While Deacon’s approval ratings dipped, a former district attorney with a winning smile started shaking hands at a lot of subway stops. Tim Stoddart’s formal announcement that he was running came at the very site where two cops had been gunned down while on a stakeout. The triggerman was a prisoner who had been furloughed. To hear the former DA’s stump speeches you would’ve thought Deacon was Willie Horton himself.
So Deacon would be damned if some serial killer was going to be the death of him come November. He wanted a second term at all costs, according to Elizabeth, and until he got it he was hell on wheels.
Now I was about to witness his wrath firsthand.
A minute later, Deacon’s secretary stepped out of his office. I expected her to turn to us, announcing politely that the mayor would see us now.
Instead she didn’t even glance our way, walking straight back to her desk. I couldn’t help noticing that she’d left his door open.
“Elizabeth!” came Deacon’s booming voice. “Get your ass in here!”
Chapter 40
“SO, THIS is him, huh? Our ‘catcher in the rye,’” said Deacon, eyeing me up and down. He was grinning, but he wasn’t happy.
Clever reference, though, Your Honor. J. D. Salinger’s signature novel motivated Mark David Chapman to kill John Lennon, or so Chapman claimed.
Elizabeth formally introduced me to the mayor, who immediately motioned for the two of us to have a seat on the couch along the wall. But not before I met the only other person in the room, the mayor’s chief of staff. He introduced himself.
“Beau Livingston,” he said, giving me the sort of firm handshake and direct eye contact they teach you in a job-interview workshop. “That’s definitely an interesting book you wrote.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Apparently you’re not the only one interested in it.”
Oops. I’d pretty much teed it up for the mayor.
“So when the hell are we going to catch this asshole?” asked Deacon, although it was clear that by “we” he meant Elizabeth and me.
We’d barely sat down, but we were already in the hot seat.
“I’m doing everything I can,” Elizabeth answered respectfully but firmly. There was just a trace of edge and a hint of push-back in her voice. Suffice it to say she wouldn’t have been in the room, let alone been Deacon’s “personal” detective on this, if she didn’t know how to hold her own against him.
“Everything you can, huh? Well, you’re sure as shit about to get a lot more help, aren’t you?” he said, pointing at the newspapers spread atop the coffee table in front of us. Naturally, Grimes’s front-page story in the Gazette was on top. Too many of the hotel staff knew about the playing card left behind—or, rather, left “in the behind,” as Grimes blithely wrote in his article—for him to hold off any longer. Not to mention the photo the room-service kid had snapped. As predicted, it spread on Reddit faster than the Zika virus.
Now the whole city knew about the Dealer, and everyone with a badge was about to be on the case. FBI badges, too, if the victims began to pile up. Surely that was the last thing in the world the mayor wanted.
Deacon folded his arms, flashing that unhappy smile again. “So much for nipping this fucking thing in the bud, huh? What a bullshit wish that was.”
The mayor might have been an air force man, but he had the whole cursing-like-a-sailor thing down pat. Listening to him, I could picture the wholesome campaign ads featuring him and his wife with their two adorable little daughters eating cotton candy at a street fair.
In fact everything about the guy seemed to be a study in contrasts. For all the profanity, Edso Deacon sort of looked like Mister Rogers. And whereas the reception area was all glitz, his actual office was bare-bones and purely functional.
“What’s the latest from the hotel?” asked Livingston, whose chief-of-staff duties surely included keeping the mayor focused. “Do you really think this guy had a room there?”
At the hotel, I had assumed the Dealer would be desperate for an exit. His way out, however, was a door the cops couldn’t cover. It was the door to his room.
Cunning bastard.
Tribeca 212 had hundreds of rooms. Safety in numbers. It would’ve been nearly impossible to search them all while keeping people from coming and going. We didn’t even know what he looked like—not the slightest clue.
“We’re working off a registered guest list,” said Elizabeth. “We’re doing background checks, checking credit cards and alibis, but…” Her voice trailed off.
“What?” asked Livingston. “What is it?”
“Yeah, what the fuck is it?” asked Deacon.
They were both staring at Elizabeth. Not for long, though, once I loudly cleared my throat.
“It’s a waste of time,” I announced. “That’s what it is.”
Chapter 41
IT WAS only right that I jump in, since I was the one who’d convinced Elizabeth that our time was better spent elsewhere. Of course convincing the mayor and his chief of staff of that would be a little trickier. The hot seat was only getting warmed up.
“A waste of time?” asked Livingston. His eyebrows were so raised they were practically part of his hairline.
Ditto for Deacon. “What the hell are you talking about—a waste of time?”
Easy now, Dylan. These aren’t your students, and this isn’t your classroom…
“Perhaps waste is too strong a word,” I said. “But if we’re going to catch this guy, it won’t be by doing what he expects us to do. His escape plan from that hotel was to stay put. He most likely went back to his room, remained there a bit, and then reemerged with other guests. Just another face in the crowd.”
“Yeah, only we’re not talking Yankee Stadium,” said Livingston. “This is a crowd of, what, a hundred or so people? And we know he’s one of them.”
“Is he, though? There are a lot of ways to check into a hotel as someone else,” I said. “Maybe he paid cash and used a fake ID. Maybe he used a stolen credit card. Or maybe it’s something we haven’t thought of yet. The point is, he already has thought of it.”
Livingston wasn’t sold. “Are you sure you’re not giving this guy too much credit?”
“If anything, I’m still underestimating him,” I said.
“What if you’re wrong, though? How do you explain it to the family members of the next victim, this nine of diamonds, whoever he might be?” said Livingston. “Go ahead, tell them we didn’t track down and triple check every person at that hotel because we assumed the killer knew we would.”
“I sure as hell can’t do that,” said Deacon.
“Maybe not, but in the meantime you’ve managed to turn a whole bunch of innocent people into potential suspects,” I said. “Detectives will comb through their lives, and the backlash will be inevitable. The words right to privacy will suddenly haunt you in the media, and the whole tone will become personal, because that’s what people always do: they make things personal. Headlines will scream that the NYPD and especially the mayor are being outsmarted by a serial killer.”
Deacon blinked a few times. “Are you calling me stupid, Dr. Reinhart?”
“No,” I said. “I’m calling you a candidate.”
“So what’s the alternative?” asked Livingston. “Wait around until the next dead body turns up?”
Deacon and Livingston were forgetting something. “It’s not like I don’t have skin in the game,” I said.