Gladyss of the Hunt by Arthur Nersesian

drinking.” He smiled and said, “Fuck! Two hundred bucks—gone.”
    â€œBut he left the wallet?”
    â€œHe musta seen my shield,” Bernie said. “That would’ve been a disaster. I’d have had to tell the captain.”
    â€œThank God for that.”
    â€œYeah. Well, I’m staking out my car for the next few nights in case the fucker comes back. I’m thinking he followed me from the bar, so maybe I’ll go back there and act like I’m loaded.”
    â€œBern, be careful. Go to Robbery. If you think he’s still working the area, let them do the stakeout.”
    â€œI just can’t fucking believe I got hit. I thought the city wassupposed to be safe now.”
    We convinced Bernie to go to the hospital, but before he left he ordered the three of us to spend the entire morning on the computer working on the Blonde Hooker case, breaking down the various components of the crimes. We typed them into the NYSPIN system, trying to put together a broad list of possible suspects.
    Between the solicitation and murders of Mary Lynn MacArthur, Denise Giantonni, and Nelly Linquist, our killer could’ve had priors for anything from credit card fraud, robbery, and possession of narcotics to abduction, assaulting prostitutes, and post-mortem mutilation. Bernie told us to focus broadly on those who had been convicted or even faced accusations of attacking women. The fact that our killer hadn’t sexually violated any of his victims made it difficult for sex crimes to place him.
    Soon after Bernie returned with a big bandage on his head, he got a call from an old informant at Riker’s who gave him the name of someone he’d heard had recently killed a hooker. He sent Alex to check it out, but he returned an hour later, saying it was all bogus.
    By early afternoon we had a list of forty ex-cons whose priors somehow related to our killer. Bernie took it to the captain, to show him we needed some help, and he assigned three other pairs of detectives to our case for the week. Bernie split the list between the five teams.
    The next six days were a gradual process of elimination: Pairs of investigators systematically went out and interviewed the forty suspects, checking their alibis, then crossing them off the list.
    By Friday not a single escort house we’d notified had called in any of their johns—and no new victims had turned up either. In case there was a connection, Bernie had me work with Robbery and check out a guy who, a day before the last murder, had brazenly robbed two pharmacies around Penn Station, grabbing handfuls of prescription sleeping pills. It turned out the criminal was just a run-of-the-mill speed freak on his way back to Long Island.
    Bernie and I teamed up the next day and he led me out into the freezing cold without giving any idea of where we were going. And when he finally started talking I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I heard the phrase, “thousands of delicate bones”; it seemed like he was talking about a fish skeleton. I had to move in close tocatch mumbled terms like “fractured metatarsals,” “torn ligaments,” “irreparable nerve damage.”
    It took me a while to realize he was talking about his own foot. I smelled whiskey on his breath, and wondered if he had mixed it with pills. He rambled on while we soldiered through the dirty snow. His right foot had gone under the knife repeatedly, he said, but the operations had led to neither a reduction in pain nor increased mobility.
    â€œWhere exactly are we going?” I finally interrupted him. He said we were hunting some “ex-cockroaches” who were on the suspect list. When we finally located one of them, Edgar Martinez, in a public housing project in the East Village, I saw how Bernie was able to put his suffering to good use. When Martinez grew reticent under his interrogation, Bernie shoved the guy against a wall and