The Guilty Read online

  I looked back at the crime scene. Saw where the body had fallen. A ballistics expert used a pencil to trace an invisible line from the top of a brownstone several blocks away to the spot where the bullet had struck Athena. This club had security cameras outside, meaning Athena’s death had undoubtedly been captured live and in color.

  All those cameras. All those witnesses. No doubt a dozen people or more had taken cell phone photos and videos of her murder. Who knew how many ghouls would post them publicly? Whoever had killed Athena couldn’t have picked a more public place. It was as if the killer wanted people to see it, to record it, to spread his mayhem. It didn’t make my job any easier, that’s for sure. There would be a cacophony of noise tomorrow, and I needed to find a pitch that could rise above it.

  I looked at the brownstone being eyed by the tech. Checked my watch. Under an hour to find a story. Didn’t have to be the whole ball of yarn, just a strong thread. Sometimes a thread was all you needed.

  CHAPTER 4

  I pushed my way through the throng of eager reporters. Felt more than one elbow jab my ribs. I wasn’t naive enough to think they were accidental. Much of the NYC press corps still burned because of the publicity I’d received from my murder rap. Grizzled vets who resented the book and film deals I’d turned down. It was a Catch-22. They would have hated me just as much if I’d taken the money. The spotlight of fame exposed every jealous and spiteful emotion from those who wished they had it, and from those who wanted nothing to do with it.

  I saw Curtis Sheffield on the cop side of the tape, holding back photographers and issuing “no comments” like they were going out of style. Curt Sheffield was a young black officer, two years out of the academy and the kind of cop who’d be one of New York’s finest for years to come. Fit, tall, with a smile that got female witnesses offering more than their side of the story. I’d interviewed Curt a few months ago for a story on the NYPD’s developing new body armor, how the upgrade was long overdue, and how based on gunshot wound studies the new vests, when implemented across the country, would likely save up to thirty lives a year.

  Curt was glad the department finally kicked in the dough to save lives, but offered sincere remorse for the lives that had already been lost. He’d been honest and eloquent, and it was clear the public good was his passion. The department had recognized this—and recognized that his face would look good on a poster—and within weeks Curt was the centerpiece of a new NYPD recruitment campaign.

  Despite our naturally combative professions, I considered Curt a friend. He was a great source because he knew any information he passed along would be treated with respect. A few weeks after the recruitment drive started, Curt admitted that most cops weren’t big fans of do I know you looks. They don’t like getting recognized in movie theaters or getting asked for autographs. So we had something in common.

  Curt saw me as I battled the wave of gawkers barricaded behind police tape. He walked over fast, a stern look in his eye.

  “Hey, back off,” he said, approaching a grizzled paparazzo trying to sneak his camera beneath the tape. He eyed me, popped his head to the left. Come over here.

  I followed him off to the side. Another cop held back the masses so we could talk in private.

  “You believe this shit?” Curt said. “Don’t know what’s worse, cleaning up this mess or having Athena Paradis’s stupid song stuck in my head while her blood is drying on the sidewalk.”

  “I’d say they’re both pretty bad.”

  “Yeah. Pretty bad,” he said, distracted. He was chewing gum. His jaw was working overtime, anything to keep his mind occupied.

  “So you assigned to this mess?” I asked.

  “You aren’t assigned to shitstorms, they just happen to rain when you’re walking by.” Curt smacked his gum.

  “Big story,” he continued. “Not just any girl got killed here tonight.”

  “Don’t I know it.” I leaned in. “Listen, man, if I had to guess, Athena was killed by a high-powered rifle. High-caliber slug.” I pointed at the outcropping of rooftops surrounding the Kitten Club. “Your killer shot from the roof of one of these buildings. Guess it’s up to your forensics and spatter people to figure out the angle and trajectory.”

  “Like Deadwood out here. Everybody saw everything, but nobody saw nothing. Know what I mean?”

  “Yeah. Figure some sick asshole with a video cell phone will upload this to YouTube any minute now.” I looked around, saw half a dozen half-drunk and half-asleep club goers fiddling on cell phones and BlackBerries. “Maybe sooner than later.”

  Curt kept chewing, nodded. “You see that building over there?” He flicked his head north.

  “Which one?”

  “Don’t know,” he said, eyes locked on to mine. “Maybe redbrick or something.”

  I looked again. There was a redbrick building two blocks north and one block west of us. I could make it out through the early morning haze.

  “Seen a lot of my boys in blue checking it out. Trying not to cause a stir.”

  “That right?”

  Curt nodded. “Hate to see those cockroaches at the Dispatch get the brass ring. You know they had a reporter over here from their gossip section, offered to write me up as one of NYC’s hottest bachelors if I planted a bug in our briefing room? Fucking parasites.”

  “Hell, you’d be lucky to break the top hundred.”

  “Yeah, tell that to my girlfriend. I’d be on patrol with a GPS monitor up my ass the second she thinks my eyes start wandering.” Curt looked around, coughed into his hand. “Can’t say I was a fan of Athena’s, you know, work, but Christ, the girl was only twenty-two.”

  “No kidding,” I said. We stayed silent for a moment, then I remembered my deadline. “Hey, drinks on me this week. If I don’t hit my deadline which is in, oh about six minutes, I’ll be out of work and you’ll have to pick up the tab.”

  “Then get the hell out of here.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Take it easy, Parker.”

  After saying goodbye I hung back for a minute. I didn’t want to let anyone else know I had a possible scoop. Then I waded back into the soup of reporters, stuffed my hands in my pockets and headed north.

  Two patrolmen jogged by me. I slowed down. There were several cops huddling outside of the redbrick building Curt had pointed out. As I got closer I heard radio activity. I stopped at the corner and peeked around.

  A cop stood by the awning, a walkie-talkie in his hand. A plainclothes cop, probably from Forensic Investigation, strode up and spoke to him for a minute, then ducked inside. I took a breath, waited until the cop was alone, then rounded the corner and approached him.

  “Help you?” he said. Nothing to see here, move along.

  “Henry Parker, New York Gazette.” I showed him my press credentials. Might as well have been a slab of lemon, the way his face scrunched up.

  “Go on, get out of here.”

  “Something going on inside this building?” The cop locked eyes with me, then spoke deliberately.

  “You know you don’t have a whole lot of fans in the law enforcement community.”

  I nodded. Even though charges had never been brought for the murder of Officer John Fredrickson, if not for me he’d still be alive. And even though he was dirty as sin, that was something no cop or Fed would ever forget.

  “Crime scene is over on Thirteenth.” He jerked his thumb back where I’d come from. “You want a better view of the crime scene, might I suggest walking to the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge and then jumping off.”

  I laughed, pretended it didn’t affect me. “I saw several officers entering and exiting this site.”

  “You saw wrong.”

  “Officer…” I said, looking at his badge. “Officer Lemansky. I know this is the building the killer shot Athena Paradis from. You and I both know this murder is going to make both of our lives a living hell until the killer is caught. All differences aside, the story is huge, and it won’t go away just because you tell me to.
Whether it’s the Gazette, the Dispatch or the National Enquirer, you’re going to have reporters up your ass until this psycho is caught. Do you read the newspaper?”

  He nodded. “So what?”

  “So you must have read that story the Dispatch ran last week. Detective Pedro Alvarez, killed in the line of duty. Did you know him?”

  Lemansky’s silence was an affirmative.

  “So you know the Dispatch ran a front-page story two days after his death. About his mistress. Lena something, right?”

  Officer Lemansky sniffed. He shuffled his feet.

  “Fucking parasites,” he said. “Madeleine deserved better than seeing her family’s name dragged through the mud.” He looked at me. “Alvarez was a good cop and a good husband. If it wasn’t for people like you he’d still be remembered that way.”

  I had my opening.

  “I don’t work for the Dispatch. I’m not interested in smear campaigns and ruining families to sell papers. If you don’t talk to me, another reporter will get the story. You’ve read the Gazette. So you can talk to me right here, right now, or I can’t promise what tomorrow’s headline will be in the Dispatch. But I can promise you what the headline will be in the Gazette.”

  Lemansky was searching my eyes for the truth. Whether he could trust me. I knew he could.

  He nodded. “I give you something, it came from an anonymous source. I get quoted, or you do anything to go back on what you just said, I don’t care if the papers start claiming we’re fucking aliens from Mars, you’ll get a mouthful of broken teeth before you ever get another story.”

  I said, “You have my word.”

  He looked around. I thought about Curt. Knew the cops just wanted to make sure the right thing was done.

  “Forensics is saying they found a note scrawled up on the roof, below the ledge they think the shooter rested the gun on. They’re analyzing it, but they say he wrote in block using a Sharpie so it’s pretty much useless. They’re sifting through about a ton of loose gravel up there, could take days to find anything else.”

  “The note,” I said, speaking softly, half to calm the cop and half to slow down my heart. “What did it say?”

  The cop looked around again. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.

  “Some lab rat passed copies around, asked if anyone had ever heard of someone talking like this before. I didn’t know, but…” He licked his lips. His eyes danced around, like somebody was about to leap from the morning shadows.

  He handed it to me.

  “Get out of here,” he said. “And remember what you said.” I nodded, took the paper and walked off.

  I waited until I’d gone about three blocks and was out of the line of sight from the building. Then I opened my hand.

  It was a simple piece of paper on which was written a single sentence. And if Lemansky was correct, besides a murdered girl, this was all the killer left behind.

  I read the sentence. Felt my breath catch in my throat. Right then I knew why Officer Lemansky was scared. I knew what my angle was. A chill of fear ran up my spine, similar to the one I felt last year when I was accused of murder.

  And I knew that Athena Paradis wouldn’t be the last victim.

  CHAPTER 5

  I was sitting in Wallace Langston’s office as he read a printout of the article. My palms were coated with sweat and my eyelids felt like they were being dragged down with two-ton weights. Evelyn had posted the text of my article at 4:22 a.m., holding it up just to confirm my source. When I told her the quote the killer had left at the scene, she paused.

  “Why do I recognize that line?” she asked.

  I took a breath before answering. “Because I wrote it.”

  The slip of paper Officer Lemansky gave me had one simple sentence on it. It read:

  The only difference between the innocent and the guilty is that the guilty are the only ones who believe in their cause.

  I had written that line several weeks after being cleared of the murder of John Fredrickson. When I was on the run, when the whole world saw me as a murderer, other than Amanda I was the only one who knew and believed in the truth. The article was in response to those who’d been so quick to pass judgment, including the Gazette’s own Paulina Cole. I was happy to hear when she left for the Dispatch. I couldn’t imagine going to work every day, sitting next to someone who printed such vileness without knowing the truth.

  When the world assumed I was guilty, they looked at me as a degenerate, someone to whom committing murder was justified.

  And now a killer had taken my words, used them to support whatever twisted reasoning goes through the mind of someone willing to steal an innocent life.

  The killer knew he was guilty. Only he didn’t care. He had a cause. Causes don’t simply end. Murderers don’t simply lose interest. There were more victims out there.

  “This came out well,” Wallace said, mainly to fill the silence. We both knew the copy wasn’t great, but contained all confirmed and pertinent facts and was as good as could be expected from a reporter running on Red Bull and a deadline.

  He put the papers down on top of a copy of the morning edition of the Dispatch. Wallace had it delivered every day, though I couldn’t remember him ever reading it.

  The headline read, HEIRESS WHACKED: Police Search For Sex Symbol Shooter. It was actually one of their more subtle headlines.

  “I give them ten points for alliteration,” I said. “‘Search For Sex Symbol Shooter.’ Almost poetic.”

  “Take off several thousand for subtlety,” another voiced chimed in. I turned around.

  Jack O’Donnell walked into the room, half a dozen newspapers under his arm. He looked well rested, energized.

  “Least someone around here caught forty winks,” I said.

  “I think I caught forty winks total my first five years on the job, don’t complain to me about sleep.” He took the papers from under his arm, and I recognized the running heads of what looked like the morning edition of every major paper in the metropolitan area, as well as a few nationals. He tossed them on Wallace’s desk one at a time, giving us a chance to read each headline.

  I wasn’t aware newspaper fonts could run that big.

  “You have no idea how much it cost us to dump our page one and get the Paradis story in there,” Wallace said. “None of them report anything substantial. That’ll come tomorrow. With any luck we’ll sell enough papers today to make up for the printing and shipping delays.”

  “Even in death Athena breaks the bank,” Jack said. “You know some asshole found a highball glass from last night that still has Athena Paradis’s lipstick on it? Bidding on eBay is up to ten grand. I’m thinking of joining the fray, resell the glass during the trial and retire.”

  “This case will never go to trial,” I said, a sick feeling in my stomach.

  “And why not?” asked Wallace.

  “Fools with a cause don’t go quietly. They don’t put their hands behind their back, and they don’t care about their Miranda rights. This guy’s in it until the end.”

  “Let’s hope you’re wrong,” Wallace replied. “Right now all we can do is our job. So let’s talk.”

  Jack flicked my ear as he walked by. “What, no iPod today?”

  I sighed, played along.

  “I usually take it off when I get to the office.”

  “Hard to concentrate when listening to Bee-yonk, right?”

  I didn’t correct him, frankly would have felt like an idiot telling him the correct pronunciation was Beyoncé. A few months ago, I made the careless mistake of going to the bathroom and leaving my iPod on my desk. The mistake wasn’t leaving it out in the open, but trusting someone like Jack to act like an adult. By the time I got back to my desk, Jack had scrolled through my entire playlist and taken votes from the entire newsroom as to which artists I should delete from the hard drive permanently. The results were tabulated, and for a week after that he would ask for the player to see if I’d comp
lied. Finally I removed the offending songs, just to shut him up. According to Jack, any music created after 1986 should never be heard through my (or any other) speakers again. He said if not for the Dylan and Springsteen, he would have thrown the entire thing in the garbage.

  “Henry,” Jack said, his voice now without any condescension. “If you don’t think this case will go to trial you’re an idiot. Someone’s getting prosecuted, even if it takes a few cases to get the right suspect. Costas Paradis’s private jet is on its way to the city as we speak, and I can promise that he’s bringing hellfire and brimstone and a savings account large enough to be a continent unto itself. Whether it’s Shawn Kensbrook, the security staff at the Kitten Club, the killer himself, or Lord Zeus up on high, somebody’s getting locked away while the key is thrown in the ocean. Half a dozen tabloid hacks are writing first drafts of quickie books that will be on sale in your local grocery store within the week.”

  “Cynical much?” I said.

  Jack dismissed the question. “If you want to last in this business as long as I have, you’ll have the cynical alarm on High 24/7. Question everything. You wouldn’t be here right now if you hadn’t done that last year.”

  “So why did a line I wrote end up at a crime scene?” I asked. “That’s my question.”

  “Let’s hope it’s an eerie coincidence,” Wallace said. “That it doesn’t have some sort of meaning that plays into why Athena was killed.”

  “If this goes to trial,” Jack added with a smile, “we can always claim libel, say the killer used Henry’s quote out of context.”

  I absently scratched my ribs.

  “Now the question for you both is,” Wallace said, “where do we go from here? We’ve got the killer’s message. Jack, you check with the NYPD, see if Chief Carruthers has any suspects or leads.”

  “I want to talk to the ballistics department,” I said. “Jack, do you know anyone there you can hook me up with?”