a lot of people over the years who’d done evil things, and some of them knew their deeds were evil, but others did not. The woman who smashed her daughter’s skull because she was sick of changing diapers was categorically different from the man who sat on his son’s chest, effectively crushing the boy to death, because that was the only way he could think of to expel the devil that made the child cough all night long. Both were criminally unfit parents, and both could be placed in a space capsule and rocketed into orbit without making the world a poorer place for their absence, but one was evil in a way that the other was not.

He wished he could figure out what the Carpenter was trying to accomplish.

Because if you could do that, maybe you could figure out what he was going to do next. And he was going to do something. The nail in the forehead, if it did nothing else, served notice that the Carpenter wasn’t ready to hang up his tools.

Until then, he’d thought the man might be done. He wasn’t a lifelong career psychopath, had lived an apparently blameless life until 9/11 unhinged him, and it had seemed entirely possible that the level of carnage he’d achieved in Chelsea might well have shocked him out of his madness. Buckram had half-expected the man to turn himself in, or kill himself. They might recover his body from the river, or scrape him off the subway tracks.