American Devil th&dl-1 Read online

  American Devil

  ( Tom Harper & Denise Levene - 1 )

  Oliver Stark

  Oliver Stark

  American Devil

  Prologue

  West Virginia, February 14, 1982

  He stood behind the white picket fence, hidden in the shadows of a beech tree. It was ten forty in the evening — enough time still to ask her the question. In his right hand, he held twelve red roses with velvet-soft petals. He wanted to give her something real special; after all, she was the girl of his dreams.

  Above the large timber-framed house, the moon was so bright that he could see the jumble of kids’ toys abandoned on the veranda. His nervous grey eyes rose to the first floor and scanned each window in turn. He stopped at hers and sweat formed instantly down his back. Her bedroom glowed with a soft pink light. The beautiful and untouchable Chloe Mestella, just fifteen years old and already way beyond the reach of him or any of the local boys.

  He figured that she’d be fast asleep by now, so he’d have to steal up to her room without her parents seeing. He knew what he was going to say to her when she woke up. ‘Chloe, will you be my Valentine? I love you so much sometimes I want to die.’ He looked again to the pink-lit window. His head was throbbing as if a train was driving through it.

  The boy stepped out on to the crisp cut lawn. The house itself looked like it was sleeping. He thought he could see the roof rising and falling like a breathing chest. What a place to grow up! What a fairy tale! But why couldn’t she just be a little bit nice to him?

  The problem with these rich girls was that deep down they weren’t nice at all. They dressed in pretty clothes and smiled sweetly when they had to, but he’d been at the old log yard after dark and seen what they did in the back seats of borrowed cars, their innocent faces twisting and trembling in the shadows like they were in some kind of pain.

  Even the untouchable Chloe had been ruined. Someone had taken advantage of her, rubbed her up in the dell, pulled her clothes about and rutted with her like a farm animal. Grunt, grunt, grunt, went the football star, with Chloe crying out for him to stop. But he carried right on to the finish line, just like he’d been taught.

  Holding the roses close to his chest, he crept along the side of the house and lifted his head to the living-room window. Mary and Don Mestella were eating seafood linguine with a couple of friends. Upstairs their little girl was tucked up in bed — a snug warm curl of a body in soft pink pyjamas. It was the perfect family scene and he wanted to be part of it.

  The boy pulled at each window in turn. The toilet window opened to his rough fingertips. He pulled himself in through the narrow gap and tumbled head first into the small room. He froze in fear and listened out.

  He peered around the half-open door of the toilet as he checked the hallway. Glasses clinked in the living room, but his eyes were fixed on the stairs. It was a short dash across the open hallway. He eased the door further open and placed his left foot on the bright polished floor. From the other end of the hallway something clattered. The boy felt his body seize up. Then a voice called out. ‘Hope you’re all ready for dessert in there!’

  Mrs Mestella. She was in the fucking kitchen. He couldn’t move. His breath shortened. She was already walking out of the kitchen with a big pavlova held triumphantly in front of her. He couldn’t risk shutting the toilet door and catching her eye. He held his breath, leaned back into the shadow of the dark room and hoped she wouldn’t look over. If she did, she’d scream, the pavlova would drop and he’d have a hell of a lot of explaining to do.

  His whole body shivered as he watched Mrs Mestella pass by in profile, all her attention on the big white meringue covered in thin slices of bright red strawberry. The boy caught a gust of sickly perfume in his throat and nearly coughed. He held it until she was in the living room, then he darted across the polished wooden floor spluttering into his sleeve. His eyes rose to the top of the stairs. Little steps to his own private heaven.

  At the top of the stairs he took off his shoes and padded down the corridor, edging open each door in turn. In the second room, he saw Chloe’s younger twin sisters radiating life. Next came the master bedroom with its double doors slightly ajar. He felt like some crazy Goldilocks but inside the fear and anticipation were leaping in his chest.

  Along the corridor he came to her door and touched it with his fingertips. It was covered with pictures of fairies. There was a wooden nameplate saying Chloe’s Room — Be Nice. This was the room she had grown up in. It contained all her innocent dreams.

  The boy looked down at his roses. He slowly repeated what he had planned to say. He wanted it all to be perfect but he was shaking like a leaf and the spit had dried in his mouth.

  He pushed the door open. The walls were pale rose and there was a small night-light that gave the room that warm soft glow he’d seen from the garden. He took three small steps into the room and there she was — his own sleeping, perfect princess.

  He felt as if his whole world had suddenly come to him fully formed from his dreams. His yearnings were so strong he felt fit to burst. He reached out towards the tanned flawless skin of her arm. As his fingers brushed her an electric charge shot right through him. Every nerve tingled.

  Her pyjama top had risen up and her hip was visible like the curve of a stone statue. The skin was so delicate and pale. From downstairs, the chatter of voices and sudden bursts of laughter rose up through the house, but they sounded as though they were coming from the bottom of a deep well. He was way up above, in heaven.

  The boy placed the twelve red roses on the nightstand, moved to her bed and took the flowered quilt in his hands. He pulled it slowly from her body and let it drop to the floor. He had only wanted a glance, that was all.

  But he couldn’t help himself now. He moved his mouth to hers and kissed her. His lips were cold and hers so very warm. His hand reached down and slipped inside her top.

  Chloe Mestella woke. Her eyelids flickered open. For a moment she was confused, her head still full of dreams. Was this real? The dark shadow above her? In a half second, she realized that this was very real. Someone was in her room. Some stranger was on her bed with his hands all over her. Fear caught fire and rushed wild through her limbs. She breathed in, about to cry out, but a hand caught her. A rough hand covered her mouth and pressed her jaw down firmly.

  ‘Shh,’ a low voice said in the pink light. ‘Your parents will hear us.’ Chloe’s eyes flicked left and right. His whole body moved quickly on top of hers and jammed hard against her — so hard against her chest that she couldn’t breathe. Her heart pounded; she was sweaty and icy cold in the same moment but her muscles felt tired and weak. It was terror clawing at her. Blind terror.

  ‘Chloe. I love you so much sometimes I want to die. Will you be my Valentine?’ She shook her head violently and tried to speak. There were tears in her eyes. She wasn’t thinking of the right thing to say, she was just giving him her answer, shaking her head. Please let me go, please don’t hurt me! The boy held her down harder, like some struggling animal.

  He forced his whole weight on to Chloe’s mouth. Disappointment mingled with shame. Shame for having hope, for loving her — shame for being refused by the one person he’d hoped would save him. The devil had said it all along. Give her a chance, if you don’t believe me. See if I’m wrong about her. Give her a chance to prove me wrong. If I’m wrong, I’ll leave you alone. With shaking arms he pushed down on her body more firmly, feeling self-hatred squirm in his mind, mocking him. He shuddered with tears as he forced his bony limbs harder and harder against the girl he loved. Chloe couldn’t breathe any more. Her legs and arms and torso thrashed about under his weight. She was making too much noise. Way too much noise.
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br />   The boy was getting real frightened now. She needed to shut the fuck up and stop moving. If he got caught, that was the end of everything. He pushed harder and harder against her throat, pushing with every muscle on to her chest. Chloe thrashed and kicked more. Then she was still.

  He looked down at her, his forehead creased in concentration. Chloe’s eyes took on a look he’d only seen in animals before, like when a cow was about to be slaughtered and its eyes grew big and white. They called it ‘crazy eye’ on the farm. The boy stared. Chloe had gone crazy eye and her arms and legs had stopped moving.

  It was hardest to kill the ones you loved. But that’s what the devil wanted — he didn’t want you killing cheap. This was much more than murder — this was a rite of passage. The devil had been at the boy’s ear for years, whispering and telling him things he couldn’t have imagined.

  The boy was alone in the silent pink bedroom. The devil had delivered as he promised he would. He was finally alone with the girl he loved. And there was so much that he still wanted to do with her. This had been in his head a long, long time.

  PART ONE

  November 15-21

  ‘Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven’

  John Milton, Paradise Lost

  Chapter One

  Police Headquarters, New York City

  November 15, 1.52 p.m.

  The deputy commissioner’s office at One Police Plaza was just across from City Hall in downtown New York. Eight minutes before the meeting was scheduled to begin, Lenny Elwood crossed his office and stopped at the view over Brooklyn Bridge.

  His eyes followed the taut steel ropes across the East River. People died all the time, he thought. It was the nature of life. Forty or more people died building the very bridge in front of his eyes. But death these days was unacceptable: unpolitical even. People had the right to live. Especially young people.

  At the best of times, Lenny Elwood was a man in a hurry for things to happen, but this wasn’t the best of times and he could feel his blood vessels constricting. He breathed deeply and reached to his inside pocket for his statins. On his dark mahogany desk, the week’s newspapers were laid out. Each headline jumped up at him as if it wanted to scream the words in his ear. But even they seemed muted next to the picture.

  Christ, thought Lenny, there was no need for a headline at all. The photograph did all the talking. His hand moved across the thick black letters and rested on the grainy shot of a bright, childish face. The girl had a ribbon in her long blond hair, large blue eyes and the shine of gloss on her smiling lips. A face that said everything was all right. Except it wasn’t.

  Mary-Jane Samuelson was a girl with so much life ahead of her. Her expression was full of optimism and innocence. And now that she was dead, hers was the kind of face that sold papers and made America stand up and take notice.

  A week earlier, the beautiful debutante had been brutally strangled inside her family’s Upper East Side apartment. Mary-Jane Samuelson was just fifteen years old. The attacker had raped and tortured her before killing her with her own pantyhose.

  But Elwood knew that things were about to get a whole lot worse. An hour earlier, the dispatcher had called through a second female body with ligature marks round the neck. They now had a potential serial killer on their hands, and Lenny wasn’t going to stand for it.

  At 1.58 p.m., he opened the door to his office, glared at the two police chiefs in their smart black uniforms and waved them in with a rapid flutter of his right hand.

  He watched each of them pull out a chair, sit down, shuffle a little and place his forearms on the table in silence. He sensed their fear and liked how it felt. They knew they had to move things along rapidly or someone would be cut off at the knees.

  The men waited in silence around the large polished table. It sat between them like a still pond, all their reflections upside down. The weekly crime meeting early that week had not gone well. High-profile murder cases were bad for the city and girls like Mary-Jane were about as high profile as you got. Lenny had told them that he wanted this sorted immediately and now there was another body. The two chiefs knew this meeting was coming. It was how the NYPD worked these days. Accountability, they called it. But it was nothing more than an old-fashioned back-alley shakedown.

  They waited a moment as the tight-lipped PA shuffled her satin blouse around the deputy commissioner’s shoulder and laid a beige file in front of him. She licked her thumb, leaned forward and opened it for him.

  Elwood looked at the report. ‘Okay, gentlemen, let’s get down to business.’ His lip twitched with eagerness. ‘Why the hell are you letting this maniac kill these girls? We’re two down and I’ve got a handful of shit from you. A handful of shit.’ Elwood looked down at his open palms and eyed each man in turn. ‘He’s cut up two girls in the most populated piece of rock on the planet and you’ve got jackshit. This is unacceptable, gentlemen. Give me some answers, right now.’

  He looked round the table, giving both men a chance to speak up. ‘You’ve got nothing? Nothing at all? The police commissioner told me this morning that he wants this sealed, solved and off the books. You must have something for me, gentlemen.’

  The chief of detectives, Bureau Chief Ged Rainer, swivelled on his seat and threw a sarcastic smile to the head of the table. ‘Well, if it’s coming straight from the police commissioner, why don’t we start doing something rather than sitting on our butts all day long? Who’d think he’d never served as a police officer?’

  ‘You think this is worthy of a comedy routine, Rainer? Listen to me and listen good — if Commissioner Garry’s reputation is on the line, then so is yours, get it? And he’s asked me to come in here and shoot one of the horses. Now I’ve got two horses sitting here and I’ve got one bullet. Is it going to be you, Rainer, you fucking comedian?’ Ged Rainer looked down at the table, his ears burning. ‘Now who’s going to tell me the whole story?’

  The chief of the homicide bureau, Jim Stanton, finally spoke. ‘I got Captain Lafayette outside,’ he offered. ‘He heads up North Manhattan Homicide. I thought you might want to hear it from the guy leading the team on the street.’

  ‘Sure, bring him in if neither of you have a fucking word to say for yourselves.’

  Outside the deputy commissioner’s office, Frank Lafayette sat in a brown leather chair. He’d been made to wait too long already. He had better things to do with his time than shine his ass. He had a killer on the loose who liked to cut his bodies open and pose them. He wanted his best man on the job, a specialist — but that wasn’t going to be easy. He’d already asked, but Ged Rainer had slammed the door in his face each time. The PA appeared silently at his side like some slinking cobra and showed him into the room.

  ‘Welcome, Lafayette. Take a seat,’ said Elwood with a smile that looked more like a sneer.

  ‘Prefer to stand, if I may.’

  ‘Stand, sit, I don’t give a damn,’ said the deputy commissioner. ‘What is it with the detective bureau? You know everyone here, Captain?’

  Lafayette nodded respectfully.

  ‘So, Captain, how does it look?’ Elwood leaned in, staring fiercely.

  ‘We got nothing at the present time, sir. That’s the plain truth. No bullshit. We’re nowhere. Detective Nate Williamson is leading the team. He’s a veteran and he’s got nothing to follow. This killer is clean.’

  Leonard Elwood scratched the shaved hair at the back of his head. ‘I want more, Captain. Honest to fucking God, it’s not enough. How many detectives you got on the case?’

  ‘Near to eighty, sir.’ Lafayette stared down at his shining shoes. He knew what was coming.

  ‘And you’ve got zilch? It’s bullshit!’ shouted Elwood. ‘Rainer, I’m right, aren’t I? It’s bullshit.’

  Ged Rainer leaned forward. ‘We don’t want a killer on the streets of New York, do you understand, Captain? This isn’t the nineties, we can do without the drama.’

  ‘I don’t want one either, sir,’ said Lafaye
tte. ‘But it’s not easy catching a pattern killer, if that’s what we have. There’s no motive, no witnesses, no informants and no leads. They strike where and when they want to.’

  ‘What do you need?’ said the deputy commissioner. ‘What is it you want from us? I presume there’s something or you wouldn’t have showed up here, taking shit for these assholes.’

  Lafayette paused. Chief Rainer was the guy who’d refused his request and now he was going right over Rainer’s head in public. The captain swallowed hard. ‘Sir, with all due respect, if we want to move forward on this, we need our best man on the case.’ Rainer turned and shot a look of contempt down the table.

  ‘Who’s your best man, Captain?’ said Elwood.

  ‘Someone who knows how to track pattern killers, sir. One of the very best. You may know the name. Detective Tom Harper. Five years ago, he brought in the Mott Haven strangler, Gerry North. He traced a used dollar bill found in the victim’s throat back to a payroll of Gerry North’s employer. It gave us a list of thirty-five men. North was the fifteenth guy we saw. Great police work, sir. Last year, he brought in the serial killer Eric Romario. You’ll remember that case, sir. Eric liked to break into apartments and wire people up to the line power and switch it on. He killed eight people. Harper worked on the killer’s background. He thought the killer would’ve begun life as a firestarter, so he picked out the records of petty arsonists from ViCAP and traced them through employment records of the power companies. He got a hit list. Eric Romario was on his way to wire up a children’s swimming pool when Harper came calling. No one else would’ve taken that line, sir.’ Lafayette looked up. ‘He came in late, took over the lead and pulled these guys down. He got somewhere with next to nothing. He’s our best guy.’

  ‘Then get him in. What are you all waiting for?’