Page 16 of The Accomplice
The Bureau had a dozen properties scattered across New York. Even a few in Manhattan, like the apartment where Delaney had spent her time working on the Sandman case. They were safehouses, mostly, but occasionally they were used by agents on secondment. She had requested this building because it was one of the few with basement parking. The apartment itself was no great shakes, and the parking space was worth as much as the property that came with it. She opened the barrier with her fob, drove down the ramp and found her space in the dimly lit basement lot.
She killed the engine. Sighed, rolled her shoulders and then let the back of her head sink into the headrest.
As she closed her eyes, she glimpsed something thin and black being whipped over her head, down past her line of vision and then …
She heard the ripple of plastic teeth grating as the zip tie was pulled fast around her throat, cutting off her air and making her eyes bulge wide, her mouth gaping, her throat locked to the headrest. Her fingers clawed at her neck, and her legs thumped against the footwell, scraping her ankles on the side of the foot pedals.
In her rearview mirror she saw a figure in the back seat. A strong hand took hold of the top of her head, and another plunged something sharp into her throat. As the hand moved away, she glimpsed a needle from a syringe, wet with her blood.
Her legs wouldn’t move. Her arms fell limp and a wave of nausea and dizziness swept over her. As her eyes fell closed, she thought she could hear a telephone ringing, once … twice … three times … and behind it, the rattle of rosary beads.
Hot breath grazed her neck.
And then a voice.
A real one, not part of a drug-induced hallucination. A low, gravelly baritone that sang her to sleep almost instantly.
‘Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream. Make her the cutest that I’ve ever seen …’
CHAPTER SEVEN
EDDIE
I closed the Carrie Miller file on my desk, leaned back in my chair and listened to the night. As a kid I watched a nature show in school on VHS. It was about the Amazon rainforest, and I remember the narrator saying that when the sun went down, the forest got busy.
It was the same for Manhattan. The noise from traffic and people was always there during the day, and I guess it was probably the same in a South American rainforest, but you damn sure noticed it more at night. Someone was singing an old Irish folk song, but I couldn’t tell which one because some people close by were screaming over the top of the chorus about who was going to pay for a cab. Car horns trumpeted, engines droned, and tires howled.
After spending five hours reading about death and looking at pictures of the Sandman’s victims I needed to stop for a minute and bathe in life. New York was the best place for that. It was a different kind of jungle. Just as crowded, just as filled with light and sound. And perhaps just as dangerous.
There were predators here that stalked the dark streets. Mostly they hunted the weak and the poor, but some, like the Sandman, hunted everyone. That’s what made him so scary. There was no pattern to his attacks. Location, timing were all over the place and there was no victim profile. It didn’t matter if you were walking the street at four a.m. or at home behind locked doors – you were not safe.
While he had been on his killing spree, the city had quietened. Then the murders stopped. After the Covid lockdown, and the prevailing theory that the Sandman had gone into hiding, probably even left the country, most people thought it was safe to go outside again and to be alone in their bed at night. The fear was still there, but it had dissipated, and normality had slowly returned to the steel, glass and concrete canyons of Manhattan.
As I closed my eyes, I caught flashes of some of the images I had looked at in the crime scene photographs. Mostly women. Eyes ripped out, sand poured over their faces, filling those twin holes where once there had been a soul, filling their throats and mouths too. It stuck between their teeth and on their lips and gums. Their wounds had turned the sand pink. Except the sand in their mouths, which had remained pale and alien.
The file was subdivided into different sections for each victim, according to the indictment. Six in all had been linked to Carrie. I thought that if the DA got a conviction on these charges the feds might try to tie in the other Sandman murders to Carrie. But that was a worry for another day. I had the crime scene reports and the depositions from neighbors and family, which gave me all I needed to get a snapshot of the six victims in this trial, their lives, and the visceral knowledge of how those lives had been taken.
Margaret Sharpe was a thirty-two-year-old marketing director who lived in East Harlem. She liked vintage clothes and home baking. She cycled to work every day on a lilac and white polka-dot bicycle with a wicker basket mounted over the front fender which she used to carry home her groceries. She had just met a young lady in her gym named Petra who also liked to cycle and bake. They had recently celebrated their six-month anniversary. Petra found Margaret dead in her apartment the morning after the attack. They cycled to their jobs together, most days, and when Margaret hadn’t answered her phone, Petra used the spare key to Margaret’s apartment. She had been murdered on May 21 last year. Later, Petra confirmed that the vintage sterling silver rose earrings found in Carrie’s closet had once belonged to Margaret.
Penny Jones and Suzanna Abrams shared an apartment in Brooklyn, on 4thAvenue. Penny was a twenty-one-year-old singer-songwriter who played eight gigs a week and waited tables at Katz’s Deli whenever she could get a shift. Suzanna was older, but no wiser. She poured Guinness and whiskey in an Irish bar two blocks from the apartment and made more in tips most nights than Penny would hit in a week. Trouble was it all flowed back into the bar, one way or another. Especially when Penny got a rejection. She had written a novel and was trying to land a literary agent, which felt like getting punched in the face every time she opened her email.
Two young women enjoying life and trying to make it in the greatest city in the world.
Their neighbor noticed their apartment door open on the morning of May 29, got no answer when he called for them. He went inside, then ran back out and called 911. Penny and Suzanna were each found in their bedrooms. Mutilated, filled with sand. Their bedroom doors were both closed, and there had been no sign of a struggle in the apartment itself. It was remarkable that two healthy young women did not appear to have been able to put up a fight against their attacker. A witness named Chester Morris had spotted a male and female at the door of Penny and Suzanna’s building the night of the attack, May 28, and it looked as though the male might have been trying to jimmy the lock. Morris had identified Daniel and Carrie Miller as the couple at the door. Penny and Suzanna were each missing a ring : Penny, a rose gold ring with two red garnets ; Suzanna’s a silver ring with a gray gemstone. Both were found among Carrie’s jewelry.
Lilian Parker was quiet and kept to herself. A freelance designer who mostly worked from home, in Tribeca. Her body was found in the alleyway behind her apartment building, which was unusual for the Sandman. She was forty-one and a keen violinist, although her neighbors had no clue about this. Her violin was found with the strings wrapped in cotton wool to dim the sound. A neighbor in the apartment next door, Teresa Vasquez, said she saw a man and woman hanging around outside the building on the night of the attack, June 3. The description matched Daniel Miller and Carrie Miller. Teresa Vasquez, like Chester Morris, had only come forward after Carrie Miller’s very public arrest. A cameo brooch that Lilian wore everyday was not in her apartment and not on her body. It was Lilian’s mother who told the police that it was missing. This had led to a review of the other killings with relatives of the victims and an identification of various pieces of jewelry that were taken by the Sandman. If it had not been for Mrs. Parker, police and FBI may not have known the Sandman took trophies from his killings.
The Nielsens lived in a grand brownstone in the East Village. A good Samaritan had noticed their front door lying open at around six a.m. The first officer on scene was relatively new to the job. His supervising officer led the rookie inside and told him to check upstairs. The supervisor ran up the staircase when he heard a dull thump from the floor above. The rookie was out cold on the landing, outside the master bedroom. At first, he thought the rookie had been knocked out by an attacker, but he soon saw what had caused the collapse. Tobias and Stacy Nielsen were tucked up together in bed. The sheets pulled up to their necks. Mouths and eye sockets filled with sand. In the room next to them, eight-year-old Elly Nielsen lay asleep clutching a teddy bear. Her adopted brother, Robert, was in his bedroom. He was only five. The children were alive and unmolested, save for having had a sedative administered by injection. They didn’t see the man who pricked their necks in the dark, but one of them, little Robert, said he felt someone’s breath on his cheek.
The rookie took a month off work on sick leave and quit when that had run out. He took an overdose of painkillers within a week of resigning and was buried with full NYPD honors. I wondered, if he had lived long enough for the feds to find Daniel Miller’s home, and Stacy Nielsen’s black pearl necklace in Carrie Miller’s closet, would it have given him some element of closure ? Would it have saved him ?
This was only a handful of the victims the Sandman had murdered. These were the latest murders and ones that the DA could evidentially link to Carrie Miller. I had stood in Carrie Miller’s house, we’d talked, and I could not equate that person with someone who could put two children to sleep and then casually murder their parents.
I had dealt with monsters before. So had the lead FBI analyst on the case, Paige Delaney. In fact, Delaney had worked with me on the Bobby Solomon case where we came across a killer who had worked his way onto the jury in Bobby’s trial. I had been lucky to survive that case, and the seven-inch scar on my thigh still itched in the winter and felt raw in the summer. She had also given me some pointers in the Avellino trial, where Kate and I had first met, as opponents. Delaney hunted killers for a living. I represented people who were accused of homicide. It was no wonder that we’d met, seeing as how we were both dealing with the worst kind of horrors in the same city. I liked Delaney. She was smart and diligent. A woman I had loved and lost, named Harper, had been a mutual friend of ours.
Last time Delaney and I spoke was at the anniversary memorial for Harper. She talked about our friend and the warmth and affection she felt was genuine. While Delaney spoke, I had listened, nodded, and we’d parted with an embrace. I couldn’t talk about Harper. Not yet. Not to anyone, not even Harry. At one time I thought the two of us might have had a future together. The scars on my body were not the only old wounds that I would carry around for the rest of my life.
I got up out of my chair and approached the window. The blaze of neon from the club across the street fell through the window, washing the room with a deep red. Noises from the street seemed to fade away in the glow, as if the riot of color muted everything else.
