Page 91 of Kill For Me Kill For You
‘No, it’s okay. You go on. You got a life, Karen. It’s not in this office. I called the lab earlier. They said they should have some DNA results from the scene within a few hours.’
He checked his watch, said, ‘That should be any time now. There’s not a whole lot to do until then.’
‘Give me something,’ she said, holding out her hand.
With a smile breaking on his lips, Farrow sorted through the pages of loose paper on his desk, found the one he was looking for and handed it to her.
‘This is a list of shit jobs,’ she said.
‘Exactly right. There’s a lot of ground to cover, but you know . . .’
Rolling her eyes, Hernandez said, ‘Shit jobs clear cases.’
She knew it was pointless to argue with him when he had hold of a bone. Only thing to do was go with it. Farrow stood up now, stretched his back, let out a growl as the pain washed over him. He threw up his hands, leaned back until he heard a satisfying crack.
He reached out for his cell phone, which sat on his desk. Before he could touch it, the phone screen lit up and began to purr on the desk. Incoming call.
He picked it up, said, ‘Farrow,’ and listened. For another thirty seconds, Farrow said nothing. Then he thanked the person on the line and ended the call. He put his cell phone in his pocket, but didn’t take his seat. Instead, he put on his crumpled suit jacket. Either the jacket or the call weighed heavy on him, because he leaned over, placed his hands on the back of his chair and hung his head.
‘What’s wrong? Where are you going?’ asked Hernandez.
‘That was the lab. They got the results back. I’m going to pick up Amanda White.’
52
Amanda
Dawn was a red promise in the sky as Amanda drained a glass of water that Thanksgiving morning. She wore a pair of shorts, sneakers and a tee.
It had been a late night. Cracking open her apartment door at three a.m., she had gone straight to bed. She’d slept fitfully, her mind racing. She felt tired and her knee ached. Sitting down at her kitchen table, Amanda counted the money she’d taken from Quinn’s house the night before. Altogether it was close to seventy-five grand. Enough to solve her immediate problems.
Opening the cupboard, she found a box of cereal, but there was no milk. Amanda wasn’t hungry, but she knew she had to eat. There had to be something in her stomach before she could take any more painkillers for her knee. It had swollen again, and she’d taped a bag of ice to her leg.
Amanda filled the bowl of cereal with water from the faucet, sat down and ate what she could while she worked at the laptop. She’d only skim read most of the articles last night. There came a point when she was too tired to take them in. Her head was a little clearer now, and she took her time, looking through each one, making notes on a legal pad as she went. She read the piece on the original attack again – when Ruth had almost been murdered in her own home by a serial killer the police called Mr. Blue-eyes. The article contained a sketch artist’s impression of the perpetrator. Looking at that sketch, and the pictures of Travers, Quinn and Benson – men who Ruth had arranged to be murdered – there was a definite resemblance. Now, in the daylight, feeling a little calmer, and in familiar surroundings, Amanda looked more closely at the pictures of Travers, Quinn and Benson.
From a distance, it would be hard to distinguish between them. But up close there were differences. Quinn was older than the other two, with deeper lines around the eyes. Benson had a higher hair line and a small scar on his cheek. Travers was paler than both.
She did another search against the images, scrolled through the irrelevant pages until she hit another image of a man, remarkably similar to Travers, Benson and Quinn. He’d been murdered in his home. Stabbed to death. No apparent motive, no suspects. Nothing taken from the property. This had occurred two years ago. There was no way to be sure this was Ruth’s work, but it could well have been. His name was Sean Gardner. He’d lived in East Harlem. She saved that article, added the man’s image to her search.
And found another.
Paul Beriano. Shot twice in the head at his front door in Queens. No motive. Nothing taken from him or the house. A hit, but Beriano had no connection to organized crime. He was an Uber driver.
Beriano had been murdered three months ago.
Adding his image to the search, she tried again.
Two more motiveless murders. Older crimes. Two more men with a striking similarity to the other victims. One was named Paul Anderson, an interior designer. The other was the earliest victim Amanda could identify – Dan Puccini, the media relations manager for the NYPD. Anderson died a year after Puccini. With all of the images of the victims together, side by side, it looked like one hell of an ID parade.
Six men murdered in different parts of New York since Ruth’s release from Kirby Psychiatric Center. There would be six different police precincts working these crimes, and nothing to connect the victims other than their faces. Dan Puccini had been murdered six months after Ruth got released from Kirby. Then the next one about a year afterwards with Anderson, and then the murders had accelerated. Nine months later, eight months later, six months, and then just three months before Quinn.
There was no way to tell if these were all Ruth’s victims. She knew there were definitely two, at least – Quinn and Benson – and the original victim Patrick Travers. And yet there was no way to prove or confirm any of them other than Travers because she’d probably had someone else carry out each of these murders. Each victim had another victim behind them – the bereaved, half-crazed person who was at the end of their rope when Ruth came into their lives with a plan for justice.
Amanda covered her mouth, swore under her breath. She had been one of Ruth Gelman’s grim reapers – conned into killing for her.
At first, having read the article on Ruth’s attack, she had felt sorry for her. Now, she felt afraid. Glancing up at the bookcase, she took down a thick volume she had read a few months ago. It was a book by a forensic psychologist on serial killers. She had read it trying to gain some insight into Wallace Crone. Perhaps she could learn something she could use against him. In the end she had not, but she knew more about how some of these freaks come to be, how they kill and, more importantly, how they get caught.
She had learned that most of them aren’t insane, which was the first thing that surprised her. Some are disorganized. Some are highly organized. And they can hide in plain sight, just like any other normal member of society.
