momentarily from the prison of self. Marie Gotteskind's killers had pulled off a perfectly orchestrated abduction, only to repeat it a year later with very minor variations and, of course, a substantial profit motive.
Why wait so long? What were they doing in the meantime?
Could there have been other abductions without anyone drawing a connection to the Gotteskind case? It was possible. The murder rate in the five boroughs is now over seven a day, and most of them don't get a lot of play in the media. Still, if you take a woman off a street in front of a bunch of witnesses, it makes the papers. If you've got a similar case sitting in an open file, you probably hear about it. And you almost have to draw a connection.
On the other hand, Francine Khoury had been snatched off the street in front of witnesses, and nobody in the press or the One-Twelve knew the first thing about it.
Maybe they really had lain low for a year. Maybe one or more of them had been in jail for all or part of that year, maybe a predilection for rape and murder had led to still worse crimes, like writing bad checks.
Or maybe they'd been active, but in a way that hadn't drawn any attention.
Either way, I knew something now that I had previously only suspected. They had done this before, for pleasure if not for profit. That lowered the odds against finding them, and at the same time it raised the stakes.
Because they'd do it again.
Chapter 7
Friday I spent the morning at the library, then walked over to Forty-second Street to meet TJ in the video arcade. Together we watched a kid with a ponytail and a wispy blond mustache run up the score on a game called Freeze!!! It had the same premise as most of the games-- i.e., that there were hostile forces in the universe, apt to leap out at you without warning at any moment, bound on doing you harm.
If you were quick enough you could survive for a while, but sooner or later one of them would do you in.
I couldn't argue with that.
We left when the boy finally crapped out. On the street TJ told me the player's name was Socks because his own never matched. I hadn't noticed. According to TJ, Socks was about the best on the Deuce at what he did, often able to play for hours on a single quarter. There had been other players as good or better, but they didn't come around much anymore. For a moment my mind spun with visions of a previously unknown motive for serial homicide, video-game aces rubbed out by an arcade proprietor because they were eating up his profits, but that wasn't it. You got to a certain level, he explained, and then you couldn't get any better, and eventually you lost interest.
We had lunch at a Mexican place on Ninth Avenue and he tried to get me to talk about the case I was working on. I left out the details, but I probably wound up telling him more than I intended to.
"What you need," he said, "you need me workin' for you."
"Doing what?"
"Anything you say! You don't want to be runnin' all over town, see this, check that. What you want to do is send me. You don't think I can find things out? Man, I'm down here on the Deuce every day findin'
things out. It's what I do."
"SO I gave him something," I told Elaine. We'd met at the Baronet on Third Avenue to catch a four o'clock movie, then went to a new place she'd heard about where they served English tea with scones and clotted cream. "He'd said something earlier that added another item to my list of things to find out, so I figured it was only fair to let him run it down for me."
"What was that?"
"The pay phones," I said. "When Kenan and his brother delivered the ransom, they were sent to a pay phone. They got a call there, and the caller sent them to still another pay phone, where they got a call telling them to leave the money and take a hike."
"I remember."
"Well, yesterday TJ called me and talked until his quarter dropped, and when I wanted to call him back I couldn't, because the number wasn't posted on the phone he was calling
Why wait so long? What were they doing in the meantime?
Could there have been other abductions without anyone drawing a connection to the Gotteskind case? It was possible. The murder rate in the five boroughs is now over seven a day, and most of them don't get a lot of play in the media. Still, if you take a woman off a street in front of a bunch of witnesses, it makes the papers. If you've got a similar case sitting in an open file, you probably hear about it. And you almost have to draw a connection.
On the other hand, Francine Khoury had been snatched off the street in front of witnesses, and nobody in the press or the One-Twelve knew the first thing about it.
Maybe they really had lain low for a year. Maybe one or more of them had been in jail for all or part of that year, maybe a predilection for rape and murder had led to still worse crimes, like writing bad checks.
Or maybe they'd been active, but in a way that hadn't drawn any attention.
Either way, I knew something now that I had previously only suspected. They had done this before, for pleasure if not for profit. That lowered the odds against finding them, and at the same time it raised the stakes.
Because they'd do it again.
Chapter 7
Friday I spent the morning at the library, then walked over to Forty-second Street to meet TJ in the video arcade. Together we watched a kid with a ponytail and a wispy blond mustache run up the score on a game called Freeze!!! It had the same premise as most of the games-- i.e., that there were hostile forces in the universe, apt to leap out at you without warning at any moment, bound on doing you harm.
If you were quick enough you could survive for a while, but sooner or later one of them would do you in.
I couldn't argue with that.
We left when the boy finally crapped out. On the street TJ told me the player's name was Socks because his own never matched. I hadn't noticed. According to TJ, Socks was about the best on the Deuce at what he did, often able to play for hours on a single quarter. There had been other players as good or better, but they didn't come around much anymore. For a moment my mind spun with visions of a previously unknown motive for serial homicide, video-game aces rubbed out by an arcade proprietor because they were eating up his profits, but that wasn't it. You got to a certain level, he explained, and then you couldn't get any better, and eventually you lost interest.
We had lunch at a Mexican place on Ninth Avenue and he tried to get me to talk about the case I was working on. I left out the details, but I probably wound up telling him more than I intended to.
"What you need," he said, "you need me workin' for you."
"Doing what?"
"Anything you say! You don't want to be runnin' all over town, see this, check that. What you want to do is send me. You don't think I can find things out? Man, I'm down here on the Deuce every day findin'
things out. It's what I do."
"SO I gave him something," I told Elaine. We'd met at the Baronet on Third Avenue to catch a four o'clock movie, then went to a new place she'd heard about where they served English tea with scones and clotted cream. "He'd said something earlier that added another item to my list of things to find out, so I figured it was only fair to let him run it down for me."
"What was that?"
"The pay phones," I said. "When Kenan and his brother delivered the ransom, they were sent to a pay phone. They got a call there, and the caller sent them to still another pay phone, where they got a call telling them to leave the money and take a hike."
"I remember."
"Well, yesterday TJ called me and talked until his quarter dropped, and when I wanted to call him back I couldn't, because the number wasn't posted on the phone he was calling
Similar Books
