“You’re not supposed to,” I said. “Not you, not Grimes, not anyone but me. I’m the one he chose. Everything I’ve been able to figure out so far is because he wanted me to.”
“Is that really a problem?” she asked. “You said so yourself. There are two types of serial killers. Those who want to get caught, and those who really want to get caught.”
“Yeah, but do you know where I first said that?”
She nodded. Now she was following. “Your book.”
“That’s right,” I said. “He’s playing us. Not only that, he’s probably got an endgame. Which means there might be one thing worse than not catching this guy.”
“What would that be?”
“Catching him.”
Chapter 58
I DON’T know if Sun Tzu said it first, but it was Michael Corleone who definitely said it best. Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.
As for who said it the loudest, my vote was for Mayor Deacon. When I walked into his penthouse suite at the Excelsior Hotel on the Upper West Side, he didn’t have to say it at all.
It was that obvious.
Not that Deacon viewed me as his outright enemy. It’s that I clearly wasn’t his friend, especially after I walked out on him in his office at City Hall. I was now somewhere in between; a guy who could help him but also hurt him. A wild card.
Did you really go digging around in my past, Mr. Mayor? Yes, of course you did.
All the more reason why he wanted me in the room.
“Thanks for doing this on a Saturday,” Deacon said to me without the slightest hint of irony. Only half an hour earlier, with Elizabeth still at my apartment, he screamed into her phone that he needed to see the two of us immediately. And don’t you dare take no for an answer from that son of a bitch Reinhart, he added.
I was standing ten feet away from Elizabeth when he called, and I could still hear him perfectly.
What we were doing on a Saturday—the “this”—could best be described as an emergency campaign strategy session. It was pure bunker mentality, albeit in five thousand square feet of luxury with a full kitchen, a media and conference room, and sweeping views of Central Park.
Since Grimes broke the story on the Dealer, Deacon’s poll numbers were down three points. His challenger, Tim Stoddart, the former DA, was now within the margin of error. In every one of Stoddart’s campaign stops he was talking about the Dealer and how his killings were emblematic of Deacon’s failure to curb crime.
As we sat down in the sunken living room of the penthouse suite, the focus was on one thing and one thing only. Containment.
The Dealer’s latest card had added a wrinkle, to put it mildly. All bets were off.
“Who else knows?” Deacon asked Elizabeth, who was sitting to my right on the L-shaped couch, where Beau Livingston was also sitting. The mayor’s chief of staff was Deacon’s proverbial Siamese twin.
Of course the mayor wasn’t really asking Elizabeth to name all the people who knew about the card that was pinned to Colton Lange. What he really wanted to know was: Who were the ones, if any, he couldn’t keep quiet?
“Mr. Mayor, are you sure this is the best strategy?” asked Elizabeth.
Deacon didn’t mind the question so much, barely raising one of his thick eyebrows, but Livingston immediately became unhinged. Strategy was his thing, not hers, and he’d be damned if he was going to let her challenge him on it.
“Do you know what I’m sure of, Elizabeth?” said Livingston, cutting in with all the subtlety of a chain saw. “I’m sure that the blacks in this city hate that we brought back zero tolerance and challenged the court’s ruling on stop-and-frisk. I’m also sure they think this administration has been silent on racial profiling. But what I’m really sure of is that there’s only one thing worse than a serial killer terrorizing this city on the mayor’s watch. And that’s a racist serial killer.”
“Who’s being a racist?” asked Elizabeth. “The nine of diamonds was a baseball player. For all we know, the jack of spades could be a farmer.”
“Yeah, because that’s what this city’s known for, farmers,” scoffed Livingston. “Wake up, Detective. ‘A spade’ doesn’t mean ‘a gardening tool’ in Harlem any more than ‘a hoe’ does.”
“I’m afraid Beau’s right,” said the mayor. “Besides, who’s to say we can’t change the game on this cocksucker?”
That was the strategy. There was no hiding the fact that Colton Lange was the nine of diamonds. People were bound to figure that out. The question was whether those same people really needed to know that the next victim was the jack of spades. The police could simply go public with another card or no card at all.
In other words, take the deck right out of the Dealer’s hands.
“There’s just one problem, gentlemen,” I said.
The words had barely left my mouth when everything but the fire alarm went off in the room. Two of the mayor’s aides were hightailing it into the suite as both Livingston’s and Elizabeth’s phones lit up. He was getting a text; she was getting a call.
And I was getting ready to hear the news.
He’s killed again.
Chapter 59
WE WERE heading back to Harlem. Fast.
The “we” was everybody. Me, Elizabeth, the mayor, his entire detail, and key staff members, including Livingston. It was a speeding caravan of black Ford Explorers and sedans, lights flashing, as the traffic moving north along Madison Avenue parted like the Red Sea.
“Crazy, right?” said Elizabeth from behind the wheel. She and I were bringing up the rear, the whole spectacle playing out in front of us.
“That’s one word for it,” I said. “Leave it to Livingston to turn dead bodies into a photo op for his boss.”
As crass and calculated as it was, I knew what the guy was thinking. The Dealer had changed things up with this one. Broad daylight, out in the open—and an open invitation to the entire neighborhood, as well as the media, to come have a look. If they all were going to be there, the mayor needed to be there, too.
Boy, were they ever all there.
The intersection of Madison Avenue and 112th Street, in East Harlem, looked like a block party, albeit one that was being covered by every single news outlet in the city. Satellite trucks lined one curb, police cruisers another. A few ambulances were scattered in between. And everywhere you looked, people. Lots and lots of people.
Murder really knows how to make a place come alive.
“C’mon, let’s go,” said Elizabeth. She’d parked and bolted from the car so fast that I wasn’t sure she’d even turned off the engine.
I fell in line behind her as we wove through the crowd, catching up to Deacon and Livingston, who were being greeted by the top cop himself, the police commissioner.
I couldn’t remember his name, but I knew his face from TV, along with that “shoot ’em” thing he did during press conferences. When calling on reporters, the commissioner wouldn’t simply point at them. Instead he made a gun gesture with his thumb and forefinger, then flicked his thumb as if pulling the trigger. It was like he was acting out some revenge fantasy on the media.
Now here he was, live and in person.