The Screaming Room Page 6
“Male?” He lowered his brows and shot Thomlinson a puzzled look. “Why would he have used a ladies’ room at the museum? A place where he’d run the risk of being seen?” Driscoll stared long and hard at the italicized printing as if expecting it to change gender. When it didn’t, he used an index finger to circle the word. “Cedric, could we be we looking for some sort of cross-dresser?”
“It worked for Hadden Clark.” Thomlinson was referring to a notorious cross-dressing serial killer who had a penchant for wearing ladies’ clothing while perpetrating his madness.
“Well, my friend, we either have a crafty one on our hands, or our two-killers-acting-in-tandem theory is looking better.”
Chapter 18
Detective Cedric Thomlinson was running late. Traffic had come to a complete standstill on Brooklyn’s Belt Parkway. Flashing lights in the distance and the trickling of cars in the opposing lanes indicated an accident up ahead. There was nothing he could do but wait out the efforts of the EMS and other emergency personnel. It wouldn’t be long before uniforms from Highway Patrol 2 would reopen the three-lane thoroughfare.
After fifteen minutes, Thomlinson was rolling again. He hastened over the Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge, hugged Beach Channel Drive as it curved left, and made it to his destination: Saint Rose of Lima’s Church on Beach Eighty-fourth Street in Rockaway Beach. He squeezed his Dodge Intrepid into a tight parking space, got out of the car, and headed toward the heavy oak door that led to the parish community room.
Father Liam O’Connor’s eyes narrowed as he watched Thomlinson enter the room and take his assigned seat. O’Connor, a titan of a man, was a Jesuit priest with a strip of white hair surrounded by gray. As a certified alcohol and substance abuse counselor, he had run the NYPD’s Confidential Alcohol and Drug Abuse Program for the last thirty-one years. Most of the inductees who filled the room had been ordered into the program by their commanding officer. For Thomlinson, this was his second go-round. A rarity for the department, but not a precedent. He had Driscoll to thank for the exception. The Lieutenant, who had become a good friend, was a master at calling in favors.
The crowd that surrounded Thomlinson tonight was a mix of men and women, all of them police personnel, and all with the same purpose: to gather the strength to keep from drinking. Thomlinson scanned the room, where faces displayed hope or despair. Most in the crowd were young rookie cops ensnared by the lure of local bars that neighbored their precinct, where they could revel the night away with other cops. Always with other cops.
Some of Father O’Connor’s fledglings recovered, regained their lives, and went on to become productive police officers. Some didn’t. For them, often fighting off the inclination to put the barrel of their service revolver in their mouth and pull the trigger, another career awaited. Thomlinson, at age forty-three, with twenty years under his belt, felt he leaned more toward the whiskey-faced veterans who made up the rest of the crowd, many of whom were barely holding on until retirement.
“Hello, Cedric. Glad you could make it.” O’Connor placed a warm hand on Thomlinson’s shoulder before making his way toward the front of room. A young officer, with a wife and two kids, had just finished speaking about the struggle he was having with alcohol. A struggle that threatened both his marriage and his career.
“Would anyone else like to speak?” Father O’Connor asked.
Thomlinson cast his eyes to the floor. He had plenty to say but chose to keep it to himself. He knew he was not well respected by his fellow officers, present company included. The resentment stemmed from an incident that occurred while he and his partner, Harold Young, were undercover working Narcotics. A controlled buy was all that was to go down that afternoon. Nothing more.
It began with a drug dealer stepping out of the shadows of a darkened hallway and asking Thomlinson if everything was cool.
“Yeah, mon. Everything’s cool,” Thomlinson had assured him. But that wasn’t the case. Thomlinson had spent the night before tossing back shots of tequila at Cassidy’s Hide-away and was hungover. So when a gun materialized in the dealer’s hand, followed by shots, the ill-prepared Thomlinson caught one above the right shoulder blade and was knocked to the floor. In the cross fire that followed, undercover police officer Harold Young was killed.
As Thomlinson was lying on a rescue vehicle’s stretcher, he caught the look of astonishment on the face of the sergeant who had helped him climb in. He was staring at Thomlinson’s gun. A gun that was still in its holster.
In the official report it was indicated that Thomlinson was situated behind Detective Young and could not fire without the risk of hitting his partner. But Cedric Thomlinson knew his drinking was a major factor that helped deliver the officer to an early grave. That reality would follow him for life.
The NYPD is like a small town where news travels at lightning speed. Thomlinson soon became known as the cop who didn’t pull his gun in a shootout. Not a good handle to be saddled with. The resultant ostracism brought on more guilt, which led to heavier drinking. The heavier drinking spawned depression and with it, thoughts of suicide.
A compassionate borough commander, Todd Emerson, now retired, had a sense of what was going on. He arranged for Thomlinson to be transferred from Narcotics to Homicide. New surroundings would do him good, Emerson reasoned. There, Thomlinson would report to Lieutenant John Driscoll, a man with a reputation for fairness. But Driscoll was a keen observer as well. It wasn’t long before the Lieutenant recognized Thomlinson for what he was. A drunk. He tried reasoning with Thomlinson but couldn’t promote change in a man unwilling to own up to his addiction. Driscoll was faced with a dilemma: What to do with this newly assigned detective, a liability to both the job and to himself? Thomlinson was heading for a serious breakdown, the consequences of which could directly affect not only the new homicide detective but the Homicide squad itself.
Driscoll was forced to make a move that might have ruined Thomlinson’s career but that may have saved his life. He placed a call to the representative at the Detectives Union and had the detective “farmed.” Thomlinson was stripped of his gun and shield and spent the next six weeks in a recovery program at a retreat house in the secluded woods of Delaware County—“The Farm.” Thomlinson had little choice. If he refused to complete the program conducted by a group of certified alcohol and substance abuse counselors, he’d be fired.
Thomlinson acquiesced and was eventually returned to active duty.
Yet, here he was, back in the program. Again.
Father O’Connor took a seat next to Thomlinson. “You stayin’ out of trouble?” he asked.
Thomlinson nodded.
“How’s she doing?”
The priest was asking about a teenager, the reason the detective was back.
“She’s a fighter,” said Thomlinson.
“You’re a fighter, too,” said the priest. “It takes stamina to keep the sleeping tiger at bay.”
In the course of a prior investigation, the detective had been ordered to drive to the young lady’s house, pick her up, and bring her to Driscoll’s office, where she was to provide a helpful statement. It was a routine assignment. On his way, though, he stopped to buy a Lotto ticket. While he was standing in line, waiting to purchase what he hoped would be a ticket back to the islands, the young girl was abducted. In an attempt to silence the voices of condemnation that riddled his brain, Thomlinson turned, again, to alcohol.
In this man’s police department, very few get a second chance. He had Driscoll to thank for that, and he silently voiced his appreciation during the communal Lord’s Prayer that ended the meeting. After that, Thomlinson walked out into the brisk night air, made his way to his cruiser, slipped in behind the steering wheel, and repeated the prayer. This was, after all, his second go-round.
Chapter 19
Another hot and steamy Sunday morning in July greeted the first visitors to the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum. Among them was a wiry-haired man with his six-year-old son.
“Permission granted,” the sailor replied, firing a rigid salute to the little freckled-faced boy flaunting a white ensign’s cap inscribed USS IOWA.
“Let’s go, Daddy!” the boy said.
Scurrying up the steel-studded steps, they reached the carrier’s upper deck. It was immense. Gutted warplanes stood silent under a blistering sun. A semicircle of onlookers had formed around the exhibit’s newest acquisition: a Russian MiG-21.
The boy’s attention was diverted to a loud commotion erupting behind an F-14 Tomcat. Filled with curiosity, he bolted behind the aircraft. A bare-chested youth, his wrists in handcuffs, was yelling at his girlfriend. Provoked, the girl lunged forward, striking her restrained Romeo on the side of his head with the heel of her shoe.
“See that? See that? Why ain’t ya handcuffing her?” the youth screamed. “Ain’t that assault with a deadly weapon?”
“Any more out of you, young lady, and you’ll be riding in the wagon, too,” the military guard warned. He barked orders into his handheld radio. “Reilly, here! We got ourselves a situation on the flight deck. Get a transport ready.”
“What exactly we lookin’ at?” the dispatcher’s voice crackled back.
“A domestic quarrel…with injuries. I cuffed the agitator after he slapped his girlfriend in the face. While I had him immobilized, she hauls off and tattoos him on the side of the head with her shoe.”
The guard positioned himself between the two combatants to block another blow from the irate girlfriend.
“Look, Jack! Over there! That’s a Fighting Falcon! Let’s get a closer look,” the father urged, hoping to distract his son from the fracas.
“D-a-a-a-d. This is getting g-o-o-d.”
“We came to see the planes, remember?”
“But, D-a-a-a-d.”
The father steered his son to the steps that led to the exhibits featured below.
“Why was that lady hitting that man?” the boy asked, descending the steps ahead of his father.
“I don’t know, son. The man must have done something bad.”
“Was the policeman gonna take him to jail?”
“Sure looked that way to me.”
As the boy and his father were nearing the bottom of the steps, a prerecorded voice sounded from a loudspeaker: “Ladies and gentlemen, the USS Intrepid was used by NASA as the primary recovery vessel for the Mercury and Gemini space programs. Just imagine yourself returning to Earth and the first people you see are the sailors aboard this floating airport…”
Reaching the hangar deck, the man led his son to the exhibit marked “Aircrafts of the Pacific.” He pointed at the Grumman F6F Hellcat, which was painted in the navy’s tri-color camouflage: sea blue, intermediate blue, and insignia white. He then read aloud from the aircraft’s polished plaque: “The Hellcat’s most successful day in combat came on June 19, 1944, during operations in the Mariana Islands. During this air battle, which became known as ‘The Great Marianas Turkey Shoot,’ the Japanese lost over three hundred seventy-five planes. Eighty were lost by the United States…. Wow! Pretty impressive, eh, Jack?”
“Sure is,” the wide-eyed youth said, stroking the underside of the plane’s sleek fuselage. “Look! Over there! What’s that one?”
A larger aircraft had caught the boy’s attention.
“Let’s go have a look,” said his dad.
They headed toward the next exhibit. The father depressed its red button, activating its tape.
A prerecorded voice began its narration: “The three-seat TBM 3-E Avenger, with a wingspan of over fifty-four feet and an overall length of forty feet, was the country’s primary torpedo bomber during World War II. Loaded with two thousand pounds of bombs and armed with three manually aimed fifty-caliber machine guns, the Avenger had a maximum speed of two hundred seventy-six miles per hour and could climb over one thousand feet per minute.”
“Wow! That’s almost as fast as Mommy when she’s out shopping, eh, Jack?…Jack?…Jack?”
“I’m under here, Dad.” The boy had made his way below the fuselage of the plane. “Looks like this one sprung a leak,” said the boy pointing to a puddle that had formed under the belly of the plane.
“That’s odd!” said the father. “These models have no engines…and that looks too dark to be fuel.” Bending down, he palpated the goo between his fingers, then brought the smear to his nose.
As his father stood in confusion, Jack climbed the steel staircase to the plane’s cockpit.
“What the hell is going on?” the man exclaimed, suddenly realizing what it was his son had found. “This plane is bleeding!”
“Daddy!” the boy cried out. “This one’s got a pilot!”
Chapter 20
Larry Pearsol completed the postmortem on Tatsuya Inagaki, the tourist from Tokyo whose lifeless form had been removed from the cockpit of the American fighter plane.
“Examination of the cephalic region reveals sharp force trauma resulting in a massive head wound, measuring seven-point-six-four centimeters to right parietal, causing fracture to the skull and bone splinters to penetrate the brain. Thirteen-point-two-centimeter linear penetration to the skin of the forehead noted. Irregular tearing of scalp…” said the ME, removing his surgical gloves. “Sure looks like the same handiwork that felled the last three victims, Lieutenant. But how would the killer pull it off with a twenty-four-hour police presence?”
“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”
Bill Heisek, Manhattan’s borough commander, had been hauled into the Mayor’s office along with Police Commissioner Brandon to explain why the officers of Midtown North looked upon these killings as a “Task Force thing.” One universal shortcoming of the department was that almost everyone was territorial. Where the hell were they while the killer struck and posed his victim? the Mayor wanted to know. Heisek was at a loss for an answer, much to the chagrin of Sully Reirdon and the commissioner. He could only assure both men that it would never happen again. It was a sure bet he’d make good on that promise, for if he didn’t, he’d be demoted to the rank of duty captain.
The Mayor was particularly perturbed because the press had trampled all over the police department. The Daily News headline read: NYPD CAUGHT NAPPING, while the Post ran with COPS BLIND TO LATEST SLAYING.
Driscoll, standing next to the corpse of victim number four, reflected on Pearsol’s findings. What am I missing? he pondered. And what’s with the scalping?
“I do have some good news,” said the ME. “I found some scrapings under the vic’s fingernails. Looks like maybe some skin with traces of blood. Could belong to your suspect. I’ll have the lab boys run the DNA and blood profiles right away.”
Driscoll nodded. The skin tracings and the blood meant this victim had a chance to fight back. With any luck, the next one might survive.
“Larry, what kind of psycho straps a Japanese tourist into the cockpit of an American fighter plane?” asked Driscoll, eyes fixed on Jasper Eliot’s eight-by-ten glossy displaying the newly found cadaver.
“Could it have something to do with Pearl Harbor? Maybe your perp lost a loved one and is seeking revenge?”
“But the other three appear to be random.”
The two men exchanged a puzzled look.
“Let’s see what we’ve got so far,” said Driscoll. “First, the hit on the German woman at the museum. Then Yen Chan, a Chinese male at Coney Island. Number three is Guenther Rubeleit, also from Germany. And now our Japanese friend here. One woman and three men. He, she, or they have crossed gender. That’s something your textbook serial killer doesn’t do. They usually target one or the other.”
“Your whacko is killing tourists and tourism at the same time.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Three of the four victims were discovered by c
hildren, weren’t they?”
“Aligante picked up on that. Although his murder sites are places where you’re likely to find kids, we haven’t ruled out there being some sort of correlation. Right now we’re thankful children aren’t his victims.”
“I’ll bet Reirdon’s thankful. I’m sure, sincerely. But the media would go ballistic if a child were killed. Every parent in the city, too.”
The Lieutenant groaned, reaching for his cell phone that was sounding in his pocket. “Driscoll, here.”
A booming voice echoed through the unit’s tiny earphone, causing Driscoll to nod at Pearsol. “Him,” he silently mouthed.
“That’s number four, John. I’m running out of patience.”
“Mr. Mayor, we’re doing all we can.”
“I just got off the phone with the Japanese embassy. They’re screaming bloody murder. According to them, the New York City Police Department has its head up its ass. And the family of the latest victim is suing the city for three hundred million dollars! They’ve been disgraced. The guy’s grandfather survived the Battle of Midway, for chrissake! Now he’s ready to commit hari-kari on his futon! He says it is the greatest dishonor of his life to have his grandson dumped in the cockpit of an American fighter plane. That was the plane that sunk three Japanese aircraft carriers in the South Pacific! And there’s more! Germany’s ambassador called me last night. He wants to know why New York is such an unruly town and why I haven’t caught the killer. You got an answer for him?”
“Mr. Mayor, I’m staring into the chalky white face of that Japanese grandson right now. The thought of his life being snuffed out by some crazed killer sickens me. We will put an end to these murders.” Driscoll lifted the cadaver’s right hand and examined the underside of the nails, where the skin scrapings had been collected. “I believe our perp is getting sloppy, Mr. Mayor. Mistakes usually spell end of story.”
“Soon, John. Make it soon. Like I said, I’m running out of patience.”